Spooked - Pet Cemetery

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

When Ray was a kid, he took care of all the animals in his neighborhood… even after they were gone. Thanks, Ray, for sharing your story with us! Ray’s podcast, What’s Ray Saying, returns next week! Enter a world of Southern-baked personal narratives and Black American history. New episodes drop November 8, 2023. Original score by Lauryn Newson, produced by Chris Hambrick, 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.

Every once in a great while, even in the darkest hour, a light appears. You're listening to Spoot. Stay. College student. Constantly beyond the point of broke, past broke. By living in this house in Ann Arbor, Michigan with some fellas, we have a house dog. Bima. A Bima is a great dog, truly.

Just sometimes, he likes to hang out in front of our place. One day, some overzealous officers that hand me a ticket for an unleashed dog. Really? Really, though? So as broke as I am, as absurd as this is. I passed a house collection plate, pay their ticket, and go on living my life. And one day, there's a note on the door.

It says an officer stopped by, asking if I can come over to the police station, half a block away. And forgetting my blackness, I go in to see if I can be of any assistance. Oh, you're the one with the dog. That's me. And as I'm talking to the officer behind the desk, I don't notice. The two officers sneaking up behind me.

I don't notice until they slam me on the desk. What the hell? They chucked handcuffs over my wrist. You want to resist? You want to resist? They slammed me into their waiting police cruiser, drive through the gun. the middle of campus and take me to the downtown Ann Arbor jail. Pull me, shackled into the station, locked me into a cell, laughing.

It's Friday afternoon, 4 p.m. I'm dazed. No phone, no clue behind bars. Officer there, leering. Picking his lunch from between his teeth with the toothpick. I remember to ask, I need to speak to a lawyer. I need my phone call. I want to speak to a judge. Well, well, I suppose you do. Of course, courts out for the day. And what with Monday being a holiday and all,

Tuesday likely awful busy. Now, it seems to me you're going to be sit right here for a spell. Might be a while. But I can't be here. I can't... Well, of course, if you found $100 in the next 15 minutes, cash not credit. Big Gap 2, smile. Well, then you can go on your way.

Otherwise, I'd settle in. $100. If I had $100, which I don't. But if I had $100, I wouldn't carry it around with me. but I do that thing you do. That thing you do anyway. I do it. I'm checking all my pockets feeling stupid,

empty wallet, two trite gum wrappers, lint, and I dig deep into my pocket one last time. I feel something. Pull it out. And in my hand, between my fingers, are two crisp, brand new, $50 bills at the cash.

Officer asshole stares at the cash. We stared together from either side of the iron bars. I see the first disappointment, then anger turning his grin upside down. But I'm smiling. I'm smiling at this money and at him. I don't know where these $50 bills have come from. I don't remember a circumstance where I would have come across a single $50 bill, much less

$2.50 bills? Go ahead, check your wallet. Take your purse. You could be as rich as minus. I bet you don't have a $50 either. See, there is magic left in this universe.

My name's from Washington. And not all magic is bad. Spook starts. Now, out spooksters. If you've listened to this show before, you know our friend, Ray Christian. He's got terrifying tales for days and you're lucky because I know where he lives.

I used to see myself as Dr. Doolittle. I loved animals so much. I mean, at one point I probably had about maybe 20 dogs, 40 cats, dozens of turtles and rabbits, maybe 20 or more pigeons. Me and animals had a special relationship that we could communicate with one another. Animals don't speak all the time in an audible way, but the squint in their eyes, their head movements, the way their tails go back and forth. I could recognize some of those social cues in animals quicker than I could recognize those in people.

In the neighborhood, dead animals were very common. They get hit by cars, maybe they die from disease, or they'd kill each other. I started to pet cemetery with the kids in my neighborhood because I wanted animals to have the same kind of dignity, and respect, and maybe be remembered, just like people. The empty lot where the old house used to be have been cleared for about a year now,

and the grasses had started to grow. A little chilly in the air, and we go out into the field and take the sticks and start to... and start to swing them around like swing blades back and forth until we cleared out a patch. But at some point, somebody got the idea. Maybe it was me to dig a hole and bury something. And the first dead animal that we all agreed

