Spooked - The Kids Aren't Alright

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

It’s said that kids are more sensitive to spirits than adults, that they can see them, even talk to them. But how can kids protect themselves from forces they can’t see or control?STORIESBloody MaryYou know the game: you stand in front of the mirror and say her name three times: Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary… But that’s just a playground legend, right?Thank you, Danielle Addison, for sharing your story with the Spooked!Produced by Zoë Ferrigno, original score by Stanley Ipkuss.Ghosts in the GraveyardMaggi and her friends love playing in the woods. They play tag, hide-and-seek, and “ghost in the graveyard.” They like to spook each other. But one day, something comes to spook them.Thank you, Maggi, for sharing your story with us!Produced by Greta Weber, original score by Dakim, artwork by Teo Ducot. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Little Jack Horner sat in the corner, and Jack began to cry. When asked what's wrong, he said for a longer. I know who's next to die. You're listening to Spoot. Stay. Seven months old, he's beautiful, gritting, chubby, chuckling little guy. You can't help but want to squeeze on him. I get all up in his face and he looks straight at me, his full attention.

And he's smiling. and reaching, grasping, like he's never seen anything more delightful in all his short life that my roundy head lips my ears. He's got him plenty to say, too, to say to me that he wants me to know. I want to know. But then somebody always has to come talking about, it's time for the babies now. Okay, fine. They lay him down in the other room

Turn the lights back Be quiet for the baby Alright, I'm quiet for the baby But I sneak into that other room I see him in his crib There he is And he's still talking To someone

Smiling Laughing, laughing reaching grasping, focusing like Whoever he's looking at Whoever he's babbling to is looking right back at him and I can't help to wonder what he sees. Who he sees. My mother says that I used to do the

exact same thing she wondered who it was I was talking to. Who was I looking at the same way I wonder who is it he's looking at? Who is it he's talking to? And if maybe, a long time ago, perhaps I spoke to them as well. Two stars. played any of those games that you learn from other kids in school. I didn't play Candy Man. I didn't step on any cracks. I wasn't going to break my mama's back. No way.

No way. No matter how much my friends dared me to do what I knew better. But some people, some folk, they need to see it to believe it. Growing up, I was never afraid of anything. I remember when Thriller

came out. I was little. And all the little kids were terrified of it. I would just be like, what are you scared up? That's crazy. This is make believe. It's no different than anything else we watch. I was very logical. I always looked for an explanation. It's the beginning of the year. I'm in the fifth grade. And I start to hear about this game. Everyone is talking about Bloody Mary. They're talking about it on the playground. They're talking about it at the bus stop. They're talking about it in our class. when our teacher turns our head.

My friends tell me that to play this game, you have to go into the bathroom and you have to say her name, Bloody Mary, multiple times in the mirror, and she would appear. And if you were too afraid, you shouldn't say her name

because she'll show herself and then she'll kill you. We're waiting at, the bus stop. And these boys won't stop talking about how Bloody Mary said she was going to come after them after they played the game at their house. We played Bloody Mary yesterday. And she appeared, we saw her. She said that she was going to come after us and she wanted payback. They're scaring my friends behind me. My friends are sitting here terrified. I'm so annoyed with this whole thing. My friends are all scared. These boys are tormenting us. And I just feel like everyone is lying. I feel like no one's seeing anything. And they just keep talking about Bloody Mary,

Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary. And meanwhile, I just really want to talk about something else. I want to talk about Janet Jackson because I'm obsessed with her. And I just want to talk about about dancing and singing and playing and just anything else besides Bloody Mary. My friend starts crying at the bus stop because these boys won't stop and they threaten to say it again. I tell them that Bloody Mary's not real. And I'm going to prove it. Later in class, I'm doing my schoolwork and chatting with my friends who I sit beside. Our desk are all lined up in this use shape and our teachers stand. in the middle. Our teacher turns our back and the boys whisper to me, you're scared. You're not going to do

anything. And I want this over with and I want this over with now. I say to them, watch this. I raise my hand to go to the bathroom. I get a pass from the teacher. I march my way down the hall. I walk into the bathroom and I can see the cement brick walls and the dirty, dingy, dirty white paints. And then I turn to the right where there's three stationary porcelain sinks and three mirrors. And at that point, I gather up any kind of determination in me. And I decide that I'm going to go ahead and play this game. I hope nobody comes in here and sees me doing this. This is so embarrassing. This is such a stupid game. I just want to see something or have this be over with and prove to them that this isn't real. So if there's something that's going to come

out of this game, it better happen now. So I put my bathroom pass on the side of the sink. I stand in the mirror. I go ahead and run the water. a little bit and I take my hand out of the water and I sprinkle it on the mirror and then I proceed to look into the mirror and I start chanting Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary and then the lights go out in the bathroom. It's pitch black in the room and And the only thing you could see is the reflection of the mirror. That's really all you can see. The rooms starts shaking as if it's an earthquake.

