The White Hand

She wants to hear the truth, she says,

but I prefer to lie.

Doctor, will I live?

She asks,

My dear,

you'll never die.

You're listening to Spook.

Stay true.

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Fourth of July, right before seventh grade, I go to a party at my buddy Jeff Shade's house.

Fat crib on Sanford Lake, right outside of Midland, Michigan.

Almost every one of my class shows, including the girls.

Jeff's dad pulls us on water skis with their brand new boat.

We roast hot dogs, marshmallows, eat watermelon, light fireworks, and explode over the lake.

And that night I stay over

with five of my best friends in the whole wide world: Jeff, Marty, Danny, Sean, Corey.

Jeff's mom makes us pancakes the next morning.

Swimming in butter and syrup, laughing, she unloads a whole can of whipped cream on mine.

Especially for me, because she says,

because

I thank her,

say goodbye goodbye to everyone

ride my bike back to my house and Pops helps me pack it inside our already loaded up U-Haul truck

Then we drive away from Sanford, Michigan

and I never see any of those people again

And I don't know enough to be sad

Almost 13 years old.

I've moved homes 13 different times, 13 different addresses, eight different schools.

The truth is,

sitting in the passenger seat of a U-Haul next to Pops on the interstate, this is my happy place.

Yeah, it is time to go.

What next?

What next?

And two decades later,

I'm on a plane to Brussels, Belgium, a place I've never been.

And I'm moving there

to work at a job I hate for a company I despise.

And a girl sits next to me, 13 years old, blinking back tears, trying to be brave, trying not to weep,

but weeping all the same.

When I ask her what's wrong, she's silent.

When I ask her again,

she tells me that because of the divorce, She's moving too.

That her house now has a for sale sign on it.

A house she can't imagine not living in.

Her best friend lives down the street.

She just made second-chair violin and orchestra.

She won't see the birds come back to roost in the trees she and her uncle planted in the backyard.

Her grandmother promises to visit.

But instead of every Thursday, just the two of them on the couch watching movies.

It might be every six months,

maybe every year.

And all of this pours from her in a hot whale.

She comes from a community, a ground, a sky, a smell of music, and being torn away from it.

I want to tell her,

comforting words,

that it will get better.

That soon this new place will feel like home too.

You'll see.

Then I stop.

I think about the people,

the families that have given me their embrace, let me into their homes and their lives, and how casually I walked away,

wondering what's next.

This little girl.

is not the one having a strange reaction to leaving everything and everyone behind.

I am.

I think, little girl, you are right to feel it.

You are right to cry.

That leaving is a hurt that should never fully heal.

In fact,

I should be weeping with you.

You are not broken, no.

Broken.

Is a grown person

sitting on an airplane who doesn't care where they are going

or who they're leaving behind.

Spook starts

now.

See, when you move away,

some things inevitably get left behind.

Now we're going back,

back to the 1980s, to Stratford, a theater town in Ontario, Canada.

Katya Tapena and her husband Jim, they've grown tired of living in apartments.

They're looking for a house to rent, a place where they don't have to share walls with their neighbors that has a yard for their daughter to play in.

When they hear about a sweet little place in a nice neighborhood for rent, they drop everything to check it out.

We went to see it.

It's got a wood stove in the kitchen, which is wonderful.

And it's got a nice little fenced backyard.

We can have a bedroom for my daughter, Aurora, who's four at the time.

All my domestic hormones start kicking kicking in and I think, this is it, this is an amazing house.

But it's still a little bit odd.

Someone has put up all kinds of wallpaper from the 50s, that sort of climbing trellis with ivy going up it and roses on diagonals.

Every room is done like this, and none of it matches.

But hey, someone's taste.

It's okay.

Like, I just want a home.

It doesn't matter to me.

And besides, I like houses that have character.

We

negotiate the rent

and we move the things we have.

There's a lot of motion going on.

There's friends helping us unload the truck.

There's other friends as well that aren't helping that much unload, but they're there.

