Spooked
Hosted by Glynn Washington
Cover it with darkness, and night, and shadows, and lies… hush. But some secrets are like seeds. Welcome to the garden.
4,372 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
Bury it as deep as you wish. Cover it with darkness and night and shadows and lies, but... Some secrets are like seeds. Welcome to the garden. NYC Studios, you're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned. Spooksters, you have spoken. We want more spook, you said. We want to support the 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 darkness alone. And, and, ask me anything for yours truly. If you've got questions, I've got answers. Maybe. And we're just getting started.
Spooksters, we are a small team, chasing down the big mystery. Your support keeps this flame burning, so come on in. The door is open. Spooked.supercast.com. That's Spooked.supercast.com. Spooked Plus. Don't turn out the lights.
When I was very, very young, I saw something that no child should ever see.
Something, in fact, no person should ever experience. And I knew, as little as I was, I knew almost instantly that I had to pretend I didn't see what I saw.
And I had never held a secret before.
I did not want to hold this one. Because the less I said, the more I saw those images, the more that horrible scene crystallized in my mind. But I never told.
Even when my grandmother asked me, and my grandmother's eyes burned hot with my lies, even then, I never told. I never said what I saw. I didn't know who I was protecting with my silence, or why.
And now, decades later, the only thing I do know
is that they didn't deserve it.
From Snap Judgment's Underground Layer, my name's Cam Washington. Keep your own secrets, not someone else's. Spook starts now.
Have you ever heard them say, "What you don't know can't hurt you"? Well, our first story caused me to reconsider such received wisdom. We begin with Jennifer.
As a parent, you always want to protect your kids. Looking back, maybe, you know,
it is best to just be forthcoming and not try to protect them.
When we first bought the house, I was aware that there had been a death at the home because my husband actually went to school with a young lady that passed away there, Libby.
They were friends and he would go pick her up at her house, which became our house, and they were close for a while. I did feel a little hesitant to move in because of the story he had told me. He was aware that she had passed and there was always something kind of mysterious about her death. She died in the barn behind the home.
But he did knock the barn down completely and he said, "It's not part of the home." We remodeled the home extensively, so it felt like a new home initially. Taylor, my oldest daughter, was our only child when we purchased the home. We decided because she was so little, I didn't think it would serve a purpose other than scare her if we mentioned anything about the history of the home. We just wouldn't mention it or bring it up.
And at first, when Jennifer and her family moved in, things were peaceful, normal, quiet. But that didn't last too long. One night, after about two years of living in the house, the family was asleep. This is Taylor, Jennifer's daughter. She was about seven at the time.
We heard just the loudest crash, like there was a window shattering. And my father immediately gets up. He grabs his gun, because we're in Texas, and he starts searching the house because he thinks there's an intruder. He thinks someone's breaking in. And he looks around and he can't find a single thing. And the next morning when he wakes up, he notices that a family portrait of ours is missing from the shelf. So he goes over to see where it is and he sees that our family photo has fallen face forward. So you couldn't see our faces. Like someone had just pushed it over face forward and it smashed.
That's when we were first made aware that something wasn't quite right there.
But still, Jennifer and her husband agreed they wouldn't indicate to Taylor that anything was wrong. And when they had another child, Joseph, they decided they would keep the secret from him, too.
It was just a normal afternoon. We were just hanging out.
And I was not feeling too good. I was napping in our bedroom.
That's when Joseph came running into Jennifer's room.
And woke me up and was crying. And he was very shaken. And he said, "Mommy, mommy, there's a lady in the living room."
He said that there was a woman, and she had no feet. She had long, blonde, curly hair. And she was just floating across the house and that she turned her head very sharply
and just gazed at him. So he closed his eyes and started to cry. And when he opened them, she was gone.
I felt pretty darn terrified after that, to be honest with you. That was, that did shake me up.
So I knew for sure that he was talking about Libby when he described what he saw in the living room. And he had not heard anything about the situation there. He knew nothing of it. We had never brought it up.
But still, Jennifer didn't say anything. She kept quiet, year after year after year. As her kids got older, they felt more and more that something or someone was in the house with them.
I've heard voices. I've heard knocking on the wall. Banging on the wall, like someone was just banging with their fist as hard as they possibly could against the wall.
But still, Jennifer didn't tell Taylor and her brother that she believed Libby was haunting the place. That she believed that what the kids didn't know couldn't hurt them. And then, when Taylor was a teenager.
I was laying in my bed and I was facing the wall. And all of a sudden, I feel this pressure on top of me, and I was still wide awake. And I feel this pressure and I'm terrified. I don't know. I just can sense that something is in the room with me. And all of a sudden, I just hear this deep gasp for air. It sounded like like someone is dying, like taking their last dying breath. But it just happened once, and then I turned my body and I see this black, shadowy, smoke-like mask just kind of implode into itself and then it kind of just sucks down into the ground and completely vanishes.
