Lunger's Row - Classic

Some folks live in haunted houses. The ghosts get cozy, they move in and they don’t move out. But what if your whole neighborhood is haunted?

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

• 0:02Glynn Washington?

  Hush little baby, don't say a word. Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird. But if that mockingbird don't sing... You're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned.

• 0:24Speaker 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.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Hello, I'm Chris Richards, general manager at Saffron Volkswagen Richmond. I'm here to announce an exciting new program that I want you to listen to. Here's my friend Happy.

• 1:01Speaker 03

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• 1:28Glynn Washington?

  Write this down. Write this down. I wake up, 3:47 a.m. I'm frantically feeling around in the dark for a pen, some paper, some light. Write this down, huh? Huh? What am I supposed to write down? Something about floating? This dream so crystal clear just a moment ago, it's fading, it's... Remember the feather? I'm tripping. I know I'm straight tripping. Need to quit with the late-night cocktails, so stupid. I go back to sleep.

• 2:09Glynn Washington?

  But then the next day, at work, I'm staring out of the window. I don't see a bird, just a dark feather falling from the tree. And before the phone rings, I know it's going to ring. I know who it's going to be on the other side, and I know exactly what she is gonna say. Spook starts. Now.

• 3:09Glynn Washington?

  So we begin. Caroline Lou, she just got her art degree and she's moving in with her boyfriend Will and his baby girl. Her new home is in beautiful, sunny, always clear sky Albuquerque, New Mexico. But there are some ominous clouds on the horizon. Spooked.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  So I pull up to the driveway and I get out of my car. And I'm walking up the entryway to my porch. And I notice this perfectly dead bird just lying in the front of my house. And so I like look down at the bird and I notice like, you know, nothing was really wrong with it, like the beak was intact, the wings were intact. How did this dead bird die? It seemed as if it had just fallen out of the sky and was gently placed in front of our house.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  We have a dog. He's a like three-year-old Basset Hound, Blue Heeler mix, named Oreo. And so he spent a lot of his afternoons outside in the backyard. So I went outside to go give him some water and food. I notice another perfectly dead bird on the back patio of our house.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  It was just like the first bird. Perfectly still, everything intact, the wings, the beak, the feet. Nothing was alarming about it, and that was the scary part. You know, how are these perfectly intact birds dying? And being left unharmed? You know, no one's touching it. No animals are trying to get at it. And Oreo definitely didn't kill it. I opened my computer. I started Googling. If you find a dead bird, what does that mean?

• 5:39Speaker 04

  And so I read maybe like three or four articles before it really became apparent that dead bird is an omen. A dead bird near your home is something bad. It's something evil. It's something that you should watch out for. So one of my favorite aspects of our house is the front porch area. It's screened in and it's large enough for us to have two rocking chairs out front. I really enjoy sitting on the porch and really looking at these houses across the street.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  One night, I went out to our porch. I sit down in the rocking chair and I notice there is like a bulldozer. There's taping going up around the house.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  And I start to realize, oh, they might be getting rid of this house. I felt this sadness inside of me.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  Because it's a part of our neighborhood. And it didn't make sense to me why this, you know, really nice looking house had to be bulldozed.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  They demolished it and they had to level the ground. There was this kind of like uneasiness in the air. And I didn't know if it was just because like my routine of looking at the house was gone, or if it was like they had completely changed the energy field of, you know, like the neighborhood or whatever.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  And then other things started happening in the house.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  So I just got home and I'm walking up my entryway and I walk through my porch and I open our front door.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  And there's this like stillness in the house that I notice. But I can't figure out where it's from. So I walk straight into the living room. And right off of the living room to the right of the house is the second bedroom, which I use as my studio space.

• 8:20Speaker 04

  I open the door to my studio and that's when I notice another perfectly dead bird.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  Lying on the floor in the middle of my studio.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  I text Will because he has got to know how this bird got into my studio.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Maybe he left a window open and then closed it before he went to work.

• 8:57Speaker 04

  So I text Will and I ask him about the bird and he's confused. He has no idea. He asks, "Why would I put a dead bird in your room?

• 9:10Speaker 04

  Where would I get a dead bird? Would I poison a bird? That's weird. I would not do that." So as I'm racking my brain, trying to really understand, I'm also the most upset by it because it feels like the bad omen is directed at me.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  Because I found the first bird. I found the second bird. And now this third bird is lying directly in the one space that is truly mine.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  My studio space.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  Every time I paint in my studio, I try my hardest to not let my cats in with me. I have two fat orange cats, Minnie and Winston. Every single time that my cats actually ended up getting inside the room, they would just run to the closet door and they would just be perched there. It was always like they stood there and stared at it as if they knew something was inside of there that I didn't see.