Everything starts shaking, the sink, the mirrors, everything. I felt like the walls were shaking. It's not a normal shaking. It's literally hearing the rattling against the cement. and seeing the sink shake that's firmly inside of the ground. I'm terrified and hysterical all at the same time and what's going on. I look up in the mirror and behind me I see a white figure start to appear. It doesn't come all at once.

It's about six inches, seven inches above the floor. And it starts appearing at the toes. the feet are like kind of dangling as if they're just hanging there. They're not standing. They're just hanging and drifting there. I try to shut my eyes and tune it out and I'm like, this isn't happening. This isn't real. Open your eyes.

Get a hold of yourself. And I open my eyes again. Then it more starts to reveal itself. It's a white dress. It's a long white dress, but it wasn't like a wedding dress. It was just a gown, almost clear. I see her black hair draped on her dress. Her hands are dangling, her feet are dangling.

But there's no face. Like, I don't see a face. And I see some blood on her dress as if she was hurt. So I'm like, I don't want to see it. I don't want to see it. I run into the bathroom stall. Everything's still shaking. I tried to keep the door shut, but it's shaking and everything's moving.

I still see the white light in her nightgown. I'm terrified and I'm crying. And I just don't want to see this anymore. I don't want to see. I don't want to see. I don't want to see. Make it stop. Make it stop.

He's got to stop. And then all of a sudden, everything stops. As I'm running out, even though the lights, come on, I feel like out of the corner of my eye, the figure's still there. Not saying anything, not doing anything, just dangling. The feeling I got and it just, it just comes over me. And it's almost like I have energy just flows from the top of my head. And it's just like a windburst down to my toes. She just wants to be seen. I run out of the bathroom. And I see. And I see, the janitor in the hallway. I run to the janitor and I'm like, why did the lights cut out? Is there

an earthquake? Why did the power go out? The janitor says to me, what's going on, honey? What's going on? What is what's wrong? And I keep pleading with this janitor to tell me anything, anything that makes sense of what just happened in the bathroom because nothing makes sense at this point. And he says to me, everything's on. Look around. around you, the lights are on, they never went off. Nothing was ever shaking. So he takes me and I go into the classroom. I can't stop crying.

And the janitor says to my teacher, she's so upset. I'm going to go check out the bathroom. And so he runs. I can hear his keys slamming against his life. back and forth. I'm in front of my teacher and she's consoling me and she's hugging me and she's like, what's going on? Are you okay? What's the matter? The janitor comes back and he says, everything is fine in there. I didn't answer the boys when they asked what's going on. I didn't try to tell them what I saw. I didn't want to brag about it. I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to, I just

I want to forget. I was always a need to see it to believe it type of person. So that was my for sure. Okay, you need to see it to believe it. Well, here's your proof. Something I said, something I did in my actions, maybe it was asking to see it. I don't know, but it opened up some kind of,

it opened up something. bigger than myself. I asked to see, I got what I asked for. Here's later, my daughter comes home and she said some kid was at school talking about it. And the only thing I said to her is do not play that game. Do not try it. Don't do it. Never ask to see a spirit. Never ask. She looks at me and she just kind of pulls back like, whoa, mom, like, why? I just said it's like you don't mess with things you don't understand. Danielle Addison for sharing her story with the Spooked. Danielle thinks a lot about the supernatural, even when she's not on her show.

And if you want to get to know her a little better, we'll have a link to her Instagram on luminary.combe slash spooked. The original score for this story was by Stanley Ipkis, who's produced by Zoe. Frigno. So when I was a kid, I go and play with my friends in the woods. We play hide and seek in the trees, jumping the lakes, swim. See, these woods were our playground. The next storyteller, Maggie, she used to do the same thing until one day. Her world changed forever. I grew up in a small town, central Wisconsin. But it was always pretty quiet. It's mostly just potato. field's kind of out in the back. And I've got, you know, a nice wooded lot behind me.

