Dancing Shadows

Jack Sprat could eat no fat.

His wife was super mean.

So when they baked the baker, well,

they made a perfect team.

Spooked.

Right after this short break,

stay

clean.

After his life ended, the old man emerged wet from the water to find himself in the middle of a large glade.

A bearded figure placed a yellow rubber duck into the pool from which he had just emerged.

Am I dead?

asked the man.

Don't you remember?

That's exactly what you asked last time.

Last time.

The man thought about it, but his head felt muzzy, his thoughts like smoke.

Well, what do I do now?

You pick another pool.

The man looked around and as far as his eye could see in all directions weighted pools of water.

Some opaque, others clear.

A few seemed very deep,

while some held almost no water at all.

The man turned to step toward a pool.

No, not that one.

The man stepped back.

Why?

You've already been there.

Look, every pool with a duck, you've traveled before.

The man gaped around amazed as yellow rubber ducks bobbed on top of hundreds and hundreds of pools.

I've already, yes.

Then the man shifted his gaze slightly to the right and he saw how vast the glade was.

So many, many pools, bigger than his suddenly sharp eyes could even comprehend.

How many pools

are there?

All of them.

The man fell to the grass, thunderstruck.

All of them.

Every single life?

How many pools will I?

All of them.

You will step into each and every pool.

The man shook his head and breathed deeply.

He said, there are bad people.

Yes.

I am very bad people.

I will do terrible things.

Yes.

But there are saints as well.

Yes.

Who else comes to this space?

Just you.

But you know this now.

What happens after I emerge from the final pool?

Well,

said the figure who looked exactly like the old man.

Maybe,

maybe then

you'll be ready.

Spook starts

now.

Now

we imagine imagine boundaries between here and there, between earth and sky, wind and rain, and we're about to meet Isaac Murdoch.

Isaac is a Jibwe of the fish clan from the Serpent River First Nation.

He's a traditional knowledge holder, and he certainly knows the importance of respecting the boundary between this world and the next.

He also understands that walls sometimes crumble.

We're going to hear a story about an encounter Isaac had when he was just 20 years old.

Isaac,

take it away.

It's always custom that we introduce ourselves in our own way before we tell a story.

So, Ani boju and dinmi maganaduk.

Ah mazanapkin gego naabe and dishnikas.

Genebe gook shabigaj watin dunchpak and ojendo dem

ah nishnaabeni and dao nimki ojbikong ninda.

Ah naha.

So the place that we're talking about is Maymoot Lake.

It's in northern Canada.

It's a very beautiful place.

Lots of islands, islands, lots of fish and moose and ducks, lots of beaver and lots of monomen, wild rice.

So to get to Maimot Lake, you have to paddle back around

this point.

There's a cabin there.

Years ago when I was younger, like when I was in my late teens,

Me and my bro David, we used to travel in the bush.

We'd go hunting or we'd go pick medicines.

And oftentimes we'd stop by at this old cabin where this old man lived.

The cabin is built like in the ground.

And so there's four foot walls that are dirt, and then four foot walls above that.

He had a dirt floor.

And the windows were made out of mazaiwayan.

which is a certain type of a fish skin.

And there was this this canoe dugout

where they put the birch bark canoe inside there.

There is no other cabins around.

And it was just beautiful with jackpines.

And the ground was all mossy with gray moss, red moss, green moss.

And you can see these tiny little red mushrooms on the ground.

that were just sprinkled all over the place.

Just like something put them there there on purpose to make art that's how beautiful this place looked

just north of his cabin door

is where

his grave is

it was just a mound of dirt

you know we'd put some sema tobacco down there

Because we knew inherently that it was like a holy place, a place of reverence,

because this man had spent his entire life living on the land, living in accordance to the sacred laws on how to live here.

I was in my late teens at the time when I first started to learn about this cabin.

I was fascinated by it.

And it was probably two, two and a half years.

I'm working picking wild rice.

We had a boss that would hire hire us because he could only hire Indian people because he couldn't find any white people to go there in the bush that knew how to survive out there.

I have this friend named Alex,

real good bush Indian, you know really knows the bush good.

He grew up in the north all his life.

Comes from a very special place called Black Bear Island.

We got along quite well.

So we went out there together.

So the cabin that we're staying at, it's not too far from that cabin from where that man lived.

It's made out of black spruce logs.

It's not a big cabin.

There's a room for a bunk bed,

another bed on the other side of the cabin.

It is right on the edge of the lake beside a creek.

You could hear the water trickling all the time.

And there's also this little woodshed off to the side, and of course, a wood pile.

It was just a very beautiful place.

So when we're not working or hunting, me and Alex are always playing crib.

We play cards in the candlelight and, you know, at night time

to see who's the crib master.

I've been shoot the bull.

I was only 20 years old.

So I was like madly in love.

So I'd talk about this young woman and he'd talk about this other young woman and when we get back we're going to be together and all this stuff

i was cooking a beaver we were gonna have beaver for supper so i'm boiling beaver on the fire outside

and the beaver's head is bobbing up

And I have a stick and I'm trying to push the beaver's head down.

