Spooked - Paint It Black

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

When you put brush to canvas you expect to create something that exists outside of yourself. But what if that something is completely evil?STORIESPaint it Black The most down-to-earth family you will ever meet brushes up with evil forces. Brian, Christian, Mary, and Bridget Mahovlic share what happened to them when they came face-to-face with something demonic.Thank you to Brian, Christian, Mary, and Bridget Mahovlic for sharing your story with Spooked!Produced by Eliza Smith, original score by Leon MorimotoThe Red Canvas Jackie and her friends were partying when they made the painting. It was a group effort: they each painted a different part of the canvas. But when they finished, and saw what they had made, they knew they had created something evil.Thank you, Jackie Hill, for sharing your story with us!Produced by Annie Nguyen, original score by Renzo GorrioArtwork by Teo Ducot  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When someone tells you that they have the dark magic power, you tell them what the late Carl Sagan said. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You're listening to Spooked. Stay. It tells you that they can communicate with the other side. Maybe they can. Maybe.

Stranger things have happened. Just perhaps they're not one of the hucksters, The shalots, the nicken poops, the frauds, the imposters, the pretenders out to abuse the suckers. Don't be a sucker, see. It's relatively easy to see through this confusion. I found in my experience that if you know anything about how this works, that you don't speak any kind of foggy language, that you don't misunderstand the symbols and add a bunch of hocus pocus nonsense.

No. No, no, no. Instead, you speak crisply and you say precisely what it is you mean. Because if you don't know or if you only half know what you're talking about, that's when bad things start to happen. This is in Washington, don't believe everything you hear, but always believe everything you book starts. Some say, what is this thing you speak of? The other side. Beyond the veil, the shadow lands.

This is stuff in nonsense. It's a fevered imagination. That's what you got. Where is the proof? Well, a few months back, we got an email from a listener who gave us what for them is the ultimate proof that something. Something. Here's spook producer, Eliza Smith. A little while back, I got an email from a listener named Bridget Mahavlik.

She told me that she had a ghost story. Well, it wasn't really her ghost story. It was a story that she had heard all the time growing up because it happened to her dad and her brother, Chris. And before she reached out to our team, she wrote to her brother to jog his memory. Bridget sent me a email and it said dad's story and I clicked on it and I had earbuds in. And I thought that this was going to be some like, some fun, cool story about my dad's life or something.

And I remember just hearing my dad retell this story that happened to us a long time ago. I had realized I hadn't told anybody that story in probably over 20 years. So I sat down with Bridget, Chris, her mom, Mary, and her dad, Brian. Now, Brian has been painting houses for years, and back when the kids still lived at home, he landed a good gig with a sweet client on the Ritzy side of town. I worked for this client a couple times. We painted the exterior of our house the previous year. I met the client's son, Eddie, when we were painting the exterior of his parents' house.

You know, that we were kind of in the same age bracket, and he was just a very outwagon. guy and we would BS when he would be home. Eddie lived in a very affluent neighborhood. Everybody had nice manicured lawns. Everybody kept their houses very tidy. Everybody got their houses painted when the paint started to peel. The client is so happy with Brian's work. He asks him to paint the inside of his house.

So we go in and set up everything, put our tarps down, our paint, our ladders. I was there for five days, Monday through Friday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we're real good. Friday was a different story. Friday, it was pretty warm out. It's real muggy. And I'm driving up to the house. I punched into the garage code. And I walked into the house and I noticed that how cold it was, you know, it was. And right away, I got a chill right up my back. So I went over to the thermostat, and the thermostat was off. There was no air conditioning going on. That day, all I wanted to do was get finished and get out of there and start another job Monday. And I went outside, smoked a cigarette,

came back in and just totally forgot about it. And I was painting the ceiling in the living room. That's when I started to hear the footsteps. The first footsteps sounded like someone walking around upstairs. I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me. When I was finalizing the deal with the owner of the house, he specifically told me. Me and my wife are working,

and Eddie's at school, and nobody will be home while you're here. The first time I heard it sounded like just one person. But as I progressed with the paint job, the footsteps started getting louder, but it sounded like there were two people up there. You know, when you get scared, and you get to tinkle up your back, and your hair feels like it's standing on edge,

well, that's where I was at. And I decided to take a break. I went outside, had a cup of coffee, And I said, oh, I got to get my head together here because I got to get this job done. And so I went back inside, started painting again, and there were the footsteps again. And that's when I realized I better call my wife to get my son out here to help me. Me and my friends were walking home, and one of my friends was like, you know, I think that's your mom. And I remember being like, what are you doing here?

