The Night Whistler - Classic

Cheryl and her kids move into a new home, and notice a mysterious presence. First they pretend it doesn’t exist. Then, they try to befriend it. And finally, they run from it.

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

• 0:01Glynn Washington?

  If there really is a line between us and them, when do we go to their side? And why do they cross to ours?

• 0:16Glynn Washington?

  From Snap Judgment's underground lair, listening to Spooked. Stay tuned.

• 0:35Speaker 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.

• 1:06Glynn Washington?

  Sometimes, when I can't find my own darkness, I chase it. I seek it out at the bottom of a glass of Irish whiskey.

• 1:20Glynn Washington?

  Neat. And if I still can't find that dark place, well, I just try another glass, and another, and then maybe another. Still, it will come, that dark cloud, no question. Bad man, meet bad space. Yes, this is gonna hurt in the morning. So why am I still reaching for the bottle? You may wonder. Sure, I know better. But better doesn't know me.

• 1:57Glynn Washington?

  Searching out my personal nightmare, because in that darkness, things are clearer, more distinct. I see their faces in that shadow.

• 2:14Glynn Washington?

  Laughing, mocking, waiting, all this. All of this because I never want my ghosts to sneak up on me. When instead, I can sneak up on them.

• 2:39Glynn Washington?

  From WNYC Studios and Snap Judgment's Underground Layer, my name is Ben Washington. Hunt your own demons, not the other way around. Spook starts now.

• 3:17Glynn Washington?

  So, we begin with Cheryl Langford. Cheryl moves with her three kids into a new apartment with her bag of clothes, boxes of dishes, and a can-do attitude. They were ready to face whatever the next chapter of life brought them with a smile. But you have to be careful out there, Spook listeners. Sometimes you can be too friendly because what you don't know might hurt you. Spooked.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  My, my father was extremely intelligent and extremely controlling. He was used to being the boss at work and he was the boss at home. He wasn't a mean man, he wasn't a cruel man, but he was the boss. And I think because I got married so early, I was 20. I chose a man that was a great deal like my father and my ex-husband was very controlling.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Finally, after 21 years, I had, I guess, the impetus to go ahead with divorce.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  You know, at this point, I didn't even know who I was, or what I was, or how strong or weak I was. My life, up until that time, had been defined as a wife. We had three children before I was 25. And I was 40 something years old, and it was time to find out who I was.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  To keep everyone anonymous, we'll call my daughter Baby Girl. She was still in high school. For my son, that still lived at home. He was about 19. Call him Little Child. And then we had a friend, and he was around 19, who needed a place to live for a while. He'd gotten kicked out of his house. We'll call him Borrowed Child. Baby Girl and Little Kid and Borrowed Child. That made up our family.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  So, found a job fairly quickly. I'm a registered nurse. And started looking for a house to rent. And we settled on one. This house really was what I thought would have been a perfect place for our kind of bruised and battered family, because it was clean, it had nice curtains. It was completely empty of furniture, except for this one bedroom upstairs. It just had a chair and a single bed. It was very stark.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  That room in that bedroom upstairs was the only one that... There was a lock on the outside of the bedroom door, the sliding bolt. It seemed extremely odd to me. But we all got moved in, got our rooms settled. Borrowed Child got the room with the lock. And my other son took the other bedroom upstairs. And Baby Girl slept with me. And we kind of settled into our routine fairly quickly.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  I usually went to bed fairly early and much earlier than anyone else. My bedroom was isolated at the end of a hall. The kids would all be in the downstairs area watching television, doing homework, whatever. But one night, I was lying in bed and I began hearing somebody whistling. It was very soft. It was no tune I had ever heard, just somebody kind of playing around, just mindless. I thought, well, it's coming from the television.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Okay, I guess I'm gonna have to get up and close the door, do something. As I became more aware of it, it got louder and more distinct. It was very clear. And I suddenly perceived that this was coming from the corner of my bedroom. My brain finally focused in and said, there's somebody in here. I was on my side, away from that corner. I turned my head very slowly that way.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  And that's the first time I saw what I would call a black... It was a mist. It was the height of a person. That was, I think, more disturbing than the whistling. And it was definitely visible from the rest of the room because the light was shining in through the hall door.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  But as soon as I turned my head, it went poof, and it was gone, and the whistling stopped.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  It didn't come back that night.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  This would not happen every single night. I think I would have run down the street if it had. But after, you know, a few days, I would have some more whistling. Each night, when I would hear the whistling, I would turn my head very slightly because I really didn't want to see anything.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  And I would see the mist. And that instant that I turned my head, it would disappear, the whistling would stop.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Sometimes I would feel like somebody had walked up against my bed, at the foot of the bed, toward the side, and was nudging it. It would shake. And it would shake enough that it felt like somebody's knees were bumping the bed.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  I just didn't know. It didn't make any sense to me. It didn't... My mind is logical as a nurse, and you've got to have black and white. You have a cause and effect. And there was no cause, just an effect. It was almost like somebody was teasing me.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Finally, I decided we need to sit down and talk. We need to have a family conference. Also, by this time,

