The Summoning - Classic

Spirits, seances and dollhouses. This is The Summoning.

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

• 0:02Glynn Washington?

  When you reach out to the other world through the veil, you may be upset when you are ignored, when they simply fail to respond. But that is not the problem. That is not the issue. No. Understand, the difficulty always comes when they pay attention.

• 0:28Speaker 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.

• 1:01Glynn Washington?

  From Snap Judgments: Underground Lair, you're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned.

• 1:17Glynn Washington?

  They say, "Don't mess with things you do not understand." But if we obeyed, we would never touch anything because we know so little. We are so profoundly ignorant that we fail to recognize even our own ability to summon evil. Still, just because we don't know what we're doing doesn't mean that we can't pay the price.

• 1:48Glynn Washington?

  My name is Glynn Washington. Always know how to do the exact opposite of what you just did because Spooked starts now.

• 2:23Glynn Washington?

  If you don't believe in the power of a Ouija board, that's fine. In fact, that's how it should be. But just don't go playing with one. Spooked listener Andrea CK tells us why. Spooked.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  So there was a Saturday afternoon that was pretty warm. You know, I'm stuck with my little sister and that's a little bit disappointing. And normally on a Saturday, I would hang out with my gang. So I called around and Gerald and Debbie and Barry, they said, don't worry, they can come over to my place and they'll be on their way. So at around one o'clock, here they come. And I'm supposed to be babysitting, you know, but we sit down and get in the living room and right away Wendy is taking out her Ouija board.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  I had never seen a Ouija board before and I had no idea what it was. She said, this is what we're gonna do, you know, I'm gonna ask the questions. She said, people with a good relationship have to use it together because then the energy is better.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  So Gerald was my boyfriend. We had been going together for a couple of weeks. So of all the people in the room, we were the only couple. So we had, we figured we had some good energy flow between us and I said, oh Gerald and me, Gerald and me, we'll do it.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  We're setting up in the dining room. So we have two chairs facing each other. It's me and Gerald facing each other. And we each put our fingers, we're putting our fingers on this little coaster thing that goes around, has a little opening in the middle of it. Wendy says, is there a spirit on the board?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  It starts moving.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  That was so scary. It was going, at first it was going really slow. Like it was kind of trying on, like to see, oh, how to use this vessel, how to use these kids to get some messages across. And it went around and around, and then it went straight up to, yes, there's a spirit on the board. So Wendy said, "What's your name?" And we're spelling out, "L-U-C-I-F-E-R." And then it stops. Wendy said, "Well, we don't think you're Lucifer. Who are you really?" And it spells out, "S-E-T-H."

• 5:13Speaker 02

  And from that point Wendy said, "You know, when did you live? And where did you live?" We're asking questions, kind of leading the witness, like, "When did you live?" "Oh, 3rd century, BC or CE." "Oh, where did you live? Greece." And he's telling us this whole story. "I felt this energy in my body, but I don't remember thinking about it. It was just kind of like, this is happening." He told us this long story about finding his wife in bed with another man and killing them both. We had a violent spirit on the board.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  I don't know if we want to keep this conversation going, like, what's going to be the benefit? And we kind of looked at each other and sat back a little. And that's when Wendy said, "Do you have any messages for anyone here?" And it went really fast, over to, "Yes." And then it spelled out, "A-N-D-Y." Andy. And that's my nickname.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  I just got a shock of energy going through my whole body. Like, there's a message for me. I mean, suddenly, it was about me. It was personal. It wasn't about Seth. It wasn't about what happened in his life. It's about me, right now. What's the message? And so, we said each letter, one at a time, and it spelled out just like this. T-I-L-E-S-T-O-P. So, it's Tiles Top, or Tile Stop.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  We don't understand the message, and it spelled out T-A-M-M-I-C-H-O-K-E. Tammy Choke.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Tammy was my little sister, who I was supposedly babysitting. Tammy was two years old at the time. Maybe he was gonna choke her. That just put a chill through my body. It spelled out the whole message again. It spelled, "No. Tile Stop. Tammy Choke." And we just jumped up, dropped the board, ran into the next room, found her in a closet in the next room, just hunkered down in the corner with my mom's

