Tales from the Smokehouse - Classic

There are people for whom stuff just happens.

They are there when the house bursts into flame.

They witnessed the robbery.

Lightning strikes their tractor the very moment they step away.

Just like

the unfolding stories know that they need a witness.

And they wait for certain people before they even begin to occur.

From Snap Judgment's Underground Lair,

my name is Glenn Washington.

If the story's going to happen,

remember the details.

Spook starts.

Now.

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Now you know when you're out in the woods at night, sitting around a campfire, poking at the coals, don't get to telling scary stories, right?

Well, you know the one person in your group that just has a knack for telling the best stories?

The kind of storyteller that can make you scream, jump out your seat, make the hair on the back of your neck stand up?

Wow,

spooksters, be afraid.

We found a master storyteller.

His name is Todd Nairn.

And if you're not already around a campfire, may I suggest that you dim the lights and get real cozy.

Spooked.

My name's Todd Nairn, Todd Curtis Nairn.

I'm from North Carolina, and I sure would enjoy telling you a couple of these stories today.

Little Barbara Nichols was a little girl I knew when I went to grade school in Corinth, Holders.

We were both in the first grade together.

And she was beautiful.

And,

well, all the boys thought she was beautiful, but I knew I did, but I didn't ever tell nobody.

But um,

every day I tried to get a little closer to her, she really didn't show me a lot of attention.

I guess she could say she was my first love.

She was just beautiful.

Well, like I said, me and Barbara, she came to my little grade school in Carnth Holstein.

We were in the first grade together.

And I also rode the same bus to and from school.

Her mom and daddy didn't have much money.

She lived down an old path in,

it was actually a little shack back then that nobody had lived in, but some old farmer had rented it to them, and they made a pretty good pace out of it.

One day, when she got off the bus, see, I didn't think she thought nothing of me, but when she got off the bus and started walking down the path, there was a great big mud hole, and she walked around it.

She turned around right when she got out and threw the over the mud hole, and she turned around and she waved right directly at me.

That's when I decided I was going to love little Barbara and let the whole world know it.

At least that's what I hoped for, but it wasn't meant to be.

Because on her walk home down that long mile path,

she had to pass a little pond about an acre and a half big.

And this is where the sadness in the horror begins.

You see, Barbara didn't make it home that day, and her parents went looking for her and couldn't find her.

So they went down to the road and stopped people that were riding and asking for their help.

It was just amazing how many people just jumped into it and tried to find that little girl.

They screamed, they walked every inch, every mile around that house.

About 9 o'clock the next morning, she was found by the banks of the little pond, now called Barbara Nichols Pond, and it's still there to this day.

Back where Barbara lived, about a mile off the road, there was a bunch of wild dogs back there that people had just let go and abandoned.

Enough people did this that the dogs kind of banded together.

And to survive, they kind of had to be like a pack.

And they would mostly kill just chickens and little goats and stuff like that.

If you went by them on a motorcycle or something like that, they'd chase you.

But I reckon if they ever got you, they got you.

It seems that those wild dogs were seen that day lying around that pond.

And from Barbara's tracks and them dogs tracks, it seems she must have been run into the water by them killer dogs to escape them from biting on her.

And instead, my little Barbara drowned.

I never did like them dogs, but I especially hated them after that.

Well, everybody was really shocked.

We just couldn't believe what was going on.

I mean, this was really our first

introduction to death.

It scared us.

We're all scared.

We all were hurt.

And we started seeing strange things happen around that pond.

We began finding dead dogs floating on or lying on the banks of it.

They'd be swollen or rotting with bite marks where the turtles and catfish, buzzards were tearing into them.

People would take the dogs hunting around that pond.

When you called the dogs back in, at least one dog was missing.

And

you would like go around and try to holler for the dog for the next couple of days and nothing else left.

You go go to Barbara Nichols Pond, and that dog would be there.

Dead.

And people just wouldn't hunt around there anymore.

And they just left it alone.

Everybody told their little boys and girls not to ever go around that pond.

We all thought that, you know, that Barbara Nichols had something to do with them dead dogs, but I mean, we never saw anything happen.

We just found the dead dogs dead in there.

I mean, we all kind of knew.

being country folks that I guess since Barbara Nichols had to die in there, they did too.

It had to be a good 12 years.

I had graduated from high school and was still working on the farm.

Well, I had Uncle Hugh, and he stayed in Wake County.

And he wanted to go frog gigging.

That's where you catch the frogs and gig the frog and skim and eat the meat off the legs.

Well, he wanted to come to Johnston County.

He wanted me to show him the ponds around Johnston County and go frog gigging.

