Spooked - The Well

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

On one side of the basement little Rowan has his toys, but on the other side, in the corner, there is a deep dark hole oozing water and something… trying to get out.Thanks, Rowan, for sharing your story with us!Produced by Anne Ford, original score by Doug Stuart, 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.

Last night, night before, 24 robbers through my door. I got up, called a friend. Now they won't be seen again. All here? You're listening to Spoot. Stay. I have a built-in, extended family therapy group for processing the demons that we experience as children.

It's called my cousins. Because especially for me, there are two I'm particularly close to, and I don't know what I would do without them, where I just don't have to explain the craziness. I can vent at full speed, at full volume, about this family. You won't believe, what pop said this week? What'd catch his play they do that for?

Does every one of us need to be locked in a padded room? My cousins will listen. They'll shake their head with me, they'll commiserate with me, and just that. the listening, the understanding. Though it doesn't fix everything and make it better, it kind of fixes things. Makes it feel better.

And I'm lucky to have my cousins to help me navigate this family mindfield of nine rockets, explosive aunties and uncles with their countless offspring. Every one of us, loud, shouting to be heard above the rest. And recently, my sister did one of those DNA tests. And it listed several first cousins were related to that, of course, I know. I know well. I know better than they know themselves, but then it starts listing names I've never heard of before.

First cousins, I don't know. First cousins, we never saw. Who did it? Immediately I start scowling the internet looking for contact information to contact them, to bring them into the fold, to let them know. They're people. Because I can't imagine making it through this

without my cousins. And these unknown ones, they've been robbed. They don't get that. But then, I wonder if it's a good idea settling someone else with our craziness,

with our secrets, our shame. For what? Maybe they were kept hidden from us for a reason. More likely, maybe we would, we were kept hidden

from them. Spook stuff. That was a kid. His family lived a big, creepy house, but that was a long time ago. Aron's grown now. Can you imagine all that scary stuff was long behind me, but some

family secrets don't stay secret. So a couple years ago, I was at a family party at my stepbrother's house. We were in their basement hanging out. It had recently been, and remodeled, there was a bar and everything down there. My younger stepbrother said something to the effect of,

man, I bet before this basement was remodeled, it was super creepy, I bet it's real haunted. And I was like, this is nothing. So I told him the story about the house I lived in when I was a kid. And my dad happened to wander into the room, the end of this story. I honestly didn't expect him to say anything, but my dad says, Oh, you didn't tell the rest of it.

And I say, what do you mean the rest of it? When I was a kid, my parents were both still in college, and the college owned a property called the Cooper Farm. It's out on this really long country road, pretty significantly outside of city limits. There's this long gravel driveway that curves around and then sits this little white farmhouse up on the rise. And we lived out in this farmhouse.

There was forests, there was an old orchard, wetlands. I loved living there just to have access to all that space to play in. But the place that was just for me was the basement, where all of my toys were. I had a sit and spin. There was a television set so I could watch my cartoons. I was allowed to do whatever I wanted in the basement, as long as I stayed away from the well. On the far side of the basement, away from where all my stuff was, was a... a well that was sunk in the concrete floor.

No cover on the top of it. It was just an open hole into the ground. The hole was only about a foot across, but it went straight down. That well ran deep. I was warned immediately, Row and don't go near that. I was never tempted to walk over and investigate that well. I was not the kind of kid that asked, questions. They said jump, I said how high. So the first time it stormed since we had been in the

house, my mom and I had been outside gardening. She said that we needed to go check the basement to make sure that it wasn't flooding. We'd go down there. My mom stops at the bottom of the stairs and I'm behind her. She says, what the fuck? The basement floor was very dark. I thought maybe it had flooded and that it was dark because it was wet. But I look again and It's moving and the place is just carpeted in frogs. You had to watch where you were stepping because you very well may squish a whole creature with your foot. So we're standing at the bottom of the steps looking at all of these frogs, just milling about on the concrete floor.

I was really excited because that was a lot of frogs and I really wanted to play with them. But she turns around and scoots me up the stairs. My mom goes to grab my dad. We grab pots and pans and buckets from the kitchen, all three of us single file back down the stairs. And my mom again says, what the fuck? They're gone. They had just disappeared within seconds. Not even little wet outlines of where a frog might have hopped away.

