Sea Legs - The Crossroads

Late watch on a Coast Guard cutter and Jordan’s picking up some high strangeness in his night vision goggles. Plus, we’ll buy you a drink at the Condor Club, but don’t dance on the piano.

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

• 0:04Glynn Washington?

  I'm a fairy. Yes, it's true, and I'll do what you ask me to, but... If you knew what was my game, you'd throw me back from where I came.

• 0:18Glynn Washington?

  You've almost reached the crossroads from Spooked. Stay.

• 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.

• 1:11Glynn Washington?

  That Sam I am. That Sam I am, he will not stop. Green eggs and ham. Please try them now. I will not, Sam. Please try them here. No eggs, no ham. Day after day, the Sam implore, I tell him, "No." Same as before. Eat them, eat them, eat them now. I will not, Sam, you blinkered Sal. I will not eat them on this boat. I will not eat them with your goat. I will not eat them here or there. I will not eat them anywhere.

• 1:51Glynn Washington?

  Sam's smile grows dark. His patience dies.

• 1:57Glynn Washington?

  "Last chance," he says, and I reply, "Get out."

• 2:03Glynn Washington?

  "Get out. Don't bother me."

• 2:07Glynn Washington?

  Sam shakes his head.

• 2:10Glynn Washington?

  "So it must be."

• 2:13Glynn Washington?

  The floor gives way. Down, down I fall into this dark and dreadful hall. Wait, wait.

• 2:22Glynn Washington?

  Perhaps, I could try- Too late for that, comes Sam's reply. You had your chance, now there you'll stay. Down in the dark to rot away. The door slams shut. It's all a sham, cuz Sam is me.

• 2:45Glynn Washington?

  Sam, I am.

• 2:57Glynn Washington?

  Spook's journey through the crossroads starts now.

• 3:59Glynn Washington?

  We begin, headed out to sea to meet Jordan. Now, Jordan is fresh out of boot camp and doing his very first unit with the Coast Guard, on board a ship patrolling the waters off the east coast. And I'm gonna let Jordan take it from here. Spooked.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  It's half past midnight. I'm out here by myself on the catwalk, standing my watch, doing my lookout.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  This is a famous class cutter, about a stern, 270 feet long. White with the famous US Coast Guard orange racing stripe on the front.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  At this point, the ship is off the coast of New England. Even being late spring, it's still pretty cold. The wind is blowing. I'm bundled up in what we call a float coat, essentially a rain jacket with a life jacket built into it.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  It's a pretty dark night. It's very starry out, but the moon had very little illumination in this particular night. So I'm using night vision goggles, and I'm looking for hazards, essentially. Things floating in the water, other ships that we might not see on radar.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  At this point, I'm about an hour and a half into my watch. It's been a pretty quiet night.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  I'm doing a scan with my night vision, just looking towards the front of the ship. And I see there's a person standing at the forwardmost point of the bow, about 70 feet away from me, with his arms outstretched.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  It's the middle of the night. There aren't very many people awake at this point. And for someone to be out there in the pitch-black darkness, standing on the front of the ship, that rings alarm bells in my head.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  I'm concerned about the worst-case scenario that this person is out there with the intent to jump off.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Right away, I have to look again. You know, did I actually just see that?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  I pick up my NVGs again and look out and it's very clearly a person standing there.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Just the silhouette of a person.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  I can tell that it's a man. He's got a military-style haircut.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  And I can tell that they're wearing the Coast Guard uniform. Not by any color, just by the sort of silhouette of it.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  I'm yelling, "Hey, what are you doing out there?" You know, hey, you know, just trying to get their attention. BOD, the officer at the deck, the person in charge of navigation of the ship. She's inside the bridge. This OOD has heard me screaming. She's my boss as a seaman. And she has come out to see what the deal is.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  She's short, probably 5'2", blonde woman with big, like, porthole glasses. Just these big, round glasses that you practically can't see past when you're talking to her.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  So I hand her my night vision goggles. I say, "There's someone standing on the bow."

• 7:56Speaker 02

  And I think the exact words out of her mouth were, "Oh shit."

