The Blue Lady

Fairy shadows in the sky

If I should grow black wings and fly to ask

all that I wondered why

Would you give answer or would you lie?

Listening to Spoot

Stay Truth

It was tough at home as a kid.

Within the four walls of our trailer, northern Michigan woods, tough.

Trying to dodge my parents in that tiny space.

Their anger, their sadness, their rage, low boil.

Please remain at a low boil.

Keep my head down, down, stay out the way, stay shadow, stay silent.

So, despite the winter cold, I spend long hours in the forest.

Not born to this land.

Not raised here, but I know these trails, these woods, the creeks, the ponds, the fields, I know them.

Because it's better outside freezing

than it's an easy nine-year-old target inside.

I like to imagine that this land knows me,

looks out for me.

One late afternoon wandering in the woods, the air snapped from just cold

to frigid.

Painful, bitter.

I pull my hood tight over my head.

Still,

can't go back home, not yet.

Keep walking through the snow.

Instead, head up, looking up, I see the flash of red.

Brilliant, crimson, he's hopping from one branch to the other, a cardinal,

clucking, singing, scolding me just because I can't fly.

It makes no sense how much he stands out.

Beautiful against this backdrop, so almost silly, makes me want to laugh looking up at him.

A right foot, instead of padding on snow, crunches through ice.

Then my leg is sinking, falling, arm failing, shock of wet.

Cold, cold, cold.

My arm in the water, pushing me out of the water, rolling, rolling.

Three seconds,

four seconds, maybe?

But that's all it takes to crack through this ice, to flop back on the snow.

Stupid.

Stupid.

Now my right leg

and right arm are wet in this cold, and I know that I'm in trouble, deep trouble.

You can never be wet here.

Never.

So I run, but I'm so far away.

I don't know how far away.

I can't remember, and the cold hurts.

Brandon iron pain hurts.

Blinding, so cold.

My leg, my arms, my fingers.

I can't stop to scream.

Pure pain, agony, it hurts.

it doesn't hurt.

Can't feel.

Swallow, panic, panic, because I know this is worse.

That pain is good.

When there is no pain,

you lose limbs.

Parts, run, run, run, run.

Blind, run, run.

My left hand can barely twist the doorknob open, barely.

Stop letting me heat out my house.

It's a recorded message.

Dark figures huddle around the TV, flickering gloom.

My father's shelling peanuts.

No one turns their head to look at me.

I stagger toward the restroom, crying, crying, hands like paddles trying to turn on the water.

Let me turn on the water.

Let me turn on the water.

I want to turn on hot water, but I know better.

Cold water first.

Cold water until you can feel.

And when I can feel,

It hurts all over again.

Hear myself silent sobbing.

Just a little bit of hot water now.

Just a little bit, just a little bit, just a little bit more.

Pulling frozen fingers apart with my teeth outside.

Inside,

it doesn't matter.

Spook stars

now.

Now then,

we begin far from the Michigan woods where Emma Louise Tully is but six years old when her parents live by the Sharon Rectory, a crumbling, 200-plus year-old manor in the Irish countryside.

Very nice indeed.

Spooked.

Moving into Sharon, I was apprehensive.

I just could never see it to be a home, a forever home for me and my family, because it just had this big scary look to it.

It's not your typical house, everyday house.

It's a very large stone building surrounded by woodland.

And when my parents bought the house, it was in complete ruins.

The whole place was falling apart, so I could never see it to be a home.

Emma doesn't know this at the time, but she's not the only person who is scared of Sharon Rectory.

In town, there's a bit of lore surrounding the house.

A lot of people say that it's haunted.

My parents, they were hearing stories, but they were both sceptical.

I suppose the way they seen it was that they wouldn't believe it until they seen it for themselves.

It was the bank holiday, August, when we moved in.

My new bedroom is upstairs and it's right next to my parents' room.

And in the opposite end of the room, there is a door that leads to the back staircase.

This back staircase, it just, even with the lights on in it, it still looks dark.

It just creeped me out.

I start to hear strange noises come from these back staircases.

I can hear footsteps coming up the stairs and it seems to creep up the stairs halfway

and

stop

and then it might

just

continue then and then it will stop again.

I'm thinking in my head, is this really only in my head or am I actually hearing something for real?

One night I could hear the footsteps.

