Room 10E

Rebecca moves into the dorms at the Fashion Institute and her roommates' outfits go missing. Everyone is mystified, but the answer… is terrifying.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Glynn Washington?

  Tick tock, tick tock. Break the glass. Click the lock. Snatch the bag. Make the drop. Count the cash. Split the pot. Watch your back. Mark the spot. Who the snitch?

• 0:27Glynn Washington?

  Make him cop. Who the snitch? Make him cop. Think it's un? No, it's not. Think you're free? No, you're not. No, you're not. No, you're not. No, you're not. No, you're not.

• 0:43Glynn Washington?

  You've crossed over the spooked. Stay tuned.

• 0:53Glynn Washington?

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• 1:35Speaker 01

  Do you like scary stories? Think you've heard it all? Well, you've never heard it like this.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Radio Ants was a horror podcast featuring true scary stories told by real people.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  He's tapping. Tap, tap, tap. He's tapping on the door. He wants us to open the door.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Then an air light turns on. And then an air light turns on in the shape of a triangle. And I'd say it's probably about the length of a school bus. You know, right above my head.

• 2:03Speaker 04

  She had long, ratted hair. She was wearing a dress. Her ribs were showing. Her fingers were long. She looked shriveled, partially decayed.

• 2:14Speaker 05

  I'm starting to freak out a little bit. I'm pleading with them to just please let me out. Dee's eyes started opening. They were pure white. And I lose it.

• 2:27Speaker 06

  Radio Rental returns October 23rd. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:43Glynn Washington?

  Eleven years old.

• 2:46Glynn Washington?

  We moved to a new apartment and somehow, out of hustle and bustle and confusion, I don't know how it happens, but my brother and I, we wind up with an extra brother, my Italian brother, Rocky. He technically lives in the apartment underneath ours, but mostly, he kicks it at our place.

• 3:09Glynn Washington?

  And Rocky's got the down syndrome, right?

• 3:13Glynn Washington?

  Plays it for all it's worth. He'll run in, start rummaging through the fridge, tossing leftover potatoes to the ground.

• 3:21Glynn Washington?

  My mama won't say jack to him. She'd have smacked this upside the head in a minute.

• 3:29Glynn Washington?

  Rocky spills ketchup on her living room carpet. No problem. Rocky practices juggling eggs while jumping up and down on her bed. Just don't do it again, okay?

• 3:43Glynn Washington?

  And because Rocky is a great guy, he extends his life license to his pals.

• 3:53Glynn Washington?

  We throw paint at the nicey dressed people outside, and right when they get big mad, "Rocky!"

• 4:02Glynn Washington?

  He comes running to take the blame like a champ. "Oh, I'm sorry."

• 4:09Glynn Washington?

  Grinning, knowing full well he ain't getting in trouble.

• 4:15Glynn Washington?

  He knows what he's doing.

• 4:18Glynn Washington?

  And we know he knows. Everybody knows. But he gets away with it anyway, 'cause he's Rocky.

• 4:29Glynn Washington?

  I hadn't thought of Rocky in a long time. We were just kids. We moved, they moved, moved again.

• 4:41Glynn Washington?

  I didn't do a great job keeping up.

• 4:49Glynn Washington?

  Not too long ago, my brother gets sick. Really sick. Starts remembering things that didn't happen. But remembering two very clearly. Things that did happen. And one day, right after ranting about billions of bearer bonds he's got buried in the bottom of the ocean. His fog clears. He says, "Man, we should've kept in touch with Rocky, man. You know, like, he was our little brother, man. It's not right, man." But tell him, "Bruh, didn't you know?

• 5:29Glynn Washington?

  I kept tabs on Rocky."

• 5:33Glynn Washington?

  Really? Yeah. He's in Cleveland. Fat little apartment overlooking the park. Rocky's got the best life, man. Because he's the best dude.

• 5:49Glynn Washington?

