Spirit of the Mountain

There's a cow in this can.

The can's for the pup.

I open the can and the pup eats it up.

The can hides the truth of what lived and who died.

My pup doesn't care.

And I don't either.

You've crossed over to spooked.

Say

Okay,

sixth grade, rural Michigan.

Close to where we live, there's a livery stable where the rich folk keep their horses.

They let me and some of my buddies come through and muck stables, move feed, do chores or whatever, for the exalted privilege of getting to be around horses.

No, we can't ride the horses.

At least, we better not get caught riding horses.

Still,

we get to tend the most beautiful animals that have ever breathed air.

And there's one

chestnut bay-like from Astori.

looks like a patronis glorious

but

no one

can get near her

she bites she whinnies she kicks we call her demon you can't even walk by her

except for the owner's son Chad

the one that hisses at us to keep your head down Don't you look me in the eyes.

The one always blinking.

One day, my buddy steps too close to Demon's stall.

She nips him on the shoulder hard enough to draw blood.

He screams bloody murder.

Demon screams back.

All the horses answer.

The stable explodes into panemonium.

The owner's son, Chad,

pads through, walks right up to Demon, pushes his hand into her stall, places it on top of her head.

Her crazed eyes still.

She whinnies, presses into his fingers, knickers, snorts,

and she's silent.

Every other horse grows silent as well, and I am in awe.

I've never seen this kind of control, this type of certainty.

It's magical.

And I hate this guy

so much.

I hate him, but

he speaks horse

like

no one that I've ever seen in life.

So I watch him, hoping,

hoping maybe someday

Maybe I can speak horse too.

The owner, Chad's father, always laughs at he wants to train demon not to bite.

Says she'd be worth a million bucks.

I'm not getting anywhere near her.

But I shadow Chad from a distance.

He always has sugar cubes in his pockets.

So I make sure I have sugar cubes in my pockets.

Always carries apples as a special treat.

I start carrying apples and one day,

after someone else runs bleeding from the stable, I see Chad press sugar onto Demon's tongue.

And it occurs to me,

he never gives her treats when she doesn't bite.

He only gives her treats when she does.

The bigger the melee, the larger her reward.

He looks over,

sees me seeing him, and quickly,

quickly

before he gets angry and they never let me back in here again.

I turn my eyes

down.

Now.

Why Why wouldn't animals?

Plants have a different way of knowing, a different relationship with the world.

Seems exactly what you might expect.

What's odd is those rare moments when they let us see

what they see.

Now once you meet Adam,

as a kid, Adam used to travel a lot to Puerto Rico

to visit his family in Yauco.

A town surrounded by mountains and jungles.

And there, he would spend time with Papito, his great-grandfather.

Everyone knew Papito in town.

He was almost like the chief of the mountains.

Everyone respected him from his kids to his great-grandchildren,

even the animals.

Papito held all the knowledge of the Tiño people.

He would always tell Adam that the mountain is aware of things.

I mean, that Adam is about to find out by himself

soon.

When I was about nine years old, I spent a whole lot of time in my Papito's house, my great-grandfather's house.

It sits on one of the many mountaintops of Yauco.

It's on this little plateau that overlooks the cliff and the valley,

and there's forest, forest, forest everywhere.

It's like a jungle.

It's very difficult to see a neighbor.

The only other neighbors that were near were his brothers and sisters who owned their own houses on this big property in the mountains that was all owned by my great-grandfather.

So one day I go up to Papito's house, which is a walk from my grandmother's house.

I love to hang out there because he had a bunch of interesting

random farm equipment and tons of farm animals, cows and horses, goats.

But nearby there was an enormous bull.

And I was deathly frightened by this bull because it was enormous.

It was huge, so much larger than me, huge horns.

So I was hanging out and playing in the front of his house, and this big bull came nearer to me.

So I go to my Papito and say, I'm scared of the bull and it's coming close.

He laughed because he saw the city kid being scared of the bull that no one pays any attention to.

The bull was walking away from the house

and Bapito did this super

powerful whistle,

like a

Fourth of July firework echoing through the mountains.

And then the bull just stopped and started coming back towards us.

That was really scary.

This is the last thing I wanted.

I was like pulling away from him, but he wouldn't let me go.

And the bull is just lumbering over very slowly.

And then he says, no, no, no, no.

That's all he said.

He said, no, no, no, no.

And then he grabbed the bull by the horns horns and he lowered it down into the ground and made it like bow its head and put its horns towards the ground.

And so he just grabbed me, picked me up, threw my leg over.

The next thing I know, I'm riding on this enormous bull and holding on to the horns.

And it was scary, but it was awesome.

and exciting.

I felt much better because I saw that this thing did whatever he wanted it to do.