• 8:12Speaker 02

  mahjong set, and she had two mahjong tiles in her mouth.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  One of them just came right out and the other one I had to do that finger down the throat trick to sort of pop it out of there. She was fine. She didn't have, I mean, I did hug her up. I mean, I really hugged her up and held her close and stuff.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  I think we ended our playdate pretty quickly after that. We were all just really in a state of amazement. This happened to me.

• 9:10Glynn Washington?

  While some people have to learn the hard way, I'm happy to report that Andrea has not used a Ouija board since this incident. Unfortunately, our next guest, her not as lucky. Get ready. Prepare yourself because we're about to unleash a favorite of the season, a Snap classic. It comes to us from the amazing Bob Carlson, creator of the podcast Unfictional. Download it. This story, it's got everything you need. Back in the cool 80s, attractive people, secluded location, and wow. I'm gonna let Mark take it away.

• 10:05Glynn Washington?

  The party really wasn't going anywhere.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  It was a combination birthday party and going away party.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  The only two people I know there are my friend Christie and our friend Deborah.

• 10:17Speaker 05

  Christie and I have been good friends since high school. She's been one of my best friends for years. The party was in an old craftsman house in Hollywood. Just so you know, I have a very bad memory and I don't remember very much. But I do remember very clearly a lot of this event.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  The party was a hodgepodge of various individuals.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  My girlfriend Becky was one of my roommates. Becky's boyfriend Mike, he was a Malibu sheriff. Then there was Mark, the Frenchman. And my girlfriend Debbie. Then my boyfriend Danny, and he was the rocker.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  In France, when we had a party, the idea was drink as much as you can, as fast as you can, and then put on James Brown's sex machine. Unfortunately, there was no James Brown available that night. So we had to think of something else. And I started to wander off into the dining area and there was a huge oak table. And in the back, there was an armoire and a bunch of crystal glasses. And hmm, an idea popped in my head and I thought, hey, there's nothing else going on here tonight, why don't we do a séance? A long time ago, in my native country of France, there was no toy store where you would find a Ouija board.

• 11:41Speaker 04

  So we would line up Scrabble letters and cut up a piece of paper that would say yes and one that would say no, and basically improvise a Ouija board. We would turn a glass upside down. We'd put our fingers on top of the glass and then you'd concentrate real hard.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  It kind of just struck a chord that it would be something fun and different to do.

• 12:06Speaker 05

  I kind of thought, whatever, we'll do it. I think in high school, maybe we tried it a couple of times, but nothing really ever happened. So I didn't take it seriously and didn't really think anything of it.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm spiritual, like I believe in God, but I don't believe in Ouija boards. I wasn't taking it seriously. I don't believe in that type of thing at all. So we lit some candles and turned on some, you know, enya.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  And just kind of played around.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  We cut out a bunch of letters, you know, to create the alphabet, put them around the table in a circle. There was a piece of paper that said yes and a piece of paper that said no. And we took crystal glass with a stem and turned it upside down and put it in the middle. You know, everybody quiet down and closed their eyes. And I don't know if we are the antennas. I believe we are. And I believe that the glass ultimately is just a vaisseau and it allows psychic energy to concentrate at the center of it.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  For those of us who had their fingers on the glass, and I think at the time it was Christine, Deborah, me and someone else, we started to feel, after a very short amount of time, actually it was uncanny how quickly it started. We started to feel that very familiar little tug.

• 13:41Speaker 05

  It was a little bit thrilling, like, ooh, what is this? I remember my hair kind of raising up, thinking, what could this be?

