Green Demon - Classic

When Austin’s dad starts having night terrors, the family thinks it’s just nightmares -- but Austin thinks something else is going on. He soon discovers that there is an actual demon plaguing his father… and Austin must confront it.

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  When the demons named their king, the angels all rebelled to sing and all the dark, they bathed in light. So half is day and half is night.

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  You're listening to Spooked.

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  Stay tuned.

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  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.

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  You've crossed over to Spooked.

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  So back in the day, for a few years, I just kind of wandered all over the world, doing part-time jobs, sleeping on friends' couches. I didn't know what I was looking for.

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  Didn't have a lot of money for lunch or the train fare, whatever. But still, I always allowed myself one splurge.

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  Books. I love books. I do. The smell, the bindings, the stories, the knowledge. I've purchased Buddhist texts in Korea, books on flower arranging, stacks, stacks of classic science fiction and fantasy. I bought books in Braille, and I can see just fine. I just like touching them. New books, old books, whole collections from a Japanese flea market. A secret, forbidden book chronicling the political history of Malaysia. Collected notes of Charles Darwin's slave journals. In Taiwan, I find an Egypt-Chinese volume detailing the acupuncture meridians of the body in extraordinary detail.

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  It was last printed over 100 years ago. And because I don't have a home or whatever, I pack these treasures away. I send them to my mama's place in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for safekeeping, hundreds of books, each one with their own story of how they were bought, bartered, bet, or traded for. And they're packed away as gifts to an older me because I have a vision for I am content, happy, gray-haired, wandering through a library of my own creation, reading sometimes by myself, sometimes out loud to my loved ones. And I see this place. I see this clearly as I see my own hands.

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  I know that someday I want my children, my children's children, their children, in turn, to know they can walk through many worlds. They can press through time and space if they learn to love these books as much as I do. And one day, I'm sitting, eating an apple, minding my own business when I get a call from my mama. She's a deeply religious woman. "Son, me and the ladies, we got to divine it." And the church ladies are here in the background, clapping and praying. "Divine it." "That's right." "He says the devil, the devil, up my house." "Huh. The devil, huh? Really?"

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  "That's right. The devil in my home, up and around my clean kitchen floor." "He followed his cloven hooves right through the house, over the rug, down the stairs, to see from whence the evil sprang." "Mm-hmm." "And you know what we discovered right on top of your pile of papers?" "Mama?" "Mother." "Satanic verses." "Satanic verses. How you gonna bring the verses of the devil into my Christian home?" "Mom, um, Satanic verses is not what you think it is. It's a book by Salman Rushdie, and he wrote..." "I know what the verses of Satan are, boy!

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  And your Satanic verses are gonna burn, just like the rest of these books." "Mama, mama, mama, leave my books alone. You can have Satanic verses. Thank you. I don't even like that book, but just leave everything else alone." "It's got the same tank. It's gonna burn the same holy fire. I just thought I'd let you know." "Mama, leave my books alone." "Goodbye, son." "Mother. Mother. Mama. Mother."

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  I call back.

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  I call back again and again, and then I'm... It's like I'm standing. I'm standing in the middle of this vision of my beautiful library as it burst into flame.

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  I feel the heat on my skin. The smoke burns my eyes. I don't call her anymore. I don't wonder if she did it. I can almost hear her Satan laughing.

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  Laughing.

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  And then,

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  after a good, long while,

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  I start laughing too.

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  Spooked Starts.

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  Now.

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  Now, our story comes to us from the other side of the world, Durban, South Africa. For Austin Francis and his dad, they're close, they're tight. And Austin's dad, he's the real adventurous type, not afraid of anything. Austin wants to be just like him, but he's about to learn how much there is to be scared of in this world. Spooked.

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  My dad was basically a very strong man.

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  He was an oak. He was the strength of our family.

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  He loved birds. He loved wild birds of South Africa. And he used to go out collecting birds.

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  In the sense trapping them, swapping them out with his friends in the bird club. That was his passion, his birds.

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  He built himself a massive aviary.

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  It was in the backyard, a massive walk-through aviary.

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  And he used to go out like 4:00 a.m. just to catch the first flock of birds that's coming in to feed on a grassland or on a farmer's patch.

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  I only went to do this with my dad one time, and I think I must have been 10 or 11 years old.

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  It was cool going with my dad out in the dark and not knowing where we're going. I knew we were going to catch birds, but I never knew the destination.

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  He knew exactly where to park, which fence to cross, how far in into the field he would go and perch, wait, set up his bird cages.

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  He was just running back and forth, removing the birds from the trap, putting them in another cage, and we waited. And it went on until we had like about two cages full of wild yellow-eyed finches.

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  It was an adventure for me. It was a little boy's adventure. Hey, we're out here in the countryside and we're doing cowboy stuff, I think.

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  You know?

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  It was cool. I enjoyed it. I was enjoying the darkness and I love the stars.

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  It was amazing until first light.

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  And then I realised I was on someone's farm.

