The Lady

Mary Mary, quite contrary,

tell us what you know.

Her husband Jack might just get whacked, and Granny's next to go.

Listen to spooks.

Stay tuned.

Okay, so Facebook is only good for three things.

Number one is birthdays.

It's great.

Birthdays.

Number two, of course, is seeing how poorly your ex's decisions turned out.

And number three,

I don't know what that is, but a little while ago, a Facebook request pops up and makes me laugh out loud from someone I used to kick it with hard back in the day.

Hang at her house.

We'd eat these Swanson's Hungry Man microwave dinners on actual TV trays.

She loved them.

Loved them.

Get all excited about Salisbury steak with a home-style meatloaf, the Swanson fried chicken.

Act like it was all tasty delicious.

I helped her chase her dog Sherbert, always trying to get run over in the street.

She had a rule that we could only play board games that we made together.

We were tight.

Tight.

And one night finally,

watching the Muppets, she loved the Muppets.

Watching the Muppets, I reach over

and I hold her hand.

For two hours, we just hold hands.

Then after I leave her place that night,

I never see her again.

I just figure

life,

different schools, different states, finally different countries.

But no one knew where she went.

Like,

she was swallowed up.

I was actually scared that maybe something terrible would happen.

I Google every so often since Google became a thing, but no luck.

And long last, Facebook.

So we trade numbers, I call, and it's like old times.

Giggling on the phone, like back in high school, talking about who did what, when, arguing over the official rules of this game we made called Tim Tuck 3.

Gossiping about people I haven't seen in decades.

And when the conversation finally slows down, she says,

I think I owe you an explanation.

Huh?

For hiding from you.

Hiding?

I just thought, no, no, no.

I knew you were looking for me.

My mom told me whenever you left a message.

But back then, the closer we got,

the more afraid I became.

The more terrified I would drown you under my own darkness.

I felt empty, and I knew I would hollow you out too.

Like a ghost.

We stay quiet then.

Both of us on either side of the line, not having any more words to say, but neither of us wanting to stop talking.

I ask her, Hey, hey, stay in the line, okay?

I'm gonna walk to the store.

You go to the store too, all right?

All right,

we both go to our respective grocery stores.

I get you a Salisbury steak,

she gets a fried chicken.

Spooks dark.

Now,

what if someone you love,

someone you care about, can't give words to what they experience?

How do you help them?

Our next story takes us down south to Little Rock, Arkansas.

Stacey Kinsler is a photographer.

She and her husband, their three-year-old daughter, Maybry, they're looking for a new house to call home.

A place where they can make memories as a family.

But some houses

they have memories of their own.

It's food.

We reached a point where we kind of felt like we outgrew our little house that we got as a starter home and started looking around and saw the cutest little house.

It was built in 1941 and it's just very much a cottage home.

It has a cute little screened in porch off to the side.

It has the cutest front door that's arched and original hardwood floors.

I loved it immediately

but it didn't feel like mine.

When we were walking through the house, it just sort of hit me in my gut like this just isn't my house.

it was a very clear feeling to me

and so we left it alone and kind of waited patiently for something else to come up and not a lot came up during that time and the summer passed

and We went back and decided we would go ahead and make an offer on it.

And so we did and it became ours.

When it came time for us to move into the house, I was just really excited because the street was so cute, and the house was so cute, and

that gut feeling of this house isn't mine.

I kind of pushed it aside and was just really focused on being excited.

So, Mabri, she started school early.

She started when she was two years old, which was not necessarily in our plan, but it's what happened.

Mabry was diagnosed with autism

and she had a profound speech delay.

Her communication was very limited, and we got her into speech therapy, and she started to go to school full-time.

So, a lot of time at home, just

being there alone, just me in the house.

So, I am at home working, editing photos,

and just decided I would come out into the living room to check on the dog and see what he was doing.

He had the little bed in front of the fireplace, so I walked in to the living room and we have an

old cuckoo clock that was over the

fireplace and the pendulum had broken

and for the first time in years saw that the pendulum on it was swinging.

It hadn't done that.

I can't remember the last time that it worked.

So I noticed that and thought it was really odd.

What on earth made it swing?

I pulled out my phone and took a video of it and sent it to my husband and he had no answer for that either.

As time goes on, I start to see lights flickering and

hear floorboards creaking.

It was little things like that that were odd and strange.

It was just something that makes you go, huh, okay, that was weird.