• 13:49Speaker 04

  You have the sensation that something is connecting with the glass and then trying to find its bearings. It's very distinctive.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  And then after a while, it started kind of getting a flow and a rhythm. And it started kind of moving in an eight, like a shape of an eight, and back and forth. And it was very rhythmic, but it was flowing and very smooth suddenly.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  Of course, the skeptics immediately thought, you're moving the glass. And I would say, no, I'm not moving the glass. And a good way to take care of the skeptics is to command the glass to do geometric forms. For example, I would tell the glass to spin in a circle. You tell the glass to go faster and faster and faster. And let me tell you, that thing flies. It's so fast.

• 14:53Speaker 04

  You cannot coordinate four people that don't know each other, have not rehearsed this, and get a glass to move this fast. It's impossible. At that point, everybody went, huh. What's going on?

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Now that it was clear that something was moving the glass other than ourselves, one of us asked, "Who's here?"

• 15:18Speaker 05

  And started going back and forth to the letter K-I-K-I, or K-E-K-E. I can't remember how it spelled it.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  And everybody asked, "Who's Kiki?" And Kristy, who was at the head of the table, in front of me, just froze. I hadn't ever seen her like that. And she looked down at the table and she said, "I know who's here."

• 15:47Speaker 03

  I knew it was Brian. Brian had been my boyfriend for about two and a half years and he passed after committing suicide.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  It spelled out K-E-K-E, which is Kiki, which was my nickname. The Brian called me Justin Private.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  That threw me for a huge loop. That is something that I don't understand to this day.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Brian was my first love. I used to think about him every day. I still have not been able to look at pictures of him. But I can, I can still see his face in my head.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  He was very good-looking, had an amazing smile. He kept a tan, better than anybody that I ever have seen.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  Brian was a very lonely, sad person. But most people wouldn't realize that when they met him. When he would walk into a room, everybody was drawn to him and he was really funny and he meant the world to me.

• 17:11Speaker 05

  I think she was stunned. I think she was pretty shaken up and I think, you know, probably quite emotional about it because of the way things had ended.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Brian tried to commit suicide several times and they put him in a little hospital and then Christmas came and I wasn't there and I wasn't able to speak to him while he was in the suicide watch hospital. But I did find out that he got a belt and wrapped it around his neck and hung himself. A horrible way to die and he was supposedly under supervision and they were watching him and somebody dropped the ball.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  "Are you in heaven?" the glass answered, "No." "Are you in hell?" and the glass answered, "No."

• 18:15Speaker 05

  We asked him if he was in a place, kind of somewhere in between. He said, "Yes." And then Becky asked how long he was going to be there and he said 27, which is the age he was when he killed himself.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  I find myself, like, sometimes, like, I'll get, like, a little tear in my eye, like, when I was talking to you and then I just wipe it away and it goes away, it dries away.

• 18:45Speaker 05

  Christie went to leave to go to the bathroom, and then it stopped moving. We asked the spirit, "Where'd you go? Did you go with Christie to the bathroom?" And it said, "Yes." And we asked him, "Okay, if you were there with her, what color underwear was she wearing?" And it spelled out, well, it misspelled it, but it said W-I-T-E, white. And sure enough, she was wearing white knickers.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  Now, just behind Christie was another guest at the party, who was her current boyfriend.

• 19:18Speaker 05

  This kind of glam rock guy, sitting around the table, being really cool, not believing any of it.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  I mean, what the hell? The ex is showing up, uninvited, at the birthday party, and is getting all the attention. So, he started to say, "This is bull." And the glass immediately starts to move, without having been asked a question. This is unusual. And spelled, "U." At which point, Christie's boyfriend replied, "U."