  And the smile that lights up my brother's face, the happiness, the joy.

• 5:57Glynn Washington?

  It's so pure. So pure, I would have repeated this same lie to him a million times over.

• 6:07Glynn Washington?

  Without a touch of regret.

• 6:11Glynn Washington?

  Rocky, man?

• 6:15Glynn Washington?

  Yo?

• 6:19Glynn Washington?

  Rocky?

• 6:24Glynn Washington?

  Smoke stars.

• 6:28Glynn Washington?

  Now.

• 7:12Glynn Washington?

  New place, new beginnings. Let's meet Rebecca. Rebecca just started college at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, pursue a career in photography. It's a magical spot. People arrive from all over the world to study everything there is to learn about arts and fashion. It's exciting, right? Right?

• 7:38Glynn Washington?

  Spooked.

• 8:26Speaker 07

  We moved into the freshman dorms and I got put in alumni hall. It's an 18-story building and they had me on the 10th floor in room 10E.

• 8:42Speaker 07

  I was very nervous to move in. I'm a homebody, so it was just a new place, kind of scary, intimidating, all new people. But the moment I walked in, I was like, this is actually very nice for a college dorm. It was a sweet setup. So when you walked inside, you're in the kitchen, which was directly next to the bathroom. And straight ahead, there's two different bedrooms for two girls each. To me, it was like, oh, my gosh, we're having this cool little mini apartment with girls my age in Manhattan.

• 9:25Speaker 07

  All three of my roommates were all very much into fashion. They always had cute outfits put together. But I definitely felt a little bit like the black sheep. I was really more of like a punk emo kid growing up. So I was wearing like flannels and ripped jeans and whatever to fashion school. Being a photography major, I actually used a lot of them as models in my projects. I was still pretty shy, but they brought me out of my shell a lot. They would invite me to parties and we would go out all over the city together.

• 10:12Speaker 07

  Around four months after we moved into the dorm room, I'm sitting at the kitchen table, working on my laptop late at night.

• 10:24Speaker 07

  And I just start feeling this tingling down my spine or like the hair on my neck standing up. And I just get this feeling of dread.

• 10:36Speaker 07

  It was almost this feeling of being watched from the bathroom, which was directly across from the kitchen table.

• 10:45Speaker 07

  I'm staring directly in the bathroom. It's pitch black.

• 10:50Speaker 07

  I'm trying to play it off in my head that I'm just psyching myself out. It's late at night.

• 10:57Speaker 07

  So I get up, I run over and shut the door hard and run back to the table and sit back down. And I'm like, do I feel better? No.

• 11:09Speaker 07

  I try to continue working on the rest of my homework, but I just can't sit there anymore. I end up just going into my bed and pulling the covers over my head and waiting for the morning.

• 11:26Speaker 07

  I'm just telling myself, maybe you're creating something in your head that isn't really there. Put your head down and move on.

• 11:39Speaker 07

  One night, I'm just looking for one of my favorite sleep T-shirts, and I can't find it anywhere. I'm looking in my dresser, I'm looking under my bed, I'm looking in my laundry basket. I just can't find it.

• 11:55Speaker 07

  I asked my roommates. No one's seen it. Granted, it's just like a pajama shirt, so no big deal. After maybe a week or two, one of my roommates notices that she's missing something. She asks us, hey, like, has anybody seen my skirt? We all pulled everything out of our dressers and closets and were looking through. No one can find the skirt.

• 12:25Speaker 07

  Over the course of the week, everyone started missing something. A tank top, a T-shirt, a dress. Being fashion students, their clothes were all like pretty trendy, like fashionable items. So it felt more special than me just losing a pajama T-shirt. The tensions got a little weird for a minute. Everyone's like, who's taking the clothes? Is someone lying? Is someone hiding these things? Everyone just wrote it off as, okay, well, it just got lost. And ha, ha, ha, maybe this is like a haunted dorm room and a ghost took it.