There's one night when I'm going to bed and I crawl into bed after a long day and was about to fall asleep and heard the latch on the door hit up against the door frame

as if something has pushed against the door but it catches

and

I feel a presence

like

something has come into the room

It's that feeling that, you know, you know when someone's looking at you, or you know when someone's entered the room.

I feel anxious and panicked.

My adrenaline starts rushing.

I turn on the light to see if there's anything there and there's nothing there.

So Wendell and I are sitting on the couch.

We got Mayberry to bed

and we would sit down, watch TV.

Just relax, enjoy our evening together after she had gone to bed.

As we're sitting there on the couch,

I heard the door

open.

And I thought, okay, so she's getting up.

She's going to come out here and talk to us or try to get us to come back in there and get her back to sleep.

But she never does.

So I got up and went to her room and found her just standing in the doorway.

And I say to her, What's going on?

What's wrong?

And she says, It's the lady.

And I say, What lady?

The lady on the dresser.

My first instinct was to say, was it somebody outside, like in the window?

Was it the neighbor?

And it was a

And that was very

unnerving because Mayberry wasn't telling stories at that time.

The information that she shared with us was always

with a purpose.

She was communicating in a way of like communicating needs.

So when she said that she sees a lady in her room

and I had been experiencing the things that I had experienced in the home,

the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

But my mother instincts kicked in and I just wanted to help her get back to sleep and comfort her.

And so I was like, okay, well, that, you know, that sounds scary, but you're okay.

And mom and dad are here.

We're just in the next room.

We can leave the door open.

I'll lie back down with you for a little while and help you get back to sleep.

And so that's what I did.

It happens about once a week.

Other nights when she wakes up, she comes to us.

She comes to us and, you know, tells us whatever it is that she needs or gets a drink or whatever.

But on the nights when it was the lady, she would never come.

She would just stand in the doorway.

And so I would get up and say to her, what's going on?

And she would say, it's the lady.

At that point, I was scared.

It made me reach out to the former owner of the house on Facebook and just say, did you ever have anything odd happen here?

And she wrote me back and said, you know,

I hate that I didn't say anything to you about it at the time, but yeah, we did.

We had weird stuff happen there.

They would hear noises around the house, creaking in the floors.

Similar things to what we had experienced.

She was in the kitchen and the sink came on,

and no one turned it on.

She had a baby, and the baby had the same room that Mabry has.

And she said that she would be changing the baby's diaper and pick up the baby, and the baby would be looking over her shoulder, making eye contact just a few feet behind her, but nobody was there.

I wasn't angry at her.

Honestly, I felt validated because it was like, okay, so it's not Mabri having dreams.

It's not me

just walking into a room and seeing random things happen.

It's we're not the only ones here that this has happened to.

So of course I'm sharing all this with my friends, my close friends, because it was all so bizarre and scary.

Jordan, one of my best friends, grew up on that street that we live on, and she lived a few houses down.

I was on the phone with Jordan, and I was telling her about the things that we had been experiencing in the house.

And that May Rue was seeing the lady.

She immediately thought of Miss Kelly,

the lady that lived in my home back in the 90s.

And so I was very intrigued.

And

I said, well, tell me about Miss Kelly.

Like, what was she like?

Who was she?

Did you know her well?

And she said, yeah.

My mom and I would make dinners for her because she was elderly, she had lost her vision, and she was unable to do that for herself.

And so

she would pack up a plate of food and take it down to Miss Kelly.

Jordan would bring her meals until Miss Kelly passed away, and our home was the last home that Miss Kelly lived in.

And of course, we both wondered: is the lady Miss Kelly?

Having a name and an idea of who this person was that was in my house, I started to feel compassion towards her.

However,

I did not want her scaring my daughter.

I wanted that to stop.

That had to stop.

So Mabri, as she was in school, it changed our lives.

It was like once she understood what communication was about, it started to really take off for her.

And

now she's able to explain what she's feeling and all those things that I wondered about when she was little.

And so

every so often, after things had calmed down, I would say, do you remember the lady?

I was just so curious.

And she would just shut it down.

She was like, yep, I don't want to talk about that.

It was a couple of years ago, and

I just felt like I would ask her again to see if she was ready to talk about it because it was something that was unresolved

for me with her.

And I said, do you remember the lady?

And she was like, yeah.

And I said, do you feel like talking about that?

And she said, yeah.

And so I just said, well, just tell me what you remember.

So I remember

my mom would put me to bed.

She would read me a story.

Then she would like tell me goodnight, turn off the lights, and then close the door.

And I would fall asleep not too long after that.