• 19:53Speaker 05

  And the cursor started spelling out his name, D-A-N-I, and then F-U. And it kept going back and forth, D-A-N-I-F-U. You know, you can fill in the blanks, but Danny got very upset.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  Now, what's interesting here is that when you have to say something like "mo", and you're speaking through a crystal glass as a spiritual entity, takes a long time to spell, M-O, etc., etc.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Danny was getting really upset, and, it sounds so silly, the Ouija board was getting really upset, which appears to have been Brian, taking a fight, if you will, with Danny, my current boyfriend. It was very disturbing.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  This is surreal. These two are having a cockfight in two different dimensions.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Danny was very hot-headed and very upset, and ended up walking out.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  My poor friend Christie was completely devastated. Meanwhile, the glass repeated several times, "I love you," and then, "I'm sorry."

• 21:06Speaker 03

  I was just so, almost frozen, just paralyzed inside my own head, thinking all these thoughts, you know, is this really him? Why did he die? How come nobody could help him? How much I missed him.

• 21:26Speaker 04

  I think that because it was her birthday, we didn't really want to continue. So, we said goodbye. And I remember my friend Deborah and I drove back to my house and didn't say a word on the way back.

• 21:39Speaker 05

  Ever since that night, I have completely believed. I mean, to me, this was the biggest, the most proof that there is something out there, more than what we can see and what we know. And it's definitely changed the way I see things. And I'm the biggest skeptic. I wouldn't believe this story if I weren't there. And I'm sure many people won't believe me, but it happened.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  I feel like he just needed to be heard again, you know? I know this sounds crazy, but I believe he was talking to us, me.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  I think the beauty of his story is not that it is a ghost story, is that it's a love story. And that someone was able to reach beyond the divide and tell someone, "For the last time, I love you." Even Romeo and Juliet didn't get that.

• 22:47Glynn Washington?

  Get this. Evil lurks right after the break, when a young girl finds someone uninvited, playing with her favorite toys. Stay tuned.

• 23:09Glynn Washington?

  When Ally Standish was a child, she arrived home in a wheelchair after getting surgery on both legs. And she was shocked to see her grandmother waiting in the living room with a smile.

• 23:24Glynn Washington?

  Spooked.

• 23:29Speaker 06

  I had never seen anything like the dollhouse. It was a wooden Queen Anne. It was painted a deep shade of cornflower blue and had this cream trimming. It looked so delicious that you just kind of wanted to eat it like icing. When I realized that this house was not only mine, but my grandmother had made the house for me by hand, all by herself, I just remember being blown away.

• 23:57Speaker 06

  It was actually quite a shock that it had come from her and that she had made it. I think by that time, a lot of the joy had just been kind of sucked out of her. And that was one of the times that she seemed to be truly happy. She never did anything that was completely selfless. You know, when she gave you something, she wanted something back. In addition to the dollhouse, she gave me a scrapbook. And the scrapbook was full of pictures of her making the dollhouse. It was her saying, "Here's my documentation of how hard I worked on this project."

• 24:36Speaker 06

  The dollhouse came complete with six plastic dolls. There was a mother and a father, and a little boy and a little girl. So it was like my family. And then there was a baby.

• 24:51Speaker 06

  They were all fine. They were all just kind of typical plastic dolls that you would see in a dollhouse.

• 24:59Speaker 06

  The more distinctive doll was the grandmother.

• 25:04Speaker 06

  She had this full-length, blue floral dress that was almost like a nightgown. And she had silver, silver, long hair. Her eyebrows were arched in this way that made her expression just look very malicious.

• 25:23Speaker 06

  Because I was in a wheelchair and I was recovering, I couldn't be outside and I couldn't go to school. So I was bored and I was itchy under my casts. And I was also scared because even though, you know, the surgeons tell you that things went fine, when you can't walk for six weeks, you do wonder, you know, what happens if they take the casts off and I've lost my ability to walk, you know? So for me, the dollhouse, it was a way for me to escape.

• 25:52Speaker 06

  My mom and I would shop for mirrors that were the size of my thumb and china cabinets that I could hold in the palm of my hand and newspapers for the dining room table and plastic apple pies for the kitchen windowsill.