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  It was a ginger farm and when you dug your hands into the ground, you could pick up ginger roots. At first light, I realised that we were illegally on someone's farm catching birds.

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  You know, so that was my dad.

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  He'd go all out for his birds.

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  He would cross a river just to set up his trap cages to catch birds.

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  That's how he was.

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  When I was about twenty-three, my dad used to have these night chasers.

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  And our house was basically silent. Nobody snored. And it was a quiet house.

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  And then my dad would scream, yell.

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  And that would, you know, shake the house up and we'd all jump out a bit to see what's going on.

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  And he'd be yelling in his sleep.

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  It scared both myself and my sibling. They were horrified. What's wrong with dad? Is he ill or why is he screaming like this? And it went on for a while and he never spoke of it.

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  It sort of bugged me because I needed to know what the hell was going on.

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  The fact that I wanted to know, it lingered in my mind all the time. But in an Indian household, it was just taboo for kids to ask the adult question, you know?

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  Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays were leisure days for me, myself and my friends. We'd go out clubbing. We used to club a lot.

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  One night, I came home just after one in the morning.

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  I fell asleep.

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  And I heard my dad yelling. He started screaming and yelling.

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  His screams were fearful as if he was being harmed or he was afraid of something.

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  I sensed that something was terribly wrong. It was not just a bad dream. Something was disturbing.

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  And I thought I should stand up for him.

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  I usually sleep with a pocket bible on my bed. My hand reached instinctively for the bible.

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  And it was like, here I go. I'm on this mission to confront whatever or whoever was hurting my dad.

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  It's like I knew what I needed to do without thinking about it.

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  I stepped out of my room. What caught my eye was a green luminous light that was coming from the lounge.

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  I take two steps into the living room and on my right, perched within the light,

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  was this creature.

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  He was a big guy. He was a big muscular guy. He had the body for man, but his face was that of a beast.

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  Pointy ears. He had pointy ears, yellowish teeth, sharp teeth.

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  His eyes were yellowish with red outlining.

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  He had green scaly skin. You could clearly see his scaly skin.

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  He had long dirty nails and he had a goldish bracelet from his shoulder to his elbow. A full long bracelet. It had some kind of engravings on it. There were little twirly kind of stuff that was on that bracelet, which I could not identify.

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  I could see his breath if the lounge was so cold. It was a summer night. The house was not cold. We didn't have any air conditioning. The lounge was cold because of him.

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  And when I stepped into that living room, I caught his attention. And he stared me down from head to toe and looked at me.

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  I had the bible clutched in my right hand to my side.

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  And then he looked at the direction of where my dad was sleeping.

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  Through the wall that divided the living room from my dad's bedroom.

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  And when he stared in that direction, my dad began to yell and scream.

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  In my normal state of mind, I would have brought the house down, you know? I would have sworn Jewish languages my mom would hate. But that night felt different.

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  I was so cool, collective and knew that I had to do this.

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  In order for me to get to him, I had to pass a couch that was between us. A long couch. And I walked around the couch to approach where he was.

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  He stopped and looked at me.

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  And he started to snarl.

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  And grimace, the much way a wild animal that was cornered by hunters or something would snarl to threaten you as if I'd hurt you, I'd kill you, or I would attack you.

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  I stopped halfway. He probably thought that I'm no threat to him and he continued to stare to his left at the wall where my dad was sleeping.

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  It was as though he could see my dad through that wall. And when he did that, my dad instantly yelled all over again.

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  To think that something like this was affecting my dad, my hero, you know? I was upset. I was livid.

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  I had to take that thing on.

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  I continued towards him and I walked around the couch.

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  No qualms about it. I walked straight up to him. And I looked him straight in the eye.

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  He snarled at me as if, in a threatening manner, and showed me his ugly teeth. And I didn't care because I was willing to sacrifice myself for my dad.

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  I just stated I plead the blood of Jesus. And I touched him on his thigh with the Bible.

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  I heard a singe, you know, much where you take a hot iron and mark a cow or something and it singed.

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  And it yelped as if in pain.

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  And the light gradually closed in on him.

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  Sucked him in.

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  And shut. That was it. He was gone. My dad stopped screaming.

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  I walked to my dad's room. And he was quiet. And I placed the Bible on his side pedestal. And I just touched his forehead to see if he was okay.

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  My dad slapped soundly. He was, he was fine.

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  I felt immediate change in our lives. Because if my dad is fine, everything is good, we're good.

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  And I went off to my room.

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  I slept like a baby.

• 21:19Speaker 00

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• 22:02Speaker 00

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• 22:35Speaker 01

  And woke up the next morning in shock, like what just happened?

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  My dad was having breakfast around nine AM or so. And I walked up to him, I said, Dad, you okay? He said, Yeah.

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  What happened this morning, last night? And then he says, Son.

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  Every night, there's this green guy that's sitting on my chest and squeezing my throat.

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  And I finished off his statement and said, uh, green guy, pointy ears, gold bracelet on his arm, and my dad's jaw dropped.

