Uneasy Rider

There's a cat, there's a cradle, there's a silver tomb.

There's a deep dark hole by the light of the moon.

We know she will rise, but we don't know when.

Our mistress returns again,

and the ceremony can begin.

You're listening to Spooked.

Stay tuned.

I have a buddy whose grandparents live right outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I went to school.

And I went with him occasionally to meet with them, check in, frankly, to enjoy some home-cooked meals that the grandfather, not the grandmother, prepared.

Oh, you wouldn't want to eat my cooking.

She'd laugh.

We'd feast on warm rye bread, dunked in chicken soup, bors, all manner of things I'd never heard of.

It was nice.

Really nice.

But there was this thing.

They each smiled fondly.

whenever they looked at their grandson.

They even smiled when they looked at me.

But when they looked at each other,

their eyes narrowed.

Their mouths grew tight like you'd almost touched the shards of anger, of fury.

And one day in the kitchen, listening to klezmer music, frying up potato pancakes, the grandfather says to my friend, don't bury me next to that woman.

And my buddy pretends not to hear.

So the grandfather turns to me, a stranger in their home, and says, don't let them bury me next to that woman.

And I don't know how to respond to this.

I don't.

So I just kind of look around like I'm simple.

But he says it again.

And every time we visit, he says something similar.

Don't let them bury me next to that woman.

Do not let them bury me next to that woman.

I graduate university.

move to the other side of the globe for a while, and life happens.

Till almost four years later, on a trip, I'm finally able to reconnect with my buddy at Chicago's Green Mill Bar.

Drinks, food.

Of course, I ask about his grandparents.

He tells me they both passed within six weeks of each other the previous year.

Brother, I'm so sorry.

And I don't ask for this part, but he tells me anyway, maybe because I'm the only person he can tell.

He says,

you know,

they buried them next to each other on a family plot.

And I can tell just by the look in his face, the guilt, the shame that

he didn't have anything to do with that.

I know he tried to stop his uncle and his aunt who insisted, but the thought.

of them lying trapped next to each other for the rest of time makes me think that

perhaps

we need to take a person's last wish

more seriously.

Spook star, star star

now.

Now,

let's say you're driving down that haunted highway and you pass the ghostly hitchhiker.

You're not going to pick him up, are you?

Because honestly, I'm of two minds on this question.

Because it's bad luck to leave a traveler stranded, but sometimes

it's bad luck to pick one up.

About five or six years ago, my husband and I were driving up the mountain where we lived.

It's a national forest, so it's a densely populated forest that they just made a road in a couple small towns in the middle of.

It's just a two-lane road that is incredibly windy.

You have, I don't know, 100-foot tall pine trees on the passenger side and then anywhere from 50 foot to 800 foot cliffs on the opposite side.

All in all, a very dangerous road just because of how many people are there and coming up there and doing stupid things, driving way too fast.

He was the one driving and I was in the passenger seat.

And we'd seen a few motorcycle riders coming down at

a much higher speed than is safe.

I'm not going to put their speed under 80 miles an hour coming around corners.

If you ever watch motorcycle racing where they're dragging their knees across the road, that's exactly what these two guys were doing.

And we got maybe two-thirds of the way up the mountain.

And as we're coming up, all of a sudden the cars in front of us stop on a real sharp curve.

We see a large tan cargo van stopped, and there's a motorcycle crashed right in front of it.

The crash was, I would say, maybe 100, 125 feet in front of us.

You could see us laying down on its side.

It kind of dawned on both of us that there was a person laying there.

So she was lying there with her motorcycle helmet just right next to her.

It looked like kind of a young boy's, you know, shark helmet.

Very colorful and bright,

like a happy helmet that a kid would have.

After about three minutes of sitting there and the person not moving and nobody really trying to tend to the person laying there, like it made a lot of sense to both of us that we could tell that this person

was not alive anymore.

It was a moment of trying to not get myself freaked out either as a motorcycle rider.

It wasn't maybe five, seven minutes after we came to the scene of the crash.

And we had passed two motorcyclists coming down the mountain as we were driving up.

They came up really, really fast on the wrong side of the road and got off their bikes frantically.

It seemed to be her friends or rider friends.

They looked completely devastated and were on their phones.

They were just kind of pacing back and forth, obviously very distraught and in shock.

It was a long time before the ambulance got there.

The ambulance rolled up and it parked maybe 50 feet in front of us.

They couldn't get too much closer to it.

We couldn't go around or anything, so we had no choice but to sit there.

It felt like hours and hours and hours as we sat there and just stared at a dead woman on the road laying in front of the vehicle that she struck.

People were getting out of their cars and walking up, and I actually yelled at some people not to start taking pictures just because people don't have any humanity left.

They covered up her body.

They weren't trying to rush anywhere.

