The Iron Gate - Classic

An American soldier takes over an empty house in Baghdad and encounters the one threat he is powerless against.

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

• 0:01Glynn Washington?

  Know this.

• 0:04Glynn Washington?

  The person who says they don't believe is always, always the person that screams the loudest.

• 0:16Glynn Washington?

  From Snap Judgment Underground Layer, you're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned.

• 0:30Speaker 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?

  My little brother is exactly one year younger than me.

• 1:11Glynn Washington?

  He always has been. My cousin and I are the same age. We go back to granny's house and my cousin says, "At midnight, let's call Bloody Mary."

• 1:24Glynn Washington?

  My brother says, "No, no, no, we can't." And he looks at me for support, me, his older brother.

• 1:32Glynn Washington?

  But I want to be cool like my cousin, so I tell my brother to stop being a baby. Then we laugh. "No." He whispers, "You can't. You can't." And I tell him at midnight, "We're gonna see Bloody Mary leap out of the mirror." And I tell him that if he doesn't help out, I'm gonna send Bloody Mary upstairs to his room while he sleeps. "No, no, no."

• 2:00Glynn Washington?

  "Then don't tell granny." Because I knew he was gonna tell granny.

• 2:06Glynn Washington?

  "He's gotta come, because we need three people to make it work," my cousin says.

• 2:12Glynn Washington?

  Look, I tell him, "Don't even worry. All you have to do is be there. I'm gonna hold the candle, all right? You just gotta hold my hand, all right? All right?"

• 2:27Glynn Washington?

  And he nods.

• 2:33Glynn Washington?

  The night we wait. Excited. After my grandmother falls asleep. After the Six Million Dollar Man. After Hawaii Five-O. After the Rat Patrol. It's time. My brother starts with this keening sound. "Boy, quit it! Quit it!"

• 2:57Glynn Washington?

  My cousin lights a candle. With granddaddy's lighter from the kitchen table, we turn off every other light in the house.

• 3:05Glynn Washington?

  And we file into the bathroom. And line up in front of the mirror.

• 3:11Glynn Washington?

  "You've only got ninety seconds on my brother's Casio watch." "Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

• 3:17Glynn Washington?

  Thirty seconds. I can see my little brother squeezing his eyes shut, tight, tight, tight in the mirror. "Ten seconds." "Say it." "Say it, gotta say it, gotta say it!"

• 3:30Glynn Washington?

  "Bloody Mary." "Bloody Mary." "Bloody Mary."

• 3:41Glynn Washington?

  And I don't see what happens next. Just something in the mirror, and my little brother screaming, and my cousin screaming. And I'm wondering, "What have we done?" When my grandmother first opened the door.

• 3:58Glynn Washington?

  What I remember...

• 4:01Glynn Washington?

  What I remember is the look

• 4:04Glynn Washington?

  my brother gives me. The look of betrayal.

• 4:09Glynn Washington?

  Of shock, of hurt.

• 4:12Glynn Washington?

  I'm supposed to be his big brother. And I let something come out at him from this darkness. I don't know

• 4:22Glynn Washington?

  what sprang out of that mirror. I don't know what it did, but

• 4:27Glynn Washington?

  thirty years later,

• 4:30Glynn Washington?

  I wish, with all my heart, I wish

• 4:36Glynn Washington?

  that I had said no.

• 4:43Glynn Washington?

  My name is Tom Washington. Some burdens are hard to put down. Spooked starts now.

• 5:02Glynn Washington?

  Sometimes on our show, you hear tales of people leaving the inexplicable in their own home. In the attic or under the bed. But this next tale, it happens to our storyteller when he was very, very far from home. Takes place in Baghdad, at a time when American troops were particularly unpopular in that city. A soldier named Dallas Sanchez has been deployed as part of a sniper kill team. Spooked.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Baghdad, Baghdad was insane. Baghdad was really intense. Baghdad was just a constant sensory overload. Tons of extrajudicial killings. You could not leave the fob without finding like a dead body face down in a trash pile because there's no infrastructure. So, talk about like the smell of the city. It smelled like death. It smelled like old death.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  This was the end of 06. The war had been going on for three years and we were in a really hot area of operations.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  Can you describe where you lived normally? Did you have like a room? Were you in a tent? Like where are you living?

• 6:34Speaker 02

  It was so close to the green zone that it was a super, super cush fob.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  We actually had like barracks. It's like a room, maybe a 10 by 12 foot rectangle. We decorated it. I had my little bed, actually had a Lou Reed "Live in Berlin" poster. When you're in the service, not just downrange. I think that those little living spaces, it feels like a cocoon. You know, it feels like you're a little bit safer.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  This was around Christmas time in 06. And like the mission that we were out on was a concurrent SKT, so...