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Because at this point, now she's reached the same initial conclusion that I have of somebody's on the front of the boat. And they might be getting ready to jump over the side.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  So immediately, she calls to the boatswain's mate of the watch. Their only roving watchstander on the bridge. And tells him to go down there.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  I can hear him open the door. It's a very distinct, like, creak and slam sound, a very heavy door. And I can see his flashlight as he comes out. He's got a life jacket on himself. And he's got another life jacket in his hand in case he has to reach out and grab this person and throw him in a life jacket to prevent him from hurting themselves.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  So the OD, she sends the bosun's mate of the watch down and a couple minutes later, he comes up on the radio and he says, "There's no one up here."

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Right away, my heart sank. My immediate thought was that this person had jumped over the side or fallen over the side and we didn't see it happen.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  I expected that we're gonna be looking for a man overboard throughout the night.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  But I immediately pick up the night vision and I see right away that the person is there still.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  I hand him to her, she can still see him there, so now I'm thinking that the BMO probably had to walk through like a lit up space to get out there. And so, his natural night vision just isn't adjusted enough to see this person.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  We're on the radio, I'm yelling, we're trying to guide him to where this person is standing. We can see him shining his flashlight right in the spot where the shadow is.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  And we see the BMO walk up

• 10:09Speaker 02

  right where this person is standing.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  We're telling him the whole time, "He's right there, he's right there, he's right in front of you, how do you not see him?" And then he walks right through the person.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  And is still saying that there's nothing there.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  My blood runs cold.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  I'm dumbfounded. I don't know how I could be even seeing what I'm seeing, I just watched a man walk through another man.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  The O D and I are trying to figure out what it is we're looking at. Maybe it's this, maybe it's that, but we can both see that it's not, it's not any of those things we try to rationalize.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  The O D goes back into the bridge. She didn't have much to say after that. I think she was pretty well shaken up and in her own head at that point.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  I continue standing my watch. Every time I looked down, it was still there.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  And at this point, I've pretty well understood that he's gonna be there.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  I get off my watch and make my way through the ship. And at this point, I'm just so exhausted that I'm ready to go to sleep. And I pass out pretty much as soon as my head hits the pillow.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  So the next day, I'm sitting on the mess deck between meals, kinda just wasting some time. But at the same time, I'm thinking about this shadow that I saw last night.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Ghost stories are very common on these boats. I've always been a sort of, what I would call, maybe a loose believer. But I've never seen one, so how can I possibly say one way or the other?

• 12:21Speaker 02

  And then the O D from that night comes up and sits down. That's abnormal behavior. Officers don't sit on the enlisted mess deck. They have their own sort of eating area, cloistered from the rest of the ship. And traditionally, officers aren't supposed to sit there unless they ask you. And so for her to come over here and sit down, she clearly has something on her mind.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Really, before I had a chance to say anything, she said, "I saw it again."

• 12:58Speaker 02

  After I got off watch, I went to my room and it was standing in the hallway. She just described it as just a black man-shaped figure. Right away, I just got chills. My hairs on my arms stood up. It wasn't just this figure that stood on an unreachable part of the ship, you know, 70 feet away from me. It's now something that I could turn the corner and see at any given moment. Within the next few days, you know, I started hearing stories about I went out on the fantail

• 13:39Speaker 02

  to smoke in the night and I saw someone standing there and raised my phone up to their face to see who it was and there just wasn't anybody there. Or about seeing a shadow of a man while they were making their rounds before they went to watch. That they were in the gym and saw just this shadow of a person. At this point, I felt pretty afraid that I was gonna now run into this thing anywhere that I went. It's capable of moving around the ship. What else is it capable of? What is it gonna do the next time I run into it?

• 14:37Glynn Washington?

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• 14:58Glynn Washington?

