Mrs. Hagstrom - Classic

When supernatural forces come for her kids, Curtis’s mom stands strong. Mrs. Hagstrom may be one of the meanest ghosts yet.

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

• 0:02Glynn Washington?

  Spooksters, you have spoken. We want more spook, you said. We want the support to show, you said. And, can we please, for the love of all that is holy, please get rid of those ads! Well, prayers answered. Spooked Plus has risen. Ad-free spook. The entire library, no interruptions, just you and whatever's lurking in the shadows. Exclusive bonus stories every month, fresh nightmares you won't hear anywhere else. The Spooked Plus community, listen together, chat in real time, because no one should face the darkest alone. And, and, ask me anything for yours truly.

• 0:47Glynn Washington?

  If you've got questions, I've got answers. Maybe. And we're just getting started. Spooksters, we are a small team, chasing down the big mystery. Your support keeps this flame burning, so come on in. The door is open. Spooked.supercast.com. That's Spooked.supercast.com. Spooked Plus, don't turn out the lights.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Soft, cushy, plush, cozy. Soft, smooth, buttery, marshmallow-y, warm. Soft. Socks, underwear, tees, and more. Bombas, everyday comfort worth obsessing over. Visit Bombas.com/audio and use code AUDIO for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com/audio. One purchase equals one donated, always.

• 1:52Glynn Washington?

  See, if I'm on the street and someone slights me, knocks my papers to the ground, calls me names, even raises their hand to me, like what happened the other day?

• 2:07Glynn Washington?

  The truth is, I'm likely to let it go. To slowly pick my things up off the ground, to say the calming word. Even, even, to turn the other cheek. "Everybody just calm down. Everything's gonna be alright. Understand, I'm a lover. Not a fighter, but, but...

• 2:34Glynn Washington?

  If I'm walking with one of my babies, my good children, my happy kids, my nappy-headed monsters, if I'm walking down the street with one of my babies and someone steps to one of them, says something untoward, or God forbid, raise their hand in my child's direction and I see it, retribution will be immediate. Unkind, out of all proportion, there will in fact be held to pay, just like any other parent, any other parent. And if the threat to them is not the crazy guy in the street, or the entitled imbecile with a thousand dollar briefcase,

• 3:18Glynn Washington?

  but if this threat, if this threat comes from beyond the veil,

• 3:24Glynn Washington?

  then the pain and the retribution,

• 3:29Glynn Washington?

  well, that's going beyond the veil too.

• 3:38Glynn Washington?

  If you think that being a spirit gives you a place to escape,

• 3:44Glynn Washington?

  think again.

• 3:46Glynn Washington?

  Spook starts now.

• 4:11Glynn Washington?

  Now then, our first storyteller. His mother, she took her job, her job of taking care of him. She took it very seriously. Spooked.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  I was actually sitting on the doorstep. It was summertime outside, eating a popsicle. And this strange-looking woman came up to the front of the house. And I was a little bit terrified of her.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  She was our next-door neighbor. She came over to the house to introduce herself. It was the middle of summer, and she was dressed in an old wool overcoat and had a scarf on and a hat. She was a little bit creepy to a four-year-old. I immediately just ran inside, got my mom. And my mom came to the door, and I sort of hid behind my mom while my mother was talking to her. At some point in the conversation, she sort of dropped in hints of what had happened in the house. There had been some trouble and that the lady who had been in the house had died and had been through quite a lot of trauma. The neighbor told us her name was Lucinda Hagstrom.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Once she had started to describe Mrs. Hagstrom, my mother remembered finding a photo in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She had me run up and grab that photo and bring it down.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  It turned out that the photo was actually Mrs. Hagstrom.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Photo of a young woman, probably on her wedding day. She kind of had an unhappy look to her. Well, at that point, it was more of a curiosity by mother. She was just curious. She's like, she knew she had lived in this house, and she wondered what her dreams were for the house.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  One of the first incidents that happened was actually to me. It was a hot summer evening. I was home alone with my mother.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  I had gone upstairs to change my pajamas. I was walking down the stairway. I'm about halfway down when I can feel what feels like a bony hand touch my back.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  There was a terrible smell on the stairway at the time that it happened. My heart started beating and about halfway down, before I could grab the railing, it gave me a firm shove and pushed me down the stairs.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  I looked back at the empty stairs and then I ran into the kitchen where my mother was doing the dinner dishes.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  I was sobbing. I tried to tell her what had happened.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  She would have no reason to believe at this point that I was literally pushed down the stairs.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  She looked at me carefully, making sure I was okay, looking over me like a mother would, and then gave me a hug. She's like, "Oh, it was just an accident. I think you're okay."

