Petrony - Classic

David’s family has owned the same plot of farmland in North Carolina for over 300 years. As he gets older, he starts to realize that some family members have never really left.

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

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

  Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray my soul will never keep the screams of those within the fire. And forget, 'twas me that lit the fire.

• 0:36Glynn Washington?

  Stay tuned.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Why have so many crop circles appeared around Britain? How did thousands of people demonstrate powers of telepathy? Can the dead suck the life from the living? Join me, Tim Harford, for a trip into the paranormal throughout Halloween month on Cautionary Tales. Listen to Cautionary Tales on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:22Glynn Washington?

  I don't drink fake old Red Pop and eat vanilla wafers. My grandfather loved him some fake old Red Pop and vanilla wafers. I don't drink Asahi Superdry, a Japanese beer. My brother, when we lived in Japan together, he would clown like he was the dude in the commercials. He turned toward me, looked really serious, take a long pull from his bottle, and he'd say in perfectly accented Japanese, he'd say,

• 1:53Glynn Washington?

  "Zum Taipiru wa umaina."

• 2:02Glynn Washington?

  We laugh, and we laugh, and we laugh.

• 2:07Glynn Washington?

  My other brother, he left the barbecue. Love to barbecue.

• 2:15Glynn Washington?

  I haven't touched the barbecue grill. Not the tongs, not charcoal, not the oven mitt, not the meat thermometer. I haven't touched any of it, not once. Since September 24th, 2019, and I... I just can't, I can't anymore, not by myself.

• 2:39Glynn Washington?

  Besides, I'm the assistant, the sous chef, not the chef. The apron doesn't even fit right.

• 2:51Glynn Washington?

  But you know, even saying this out loud right now, just saying this, it calls them back.

• 3:08Glynn Washington?

  I see you, granddaddy. I see you hat cocked off to the side. I see you, brothers.

• 3:18Glynn Washington?

  I see you two here in the studio, arms draped around each other.

• 3:25Glynn Washington?

  One holding that acai super dry beer in his hand, the other clicking them barbecue tongs. I see you. I see you. And since you're all here, you should know, I'm gonna eat vanilla wafers one day, granddaddy, I promise. I'm gonna drink acai super dry, bottle after bottle after bottle, even while I'm flipping burgers on the barbecue grill someday. Someday.

• 3:59Glynn Washington?

  Not today, I can't do it today, I wish I could. I wish I could someday soon.

• 4:09Glynn Washington?

  My name is from Washington. Someday real soon.

• 4:15Glynn Washington?

  Spoke starts now.

• 4:40Glynn Washington?

  So, we're headed to North Carolina to apply to farmland that's been in David's family for over 300 years. Wide open skies, lush green trees, smoky blue mountains. What's not to like? Well, I'm gonna let David tell his story. Spooked.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  This was a part of the country they call flyover. No one wanted to live out here because in order to live out here, it meant you had to work hard, that, you know, you were just a farmer. There was nothing other than farm life to you. When you came out in this part of the country, you may have come to visit, but if you stayed longer than Sunday afternoon, you were expected to grab up a hoe, or shovel, or whatever, an axe, and go to work. We have a 200-year-old farmhouse. It was built in 1800. It is built from hemlock

• 5:48Speaker 02

  and heart yellow pine. There are no nails in the house. It was built according to the time in the manner of shipbuilding with pegs, mortise and tenon. I grew up here, even though I'm from Raleigh and I went to school in Raleigh and grew up there, but a lot of what I learned about life was on this farm. I used to come to see my grandfather, who lived here at the time and farmed the property. I came to see him as a kid once a month, or once every two months, depending on the time of the year. And then every year in the summertime, I would come and stay with him for a week or so, which was absolutely

• 6:32Speaker 02

  like heaven on earth. All I wanted to do was to sit in my granddad's lap and go out and play in the fields. We were like Tarzan. You know, we were always in the woods, or playing, or doing something. So, I loved coming down here and I looked forward to it. There's nothing but good memories here.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Sometime around 1972 or 73, somewhere between nine and 10, and years old, and my sister would have been 12 or 13. I had come with my sister to spend the week with my grandfather, and late at night, all the windows and doors would be open, having no air conditioner, there'd be a fan going, and I always slept on the couch, and the mosquitoes used to just feast on me. I'd wake up with lumps, I'd look like Muhammad Ali after a fight or something, I'd have lumps all over me from being bit. So, we all would go to bed fairly early. I can remember the television shows at the time were like Dragnet, and Adam

• 7:36Speaker 02

  12, and Emergency, and my aunts and grandfather loved to watch those things. And after farming all day, they'd sit down and drink a Coke, or a Tab, or a Pepsi, and my aunts might would pop up some popcorn, and we'd sit around and watch the TV shows until 9:30 or 10 o'clock. And then, if I wasn't already asleep, they'd turn off the lights, and everybody would go to bed. And my grandfather would usually throw a quilt down in front of the door, and lay down on the floor to get the breeze. My sister slept in my father's bedroom, in his feather bed, and I slept on the couch. One night, we were doing that, and it was