You know, there was no rush to lift her from the ground like, you know, you would normally see when they're trying to rush somebody to the hospital.

I turned around to check on how many cars had been lined up behind us.

But then when I turned back around, I saw that the body bag was completely flat.

It looked like her body had disappeared.

I looked inside the ambulance and there was nothing in there.

So I'm like, okay,

that's weird.

She turned and she asked me if I had noticed the body bag was flat.

She had panic on her face.

It was a concern that I wasn't normally used to.

And I kind of scoffed.

I looked at it.

I was like, what are you talking about?

I could still see the woman underneath the body bag.

In my head, I was like, you sure?

Because it was flat.

I felt like I was going crazy because he's still seeing the shape of it.

And I don't see anything.

Ten seconds later, maybe 20 feet away from the car off to the side, I saw this woman standing and then starts walking towards my husband like a floating walking type of entity.

I couldn't see her face.

It was not clear.

And I knew it was the same woman that I had seen laying on the ground because she was wearing a full leather outfit, the motorcycle outfit.

There was a cartoonish helmet that she had picked up.

I just didn't know what to do at that point or what to think at that point.

I didn't know what it was going to do.

I was starting to sweat.

The back of my neck was burning, and that's when I said,

start the car, roll your window up.

I'm like, why?

Do you want the AC?

Because I'm not seeing anything.

The woman put her body through the window and got in front of my husband's face and grabbed his shirt and whispered, Please help me.

She sounded desperate, worried about something.

Please

help me.

She just disappeared.

And I looked at the body bag and it's as if she never left.

The shape was there again.

I was like this, did I just imagine this whole thing?

Of course, at the same time, I was sad, incredibly sad, and just thinking about her family and the news that they were about to get.

So after what seemed like forever, the EMTs finally decided to let vehicles go past.

And we finally got home.

For at least a week, it was pretty much all we could talk about.

I didn't talk to my husband about, you know, seeing a figure or anything like that because he's a non-believer.

So every time I talk about something paranormal or spiritual, he just like kind of brushes it off like, oh, okay.

But I was curious about the woman.

I had this sense of connection with her.

And I also was wondering why she had asked my husband for help.

So I googled the motorcycle accident at this place at this date and so got her full name.

Her Facebook page just came up right away, and I found a forum where she was chatting with a motorcycle crew or something.

And she had talked about that day that she was going for a ride, and she was just waiting for her husband, quote-unquote, husband, to leave, and then she was going to go.

She said something like, don't forget I'm a new writer.

And they're like, oh, you'll be fine.

It's this mountain.

I just started a piece together that maybe she was having an affair with one of them just because

she had put husband in quotation marks.

That's what I had suspected anyway.

It did feel intimate looking up information about her on the internet.

I think it felt like

since she asked for help, maybe I could find out what she was talking about.

So a few days later, I had started a new job.

I was a cemetery caretaker at one of of the biggest cemeteries in the country.

I think they had a little over 100,000 people that had been buried there over the past 30 or 40 years.

My job was to bury people.

It was 25 to 50 burials a day.

We load the casket onto a lowering device.

The machine lowers itself at a gradual pace.

And then we have to use a backhoe to put the 1,000 pound concrete lid back onto it.

We would fill the hole in and then we would tamp it down.

And then we had a 175 pound gas tamper that would sound like a small jet engine and it would smack all the dirt down.

About 10 days after I'd started this job, I got assigned to a certain part of the cemetery that I had never worked before.

I had no training in.

So I was a little confused, but I was still a new.

new person so I went and did what I was told.

It's Southern California.

It's 100 degrees out in the the middle of the summer.

And we had a fairly busy day.

It was maybe 35 people that we had to bury.

I was soaked in sweat, covered in dirt.

I was ready to go home.

The very last burial of the day.

And they brought out the hearse.

And as we were unloading the casket, the director for the ceremony, the burial ceremony, he told me that it was a younger woman with two kids had died in a motorcycle accident.

I asked him who it was and he showed me the pamphlet from the ceremony.

And sure enough, it was the same woman that we had encountered on the mountain that had been killed in the motorcycle accident.

As I'm lowering the casket, I was emotional about it.

I started looking around and I started looking at the people that were out there and I felt like I should should talk to people, let them know I saw what happened, but it wasn't about me.

If you bury 25 people a day, five days a week, you start to become desensitized to the idea of death.

You don't have a connection anymore.

But as we were loading this woman in, there was this connection that I hadn't felt since I had started there.

I couldn't fathom the coincidence of staring at this young woman for such a long time and then being one of three people that that were going to be the last ones to ever see her before she's laid to rest forever.

We weren't allowed to have phones out there.

As soon as I got back to our break room, I immediately text Micah and I actually sent her a picture of the ceremony pamphlet.

