Peek-a-boo

Gerald carved his name in concrete behind the house. And now, he keeps trying to say hi to the new family that moved into the house. The problem? Gerald’s dead.

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

• 0:05Glynn Washington?

  Locked inside, this prison scary. Wrapped with filth and vermin wary. Knew I heard him sneaking right outside my gated door. I snatched my hand out quickly, just as I had tried before. This time, I caught him creeping, hoping he could find me sleeping. Oh, I gave him such a beating as he never had before. And when he cried for mercy, I just beat him all the more. Thus, I never saw the letter he had slipped beside my door. So the chance to walk in freedom was the chance that I forswore.

• 0:48Glynn Washington?

  Thou trapped inside this cell is where I'll rot. Forevermore.

• 1:03Glynn Washington?

  You're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned.

• 1:15Glynn 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.

• 2:00Glynn 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. Don't turn out the lights.

• 2:42Glynn Washington?

  Okay, so it hasn't even happened yet, but I'm already tripping. Been sitting with my baby girl recently as she prepares for applications to colleges. We even visited a few places, looked at dorms, meal plans, student-faculty ratios, and soon she's gonna pick a school and we'll load up a car and take her to live somewhere else. I'll meet her new roommate, help her put stuff on the wall, make some dad jokes, and as I turn away from her, I will try my very best not to weep.

• 3:25Glynn Washington?

  At least try to wait till I get back into the car before losing my mind, but I am so proud of her, so happy for her. She is made of magic and I'm the luckiest girl dad of them all. Already I'm seeing things that I want to send with her. The complete eight-volume Expanse book series. We share a love of sci-fi, she and I. This locket I found at a Japanese free market before she was born, that painting of us all together. So many things I want her to take to remain a part of her.

• 4:05Glynn Washington?

  The love, the laughter, the eye rolls, the baits, the smells, sometimes good, sometimes very bad, coming from my kitchen.

• 4:15Glynn Washington?

  I hope I have been a good father to her. I know she's the very best of me. I want her to carry my sometimes joy. I shared Wendy's love of words and arts and music and story, but...

• 4:35Glynn Washington?

  Some of me?

• 4:38Glynn Washington?

  I pray she leaves behind forever because

• 4:42Glynn Washington?

  because I see monsters.

• 4:46Glynn Washington?

  Several years ago, as new adults, before kids, before mortgages, before 401Ks, before all of it, my cousins and I flew from various parts of the country, gathered in Los Angeles and we hugged, and we laughed, and we wept, and we cried, and we vowed that the insanity we had all experienced

• 5:10Glynn Washington?

  would stop with us. That this cycle would not become our baby's birthright. I made that promise and I meant every word.

• 5:20Glynn Washington?

  But now I'm older and I've learned that even the very best of intentions are built of sand. I've even offered myself an olive branch, a bit of forgiveness. I've come to accept that if you witness a murder before your fifth birthday, if you are locked in a closet filled with demons as a child, that this darkness becomes twisted inside your DNA, that this darkness colors every interaction I have, every step, every thought. And yeah,

• 5:54Glynn Washington?

  that background has its own gifts. Because the doors Shadowlands do not simply swing open to those who have lived a life of happiness and joy. These gates are only pried open through pain and loss

• 6:10Glynn Washington?

  and sorrow.

• 6:13Glynn Washington?

  My grandmother once told me that the witch site can skip a generation. I want to skip all my generations because the price is far too high. I want that my children's children's children do not see the shadow figure in the corner. I want that they do not hear the screams from the dark force. But wanting is not enough. I imagined that I could simply hide that part of myself from her, shield her from this consuming pit of madness, but I'd have to be some kind of new fool to imagine she doesn't know me better than anyone ever has.

• 6:56Glynn Washington?

  She's held my hand even as I've held hers.

• 7:03Glynn Washington?

  So I wonder, and I hope, and I pray that I have held back enough of my own darkness, enough, just enough.

• 7:14Glynn Washington?

  So that when she is packed off for school and finally turns away from me,

• 7:21Glynn Washington?

  I beg the universe that she can step away from this shadow

• 7:29Glynn Washington?

  and she can walk in the light.

