The White Hand

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.

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

• 0:06Glynn Washington?

  She wants to hear the truth, she says. But I prefer to lie. "Doctor, will I live?" she asks.

• 0:18Glynn Washington?

  "My dear, you'll never die."

• 0:24Glynn Washington?

  You're listening to Spooked. Stay.

• 0:38Glynn Washington?

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. And sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage for you, along with 24/7 claim support and great customer service. So when you think about it, that's like four great decisions that more than makes up for the TV debacle. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 1:21Glynn 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.

• 2:05Glynn Washington?

  If you've got questions, I've got answers. Maybe. And we're just getting started. Spook says, "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.

• 2:43Glynn Washington?

  Fourth of July, right before second 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 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. And that night, I stay over with five of my best friends in the whole wide world. Jeff, Marty, Danny, Sean, Cory. Jeff's mom makes us pancakes the next morning. Swimming in butter and syrup, laughing.

• 3:28Glynn Washington?

  She unloads a whole can of whipped cream on mine, especially for me, because, she says, because. I banker, 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.

• 4:10Glynn Washington?

  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?

• 4:27Glynn Washington?

  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 or a company I despise. And a girl sits next to me, thirteen years old, blinking back tears, trying to be brave, trying not to weep,

• 4:53Glynn Washington?

  but weeping all the same.

• 4:56Glynn Washington?

  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,

• 5:40Glynn Washington?

  maybe every year. And all of this pours from her in a hot wail.

• 5:49Glynn Washington?

  She comes from a community, a ground, a sky, a smell, a music, and being torn away from it.

• 5:58Glynn Washington?

  I want to tell her comforting words that it will get better, that soon this new place will feel like home too. You'll see.

• 6:13Glynn Washington?

  Then I stop.

• 6:16Glynn Washington?

  I think about the people, the families that have given me their embrace, let me into their homes and their lives, and how casually I walked away.

• 6:27Glynn Washington?

  Wonder what's next.

• 6:31Glynn Washington?

  This little girl is not the one having a strange reaction to leaving everything and everyone behind.

• 6:40Glynn Washington?

  I am.

• 6:44Glynn Washington?

  Thank little girl, you are right to feel it. You are right to cry. That leaving is a hurt that should never fully heal. In fact,

• 6:58Glynn Washington?

  I should be weeping with you.

• 7:02Glynn Washington?

  You are not broken, no. Broken

• 7:06Glynn Washington?

  is a grown person sitting on an airplane who doesn't care where they are going

• 7:15Glynn Washington?

  or who they're leaving behind.

• 7:22Glynn Washington?

  Spook starts.

• 7:26Glynn Washington?

  Now.

• 8:21Glynn Washington?

  See, when you move away, some things inevitably get left behind.

• 8:28Glynn Washington?

  Now, we're going back. Back to the 1980s, to Stratford, a theater town in Ontario, Canada. Katka Depeña and her husband Jim, they've grown tired of living in apartments. 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 in a nice neighborhood for rent, they drop everything to check it out. Spook.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  We went to see it.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Every room is done like this, and none of it matches.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  But hey, someone's taste. It's okay. Like, I just want a home. It doesn't matter to me. And besides, I like houses that have character.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  We 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.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  As I'm bringing a box in, my daughter says to me, "Who's the old man on the phone in the hall?"

• 10:57Speaker 01

  I'm confused, and I go into the hallway to see what she could be talking about. And 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, the party line phones, where you would jiggle the receiver and ask the operator to connect you. But that's all that's there.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  I look around to see what it might be.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  There is no one there.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  So I turn and move the ladder to a different location, a little further down the wall, go back up again. And it's okay for a couple of minutes. And then I get the same sensation again.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  This feeling of being watched, this feeling of not being alone, starts to be omnipresent.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  And I blame me.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  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 feeling is.

• 13:54Glynn Washington?

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. And sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage for you, along with 24/7 claim support and great customer service. So, when you think about it, that's like four great decisions that more than makes up for the TV debacle. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  I'm downstairs in the living room, and Aurora's supposed to be napping upstairs, and I hear this little voice go, "I have to pee." And she comes running down the stairs.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  And I asked her, "Why?" And she said, "Sakes is there."

• 15:55Speaker 01

  When I ask her who Sakes is, she says, "He's an old man, and he lives here."

• 16:05Speaker 01

  That feels extremely creepy to me.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  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 says, "Mom, the white hands are bothering me. I can't sleep."

