Spooked - The Sinkhole

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

One day, while out landscaping his yard, Moses reaches into the dirt and pulls out a handful of bones. He wants to find out who they belong to. But that might not be such a good idea… Thank you, Moses Thompson, for sharing your story with the Spooked! Folks, if you want to know more about Moses and his house, check out this article.  Produced by Zoë Ferrigno, original score by Yari Bundy, 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.

Diamond, the clubs, the heart, the spade. They cut more surely than the blade. The ace, the king, the queen, the jack. They whisper love. Then turn their backs, listening to Spoot. She wasn't my first real girlfriend yet. But I hoped and I prayed things were moving that way. Dude, her roommate told me she likes you.

We're friends. Stop playing. You know what I mean? I can barely conceive of such a thing with her. Still, there I am. Looking up at her, my head in her lap, on a too small couch as she tells me about her Kim lab or biology class or whatever, I don't know just each word sweeter than the one before.

I've been up for almost 24 hours straight, school, job, ridiculous university newspaper project, but when she asked me if I can come over, I'm like, I'll be right there, right there, listening to her. It's warm, it's nice, maybe too warm, too nice, trying to listen to concentrate, but for a moment, maybe a moment longer. Sleep wins.

Then I catch myself, what? open my eyes to see a shadow racing toward my head. I raised both of my arms to brace for the blow. Ah! Only to see her snatch her hand back from my cheek. And I'm curled in some fighting defense stance like I've lost my damn mind. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

I just dozed off for a minute. Must have been fighting monsters in Dreamland. I try to play it off. You know, to laugh, I look over. And their tears streaming down her cheeks. Hey, hey, hey, don't cry. You just startled me. That's all.

Please, please don't cry. She doesn't speak for a long moment. Then she asked me straight up, who used to hit you? I'm not going to start whatever this is off by lying to her. I'm not ready to tell the truth either. Listen, um, I'm okay for real. I am okay, please, please don't cry. And she says, you know, you can tell me anything, right?

And I don't know how to answer this. There are stories about what happened that I can't even tell myself, much less her. She says, I'm going to tell you a secret. And she does. A secret that I never imagined, never considered a dark secret, a secret. She never told anyone else. It's such a trust. It's such a leaping off the void, praying someone will catch you.

I feel dizzy. I know that whatever happens between us, this is holy, sacred. Ask me again why I jump from the deepest slumber to ward off invisible blows. I take a leap as well. Spook stars. What is holy? What is set apart? Today, we're going to hear from love.

Moses in Tucson, Arizona. When Moses was growing up, his dad had this routine. After work, he'd come home. He'd change into shorts and a pair of flip-flops. He'd grabbed a beer out of the fridge and head outside to work in the yard. Moses learned to love gardening from his father. Moses even became a professional gardener. There's just something about the feel of the soil in his hands,

watching things grow. So when Moses and his wife, when they buy a brand new house with an unfinished yard, he is over the moon. The whole thing is just a dirt blank slate. Moses, Moses can't wait to get his hands into it. One afternoon, I come home from work. My wife's out of town. She's traveling for work. And I'm at the house by myself.

And I start working in the yard. I'm moving dirt. I'm contouring the landscape to catch rainwater and plant things. It's kind of like therapy for me to be able to work with my hands and connect with nature. It just makes me feel calm. And so I'm in the moment. I'm listening to the birds. I'm noticing hummingbirds and butterflies and just really in a happy place.

As I approach the northwest corner of the yard, I see a depression that doesn't look good. normal. I go to the depression, I go down on one knee, and notice that there's a sinkhole there. About two feet by two feet with the top layer of the soil sunken down six or eight inches. I just assumed that we had a broken sewer line. A flash of anxiety came over me because I'm just like, man, sewer lines are not inexpensive. We just bought the house and money was already really tight. So grabbed a shovel and went and started to dig it out looking for the sewer line and waiting for the soil to get wet because that's what would have caused the sinkhole is the wet earth. As I dug down, I never found it.