Where would they have been going, even if they had tried to escape. into the well, it just didn't make any sense how they would be gone so quickly. My thought in that moment was, did I imagine that? But every time it would storm, it happened again. It wasn't only the basement that had strange goings on. About a year later, it was my birthday. We had a surprise party for me. I'm totally thrilled.

I'm opening my presence as they are being handed to me. And there is a hobby horse unwrapped leaning against the wall. So it was this plush, stuffed chestnut-colored horsehead on a stick. It had a white diamond between its eyes. And at the very end of its snout was this pale, peachy pink color. It had this voice box that when you pressed the button, its mouth would move up and down and it would make horse noises. It was a very cute horse, but when my dad figured out that it made noise, he goes, that's going to piss me off, I guarantee it, and my granny takes it. And for the rest of the night, she clicks that button over and over and over and over again for the explicit purpose of pissing my dad off until the voice box breaks.

And that did not bother me because I loved my hobby horse. So that particular night, I brush my teeth with my little electric toothbrush that would sing a song, I get in bed, my parents read me a story, we say our good nights, they closed the door. Very late into the night, I woke up to the sound of thump, thump, thump. It's coming from next to me, it's coming from within the room. rolled over to see my hobby horse is standing on end in the middle of the floor of my bedroom. It's lifting up maybe five centimeters, maybe less, and then thump. I can feel my body tense up, ready to run, but I can't make myself do anything. And it goes on for maybe 30, 45.

more seconds. At that point, it stops. It stops doing the thump-thump lifting up and down. It turns so that the horse head is pointed directly at me. And its lips are moving up and down of its own accord. And it looked directly at me. There were no horse noises coming out of it. But something was opening and closing the mouth. And it was terrifying. I throw off the covers. My feet hit the ground, I throw open that door and run down the hallway and around the corner into my dad's office. I'm crying. He's trying to comfort me, calm me down. Tell me what happened. And I did. He said, okay, honey, you were probably having a bad dream. Why don't we go back in there and we'll look at it together. And I said, no. I sat in my dad's lap the rest of the night until I fell asleep while

he was still working on his term paper. We got rid of the hobby horse. My parents gave it to goodwill and we never saw it again. After that point, I spent a lot more time outside than I did inside. And if I was inside, most of the time I was hanging out with my parents so that I did not have to be alone. Despite everything, I still liked playing in the basement. It had rained earlier in that day. The frogs had shown up and the frogs had gone away.

I was still sort of on the lookout. If I could find a stray frog to see if I could follow it and maybe get some idea of where it had been going. Never happened. It's getting pretty late in the day. I had Powerpuff girls on in the background. And I hear from the other side of the basement a sound. It sounds like little nails,

scrabbling on hard cement. And I mute the TV and I listen and then it stopped. Kind of brushed it off, turned my cartoon back on, and continued to play with my Hot Wheels and a couple more minutes go by, and I hear it again. And I look towards the part of the basement where the well is. And there's this thing on the wall where that sound is coming from. this thing. It's roughly the size of a beach ball and it's flat squished up against the wall.

There were two glowing pale yellow dots that were on the flat side that was facing me. All around the edges of this shape were these minuscule, undulating little filaments, fingers, and they were moving in a wave, almost how a millipedes, legs do, just constant teeny tiny motion all the way around. When those little fingers moved, that's where that scrabbling sound was coming from. I felt as though it had come from the well and was coming to take me with it.

I, as fast as I could, I threw my toys and was running, but as soon as I start to move, that thing bolts, not away but towards me. As I'm looking back, trying to escape from it, it was on the wall, and then suddenly it was on the ceiling, and then it was back on the wall, and then it was lower on the wall, and that whole time, it's bouncing and jumping as I'm running away from it, and I'm running up the stairs on all four screaming and crying, And that thing hits the ceiling, then hits the wall where the banister is, and then it hits the ground, and then it's back on that wall, and it's still climbing up after me. I am the basement door, and I'm sitting on the floor of the kitchen,

and I put my back up against it, and I feel, fomp against my back, as that thing has hit the door coming after me, and I hear against the door that scrabbling noise, as if it's trying to scrape its way after me through the door. My parents come running into the kitchen through my tears and my yelling while I was on the floor of the kitchen. I told them what I saw. And they stood me up and walked me down to my bedroom and tried to get me to calm back down again. They asked me to go through it again.

