Spooked - Picture Perfect

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

A picture is worth a thousand words. Unless it leaves you speechless. STORIESPicture PerfectWhen Susiy and her family visit a new town, they have no idea who they’ll be running into.Suisy, thank you for sharing your story with us.Produced by Anne Ford, original score by Lalin St. JusteScreenshot Ghost Grise is working night shift in the nursing home. One night, something’s making mischief… and it’s not a patient.Thanks, Grise, for sharing your story with Spooked!Produced by Anne Ford, original score by Nicolas MarxArtwork 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.

Ding-dong bell. Johnny's in the well. Who threw him in? Little Jackie Flynn. Who will pull him out? Nobody. Nobody will. Or little Jackie Flynn might throw them in.

Analogy. Set to have the power, allowing the user to peer into other worlds, futures and dimensions. Of course, eight years old. I don't know this. I just figure it's high time.

I give myself a nice shave like I'd see my father. So I wait till the coast is clear. Creep over to the bathroom, lock the door, climb up on the stepstool, turn on the hot water. Then in front of the bathroom mirror,

I lather up my face with barbersaw shaving cream. And the smell, the shock of white, the sting against my skin, it's awesome. And I get a better look to marvel at my new manly manliness. I grab my mother's old hand mirror and angle it toward myself in the bathroom mirror. And in this reflection, I see infinite meat. My face covered in white foam, smiling, the back of my head, repeating till forever. And I'm staring at these other grinning myself, trying to see if we're all the same or maybe just the tiniest bit different.

And then, for the briefest moment, I see a face that is not ours. As clear as Christmas, staring back, angry, furious eyes. I dropped the mirror. It shatters into a thousand pieces. Who was that? My core terrified. Standing among shards of splintered glass, shaving cream running from my face, and it takes me a long time. Years to find the courage to search for that shadow figure again. To pick up and hold mirrors against a mirror with trembling hands.

Seeking someone something that should not be there. I've never since seen anything except my own terrified eyes blinking back, but I think that that millisecond, that shadow, that certain knowledge, has touched every single thing I have ever done since, always there, always waiting, as much as I wish it were not so. In fact, I'm pretty sure that this show began. in that bathroom, staring between two mirrors. Susie and her family, they're visiting Savannah, Georgia,

the city known for its friendly people. We're talking. It was a solitary summer day. There was almost steam coming up from the street. We were driving around and admiring the beautiful old, trees with Spanish moss that hangs down in this lacy, billowy way. We went for ice cream, I remember. And then we decided to take a walking tour.

After that, it was so hot, we decided to go back to our hotel room. We start looking through. my husband's digital camera. We are excited to see all the pictures that we had taken that day. We looked at our pictures of us eating ice cream and strolling through the park and my daughter playing with a little dog

that she had met there. But we couldn't wait until we got to the pictures of the pictures of, our tour. When we get to the last few pictures, we see something really strange. We're looking at golden orbs, dozens and dozens of floating lights and orbs the size of tennis balls. The pictures were filled with these things, floating all around our face. and all around our bodies. It was beautiful, actually.

This feeling of awe came rushing to me. I think we're both a little bit dumbfounded. After about 15 minutes, we put my daughter down to sleep. And when we went back to the pictures, somehow the last batch of pictures, They were completely black. They were all dark. And there was nothing there.

Including us, what happened? It was as if we didn't have the experience at all. We couldn't tell anybody anything except to tell them as a story. The tour started in the famous school. It's like a park where you can sit on benches, have a sip of lemonade. It has beautiful flowers, lovely trees. There was a whole bunch of people, I would say about 20 people and a tour guide. The tour was about three quarters of a mile.

It was geared towards families by someone who really knew the town of Savannah. After the tour, we ended up back at the square at the same spot. Everybody was saying their goodbyes and thanking the guide. We could see everybody wandering off. We were the last family there. We decided to walk around a little bit. My little daughter, she was about three years old, and she had a bright blue stroller.

We would put her in the stroller, and then she'd want to get out and walk. I'm like, no, no, it's too hot. No, I want to walk, I want to walk. So I picked her up out of the stroller. All of a sudden, I hear, hello. I was really startled because I thought everybody had gone. I looked up and there was a couple there.

A woman and a man. We didn't see them walk up. They were sitting on the fountain. We were very close. to them. The woman appeared to be a boat in her late 20s or early 30s. She was a brunette and she had a startling blue eyes. Her skin was very pale as if she avoided the sun. She had her hair pulled up in a sort of bun. She had on a longish skirt. It was modest and she had on a little jacket and she had on boots and it in the middle of summer.