The soil stayed bone dry and that felt odd. As I'm digging this hole, I'm building a pile to the side of the hole. I take a shovel load out and I go to put it on the pile and I notice sitting on top of the pile is an oxidized. piece of brass in the shape of a diamond with kind of a circular domed center. I'm setting my shovel down, like getting down on my knees in the dirt, picking up this ornate piece and inspecting it. It was maybe an inch high and maybe a half inch wide. It was this beautiful blue-green, and I could tell that it was really old. It wasn't like anything that I had seen before. And I was just like, what is this? I get down into the hole.

The holes maybe only two feet deep. And I start sifting through with my fingers. I found a couple other brass diamonds. And then I found an ornate cross. The cross was a little bit bigger, maybe two inches tall and maybe an inch wide. It was weathered, it was pitted. The oxidation was really old and flaking off of it. At that point, the worry had turned into excitement.

The thought of a broken sewer line was like long gone. And as I sift through the soft dirt looking for the ornaments, I realized that there was a wood bottom to the hole. I used my hands to brush the dirt away from the wood and then found part of the wood had collapsed. And there was an open cavity below the top caved in wood that was hollow. It was just dark in there. It was just a dark hole underneath the broken wood.

I was racking my brain for what it might be, why there would be a wooden box buried in my yard. I reached into where the boards had broken, and I felt around, and I could feel some loose things down in there and pulled out a handful of bones. The bones were small, they were yellow. I could tell that they were really old. They were dry.

There was no flesh. It was kind of like an oh shit moment. Clearly, I'd find something significant. I didn't know what they were from, but my heart was pounding out of my chest. I took the bones and I laid them out and took a lot of pictures and sent them to my wife. She's a pediatrician

and I said, hey, is there any way that these are human remains? She texted me back. They look like finger bones but they're too small. I just assumed that it was somebody's pet cat or pet dog that had been buried there. It was sunset. I stopped digging. I took a piece of plywood from the yard

and I put it over the hole. We've got a Labrador, and she would have been very interested in the bones if I would have left him in the yard. So I took the bones and the brass ornaments inside and just laid them out on the mantle of my fireplace. I had dinner, you know, and went about my routine and went to bed. It's the middle of the night. I wake up, but I'm not quite sure what woke me up. And I'm laying there. I'm looking at the ceiling.

And I can hear somebody whistling a song. It was an old-timey whistle. Like, it took me a second. It was like, am I still dreaming? You know, am I really hearing this? I sit up in bed. I look around and I'm definitely awake and I definitely can hear somebody whistling a song.

It was like somebody whistling and working. It sounded like the sound was coming from the front yard. I laid there for a few minutes listening to it. And then, you know, got up the courage to get up. and try to figure out, like, okay, is there a guy in my yard? I was afraid that maybe somebody was stealing tools or, you know, trying to get in the garage. I go over to the window and look out

in the direction of where the whistling's coming from and nobody was there. I went around to the doorway and peeked out the screen door. And again, I couldn't see anybody. At that point, I called my dog. I wanted the peace of mind of, you know, having my dog with me, even if it was just pure optics, because I've got, like, the friendliest dog in the world.

We go out onto the front porch, and it sounds like the whistling's coming from the side yard. So we walk around to the side yard, and it sounds like the whistling's coming from the backyard. We're in the backyard, and there's nothing there. It just seemed like the whistling was just kind of one step ahead of us, It just didn't make any sense to me. I didn't understand how I could hear something so clearly

and not run into a person. We went back inside and again I laid in bed and it sounded like the whistling was coming from the front yard. The sound was nice. It was a pleasant sound. As I listened to the song, I could feel the cool air, you know, from outside coming in and I fell back asleep. So as I woke up the next morning,

I was still thinking about what I had found in the yard, I was trying to talk myself into it being somebody's pet, but I wasn't satisfied. I had met a local archaeologist through one of my neighbors. I called them up and I said, hey, I found something really strange in my yard. There were some bones. Like, is there any chance that they might be human remains?