And they both just look at each other and look at me. It was, all right, Rowan, go sit down. We'll put on a movie. Mom will make dinner and we'll pretend like nothing happened. and that was the last time that we ever talked about it. If either of them went back down in the basement to try and find whatever that was, they did not tell me. After that, I lived on pins and needles all the time.

I thought that that thing could come out of the well and be anywhere in the house that it wanted to be. That was my waking nightmare, that that thing would come back, and that it wouldn't just be in the basement. It would be in my room. It would be in the hallway. Or it would take my parents. My parents weren't going to be able to protect me.

It populated my nightmares for a long time. It still does. That was the story that I told at that party. So when my dad came in and said, oh, you didn't tell the rest of it. I said, what do you mean the rest of it? And he said, do you remember how the week after that happened

you went to go stay with your grandparents for a while? And I said, yeah. He said, well, while you were gone, we had a Catholic priest come in and do an exorcism of the house and do a cleansing and a ceiling of the basement, particularly on that well. And I said,

Oh, and he said, yeah. And then he yawned and walked away and then offered no more explanation after that. And every time I have tried to talk about it since, he says, Oh, yeah, I know that you had issues with the basement. So we took care of that as best we could. Why didn't he tell me that when I was four? Why didn't he make it clear that he did believe me? It hurt.

I wanted my dad to hear what I was saying and he didn't. And even if he did, he made it out as if I wasn't telling the truth or that it could have been, it had to have been something else. Just a couple weeks ago, I was on my way to go camping and my grandmother lives in Michigan. And I had stopped by her house. And I have never shared any of my stories with my grandmother. Frankly, I didn't even think that she believed in ghosts. She said, do you know what house that you lived in that was really haunted? And I said, what, Granny?

That fucked up little house farm thing that you guys moved into when you were like four and your mom was still in college. I wanted to kick your dad's ass for letting you play down in that basement. That was a whole fucked up situation. You're sharing your story to scoop. The original score. Before that story is by Doug Stewart. It was produced by Ann Ford. Now, the story might be done.

But our curiosity is not one to see Rowan's old house for ourselves. So we sent producer Ann Ford all the way to Indiana to check it out. What does it like to be back at this place after all these years? It's bizarre. It's really bizarre. It's a snowy February day. And I just drove five hours from Chicago to check out a haunted farmhouse. When I told my mom I was coming back here, The first thing she said was, are you okay with that?

And then she didn't really say anything more. There's always just sort of been that wall about talking about what happened here. Because she's not really ready to talk about that stuff yet. So, and God knows my dad won't. Rowan hasn't been back in the house since he was a kid. When I asked him to come along today, he agreed on one condition that he didn't have to go in the basement alone. That's fine with me.

I don't really want to go down there by myself either. The thing is, as we're walking up to it, the house looks about as terrifying as an Arby's. It's just a little White House with an attached garage and a big field behind it. And I have to say again, just how much less spooky it looks to me in person than it did from your story. Yeah, yeah.

The people who live here now have given us permission to visit, so we head inside. Inside, the house is equally chill. There's a mudroom where we take off her boots, a couple small bedrooms, and a friendly tabby cat who follows us around. I've been a little worried about how Rowan will handle being back here, but he seems fine so far, even kind of happy about it.

He tells me about the snow woman his dad built once in the yard. He points out how the floorboard in front of the kitchen sink creaks just like it did when he was a kid. He doesn't even object to. when it's time to go down to the basement. And the basement, the basement is where the vibe changes, at least to me. It's your classic low-ceilinged, concrete-floored basement

with lots of shadowy corners. The kind of place, it's not hard to imagine getting just straight up murdered. But I keep that thought to myself. Meanwhile, Rowan still seems relaxed, at least at first. This front half of the basement was my play, We had the big rug here and this awful green couch that went along here. We never used this fireplace.

