Mirror Image

When Jenny’s family moves into a rundown house outside Philadelphia, she’s excited to have the whole third floor to herself. She finally has privacy to become who she’s always been. But up there, she’s not the only one wanting to be seen.

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

• 0:10Glynn Washington?

  Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? The mirror laughed and then she said, "Don't you know that you're long dead?"

• 0:24Glynn Washington?

  You're fast over the spooked. Stay tuned.

• 0:37Speaker 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.

• 1:29Glynn Washington?

  Okay, so I'm gonna tell you about a mistake. A mistake I made in high school. And I've mentioned here on Spooked that I explored hypnosis back in high school. It was fun, exciting, stage stuff. Had folk shouting out strange, new languages, others jumping up to translate. I started out using my brothers as test subjects. Had them both barking like dogs, hilarious. And later, friends volunteered. We'd laugh, watching them suddenly hold their nose, thinking they are smelling the worst thing ever. Good stuff, fun.

• 2:12Glynn Washington?

  And I'm a coil now. I had no idea what I was playing at.

• 2:21Glynn Washington?

  Cause barking like a dog, that's all well and good, that's chuckles and laughs, but one day, I told Alex that he was going back in time. Back in time to when he was ten,

• 2:37Glynn Washington?

  eight,

• 2:39Glynn Washington?

  four years old.

• 2:43Glynn Washington?

  And I gave him a pen. And I asked him to write his name.

• 2:49Glynn Washington?

  And then suddenly, four-year Alex, he says, "I don't know how to spell my name."

• 2:57Glynn Washington?

  People gasped, and I was lucky. Everybody had a great time, even Alex.

• 3:05Glynn Washington?

  And I should've left it alone.

• 3:09Glynn Washington?

  But now I had to push. And I wanted to be the man. So next session, I tell Tammy, when I'm setting up the induction, I tell her that we too,

• 3:22Glynn Washington?

  we're gonna go back in time again, way back in time. And before we go, Tammy, I want you to know, whenever I say the word popsicle, you're gonna immediately collapse to the most beautiful dream of chocolate waterfalls and gumdrops and magic rainbows, okay? Okay, okay?

• 3:46Glynn Washington?

  Now, every sound you hear, every breath you take, you'll go deeper and deeper into this state, we're calling it hypnosis, right? Deeper and deeper and deeper. Now come with me. Deeper through time. Deeper, you're 12 years old. Deeper, you're 10 years old. Deeper, five, three, deeper, two, deeper, one, deeper, zero.

• 4:17Glynn Washington?

  Now you're floating in the in-between space. And some people, Tammy, who have passed through this land before, they recall that they once had an other life, a full life they lived before this one. And now, Tammy, I want you to go back to that life, to the life you had before, okay?

• 4:47Glynn Washington?

  Okay?

• 4:49Glynn Washington?

  Now go there, go into that life, go into that body.

• 4:56Glynn Washington?

  And as soon as you're there,

• 4:59Glynn Washington?

  open your eyes and tell me what you see.

• 5:05Glynn Washington?

  Everybody all around, they crowd around in anticipation. This is the big showstopper, the wow moment, the thing everybody at school is going to talk about.

• 5:19Glynn Washington?

  Tammy opens her eyes,

• 5:23Glynn Washington?

  and I see horror. Popsicle! Popsicle, popsicle, popsicle, popsicle.

• 5:32Glynn Washington?

  Her eyes close, her head lolls to the side, her breathing resumes, deep and rhythmic. And all I know is that my little show, this show, is over. That this game, this is not a game, and I am worse than a fraud. See, it does not take evil intent to do harm.

• 5:54Glynn Washington?

  And I will be forever grateful that this time, for the first time, before putting someone under my ridiculous child's concept of hypnosis, this time I told her about the safe place.

• 6:12Glynn Washington?

  I told her where to hide.

• 6:16Glynn Washington?

  Because truthfully,

• 6:19Glynn Washington?

  I had no idea what to do with what she saw.

• 6:28Glynn Washington?

  Popsicle.

• 6:37Glynn Washington?

  Spook Starts.

• 6:42Glynn Washington?

  Now.

