Peek-a-boo

Locked inside this prison scary,

racked with filth and vermin wary.

Knew I heard him sneaking right outside my gated door.

I snatched my hand out quickly, just as I had tried before.

This time I caught him creeping, hoping he could find me sleeping.

Oh, I gave him such a beating as he'd never had before.

And when he cried for mercy, I just beat him all the more.

But

I never saw the letter he had slipped beside my door.

So the chance to walk in freedom was the chance that I foreswore.

Now, trapped inside this cell is where I'll rock

forevermore.

You're listening to spoot.

Stay.

Okay, so it hasn't even happened yet, but I'm already tripping.

Been sitting with my baby girl recently as she prepares her applications to colleges.

We even visited a few places, looked at dorms, meal plans, student-faculty ratios, and soon she's going to pick a school.

I'm going to load up a car and take her to live somewhere else.

I'll meet her new roommate, help her put stuff on the wall, make some dad jokes, and as I turn away from her,

I will try my very best not to weep.

At least, try to wait till I get back into the car before losing my mind.

But I am so proud of her.

So happy for her.

She is made of magic, and I'm the luckiest girl dad of them all.

Already I'm seeing things that I want to send with her.

The complete eight-volume expanse book series.

We share a love of sci-fi, she and I.

This locket I found at a Japanese flea market before she was born.

That painting of us all together.

So many things I want her to take to remain a part of her.

The love, the laughter, the eye rolls, the baits, the smell, sometimes good,

sometimes very bad, coming from my kitchen.

I hope

I have been a good father to her.

I know

she's the very best of me.

I want her to carry my sometimes joy, my shared whimsy, this love of words and arts and music and story.

But

some of me,

I pray she leaves behind forever because

I see monsters.

Several years ago, as new adults, before kids, before mortgages, before 401ks, before all of it, my cousins and I flew from various parts of the country, gathered in Los Angeles, and we hugged and we laughed and we wept and we cried and we vowed that the insanity we had all experienced would stop with us.

That this cycle would not become our baby's birthright.

I made that promise and I meant every word.

But now I'm older

and I've learned that even the very best of intentions are built of sand.

I've even offered myself an olive branch, a bit of forgiveness.

I've come to accept that if you witness a murder before your fifth birthday, If you are locked in a closet filled with demons as a child, that this darkness becomes twisted inside your DNA, that this darkness colors every interaction I have, every step, every thought.

And yeah,

that background has its own gifts.

Because the doors to shadowlands do not simply swing open to those who have lived a life of happiness and joy.

These gates are only pried open through pain

and loss.

and sorrow.

My grandmother once told me that the witch sight can skip a generation.

I want to skip all my generations because the price is far too high.

I want that my children's children's children do not see the shadow figure in the corner.

I want that they do not hear the scream from the dark forest, but wanting is not enough.

I imagined that I could simply hide that part of myself from her.

Shield her from this consuming pit of madness, but but I'd have to be some kind of new fool to imagine she doesn't know me better than anyone ever has.

She's held my hand even as I've held hers.

So I wonder, and I hope, and I pray that I have held back enough of my own darkness, enough,

just enough,

so that when she is packed off for school and finally turns away from me,

I beg the universe

that she can step away from this shadow

and she can walk

in the light.

Legacy, legacy, legacy.

What do you leave behind?

What do they carry?

Susan and her husband had just bought their first house.

They're excited to move in with their three kids, Ben, Christina, and Stephanie.

They get to make it into a home.

It is a ranch-style house, three bedrooms on about an acre and a third.

It had a huge backyard with big mature trees and a circle drive, and it just seemed perfect.

We just considered it to be the perfect house for our family.

One of the things that we noticed right after we moved in was that in the concrete patio in the back, the name Gerald Thompson was carved into the concrete.

And so we just thought that was really sweet that someone felt so personal about the house that they had carved their name into the concrete.

After a few months in the house, the children were at school

and I was all alone alone, and the house was nice and quiet.

I was sitting in my easy chair, and I was embroidering.

That's my favorite thing to do.

There was a feeling of eyes on me, just a feeling of

holy cow, I'm not alone.

Someone is in this house with me.

But I just brushed it off as just my imagination, just something that I was feeling for no good reason.

My name is Christina and I am the middle child of three children.

My name is Ben and I'm the oldest.

My name is Stephanie and I am the youngest member of the family.

I was around four,

approaching five years old at the time.

And then the house was still new and very exciting.

The yard was big.

It had lots of trees and lots of things to run and do and explore.

So as a 10-year-old boy, I was really excited moving into this house.

In my parents' master suite in the back of the house, there was a tiny little bathroom.

