Scarebnb

Katie gets a little more history than she bargained for when she books a historic vacation rental for a trip to Gettysburg with her dad.

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

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

  The room is old. The locks are gold. This is the key I have to hold. Inside the door that takes the key. Hey, hey! What are you doing? What? Don't open the door, fool! You're crazy? Do you wanna get ate up?

• 0:30Glynn Washington?

  Listen to school. Stay tuned.

• 0:40Speaker 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:23Glynn Washington?

  Now, you may not know this, but when I was a kid, same as today, you could order live chicks, baby chickens, in the mail. Special delivery. And this was my father did. One bright Sunday morning, I'm sitting on the stump reading Encyclopedia Brown when I hear the mail truck. I run to the front of our trailer. I can see a red-faced man unloading a stack of boxes addressed to our small farm. I filed the signs and paperwork, and I stand next to the pallets where you could hear this high-pitched squeaking.

• 2:05Glynn Washington?

  Can I do it? Can I? Can I? Can I do it? Pops gives me the nod, and I pull the lid off the top box. Fifty yellow balls of fluff in individual cardboard squares, cheeping indignantly. I reach in and pull one tiny baby chick to my face, grin at it. She blinks back at me, chirping, squeaking, like she's got something important to say. I laugh with joy, ask my father, "Can I name her? Can I name her?" He looks at me serious then. "No." "Why not?" "You don't name food, boy, ever. And chickens are food.

• 2:50Glynn Washington?

  You understand me?" "Yes, sir." "Do you understand me?" "Yes, sir." I didn't understand him. So I name her Birdy. And I raise Birdy. I play with Birdy, feed Birdy seed directly from my hand. Fatten her up with her brothers and sisters for nine weeks. And we send most of the birds off for processing. Birdy and a few others, we keep for ourselves. And one day, my father grabs up his axe.

• 3:31Glynn Washington?

  He says, "It's time, but not." No, I tell him. I tell him, "I'll do it." I walk with him out to the coop, hold her up to my chest. Tell her name one more time softly, so my pops can hear. "Birdy." A hand hurts to him. Going to stump my father, holds her still, pushes her head between the grooves, worn special for just this one task.

• 4:15Glynn Washington?

  I mark the spot on her neck, because I'm only going to do this one time. One time.

• 4:27Glynn Washington?

  I raise the axe and bring it down, hard.

• 4:35Glynn Washington?

  It slices clean, her feathers quiver, her feet claw at the air. But Pop squeezes her body fast, doesn't let her flap, just holds her, headless, upside down, as her blood sprays to the earth, to the stump.

• 4:54Glynn Washington?

  And that very night, roast chicken dinner.

• 5:01Glynn Washington?

  And I can't, I can't eat.

• 5:04Glynn Washington?

  Pop doesn't force me, I go to bed hungry. I don't eat the next morning, or the evening, or the day after that. My mother cries, "Baby, baby, you have to eat something." My father says, "Leave 'em be, he'll eat when he's ready."

• 5:26Glynn Washington?

  Three days later, I venture back out to the stump where I had betrayed her, sacrificed her. I tell her, "I'm sorry about that.

• 5:38Glynn Washington?

  So sorry, but you're probably gonna have to eat something now."

• 5:47Glynn Washington?

  And I tell her other things too, at that stump, that place where I murdered her and bear. I bring a handful of the seed, the seed she loved to peck out of my hand.

• 6:01Glynn Washington?

  I spread it on the stump.

• 6:07Glynn Washington?

  When I return in the morning,

• 6:14Glynn Washington?

  the seed is gone.

• 6:21Glynn Washington?

  It's supposed to die.

• 6:24Glynn Washington?

  Nah.

• 7:10Glynn Washington?

  That stump, that place, that altar.

• 7:14Glynn Washington?

  It's magical, it's scary for me. Even today, so many years later.

• 7:22Glynn Washington?

  And so many folk, they have their own place where the air hangs thick with echoes. And our next storyteller, Katie. Katie and her pops, they're headed to one of these places for little father-daughter bonding time.