And she was like, get in. I got on the car and she told me that dad had an emergency at a paint job and that he needed my help and I'm looking at my mom and I'm like

what kind of emergency is a paint job emergency I didn't understand at all and I'd gotten there though my dad was acting a little strange he told me to paint the living room ceiling and he had never asked me to paint an entire ceiling by myself at the time. And I thought that that was weird.

And he went into the other room. And then so I started painting. So I was painting the ceiling, and I started to hear people, from what I heard, it sounded more like people were stomping upstairs. I remember envisioning people like with giant clogs on their feet,

like jumping up and down. Or there was another contractor up there like hammering up drywall or replacing floorboards or something. It was that loud. And I remember I'd gotten to the point where I was getting kind of annoyed. So my dad always had a rule on his paint jobs that we had to be almost overly respective of the customers. Yes, sir, no sir.

After a while, to be honest, I was getting so annoyed, I was annoyed at the time. the whole situation, you know, being a teenage punk kid, I was pissed off. And I almost on purpose said it loud enough for the people upstairs to hear. And I said, I'm going to go up there. So I did. I went upstairs and I got up to the main landing and I looked and sure enough there was nobody there. And I got up there and I saw there was nobody up there. My anger dissipated and my emotions were just,

almost betrayed me. Like I didn't know what to feel. I didn't know what to think. I was so 100% absolutely positive that there were people up there doing something. There wasn't a cat, there was a no dog, and there sure as hell were no people up there. But it definitely felt like

the house was alive in a way, as silly as that might sound. Like there was some kind of a, a heartbeat to it or something. When Christian was upstairs checking the upstairs out, I was down in a utility room. And just in that certain spot right above me, pounding, the footsteps started to get louder and louder.

And I'm not a Catholic, but I was saying my Hail Mary, full of grace. I was that scared. And the more I repeated that, the louder these footsteps got. So as soon as I got done with that, rum, I decided to tell Chris, let's hit it, let's go, we're out of here. I had never really seen my dad scared like that up to that point in my life. And I do remember I was driving home, and I looked at my dad and I said, what was that all about? Like, what was that?

And he just said, I don't know, but I wanted you to come out here because I didn't think anybody else would believe me. So the guys got home, and Brian went into the shower. Chris was cleaning out the paintbrushes in the basement. I'm Mary. I'm Brian's wife and Chris's mom. As soon as I got out of the shower, I started tolling myself off, and I felt and noticed that it had a very pain in my back, but I couldn't see it in the mirror because of the location. So I called my wife Mary into the bathroom.

I say, hey, honey, what's up with this? What's on my back? when he turned towards me there was a long handmark down his back and it was bleeding and it was quite long it looked like a slender hand had scratched him

I knew when I saw Brian's back that it was something evil and I asked who did this to you and he said no one what is it what is it and I said Brian someone scratched you something scratched you you, someone scratched you, and he said, I was alone in the house. There was no one there. Brian's a very steady guy. You know, he used to laugh off things, you know, when people would,

you know, talk about the supernatural. But, um, I could just tell that something changed in him that day. The only thing I'm trying to make sense of when it happened is when I was in the utility room, saying all those Hail Mary full of graces. And whoever was there, didn't like that and possibly scratch my back, not knowing at the time, because I didn't feel anything at all until I got out of the shower. That's my only rationale. Normally I would get home from a paint job,