• 7:23Speaker 03

  And what's an SKT?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Sorry. SKT are a small kill team or sniper kill team.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Like the basic tactic would be, we would leave the FOB very, very late at night. End trucks, roll around the neighborhood with the lights out for several hours. The trucks would slow down to a crawl and we would try and like silently open the rear doors. Just dismount from the truck without slamming anything or making any noise. Walk through the neighborhood as stealthfully as you can. We reach like the target house. Basically from there, you just, just break in.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  And then set up a hide and just pull Overwatch over the sector. And just wait basically for someone to do something grimy, like digging a hole to bury an IED. And then we'd respond accordingly.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Anyways, yeah, we would have probably at least six hours notice that we were gonna be stepping off.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Generally before heading out on a mission, were there particular things that you would fear? Like, do you remember anything about those moments?

• 8:42Speaker 02

  I can remember one time and it ended up becoming a pre-mission ritual. Cause Pelkey had a really great sound system. And he'd be like, dude, we're about to get pumped up for this mission. Press play.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Benny and the Jets at 50 decibels, just cranking that out. Benny and the Jets became our anthem.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  You pack up like you're getting 120 pounds worth of kit and scramble to the top of the truck, get your weapon mounted. I was a gunner. I had my head up out the top, just scanning, scanning like a maniac. When you're moving across open ground while scanning, sweating profusely. I mean, like, I know this is public radio, so this analogy would probably never make it on air, but it really is like just doing a fat rail.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  To have eight guys moving in a file through a neighborhood, it's the point of the mission where you're most exposed, where you're most vulnerable.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  You have to maintain almost complete silence because aside from the sound of the wind, maybe some dogs barking, there is no sound. Like, so for 72 hours straight, it's like basically like being in church because any sound could like compromise you and potentially get everybody that you love killed.

• 10:35Glynn Washington?

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• 11:17Glynn Washington?

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• 11:35Speaker 04

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• 12:19Speaker 04

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• 12:39Speaker 03

  Okay, at the moment that this story takes place, how long had you been in country, or how many of these missions had you been on?

• 12:48Speaker 02

  So this was probably the seventh or eighth mission that I'd been on. The mission started out typically, it felt completely the same as any other mission.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  So it's probably like around midnight, or one or two o'clock in the morning. We approached the building, and before I've even gotten like a chance to drop my ruck, like my best friend comes up to me, and he just looks really shaken up.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  And he's like, dude, there is something wrong here. There's just something bizarre. So immediately walking in this place, the first thing that I noticed was this sound.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  This dissonant noise, it sounded almost like a, like a broken radio in a room down the hall.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Just completely atonal, an entirely disquieting, unwholesome sound. It almost sounded like a congregation of whispers.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Like thousands of voices trying to communicate something, but in a completely nonsensical way. And that really was the, the point where I felt like something was really different this time.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  I decided that, you know, I was gonna look around some of the upper floors. So as I was walking around like that, the second story, I came into this one room that it was completely stripped bare, simple cement floor. I don't know what drew my attention to it, but I turned to face the interior wall and just saw that the wall was pockmarked with bullet holes, with rounds. So I was standing there, looking at these pockmarked walls. It just seemed like something wasn't right, that these, they weren't typical. And, uh, my squad leader had showed me this like pencil trick.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  You can insert like a pencil in, into like small arms fire against a wall. It'll tell you like the direction that the fire had come from. So this being the second story, I put the pencil into the wall and it's, uh, parallel to the ground, just sticking in, like it meant that those shots had been fired straight across. Soon as I stuck that pencil in, everything fell into place. This had to have been a kill room, like they had to have lined people up in here and just executed them. And I just felt a little heave in my stomach. Standing in a kill house.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Instantly, just felt like the walls just collapsed in on themselves. Felt really claustrophobic. And I just needed to get the [__] out of the room. It seemed like there was a malign presence there that was trying to get somebody killed. And it was totally inexplicable. You have to imagine that all of this is under the backdrop, under the soundtrack of this just discordant noise. Just this ever-present aural presence?

• 16:44Speaker 03

  This feeling that you were feeling, were all the guys feeling that? And was that like a palpable, kind of like anxiety in the air?

