Spooked - Take Me Home

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

You are on your smoke break at Walmart. You look down and see a box: inside is a ceramic lamb with a note around its neck asking you to take it home. Do you: a) burn it; b) throw it in the trash, or c) take it home? Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jill and Jack reached through the crack to see with naked steel. A magic lamp, a golden map, a blade of tempered steel. Listening to Spooked, stay tuned. You walk the dark road. Once you hear a faint whisper or even see the cloaked one, it may be easy to suppose that, well, you've been here before, You've experienced a few things that at long last and great cost. You understand this veil of light and shadow smoking deception that here too there are rules.

And rules can be mastered like a chessboard or a piano or a deck of cards, rules, mastery, understanding. So later, far too high a price for fancy bibles, it often comes as a great, Shocked that we know. Nothing. Spooks Season 5, 22 all-new episodes from now, through the season of All-Hallowed Eve, only on Luminary, understand.

You've never been this way before. Never believed in buying new things. Never really had that option, really. Always the yard sales. The Salvation Army, the goodwill, for our back-to-school. And to me, these places, they always smell like feet, smell like the senior center. But my mama says there are treasures here for the patient.

I don't find treasures because I don't have patience. True. But I do see stories to that shirt. In the seams of that jacket, the fade of those jeans I see. stories. Some are happy. Some are sad, but others, others think of fear, of a horror, of a hatred that I know, worried to touch my skin, it would change me. So when a mother crows about the jacket that is almost good as new, and I shake my head, no, even in our poverty, even from our desperation. She accepts this

instantly. She doesn't try to argue, doesn't threaten to beat me, because my mother knows I see the stories. She knows and because my mother

no thinking back now. My mother, she sees the stories too. My name is from Washington. Spook starts now. Not to pick up random objects lying on the street. You never know what may be attached to certain household items.

But our storyteller Corey, I don't know. Maybe Corey didn't know that rule. This person, odd things, like taxidermied animals, pickled specimens, things like that. I didn't really believe in the supernatural, really. So I would just buy these things with the, kind of the hope that maybe something would happen, but not the expectation that they would. I am working at the worst Walmart in the world. I went out on a smoke break, and I went up to the top of the steps

so that I could throw my cigarette butts in the dirt underneath the bushes. I look over on the left, and there was a paper bag sitting there. I was expecting beer bottles or something, but inside the paper bag was a ceramic lamb. So I reached it and I pick it up. It's about nine inches tall, and it's white with a blue base. It had a red ribbon around its neck. It wasn't ceramic like the lamb was. It was a real ribbon.

It looked very cheap. Underneath it, in the bag, was a note that was written in red ink. It said, take me home. I'll be a good little bitch, I promise. That was the stupidest thing I'd ever rid in my life. I glanced around to see if there was anybody nearby because the bag didn't look like it'd been there for very long, and it wasn't there on my previous break. So I took it inside, and I showed a friend of mine, and he worked in electronics with me. He said, you should absolutely not take that home.

And I said, you know I'm going to take this home. I know it's really stupid, but where am I ever going to find something like this again? I set the lamb down underneath the cash register in electronics, and I bumped it. And I learned it was a music box. I started playing a melody. It was called The Impossible Dream. It was just a really innocent blolabai song. I take it home, and I showed it to my girlfriend ahead at the time.

Neither of us were happy in our relationship, but we stayed together out of convenience. The only common interest we had is that we were both into collecting weird things. She was a little excited about it after she realized I wasn't joking. It wasn't something that I just bought at Walmart because it was stupid. So I threw the bag away, took the note out, and I put the note in the top drawer of my computer desk. We took the lamb in and cleared a space out and set it right in the center of the bedroom dresser. The next day, I got home from work and changed it on my clothes and sat down on my computer.

I would work nights, and I would get off at about 11 p.m. And I heard a rustling sound coming from the top of the fridge. I turned it on the light. I just assumed it was another mouse because we'd had one before. So I stood up out of my chair to go look for this mouse, and my cats were both sat on the floor

right at the edge of where the kitchen started. And as soon as I got to where the cats were, right as I was about to step on the linoleum, the rustling sound on top of the fridge changed into a low sort of sound that the girl makes from the grudge. I was actually terrified of that noise. It started to change pitch from, uh, to... So I just slowly backed up and sat down at my chair.