• 7:43Glynn Washington?

  Spookstars.

• 7:47Glynn Washington?

  Now.

• 8:36Glynn Washington?

  Legacy, legacy, legacy. What do you leave behind? What do they carry? Susan and her husband had just bought their first house. They're excited to move in with their three kids, Ben, Christina, and Stephanie. They get to make it into a home.

• 8:56Glynn Washington?

  Spookstars.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  It is a ranch-style house, three bedrooms, on about an acre and a third. It had a huge backyard with big, mature trees and Circle Drive, and it just seemed perfect. We just considered it to be the perfect house for our family.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  One of the things that we noticed right after we moved in was that in the concrete patio in the back, the name Gerald Thompson was carved into the concrete. And so we just thought that was really sweet, that someone felt so personal about the house that they had carved their name into the concrete.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  After a few months in the house, the children were at school,

• 10:15Speaker 01

  and I was all alone, and the house was nice and quiet. I was sitting in my easy chair, and I was embrodding. That's my favorite thing to do. There was a feeling of eyes on me, just a feeling of, "Holy cow, I'm not alone. Someone is in this house with me."

• 10:39Speaker 01

  But I just brushed it off as, just my imagination, just something that I was feeling for no good reason.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  My name is Christina, and I am the middle child of three children.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  My name is Ben, and I'm the oldest.

• 11:01Speaker 04

  My name is Stephanie, and I am the youngest member of the family. I was around four, approaching five years old at the time, and the house was still new and very exciting.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  The yard was big. It had lots of trees, and lots of things to run and do and explore. So as a 10-year-old boy, I was really excited moving into this house.

• 11:26Speaker 04

  In my parents' master suite in the back of the house, there was a tiny little bathroom. And I just thought it was so exciting to sneak back into their tiny little bathroom. And there was a huge mirror over the sink. I was looking in the mirror and saw the figure out of the corner of my eye.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  One morning when I was mowing the lawn, I started to get kind of a creepy feeling, like someone was watching me. And they were very careful to stay hidden.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  I was sleeping on my side. And all of a sudden, I felt something touch the top of my head. It was like a finger touch.

• 12:31Speaker 04

  It was just a sort of a shrouded figure.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  I thought I saw someone peeking out from behind the mimosa tree. And I turned and did a double take and looked at it, and it just disappeared.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  I slept with my little sister, so I kind of rolled over to see if it was her. But she was asleep. And so I thought, OK, well, maybe it was just my imagination. And I rolled back onto my side.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  And I thought it was just something that, you know, if I were to look at it, it would go away. It would be sort of in my imagination. And I look at the figure, and it's there in the mirror. It continues to stay there.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  And almost immediately felt that finger touch on the top of my head again.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  And this time, it moved from the top of my head, down my cheek, down my neck, down my shoulder, my arm, all the way down to my toes.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  As I approached the side of the lawn and I continued mowing around the tree, this shadowy figure jumped out.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  I was frozen and my heart was racing and I just could barely breathe.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  It scared me pretty badly. It was this just very terrifying feeling that came over me.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  It scared me so bad that I jumped off the riding lawnmower. And as I jumped off the mower, I looked directly at it. It just disappeared like there wasn't anything there.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  I was frozen for a minute and did not know what to do.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  So I walked over to the tree and I looked around. There were no signs of any person there. There was no signs of any animals or anything.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  And ran and told my mom that I felt like I had seen something in the mirror.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  There was uncertainty as to what I'm seeing. Am I crazy? And really not knowing how to talk about it to anyone either.

