A Friend In The Forest - Classic

On the edge of Ireland in the deep forest, a young boy makes a new friend that no one in town has seen for years.

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

• 0:03Glynn Washington?

  The best kind of friend does exactly what you want, laughs at all your jokes, and never asks for the last piece of pizza. But you might have to settle for someone a little less easy to get along with.

• 0:23Glynn Washington?

  You're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned.

• 0:37Glynn Washington?

  Spooksters, you have spoken. We want more spook, you said. We want the support to 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

• 1:16Glynn Washington?

  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.

• 1:51Speaker 01

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• 2:35Speaker 01

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• 2:49Glynn Washington?

  Our farm was in rural Michigan, surrounded by woods and swampland. And when my parents screaming inside our trailer grew too loud, those woods were great to get lost in. I'd follow animal trails through the brush, beat back swarms of biting flies, knowing that no one else in the history of time had ever cut through as far or dug in as hard, ever.

• 3:15Glynn Washington?

  Till one day, the long and almost trail, I came across a well.

• 3:23Glynn Washington?

  And this well, made of crumbling brick, set into a circle, had the heavy metal lid sealing it from the top. And I thought I could lift it, maybe have a drink of water, when I heard a knock.

• 3:43Glynn Washington?

  Clear as that bright summer day, a knock from inside the well, as if someone inside wanted to get out. And I sat and heard the knock again and again. But no, of course, I didn't lift that lid.

• 4:07Glynn Washington?

  Instead, I backed away.

• 4:11Glynn Washington?

  I turned and I ran home, didn't tell anyone. Still, I trekked back out there the next day and heard the knocking again. More frantic, maybe, maybe, maybe not. Hello?

• 4:30Glynn Washington?

  Hello?

• 4:35Glynn Washington?

  And again, I did nothing.

• 4:39Glynn Washington?

  But then the next day, I made the trek all alone, sweating under the sweltering Michigan sun. And once again, I sat to wait on the sound.

• 4:52Glynn Washington?

  But this time, I heard nothing.

• 4:58Glynn Washington?

  A strain pushed up close against the well. Nothing.

• 5:07Glynn Washington?

  Nothing.

• 5:10Glynn Washington?

  Nothing.

• 5:12Glynn Washington?

  Even then, it was so hot and I was so thirsty. But I knew inside, this well was water that I would never drink.

• 5:33Glynn Washington?

  You're listening to Spooked. My name is Glynn Washington. Question everything. And of course, this goes without saying. Never open the well.

• 5:55Glynn Washington?

  Today, we begin spooking the land next to the Vale, Ireland, where Shane Dunphy spent years working with kids as a social worker. Shane thought he'd seen it all, until he met a little boy named Gregory.

• 6:11Glynn Washington?

  Due to the sensitive nature of this story, some names have been changed.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  There's a small coastal town in Ireland that locals call the most westerly point in Europe. But it can feel like the last place on earth. To the east, it's cut off by miles and miles of dense woods.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  The Finnegans, they lived just on the edge of these woods. So I found it extremely difficult to get there.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  It was 2007, and Shane Dunphy was fairly new to town. As he made his way to the Finnegans for a house visit, he couldn't see any clear street signs to follow.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  You go off one little country lane, down another by-road, off another little laneway. The trees seem to close in overhead as you come up to the house.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  This tiny, little, sort of two-up-two-down worker's cottage, which looks like something out of Grimm's fairy tales.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  It was quite eerie.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  So I arrive out and I meet Gregory.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Shane had learned that Gregory was continuously sneaking off at night into the woods.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  He had reddish blonde hair, greyish blue eyes. He was maybe a little bit on the small side. And he doesn't really want to talk to me. Everyone imagines when you work with kids that, you know, conversation flows immediately and it didn't at all. He pretty much froze when he saw me. And what I did was I played this game with him. Okay, I'm gonna ask you questions. You can shake your head for no, nod for yes. Okay, so you go to school in the village and he nods for yes. And I say, okay, and your teacher is a six foot tall, blue bunny rabbit. And of course, he laughs and says no. And we go on like this. And eventually, he admits that he does go out at night into the woods to play