Like, who is this person? I was like, hi. My husband looked up too and said, Hey. The young man, he had on a jacket as well, got tomato red jacket. His hair was long and wavy, but I couldn't see his face.

And she said, Oh, that's my husband. He enjoys looking out at the square. And I'm like, okay. The lady just started chatting. Hey, you guys are new around here. Never seen you before. And I was like, uh, yeah.

Have you ever been to Savannah before? It's a great town. It's lovely here. And I said, yes, it's very, nice. And her husband is now nodding, like he's agreeing with everything she's saying, but he's still not turning his head. He's only looking off into the distance. His wife is chatting up a storm. She's not taking a pause as if she doesn't want us to leave. Every time I go to say, well, it's time to go, she starts a new conversation.

Oh, my goodness, is that your daughter? Oh, she's so pretty. That was beginning to creep me out. Suppose they're complete weirdos, and they hold us up, they kidnap us. Because I watch enough dateline to think that, right? At the same time, it felt as if they were harmless and that they really just wanted to talk.

And she says, don't you just love the square? We got married here some time ago. And so it's our favorite place. And I'm thinking, but they look so young. They haven't had weddings there. In almost a hundred years. She says, can I see your husband's camera? I've never seen one like that before.

And my husband, who's a camera buff, is all up into the conversation. Like, yes, this is what it does. He didn't seem to notice anything weird at all. Because he never does. I'm trying to give him the hint, can we go, no, please. I would like to leave.

And she says, I want you to remember us. Take some more pictures. Take some pictures of the fountain. And I want to take a picture with your little girl. She goes to my husband. Take the picture. Take the picture.

This is perfect. My husband takes the picture. And then she stands up by the fountain and says, You take a picture of us now. Okay? And she says, no, you get in the picture. You get in the picture. She's getting more and more excited.

Her attitude is almost unhinged. And this gentleman is still nodding, and he's nodding more furiously. Finally, I say to her, my daughter's getting really tired. We've had her out too late already. And she goes, oh, I wish you guys didn't have to go. You know, we hardly get any company.

We'll come back and see us. Please, we'd love to see you again. And I hope the pictures help you to remember us. We said, okay, thank you very much. And we start walking off. And as we're walking off, she's still talking. Please, we'd love to have you back. Please come back.

My husband is always ready to start an entirely new conversation because I know him. So my husband starts turning and then I turn to kind of pull on him to say, come on, let's go. There was nobody there. And you can see the entire square. It was impossible for them to have walked off without us seeing them walking away into the distance. That was so creepy. We get to the inn and we decide we're going to look at the pictures. And all we see is all these golden orbs.

There is no man. There is no woman. All we see is dozens of these golden orbs. After about 15 minutes, the picture goes dark. I was like, aha, I knew it. I knew there was something very strange about this couple. My husband, he was saying, well, they could have walked off really quickly. I tried every which way for about 10 minutes not to believe it.

But then he just said, you know what? I can't think of anything else, but that they were ghosts. I had an actual conversation with a ghost. Susie, we are so glad you emerged from that conversation safe and sound. Thanks for sharing your story with the Spooked. That original score was by Lalene St. Juice. It was produced by Ann Ford. Oh, no, but we're not done.

Not even close. We've got other objects that need to be entered into the Spook Chronicle. Greece has been a licensed vocational nurse for seven years. Her favorite shift is nighttime in the nursing home. That's when she's got the top. time to take care of her patients without rushing around. She's got time until the night she calls for help. Because the help she gets, well, that's no help at all.

Spooted. So the living room of the nursing home, it has TVs, and we have several couches there. There's a piano. There's a radio. Some of our Alzheimer patients, they don't remember a whole lot, but they remember how to play the piano. I found my dementia patients to be my most favorite patients. They're super sweet. They're always trying to escape.

I had this one gentleman who would say, hey, you know, I have a thousand bucks in my pocket. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's kind of cool, right? What are you planning to do with it? Well, half of it is yours. If you let me out of this window, you know, I won't tell anybody. I just tell him, well, let me finish my shift, and then I'll come back and get you.

