40 Days

My Bonnie fled over the ocean.

I followed them out to the sea.

My bonny ran fast when they saw me.

Dear Bonnie, oh, why would it be?

My bonny thought I wouldn't notice.

My bonny was wrong, as you see.

Now Bonnie lies under the ocean, and I swim alone

by the sea.

Listen to Miss Spooked.

Stay tuned.

I've never met my grandfather, and I don't know much about him except that after he was killed, it turned out that his family, his wife, my grandmother, his daughter, my mother, and her eight siblings, this family

was not his only family.

There was another secret family with numerous children and kinfolk as well, a secret family that a surprising number of people somehow knew all about.

And as a child, I learned, learned, I was taught, this other family, that those people were bad people,

to be hated, to be feared, because every branch of the tree touched by sin bears the taint of that sin.

Illegitimate heirs to my grandfather's sterling legacy, usurpers.

And I saw them.

The other kids sometimes blinking angry eyes at me as I stared right back over at them.

All of us us with the same roundy heads, the same slope of the nostrils, the same gap between their front teeth as there is between mine, the same red running through our veins.

And

it's all well and good to hate the neighbors down the street, the people in some other country.

that speak another language.

Maybe the people that dress in different clothes, those that worship another God.

But

as a child,

I learned that the cleanest,

the brightest, the fiercest type of hate

that we save that

for family

stars, star stars, spook stars, spook stars.

Now,

Now,

Laura Lee,

she grew up without her parents around.

She said she lived in her grandmother's house in the Philippines in a village just a few hours from Manila.

But Lord Lee,

she was never alone.

There were more than a dozen people living in my grandma's house.

My grandparents, my aunt, an uncle or two, me, my brother, my sister.

Four of my cousins hung around at my grandma's house with us.

And we were all about the same

So it was great.

We just play all day all night, a lot of running around and screaming and yelling until it's time to have dinner.

The house was two bedrooms, one bath, and then a kitchen/slash dining room and one really big living area.

And there's a window that overlooks the front yard.

It's a garden with benches and that's where we usually hung out after school.

You know, it's nice and shady out there.

A lot of cats would hang out because we usually throw out scraps to feed the strays.

That's also where all the Itas, that's auntie in Tagalog, that's where all the Itas from the neighborhood would come over and gossip with my grandma in the afternoons when it's too hot to do anything.

They were all tight.

They pretty much grew up together.

One day, we were all hanging out in the front yard.

Kids were just playing around,

and all the aunties were just gossiping with grandma.

My grandma suddenly pops up with:

The last two nights, I've had a really, really odd dream.

I keep dreaming that Ente, my uncle, was standing here in the front yard, and I was looking out the window.

He was looking up at me, and he kept saying,

Mom, I'm coming home soon.

Don't forget to throw a really big party for me.

It was odd because my grandma, and she's a good Roman Catholic, when aunties would talk about weird superstitions that they have, my grandma would be the first to poo-poo that sort of thing.

She said, instead of feeling happy in her dream, she just felt really uneasy.

And she couldn't pinpoint why

the neighborhood aunties were all, well,

what was weird?

Did you notice anything?

What was going on?

And grandma says, well, number one, he was wearing a suit,

wearing a suit with a red tie.

He was really dressed up.

I mean, he doesn't own a suit.

Also, he was surrounded by all of this luggage and it was red luggage and they all had fancy wheels on it and he doesn't own anything that fancy.

So, of course, course all the auntie was like, oh, that's not a big deal.

You know, he's coming back home in a couple of months for Christmas and he's going to stay for three months.

That's probably what you're dreaming about.

You're just excited.

My grandma's like, yeah, I don't like it.

I didn't like it at all.

I didn't know my uncle all that well.

The most interaction that I would have with him is when he would come back for, you know, vacations.

He was my cousin's dad, and that was pretty much it.

All I thought was like, wow, creepy dream, that's so cool.

I'm going to tell my friends about it at school tomorrow.

But otherwise, it was just random talk.

A little less than a week after, I was in the kitchen snacking and chit-chatting with my cousins.

And we just hear grandma yelling.

Something bad just happened and it's probably our fault.

So we very reluctantly get up and go to the living room where my grandma was.

And she's standing there, hands on her hips.

And she jabs her finger and points to the ground.

It's like, look at this.

What did you do?

Were you running around again?

And she's pointing at my uncle's framed high school graduation photo, which is lying face down on the floor.

Grandma thought that because we were running around being rambunctious, somehow we had knocked this photo off a wall.

She was worried that the glass could have shattered.

What was weird about it was that the wire that is used to hang the photo was actually twisted around the nail.

It was impossible for that photo to have fallen off without pulling the nail out.

It was like somebody took it from the wall, unhooked it, and then placed it on the floor face down.

And we're like, grandma, we didn't do that.

But my grandma is like, okay, I'm going to move the photos from the wall because obviously these children cannot control themselves.

