Spooked - Panic Room

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Sarah thinks she’s found the perfect new apartment in San Francisco. But she’s in for a surprise…Thank you, Sarah, for sharing your story with Spooked!Produced by Zoë Ferrigno, original score by Nicholas Marks, artwork 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.

Even Simon met a pieman and stole up all his wares. Simon gobbled down the pies and danced without care. But the pieman knew that, Simon. So he set to snare. Said, I hope you liked them, poison pies, and better say your prayers. Listen, spooked. Stay. That's three dogs.

All super trained. Sit, he'll fetch. All that. And when he leaves the house, the dogs watch TV. Now, they really watch it. When the bad guy comes on the movie, the dogs howl. When the hero's in trouble, the dog's pace, nervous. Right, they get it, they understand.

I'm going to ask him to explain fast and furious to me someday. Now, my buddy, he's all proud. He says, look at air. Look how smart my dogs are. Right. alluding without saying so to my dog, who is as dumb as a rock. I try to turn on the TV for him to some dog show or animal planet or something.

He doesn't pay any, never mind. Just sits there on the couch looking the other way. He can't do any tricks really either. But, but... My dog is magic. Not catching a frisbee now. No, but if something is going on with me If I'm sad, if I'm stressed

If one of my kids need some extra love, he's right there He'll come Rest his head on your lap To let you know it's going to be okay And he will stay there Right there Right here

Until it is okay Then he goes off about his business Staring at walls, chewing on rocks or whatever he loves everybody. On the street he'll go wagging up to almost anyone. Does it matter? But when he does stop, when he does draw away from a person,

I pay attention because of my own intuition is broken. Atrophy. His is razor sharp. I trust him implicitly. If he's got a problem with you, if he tells me that you are a baby, bad person truthfully, I'm going to have to have a problem with you as well. Because he's never wrong.

So ask yourself, what would you rather have? A smart dog or a magical one? Spook starts. Now, eternal warning system takes place not too far from Spook's underground layer in San Francisco. It's the year 2005. Serious in her 20s looking for a new spot to live. And finding an apartment in the Bay Area, this is no easy feat. And if you do find a place, well, I'd been putting feelers out to find a place. And one morning I was at church and I had made

some friends there and someone mentioned, oh, you should talk to, let's call her Lynn. She has a place that's available in her spot. And so she introduced me to Lynn. She had dark brown hair that was cut into a very cute bulb. I definitely got good vibes from Lynn. Really friendly. She was friends with other people that I had made friendships with, and so I thought it could definitely be a great roommate situation. So Lynn gave me the address for the apartment

and told me that it was in the Dubose Triangle neighborhood and gave me a few details about the apartment specifically that it would just be the two of us. and she invited me to come over and see it. So a few days later, after my conversation with Lynn, I walked down Knob Hill, I catch Muni, and I step off at the church and debose stop. When I first walked up to the house, I was struck.

It was painted, bright yellow, it had all the lacy, intricate carvings you can imagine on a Victorian. And there was a beautiful metal gate out front of it, so I opened the latch and went in. And I rang the kind of shrill bell. And Lynn threw open the doors and welcomed me in. When you first walk in, it's a long, narrow hallway. And then directly to the right is the room that would be mine. And it was probably originally a parlor or a dining area. So it had a huge beautiful bay window.

It had an ornate original fireplace. It had a chandelier. It was just lovely. Lots of light was pouring in. Walking down the hallway from my room, Lynn's bedroom was the next door on the right. And it led into the living room. In the living room, there is a closet.

And then there's also two doors that lead off to the bathroom. and to the kitchen. Throughout the whole house, it was all the original wood floors. They were beautiful honey color. After I toured the apartment, I told Lynn that I loved it, but that I really wanted to sleep on it that night and that I would get back to her the next morning. I wanted to make sure it felt right before I jumped into it

because I realized, you know, it was a big deal to move again. That night, I went home and I had a dream. I dreamt that I walked up to the house. and this wasn't a dream where it doesn't look like the house but you know it is. It was the house. It looked exactly how it had that day when I visited. I walked right up to the door, but this time the doors were already open when I got there. The hallway was really dark and Lynn wasn't there greeting me.

It was empty. I got this feeling of dread that kept building. instinctively, immediately I knew something was wrong and that somebody needed help. And so I called out tentatively and I heard it echoed down that long Victorian hallway. But before anything could happen, I was just overcome with such fear in the dream

that I took off running down the street. And then I woke up feeling, a little uneasy, but I have a very wild nighttime self, and I have really vivid, colorful dreams. So when I had this dream, I didn't think too much of it. I wrote it off as just a dream, and I decided to call Lynn and say that I wanted to move into the apartment.

I'd probably only been living in the house about a week or two. One afternoon I was home alone. I had been reading in the living room and I decided to close my eyes for a few minutes. And as I laid down, it felt very much like someone was in the room with me. So my eyes flew open. No one was there.

