Spooked - Sea Legs - The Crossroads

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

Late watch on a Coast Guard cutter and Jordan’s picking up some high strangeness in his night vision goggles. Plus, we’ll buy you a drink at the Condor Club, but don’t dance on the piano.STORIESCoast Guard HauntsIt’s midnight in the middle of the Atlantic ocean and Jordan is standing watch on board a Coast Guard cutter ship, scanning the dark, starry horizon with a pair of night vision goggles. He’s looking for hazards in the water and other ships. But nothing can prepare him for what he’s about to see.Jordan, thank you, for sharing your story with Spooked!Produced by Zoë Ferrigno, original score by Lauryn Newson.The Show Must Go OnWhen the Spooked team found out that there was a haunted strip club right in their own backyard, we had to check it out in person. Producer Zoë Ferrigno reports from the Condor Club, where local history lives on…Big thanks to Rachel for sharing her story with us. Thank you as well to the wonderful staff at the Condor Club!Want to learn more about the history of the Condor Club and the woman who put it on the map? Check out this awesome documentary: Carol Doda: Topless at the Condor.Produced by Zoë Ferrigno, scouted Paulina Creque. Original score by by Doug Stuart, performed by Doug Stuart and Casey Butler. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm a fairy. Yes, it's true, and I'll do what you ask me to. But if you knew what was my game, you'd throw me back. From where I came, you've almost reached the crossroads from Spooked. Stay, that's Sam I am. That's Sam I am, he will not stop. Green eggs and ham. Please try them now.

I will not, Sam. Please try them here No eggs, no ham Day after day Does Sam implore? I tell him no, same as before Eat them, eat them, eat them now I will not, Sam

You blinkered Sal, I will not eat them on this boat I will not eat them with your goat I will not eat them here or there I will not eat them Anywhere Sam smile It goes dark His patience

dies. Last chance, he says, and I reply, get out, get out, don't bother me. Sam shakes his head. So it must be. The floor gives way down, down I fall into this dark and dreadful hall. Wait, wait, perhaps I could try too late for that, come Sam's reply. You had your chance. Now there you'll stay down in the dark to rot away. The door slammed shut. It's all a sham because Sam is me. Sam, I am.

He's fresh out of boot camp and doing his very first unit with the Coast Guard on board a ship patrolling the waters off the East Coast. I'm going to let Jordan take it from here. Half past midnight. I'm out here by my... myself on the catwalk, standing my watch, doing my lookout. This is a famous class cutter, bow to stern, 270 feet long. White with the famous U.S. Coast Guard, orange racing stripe on the front.

At this point, the ship is off the coast of New England. Even being late spring, it's still pretty cold. The wind is blowing. I'm bundled up in what we call a float coat, essentially a rank. jacket with a life jacket built into it. It's a pretty dark night. It's very starry out, but the moon had very little illumination in this particular night. So I'm using night vision goggles and I'm looking for hazards, essentially. Things floating in the water, other ships that we might not see on radar. At this point, I'm about an hour and a half into my watch.

It's been a pretty quiet night. I'm doing a scan with my night. I'm doing a scan with my night. night vision, just looking towards the front of the ship. And I see there's a person standing at the forward most point of the bow, about 70 feet away from me, with his arms outstretched. It's the middle of the night. There aren't very many people awake at this point, and for someone to be out there in the pitch black darkness, standing on the front of the ship,

that rings alarm bells in my head. I'm concerned about the worst-case scenario that this person is out there with the intent to jump off. Right away, I have to look again. Did I actually just see that? I pick up my NVGs again and look out, and it's very clearly a person standing there, just the silhouette of a person.

I can tell that it's a man. has got a military-style haircut. And I can tell that they're wearing the Coast Guard uniform, not by any color, just by the sort of silhouette of it. I'm yelling, hey, what are you doing out there? Hey, just trying to get their attention. The OOD, the officer at the deck, the person in charge of navigation of the ship,

she's inside the bridge. This OOD has heard me screaming she's my boss as a seaman and she has come out to see what the deal is. She's short, probably 5'2 blonde woman with big like porthole glasses, just these big round glasses that you practically can't see past

when you're talking to her. So I hand her by night vision goggles. I say there's someone standing on the bow. And I think the exact words out of her mouth were, oh shit, because at this point now she's reached the same initial conclusion that I have of somebody's on the front of the boat and they might be getting ready to jump over the side. So immediately she calls to the Bosen's mate of the watch.

