Spooked
Hosted by Glynn Washington
If no one is around, is anyone watching?
4,375 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
I take a stroll down to the park to steal the children's candy. The mothers scream at me to leave as I drink swigs of brandy. Ha, ha, ha. You've got over his boot. Stay tuned.
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.
Hello, I'm Chris Richards, general manager at Safford Volkswagen Richmond. I'm here to announce an exciting new program that I want you to listen to. Here's my friend Happy.
Hi, I'm Happy Harry Turner, special finance manager at SaffordCredit.com. If you're in an open Chapter 13 bankruptcy, recently filed a Chapter 7, or you've been turned down because of credit challenges, don't give up. For nearly 30 years, I've helped people get reliable transportation when others said no. Visit SaffordCredit.com. Remember, I'm not happy unless you are.
In sixth grade, I lived near a lake, a small town called Sanford, Michigan, Sanford Lake. Awesome place. Understand, my family didn't have nothing like this, but my friends, their dads worked at a fancy Dow Chemical. And mostly, they had houses right on the lake with docks and boats. We had waterski and jetski and swim, and all my buddies lived a short bike ride away.
Especially my bestie. We were free-range kids. Wild, in the woods, the water, the streets. Hung out tough, the best friend a kid could have. And not too far away, there was a livery stable, where I learned to keep horses. There's a little store with video games and snacks. And besides my truly psychotic sixth-grade teacher, everything was awesome. I loved it. But after that one year, my sixth-grade year, we moved away.
I've never been back.
Not ever. So imagine, just a few years ago, May 20th, 2020, right near the beginning of the pandemic. I'm sort of halfway, kind of almost, listening to the news. And I hear that Sanford Dam is about to breach. What? Sanford is about to be overrun. Deluged. A Midwest tsunami, a new Katrina. And I run to my computer and see that it's happening right now. That all those pretty houses on my beautiful lake
are underwater.
I can barely breathe, thinking, what about my buddy?
Back then,
we didn't have internet, Facebook, Instagram.
But we do now.
I look up my friend, see her name, see her number. No way. Could it be really? Really, it's been decades.
But I text anyway.
Hey, man. This is Glenn.
You all right?
And I'm waiting. Staring at the phone, staring and I see those rolling dots at the bottom. Processing, processing.
Then... Dude, yeah, it's crazy. We're running, checking houses for folk now, but it looks like most people are making it out with the clothes on their backs. Where you been?
Laugh emoji.
And I laugh.
And then...
I cry.
You think you left the place. You left the person behind decades ago, but...
That is not the way this works.
Spook starts. Now.
We begin with a story from another lake. Elise. She's a young girl from Atlanta and wants to celebrate the 4th of July at one of her favorite places, Lake Lanier. It looks like the perfect long weekend, just swimming and riding jet skis with her dad. But Elise's perfect day is about to take a turn.
Spooked.
So that day, I wake up super excited. Me and my dad are gonna go jet skiing with his very good friend Jay. It's my favorite thing in the world. I beg for us to go to the lake all the time.
I remember putting on my bathing suit. We packed some snacks.
The lake was packed that day. There's other families joking, laughing. There was music going. I could hear the sizzling of the grills, smell the hot dogs and hamburgers that were going. And the sun was just shining. There was not a cloud in the sky.
We were in a little bit of like a cove. There's trees just as far as your eye can see. There's an island in the middle of the lake that has one big tree on it. And there's lots of rocks, rocks everywhere.
We put the jet skis in the water, my dad and his friend. I was in the water playing, splashing around a little bit with my dad. He was splashing water at me. And then he decided to take me around on the jet ski as he'd done multiple times before.
I sit down on my knees between my dad's legs as he's standing up, put my hands gripping the side of the skis, and just like that, we take off.
We went around that little island with the big tree. My hair is blowing in the wind. I just feel like a bird, like I'm flying. And I'm thinking, this is the best day ever.
It was later in the afternoon. Almost time for us to pack up. We're back in the shore after a jet ski ride. And I am sitting on the jet ski on my knees. My dad is standing in the water. His friend Jay is on my left side. I can hear them talking about plans for the rest of the day. Maybe going to get dinner or leave. And I just am thinking, I love the lake. I don't want to leave the lake.
The jet ski was turned off at this point, and it was starting to sink down a little bit. My dad tells Jay to turn on the ski because it's taking in water. He turns on the ski. And the jet ski rumbled so loud, it terrifies me. I instinctively turned around and I grabbed the handlebars. And in that moment, I grabbed the throttle as well. And all of a sudden, the jet ski takes off so fast.
The water is going by very quickly. It almost looks like glass. The roar of the engine, it's so loud, it's almost deafening. The wind was whipping so hard that it was, my face hurt. I am bouncing up and down off of the bottom of the jet ski. I'm looking around. Because I'm by myself, there's no one else on this jet ski. Where's my dad? Where am I going?