And I just thought it was so exciting to sneak back into their tiny little bathroom.

And there was a huge mirror over the sink.

I was looking in the mirror and saw the figure out of the corner of my eye.

One morning when I was mowing the lawn, I started to get kind of a creepy feeling like someone was watching me and they were very careful to stay hidden.

I was sleeping on my side

and all of a sudden I felt something

touch the top of my head.

It was like a finger touch.

It was just a sort of a shrouded figure.

I thought I saw someone peeking out from behind the mimosa tree and I turned and did a double take and looked at it and it just disappeared.

I slept with my little sister, so I kind of rolled over to see if it was her but she was asleep

and so I thought okay well maybe it was just my imagination and I rolled back onto my side and I thought it was just something that you know if I were to look at it it would go away.

It would be sort of in my imagination

and I look at the figure and it's there

in the mirror.

It continues to stay there.

And almost immediately felt that finger touch on the top of my head again.

And this time,

it moved from the top of my head, down my cheek, down my neck,

down my shoulder, my arm, all the way down to my toes.

As I approached the side of the lawn and I continued mowing around the tree, the shadowy figure jumped out.

I was frozen and my heart was racing and I just could barely breathe.

It scared me pretty badly.

It was this just very terrifying feeling that came over me.

It scared me so bad that I jumped off the riding lawnmower.

And as I jumped off the mower and I looked directly at it, it just disappeared like there wasn't anything there.

I was frozen for a minute and did not know what to do.

So, I walked over to the tree and I looked around.

There were no signs of any person there.

There's no signs of any animals or anything.

And

I ran and told my mom that I felt like I had seen something in the mirror.

There was uncertainty as to what I'm seeing.

Am I crazy?

And really not knowing how to talk about it to anyone either.

And she pretty quickly brushed it off and told me it was nothing.

I just brushed it off, I didn't think much about it.

And several months later, probably we've probably been in the house for a year.

I was dusting in the den

and I felt something watching me.

I looked to the area between the kitchen and the dining room.

I saw a boy, an older teenage boy, standing there just looking at me.

He had brown hair and

green eyes.

He had reddish eyebrows and several pimples on his face.

He had

kind of a 60s-looking white button-down shirt.

It was short-sleeved,

blue jeans, high-waisted, and he had a little brown leather belt.

I could see through him.

He wasn't like clear or anything like that.

There was definite presence to him, but fuzzily you could see what was behind him.

I was not scared, but I was startled by his presence in the room.

He looks at me and he

just very slowly turns

and then just is no longer there.

I just stand there thinking to myself,

holy cow, my husband's never going to believe this, so I'm not going to tell him.

I also didn't tell my children about this because I did not want to frighten them.

Christine and I loved to go ride our bikes out in the driveway.

We had this cool circle drive area

and there are windows all across the front of our house and we're just playing and having a great time.

As I'm driving in front of the house, I keep seeing something

behind me every time I pass by the window.

At some point, as I'm passing through, I stop my bike and Christina and I are talking and I look in the window and sure enough I see in the window my reflection and I see

the reflection of someone standing behind me.

It was a little boy, I would say

maybe 12-13 years old.

He was wearing a white t-shirt and he was wearing blue jeans.

It startled me because no one had been there and I jerked my head around to see who was there.

And there was no one standing behind me.

So I turned back around to look in the window, and it was gone.

Gone, gone, gone, gone.

And I was frozen in fear and shaking.

I look at Christina and I say,

I keep seeing something behind me in the window.

Every time we pass by, I can see something in the reflection.

And she just stared at me and her face goes pale.

And I said, yeah, I've been seeing that same figure too.

Stephanie and I, we just began to confide in each other about the things that we had been experiencing.

But we never really said anything to Ben about it.

We almost didn't want to have any validation outside of the two of us.

We didn't want to alarm our parents, make them think that we were crazy, or just making up silly stories.

So, Stephanie and I were trying to figure out what were we going to call

this little boy that we kept seeing, what were we going to call him?

And

we kind of remembered the name that was carved in the concrete in our backyard, Gerald Thompson.

And

we decided, you know,

that's probably who this is.

And so,

after that, that, his name was Gerald.

We were at a Christmas party at the home of one of our friends in our Sunday school.

Her name was Tony.

As we were visiting at the party, Tony asked me where we lived.

She had lived in Bartlesville her entire life, and I had only lived here about four years.

And I told her where we lived, and she said, oh, I think one of my friends that I went to school with lived in that house.

And I said, Oh, really?

And she said, Yeah, I think he did.

And she pulled down her yearbook.

And she said, Yeah, yeah, he did.

