Spooked - Tales from the Smokehouse - Classic

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

Cursed cat bones. Dead dogs. A haunted pond. Master storyteller Todd Narron is our tour guide as we explore the mysterious, spooky American South.STORIESBarbara Nichols PondEver since a little girl died a watery death, the kids in Johnston County steer clear of the pond. Years later, Todd thinks that she might just be avenging her untimely end.The Cat Bone CurseTodd’s uncle was one mean son of a biscuit. But long after he’s dead and gone, his descendants worry that his meanness might rub off on them.Thank you Todd, for sharing your stories! If you want more stories from Todd, check out his books, Country Stories of Ghosts and Bad Men and Country Stories of Ghosts and Bad Men: Series 2 - The Dead Ones.Produced by Anna Sussman, original score by Renzo Gorrio, 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.

There are people for whom stuff just happens. They are there when the house bursts into flame. They witness the robbery. Lightning strikes their tractor the very moment they step away. It's like the unfolding stories know that they need a witness. And they wait for certain people before they even begin to occur. From Snap Judgment's underground layer. My name is Gunn, Washington.

If the story's going to happen, spook starts at night, sitting around a campfire, poking at the coals. Focke's to tell them scary stories, right? Well, you know the one person in your group that just has a knack for telling the best stories? The kind of storyteller can make you scream, jump out your seat, make the hair on the back of your neck stand up? Wow, spooksters. Be afraid. We found a master storyteller. His name is Todd Naron.

And if you're not already around a campfire, may I suggest that you dim the lights and get real cozy? My name's Todd Nairn, Todd Curtis Nairn. I'm from North Carolina, and I sure would enjoy telling you a couple of these stories today. Little Barbara Nichols was just was a little girl I knew when I went to grade school in Corinth Holders. We were both in the first grade together.

And she was beautiful. and we all the boys thought she was beautiful but I knew I did but I didn't ever tell nobody but every day I tried to get a little closer to her she really didn't show me a lot of attention I'd guess she'd say she was my first love she was just beautiful well like I said me and Barbara

she came to my little grade school in Corinthth Holors and we were in the first grade together and I also rode the same bus to and from school her mom and daddy didn't have much money She lived down an old path In a It was actually a little shack Back then that nobody had lived in

But some of a old farmer had rented it to them And they made a pretty good piece out of it One day, when she got off the bus I didn't think she thought nothing of me But when she got off the bus I started walking down the path There was a great big mud hole And she walked around it

She turned around right when she got out I went over the mud hole And she turned around and she laid right directly at me That's when I had to see. decided that I was going to love little Barbara and let the whole world know it. At least that's what I hoped for, but it wasn't meant to be. Because on her walk home down that long mile path, she had to pass a little pond about an acre and a half big,

and this is where the sadness and the horror begins. You see, Barbara didn't make it home that day, and her parents went looking for her and couldn't find her. So they went down to the road and stopped people that were riding and asked him for their help. It was just amazing how many people just jumped in to it and tried to find that little girl. They screamed, they walked every inch, every mile around that house. About 9 o'clock the next morning, she was found by the banks of the little pond, now called Barbara Nichols Pond, and it's still there to this day.

Back where Barbara lived, about a mile off the road, there was a bunch of wild dogs back there that people had just let go and abandoned. And the other people did this, that the dogs kind of bandied together. And to survive, they kind of had to be like a pack. And they would mostly kill just chickens and little goats and stuff like that. If you went by them on a motorcycle or something like that, they chase you. But I reckon they, if they ever got you, they got you. It seemed that those wild dogs were seen that they lying around that pond.

And from Barbara's tracks and them dog's tracks, it seems she must have been run into the water by them killer dogs. To escape them from biting on her, and instead, my little barber drowned. I never did like them dogs but I especially hated them at the bed Well everybody was really shocked We just couldn't believe what was going on I mean

This was really our first Introduction to death It scared us We're all scared We all were hurt And we started seeing strange things Happen around that pond We began finding dead dogs

Floating on or lying on the banks of it Maybe swallowing or rotting with bite marks where the turtles and catfish, buzzards, and were tearing into them. People would take the dogs hunting around that pond. When you called the dogs back in, at least one dog was missing. And you would like go around and try to holla for the dog for the next couple of days. And nothing else left, you'd go to Barberneckles Pond and that dog would be there. Dead.

And people just wouldn't hunt around there anymore. And they just left it alone. Everybody told that little boys and girls not to ever go around that pond. We all thought that, you know, that Barbara Nichols had something to do with them dead dogs, but, I mean, we never saw anything happen. We just found dead in there. I mean, we all kind of knew being country folks that, I guess, since Barbara Nichols had to die in there, they did too. It had to be a good 12 years.