• 14:44Speaker 04

  And she pretty quickly brushed it off and told me it was nothing.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  I just brushed it off. I didn't think much about it. And several months later, probably, we've probably been in the house for a year. I was dusting in the den and I felt something watching me.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  I looked to the area between the kitchen and the dining room.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  I saw a boy, an older teenage boy, standing there just looking at me.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  He had brown hair and green eyes.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  He had reddish eyebrows and several pimples on his face. He had kind of a 60s looking white button down shirt.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  It was short sleeved, blue jeans, high waisted. And he had a little brown leather belt and I could see through him. He wasn't like clear or anything like that. There was definite presence to him, but fuzzily you could see what was behind him.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  I was not scared, but I was startled by his presence in the room.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  He looks at me and he just very slowly turns and then just is no longer there.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  I just stand there thinking to myself, holy cow, my husband's never going to believe this, so I'm not going to tell him. I also didn't tell my children about this because I did not want to frighten them.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  Christine and I loved to go ride our bikes out in the driveway. We had this cool circle drive area. And there are windows all across the front of our house. And we're just playing and having a great time. As I'm driving in front of the house, I keep seeing something behind me every time I pass by the window. At some point, as I'm passing through, I stop my bike and Christine and I are talking. And I look in the window and sure enough, I see in the window my reflection. And I see the reflection of someone standing behind me.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  It was a little boy, I would say, maybe 12, 13 years old. He was wearing a white t-shirt and he was wearing blue jeans. It startled me because no one had been there and I jerked my head around to see who was there and there was no one standing behind me. So I turned back around to look in the window and it was gone.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  And I was frozen in fear and shaking. I look at Christina and I say, "I keep seeing something behind me in the window. Every time we pass by, I can see something in the reflection." And she just stared at me and her face goes pale.

• 18:19Speaker 05

  And I said, "Yeah, I've been seeing that same figure too." Stephanie and I, we just began to confide in each other about the things that we had been experiencing, but we never really said anything to Ben about it.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  We almost didn't want to have any validation outside of the two of us. We didn't want to alarm our parents, make them think that we were crazy or just making up silly stories.

• 18:54Speaker 05

  So Stephanie and I were trying to figure out what were we going to call this little boy that we kept seeing, what were we going to call him? And we kind of remembered the name that was carved in the concrete in our backyard, Gerald Thompson. And we decided, you know, that's probably who this is. And so after that, his name was Gerald.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  We were at a Christmas party at the home of one of our friends in our Sunday school. Her name was Toni. As we were visiting at the party, Toni asked me where we lived. She had lived in Bartlesville her entire life, and I had only lived here about four years. And I told her where we lived, and she said, "Oh, I think one of my friends that I went to school with lived in that house." And I said, "Oh, really?" And she said, "Yeah, I think he did." And she pulled down her yearbook, and she said, "Yeah, yeah, he did. Here's his picture right here." I just about painted.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  It was an inmemorial photograph in the yearbook. It was the boy that I saw in my house. He had the acne, the pimples. And when I saw his name, it was Gerald Thompson. I felt the blood rush to my face, and I felt like I had shrunk away and was watching everything from the other end of a tunnel. She was explaining to me what happened to him, and I listened, but my mind just kind of went on overdrive, and I felt like I couldn't hear and could barely even see anything because my heart was racing.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  When he was in high school, one day, he had a really, really bad headache, and he laid down his head on his desk. He had a brain aneurysm, and he died. I did not say a word to Toni about how this put so many pieces of this puzzle together because I felt like I was kind of a bad Christian for having seen these things and having experienced these things. But I knew then that everything that I was seeing and everything that I was experiencing

• 21:32Speaker 01

  was not a fluke, and it was all 100% real.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  And my husband, he patted me on the leg and said, "Is everything okay? You've kind of been quiet." And I said, "Oh, no, no. I was just thinking about everything that happened tonight."

• 21:52Speaker 01

  The first conversation that I had with my husband about seeing Gerald and knowing who he was was not too long after that Christmas party. Well, he argued with me about it and didn't want me to tell anybody about it.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  After I realized that this was a real person, I definitely felt more of a motherly relationship to the spirit of this child. I talked to Gerald while I was folding laundry. I would just try to talk calmly to him and say, "You know, what's going on? How are you doing? Come on in and let's have a conversation." I literally said things like that out loud to him because I wanted him to feel welcome and to feel wanted. And I was hoping that he would talk to me, to have a friend.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Gerald was very selective when he would appear to me. I was always in that room alone. When he would be around, he would just appear there, just a still figure. And very rarely would he walk toward me or away from me.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  He never spoke. He never said a word.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  There was just a feeling of very profound sadness. It worried me as a mother that there was a child because he felt...

