Lady with the Baby

Dave and Vicki love their dad’s new house. It’s by far the nicest one he’s ever lived in. But underneath the beauty, something lurks…

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

• 0:00Glynn Washington?

  Bye bye, black boy. Have you any gruel? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Three cup full? Well, I'll take one then, if you don't mind. No, sir. No, sir. This gruel's all mine. You've crossed over to Spooked. Stay tuned.

• 0:35Speaker 01

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• 1:17Speaker 02

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

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Radio Rental is a horror podcast featuring true scary stories told by real people.

• 1:30Speaker 03

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

• 1:37Speaker 04

  And then their light turns on. And then their 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.

• 1:45Speaker 05

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

• 1:56Speaker 04

  I'm starting to freak out a little bit. I'm pleading with them to just please let me out.

• 2:02Speaker 06

  These eyes started opening. They were pure white, and I lose it. Radio Rental returns October 23rd. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:22Glynn Washington?

  Okay, so I'm with a friend, chilling, cooking dinner, drinking wine. And she tells me that the eyes are the window into the soul. And that even if the person cannot see it, even if they're blind, the best way to glimpse the true self is to look directly into someone's eyes.

• 2:46Glynn Washington?

  And I'm chopping the garlic. Yeah, um, okay, I get it. That's interesting or whatever, you know. But she can't leave well enough alone. Comes back with a kicker. She says that I never look anyone directly in the eyes. What? That's crazy. I talk to people. I look folk in the eyes all the time. Really though, really?

• 3:14Glynn Washington?

  Okay, well, go ahead. Look me in my eyes, right now.

• 3:24Glynn Washington?

  Are you tripping? You scared?

• 3:29Glynn Washington?

  Go ahead.

• 3:32Glynn Washington?

  Look me in my eyes.

• 3:37Glynn Washington?

  A proof of wrong. To stop this noise, I turn toward her. I set up to look directly into her eyes. So I look directly into her eyes. And there's a twitch. My head, my neck don't work quite right. Wait a minute, wait a minute, gotta reset. Focus. Turn toward her again. Well, she looks directly at me, and this time,

• 4:10Glynn Washington?

  I search out her face.

• 4:13Glynn Washington?

  I see her question. I look directly into her eyes to peer inside. And when I see it,

• 4:22Glynn Washington?

  my being, myself, my soul screams, "No, no, no, no, no, stop it, stop it, stop it!"

• 4:30Glynn Washington?

  Turn away.

• 4:33Glynn Washington?

  I break the case not because of what I witnessed in her divine, no. She is beautiful, magical.

• 4:47Glynn Washington?

  It's because of fear, the terror, the buried understanding that when you peer directly into someone else's eyes, into someone else's secrets,

• 5:01Glynn Washington?

  they...

• 5:06Glynn Washington?

  they can see directly

• 5:10Glynn Washington?

  into yours.

• 5:20Glynn Washington?

  This book starts...

• 5:24Glynn Washington?

  now.

• 6:07Glynn Washington?

  Secrets, secrets, secrets. It's the mid 1960s. Dave and Vicky are both in high school in Michigan. Most of the time, they live with their mom right outside of Detroit. Then their dad gets his job as a groundskeeper from Michigan State University. And the school gives him a new house to live in.

• 6:33Glynn Washington?

  I'll let Dave and Vicky take it from here.

• 6:38Glynn Washington?

  Soon.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  The first time I went to the house, I was very impressed. It was a beautiful brick ranch home. It was very nice and quiet.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Where it was at was in a beautiful setting.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  The house was on 40 acres. It has rolling hills and there are some pine trees.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  The closest home would probably be at least a half mile to three quarter mile away.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  My dad hasn't been able to be in a home like that in the past.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  So initially, I thought, wow, this is a really nice home.

• 7:36Speaker 05

  Dave and Vicky would go visit their dad in his new house about once a month. They looked forward to these weekends. They loved spending time with their dad. And they got along really well with his wife, Charlotte, and her kids, too.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  One evening, Dave decided to go for a visit on his own.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  I think I was like, pretty close to 16, right around 16, I had my license. And I drove out to their home. They made me a sandwich and we sat down in the living room.