Here is his picture right here.

I just about painted.

It was an in-memorial photograph in the yearbook.

It was the boy that I saw in my house.

He had the acne, the pimples.

And when I saw his name was Gerald Thompson, I felt the blood rush to my face and I felt like I had shrunk away and was watching everything from the other end of a tunnel.

She was explaining to me what happened to him and I listened, but my mind just kind of went on overdrive and I felt like I couldn't hear and could barely even see anything because my heart was racing.

When he was in high school, one day, he had a really, really bad headache and he laid down his head on his desk.

He had a brain aneurysm and he died.

I did not say a word to Tony about how this put so many pieces of this puzzle together because I felt like I was kind of a bad Christian for having seen these things and having experienced these things.

But I knew then that everything that I was seeing and everything that I was experiencing was not a fluke and it was all 100%

real.

And my husband, he patted me on the leg and said, is everything okay?

You've kind of been quiet.

And I said, oh, no, no, I was just thinking about everything that happened tonight.

The first conversation that I had with my husband about seeing Gerald and knowing who he was was not too long after that Christmas party.

Well, he argued with me about it and didn't want me to tell anybody about it.

After I realized that this was a real person, I definitely felt more of a motherly relationship to the spirit of this child.

I talked to Gerald while I was folding laundry.

I would just try to talk calmly to him and say, you know, what's going on?

How are you doing?

Come on in and let's have a conversation.

I literally said things like that out loud to him because

I wanted him to feel welcome and to feel

wanted,

and I was hoping that he would talk to me to have a friend.

Gerald was very selective when he would appear to me.

I was always in that room alone when he would be around.

He would just appear there, just a still figure, and very rarely would he walk toward me or away from me.

He never spoke, he never said a word.

Support for Spooked comes from Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport.

OAK offers non-stop flights to your favorite destinations across the U.S.

and Mexico with new non-stop flights to Los Cabos and Zacatecas.

OAK makes travel easy with Park OAK's convenient parking options.

Reserve a spot in the daily lot or economy lot and save on your next trip.

Learn more at iflyoak.com, the best way to San Francisco Bay.

This is a vacation with Chase Sapphire Reserve, the butler who knows your name.

This is the robe, the view, the steam from your morning coffee.

This is the complimentary breakfast on the balcony, the beach with no one else on it.

This is the Edit, a collection of hand-picked luxury hotels you can access with Chase Sapphire Reserve, and a $500 edit credit that gets you closer to all of it.

Chase Sapphire Reserve, the most rewarding card.

Learn more at chase.com/slash Sapphire Reserve.

Cards issued by J.P.

Morgan Chase Bank and a member of FDIC, subject to credit approval.

At LinkedIn, we know hiring is a big deal for your small business.

Sometimes it can feel a little, ah, overwhelming.

LinkedIn uses data that you can't find anywhere else to give you the best candidates.

Also, you can feel confident you're hiring the best person for the job.

And even a little,

hiring bliss.

See why 86% percent of small businesses who post a job on linkedin get a qualified candidate within a day post a job for free at linkedin.com slash pandora linkedin your next great hire is here

no matter what you're building you shouldn't have to worry about how fast you can cover your roof zip system roof assembly is an easy to install panel and tape system that helps quickly achieve rough dry-in eliminating the need for felt.

Whether you're adapting to schedules, codes, or weather, our products keep your roof all zipped up.

Watch easy installation tips to protect roofs during and after construction at zipsystem.com.

Oh, watch your step.

Wow, your attic is so dark.

Dark.

I know, right?

It's the perfect place to stream horror movies.

What movie is that?

I haven't pressed play yet.

AT ⁇ T fiber with all five covers your whole house.

Even your really, really creepy attic turned home theater.

Jimmy, what have I told you about skinning our guests?

Get ATNT fiber with all-fi and live like a gagillionaire.

Limited availability coverage may require extenders at additional charge.

There was just a feeling of very profound sadness.

It worried me as a mother that there was a child

because he felt

because he felt like a child who needed someone.

That was the feeling that I got, that he was a child looking for his mother.

When you're a mother and a wife, you don't have a lot of things that you feel like are only yours.

And I kind of felt like it was my own little secret.

It was almost a special thing that I had that nobody else had.

I never mentioned it to the children for all the years that they lived there, including after they moved out.

I had been moved out of the house probably 10 years.

At this point, my sisters and I have all married and we have children of our own.

We were back visiting my parents.

I was in the bathroom with my youngest daughter, and she was four years old at the time.

And I was in the bathroom with her doing her hair in the morning.

My sister was in there as well, putting her makeup on.

And I had my daughter standing on a little stool in front of me.