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• 15:52Speaker 02

  About a week after that initial incident, we're having what we call quarters, where we all get together and the executive officer and the commanding officer, they discuss our upcoming plans, they make announcements. The executive officer stands up and he goes, oh, and we've got a burial at sea that we need volunteers for. I'm thinking, what? What are you talking about? Burial at sea? Like, nobody's dead. Nobody died on this boat. Come to find out, since we left Florida on our way back up to New England, we have been carrying this urn onboard.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  And it's been tucked away in one of the officer's staterooms for safekeeping. And the urn belonged to a former electrician's mate in the Coast Guard. The electrician's mate had been in the Coast Guard in the 80s onboard this particular ship, responding to search and rescue. What he requested was to be buried at sea in the vicinity of where his first SARS case was.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  At this point, it starts to make sense.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  This was probably the man that was walking around the boat.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Anytime you run into an old veteran, one of the first things they want to do is take a look at the ship that they used to be on. See what's changed and see who's working and how things are going.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  I think he was just trying to get his bearings and see what's changed, see what stayed the same. Reminisce, in a way.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  This guy who was on this ship that stood where I stood, did the mission that I do, and now we're honoring his final request.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  That felt very moving to me, and I was very quick to volunteer to be a part of this ceremony.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  The day of the ceremony comes, and I have volunteered to be an urn bearer.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  We have three riflemen to do the gun salute. We have someone with a trumpet to play taps. A couple people to hold the American flag as we do the interment.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  This particular urn is a small, plastic box.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Myself and the chief, we bring it over to the rail and put it over the side and let go.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  When we drop the urn in the water, I sort of say a little bit of a prayer to myself, just thinking about the implications of what we've just done and what it means to the man and his family.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  And after that, the sightings stop.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  The shadow just feels like another shipmate now. That being said, a shipmate that I still don't want to run into in the dark in the middle of the night. But it's just someone else who lived part of their life on this boat.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Recently, I was underway on the ship that I'm on now. And I knew that the ship that I used to be on was in a port that we were pulling into.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  I went over to the ship. They were right across the pier. Salute the watchstander, go on the brow, and salute the flag, as is custom in the Coast Guard, and step on. And immediately, that smell, every cutter has its own smell. And just the memories of the time I was there just filled, filled my head as, as I took in that smell.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  And I kind of feel like maybe that's what that electrician's mate was doing as well, just taking in the memories.

• 20:20Glynn Washington?

  Jordan, thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing your story with us, Spooked. The original score for that piece was by Lauren Newsom. It was produced by Zoe Feringo.

• 20:36Glynn Washington?

  And now, our next story hits close to home for reals. It all goes down at the Condor Club, a legendary nightclub just a few miles away from the San Francisco Spook catacombs at KQED. And yes, the Condor Club is a real, live, adult establishment. And as such, this story includes mentions of actual nudity, actual sex, even some strong language, sensitive listeners and such, you know. Naturally, with all that on offer, of course, our own Zoe Feringo decided she needed to pay the club a visit. I'll let Zoe take it from here.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  It's a Sunday night and my fiance Pete and I are in North Beach, walking up Broadway. Most nights of the week, this street is totally lit up with neon signs. But tonight, almost all of them are dark. There's no glowing gangster outside of Big Owls, no blonde bombshell in front of the Hungry Eye. Even the bright green snake outside of the Garden of Eden has the night off. From the looks of it, there's only one club open in North Beach tonight. And the 50-foot-tall neon sign that says Condor in big, gold letters is as bright as ever.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Inside, the Condor Club is dark and very loud. There are Christmas decorations hanging on the walls and football is playing on the TVs. It kind of feels like just your average neighborhood bar, except for one thing: the dancer up on stage in a silver bikini top, hanging upside down on the stripper pole. The truth is, the Condor isn't just a neighborhood bar, even if it feels that way sometimes. It's one of the oldest strip clubs in San Francisco and the very first topless bar in America.

• 23:10Speaker 04

  I was really excited to work there, honestly, even if I wasn't dancing, because it's an iconic spot.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  That's Rachel. She started working at the Condor as a bartender in 2019.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  The building itself is like over 100 years old.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  So when you go in, it has like a very like old school burlesque vibe, which I really liked. The stairs are still made of hardwood. The railings are still made of hardwood. The wallpaper was like super detailed and ornate paisley with like these deep reds and gold. And then you just have pictures of dancers who danced there throughout the years. There's this history there. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if it opened as a museum one of these days.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Rachel started out working the day shift at the club.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  In the beginning, it was intimidating. The girl who was training me during the daytime, she was very charismatic and a lot of people loved her. She had a lot of regulars that came in just for her. So I was just like, I felt like I had like this huge role to fill, you know?