• 8:07Speaker 05

  As they sat down to eat, Charlotte seemed pretty upset. And she started to tell Dave a story about something that had happened in the house a few nights before.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Charlotte was in the living room by the fireplace. And she was sitting there enjoying the warmth of the fire.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  And then she heard a sobbing noise, a woman crying.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Like a sob of desperation.

• 8:41Speaker 05

  Charlotte said that she started looking around, trying to figure out where the crying was coming from. And that's when she saw something through the window out in the front yard.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  She said that she saw a ball of light.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  It had like a glow to it and it was kinda whirling. And it came through the picture window. Not fast, just slowly whirling, coming through that window.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Was kinda coming towards a dining room, floating in the, in the air. Probably about four feet up. And as it came towards the dining room, it was starting to take shape of a, of a human form.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  And it looked like an infant in flesh and blood.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Maybe, you know, six, eight months.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  And the sobbing was getting louder as the baby got closer towards her.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  The baby apparently floated up towards a green chest they had sitting in dining room, like a little buffet chest. And her purse was on there.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  And it was playing with her keys that were hanging out of her purse. She's just looking and, and, and just in total surprise like, you know, what is this? And she couldn't believe it.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  And as the sobbing came closer and got higher in the volume, she saw this apparition floating from around the corner.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  It was like a shape of a woman.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  The woman, she said, had more of a blonde hair, a light colored hair, but the face was totally blurry. And it had a dress or a gown, like it was white, but she couldn't see the apparition's feet.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  And it was coming towards the baby and it floated there and it picked the baby up. And it lifted it and it went out and just zoomed around the corner and just vanished.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  It was like, wow, can this be real?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  But Charlotte wouldn't usually make up things. She was a pretty straight woman. She wouldn't make up a story like this. I could tell that she was distraught. She would gasp for air telling me the story. And she was almost in tears sometimes because of what she saw.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  After she told me that, I was kind of uneasy after that point.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  It's a feeling of like, what's gonna happen here? Am I gonna see something? Am I gonna hear something?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  One night I went over to the home and I was there with my stepsister. It was getting late, so we ended up going to sleep. I was sleeping in the bed. My stepsister was next to me. All of a sudden, I just awoke.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  I look up and I see a woman with a long dress on, like floating down the hallway.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  She had longer hair.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  But I could see mostly her dress like flowing.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  It was almost see-through.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  I couldn't see anything about her face, but I could see that it was a woman.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  She was coming down the hallway and it was coming a little bit closer. It was maybe 10 feet from me.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  My heart was beating very fast.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  And then it just disappeared.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  I sat up.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  My stepsister was next to me. I woke her up and I go, "Did you see that?" She says, "What, what?" She didn't see what I saw.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  I realized that it was most likely what Charlotte, my stepmother, was talking about.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  I saw what she had seen.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  I froze up and got goosebumps and shivers.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  I wanted to go home. I wanted to leave because I didn't want to have to see anything like this anymore.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  I did not want to come back.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  I didn't go there as much as I should because I was so afraid to come back, you know, with all these things happening.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Dave, on the other hand, would still go out for visits. When summer rolled around, Charlotte invited him out for a little barbecue with her kids.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  My stepsister, Joanne, and her husband, Tom, came over with their daughter, Wendy. Wendy was about four years old. And she was like a little blond-haired girl, real cute little girl. And we were gonna have like a little summer gathering. We were gonna spend a night or two there.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  It was in midday. It was like in the early afternoon. I was in the kitchen and I was having a soda pop. And I heard some screaming.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Saying they can't find Wendy. Wendy's missing.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  The father, Tom, was looking for her and Joanne was frantic. And they're looking all the else. They went through the bedrooms. They walked. Through the living room.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  We looking, looking for quite a while.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Finding one of the adults had come up and said, "We found her. We found Wendy."

• 15:38Speaker 01

  So Wendy was found at the bottom of the steps to the basement.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  And I says, "What was she doing down there?" He asked, "What are you doing down here? We've been looking all over for you." Wendy replied, "I'm talking to the lady with the baby."