• 7:23Glynn Washington?

  That next life. That other life.

• 7:28Glynn Washington?

  Let's meet Jenny. It's the 70s and her family is moving into a rundown house outside of Philadelphia. And in this place, the shadows know how to keep secrets, but sometimes, those same secrets have a way of spilling over.

• 7:47Glynn Washington?

  Spooked.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  We moved in in early August of 1972.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  My parents, my sister, and I walk into this house with our three dalmatians, and instantly, it is clear that the previous owner of the house fancied himself an amateur interior decorator.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  This elegant living room was black, rooms painted crazy colors. The family room had these wagon wheel chandelier things hanging from the ceiling, and zebra striped paneling on the walls.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  The reason my parents could afford it, though, is that it was in such crazy, bad condition.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  My father said, "Let's go upstairs, so you can choose your rooms."

• 9:46Speaker 02

  The second floor was even darker than the first floor. My sister immediately chose her room. My father picked the room next to it, which was, I guess it was the master bedroom.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  I went into the last room on the second floor, and I see this room that looks like a girl's bedroom with these frilly curtains on the wall.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  I loved that room.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  And I said, "Is this gonna be mine?" My mother said, "No, we thought you'd like to be up on the third floor." That's where the boys of the previous family, the Hunts, had lived.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  I went up there and looked around and thought, "Yikes."

• 10:34Speaker 02

  It had this creepy vibe. There was an absolutely creepy vibe in there. It was dark, and it also had this creepy yellow wallpaper that featured what looked like sheet music. And then there was this bathroom with marks on the ceiling where the rain leaked through the roof.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  And I said, "Oh, I have to be up there, but you're all gonna be down here." And one of my parents said, "Well, you can have your own empire." So I was like, "Okay, I guess I'm gonna have my own empire."

• 11:19Speaker 02

  One night, my parents went out and I was determined to scrape off the wallpaper in my bedroom.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  I had this can of paint.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  It was this kind of, you know, electric hippie blue.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  And I started tearing up the wallpaper, just ripping it down left and right.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  While I was scraping off this wallpaper, I felt something was watching me.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Something, I felt it so, so strongly.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  One part of me is just aware of what I'm feeling.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  And the other part of me is saying, the way you would, "There are no such things as ghosts. Don't be an idiot."

• 12:15Speaker 02

  I kept slicing the paper, and that's when I noticed something.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Underneath the wallpaper were all of these scribbles and drawings. Right there, at shoulder level, there was a line that said, "In this room in the year 1898 lived Dorothy Cummins, who was not of sound mind, and drowned."

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Pulled off this big chunk of wallpaper. And I noticed below knee level, there were a bunch of children's drawings, as if some, you know, a kid had been drawing on the wall and scribble. There were some wavy lines that might have been the ocean, the sun, the moon. And there was a face.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  There was a face of a woman with this long hair. It wasn't a great drawing and it had been underneath wallpaper for a long time.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  I put two and two together. So there was someone in this room who was not of sound mind and now here's, here are these drawings. So I just assumed that it had been that woman in the drawing, the one who had drowned.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  That's the story I assembled in my mind.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  It was, it was creepy.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  And you know, I'd painted over and all those drawings disappeared.

• 14:16Glynn 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. Cause 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.

• 14:59Glynn 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.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Living in that house was all a very big change for us. But also, I was about to enter ninth grade. And that was really scary. I went to this all-boys school. It was a place where, you know, we had to wear coats. We had to wear ties. Everything was about football. I wanted to be a poet. I wanted to be a musician.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  When I was home, I'd spend most of my time in my room by myself. It was a place of quiet. It was a place of peace. And on the third floor, there was this storeroom. In that room, of course, went all of the garment bags and the, you know, clothes of my mother and my sister. As a kid, I'd play this game called Girl Planet, in which I believed I was an astronaut who had crashed on a, you know, an alien planet. But here's the deal.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  In that place, that girl planet, the atmosphere changed you into a girl. It just happened. And your clothes changed to a girl's clothes, too. Bang.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  So, you know, on the third floor, there's nobody up there. Every day, I come home from school. I go in there, I grab one of the dresses, and I slip it on and go into my room and pull the deadbolt and sit down and do my homework. And then, when I was done, when it's time to go to sleep, I put them back.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  There was one night. I woke up at like 2:00 in the morning.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  And I noticed that my dog was growling.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  My dog was called Sausage. She was this kind of fat, Dalmatian dog. And I loved that dog like crazy.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Suddenly, I hear a creak out in the hallway.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Another creak.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  So I got up to check things out.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  And then I noticed the door to the bathroom is open.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  And I went into the bathroom.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  And there, over my shoulder, I saw for a second, in the mirror,

