Spooked LIVE: Dr. Ray Christian

As a little boy in Richmond Virginia, raising pigeons, Ray Christian made a friend with the same hobby. But there was something mysterious about Ray’s new pal.

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

• 0:07Glynn Washington?

  Over the river and through the woods To grandmother's house we go. What's in the pot? Whatever she caught It's best that we don't know.

• 0:23Glynn Washington?

  Listen 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 face

• 1:16Glynn Washington?

  the darkest 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.

• 1:58Glynn Washington?

  Okay, so after the sound of the call to prayer fades, outside a tiny village, I'm walking down this path. To either side is jungle. Critters bark overhead, it's hot, it's lush. I do not know this place. Rural Indonesia. It's just me by myself. Though I see a kid, maybe eleven or twelve, he's grinning. He says, he says something. Then he starts walking into the jungle, motions me to follow him. Suhhh. Trail behind a strange boy in the woods. I trip after him over stumps of branches. What?

• 2:42Glynn Washington?

  I'm about to turn back. When I hear voices, music. We turn left, right. And now I understand where all the village menfolk land. Cut out of the foliage emerges a whole secret world. Dudes squatting around circles, pressing fistfuls of cash from one person's hand to the next, smoking, eating, laughing. All of it framed by rows and rows of wicker cages.

• 3:20Glynn Washington?

  Inside each cage, beautiful, multicolored roosters stare back out, occasionally tipping their heads back to scream. These are our gladiators. They will fight to the death in the middle of that circle. And the boy, he's talking to me again, he's pointing, he's saying that I should pick one of the birds? No, no, he's saying I should pick this bird, his bird. I'm guessing one he raised. And a man, maybe his father nods behind him.

• 4:01Glynn Washington?

  I kneel down to peer inside the cage

• 4:06Glynn Washington?

  at the most glorious animal I've ever seen. Proud, his plumes and explosion of black, red, green. His feathers burn, translucent, blinks back at me. Eyes brilliant, alien, fierce.

• 4:26Glynn Washington?

  A winner.

• 4:28Glynn Washington?

  The boy knows absolutely he has me. He smiles, he holds out his hand. I shove money into it. I turn back toward the cage transfixed because soon, very, very soon, the fight will begin.

• 4:56Glynn Washington?

  Spookstars.

• 5:01Glynn Washington?

  Now.

• 5:52Glynn Washington?

  Oh, yes, it is on. We are here at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Los Angeles. A full coven of spooksters wait in the shadows, not knowing who will take this stage and share their tale. They're gonna be delighted. Because I've got a secret to say. I am about to introduce Spooked Royalty. A voice you know and you love. Dear friend of mine. Get ready. Dr. Raymond Christian. Spooked. Live.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I was about 12 years old. And it was one of the hottest days I could remember. Just hanging out with the boys. A group of six or seven of us. A combination of which changed frequently. A hot, oppressive day. Just hanging outside when we were out of school. The heat radiating from the pavement. Tar sticking to our shoes. But there was one sanctuary for us from the heat. And that was the air-conditioned funeral home.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  That was located on the corner between the two blocks where we played. You'd go inside that funeral home in that air conditioning with our skin all moist. And you'd be cooled off instantly and refreshed. Now, in our community, it was not unusual for people to come to the funeral home to view bodies of people they didn't even know.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  They did so out of curiosity. They did so to verify.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Is that the man who was killed trying to rob somebody? Is that the kid who was killed on the bicycle? Now, the people who worked in the funeral home, they knew that on occasion, us kids would come inside just to cool off.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  And they would allow this on occasion. But they had just one rule. You must sit in the viewing room.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Which meant, we had to look at the bodies. Not something we wanted to do, but all of us knew the rules of the game. And we would sit there and close our eyes for the fifteen minutes or so that we were allowed to be inside.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  One day, we're outside and we're playing kickball. And I kicked this ball all the way across the street, and it's about to sail over this fence, where this vicious dog stayed inside. And every time people got close to that fence or near it, he would snarl and snap and try to attack it. And as the ball was about to head over the fence, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, this kid shows up and dives and just slaps the ball down and saves the day.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Now, none of us knew who this kid was. How is it that he seemed so familiar? He was like one of us, but yet, he was none of us. And that's the first time we met him.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  And he went inside the funeral home like he had done it many times before. After that, he started to show up all the time. But none of us could ever recall him ever being there when we started the game. It always seemed as if we'd be playing and running and going around the corner on our bikes, and all of a sudden, he would just appear.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  There was always one more of us.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Now, the fact that he didn't speak, wouldn't answer our questions, was not so unusual to us. We lived in a community where there were lots of people who came from rural areas we said the country, who had disabilities, both adults and children alike. In fact, I probably knew a half a dozen kids who didn't speak just like this. He was a skinny kid, had a small Afro, about two inches. He wore a shirt that he didn't button up, cut-off pants, tennis shoes with no socks. He was a different kind of kid. One day, I'm outside,

