The Banker - Classic

When Antonio and his sister Anita were growing up in Texas, their family didn’t have much money. That’s why they were so excited to move into their very own home, even if it was a little run-down. It turns out, the home already had an occupant.

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

• 0:04Glynn Washington?

  A tisket, a tasket. I trapped him in the basket. He begged for me to set him free. But I knew he would come for me.

• 0:19Glynn Washington?

  Listen to Spooked. Stay tuned.

• 0:28Speaker 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.

• 1:06Glynn Washington?

  As a young child, I felt that my parents, my mother and my father, I felt they loved me very much. I did, truly. It was just that they, and those people from their churches, they were fighting something Titanic, something urgent, demonic. Because their apostle, Herbert W. Armstrong, preached that this was the end of days, and they had to meet with each other, had to pray, to fast, to study their Bibles, to listen to cassette tapes from the headquarters church in Pasadena, California, and run the farm. Farms, even failing farms like ours, do not run themselves.

• 1:50Glynn Washington?

  So they worked, and they worked, and they worked from sun up to far past sundown, every night, with the exhaustion. I heard the fear, the terror behind my father's goodnight apologies. "Don't worry," he promised. "The kingdom of God will be here soon, then we'll have all eternity to play ball, and go swimming, and climb trees." I told him it was okay, but I didn't mind. And it was true, I didn't mind.

• 2:24Glynn Washington?

  Even as he asked forgiveness for not having the time to spend on me, I just wanted to be alone. I liked being alone because I never felt alone.

• 2:39Glynn Washington?

  I saw them mostly out of the corner of my eye. The shadows, the shapes and figures darting in and out of sight. Sometimes, they would even make themselves plain. Women, men, my grandmother, even a baby once. Other stuff.

• 3:00Glynn Washington?

  I knew this was my secret, that my mother and father would holler and weep and call for a pastor if I told them who really kept me company. They would say I can sort it with the very demons they fought every single day through their prayers and their fasting. They would call the pastor for an exorcism to cast them all away, and I couldn't have that. I wouldn't.

• 3:26Glynn Washington?

  So I kept my world hidden.

• 3:29Glynn Washington?

  Never breathed a word about who I really spent my time with. And that's why, when the darting shadows shrank from, worn of, a new force in my periphery. Something that chased the laughter and the light, something that radiated an evil I had never encountered before. Something that, for the very first time, scared me.

• 3:54Glynn Washington?

  Scared me.

• 3:58Glynn Washington?

  I realized that I had kept my secrets

• 4:04Glynn Washington?

  too well.

• 4:11Glynn Washington?

  My name is Glynn Washington.

• 4:14Glynn Washington?

  Spook starts. Now.

• 5:07Glynn Washington?

  Who do you trust? Who makes you feel safe? When Antonio and his sister Anita were growing up in Texas, their family didn't have much money. That's why they were so excited to move into their very own home, even if it was a little bit rundown. Spooked.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  The people that my parents bought from lived there for about 50 years. So it just got in disrepair. Often you pull a pack of wallpaper and you see an old article from the Eastern European Gazette that we'd never heard of as kids. We just thought the words looked funny and picked it off the wall.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  When the family moved in, Antonio was only three and Anita was a newborn. So their parents decided that all four of them should share a bedroom. Anita in her crib and Antonio in a bed against the wall.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  I'm five or six years old and one night in my bed, I decide to look to my doorway and there's a man standing in the doorway, who I couldn't really tell who it was, beckoning me to follow.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  I want to know who it is, but then in the exact same breath, I don't want to know who it is. I get up out of the bed. I start walking. I can only see just the shape of the person, just haze beyond. And as I get to where I think I'm going to interact with this figure, the haze turns to darkness.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  I then realized that I'm standing on the floor furnace, the grate searing through my feet, and my parents find me screaming.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  My parents just look at me bewildered, wondering, "Why did you do that?" And I didn't really know. I couldn't. I was just kind of gobsmacked, thinking, "Well, who was I following?"