One day I'm in my madrina's house, which was at the top highest peak of all of the hills that we lived on.

I'm playing with my sister and my cousins.

My madrina, my godmother, was taking care of Papito at the time.

He was in his late 90s

and he had severe sort of dementia.

Papito is laying in my madrina's room in her bed.

And as we play during the day, I start to get the sense that something is happening.

Everybody is gathering at my Madrina's house.

And more and more people keep showing up.

People from the town, uncles, aunts, and a priest shows up.

I peeked into the room, and the room was filled with people.

Papito is laying in the bed.

He looked

very

small and skinny and pale.

He looked gray almost.

I started to feel uncomfortable.

I didn't know what was going on.

But I knew that I didn't want to be around at that moment.

So I go to my Awela and I tell her how I feel.

She told me that I could go back to her house, that the sun is just starting to set.

If I leave now, I can make it before the sun fully sets.

And that I could wait for them to be finished what they were doing.

So I leave my Madrina's house and I start on the path to my grandmother's house.

I can hear the sounds that are fading away from the house and it sounds like

crying.

And I'm thinking, oh, okay,

whatever it is that I didn't want to be around for is happening right now.

I'm entering the

lower part of the mountains, the beginning of the valley, and the forest.

And I realize that it's much darker than I thought it was going to be.

There is just so many trees, vegetation, tangly vines.

I get to my grandmother's driveway, which is a long little road.

And as I get there,

I heard

somewhere nearby

a very strange sound, an animal sound.

The first thing I thought of

was a cow, because there's cows everywhere.

And then a moment later, it screamed in a way that I've never heard a living thing scream before.

It was almost like a human wail coming from an animal.

I

get this cold tingliness throughout my whole body,

goosebumps going up my neck.

I immediately just started started to run towards my grandmother's house.

As soon as I start running, I hear another.

And now I'm sure it's an animal.

But it sounded like someone, a person,

in pain.

Then in the distance, a bunch of other animals start wailing.

The pigs in the valley, the dogs that were randomly all over the mountainside,

the cows and the horses and the bulls.

Some of it sounded like it was the pigs near the slaughterhouse that were not even on our property.

They were in agony,

as if they were being killed.

And then the night is just filled with these wails.

It's an igniting of voices that keep coming out of the darkness because I can't see where they're coming from.

And so I'm running, running, running to my grandmother's house.

And this wailing seems like it's chasing me.

Like it sounds like it's right in the back of my head, trying to grab at my ankles.

Once I get to the top of the hill, I'm panting like a madman.

I pass through the gates of my grandmother's house, slipping and sliding, run up to her patio, grab the door, yank it open, and slam the door shut.

I'm all alone.

The wailing is still

going strong, and it feels like it's completely surrounding my grandmother's house.

I run into the room where I was sleeping, and I lay on the cot.

I just started praying.

I just wanted the time to pass to wait for my grandmother to come back.

Eventually, the animal noises finally died down,

and shortly after that, my grandmother arrives

my grandmother comes up to me and and asks me if I'm okay and I sort of stammer over my words

I told her that when I was coming back to the house I heard the animals screaming

And my grandmother said, of course they're screaming.

Of course they're upset.

And I asked her, why are they so upset?

She said, because Papito died.

Papito's gone now.

At first, I'm confused.

I didn't understand.

And I said,

how could they know that he died?

And my grandmother said that all of the animals know these things.

They sense his spirit.

Papito was like their father, their master, their protector, everything to them, their chief.

They could feel him leaving.

They were sad and scared.

So, of course, they know.

That night,

I

was having a lot of trouble falling asleep.

I was up thinking a bunch of things.

How could animals know that Papito died?

And I wondered, do animals have some sense that we don't have?

Or do we have that sense?

I was so restless that I got up, I opened up the main door very carefully and quietly, and then went outside into the night.

There was a place in my grandmother's house that I really loved to go during the day.

And it was in the rear of the house where there was a hammock hanging and there was just like a cliffside and it overlooked the the valley.

I went towards the edge of the cliff.

I lay in the hammock in the darkness.

I'm looking out over the valley, seeing the little bit of stars out there, and just the blackness of the mountain.

I hear the crickets and the coquis, the little frogs that make a very specific sound in Puerto Rico.

And

I hear

an animal sound in the darkness.

It wasn't a growl.

It was more

strange and scary than a growl.

I don't know what it is, but it sounded scary.

And it was coming from the darkness in front of me.

The animal makes this sound a second time.

It was a strange, hyena-like, yipping

excitement, but not a good excitement.

It sounded very close, and it sounds like something that wanted to hurt me.

I'm frozen stiff.

I can't move.

I was just like a deer in headlights.

The thought crossed my mind,

oh, my grandmother's gonna be so mad if I die.

