Spooked - These Boots Are Made For Stalking

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

What happens when everyone in the family can see the same specter… but they don’t tell each other for years? This story contains explicit language - sensitive listeners please be advised. Thanks to Michelle, Sherri, and Ed for sharing your story with the Spooked. This story comes to us from the Stories with Sapphire podcast, listen & subscribe for some scary stuff! Produced by Annie Nguyen, original score by Renzo Gorrio, 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.

Pumpkin peach or apple pie Pick a slice you'd like to dry The old man's choking I wonder why Apple pie Listen to spoot Stay Walking together

So many ways It's a reflection of our own world Our own space It can't be funny here And be sad Terrible things do happen Please understand, though. Understand this more than anything here?

You search for monsters every once in a while. In Washington, there is still time to turn back. Spook starts. We're traveling to sunny Southern California. We're going to meet a good family man, Ed. Ed and his two girls, Michelle, who's 11, and Sherry, who's 4. years old. So every night when my mom and dad tell me I need to go to bed, I run up the stairs. Before going in my room, I have to look in the hallway. I see a tall, dark figure out of the

corner of my eye, just leaning against the wall. But when I look, he's gone instantly. So I run straight into my room and I just stand in there with my heart beating, just hoping that he's not going to follow me into my room tonight. So I just continue getting ready for bed after I calm down a little bit. My parents come and say good night to me, and I'm alone. So I'm thinking, if I look and he's not there, I'll be able to pull a while. sleep. But if I look and he is there, I want to be able to see him. And then I slowly try and roll over and he's still there standing behind the door. I'm able to see his trench coat, his arms folded across

his chest, one leg propped up on the wall as if he's leaning against the wall. that casualness is almost scarier to me because he was so confident and sure that he's supposed to be there. And I didn't know why he's there. So I always would think, I just need to fall asleep. I just need to fall asleep. He'll be gone. I'm not really sure what woke me up. But because it's the middle of the night,

And it's completely dark in my room. I peek my head out from under the covers, and he's right next to my bed. I immediately feel like I'm going to throw up, and I don't know what to do, but I just look at him. He's just standing right next to my bed, kind of leaning a little bit closer to me. The brim of his hat is covering his face. as I'm able to try and look up at him, the top half of him disappears. I pull the covers back over my head,

and I'm trying to calm down. You know, I'm like hugging my stuffed animals, the tightest I've ever hugged anything. I'm able to fall back asleep, and I wake up in the morning, and he's gone. And I couldn't remember a time where I wasn't seeing him that it was my normal, and I didn't question it to my parents because I figured that's just how life was. You just see this scary man in the middle of the night in your room. I'm Michelle Davis.

I am the oldest sibling in my family. Sherry is about eight years younger than me. We didn't get along very well growing up, so we mostly were just sort of left to our own devices. So after school, my friend's mom picks me up. We have a little carpool, so just a couple girls that live in the area. And so she took us home. I normally don't really like being home alone, but since it's light out still,

I don't really mind. But I always used to feel really weird walking up the stairs. So I go in the house, and I know I'm supposed to start dinner, but I just really don't feel like it. So I'm going to go upstairs instead. So walk upstairs, walk down,

the landing, you know, I'm just kind of staring at my feet in my own head. And as soon as I get around the corner of the hallway, out of the corner of my eye, I just saw this figure. And this thing that I saw filled the doorway. And when I look up, it's just a dark laundry room. But I just figured like, oh, well, you know, I didn't really see anything. I don't really know what that was. It was just a figment of my imagination out of the corner of my eye. This is about a month or two after the first incident.

I came home from school, got dropped off like normal, go upstairs to deposit all of my school things, and turn around the corner, and I saw the figure again. And it's more solid. I was so startled, I just, I looked at it again, and it was gone. So now I'm thinking, well, shit, did I see something? before too? Or is this happened? Was my eyesight getting all

whacked out? Or did I see something? After the second time, all the times after that started to get more and more detail. You know, oh, he's wearing a coat. Like, oh, he's got combat boots on. Oh, he's wearing a fedora. He's got gloves.

