Spooked - The White Hand

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

Katia thinks that the dated wallpaper is the worst thing the last tenant’s left behind in her family’s new home. She’s in for a big surprise.Thank you, Katia, for sharing your story with the Spooked!Produced by Zoë Ferrigno, original score by Yari Bundy, scouted by Aurora Stewart de Peña,  artwork by Teo Ducot.Watch and listen to Spooked... you can subscribe on YouTube for our scary stories. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

She wants to hear the truth, she says, but I prefer to lie. Doctor, will I live? She asks. My dear, you'll never die. Fourth of July, right before seventh grade, I go to a party at my buddy Jeff Shade's house. Fat crib on Sanford Lake right outside of Midland, Michigan. Almost every one of my class shows, including me.

the girls. Jeff's dad pulls us on water skis with their brand new boat. We roast hot dogs, marshmallows, eat watermelon, light fireworks that explode over the lake. That night I stay over.

With five of my best friends in the whole wide world, Jeff, Marty, Danny, Sean, Corey, Jeff's mom makes us pancakes the next morning. Swimming in butter and syrup. laughing. She unloads a whole can of whipped cream on mine. Especially for me, because, she says, because.

I thank her. Say goodbye to everyone. Ride my bike back to my house and pops helps me pack it inside our already loaded up U-Haul truck. Then we drive away from Sanford, Michigan. And I never see any of those people again. and I don't know enough to be sad. Almost 13 years old, I've moved homes 13 different times, 13 different addresses,

eight different schools. The truth is, sitting in the passenger seat of a U-Haul next to Pops on the interstate, this is my happy place. Yeah, it is time to go. What next? What next?

And two decades later, I'm on a plane. to Brussels, Belgium, a place I've never been, and I'm moving there, to work at a job I hate for a company I despise. And a girl sits next to me, 13 years old, blinking back tears, trying to be brave, trying not to weep. But weeping all the same, when I ask her what's wrong, she's silent. When I ask her again, she tells me that. Because of the divorce, she's moving too. That her house now has a for sale sign on it,

a house she can't imagine not living in. Her best friend lives down the street. She just made second chair violin in orchestra. She won't see the birds come back to roost in the trees. She and her uncle planted in the backyard. Her grandmother promises to visit. But instead of every Thursday, just the two of them on the couch watching movies.

It might be every six months, maybe every year, and all of this pours from her in a hot whale. She comes from a community, a ground, a sky, a smell, of music, and being torn away from it, that it will get better, that soon this new place will feel like home too.

You'll see Then I stop I think about the people The families that have given me their embrace Let me enter their homes and their lives And how casually I walked away Wonder What's next

This little girl It's not the one having a strange reaction To leaving everything and everyone behind Our right to feel it You are right to cry that leaving is a hurt that should never fully heal. In fact, to be weeping with you. No, broken.

No. Broken is a grown person. Sitting on an airplane who doesn't care where they are going. Everett plate get left behind. 1880s to Stratford, a theater town in Ontario, Canada. Katka de Pena and her husband, Jim, they've grown tired of living in an apartment. They're looking for a house to rent, a place where they don't have to share walls with their neighbors that has a yard for their daughter to play in. When they hear about a sweet little place and a nice neighborhood for rent, they drop everything to check it out.

We went to see it. It's got a wood stove in the kitchen, which is wonderful. And it's got a nice little fenced backyard. We can have a bedroom for my daughter, Aurora, who's, four at the time. All my domestic hormones start kicking in, and I think this is it. This is an amazing house. But it's still a little bit odd.

Someone has put up all kinds of wallpaper from the 50s, that's sort of climbing trellis with ivy going up it and roses on diagonals. Every room is done like this, and none of it matches. Hey, someone's taste. okay. Like, I just want a home. It doesn't matter to me. And besides, I like houses that have character. Negotiate the rent. And we move the things we have. There's a lot of motion going on. There's friends helping us unload the truck. There's other friends as well that aren't helping that much unload, but they're there. As I'm bringing a box in, my daughter says to me,

Who's the old man on the phone in the hall? I'm confused, and I go into the hallway to see what she could be talking about. There's no old man there, and there's no phone there. There's an old plate on the wall where people used to mount the old party line phones, where you would jiggle the receiver and ask the operator to connect you. but that's all that's there. I say I don't see anyone, and I assume that she's seen someone that she doesn't recognize.

She's a little kid, and to little kids, everybody big looks old. Those first few weeks, it's exciting because we have a house, and I'm happy about that. But it's also, it just feels unsettled. I don't feel calm. I don't feel as relaxed as I had hoped I would. But I think if I put in the work, I will spruce it up, and it will all fall together. I was washing the walls in the dining room on top of a ladder with my back to the rest of the room,

and I can't escape the feeling that I'm being watched. I look around to see what it might be. There is no one there. So I turn and move the ladder to a different location a little further down the wall and go back up again. And it's okay for a couple of minutes. And then I get the same sensation again. This feeling of being watched, this feeling of not being alone, starts to be omnipresent.