I could see the front door from there. I could even see to the kitchen if I turned. I knew Lynn wasn't in her room. So I shook it off and thought that maybe it was just kind of I was overtired. But as I tried to close my eyes again, the same feeling happened. I felt watched to the point that I didn't feel safe having my eyes closed. It's a really uncomfortable feeling. I knew I was home alone.

but I kept glancing around me, looking down the hallway, looking behind me, looking out the window. So I decided that it would be better just to be outside instead. I quickly grabbed up my purse and my phone, got my jacket on, and hustled out of the house. I immediately feel better to be among people and hustle and bustle. I go walk around to some shops I got a drink while I was out and by the time I came home Lynn was home too

and it felt much better to have another person in the house with me I was hanging clothes up in my closet which was a walk-in closet right outside my bedroom and I felt the feeling that someone was behind me in the hallway and so I immediately spun around

to see if someone was there and saw nothing. A few days later, I was getting ready to go to bed, and I was just about to drift off. And that same terrifying feeling gripped me again that someone was in the room with me. I knew no one was there. I could see that the door was still closed, but that feeling still persisted.

I didn't know how to bring it up to Lynn. she was a really practical happy-go-lucky kind of person and it didn't feel like a conversation that would make sense. When people were there and we had friends over, it was fine. The house was filled with laughter and people and it was great. And so instead of trying to understand what it was, I tried to sweep these feelings under the rug. I just relied on a crutch of like keeping a lot of lights on, on having people over not being home alone as ways to kind of avoid it rather than looking really deeply into it. One night I go to bed. I got in under my covers and fell asleep. And I woke up in the middle of the night to the doorbell shrilly ringing. And I looked at my phone and it was 3 a.m.

And I heard a man's voice say, Ripper again. My blood just ran cold. Just a moment later, two flashlights shone in the bay window. My first thought was maybe there were intruders or robbers that were trying to get into the house. My heart was about to beat out of my chest. I felt just the fear pouring. through my body, and I was laying just stalk still as I watched the flashlights sweep over the room.

And then the flashlights moved away. I heard footsteps retreat, and I heard the metal gate latch close, creep out of bed. I walk over to the window and peer out the curtain. I can see that there's a police cruiser parked on the street right in front of the house. My first thought was, a feeling of relief, which is like, oh, it wasn't an intruder. It was a policeman. But very quickly, the next question that jumped in my brain was, why would they be coming to our house at 3 a.m.? At this point, my heart is still pounding out of my chest, but I'm ready to now do something about it and figure out what's going on. And so I opened the door, my roommate has heard the commotion to,

and we meet in that long hallway that faces the glass double doors. I was terrified to open the door. I didn't want to go outside, and so I tell Lynn that perhaps we should call dispatch to see if there had been a disturbance in the neighborhood. So I looked up the phone number for dispatch, and I called them on my cell phone. I tell the dispatch officer who answers what just happened, my address, and ask if they could give us any information on why police officers were just at our door. Dispatch takes my address and answers, yes, there was a 911 call that came from your apartment. And so police officers came to check on you. I was so confused when she said that.

I asked her to give me the phone number that it came from, and she read it to me. I write down the number. It wasn't my cell phone. It wasn't my roommate's cell phone. We needed a landline for Internet back then, and it wasn't that phone number either. And I told that to her. I said, oh, that's not actually our phone number. Is it possible that this came from one of the two flats above us?

and she said, no, this number is registered to your flat specifically. She didn't give me any details about the 911 call, and at the time I didn't think to press further, because I was sort of incredulous, and I was just thinking it was an error that wires have been crossed somewhere. I hung up the phone, I thanked her for her help. As I'm relaying the information to Lynn, I held up the sheet with the phone number,

and she said, oh, well, you know, there's a phone jack that's in the closet that adjoins between my room and that locked third bedroom. I could probably plug in my phone and see what number that is. I am baffled because I didn't even know that there was a locked third bedroom in the house. It turns out that the door across from the living room, which I had assumed was a closet, was actually a locked third bedroom and one that was locked by the landlord and was not accessible to us. I follow Lynn into her bedroom and she shimmies under her clothes in the closet and at the very back she's able to stick her phone plug into this jack. And then she stands back up, and from her landline, she calls my cell phone. And the phone number that flashed on my screen was the phone number that dispatch had told me called 911. This is full chills running through my body, goosebumps across my whole body, hair standing on end,

because the call is coming from inside the house. We started wondering had someone got in through the window. We tried the door to the third bedroom, but it was, in fact, locked. We kind of peeked under there to see if we could see any light or anything, but there was nothing to be seen, and it was completely silent inside the room. By this time, it's probably 4.30 a.m. Neither of us is going to be able to sleep that night. We are wired with the adrenaline.