• 7:20Speaker 03

  The whole family was shaken after Antonio's injury, especially after he told them that he'd been following someone. But no one had been in the house. There was no intruder. So Antonio's parents dropped it, then life went on. And as the children grew older, it no longer made sense for everyone to sleep in the same bedroom.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  So it is summer, and so neighborhood kids, friends of the family, family members, our cousins. We were all playing in this very large room in the house. And my grandmother was looking after us. But I keep looking up into the corner, and I keep seeing this man standing there, and he's staring at us.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  He has dark, black hair. It's slicked back. He's wearing a suit, which is strange because it's in the middle of the summer. He's standing very straight with his arms alongside his body. And he's not moving. He's standing in this corner, and he's staring at us and staring at me. Nobody else seems to think there's anything wrong happening. They don't feel creeped out in the same way that I feel creeped out. And he doesn't look like anyone I know. He doesn't look like any of my relatives. And I keep looking over at my grandmother. She's not reacting to him. And I say, "Grandma, who's that man in the corner?" And she says, "What man in the corner?"

• 8:55Speaker 04

  And I said, "That man who's just standing there staring at us."

• 9:00Speaker 04

  She quietly gathers up all of the little kids and gets us out of the room.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  That was the first time I experienced seeing the banker.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  What Anita and Antonio didn't know at the time was that back in the 1920s, a wealthy banker had built the house as a love letter to his wife. He chose the finest furnishings, imported wallpaper from France. In the backyard, fruit trees blossomed over a koi pond. And for many years, everything was beautiful. But when the banker and his wife died, they left no children to maintain the home. Anita, Antonio, and their parents moved into a house that had fallen into decay.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  After Anita saw him, she and her grandma knew someone was lingering in the house, but they didn't talk about it. No one in the family did. And Anita thinks she knows why.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  The Mexican side of the family is, I feel, in touch with the spiritual world. And it's fairly normal to speak to your ancestors and for sometimes for them to speak back to you. And that's a very positive thing, you know? But if it's a stranger, if it's someone not in your family, then it's less clear what to do about it.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Only a year or so later, Antonio's dad was out of town on business. Antonio was getting ready for bed.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  I was about 10 years old and I feel a presence near the bed.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  And I think, well, maybe it's one of my parents. Maybe my dad's come home and just wants to see that I'm sleeping restfully. But as I look towards the foot of my bed, there's nobody standing there. I look towards the door, there's a figure just standing, not speaking. And I think not to speak because, hey, it's my dad. Maybe I should fake that I'm asleep. And I think I'm going to rotate to the side and fall myself to sleep.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  In the morning, when I asked my mother, "Hey, what time did Dad get home?" She looks at me, "What do you mean?" I said, "Yeah, what time did he get home? He was there checking on me." Her face loses a bit of color. "No, Antonio, he's still in Kennedy, Texas." Her eyes water a bit.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  She kind of shakes her head and walks off, knowing what we never really wanted to talk about, that the Spirit visited again.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  But about a week later, Antonio's mom brought the subject up herself, out of nowhere.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  She says, "He's been here before. My sister's there, we're in the kitchen. We're looking at my mom, 'What do you mean?'" And mom says, "When you were little, you'd ask me about a man you'd see in the hall. Last week, that was him."

• 12:05Speaker 02

  And so my sister asked, "What do you mean, Mom? Who is him?" "Well, we don't really know his name, but it's the banker."

• 12:14Speaker 02

  For the first time, she's verifying something that I knew all along. We now have a name for the person that has visited.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  So then she relays the story to us, that one night, probably when I was about four or five, she's reading a book, I'm dozing off. She decides to lay down next to me, and she dozes off. All of a sudden, she feels pressure.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  She tries to awake, and there's somebody putting pressure on her shoulders, but she can't see anybody. And she feels a presence. She said she felt the presence of a man. And as she tries to call out, she feels pressure of a hand on her face, almost to the point of suffocation. And the only thing that releases suffocation is my little child eyes awaking and looking over. And then the pressure released as she gasped for air. And apparently, I asked what was wrong, and she played it off like nothing happened. We were like, well, you know, hey, Mom, why are you telling us this now? And secondly, why haven't you done anything about it? Is it going to attack me? Because I don't know how you fight this thing.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  I think Ghostbusters had probably been around at that point. So we wanted her to strap on a proto pack and go take him out. My dad arrives back at the house. My sister and I confront him. We want to know what Mom said is true. He looks over at my mom and my mom kind of just motions to him. They know about him. My dad, who is a deacon in the church, he says, okay. He seems to be like he's disturbed that we now know something that they've tried to protect us from.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  And my dad looks over at my mother and he says, well, what we're going to do is something very simple. Bless the house.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  So we all proceed through the house ceremoniously. We go to the front door.