I was like, no way, no freaking way.

Over the next few weeks, I felt a weird draw to watch the grave.

And it was pretty much the first thing I did when I would get to work.

I would make a pass by the grave to see if anything had happened to it each day.

It was about a week later, and I noticed people coming up and visiting the grave site of the woman.

And I didn't think anything of it.

It's fairly normal for a cemetery.

So after the people left the grave, I kind of just walked past it.

And I noticed that they had left trash on it.

Crumbled up piece of paper that didn't have anything on it and a bag of chips.

So I picked it up.

I felt a personal responsibility to do that.

Over the next few weeks, I never really noticed anybody coming to the grave, but I felt like it was important for me to go by.

One time I found the last name of it covered in duct tape.

And then somebody used some kind of material, like chalk or something like that, and like scratched over the last name.

My first reaction is anger, and then the next one was sheer confusion because I never found that on anybody else's grave in the entire cemetery.

So we cleaned it, and I felt that if anybody was gonna do it, I guess it should have been me.

I don't think I would have been able to stop thinking about it if I had to go make sure that this grave wasn't messed with.

And I remember I told Micah each time.

Looking back, I feel like she had asked him to pay respects to her body and her graveyard, where

maybe she knew that no one else will.

Maybe he didn't hear it and he doesn't believe it, but I think that it got to him somehow.

It's pushing the limits of my ability to explain it as a coincidence.

I think there is...

There's a slim possibility there's more to it, but for me to make sense of it to myself rather than just sit around and wonder, I just

chalk it up as a coincidence.

I need the unexplainable to be explainable.

But at the same time, like, I'll never tell my wife that I don't believe her when she tells me she sees something or experiences something.

If she has that gift, then I fully support the idea that she sees and feels things that I never will.

I remember riding the motorcycle down the mountain after we saw the accident and every single ride I thought of that woman and then it didn't take too much longer for me to just give up riding motorcycles.

It was a huge relief to me because I was always worried about it.

I really do love the experience of riding a motorcycle but it's just not worth it anymore.

Thank you, Micah and Andrew, for sharing your story with the spoot.

That story comes to us from the podcast Stories with Sapphire.

A Sapphire's podcast that is chock full of scary stories we think you're going to love.

We're going to put a link to her show in our show notes.

The original score for that story was by Doug Stewart.

It was produced by Ann Ford.

If you walk the backwoods of Michigan, you can step through forests so thick, brambles so tight, It feels like you might be the first person ever to set foot through this land.

But then you look down and see that you're pushing through the remains of a homestead, passing by the crumbling casings of a well.

You start searching, getting your bearings, figuring out where the back of that long-ago structure may have stood, focusing your gaze on the lay of the ground.

You just may find one,

two, even more.

Nothing so formal or grand as a tombstone, no.

Often just a rock.

A faded name marked on it with some simple tool etched with hands unaccustomed to this type of labor.

Estelle Mead,

Jasper Milroy Collins, Bartholomew Swallow, Flossie McNair, Imogene Elton, names that this forest, These trees, that rain tried to erase from the stone standing sentry over this consecrated place.

But them that set them

did not need for the names to be forgotten so easily.

So they chiseled deep into the rock,

patient, deliberate.

So that even if they or their children or their children's children could no longer tend the sight themselves, the remembering would still be seen on the stone,

would still be witnessed,

would still be felt

by anyone happening to wander through these Michigan woods.

I know,

I know we walk this path together.

Be afraid.

And do you yourself possess an inexplicable power of which no one will believe?

But try me.

Tell me.

Tell us all about it.

Email us your story, spooked at snapjudgment.org, because there's nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener.

Let us know, spooked at snapjudgment.org.

Until the dark side, you spooked with some spook gear.

The t-shirt of your dreams available right now at snapjudgment.org.

And remember, there is so much more.

If you like your storytelling under the bright light of day, under the glorious rays of the sanctified sunshine, listen to our sister program, the amazing, stupendous Snap Judgment podcast.

It is storytelling

with Avery B.

Talita.

Spook was created by the team that knows full well not to trust their own shadow.

Except for Mark Ristich.

He asked his shadow for lottery numbers.

Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Davey Kim, Renzo Gorio, Teo Takat, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Fergneau, Tiffany DeLiza, Ann Ford, Doug Stewart, and Isaiah Sims.

The spook theme song is by Pat Macedi Miller.

My name is Lom Washington.

And they never tell you that you hold tremendous power.

That every thought, every word you utter is a command to the universe, to which the universe must respond whether you know it or not.

That which you fear, that which you despise, that which you detest is exactly what you give energy to.

And the only antidote, the only protection available from amplifying our own dark energy is to never, ever,

ever,

ever,

never, ever

turn out

the light.