that we should probably bury was a dead pigeon that we'd found in the alley. The sun was starting to come up, and the grasses were still kind of wet and damp from the dew. do. We put it in the ground and I picked up a couple of popsicle sticks and I stuck them together like it was a cross and I put it in the ground. We said some words, the only words we knew to say, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If the maggots don't get you, the worms must. And we pat the ground down. At some point, somebody had a dead goldfish, I think it was. And I had a little bit. I'll

the natural idea was, let's do the same thing for the goldfish that we had did for the bird, then a roach, and the grasshopper. We would probably have one funeral a week. Maybe several weeks might pass, and it would be nothing. I played the game of having the pet cemetery, but I also believed it, and I felt it. We never killed any animals to acquire them. We always found them dead. The unspoken understanding was it had to be something that we hadn't already buried.

And we kind of ran out of our list of animals really fast that we could come in contact with. Dogs and cats, a lot easier to get. You would see dead ones in the streets and the alleys. It started slowing down right up at the point we got to rabbit. That took a while to find a rabbit and found a red dead rabbit at the park. The dead squirrel was stiff as a board. That took a couple of months to get. But there was a sense of excitement about I found something different.

As the animals became larger, the easier it was for me to believe it was more necessary to bury them. Before the other kids, the larger they got, the more it seemed like burying a human. And they didn't want to play anymore. There was another dynamic going on at the same time. There was a kid missing in the neighborhood. What made that an issue, other kids had came up missing in the city and had been found dead.

It was being talked about regularly, all kind of rumors, all kind of suspicions, city leaders, black leaders. They had to tell people something to calm them down, something they could do. And one of those was, your kids. Make sure you watch your children. And now almost everybody's parents were starting to tell them to stay closer to the house and didn't want them all playing by themselves together

anywhere. I started to feel lonely that the group of kids were starting to fall off. It finally got down to just me and one other kid and then it came down to just me. My mother knew I was burying animals and she never really said anything to me about it until one day she got on the bus and she looked outside and other people were poor and say oh my God, is that a cemetery? At that point

each grave was probably about maybe two feet long and maybe a foot wide. So they weren't like teeny miniatures. They were like big size and no matter what size the animal was if it was a little mouse

I would have a mound that would be at least two feet long. And cardboard headstone put 20 of those in there and it looks like

well, I thought I did a good job of making it look like just like what I wanted it to look like. When she came home, she told me that it was scaring people. That thing looked real. Too real.

I knew she wanted me to get rid of it, but I don't think she had the energy or the time to focus. on that particular small little weirdness that was me anyway. I still maintained the cemetery.

I still pulled up the weeds. I still tried to make sure the rows were neat. I replaced the crosses with these cardboard posters that used to be up on walls to promote shows and things like that. I would pull them down and I would tear them up into the shape of a tombstone. Then I would write and parrot.

dog, cat. I removed bottles and cans and pieces of trash, cigarette butts, out of it as much as I could. But now I was doing it, and I didn't have any reinforcement. It's risky for me to be outside at the edge of darkness by myself with this kidnapper out there roaming the neighborhood, but it's worth it to me to maintain the pet cemetery. I climbed to no old buildings and factories, church steeples. I was a kind of kid. It was always looking into trees, looking on the ground for animals.

One day I was walking through an alley, and I saw a ball of fern tree. Not normal. That's not a cat. And I get closer. And I realize it's a monkey. And it's wet, and it's shaky, and it's all trembley. And here it is, in a tree in Church Hill, in my neighborhood. It doesn't really move, but I see its eyes blinking.

I get a stick. I try to poke it. Get it to move. It won't move. And I think about climbing the tree. But that monkey starts going crazy. I wanted to get the monkey. I thought that if me, nice me, Dr. Doolittle or the Black Ghetto,

was going to climb up in that tree, and that monkey was going to go, oh, it's you. And he was going to climb down, like on TV, and get on my shoulder, and I was going to take him home. A lot of folks would never have taken it for a pet, but I'm thinking it's so rare, and I love animals so much. That monkey was insane,

and he gave me the message. I'll bite you apart if you touch me. So I came back the next day. I got a couple of old apples, and I brought them back. And I thought maybe I'd take a sheet I brought with me and put it over the monkey's head and grab it that way and hold it and take it home. If I could put it in a box or a cage myself, I could calm it down. Of course, the monkey's teeth looked way more vicious.