They're only roving watchstander on the bridge and tells him to go down there. I can hear him open the door. It's a very distinct, like, creak and slam. sound, a very heavy door. And I can see his flashlight as he comes out. He's got a life jacket on himself, and he's

got another life jacket in his hand in case he has to reach out and grab this person and throw him in a life jacket to prevent him from hurting themselves. So the OD, she sends the Bosen's made of the watchdown, and a couple minutes later, he comes up on the radio, and he says, there's no one up here.

Right away, my heart sank. My immediate thought was that this person had jumped over the side or fallen over the side, and we didn't see it happen. I expected that we're going to be looking for a man overboard throughout the night, but I immediately pick up the night vision, and I see right away that the person is there still. I hand him to her, she can still see him there, so now I'm thinking that the BMO problem, probably had to walk through like a lit-up space to get out there. And so his natural night vision just isn't adjusted enough to see this person. We're on the radio, I'm yelling, we're trying to guide him to where this person is standing.

We can see him shining his flashlight right in the spot where the shadow is. And we see the bemo walk up right where this person is standing. We're telling him the whole time. He's right there. He's right there. He's right in front of you. How do you not see him? And then he walks right through the person

and is still saying that there's nothing there. My blood runs cold. I'm dumbfounded. I don't know how I could be even seeing what I'm seeing. I just watched a man walk through another man. The ODI and I are trying to figure out what it is we're looking at, maybe it's this, maybe it's that, but we can both see that it's not. It's not any of those things we try to rationalize.

The O.D. goes back into the bridge. She didn't have much to say after that. I think she was pretty well shaken up in her own head at that point. I continue standing my watch. Every time I looked down, it was still there. At this point, I've pretty well understood that. he's going to be there. I get off my watch and

make my way through the ship and at this point I'm just so exhausted that I'm ready to go to sleep and I pass out pretty much as soon as my head hits the pillow. So the next day I'm sitting on the mastic

between meals, kind of just wasting some time. But at the same time, I'm thinking about this shadow that I saw last night Ghost stories are very common on these boats I've always been a sort of what I would call maybe a loose believer

but I've never seen one so how can I possibly say one way or the other and then the OOD from that night comes up and sits down that's abnormal behavior officers don't sit on the enlisting They have their own sort of eating area cloistered from the rest of the ship.

And traditionally, officers aren't supposed to sit there unless they ask you. And so for her to come over here and sit down, she clearly has something on her mind. Really, before I had a chance to say anything, she said, I saw it again. After I got off watch, I went to my room and it was standing in the hallway. She just described it as just a black man-shaped figure. Right away, I just got chills. My hairs on my arms stood up. It wasn't just this figure that stood on an unreachable part of the ship,

you know, 70 feet away from me. It's now something that I could turn the corner and see it any given moment. Within the next few days, you know, I start hearing stories about I went out on the fan tail to smoke in the night I saw someone standing there and raised my phone up to their face to see who it was and there just wasn't anybody there or about seeing a shadow of a man

while they were making their rounds before they went to watch that they were in the gym and saw just this shadow of a person. At this point I felt pretty afraid that I was going to now run into this. thing anywhere that I went. It's capable of moving around the ship. What else is it capable of? What is it going to do the next time I run into it? About a week after that initial incident, we're having, what we call quarters, where we all get together in the executive officer and the commanding

officer, they discuss our upcoming plans, they make announcements. The executive officer stands up, And he goes, oh, and we've got a burial at sea that we need volunteers for. I'm thinking, what? What are you talking about? Barial at sea, like, nobody's dead. Nobody died on this boat. Come to find out, since we left Florida on our way back up to New England, we have been carrying this urn on board.

And it's been tucked away in... one of the officer's state rooms for safekeeping. And the urn belonged to a former electrician's mate in the Coast Guard. The electrician's mate had been in the Coast Guard in the 80s on board this particular ship, responding to search and rescue. What he requested was to be buried at sea in the vicinity of where his first SAR case was. At this point, it starts to make sense.

this was probably the man that it was walking around the boat. Anytime you're running to an old veteran, one of the first things they want to do is take a look at the ship that they used to be on, see what's changed and see who's working and how things are going. I think he was just trying to get his bearings and see what's changed, see what stayed the same, reminisce in a way. This guy who was on this issue, ship that stood where I stood, did the mission that I do, and now we're honoring his final

requests. That felt very moving to me, and I was very quick to volunteer to be a part of this ceremony. The day of the ceremony comes, and I have volunteered to be an earn-bearer. You have three riflemen to do the gun salute. We have someone with the trumpet to play taps. a couple people to hold the American flag as we do the internment. This particular urn is a small plastic box. Myself and the chief, we bring it over to the rail and put it over the side and let go. When we drop the urn in the water,

I sort of say a little bit of a prayer to myself, just thinking about the implications of what we've just done and what it means to the man and his first. family. And after that, the sightings stop. The shadow just feels like another shipmate now. That being said, a shipmate that I still don't want to run into in the dark in the middle of the night. But it's just someone else who lived part of their life on this boat. Recently, I was underway on the ship that I'm on now, and I knew that the ship that I used to be on was in a port that we were pulling into.