and I would immediately rip my paint clothes off, jump into the shower, put new clothes on, and go skateboard and hang out with my friends, and have a great time. When I got home from this paint job, I remember going up to my room, and I remember sitting on my bed, and I sat there for a really long time

to try to figure things out. I don't know what to do about it. There's nothing I can do about it. I'm a punk teenage kid and me and my dad are running out of this house because there's people jumping up and down, upstairs, and you go up there and there's nobody there, and we're terrified, and your dad, it's never scared,

is scared, and you get home and your mom's scared, and then, You're freaked out all night long and whatever the next day. You know, I didn't even tell my best friends about it for a couple of days just because I was having trouble processing everything. I believe the incident happened in late August sometime, and I had gotten a job waiting tables at a fine dining restaurant. I believe it was like towards the end of the winter, and it was very busy.

and I remember looking and some guy was looking at me and he looked extremely familiar and he goes Hey Chris Mahavlik What's up man? And it was The client's son

Eddie And I remember him being like Yeah do you guys Do you guys have any problems over at the house When mom and dad were at work And I was kind of playing dumb I said no what do you mean And he goes

Well you know that house is haunted And I said no I didn't all that. And he goes, oh yeah, you know, mom and dad got that house for dirt cheap. And I remember thinking that there's no house in that neighborhood that was for dirt cheap. It was a very upscale neighborhood. And I said, oh, yeah, how'd they do that? And he said, oh, you know, when they moved in, and they completely gutted the house. It was very outdated. There was old wallpaper. There was some really ratty carpeting down. So they ripped on all the wallpaper. They ripped up all the carpeting. And he told me,

that there were pentagrams and upside-down crosses. Wow. And the number 666 spray painted on the walls and carved into the wood floors. And he said that they were carved so deep in the wood floors

that they could not refinish them. They had to recarp it over them. And he said that they had routinely heard things going on in the house. His exact words were something crazy was always going on over there. We just got used to it. How you get used to something like that, I have no idea.

For me to be surprised that something like this would be going on in a neighborhood like that would be an understatement. Growing up, you always think that haunted houses are in bad neighborhoods. And it was definitely not the case here. This is a great neighborhood. I didn't really know what to think, but I do remember just feeling like the blood it all run out of my body. And I just said, all right, I got to get back to work. And I went to the waiter station and my buddy that got me the job. Brad was like, what's the matter?

You don't look so good. And I just said, I don't feel right, you know, whatever. I'm good. For me to say that it was a demon or a ghost completely contradicts most of my beliefs in life. But for me to say it wasn't a ghost or a demon, I know my dad has no conclusion. We have no conclusion. Chris and Brian were willing to share their story, but they were never willing to really believe. And then Bridget, who shared this story with me in the first place, piped up.

I think these guys do know what happened. I was there when my dad came through the door and, again, quietly but sternly said it happened. I know my brother, I know my dad. I think they know in their heart of hearts that it was an evil presence, but they are so scientific and proof-driven and logical and practical that there's that part of their brain that is struggling to reconcile. I unfortunately think that my sister might be smarter than I give her greater for. That's right.

That's why she has a master's degree from Kay's. She's the nail on the head. Normally when you go into a house, but especially being a contractor, you know that it's just made out of brick and wood and plaster and paint. And when we were in this house and we heard these noises that the house was making or something in the house was making, and then I went to go check it out, and it stopped. I realized something else was going on

besides a bunch of brick and mortar there was something else going on inside of that house besides drywall and two by fours and I still to this day that freaks me out Loving Light the Brian, Christian, Mary and Bridget Mahavlik for sharing your story was spooked

Now in just a moment we're going to meet another kind of painter one whose paintings are not just paintings. Welcome back to Spooked. Now, I know a couple of painters who have true talent. They make colors dance and sing, and sometimes, if the light strikes just right, their paintings actually look like they are alive.