• 18:27Speaker 02

  this old woman.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  She was not terribly old, but she was old enough. And she had long blond hair. She had green eyes.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  She had like a long, white nightgown. And I noticed that her hair seemed wet.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  I turned around, and there was no one there.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  So I'm freaking out, and I run back to my room, lock the door, and I get into bed, and I'm just like, "Nope, that didn't happen."

• 19:07Speaker 02

  I just lay down there, waiting to fall asleep.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  On that third floor, that feeling I had that I was being watched, I always had that feeling. Sometimes I'd find the bathroom door open, and I don't remember it being open. Had my mother been up there? Had my sister been up there? Had I just not closed it? I don't think my sister or my parents ever felt any of this.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  One time, I remember asking my mother, "Mom, do you ever feel scared in this house? Do you ever feel... do you ever get the creeps?" And she said, "Oh, of course not." It made me sad because it meant that I couldn't explain to her the thing I was feeling. But, you know, I couldn't talk about a lot of things.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  It had been another typical night for me. I'd come home from school and managed to sneak into my sister's bedroom. My desire was to grab some stuff from her hamper. You know, that's where she'd throw out her blouse and her skirt at the end of the school day.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  So I go in there.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  There was a green paisley skirt and a blue blouse. And the little blue blouse, it had these little mirrors in it.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  I ran back into my room, of course, and pulled the deadbolt.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  I did the switcheroo.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  And at that moment, I got that weird feeling again.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  I felt the eyes watching me.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  I did my homework. I did the switcheroo back. And it was time to go to bed, but I needed to put everything back where it was. I went down the creaking stairs and I stuffed them back in the hamper. And while I was in there, I thought, "Oh, no, what if... what if they hear me doing this?"

• 21:22Speaker 02

  So I went into the bathroom and I flushed the toilet to make it seem less suspicious. I went back up the stairs to the third floor, got in bed.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  I went to sleep.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Somewhere around 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock in the morning, I heard my mother screaming.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  I turned on the light by my bed, the light didn't go on.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  There's this kind of roaring sound, like we're in the middle of a storm or something, and my mother is screaming from downstairs.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  And I opened the door and walked down the stairs to find this waterfall.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Ankle-deep, on the second floor, pouring down the stairs and pouring through the rungs on the banister. My sister is in the hallway, and she's pointing to the bathroom, the one that I'd used before when I grabbed the clothes out of that hamper. And now I see that the toilet in that bathroom is overflowing. Water just pouring like a fountain.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  So my mother and my sister and I are walking around, and there's just water pouring everywhere.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Now, we hear this giant crash from downstairs.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  We all go down the main staircase and into the living room, and that's when we saw it. The kitchen ceiling just collapses, crashes onto the floor. The plaster is everywhere.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Here comes sausage coming down the stairs. And we go out into the front hallway, and at that moment, the living room ceiling burst. Plaster, wood, just rains down on us.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  My sister went to the front door, swings it open, and this water just gushes out onto the porch.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  So now our house was wrecked. I mean, like, really, really wrecked. They spent like the next week pumping water out.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  My first thought was, this is all my fault. This is because I flushed that toilet.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  But, um, I remember thinking, what was that girl, Dorothy Cummins? She was of unsound mind and drowned. And the last time I'd seen her, her hair was wet. And now here's my house. What does that mean?