• 16:51Speaker 02

  There's like a, there's an undercurrent of tension.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  It wasn't like a, we all huddled together in a circle and are trading this back and forth. It was, people would pair off with their best friend and be like, dude, you would not believe what just happened. Nobody's gonna talk about that because you're showing weakness. I think that if one person were to stand up and be like, guys, this is kinda scary, we would have ripped them apart. So, we were left with all of this downtime. And so, you have now, like, half a dozen 20-year-old children. And one of the number-one pastimes on these SKTs is looting.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Someone is like, hey, there's a storage unit down on the first floor. And that immediately became something that all of us jumped onto. Because it, it gives you a chance, I guess, like, to prove that you're not afraid of no ghosts, to prove that, that you're not scared. As soon as that call goes out, like, yeah, no, what, yeah, yeah, hell yeah, man, I'll, I'll root through these peoples that I have no business in. It's almost like a, an affront to whatever was there.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  It was just like a gated off, uh, unit, uh, on the first floor. And, uh, walked over there-

• 18:25Speaker 03

  Like a gated off room? Would that be right?

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically like a storage space. I mean, exactly like a storage space. And there's just a very simple, symmetrical wrought iron gate on front.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Those wrought iron gates are so loud that three of us walked up and got really low to the ground and just grabbed the gate on the bottom and just lift a quarter inch and then quietly walked backwards so that the gate's not rubbing against the ground so that it wouldn't be loud at all. We had left the gate, like, propped all the way open.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  So, I think about half a dozen of us go into this, uh, storage unit. Upturned tables, chairs, clothing, decorations, silverware, all kinds of things. It smells like dust. Old.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  And it's pitch black and the only light in this storage area is coming from our little, uh, our little red tac lights.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  It's already like three layers of spooky. Like, we couldn't even use our nods in this space, our night vision goggles, because it's so dark, there's so little ambient light. And nods are really for looting anyways because, uh, you know, you really wanna, yeah, you know, there's, there's an art to this deplorable practice.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  The only sound is like, uh, light rustling. I'd picked my way, probably two-thirds of the way back into the storage unit and, um, I find this cardboard box with a couple of cheap little paintings in it. One of just, uh, like a pastoral landscape with a creek in it. This is like, "Oh, these are gonna look amazing in my room."

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Then I turned, after finding them immediately, I turned to my left to show off my bounty. Was just met with pitch darkness, just, just blackness. There was no one else in the room. I was completely alone. And I didn't feel like I had tunneled out on these paintings. I mean, this wasn't like the Mona Lisa, it wasn't like I was, you know, just drinking in Starry Night with my eyes. I was just like, huh, these are neat paintings. Hey, check out the, oh, I'm alone. Makes no sense as to how six guys were able to creep out of a room.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  You couldn't step on the floor because of all of this furniture, all of the crap. Immediately, I feel like a leaden weight in my stomach. I just steeled my nerves, put my paintings, tucked them under my arm, and started trying to quietly move towards that gate. I'm climbing over this stuff meticulously, but the entire time, I just want to run. By the time I got to the front gate, I had really worked myself up into a froth. I was really terrified.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  I just wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could. And I get up there to the gate, and the gate is closed. I get low, and lift, and start trying to push it open, and it just feels like it's sealed, like it's been, like, concreted in place. But I was not going to cry out.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  I stood there waiting for a solid two to three minutes, which probably doesn't sound like that long of a time. But when you're sealed in a foreign space with like pitch blackness behind you and the weight of the entire mission's security hinging on you forcing this gate open, it felt like an eternity. There was like a fear welling up in me because there are so many different layers of danger to this. Locked behind a steel gate in an extremely dangerous area and being muzzled, effectively muted.

• 23:15Glynn Washington?

  When we return, Spooked. The Iron Gate continues. Stay tuned.

• 23:58Glynn Washington?

  Dallas is part of an SKT, a small kill team in Baghdad. He's out in the middle of the night on a mission in an abandoned building. And the past the time, he and some of the guys on his crew are looting the place. Suddenly, Dallas finds himself separated from his team and trapped by an iron gate. Spooked.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  The neighborhood where we were in Baghdad, Al Dora, they're like a death squads basically roving the neighborhood. And if they saw someone alone, they'd just yoke them up, take you to the nearest trash pile, and put two rounds into the back of your head. But I caved, I broke. I was like, I don't care. At this point, I'm gonna guerrilla graud this gate open? I grabbed the gate with both hands and just shoved it as violently as I could. And nothing. It felt like shoving on a brick wall. I remember shaking a little bit.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  I turned my light off, and I stood there, like at the mouth of that gate. So I could see into the opening of the courtyard, where there's a little bit of moonlight casting a shadow. So, and that's the only light source at this moment. I can remember consciously not wanting to look back. I had like a sweat coming out of every pore in my body, because you can't like pant, you can't like, like a dog, be scared or whatever in situations like that. Like silence is so important.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  So it's like a controlled hyperventilation. The fact that I'd lost my nerves such that I would compromise our SKT just speaks volumes about how terrified I was. I was the alternate gunner for our squad, and I had the squad automatic weapon, the casualty causing weapon, on the battlefield. Probed between eight and a thousand rounds, armed to the teeth, against any physical threat. But in this instance, it's completely worthless.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  I felt really powerless. Whatever was there, whatever was lingering in that space, just did not want us there. Especially with us down there, rooting through all of their stuff is just wrong. Whatever was there, wanted all of us out. I stood there for maybe 30 seconds and I just gave up hope and just resigned myself to the fear. And the gate just drifted open.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Just completely silently, just like on well-oiled hinges, the gate just drifts open, right in front of me. And I thought I had chills before, I thought that I was scared before, but in that moment, it just, I just could not explain what would cause that thing to drift open. It just wanted us gone. Like, at the end of the day, when we went in there, it's with a malicious intent.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Like, we're set up in the building, just an invisible force, waiting for someone to violate, like, the rules of engagement, so that we could kill them. So I came out of that gate, in a mixture of rage and terror, and immediately sought out, like, my best friend, to just unload on him. And I get to him, and I was like, in whisper, in whisper mode, like, "What the hell is wrong with you, dude? Why would you do that?"