Well, that's just a trick of the mind, right? Something you see out of the corner of your eye. It's not like it's actually living and breathing. Huh? Jackie Hill. Jackie wasn't for sure what she saw. But Jackie Hill, Jackie wanted some answers. Spooked. It's a snowstorm, so there's nothing to do outside. So we're all in my basement, which is my room, and we're partying. Marissa is putting on the song Where Is My Mind from the Pixies? And we're both kind of like, Where is my mind?

Like singing, dancing. Someone pointed out, like, oh, what's that on the floor? Like, you know, and I'm like, oh, these are my old canvases from college. You know, I used to paint in class. And Marcia was like, let's paint some things. Why not? Fuck it. Like, let's make a fucking mess.

There was red paint on my bed sheets. We were taking our hands and finger painting on the wall with the paint while singing and cursing. It was just being total. wild hooligans that were drunk. I put the canvas on my bed and I was standing up and Marissa was sitting across from me on my bed. I'm just doing the hair here

and it's coming out blue and it looks pretty and there's lots of colors and my other two friends were on the side just kind of running in and just kind of adding anything that they wanted to. And as soon as we turned it upright, My eyes went straight to the middle of the painting, and I saw what seemed to be a face,

and that's when I was like, wait a second. This shit's pretty creepy. There's a long, eerie, like, smile type thing, like, as if it was, like, cut into the sides of the cheeks, almost, which looked like a little girl smiling with blue hair, her eyes looking very eerie, with her throat slit, and then a little more drippy, and then you get to the bottom, and then the whole bottom was just pulled with blood. Even though it was super creepy, it's a really good painting. Like, it made you feel something when you looked at it.

And to be honest, we all thought that it could be sold for a lot of money, just because how, like, cool looking it was. Like, I initially thought it was creepy but cool. And I remember Oscar thought it would be funny to take the painting and put it on my dresser and go, ooh, it's possessed, the devil's coming. So he, like, flickered the lights in my room, and he was just like, oh, you know, it's going to get you. And he was just trying to scare the shit of us, which I'm scared of the dark. So it did scare the shit at me. And I turned the lights off, and I was like, stop it, Oscar.

Like, stop fucking around. And I took it off of my dresser. And I was like, all right, guys, like, you got to. get out of here and like I then kick them out. So I took it and I threw it behind my dresser because I didn't want it staring at me while sleeping. I came home one late night about four or five days after we made the painting and I went downstairs to get something and I switched both the light switches off. And then I remember I went into the kitchen and I came back and the light switch on the left-hand side was flicked on.

I know I shut it off, and before I knew it, I looked in my yard, and the outside light for the backyard was like, like, it was switching on and off, like, super violently. So I ran down the stairs, ran into my room, push papers out of the way and grab the painting as soon as I can. I brought it into the backyard, threw it on the cement ground, then picked it back up, snapped it over my knee

multiple times until all the wood was broken, shredded it off the wood, took all the staples out, crumbled it up until I couldn't see its face anymore, and got acetone from upstairs and a lighter, and I drenched that damn thing with acetone. And I lit it on fire over. and over and over again. And no matter how many times I lit this painting on fire, it wouldn't burn.

I couldn't believe that with the amount of acetone that was on it, that it would not burn for shit. Like, I used multiple lighters, and I even used, like, other papers surrounding it to, like, hope it would catch, and nothing worked. And I just became super frustrated, and I just said, fuck it. It was almost like I was so destroyed, but I couldn't destroy it. It was like I felt like I got the shit beat out of me or something, and the pacing was completely fun.

So I kind of just put it in a bag and brought it back in. And also, I don't want to just throw it out because someone else might get it or it might come back to haunt me. I wanted to know for sure myself that every trace, every piece of wood, everything from that entire hard painting was gone. So it was about a month after I tried to burn the painting. I was on set. I was doing acting work and waiting to be placed in the scene. And I met someone really cool in the line.

And then we got into discussion. He actually told me that he's a medium. When I told him all the eerie shit that happened in my house, house between my friend sleeping over and feeling that something was watching them while they were sleeping. And even my friend Lenny feeling when he was in my downstairs bathroom, he just felt there was something in my basement that was off. When he looked in the mirror, he felt like it wasn't just him that was there. And then I told him, well, yeah, like I felt a little negative energy from like this painting and I tried to burn it.