• 13:09Speaker 07

  It was just kind of a running joke.

• 13:39Speaker 07

  I'm sitting at the kitchen table again, doing my work late one night. Everyone else was asleep. And the feeling comes over me again.

• 13:52Speaker 07

  The feeling of being watched from that dark bathroom.

• 13:58Speaker 07

  The hair standing up on the back of my neck.

• 14:02Speaker 07

  Pit in my stomach, just panic.

• 14:08Speaker 07

  All of a sudden, I just hear the shower turn on in the bathroom. Full blast.

• 14:17Speaker 07

  I'm frozen in my seat at the kitchen table.

• 14:23Speaker 07

  If someone was gonna go in there, I would see them.

• 14:28Speaker 07

  I'm thinking to myself, what do I do right now? Do I run into my bed and just let the shower run all night?

• 14:36Speaker 07

  I run into the bathroom. I try not to look anywhere. But I see that the shower handle is pulled all the way to the right.

• 14:47Speaker 07

  I'm just in shock. What the fuck is going on?

• 14:53Speaker 07

  I just as quickly as possible pulled that shower handle back to the left, turned it off,

• 15:00Speaker 07

  and slammed the door shut, run so fast into my room and jump into my bed and pull the covers over me,

• 15:08Speaker 07

  like a little kid that's scared running up the stairs at night.

• 15:16Speaker 07

  I'm mostly up through the whole night.

• 15:20Speaker 07

  I felt like the other things could be written off as anxiety or someone stealing clothes. But this was just weird.

• 15:35Speaker 07

  I tell the story to my roommates the next day. And I don't know if it's a nervous response, but they laugh.

• 15:44Speaker 07

  That's so crazy, but also, haha, what? They didn't really think much of it beyond the moment of me telling them. And that was kind of isolating.

• 15:58Speaker 07

  So a few weeks later, I'm just getting out of class around dinnertime. And I'm just going up to my dorm room to make some dinner and take a shower. There's no one else home at this point. None of my roommates are home. I step into the bathroom and turn on some music to just start winding down. And I step into the shower.

• 16:31Speaker 07

  All of a sudden, I just start seeing stars.

• 16:37Speaker 07

  And my vision is just going almost black and purple.

• 16:44Speaker 07

  What's going on? Is it temporary?

• 16:48Speaker 07

  I'm starting to get scared. And my vision is just going darker and darker and darker.

• 16:58Speaker 07

  I'm just absolutely panicking.

• 17:02Speaker 07

  I'm just, in my mind, spiraling. I really hope I'm not permanently blind. I'm a photographer. Am I going insane?

• 17:17Speaker 07

  I'm realizing I'm in the shower in my dorm room, naked and alone. I'm like, well, I can't have this happen here. This is dangerous. I have to get out of here.

• 17:30Speaker 07

  As I'm reaching along the wall to feel for my towel, I realize I'm 100% blind. I can't see a thing.

• 17:42Speaker 07

  I put the towel around me, carefully step out. I'm holding on to the wall for dear life until I exit the bathroom. My logical thought was the best thing I could do right now would just be to ask my neighbors for help.

• 18:04Speaker 07

  I'm feeling the left-hand wall of the dorm room hallway until I feel my fingers press up against the next doorway. And I knew I was at my neighbor's dorm room. I knock on the door and someone opens it and I recognize their voice. "Are you okay? What happened?" And I tell them I can't see anything. "Just please let me stay here. Let me stay for a few minutes until I feel better." They bring me in and they bring me a glass of water. They ask me if I want anything else. Do I want any clothes? Do you need to go to the hospital?

• 18:49Speaker 07

  And I'm like, "Nope, just let me sit here and I'll get myself together."

• 18:56Speaker 07

  I felt like maybe this was all anxiety-related. Maybe this is a fluke thing. I sat there for about 45 minutes and over the course of nearly an hour, my vision slowly started coming back.