I look up. I'm going in a straight line directly towards this hill. And the whole hill is covered in rocks, like big boulder rocks, all different sizes, all different shapes. I was very scared, but I can't let go of either of the handlebars. My hands are locked. They are so tight that my knuckles are hurting. And I'm getting very close to this rock embankment when I see something blue out of the corner of my eye.
I turn my head to the left, and there is a lady, maybe about four or five feet away from me. She is not in the water. She's above the water, floating right around my eye level. She's sitting on her knees, her hands resting on her kneecaps. When I saw her, time slowed down the moment that she appeared. It was like everything froze. She has on a blue crocheted knit top. She has long blond hair, probably to her belly button, and bluish-greenish eyes.
She has a soft smile on her face, and it just filled me with like a wave of calm. I remember thinking, wow, she's so beautiful. She looks like one of my Barbies. She smiled at me and said, "This may hurt a little bit, but everything will be okay." At that exact moment, she disappears.
And I turn, I snap my head back forward and I hit the rocks and I fly through the air.
I hit the tree. I can feel like a little sting on my forehead.
But as soon as I feel it, I feel my vest get really tight because I'm wearing a life jacket.
It's like something grabbing me as tight as it could and pulling me back away from the tree.
And then, whatever it is, lets go of me.
That's when time speeds up again. And I slam into the water face first.
I can see the water and I start to see the red swirls of blood. And I'm so mesmerized by the way that the light's hitting it and it's mixing with the water. I thought, huh, that looks so beautiful.
All of a sudden, I felt somebody behind me bear hugging me.
I feel the wind hitting my face and I was able to breathe.
I look at this man, this stranger I've never met. He starts frantically screaming.
The baby's alive, the baby's alive, she's alive.
Next thing I know, there is a crowd of people and they're all like gasping and insisting that I lay down.
My dad and Jay get up there, they're huffing and puffing. They're saying over and over, we told you, hit the red button, hit the red button. Oh my gosh, are you okay? I was very confused. I tell them I'm okay. Can I just go back to playing in the water? My dad just looks like a deer in headlights. He says, no, baby, we can see your skull.
We get to the hospital. They removed this bandage on my head. And I see my mom. She's standing right there. And she looks horrified. They had to do x-rays, MRIs, you name it, to make sure I didn't have broken bones, swelling. They found nothing. It was just a wound on my forehead. The doctor said, you know, "You're one really lucky and blessed girl. Like, this could have been really bad." And I remember thinking, "Okay, yeah, I guess so."
They gave me a bunch of stitches, and that was it. After the hospital, I tell my mom in the car about the lady in blue. I say, "The lady in the blue dress? The lady in the blue dress, where is she?" My mom says, "What lady?" And I explained, "The nice lady. When I hit the tree, she threw me over her shoulder as she flew away. Who is she?" She whipped her head around and said, "Baby, I don't know who that lady is. Tell me again, what did she do?" She had pulled over at this point. She's looking at me, and her eyes get wide.
And she says, "I believe you saw an angel. You should thank her because she saved your life." I was like, "Okay, I have an angel."
The accident left me with a large scar perfectly in the middle of my forehead. For years, every time someone asked me what happened, I would tell them the story. I would tell people I'd seen an angel. I just always called her my guardian angel in the blue dress, my lady in the blue dress.
Last year, I had gotten on TikTok and I'd seen a lot of videos about Lake Lanier. And I decided to share my story.
So I hear we're telling our weird stories about Lake Lanier? Okay, cool. So hey, I'm an Atlanta native, grew up about 30 years.
My video started getting a lot of traction. I started getting a lot of comments. Have you heard of the Lady of the Lake? The Lady of the Lake in blue? I had never heard of the Lady of the Lake.
After a few hours of having my video up, I received a comment and it said, "Hey, the Lady in blue is actually Delia Mae Parker. Google her, period."
I Googled Delia's name and immediately, there's pages upon pages.
I'm clicking on one, I'm reading everything on it. I click the next one, I start reading everything on it. I started to try to tell myself it wasn't her, until I read an article that had pictures of her.
She did have long hair. Her eye color was the same. Her face was very similar.
I am increasingly getting freaked out. Like, my whole body is covered in chill bumps.
Delia Mae Parker was a woman in her early twenties who, in the 50s, was working at the Riverside Military Academy.
She went out with one of her friends for a night out. They were, I believe, going to go dancing. She borrowed a blue dress and they went missing that night. They were never located. They put a headstone up for her.
And her body was not found until the early 90s.
They unfortunately crashed and they found her friend's car in the lake.