• 24:28Speaker 02

  It began in earnest, the process of changing that house from what it had been into what it was gonna become. New wood flooring went down. The living room, which had been black, was finally painted a tasteful off-white. Down came all the old scary wallpaper. And in a year or two, that house was almost unrecognizable from the place that we moved into.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  It was the beginning of kind of the next part of my family's life. But when I got out of college, I moved to New York City and I forgot everything about Dorothy Cummins.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  I would visit my mother pretty regularly. My mother loved that house and she'd lived in that house all that time. Just around when I turned 40. I think it was 2001. We were in what had once been the room with the wagon wheel chandeliers and the zebra striped wallpaper. Now, of course, it was an elegant family room. My father was long dead by then.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  I poured her a gin and tonic, her favorite, on a Sunday night. And I said, "Mom, there's something I have to tell you." And so I told her I was trans. "I'm sorry I never told you when I was a child because I was afraid you wouldn't love me anymore." And that's when I began to cry and shake and just sob. But my mother reached out to me.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  She said, "I would never turn my back on my child." In my mother's last week or two of life, we had home health care nurses looking out for her. But one night, one of the home health care nurses quit. She'd gone into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. And in the mirror behind her, she saw the face of an old woman. She turned around and there was no one there.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  So there was still something up there, something still living in that house. In 2011, my mother died at the age of 94. You know, we did the thing people do. My sister and I selected the things of our parents we wanted to keep. The rest went off to auction. There was one day when, you know, moving vans came and I was just kind of overseeing the whole business. I was there by myself in the house.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  And I climbed the stairs and I sat down in what had been that room with the yellow wallpaper. And I started weeping and crying.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  I felt the passage of the years and the loss of my parents, whom I really loved. And also, I remembered how much I'd carried something that I just didn't have the language to talk about.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Eventually, I got up and I went to the bathroom. And I looked in the mirror, and there was that old woman, looking at me again.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  But I realized, it wasn't a ghost. It was me, age 55.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  It was the woman that I'd grown up to be.

• 29:25Glynn Washington?

  Thank you so much, Jenny, for sharing your story with the Spooked. Jennifer Finney Boylan. She's the author of 19 books, including "I'm Looking Through You," "Growing Up Haunted." Where you can read more about her experiences living in that house. Also, her new memoir, "Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us," is out now. We'll have links to Jenny's books in the episode description. The story was scouted by Elliot Lightfoot. The original score is by Nicholas Marks. It was produced by Eric Yanez.

• 30:05Glynn Washington?

  Been here before. Done this before. Did you ever watch a child sleep? Innocent, peaceful. Bruce Littner used to watch his son sleep. Little James, just two years old, perfect. Perfect little boy. Till one night, the screaming starts. Airplane crashed on fire, little man can't get out. Bruce rush in to soothe this little boy. Tell him everything is gonna be alright. But night after night, 2 AM, 3 AM. This baby boy, he wakes thrashed and kicking like he's trapped inside something. Little man can't get out!

• 30:49Glynn Washington?

  One night, his mama holds him close and asks, "Who's this little man?" James looks up at her, terrified, and says, "Me." Little James had never seen a war movie. Just two years old, he watches Barney, plays with blocks. And he starts saying things. Specific things. Says this plane got shot down, the Japanese did it. Says he flew off a boat called the Natoma. Natoma? Bruce's pops, they think this is crazy nonsense, but...

• 31:29Glynn Washington?

  But for some reason, Bruce searches anyway. Goes through old records, old books. And he finds it. The USS Natoma Bay. It's real. An escort carrier in the Pacific. And then he learns it. One of his pilots was killed at Iwo Jima. His name was James Huston Jr. And here, Bruce has to shut down his own little research project for a little bit. To understand, Bruce was raised Baptist. And this reincarnation is not part of his worldview. But this little boy keeps talking. Little James says he had a friend named Jack Larson.

• 32:14Glynn Washington?

  And it turns out there was a Jack Larson, who flew with Hudson on the Natombe. Little James says his plane got hit in the engine. Eyewitnesses saw Hudson's plane take a direct hit to the engine before it exploded and plunged into the sea.

• 32:30Glynn Washington?

  Little James draws pictures of aerial combat, explosions, signs of "James Three."

• 32:39Glynn Washington?

  Why "Three"? 'Cause I'm the third James.