• 19:15Speaker 07

  As I regained my vision, my neighbors slowly helped me up, made sure I was okay, and walked me back over to my dorm room. I just put some pajamas on and got into bed.

• 19:37Speaker 07

  When I woke up the next day, I was still exhausted. I skipped all my classes. And I decided to just call my mom to tell her about the experience I had in the shower. I ended up just confiding in her about what I had been feeling and experiencing over the last few months. And she said, "Oh, you know, your aunt actually went through something like this. You should give her a call." So I call my aunt. I tell her all of the details of what had happened. She immediately is pretty concerned and tells me her story.

• 20:22Speaker 07

  One night, she was woken up by sounds in her apartment. And she saw a light emanating from her living room. She got up to go look, and there was an angelic figure standing there. She tells me to encourage whoever's in here to move on, to say something along the lines of, "This isn't where you're supposed to be anymore. You have to move on to the next place." I hang up with my aunt. I feel so silly listening to this.

• 21:06Speaker 07

  I don't know that I really believe her. I also felt kind of embarrassed to just start talking out loud to nothing. So I held on to that information. I had still just been so exhausted for three days at this point. And I'm just feeling like, you know what? I'm just gonna say it. I said out loud, "You don't belong here anymore. This isn't where you should be. It's time for you to move on." And in that moment, I felt a breeze in the room.

• 21:56Speaker 07

  Like this cool, refreshing, almost breeze.

• 22:03Speaker 07

  Saw my bedroom door slowly creak, and I feel a weight lifted off my chest. And it immediately felt lighter in the room.

• 22:19Speaker 07

  I didn't feel so tired anymore. And the feeling of being watched from the bathroom was no longer there. But I couldn't explain why. I didn't want to assume just speaking out loud would work.

• 22:53Glynn Washington?

  This episode is sponsored by Vinted. Imagine opening my closet, looking for a shirt, and I see that jacket. That jacket, that jacket I got for that party I never went to three years ago. That jacket, it's still there, it's still mocking me. Well, it was still there. Because then I stopped and I reached for my phone. Because Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes that you no longer wear. Listing on Vinted is quick and simple. Once an item sells, Vinted creates the prepaid shipping label for you. And Vinted has no seller fees. Meaning you keep every dollar you earn.

• 23:36Glynn Washington?

  And I could get a little more room in my closet. You know, for that next jacket. Give your clothes a second life with Vinted. Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. No seller fees, so you keep everything you earn.

• 24:14Speaker 07

  About two months after that experience, I go back to Long Island for the summer to my childhood home. I went to visit my high school photography teacher because she was actually the one that helped me apply to FIT for school because she had went there in the 90s. So I wanted to just say, "Thank you for helping me get in," and just catch up together. She asked me how my first year went, how were the dorms, how was school and the projects. I tell her that I had stayed in the Alumni Hall dorm building. She was like, "Oh, my God, that's so crazy.

• 24:59Speaker 07

  That's the one that I stayed in in the 90s. That's so funny. What floor were you on?" And I was like, "Oh, I was on the 10th floor." And she's like, "No way. I was also on the 10th floor. Like, how crazy would it be if we were in the same room?" And I was like, "I was in 10E." And she was like, "Oh." "I was in the room next door. I was in 10F." The mood got weird, and she got very cold, almost like solemn. And I was like, "Why did your vibe shift like that?" And she was like, "Well, when I was there, a girl died in that room."

• 25:43Speaker 07

  She was a partier. She was a really sweet girl, but, you know, did some drugs, and she unfortunately overdosed in that room and died. It's believed that she passed in the bathroom.

• 26:03Speaker 07

  I just feel my stomach drop. And I'm in complete disbelief of what I'm hearing. I end up telling her what I had experienced in this room, and she's now in shock. And she says, you know, "I tried really hard to find this girl. I couldn't find anything about her." I know her first name, and that she was really into this, like, fashion of rave culture, and, you know, JNCO jeans, and neons, and choker necklaces.