The detail that made me the most uncomfortable was her crash site was not far from where my accident happened. I'm sitting there reckoning with myself. I had held on to this image in my mind that this was my guardian angel. And I realized that the thing that saved me, it was a ghost.
I do believe that Delia is a spirit that does help people.
There are so many accidents on that lake. Every single week, I read about one, or it's in the news that another person has either drowned or been in a boating accident or a tubing accident. And I've watched multiple videos of people's encounters with her, that they'd had almost like a near-death experience as well, and that she'd saved them. And so I do believe that Delia is out there trying to protect people from meeting the same fate that she did. I do believe, at this point, I owe it to Delia to go back to Lake Lanier to say thank you for saving my life.
However, I will not be jet skiing this time. I'll be sailing from the shore.
Thank you so much, Elise, for sharing your story that spooked. This was scouted by Evan Stern. It was scored by Yadi Bundy. It was produced by Eric Yanez.
Now Laurel is a college student who's always been tight with cats. She knows just how to scratch their chins. She knows how much they love the water from the tuna can. But one evening, these kitty cats, they start acting real strange.
All of my roommates had gone for the summer. Most of the people in town were gone. I was working in this room alone in the basement of the library. I could literally go an entire week and see nobody but the checkout clerk at the grocery store. I didn't have anyone except my cat. I named her Bastette after the Egyptian cat goddess.
I'm one of those nutty people who talks to cats and I use a baby voice. Aw, hi Bastette. How are you doing today? Aw, do you like your, do you like your kibble? She was a very independent but affectionate calico.
She was friendly with people, but she wasn't really a lap cat. You know, very inquisitive, wanted to know what was going on. Liked to go outside and hunt and roam. But she would always come back in at night.
There were a lot of cats in this neighborhood. Cats have always come to me. That sounds kind of silly when I say it, but I have often had cats just turn up on my porch injured or sick or starving. I take them in for a few days. I, you know, get them stable. I find them a home. Over the years, I've found homes for probably 20 cats. That's been my whole life.
One night I was at home, I was working on a painting, had my watercolors out.
The best that was hanging out with me in my room, like she normally was. Around 10:00 PM, I started getting thirsty and hungry. I wanted some juice. The fridge was totally empty, so I just had to go out to the store. It was a warm summer night, humid. That late at night, there was nobody out on the streets. There was no traffic. You could see all the stars.
I decided to take a shortcut through the neighborhood, down this little trail that goes through the woods and over a bridge. The best that followed me out the door and onto the porch, but then she hesitated at the steps at the top of the porch. After a little bit of hesitation, she followed me, but she wouldn't go past the corner. She stayed on the corner and meowed at me, which was very odd. I thought, okay, she just wants attention. I'll make sure to pet her a bunch when I get back. So I left her and continued my walk.
As soon as I got out of her line of sight, and then a cat came out from my neighbor's yard.
It was one that I recognized. Gus was a very elderly tabby.
You know how some cats, when they get old, they don't exactly get chubby, but they sort of sag? That was Gus. He was like this old saggy cat.
He followed me for a little ways. He'd never followed me like that before. I got to another corner and he stayed at the corner, but then as soon as I got out of his line of sight, another cat popped out.
And this kept happening.
They were cats that I recognized, but they weren't always cats that I was really friendly with. Like, some of them weren't cats that normally would come right up to me or follow me around.
I was kind of thinking like, oh man, what is going on? Like, what's gotten into them? Like, did I leave catnip in my pocket or something?
As I was walking, at one point, this pair of black cats comes out of the bushes and just flanks me, one on each side. It was Mr. Squibs and his brother Scruffy. Mr. Squibs was a velvety black cat with big, golden eyes. Scruffy looked exactly like Mr. Squibs, except less well-groomed. They weren't trying to get my attention. They clearly weren't interested in getting anything from me: treats, or pets, or anything like that. They were just walking with me. They were looking around, mostly ahead, off to the side, the whole time I was walking down that block.
It was unnerving. It sort of set off alarm bells in my head.
Once or twice was normal. Three times was odd. But by the time the fifth cat had come up and followed me, I was like, alright, this is definitely strange.
By the time I got to the trailhead, it'd only been maybe a 15-minute walk. I saw a cat there that I didn't recognize, sitting right at the entrance, in front of that concrete post, almost like he was waiting for somebody. He was fluffy and this sort of pale, creamy orange, kind of like a creamsicle. I knew I had never seen a cat like that in the neighborhood.
As I got up close to him, he came up to me and let me scrunch his ears and rubbed around my legs.
As I started walking down this trail,
he kept winding around my feet.
You know how cats do when they really want attention, like you can't take a step without this cat running in front of your foot? That's what he was doing. I could hardly walk forward at all.