I went over to the ship. They were right across the pier and salute the watchstander, go on the brow and salute the flag as is custom in the Coast Guard and step on and immediately that smell. Every cutter has its own smell. And just the memories of the time I was there

just filled my head as I took in that smell. And I kind of feel like maybe that's what that electrician's mate was doing as well. Just taking in the memories. And thank you, thank you for sharing your story to spook. The original score for that piece was by Lauren Newsom. It was produced by Zoe Frigno. Our next story hits close to home for reels.

It all goes down to the Condor Club, a legendary nightclub, just a few miles away from the San Francisco spook catacombs at KQED. And yes, the Condor Club is a real live, adult, establishment. And as such, this story includes mentions of actual nudity, actual sex, even some strong language, sensitive listeners and such, you know, naturally, with all that I'll offer. Of course, our own Zoe Ferreigno decided she needed to pay the club a visit. I'll let Zoe take it from here. It's a Sunday night and my fiancé Pete and I are in North Beach,

walking up Broadway. Most nights of the week, this street, is totally lit up with neon signs. But tonight, almost all of them are dark. There's no glowing gangster outside of big owls, no blonde bombshell in front of the hungry eye. Even the bright green snake outside of the Garden of Eden has the night off. From the looks of it, there's only one club open to North Beach tonight.

And the 50-foot-tall neon sign that says condor in big gold letters is as bright as ever. Inside, the Condor Club is dark and very loud. There are Christmas decorations hanging on the walls and football is playing on the TVs. It kind of feels like just your average neighborhood bar, except for one thing. The dancer up on stage in a silver bikini top, hanging upside down on the stripper pole. The truth is, the Condor isn't just a neighborhood bar, even if it feels that way sometimes. It's one of the oldest strip clubs in Sanford.

Francisco and the very first topless bar in America. I was really excited to work there, honestly, even if I wasn't dancing, because it's an iconic spot. That's Rachel. She started working at the Condor as a bartender in 2019. The building itself is like over a hundred years old. So when you go in it, it has like a very like old school burlesque vibe, which I really liked. The stairs are still made of hardwood. The railings are still made of hardwood. The wallpaper was like super detailed and ornate, Paisley

with like these deep reds and gold. And then you just have pictures of dancers who dance there throughout the years. There's just history there. Like I wouldn't be surprised if it opened as a museum one of these days. Rachel started out working the day shift at the club. In the beginning, it was intimidating. The girl who was training me during the daytime, she was very charismatic and a lot of people loved her.

She had a lot of regulars that came in just for her. So I was just like I felt like I had like this huge role to fill, you know. Rachel knew if she was going to win over the crowd, she was going to have to put in some extra time before her shift when the club was dead. I came in and I was setting up the bar and I was practicing making drinks so that I could get faster at it. and I went to go grab a bottle, and then I noticed that the Hennessy bottle was out of place.

It was just like slightly scoched towards the edge. And I noticed that because I'm one of those people where I'm like, it needs to be in like a perfect little place, like it needs to look neat. And so I went and I pushed it back, and then I got down off the ladder, and then I started cleaning the bar and cutting fruit. and just doing downtime stuff that you do as a bartender at the bar. I look up in that damn bottle

is by the edge again and I'm just like, what the hell? Because I made sure that I pushed that thing back and then I went and I did it again. And it kept happening whenever she was there practicing in the deserted club with the empty stage. I would push it back

and then it would be slightly out of place again. It was just that one bottle of Hennessy. It was really annoying. After a few weeks on the job, Rachel was starting to get the hang of things. Because we had a lot of beer drinkers, I would keep bottles of beer on ice. So I remember I was taking some bud lights, putting them on the ice. It's very early. So like no customers had rolled in yet, the band hadn't come in yet.

And I heard what sounded like footsteps. It sounded like somebody was just darting up the stairs. I thought it was my main. manager. But then about five to ten minutes later, it sounded like somebody was running back down the stairs. I was like, all right, what's going on? Did something happen?