And he said, where do you live? And I told him. He said, oh, yeah, they're human bones. They're 100% human bones. He's like, your house is built on what was the Court Street Semmel. My mouth hit the floor. Never in a million years would I have thought that in my lifetime I would find a human grave? He said, don't disturb it anymore.

Don't tell anybody that it's there. My team and I will come out and will do an excavation. Two weeks later, he brings his team out. The archaeologist actually brought with them a map of the cemetery, you know, something that was drawn during the time that the cemetery was active. The cemetery began in the 1870s. They stopped burying people there in about 1910. All of these different orders had their own sections in the cemetery. You know, the order of Odd Fellows and the Freemasons.

And then to the west is the Protestant. But our house was smack dab on top of the Catholic section. I show them the bones and the artifacts on the mantle. They bagged them separately. All of the bones went. to the Catholic diocese, and all of the artifacts went to the state history museum. After looking at the ornaments and bones, they set up around the sinkhole with brushes and small scoops. I had brought out a lawn chair and really posted up right in front of where they

were working in the shade of a tree. I was trying to be respectful and not ask them a million questions and let them work, but I really was fascinated. They slowly worked their way down, brushing the soil aside, scooping it out, sifting, and they unearthed the top of the casket, the wood surface with the broken board that had opened up below. One by one, they removed the top boards of the casket. A small skeleton was below. The head of the small skeleton was oriented towards the foot

of a really big mesquite tree, and a root of the mesquite tree had grown through the eye of the skull down across the spine, out along the leg and out the bottom of the casket. As they started to remove the bones and parts of the skull came out and the jaw came out, that's where they could see that all of the baby teeth were there.

And at that time, they were able to tell me that it was a four or five-year-old child. The casket was maybe 36 inches long, and in that casket, they found more than 200 buttons, buttons that had been hand carved out of seashells. I said, why would there be so many buttons in the casket? And they said that during that time period, if somebody died from a contagious illness,

they buried the person with all their clothes because they knew that the clothes could be a vector for like infection. And so the clothes had disintegrated, but the buttons remained. They had meticulously removed each bone. Each bone had been bagged. They deconstructed the side walls. of the casket, and as they removed the bottom boards, they revealed the top clasp of a second casket that was directly below the first.

This time it's a full-size casket. It's an adult male in his mid-20s or early 30s. Again, lots and lots of buttons. The archaeologists were talking amongst themselves, and really the consensus was that probably something contagious like cholera, had killed both the father and the child at the same time. The archaeologist turned to me and said, don't dig any more holes in your yard.

You've easily got a hundred more graves in your yard, and we can't excavate all of them. There was so much gravity to that. The archaeologist told me that families could pay to move the bodies when the area was developed, but it was advertised in the English-speaking newspapers. And at the time, turn-of-the-century Tucson, on most folks that were Roman Catholic were Mexican and Spanish speaking.

And so Spanish speaking families might not have been aware that the cemetery was being moved and those bodies were left behind and just the headstones were moved. I was left with this feeling that something really not okay happened to the families that put their loved ones here. I'm not Catholic, but I know that the families that put their loved ones here were Catholic. And that's what they believe. and so I feel like I need to respect that. And I wanted to do something to honor that. There was a woman that I'd met through work, who was an avid gardener.

She's just a traditional knowledge holder in this community, and her name is Donya Josefina. She has a flower shop not far from here, and in that flower shop, she has all kinds of saints and medals. When we were invited to a First Communion or a baptism, we would go see Donya Josefina and buy a medal or by a saint. And so I went to Daniel Josefina, and I told her. And she's like, oh, yeah, I know where you live.

I know the story. I told her, I want to do something. She's like, build a shrine. And so I bought a few saints, and I brought a few candles. She knew that I was a gardener. And so the first saint that she had suggested was St. Francis of Assisi. Because of his connection to plants and birds and the natural world. then she also recommended that we put a local saint.

San Javier is a local saint here. And so those are the two saints that we chose to put in a shrine. Right where that grave was found. Time goes on. It's spring break. My closest childhood friend and his family come to visit us from Kansas. My wife and I are in one bedroom. And my friend, his wife, and their two young kids were in the spare bedroom together.