And just out of the blue, she said, Mommy, who is that person standing behind us in the mirror?

My blood ran cold.

I said,

Well, there's no one behind us.

I don't see anyone in the mirror.

And she said, Mommy, look in the mirror.

There's someone standing right behind us.

And I looked at Christina and she looked at me.

And we did not know what to say.

I kind of felt almost tears in my eyes because I was overwhelmed by it.

I just tried to reassure her.

I said, I don't see anyone in there.

I think it's okay.

You know, I think maybe you're just seeing things.

The next visit we had,

we were all visiting my parents.

Ben was there, Christina was there.

We were sitting in the living room chatting, and my middle daughter came walking down the long hall into the living room.

She looked very upset, and she kind of came to me teary-eyed and I said, sweetheart, what's wrong?

And she said, why does that man keep jumping out from that corner every time I come down the hall?

And

Ben and I just looked at each other.

I did not know what to tell her.

And it was very difficult for me to calm her down and to tell her, I think maybe, sweetheart, you may just be seeing things.

There's nothing there.

I had not expected my children to ever have any experiences in the home.

That had not crossed my mind that I should protect them from anything going on in the house.

It really took me back to

when I was a little girl in the home, around four years old, and experiencing those same types of things.

It felt validating in some ways, but not in a good way.

It was Thanksgiving just a few years back.

We were staying at a large cabin in Louisiana, and

it was late at night, and we were all just up visiting.

We started talking about our experiences in the house.

And, you know, as an adult, you're removed from the situation.

It was extremely interesting to me, especially to hear from Ben.

It was just crazy to hear about his experiences.

There was a tree that he liked to hang out in and jump from.

There were also trees he would stand at and kind of watch us.

That was something none of us had really ever shared, but we all had the same experience in the yard with that.

I asked Stephanie, what did he look like to you?

I said, it's to me when I see it, it's this figure wearing a white shirt and jeans.

And just his, his eyes got just huge.

I was like, yes, the white shirt.

And the hair raised on my arms, because I had never told anyone that.

My older sister, Christina,

She also experienced this thing around the mimosa tree.

And as a test, I said, well, which mimosa tree?

And out of the five that are in our yard, she identified the right one.

At that point, we realized how much we had kept from each other because we had a sense that maybe we were crazy or someone else wouldn't understand.

I,

for whatever reason, had become convinced that this wasn't a problem with the house, a problem with the yard.

This was something that was attached to me.

That

this would be something that would follow me around, that I would never be free of it.

I graduated high school there and I went off to college.

And I remember being so scared, every new apartment that I would go to, even every dorm room.

I remember waiting for that feeling to come, being scared of something happening.

And what Stephanie said,

but never anywhere have I ever felt that except in that home that we grew up in.

It was just kind of a

release in a way of just being able to have those conversations with them and know it was real, it happened,

and

I'm not a crazy person.

It never entered my mind that it might backfire that I had not said anything to the children about it.

That really hadn't ever crossed my mind.

I really had just hoped that I was the only one.

I think he

was

different

with me than he was with them.

I think he was much more mischievous with them.

The quintessential bratty teenage boy

and just more of a presence that kind of needed a mommy when he was around me.

That was the feeling that I always got around him.

Maybe it was wrong that I didn't talk to them about it.

I really don't know.

Rather than me trying to brush it off, thinking that I was protecting them from being frightened when it looks like what I was doing was

just acting as though I did not believe them.

But you just do the best you can until you know to do better and then you try to do better.

I think that she probably did the right thing because I feel like, as a kid, if she had come to me and said,

Yes, Stephanie, I see it too,

I think that I would have just been more frightened.

Even having my kids have experiences, I think your default mode as the parent is to try to dismiss anything that you can't explain to your kids that you feel like you don't don't have any control of, you have no power to stop it.

I think it's easy to just dismiss that.

We moved out of the house about five and a half years ago.

My husband didn't want to fix up that house.

He wanted to move instead of fixing up that house.

There was so much chaos going on in the house that I didn't think so much about Gerald at all.

In fact, when we were getting ready to move, I hadn't seen him in a long time.

But the house had always had a peculiar sweet smell to it.

It wasn't particularly pleasant or unpleasant.

It was just a peculiar sweet smell to it.

That smell ramped up tremendously, and

I got the emotional sense that Gerald may have felt that we were abandoning him as we left.

I would have sold the house long ago, except my husband still has things in it.

I don't know what keeps him from selling the house, but maybe the kids can kick in with some information as to why they think daddy's hanging on to that house.

Even though we've been out for five and a half years, I still go to the house at least once a week.

It is beginning to fade now.