And immediately after, I hear

this whistle,

like a firecracker, in the darkness, in the valley.

And that animal sound stopped.

I'm feeling like I just got shocked by electricity.

And I feel a sudden flush of relief.

And

in that moment, I knew, I knew it.

I just somehow knew that Papito made that sound.

Papito was there with me.

Papito's spirit said goodbye to the animals and even stuck around long enough to protect me

and to say goodbye to me.

I I slowly get up and make my way into the house.

And I'm thinking,

there's something

after

death.

I knew that death was something very, very powerful, very part of life.

But

Papito showed me that

death is not the end of our energy.

Thank you, Adam, for sharing your story with Spook.

That original score was by Doug Stewart.

It was produced by Eric Yanez.

Okay, so

Province, Rhode Island,

far away from the Cobblestone Touristy Park,

it sits a quiet building

called Steer House.

Nursing home, it's a hospice, and in this place lived a cat.

Not a purring cuddle machine, no Instagram cutie.

No,

this cat

is cold-blooded.

name's Oscar

gray white fur green eyes Oscar doesn't care about sitting in your lap

Oscar doesn't chase toys Oscar doesn't even want to be bothered with people much

unless and until

you are preparing for your final journey

And the first time this happens,

no one really pays much attention.

Oscar slips into the room of a woman who'd stopped speaking two days prior.

Oscar jumps into her bed and this cantankerous feline actually curls up at her side

and just wait.

Hours tick by and quiet as mist,

the woman passes away.

The attendants think, what a sweet moment.

What a cosmic coincidence to have have the cat as a comfort during her final moments

in another room and another patient

oscar disappears from his usual spot in the hallway and somehow winds up curled in a ball besides this man

oscar lies still eyes half shut tail tucked

and this man too

passes into the beyond

and another person

and another

and again another still.

And by the time we arrive at the strange coincidence number 25, people aren't saying that's weird anymore.

No.

Instead, they say call to family.

Oscar's on the bed.

No.

heartbeat monitors, no vital sign crashes, just a feline signal that the end is nine.

And Dr.

David Dosa, he sees this and he's trying to make sense of it.

He's a man of science, but Oscar's, Oscar's thrown off his game plan.

They start tracking him.

Oscar, he's right over and over and over again, more than 100 times, more than 100 people, and not just patients in decline.

Sometimes,

Oscar curls up before

anything looks different,

before the nurses even notice.

Eventually, they stop questioning.

Instead, they start trusting.

Families say that when Oscar enters a room, something changes.

It was eerie when daughter recalls.

He gave us time to say everything we needed.

Another man, his eyes wet, voice cracking, remembers he wasn't there for us.

He was there for her.

But he helped us understand what was happening.

Oscar didn't howl.

Oscar didn't demand, didn't console.

He witnessed still a shadow when the breath slowed and the room filled with that silence born of absence.

And touched and moved, the good doctor wrote a book about what he saw called Making Rounds with Oscar.

How do you explain what happened?

Is it a trick?

A gift?

A miracle?

Instincts?

I don't know.

But of course, I tell you this story to ask a favor.

Because if you have a knowledge of a non-human neighbor, It seems to have a special connection to the inexplicable.

Maybe even that special non-human neighbor living in your house that you put food in their bowl twice a day.

Well,

I'd sure love to know about it.

Why?

Because,

dear friends, there is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener.

Spooked at snapjudgment.org.

Spooked is brought to you by the team that makes their own pet food for any animal in their care.

Except for Mark Ristich,

who always says, if I can eat kibble, so can they.

There's David Kim, Zoe Ferigno, Ann Ford, Eric Yanez, Taylor DeCotte, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Doug Stewart, Elliot Lightfoot, Paulina Creek, Juan Diego Baltrán, Sasha Wilson, Dan Yashinski, on Team Snap,

the union represented producers, artists, editors, engineers, are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, Local51.

The spook theme song is by Pat Masudi Miller.

My name is from Washington.

They say that time...

It's just an illusion.

Well, it's a pretty good illusion, right?

It's a pretty good trick.

Because time is relentless.

Everything time giveth, time also snatches away.

Nothing stays the same, even for a moment.

The rules are harsh.

Unforgiving, only forward, never back.

No appeals, no regard, no back door, no secret hatch.

All the money in the world can't buy a fast pass off this ride, right?

Right?

well I wonder

sometimes if

what we experience is supernatural

it's paranormal

it's really just echoes

of those that discovered an escape route

From those that decided that this moment was too important to abandon and that part of them was going to stay right here no matter what time said about it?

And what is our responsibility

to those lost echoes left behind?

I don't have a magic formula.

The best I know to do

is to never, ever,

never, never, ever

turn out

The light

is a little bit