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Because he felt like a child who needed someone. That was the feeling that I got, that he was a child looking for his mother.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  When you're a mother and a wife, you don't have a lot of things that you feel like are only yours. And I kind of felt like it was my own little secret. It was almost a special thing that I had, that nobody else had.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  I never mentioned it to the children for all the years that they lived there, including after they moved out.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  I had been moved out of the house probably 10 years. At this point, my sisters and I have all married, and we have children of our own.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  We were back visiting my parents. I was in the bathroom with my youngest daughter, and she was four years old at the time. And I was in the bathroom with her doing her hair in the morning. My sister was in there as well, putting her makeup on. And I had my daughter standing on a little stool in front of me. And just out of the blue, she said, "Mommy, who is that person standing behind us in the mirror?" My blood ran cold.

• 25:24Speaker 04

  I said, "Well, there's no one behind us. I don't see anyone in the mirror." And she said, "Mommy, look in the mirror. There's someone standing right behind us." And I looked at Christina, and she looked at me. And we did not know what to say. I kind of felt almost tears in my eyes because I was overwhelmed by it.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  I just tried to reassure her. I said, "I don't see anyone in there. I think it's okay, you know? I think maybe you're just seeing things."

• 25:57Speaker 04

  The next visit we had, we were all visiting my parents. Ben was there, Christina was there. We were sitting in the living room chatting, and my middle daughter came walking down the long hall into the living room. She looked very upset. And she kind of came to me teary-eyed, and I said, "Sweetheart, what's wrong?" And she said, "Why does that man keep jumping out from that corner every time I come down the hall?"

• 26:29Speaker 04

  And Ben and I just looked at each other.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  I did not know what to tell her. And it was very difficult for me to calm her down and to tell her, "I think maybe sweetheart, you may just be seeing things. There's nothing there."

• 26:51Speaker 04

  I had not expected my children to ever have any experiences in the home. That had not crossed my mind that I should protect them from anything going on in the house. It really took me back to when I was a little girl in the home, around four years old, and experiencing those same types of things. It felt validating in some ways, but not in the good way.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  It was Thanksgiving just a few years back. We were staying at a large cabin in Louisiana. And it was late at night and we were all just up visiting. And we started talking about our experiences in the house. And, you know, as an adult, you're removed from the situation.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  It was extremely interesting to me, especially to hear from Ben.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  It was just crazy to hear about his experiences.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  There was a tree that he liked to hang out in and jump from. There were also trees he would stand at and kind of watch us. That was something none of us had really ever shared, but we all had the same experience in the yard with that.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  I asked Stephanie, "What did he look like to you?"

• 28:20Speaker 04

  I said, "It's to me, when I see it, it's this figure wearing a white shirt and jeans." And just his eyes got just huge. I was like, "Yes, the white shirt."

• 28:33Speaker 03

  And the hair raised on my arms, because I had never told anyone that. My older sister Christina, she also experienced this thing around the mimosa tree. And as a test, I said, "Well, which mimosa tree?" And out of the five that are in our yard, she identified the right one. At that point, we realized how much we had kept from each other because we had a sense that maybe we were crazy or someone else wouldn't understand. I, for whatever reason, had become convinced that this wasn't a problem with the house, a problem with the yard.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  This was something that was attached to me, that this would be something that would follow me around, that I would never be free of it.

• 29:24Speaker 04

  I graduated high school there and I went off to college. And I remember being so scared, every new apartment that I would go to, even every dorm room. I remember waiting for that feeling to come, being scared of something happening.

• 29:40Speaker 05

  And what Stephanie said, but never anywhere have I ever felt that, except in that home that we grew up in.