• 11:28Speaker 01

  and I'm looking at pigeons flying around the funeral home. And I'm out with the kid. And without speaking, it seemed as if he said to me, "I like pigeons." "I like pigeons." Which was shocking to me. So I took him to my house, to my backyard, where I raised pigeons. And like a lot of poor kids, I made my pigeon coop out of discarded lumber, pieces of cardboard,

• 12:12Speaker 01

  and a couple of old TVs that I had gutted out. The kid was in my backyard, and I could tell the way he looked at the pigeons, the way he touched them, the way he cooed, "Coo, coo", to calm them down. I knew that this kid, he loved pigeons.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Well, for me, I had been raising pigeons since I was about eight years old. And probably what I enjoyed about them the most was, I don't know, the weird way that they used to move around, the way they pecked at the ground, but probably more than anything, it was the fact that you could let them go and they would fly away and come back to the home that you made for them. That's where the magic was. But the kind of pigeons that we were really interested in was a type of pigeon that almost stopped in mid-flight

• 13:28Speaker 01

  and flipped. We'd call this rolling. And some of the better pigeons, they would flip and flip and flip and flip till they'd almost hit the ground and fly right back up. And us kids, we would be so, so excited by this. And every time we got exposed to someone who had rollers or somehow was connected to rollers and we'd see them in the sky, we would all get together, we'd stand out in the streets and we would holler and scream to excite the birds to get them to roll even more. "Come on, come on, come on!" And we would scream and we would holler, "Come on, come on!"

• 14:08Speaker 01

  But unfortunately, none of us ever acquired rollers. They had to be passed on. And for us poor kids, rollers were pretty much out of our financial reach. And after this, me and the kids started hanging around together all summer.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Well, one day, me and the kid were taking a walk through one of the back alleys. And as was the habit in our neighborhood, big old vicious dogs would always seem to take over an alley. And they would chase you until they get to the end of the alley and they would stop. And that's how it was this day. We're walking through the alley and a big old dog take after us. And we run and run and run and run and run. And we finally, we get out to the end of the alley and woo-hoo-hoo. We made it. We made it. I'm so excited. We just did something together. We boys now, we experienced this crazy thing. I know you've got something to say. And I bend over and I'm coughing and I'm laughing.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  And I look around to see what he thinks about this crazy thing we just went through. And

• 15:27Speaker 01

  he's not there.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Now,

• 15:36Speaker 01

  I'm starting to feel funny about this kid.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  He shows up the next day.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Now, I've got to ask. "Man, where'd you go?

• 15:52Speaker 01

  What happened to you yesterday? What happened to you in the alley? How could you have gotten away? There was no way to go? What happened?"