So I said, yeah, and he promised a good time, which by this time I was a teenager.

and that meant, you know, having some beer and stuff.

Oh, frog gigging, that's one of the funnest things you could ever do.

Take a little John boat, which is a little lightweight boat, and you have a frog gig.

Some people use a 22-gun, but he had a frog gig.

Slowly go around the pond edge with a spotlight, I mean a real strong spotlight, and you put it in the frog's eyes.

And he'll stand just as still as he can be.

And what you do is you got a gig, which is like a tiny little tripod

for

Neptune or something like that we'd use.

And what you would do is you stick the frog, bring him in the boat, and you would kill the frog right off the bat so he wouldn't suffer.

Then you would cut his legs off and put him back into the water.

Kind of like the circle of life kind of thing.

So we go to all the ponds and everything, and nothing was happening.

Nothing was happening.

Probably seven or eight ponds.

It was getting really embarrassing because we won't get nothing.

And I told him that we would be getting something.

So we didn't even have enough frogs for one person to have a meal out of.

I said, I got one more pond we can go to.

And I really didn't want to go to that pond.

I didn't feel good about it.

And I didn't even feel like I'd want to be a part of it.

But I was kind of embarrassed that we didn't have nothing.

I don't think I would have done it by myself.

Well, I know I would have never done it by myself.

But just having another

person there

gives you some kind of courage.

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It was real hard to get to, real marshy.

And carrying a 300-pound boat, just the two of us, it was real heavy.

You were doing all you could do just to get into the pond.

and when you got in the pond I had a lot of feelings of Barbara

I just thought it's it's not the place to be

and we started going around the pond is real real easy and um we were catching frogs and we got to the back side of the pond and we heard a dog yapping

this one barking this was like

yapping in just treasure like he was getting beat

we took a spotlight and shined it up there into the sides of the bank and we saw a dog coming yapping

he wasn't looking at us he was looking at something behind him

like he was just getting it getting beat from behind and then and run into the water

but as fast as he was going he hit that water out wide open and um he started swimming for the boat for all he was worth

We picked up the frog gig and the oar and we thought well we don't know if he's got rabies or what he's got but we can't let him in this boat with us.

But that dog kept going faster and faster and coming nearer and nearer to us.

But he was still looking behind him.

And right when he got our boat,

something sucked that dog in the water, and the dog just don't drown like that.

Uncle Hugh looked at me like he had never seen nothing like that in his life.

And I know I had never seen anything like that in my life.

That wasn't no ordinary thing.

We knew I knew something was up right then.

So

we was scared to death.

I figured it must be little Barbara Nichols that got that dog.

And she was running and she was getting revenge on them dogs.

And she got a lot of revenge.

I think Barbara Nichols was chasing that dog.

I think she chased all them dogs.

I wish that little Barbara would have gone on to heaven.

or passed on somewhere and I hate that she was down there running after the dog.

As fast as we could, we put that book back on the truck and got out of there, and I ain't been back since.

It's been called Little Barbara's Nickel Pond, and she can have it, I reckon.

Now,

don't think for one moment that we're done with Todd Narin listeners.

No, no.

She's got another true, terrifying tale to share and this one

This one's about a curse

dark home cooked magic

spooked

My old grandfather had a brother named Uncle Frank and he was mean in everything he did.

He was so mean that

nobody around there would hire him or even talk to him or have any business to do with him itself.

There was a rich moonshiner in the area, and Uncle Frank worked for him.

That's the only job he could get.

He would either whoop you, if he couldn't whoop you with a knife or a hatchet or something, he'd throw a spell on you and you'd be dead in less than a week.

Okay, now grandma told me the spell went like this, but she wouldn't tell me all of it because she didn't want me or Walker Jr.

doing it.

She said you had to get a cat, a dead cat.

You couldn't go out and kill a cat or anything like that.

And you take that cat and you put them in a pot outside, of course,

and you boil it until all the meat and the hair and everything is gone.

There's nothing but the bones left.

You take those those bones and you have to take it to a river or a little creek, somewhere where there was running water, and you toss the bones into the running water.

And then there's one cat bone in a cat that afloat.

The other one was a sink in that river, that running water, but the other one afloat, and that's the one you're going to be needing: is that floating bone.

You take that float bone,

and you got you a dead man on the way.

So if you get the floating cat bone and take it back to whoever your enemy is or whoever you want to get, you put it under his rug.

And when that man stepped out onto that rug, they would step on that cat bone and the death spell would be all over them.

But that's all she would tell us about a spell because she knew that Uncle Frank was in us too.

His blood was in us, and she didn't want us to turn out like Uncle Frank.

One morning, he got up,

slicked back his hair, cussed a little bit, and walked out the back door and stepped on the rug.