I blame me. For some reason, I'm being overly sensitive to something and that I have to just, as we say, pull up my big girl panties and get on with it to keep working on the house, that there's nobody there, that nobody is watching me. But I can't figure out what this feels.

feeling is. We were alone a lot in the house, Aurora and I. My husband, I would have liked him to have been there more, but he couldn't. The only way that he could have been there was to stop the job, and we couldn't afford that. So I was on my own. I'm downstairs in the living room. and Aurora is supposed to be napping upstairs and I hear this little voice go,

I have to pee! And she comes running down the stairs. The direct path for her is down the hallway. But instead, she comes out and goes all the way around through the living room, through the dining room, to the other door for the bathroom. And I asked her, why? And she said, Sakes is there.

When I ask her who Sakes is, she says he's an old man and he lives here. That feels extremely creepy to me. But she's an imaginative child. We all are. We work in the arts. Of course, we have imaginations. So I definitely believe that it's an imaginary friend. but it's clear that it's not an imaginary friend that she likes.

Because after a while, I realize that Aurora will never, ever go down the hall with the phone plate on it. It's the middle of the night, and I can hear her calling from her room, which is right across the hall. So I leave my bed, and I go across the hall, and I sit in her bed, and she, She says, mom, the white hands are bothering me. I can't sleep. I ask her to describe the hands, and she says they're white. Sometimes there's many. There's always more than two.

Sometimes they pass. Sometimes they scratch. Sometimes they're just around her. And she tells me, It's sakes. It appears to me that my daughter is having some repeated, uncomfortable dreams. So I say to her, it's okay, sweetie. I'll stay here and I'll protect you.

You can sleep, and I will protect you. And I decide that what I'll do is I'll just curl up next to her in her bed. It's wide enough. and that calms her down immediately. She gets back to sleep. But this would continue, and I would hear it two times a week, perhaps. I would just get up when she called me, and I would just curl up with her in her bed.

So it's afternoon. I'm having a nap. Aurora's having a nap. And I hear a sound that wakes me up. I hear the sound of rushing water. My first thought is, oh, the pipe's broken. And I go downstairs and the bathtub's on. The small sink in the side room the toilet is in is on.

The main vanity room sink is on. And I go into the kitchen and the kitchen sink is on. on full force, all faucets, just flat out. So I turn them off. I don't understand what's going on, and I'm freaked out. I'm a relatively handy person. I know that there's no reason that I know of that that should happen. The combination of this, my daughter's nightmares, of me feeling like I'm being watched. There's something here. There's something here that's not us. There's something here either doesn't want us here or it wants to get our attention. I need to know more. I am leery of going to the neighbors and asking, say, have you heard anything about the house I'm in being

haunted. And my husband hasn't had any experiences that I know of or that he's willing to go into. It's coming up to Christmas, and we've got the sugar cookie dough rolled out. And Aurora is really interested in this. She's got the reindeer cut out and the snowman cut out and the Santa Claus cut out, and she's very precise about laying out the different shapes. I pick this stereotypically bucolic moment to open up the topic. Because if I can do this gently, if I can do this playfully, maybe that will help her deal with it in a way that doesn't scare her, because I certainly don't want her to feel that. So I ask her, who sakes is?

Who is this man? What does he look like? She says he is a small man, very old. He's got very pale skin. He has a peaked cap. It's a good thing that she comes from a theater background because we both know what a peaked cap is. She said he walks around a lot.

He's always on the phone. And then I asked her if he was friendly, and she didn't answer me at all. And I didn't like that. I didn't like that around my daughter, not at all. It's one thing if it's just me. I can override that. Not if there's anything,

anything that's making my child unhappy or unsafe. It's a very pleasant Sunday evening. We're just sitting down at the beginning of dinner and there's a knock on the screen door to the kitchen. And I go to the door to see who it is and there's a young man I don't know at the door. He's very friendly.

Looks like a farm boy. Someone who works with his hands. clearly. He's standing on the back, covered doorstep. I'm inside the kitchen. We're talking through the screen door. And I ask the young gentleman what I can do for him, and he says that he is looking for the couple that he bought the house with. They bought the house that we're now in at an auction. Because a person had died in the house. And there was no one to take care of the estate of the departed. And their plan was something that they'd done before.

They would buy the house, clean it up, sell it. But he'd had to leave early because of a family emergency, and he had gone away, lost contact with the couple that he'd worked with. But he was interested in getting him. back into it again. That's why he was looking for them. He says, it's really interesting when you buy old houses. There's things left all over the place.

And you want to know the weirdest thing that we found. And he points to something past me, which would be the cabinets above the stove. And he says, right up there we found the guy's old artificial hand. He said it was ceramic. It wasn't flexible. It wasn't something that you could do things with.