• 16:02Speaker 01

  And he gives me nothing.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Sometime later, we're taking a walk.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  But this walk is different.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  He's taking me to a place that I think he's trying to guide me to. We walk four or five blocks. And I think maybe he lives around here somewhere.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  And we wind up in front of this old house.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  The house had been burned and abandoned for several years.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  And as we standing there in front of the house,

• 17:07Speaker 01

  I remember,

• 17:09Speaker 01

  this is the house that that kid got killed in a fire couple of years ago.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Now,

• 17:21Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm starting to feel scared.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  And I look over at the kid, and he's just staring at the house.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  And I say, "You ain't that kid that got killed in the fire?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  I'm not believing this." But I feel like I can't move. And the kid is just staring at the house. And I feel like he's telling me without speaking,

• 17:55Speaker 01

  "Go inside the house."

• 18:05Speaker 01

  I walk toward the house.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  I start up the stairs.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  When I reached the top of the stairs,

• 18:18Speaker 01

  where the roof has collapsed, over in the corner, illuminated by the light coming in through a piece of broken glass, I see in the corner,

• 18:33Speaker 01

  pigeons. There are pigeons in the corner. And wait a minute, this is a pair of pigeons. And they got squabs, baby pigeons. And these aren't just any pigeons. They're rollers. These are rollers. There are rollers up here. And so I reach up to them and I grab them and I put them inside my arm and they're all excited and flapping around. And so I start to cool, to calm them down. Cool. Cool.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  And they relax. And I'm happy. And I'm not scared anymore. I've got them in my arms. I want to get outside. I want to show the kid, these rollers, how amazing is this? And I get outside.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  And he isn't there. Now, I know, he knew I loved rollers. And I know, and I believe, he wanted me to have those rollers. And when his babies were ready to pass on, he was ready to pass on. And I raised another six or seven generations of rollers, right up until I joined the army.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  And I passed them on to another kid, which was the tradition.

• 20:22Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, Dr. Raymond Christian. Check out Ray's podcast, What's Ray Saying? And to find out all things Ray, check out our show notes. And I want to thank the LA's team for welcoming Spooked, John Cone, Becca Stume, Kristen Payne, the Orpheum team, what a glorious, what a beautiful theater. Ryan Davis and Sarah Rose Leonard at KQED. The original live score was written and performed by Doug Stewart and Brajine Murphy. Recording was mixed by Miles Lassie.

• 21:06Glynn Washington?

  Now, have you ever turned a knob, turned a page, turned a key, turned towards something or turned away from that which should not be? If so, I want to hear from you. Let me know. Spook at snapjudgment.org, because there's nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. Spook at snapjudgment.org. At KQED Studios, there is a floor that has no elevator. You must first walk the stairs. From the stairs, there's a turn. From the turn, there's a door. From the door, there's a gate. Go back.

• 21:48Glynn Washington?

  Do not venture there, for that is where Spook dwells. Run away, because if you seek to find Spook, Spook may seek to find you. Spook is brought to you by the team that makes sure all the exits are clearly marked, except for Mark Ristich. He locks everything, so that whatever happens, no one's going nowhere. There's Davy Kim, Zoe Fergino, Eric Ganes, Elliot Lightfoot, Rista Dodge, Taylor Decot, Miles Lassie, Doug Stewart. The Spook theme song is by Pat Massey Miller. Special incantation from Spook Legal reads that no Snap Studios content may be used

• 22:33Glynn Washington?

  for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission. Unting Spook, the union represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO Local 51. My name is Glynn Washington. And when you explore ancient cultures, one thing emerges again and again and again. From Central America to Central Africa, from the Mediterranean to the Magic Isles, we have

• 23:09Glynn Washington?

  been and we remain envious, jealous of birds and their sacred ability to fly. The shamans, the seers, they often ride falcons, ride eagles, not just to explore the now, but to glimpse the future. We covet their vision for our own. We seek to own what we can never own. How dare they extend wings to fly away, leaving us behind? They can chase the sun itself, so that the world never grows dark.

• 23:47Glynn Washington?

  The best we can do,

• 23:50Glynn Washington?

  the very best we can do,

• 23:53Glynn Washington?

  is to never, ever, never, ever, never, never, ever, never, turn out the lights.