• 7:28Speaker 02

  A couple of months later, I was also walking down the stairs.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  I could feel somebody behind me. I could sense that there was somebody behind me and then the cold, bony hand in my back.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  But this time, it wasn't just a gentle shove. This time, it was a full-on, forceful push.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  This time, I went down the stairs pretty hard, hitting the bottom.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  My parents heard me hit the floor. They came running. I insisted that I felt a bony hand. There was something breathing on me before it happened.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  It was smelly and scary.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  My parents kind of looked at each other. They probably had no idea what was actually happening. But just a few months after we moved in, pretty much everybody had sensed something or heard something or seen something at that point.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  There's four siblings. They would hear voices. They'd have their hair pulled. They'd hear growling footsteps. Saw the face of Mrs. Hagstrom in his bedroom window. Would often have doors slammed. We had two giant light fixtures and they started just to sway back and forth. Somebody tapping on the window. Lisa, she fell at different times, things crawling onto her bed.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Our parents got us together one Monday evening and thought that they should kind of talk to us about what was going on in the house.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  My parents' viewpoint at that point was, yes, there are spirits living in this house, but as long as you don't bother them, they are not going to bother you.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  After that meeting, we kneeled down and, as a family, prayed with a prayer led by my father.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Him and my mother together instructed us, "Do not interact and they will leave you alone." Which didn't sit very well with me because I obviously wasn't bothering them, but you know, I had been pushed down the stairs twice at this point.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Obviously for me, even at a young age, I was like, "I don't think so. I don't think this is gonna work."

• 9:55Speaker 02

  The first major experience in the house that my mother had was pretty shocking. It was a fall afternoon and she was in the kitchen processing apples.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  And she heard what she thought was a kitten in the basement meowing.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  She decided to go down into the basement.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  She, as she was walking down the stairs, the air just started feeling colder and colder and heavier and heavier.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  She really just wanted to leave the basement of the house at that time. Wanted to escape whatever was happening.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  As she went down the stairs,

• 10:51Speaker 02

  the sound sort of changed into

• 10:56Speaker 02

  a baby crying.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  It was that sound of the baby that stopped her.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  She felt a tingle, like an electrical current, pass through her body.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  And there, standing before her, was Mrs. Hagstrom, in the middle of the room.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  My mother knew who she was instantly from the photo that she had seen when we had first moved into the home.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  She told me that her her skin looked like ash,

• 11:39Speaker 02

  as if a breeze would cause her to crumble.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Her hair was just in filthy strands hanging around her face.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  My mother said her eyes were the most horrible.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Then suddenly she vanished.

• 12:06Glynn 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.

• 12:48Glynn 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.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Both my father and mother had had their own experiences with Mrs. Hagstrom in the home. So one day in June, my dad, he had a Coleman lantern that he was working on. And on that door that went directly into the basement, he heard what he thought was a tapping sound. So he looks over there and he didn't see anything, continued to work on his project, continuing to work on the lantern. And he heard it again.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  The tapping kind of changed into a strong pounding. So he gets up from his seat, goes to the window again, and he sees just beyond his own reflection, the gaunt face of a woman. It just flashed and then it was gone. You know, he's telling himself to pull it together, takes a deep breath and he just goes back to his work. Kind of looked around. Then he felt an icy finger kind of touch him on his forehead. The finger then traced his forehead and his cheek.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Immediately after that, the Coleman lantern was flung from the workbench.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  It crashed to the concrete and shards of glass just littered the floor.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  As strange as this sounds, it eventually became normal to us. We learned to live with what was going on in the home. We had further incidents, but they... Sometimes we just reacted almost indifferently to them.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  But I feel like the fact that I was the youngest child in the family made me a particular target of Mrs. Hagstrom.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  I don't know if she thought going after the baby of the family would be particularly offensive to my mother, but I definitely seemed to be the target of a lot of what was going on in the house.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  There was one night where I was in my room.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  I heard the footsteps outside in the hallway, which we did almost every night. And they would come and they would go. I heard them start walking into my room on the linoleum floor over to my bed.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  I could feel something pressing down on me,