This wasn't Casper, your friendly ghost actions. This was a ghost who wanted your attention and to torment you a little.
Taylor decided she would keep this experience to herself. She worried that if she said something, her parents wouldn't believe her. Or they would just ignore her.
They were in the kitchen talking about it, and I had been in the other room, watching cartoons. And as I walk in, and I don't think they realized it, they were saying, "Oh, you know, it was a suicide and Chappie's, he knew her." Chappie's is my dad. That's his nickname. And I was like, "What are you guys talking about?" "Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. They're just telling a story."
But Taylor was pretty sure her parents weren't just telling a story. They knew something about the house, about the haunting. And then...
Middle of the night, dead asleep, and I awoke just suddenly. And she was hovering over me, kind of like the way a skydiver hovers as they're descending. And I could see her very vividly. She wasn't in spirit form. She was very much flesh and blood. And she was looking at me very intently. And she had these just locks of very, very dense curly blond hair.
And she was very young-looking, like a very young-looking adolescent, almost childlike. And she was wearing a very flowy, blue-and-white dress. And she was just staring at me. I felt a piercing look towards me. It wasn't friendly by any means. And I started screaming. And my husband turned on the lights, and she went away.
I was extremely shaken. When I told my husband what I saw, he was like, he was in shock. And that's when he said, "You just described Libby."
Our kids did start to ask questions about who this lady was. As a parent, you mean, you always want to protect your kids. You know, there was a part of me that didn't necessarily want them to feel, you know, scared or spooked.
I do feel that I was always seeking that truth about why my house was haunted.
But, you know, in the end, I mean, the truth usually surfaces anyway, so.
One summer, Taylor had surgery on her leg, and she was lying in bed. Her doctor had put her on bedrest.
In my bed all day, in this room, alone on the other side of the house from everyone else. I would keep the shutters closed. I was just kind of always in the dark.
Lying in the dark, all Taylor could think about was the ghost in her house. Who was she? Now that she had a lot of time on her hands, she decided she would try to find out.
I found a newspaper archive of newspaper issues from way back in the 60s. And I was spending just hours and hours, searching and searching, until finally I got to an obituary page. And I remember seeing her name for the first time, and there was almost this relief to it.
I remember it saying, "Libby died on this date by fire."
The fire occurred in a storage room in the back of the property where they kept, they had horses on the property. They kept saddles, they kept feed, they kept different hay. The circumstances surrounding her death were very mysterious.
When she was found, she was found with a saddle on top of her body and there had been a fire around her. And some speculated it was suicide. And some speculated it was a cover-up, that she had overdosed on some sort of drug. It just felt like this one weird piece of the puzzle just fit right in. And I had her name, and I knew that she had died by fire. And I knew that she was the one. That she was the one causing all these problems. That this restlessness and this anger was coming from her.
Taylor held on to this information for three years. She didn't say a thing to her brother, her mom, or her dad. And then one night, at dinner with family, friends, at their favorite restaurant, she finally had the guts to bring it up. And so she asked. And her dad broke down and told her about Libby, his friend. And about how, when he first bought the house, he had knocked down the barn where she died.
He felt like he couldn't keep it. He felt like there was too much...
There was just something there that he didn't want around. So he had them knock down the walls, and he had them take out the slab foundation, cover it with dirt. And he felt like, there, it was done and buried. He didn't have to worry about it. And he felt like that would keep everything at rest. He felt like that would, that it would kind of cleanse it, but it didn't. It really didn't.
I didn't realize that she knew as much as she knew.
So when did you discover that she knew as much as she knew?
When you told me. Just now. I think we're keeping a few secrets here in this family, but maybe not telling the kids wasn't the best decision. It was, you know, good intentions on our part, but maybe we should have explained to it, you know, on their terms, so that it would give them an understanding and a perspective of maybe why things were happening the way they were happening.
The family has since put the home up for sale and they've moved to a different house.
You know, we left a few things there and it hasn't been sold yet. Just as recently as a few weeks ago, my son Joseph went to the house to get shoes. And he went in, went to grab the shoes and heard a bang, like somebody just kind of banging on the wall, but light. And then as he was walking through the house, it just got louder and louder to the point where it was deafening and he just bolted out of there. So I think whatever's there wants to be left alone.
Thank you Jennifer and Taylor for sharing your story. Folks, these wonderful women are Spooked listeners. We are so grateful they shared their supernatural experience with us because mystery is bound. And if you have a ghost story in your back pocket, don't keep it to yourself. No, share it with the world. Let us know at spookpodcast.org.
Now in just a moment, some relatives don't know how to let go. Spooked.
Now then, when Maria Foster was only three years old, her family moved to Los Angeles. But Maria grew up listening to those stories all about her mother's childhood in the Mexican Sierra Mountains. Spooked.
