Spooked - The Shadow Men

Episode Date: October 1, 2017

Witch Cage: A woman buys a medieval jail… and tries to make it her home. Phantom Border Agent: A border agent encounters his long-dead colleague in the middle of the desert. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Okay, so this is what I know, what I've learned. Just because you're not supposed to have seen what you saw doesn't mean it didn't happen. From SnapTas with Underground Layer, you're listening to Spoot. Stead. It's interesting how we discuss different phenomena. Like we say certain places are haunted, meaning that for whatever reason, some entity has decided to return or decided not to get out of our way.

Instead of going where we want them to go, they bump and tap and wail in the night, and that's all well and good, sure. But there's another thing, too. Maybe. Some places are simply evil. And some houses should be left empty. But I know.

Y'all ain't trying to hear that until it's too late. From Snap Judgment's Underground Layer, my name is Van Washington. Burns from sage. Light a candle. Because spooked starts now. The one thing people often say about Vanessa Mitchell

is that she has a very strange taste in houses. I knew from the minute I was pregnant that I was going to be in trouble there with the baby. I was probably about eight months pregnant at this point. I was upstairs in my bedroom. I was actually putting a something on and I was going to look in the mirror

when I felt two hands pushed me from behind. They pushed me so hard. I hit the floor straight away. And I was lying on the floor. And honestly, I think I probably laid there for five or ten minutes. And I didn't dare even breathe. Because I thought if I move, something's going to really start hurting. I've lost a baby.

I didn't have my phone with me. I knew when I was lying there, possibly, nobody would have found me. I could have been there for days. It was dangerous. It was dangerous what I was living with. When Vanessa moved into the house two years earlier, it seemed perfect. It's a pretty little place. From the outside, it looks like a little country cottage.

But you can see it still has the original prison door. from the 1500s. There's a plaque on the outside and information about it. Over the years, the house had gotten the nickname The Cage. This was in the village of St. Ozeth, in Essex, a county in England,

which at the time was notorious for its witches. The plaque was made of steel, with old-fashioned writing in black. It read, The cage medieval prison. The cage housed accused witches, which, the history books say,

included at least 14 women during Ursula's time. When she was imprisoned, Ursula was forced to incriminate many of them, and while some were acquitted or reprieved after their sentence, in the end, Ursula Kemp and Elizabeth Bennett, another woman in the village, were sentenced to death. St. Ozith resident Ursula Kemp was imprisoned here before being hanged as a witch in 1882. And even now, people believe the building still harbored their spirits.

Why don't you tell me about Tell me about Ursula? Ursula Kemp was a lady, we think, nobody's really sure, in her late 20s, early 30s. She was a healer in the village of St. Osith. People came to her for potions and medicines and various other things. It was a hard life in England in the 1500s and food was scarce and everything else.

So she would make agreements with the local people to get paid for her healing. And that arrangement had always worked until it didn't. There was one woman in the village and she had a child that was ill. The woman's name was Grace Thurlow. She asked for Ursula's help. So Ursula helped her. She cured the child. But when Ursula asked for the money, the woman refused to pay.

So as time went on, she went back to Ursula and she asked her for help again. And Ursula said, well, yeah, but, you know, you've got to pay me this time. So the lady agreed. But when Ursula asked for the money a second time, the woman again refused to pay. So there was an argument between Ursula and the lady. Not long after that, the lady's baby fell from its crib and died. Because she was angry at Ursula, she did. She publicly accused her of being a witch.

She was convinced that Ursula had put a curse to cause a baby's death. And subsequently, Ursula was arrested, and so was. her little son Tom. So he had to stand up in a court against her and say, yes, my mother's a witch, and I've seen her perform witchcraft. It was on his testimony as well where she was executed. This was a story that was whispered through town that made people stay away from the house. So many people had suffered here when it was a prison. It must be full of evil. The man who owned the house before Vanessa committed suicide. But unlike everyone else, for some strange reason.

The rumors and history didn't bother Vanessa. She found them intriguing. So when she saw the cage up for sale, she went ahead and bought the house in 2004. And over the next three years, she encountered a number of terrifying forces. The day I moved in, I was making a cup of tea,

and I heard something behind me. And I turned around, and there was a tall, very, very dark black Shadow Man. The outline wasn't definite. It looked as if a child had taken a crayon and just scribbled on paper at Shadow Man.

He felt dark and menacing and I literally just stood still like your heart stops for a minute. And I just thought, oh God, I'm in trouble here. I knew that first day that I wasn't moving into an empty house. Things happened pretty much straight away.