All the blood had gone from my face. I felt really numb and wobbly. The only thing I could think of to do was just drown the noise out with Elvis. And I put the headphones on my ears. And I just turned the volume up as loud as I could. And I didn't look away from my computer screens. I didn't want to look in any direction that was not my computer screen. I sat there like that until the sun came up.

Probably about 7, 8 in the morning. My girlfriend woke up and she came out to the living room, which is kind of what I wanted. I was waiting for her to wake up and come out so that someone else could be present. She was kind of berating me for a second, but I'm happy that she's in the room because I was able to take my headphones off, and the noise was no longer happening. She showed me her arm, and she said, one of the cats scratched the hell out of me last night. I knew, for a fact, the cats were not in the bedroom the night before.

It was like three little lines that were about six inches long. going down her arm. I just said, oh, yeah, it must have been, it must have been banjo. I didn't tell her what I had experienced because I don't think I knew what to tell her. And I also didn't want to freak her out. I didn't need us both freaking out. The next day I woke up, went to work, and I got a phone call from her on my cell phone. and she was screaming on the phone and I couldn't really make out what she was saying but I could hear like rumbling or knocking or something in the background

I just yelled to manager and said hey I have an emergency I have to leave and I just went clocked out talking to her while I was driving and finally I made out that she was saying there's someone trying to break in the house like through the walls my immediate reaction is that this is somehow related to whatever the grudge noise was that I hadn't told her about yet I was was driving down our road that would lead to our house. And she had ran outside in her pajamas. And she was running down the street still on the phone with me.

And she said, you know, I see you. I see you. So we hung up and she got in the car. And she said there was just people knocking on all the walls in the house. I still didn't want to talk about what I had experienced. So I told her that I had. I'd seen a squirrel go into a hole in the wall the day before. And squirrels make knocking sounds when they're rumbling around on the walls and they'll, like, take food in there.

And that's probably what she's hearing. And she actually accepted that. I was internally freaking out and on the verge of, like, a heart attack. There was nothing in my head but the dread of going to the house and the now rising belief that my house was possess. by some kind of demonic thing. But I also didn't know how to reconcile that with the fact that I didn't believe in that. So we drive back down to the house,

pull into the driveway. I really didn't want to go in the house. I just had a really bad feeling. But I went into the bedroom and was changing out of my work clothes. And she went into the bathroom and she immediately started screaming again. She ran out of the bathroom

and ran into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her and she was like, look in the bathroom. Something tore up the bathroom. I opened the door and I go into the bathroom and the wall that connects our bedroom and the bathroom there was now a huge gash in it. The drywall and the wallpaper was peeled down and there's long gashes in the dry wall

that looked like something had been raking a sharp object down it repeatedly. And there was like drywall all over the floor. I was no longer able to pretend that this was normal. I couldn't come up with any story to justify that one. I went to the bedroom and I told her, look, we need to go for a ride in the car. We drove around for a little bit and she was asking me, What is going on? What are you not telling me? It took me to like a half hour, 45 minutes to actually work up the nerve to finally say,

okay, look, I don't think we have squirrels in the walls. I think our house is like haunted or something. After I told her about the sound, and I told her that the scratch in her arm wasn't possibly one of the cats, she actually stopped saying anything. She just kind of sat in the car while I drove around and just looked thoughtfully for a few minutes. and then she asked me, you know, why didn't you tell me this before? I just kind of said, I don't know. I didn't want to freak you out.

I didn't really want to believe it. And we go, so what do we do? We agreed while sitting in the car that until we figured out what to do with it, we were absolutely not going to talk about it in the house. We weren't going to mention anything that it did. We weren't going to mention that the lamb even existed. we weren't going to say the lamb at all. What do they do in horror movies?

I think this is Vic the only thing that I knew was to just not acknowledge it. Like if we ignore it, maybe it'll get bored and go away. So every day she was waking up with more scratches. We could be sitting in the living room and all of the kitchen cabinets would fly open and just stuff would start falling out of them.