And he felt a little lump.

And me and you might not worry about what the little lump was, but we just keep going.

But Uncle Frank knew what that was.

So he picked up the rug, and there it was, a floating cat bone.

So somebody had finally gotten Uncle Frank.

And he was sure mad about it.

So he had had a spell all over him.

And he knew right then, sure enough, that he was dead.

But he was going to do everything in his power to make sure he found out who it was that killed him.

So

somebody told him about a witch.

That's where Uncle Fray went.

And she told him there wasn't nothing that she could do for him.

That in less than a week and probably a couple days, he'd be dead.

She said, but there is one thing that she could do.

She said, just as soon as you die,

you're probably going to go straight to the hell.

You're going to see the devil.

And you can make a deal with the devil.

He would kill the man that killed Uncle Frank.

But

if you did this and made the deal with the devil, you would burn hot, twice as hot as the regular sinner.

But Uncle Frank, he figured hot was hot.

So who cared about being twice as hot?

So he made that deal with the witch and the devil.

And then he went back to my grandmama and he told her, he said, just as soon as I die, wait for the next person in the community to die, and that'll be the one that killed me.

It didn't take me just a few days, and he fell dead as a doornail.

Just as healthy as he could be, and he was a cussing, and then he just fell dead right in front of the smokehouse.

And about 30 minutes after Uncle Frank died, grandma sat there and she listened.

You know, and after a while, they come in that the preacher had died.

And

she was kind of surprised that it was the preacher.

And when they went through his pockets, they found three other floating cat bones.

So we don't know how many people he killed, but he sure killed a bunch of sinners.

He was planning on killing.

a lot more sinners with that float with them floating cat bones

They say all the youngins got to get up and put Frank up and put him, brought him back in the house in the living room, and washed him and cleaned him up and everything.

So, I mean, we didn't do no autopsy or nothing like that back then.

We just grabbed him up, cleaned him up, and

tried to get him ready for burial.

And they called the funeral man, but the funeral man said they weren't going to come and work on Uncle Frank.

He was just too mean.

Well, they laid him out in the living room and hoping with somebody, you know, some of his friends or somebody would come by, but Uncle Frank didn't have no friends.

So

they didn't know what to do with him.

They called the churchyard and they said, can we bury Frank in the churchyard?

And the church people said, no, because we can't sell the lots beside of him.

Nobody wants to be beside Uncle Frank.

And they couldn't find nowhere to put Uncle Frank.

So my granddaddy went down to the back of the farm and started digging, but it was red clay.

He couldn't get about a foot down in the ground.

So they had a neighbor, and we all called her Aunt Rue, but I don't really know what her real name was.

And they went and asked her.

She said they could go way down in the bottom in the bottom of the farm, but it just had to be far enough away from her house because she didn't want Frank close to her.

So that's what he did.

He went way down in the bottom of the farm, of her farm.

She dug a hole and buried him.

And he couldn't afford a stone.

So he just got a wide azalea bush and put it on top of Uncle Frank.

Aunt Rue, yeah, we went to her house quite often, me and my brother.

She was real, real, real old by the time me and Walt Virginia came along.

But she always had sugar cookies and

cola and everything, anything we wanted to do, she would do it.

She was one of the sweetest persons I'd ever known.

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One weekend, I was just too sick.

I was down in the throat, couldn't hardly swallow.

And it was our weekend to go to our grandma and granddaddy's.

Well, Walker Jr.

knew that he'd be kind of bored with nobody his age to play with.

Walker Jr.

is my brother, so he carried his best friend, Ben O'Neill, down there to play.

So Walker Jr.

and Ben O'Neill were looking around, trying to find something to do.

So back in in the 70s, there wasn't much to do.

I mean, even if you look TV, you had to watch what the grown folks watched, and that wasn't no fun.

They found some fishing poles.

Well, they went and they knocked on Aunt Rue's door.

They asked, could they go fishing?

And she said, of course they could.

Did they have any worms?

And they said, no.

She said, well, go down there by the tobacco field, dig up some worms.

They ended up going a little bit farther than they should.

They started digging worms right up under a wide aza bush.

But this is about 40 years later after Uncle Frank had died.

And sure enough, they had hit something.

And they looked real hard at it, and it was a skull.

And it was worms, great big worms, just crawling everywhere, in and out of the holes of his eyes and his nose and everywhere else.

So they thought they hit a jackpot.

They were just scared to skull.

Ben O'Neal took the skull

and he took it out of the hole.

And he started chasing my brother, acting like he was going to bite his ear off or something.

Because Walker Jr.

wouldn't touch no skull or nothing like that.