The doors are opening and shutting. The taps were always running the upstairs bathroom. The electrics are always coming on. Which, you know, on a practical level, I was on a budget. You know, I had to pay for that. It was definitely unsettling and slightly creepy. But Vanessa said the spirits weren't all bad. Sometimes, she said they offered her a sense of comfort.

I was sitting on the floor. in the front room with my leg stretched out and I was leaning up against the sofa. And the TV was on and I looked up and I saw a woman walking slowly over towards me. She was in colour. She was clear. I could see her clothes, her face, her hands and the wooden bowl that she was carrying. And I could see her clear as day. She didn't make me want to scream and run out the house. she didn't make me even really get up off the floor. She felt lovely. And she walked up to me and she got something out of the bowl,

which to me looked like leaves or popiuri, something of that nature. And she sprinkled it over my head. And then she disappeared. Was it Ursula Kemp? I can't be 100% sure. But I would imagine it was her. I believe she was one of the witches there. And in some way she was trying to protect me from what was

come. When autumn came, something changed in the house, something completely and utterly changed. Something grew bigger in the house with an oppression and a darkness. On one occasion, I was sitting in the front room and I could see this black mass forming against the white paint. It was pulsating and it was changing shape and would just move slowly from the floor to the ceiling and along the walls. It was moving almost with intelligence, almost as if it was breathing and living. I think that's when I really started getting scared of the house.

I certainly then knew that I couldn't be in the house alone really and certainly not on my own at night. But it was something Vanessa went through alone. And because it wasn't exactly the type of story other people would believe, she had to put on a brave face. I did a really good job of hiding it. I wasn't going to go to work in my quite high-powered job, in my very competitive job, in a man's world, in quite a hostile industry,

where it's targets and margins every day and meetings every morning. I wasn't going to go in and say I just got hit by a ghost last night. They had a thought I was deranged. They would have all taken the Mickey out of me at work, And that was my safe place. After several months of keeping the secret, all to herself, it started to take its toll. I felt strange. I was so, so tired.

I was absolutely exhausted. I was so drained. I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what. Anyway, so I went to the hospital to have a scan, and she looked at the scan and she said, Vanessa, you've got a five-and-a-half-month-old baby in there. I was completely shocked, actually. I had split up with my partner. But I knew I wasn't able to protect myself in the house, let alone a baby.

So how I felt about that was a bit of despair, to be honest. And I thought, I've got this baby coming. I'm not in a stable relationship at all. And I'm living in this house, which I'm scared of, which I can't cope with really anyway. Even other people were seeing things. People would be coming around the house. and they'll say we're not coming around again. Your house is haunted, your house has got an evil feeling to it.

Vanessa didn't leave the house because she didn't have anywhere else to go. She'd put all her money into the house when she bought it. And she was stuck. So it made me a lot more isolated than I was before. And that's when I think it really stepped it up. She spent the rest of her pregnancy scared and alone. And when she was eight months pregnant, The spirits in the house got violent.

You know, it just got more hostile. It got stronger. Whatever it is, just got stronger and did it to intimidate and scare. And then that one day in the bedroom, when she looked in the mirror, I felt two hands pushed me from behind. They pushed me so hard. I hit the floor straight away. Lying on the floor, Vanessa was terrified she lost the baby.

So when a month later, she gave birth to a healthy baby, boy. It was a huge relief. She named him Jess. But when she left the hospital, she still had to take him home to the cage. I remember vividly one time I pulled up the car outside the house. I just got home from work. I'd already picked up Jess, my baby, and I got him out of the car and I walked around to the back gate to go in the house. And it was around February time. It's from freezing. So I remember I leaned up against the wall of the house. I couldn't go in. I was so scared I couldn't go in. And these snowflakes were coming down and they were landing on Jesse's head. I put him in my coat to keep him warm and I only went in because the snow got too much.