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  And he said, what? And I said, Dad, I confronted him this morning.

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  And he left his breakfast, he said, let's go to my room.

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  He said, get me my diary from the, from the bookstand. He opened his diary and he said, this guy? And I said, yeah, that's him.

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  And my dad has been making sketches of him. Every time he had confrontation or nightmares, he would sketch him.

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  At first, they were rough sketches.

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  My dad was just trying to remember what this demon looked like. And he would sketch, you know, make wild sketches.

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  I was in awe and I looked at the sketches rather in depth.

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  He did a sketch of the demon with a bird on the left hand side, flying away, flying off.

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  And then there's like three more or four more sketches of the demon.

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  And the sketches were getting closer each day until his final sketch.

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  The final sketch of the demon was like sort of a bust version, just the shoulders and chest. You could see his pointy ears, a sharp teeth, and his, and his eyes, demonic looking eyes.

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  And I tapped my finger on his diary and I said, that's him. He said, just that's him.

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  That was him. My dad was, he stood there in shock, in total shock. He never thought that I or anyone else would have experienced this thing. And I said, Dad, he won't be bothering you anymore.

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  I was quite confident in myself. And it was, it was a real, really good, good feeling.

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  The next day, my mom decided to call the pastor over to shed some light on the incident.

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  I gave him the entire rundown. And he listened carefully. And his conclusion was that, that the Holy Spirit came over me to protect my dad.

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  Which explains why I was so calm. And I did not freak out in any way and why I clutched the Bible.

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  He sounded a bit corny to me, it wasn't what I wanted to hear. His explanation didn't, didn't quite gel with me. This was something that I was, I was waiting for. And all this while that my dad was having the night terrors, it grew on me. It stayed on my mind that I need to know who or what is bothering my dad. And I, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it.

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  However,

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  he said this in closing, when it's my time,

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  the same demon would come for me.

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  When I'm at my weak point or when it's time, when it's my time to go cross over, the demon would be there to take me.

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  That was it. And he prayed, he prayed for my dad and he prayed for the family and he was gone.

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  The demon, it never came back. My dad totally stopped screaming and he was at peace afterward.

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  I know it never worried my dad again. But I feel that although that he didn't return, he may have had a dire effect.

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  My dad was soon after diagnosed with cancer and it was in the last stages and it was too late for treatment and he soon passed on afterwards.

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  I was raised Catholic, but my grandparents, my dad's mom and dad, were Hindus.

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  The tradition in Hindu culture is whereby the priests would do an exorcism on someone that's possessed, or remove demons from homes, and release the demon into the rivers.

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  Away from basically civilization, from houses and stuff, like they would go off to a far river and release the demons into the river.

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  And my dad used to, those were his places to catch his wild birds. And I would assume that this is where this thing latched on to my dad.

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  Perhaps the demon knew that my dad had a weakness and decided to attack him, because he probably knew that my dad was dying.

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  My dad never knew this, we never knew this, until he got really sick.

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  I acquired a job out of the province and I had to move. I was in my own place.

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  It was two months later and I went back to the house after my dad's passing. I was hurting inside, because there were empty spaces in that house, because he was not there, and it felt hollow, it felt quiet. And I stared into his bedroom and just realized that, you know, he's not around anymore.

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  I walked to the lounge and I think secretly I called out to that demon, you know, as if, are you still around? Are you hiding from me? Did I defeat you? Did you take my dad?

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  I still go to the house and I spend some nights in the lounge, you know?

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  I bunk on the couch sometimes, just to see, to get in touch or know.

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  I think that's my one wish, is to face him head on again.

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  If I were to see him, experience him, or sense him in some way, I would definitely take him on.

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  I promise you that.

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  Thank you, Austin, for sharing your story with Spooked. The original score for that piece is by Leon Morimoto, and it's produced by Zoe Fergno.

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  Spooksters, let the dark winds blow, we walk this path together.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  If you have a story of your own battle against the darkness, I need to know it. I need to know it right away, quick, in a hurry. Email us, [email protected]. There is nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener. Let us know, [email protected]. Yes, you can get spooked gear at snapjudgment.org. And remember, if you like your storytelling under the bright light of day, get the amazing, the stupendous, the Snap Judgment Podcast, it might just change your life, it's storytelling with a beat.

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  This book was created by the team that would never burn a book, except, except for maybe Mark Wistich, because he roasts marshmallows over flaming library books. He does, I've seen him do it. There's Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, their chief spookster, Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Renzo Goryo, Theo Decot, David Kim, Beau Walsh, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Fergno, Tiffany Delisa, Ann Ford, and Doug Stewart. The spook theme song is by Pat Massey Miller. My name is Bill Washington. And sometimes, you just have to trust yourself. There's no need to ask around to see what someone else thinks.

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  If you feel the icy hand on the back of your neck, friend, run. Neither do you have to explain why you do what you do. Let them understand that in your house, you will never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, ever turn out the lights.