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Right away, the first thing that hit me was, "Wow."

• 16:05Speaker 01

  I'm intrigued and I'm very curious.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Could this be the female that my stepmother saw?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  One night after school, Dave drove out to the house and had dinner with his dad and Charlotte.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  They went to bed. It was probably like about after midnight, you know, 12, 12:30. So I'm sitting on the couch by the fireplace, enjoying a nice warm fire. And I hear the ping pong balls in the basement bouncing around.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Am I hearing something? Am I really hearing this?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  It took every bit of energy and every bit of courage to go down them steps.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  And I got to that door. I was almost frozen to open that door. I don't know if I want to see this or not.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  And as I opened that door really quickly, all it was there was, was the ping pong balls sitting on a table and the paddles alongside them.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  I thought I was just hearing things. And then I went back upstairs, sat down again and

• 17:26Speaker 01

  all of a sudden I hear the balls going back and forth. I goes, "I can't believe this." I hear the balls going. I hear a spike. I hear the balls dribbling on the floor when it rolls off the table.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Walked down the stairs.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Soon as I opened the door, it stops.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  But I look on the table, the balls are on the floor, the paddles are on the floor.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  When I saw the balls and the paddles in different positions, I was quite worked up. It's an edgy feeling of something's gonna pop out, something's gonna jump out at me. I'm just waiting for that to happen. It validated that something is going on.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  There's something that's happening here that's not normal.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  But just as they were getting more familiar with it, Dave's dad told them that he'd found a new job and that he and Charlotte were leaving the house. Charlotte started packing up to get ready for the move. And she found something, an old watercolor painting in the coat closet. That was her main coat closet coming out into the house every day. And they never saw that picture. Never saw it till right towards then when they were just about finishing up cleaning the cabinets out, wiping them out.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  The painting was of a landscape, and in the bottom right corner, written in cursive. It said the name Hicks, H-I-C-K-S.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  It was the first time Charlotte had heard the name, and she told a friend at work about it, a friend who had actually known the folks who'd lived in the house before.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  And they told her that the family that lived there was named Hicks. And the Hicks family had a son. He had a girlfriend.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  She was pregnant and had a baby.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  The young woman was on her way To the Hicks' home for the very first time to meet the parents and introduce them to their new grandchild.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  It was a winter day. The roads were bad. And she had slid her car into the ditch.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  And the baby and the mother were killed in the accident.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  It was like, oh, my God. This is what we've been seeing. The baby, the woman, and it all made sense. Not that we were crazy, that we were really seeing something that could be real.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  But Dave couldn't stop thinking about the night he'd heard the ping pong balls going back and forth down in the basement.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  I didn't think there's no baby and no mother down there playing ping pong. I think there's something different going on down there. I think there was more than one spirit in the home. That's my opinion.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Whatever the full story was, the family considered it a mystery that they were about to leave in the past. But then, one day in October, Dave got a call from his stepmom.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  She says, your father got in a real bad car accident. You need to get out here.

• 21:20Glynn 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. 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.

• 22:02Glynn 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.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  When Dave got to the house, he barely recognized his father. He looked like he had just gotten out of a bad boxing match. His face was all bruised up. He had knots on his head. He had bruising under his eyes. He had stitches on the top of his forehead, on his cheeks, on his chin. It was real hard to see him like that.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  And he told me, he sat down on the edge of the couch by the fireplace. And he says, here's what happened. He explained the whole thing to me.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  It was like about 10 o'clock at night. My father was sitting at the table. A knock came at the front door.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  So my father says, I'll get it. So he walked to the door. He opened the door and there was a boy standing there.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  And the boy asked him, sir, would you like to buy a pumpkin?