And he goes, oh, really? Like, what was the painting of? And I was like, oh, it was, I don't know, kind of looks like a little girl. And he was like, oh, he's like, then it must be a little girl spirit in your house. Like maybe something happened to her that needs to be told. And he goes, you know, let me see a picture of the painting.

And then I showed him and he's like, oh no. Do not ask it any question. this is not good. He was like, she watches you. Like, she watches you in your basement, getting ready. And she wishes she was alive, too, you know, and she might have died very horrifically. And she wishes that she could grow up to be like you

and live your life and have your body. And she never got to do that because she's dead. And at that moment, I was just like, you know, this is a lot. But at the same time, like, I had a sense of relief that this was happening, but I was also very, very scared. He's like, this is what you got to do. You need to go to a stone shop, get obsidian stones, go to the woods of Pennsylvania on the full moon,

and make it clear that this presence is no longer allowed in your life or in your house. And he said the only person that's going to be able to help me bury the painting is my ex, and he said that he's the only one physically and mentally and spiritually strong enough to bury this painting in the ground. I don't care if he was lying or this wasn't the wrong way. I just knew that I put it off for so long that even if this wasn't the answer, I had to try something.

Sunday was the full moon, so that's when I had to bury it. So the painting was on the floor crumbled up in a bag when I was trying to remove. it and I was putting it into another bag to make sure I got all the pieces. And I got a super weird, eerie feeling, and I kind of felt like a little bit sick. Then I got angry instantly because of the fact that it even made me feel like that. So I picked it back up and I just went through my downstairs hallway and opened the door and just got out as fast as I possibly could. When I first got in the car, I felt pretty confident because I knew that it was going to be gone and I actually got in there.

But as the ride went on, I started getting scared because of how dark it is, how little people are around, and the fact that it's just me in the painting alone with the car. I was blasting music, so I wouldn't think about, you know, the fact that the painting's in the back. So while I was driving, I hit the point where I was in Pennsylvania. down the back rows, there's no lights, there's no one to be seen. And I'm thinking, wow, it's really quiet out here. It's frigid cold. The moonlight is shining down upon me.

And I was like, oh shit, what if she's pissed that I'm bringing her here and she doesn't want to be buried and that she's either going to tap me on the shoulder at the back of my car or, you know, pop up in the middle of a road so she causes me to have a car crash or run her over? I was like, I just wanted it out of my car and in the damn ground already, and I just needed, you know, to get up there. So I'm continuing driving to Pennsylvania, and I'm pulling up on the road by his house that he said he would meet me by. I kind of was in relief.

I gave him a hug, and I'm like, okay. Like, he's here, like, I'm safe, because I don't feel scared of anything when I'm around him. I know that he's not scared of a painting or whatever as much as I am. So I felt instantly safe. And I felt like, you know, we were the duo Badass Team that's finally going to do this. So we kept driving onto, like, a hill. It was like a hill in the woods, and we had to park the car and actually walk up, like, into the woods.

And it was pitch dark in the snow. We pick a spot and I put all my stuff down and he picks up the shovel and the ground is so frozen. Only the tip of the shovel actually goes into the ground and I'm thinking, oh gosh, like I hope he doesn't give up. And I was like nervous that we weren't able to get the hole deep enough, but we managed to get the hole about an arm's length. I put the black stones into the ground. It was the stones that the medium told me to put in the ground to hold negative energy there. And I took the painting out of the bag and threw it in the ground and made sure it was down deep and the stones were placed properly.

And I then lit the sage, did a little cleanse over. over the hole and I put the sage in the ground and then me and Jake buried it together and made sure we stepped on it. It was in the solid ground and I wrote the rest of the spell saying your energy is no longer welcome here. I hold you to this ground and you're bad. Yes, that's it. I said it two more times under the full moon after that while Jake rolled his eyes because he was like, oh like come on. Like, it's cold outside, you know, I do this. And after I said it the third time, I was confident that this would finally be done. So while we were in the car, I felt the sense of relief.

