Spooked - Smells Like Teen Spirits - Classic

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

They say that evil forces will sometimes prey on the smartest people in the room. That means, of course, the teenagers. The Mammoth Mountain Poltergeist When Tom Ross was a teenager, he took a ski vacation with his aunt and uncle. Little did he know, there was something waiting for them at the chalet. Thanks Tom for sharing your story! Check out Jenny Ashford’s book, The Mammoth Mountain Poltergeist, which she wrote about Tom’s experience. The Moonshiner’s Daughter Growing up in rural Tennessee, Alex felt at ease, even though she and her dad were in the middle of nowhere. Until one day, when she saw a trespasser on their property. Thanks Alex for sharing your experience with Spooked!  Produced by Eliza Smith and Anna Sussman, original score by Leon Morimoto, Davey Kim and Pat Mesiti-Miller, artwork by Sanaa Khan.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

They say that a person's home is their castle. Perhaps. Except when you know that something lives inside that castle. Something patient. Something waiting. Something angry. Snap judgments underground layer. You're listening to Spoot.

Stay tuned. I've never been a violent person. Violence has never been my first response to upset. I didn't go so far as to say that I never understood violence. Didn't understand the desire to want to hurt someone. To physically inflict harm on their person, I could never comprehend it because I'm a man of letters, of conversation, of compromise. It did not compute until 19 years old, moving in with my new roommate, Tommy. Tommy of the back would sneer.

Tommy of the easy. lie, Tommy of the simple cruelty, I remember seeing him licking my toothbrush. Later, he looked me dead in the eye and told me that I didn't see him do what I saw him do. Once, I picked up my new high-topped Jordans only to discover them drenched in urine. Yeah, but

when I found the used condom shoved up. Underneath my pillow, where I lay my head to sleep. Then I knew murder in my heart. I saw myself committing the act. I did. Hot rage pulled from my pores like sweat. I saw myself ending Tommy painfully with my own two hands and smiling while I did it.

The thought brought me joy. If I'm honest, the thought brings me joy even now to the thought. think it. And I wonder, I wonder if this impulse, this, this hate is something that you can leave behind. It starts. They say, they like to slam doors. They say that poltergeist feed off the energy of young people. It was susceptible. And our first guess, he certainly was susceptible. It was 1982. I was 13 years old. My parents had just gotten divorced. So I had a lot of bottled up emotions.

And I spent most of the weekends with my aunt and uncle. My uncle Red and Aunt Lois. My aunt, my uncle, me and my cousin had the opportunity to get out of town and go to Mammoth Lakes, California, which was a nice ski resort up in the mountains. I didn't know how to ski, but I thought it would be fun. We were driving up through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, you know, there was snow everywhere. Lois and Redder up were up front talking to each other. I was just sitting in the back seat, and I just started to kind of get this feeling of dread. You have these narrow two-lane roads that kind of twist around inside the mountains.

And when you looked off to the left, it was just like a sheer drop, like off a cliff. We'd been driving for more than an hour, and the hood flew. open. My aunt Lois screamed. And my uncle brought the car to a stop. He got out, went to the front, and then he came back into the car. And we were looking at him like, what happened? He goes, I can't explain it. The latch was fine and everything. Nothing was broken. Hood just flew up. That scared us pretty bad. Well, when we got to the ski lodge, it was just in a normal, like, housing complex. It was a two-story condominium. And it had kind of 70-style shag rug, and the decor was very 70s, kind of out of date.

So we spent the first day mostly just settling in, and I helped my cousin set up his Atari. Later on that night, as I was trying to go to sleep, I heard the coat hangers in the closet kind of jingle against each other, as if they were blowing in a slight breeze. And then I heard the sound of something dragging. across that big heavy shag carpet at the foot of the bed and then it just abruptly stopped and then directly after that maybe about five seconds after that i heard the telephone receiver on the nightstand next to the bed pick up and fall back down onto the telephone it made noise it was a pretty loud noise it sent shivers up my spine when i heard it hit and then i

built up enough nerve to look over there and turn my head I was half expecting to see somebody standing there. There was nothing there. I kind of willed myself to go back to sleep. I woke up the next morning I felt fine. It felt like nothing had happened, like it had all been my imagination. Me, my aunt, my uncle, we all head out to the ski slopes.