• 7:40Glynn Washington?

  And they're taking us along with them.

• 7:43Glynn Washington?

  Spooked.

• 8:04Glynn 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.

• 8:47Glynn 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.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  The holidays have a way of bringing out old habits. Saying yes to every invitation because you feel guilty saying no, or getting pulled into the same family arguments year after year. But what if this year, you gave yourself permission to do things differently? Maybe you skip an event you don't have the energy for, or take a breath instead of reacting to that comment that always gets under your skin. Those small moments can change how you feel and how you show up for the people you love. That's what growing feels like. Growth Therapy makes finding care easier. Find a licensed therapist who fits your needs, book your first session in minutes, and start in as little as two days. Prepare for holiday glimmers instead of holiday stress.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Visit growtherapy.com/booknow. That's growtherapy.com/booknow. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  So around 2017, my dad had started a battle with some skin cancer. It was on his face, his neck, his ears. He was starting treatments. And I thought, you know, it'd really be cool is to get his mind off of doctors and surgeries and medicines and, you know, all of that kind of thing with a Gettysburg trip. You know, it's always kind of been on his bucket list.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  Something that my dad and I had really connected with while I was growing up was his love of history, specifically his kind of love of history around battles and war and, you know, that kind of thing. We were a military family, so he really gravitated towards kind of like military-type history. One of the things I did to make this trip a little bit more special was to find somewhere to stay that wasn't your generic best western, you know? I really wanted to find somewhere unique, somewhere that had a lot of character and history just within the grounds. And I found this farmhouse.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  I was looking through the photos and kind of the description from the host, and it seemed perfect. It had been built before the battle happened, so it was very, very, very old. It looked like it had a really gorgeous yard, and it really seemed like the perfect fit. Somewhere we could go, we could go do touring and then come back and have a little bit of tranquility and relaxation.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  It's a very rural Airbnb, so we did get lost. We had to turn around and find where we were going. But we drove up, and it was this long drive through some fields. We pull up into the driveway, and we can see the large kind of stone farmhouse. So we got out, and the host meets us. She was, you know, sort of middle-aged, very nice, very gregarious. She was like, "Let me take you around, let me show you the property." And she kind of walked us around, and it's Gettysburg in the summer. It was hot. I mean, it was muggy.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  She took us to the pond, and she said you could swim in it if you'd like. It was kind of scummy, I wouldn't have swam in it, but you could if you wanted to, if you were brave. There were fish in there, you could hear the frogs croaking. She walked us past the barn. The barn was big, it was old. She had these cows, right? It was this cutest cow you've ever seen. And it would just come right up to the fence. And we were petting the cow, and there were farm cats. My dad's a big cat guy, and so he was just loving all the animals. He was petting them. They followed us around. He thought that was really fun.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  She took us inside the house. So when you first walk in, you see the kitchen. And in the kitchen, the wall is the original brick of the original house. And my dad geeked out over that. He just thought that was so cool, right? He said, "This brick's been here longer than Idaho was a state," right? He was just very excited about all of this stuff.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  So we walk upstairs. There was kind of a spirally sort of narrow staircase. You know, it was built back in the day. It kind of creaked. And there were two bedrooms. I chose the smaller of the two bedrooms. It had two twin beds in it. And then the bedroom next to it was larger. It had a big king bed. The wood on the doorways was original. There was the original wood floors. You could just tell that this room was steeped in history. My dad just sat in the bed and was like, "Wow. Look at this room, Katie. Look at this place." He was so grateful. You know, he just was like, "Thank you for finding this place for me.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Like, this is so unique." So we do the little tour. The host leaves. She says, you know, "Bye, I'm out of here, right? Enjoy the space. Let me know if you have any problems." And we kind of spent the first hour settling in, getting unpacked, and then sort of walking around the property. So it was becoming evening. She had a gorgeous bench set up by the pond that you could sit on. So we sat there for just a little bit and rested, listened to the frogs, the cicadas. It was loud, but in a relaxing way. And then we played some cards, and we said, "Well, we're getting kind of tired, and our tour guide's coming in the morning."