All of a sudden the the sky was black.

But they weren't regular storm clouds.

Like thunderclouds or whatever.

There's these great big bubbles underneath hanging down from the sky off this great big cloud.

And there's lots and lots of bubbles all over.

You can see tiny little flashes of light inside these bubbles that are hanging below the clouds.

One over here and one over there and then another flash over here.

The clouds, they came swooping right down, way down, very close to earth.

Like way lower than normal.

These clouds are hanging

like maybe a little taller than the trees.

We knew a storm was coming, so we're dragging the canoes on shore, tying things up that are on the dock.

That's when all of a sudden this smell just smacks me right in the face.

The smell was a smell of death, of something bad.

I had to cover my mouth because of this powerful smell.

Even the leaves on the trees were going upside down because of the smell.

I'm saying, why does this smell like death?

And he's like, I don't know, I don't know.

Go in Kikandazien.

He says, I don't know why it smells like that.

My heart is pounding.

I'm starting to sweat.

This is not just a regular storm.

Something else is going on.

There's lots of Atsukanan, sacred stories about our people,

and how clouds had come down and they fought with us or they gave us gifts or presents

or they'd take us up and we'd never be seen again.

I never worried about that before because

I've only heard these in our sacred teachings and our ceremonies, but you'd never think that it would happen to you.

So I'm scared that they're going to come down and take us.

So we both agreed to go into the cabin.

I shut the curtains

because I don't want to look at those bubbles.

We started playing cards just so that we can distract ourselves from what's really happening.

It was getting dark fast

and I can hear the whistling of the wind coming into the little spots in the cabin where maybe there's no moss.

You can hear all these little whistles and peeps,

and the trees are going back and forth.

And all of a sudden, that's when I hear the wood chopping outside.

So I have an axe out at the woodshed.

It's a red-handled axe,

razor-sharp.

And I can hear this axe just chopping wood

10 feet from the door.

It's an unmistakable sound.

It cannot be anything else.

I'm too scared to look out the window.

We're so far in the bush,

so isolated.

Nobody would be there.

Nobody would be there.

I know that whatever's out there,

the reason why they were chopping wood was to let us know that they were there.

If it was a real man out there, I'd go out there and kick his ass.

No problem.

Or give him a good go, at least.

But this thing I know I can't defeat.

My breathing starts to get faster

and Alex was trying to be calm about it

But I can tell that he was scareder than I was

I could see his his hands were shaking a little bit

All of a sudden there's this

loud thrashing

thunder that's

So powerful and so thick we can feel it all the way through our bones

As the lightning strikes

and I'm looking at the shadows inside the cabin walls, I can see three other human figures besides me and Alex

sitting at our table.

I'm so stunned.

They were

a little bit bigger than us.

And they were a little bit more pronounced.

They're more darker.

I turned away.

I didn't want to look anymore.

I said, whatever it is, it's now in the house.

I told Alex, go underneath the bed and cover up.

I said.

And then I did the same.

I can feel my heartbeat racing.

And I can feel this constant pressure of

fear

and doom.

I'm just, I'm praying.

I'm calling upon old people that I knew a long time ago to come and to be with us.

I'm underneath the bed and I'm just kind of peeking out.

I can still see shadows that are not supposed to be there.

Alex is the one that's saying, we gotta go.

We have to get out of here.

Like, we need to go right now.

I said, if we go, I said, you know, we're gonna end up in those clouds.

We can't stay here.

He said, there's ghosts in here.

So we get out.

We just run out of there with nothing.

It's cold.

It's windy.

It's smelly.

like a dead body.

You gotta cover your nose and and your face because it's so stinky.

I tried to keep my eyes away from that wood pile.

I didn't want to look at nothing.

All I wanted to see was my own feet walking.

We go down to the lake

and we jump in the canoe.

And I'm like paddling hard.

I tell Alex, you gotta paddle hard.

I'm panicked

because every time I look back at the cabin

I can see the shadows dancing through the window

I want to get out of there I want to be bye-bye

so there we are we're paddling trying our best

the only thing on my mind was survival

My adrenaline is pumping.

I am paddling so hard and so fierce.

But the waves are coming up and the canoe

is just not even barely moving.

That wind is too strong.

There's nothing we can do.

There was the thought that the cloud would come down and take it,

the canoe.

And that's when I said, let's go back to the cabin.

The cabin was the safer place,

even though there were shadows in there that weren't ours.

So I grab onto the front of the canoe and I drag it up on shore.

And we went right into the house.

Alex goes into his bunk bed.

And I go into my bunk bed.

And we put the blankets over top of our faces

As the lightning and the thunder rumbles the house,

you can hear things scraping.

You can hear things shifting around

inside the house in the cabin.

But we don't dare look.

I was so scared that something was going to rip that blanket off me or grab my leg and pull me off that bed.

And I start to pray.

I was always raised in the Indian way,

but I prayed to everything, every god I ever heard about.

The storm calms down after, and the smell was gone.