• 14:15Speaker 04

  He came in with this golden bucket that has sort of a scepter looking thing that's in it. And it's full of holy water. And it has a wand at the end. And he would pull this wand out of the bucket and start flinging the wand into the different corners of the room and praying.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  And then he does the sign of the cross, turns around. We're now in the living room. Blesses the top of the door, walks through each room, blesses the top of the door. And as he proceeds to my room, he says, this is where we'll end. I was nervous and I was uncomfortable, but I did feel a little comfort, like they knew what they were doing. And he gets a small book. And we look because it's not the Bible. And it's a book that has the word rites on it. And he starts murmuring some prayer that my sister and I don't understand. Part of it's in Latin. So he blesses the door that I've seen the man over and over and over.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  He just looks at us. It should be good now. We're done. But then you kind of think, well, he has this book. He knows about this. So he's probably done this before. So how long does it last? How much time do we have?

• 15:39Speaker 02

  So there's one night, I'm now 11 years old, and as I'm drifting off to sleep, I get a sense that somebody walks into my room.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  So I really weakly call out mom and dad, who's over there?

• 15:53Speaker 02

  And nobody answers. So all the hair stands up on my back and I can just see in the moonlight, somebody standing no less than three to four inches from my face in an old tweed suit with the little pocket for the stopwatch. I immediately think to myself, dad didn't fix it. I look up and as right as I'm about to get to the face and it is this hand came and covered my eyes, not touching me, but just where you can feel the

• 16:28Speaker 02

  electricity, if you will, of somebody right next to your face. Your eyelashes almost just brushing the hand. It's just letting me know, I'm not leaving. You can try any ceremony you want. This is my house. And I'm petrified. So I move my head and it tracks with my head movement, but I can't see directly in front of me. And I don't want to push my head for, because I don't want to touch it. I know what we're gonna do. We're gonna turn on the lights. I'm gonna see whoever this is. And when the moment I made that decision, the darkness cleared and it was back to just dark room, not pitch black. So I leap to my feet. I walk as quickly as I can, the 10 feet to my light switch.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  And I don't want to look back. I don't want to look back. I want to hit that switch. And so I go and I flip the switch and I turn around and at the same time I go, gotcha, the damn light bulb bust. I'm like, oh my god.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  So I carefully plot my next plan. I'm gonna go into the hallway and this time I'm gonna turn at the same time I flip the switch. So I go to the hallway. I very slowly turn. I've got my hand on the switch and I'm ready to just say, gotcha. I hit the switch and then you hear that.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  And so I get to my sister's room about four feet further down the hall. I reached into her room and go to flip the light switch. It had already bursted. It wouldn't even turn on. I sat next to her, her bed and just slept sitting there. That is how my parents found me.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  It was clear now. Their dad's prayers and holy water hadn't worked at all.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  I wanted to ask my dad many times, why didn't it work? Why didn't it just fix the problem? But I felt a certain amount of guilt like, well, maybe it's because if I only believed as much as my dad, it would work.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  Eventually Anita and Antonio moved out of the house. They went to college, started their own lives, but their parents still lived there. And now that they were empty nesters, they started using Antonio's old bedroom as a TV lounge.

• 18:41Speaker 04

  And so my mom would often go in there to watch shows. She likes the novelas and movies. And so when I came home, I said, why don't we create a nice space for you here? The wallpaper's falling down. The carpet's pretty gross. It's not in a good shape. So we decided to renovate my brother's room and moved all the furniture out of the room, tore off all the wallpaper, tore up all the carpeting, whitewashed everything. We moved everything back in and, you know, my mother really, really loved it.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  I did stutter a little bit thinking to myself, well, what if they changed something that's not supposed to be changed? What if they move something that doesn't want to be moved? Well, what if you?