• 15:51Speaker 03

  The first day was going to be pretty much as much as we could pack in, in that first day. And so we said, "Love you. Have a good sleep. I'll see you in the morning." And we went to bed.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  You know, I settled down. I was thinking, wow, you know, I can't wait for tomorrow. Really excited to see where this tour guide takes us. I'm excited to see my dad, you know, how he reacts to seeing all this cool history. You know, I went to sleep feeling very positive about everything. And then I'm feeling something metal brush against my body. My arms, it's running up and down my legs. There wasn't any pain involved, but it did feel sharp and hard. And I look down and realize it's a straight edge razor.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  And this straight edge razor is shaving me. I couldn't see a hand shaving. I was focused on the blade. It's shaving legs. It's shaving torso. It's shaving the back of my head. I am terrified, heart racing. And then I woke up, almost like I could still feel the razor scraping on my skin. It was dark. The house was quiet. And I thought, what was that?

• 17:27Speaker 03

  It just was a strange dream to be having. It wasn't something that I normally would dream about. It freaked me out. And then I sort of brushed it off. Oh, well, you know, you're in a strange bed. You're in a strange place. You're tired. You just had a weird dream. And I rolled back over and went back to sleep. I wake up relatively refreshed from having woken up in the middle of the night. We get ready and we drive to breakfast.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  We sit down and we order our food and then we just kind of start having your generic morning chat. How'd you sleep? How were the beds? Were the pillows comfortable? You know, that kind of thing. And I said, yeah, no, I slept pretty okay, but you know, I kind of had a weird dream. And my dad looks at me and says, oh, what was your dream about? Because I had a weird dream too. It's not really something we would normally bring up, but the fact that we both had these strange dreams, I felt like we needed to talk about it. And so I told him about my dream and he says, that's really strange. I had a dream where I was laying in bed.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  He said, I felt like I was being held down, like something was holding my shoulders down, my arms down. And in my half awake state, I lifted my arm up to brush whatever was holding me down off, like get off of me. And that's when something grabbed my wrist and firmly slammed my hand down. And he woke himself up by hitting himself on his chest. And he said, I looked around and there's nobody there. The room's empty, it's just me. And I thought, well, that's weird, huh? And then he went back to sleep, just kind of like I did.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  And so we both kind of looked at each other and just thought, well, that's really interesting. You know, that in the light of day, it's not as scary, right? And you're like, that's kind of interesting that we both just had a really weird dream. And then we started talking about the rest of our day, what we were going to do with that tour guide. We had an amazing day. We really did. This tour guide knocked it out of the park. He took us to all of, you know, the big hits, but he also took us to some little hidden statues that were in the woods that you could only get to if you knew where they were.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  He showed us some really cool old paths where you could see the walls that were built by the soldiers to, you know, help guard them from bullets and things like that. We went around, saw all the things and just had a great day.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  We ended up picking up dinner, taking it back to the house that night. And we ate outside. There were ducks on the pond, so you could hear the ducks quietly quacking and settling down for the night. He said, "You know, I think I'm ready to head in." And I said, "Great, let's go get some sleep." And then we went to bed. I settled in and I just drifted off to sleep. A few hours go by, and I'm dreaming that I am hearing the Lord's Prayer. "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread."