• 26:06Speaker 06

  So I had a sleepover one night in the spring. My girlfriends were sleeping in the playroom and I got up in the night to go to the bathroom. And that room had these big skylights. And so on nights when the moon was out, it was very bright. The dollhouse was kind of illuminated and I just glanced over at it and kind of stopped.

• 26:33Speaker 06

  I could clearly see the shape of each of the dolls, a man, a woman, a girl, a boy, a baby, except they were not where I had left them the last time I had played with them.

• 26:47Speaker 06

  The father was sitting on the couch across from the little TV and the mother was in the bathroom with the baby. And the boy and the girl were in their beds, kind of turned away from one another. Only the grandmother was left at the table, where I had left her. And she was just kind of staring out at me. It creeped me out.

• 27:11Speaker 06

  But, you know, you don't immediately jump from that to, "My dolls are moving on their own." I just figured that one of the girls had moved them when I wasn't watching. But then when I asked the next morning, nobody admitted to having touched them.

• 27:28Speaker 06

  I just kind of, you know, went about my regular life. Figured that if I ignored it, it would stop. But instead, things just... One night, as soon as I walked into the room, something felt really off to me. Something was telling me, "Do not look at that dollhouse. Do not look at that dollhouse." But I couldn't help myself. This time, the father was positioned at the dining room table. He had his face down, and the tie had been tied around and around his neck.

• 28:05Speaker 06

  The baby was face down in the kitchen sink. The mother's head was plunged into the open oven. And the little boy was upstairs smothering the little girl with her pillow.

• 28:21Speaker 06

  And the only doll that didn't seem to be dying was the grandmother. And the grandmother sat at the head of the dining room table. And she had this evil smile spread across her face. And I remember thinking that this felt personal, that this felt like some kind of revenge.

• 28:46Speaker 06

  I was shocked. I screamed, and I ran downstairs and got my parents and told them what had happened. And they were a bit bemused. And I think we all kind of decided together that this had to be my brother playing a joke. So they went and kind of told him off. And he told them right back off and said that he had had nothing to do with it. I never told my grandmother about any of it. I didn't want to call her and say, "Thank you for the beautiful dollhouse. By the way, your dolls are terrifying me." So, no, I never spoke with my grandmother about any of it. So I was really excited when my brother was leaving for summer camp because it meant that things would finally calm down

• 29:30Speaker 06

  and things with the dollhouse would stop. And that's just not, that's just not how things went.

• 29:38Speaker 06

  They were lined up on their backs on the living room floor, all of them except for my grandmother. She was crouched above the father. She had a butcher's knife in her hand, pointed at his throat, poised to just slit them all right down the line.

• 29:56Speaker 06

  Her chin was tilted up and she was leering at me.

• 30:02Speaker 06

  I mean, I had run out of explanations. The only people who had been in the house were me, my mother, and my father. And so I wanted to get the dolls away from me. My eyes kind of fell on this blanket chest that we kept in the playroom. And it was a big, heavy, black chest with a heavy lid. And so I took the dolls and stuck them in there at the bottom. I slammed the lid shut.

• 30:33Speaker 06

  It was some time later that I had a sleepover at my house. I needed more blankets. And you know, I thought enough time has passed and surely I can look at these dolls and not be afraid of them anymore.

• 30:49Speaker 06

  And so I opened up the chest and I dug out the dolls. As I lifted my arm to close the chest,

• 30:58Speaker 06

  I looked at the underside of the lid, which was wood, and the entire underside of the lid was covered in tiny scratch marks, as if a very small person had been clawing to get out.

• 31:17Speaker 06

  It just, it freaked me out.

• 31:20Speaker 06

  So at that point, I whirled into motion and I grabbed the dolls and I went downstairs, found newspaper, and wrapped them all up. I kept all of the family together, except for the grandmother. Her, I wrapped separately. I ran up to the attic and I threw them into the far corners. And I threw her into the opposite corner.