• 26:40Speaker 07

  I'm in shock. I'm thinking, that's the kind of clothing going missing from my fashion student roommates.

• 26:51Speaker 07

  I tell her the experience I had in the shower, and losing my vision. And she theorized that maybe this girl was showing me what she had went through in this bathroom. Maybe she was upset and angry still. Maybe I was a doorway for her to communicate through, and she was able to then move on properly and not be stuck in this bathroom.

• 27:26Speaker 07

  Over time, I've given this a lot of thought, and I think that's what was happening.

• 27:38Speaker 07

  The next year, I moved to a different dorm building, a few blocks down from the school, with new roommates in a new room, a new place. But my classes still took place in the building directly across from Alumni Hall.

• 28:02Speaker 07

  Every time I would go to class, I would see the building

• 28:07Speaker 07

  and I would think about that room. I wonder if people are having any weird experiences in there.

• 28:18Speaker 07

  But I'm hopeful that I helped her to move on.

• 28:23Speaker 07

  I hope that she's in a different place now and is more at peace.

• 28:46Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, Rebecca, for sharing your story with the Spooked. That original score is by Nicholas Marx. It was scouted by Vanessa Kolombeski. It was produced by Eric Yanez.

• 29:03Glynn Washington?

  Now, 1980s Miami. Dr. William G. Rohl, the leading parapsychologist, begins investigating a 13-year-old boy named Julio. Family, friends, and eventually journalists and investigators, they report they witnessed objects moving of their own accord. Never Julio is nearby. Furniture, dishes, silverware, things just fly about whenever he's scared, anxious, or upset. And after numerous tests and experiments and interviews, Dr. Rohl concludes that

• 29:40Glynn Washington?

  the phenomenon is something that he labels

• 29:45Glynn Washington?

  recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, RSPK.

• 29:55Glynn Washington?

  This is what the good doctor concludes and giving it a name, RSPK. That is all well and good, but to my mind, unhelpful.

• 30:06Glynn Washington?

  Now Julio has since taken his gifts and retreated from the public guide, but if you know someone with RSPK, or dear Spookster, if you have RSPK, I would love to know so much more about it than the name. So what Spook Nation, let us know, [email protected], because there's nothing better than a Spook story from a Spook listener.

• 30:35Glynn Washington?

  Spooked is brought to you by the team that has a very thorough checklist they go through before renting any apartment, except for Mark Ristich. In fact, it's best the landlord has a very thorough checklist in hand before renting an apartment to Mark Ristich. There's Davy Kim, Zoe Frigno, Ann Ford, Eric Yanis, Taylor Decot, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Doug Stewart, Paulina Kriki, Elizabeth Z. Pardue, Dikki Amatu, and Lulu Jemima. The Spook theme song is by Pat Massey Miller.

• 31:16Glynn Washington?

  My name's from Washington, and it's interesting, isn't it, that so many phenomena on this shadow road are tied to remembering, remembering this battle, remember this crime, remember this loss, remember, like a psychic scream of, "I was here. Please see this. Please see me. Please."

• 31:50Glynn Washington?

  A need so powerful, it transcends death. Please see me. Think about that. And I don't want to wait for anyone that I know, anyone I care about, to pass on imagining they have to come back to ensure they are finally seen. No, no. Now, don't haunt me later. I want to see you now. I want to hear you now. Now. Now.

• 32:24Glynn Washington?

  And I thank

• 32:27Glynn Washington?

  those that look me in my eye now. Those that insist on seeing me now. That don't let me hide now. That refuse to take no for an answer now. That drag me, kicking and screaming and sobbing for my own darkness and insist now, now,

• 32:49Glynn Washington?

  that I never,

• 32:53Glynn Washington?

  ever, ever, ever,

• 32:58Glynn Washington?

  turn out

• 33:00Glynn Washington?

  alive.