• 24:21Speaker 03

  Rachel knew if she was going to win over the crowd, she was gonna have to put in some extra time before her shift when the club was dead.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  I came in and I was setting up the bar and I was practicing making drinks so that I could get faster at it. And I went to go grab a bottle and then I noticed that the Hennessy bottle was out of place.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  It was just like slightly scooted towards the edge. And I noticed that because I'm one of those people where I'm like, it needs to be in like a perfect little place, like it needs to look neat. And so I went and I pushed it back. And then I got down off the ladder. And then I started cleaning the bar and cutting fruit and just, just doing downtime stuff that you do as a bartender at a bar. And I look up and that damn bottle is by the edge again. And I'm just like, what the hell? Because I made sure that I pushed that thing back. And then I went and I did it again.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  And it kept happening whenever she was there practicing in the deserted club with the empty stage.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  I would push it back and then it would be slightly out of place again.

• 25:40Speaker 04

  And it was just that one bottle of Hennessy.

• 25:44Speaker 04

  It was really annoying.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  After a few weeks on the job, Rachel was starting to get the hang of things.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Because we had a lot of beer drinkers, I would keep bottles of beer on ice. So I remember I was taking some Bud Lights, putting them on the ice.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  It's very early, so like no customers had rolled in yet. The band hadn't come in yet.

• 26:10Speaker 04

  And I heard what sounded like footsteps. It sounded like somebody was just darting up the stairs.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  I thought it was my manager.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  But then about five to 10 minutes later, it sounded like somebody was running back down the stairs.

• 26:30Speaker 04

  I was like, all right, what's going on? Did something happen?

• 26:34Speaker 04

  So I decided to investigate. So I went upstairs and I looked around.

• 26:39Speaker 04

  My manager was not up there. I came back down.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  As I'm coming down the stairs leading up to the private rooms, he comes up from the basement stairs.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  And I'm like, I just heard somebody running up and down the stairs. I thought it was you.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  And he was just like, oh, yeah, that's the ghost. I've heard it too.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  In my head, I was like, you know, people like to blame things that they can't explain on ghosts.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  Or he's just trying to scare me. That was what was going through my head.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  So I brushed it off and went back to work.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  It was another dead afternoon, and Rachel was all alone in the club again, up on the stage.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  My manager told me that he wanted me to start cleaning the mirror that's behind the pole on the stage, because no one was cleaning it. And it's just filled with fingerprints and lipstick stains, because sometimes the girls would kiss the mirror. So I'm up there with the Windex, and I'm wiping it down. I'm minding my own business. And then as I'm wiping away these fingerprints, I see a man standing behind me.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  And that's when I got startled.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  He was very tall, very big. Then he had a beard.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  He was wearing a full-on, like, black suit, white button-up shirt with a red tie.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  It was the kind of outfit that the bouncers wore.

• 28:27Speaker 04

  And he looked like my old coworker that I had at my old club.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  And I was like, oh, did he come by to say hello? And I turned around and no one's there.

• 28:42Speaker 04

  It was literally like a split second. Like, I saw it in the mirror and I kind of got excited. And I turned around and no one was there. And I was like, what just happened?

• 28:53Speaker 04

  I got scared. I was like, is somebody in here? Like, who was that?

• 29:00Speaker 04

  I looked around and I was like, maybe somebody from the night shift maybe came in to pick up their paycheck or something.

• 29:09Speaker 04

  No, no one was there.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  And then I remembered, like, boss said it was haunted. Is this what he was talking about?

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Up on the same stage where Rachel saw the man behind her in the mirror, another dancer is finishing her set. There's a guy in a suit up there with her, using a push broom to sweep up all the cash on stage. Peta and I get up and make our way into the club's other room to get drinks at the bar.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  We see the stairs that lead up to the private rooms, where Rachel heard the disembodied footsteps. And then, towards the back of the club, we notice that part of the floor is glowing.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  We walk over and see that set into the floor is a baby grand piano. It's underneath a layer of plexiglass and illuminated by hot pink lights. There's a clear stripper pole coming up out of the plexiglass that goes all the way into the ceiling. It turns out that this piano plays a big role in the history of the club.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  I was bartending at nighttime. It was very, very busy, very loud music playing. I was very stressed out because there was a lot of people and I have to deal with this DoorDash order because one of the dancers had ordered food.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Rachel grabbed the takeout bag and started heading for the back room. But before she got there, she ran into another dancer.