• 31:45Speaker 06

  I didn't want her to be able to hurt them anymore. You know, as silly as that sounds. I didn't want her to be able to do that anymore. I didn't want her to have that power. And so I felt like she deserved to rot by herself.

• 32:00Speaker 06

  That marked the end of my thinking about the dollhouse. And I didn't really start thinking about it again until my grandmother passed away.

• 32:12Speaker 06

  When she was a couple of days away from death, she called my mother into her bedside and she said, "I want you to know that I forgive your father. I just can't remember what for."

• 32:27Speaker 06

  The night after she died, I went to her home with my mom and we spent the night there. I think my mom really wanted to inhabit that space. So she slept in the room that she had slept in as a child. And that left me with my grandmother's room, where she had slept for 50 years and shared a bed with my grandfather, back when a lot of fighting and drinking. And my grandmother, she refused to be in the same room as my grandfather for the entire rest of her life. And so I was sitting in this room, on her bed, and thinking about how that dollhouse came from the bowels of this unhappy place.

• 33:13Speaker 06

  And so I was really panicky. I got under the covers and I slowly closed my eyes. And once I closed my eyes, I felt safe. It was if, for the first time, I felt not in a vice grip. Like if she was there at all, she was wrapping her arms around me.

• 33:38Speaker 06

  I started to feel differently about her after that night when we came across the photo album that she had made of her making the dollhouse. When I was flipping through the book, I realized that there was this whole other side to this person that I had never had the chance to know.

• 34:02Speaker 06

  However troubled she was, this was the best that she could do to love me at that point in her life. Yeah, I mean, the only other thing I can do to make amends is to go up to the attic one day where the dollhouse has sat for many years, collecting dust, and let another child, you know, if I ever have a daughter, let it be the source of happiness that I think my grandmother had intended it to be for me. Different dolls, though.

• 34:46Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, Ally, for sharing that story. Ally Standish is a new children's book author. Her debut novel is out right now. It contains no creepy dolls. I have a link on our website, spookedpodcast.org. Thanks as well to Snap Judgment listener. You do get the amazing Snap Judgment Storytelling Podcast, right? You subscribe to that, right? Snap Judgment listener Andrea CK for letting us know about her Ouija board. And big love to Bob Carlson of the podcast Unfiction. And as always, I'd advise you to be afraid, because on the next Spooked, the worst kind of clown. Is there a good time? I don't think so.

• 35:30Glynn Washington?

  The worst type of clown shows up at a kid's house in Mexico. In fact, maybe you shouldn't listen to this one.

• 35:42Glynn Washington?

  Now, both of the stories that we have for you, we want to hear the stories you have for us. Some Snapers have hit us already on the Spook line. Be one of them. Record onto your phone, device, thing, and send it to [email protected].

• 36:00Glynn Washington?

  The Spooked Monster Mash team includes Mark Ristich, Eliza Smith, Liz Mack, Anna Sussman, Jasmine Aguilera, Davy Kim, Teo Decot, Jody Colly.

• 36:14Glynn Washington?

  Original music by Pat Massey Miller, Davy Kim, Leon Lozmoito, and Renzo Corio. The Spook theme music was by Pat Massey Miller.

• 36:36Glynn Washington?

  If you're digging spooked, let somebody know there are now ten episodes waiting for your listening pleasure as we count down to thirteen episodes before Halloween. Get 'em, get 'em now before they all disappear. Spookpodcast.org. Even better, we're dropping two spooked episodes a week. And if you need your spooked fix with a quickness, hear new spooked episodes three days early, just download TuneIn app and hold on to someone's hand squeezed tight. Spookpodcast.org. Hit the SnapDust and Spook Squad on the Twitter, the Instagram, the Facebook, SpookPod.

• 37:17Glynn Washington?

  And when you're in a dead sleep, wake up in the middle of the night to feel someone sit down at the foot of your bed and there's not supposed to be anyone there at all. You might have avoided this tailor in the future if you simply heed my advice to never, ever, never, never, ever turn on the lights.