• 17:08Speaker 01

  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 pat.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Sometimes they scratch. Sometimes they're just around her."

• 17:32Speaker 01

  And she tells me, "It's Sakes."

• 17:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  So it's afternoon. I'm having a nap. Aurora's having a nap. And I hear a sound that wakes me up.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  I hear the sound of rushing water.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  My first thought is, oh, the pipe's broken. And I go downstairs

• 19:01Speaker 01

  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. And they're on full force, all faucets, just flat out.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  So I turn them off.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  I don't understand what's going on and I'm freaked out.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  I'm a relatively handy person. I know that there's no reason that I know of that that should happen.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  The combination of this, my daughter's nightmares,

• 19:51Speaker 01

  of me feeling like I'm being watched.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  There's something here.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  There's something here that's not us. The something here either doesn't want us here or it wants to get our attention.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  I need to know more.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  I picked 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.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  So I ask her, "Who Sakes is? Who is this man? What does he look like?"

• 21:36Speaker 01

  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."

• 22:04Speaker 01

  And then I asked her if he was friendly.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  And she didn't answer me at all.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  And I didn't like that. I didn't like that around my daughter, not at all.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  It's one thing if it's just me. I could override that. But not if there's anything that's making my child unhappy or unsafe.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  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,

• 23:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  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 back into it again. That's why he was looking for them. And he says, "It's really interesting when you buy old houses.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  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."

• 24:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  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 fit. And 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.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  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 bedroom and I say, "And this is our bedroom."

• 28:11Speaker 01

  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. You 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.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  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 that this works. I don't know whether it will or not. We'll see.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Things seemed to slow down a bit after that. It seemed to lighten. White hands, nightmares, et cetera. That stuff seemed to decrease.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  I think that he heard me.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  And I'm happy about that.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  And then I hear her across the hallway starting to stir in the middle of the night.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  I hear the beginning of, "Mom. Mom.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Mom.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Mom."

• 30:21Speaker 01

  And I get out of bed right away. And I go across the hall.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  And she's OK.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  But five feet from her bed

• 30:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  It's rocking like someone is in the chair.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  This is his answer, that he's here. Maybe it's my house, but it's his house too.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  I'm afraid and I don't know what to do, but I know I will protect her with my life.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  So I go over and I yell at the chair.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  And I tell it that it has to go. It has to get out.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  And then after that, I just sit in the chair

• 31:44Speaker 01

  to hold it still. And I just stay there that night. I climb into her bed and I go asleep next to her.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  I wanted her to think that it was a dream. It's okay if I knew that it wasn't a dream.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  I was glad to leave.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  And she just says, "This is a nice house. I like this house."

• 33:19Speaker 01

  So she got to pick out her room.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  And she doesn't bring up

• 33:30Speaker 01

  this man that she's named Sakes again.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  There's no more dreams. There's no more white hands.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  There's no one in that house that she talks about.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  And that's good enough for me.

• 34:03Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, thank you, thank you Katya for sharing your story with us Spooked. The original score for this piece was by Yadi Bundy. It was produced by Zoe Frigno.

• 34:22Glynn Washington?

  Now, there was a man who walked forty 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, 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 two hundred meters distant?" The man, his eyes wide, his face sallow, creases deep from countless hours spent carrying water under

• 35:01Glynn Washington?

  the unforgiving sun, shakes his head gravely and says, "Stream? You gotta be kidding me. What stream?" You see, it's the same with Spooked. 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 a Spooked story from a Spooked listener. Spooked at SnapJudgment.org. Let us know.

• 35:55Glynn Washington?

  Spooked is brought to you by the team that understands full well that not everyone who wanders is lost. Except for the case of Mark Ristich, if you see him wandering about, no doubt about it, he's lost. Please call the number taped to his jacket, thank you. On this Davy Kim, Zoe Frigno, Eric Yanis, Taylor Decot, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Doug Stewart, Elliot Lightfoot, Paulina Kriki, Juan Diego Beltran, Sasha Wilson, Daniel Shinsky. The Spook theme song is by Pat Messine Miller, My Name Is John Washington.

• 36:36Glynn 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. To cage it, to control it, to harness it, so that it does not destroy us. You'll need amazing wisdom to achieve such lofty goals.

• 37:17Glynn Washington?

  Unfortunately, the only piece of advice I have to offer is to never, ever, ever, never, never, ever, never, never, ever turn out blind.