• 8:26Speaker 03

  and that he snuck out at night to meet this other friend. And he told me that this other little boy was called Thomas. Now, this is the first I'd heard of this. Certainly, Orla, the mum, hadn't mentioned it. So I thought, right, this is interesting. And so I ask him, where did you meet Thomas? Did you meet him in school? Did you meet him in church? You know, did you meet him on the internet? But he shakes his head no to all of these questions. Look, Gregory, you're gonna have to tell me, where did you meet this guy? And he tells me that he heard him. And I said, what? You heard him? And so he brings me up to his room.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  His bedroom is a tiny little space. There's some posters up on the wall of like football players and Formula One cars. There's a little dresser and then there's a window looking out onto their little backyard, which exits out through a little gateway into the woods. And he says, I heard him calling me from down there. And he said, I got up and I went to the window and I looked out and there was this little boy standing just under that tree over there. The little boy saw him and beckons to him. And he told me that Thomas was living alone in the woods.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  I told him, maybe I should meet him. Maybe he's hungry, maybe he's frightened. Gregory was absolutely adamant that Thomas did not like adults, was afraid of adults. Their world was just between the two of them.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  I'd worked an awful lot with kids who were habitual runaways. And they're either running to something, or they're running away from something. I felt that this was a very lonely, very isolated little family. You know, the dad, he had left them. The mum was working three jobs. He was lonely. So I thought it was absolutely normal and reasonable for Gregory to create a little playmate for himself. Gregory has an imaginary friend.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Before leaving the Finnegan's that evening, Shane told the mum to start inviting Gregory's friends over, or have him join a soccer club or youth group.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Anything to get him an outlet so that he doesn't feel the need for this. And I reckon that the running away and the imaginary friend will disappear.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  About two weeks later, just, I think it's over the lunch break actually, that I got the phone call. And it was from a police officer who immediately said, "You've been doing some work with the Finnegan's, or the mum said you might have some input into what's happened."

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Gregory had disappeared the night before. The cops didn't find him until the next morning, miles away from home, in the thick of the woods. Gregory said he'd been playing hide and seek with Thomas, and that Thomas was still nearby. But the cops found no trace of the boy. Well, except for one thing. When they got back to Gregory's house, they searched the area outside his window.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  And they discover two sets of footprints.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  The guard, Harry, showed me a photograph of one of the sets of footprints, with some measuring tape beside it for scale.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  One set of footprints was larger than the other, but they both clearly belonged to children.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  My heart dropped because I thought, oh my gosh, Thomas is real. And that really frightened me. Is Thomas being used to lure Gregory into something really, really sinister? I've been involved in cases before in the past where children were used to literally draw kids into paedophile rings, child abuse situations. Now, that doesn't happen every day, but these are realities. So the big question on everybody's lips was, who is this child?

• 12:43Speaker 02

  Shane talked to Gregory's mom again and told her to put a bolt or a padlock on all the doors and to hide the keys so that Gregory cannot escape anymore.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  I was starting to feel a certain sense of responsibility towards the family at this point. And also, I was starting to, I liked Gregory. I thought he was a nice kid. I thought he was interesting and funny. And, you know, I kind of started to quite enjoy hanging out with him. So one afternoon, we went out for ice cream.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Shane wanted to see if he could get Gregory to open up a bit more about Thomas. And he did.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  Gregory, he was really, at that particular time, enjoying games on his Playstation. And then he said, actually, Thomas doesn't have a Playstation and he doesn't have an Xbox. And I said, well, what does he like then? What games does he play? And Gregory told me that he had a Specky. I immediately said to him, do you mean a ZX Spectrum? And he said, yeah, that's, that's it. That's what he has.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  The ZX Spectrum was a game console popular in the 80s.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  And this is what really jarred with me. He said, the two games that he says are his favourites are Manic Miner and School Days.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  Now, these were the two big games when I would have been about 13 or 14 years old. So we're talking 1984, 1985. You know, I was really fascinated by this. What else? And he said, well, what's the A-Team? Thomas tells me it's his favourite show. Again, I'm bowled over. The A-Team. I said, well, that's like an action show that was on, again, when I was a kid. Gregory mimicked one of the catchphrases from Mr. T. He said, I pity the fool who doesn't like the A-Team. What the hell is all of

• 15:06Speaker 03

  this about? This child, Thomas, who was a huge dilemma and mystery and a cryptic something that I couldn't even understand, who was engaging in all the things that I engaged with, there was a part of me that was drawn to it. But hang on a minute, we've stopped you getting out. I said, so how are you seeing Thomas then? And he said to me, that Thomas is getting in. How do you mean he's getting in? Explain that to me. He said to me, I wake up at night and he's in my room. Now, that sent a chill right down my spine. I felt a very powerful sense of urgency that we needed to get to the