You know, I remember battling with myself for 10 minutes freezing thinking this is ridiculous. Vanessa just go in. go in. I can't go in. I can't go in. Vanessa, you've got to, you've got to, you've got a baby, he's cold, but I can't go in. But the snow's falling on his head, you've got to go in, but I can't go in, I don't want to go in, but you have to. One evening, I was in bed with my little son, Jesse. I dozed off to sleep, as usual, with the TV, with all the lights on, and I was woken up. I heard a thud of footsteps coming up the stairs. boom boom

boom boom now when I know it's coming up the stairs there's only my door separating me from what was out there

there's an iron latch in the bedroom door and from the outside somebody was smashing this latch up and down up and down up and down ferociously and violently and it was getting louder

and louder and it was getting quicker and quicker It's like all your senses are pricked up and on alert And I couldn't get out of the room Because then I'd have to go through it At that time I was completely powerless What can I do? I couldn't call the police, I can't fight it

I can't defend myself against it At that point I was living completely in my bedroom I had shut off from the rest of the house I didn't use the rest of the house at all I was literally everything was in my bedroom I didn't even, literally, most nights go to the toilet. I couldn't even go outside the bedroom door. I had a bloody Victorian potty.

You know, I had to, you know, underneath a bed. To me, at the time, it was just the safest thing that it was possible for me to do. The only thing I felt that I could do to protect myself was confined myself in a smaller space in the house. So I had all the baby stuff in there, the baby cot, the baby cot, the baby. baby bouncer. I would take my packed lunches in there. I would eat dinner in there. I would take a flask of tea or coffee in there for the night. All my clothes, all my makeup. I had to make sure that everything was always in there constantly. So there would be no reason for me to ever leave that room. To Vanessa, it felt like there was really only one person who could understand.

Ursula, the healer, who was blamed for the death of a baby. The woman who'd over 300 years ago been locked up in the cage until she died. Vanessa looked to her for comfort. You could feel sometimes there was something there, a presence that was good and that was comforting. And if I was really scared of something that was happening in the house, which was very often, I would talk to her and just say, Oh, Shno, you're here.

Please help me, I'm in trouble here. I mean, I'm not deranged. I want to sit there having to talk to thin air. being in a house like that makes you do crazy things honestly it changes everything Vanessa felt this connection well I didn't feel she was guilty I didn't then I don't now

I could empathise with her because I knew that she was a single mother of a son who had been struggling in the world struggling financially who was left in a horrible situation and I felt the same and I was the same I was in prison too

but I was in prison in my own house as I said I was completely locked in my bedroom I didn't use the rest of the house at all but on one occasion I had to because I was upstairs and realised I had no work clothes for the next day you see I used to have to take Jesse everywhere with me in the house

and I thought oh for the sake of two minutes I just thought this ill be fine there so I went downstairs and I'm doing the ironing just quickly and Jesse's, Jesse had three Thomas a tank engine toys and out of the blue they just started chugging around my feet. And my instant instant reaction was anger. The second one of course was fear.

So I quickly opened the door to get up the stairs and I saw a man standing at the top of the stairs. Now this man had a man. modern day clothes. He wasn't like the others I'd seen. This man is standing right next to my son. I legged up the stairs. He disappeared. I got in the bedroom and Jesse was there in the cot right in front of me the minute I'd gone through the door and he was fine. He was still asleep. He hadn't woken up through any of this. It was probably within the next two weeks I actually moved out of the house because something had got in between me and Jess. my son.

After the incident, Vanessa reached out. I rang up my best friend Kerry. But she just said to me on the phone, right, listen, I'm not with John anymore. I've got a spare room. Do you want to come and move in with me? And I was gone within a few days. The day I left, as I closed the door, I remember looking back through the glass, just to see who was there.

You know, just to see the shadow man again, just to see. just as if to say, right, you know, I'm not coming back. I opened the gate and I locked the gate from the inside so nobody could get in or up to the door. And I got in my car and I drove away. I've owned the house now for 13 years. It's up for sale. I know I need to be released from the house at some point.

That only happened when the house is sold. I felt that I was imprisoned in the house for years. Something wanted me. there. Absolutely. I felt it was my prison daily because even up till today I think it is. To hear more about Vanessa Mitchell's experiences, check out her book Spirits of the Cage. True accounts of living in a haunted medieval prison. She's also written a second book, in her own words, Secrets of the Cage. It comes out soon and goes even deeper to the prison's history. And for any of you home buyers out there, the cage, the cage.

medieval prison is up for sale and we're going to have more information at spookpodcast.org. It happens when you wander into a darkness so deep that you can't see your fingers in front of your face even you feel someone else's fingers wrap around your throat. Now then, our next storyteller is a spooked favorite. This guy, many, many, many stories. This one, Rocky Elmore's story, it takes place in a no man's, between the U.S. and Mexico. When I first got to Otai Mountain, the place felt different from other places I had been

because it's quite easy as a Border Patrol agent to feel like your top dog. But when I went up to Otai Mountain, it said in that there were predators there that could kill a human being nearly instantly. Mountain lions were the top dog up there. Under normal circumstances, a mountain lion attack against a human being would be extremely rare. but the cats that lived up on O-Tai Mountain lost their fear of man. There wasn't a lot of things up there for them to eat other than rabbits and just a very, very few deer. So people immediately went into the food chain, and it was a pretty easy source for them.