Our reaction to that would be to just stay, sat, don't scream, don't freak out, and then just go back and put everything back in the cabinets and close the cabinets and act like nothing happened. If we needed to say we had experienced something, the code word was we need to go for a ride, and we'd get in the car and we would talk about it outside of the house. Everyone knew about this. We had this really big friend group of about 40 people that we'd hang out with, and they were all be like, why don't you get rid of this thing? Why don't you just get rid of it? I felt like I couldn't just break it or throw in the trash. There might be a chance that maybe it wouldn't leave my house,

but then I wouldn't have the vessel that it belonged in, and I would have done away with it. We had lived with the lamb for probably a couple of years, and in that time, this stuff was going on every single day. We still had a bad relationship. We still weren't happy together, but we had this mutual understanding if we couldn't do anything about our relationship problems

until we were rid of the demon that lived in our house or whatever the hell it was. The hole in the wall was getting larger, but not quickly. We never heard any kind of scratching or anything. We would just get up, and the hole would be a little deeper. Eventually, you could reach your hand inside

this giant gash in the wall. But still, we kind of just ignored it. It hadn't murdered anybody. It was our justification. One night, I woke up first, and I kind of, like, shoved my girlfriend. I kind of, like, elbowed her awake, and she turned over and she was like, what?

And I held up the hush sign with one finger over my lips. It sounded like a nine-year-old girl, but there was no proper inflection to the words or like the words didn't belong together. After that, it wasn't quiet. Probably once a week it would wake us up. It seemed to be locked out of our bedroom or something. When we'd hear it talking,

we would make sure we didn't open the door for several hours. So there was like one occasion where I had to work in the morning and we'd heard it just a few hours before I was supposed to go in. And I called in to work because we didn't think that enough time had passed between when we heard it talking and when I was going to go to work, so we didn't want to come out of the bedroom. We didn't want to open the door. It was a nightmare every day.

We just wanted to be done or we wanted to stop interfering with life. It's really digging through the drywall. And directly opposite is exactly where the lamb was sitting on my dresser. I was worrying about what was going to happen when I finally broke through. to the other side. I was just afraid that it would get into the bedroom and it would just start doing the stuff that it did in the rest of the house while we were asleep. And I didn't want it to like drop a bookshelf on me or something while we were sleeping.

Right about the time that the hole is getting to the other side. It was probably 1130 to midnight. I was sitting at my computer in the living room. And I just heard from behind me to the left, hey. And I said, yeah, well, and then the voice replied, nothing. It was a satisfied type of sound.

I kind of jerked my head because I realized that was not my girlfriend's voice. And I spun around. There was nothing there. I was immediately hit with immense panic because I just broke the cardinal rule. I talked to it. It seemed very happy that I'd spoken to it in that one word. It was a gleeful type of nothing. the only time this thing had ever had inflection in its voice that made any sense.

I went into the bedroom and I said, hey, we need to have a car ride right now. We hadn't had to, quote-unquote, car ride in a while because it wasn't doing anything new. As soon as we got about three or four blocks away from the house, I said, it talked to me and I accidentally spoke back. She said, now you've given it power. You've given it energy. It knows that we know it's in the house. It's going to be mad because we've been ignoring it for the last. almost three years. Back to the house and the rest of the night was actually really uneventful.

The next day, I did not have work and we decided we were going to stay in. It was early. Doors in the house started slamming. The washing machine turned itself on. There was a constant, just loud, croaking coming from every place in the house all at once. And as it was doing this, the windows are slamming. The taps are running. The coverings are flying open.

Food is falling out. And at about 12.30, this is going on for like an hour and a half or so. We hopped in the car, and when we got outside, like in our driveway, you could hear our house making noise from outside. We were like, okay, I'm sure this is related to me talking to it. We have to get rid of this thing now. And we were like, we can't stay here anymore. So we ended up going to her mom's house.

I had gone way past scared and I was just now in anger I was mad at the stupid thing I brought into the house I was mad at myself forever bringing it in the house and once I cold down a little bit I started looking up paranormal researchers in the city I found one that was a few hours away to the north

that I said yeah we'll come down we'll do our research and our tests and stuff and I was like yes whatever please I couldn't accomplish anything I wasn't sleeping I wasn't going to work I was on the verge of getting fired. I was just wanting them to get rid of it in some way, but I didn't know what that would entail. So they came the next day.

When they first came inside, nothing was going on. But the house was a disaster. There was stuff everywhere. They had a bunch of electronic equipment. They had some recording equipment that they set up in various places. At first, nothing happened. and they were there for about 30 minutes. And at some point when they were in the bedroom,

they pointed a recording equipment at something. And after they did that, it angered the lamb, and it became very active. The little beepy-buzzy things that they had started going off the charts all around the lamb, and the little gizmos with the lights, they all went red. But nothing was actually, like, really happening. Even though the grudge sound wasn't happening, it was quietly angry.