• 8:18Speaker 02

  dead quiet. I mean, you've got to understand, it's so quiet that the crickets are telling each other to shush. So, we're all dead asleep, and I remember waking up to shrieks, just screams of terror. And it was my sister. She was awoken from her sleep by something picking up the end of the bed, and jostling it up and down, shaking her. When she woke up, she could see a gray figure, or the outline of a figure against the window, but it was not anything or anyone she recognized.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  That was the first time that we ever, my sister and I, ever encountered anything.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  As a kid, I would be laying across my grandfather's bed, or across my father's bed there at the house, and would have the sensation of someone sticking their finger in my back and running it up and down my spine.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  There's been a lot of people that died in the house. They were born in the house and died in the house. So, you know, I guess it would give you the creeps, as people say today, but I didn't think anything of it at the time, until 1995.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  In 1994, I built a house across the street from where I live now, on a piece of property my father had left me when he passed away. About five acres. And if you look out the front door of that house, it has a panoramic view of the rest of the farm, the old 1800s farmhouse is directly across the street, some 350 yards. I had bought four Texas Longhorn calves and put them out in a pasture. And there was a storm coming up, and I was at the house by myself. So I go out and look at my cows, to make sure that my cows didn't freak out and jump the fences and run to parts unknown.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  And when I'm looking out the door, this little girl runs across the front of the old farmhouse. So I couldn't make out a lot of detail about her, other than it was just a little girl. My Aunt Marie lived in the old farmhouse. And at the time, one of my uncle's houses down the road was occupied by a family. And they just didn't have a lot of money. They didn't have a car. And so my aunt used to let the lady use the telephone to call her relatives to come and get them to take them to the store or to do whatever. And so I kind of thought the little girl belonged maybe to that family.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  And maybe that the mother was on the phone or visiting with my aunt. So as the storm got closer, I kept watching and you could see the lightning off in the distance and, you know, the rolling thunder.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  I stood there and the little girl ran around the house and she was just whirling and playing. And the storm started getting uncomfortably close. And I said, "Well, I need to go over there and find out what's going on because I may have to take these people home or to let them know, 'You better get home, the storm's up, coming up.'" So I started walking across the street and a little girl came whirling by a couple of times before I ever got close to the house.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  When I got down to the house, I never saw her come back around from the back of the house. She just kind of, just went around the corner and I didn't see her anymore. So I started checking the barns to see if she was hiding in either the old wash house or maybe the old pack house or the old grading room where they used to grade tobacco and stuff like that or, you know, or whether she in the house with my aunt. And about this time, it's starting to sprinkle a little bit and I went and opened up the front door and stuck my head in and I said, "Aunt Marie, who's this little girl playing around in the yard out here?" My aunt said, "What little girl?"

• 12:57Speaker 02

  And I said, "Well, there's a little redheaded girl out here dressed in yellow playing in your yard. She's not in any of the barns, and I thought she may have come in the back door here." She says, "No, nobody's come in, the back door's locked, and nobody's in the house." So I backed out, and it started sprinkling a little bit heavier at the time, and so I started off to go back home. And I didn't want the little girl to get caught up in one of my electric fences, or the barbed wire, or anything, trying to cut across the field. So I just kinda, you know, kept my eye out, and here she come, running around the end of the house. I hear this little girl giggling and just having the best time.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  As soon as I said, "Hey, stop," she looked at me and vaporized instantly into nothing. Mid-step, poof, just gone. If you've ever pulled a drop cord or lamp cord out of a wall socket and touched the prongs with your finger before the connection was broken, you will know the exact feeling that I felt. It was just like I had received an electrical shock, just hits you, stuns you, and you're like, "Okay, life as we know it is not going to be the same from this point on."