• 16:14Speaker 02

  starting at my legs and then pressing down on my arms and my chest.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  I essentially... I feel like the spirit was trying to either enter me or kill me.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  I was screaming, "Get off of me, get off of me."

• 16:39Speaker 02

  I felt like a car was pressing down on me, basically. It got to the point where I could barely breathe.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  And I was gasping for air.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Like I said, all I know is, at some point it did because I went downstairs and asked my mother why she didn't hear me. Why didn't she respond? I was screaming for help and she said that they didn't hear anything.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  I think this incident was a turning point for her. Up until that point, Mrs. Hagstrom was simply an annoyance, but at this point, she became a real danger to our family in my mother's eyes.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  My mother was, I think, a very typical housewife at that time period. She was very family-oriented. Her family and her kids were everything to her and she would have done anything for them, you know? After we had lived in the house for many years, we noticed that my mother was starting to act differently. She would have to go to bed for several days at a time. As a mother, she tried to fight this, whatever it was, because she felt a strong need to take care of her family, especially with the events that were going on in the home. Finally, Dad told us what was going on, that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  And we were just devastated.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  She wasn't able to do most of the things that she did with us before, so... It came to the point where she had trouble walking. She had trouble walking up and down stairs. Increasingly, she spent more time in bed and just was unable to do anything.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  It was a winter day. It, I believe, was a few weeks before Christmas. I remember it well because we had had an ice storm. There was no power in the house. We had had problems with power off and on all that week.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  But I remember walking home, just feeling really odd as I walked into the house because it was completely quiet. So as I opened the door and flipped on the switch, there was no power, of course.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  My mother was in bed and I was the only one that had come home. First, I went in and checked on my mom to see if she needed anything. And she told me she was fine and gave me a kiss and went back to sleep. I went out to the kitchen table, pulled out one of my library books and attempted to read. And it was just deadly, eerily silent in the house.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  You could hear a pin drop.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  I hear a thump upstairs. I was just determined to ignore it.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  At this point, I'm really hoping that some other member of my family would come home. But

• 19:48Speaker 02

  the pounding upstairs continued.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  I just assumed it was Mrs. Hagstrom up to her normal stuff. Taking advantage of the fact that I was there by myself, my mother was sick, she was pretty ruthless. Any opportunity she had to try to intimidate us, she would. She knew my mother was sick, so...

• 20:13Speaker 02

  I think Mrs. Hagstrom's intent was to make my mother feel like she couldn't protect the baby of the family.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  It increased in intensity to where there was just racket, footfalls, thumping. I mean, I knew it was Mrs. Hagstrom, but this was worse than it had ever been.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  I heard a thunk, but this time the thunk was different. This time, it was the sound of my mother falling out of bed.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  She had originally just tried to stand up. And the first time she tried to stand up, she fell down, but she pulled herself up again. At this point, my mother had had enough. Never underestimate the strength of a mother when she's protecting her family, because at that point, she's done.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  She walks out of the bedroom and I'm right there at the bottom of the stairs. And I am like, "What are you doing? You need to be in bed." And she somehow managed to walk up the stairs, one stair at a time.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Each step was probably excruciatingly painful.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  I wanted to go up there with her and she's like, "No, just stay right here."

• 21:35Speaker 02

  And I'm like, "What can I do for you?" And she goes, "Kneel down there and pray for me."