And it was white. Absolutely white, like a white dinner plate. When he told me, I felt like the blood in my body had drained out of a hole in my feet. It knocked the breath out of me. It was a white hand. I start the next day to do something I should have done before, which is to ask my neighbors about the previous resident,

and they say, oh yes, it was an old guy. He was Scots, and he had an artificial hand. They said that this man, whose name they never learned was a very unfriendly and solitary character. He would stump around the porch of the house or in the small backyard, arranging things, wearing a peaked cap. They never knew whether he had any hair under the cap at all. And he wasn't a very big person, but he was very wiry, very strong.

I'm able to put all the pieces together, and they all feel. fit. I think maybe I can convince him to move on, to let go, to leave us alone. And I decide that I'm going to have to do my version of an exorcism. I wait until my daughter can have a sleepover at a friend's house. And I know my husband won't be home for a long time because he's working that night. I start in Aurora's room. And I say, you have to leave. This is not your home. I know you are here and I'm sorry, but you have to go because now this is my house. Then I go to my bed. Then I go to And I say, and this is our bedroom. I go down the stairs.

I go past the phone mount in the hallway, and I say, you don't have to be on the phone anymore. You are free. You can move on. I go into the living room. And I say, this is not your house. You have to leave. I do the same thing in the adjacent dining room. I go into the bathroom and I say, you must leave this house alone.

have to let go. I repeat the same things in every room in the house. I stay up for quite a while after that and I go into the kitchen. I pour a glass of wine and I just sit there and I think about what his life may have been like. And I feel horrible for him because in a sense I'm banishing someone. But this is what I have to do. I cannot keep going like this. I hope. I hope. that this works. I don't know whether it will or not. We'll see. Things seemed to slow down a bit after that.

It seemed to lighten. White hands, nightmares, etc., that stuff seemed to decrease. I think that he heard me, and I'm happy about that. and then I hear her across the hallway starting to stir in the middle of the night. I hear the beginning of mom, mom, mom, and I get out of bed right away, and I go across the hall and I go across the hall and she's okay. but five feet from her bed

is an old wooden rocking chair. It's where I would usually sit to read to her in the daytime. And the chair is rocking. It's rocking like someone is in the chair. This is his answer that he's here. Maybe it's my house, but it's his house too. I'm afraid

and I don't know what to do but I know I will protect her with my life so I go over and I I yell at the chair and I tell it that it has to go

it has to get out and then after that I just sit in the chair to hold it still and I just stay there that night. I climb into her bed and I go asleep next to her.

I wanted her to think that it was a dream. It's okay if I knew that it wasn't a dream. You just... You don't want your kid to be scared. Particularly if they're scared of something

that their parents cannot protect them from. I decided that we were going to move and we were going to get another house, which was really disappointing, but I can't think of anything else I can do. I was glad to leave. We actually are able to find a house to buy. At the time, the cheapest house in Stratford,

equally aged, but with a really nice feeling to it. Aurora is running around, and I ask her how she feels about the house. And she just says, this is a nice house. I like this house. So she got to pick out her room. And she doesn't bring her room. up this man that she's named Sakes again. There's no more dreams.

There's no more white hands. There's no one in that house that she talks about. And that's good enough for me. You thank you, Katya, for sharing your story with the spooked. The original score for this piece was by Yaddi Bundy. It was produced by Zoe Frigno. There was a man who walked 40 miles every day In order to reach a spring to fill his bucket of water.

Every single day, the children would see him rise early in the morning and return late in the evening, dragging his bucket of water behind. One day, a young boy asked the man, why do you walk so far to the well? When a mountain stream of pure water rushes by a mere 200 meters distant, the man, his eyes wide, its face, creases deep from countless hours spent carrying water under the unforgiving sun shakes his head gravely and says, Stream.

You got to be kidding me. What's stream? You see, it's the saying with Spook. The lost wander searching for water because they don't know about the stream. It's not right, spooksters. Tell somebody. Write a review. Tweet.

Actually, you know what? Don't tweet. Forget that guy. Instagram, TikTok, shout. Let your favorites know before it's too late on all the platforms. And don't forget. Don't forget. There's nothing better than the Spook story from a spooked listener.

Spook at snapjudgment.org. Let us know. Spook is brought to you by the team that understands full well that not everyone who wanders is lost. Except for the case of Mark Ristage, if you see him, wandering about. No doubt about it. He's lost. Please call the number taped to his jacket. Thank you.

Mother's Davy Kim. Zoe Frigno. Eric Yannies, Tailed Decott, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Doug Stewart, Elliot Lightfoot, Paulina Creaky, Juan Diego Baltran, Sasha Wilson, Daniel Sinsky. The spook theme song is by

Pat Massini Miller. My name is in Washington. And there is no pleasure, ignorant of pain. Order is meaningless without the threat of chaos, and the same applies for shadow. Because the shadow is not in opposition to the light. The shadow is twin to the light. Because seeking dominion, this is a fool's errand.

There will always be darkness. No, we seek balance. We need it to control it, to harness it, so that it does not destroy us. You'll need amazing wisdom to achieve such lofty goals. Unfortunately, the only piece of advice I have for offer

is to never, ever, ever, ever, never, never, ever, never, ever.