Over here was where the TV was. And where would the frogs show up? So the frogs would usually be in the back part of the basement, but the first time that it happened and it was just carpeted along the bottom here. But the longer we stay down here, the easier he seems to get. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch him shivering now and then. I don't blame him. It just still gets to me.

We walk down the stairs and I'm like, oh, yeah, it's fine. It's so vivid in my head. I'm really, I'm really on edge. I don't want to be here. But he stays, we're down here to do something important. And you show me where the well was, where you remember it being? I remember the well being over here, but it is not here anymore. It was over here in this corner, recessed into the ground.

Now there's just a smooth expanse of basement floor. Rowan keeps staring at it, like he expects the missing well to open up and show itself. Does it feel like a relief? No. That thing that I had pinpointed all of my fears to that like this is the portal, this is the gateway, and it's not here, it makes me feel insane. Because I know what I saw here. I know what happened to me in this house. So if it's not here, what the hell was it?

Why would I have remembered something so vividly for so long and still, even we're standing in this basement and not seeing any quote-unquote evidence of what I went through? And I'm still shaking. There was definitely a well there. I remember it. This is Stephanie, Rowan's mom. I'm talking to her over Zoom a few days after the basement excursion. I want to find out what she recalls about the home that scared her kids so much. After what Rowan said, I wasn't sure she'd be up for it, but here we are.

What did you experience in that house? Sometimes in that easiness, but that was mostly confined to the basement. a sense of foreboding, a heaviness, a feeling of being watched. There was a well in the same general area as the uneasy feeling. If you took the lid off, there might be something in there, sort of a feeling. Did you have any concerns about Rowan playing down there? In hindsight, I don't know that it necessarily may have. been the best decision I could have made to let him play down there by himself.

As a mom and as a full-time grad student, my attention was pulled in a lot of different directions at the same time. I know he had an experience down there and it was a dark experience. I have a vague memory of Rowan screaming out of the basement. I don't remember how he described it to me other than it came out of the well. That really scared him. It scared me too because I know. I know 100% my child was telling me the honest truth. Isn't that what we all want to be taken seriously? Did my parents do anything? They did.

They believed me. They cared enough to do something about it, even if they didn't think. Even if they didn't believe what I was telling them, they still took that into account. Thank you, thank you, thank you. To Rowan for going back into it. that basement, to Stephanie for sharing her memories, and thank you to the caretakers of the Cooper Farm for letting us in. I'm looking for something, spokessters. I'm trying to gain access, and I'm hoping you can help me out because I would love

to speak to someone from a society, a group, a community of people who use forces, magic, spirit, spells, whatever you call it, they use it to affect the world around them. call it again whatever you want to call it do you know a person that can provide an introduction to such a group do you maybe you are in fact the person that could speak to us yourselves if you are please please please please please please please please let me know

spooked at snapjudgment.org because there's nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener spook at snapjudgment.org now if you need that spook gear the t-shirt of your dream that's available right now at snapjudgment.org and remember, if you like your storytelling, under the bright light

of day, get the amazing, stupendous sister podcast Snap Judgment. It's storytile. Fook was created by the team that would never go back into any haunted farm all by themselves, especially not Mark Ristich. Actually, Mark, he won't even go

on the haunted ride at the fair by himself. There's Davey Kim, Chris Hambrick, Lauren Newsome. Leon Morimoto, Teo de Kott, Marissa Dodge Zoy Fregno, Ann Ford Greta Weber, Eric Yanez, Tessi Paoli, Cody Harjo, Lola Abrera, Doug Stewart, and Miles Lassie.

The Spook theme song is by Pat McSeedy Miller. My name is from Washington. They'll tell you that there's nothing in the basement. They'll tell you that the voices you hear are all in your head. They will tell you lots of things, but rest assured. They will not be there when you feel that cold touch in the middle of the night. That's why I don't care what they say.

Always check the locks. Always check the stove. And always arm the diligent with the same advice. Which is to never, ever, never, never, never, ever, never, ever, never, ever. Never, never, never, ever.