• 32:44Glynn Washington?

  James Hudson Jr. was James Hudson the second. And after many more hours of research, many more deep family conversations, Andrea, James' mother, learns that Hudson's sister, Anne, she's still alive.

• 33:02Glynn Washington?

  James Hudson's baby sister, eighty-four years old and still grieving, and Andrea sets up a phone call. And this little boy, speaking to a woman he'd never met, calls her Annie. Only James Hudson Jr. ever called her that. He knew their father drank. He knew he had to go away. He knew their mother painted Anne's portrait when she was a little girl. Private things. Family things. Things not in any book.

• 33:36Glynn Washington?

  After they put down the phones,

• 33:39Glynn Washington?

  Anne sends a package to young James. Along with a letter, she includes her brother's belongings, family heirlooms gifted. Return.

• 33:50Glynn Washington?

  Is a fair his own birthright.

• 33:53Glynn Washington?

  A model plane, a bust of George Washington, she starts calling him "James Three." He calls her "Sister."

• 34:03Glynn Washington?

  When James Three turns eleven, his parents take him to Japan.

• 34:08Glynn Washington?

  There they travel to Tijijima, the small island nearest to where Hudson's plane went down.

• 34:15Glynn Washington?

  They motor out in a rented fishing boat to the exact spot.

• 34:21Glynn Washington?

  And there, weeping, James drops flowers into the water. A memorial. To himself.

• 34:35Glynn Washington?

  For himself.

• 34:38Glynn Washington?

  From himself.

• 34:44Glynn Washington?

  This story, it's from the most extensively documented cases of past life recollection ever. I want to thank the family for the wrath of interviews, writings, even publishing the book Soul Survivor: The reincarnation of a WWII fighter pilot by Bruce and Andrea Lettinger with Ken Gross. I also want to thank Dr. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia who documented this case extensively in his research on children's past life memories. And if you have a story for Spooked, please let me know. [email protected] because there is nothing better than a Spooked story from a Spooked listener. Now be careful because

• 35:26Glynn Washington?

  Spooked Studios is sneaking it behind you right this moment. Don't look back. Don't look back. Even if you can't see it, you can feel it. Don't seek to find it, as it seeks to find you. KQD in San Francisco is where we hide the secrets. We've got the special incantation from Spook Legal reading that no Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission on Team Spooked. The union representatives, producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of

• 36:06Glynn Washington?

  America, AFL, CIL, Local 51, and Spooked is brought to you by the team that does not trust mirrors. Especially Mark Wissage, he refuses to believe that's what he looks like. There's David Kim, Zoe Fregno, Eric Yonkers, Elliot Lightfoot, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Taylor Decot, Regina Berriaco, Olga Kriki, Elizabeth Z. Pardue, Lethia Matu, Lulu Jamima, Doug Stewart, Nicholas Marks. The Spooked theme song is by Pat Masey and Miller. I live from Washington. And I'm pretty sure that this is my first time through this world.

• 36:46Glynn Washington?

  My first pass. I could be wrong, but I can't remember anything else. And I hope that when my time here is done, that I don't feel the need to return. But I know right now, I'm not done.

• 37:07Glynn Washington?

  I'm unfinished. See,

• 37:12Glynn Washington?

  apologies must first be made.

• 37:16Glynn Washington?

  Wrongs must be righted, wines tasted, art seen, hugs given, stories shared, so, so much to do.

• 37:26Glynn Washington?

  But instead of rushing to do it,

• 37:30Glynn Washington?

  I find myself doom scrolling. Their latest outrage on my phone.

• 37:37Glynn Washington?

  What a gift. What an amazing gift it would be to take that final rest and feel complete, like, like, "Okay, I did that. Let us laugh together one last time." But to make that happen, I must first get very, very, very lucky. And then, I must get very, very busy.

• 38:03Glynn Washington?

  And murder this electronic thief of dreams, because I know,

• 38:10Glynn Washington?

  I know

• 38:13Glynn Washington?

  with absolute certainty, my real horror

• 38:20Glynn Washington?

  is regret.

• 38:23Glynn Washington?

  Never, ever, ever, ever turn out light.