As I'm bringing a box in, my daughter says to me, who's the old man on the phone in the hall?

I'm confused, and I go into the hallway to see

what she could be talking about.

And there's no old man there, and there's no phone there.

There's an old plate on the wall where people used to mount the old,

the party line phones, where you would jiggle the receiver and ask the operator to connect you.

But that's all that's there.

I say I don't see anyone

and I assume that she's seen someone that she doesn't recognize.

She's a little kid, and to little kids, everybody big looks old.

Those first few weeks, it's exciting because we have a house, and I'm happy about that.

But it's also

it just feels unsettled.

I don't feel calm.

I don't feel

as relaxed as I had hoped I would.

But I think if I put in the work, I will spruce it up and it will all fall together.

I was washing the walls in the dining room on top of a ladder with my back to the rest of the room,

and

I can't escape the feeling that I'm being watched.

I look around to see what it might be.

There is no one there.

So I turn and move the ladder

to a different location a little further down the wall, go back up again,

and it's okay for a couple of minutes.

And then I get the same sensation again.

This feeling of being watched, this feeling of not being alone,

starts to be omnipresent.

and I blame me.

For some reason, I'm being

overly sensitive to something, and that I have to just, as we say, pull up my big girl panties and get on with it to keep working on the house.

That there's nobody there,

that nobody is watching me,

but I can't figure out what this feeling is.

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We were alone a lot in the house, Aurora and I.

My husband, I would have liked him to have been there more,

but he couldn't.

The only way that he could have been there was to

stop the job, and we couldn't afford that, so I was on on my own.

I'm downstairs in the living room,

and Aurora's supposed to be napping upstairs, and I hear this little voice go, I have to pee.

And she comes running down the stairs.

The direct path for her is down the hallway.

But instead, she comes out and goes all the way around through the living room, through the dining room, to the other door for the bathroom.

And I asked her why.

And she said, Sakes is there.

When I ask her who Sakes is, she says, he's an old man and he lives here.

That feels extremely creepy to me.

But she's an imaginative child.

We all are.

We work in the arts.

Of course, we have imaginations.

So I definitely believe that it's an imaginary friend.

But it's clear that it's not an imaginary friend that she likes.

Because after a while, I realize that Aurora will never, ever go down the hall with the phone plate on it.

It's the middle of the night,

and

I can hear her calling from her room, which is right across the hall.

So I leave my bed, and I go across the hall, and I sit in her bed, and she says,

Mom, the white hands are bothering me.

I can't sleep.

I ask her to describe the hands and she says

they're white.

Sometimes there's many.

There's always more than two.

Sometimes they pat.

Sometimes they scratch.

Sometimes they're just around her.

And she tells me,

it sakes.

It appears to me that my daughter is having some repeated uncomfortable dreams.

So I say to her, it's okay, sweetie.

I'll stay here and I'll protect you.

You can sleep and I will protect you.

And I decide that what I'll do is I'll just curl up next to her in her bed.

It's wide enough.

And that calms her down immediately.

She gets back to sleep.

But this would continue, and I would hear it

two times a week, perhaps.

I

would just

get up when she called me, and I would just curl up with her in her bed.

So it's afternoon.

I'm having a nap.

Aurora's having a nap.

And I hear a sound that wakes me up.

I hear the sound of rushing water.

My first thought is, oh, the pipe's broken.

And I go downstairs

and

the bathtub's on.

The small sink in the side room the toilet is in is on.

The main vanity room sink is on.

And I go into the kitchen and the kitchen sink is on.

And they're on full force.

All faucets, just flat out.

So I turn them off.

I don't understand what's going on.

And I'm freaked out.

I'm a relatively handy person.

I know that there's no reason that I know of that that should happen.

The combination of this,

my daughter's nightmares,

of me feeling like I'm being watched,

there's something here.

There's something here that's not us.

There's something here either doesn't want us here or it wants to get our attention.

I need to know more.