We go back to the house, and when we arrive there, things are out of order. All the beds are now made, and we didn't make them when we left. My aunt Lois called the front office and asked them if there was some kind of a room service that was coming in and they said no, no, not at all. We were checking the house out and on the bottom floor at the very end of the hallway there was a room that had a bunk bed in it

and it had a little nightstand that had a lamp on it and Lois said, boy, that is an ugly lamp. And we shut the door and walked away. And my uncle Red said, wait a hold on. Let's go back and memorize that room. And we walked a few steps back and opened the door. And the lamp was now gone. When I went and walked back to that room, I found my uncle on his hands and knees

trying to pull on the carpet to see if it's actually attached to the floor or not. And they found the lamp. The lamp was in the closet. And my uncle says, no, there must be somebody hiding in this house. Maybe somebody was faking it. Maybe there was cameras in there that the room was rigged up some kind of special effects. And then he starts, you know, pushing on walls inside the closet to see if there was a false

wall there. But there was no other way into the room, you know, and we were standing in the only doorway in and out of that room. There was one window, but the window had been plasticated on the inside because it was winter. Day two, and it's still pretty early, I would say it was probably about three or four in the afternoon. We decided to get out of the house and go get something to eat. we shut off the lights and closed the upstairs drapes and went downstairs and got into the car and my uncle started the car and i looked back at the uh at the chateau

and i noticed that that top floor window was opened and the lights were on i could see something like some kind of a weird bluish haze and i said red look you turned that light off and shut those sheds And he looked up at it and went, yeah, I sure did. So my uncle just backed out of the parking lot. We left and got some pizza. It was weird. Sitting there eating pizza. I'm asking my uncle, you know, what is that thing? What is that ghost?

You know, I can't believe that. And they're trying to tell me to shut up to not call to ghost. We go back to the house. The shades are still open up there. The light's still on. We go upstairs and me and my uncle go directly to that window. And I'm looking down at where our car was parked. And I see something scrawled on the window.

It's in like clear, waxy substance. And it says, go. G-O. Go. The road to Mammoth Lakes was closed. There was a snowstorm going on, so we couldn't leave. And many things happened over a period of days there. We'd hear furniture in the master bedroom moving slightly, or like it was being drug across the floor.

I had found a handprint on the ceiling of the bathroom of the master bedroom. And I said, Red, look at this handprint up here on the ceiling. And as he was coming towards me, he passed the doorway of the master bedroom. And I saw him just freeze and gasp. And I ran forward to see what it was he was seeing. And in the corner of the room was a rocking chair. And the rocking chair was rocking back and forth violently. There was nobody there to rock it.

I nearly jumped out of my skin. From then on out, nobody wanted to go anywhere on their own. Everybody did things together, especially at night. We were all sleeping on the guest bed in the upstairs living room with the lights on, all of our clothes on, everything. Just in case anything were to happen, we were ready. I remember Lois didn't sleep all that much at night. She stayed awake and watched over it. everybody. We were all sleeping and I heard this sound. There's something that happened downstairs and I heard

something that sounded like a chain rattling. Next morning we woke up and that chain to the front door downstairs. The base of that chain lock had been ripped out of the door frame. It was hanging by only one screw. And where the chain had been hanging over the doorframe, there were three deep gouges looked like a claw mark. And, you know, he was shaking. You know, I was shaking. It was kind of a sense of dread because we were snowed in and we couldn't get out of there until they cleared the roads.

We really didn't have anywhere else to go. So we just had to wait it out. Things happened every moment. You know, it was just constant. And by the third night, I guess to us, we got used to it. If this thing wanted to hurt us or to kill us, it would have already. It was just kind of an involving situation. We just noticed that if we talked about something, that would usually be what moved next.

We were in the master bedroom and we took a piece of paper. And my aunt wrote a message to it. I don't remember exactly what she wrote on it. I took that piece of paper and that pen and I put it on the nightstand. next to the bed in the master bedroom. And as I was walking away from it, going to the door, I could picture in my mind

that this thing was going to jump up. This pin would jump up and start writing. It was a big pin, clear one. So as I was walking away from it, I kept looking over my shoulder, waiting for that pin to jump up. It never did. I got to the door.