They go to bed, we wake up the next morning, and I say, you know, how'd you guys sleep? Did the trains keep you up? Because we're really close to the train tracks. My friend said, you know, it wasn't the trains that kept us up. It was the crying baby. And I was like, what? What a crying baby? And they're just like, yeah, just like in the yard, like just outside the window all night long.

And he's like, it must have been your next door neighbor. my next door neighbor is in her 60s and single, and the neighbor to the rear was a retired couple. There's no babies. Again, I'm not a person that's fascinated by the supernatural. I'm skeptical. But as my friends told me that story, the thought of unearthing a child's grave

flashed into my mind. It was really unnerving. But from there the subject was changed and we just moved on to what we were going to do for the day and went about the day. And then my son is born. I was so caught up in being a father and that time in my baby's life that the stuff that happened in the house and finding the graves definitely took a back seat and wasn't something that I thought about. Then Eli is a toddler. He's learning how to walk. He is a very active kid and he was a climber. And so it was a fairly common occurrence that we thought he was sleeping,

and then he'd climbed out of his crib, and we'd hear him running around the house. And he's got a plastic tonka truck with big plastic knobby wheels, and he leans on the top of the truck kind of like a walker and uses it to run around the house. I'm laying in bed one night. It's the middle of the night, and all of a sudden that thump-thum-thum-thum that we'd become so accustomed to wakes me up. layered on top of that is the zizzles of the plastic wheels zipping across the wood floor.

So I get up and go out to find Eli in the living room, scoop them up, take him to bed, read him a story, put him back to bed. And no one's there. And I go into Eli's room and he's in his crib and he's sound asleep. At first I'm relieved that it's like, okay, he's in his bed, he's safe. and then I realized that I heard those footsteps and he's not causing those footsteps like something's off I went back to bed

I'm scared you know something's not right but I also need to function the next day at work and so I lay down and I get myself you know relaxed to the point that I can go back to sleep when I woke up in the morning was kind of questioning like

did I dream that or was that a real thing I walk out into the living room I saw the tonka trunk wedged under the sofa and knew in that moment that it wasn't a dream and knew that I had put the Tonka trunk away the day before in the toy bin in his room. There was something happening that I couldn't explain, and it felt like it was getting more intense. This is a phenomenon that happens many times a week, if not every night.

I told my wife about the things that I had experienced, the whistling and the footsteps of the running around in the house. She didn't take it seriously. She rolls her eyes at me and changes the conversation. I don't want to push it with her. You know, if she's not scared, like I'm happy that she's not scared. I don't want her to be scared. One night, my wife and I are sleeping.

I wake up and I don't know what woke me up, but soon after I wake up, I hear the sound of scratching on wood below the bed. echoing up through the floorboards. I'm terrified. It was loud. I'm too terrified to even put a foot on the bedroom floor. I lay there wondering, is Kelly going to sleep through this? And she didn't, she woke up.

And she's like, what's that? And I'm like, I don't know what that is. We both kind of like belly crawl to the edge of the bed and we're looking and I turned my flashlight on my phone to make sure there was nothing in the room with us. I scan the floor, I scan underneath the bed, and there's nothing there. But all the while, there was a loud scratching that was beyond, like, what a mouse or a squirrel could do. Like, whatever was doing it was big. We both were just very scared in that moment.

But I also felt validated. It wasn't me telling her something that she's just like, oh, you're crazy or you're making it up. is like, we both live this experience and we both were terrified. After 10 or 15 minutes, finally the sounds just stopped. We both were scared. Somehow we get ourselves back to sleep.

The next day I go to the crawl space, there's 100 years of like silt. It's like four inches of baby powder. As I use a light to go across the silt, I was expecting for it to be disturbed him to be able to see, you know, tracks from an animal that squeezed through and got in there. But as I looked across the top of the sediment, it was pristine. One afternoon, my wife and I are in the kitchen.