But then there's one night where

I would wake up, and there's this woman sitting on my dresser across from my bed.

She looked pale to the point where

she just looked like a sheet of paper.

And she had like old scraggly hair and it was like gray, dirty, you know

She was wearing this black hood type of dress

She looked kind of upset

like she was disappointed My mind was racing.

I could feel the adrenaline like kick in

Because I was like, oh, what do I need to do next or like what's going to happen or like like, is she mean?

Is she nice?

I kind of sat there for a moment and just kept watching her and that's when I decided I should just get up and go try to talk to my parents about it.

But I didn't really know exactly how to talk to them about what happened.

I've always

kind of I've been like an internal person so I don't love to like be like, oh my gosh, there's like someone in my room.

I don't want to scare them.

Because I thought that'd make it worse.

I thought waiting by the door

would be better than to just go tell them.

So I kind of felt more safer like just being like right outside my bedroom.

Whenever my mom did see me by my door, we went back in my room,

but the woman is gone.

She's disappeared.

I want to say, like, maybe a week or two later, my mom is putting me to bed

and she tells me good night,

turns out the lights, and then shuts the door, and then I fall asleep.

But I wake up,

and then she was on the ceiling, stretched out like an ex.

She looked the same.

She was wearing the same clothes, but I could see her face better.

I could see all the details of her face.

Pale, dark eyes.

She was looking at me, and she had this like huge, creepy-looking smile on her face.

It was a way bigger smile than like a normal person would smile, and it looked way too big for her face.

Almost like up to her like nose.

It just looked evil.

I kind of felt like I wanted to vomit because it was just like that disturbing.

I was scared she was gonna fall off the ceiling and fall on fall on me.

and then after that, she would be in my room everywhere.

Like, she could be like, you know, sitting on my bed, sitting on the dresser, which I feel like is common for her, or she would be on the ceiling.

One night, I woke up,

the lady

was inches from my face.

and she was screaming so loud, like on the top of her lungs, and it was like a blood-curdling scream.

I could see her mouth, like the inside of her mouth, really well, because she was so close.

Her teeth looked rotten.

It's like like she hadn't brushed them in like several years.

And she had this smell like

from every part of her body.

Kind of like something was decaying.

I just bolted for the door.

I could still hear the screaming as I was running towards the door, but then as soon as I opened the door and I stepped out of my room,

the screaming screaming stopped.

So I was like,

she's gone, but I felt like she was still around, like I could still feel her presence.

I just didn't feel safe anywhere.

So one night we're watching TV, and Mabri's in bed, and we hear the door open.

I get up knowing we're going to have a lady conversation, and I go back and I get her in bed and I say, okay, so what's going on?

She said, it's the lady.

And I said, well, what happened?

So

I was asleep and I woke up and I could feel her sitting on my bed.

She looked at me and she just told me that she didn't like my mom like she was kind of announcing it to me

I was like extremely terrified at this point because I'm like

is she going to hurt my mom

I did go back into the living room and sat down and told my husband what Mabry had said.

And, you know, of course, he thought that was scary.

We just tried to go back to watching TV and go on about our night.

But it's very hard to focus on the show.

It was hard to go to the bathroom alone or lie down in bed and go to sleep and have that feeling of there's something in my house and whatever it is doesn't like me.

Not long after that, Jordan and my friend Lori came over.

We were going to watch a movie.

So we were all sitting on the couch, and I was giving them the latest update on the lady, and

Jordan just said out loud to the house,

Miss Kelly, it's Jordan.

Remember me?

I used to bring you dinner and like, this is my friend Stacey, and she's a good person, and her daughter's a sweet girl, and her husband's a good man, and these are my friends.

I wasn't ready for that, and I got really uncomfortable.

I thought, you don't, please don't do that.

Just stop.

Like,

you're either gonna make her mad or you're gonna stir her up.

But the opposite happened.

Things changed after Jordan talked to Miss Kelly.

I would say that the atmosphere in the house

felt

more like my home, you know.

The coziness of the house became

cozier.

It all just felt a little bit calmer and more peaceful.

And

maybe no longer saw the lady.

It stopped after that.

Like, I had the anticipation of her showing up.

I felt like if I would say anything about her, it would somehow like bring her spirit back.

So, that's why I never really talked about it.

As 10 years went by,

I was like, oh, it is official.

She isn't coming back.

Which is what made me think, oh, I feel safe talking about it now.

Like, a weight has been lifted off

of my body.

Like that's kind of how it felt, you know?

To hear her tell it now, I think it brought up different emotions.