• 31:12Speaker 04

  Her face is like, super pale white. When I noticed they were looking up at the ceiling, I turn around, I look up. I was expecting to see something wild going down on the second floor in the private rooms because that's what happens when you work in a nightclub. That's what I was expecting to see, something wild.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  But when I looked up,

• 31:42Speaker 04

  I saw this black, shadowy figure

• 31:49Speaker 04

  of a woman, hourglass shape, pinned up hair, with her hand on her hip, just like descending from the ceiling, like down to the floor.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  And it was dark, but I could see it. It was plain as day.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  And then as soon as it hits the floor, it just dissipates. It was like a raindrop hitting the floor. It was like, poof.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  Gone.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  I was super shaken up. I had chills, I was freaking out, but the dancer next to me, she was like really freaking out. She was like, "Oh my god, did we just see that?" I was trying really, really hard to keep it together, but I couldn't stop shaking. Just the way she was posing, just the way that her body was shaped. There's no doubt in my mind that that was Carol, absolutely.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  Carol, as in Carol Doherty, the iconic topless dancer who made the Condor Club famous, and who turned North Beach into a hub of sex and controversy in the 1960s.

• 33:07Speaker 05

  Yours was the first topless show.

• 33:09Speaker 06

  First topless and the first to be in trouble. I was the first one to go to jail for three hours.

• 33:13Speaker 05

  You did go to jail for three hours? What was that like?

• 33:16Speaker 06

  It was very terrible. I don't particularly like it.

• 33:19Speaker 05

  But I would like to know, what is the performance at the Condor? What did it consist of?

• 33:24Speaker 06

  Oh, it consisted of a piano, a ceiling, and a body. Coming out of the ceiling on the piano with this wild rock and roll music. And it was like an elevator. It was like going up and down on an elevator. And I would hit the stage and I would go into one of my routines. Mostly rock and roll dancing, you know, the contemporary.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Carol performed her signature moves, singing and dancing, topless on top of the piano, six times every night. And each time, the crowd in the Condor Club would go wild.

• 34:07Speaker 04

  When I saw the silhouette come down from the ceiling, like that was her platform, where she had her piano, where she would come down. Like, that was her spot.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  She passed away in 2015, so pretty recent. But I wouldn't be surprised if she felt very spiritually, emotionally connected to that place.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  But the legacy of the piano, that now sits encased in plexiglass beneath the floor, goes beyond just Carol Doherty.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  So back in the early 80s, this floor host and a dancer decided that now that the club was closed, that it was a good idea to do the nasty on top of a piano. Why they thought that that was a good idea, I don't know. But as they were, you know, being intimate on top of the piano, it malfunctioned. And it just smashed against the ceiling.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  And it crushed the man.

• 35:16Speaker 04

  His girlfriend, the dancer, she was able to survive.

• 35:20Speaker 04

  But yeah, the floor host, yeah, he did. He did not survive, unfortunately.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Over time, Rachel came to wonder if that was the large man in the bouncer suit whose reflection she saw behind her that day in the mirror.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  Apparently, he had a beard. Like, that was his nickname, The Beard.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  This theory intrigued me, so I started looking into it. And I found out that there's evidence that The Beard, whose real name was Jimmy Ferrotso, may actually have been murdered by the mob. And then his death was staged to look like an accident.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  We probably won't ever know what really happened, just like we'll never know whether Rachel saw The Beard that day or the spirit of some other guy who just really loved Hennessy.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  To me, it's like a lot of different spirits that are there.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  Even though I was there for only several months, I could definitely just feel a lot of different energy because there's just so many different people that have come and gone from that place since the 60s.