And pretty much there was woods and trees all over the place. Imagine there's some houses, but multiple, like, hundreds of thousands of trees. Mainly these really big, tall pine trees that just kind of tower over you. And you just sit there and marvel at it. The thing I probably like most about living where I grew up was being able to sort of have that freedom to, you know, go out and do those things I wanted. You know, I could climb trees over into the neighbor's yard. I could go biking and we could find some abandoned trailers or like an abandoned ditch in like some water areas. Maybe there's a little hidden creek like a couple miles down on this dirt path. Our parents

weren't really in the picture all the time when it came to, you know, us playing around and stuff like that. It was considered sort of a safe country neighborhood. So kids could go out and stay out for long periods of time. It was around late October. Halloween was right around the corner, so all the leaves were on the ground, everything was cold old countryland. I went over to Brandon's house, and typically his parents would normally be there, but they weren't tonight, so his older brother Aaron was supposed to be watching us. It was me, Megan, Brandon, and then Nate and Gage. I was around 12 or 13. at the time and everybody else was in that 9 to 10 range.

It was getting dark outside. Everything starts to settle down a bit and we're like, okay, now is time to start playing our hide and seek game. So we decided to play ghosts in the graveyard. So essentially how this game works is there's one person who's a seeker and the other people who go out and hide. And there's this sort of central point that you have to get to as a person who's hiding to be able to be quote unquote,

safe once you're in the game and that's how you win as somebody who's hiding. Brandon is, he's a seeker and I'm getting ready to, you know, go to my typical hiding zone. Down the lane, there's this edge of a property line sort of in the back and that's where there's this really big cusp of trees that have a lot of things that sort of fall on the bottom. I'm a minority, so I've got this bigger, bushy sort of head on me and got tan skin. and so it's easier for me to hide in the woods. So I'm going over there and I see, you know, there's this little ditch. And little ditches are good places for me to hide.

So I'm laying down and I'm just waiting. And I hear rustling over to my left. I'm thinking like, all right, somebody else joined in my hiding spot. like they're climbing up my trees so I'm going to look up and I'm going to say like hey get your own spot so I look up and it's it's not any of the kids it's not anybody like that and there's instead these two huge tall beings and they had to have been like six to eight feet tall. They're just these huge tall shadow-type creatures that are just standing there and staring. It was almost like the shadow that was their body also connected onto their faces like a hood.

These tall sort of oblong shapes that are just coming straight up almost like plants from the ground. And then it's just the white face. Rob, it's just part of it. It's not... attached coming out of it and they're just standing there with these black holes for eyes and a mouth but like it's they're not breathing it's like when you look at a you know somebody who's just passed and then you suddenly realize like oh my gosh they're so still and it was that same sort of feeling like this isn't something that's moving this isn't something that's alive that's living. There's no presence. There's no form. It's just standing there. The first thing I did

when I saw these things was I hesitantly asked, like, hello. And there's no response. I asked again, hello. And then it was suddenly just like a weird energy sort of was like in the air. and it was this kind of heaviness. When you're getting ready for like a storm to come over, you know, you feel that amount of pressure. And that's what it was like. It was like, oh my gosh, suddenly there's a storm here. What am I going to do?

I could feel and I could sense that they were talking. It wasn't like talking, you know, like how you and I would talk. It was this weird abstract form of communication. and I couldn't discern what they were saying. I just knew they were talking about me. I don't know about what. I don't know why. I just know that they are.

So then I look up, and then all of a sudden, they just go at each other. It was just like at that moment, there was like some sort of snap between them where it was like they just suddenly came together. So it was like two halves of a magnet just suddenly stick together. And it was like, I don't know what's going to happen.

Like, they're fighting about me. They're fighting something related to me. So then at that point, I finally, like, I'm booking it. So I'm running. I'm tearing up ground as I go. I'm crying. I'm almost hyperventilating. And I'm running out to, like, I need to get back to the yard.

I need to get back to the yard. So I run over the back of the yard. and there's Brandon and Nate at this point, and they're like, what's wrong? Like, why are you crying? Suddenly out of the woods, then here comes Megan, and she's screaming. So then we're all panicking, we're running towards the deck,

and then here comes Gage, and he's holding his arm out of the other side of the brush on the other side of the house, and it's bleeding. We're all panicking, crying, and then here's Aaron who just got woken up. So he's like, what's going on? What do you want? I'm, like, putting through breaths trying to explain what's going on.

I don't even really have the vocabulary to explain, you know, what's going on. What I just saw, I'm just like, there's, there was two people. There was people out there. So he and Brandon both played baseball, so they grabbed their bats from the garage. And Aaron's like, Maggie, you need to take us to where you saw these things. And I'm like, I'm not doing that. And Brandon's like, I'll stay right behind you. and we'll go.