I had graduated for high school and was still working on the farm. Well, I had Uncle Hugh, and he stayed in Wake County. and you wanted to go frog gigging. That's where you catch the frogs and geek the frog and skim and eat the meat off the legs. Well, he wanted to come to Johnston County. He wanted me to show him in the ponds around Johnson County and go frog gigging. So I said, yeah, and he promised a good time, which by this time I was a teenager, and that meant, you know, having some beer and stuff.

Old frog gigging, that's one of the funnest things you could ever do. Take a little John boat, which is a little lightweight boat, and you have a frog gig. Some people use a 22 gun, but he had a frog gig. Slowly go around the pond edge with a spotlight. I mean, a real strong spotlight. And you put it in the frog's eyes, and he'll stand just as still as he can be.

And what you do is you've got a gig, which is like a tiny little tripod for Neptune or something like that would use. And what you would do is you stick the frog, bring him in the boat, and you would kill the frog right off the bat so he wouldn't suffer. Then he would cut his legs off and put him back into the water Kind of like the circle of life kind of thing So we go to all the ponds and everything

And nothing was happening Nothing was happening Probably seven or eight ponds It was getting really embarrassing because we won't get nothing And I told them that we would be getting something So we didn't even have enough frogs for one person To have a meal out of I'd say that we got one more pond we can go to

And I really didn't want a gooder that pond. I didn't feel good about it. And I didn't even feel like I'd want to be a part of it. But I was kind of embarrassed that we didn't have nothing. I don't think I would have done it by myself. Well, I know I would have never done it by myself. But just having another person there gives you some kind of courage. It was real hard to get to, real marshy.

And carrying a 300-pound boat, just the two of us. It was real heavy. you were doing all you can do just to get into the pond and when you got into the pond I had a lot of feelings of Barbara I just thought it's not the place to be and we started going around the pond it's real real easy

and we were catching frogs and we got to the back side of the pond and we heard a dog yapping this one barking this was like yapping in distress like he was getting beat We took the spotlight and we shined it up there into the sides of the bank and we saw a dog coming yapping. He wasn't looking at us, he was looking at something behind him.

Like he was just getting beat from behind and run into the water. As fast he was going, he hit that water out wide open. And he started swimming for the boat for all he was worth. We picked the frog gig in the oar and we thought, well, we don't know if he's got rabies or what he's got, but we can't let him in this boat with us. But that dog kept going faster and faster. faster and coming nearer and nearer to us. But he was still looking behind him. And right when he got our boat,

something sucked that dog in the water and my dog just don't drown like that. Uncle Hugh looked at me like he had never seen nothing like that in his life. And I know I had never seen anything like that in the life. That won't know ordinary thing. We knew, I knew something was up right then. So we were scared to death.

I figured it must be a little Barbara Nichols has got that dog, and she was running, and she was getting revenge on them dogs, and she got a lot of revenge. I think Barbara Nichols was chasing that dog. I think he chased all them dogs. I wish that little Barbara would have went on to heaven or passed on somewhere, and I hate that she was down there running out the dog. But the fast as we could, we put that boat back on the truck and got out of there, and I ain't been back since. It's been called Little Barbara Nickel Pond, and she can have it, I reckon. that we're done with Todd Naron listeners.

No, no. He's got another, true, terrifying tale to share in this one? This one's about a curse. Dark, home-cooked magic. Spooked. My old grandfather had a brother named Uncle Frank, and he was mean in everything he did. He was so mean that nobody around there would hire him,

or even talked to him or have any business too with himself. There was a rich moonshiner in the area. And Uncle Frank worked for him. That's the only job he could get. He would either whoop you. If he couldn't whoop you with a knife or a hatcher or something, he'd throw a spell on you, and you'd be dead in less than a week. Okay, now, Grandma told me the spell went like this,

but she wouldn't tell me all of it because she didn't want me or Walker Jr. doing it. She said you had to get a cat, a dead cat. You couldn't go out and kill a cat. or anything like that and you take that cat and you put them in a pot outside of course and you boil it

until all the meat and the air and everything's gone there's nothing but the bones left you take those bones and you have to take it to a river or a little creek somewhere where there was running water and you toss the bones

into the running water and then there's one cat bone and a cat that a float The other one was a sink in that river They're running water, but the other one will have float And that's the one you're going to be in needing is that That floating bone

You take that float bone And you got you a dead man on the way So if you get the floating cat bone And take it back to whoever your enemy is Or whoever you want to get You put it under his rug And when that man stepped out under that rug They would step on that cap bone

And the death spell will be all over them But that's all she would tell us about a spell because she knew that Uncle Frank was in us too. His blood was in us. And she didn't want us to turn out like Uncle Frank. One morning he got up, slicked back his hair cussed a little bit, and walked out the back door and stepped on the rug.