Like, I was powerful enough to do this. I was telling Jake, thank you so much for helping me. Like, now we could go celebrate. Like, this is it. And he shared with me while smoking a cigarette while he was driving. he's like, oh, I don't know. Like, while I was digging the hole, like I felt like something didn't want me to dig the hole,

and he's like, I don't know. He's like, I think she must be pissed at me. It was like almost as if I passed my fear onto him then. And then we went to a bar, and my ex was freaking out, which I've never seen him like this before in my life, because he's not even scared of humans. He was like,

shucking up. Like he, like, downed a couple of drinks. Like, I knew that he was not okay. He's like, I don't know. I keep, like, thinking about it. And he's like, I know she's pissed. I was scared when he told me that. I went in the bathroom and I was just like, damn,

like, if he's scared, this is fucked up because now I brought, you know, the one person I love more turmoil than he already even had in the first place. So I didn't want him to be fucked up. from the situation. I felt a little guilty then because I was like, shit, I brought this to his life when he had nothing to do with it. Then while I was in the bathroom, I get a call from the medium. He's like, did you bury it? And I was like, yeah, it's full and buried. I did everything you told me.

I said the spell with obsidian, everything. It's in the ground, that's it. And he goes, that's strange, because I still see her in your aura. He's like, yeah, like, I got an image, flash image of her with her eyes rolled back. He knows she was pissed, but he's like, she's still around you right now. And I'm like, what? Like, I was making, I was like, what do you mean? She's still around me.

Like, so I tried to scan my brain. He's like, wait a second. He's like, do you have the picture of the painting anywhere? And I was like, not that I know of. Like, I don't have any on my phone. I deleted all the ones that were. in my camera roll. I don't understand. Wait. Oh man, I remembered that I had an Instagram for my art pieces and I was like, holy shit, this painting is still on my art Instagram. So I was freaking out

trying to put the passwords into the thing because I didn't remember the password to my art Instagram and I was like I was flipping I was like I was telling my ex I was like how am I get to log into this and get into this if it's not working and then what if I never delete the picture and she's still in my oar and he's like calm down he's like you'll get in that's you know stupid first of all why is it in your or just because there's a picture of it like he thought that was stupid and then finally I got into the Instagram I just deleted the picture all together and I'm like like that was the final piece like that's gone and after I deleted that I called him back up, I'm like, it's deleted, and he's like, all right, like, don't worry about it. You should be good

from now. I see that she's bound to the ground, which that's good, and you have no pictures or anything of it, and that should be done. You know, it was weird? I kind of felt bad. Like, I, like, felt bad that she was lonely and then grounded to the land. So, like, at the same time as I was, like, scared because she was pissed. I was like, damn, like, now she's all alone. Like, by herself in the land, you know, and she doesn't have me in anymore. Thank you, Jackie Hill, for sharing your story of Spooked. Please, Jackie, please stay away from those paints and brushes, all right? Not doing you any good.

The original score for that piece was by Renzo Goryo. It was produced by Annie Nguyen. You've been listening to Spooked, a Snap Judgment production. And if you also dig stories that were not born in the cauldron, Check out our sister podcast, Snap Judgment. It's amazing storytelling. With a beat, it's at Snapjudgment.org. My name is in Washington.

Spook is produced by Mark Ristich. Anna Sussman, our chief spookster, Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie Newin, Tiffany Delisa, Anne Ford, Eric Yannies, original theme music by Pat Massini Miller. Our sound team is Lauren Newsom. Renzo Gorio, Jacob Winnic, and Leon Morimoto.

And I just asked this, that at nighttime, the nighttime you check, you check to make sure the water's off. You check to make sure the kids, they don't have a TV on. That even if they're not washed, the dishes made it to the sink. You check all of that. But remember this, most of all, more important than the bowls. More important than getting the dog fed, more important than turning the heat down. Remember, never.

ever never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, ever, ever, ever.