So I decided to investigate, so I went upstairs and I looked around. My manager was not up there. I came back down. As I'm coming down the stairs leading up to the private rooms, he comes up from the basement stairs. And I'm like, I just heard somebody running up and down the stairs. I thought it was you. And he was just like, oh yeah, that's the ghost. I've heard it too. In my head, I was like, you know, people like to blame things that they can't explain on ghosts. Or he's just trying to scare me. That was what was going through my head. So I brushed it off and went back to work. It was

another dead afternoon, and Rachel was all alone in the club again, up on the stage. My manager told me that he wanted me to start cleaning the mirror that's behind the pole on the stage because no one was cleaning it and it's just filled with fingerprints and lipstick stains because sometimes the girls would kiss the mirror. So I'm up there with the windex and I'm wiping it down, I'm minding my own business, and then as I'm wiping away these fingerprints, I see a man standing behind me. And that's when I got startled. He was very tall, very big.

Then he had a beard. He was wearing a full-on, like, black suit, white button-up shirt with a red tie. It was the kind of outfit that the bouncers wore. And he looked like my old co-worker that I had at my old club. And I was like, oh, did he come by to say? hello and turn around and no one's there. It was literally like a split second. Like I saw it in the mirror and I kind of got excited and I turned around and no one was there and I was like, what just happened? I got scared. I was like, is somebody in here? Like who was that? I looked around and I was

like maybe somebody from the night shift, maybe came in to pick up their paycheck or something. No, no one was there. And then I remembered like boss that it was haunted. Oh, is this what he was talking about? Up on the same stage where Rachel saw the man behind her in the mirror, another dancer is finishing her set. There's a guy in a suit up there with her, using a push broom to sweep up all the cash on stage.

Pete and I get up and make our way into the club's other room to get drinks at the bar. We see the stairs that lead up to the private rooms, where Rachel heard the disembodied footsteps. And then, towards the back of the club, we noticed that part of the floor is, is glowing. We walk over and see that set into the floor

is a baby-grant piano. It's underneath a layer of plexiglass and illuminated by hot pink lights. There's a clear stripper pole coming up out of the plexiglass that goes all the way into the ceiling. It turns out that this piano plays a big role in the history of the club.

I was bartending at nighttime. It was very, very busy, very loud music playing. I was very stressed out because there was a lot of people and I have to deal with this DoorDash order because one of the dancers had ordered food. Rachel grabbed the takeout bag and started heading for the back room.

But before she got there, she ran into another dancer. Her face is like super pale white. When I noticed they were looking up at the ceiling, I turn around, I look up. I was expecting to see something wild going down on the second floor in the private rooms because that's what happens when you work in a nightclub. That's what I was expecting to see, something wild. But when I looked up, I saw this black, shadowy figure of a woman,

hourglass-shaped, pinned up hair with her hand on her hip. just like descending from the ceiling, like down to the floor. And it was dark, but I could see it. It was plain as day. And then as soon as it hits the floor, it just dissipates. It was like a raindrop hitting the floor. It was like, poof. Gone.

I was super shaken up. I had chills. I was freaking out. But the dancer next to me, she was like really freaking out. She was like, oh my God, did we just see that? I was trying really, really hard to keep it together, but I couldn't stop shaking. Just the way she was posing, just the way that her body was shaped. There's no doubt in my mind that that was Carol, absolutely.

Carol as in Carol Dota, the iconic topless dancer who made the Condor Club famous and who turned North Beach into a hub of sex and controversy in the 1960s. Yours was the first topless show. The first tapless and the first to be in trouble. I was the first one to go to jail for three hours. He did go to jail for three hours? What was that like? It was very terrible.

I don't particularly like it. I would like to know what is a performance at the Condor? What did it consist of? Oh, it consisted of a piano, a ceiling, and a body. Coming out of the ceiling on the piano. With this wild rock and roll music. And it would... It was like an elevator.