I'm watching the door,

and I could see a must, a blue must form in the middle of the room.

It wasn't a heavy kind of a fog.

It was

light, it was transparent.

I'm seeing what looks to be like a lady form.

The top of her form spurs, so I could see her head and her hair.

Her dress started to form.

It's a long dress and it's not of this era.

I don't see a face.

There's just blank, it's just

nothing, it's just emptiness.

I just couldn't watch her anymore.

I was under the covers

and I'm trying not to breathe because I feel like if I breathe, she'll hear me.

And I don't know what she's going to do.

I don't know what her intentions are.

I'm starting to sweat.

Eventually, I come up for air and I don't see her in the room anymore.

This continues to happen night after night, and

it's terrifying.

Emma's parents are just in the next room, but she never screams or runs to them.

I didn't know whether or not to tell my parents because I didn't know that if they would believe me or not or if they would be thinking that I'm making this up because I want to go back to our old house.

It was about

a couple of weeks later.

I'm lying in my bed and I could hear the footsteps coming up the back staircase.

I instantly pull the covers covers over my head.

I'm lying there, hoping that this would be another night where

she'll just pass through the room and I try and fall asleep.

I could feel like an almost weight

sat beside me,

and I could feel

her presence right close to me.

I pull the covers

back,

and

I can see her sitting at the bottom of my bed.

She was facing me, and I could see her look at me with

a featureless face, just her head just turned to me.

I was under the covers again.

I could still feel her beside me,

and I could hear a very, very faint light kind of humming.

It was just enough to make out,

and

I feel it that she's trying to comfort me, but I don't feel any comfort.

I'm so scared.

It lasts for a few seconds, and then it's silence,

and all I can hear is my breath.

At this point Emma decides that she has to talk to her mum.

I'm afraid that she's not going to believe me.

I tell her and she kind of pauses for a second

and she tells me that she has seen her too and so has my dad.

They would see her standing at the bottom of the bed and then my mum would often see her too beside my dad And my dad mightn't have been able to see her the time my mum was able to see her.

It was one, I think, night he put his hand out the side of the bed, and he says, Where is she at?

And mum says that she's seen his hand go straight through her.

My mum's telling me that it's okay, that it's not going to hurt you, that

it's it's just something that's in the house that we just can't explain right now.

Emma's mom, Lisa, starts researching the house and she discovers something tragic.

About 200 years earlier, a group of men came to assassinate a minister who was staying at Sharon Rectory.

The men surrounded the house and shot at the windows.

A stray bullet hit the lady of the house, Sarah Waller, in her shoulder.

She died later that night.

Whenever my mom found about her passing in the house, from then on we just started to call her Mrs.

Waller or I think it's respectful just to call her by her name rather than the blue lady.

Over time she's kind of making her presence known more.

We could hear the piano up in the living room start to play itself.

It sounds like playing ballroom music.

The doors would bang.

There's furniture being moved.

There was a trunk at the bottom of my parents' bed and it had like a lock at the bottom of it maybe 6.30 in the morning that would have banged and banged until they got up.

I suppose in her time that maybe that's the time that people woke up and she was expecting it from us too.

My mum would have always bought like secondhand furniture from carpet sales or from charity shops and she picked up three pictures of it was like a greek mythology this one particular picture i didn't like because it was like these ladies was sacrificing another lady to a tiger

i said to dad i didn't want that one up on the wall and he was like we're just gonna have to put them up pieces because we're not going to be able to listen to your mum if we don't get them up.

We were sitting down in the kitchen that evening having dinner and there was an almighty bang through the house.

My dad ran up to the hall because he thought somebody came through the door.

It was so loud and there the picture was that I didn't like.

It was sitting in the middle of the hall.

My dad puts it back up on the wall again and we go back and we finish eating our dinner.

That night I'm lying in bed and my mum and dad go to bed and just a few hours in we could hear this bang again.

I could hear my dad getting up in the room next door, and I could hear him walking down the front staircase.

And

a few minutes later, he comes back and he gets into bed.

So the next morning, I'm saying to my mum, you know, I heard a bang last night, mum.

What was that that happened?

And she tells me that the picture that fell the day before fell again through the night.

It continues to happen.

My parents eventually take the picture off the wall because it falls in the most unusual way.

It falls not straight down on the wall, it falls to the middle of the floor, and the nail still remains in the wall.