• 15:46Speaker 03

  bottom of this before something really terrible happened. And I did, I pushed him again. You know, look, I really need to meet him. And he's just like, no, absolutely not. I had come home quite late one evening. I'd had a really rough day at work and I'd kind of fallen asleep. And I remember being woken up by my cellphone ringing. It was Orla on the other end and she was really upset, very agitated. And she asked me, could I come out to the house really quickly because something had happened? I said to her, you know, look, should I call the police on my way out if somebody tried to break in? She said, no, that the police can't help us with this.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Now that kind of freaked me out a little bit. I thought, oh my gosh, what has gone on? I got in my car, got out there as quickly as I could. She brought me into the kitchen and she had an old cassette recorder sitting on the kitchen table. She said, play that. So I played it. Had to actually pick it up and almost put it to my ear to hear what was being said. Gradually, I realised what I was hearing was two distinct voices, one of which was clearly Gregory's. Gregory saying, no, mommy gets afraid when I go outside to play with you. But the other was slightly lower and sounded almost as if it were coming from an older child.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  And I could hear the other child's voice becoming quite annoyed, quite agitated. You know, look, you know, you have to play fair. It's your turn. You need to come out with me now. She got the sense that he had stood up. And at that point on the recording, I heard Orla, Gregory's mother, bursting in. I heard her saying, Gregory, are you all right? She told me that when she went into the room, Gregory was on his own. But she said the window was open and on the rug on the bedroom floor, there was soil and pine needles and little twigs, as if somebody who had been walking around in the woods had been standing there.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Shane went out back and he did see a drainpipe running up the side of the house, right beside Gregory's window. He figured that was how Thomas was getting in. For the sake of the mom, Shane threw out another possible explanation.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Could it be Gregory pushing the fantasy to a new level, where he's creating these two voices himself? But usually when children do that, they're very, very deeply psychiatrically disturbed. And that just wasn't Gregory.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  I was just telling myself that these were just two frightened little boys who had found each other and somebody needed to help them.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Shane sat down with Gregory again. He had to ask him who he thought Thomas really was.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  The words he used was Thomas was from the woods, almost as if he was a part of the woods. To be honest with you, it kind of slightly gave me the creeps to hear him say it because I felt that maybe he did understand an awful lot more than we assumed he did.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Shane hadn't really talked about this situation with anybody outside the family. So he confided in the school principal, who was also a friend and could perhaps shed some light on this mysterious boy who lived in the woods.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  He kind of suggested that I had somehow stepped into kind of like a rural legend about a girl who had become pregnant by her father. The father had brought her out into the woods to a cabin and he had kept her there and made her have her child in this shack. And the story went that she gradually became crazier and lonelier and more estranged. And she took to wandering the paths of the forest. If she were alive today, would have been the closest neighbour to the Finnegan family.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Shane dug up some newspaper clippings about this local legend that dated back to the mid 1980s. One mentioned that the woman's child had been 10 years old.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  We were never given the name of the little boy. However, the name of the man who had allegedly fathered this child was Thomas. The third article told of her suicide. This woman had taken herself out into the woods and had hanged herself. And there was a photograph of the living room of the house that this woman had lived in. And it showed the TV and the couch and a coffee table. And sitting on the coffee table,

• 20:39Speaker 03

  this little square black box with the grey keys and a little, literally a spectrum rainbow pattern in the corner, was a ZX Spectrum home computer.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  What the hell is going on? This is just too weird.

• 21:15Glynn Washington?

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• 21:56Glynn Washington?