I

am leery of going to the neighbors and asking, say, have you heard anything about the house I'm in being haunted?

And my husband hasn't had any experiences that I know of or that he's willing to go into.

It's coming up to Christmas,

and we've got the sugar cookie dough rolled out.

And

Aurora is really interested in this.

She's got the reindeer cut out, and the snowman cut out, and the Santa Claus cut out, and she's very precise about laying out the different shapes.

I pick this stereotypically

bucolic moment to open up the the topic.

Because if I can do this gently, if I can do this playfully, maybe that will help her deal with it in a way that doesn't scare her, because I certainly don't want her to feel that.

So I ask her,

who Sakes is?

Who is this man?

What does he look like?

She says he is a

small man, very old.

He's got very pale skin.

He has a peaked cap.

It's a good thing that she comes from a theater background because we both know what a peaked cap is.

She said

he walks around a lot.

He's always on the phone.

And then I asked her if he was friendly,

and she

didn't answer me at all.

And I didn't like that, I didn't like that around my daughter, not at all.

It's one thing if it's just me, I can override that,

but

not if there's anything,

anything that's making my child unhappy or unsafe.

It's a very pleasant Sunday evening.

We're just sitting down at the beginning of dinner and there's a knock on the screen door to the kitchen.

And I go to the door to see who it is.

And there's a young man I don't know at the door.

He's very friendly,

looks like a farm boy,

someone who works with his hands, clearly.

He's standing on the back covered doorstep.

I'm inside the kitchen.

We're talking through the screen door.

And I

ask the young gentleman what I can do for him.

And he says that he is looking for the couple that he bought the house with.

They bought the house that that we're now in at an auction

because a person had died in the house

and there was no one

to

take care of the estate of the departed.

And their plan was something that they'd done before.

They would buy the house, clean it up, sell it.

But he'd had to leave early because of a family emergency and he had gone away,

lost contact with the couple that he'd worked with,

but he was interested in getting back into it again.

That's why he was looking for them.

And he says, it's really interesting when you buy old houses, there's things left all over the place.

And you want to know the weirdest thing that we found.

And he points to something past me,

which would be the cabinets above the stove.

And he says,

right up there, we found the guy's old artificial hand.

He said it was ceramic.

It wasn't flexible.

It wasn't something that you could do things with.

with,

and it was white,

absolutely white, like a white dinner plate.

When he told me,

I felt like

the blood in my body had drained out of a hole in my feet.

It knocked the breath out of me.

It was a white hand.

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I start the next day to do something I should have done before, which is to ask my neighbors about the previous resident.

And they say, oh yes, it was an old guy.

He was Scots, and he had an artificial hand.

They said that this

man,

whose name they never learned, was a very unfriendly and solitary character.

He would stump around the porch of the house or in the small backyard, arranging things, wearing a peaked cap.

They never knew whether he had any hair under the cap at all.

And he wasn't a very big person, but he was very wiry, very strong.

I'm able to put all the pieces together and they all fit.

And I think

maybe

I can convince him

to move on, to let go, to leave us alone.

And I decide that I'm going to have to do

my version of an exorcism.

I wait until my daughter can have a sleepover at a friend's house.

And I know my husband won't be home for a long time because he's working that night.

I start in Aurora's room

and I say,

You have to leave.

This is not your home.

I know you are here

and I'm sorry, but you have to go

because now this is my house.

And then I go to my bedroom and I say, and this is our bedroom.

I go down the stairs.

I go past the phone mount in the hallway and I say,

You don't have to be on the phone anymore.

You are free.

You can move on.

I go into the living room and I say, this is not your house.

You have to leave.

I do the same thing in the adjacent dining room.

I go into the bathroom and I say, you must leave this house alone.

You have to let go.

I repeat the same things in every room in the house.

I stay up for quite a while after that and I go into the kitchen.

I pour a glass of wine, and I just sit there and I think about what his life may have been like.

And I feel horrible for him, because, in a sense, I'm banishing someone.