And I would start to pick up all these little details. And it seemed that he was getting like more and more clear, more and more solid. Once it started happening with some sort of frequency, I started trying to think, well, what's making this happen? In Catholic school, we're taught that if you sin,

then you can invite demons into your heart. I stopped reading Harry Potter books. You know, I threw away my tarot cards because I figured those are probably really bad. I stopped looking at anything witchcraft related, which killed me because I really loved it. But, you know, if I didn't want to get haunted, then it was going to have to get given up. So we're sitting eating dinner.

It's about midweek. I usually sat across from my mom, and then my dad would sit to my right and my sister would sit to my left. My mom is telling my sister, you need to go upstairs and get ready. My sister's on the verge of like some sort of tantrum. Mom and dad were telling me to go to bed, and I just didn't want to. I'm crying hysterically, and my parents were like, no, you need to go to bed. So my heart starts beating faster and faster to the point that I'm crying. I start begging my parents to not make me go upstairs, at least not without them.

So my sister pouts off through the kitchen. and then immediately comes screaming back in. I'm crying and saying, like, I can't. The man is up there. The man is up there. I don't want to go up there. Please don't make me go. My dad immediately, like, stands up and goes, what man?

Who'd you see? I'm internally freaking out because she starts to describe what she saw. And she goes, the man with the hat. The man with the black hat. And I choke on my dinner because I'm like, oh, fuck. My dad goes up to the front door and starts looking through the windows and things, seeing if there's somebody looking in the windows. My dad definitely thinks it's a home invader.

I, on the other hand, know that she's seeing what I'm seeing. But my mom's trying to comfort my sister and get her to calm down because she's flipping out. So my dad comes back in the room and he's like, I didn't see anything. So my mom's like, you know, there's nothing there. Just go upstairs, you know, just get ready for bed. Like, you didn't see anything. It was just a trick of your eye. You know, I'm hearing all of this going, is this how they're going to respond to me?

Are they just going to smooth it over, ride it off, go like, oh, it's just your eyes playing tricks on you? If I had spoken up at that point, it probably would. probably would have freaked out my sister more, just because, you know, that validation that, like, oh, yeah, there's totally a dude in a hat that rums around the house. You know, she'd probably never sleep again. So I couldn't really talk about it with her because she's too young. I figured, like, because I'm seeing us, I'm probably going to make it worse. That really made it a hundred times more frightening.

I thought, if you've got a demon, the demon just bothers you. If you got a ghost, the ghost bothers everybody. I went into absolute hyper alert. I figured that if I could sneak up on it, instead of it sneaking up on me all the time, then I could get a better idea about what I'm dealing with. When I would go upstairs, instead of just turning down the hallway and going into my room,

I would stop right before I got to the hallway and then peeked my head around really fast. to see if I could see it. And unfortunately, none of this worked. So I never saw it when I was trying to see it. When I started trying intentionally, the fear kind of started to subside a little bit because I was hunting this thing now instead of it trying to hunt me.

My mom and I are going to go to borders. So we go. My mom and I split up because she wants to go look at CDs and I didn't. So immediately I'd be. line over to the sci-fi fantasy section. This is my jam. I find the end cap with all the Lord of the Rings books.

So I'm, you know, looking through, trying to find the one without, you know, the creased cover, just casually reading a little bit. But I'm crouched down toward the bottom of the end cap. I notice, to my right, a pair of boots. Immediately I get that just horrible feeling, again. Dread and anxiety, just walking. washes over me. And the only way that I knew that it was that shadow figure was because I had that exact same feeling in the pit of my stomach thinking, I'm going to die. This thing's going to attack

me. It's going to happen here. I'm just looking at it. I'm going, okay, on three, I'm going to look. So I swept my head up and nothing was there. I'm freaking out, shaking. Like, like, can't control myself, basically. And so I go find my mom. And I tell her, like, we gotta go. I don't feel good. This was crossing some boundaries for sure. I mean, Borders was, you know, one of two places that I could go

where I really didn't think about this thing. And if I could stick my nose in a book, I was fine. And because this thing is now inviore. evading that, it felt like this real violation of my personal space. Like, I felt like I could probably have handled it being at the end of the hallway forever. But I can't handle it being next to me in my happy place. I was just so, like, paranoid and, like, waiting for the other shoe to drop because I didn't know if I, like, angered this thing by trying to look at it or see it.