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Borrowed Child had started sleeping on the living room couch. And he would cover his whole body up, like a mummy, wrapped up, head and all, in a sheet. So I sat him all on the couch. I got in front of him, and I said, "Let's talk." I said, "There's something going on. Borrowed Child, you're sleeping on my couch. You have a good room up there."

• 10:40Speaker 02

  And this six-foot, like, one guy, who is just a tough guy, he actually started to cry.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  And I said, "What, why are you crying?" And he said, "There's something upstairs. There's something up there. And I think somebody's getting into the house." I said, "Why would you think that?" And he said, "Because I'm being poked." He said, "It's always around 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning around there. I'll be on my side asleep and I'll feel something poke my shoulder." For him, it was almost every night. He would get poked and it would get harder and harder and harder. He had been poked one night. He sat up in bed. And as he was sitting up, he felt his covers moving.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  And he looked down and the bedspread, the comforter, and the sheet were slowly being pulled down his leg. And then it just shot off the bed. Flew across the room and just crumpled up in this big pile. He was terrified. One night, he looked up and he actually saw a man standing in his bedroom door. He was leaning around the door frame, looking at him. And he said, "Was it an older gentleman? He had on like a fedora? And he thought he either had on a suit coat or his pajamas."

• 12:44Speaker 02

  And he said, "For all purposes, this, this was a real person." He said, "It wasn't a mist. You couldn't see through it. It was a human." And he said, "That just about did him in. It darted back. The man darted back into the hall." And our old child got up eventually to go look. He could see a black mist walking down the hall, going toward middle child's room. It faded from the feet up and slowly faded as it went through middle child's door. It just passed through the door.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  He went over to middle child's door and he could hear him snoring. And he knew that my son was okay. And he wasn't gonna open the door because he didn't want to see anymore. But that's when he started sleeping downstairs. He said, "That was enough. I wasn't gonna sleep up there anymore." So I told him that after that, he could sleep on the couch as much as he wanted to. That's when we all, the other kids, all chimed in and they all started talking about things that had happened to them. And they had been happening really from the beginning, but nobody said anything.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  I wasn't the only one that had their bed shake. Middle child had, he had an ancient bed, a big oak sleigh bed. And he was sitting there on his bed, reading, and his whole bed started shaking violently. He jumped off of it and turned around to look at it. And he said it still shook. Nothing else in the room was shaking, just his bed. And there was nobody there. We talked it over. And we have a funny sarcastic family. And they started talking about this old cheesy movie we had seen years before. And the spook in it was named Bob. And so we nicknamed our guy Bob.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  And that's how he got his name in the beginning. This was a very cookie cutter neighborhood. The mailboxes for a group of homes would be on a post in a central location. And there were probably 20 mailboxes at each one. So I would trot down there every now and then and get the mail. That one particular day, I did not look at who the mail was addressed to. I figured if it's in my box, it's mine. I ripped open this particular envelope and I noticed that the slip inside was the strange kind of pinky-orange. It was very outstanding. I thought, "Oh my, have I forgotten to pay something?" Because that looked suspiciously like a bill. I actually read part of it before I realized, "This can't be mine.