• 29:51Speaker 05

  It was just kind of a release, in a way, of just being able to have those conversations with them and know it was real, it happened, and I'm not a crazy person.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  It never entered my mind that it might backfire, that I had not said anything to the children about it. That really hadn't ever crossed my mind. I really had just hoped that I was the only one.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  I think he was different with me than he was with them. I think he was much more mischievous with them. The quintessential bratty teenage boy, and just more of a presence that kind of needed a mommy when he was around me. That was the feeling that I always got around him.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Maybe it was wrong that I didn't talk to them about it. I really don't know. Rather than me trying to brush it off, thinking that I was protecting them from being frightened, when it looks like what I was doing was just acting as though I did not believe them. But you just do the best you can until you know to do better, and then you try to do better.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  I think that she probably did the right thing, because I feel like, as a kid, if she had come to me and said, "Yes, Stephanie, I see it too," I think that I would have just been more frightened. Even having my kids have experiences, I think your default mode as the parent is to try to dismiss anything that you can't explain to your kids, that you feel like you don't have any control of, you have no power to stop it. I think it's easy to just dismiss that.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  We moved out of the house about five and a half years ago. My husband didn't want to fix up that house. He wanted to move instead of fixing up that house. There was so much chaos going on in the house that I didn't think so much about Gerald at all. In fact, when we were getting ready to move, I hadn't seen him in a long time. But the house had always had a peculiar sweet smell to it. It wasn't particularly pleasant or unpleasant. It was just a peculiar sweet smell to it. That smell ramped up tremendously. And I got the emotional sense that Gerald may have felt

• 32:42Speaker 01

  that we were abandoning him as we left. I would have sold the house long ago, except my husband still has things in it. I don't know what keeps him from selling the house, but maybe the kids can kick in with some information as to why they think daddy's hanging on to that house. Even though we've been out for five and a half years, I still go to the house at least once a week. It is beginning to fade now. That smell is finally beginning to fade.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Several months ago, I went to the house and just sat in the house for an hour or something. And I just literally talked out loud to Gerald. I said, "You know, I haven't seen you in a long time. I hope you're doing okay. Can you at least let me see you to see how you're doing? I'm sorry we left and we didn't even say goodbye."

• 33:40Speaker 01

  And there was nothing. I didn't feel his presence. I actually cried because I felt like he was gone. And I should be happy about that. If there's nobody there, he would be lonely. So I don't know if he felt like there was something that I could be for him, or if he just needed some kind of comfort. I hope I was able to do that for him.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  If he is still there, I just want him to know that he wasn't abandoned. This was just a process that adults go through in moving, and that it wasn't an intentional abandonment.

• 34:41Glynn Washington?

  Big love to all of you, Susan, Ben, Christina, and Stephanie, and a shout out to Gerald, the family ghost from all of us here at The Spooked. The original score was by Renzo Goryeo. The piece was produced by Zoe Ferrigno and Chris Hambrick, with assistance from Greta Weber.

• 35:20Glynn Washington?

  Now Spooksters, thank you so much for being a part of this journey, for supporting this show, for being part of our family, the Spooked family. We appreciate you. If you have an experience that has changed your world, a story you've been wanting to tell, that you think no one will understand, will understand, tell us about it. You know there is nothing better than a Spooked story from a Spooked listener. Spooked at snapjudgment.org. You can mourn the dark side that you do spook with some Spooked gear, the T-shirt of your dreams, available right now at snapjudgment.org. And remember, if you like your storytelling

• 36:02Glynn Washington?

  to take you for a ride under the bright light of day, get the amazing, stupendous Snap Judgment podcast. It is storytelling with a beat.

• 36:24Glynn Washington?

  Spooked was created by the team that always leaves more breadcrumbs behind in the dark forest, except for Mark Wistrick. He just wanders about hoping for the best and assessment. A special thank you to our own Eliza Smith. May the shadow never find you on your next journey. Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Nusse, Leon Morimoto, Dady Kim, Renzo Gorio, Tayo Decot, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Fergno, Tiffany Deliza, Anne Ford, Greta Weber, Doug Stewart, and Isaiah Sims. The Spooked theme songs by Pat Massey Miller. My name's Ben Washington.

• 37:02Glynn Washington?

  When a door is opened, when the veil is drawn aside and the invitation extended, understand that even here you have the choice to turn back around from whence you came, to never retrace the steps that brought you to this rip in the fabric, the space between here and there. But if you proceed forward, know that the old rules are forgotten in this new place, all of them, all of them, except for just one.

• 37:35Glynn Washington?

  When you cross over, even then, never, ever, never, ever, never, never, ever, never, ever, never, turn out the lights.