And I'm going to put it in this shelf.

So she arranged the photos kind of towards the back and then put tchotchkis in front of it.

So it was safe.

We ended up getting banished for the house for the rest of the afternoon.

Later in the afternoon, we were outside playing marbles.

And again, we heard this howling from my grandma.

Get up here!

So I kept tropping up the stairs and we go to the living room where this big bookshelf was placed.

placed.

And in front of it was a picture frame.

My uncle's photo face down on the floor again.

And everything else was perfectly arranged on the shelf.

And my grandma's like, who did this?

Her tone was different.

It wasn't like 100% mad.

This was more like 70% mad and 30%

something else, like nervousness or uncertainty.

She wanted one of us to say, sorry, grandma, I did that, but none of us did that.

At this point, my grandmother was just like, okay, fine, just go, just go.

Even us kids, we were thinking something creepy is going on, something is wrong, you know, there's something very off.

But we didn't want to talk too much about it because these are my cousins' dad.

I would be like, like, I'm just not going to think about it.

So around this time, weird things were happening at my Aunt Vergie's house.

Aunt Vergie is the aunt that is the wife of my uncle that my grandma had been dreaming about.

My cousin Christopher, He just kind of pipes up is, it just smells weird in the house.

It smells like church during Lent, when it's filled to the brim with flowers and all these burning cheap candles, a kind of overwhelming blanket of smell.

We don't like it.

We're going to stay at grandma's because at least it doesn't smell like a church.

I was kind of irritated because we had to share this tiny little room with four more kids.

The three smallest kids shared the bed and we all had to sleep on hard wood floors.

All I wanted them was them to go home.

home.

It was very uncomfortable.

A week later, my cousins and I were just hanging out in the living room watching TV.

The adults were out in the front yard chit-chatting.

And suddenly, in the middle of Sesame Street,

we just hear my grandma wailing.

So, of course, all of us went running for the window, and all we saw was all of our neighbor aunties huddled around my grandma.

My grandma is just on the ground crying.

My aunt Olivia was there talking to these two foreigners.

One was some blonde guy and the other was a dark-haired dude, obviously not Filipino.

And they were wearing suits and she was talking to them in English.

Her voice was pitched really high.

I don't know what she was saying.

The blonde dude was holding on to my aunt's hands.

And you can see that my aunt was like shaking her hand up and down as though trying to shake off the blonde guy's grip.

All of us kids were just standing there overlooking all this, frozen.

I never thought for a second I should go down there and find out what's going on.

It was just too horrifying to see my grandma lose her control completely like that.

To see my aunt so disturbed.

Aunt Olivia shooted us kids into the bedroom.

But as soon as that door closed, we all were plastered against the door with our ears against it because we wanted to know what had happened.

All the adults, all my uncles, my aunts, a couple of neighbors, my grandma's friends, my grandfather, we were all in the living room talking about what had happened that afternoon.

My uncle had passed away two weeks before.

He'd passed away in sleep.

He had a huge heart attack and just never woke up.

The two guys were representatives of the oil and gas company that my uncle worked for.

They were saying that they would take care of all arrangements to ship his body back to the Philippines.

It was just terrible.

Do you never never want to think that somebody died in your family?

Three days after the representatives came, Aunt Olivia had gone to Manila to pick up the body and his personal effects.

And the luggage was brought to my deceased uncle's house.

Aunt Olivia came over to grandma's house and just having dinner with the rest of us.

I'm sitting there picking up my fish and she told my grandma it was the the red luggage that you dreamed about

it was a red canvas with wheels

it was just dead silence for a couple of seconds i'm sitting there with fish halfway to my mouth and i'm looking at my aunt like are you serious oh my god

my grandmother just kind of nodded her head like

okay there's something really weird going on here but we are not gonna talk about it

The body was driven to my deceased uncle's house.

They were gonna have a five-day wake.

There was gonna be breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

There's gonna be karaoke.

There is gonna be gambling.

The first day of the wake arrives.

It was very chaotic.

It felt like the entire town was there.

I am dead certain that there were people who showed up for that wake that didn't even know our family.

I just remember the massive amounts of food that was constantly being brought out to feed all these people.

I noticed there's just flowers everywhere.

The smell is just so cloyingly sweet.

And then just feeling all this hot air because we had fans running to try to keep the room cool, keep air circulating, but it was just circulating more hot flower smell, more hot candle smell

you had to walk down the middle of the living room to get to the casket

the top of the casket is glass so you can see him from the waist up

I was the oldest so I had to be the first one to go amongst all the cousins and my siblings

Not going up there to pay my respects was not an option.

There would have been a spanking.

I walked up there and I'm standing there really trying not to just

try not to shudder.

I'd never seen a dead body before.

He was dressed really nice in a nice gray suit with a red tie, exactly how my grandma had described her dream.

I saw this trail of something from his eye down his temple towards his ear.