As I'm closing it, the space is getting narrow and narrow as the door is closing. I saw a flicker of light in the middle of the room, in between me and that piece of paper, and then bam, the pin hit me in the chest. It shot at me like a bullet. It startled me so bad, I slammed the door, and I backed up, and I said, Red, did you see that? And he went, yeah.

And I said, that didn't happen. He goes, no, that did happen. And I said, no, no, no, man, that didn't happen. He said, no, man, that happened. We were at the chateau, I think, four or five days. Lois and Red were pretty much at the end of their rope and they finally cleared the roads. My aunt was just really tired

because I don't think she slept very much during that time when we got back to Lois's house. I tried to get some sleep on the guest cot in Wesley's bedroom and I was in a sleeping bag. I heard the dresser drawer open up and I felt something land on my head on that sleeping bag.

And then it drugged itself down that sleeping bag and I heard it make that noise across the nylon. And it drug itself down to my feet. And then it did it again. Something landed on my head. And then it drug itself down to my feet. I remember it happened at least three times. I was too scared to look out. I was totally in the sleeping bag.

I'd closed even the face of the sleeping bag up. I was like a chrysalis. I didn't even want to know what was happening outside of me. I woke up the next morning, and every drawer of that dresser was open, and it was totally empty. And the foot of my sleeping bag was in about three feet of clothing in a big old stack. The thing had been throwing clothes on me all night. Back at the chateau, I thought that this was some kind of a haunted chateau, but now that it's happening at my aunt's house, I'm thinking there's a lot more to this.

And it was just, it scared me. I thought maybe we couldn't get away from this thing. I started to suspect that maybe it wasn't reading my mind, maybe in some kind of weird way I'm a part of this and that I'm moving these things. I was saying to myself, that's impossible. Human beings can't do this. This is something demons and ghosts do. So then I tried to move an object by the force of will. Took a bottle of cologne and I said to myself, I'm going to make this thing move this bottle of.

Cologne and that bottle of Cologne never moved. I was looking over my shoulder for about a week wondering if the thing would come back. Days later it's still nothing had happened and I thought you know what that's it is over. Kind of felt relieved. That was a close one. You know what I'm talking about like when you wipe your forehead. It was a feeling of relief. It was almost kind of like taking responsibility for it somehow diffused it. My aunt and uncle believed it was just some kind of a demonic ghost that was following us around. And I just kind of went along with that explanation. You know, I didn't want to tell them what I really thought it was.

Thank you, Tom Ross, for sharing your story to Spook. So read more about Tom's experiences. Check out the book, The Mammoth Mountain Poultergeist on our website, spookpodcast.org. And when Spook returns, I hope you've got a cup. Because you can't drink moonshine with just your hands. Stay true. Now we're traveling all the way to the forest of Tennessee where Alex's family has lived for generations.

There's a historical society, not in my town, but in a town over. And they know my family. They know all of them. My great-great-grandpa was a bootlegger called Peg Leg, because he had a peg-leg. And he's extremely well-known because he had a... His cart was an ox and a mule, and it's really different. to make an ox and a mule pull together, but he did. So he's this huge, well-known person.

And so, yeah, one or two generations ago, we had full sway of all of those mountains, and we just kind of died out. Where I'm from, in the height of the Appalachians, the areas where GPS doesn't really work. My dad would put me in the truck, and we would go loafering around in the wilderness, wilderness picking up, you know, whatever illegal contraband we could pick up. And so, yeah, that was

totally my dad. He was a convict. You know, all his friends were rough and tough, and he was rough and tougher, and I was like Velcroed to him. One of the rare times when he said, stop bothering me, you're hindering my work, go play. I think I was around 10 or 11. I went home and I was out into the backyard to play with my sister, and I passed this tiny little back porch area. And, that had this big mirror, which faced the woods. And me and my sister were just playing this game. We were running, and every time I would run in a circle past this mirror, I would just look at it and see myself, you know,

flash and then run around and flash and then run around. And then I turned to the left where the mirror was at, and I saw myself really close in the reflection. I just stopped. And in the woods up behind me, I could see this man just standing there. This man was standing kind of over my shoulder looking down at me. He was maybe 20 feet away.

I thought it was my dad because same stance, same mussely arms, same cut-off shirt. But it was off. He looked just like my dad except he didn't have tattoos. Since I knew that he was not supposed to be anywhere near that, area, that's when I kind of stopped and turned around, looked, nobody was there. My dad was over in the other direction. So then I went to dad and said, I swear, I saw you standing over there. It looked just like you.