So I walk upstairs. kind of braced myself thinking, okay, every other time it got the jump on me. But that time, I was like, nope, this is going to happen. And I want to get a good look at it as much as I can before it disappears. So when I have my head down, and I'm looking at it out of the corner of my eye, I'm looking at all the little details. And this thing is solid. It is like there is a full physical person standing at the end of the hallway.

and I still can't see a face. And that was the most jarring thing. I could see everything else. Black slacks with a crease down the front. Swayed trench coat, double-breasted. There's four buttons on each side. And his hands were in his pockets. Feltie kind of suede fedora with a larger brim.

Kind of more like a Panama hat. Something's going to happen. and I don't know what it is, but it doesn't feel good. That's when I looked up and then it was gone. Because of the adrenaline of that, I felt like real shaky again like I was going to throw up because I don't know what to do, but I feel like I'm in danger.

It felt like it was its food because the more anxious I get, the more I see it, and the more fearful I am, the more it shows up. So I'm still trying not to go, upstairs until there are other people home. And I just, I don't want to deal with it. I don't want that feeling again. So I'm just going to go make dinner.

I'm standing at the stove. And the stove is in a very particular area where you can see into the family room. I'm standing there, heating up water. I see a movement out of the corner of my eye. And I look. and there's this man standing there. And it's the man.

Like, the light from the window was reflecting off of his clothing. And he was massive, like, so tall. He was really close to me. I just sat there in shock. Like, I'm looking at him. I'm looking at him. He's right there. And, you know, I could see the fabric of his coat. He had leather boots and leather clothes.

gloves. I could see the fuzz on the felt on his hat. I could see everything except for his face. And this felt like some big reveal that I did not want to be a part of. I came too and ran out the back door. I was so scared. I don't remember what happened after that. The next thing I remember is my dad coming home. Like I'm crying and I'm shaking. I can barely. stand up. I didn't even bother to put shoes on. It gets, it's cold out at this point. So my dad's asking me, what's wrong? Dad, I saw it. I saw the man. I've been seeing the man. It's the same one that Sherry saw. So he goes, okay, I understand what you're saying. I'm going to check the house. So he goes and checks the house and nothing was there.

and I'm still not convinced. Like, I saw it. I saw with my own two eyes. There was a man in the house. He believes me, though, is, like, the thing that was so boggling to me. Just, like, he actually believed what I said. And so I was like, okay, like, this isn't so bad, like, telling people and talking about it. It wasn't until Christmas that we really talked about it again.

We had had some family over. and I'm sitting there talking with my aunts and uncles and my parents. My dad brings up that both Sherry and I had been seeing this figure. My aunt looks at me and she goes, okay, we're going to bless the house and tell it to go away. She was on her way to being a nun at that point. She's extremely religious. So, yeah, she did.

did carry holy water on her person at all times. So her and my uncle go through and they put holy water on all the doors. I think for my own sanity, my parents were like, why don't you just stay downstairs? So after all that, I mean, it just, it never happened again. We like pretty much never talked about this experience for a really long time. Several years later, we were standing around. in the kitchen. I think it was also around Christmas. I said, oh, hey, do you remember the shadow person we used to see? Yeah, you know, I used to just see him out of the corner of my eye. I never saw him directly. And my sister and I look at each other and go, wait, excuse me? And he starts to explain that when we were building the house, I was trying to save some money. So I would come to the site

every day if I could, but for sure on the weekends, Michelle was around six years old and would come to the site with me frequently and just play while I was cleaning up. I would go and clean up all the debris that's around the house. I started seeing out of the corner of my eye a figure on the roof. He was crouched down,

almost as if he was hunched over with his hands clasped around, his knees and I could see the big hat and then when I would look it would go away every time I'd be in the backyard and he would always be in that same spot but you know it continued for for quite a while afterward after we even moved in that that thing was always sitting on the roof in that same position and you rationalize things like that you know it's my imagination now you know you know you know Now I always think there's something there whenever I turn my head.