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  This is from a mortgage company." And I saw it was addressed to our landlady.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  I had met the lady. She had actually come over to the house one day. And she was an elderly lady. She had had all the joints in her hands and fingers replaced, which sounds awfully painful. A very frail lady.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  This notice was from her mortgage company that she was a month behind on her mortgage payment. I realized that her house payment was much higher than what she was charging me for rent. She had told me she was, had had financial problems. I knew she was living in an apartment, but I looked at what she owed every month versus what I paid. And I thought, how strange. Why would you put yourself in that situation? It just seemed so odd.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  One day, we were sitting at home, and we were all talking about, kind of fussing about Bob bugging us. And my daughter said, you know what? I'm gonna call our landlady. And I said, yeah, I don't know about that. She said, no, I'm gonna call her. I'm gonna do it. And you'd have to know Baby Girl. She's pretty headstrong. So she called her, and we were all sitting there. And Baby Girl said, I just want to ask you if anybody's ever died here. And I thought the lady would either hang up on her or say, well, you know, you're nuts. And, but she said, yes, somebody has died in the house. My husband died there.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Of course, Baby Girl's mouth fell open. And she said, what was his name? And that's when Baby Girl's mouth really dropped. And she said, well, thank you very much, and hung up.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  She was very pale, and she said, Mom, this fellow that died here, his name was Robert.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  And we just sat in stunned silence.

• 18:02Glynn Washington?

  Oh, it ain't over. It's never over. The stunning conclusion, when spook continues in just a moment. Stay tuned.

• 18:38Glynn Washington?

  When we left the story, Cheryl called her landlady and asked some snooping questions about the history of her apartment. And Cheryl learned that her landlady's husband had actually died there, right there in the apartment.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  I later did speak to the lady at length. And she was very talkative one day, I don't know why. But she said that they both had been working. They were getting on up in years, but they were still healthy and working. And he became ill and progressed fairly quickly. She never told me what was wrong with him. But he became one more confused, so she started getting sitters for him to sit with him while she worked.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  And she said eventually they went through all of their insurance and then all of their savings. So they were very desperate, she said there was nobody to help. When she couldn't afford sitters any longer, she still had to work, she still had to get groceries to, you know. That's when she started locking him in his room.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  She said she really had no choice. She was afraid he would go out the door, wander off, fall down the stairs. And she thought it would be best to just keep him locked in his room. She said he only had a bed and a chair. He had a TV. But she would keep that sliding bolt locked when she went to work. That's why the lock was on the outside of the door. So he would spend hours in that room alone, confused and not knowing probably where she was or why he was alone. You wondered just how, was he frightened? Was he? He probably wondered, why can't I get out of this room? What's going on?