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• 22:29Speaker 03

  I wondered had Gregory somehow overheard a conversation about the case? Maybe were the Finnegan's in some way related to this family? But again, I realized I was grasping at straws and I was now starting to think, I really don't know what's going on anymore.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  But Shane kept poking at it. According to one newspaper clipping, there was a local priest who had befriended the woman, and he was still alive. But when Shane went to see him, the man didn't want to talk. Shane was running out of leads to chase.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  I got a call from Orla. She was borderline hysterical.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Gregory was gone, but this time it was different. Orla had been preparing breakfast in the kitchen when suddenly Gregory shot past her and out the back door. She called after him, only to see him run into the woods. And he wasn't alone. There was another boy pulling Gregory by the hand.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  We did call the police, but their reaction was, looking at, literally, he's only gone. He's gone an hour, he's run away before. If he's not back by this evening, give us a call again, kind of thing. They were growing weary of the case at that stage. I called George Taylor, the principal of the school, who was my friend and who knew the woods intimately.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  And he had the principal guide them through the woods to try and find the two boys.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  We could see two distinct sets of tracks, and they were heading north. Eventually, after a couple of hours, we came across a kind of a hollow in the woods. In that hollow, there was an old shack, an old stone ruin. Gregory was lying up against the wall of this shack asleep, which I thought was very strange, why he would have gone to sleep, but he was. And I went down into the hollow to Gregory. I remember I kneeled down beside him and woke him up. As I did that, suddenly, we heard the sound of a child crying.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  This seemed to be coming from all around us, and kind of in my head as well. I said to Gregory, you know, where's Thomas? Where is he? He said, he's over there. I looked over, and there was a child standing a distance away in the trees. I could see that he was wearing a kind of a, like an anorak with buttons, and he had a hood up. I remember I took my eye off him to say something again to Gregory, and when I looked up, he was closer, impossibly closer. He couldn't have bridged that distance in the time that it took. And I looked again, and he was closer again. And at this stage, I could actually see him quite well.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  You know, I could actually see kind of grass stains or moss stains on the knees of his jeans. And the sound of the crying was even louder. It was so loud, it was hurting at times. I remember I picked up Gregory and gave him to George, and George said, we have to get out of here, you know, we need to go. But there was still part of me that wanted to help this kid. Here he was, he was standing right in front of me. And he looked like a, a boy. I, I held out my hand, I said, come on, come with us. You know, we, we can talk about whatever's going on. As I said that, something crossed his face.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  I don't know whether it was a look of fear or a look of anger or a look of uncertainty, but it was like a rope had been tied around his waist and suddenly it had been pulled back through the trees. He was gone. Just whoosh. The sound stopped. The crying wasn't there anymore.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  We took Gregory and we started walking back home. And I remember him saying to me, is, is he gone now? Is Thomas gone?

• 26:52Speaker 03

  I didn't have an answer, I didn't know what to say.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  One afternoon, I'm in the office and suddenly I look up and Father Malone is standing in the doorway.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Father Malone is a local priest Shane had tried talking to days before.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  And he's clearly very distressed. And he tells me that he had to come clean.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  He did know more about the woman in the woods. Father Malone had visited her often.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  She told him that she had been having violent thoughts towards her son. She had been thinking about killing him. He said that he hadn't really known what to do. So he just offered a listening ear. Then this one afternoon, he arrived out to the house. He knocked on the door and there was no answer. And he was about to leave when he saw the woman walking out of the trees. There was blood on her clothes, smears of blood on her face. She told him that she had murdered her son.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  When Father Malone went to the police, they didn't bother to investigate.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  Everybody believed that the boy didn't exist, that this was a figment of the woman's imagination.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  A month later, the woman hung herself.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  Father Malone told me that what we were seeing was the unquiet ghost or the spirit of this little boy who had been murdered. Well, I didn't really know what to say, other than it added up. I suppose it almost completed a circle in terms of everything that had been going on.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  A couple of days later, Father Malone and Orla and Gregory and myself went into the woods and we had a candlelight ceremony.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  They didn't go too far into the woods, just about 20 yards from the Finnegan's house, and they stood in a loose circle.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Gregory held candles, which during the ceremony, Father Malone lit them from a sacred candle that he had brought with him. Now, to be clear, this was not an exorcism or anything like that. Father Malone wanted to acknowledge what had happened to Thomas. And I know that closure is quite important, but as to what the outcome was going to be, I really had no idea. He said a few words, just blessing Thomas and that we all wished for him to be accepted into heaven.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Shane had explained to Gregory that they were saying goodbye to his friend.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  I think he felt glad that Thomas had gone somewhere where he was happy and safe. At one point out of the corner of my eye, I fancied I might have seen a little figure among the trees, but I don't know whether any of that was just what you expect in a situation like that. Then we went back to the house and had tea. That was the last anybody saw of Thomas. He didn't come back.

• 30:28Glynn Washington?

  Big thanks to Shane Dumphy for sharing this story with the Spooked. You gotta know, there's so much more to this piece, so much more. We'll have a link to Shane's book, "The Boy They Tried to Hide," at spookpodcast.org. That's a story we have for you. We want to hear the stories you have for us. Some Spooksters have already hit us on the Spook line. Let us know your story. Record onto your phone device, then send it to [email protected].

• 31:02Glynn Washington?

  The Spooked Ghost Hunter Squad includes Mark Ristich, Nancy Lopez, Eliza Smith, Anna Sussman, Jasmine Aguilera, and Taylor Decott. Original music by Pat "The CD" Miller.

• 31:21Glynn Washington?

  Now, if it's close to midnight, and something's evil lurking in the dark, and under the moonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart, always remember, and don't forget to never, ever, never turn out the lights.