• 10:36Glynn Washington?

  This episode is sponsored by Vinted. Imagine opening my closet, looking for a shirt, and I see that jacket. That jacket, that jacket I got for that party I never went to three years ago. That jacket, it's still there, it's still mocking me. Well, it was still there. Because then I stopped and I reached for my phone because Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes that you no longer wear. Listing on Vinted is quick and simple. Once an item sells, Vinted creates the prepaid shipping label for you. And Vinted has no seller fees, meaning you keep every dollar you earn.

• 11:19Glynn Washington?

  And I could get a little more room in my closet, you know, for that next jacket. Give your clothes a second life with Vinted. Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. No seller fees, so you keep everything you earn.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  I notice Will has already gone to work, the baby is in daycare. I have the whole day in front of me to be in my studio and paint.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  Immediately walk to my studio and I notice that the door is slightly ajar. I go inside my studio. My big, heavy table that I put in front of my closet door is now in the center of my room and the closet door is wide open.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  So I immediately text Will, "Why did you move my table? Why were you in my studio? What was the point of moving everything? Nothing was touched. Every, some, like, did you need something?"

• 12:44Speaker 04

  And so he tells me that he noticed that the door to my studio was left open when he left for work. But maybe I left it open for a reason, so he didn't want to touch it.

• 13:03Speaker 04

  Instantly, I felt scared and I felt panicked and I felt watched.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  And I felt two women energies, like it was me versus them.

• 13:27Speaker 04

  Despite all of the scary things that were happening inside of the home, I still tried my best to make the home my home.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  It was Saturday and a bunch of friends came over and we're all hanging outside in our backyard. The grill's going, baby's outside having a good time. I realized, oh, it's time for baby's nap.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  I'm like, alright guys, I'll be right back. I'm gonna go put baby down. So I bring baby inside, put her down, and I go back outside to join everyone for the barbecue.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  Soon we realized that baby had pushed aside the curtains,

• 14:24Speaker 04

  was standing in her crib, staring outside at us, and she starts screaming.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  At that moment, as she's looking at us and screaming, the light on the garage starts glowing super bright.

• 14:53Speaker 04

  And Will and I are super freaked out.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  Everyone's looking at us like, guys, it's just a light bulb. What's the big deal?

• 15:07Speaker 04

  I tell them, that's not a battery powered light bulb. That's an electricity light bulb. And there is no electricity that goes out to that.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  There is no possible way that that light bulb could be turned on right now.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  Everyone is feeling a little bit spooked.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  So Baby's still screaming. The light is still glowing brightly. I say, okay, you guys, I'm gonna go inside. I'm gonna close the curtains and I'm gonna put her down for her nap.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  So I go inside. I see how Baby's doing. She's okay. So I put her down. I closed the curtains. And I walk back outside.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  The second that I come back outside,

• 16:01Speaker 04

  everyone is looking at me. Their eyes are wide, their mouths are open. And everyone's dead quiet.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  And I'm like, what just happened? Why are you just looking at me?

• 16:18Speaker 04

  And Will tells me, he's like, when you went in there to put Baby down, I told everyone, oh, just watch. When she closes the blinds and puts her down, so Baby's not staring at us anymore, the light's gonna go off. Just watch. You know, he was just joking though. The second that I put Baby down and closed the blinds, the light turned off.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  I am so freaked out by that.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  So I go to my friend's house for a barbecue. There's like six or seven of us there and we're all sitting around the bonfire. And I start telling everyone about all of the scary things that were happening inside of the home.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  One of my friends said, "Well, that makes sense because of the area that you're in."

• 17:30Speaker 04

  "That area of Albuquerque is one of the most haunted areas in the whole city."

• 17:42Speaker 04

  "You're next to all these different hospitals that used to carry and hold and house tuberculosis patients."

• 17:54Speaker 04

  "Back in the day, this one to two mile stretch really became a dumping ground for unmarked graves all across this part of town." "Then in the 50s and 60s or so, when like development came, "they bought up this land and just built these houses on top of it without really understanding like the history of it."

• 18:21Speaker 04

  "And she started telling me about how she lived a couple of blocks down."

• 18:35Speaker 04

  "She was telling me that one night, she was walking home."

• 18:43Speaker 04

  "It was super late at night and in Albuquerque, there's not a lot of city lights. The streets are very dark."