All they had to do was pick out a group, follow it, wait for somebody to get left behind, and that guy was a goner. So we found quite a few bodies, and we found them on a fairly regular basis. Now, as far as I know, none of these kills went on to the official California record. Things that happened down on the border just have a tendency to stay on the border. About four years in, I had a trainee with me. We're working a midnight shift out at Otai Lakes. Censor had went off, and we responded to it. Now, I had always carried a revolver previous to this night,

but the Border Patrol changed its policy and decided that everyone would carry a semi-automatic handgun. It came with a holster, a different type holster than what I had ever used before, and it fit very, very close to the body. A few minutes went by, and we started to hear very, very slight noise up on the hillside. I noticed my trainee was starting to get pretty excited about it, and then I realized that it was only an animal because it was much too quiet to be people. So I told him, said it's probably a deer, let it pass. Within probably five to ten seconds after that,

I heard the most terrifying noise I ever heard in my life, and it was a mountain lion screaming. I've always heard it described as the scream of a woman being murdered, but I have never heard a human scream that could come anywhere near what a mountain lion scream is like. It's something that you just have to hear for yourself to truly understand. So when we heard the scream, both of us turned around. I never moved so fast in my life.

And I caught a glimpse of this full-grown mountain lion charging us. I went for my gun, and I could not get the gun out. It was stuck. And I was ripping and tearing as hard as I could on that pistol. And at the same time, salt. the cat charging right at us. So I started yelling at the trainee to shoot them, but I didn't hear any gunfire. I don't know if the trainee could not get his gun out or if he was just petrified with fear.

And at the very last second, the cat, he darted off to the side. And within a nano second, I lost sight of him, and then I heard him hit. It's true prey, which was the deer. And then the screaming started all over again, and it was, worse than the first scream. It was a combination of the animal he had hit and then the cat was tearing it to pieces. But as scary as mountain lions were, they weren't the only thing out there to be afraid of. In early March 1995, I was still on the training unit. We're heading out to Otai Lakes on a midnight shift. Heavy fog had rolled in and the area had also burned off recently

in a wildfire so the ground and the trees were black. with soot and then the fog was sweeping over that so we got turned around in the fog and got lost so we walked around in vain for several more minutes trying to find our trail we couldn't do it but there was a little tributary feeding the south end of othai lake and as we were walking it we heard a very loud single splash hit the water and it sounded as if some exceptionally large object had fallen from the sky so we we knew it wasn't people running across the creek. It was something else. Now, we're always trying to stay quiet on night operations. So everyone looked at the training officer. The training officer just nodded his head toward the creek, and we all started heading that way without speaking a word.

As we started to close in, I noticed the training officer drew his firearm, and I thought this was a little strange, but something had set him off and put him on guard. And I suddenly started to get this sense of dread and doom and intense sadness sweep over me. It was as if something was projecting its emotion onto me. I was starting to mess with my mindset and my feelings. And I knew we're about to see something horrible, and I started trying to mentally prepare myself for that. But after getting up to the creek and noticing there were four or five coyotes

prancing up and down very anxiously along the water's edge, we couldn't see anything. But I could hear something over in that water, as if a person was shuffling their feet very quietly, going up a little current was there. So at that point, everyone had their guns drawn. The coyotes were staring straight into the middle of the creek exactly where we were looking and didn't seem to be bothered one bit that we walked up to them. and it was obvious that they were scared. I was literally standing no more than 18 inches away to a coyote on my right side,

and I paid no attention to him, and he paid no attention to me. We started trying to turn our flashlights on and follow this sound upstream, but the fog blinded us, shining the lights back in our own eyes, and there were no footprints to be found. The only prints there were tracks for the coyotes and tracks for our own boots. and that was it, nothing else. The coyotes, their tails were tucked and their ears were lowered, and they left.

They got out of there. We eventually just gave up, but we knew whatever that was in the water would eventually walk out in front of the scope that the supervisor set up on the mountain in order to work the mesa below because these scopes picked up on heat. An animal would put off a certain shape

in an amount of heat, rocks put off heat, anything that collected heat through the day would give that heat up through the night. For instance, a person walking, say, a mile or two miles away, they didn't really look like a person at that distance. They looked kind of like an upright coffin. So you had to judge what was giving the heat up.