Finally, Walker Jr.

told him to take it back, but Ben O'Neill was a little bit lazy, so he just put it down beside a stump and kept going.

But anyway, they went fishing, and them worms were something tough because

every time they tried to put them on the hook, he could swear they would grunt.

And they would throw the worms into the pond with the hook and the cane pole.

And it seemed like every fish in the pond goes to the other side of the pond.

So there wasn't much fish caught that day.

And they walked back to Granddaddy's house.

and they didn't tell nobody nothing about finding their skull

so

they thought well what else can we do fun now so they said let's spend a night in the um smokehouse camping out

so they camped they got the quilts and the coca-colas and all the candies they could get or grandma would give them they went out and they laid out in the smokehouse and playing and laughing and stuff And it got kind of late, so they started laying down to go to sleep.

When they did, something started crawling on the toes and went up to their ankles and went up to their legs and just went all over them.

They started itching all over.

And we didn't know if they had the triggers or what was wrong, but they went busting through grandma's bedroom door, saying that something was beating them up.

And what they did is she said, what'd y'all get into?

You know, like, she didn't know if they got in something they were allergic to or something.

So they finally told her about the skull.

Well, she knew exactly who the skull was.

So she said, she put on her clothes and she said, take me to the skull.

So that's what they did in the middle of the night.

They walked down there with a flashlight and they found the skull beside a stump.

Ben O'Neill picked it up and they told her to go put it back in the hole.

When they did, they put it back in the hole.

The worms just come from everywhere and crawled all over that skull.

But the itching went away.

just went away like somebody put a salve or something on me just it just kind of disappeared when they put their school back where it's supposed to be

and they walked home that night they said nobody said a word but they just come home telling me you know they'd found a school i said no you're lying ain't no way in the world he said i did i was real jealous well i actually wanted i wanted to see the school but he never would take me back there but yeah i'm kind of glad i went there because uh

Walker Jr.

and Ben O'Neill were two good little boys.

They were real good.

They didn't do no harm to nobody.

But when they got when they dug up Eskill Uncle Frank, them boys seemed like they changed.

My brother got

a little wilder, doing things he wasn't supposed to do.

My brother was in another town, a town he shouldn't have been in, and the cops saw him.

Well, the cops got behind him.

And

Walker Jr.

made a bad choice and decided to run.

And they were running him down.

And he overcorrected in a curve and it flipped him out of the car and it it flipped on top of him and it killed him.

I was 13.

He was 19.

Ben O'Neill, I thought the world of him.

Everybody did.

He was a sweet boy.

But after that, after he touched that skull,

he took his own way

because Ben O'Neill turned out to be a little meaner than Uncle Frank, really.

He joined up with a motorcycle gang, a club, motorcycle club, to get that right.

And all motorcycle clubs ain't bad, but this particular club was bad.

And after he'd been there a while, he just got to be too bad.

And I guess he got so bad that the rest of them got scared.

And two of them held him down and they cut his head off and they put it somewhere out in the woods.

So

we don't know where his head is.

We know where his body is, but we don't know where his head is.

It's somewhere in Johnson County.

I hope it ain't Uncle Frank that did all that to my brother and the Ben, but

I can't say he didn't.

I guess you could say I was kind of blissed that I had a sore throat that day, that weekend, because I didn't get to see what they saw.

If I had of,

maybe Uncle Frank would have jumped on me.

There's no telling, I'd even be here right now talking to you.

You never know about evil.

It's just got a way of following you around

once you get into it.

And sometimes you just can't shake evil.

Love and light to Todd Neron for sharing his stories with Spook.

Thank you, Todd, for giving us those heebie jeebies.

Now.

Todd asks us to give a shout out to the good Lord Jesus Christ, to Todd's family, and to Miss Anna Sussman for taking a chance on him.

If you want more stories from Todd Nairn, not to worry because Todd has a book.

It's called Country Stories of Ghosts and Bad Men.

That's Country Stories of Ghosts and Bad Men.

Now then, let the people understand.

Tell your friends.

Tell your enemies that you know where monsters dwell.

The magical, the scary, the dark, spook podcast, where this season we spare no expense in search of the truth behind the veil.

And if you like your stories told in the bright light of day, check out our sister podcast.

It's called Snap Judgment.

Cinema of sound, movies of the mind, storytelling with a beat.

Spook was brought to you by The Crackling Fire and

Mark Ristich.

Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, our original soundscape by Renzo Gorio.

The spook theme song was by Pat Massini Miller.

And remember, always listen to the storytellers, always,

and know this without fail.

Every single storyteller worth their salt, every single one, will always advise you to never, ever,

never, ever, ever

turn out the lights.