You know, I mean, it's just so I just stopped paying attention to it. The time that he started to get kind of weirded out about it was because he used to work the night shift. So I could listen to the radio because I was the only one working the night shift. So I was in this huge office that had probably 30 cubicles in it and I was the only one there. So I could listen to Art Bell all night long. and Art Bell used to come on around 10 o'clock p.m. And, you know, it was always an entertaining show, UFOs, Bigfoot, you know, paranormal stuff. It was always interesting.

Tonight we're going to talk about the shadow people. And he was talking to this woman who had been researching this phenomenon that she was calling shadow people. And how people would see these people would see these people fleeting, sometimes out of the corner of their eyes, sometimes directly. She said what was unique about it was it was a worldwide phenomenon, and they always were similarly dressed. You couldn't see their face. They had a long coat on, knee-high boots that were laced up. That's what got my attention. because I said, you know, that's kind of like what was happening when I saw this,

what I saw thought was a person on the roof. Now I'm getting interested because that was the kind of details that I was picking up when I would see it out of the corner of my eye. And when they did the shadow people segment, they said that they had drawings of these shadow people. So my dad's like, all right, so he goes to the website and sees drawings of the same thing that he's been seeing and the same thing that my sister described. But when I saw that picture after listening to the Coast to Coast program with Art Bell,

that's kind of when it all came together. At this point, he didn't know I had been seeing it also, but he was all wigged out thinking, okay, this is something's weird. And when I came to him and said, I've been seeing this thing, now that he had all this knowledge about what he had heard and what he had seen other people's drawings of, I think that scared him more than anything, thinking like, oh, okay, well, now my family's in danger. And it's not just some trick of the eye.

So for some context, the room that we're sitting in is directly adjacent to where I would see it. So it's kind of ironic, I guess. And from what I've read about this, it's associated with children. But I guess, though, if it's mostly around kids and you saw him when you were building the house, in the backyard, I hadn't even been born yet. I just think it's interesting, though, that since I wasn't born, if he has drawn to children, he was initially drawn to Michelle. Yeah, he used to sit in front of that bathroom window.

Upstairs, yeah. Right by Michelle's bathroom. Yeah, it's right outside my window for my room. And that's where he used to be crouching. So, I don't know, maybe he had to let me know he was there. Yeah. Wanted some form of parental consent. Yeah, right.

Just wanted to let you know. I'm going to be in your house, terrorizing your kids. Hope that's cool. Yeah. Maybe there's some sort of honor amongst ghosts. You know, they have to tell you their intentions. Maybe. But there are no big, broad-brimmed hats in the house.

That's for sure. Oh, fun fact, I bought a hat that looks identical. Don't wear it around here. Big thanks to Michelle. Thanks to Sherry and thanks to Ed. We appreciate your sharing your story with the spooked, and we are so glad the Shadow Man has gone away. The story comes to us from the stories with a Sapphire podcast.

If you want to hear more, we'll have information about Sapphire show on the spooked luminary page. Original score by Renzel Goryo. The story was produced by Annie Nguyen. It's that time. say you want more stories, more darkness, more in commerce. If you have a story that spooked you, personally, let us know. Send us your story.

It's spooked. At spookpodcast.org, there is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. And if you like your podcasting, you like your storytelling in the bright light of day, subscribe to the amazing Snap Judgment podcast because it might change your life. Spook was brought to you by the team that wears trench coats wherever they go, everyone, except for Mark Ristich. As he wears sweaters. Anna Sussman, Chief Spookster is Eliza Smith, Chris Hambryk, Aeney Nguyenwynne, Lauren Nussu. Neil Moyamoto, Renzo Gourio, Tailed DeCott, Marissa Daj, Leah Yates, Zoe Ferreineau.

Greta Weber, Jacob Winnick, Seneca, Tiffany D'Lisa, and Ford, Fernando Hernandez, and Flo Wiley. The spooked theme song is by Pat McNeilley Miller. My name is Gunn Washington and remember, you don't have to explain to anyone while you don't step on cracks, while you keep your keys in your left pocket, not your right, why you wipe the table before you wipe the counter.

You don't owe anyone, any explanation as to how you live your life. No excuses, no reasons, but all of us know to never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. Thank you.