• 18:53Speaker 04

  The whole sky is illuminated with stars, with planets. It's absolutely beautiful. But it's also slightly terrifying if you're walking home late at night by yourself. My friend Jackie was walking home. And her house was kind of on a hill. And at the very base of the hill was this freestanding wall. It stood up pretty tall, 10 feet.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  She said as she was walking up to her house, she noticed that there was a figure just sitting at the very top of the wall. And so she stops. And she calls out to the figure. Hello? Who are you? Do you need something? And the figure is still sitting there. And she tells me it's a woman figure. She had long black hair.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  She was wearing a dress. And she was just sitting there. And so my friend Jackie calls out again. Hello there? What are you doing? Do you need help? At that moment Jackie said that that woman stood up and like turned around and like stared at her with these like piercing eyes. And she just jumped off from the top of the ledge.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  And then just ran off into the night. At an alarmingly fast speed.

• 21:10Speaker 04

  She knew it wasn't human.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  After that, she kind of just ran back inside of her house and pretended that didn't even happen.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  After Jackie finished her story, our other friend Anna chimed in and she said, "I've heard of that ghost."

• 21:44Speaker 04

  "I've heard people running into that ghost before and seeing that same woman, the long, dark hair, the dress, the piercing eyes."

• 21:56Speaker 04

  She was saying how this woman just walks around that area late at night and is seen by so many different people. She said, "I saw that exact same ghost. That ghost came to my house." And once she starts talking, another person says, "That ghost is very common in Albuquerque legend. That one is seen throughout the decades."

• 22:52Speaker 04

  After hearing all of their stories,

• 22:56Speaker 04

  I was feeling very scared.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  And I felt good that it wasn't just all in my head and that, most importantly, that there was a history, an understanding of the area and why it was so haunted.

• 23:26Speaker 04

  So as I'm sitting there in my living room, I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw some people had posted these articles. "The community college found several skeletal remains." I clicked on the link and it was the house across the street. Everything kind of started to make a little bit more sense. So I'm in bed, watching the romantic comedy and I hear the buzzer for the laundry just went off.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  So I pause my movie and I walk into the kitchen, into the laundry room, when I hear my movie start playing again.

• 24:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'd love to.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  And I think, huh, that's weird. I definitely paused that, right? So I walk back through the kitchen, walk through the dining room, back into the room, press pause on the movie again. I make sure it's paused, the movie's not playing. So I walk back into the laundry room, ready to switch the load again. And I hear the movie playing. I'm like, feeling annoyed, a little scared, but I'm like, this gotta be a technology error.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  So I walk back to the bedroom a third time, pause the movie. That's when I hear what sounds like footsteps, running on top of the roof.

• 25:25Speaker 04

  And our house is a one-story adobe house. The roof is flat and there's nothing on top. But I hear footsteps and I hear footsteps running.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  They're running from the main part of the house, from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room. You can hear the thumping of the body weight.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  But it felt like there were two people running up there really quickly. Like they wanted their stomps to be heard down below.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  I was really freaked out.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  And so I called Will and the call was dropped.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  I tried texting him, the text isn't sending. My phone was completely jammed and there's running on the ceiling. And I'm like, okay.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  I said to myself, all right, Caroline, you got this. You're fine. You're an adult. This is your home. Baby's sleeping. She's coming in on you. Just finish making your food, get the laundry and then you can come sit on the bed under the covers like an adult. I like pep talked myself, walked into the kitchen, turned off the stove.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  And then I walked into my laundry room.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  And this laundry room is very small. It just had one of those stackable washer and dryers, where the washer is on the bottom and the dryer is on the top. And this dryer, almost every single time I opened up that dryer door, I broke some of my nails because you had to like pull so hard to open it because it wouldn't just, you know, pop open. I take my laundry from the washing machine. I put it inside the dryer. I shut the door. I turn the dryer on and I dropped something on the ground. So I reached down and as I'm picking it up, the dryer stops

• 27:53Speaker 04

  and the door flings open and hits me in the face.

• 28:02Speaker 04

  It felt like a deliberate act.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Like they're actually trying to harm me. Like they just hit me in the face with this door that doesn't open. It never opens.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  They mean business now.

• 28:18Speaker 04

  So I shut the dryer, turned the dryer back on, ran back to my room, ran under my covers, and I tried to call Will again. My call dropped.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  My heart starts racing a little bit more.

• 28:38Speaker 04

  And I hear

• 28:42Speaker 04

  running on top of the roof.