Tried scrunching his face, and he didn't really seem to care about that. He was in front of me, he was underfoot every time I took a step. It just got more intense the further I went. I started to get kind of wigged out.
I told myself at first, it's just a cat being very affectionate. He's just wants attention. Cats do this all the time. But I couldn't shake this feeling of unease.
As I got closer to the bottom of the trail where there's that bend, I thought, well, if this cat really is trying to get me to stop, all I have to do is turn around and walk the other way.
So I turned around and I started walking back uphill. But the second I turned around, he stopped.
He just tagged along right behind me like a dog at heel, almost. Didn't get in the way once.
I thought, okay, this is really strange. The cat was herding me back up the trail.
I thought, well, I want my orange juice, but I can wait. So I went all the way back up the trail and he didn't let me out of sight. When I got to the trailhead, he just sat there watching me as I walked away.
Just like he had when I'd approached in the first place.
The whole way home, every time I turned a corner, cats would come out and follow me and walk alongside me. Mr. Squibs, Scruffy, Gus.
As I got back close to home and I turned the corner, I saw Bastette was waiting. She hadn't even sat down. She was standing there staring in my direction, like she'd been watching the whole time for me to come back. She ran straight up to me and wouldn't leave my side. She followed me right back into the house. I latched the door behind me.
I was like, this is ridiculous. I got scared by a friendly cat. What is wrong with me?
Several months later, the school started back up again. I was sitting in the study lounge area of the library with some classmates. One of my classmates happened to mention that she'd heard there was a stabbing, that a girl had been attacked while she was out walking at night on the trail at the bottom of the footpath. I thought, "Oh, my gosh. I walk that way all the time." She said it happened in July, at night. And I remembered this weird night with the cats. That was the only time I'd been out walking that way that late over the summer.
It had to have happened that night. It was hair-raising, chilling, to think about would I have been the one to cross that bridge? And then I realized the cats were trying to herd me away from danger. I think that there was somebody waiting who had bad intentions. They were looking out for me. Dogs adore you. You meet a Labrador, it's going to be your best friend, no matter who you are.
Cats, they're not going to care about somebody they don't have a relationship with. When you meet a cat, you have to prove yourself to it. They can tell when somebody looks out for them, and they return that favor. I've never seen that big fluffy orange cat again, but if I ever did, I would give him a scrunch in the ears and a big can of tuna.
Laurel, we are so glad you're okay. And so glad you listened to what the fairies had to tell you. That piece, it was scored by Sandra Lawson-Indu. It was produced by Ann Ford. Now spooksters, please, please, please, if you have a story that you think the world needs to hear, please send it our way. [email protected], because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. Spook Studios lies hidden below pools of magic mystery, deep underneath KQD in San Francisco.
Don't seek to find it, lest it seeks to find you. We've got the special incantation for Spook Legal that says no Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission. On Team Spooked, the union represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers, members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Org of America, AFL-CIO Local 51. And Spooked is brought to you by the team that also has nine lives. Of course, from Mark Ristich. He's on borrowed time.
There's David Kim, Zoe Fregno, Eric Yanez, Elliot Lightfoot, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Taylor Decat, Regina Berriaco, Paulina Kriki, Elizabeth Z. Pardue, Rithi Amatu, Lulu Jemima, Doug Stewart, Nicholas Marks. The Spook theme song is by Pat McSweeney-Miller, Manu's from Washington. At the beginning of this episode, I told you about Lake Sanford and the destruction of Sanford, Michigan. Over 2,500 homes and businesses laid waste or damaged, and entire community deluged because of the quirk of geology.
After the storm waters rose, they retreated.
When for the first time in living memory, people saw the bottom of our lake, with prehistoric-looking gray skeletal tree trunks that hadn't seen daylight in generations, snatched back into the open air. And folk went looking for secrets finally revealed. In fact, some went searching for monsters, thought maybe to discover clues about Michigan's most infamous creature, the Michigan Dogman. Half-man with a canine face set to run the very area of the flood zone. Others tried to discover the mysterious Waterlights
that have confounded travelers for generations. So others set search for shadow figures set to roam riverbanks, quests, journeys, and distractions to save people from the shock of that wall of water. Because it took time, it took space to realize that Sanford was built on a lie, that there had basically been no maintenance on the dam since the carnival barker Frank Isaac Wixom set the place up as a real estate scheme a full century ago. And the people charged with running the dam, that held back the waters, the people charged with protecting the town,
they knew full well it was just a matter of time. But maybe, maybe, if they waited long enough, it'd be somebody else's problem. The Dogman didn't destroy Sanford. Our mysterious and beloved Waterlights had nothing to do with it. Bigfoot is innocent. Nah. A greater evil destroyed Eden.
Greed.
I have met the monster. And always, always, it
is us.
Never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, turn out the lights.
Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated