Uneasy Rider

On a dark dark night, in a dark dark town, on a dark dark street, there stood a dark dark figure in the dark dark shadows, waiting.

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

• 0:04Glynn Washington?

  There's a cat, there's a cradle, there's a silver tomb. There's a deep, dark hole by the light of the moon. We know she will rise, but we don't know when. Our mistress returns again, and the ceremony can begin.

• 0:28Glynn Washington?

  You're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned.

• 0:34Glynn Washington?

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• 1:17Glynn Washington?

  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 darkest alone. And, and, ask me anything for yours truly.

• 2:01Glynn Washington?

  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.

• 2:27Glynn Washington?

  Don't turn out the lights.

• 2:44Glynn Washington?

  I have a buddy

• 2:46Glynn Washington?

  whose grandparents lived right outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I went to school. And I went with him occasionally to meet with them, to check in, frankly, to enjoy some home-cooked meals that the grandfather, not the grandmother, prepared. "Oh, you wouldn't want to eat my cooking." She'd laugh. We'd feast on warm rye bread, dunked-in-chicken-soup borscht, all manner of things I'd never heard of. It was nice, really nice.

• 3:17Glynn Washington?

  But there was this thing. They each smiled fondly whenever they looked at their grandson. They even smiled when they looked at me. But when they looked at each other, their eyes narrowed. Their mouths grew tight like you'd almost touch the shards of anger, of fury. And one day in the kitchen, listening to klezmer music, frying up potato pancakes, the grandfather says to my friend, "Don't bury me next to that woman."

• 3:51Glynn Washington?

  And my buddy pretends not to hear.

• 3:54Glynn Washington?

  So the grandfather turns to me, a stranger in their home, and says, "Don't let them bury me next to that woman." And I don't know how to respond to this. I don't. So I just kind of look around like I'm simple. But he says it again. And every time we visit, he says something similar. "Don't let them bury me next to that woman. Do not let them bury me next to that woman."

• 4:20Glynn Washington?

  I graduate university,

• 4:23Glynn Washington?

  move to the other side of the globe for a while, and life happens. Till almost four years later on a trip, I'm finally able to reconnect with my buddy at Chicago's Green Mill Bar. Drinks, food. Of course, I ask about his grandparents.

• 4:42Glynn Washington?

  He tells me they both passed within six weeks of each other, the previous year. "Oh, brother, I'm so sorry."

• 4:52Glynn Washington?

  And I don't ask for this part, but he tells me anyway, maybe because I'm the only person who can tell. He says, "You know, they buried them next to each other on a family plot."

• 5:07Glynn Washington?

  And I can tell just by the look in his face, the guilt, the shame, that he didn't have anything to do with that. I know he tried to stop his uncle and his aunt who insisted, but the thought of them lying trapped next to each other for the rest of time makes me think then, perhaps

• 5:31Glynn Washington?

  we need to take a person's last wish

• 5:35Glynn Washington?

  more seriously.

• 6:34Glynn Washington?

  Now, let's say you're driving down that haunted highway and you pass a ghostly hitchhiker. You're not gonna pick him up, are you? Because honestly, I'm of two minds on this question. Because it's bad luck to leave a traveler stranded, but sometimes, it's bad luck to pick one up.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  About five or six years ago, my husband and I were driving up the mountain where we lived.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  It's a national forest, so it's a densely populated forest that they just made a road and a couple of small towns in the middle of. It's just a two-lane road that is incredibly windy. You have, I don't know, 100-foot-tall pine trees on the passenger side and then anywhere from 50-foot to 800-foot cliffs on the opposite side. All in all, a very dangerous road just because of how many people are there and coming up there and doing stupid things, driving way too fast.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  He was the one driving and I was in the passenger seat.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  And we'd seen a few motorcycle riders coming down at a much higher speed than is safe. I'm not gonna put their speed under 80 miles an hour coming around corners. If you ever watch motorcycle racing where they're dragging their knees across the road, that's exactly what these two guys were doing.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  And we got maybe two-thirds of the way up the mountain. And as we're coming up, all of a sudden, the cars in front of us stop on a real sharp curve. We see a large, tan cargo van stopped, and there is a motorcycle crashed right in front of it.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  The crash was, I would say, maybe 100, 125 feet in front of us. You could see it was laying down on its side. It kind of dawned on both of us that there was a person laying there.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  So she was lying there with her motorcycle helmet, just right next to her. It looked like, kind of, a young boy's, you know, shark helmet.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Very colorful and bright, like a happy helmet that a kid would have.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  After about three minutes of sitting there and the person not moving, and nobody really trying to tend to the person laying there, like, it made a lot of sense to both of us that we could tell that this person was not alive anymore.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  It was a moment of trying to not get myself freaked out either, as a motorcycle rider.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  It wasn't. Maybe five, seven minutes after we came to the scene of the crash, and we had passed two motorcyclists coming down the mountain as we were driving up. They came up really, really fast on the wrong side of the road and got off their bikes frantically.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  They seemed to be her friends, or rider friends. They looked completely devastated and were on their phones. They were just kind of pacing back and forth. Obviously, very distraught and in shock.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  It was a long time before the ambulance got there. The ambulance rolled up, and it parked maybe 50 feet in front of us. They couldn't get too much closer to it.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  We couldn't go around or anything, so we had no choice but to sit there.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  It felt like hours and hours and hours as we sat there and just stared at a dead woman on the road, laying in front of the vehicle that she struck.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  People were getting out of their cars and walking up, and I actually yelled at some people not to start taking pictures, just because people don't have any humanity left.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  They covered up her body. They weren't trying to rush anywhere. You know, there was no rush to lift her from the ground, like, you know, you would normally see when they're trying to rush somebody to the hospital.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  I turned around to check on how many cars had been lined up behind us. But then, when I turned back around, I saw that the body bag was completely flat.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  It looked like her body had disappeared. I looked inside the ambulance and there was nothing in there. So I'm like, okay, um, that's weird.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  She turned and she asked me if I noticed a body bag was flat. She had panic on her face. It was a concern that I wasn't normally used to. And I, I kind of scoffed. I looked at her. I was like, what are you talking about? I could still see the woman underneath the body bag.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  In my head, I was like, you sure? Because it was flat. I felt like I was going crazy. Because he's still seeing the shape of it. And I don't see anything.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  10 seconds later, maybe 20 feet away from the car off to the side, I saw this woman standing and then starts walking towards my husband, like a floating, walking type of entity. I couldn't see her face. It was not clear. And I knew it was the same woman that I had seen laying on the ground. Because she was wearing a full leather outfit, the motorcycle outfit. There was a cartoonish helmet that she had picked up.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  I just didn't know what to do at that point or what to think at that point. I didn't know what it was going to do.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  I was, started to sweat. The back of my neck was burning and that's when I said, "Start the car, roll your window up."

• 12:39Speaker 02

  I'm like, why? Do you want the AC?

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Seeing anything.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  The woman put her body through the window and got in front of my husband's face and grabbed his shirt and whispered, "Please, help me."

• 12:58Speaker 01

  She sounded desperate, worried about something. "Please, help me."

• 13:07Speaker 01

  She just disappeared.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  And I looked at the body bag, and it's as if she never left. The shape was there again.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  I was like this, did I just imagine this whole thing? Of course, at the same time, I was sad, incredibly sad, and just thinking about her family and the news that they're about to get.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  So after what seemed like forever, the EMTs finally decided to let vehicles go past, and we finally got home. For at least a week, it was pretty much all we could talk about.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  I didn't talk to my husband about, you know, seeing a figure or anything like that because he's a non-believer. So every time I talk about something paranormal or spiritual, he just like kind of brushes it off like, "Oh, okay." But I was curious about the woman.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  I had this sense of connection with her. And I also was wondering why. She had asked my husband for help. So I Googled the motorcycle accident at this place at this date. And so got her full name. Her Facebook page just came up right away. And I found a forum where she was chatting with a motorcycle crew or something. And she had talked about that day, that she was going for a ride. And she was just waiting for her husband, quote-unquote "husband," to leave, and then she was gonna go.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  She said something like, "Don't forget I'm a new writer." And they're like, "Oh, you'll be fine. It's this mountain." I just started a piece together that maybe she was having an affair with one of them just because she had put "husband" in quotation marks. That's what I had suspected, anyway.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  It did feel intimate, looking up information about her on the internet. I think it felt like, since she asked for help, maybe I could find out what she was talking about.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  So a few days later, I had started a new job. I was a cemetery caretaker at one of the biggest cemeteries in the country. I think they had a little over 100,000 people that had been buried there over the past 30 or 40 years. My job was to bury people. It was 25 to 50 burials a day.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  We load the casket onto a lowering device. The machine lowers itself at a gradual pace. And then we have to use a backhoe to put the 1,000-pound concrete lid back onto it.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  We would fill the hole in, and then we would tamp it down. And then we had a 175-pound gas tamper. That would sound like a small jet engine, and it would smack all the dirt down.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  About 10 days after I'd started this job, I got assigned to a certain part of the cemetery that I'd never worked before. I had no training in. So I was a little confused, but I was still a new person. So I went and did what I was told. It's Southern California. It's 100 degrees out in the middle of the summer. And we had a fairly busy day. It was maybe 35 people that we had to bury. I was soaked in sweat, covered in dirt. I was ready to go home.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  The very last burial of the day and they brought out the hearse and as we were unloading the casket, the director for the ceremony, the burial ceremony, he told me that it was a younger woman with two kids had died in a motorcycle accident. I asked him who it was and he showed me the pamphlet from the ceremony and sure enough, it was the same woman that we had encountered on the mountain that had been killed in the motorcycle accident. As I'm lowering the casket, I was emotional about it. I started looking around and I started looking at the people that were out there and I felt

• 17:26Speaker 02

  like I should talk to people, let them know I saw what happened, but it wasn't about me. If you bury 25 people a day, five days a week, you start to become desensitized to the idea of death. You don't have a connection anymore, but as we were loading this woman in, there was this connection that I hadn't felt since I had started there. I couldn't fathom the coincidence of staring at this young woman for such a long time and then being one of three people that were going to be the last ones to ever see her before she's laid to rest forever. We weren't allowed to have phones out there. As soon as I got back to our break room, I immediately texted Micah and I actually sent

• 18:11Speaker 02

  her a picture of the ceremony pamphlet.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  I was like, no way, no freaking way.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Over the next few weeks, I felt a weird draw to watch the grave and it was pretty much the first thing I did. When I would get to work, I would make a pass by the grave to see if anything had happened to it each day. It was about a week later and I noticed people coming up and visiting the gravesite of the woman and I didn't think anything of it. It's fairly normal for a cemetery.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  So after the people left the grave, I kind of just walked past it. And I noticed that they had left trash on it. Crumbled up piece of paper that didn't have anything on it and a bag of chips. So I picked it up. I felt a personal responsibility to do that. Over the next few weeks, I never really noticed anybody coming to the grave. But I felt like it was important for me to go by. One time I found the last name of it covered in duct tape. And then somebody used some kind of material, like chalk or something like that, and like scratched over the last name.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  My first reaction is anger, and then the next one was sheer confusion, because I never found that on anybody else's grave in the entire cemetery, since we cleaned it. And I felt that if anybody was gonna do it, I guess it should have been me. I don't think I would have been able to stop thinking about it. I had to go make sure that this grave wasn't messed with. And I remember I told Micah each time.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Looking back, I feel like she had asked him to pay respects to her body and her graveyard, where maybe she knew that no one else will. Maybe he didn't hear it and he doesn't believe it, but I think that it got to him somehow.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  It's pushing the limits of my ability to explain it as a coincidence. I think there's a slim possibility there's more to it, but for me to make sense of it to myself, rather than just sit around and wonder, I just chalk it up as a coincidence. I need the unexplainable to be explainable. But at the same time, like, I never tell my wife that I don't believe her when she tells me she sees something or experiences something. If she has that gift, then I fully support the idea that she sees and feels things that I never will.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  I remember riding the motorcycle down the mountain after we saw the accident. And every single ride, I thought of that woman. And then it didn't take too much longer for me to just give up riding motorcycles.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  It was a huge relief to me because I was always worried about it.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  I really do love the experience of riding a motorcycle, but it's just not worth it anymore.

• 21:32Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, Micah and Andrew, for sharing your story with the Spooked. That story comes to us from the podcast Stories with Sapphire. Sapphire's podcast is chock full of scary stories we think you're gonna love. We're gonna put a link to her show in our show notes. The original score for that story was by Doug Stewart. It was produced by Ann Ford.

• 22:14Glynn Washington?

  If you walk the backwoods of Michigan, you can step through forests so thick, bramble so tight. It feels like you might be the first person ever to set foot through this land. But then you look down and see that you're pushing through the remains of a homestead, passing by the crumbling casings of a well. You start searching, getting your bearings, figuring out where the back of that long ago structure may have stood, focusing your gaze on the lay of the ground. You just may find one, two, even more. Nothing so formal or grand as a tombstone, no. Often just a rock.

• 22:57Glynn Washington?

  A faded name marked on it with some simple tool, etched by hands unaccustomed to this type of labor. Estelle Mead, Jasper Millroy Collins, Bartholomew Swallow, Flossie McNair, Imogene Alton. Names that this forest, these trees, that rain tried to erase from the stone standing century over this consecrated place.

• 23:23Glynn Washington?

  But them that set them did not mean for the names to be forgotten so easily. So they chiseled deep into the rock. Patient, deliberate, so that even if they, or their children, or their children's children could no longer tend to sight themselves, remembering would still be seen on the stone.

• 23:47Glynn Washington?

  It would still be witnessed, would still be felt by anyone happening to wander through these Michigan woods.

• 24:33Glynn Washington?

  I know, I know, we've walked this path together. Be afraid. And do you yourself possess an inexplicable power of which no one will believe? Well, try me. Tell me. Tell us all about it. Email us your story, [email protected]. Because there's nothing better than a spooked story from a spooked listener. Let us know, [email protected]. And tell the dark side you spooked with some spooked gear. The T-shirt of your dreams available right now at snapjudgment.org. And remember, there is so much more. If you like your storytelling, under the bright light of day, under the glorious rays

• 25:16Glynn Washington?

  of the sanctified sunshine, listen to our sister program, the amazing stupendous Snap Judgment Podcast. It is storytelling with a beat.

• 25:55Glynn Washington?

  Spook was created by the team that knows full well not to trust their own shadow. Except for Mark Ristich. He asks his shadow for lottery numbers. Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Chris Hamrick, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Davy Kim, Renzo Goryo, Theo Decat, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Ferdinand, Tiffany Delisa, Ann Ford, Doug Stewart, and Isaiah Sims. The Spook theme song is by Pat Massey Miller. My name is from Washington, and may never tell you that you hold tremendous power. But every thought, every word you utter is a command to the universe, to which the universe must respond, whether you know it or not.

• 26:38Glynn Washington?

  That which you fear, that which you despise, that which you detest, is exactly what you give energy to. And the only antidote, the only protection available from amplifying our own dark energy is to never, ever, ever, ever, never, ever turn out the light.