He felt a little lump. And me and you might not worry about what the little lump was, but we just keep going. But Uncle Frank knew what that was. So he picked up the rug, and there it was a float. catbone. So somebody had finally gotten Uncle Frank,

and he was sure mad about it. So he'd had a spell all over him, and he'd choose right then short enough that he was dead. But he was going to do everything in his power to make sure he found out who it was to kill them. So somebody told him about a witch. That's where Uncle Frank went.

And she told him that won't nothing that she could do for him. That it less than a week, and probably a couple of days, he'd be dead. she said, but there is one thing that she could do. She said, just as soon as you die, you're probably going to go straight to the hell. You're going to see the devil.

And you can make a deal with the devil. He would kill the man that killed Uncle Frank. But if you did this and made the deal with the devil, you would burn hot, twice as hot as the regular center. But Uncle Frank, he figured, hot was hot, so who cared about being twice as hot? So he made that deal with the witch and the devil. And then he went back to my grandmama, and he told her, he said, just as soon as I die,

wait for the next person in the community to die, and that'll be the one that killed me. It didn't take me just a few days, and he fell dead as a doorknail, just as as healthy as he could be. And he was a cousin, and then he just fell dead right in front of smokehouse. and about 30 minutes after Uncle Frank died Grandma sat there and she listened you know and after a while they come in that the preacher died

and she was kind of surprised that it was the preacher and when they went through his pockets they found three other floating cat bones so we don't know how many people he killed but he sure killed a bunch of sinners was planning on killing a lot more sinners with that float with them floating cat bones

They say all the youngans got to get and put Frank up and brought him back in the house in the living room and washed him and cleaned him up and everything. So, I mean, we didn't do no autopsy or nothing like that back then. We just grabbed them up, cleaned him up, and tried to get him ready for burial. And they called a funeral man, but the funeral man said they weren't going to come and work on Uncle Frank.

He was just too mean. Well, they laid him out in the living room and hoping with somebody, you know, some of his friends or somebody would come by, but Uncle Frank didn't have no friends. So they didn't know what to do with him. They called a churchyard, and they said, can we bury Frank in the churchyard? And church people said, no, because we can't sell the lots beside of them. Nobody wants to be beside Uncle Frank.

And they couldn't find nowhere to put Uncle Frank. So my granddaddy went down to the back of the farm and started digging, but it was red clay. He couldn't get about a foot down in the ground. So they had a neighbor. and we all called her Aunt Ruth, but I don't really know what the real name was. And they wouldn't ask her. She said they could go way down in the bottom

in the bottom of the farm, but it just had to be far enough away from her house because she didn't want Frank close to her. So that's what he did. He went way down in the bottom of the farm, of her farm. She dug a hole and buried him. And he couldn't afford it stone.

So he just got a wide azale bushman and put it on top of Uncle Frank. Aunt Ruth, Yeah, we went to her house quite often, me and my brother. She was a real, real, real old by the time me and Walker Jr. came along. But she always had sugar cookies and cola and everything, anything we wanted to do. She would do it. She was one of the sweetest persons I'd ever know.

One weekend, I was just too sick. I was down in the throat, couldn't hardly swallow. And it was our weekend to go to our grandma and granddaddies. Well, Walker Jr. knew that he'd be kind of bored with nobody his age to play with. Walker Jr. is my brother. So he carried his best friend, Ben O'Neill, down there to play. So Walker Jr. and Ben O'Neill were looking around,

trying to find something to do. So back in the 70s weren't much to do. I mean, even if you look at TV, you had to watch what the grown folks watched, and that won't know fun. They found some fishing poles. Well, they went and they knocked on that rude's door. They asked, could they go fishing?

And she said, of course they could. Did they have any worms? And they said, no, she said, He said, well, go down there by a tobacco field, dig us some worms. They ended up going a little bit farther than it should. They started digging worms right up under a wide azale bush. But this was about 40 years later after Uncle Frank had died. And sure enough, they had hit something.

And they looked real hard at it, and it was a skull. And it was worms, great big worms, just crawling everywhere, in and out of the holes of his eyes and his nose and everywhere else. So they thought they hit the jackpot. but they were just scared to school. Ben O'Neill took the skull, and he took it out of the hole, and he started chasing my brother.