We finally go back to that lot line where they just were and they're not there anymore. And I'm like relieved but also very much not relieved because that means that they're not there anymore so then where are they?

So then we head back to the house and we pulled Megan and Gage and Nate out from the basement and we're like okay like trying to sort of debrief essentially Gage is saying, like, you know, they tried to grab me. And so he's got these arms around his arm and he pulls away and he's running and panicking back into the woods. Megan, her experience was similar.

She had like a group that came in and were trying to sort of get at her. And that's when she booked it back towards us. It was just a bunch of experiences just all at the same time. Having other people there to experience it, it's a minor relief, feeling like you're not alone with it, but it's really, it's kind of, that relief is overshadowed by the fact that, okay, if it's not just me, then that means that I actually have to face the fact that this is a thing that happened. And then we head back to the house. So then we're just sitting there, and then we look outside of this little back porch window, and, you know, we look at the tree line. And there's had to have been probably like eight to ten of these same types of beings just standing there at the tree line, poking out their heads from it and just staring. You can tell that they're just watching and waiting and they're just waiting to see what we do. And then feeling that panic wash over you when you're like, oh my God, like, what are we going to do?

we ended up in the basement again and then I got the call from Megan's mom that we had to go I had to get her back home and since I was the one who brought her I'm also the one who has to get her home so it's like a mile and a half down the road

just right past another huge series of lots of trees and so I just I grabbed the bat and we book it essentially down and I get her home and then I have to go back by myself with this bat in the middle of the night. So I run back and like I swear like I feel eyes on me in the woods like as I'm running back

and then I rush back home myself. And then it's just, it's really just like a blur. It's like a car crash. And then once it happens it's over and then what do you do with yourself? So none of us really ever went and played ghosts in the graveyard again. We never got together and just played in the woods and it was this white elephant in the room where it's like, okay, nobody's going to talk about this,

nobody's going to mention it, nobody's going to say anything. But it was sort of this weird experience with limited information to go on to be like, okay, what were these things? I think that the best way to describe them is they were, interdimensional beings. I don't think that they were from our universe. I just think it was just some sort of break in the matrix between this world and the next, and then there was something that wanted to see it, wanted to see our side of things. I was over at my grandparents' house. It was in winter, so it was around Christmas. So it was like a month or two after this happened.

So then I'm going out to the car because it's our Christmas party, so family's all there. So I have to go out to the car to put the gifts in the trunk and, you know, as you do, or leftovers, because we're Midwestern people. So you always have like eight things of leftovers of stuffing and turkey and whatever. So I'm putting it back in the trunk and I see them. I see those two white faces again, just poking out from the woods, like halfway up the tree. And I just freeze and try to, you know, accept like, okay, this is what's happening now. I think they were really just looking to see, like, if anything was going to happen with us after we had encountered them. I don't think they intended for it to happen at all.

And I think after it did, I think they needed to keep tabs to make sure that it wasn't going to go anywhere. I think if we had spoken out done something, I don't know. I might have disappeared. I still feel like if I were to go in the woods that I could see one of them again. So I don't go in the woods. And that's how I live my life. Thank you, Maggie, for sharing your stories to spook remember you never know what's waiting for you. In the Dark Forest.

The story comes to us from Spook correspondent, Greta Weber. The original score was by Da Kim As yes, it is that time. Now, you've heard from other phone. But if you have a personal story that spooked you, where you touched a force, a power of being that was not supposed to be there, where you had a relationship with the mystery,

send us your story. Spoot at snapjudgment.org. There is nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener. But don't tell me, you saw it. a ghost. Everybody saw a ghost. If you have a real story, though, let us know. Spooked at snapjudgment.org.

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 was brought to you by the amazing team that says grace before each and every meal.

Everyone except for Mark Ristich, he just throws salt over his left shoulder. There's Anna assessment, our chief spookster is Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Amy Nguyen, Lauren Newsom, Lea Morimoto, Renzo Goriot, Reynzo Gorda, Leahy Hades, Dr. Reyes, Zoy Friigno, Greta Webber, Jacob Winick, Son of Khan, Fittian Leza, Ian Ford, Fernando Hernandez, and Flo Wiley. The spook theme songs by Pat McSini-Miller.

My name is in Washington, and it's an old trick. Don't be fool. even if they offer you candy even then remember never never ever never ever never ever never ever