• 28:46Speaker 04

  So I call Will again.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  I'm like, please, please, please, please work. I'm really scared right now. And the call is dropped again.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  Literally two minutes later, Will walks in through the front door.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  And he comes in the bedroom and he's like, what's going on? Baby's still sleeping. I'm freaked out. I'm like telling him what just happened. He's like, you know what's weird is that I was leaving work. And as I was about to leave work, this customer came in and he was telling me all the ways in which to get a ghost to leave the house.

• 29:37Speaker 04

  While this customer came in was while all the scary shit was happening to me. And I feel like that can't just be a coincidence. Like, they had to had known that that Will was trying to remove them.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  He tells me, "This is what we have to do. We need to open up all the doors, all the windows, and we need to go from room to room yelling. We have to tell them that this is our house. We have a lease. They're not on the lease. They need to get out. They are not welcome here."

• 30:16Speaker 04

  So we start in the kitchen. We're like yelling, "You gotta get out. Like, this is our house." We go to the living room. We go to our bedroom. We go to the studio. We go to the front living room. And after like 10 minutes of this, we like close all the doors, close all the windows, and we kind of just stand there. And I'm like, "Okay, so... Did it work?"

• 30:42Speaker 04

  And he's like, "I don't know. I don't know what we're supposed to do. Is something supposed to happen?" I'm like, "I don't know." So he's like, "Okay, well, I'm gonna go sit out on the porch. I'm gonna smoke a cigarette."

• 30:54Speaker 04

  So I sit back down and turn the movie on.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  The sound is pretty low because Baby's bedroom is right next to our room, and I don't want to wake her, even though she didn't seem to wake up.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  But ultimately, the house feels peaceful.

• 31:17Speaker 04

  Minutes later,

• 31:21Speaker 04

  Will comes rushing into the house.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  And he's panicked. He runs into the bedroom, and he's like, "What's going on? What's going on?

• 31:32Speaker 04

  Like, what's happening? Are you okay? Are you okay? Is Baby okay?"

• 31:37Speaker 04

  And I'm like, yeah, we're just sitting here in this quiet house. I'm just watching this movie, baby's asleep. Why? Like, why are you so panicked? Like, what's going on?

• 31:52Speaker 04

  He said, "I was sitting outside, I'm smoking my cigarette, when all of a sudden, it just sounded like these shrill screams were just rushing from the house."

• 32:09Speaker 04

  I thought you were being murdered. I thought something was happening. I thought that you were in trouble, that you were hurt. Like, these screams were so loud, and they sounded like woman screams coming from the house.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  I was like, oh, nope, no screaming here. I'm not screaming, baby's not screaming. And he was so freaked out that, like, we, we, we sat down and we talked about it, and we immediately were like, was that the, was that the ghost? Were the ghosts leaving? Were the ghosts leaving the house screaming at him? Because he is the one that, like, really forcibly removed from, from the house? And obviously, you know, afterwards, I Googled on my phone, and I looked it up, and apparently, that's a common thing that happens is, is when ghosts are leaving a property or, or a place, you know, they let you know about it.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  All the spirits that came from the tuberculosis history of the city, that's still pretty recent history, within like, the last 100 years or so.

• 33:28Speaker 04

  The neighborhood is definitely still crowded with spirits.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  I can only assume that whatever remains that they found across the street, those spirits floated towards our house.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  It's likely that they will continue to kind of roam the area.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  You know, if that's all they know and if they haven't found a way to like move on yet, I think they just moved on to probably my neighbor's house.

• 34:11Glynn Washington?

  Thank you Caroline so much for your story. We here are so glad those ghost ladies are at least haunting the next house on the block.

• 34:30Glynn Washington?

  It's true. Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future. If you want to hear stories that won't haunt you in the middle of the night, but will lead you toward the light, subscribe to our sister podcast, the amazing Snap Judgment Storytelling with a Beat. Spooked is brought to you by the team that knows there is in fact something hiding in the closet. Hope that he is who he says he is when he says he is. Mark Ristich, there's Anna Sussman, our chief spooker is Eliza Smith, Chris Hamrick, Rizadah, Renzo Goryo, Jacob Winnick, Tiffany Deliza, Anne Ford, Eric Yanya, Sana Khan, Annie Nguyen, Leon Morimoto. Our original score is by Lauren Newsom.

• 35:16Glynn Washington?

  The Spook theme song is by Pat Masey Miller. My name is Ben Washington. And if someone asks you to pick the red pill or the blue pill, you tell them that it's easy to decide if they don't mind, that you'll gladly choose the one that involves you never, ever, ever, ever, ever. Having to turn out the lot.