So I came back to third day, same results. I had the sheet, apples. No way. Monkey wasn't doing anything. The next day, fourth day, I came back in there. Monkey was gone. No monkey in the tree, no monkey around the tree. Maybe somebody else got the monkey or the monkey got brave and jumped down.

Who knows? I lost my chance. Several weeks had passed after I didn't see the monkey anymore. And I'm walking through the alley and I see some bones, but a piece of cardboard. That's not unusual in of itself, but I'm always curious enough to see what kind of animal might be under there. When I kicked the piece of cardboard off the carcass, it's the monkey.

I'm disappointed, but I have the realization that I have a nixed to having a live monkey as a pet. I wouldn't say it was one of my dreams, but this is the rarest. I never have another opportunity to bury a monkey. This one

was so exotic, so difficult to come by. So I took advantage of that, but I knew I had to think about this a little more carefully. I knew I couldn't walk from there to the house with this decomposing dead monkey. There's no way. I have to go find a cardboard box. I used a couple of sticks like I had learned before with the dogs to try to prop it up. and maybe two sticks on one side, two sticks on the other,

and roll it backwards and a tilt a little bit and then dump it into the box. Either said than done, just like in the past, you know, I tilted back, but the monkey was starting to fall apart and it just reeked its liquidy substance on my arms. So I did get the monkey to the cemetery, and I dug the grave. I kept it in the box. I had to smash it in on the sides.

It was really too tall, too big. I put up the cardboard. Monkey. I was proud of that. In the many, many weeks that followed, large groups of us would kind of join each other, heading toward the school at the same time, all of us that walked.

and I remember a group of kids saying, wonder what happened to that baby. What are you talking about that missing kid? The one in the alley, the body. What do you think happened to it? Somebody must have moved it. And I heard this in a conversation going to school, and then I heard it again.

Some other people said there was a body in the alley. Maybe it was that kid. There was a kid in the alley. There was a dead kid in the alley. Every time I would hear this conversation, every time I would hear people talk about it or even suggest it. It would make me feel compelled to say, oh, no. It was the monkey.

But I knew I couldn't say anything like that. I would draw too much attention. After I started thinking about it, I kept going over and over in my mind a little details, little flashes of the head. Okay, that looks like a kid's head. but it's not because it got furled. Or maybe it was dirt.

And maybe those were pants and not just as decomposed skin. Maybe I was looking at the wrong thing. I kept going over and over it as I had put it in a box and the bones were starting to separate. I remember being confused and thinking, yeah, that could be something. And I kept going over. over that in my mind.

That small, small possibility that I might have made a mistake. And I didn't bury a monkey. I buried a kid. That bothered me for a very long time. Hearing them talk about that for years. Either I did a wonderful thing or I made the mistake of my life.

But I wasn't going to check. I was afraid to check. And I didn't bury anything else in the Pet Cemetery again. Ray. Ray Christian, Dr. Ray Christian, thank you for sharing your story of the Spooke listeners. If you want to hear more from Ray Christian, be sure to check out his podcast, What's Ray Say? So what's Ray saying? It's on podcast apps everywhere with a link on our numinary show page. The original score for that story is by Lauren Newsom.

It was produced by Chris Hambrick. To get inside the spooked underground layer, follow Spooked on Instagram at SpookPod. And remember, if you like your storytelling under the bright light of nature's glorious sunshine and I know that you do, get the amazing, stupendous and incredible, Snap Judgment podcast, it's storytelling with the beat. And even though the world discarded it a long time ago, spook was created by the team that follows the precepts of that book, The Secret from a while back, the book that says you can manifest your own reality simply by believing in it. Unfortunately, Mark Ristich, he refuses to play along.

There's Anna Sussum, Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen Nguyen, Nguyen, Lauren Newsom, Leah Morimoto, Renzogorio, Tailed DeCott, Marissa Dodge, Greta Weber, Jacob Winnick, Alia Yates, Zoe Frigno, Seneca, Tiffany Delisa, Anne Ford, and Fernando Hernandez. The spooked theme song is by Pat Massini Miller. My name's from Washington. And I don't care if the A&Eyne.

angel comes shrouded in white robes, holding holy water in one hand and a pecan pot in the other. I just know this.