All of her sisters had lots of children. Everybody had six or seven children. My own grandmother had 12, for heaven's sakes. My mom only had two girls. And the pressure was always on to have boys and have boys and have boys. And because she did not have boys, then somehow she was minimized. My father, he always disparaged her for saying, "You only gave me women. You know, what good are they?" "Bellas," he would call them, "they only gave me broads. I need sons." My mom, she just couldn't have babies anymore. So then my father moved on. And sure enough, with this next relationship, boom, he has a boy
and sends my mother a Polaroid of this boy. I was 12, and he sends this Polaroid. And mom shows, "Look, your father had a son." And she's crying and crying and crying. She's crying in the bedroom. She's crying in the kitchen. She's just crying. And I'm like, "Well, what the hell am I? What am I, chopped liver?" We were too poor, so I couldn't have the traditional quinceañera with all the escorts and dresses and party and what have you. But that's when my mother sat me down. "Okay, you're 15 now. You are available now to be married." And I'm like, "What? I'm in junior high school. What are you talking about?"
I was supposed to marry a good Mexican man. And I was supposed to have children. That was my duty. More than anything, she wanted to have grandchildren. And more than just children, she wanted to have a boy grandchild. And it must have been eating at her.
And so, we had a whole bunch of people at a party. I distinctly remember, we were at someone's house. I'm playing guitar, we're singing, people are singing together. There's food and drinks. And then my mom's sitting in the corner there, and all of a sudden I hear her wail, "Nunca voy a tener nietos." "I'm never gonna have grandchildren."
What? And I'm looking at her like, it was like that moment where the guitar goes untuned and the string rings, "Rang! What did she say?" And she looked at me so forlorn, so sad. I'm like, "Okay, song's over, I'm outta here."
My sister and I were dating, we're going out, we're going dancing, we're going to the clubs, and we'd be getting dressed up to go and do our disco thing. And she'd be sitting on the sofa, all morose, "Nunca voy a tener nietos." There they go again. Or she'd be muttering in the kitchen, "Nunca voy a tener nietos." As she'd be closing the door, you know, "Nunca voy a tener nietos." "Ay, nunca." She'd slap her head, "Nunca voy a tener nietos." I'm like, "Oh my God, what a fixation."
I turned 29, and then I just discovered very late on that I was very pregnant. I was four and a half months pregnant. And I called my mother, I didn't, who else to call them, and I go, "Mom." Now, she has not seen me in two years, okay? She hasn't seen me since I'm 28, because by now she's moved back to Mexico and she's living happily ever after over there. And I call her up, I go, "Mom, I'm pregnant." "Oh, I knew it. I knew it, the last time I saw you, you looked a little heavy. I knew you were pregnant."
I'm thinking to myself, okay, she's lost her mind. I haven't seen her in two years. How could she possibly know? But she knows, there's no talking her out of it. And she's gonna tell the whole world. And she did. "Oh, Maria's pregnant. Finally. Glory. Hallelujah. She's pregnant." I thought I would never see the day.
I didn't want to know the gender of the baby, because I had all of these boy-girl issues. So when the baby was born, and I hear the doctor said it's a boy, I remember saying, "Oh, thank God." And then I said, "Oh, my God. I can't believe I just said that." So, yes, I had a boy, and he's beautiful. Zachary. Zachary James is his name. And as soon as mom could bust through that hospital room door, she did.
She lifted him up, not like Simba in The Lion King, but darn close. She lifted him up, I have a photograph, and just looks at him like the most precious thing she's ever laid her eyes on. She has this angelic glow about her. And it was him and his grandma. I mean, he sang songs about his grandma. He played games with her.
And then when she really got sick, her whole thing was, "Son, will tell Zachary that I love him." She was just so young. She was only 53 when she passed.
She only got those three short years with Zach. She didn't see Zachary go to his first day of school. She didn't see Zachary in his Halloween costumes. She wasn't there for any of the Christmases. She wasn't... she just wasn't there.
After mom passed, my sister and I would talk on the phone and cry. I mean, it was just the two of us. We felt like orphans.
And Friday night, she came over. We're having dinner. And it was myself, my sister, and my son Zach. And he's still in his high chair, because he's only three.
I know we served entomatadas. Instead of enchiladas, my mom would make us entomatadas with tomato sauce. Because we wouldn't eat it, we didn't like chili when we were little. So we just had entomatadas, which was the fried tortilla with the tomato sauce and some pepper and tons of cheese. So we were remembering mom and we're having entomatadas. And we're eating. And all of a sudden, Zachary says, in Spanish, "Nunca voy a tener nietos."
"I'm never gonna have grandchildren."