• 21:43Speaker 02

  I loved my mother so much that I was able to focus and do what she asked me to do, which was just stay there and just start praying for her, for her strength, so that she could deal with what she was about to deal with.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  I'm kneeling on the floor right before the first step. And I'm holding this candle because that's in the way we could see.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  She somehow made her way up the steps and she got to the top of the stairs and made her way to the storage room where all the racket was coming from.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  This was Mrs. Hagstrom's favorite hangout.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  And she threw the door open, then the banging immediately stopped.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  My mother continued to grip the doorway and she had her flashlight and shined the beam of the flashlight into the room. And at this point, she was now fighting for her family, for herself, for everything that she believed in. She yelled, "Come out, you coward."

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Her body seemed to have a temporary reprieve from her illness. She's, her body straightened. Her pain was replaced with what I would call divine determination. And she just walked into the room like she owned it with strong strides. And she just stood in the center. And that's when something, she heard something whiz past her head in the darkness and it crashed against the wall behind her. She put the flashlight on, the object on the floor and she saw it was that, it was the photograph.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  It was the photograph that she had found so early on when we had first moved into the house, the photograph of Mrs. Hagstrom as a bride. My mother realized that part of it had hit her and that she had a cut in her forehead and she could feel the blood dripping down on her. She just couldn't believe that she had actually, at some point, felt pity for this woman, you know? She originally felt pity for her and this woman had spent all these years terrorizing her family. She was done, you know? She had nothing left for that woman. My mother screamed into the darkness, "I'm not afraid of you.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  I want you out of my house and I want you out of my house now." The room just was silent, completely silent. The only sound was my mother breathing. And then finally, Mrs. Hagstrom just slowly materialized in the corner of the room. In the most disfigured and horrible manner, a little more so than the first time she had seen her, her eyes were basically black sockets. Skin was just gray and crumbly, looked like it was going to rot away from her face. It was pure evil. My mother just confronted her. She's like, "I'm not afraid of you and I want you out of my house.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  You need to leave." Sort of a yellow, I don't know, maybe you could describe it as a yellow blaze, kind of just came from Mrs. Hagstrom's spirit.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  It was like a glow that basically filled the room. She described Mrs. Hagstrom's spirit as wailing and it was actually writhing. It was fighting, fighting against my mother. But it eventually faded. But just before the apparition vanished, my mother, for just a brief moment, saw the spirit's face transform into the same young woman who was in the photo, just for a moment.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  And then she was gone. This experience, of course, had completely drained my mother. She fell to the ground. She was laying on the floor. Soon after that, my brother had come home and I remember yelling to him down the stairs to come up, come up. And we got her into that bed and there was literally a change you could feel in the house. Yeah, that was basically how the situation resolved for us. It didn't resolve up completely. She was still definitely there.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  But she no longer bothered us. You know, don't get between a mother and her family because you won't win.

• 27:33Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, Curtis Meyer, for sharing your story at the Spook. Curtis would like to thank his parents and his siblings for helping him survive a very unique childhood. Y'all need to run away more, in my opinion, Curtis. But if you want to read more about what life was like in the Meyer family's haunted home, check out Curtis' book. It's called Shadow of Fear.

• 27:55Glynn Washington?

  And don't forget, listeners, if you have a scary story to tell, one you've been holding on to for a long time, drop us a line, [email protected]. And know this, if you dig storytelling in the bright light of day, check out our sister podcast, it's called Snap Judgment. It's available wherever you get your podcasts. Let the record reflect, the people have spoken, your wishes are command. All new Spooked episodes as we count down to All Hallows' Eve. Be afraid.

• 28:35Glynn Washington?

  Spooked is brought to you by every single sound you fail to investigate in the middle of the night. And Mark Listich, Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick. Original soundscapes for the stories you just heard were by Leon Morimoto. The Spook theme is by Pat Lassit Miller. My name is from Washington. They say, you know, that they want you to come upstairs for just a moment. They want to show you something. Well, reject their silent song, no matter how they word it, how they cry. Please, beg, just remember, this all-important safety tip, never, ever,

• 29:19Glynn Washington?

  never, ever, never, never, ever, turned out the lights.