One was

amazement at her and what she's been able to overcome and her

ability to communicate.

That part of it is cool.

The other part of it was, that's really scary.

and

that was heartbreaking.

You don't want your daughter to have to see those kinds of things, but her

ability to talk about it and not be afraid-that was what gave me peace about it.

The story was complete, kind of, you know, the holes were filled in, and it did feel like closure-scary closure, but closure nonetheless.

So it was the spring and I had gotten in bed and was about to fall asleep and heard the door press against that the latch

and

felt just a presence in the room and

I picked up my phone and turned on the flashlight and shined it around and nothing was there.

This didn't feel scary the way that it used to.

It didn't feel threatening.

So I just turned the flashlight off and went to sleep.

The next morning, Maybrie said, I think I saw the lady again.

So I was asleep and I woke up.

I turned towards the doorway

and I see this

figure in a white dress

and

now looking at her I realize it is the lady

and

she actually had I think a little bit of makeup on

Like her face looked a lot better.

It didn't look as pale And then, like,

her hair looked better, too.

And it looked pretty.

It looked like someone actually took care of her.

So I saw her, and she was just looking at me, but she would kind of like slowly fade away, but then slowly appear again.

Like headlights flashing on a car, but like really, really slowly.

She didn't really have like

a smile on her face, but she didn't look upset either.

She just kind of had like a neutral expression on her face.

It definitely seemed a lot kinder.

I was confused, but I wasn't scared.

I was kind of like laying there, like, that's so strange, like, that she's there and it's been 10 years.

And then

I went back to sleep after that.

I think that the lady appeared again to let us know that she is at peace.

It's been a long road.

She knows the family that we are.

And

I think that she has made peace with us being there.

But even though things have calmed down in the house, we still feel her around.

We still have lights flicker.

We still have footsteps in the hall.

I feel like it's just sort of become like a thing to us now.

Like it's it's not new.

We don't feel like

we need to like hide from anything.

Like we feel more safe.

Like it's our home.

Wendell gets a little more scared now than he used to, which is funny to me.

He'll just kind of make a noise, like, oh, I don't like it, I just don't like it.

I'll just look at him and like shrug my shoulders.

Like, there she goes again.

At some point during all of this, I decided to sage the house.

It felt like housekeeping almost.

We've reached a new point in all of this, and saging any negative energy just feels like one good last step.

I walked all through the house and prayed over it, and just, you know, put my energy into it.

And as soon as I was done, as soon as I put it out, I laid down on my bed.

And the air conditioner is right outside of the bedroom window, and it just

exploded.

Big, huge bang,

sparks.

I do think it was Miss Kelly telling me to back off.

I think to me, at that point, it was like I've made peace with y'all living in my home, but I'm still going to be here and

don't try to push me out.

I almost had the laugh of like, okay,

okay.

Sorry, I'm sorry.

I won't do that again.

We'll make peace with you if you make peace with us.

I'm sorry.

Thank you, Stacey.

And thank you, Mabry, for sharing your story with the spook.

Make no mistake.

Stacey and Mabry, our listeners to this show.

We love stories from listeners.

Original score was by Leon Morimoto.

News produced by Zoe Furigno.

Spooksters, spooksters, spooksters, we walk this dark path together.

Spooked season six and understand, we are searching for monsters.

If you've encountered a creature, a specter, a thing that defies expectations that we have of the universe, I want to know all about it.

Spook at snapjudgment.org.

Because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener.

Spook at snapjudgment.org.

Warn the dark side that you spook with some spook gear, the hat, the t-shirt of your dreams.

Available right now at snapjudgment.org.

And remember, If you like your stories told under the glorious light of the midday sun, get the amazing, stupendous snap judgment podcast with storytelling

spook was created by the team that keeps their promises each and every one except for mark ristich He always has his fingers crossed.

Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Newsome, Leon Morimoto, Dave Kim, Renzel Gorio, Teo DeCot, Marissa Dodds, Zoe Frigno, Tiffany Lisa, Ann Ford, Doug Stewart, and Isaiah Sims.

The spook theme song is by Pat Macedi Miller.

My name is from Washington.

We're told as children that great wisdom comes with great age.

Perhaps,

mostly.

But I have witnessed many an old fool.

And while some small children they display the understanding of the ancients, they know not to mistake simplicity for banality.

They appreciate that the most basic understanding can be the most powerful.

That first things

should always be first.

And when warding off that born of darkness, the first thing, the very first thing,

is to never,

ever,

never ever never ever never never

ever

turn out

the light