It looked like it was a tear trail.

It looked like he cried.

When I saw that, all the hairs on my body just went straight up.

It absolutely creeped me out, 100%.

After that first night, my siblings and I were not expected to show up at the wake anymore.

We were just hanging out at my grandma's house.

It was close to dinner, and my little sister was like, sis, I'm hungry.

Can we eat dinner now?

So we go into the kitchen.

The door leading out to the yard is wide open because it's hot.

When I walked in there, I was thinking, oh, weird, there are no cats.

Usually, we have all these strays coming in, hoping for a handout.

My grandma's kitchen has this antique table and chairs that are of carved wood, and they're incredibly heavy.

My sister could not physically pull in her chair herself, herself, so she sits on the chair and I push it in for her.

I dish out dinner, put her plate down in front of her, I sit at the head of the table, so there's an empty chair between us.

My sister and I were not talking, we were focused on just eating.

And then suddenly, that empty chair between us starts rattling.

It's not like a nice gentle rocking,

it was like somebody had grabbed the back of that chair and was shaking it back and forth

and then forward and back.

It was a violent shaking.

My heart is thudding so hard.

It's up my throat.

I can hear it in my eardrums.

My sister and I were looking at this chair just in shock.

I tell her, Daphne, please stop doing that.

And she looks at me and her eyes are huge.

She says, I didn't do that.

I'm not, that's not me.

That's not me.

I can feel all this blood rushing to my face and rushing back down.

I duck my head under the table.

My sister's feet are tucked under her,

and this chair is just rattling on its own.

It felt like it was going on for minutes, but I'm sure it was just seconds.

And it rattles a couple more times while I've got my head out of that there.

And then it stops with a thump.

Like somebody lifted it up and then thumped it back down.

We were out of that kitchen so fast.

We're in the living room and I'm crying.

My sister's crying.

I was just so scared.

I knew this was my uncle doing this.

Who else would it be?

The wake was going on.

And for Filipino beliefs, when a person passes away, they have 40 days and 40 nights to say goodbye to whoever they want to say goodbye to before they move on.

Sometimes they visit you in a dream.

Sometimes things fall for no reason.

Lights go on and off.

Sometimes, I guess, they decide that they're going to rattle a chair for you because that's what's available.

It's probably a week after the funeral.

My uncle was actually blessed and buried and I felt okay enough to tell my grandma about my uncle uncle visiting Daphne and I in the kitchen.

She was just very matter-of-fact about it.

That's your uncle.

He's just saying hello, don't be scared.

It's because your mom was his favorite sibling.

He just wanted to make sure that he said goodbye to you guys because

you're important.

And I'm like,

did he have to say goodbye that way?

I left the Philippines when I was 11.

I moved to the States to be with my mom.

I had asked my mom, please, when you pass away, do not visit me.

Maybe visit me in a dream, but don't make yourself felt physically.

Well, I don't want any of that, mom.

She's like, okay, okay.

And we just kind of giggle.

Then I'm like, but

when I pass away,

I'm gonna haunt every single one of you.

I'm gonna scare the heck out of you.

Why not?

I mean, I've had it happen to me.

But no, seriously, though,

I feel like sometimes there's expectations, right?

And I think even after I pass, I will still feel personally responsible and obligated to do my duty as a nice Filipino person to go ahead and haunt my family members.

Even after death,

you're expected to show up.

By golly, you will show up.

Thank you, Laura Lee, for sharing your story with the spook.

That piece was scored by Doug Stewart.

It was produced by Ann Ford.

Now,

you know someone who routinely interacts with creatures that some might call fairy,

fae,

sprites, we folks, others, a story that you don't know who to tell,

or maybe you're that person yourself with this story.

Tell me, because I want to hear it.

Spooked at stampjudgment.org because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener.

Spook at snapjudgment.org.

We all know the best way to ward off evil spirits is by sporting spook gear.

It's available right now, right now at snapjudgment.org.

And remember, if you like your storytelling under the bright light of day, get the amazing, stupendous sister podcast at Snap Judgment storytelling with a beat.

Scoop is created by the team that does not scare easy.

Cutting this course to Mark Ristich,

he screamed like a schoolboy when I pulled the old slide the nose off the face trick.

There's Davey Kim, Chris Hambrick, Lauren Newsome, Leon Murimoto, Teo DeCot, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Frigno, and Ford, Greta Weber, Eric Ganez, Tessa Paoli, Cody Harcho, Lola Obrera, Doug Stewart, and Mines Lassie.

The spook theme song is by Pat Machini Miller.

My name's in Washington and I find that the thing about premonitions is most of the time you're already in the mix when the warning comes down.

Unhelpful at best.

So walking the dark path, I prefer to offer useful advice instead.

Stick to the tried and true, the fetid and the tested.

Believe me, when I say the one thing that can save you when nothing else will is simply to remember to never,

ever,

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

turn out

the lights.