• 20:46Speaker 02

  It had to have been traumatic. I remember that when I first moved there, I had gone around and I had locked all the windows. Upstairs, the windows slid in the tracks. And the track in that room was full of pills. Every track was just like a little chitchat train, just full of capsules. I thought, well, there's somebody been in this room that was sick. Being a nurse for so long, I knew somebody's hiding their medicine. And somebody doesn't want to take it. They're suspicious or they're confused.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  And I think Bob was just putting his pills up there. I have wondered if he didn't die alone. She did say he did die in the house. I've had patients that died alone, and it's got to be one of the most frightening things in the world. If he was alone when he died, and maybe that's enough to keep you here on this earth, if your death is traumatic enough.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  I think she left because I think after Bob passed away, I think he was bugging her too. I think he was still there in that room.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  As things progressed, he was still there. He was still turning on lights and all the faucets would be left on. I finally had to fuss at him one day and I just yelled out, "Bob, stop it. You've got to stop this." I was almost crying and he did. He stopped. So through time, on occasion, we would all just have to say, "Stop, Bob. Stop it." And it was nice to know that you could, you know, reprimand Bob and we just got used to him. He was part of our life.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  After a year with the lease, I knew that I really didn't want to stay there again. As time got closer and closer, I got everything ready. I got movers to come and everything. I think when Bob realized, because Bob always knew what we were up to, I think he realized we were leaving and he got angry.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  I don't know if it's because he thought, "I'm losing my other family and I've already lost one. Now these people are gonna go away." Things just started to, they just seemed to ramp up.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  I started packing. Lights started coming back on, full force, worse than ever before. The water started coming back on. The dishwasher even turned on one night and I never had used the dishwasher. Borrowed child saw him again down in the den one night and that frightened him. He didn't want to come in the house. And then the worst was the day that we actually moved.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  The Packers had left. They had emptied out the whole house. My son, he was taking his posters out to his car. He was walking down the steps and I was in the kitchen. I heard this horrendous crash and screams. And I ran into the den and he was all crumpled up on the landing. Glass and frames everywhere, torn posters. And he said, "Mom, something just pushed me."

• 24:37Speaker 02

  He said, "Right before you got to that last small landing at the bottom of the stairs, he felt two big hands on the back of his bat." He said it was very forceful and pushed him. And, you know, at this point, after a year, I didn't question him. I knew it was Bob. And I said, "Well, let's get you cleaned up and bandaged." And he wouldn't come back in the house. My daughter was upstairs and she was vacuuming that room. And she came suddenly. She just was hurdling down the stairs, screaming to get out, "Just get out. Get out now."

• 25:22Speaker 02

  And, well, we did. I picked up the phone and we ran outside into the driveway. She was shaking. And my daughter's pretty tough. And she said, "Mom, you didn't hear that." And I said, "No, I didn't hear anything except the vacuum cleaner," which she had left going upstairs. She said, "Something growled at me. It came from every corner of that room." And she said, "It was loud. It was a guttural sound, but it was not an animal."

• 25:58Speaker 02

  And right after she told me what had happened, the phone rang. I had taken the cordless phone with me. It was my mom in East Texas, about 90 miles away. And she was very frightened. She said, "What happened? What's wrong?" She said, "If you had not answered the phone, I was sending the police out there." She said, "I have never had a feeling of dread in my life." And she said, "I felt like something horrible had just happened to all of you."

• 26:30Speaker 02

  That night, I went to the new place. My kids had set up my bed for me and made it up. And I slept better than I had slept in a year. It just felt like such a weight was gone. I think I think about Bob at least weekly. You know, I think about my divorce and then I think about Bob. Bob comes up a lot. I think in different manners. I think we were both trying to gain some control. I just don't think he knew where to turn. He didn't.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Maybe he didn't understand death and didn't understand why people weren't paying attention to him. So he would say, hey, look here, here I am. I think we all want to be noticed one way or another in our life.

• 27:53Glynn Washington?

  Thank you to Cheryl Lang for sharing your story with Spook. Well, the link to Cheryl's memoir, Hot Dog Wars: Family Skeletons and a Ghost, at spookpodcast.org.

• 28:12Glynn Washington?

  Please understand, this is but one path. The journey is not over. Amazing storytelling under the full light of day available right now at our sister podcast, Snap Judgment. Spook was brought to you by the team that never sees their reflection in the mirror and never casts a shadow. Mark Ristich, Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Erica Lance. The original theme song for Spook was composed and performed by Pat C.D. Miller.

• 28:46Glynn Washington?

  The original score was written, composed, and performed by Leon Morimoto. And as this curtain between the living and the dead is drawn for the all-hallowed eve, and you hear the pleas from the other side, begging, whispering, threatening, all for just to taste, just the memory of what went before, you want to help because you're a good person. But whatever you do, don't be led to your destruction. Please heed my call and listen to me when I say, never, ever, never, never, ever, never, never turn out the lights.