Ain't like he was going to bite his ear off or something. Because Walker Jr. wouldn't touch no skull or nothing like that. Finally, Walker Jr. told him to take it back, but Ben O'Neill was a little bit lazy, so he just put it down the side of the stump and kept going. But anyway, they went fishing, and then worms were something tough, because every time they tried to put them on the hook,

he could swear they would run. And they throw the worms into the pond with the hook and the cane pole. And it seemed like every fish in the pond go to the other side of the pond. So they won't know much fish caught that day. And they walked back to Granddaddy's house. And they didn't tell nobody nothing about finding their school. So they thought, well, what else can we do fun now? So they said, let's spend a night in the smokehouse camping out.

So they got their quilts and the Coca-Cola. and all the candies they could get or grandma would give them, and they went out and they laid out in the smokehouse. They play in and laughing and stuff. And it got kind of late, so they started laying down to go to sleep. When they did, something started crawling on the toes and went up to their ankles and went up to the legs and just went all over.

They started to itching the all over. And we didn't know if they had the sugars or what was wrong, but they went busting through grandma's bedroom door saying that something was eating them up. And what they did is she said, what did y'all get into? She didn't know if they got in something they were allergic to or something. So they finally told her about the skull. Well, she knew exactly who the skull was.

So she said, she put on her clothes and she said, take me to the skull. So that's what they did. In the middle of the night, they walked down there with a flashlight, and they found a skull beside a stump. Ben-on-il picked it up, and they told her to go put it back in the hole. When they did, they put it back in the hole. The worms just come from everywhere. and crawled all over that skull.

But the itching went away, just went away, like somebody put a salve or something on me. It just kind of disappeared. When they put that skull back where it's supposed to be, and they walked home that night, they said nobody said a word. But they just come home and telling me they found a school. I said, no, you're lying.

There ain't no way in the world. He said, I did. I was real jealous. Well, actually, I wanted to see the school, but he never would take me back there. But yeah, I'm kind of glad I'm on there Because Walker Jr. and Ben O'Neill were too good little boys. They were real good.

They didn't do no harm to nobody. But when they dug up that's good to Uncle Frank, them boys seemed like they changed. My brother got a little wilder doing things he was supposed to. My brother was in another town, a town he shouldn't have been in. And the cops saw him. Well, the cops got behind him And Walker Jr. made a bad choice

And they were running them down And he overcorrected in the curve And it flipped him out of the car And it flipped on top of him and killed him I was 13, he was 19 Ben O'Neill, I thought the world of him Everybody did He was a sweet boy

But after that eye, after he touched that skull He took his own way because Ben O'Neill turned out to be a little meaner than Uncle Frank, really. He joined up with a motorcycle gang. It was a club, motorcycle club. Get that right. And all motorcycle clubs ain't bad, but this particular club was bad. And after he'd been there a while, he just got to be too bad.

And I guess that he got so bad that the rest of him got scared. And two of them held him down and they cut his head off. And they put it somewhere out in the woods. So we don't know where he's head. head is. We know where his body is, but we don't know where his head is. It's somewhere in Johnson County. I hope it ain't Uncle Frank that did all that to my brother and the Ben, but I don't, you know, I can't say he didn't. I guess you could say I was kind of blessed that I had a sore throat that day, that weekend, because I didn't get to see what they saw. If I had of,

maybe Uncle Frank would have jumped on me. There's no telling I who you can be here right now. talking to you. You never know about evil. It's just got a way of following you around once you get into it. And sometimes you just can't shake evil. To Todd Nera, for sharing his stories with Spooked. Thank you, Todd, for giving us those hebe-jeebies. Now, Todd asks us to give a shout out to the good Lord Jesus Christ, to Todd's family, and to Miss Anna Sussman for taking a chance on him. If you want more stories from Todd Neron, not to worry because Todd has a book. It's called Country Stories of Ghost and Bad Men.

That's Country Stories of Ghost and Bad Men. Now then, let the people understand, tell your friends, tell your enemies, that you know where monsters dwell. The magical, the scary, the dark, spook podcast where this season we spare no expense in search of the truth behind the veil. And if you like your stories told in the bright light of day, check out our sister podcast. It's called Snap Judgment,

cinema of sound, movies of the mind, storytelling with a beat. Spook was brought to you by the crackling fire, Anne, Mark Ristich, Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, our original soundscape by Renzo Goria. The Spook theme song was by Pat Messini Miller. Always listen to the storytellers.

Always. And know this, without fail. Every single storyteller worth their salt. Every single one will always advise you to never, ever, never, ever.