They'll forget, they'll offer it again. One night, soon after I started, I was walking down the hallway. I was talking to another nurse. She's like, my patient expired. Can you walk with me, right? She needed me as a witness for the time of death for the patient. So we were going through the dementia unit, which has two double doors that are locked. In those double doors, they have a small window towards,

the top. In that little window, I saw a woman standing there. I could see her shoulders, her head, and then she had gray hair. And I said, what am I looking at? The other nurse, she's like, oh, you see it too. It's the soul of the person. It just kind of hangs around for a little bit, trying to figure out that they already passed. Once we opened the doors, there was nobody there. Wow. I was amazed. She told me it happened to her all the time. She's been in the field already for more than 20 years. There was just no doubt.

I had heard of this kind of thing before, but I had never seen anything like it myself. One night in early March 2020, I was in the front by myself. It was already like 2 a.m. I was sitting in the nurse's station with my little rolling chair. I start writing my reports so that I could get them ready for the end of the shift. And I started hearing the piano.

It was just two keys that seemed to play. The deep notes. And I thought to myself, did I honestly just hear that? Because there's nobody here with me. It gave me the chills. Like, my legs were definitely shaking. Where is that coming from? From my nurse's station, I could see the piano directly.

I know that there's nobody there. So I'm like, okay, well, let me go look. Maybe somebody woke up. Maybe a patient's out here and they're confused and whatnot. I walked down the hallway and I could just quickly count that all my patients were there. And then I think, okay, so somebody's playing a joke on me, right? I go look for my coworkers, and no, they were all in the back doing their jobs and stuff. I was like, okay, so I imagined it.

And I'm going to start doing my round. But then I see that the piano, it has a little book of music. And I saw one page starting to turn. and then it struggled and it went back and it just stayed there flat and then it started to rise up again and it fully turned and then another one was starting to there's no vent I could say is pushing the pages none of the fans were on

and all those windows they don't open I had felt chills on the back of my spine The air felt so thick, like threatening energy. I felt like it was trying to scare me. I didn't want to go and call my coworkers because I didn't want them to think that I was that crazy nurse that they had to work with. So I FaceTime my husband.

He works in Alaska, and he worked a night shift. When he answers the phone, he looked a little confused. He says, why are you calling me FaceTime if you're at work? Because I never really do that. I'm telling him, okay, something weird's going on. I need you to tell me I'm not going crazy. He's like, but you're always crazy.

What do you want me to do about it? He was joking around. That's the type of person that he is. He explained what was going on with the piano. I said, I don't know. what do you think is going on? I was hoping he was going to go into the logistics of why the piano could have played. There's a mouse and there's something.

But instead, he went quiet and he was focusing on the screen. I was like, okay, he's looking for something. He says, hey, so don't freak out. But I'm going to send you a screenshot. A screenshot of me. I immediately got mad because that's not what I called him for. I just told him, you're not really helping right now. That's not what I wanted to hear.

And I just hung up. The call just made matters worse. I was not going to think about what he said. I wasn't even going to go there. Although I was super scared, I was pretending like, okay, I'm just going to get to work. and I'm having a regular day. Before I know it, it's going to be morning and I'm going to be out of there.

I turned on all the lights to the dining room, to the hallways. I go to this particular patient and the room, you go into the door, and there's two beds inside of one room. And it's divided by a curtain so they can get privacy as they're sleeping. The curtain is to be.

my right and the patient is in front of me. And on the other side of the curtain, I could see this dark shadow. It had like the shape of somebody that was wearing a hoodie. I thought, okay, it could be the other patient on the other side. But the shadow just kept getting taller and taller and taller. This thing was like two feet above me. I look at my patient. I look at my patient, I can tell he's seeing the shadow too. It just looks scared, scared, scared, scared. His eyes were wide. And he is grabbing onto my hand

so that I couldn't leave or I can go. I'm feeling really scared at that moment. This thing was getting more brave. Whatever it was, it was trying to show itself to me. But I was thinking more about my patient because I can run, but they can't. They're bedbound, nonverbal. I felt like I had to be the brave one.

And I grabbed the curtain, and I quickly push it off to the wall. And there's nothing there. And the patient on the other side is asleep. I have goosebumps all over. I felt my skin was ice cold. And my blood dropped all the way down to my feet. I tell my patient, hey, it's okay, you know, I'm going to be right back. I'm going to leave the light on your side.

And I'm going to go and walk to the back station to get another nurse to come with me to the hallway. I'm trying not to run. And then behind me, the door slammed. I keep walking further and another door slams close behind me. I didn't even want to look back to see what doors. I had a feeling that whatever evil thing was there, it was letting me know, I'm right here. I'm right next to you.