And we just stopped dead. I look at my sister and we look at the baby and I asked him, "What did you say?" And he says, "Nunca voy a tener nietos." And I just looked at my sister and I'm like, "Who else said that? The baby couldn't have known? He couldn't have known."
I go, "Who told you that?" "Oh, mi abuela."
"When did you see your abuela?" "Oh, en la noche, at night." "So what did she say?" And he extends both his little arms and he says, "She says, 'Tucutuco, no tengas miedo, soy yo, abuela.'" Which means tucutuco is her baby talk to her. He says, "Don't be afraid, it's me, grandma."
He's using her words. He's only three. And he's using her language and her gestures, the way he's expressing himself and putting out his little arms, explaining, "Tucutuco, I love you." And then we start to start whispering, my sister and I. And her eyes were bugging out of her head. She stopped, literally, she was like taking a piece of food and the baby says, "Nunca voy a tener nietos," and she stops with the fork halfway through her mouth. "What should we do? I don't know. Should we have a mass? It's Friday night, Tony, where are we gonna get a mass? Maybe if we get a candle? Yeah, yeah, that's a good idea, let's get a candle." So we pack up the baby, forget the dinner. We go to the supermarket and there's this whole 12-foot section of nothing but the holy candles with Jesus and Mary and Guadalupe.
And I happen to like cobalt blue glass, so I picked a really beautiful blue glass candle.
And we took it home and we set it not in the dining room table, but I had a little cubby. And so that night when we went to bed, we said our prayers. And then the morning that we got up and um, and I look, the candle is about 18 inches tall and it's in it, what? About a two foot little cubby hole. It has fallen over on its side. Oh my God, how could it knocked, maybe there was a tremor, maybe there was an earthquake? How could that possibly happen? I'm trying to figure out the physics of the candle falling over on its side. And then I'm realizing, well, if the candle fell over, you know, what? What a danger I'm gonna burn the house. We're all gonna die in our sleep. You know, I'm already being visited by a dead person.
This, I hope this isn't an omen, and my mind's racing. So I'm like, okay, so tonight, tonight I'm going to put this thing in water. So we put the candle again in the, in the, um, this time I put it in the kitchen sink. So I figure if it falls over, at least it'll fall in the water and there's no danger to the house. And then we go to bed and we pray and we pray and I'm praying really ardently now. Oh dear God, I don't know what's going on. I don't know if that's my mother. I don't know what's going on. If it's my mother, why is she here? Does she need something? Does she need us to pray for her? You know, help me figure this out because you're scaring me. In the morning I got up and I went to check on the candle. That was my priority.
The thing had exploded into a million pieces. A million pieces, not like it fell over and cracked into two or three. It exploded. There was glass everywhere, on the sink, on the kitchen counters, on the breakfast counter, on the floor. It was on top of the microwave. It was everywhere, everywhere. And then I hear my sister coming down and, and she said, what happened? And I, and I'm stuttering, I'm, I'm telling her, I don't know, I don't know. It's August, it's hot. The water shouldn't have been cold. It shouldn't, the candle heat from the glass. I'm trying to figure out the physics of it.
It couldn't have, it couldn't have caused the explosion. I don't understand.
I think her love for that boy child was greater than all the universe. And she, she left too early. She got really sick very quickly and she just left before she had time to be with him.
And here comes the pitter patter of Zachary James, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, coming down the stairs. And he says, "Dice mi huela que no le gusta la luz."
Oh, forget the Lord of God. "My grandma says she doesn't like the light." Oh my God, my heart drops again. She's still here. I said, "Why not?" She's, "No le deja dormir." "It doesn't let her sleep." Oh my God, we've done it wrong. We've done something terribly wrong.
What else has she said? She said, "Tucu, tucu." "I love you, but I can't visit you anymore." And was that it? No. "Cuidado con el vidrio, no te cortes." "Careful with the glass, don't cut your feet."
Thank you, Maria Foster, for sharing your story of the spook. Now, Maria is also a spook listener. We want to hear your stories. Find us online, spookpodcast.org, and let somebody know.
Now, you know, right? You can feel it, huh? Like there's a power, a magic guiding these stories, demanding they be heard. Submit to that power. And if you dig amazing storytelling of the non-supernatural variety, get the amazing Snap Judgment Podcast. It will blow your mind, I promise.
The keepers of the Spook Flame include Mark Ristich, Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Shayna Shealy, Jody Colley, Taylor Decott. The original theme song for Spooked is by Pat Masiety Miller. The amazing team that wrote, performed, and produced this original score you're hearing right now for this episode includes Pat Masiety Miller, Renzo Goria, and Leon Morimoto. And when you feel that cold wind, when you hear that soft whisper, alluring, tempting, beguiling you, promising you not to worry, "It'll be okay this time."
Just this once, we get their lives. Never, ever, never, never, ever, never, ever, ever, turn out the lights.
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