• 36:33Speaker 04

  And a strip club is a very emotionally charged place. There's a lot of different emotions and, you know, people are experiencing a bunch of different things.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  I feel like their energy just sort of lingers.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  It's about 10 PM at the Condor Club. There's a little break in the entertainment, and Pete has wandered off with his drink to the back of the club to check out the piano one more time. He's standing right over it, in the same place where Jimmy Ferrotso met his end, and where Rachel saw what she believes was Carol Doherty's ghost. There's another dancer about to take the stage, but I think it's time to go. I want to get my fiance out of here in one piece.

• 37:37Glynn Washington?

  A big, big thank you to Rachel for sharing her story at the spook. And thank you to the wonderful staff at the Condor Club for their hospitality. Spooksters. If you want to learn more about the history of the Condor Club and the woman who put it on the map, there's a wonderful documentary you should check out. It's called Carol Doherty: Tap Us at the Condor. You can find out more about it in our show notes. The original score for that piece was by Doug Stewart. It was performed by Doug Stewart and Casey Butler. It was scouted by Pauline Akriki and produced by Zoe Frigno.

• 38:16Glynn Washington?

  Now, let me tell you a tragic story about these crossroads, about this shadow land. Because the truth is this. Some people, they don't know the way. They've never heard of spook. They don't know. There's a community of spooksters trying to cast light on the darkness. They wander, alone and afraid.

• 38:40Glynn Washington?

  And if you find solace, respite, connection from hearing real people sharing their real stories, take a moment, right now. Do me a favor. Let somebody know. Send them the spook story they need to hear. 'Tis the season. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, call them. Use a stamp. That's the only way we can keep this journey alive. Now if you yourself, you have spoken to a fairy, the magical kind, I would love to hear about it. [email protected], because there's nothing better than a spooked story from a spooked listener. He's got the special incantation from Spook Legal, reading that no Snap Studios content may be used for

• 39:22Glynn Washington?

  training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission. Spooked is brought to you by the team that goes to adult establishments for the food. Except for Mark Ristich, he just likes the conversation.

• 39:42Glynn Washington?

  The road to Spook Studios runs through shadow and light, time and space, only to intersect with KQED in San Francisco. Don't seek to find it, lest it seek to find you.

• 39:55Glynn Washington?

  Our team Spooked, the union represented producers, artists, editors and engineers, are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIOL, Local 51, all of that in.

• 40:10Glynn Washington?

  Davey Kim, Zoe Frigno, Eric Yanis, Taylor Decot, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Elliot Lightfoot, Su Yichu, Evan Stern, Eve Jeffco, Ishal Lopez, Jack Darrell, Doug Stewart. The Spook theme song is by Pat McSeddon Miller.

• 40:33Glynn Washington?

  My name's John Washington, and Philip K. Dick once said that "it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."

• 40:46Glynn Washington?

  And I feel recently that my tenacious grip on whatever reality is is slipping even more. All of us that have heard something, seen something, felt something that couldn't be, we know that if we insist that we saw or we experienced what we saw or we experienced, that if we turn away efforts to rationalize it away, refuse to pretend,

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  refuse to make nice, then it might not go so well for us.

• 41:18Glynn Washington?

  People might have to be called. Papers might have to be signed. We can't have that. So we do pretend. We do make nice. We didn't see what we saw anymore. It's easier that way.

• 41:35Glynn Washington?

  And I wonder if living that lie has had a consequence. An unforeseen consequence. I wonder if when we refuse to acknowledge our own reality,

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  does it make it easier to ignore someone else's?

• 41:53Glynn Washington?

  We tell ourselves the contradiction isn't real in order to get along. Sure. It's cool if one person has half a trillion dollar and another person can't afford to purchase their children a sandwich. Sure. The real criminal is the guy who picks tomatoes for the sandwich she can't afford. Sure. The full might of the military needs to be deployed against our own citizens. Sure. Sure. Or could it be that once we tell lies to ourselves, it's easier to embrace the lies of someone else? I don't see monsters at the gate. Sure, we won't be next. Sure. Sure.

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  Sure.

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  Never, ever, ever. Never, never. Ever, never.

• 42:46Glynn Washington?

  Turn out the lights.