• 23:34Speaker 01

  He goes, no, we're moving. We're not going to celebrate no Halloween or we're moving out. Thanks anyways. He said, well, how would you like to buy some apple cider then? He goes, no, we're moving, so we really don't want to buy anything. But here, here's a dime for coming out. So he put a dime in the kid's hand.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  So he said goodbye, he closed the door.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  And my stepmother, Charlotte, asked Vic, who was that? And he explained the whole thing. She goes, Vic, it's almost 10 o'clock at night. There should be no one at the door. Did you see headlights in the long driveway? Did you see? Maybe a parent in the car or something.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  So he's, "Let me go look." He walked back over there to see if there was a car. He opened the front door and there was a dime sitting on the threshold of the door.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  And there was nothing out there. It was total black, pitch black out there.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  About a week later or so, they were just finishing their packing. He decided to order pizza and she said, "Well, you don't have a delivery?" He said, "No, I'll just go pick it up." So he got in his car. He had an Oldsmobile 88, a gold Oldsmobile. And he pulled out the driveway and headed down, made a right turn on the asphalt road.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  He's, "Dave, I saw that same kid that was in the door.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  I saw that same boy on the side of the road when I turned out of the drive, heading down the road and became transparent. And he ran in front of the car and I went right through him with the car and I ended up in a ditch."

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Dave has pondered whether or not there was a connection between that boy and the other spirits in the house. I have no idea why there is a spirit in this house of a woman sobbing for its baby and a baby. And all of a sudden, we've got a boy around 10 years old. But I thought about the family, the Hicks family, you know, how to experience something that tragic. And it made me wonder, when the family was living there, was there things going on there? Was she, was this baby and this mother in this home haunting when they were living there?

• 25:56Speaker 01

  I think the spirit was still in the house because she had unfinished business. She was trying to let the parents of the home know that she had this baby with their son. But she got in this accident.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Even though I was scared to death, I kinda wanted to help her, you know, to help her to move on. But being 15 or 16 years old when it happened, I wouldn't know how to go about that. When I got older and after being a mother, you know, and having children, it makes me feel very bad for her and hoping that she had peace.

• 26:57Glynn Washington?

  Thank you Dave and Vicky for sharing your stories with the Spooked and the Big Bangs. Dave's daughter Sharon for reaching out to us about her family story. Spooksters, if there's a tale in your family that's been passed down from the older generations, be like Shannon, reach out, pass it down to us. Spooked at SnapJudgment.org. Original score for that story was by Nicholas Marks. It was produced by Zoe Frigno.

• 27:29Glynn Washington?

  Now then, there are things that walk, things that crawl, things that knock, things that ball. And if you are played with any one of these things and you feel like there's no one else you can tell, tell me. Yes, let me know. Spooked at SnapJudgment.org. Cause there's nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. Spooked at SnapJudgment.org. Spooked is brought to you by the team that has learned not to make any sudden movements. Except of course from Mark Ristich, whose entire life is a series of sudden movements.

• 28:09Glynn Washington?

  There's Davy Kim, Zoe Frigno, Anne Ford, Eric Yanez, Teyla DeCott, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Doug Stewart, Paulina Kriki, Elizabeth Z. Pardue, Divya Matu, Lulu Jemima.

• 28:25Glynn Washington?

  Yeah. On Team Snap, the union-represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO Local 51. The spooked theme song is by Pat Massey Miller, "My Name's Gun Washington." One of my favorite quotes ever. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." And I think about this almost every single day. It's fantastic, the notion that the machinery of the universe grinds out to produce moral outcomes. I love this idea.

• 29:10Glynn Washington?

  But is it real? Does the universe conspire to provide justice, or does it plot to steal justice away? And I guess that's just kind of a roundabout way of asking. Is it, whatever it is, is it good, or is it bad? And to be frank right now, when I look around, it's hard to imagine that the darkness isn't grinning. The shadow is ascendant. And when I curl into that feeble position, what saves me from despair

• 29:54Glynn Washington?

  is recalling that nothing complex is ever one thing, that there might be a lot of different it's making up the moral universe. And maybe, maybe we're part of it. So instead of asking if the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, ask instead, am I bending toward justice? Am I bending toward love? Toward forgiveness, towards peace, towards joy? Am I? And my honest answer is sometimes yes, and sometimes no.

• 30:34Glynn Washington?

  It may be the best you can hope for when you look back to see your footprints in the sand. You can say, "No, I wasn't perfect."

• 30:44Glynn Washington?

  But even in despair, even in darkness,

• 30:48Glynn Washington?

  I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever turn out the lights.