• 21:15Speaker 03

  And it repeated. "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread." But I kept getting to, "Give us this day our daily bread," and then it would start over. "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." And it just was a loop. "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come; thy will be done. Father, who art in heaven, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. And then I'm waking up.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  And I realize it's me sleep talking. I'm the one who is saying the prayer. Once I realized it's me, I immediately stopped saying the prayer. But it just made me feel uncomfortable, very uncomfortable.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  The Lord's Prayer is not something that I've said since I probably moved out of my house at 18, you know, and by now I was in my late twenties. And I'm not a sleep talker. I felt very anxious. The air felt heavy. But I just kind of tried to talk myself down from being uncomfortable. I rolled over and I said, you know, that was a weird dream again, just a weird dream. You have a long day tomorrow. You need to get your sleep.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  The crickets and the frogs were actually fairly loud, but I find that a comforting sound, and I was able to go back to sleep.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  I am running.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  I'm running through these woods on a dirt path. I can feel the grittiness of the gravel beneath me. And I am just running as fast as I can to escape. I was being chased by this soldier. And I ended up being chased up against a rock face. My back's against that rock wall, and I look up at this person's face who's walking towards me.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Redhead, no hat, but he did have a blue uniform on. And the thing that stuck out the most is this grin, this just malicious grin that almost took up this guy's whole face. It felt like this is going to be bad. This grin felt so malicious in what this person was going to do to me. And I start saying the Lord's Prayer in my dream. "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come." You know, I'm panicking in the dream. It's breathy. "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, and it will be done." And he gets in my face and looks at me, biggest grin you could imagine,

• 24:56Speaker 03

  and says, "You think that's what I'm saying to you?"

• 25:03Speaker 03

  I woke up heart pounding, sweating, terrified, thinking, like, thank God I woke up, right? I wouldn't have wanted to have dreamed what happened next. Like, it was gonna be bad, whatever it was.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  There was something about it that was more real than any other dream I'd had in my life. And I did not go back to sleep that night.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  Getting ready for the day, I wake my dad up. We go get breakfast and he says, "You look kind of tired. You know, do you not sleep well?" And I say, "You know, I actually, I had some pretty strange dreams again last night." And he said, "Me too."

• 25:50Speaker 03

  I tell him about my dreams. And then he tells me about his dream.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  He was, again, laying on his bed and he could feel something cutting into his face.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  He could feel like a scooping, cutting motion all over his face, his scalp. His eyes were closed. He said he didn't see anybody, but he could just feel things like scooping flesh out of his face.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  It was almost like they were cutting out his skin cancer.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  I felt very like, wow, that's really weird. But you have skin cancer. It's on your mind. You know, we were looking at all this horrible war history yesterday. Maybe I just incorporated it into my dream and that's why I was being chased. You know, I was even trying to kind of dismiss it. That was just a strange dream. That's all it was, nothing, you know, to worry about. And we could just kind of move on and go enjoy the day. We had a half day left with this tour guide. So he picked us up and we did a couple other little things, little site visits, bought a couple souvenirs, you know, had a quick snack and then went back to the Airbnb.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  We're packing up, we're taking our bags out to the car, you know, kind of cleaning up the rooms a little bit when the host comes back in. She walks in, sees us packing and leaving, is like, "Oh, good, I caught you. How was it? How was the stay?"

• 27:34Speaker 03

  We were telling her, "Oh, yeah, we really enjoyed sitting out by the pond and listening to the ducks." You know, we were just kind of having those general, like, "We really enjoyed our stay at your property" kind of conversation. And then offhand, you know, we said, "Yeah, it was really comfortable. We just had some weird dreams, though." And she stops and says, "Weird dreams?"

• 27:53Speaker 03

  So we're like, "Yeah, you know, just some unsettling dreams, but it's a strange house. We're surrounded by history." She says, "Well, let me guess."

• 28:03Speaker 03

  She says, "Were you dreaming that you were being chased? Did you have dream you were having surgery done on you?"

• 28:12Speaker 03

  And the blood rushes out of my face. Because she's describing what happened to my dad and I.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  And she just kind of seemed like, "Yep, yep, I've heard it before."

• 28:29Speaker 03

  And so, we asked about the rooms then. We said, "Well, could you explain, you know, maybe why people are having experiences in these rooms?" And she says, "Well, I don't normally advertise this in my posting, but the house was used as part of a field hospital.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  And the rooms you stayed in were the surgical suites.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  Katie, the room you were staying in was the general room for where they would do amputations. They would come in, cut off an arm or leg, whatever, and toss it out the window.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Dad, your room was the officer surgical suite, where the officers would go to have surgery. And then they would go to the barn to recover."