It seemed like, at least inside the cabin, we felt safer.

Early in the morning, you can hear the birds start to sing.

I'm gonna guess it's like six o'clock in the morning.

I'm half asleep, half awake.

Alex says, hey, there's somebody at the table.

And my heart just jumped.

And I look.

I lift up the blanket and I looked at the table and there's an old man sitting there playing solitary.

And I know he's playing solitary because I can see him.

The way that he's flipping the cards over.

He was wearing a button-up shirt, like an old-style button-up shirt, like maybe from like the 30s.

And he's got a hat on,

like an old-style Indian hat.

He's got moccasins on.

His hands are big and old.

And I knew in my heart that it was the old man that lived at that cabin.

I felt a sense of relief

that somehow we were protected by this person.

But at the same time, there's a ghost at the freaking table.

And so that's scary.

That's scary.

And so I put the blankets over my head again.

I just start praying more.

And then I can hear a shuffle.

And then the cards go on the table.

And when I look again,

he's not there.

And I said, Alex, let's go.

We gotta go.

You know, we go outside and there's a whole bunch of wood chopped out there.

Like, almost that whole pile was chopped.

We start paddling across the lake.

Winds at our back.

There's something going on in the back of my head.

So it feels like there's something's walking in my hair.

And I keep scratching, I keep scratching it.

But it keeps being there.

We got to that portage.

And then we paddled across that other lake.

And we stopped and we gave offerings at that old man's cabin.

it's a custom

every single time when we go by a place where there's a place of spiritual significance

we have to go there and offer it food and tobacco

so despite the fact that we had this very ghostly encounter

There is no way that we could go by that cabin and not leave an offering.

We get to the main road and we hitchhiked

back to civilization.

So I go to my uncle's.

My uncle's house doesn't look too different than the cabin that we were staying in.

And so I'm there for a couple of days.

I keep scratching like I have nits, bugs.

I tell my uncle, I got this itch.

I think I got a bug or something in my hair.

He goes, let me check your hair.

So I sat down there and he checked my hair.

And he says, you know, that's probably not a bug.

That's probably a jeepai.

That's a spirit that's stuck in your hair.

It's tangled in there.

Sometimes a spirit, a jeepai,

can get stuck in your hair or go in your pocket and will stay there for a while

and try to get nourishment from your body so it can get energy to travel to where it needs to go next.

He goes, you know, I've seen an old man in the garden cleaning up everything, getting things straightened out.

They just disappeared.

He knew it was somebody from the other side.

He goes, where you were, was there an old man there?

I said, yes.

He says, that's probably that old man that's been in the garden.

My uncle grew up in the bush.

He, of course, he went to residential school, but he spent the rest of his life in the bush.

And he also knew how to deal with the spirits because when you live in the bush,

You're always dealing with things like that all the time.

You know what to do.

So, my uncle did this beautiful ceremony where he sent the old man back to the spirit world.

It took him one day to prepare and get all the things that he needed from the forest.

It's a very private ceremony that's done that I can't actually describe,

but

there's nothing in my hair after that.

I got educated that night.

This world is not a resource.

This world is a spirit.

It's our mother.

Maybe we got tough love that night.

During that storm, I think the old man was there

to protect us from that thing that went through.

that the old man stayed with us and as

we got away it traveled in my hair.

I always treated that old man's spirit with respect.

By making those offerings and by paying tribute

maybe we received great medicine from above.

We received something special

that saved our lives.

So I just want to give a traditional farewell to you that are listening.

So on gachinandamya ya mom pi giganonin gok jibaya gook

you know mewe a migwechergo

nao wa ma pi guab ninem.

Thank you Isaac for sharing your story with Spook.

If you want to hear more stories from Isaac, knowing about his art and his activism, head over to our show notes.

We have got you covered.

That story was scored by Leline St.

Just.

Was produced by Zoe Frigno.

Now,

you know here at Spooked.

We've learned that some people

They know some things that they are not supposed to know.

Names, places, languages, histories, they've never been exposed to.

And I wonder, I wonder if you know something that you're not supposed to.

If so, please tell me about it, spooked at snapjudgment.org, because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener.

Spooked at snapjudgment.org.

Spooked is brought to you.

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Except for Mark Ristich, Ristich, everyone's pretty sure it's his first time through.

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The spook theme song is by Pat Massini Miller.

My name is Glenn Washington.

And a long while ago,

my son asked me, What is a story, Daddy?

And because he was curious, he was serious when he asked, I thought about it for a long while.

And finally, I told him,

I think

stories are life.

Distilled.

He nodded.

He said his thanks and he ran off to play with his friends.

And over the years, I thought a lot about that answer.

A lot.

a lot

and I don't think it's wrong

in fact I think it's more right than wrong but I believe stories are meant to be more than just that

they're a map

they're a guide they're a trail of breadcrumbs stories tell us which way the wolf lurks where the queen hides her honey

And most of all,

stories are a reminder

to never,

ever,

never, ever, never,

never, never, not, ever, never, ever, ever

turn out

the lights.