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Nah, I better not. It's probably for the best. And if, if it happens, at least I don't live there anymore.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  But only six months later.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Ten days before Christmas, we were getting ready to come home. We're making our flight plans. And we get a call, and my mom says, "You need to turn on the news. The whole house is on fire." She's distraught. And when I turn it on, there's somebody standing in front of our house that I grew up in, saying, "Ten days before Christmas, family tragedy." And I'm in disbelief, because there's two fire trucks, like you would see in a movie, with the flames shooting out the top of our house, like a bomb was dropped.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  When the fire started, the parents were asleep. After the smoke woke them up, they got out, just in time to watch their house burn.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  We later on talked to the fire inspector, and he goes, "Man, this is something I don't normally see." So my dad and I ask him, "Well, what do you mean?" He says, "Well, this is an electrical fire." "Okay, so why is that unusual?" "Well, because of this." And he pushes away a bit of debris. And we look on the wall, and there's a wall plug, an outlet, which is in perfect, clear, non-burnt shape. He says, "Well, this is the origin." And all the memories flood back. The origin of where my feet were burned. The origin of where the second light bulb burst. The origin of where I always saw him. The man, the banker.

• 21:09Speaker 04

  That was the room. That was the precious room. And we literally ripped everything out of it. And I think it was the final straw.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  My parents would never come out and say that the ghost started the fire. But we know it had to have been the ghost. There's no way it was someone else.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  For Anita, it felt like the worst possible ending to her family's struggle with the banker.

• 21:38Speaker 04

  I think we all lost. The banker loved that house. And now, they don't even get that house anymore. So everyone loses.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  I'm thinking to myself, well, hey, there's, the spirit's probably gone. And so maybe this fire was the opportunity to cleanse the spirit from the earth plane to wherever they're going. And then I ask, where are you gonna go, Mom? Where are you gonna go, Dad? Are you gonna go somewhere else? You have the opportunity to move anywhere you want in the city. And they say, no, we're gonna rebuild. And since you're an architect, we want you to do it. I think to myself, wow, that would be great. But also scared, well, what if we bring it back?

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Visiting my home after the fire, walking to the house to see what we can salvage. And I look up to the sky, a leaf from the tree hits me in the face. And I think to myself, what if I built and designed a house that's open to the sky? And so that then became the design idea for the new house. A courtyard house, one that you would see in Mexico. It has an open air courtyard to simultaneously honor, but also not allow the spirits to be in there anymore. I had the opportunity to create and put the position of the bedrooms far away from any experience that my sister and I had

• 23:03Speaker 02

  with regard to any sightings, any spirit. I designed it such that that room will never be enclosed, ever, to try to give poetic release and spiritual release to whoever's there and say, hey, you know, this is still your space, but we are gonna occupy the rest of it.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  What I thought about when I entered that courtyard for the first time is, this is a truce. If this can't be my parents' house, it can't be yours' house either. And so that courtyard to me was an offering, an olive branch. Say, look, nobody's gonna have this, it's gonna be no man's land. Come and go as you please, just leave my parents alone. I do honestly feel that the banker has moved on. I don't sense him anymore. It does seem like it worked.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  But I still have dreams about that room. Waking up in my room with the door open halfway cracked, and there's somebody there.

• 24:18Glynn Washington?

  Antonio and Anita, we are so glad your family is safe and so glad you shared your story with us at Spooked. Original score for that piece was by Renzo Goryeo. It was produced by Ann Ford.

• 24:53Glynn Washington?

  Oh, spooksters, did you ever move an object with your mind? See someone or something pass through a brick wall? Feel desperate eyes searching for you in the dark? Experiences you can't tell anyone about? Well, tell me. I want to know. [email protected] because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. [email protected]. Show the dark side of you spooked with some spook gear. The t-shirt of your dreams available right now at snapjudgment.org. And remember, if you like storytelling that will never leave you afraid, get the amazing stupendous Snap Judgment Podcast. It's storytelling with a beat.

• 25:52Glynn Washington?

  Spook was created by the team that trust everyone at some point to do the right thing, except for Mark Ristich. There's Anna Sussman, our chief spookster, there's Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Davey Kim, Renzo Goryeo, Taylor Decot, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Farigno, Tiffany DeLiza, Ann Ford, Doug Stewart, and Isaiah Sims. The spook theme song is by Pat Massey Miller. My name is Glynn Washington.

• 26:20Glynn Washington?

  And we like to think that in our darkest moments, the times of fear, of horror, there will always be someone else there to share the burden, to carry the load, a parent, a friend, a relative, a spouse. Let me tell you, in no uncertain terms, that on this thought path, you walk alone. And you need to enlist every tool, every trick, every favor at your disposal to make this journey. No one else can do it for you. Which is why I advise, in no uncertain terms, to never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, turn out the lights.