• 28:30Speaker 02

  But he had no idea what I was talking about. As far as he was concerned, we went in, checked it out, everybody came out, all in together, and that was it.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  At this point, I'd been in the building for maybe eight hours. I'm ready to go home now. This has very not been a pleasant experience for me.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  I imagine that for some people, it would be really easy to dismiss this like as nerves or like the stress like of battle, yeah, trauma, things like that. But the thing to keep in mind about that is this was one of maybe 50 missions that I went out on, but nothing ever like this, nothing ever that came so close that was so blatant, like a force.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  So as the sun comes up, the gun trucks pull up and we exit the building. This is how just stupid you are at 20 years old. Those paintings, they stayed in my ruck. I brought those things back.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  So I'm back in my room in the barracks and take these things out. And I'm like, hey, check out these cool paintings that I got. And Kegony, our platoon medic is in there and he's like, I would very much like to have that. And I'm like, no way, dude. Nope. This is my decoration. I went through the haunted house for this. This is my prize. I am keeping it. Thank you, sir. So KG leaves and Sam comes in, one of our Terps, one of our interpreters, Sam. And I was like, what the hell is up with that place, dude? Like, it's really, really weird. And he's like, oh, yeah, like that place is unclean.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  And I was like, what do you mean it's unclean? He's like, very many people died in that building, so it's unclean and no one goes there.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  And when he said that, it really brought home to me what had happened.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  And it's such a thing to admit. It's like such, such a bad thing, but I picked up that painting and I was like, hey, do you guys know where Kagone went? Like, I wanna, you know, and I found KG and I was like, here, man, I know this is really special to you. I'd really like for you to have this. And I gave it away.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Did part of you, any part of you feel proud of this force or this spirit for, um, for fighting back in a way that, that had no military, um, weakness?

• 31:24Speaker 02

  That wouldn't come until way, way later. Now, looking back, all of these years later, I have a lot of respect for whatever that thing was. It was able to scare me.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  I felt like anyways, like I, I got my comeuppance. Five months after this whole episode in, uh, May is when I got hit by a V-bed or a car bomb.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  And, uh, even the fear was not as scary as that experience for the simple fact that I felt like if I caught a round in the noodle, I'd be dead. If I got ripped apart by an explosion, I'd be dead. But whatever was inside of that structure, it felt like if you were to die in its presence, that it would have like a completely different set of consequences than if you were to die just, uh, out in sector somewhere.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Like, uh, you could become like, um, trapped.

• 32:57Glynn Washington?

  Thank you Dallas Sanchez. Dallas also wanted to thank his family and Suzanne for encouraging him to share his stories. He's looking for a publisher. Dallas is a long time Snap Judgment listener. We love it when listeners share their stories with us. And if you too have an inexplicable tale to tell, make sure you drop us a line at spookpodcast.org.

• 33:39Glynn Washington?

  Now if you dig it, and I know you dig it, let somebody know. Spookpodcast.org. As we count down to Halloween, be afraid. The Spooked Ghost Hunter Crew includes Mark Ristich, Eliza Smith, Jodi Kali, and Jasmine Aguilera. Original music for that story was by Leon Morimoto. The piece was produced by Anna Sussman. Our theme song was created by Pat Macidi Miller. Additional original music by Pat Macidi Miller, Leon Morimoto, and Rizzo Goriello. And if you like real stories from real people with no ghosts, subscribe to the amazing Snap

• 34:23Glynn Washington?

  Judgment Podcast and it goes without saying, let me say it anyway, that friends, if you are finding yourself trapped behind an iron gate with undead creatures closing in, please remember in this circumstance, the best thing you can do is to never, ever, never, never, ever, ever, never turn out the lights.