• 14:21Speaker 02

  And I said, "Well, that has to be a ghost, there ain't nothing else it could be." Now I know that they're real, because I've seen one. Now what do I do about it? Who is she? That was number one, who is she? Number two, why is she here? And number three, is she going to hurt me or make me hurt myself? I saw her on a couple of other occasions, doing the exact same thing, whirling and playing around the house.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  I've been close enough to see that she did have freckles. Her hair is combed, straight back, kinda parted in the middle, it's just flowing and free. For all intents and purposes, she looks like a real nine-year-old kid.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  I was at home. I had been in a really serious car accident. I had broken my neck. And so I was at home recuperating from that. And I had a dog named Pete. It's an American Bulldog. And he was my buddy. And I was doing a crossword puzzle in a book, watching some show on the History Channel. And I heard a creaking sound on upstairs in my house. And Pete, my dog, starts growling.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  And he walked into the foyer. I get up out of my chair and I hobble into the foyer. And Pete is growling. And he's looking up. So with my neck in a collar, I have to kind of position myself and hobble around and lean back and look up. And there on the landing on the second floor of the house, looking through the pickets, is the little redheaded girl. She's staring at me. And we locked eyes.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  I was speechless. At one time, I got enough detail of her that she was wearing like little white socks that turned up on the top that looked like buttercup flowers. She kind of stood back and stood up, took about two steps back. And she just vanished like she has every other time.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  I went upstairs and Pete followed me.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  We walked up there and I looked around to make sure that I didn't blink and she stepped off in the bedroom.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  While I was up there, I got a very faint giggle.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  And so I came back downstairs and you know, I'm like, oh crap, now she's in my house. You know, it's bad enough she's out in the yard and she's been bringing stuff, we figured back and forth between the houses, finding it in the yard and stuff. You know, bits and bolts and hammers and tools and things, finding them out there in the yard all the time, but now I got her in my house.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  I don't want her in my house. I want her out there in the yard and she's free to play out there all she wants to, but I don't want her in my house.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  I didn't invite you in here. What are you doing in my house? This is my space. There, out there in that backyard, that's your space.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Why are you in here?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  I went back and opened up the front door.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  And went back to my chair, picked up my book and went back and continued my puzzle.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  And determined to try and go on with normalcy.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  It's been about a year and a half after I broke my neck. It was about 9:30, quarter to 10. I laid down on my couch to take a nap. I felt crummy.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Now, anybody that's got dogs, cats, children, nosey roommates, have all awoke to somebody standing there at the side of your bed staring at you. So I'm laying there on the couch and I get this sensation and first I kind of thought it might be Pete.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Okay, but bulldogs snore.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  And Pete was typical, you know?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  You know, he's over there snoring, so it ain't Pete.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  So I cracked my eye and I looked to the right. And there at my back door, standing on my back deck with her hands cupped around her face, looking in my back door, little redheaded girl. She just standing there looking in. She's out on the deck. And I just kind of swing my feet over and I sat on the couch. And I stood up and I was going to walk over there and kind of look back at her. And when I did, she just stood back up straight and stepped back a step or two and just boom, gone, disappeared.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  So, that got me to thinking, okay, you know, now we're having some reactions back and forth here, more than I want. And, uh, so, I'm like, I'm gonna have to do something, but I don't know what to do at this point. I didn't want my, my wife to say, "We gotta sell this house and leave." Because this is my family farm.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  I don't want to be run off of my farm or my property by something that's not supposed to be there that half the world doesn't believe is there in the first place.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  I got on the computer and I started looking up ways to get rid of ghosts in your house. I was just looking for some kind of idea, you know. I'm not too much into that type of stuff, you know. People come up with all kinds of wacky stuff, but... So I'm looking for an idea, that's something simple to try. And I found out by looking up that a saging ceremony, basically you recite some, a couple of Psalms and passages from the Bible while you burn green sage. Well, I got sage that grows on this farm all over the place naturally.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  I don't have to go to some get rid of the ghost store and buy it. I mean, I can just walk out of my backyard and pull it right up out of the ground. So I went out and I pulled me up some and I said, "I'm gonna try that. We'll see. Why can't it hurt?" So I tried it. And I basically told them, you know, "They're welcome to stay in the yard. Play all you want. You can have the old house back there. That's where you lived. Play all you want. Live there. That's your space. This is my space. You stay out of my space. Because if you don't, I'm gonna bring somebody in here and we're gonna send you through the light.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  So wherever you're still here, if you're happy, stay out of the house." Since that day, I have not seen anybody in the house. I have not seen her on the back deck peering into windows. She has not knocked on the back door. I have not found any of my nuts and bolts, screwdrivers, pliers, hammers laying in the yard. She hasn't done anything to alert me to her presence mischievously since that day.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  I had no idea who it could be. I always thought it was somebody in the family. I always have. Because the house has never belonged to anybody other than my family members.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  I decided that I might be able to to get some answers to that if I got connected with the right group of people or paranormal investigation team or whatever to come out. I might be able to find out some answers to those questions. I got connected with the group Inspire out of Raleigh.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  They came out and did an investigation. And there I sat all of them down on the couch in my living room. And I explained to every one of them, "You're not coming to tell me whether my house is haunted or not. I will tell you that it is. What you're here to do is you're here to tell me your experiences. And we're going to try to find out who and why."