I'm going as fast as you are. So I finally get to the backstation. The two CNAs are there. They're doing their computer documentation, right? I said, there's something there. It's not letting me work It feels evil And they looked at each other

And they were like Really Smiling and looking at each other And then looking at me And out of nowhere It's dead quiet You hear a little girl voice The CNA to my left

Who was facing me She jumps up And she's like, did you hear that? And my expression must have told her everything. Because she's like, you heard it, right? You heard it. And I'm like, I'm telling you there's something evil here with us. I didn't want to discuss it too much.

I didn't want it to come back. The morning shift was coming in. So we had already turned on all the lights. 6 a.m. the nurse gets there. I give a report. And I'm like, I am going to get out of here. And I said, you know what? I'm going to say sorry to my.

my husband because I didn't even call him back. And I know he had called me a couple of times right after, and then he sent me a few messages. But with everything going on, I honestly had not thought about the picture. I'm like, I'm just going to shoot him a text message that I'm sorry, right? So I get in my car and I'm getting ready to leave. And I pull out my phone and I see the text messages that he sent me. And I immediately see this screenshot that he sent me. He had already zoomed it in. And I had already zoomed it and he had circled and read the area that he wanted me to look at. I could see my shoulder on the screenshot, and behind me I could see the windows of the nursing home.

In the corner where the two walls meet, I could see a black, tall figure. It was pretty thin. And then at the top, I could see a white face. with wide eyes and its mouth wide open. That's what I was seeing behind the curtain. A very, very tall, dark shadow. I felt like my legs were made out of jello at that time.

And they were shaking a little bit, and I'm like, what if it follows me? What if it's in the back of my car right now? I'm like, all right, just get yourself together. I did not want to be by myself after that. For a while, like, it just, I would go to sleep and I felt like something was staring at me or I couldn't go to sleep by myself.

My husband still jokes about it right now. The joke is that he would rather take a screenshot than save my life because he never told me to run away from there. The next week, that's when the wave hit for the COVID. Within that first week, we lost 14. We were losing people without being able to even help them. There was no ambulances coming to pick up these poor patients.

We were on our own. I was thinking about everything that was going on, and that specific night came to mind. It just made me think that it was a sign, an omen of all the death that was coming. I think that evil was just walking around. We know you want to see this screenshot, but I've got the bad news. She, Greece's got a new phone.

And that screenshot disappeared into wherever old technology goes to die. The original score was by Nicholas Marks. A story is produced by Anne Ford. We are searching and spooked for a very specific type of magic. See, there are those that claim to have long-term relationships. By force, by guile, by trickery, while they're able to command the powers of a spirit servant. A demon for hire, a familiar, and for a lucky few,

these relationships have spanned generations. centuries, continents, when covering fragments of story here and there, but if you know of the real thing, I know someone who does, we'd love to hear all about it. Spook at staffjudgment.org because there is nothing better than the spook story from a spook listener. Spook is brought to you by the team that wishes everyone the very best, except from Mark Wistich. He wishes for a perfectly toasted grilled cheese sandwich because nothing on earth is harder to find. Now there's Davey Kim, Zoe Ferigno, Ann Ford,

Eric Yanyas, Taylor DeKott, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Yari Bundy, Doug Stewart, Paulina Creeky, Elizabeth Z. Pardue, Adity Umatu, Mutu, Jammima. The spook theme song is by Pat Massidi Miller. My name is Glenn Washington. And these mirrors, these cameras, machines, computers is interesting. Having recently spoken with several AI scientists, they admit they're not entirely certain how their own machines work. That they're often surprised by the answers erupting from their creations.

Surprise, shocked, sometimes even dismayed after scraping the entirety. of human knowledge. Human art, poetry, novels, doodles, stories, photos, love notes, erotica, all of it, all of us harvesting ourselves to feed their new God. Why are we surprised that sometimes it feels as if machines have taken on a life of their own. We've sacrificed our lives for theirs, feeding it our very imagination. knowing full well, since the ancient Ghalom, since Frankenstein, since Terminator, we've prophesied the day our creation turns on its master. And yet, even now, we have the goal to imagine a happy ending. The ghost and machine is not apart from us.

The energy is us. and instead of happy lies, perhaps the best we can do is simply to see ourselves more clearly. To that end, friends, I offer one humble suggestion. Never, never, never, never, never, never, ever, ever, ever.