• 29:18Speaker 03

  And I was shocked. I was shocked. Like, again, blood out of my face. Because then, the dreams suddenly made sense.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  They suddenly made sense why I was being shaved. Maybe I was being prepared for surgery or an amputation. Maybe the Lord's Prayer was stopping because they're dying halfway through saying it was last rites. She said, "My sister was staying in the room my dad was staying in, and she was having ankle surgery. She had had some pins put in, and she was dreaming all night that someone was trying to dig into her ankle to pull the pins out." She's like, "We think they thought her pins were shrapnel, and they were trying to get it out." My stomach dropped because that's kind of what my dad experienced.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  He experienced somebody doing surgery on a thing that was wrong with him. We said, "Well, that's really cool." We were trying to be nice about it. We were freaked out. We were like, "Oh, that's really interesting. That's really cool. We gotta go." And the drive back was almost completely silent. We were processing. Being chased. What did it mean, being chased by the good guy? The redhead soldier was wearing that blue uniform, and they're the good guys in this.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Is it that I was reliving the moments of a Confederate soldier? And they had somehow brought me to this room, this field hospital, and then I died there? And that was my last memory, was being attacked by this Union soldier? Or maybe it was the memory of the Union soldier, who had gotten brought to the surgery suite and maybe passed away? Maybe this was his last memory?

• 31:35Speaker 03

  When we get back to Massachusetts, we sit down and we're able to start talking about it. And we just looked at each other and just said, wow, that was wild. He's a therapist, you know? He's very pragmatic and logical. But without a beat, he was saying, this is something that happened. He said, I'm going to think about this for the rest of my life.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  So I recently went back to look at the listing, just to kind of verify dates and things like that. And I noticed she had added a little blurb. And it says, "I will be your only living host, but there are many others who reside with me. They have lived at the farm for many, many years, some for hundreds of years. Yes, the house is haunted."

• 32:58Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, thank you, thank you, Katie, for taking us to Gettysburg with you and sharing your story with the Spook. The original score for that piece was by Nicholas Marx. It was produced by Zoe Frigno.

• 33:19Glynn Washington?

  Understand. This journey, this chronicle, this form is a search for secrets. Because the knowledge of the shadow has been hunted, burned, it's been hidden. So much and so much has been lost. But so too, so much is being found.

• 33:44Glynn Washington?

  If you know a secret, a secret place, a secret power, a secret creature, or a secret story, please let me know. [email protected] because there's nothing better than a Spooked story from a Spooked listener. Where the Spook reside? Wherever you are, look behind you. Go ahead. That shadow, just out of vision, there lies the Spooked Shadowlands, deep beneath KQED in San Francisco. Absolutely no Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission.

• 34:24Glynn Washington?

  Spooked is brought to you by the team that refuses to eat chicken dinners. Except for Miss Mark Ristich, she's always going on about how the Colonel really knows about his 11 herbs and spices. On Team Spooked, the union representative producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Network of America, AFL-CIO Local 51. And there's Davy Kim, Zoe Fregno, Eric Yanez, Tayle Decot, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Suzy Chu, Evan Stern, Eves Jeffco, Isel Lopez, Jack Darrell, Doug Stewart, Nicholas Marks.

• 35:08Glynn Washington?

  The Spooked theme song is by Pat McEvee Miller. My name is Don Washington. And I would love to go on a trip with my dad to Gettysburg, to anywhere, to 7-Eleven, even if the monsters came out at night, because I know that time is a thief, that every moment is a race to put aside these hurts long enough to say what we want to say while we're both here to say it. I do not wish to tell his ghost that, which I was never able to tell him.

• 35:50Glynn Washington?

  I love him, that I'm sorry for this distance, that I never knew why I always seemed to provoke his rage, but these walls are deep, these scars cut quick, and there will come a day soon when I'm sorry will be too late. I know this.

• 36:12Glynn Washington?

  I notice.

• 36:15Glynn Washington?

  Still I dance with time, hoping tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, the moment will emerge when everything is healed, knowing full well that tomorrow is a lie.

• 36:32Glynn Washington?

  Never, ever, never, ever, never, ever,

• 36:37Glynn Washington?

  ever

• 36:39Glynn Washington?

  turn out.