Eli is playing with his toys on the kitchen floor, and my wife and I are sitting at the dining table, having a conversation. And out of nowhere, Eli gets hysterical, and he's crying, and real tears are flowing down his face, and he's scared. I was afraid that Eli was hurt. As we try to talk to him, he crawls into the corner of the kitchen, and he points down to the floor and starts saying over and over again, down there, down there, down there.

We pick him up, we hold him, we try to comfort him, we take him out of the kitchen. And as he calmed down, I started thinking about the other things that had happened in the house. Goose bumps hit me, and I was just like, this is not okay. It occurred to me. that there's kind of two things happening at the same time. There's the energy from a young child, and there's also something more intense.

The graves that I disturbed was the grave of a toddler, and the grave of what the archaeologist presume was the toddler's father. I don't know if he's protective of the child are just not happy about what happened, the way that the graves were disrespected. I mean, I dug into a grave, and I put my hand into a casket,

and I pulled out somebody's bones. I don't really feel like the shrine held. What I thought was going to be something, like, deeply meaningful. I don't know what purpose it served because the space just continues to be disrespected. First, the San Javier was stolen, and then St. Francis got stolen. We live downtown, and there's a lot of foot traffic,

and so I can't keep saints out there without them getting stolen or candles out there without them getting stolen. My wife, she doesn't like to talk to. talk about it. She said to me, you know, if you want to stay in this house, if you want to continue to live here, like we can't talk about this stuff. And to me, that kind of signal that maybe there was a part of her that took it serious enough, where if she was really to acknowledge it, that she wouldn't be able to stay here. We've come to the conclusion that we love this house and we don't want to move, and this is just something that we have to live with. But I know that

something's going to happen. Like, it's just a matter of time before I see something or experience something. You know, it might not be this week, it might not be next week, but it'll be some night that something's going to happen where I'm terrified. It's ongoing. Thank you, Moses Thompson, for sharing your story with the spooked folks. If you want to know more about Moses and the cemetery under his house, you can read an article about his discovery in our show notes. And know this. Moses is a spooked listener. He reached out to share his story

if you have a story of your own. Be like Moses. Write a spooked at snapjudgment.org. The original score for this story was by Yari Bundy. It was produced by Zoe Frigno. You may know that there are people that just have a talent for baseball. Getting home runs the second time they pick up a bat. Others can instantly speak the language of chess.

My cousin is a musical prodigy. You can grab instruments he's never seen before and figured them out. There are other talents that people are born to. Talents that no one can seem to explain. Memories. They really shouldn't have skills that are supposed to require decades of practice, a blessing. One of these people, or if you know someone who is, please, tell me all about it.

spooked at snapjudgment.org because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. Spooked at snapjudgment.org. If you need to identify yourself as someone who walks this dark path to the community of launch, know that spook deer is available right now at snapjudgment.org. Remember as well, if you like your storytelling under the bright light of day, Get the amazing, stupendous sister podcast, snap judgment. It is storytelling. With the beat by the team that will never spill the beans in the secret plans,

except, of course, for Mark Ristich, but only if you know where he's ticklish. There's Davy Kim, Chris Hambrick, Leon Morimoto, Tailed Decat, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Faridno, Anne Ford, Eric Yanyas, Cody Harjo, Lola Abrera, Miles Lassie, Yari Bundy, Doug Stewart, the spook theme song. It's by Pat Lachidi Miller.

My name is Gunn, Washington. And people who research our prehistoric history to find the time that marks a separation from our supposedly primitive ancestors and ourselves, they will note that our brain size, our range, our mating habits, our rituals changed drastically after the advent of controlled fire.

Yet the fire that has been, always been there, but controlling it. This is the innovation, the revelation, deploying the heat for signaling, for warmth. We're starting to uncover items that suggest our hard-acquired fire.

Had more ceremonial uses as well. In disparate cultures, across various continents, the first gods commanded their followers to ten and everlasting flame. They swore by the same basic precept, the same

admonition I give to you, but instead of now saying, forever keep this fire alight, we allow for a modern spin of the most ancient practice there is, and it goes something like this. Never. Never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never.