That smell is finally beginning to fade.

Several months ago, I went to the house and just sat in the house for an hour or something.

And I just literally talked out loud to Gerald.

I said, You know, I haven't seen you in a long time.

I hope you're doing okay.

Can you at least let me see you to see how you're doing?

I'm sorry he left, and we didn't even say goodbye.

And

there was nothing.

I didn't feel his presence.

I actually cried because I felt like he was gone.

And I should be happy about that.

If there's nobody there,

he would be lonely.

So I don't know if he felt like there was something that I could be for him or if

he just needed some kind of comfort.

I hope I was able to do that for him.

If he is still there, I just want him to know that he wasn't abandoned, that this was just a process that adults go through in moving, and that it wasn't an intentional abandonment.

Big love to all of you, Susan, Ben, Christina, and Stephanie, and a shout out to Gerald, the family ghost from all of us here at the Spooked.

The original score was by Renzo Gorio.

The piece was produced by Zoe Ferrigno and Chris Hambrick with assistance from Greta Weber.

Now, spooksters, thank you so much for being a part of this journey, for supporting this show, for being part of our family, the spook family.

We appreciate you.

If you have an experience that has changed your world,

a story you've been wanting to tell that you think no one will understand, we'll understand.

Tell us about it.

You know there is nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener.

Spooked at snapjudgment.org.

You can warn the dark side that you do spook with some spook gear, the t-shirt of your dreams available right now at snapjudgment.org.

And remember, if you like your storytelling to take you for a ride under the bright light of day, get the amazing, stupendous Snap Judgment podcast.

It is storytelling with a beat.

This book was created by the team that always leaves more breadcrumbs behind in the dark forest.

Except for Mark Rischich.

He just wanders about hoping for the best and assessment.

A special thank you to our own Eliza Smith.

May the shadow never find you on your next journey.

Chris Hamburg, Amy Nguyen, Lauren Newsome, Leon Moirimoto, David Kim, Renzo Gorio, Teo DeCot, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Ferrigno, Tiffany DeLiza, Ann Ford, Bretta Weber, Doug Stewart, and Isaiah Sims.

The spook theme songs by Pat Massini Miller, My Name's Glen Washington.

When a door is opened, when the veil is drawn aside and the invitation extended, understand.

That even here, you have the choice to turn back around from whence you came, to never retrace the steps that brought you to this rip in the fabric,

the space between here and there.

But if you proceed forward,

know that the old rules are forgotten in this new place, all of them, all of them,

except for just one.

When you cross over,

even then,

never,

ever,

never, ever, never, never, ever, never, ever, never

turn out

the lies.

Support for Spooked comes from Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport.

OAK offers non-stop flights to your favorite destinations across the U.S.

and Mexico with new non-stop flights to Los Cabos and Zacatecas.

OAK makes travel easy with Park OAK's convenient parking options.

Reserve a spot in the daily lot or economy lot and save on your next trip.

Learn more at iflyoak.com, the best way to San Francisco Bay.

When evaluating potential hires for your small business, it's essential you look beyond resumes.

Sure, a candidate may appear impressive on paper, but understanding the person is crucial.

LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network, provides a complete view of your candidate's skills, experiences, and interests.

With LinkedIn's up-to-date data, you can be confident that you really know who you're hiring.

Post your free job at linkedin.com slash Pandora.

That's linkedin.com/slash Pandora.

Terms and conditions apply.

No matter what you're building, you shouldn't have to worry about how fast you can cover your roof.

Zip System Roof Assembly is an easy-to-install panel and tape system that helps quickly achieve rough dry-in, eliminating the need for felt.

Whether you're adapting to schedules, codes, or weather, our products keep your roof all zipped up.

Watch easy installation tips to protect roofs during and after construction at zipsystem.com.

Oh, watch your step.

Wow, your attic is so dark.

Dark.

I know, right?

It's the perfect place to stream horror movies.

What movie is that?

I haven't pressed play yet.

AT ⁇ T fiber with all five covers your whole house.

Even your really, really creepy attic turned home theater.

Jimmy, what have I told you about scaring the guests?

Get AT ⁇ T fiber with all-fi and live like a gagillionaire.

Limited availability coverage may require extenders at additional charge.

My dog Max loves chewing on my favorite pair of shoes, almost as much as he loves his Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula dry dog food.

Seriously, he never leaves a crumb.

And I love it too, because it's made with high-quality protein, antioxidant-packed fruits, and nutrient-rich veggies.

Blue Buffalo Foods are made with the superior ingredients your dog needs to thrive.

Can your dog food say that?

Visit feedbluefood.com to learn more.