But

this is what I have to do.

I cannot keep going like this.

I hope that this works.

I don't know whether it will or not.

We'll see.

Things seemed to

slow down a bit after that.

It seemed to lighten.

White hands, nightmares, etc.

That stuff seemed to decrease.

I think that he

heard me.

And I'm happy about that.

And then

I hear her across the hallway

starting to stir

in the middle of the night.

I hear the beginning of Mom,

Mom,

Mom,

Mom,

and

I get out of bed

right away, and I go across the hall.

And she's okay,

but

five feet from her bed

is an old wooden rocking chair.

It's where I would usually sit to read to her in the daytime.

And the chair is rocking.

It's rocking like someone is in the chair.

chair.

This is his answer:

that he's here.

Maybe it's my house, but it's his house too.

I'm afraid and I

don't know what to do, but I know I will protect her with my life.

So I go over and I

yell at the chair

and I tell it that it has to go.

It has to get out.

And then after that,

I just sit in the chair

to hold it still.

And I just stay there that night.

I climb into her bed and I

go to sleep next to

I wanted her

to think

that it was a dream.

It's okay if I knew that it wasn't a dream.

You just

don't want your kid to be scared.

particularly if they're scared of something that their parents cannot protect them from.

I decided that we were going to move and we were going to get another house, which was really disappointing,

but I can't think of anything else I can do.

I was glad to leave.

We actually

are able to find a house to buy

at the time the cheapest house in Stratford, equally aged,

but with a really nice feeling to it.

Aurora is running around

and

I ask her how she feels about the house.

And she just says, this is a nice house.

I like this house.

So she got to pick out her room.

And

she

doesn't bring up

this man that she's named Sakes

again.

There's no more dreams.

There's no more white hands.

There's no one in that house that she talks about.

And that's good enough for me.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Katja, for sharing your story with the spooked.

The original score for this piece was by Yari Bundy.

It was produced by Zoe Frigno.

Now,

there was a man who walked 40 miles every day in order to reach a spring to fill his bucket of water.

Every single day, the children would see him rise early in the morning and return late in the evening, dragging his bucket of water behind.

One day, a young boy asked the man, why do you walk so far to the well?

When a mountain stream of pure water rushes by a mere 200 meters distant

The man, his eyes wide, his face sallow, creases deep from countless hours spent carrying water under the unforgiving sun, shakes his head gravely and says,

stream.

You gotta be kidding me.

What stream?

You see, it's the same with spooks.

The lost wander searching for water because they don't know about the stream.

It's not right, spooksters.

Tell somebody.

Write a review.

Tweet.

Actually, you know what?

Don't tweet.

Forget that guy.

Instagram, TikTok, shout.

Let your favorites know before it's too late on all the platforms.

And don't forget.

Don't forget.

There's nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener.

Spook at snapjudgment.org.

Let us know.

Spooks is brought to you by the team that understands full well that not everyone who wanders is lost.

Except for the case of Mark Ristich, if you see him wandering about,

no doubt about it, he's lost.

Please call the number taped to his jacket.

Thank you.

Mothers Davey Kim, Zoe Frigno,

Eric Yanez, Taylor Decat, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Doug Stewart, Elliot Lightfoot, Paulina Paulina Creeke, Juan Diego Baltrán, Sasha Wilson, Daniel Shinsky.

The spook theme song is by Pat Massini Miller.

My name is Glenn Washington.

And

there is no pleasure, ignorant of pain.

Order is meaningless without the threat of chaos.

And the same applies for shadow.

Because the shadow is not in opposition to the light.

The shadow is twinned to the light.

Because seeking dominion, this is a fool's errand.

There will always be darkness.

No, we seek balance

to cage it, to control it, to harness it so that it does not destroy us.

You'll need amazing wisdom to achieve such lofty goals.

Unfortunately,

The only piece of advice I have for offer

is to never ever ever,

never, never, ever, never, never, ever

turn out

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.