Like, it didn't want to show itself physically by doing something in the house. The lady who had been in the bedroom was apparently their medium. She said that she was getting a sensation, like an image in her head or something of what it was. She never called it a demon. She said it was an entity. But she said she was very specific.

It was imitating a little girl, had never been a person. She said that she felt that there were two things in the house. And that the first thing and the second thing weren't getting along, she believed the reason that it couldn't come into our bedroom was because we had something else that was more benevolent that was attached to one of the weird things that we had in our bedroom. and that benevolent thing was keeping it out.

And that was why it was allowed to wander around the house freely, but it couldn't come into the bedroom where we were. So there were two things in our house, but one of them was like Casper the Friendly Ghost, and the other one was Satan. They agreed with my idea that I wouldn't be able to just give it away. It would stay with me. Someone else had to want it the way that I had wanted it when I had taken it home,

and they had to know what it was. and she said she knew someone who would take it. And I was like, I don't know who in the world would knowingly take something that does this, but okay. And she's like, he has a whole museum of haunted stuff. It was difficult to imagine that there was a museum full of things like my lamb. And I was like, I don't care, whatever. If he takes it and he gets rid of it, then fine. They collected the lamb.

It exchanged hands. I gave it to them. and it was a very freeing feeling to put the lamb in someone else's hands and watch them walk out of the house with it. And we both had this wonder, like, is this really, this is it? This is over?

We decided we would spend the day in the house and see if it quit. Nothing else happened. That day or the next day or any other day. Both of us were free to live out the remainder of our very strange relationship. as normal people and we broke up like normal people after a couple weeks one of the guys who was recording during the investigation he emailed me and he told me hey I have this

this EVP that you need to hear and I was like no I don't care dude it's gone I'm living my best life right now I'm done keep it put it in your collection sell it on eBay I don't want any part of this and the house was sold to an elderly elderly lady, who was very nice, and she knew what had gone on. And she was perfectly accepting of that. We left most of our stuff there. But the old lady, she said, hey, you know, you've got your computer desk here. Do you want anything from this?

And I was like, no, no, all the stuff in there is just junk. You can throw it all out. And she was like, what about this weird note? And I was like, what note? And she was like, it's in red, and it says, you know, it has a cuss word on it. take me home, I'll be a good little bitch, I promise. I was like, oh my God, I forgot the note. I told her to just throw it away, burn it, just absolutely get rid of it.

She actually called me like a few days later. She said she tried to throw it away, but she felt weird. So she put it on a magnet on her fridge. And I was like, okay, whatever makes you feel good. Like a badge of honor, I guess. Me, the house wanted to keep it. I don't know. for sharing your story to spooked.

The original scores by Lauren Newsom was produced by Chris Hambrick. Spooksters know that we are so glad to be back season five here right now through Halloween. And you know, we'd love to hear from you. We'd love to hear your stories. If you have a tale that you need to tell us, drop a line at Spooked at Snap Judgment, L-O-R-G.

Man, it's that time once more, More, more, you say. You want more darkness, more encounters, more monsters, more stories, not to fear. More stories you shall have. Season 5 of Spook only on Luminary Podcasts, your friends. Tell your enemies. And if you like your storytelling in the bright light of day, subscribe to the amazing Snap Judgment podcast because it might just change your life.

Spook just brought to you. I have a team that would never just pick some. off from the side of the road and bring it into their home. No way. No way. No one would do that except, of course, for Mr. Mark Ristich. Anna Sussman. Our chief spookster is Eliza Smith.

Wenzel Gorial, Chris Hanrick, Annie Nguyen, Leon Morimoto, Tale DeCott, Marissa Dodge, Leahy Jets, Zoe Frigna, Greta Weber, Jacob Winick, Sonokhan, Tiffany Delisa, and Ford, Fernando Hernandez, and Flo Wiley. The spook theme song is by Pat McNeillan. My name is in Washington,

and if you ever meet a stranger, thoughtful, but be firm. Let them know that as for you, in your home, you have certain rules that shall never be broken. First and foremost amongst them. Never, ever, never, ever, never, never, never, ever.