And Jeb was probably the best scope operator in the Border Patrol. So he would be able to see it and call out whatever was over in that water. And about 20 minutes later, we started to hear bits and pieces of a radio transmission because a couple of agents got in the area and suddenly Jeb called them off. Now the agents were a little reluctant to leave because they wanted to finish what they started and they didn't really understand why they were being called off. It didn't make any sense to them. But Jeb told them again and emphasized a little more strongly that they needed to get in their vehicles and leave the area. He said there is a very large predator following the two of you.

Now, these guys were totally unaware of it. They couldn't see anything. Nevertheless, they did what Jeb told them to, because you didn't question it orders. You just did it. So that was the talk of the station for the next few days. People were kind of throwing ideals around as to what they thought it might be. And, of course, everyone thought probably it was a mountain lion,

because we spoke informally with the Bureau of Land Management, and they said that one of these cats was about 200 pounds. But time went by, Jeb got a new job back east somewhere. And before he left, he told a story to a few of the agents that he knew well. And what Jeb told was that on the night in question of the mountain lion following the two agents, that it was not a mountain lion at all. What he actually saw was some creature come up out of the Otai River, and it walked upright like a man.

He said, but had the largest heat signature Jeb had ever seen on the night vision scope. The creature was right behind them, and it dwarfed them both. Estimated it probably 10 feet. I heard one guy say maybe 12 feet. This was very much like what happened to us at the creek, and that it was invisible to their naked eye. It was only visible to the scope. I never brought the subject up for quite a while after that.

I never talked to Jeb. I was a trainee. Trainees did not go up and talk to supervisors, and I never dared question what he saw that night. As time went on, over the next few years, I began to hear several more stories. These stories involved both agents and people crossing illegally. In every sighting, this beast would chase either the people

or would chase the agents and could have easily caught them, but never did. It's like he chased them to scare them off and then gave up the chase. And there would be no sign found, no footprints, no sign of the creature whatsoever. I didn't have any real clues

or any real ideal of what all this meant. But one night while I was working the mountain on a swing shift, I run into some BLM personnel. These were environmentalist types. They weren't law enforcement. There was about 10 of them up there, maybe more.

And they were hanging out at Butwick Canyon. And that was one of our more remote, treacherous areas. I was kind of wondering what had brought them up there. So I pulled up, started talking to them, asked them what they were doing, and they said they'd come up to look for bear scat, which I thought was a little unusual because I didn't think there was any bears anywhere near Otai Mountain.

We'd never found tracks for one, no scat for one. Nobody had ever reported a siding. So toward the end, I said, well, what do you think about some kind of a Sasquatch creature being up here? And then I kind of chuckled after that because I didn't want them to think I was a crazy person. And none of them laughed or chuckled. And one of them started to talk about the subject. I said, we think there's possibly three of them up here that we think is a family unit to adults and a juvenile. So then I kind of thought, well, you know, they might be setting me up.

They're all going to break out laughing in a minute and say they were just kidding. Not, you know, not really. We don't believe in that. But they never did. So what is the real truth? What really is out there? Big thanks to Rocky Elmore for giving us the lowdown on what's really happening. Be sure to check out Rocky's book, Out on Foot, Nightly Patrols, and Ghostly Tales of a U.S.

Border Patrol page. Now, mystery is about. Be sure you don't miss a moment of spooked. Not a moment. And we've got big news. Because spook is going to drop, not one, but two episodes every week until Halloween. Be afraid.

And if you just can't wait, if you need your spook fix right away, we've got you covered. Get spooked three days early. Just download the tune-in app. Don't haul all the scares. Let somebody. know why you're hiding under the bed.

Maybe they can crawl up underneath there with you. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Spook Pod. And listen, you have made Spook the number one podcast in the country. Booyaka. Boiaka.

Makes friends with the neighbor kid. The wrong neighbor kid. Spook was produced by random people I found wandering the dark of night. Mark Ristich, Anna Sussman, Liza Smith, Taylor Cot, Liz Mac, Jody Colley, Jasmine Aguilera.

Original music by Pat Massini Miller, Leon Morimoto, and Renzel Goryo. Friends do recall that. If you see your buddy Frank over at Ted and Janice's barbecue and he suddenly turns into a bat and flies off into the darkened sky,

be sure to recall. And don't forget to never, ever, never,