• 25:03Speaker 02

  They brought a couple of people with them, just George and Nikki and another girl. The girl was described to me as pagan or wiccan. She had a little thing like dowsing that she did. She had a couple of depleted radioactive rods. They had little balls on the end of them. They were bent in 90-degree angles. They were probably a foot and a half long. She had two glass tubes in a little felt line bag that she, in a box she kept them in.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  And even in the daylight, when she pulled them out to show me, they were glowing a purplish-green color. They were glowing, not just painted or colored that way. They were emitting an aura that you could put them against your hand and see a shadow or light off of them. She held the glass tubes in her hand and she put the little rods in there. And she would hold them as still as possible. So she said, "You can walk around in the yard and in the house with me and you can ask questions in the air. And if there's any spirits around, we'll, you know, if we tell them to point these balls to the front for yes, to the back for no, then we'll stand there and you can ask these questions. And maybe they'll come up and do it and we'll get some answers that way."

• 26:33Speaker 02

  I asked her if the little redheaded girl was present.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  And I got a positive response to it. So at that point, I started throwing out questions. So we walked around in the yard for a while and I probably asked about thirty questions. The questions that I asked, only I needed the answer to. I didn't get any wrong answers. Oh, I'm smiling. I'm smiling. I mean, I'm like, okay, well, now this is getting pretty good. So, you know, I don't want to run out. I don't want to make whatever here is tired of answering questions. So I'm going to just throw out, is your name questions.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  Knowing that red haired, people ran on my grandfather's side of the family and the little girl has red hair, I started naming his sisters. Is your name Leona? Is your name Patronia? I'm standing there looking at the lady holding her hands, not moving an inch, not flinching, and I didn't blink and the dad gum things went positive. Patronia. My grandfather's sister, oldest sister was named Patronia.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  She had red hair. She was, had lived in the house. She was born there and she died there in the front bedroom. The same bedroom that I got touched in. The same bedroom that my grandmother died in that bed. She died in that same room. So I've got a name now. Patronia. So this was like the thirtieth question that I had asked and I had gotten thirty correct answers to. So I put a lot of weight in that.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  There's no way possible that she could hit on this mini rye. If she were that lucky, I would have took her to Vegas. She hit it dead on. And I believe Petronia was there with us, in the yard. I didn't see her, but I know she was there. Petronia had something called plegura, which is a condition, a lack of niacin in your diet, which comes from corn. And that's actually what ended up killing Petronia, was she refused to eat niacin-rich foods.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  It caused her blindness, as well as other conditions that she had. We always wanted to know, well, why is a lady who died when she was 42 years old showing up as a nine or 10-year-old, or eight to 10-year-old, in the backyard? And according to the Ryan Research Center, that's not unusual. It's not unusual that a lot of times people manifest themselves at a time when they were the happiest in their life. And we happen to know that Petronia was probably happiest in her life around the age of 10, because she started going blind at 11, and by the time she was a teenager, she was totally

• 30:06Speaker 02

  blind. I never met her in real life. She died in 1922. The people that I would most like to meet are the ones that I knew in life, because I miss them. They're gone, they're my family. If I could pick, I'd love to be able to go back and go get me a bucket of chicken and go back and sit on the front porch with my granddad and my family and, you know, and have family time with them again. It's unique to have a 200-year-old haunted house in your backyard, and it just so happens

• 30:48Speaker 02

  that it's a family heirloom, and some of the heirlooms that are in it are family members.

• 31:02Glynn Washington?

  Thank you. Thank you, thank you, David, for sharing your story with The Spooked. Big, big love to you and big love to Petrony. The original score for that story was by Jordan Wallace. It was produced by Spook correspondent, Greta Weber.

• 31:34Glynn Washington?

  Oh, yes, yes, that was just one step on this dark path. More encounters, more premonitions, more monsters await. Real stories. And you want more. You want more. So more stories you shall have. Now, if you have a personal story that spooked you, where you touched a force, a power, a being that was not supposed to be there, send us your story, [email protected]. There is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. And if you like your storytelling in the bright light of day, subscribe to the amazing Snap Judgment podcast because it might just change your life.

• 32:27Glynn Washington?

  Congratulations, Paul Kleinschmidt and Celeste Iglesias. Without further ado, we're going out on their winning Spooked theme song remix.

• 32:51Glynn Washington?

  Spooked is brought to you by the amazing team. Each one has their own personal amulet for warding off the darkness. Every single person bears it every single day, except for Mr. Mark Ristich. He takes his chances. Anna Sussman, our chief spookster, is Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrik, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Renzo Goryo, Teo DeCott, Marissa Dodge, Aaliyah Yates, Zoe Fregno, Greta Weber, Jacob Winnick, Sonn Akon, Tiffany DeLiza, Anne Ford, Fernando Hernandez, and Flo Wiley.

• 33:26Glynn Washington?

  The Spook Theme Song is by Pat Lassiter Miller. My name is Van Washington. And you can keep a small fire burning.

• 33:38Glynn Washington?

  You can set up a lantern, even a candle will work. It matters not to me what you do, but that you know

• 33:47Glynn Washington?

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