and the cortisol, and we stayed up the rest of the night watching movies. I was probably the first person to work in San Francisco that day. I was not going to linger in the house longer than I needed to. I get a text from Lynn a little bit later that day, telling me that she had been in touch with our landlord to explain what had happened last night. The landlord had agreed to come over to the apartment later that night to chat about it,

and also show us the room. I wasn't looking forward to going home that night, but I was also hopeful with the landlord coming that maybe we could figure out what was going on. When I got there, Lynn and the landlord were already there. I remember the landlord pulling out an old-fashioned skeleton key because the doors were all original and opening the door. inside it was a really small, tidy room,

but there was a small twin bed against the wall, and there was a small desk, the window was locked, and it looked untouched. So we felt less nervous thinking that someone had broken into the apartment the night before, but still really confused. It seems so strange. that a whole room that could have generated an extra $10,000 to $12,000 a year was just laying vacant. And so I asked the landlord why they keep it sealed, and she responded that they used it for storage,

which seemed a little odd to me because the room was not full of items. It was pretty spare. After the conversation with the landlord, I'm still feeling really unsettled. I'm feeling pretty confident that it's not a person who made those calls. And I'm now wondering what else might be going on here. Is there something living with us that I can't see? It was an evening when we were both home from work. We had just done the dishes and were cleaning up, kind of getting ready for bed.

And I decided to ask Lynn what she thought about having our house blessed. She reacted pretty calmly. She was always pretty even keeled. And she said, yeah, if you want to do that, that's okay with me. We ask two men that we know. They're sort of like assigned to be helpful. help people in the church. It was probably the next week that they came over.

It was one evening after work. It was dark. We went into the living room, and they told us that they were going to say a prayer to bless the house and the people inside it. We were all sitting on chairs and the couch during this, and it was a pretty simple prayer. There was no mention of casting anything out.

It was more a prayer of feeling safe inside the home. I feel really hopeful after this. I think, okay, maybe we've locked it down. Maybe this will feel different. It's the next night after that prayer has happened. And I wake up in the middle of the night. I feel dread. I feel that something's in there with me.

And so I just instantly sort of knew that this wasn't going to be solved. There was just something very wrong and dark about this house, and I didn't want to live there anymore. It wasn't even until I had moved out of that house and into my new apartment that I remembered the dream. And at that moment, I realized that that feeling I had felt in the dream, of the terror and the dread were the same feelings I had when I lived in the house and was by myself.

I think something happened in the room that traumatized and hurt people and I realized that that dream was intuitive and was trying to give me a warning. I trust my intuition now. I don't disregard those feelings that I have anymore. Thank you, Sarah.

sharing her story with the spooked. That original score was by Nicholas Marks. It was produced by Zoe Frigno. Understand. This happened right down the street, but some experiences, to touch the ineffable, there's such a thing as spiritual tourism,

where you go to the somewhere, the jungle, the woods, the mountain, you meet a real-life brown person. You drink the drink, you smoke to smoke, You wait for the experience to happen, and then you catch the 10 o'clock plane back to where you came from. There's no knowledge, respect, understanding for the people, the ritual, the ceremony, or the tradition that gave birth to that liquid in that bowl.

With a savor of that smoke and that pipe, you just jump to the end. And while I am sure there are good times to be had that way, I know as well that certain understandings don't have shortcuts. So I'm more interested in the work and someone who has done that hard labor to engage with the culture to learn from it, the slow, humble steps to begin an understanding to a different map of the world. If you know something like that,

perhaps if that someone is you, I'd like to know about it, please. truly spooked at snap judgment.org because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. Now, right here, hot off the presses, a recent listener note from the podcast platforms, spook features amazing stories. A truly horrible host. What? Well, we'll move on. Listen, if you have a comment of your own, please share on Apple Podcasts.

Spotify, IHeart app, or the podcast platform of your choosing. That would be fantastic. Spook is brought to you by the team that immediately flees when discovering someone called 911 from inside the house, except for Mark Ristich. He's out here begging the spirits for lottery numbers. Now, there's Davey Kim, Zoe Frigno, Ann Ford, Eric Yanez, Teo de Kott, Merceda Dodge,

Leon Morimoto, Miles Lassie, Yari Bundy, Doug Stewart, Paulina Creeky, Elizabeth Z. Pardue, Adityamatu, and Lulu Jemima. My name is in Washington, and every person vibrates at their own individual frequency. A lone part. Sometimes I think storytelling at its core is an attempt to match vibrations that if I tell this to you, if I can relate to you, perhaps for a moment, we will vibrate at the same frequency together. You feel what I feel. We seek shared vibrations,

and when it happens, this vibe, it's mystical, magical, communal, I see you. I feel you. You feel me, us. Spook Road. It explores other vibrations that are not just you and I. A space where we try to feel for a moment of energies

they're reaching out of those that are not with us anymore and those that never were. A quandary is how to seek the shadow or protecting yourself from it. Because this is a land with no guidebook. So if you want to maintain the balance between wanting and fearing, between mystery and knowing,

between feeling bare vibration while holding tight to your own, never, ever, never. Thank you.