It was like going up and down on an elevator. And it would hit the stage and I would go into one of my routines. Mostly rock and roll dancing. Carol performed her signature moves, singing and dancing, topless on top of the piano, six times every night. And each time the crowd in the Condor Club would go wild. When I saw the silhouette come down from the ceiling,

like that was her platform. where she had her piano, where she would come down. Like, that was her spot. She passed away in 2015, so pretty recent. But I wouldn't be surprised if she felt very spiritually and emotionally connected to that place. But the legacy of the piano that now sits encased in plexiglass beneath the floor goes beyond just Carol Dota. So back in the early 80s, this floor host and a dancer decided that,

now that the club was closed, that it was a good idea to do the nasty on top of a piano. Why they thought that that was a good idea? I don't know. But as they were, you know, being intimate on top of the piano, it malfunctioned. And it just smashed against the ceiling. And it crushed the man. His girlfriend, the dancer, she was able to survive. But, yeah, the forehost, yeah, he did not survive, unfortunately. Over time, Rachel came to wonder if that was the large man in the bouncer suit,

whose reflection she saw behind her that day in the mirror. Apparently, he had a beard. Like, that was his nickname, The Beard. This theory intrigued me, so I started looking into it. And I found out that there's evidence that the beard, whose real name was Jimmy Faro, may actually. have been murdered by the mob, and then his death was staged to look like an accident.

We probably won't ever know what really happened, just like we'll never know whether Rachel saw the beard that day, or the spirit of some other guy who just really loved Tennessee. To me, it's like a lot of different spirits that are there. Even though I was there for only several months, I could definitely just feel a lot of different energy because there's just so many different people that have come and gone from that place since the 60s.

And a strip club is a very emotionally charged place. There's a lot of different emotions, and, you know, people are experiencing a bunch of different things. I feel like their energy just sort of lingers. It's about 10 p.m. at the Condra Club. There's a little break in the entertainment, and Pete has wandered off with his drink to the back of the club to check out the piano one more time.

He's standing right over it in the same place where Jimmy Farozzo met his end, and where Rachel saw what she believes was Carol Dota's ghost. There's another dancer about to take the stage, but I think it's time to go. I want to get my fiancé out of here in one piece. Big thank you to Rachel for sharing her story at the spook, and thank you to the wonderful staff at the Condor Club for their hospitality spooksters. If you want to learn more about the history of the Condor Club, Club and the woman who put it on the map.

There's a wonderful documentary you should check out. It's called Carol Dota. Top us at the Condor. You can find out more about it in our show notes. The original score for that piece was by Doug Stewart. It was performed by Doug Stewart and Casey Butler. It was scouted by Pauline Creekie and produced by Zoe Frigno. Let me tell you a tragic story about these crossroads, about this Shatteland.

Because the truth is this. Some people they don't know the way They've never heard of spook They don't know There's a community of spooksters Trying to cast light on the darkness They wander Alone and afraid

If you find solace Respite connection from hearing real people sharing their real stories Take a moment Right now do me a favor Let somebody know Send them the spook story They need to hear

Tis the season Facebook Instagram TikTok column Use a stamp. That's the only way we can keep this journey alive. Now, if you yourself, you are spoken to a fairy, the magical kind, I would love to hear about it. Spooked at snapjudgment.org, because there's nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. He's got the special incantation from spook legal reading that no Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission. Spooked, he's brought to you by the team that goes to adult establishments for the food.

Except for Mark Ristage, he just likes the conversation. The road to Spook Studios runs through shadow and light, time and space only to intersect with KQED in San Francisco. Don't seek to find it. Let's it seek to find you. Spoot. The union represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broad. Podcast employees and technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL, CIO, Local 51, all of that in Davy Kim, Zoe Frignell,

Eric Yanez, Taylor DeKot, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Elliot Lightfoot, Suey Chu, Evan Stern, Eve Jefftoe, Echelle Lopez, Jack Darrell, Doug Stewart, the spook theme song is by Pat McSeedy Miller. my name is I'm Washington and Philip K. Dick once said that

it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. And I feel recently that my tenuous grip on whatever reality is is slipping even more. All of us that have heard something, seen something, felt something that couldn't be, we know

that if we insist that we saw or we experienced, what we saw or we experience that if we turn away efforts to rationalize it away, and refuse to pretend. Refuse to make nice, then it might not go so well for us. People might have to be called. Papers might have to be signed and we can't have that.

So we do pretend, we do make nice. We didn't see what we saw anymore. It's easier that way. And I wonder, if living that lie has had a consequence. An unforeseen consequence. I wonder if, when we refuse to acknowledge our own reality, does it make it easier to ignore someone else's?

We tell herself the contradiction isn't real in order to get along. Sure. It's cool if one person has half a trillion dollar and another person can't afford to purchase their children a sandwich. Sure. The real criminal. He's the guy who picks tomatoes for the sandwich she can't afford. Sure. The full might of the military needs to be deployed against our own citizens.

Sure. Sure. Once we tell lies to ourselves, it's easier to embrace the lives of someone else. I don't see monsters at the gate. Sure. We won't be next. Sure. Sure.

Never ever.