He looked at me. He looked at the woods. He thought about it for a minute. And then he looked back at me and was like, go play. It was super weird because my dad is the king of his own territory. And, you know, if he thought someone was trespassing, he would go after him with a gun. So I was pretty conflicted about it for a long time. This cabin is so remote.

You always felt really isolated there. We did end up getting a little tiny TV set. Primitive, but I didn't care because I love my cartoons. I was sitting there watching cartoons and like my nose was at the TV. The TV was facing. my dad's chair, which he always sat in, but just the old blue broken down chair and he had, you know, a blanket over it and a pillow for his back and a whiskey bottle behind the pillow that was always there. And I heard him, I heard his boots clomping across the floor.

He wears these big heavy, like, logging boots. He sat down. He was three feet away from me with his legs kicked out. It was just totally normal. The only, abnormal thing was that he didn't say anything or change the channel. So I was sitting there watching my cartoon trying to milk every minute I could. I only turned around finally because it was so quiet. And when I turned around, his chair, it's just totally empty. I could not believe it. It was like watching somebody disappear.

I was so shocked. I immediately got up and he was. was nowhere in the house. I glanced outside and his truck was gone. After these things happened, I, you know, I always kind of approached him with a lot more caution, almost like, are you real? Like, are you, are you quantum leap? As time got on, I was like your typical, angsty teenager. I didn't have my own room, so I kind of hung out by the counter in the kitchen and I could draw and sit at the chair and listen to my radio. On this day, I was super into what I was doing

and super into the music. I had it blasting. My dad, he was going to walk out the door but saw me and stopped. He just kind of stood there face to face with me and was smiling at me. He was clearly looking at what I was doing, and so I just kind of kept going

until I assumed he would tell me to take my headphones off. He had always supported my artwork, so I thought, okay, He sees what I'm doing and he, you know, he thinks it's cool. And so when he smiled, it was so rare and so genuine. You know, to me it was like it made my world better. And so, you know, I didn't kind of want to break the mood. I was really enjoying that silent praise.

So I looked up and he was gone. I actually went back and sat down, put on my music and started analyzing it. and I thought, like, I could see the face and it was smiling, and it had, like, no facial hair, and it had no tattoos. It was like there were two versions of my dad. There was the loud, angry, violent version that I knew really well, and then this version that was more calm and gentle and, you know, almost fleeting that I could never communicate with.

he just kind of showed up at certain times. My aunt, she was the baby girl. She had all these pictures. She was sentimental. And I had been living with her close to a year, actually, a long time. I was almost 17. So I finally asked, do you have any family pictures? Because I've never seen anybody.

We just didn't talk about them at all growing up. And it was just a big stack of pictures, and I was sitting there looking through them. And so I got to this one picture. It was this man sitting in this chair just propped way back. It looked just like my dad. The difference was he didn't have tattoos. It was like I saw him and I was like, that's him.

That's the guy. Immediately I thought about it. The first thing I said was, who is that? She was surprised that I didn't know who he was. That's your grandpa, Alex. I'm like, and then I started thinking about, you know, I remember the man in the woods and I remembered when he came and sat in the chair. It all just kind of came together really fast and I never questioned it after that.

And honestly, my first thought was that I wanted to run back home because it was like he was there. He died 16 years ago before I was born and he died in the house that I grew up in. It really touched me because I really needed that as a kid. I would have loved to have had a grandpa and the fact that he was there for me in that way. I thought it was really sweet and I still do. But thanks to Alex for sharing your story. Alex down lives in Utah. The plans return to her hometown with her son.

And maybe, just maybe. Grandpa might visit again. Dig this show on your podcast device. Shows from spook love on the social media, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. You are the forces that make this show go. This episode was brought to you by the letters Mark Ristich, Nancy Lopez, Jasmine Aguilera, Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Taileda Kot, and Jody Colley.

Our original theme music was by Pat Messini Miller, the original soundstaking. All of the music in this episode composed, performed by Pat and David Kim and Leon Murimoto, best in the business. And understand, while evil forces may conspire to have you believe it's a good idea to just flick the light switch,

reject their siren song, Never, ever, never, never, ever, never, never turn out the lights on the next spooked. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean that it can't see you.