It's like it's been thrown.

Emma's parents ask their local priest to come over and bless each room of the house, but it doesn't really seem to do anything.

This was going to take a lot more than just a priest coming and saying a few prayers and throwing holy water around each room.

One of my mum's friends knew a lady called Kate Houston.

Kate Houston is a psychic medium, and she says that she would get in touch with Kate Houston to maybe come in and talk to my parents about

their experiences.

As soon as Kate walks in the front door, she says she can feel a presence.

Per her request, Emma's parents haven't told her anything about the history of the house.

She did say that there was a lady that was there that was with us at the time, and she was picking up the name Sarah.

So that's what made us think, okay, she knows what she's talking about.

She seems genuine.

At the end of her visit, Kate tells the family that she thinks they need to do a seance.

So the night has come.

They've prepared the kitchen all in candles.

There's a lot of hustle-bustle going around of just preparation.

My grandmother and my mum's brother, my uncle Raymond, are joining us on the night.

I'm still trying to understand what's going on of why they need to do this.

I can't help but think, is this going to work?

As they're sitting around the table, Kate's calling forth any spirits that's around the house if they want to make themselves known.

And as they're sitting in quietness, my grandmother says I can hear what sounds like a gunshot.

Suddenly Kate seems to be in pain.

She's gripping her shoulder.

My mum is overcome with emotion.

She bursts into tears.

Kate, even though she was in pain, she was still telling them to continue on to try and focus.

Kate tells my dad, you need to pray and you need to keep praying.

Don't stop.

No matter what else happens, you have to keep praying.

He's praying.

My mum and Kate, my grandmother, and my uncle are still conducting the seance.

I can see the door opening

in one end of the kitchen and closing again.

And then it's like a gush of wind goes through the room and the other door opens and closes again really really slowly.

Mrs.

Waller comes in.

She like floats in.

There's more detail than ever before.

Her hair is in ringlets.

The details in her dress are exquisite.

They're

little bows on the dress and fine stitching.

She finally has a face.

She's a really young complexion.

She's beautiful.

And she stands in the middle of the table.

We could see her form in a blue teardrop shape.

And all of a sudden, she was gone.

They finished up after the seance and they talk about what exactly had happened.

The gunshot going off to Kate feeling the pain to mum feeling the emotion.

It was like that was her final moments that Mrs.

Waller was trying to get across.

After that night of the seance,

I didn't hear the footsteps.

I didn't see the lady come through the room at night.

I thought, I wonder, was this finished?

Was it gone?

Time goes by, and the family believes the seance has worked.

Emma's parents continue to renovate Sharon Rectory.

When they finish working on the main house, they start fixing up the coachman's residence and a little cottage house on the property.

As Emma gets older and becomes a teenager, she starts spending more and more time on her own.

I would feel a real kind of negative feeling in the house.

There was like weird smells that would have just came out of nowhere.

It's like rotten eggs, sulfur smell, that's what it smells like.

I felt that maybe Mrs.

Waller was more of a protector and that she kept whatever this that I was feeling at bay and because she was no longer

stuck here it seemed to kind of

become more active.

One evening I get on my bike and I'm cycling down the back lane and there's a man that's walking up the lane.

He's wearing a long black coat and a hat and I stop my bike and I'm watching him come closer to me.

His face is like it's that pale, it's almost a greyish colour.

He doesn't have a smile on his face, he doesn't look to be like a happy man.

I shout over and I ask him, Are you looking for my mum and dad?

But he doesn't reply.

He turns really slowly

and walks back down the lane again

and he vanishes.

It was crazy.

It's just in a split second, he's gone.

By the time Emma is getting ready to start college, she wants her own space.

Her parents have finished fixing up the coachman's residence, and Emma moves in.

The coachman's residence is just a flat that's on the other side of the house.

My first night in the coachman's, I just tossed and turned.

I couldn't settle.

The whole night I stay awake.

The next night I'm lying in bed and I feel like that it's just too dark.

So

I get up and I turned on the bathroom light and the bathroom light shines through the bedroom.

So I feel a bit more comfortable.

I'm drifting off to sleep.

And I hear a bang in the room.

A bang that's very loud, it makes me jump.

I get up and I look around and I can't see anything that's out of place.

I'm freaked out, but I think this is where I'm going to be staying for the future, so I need to stick it out.

So I continue to keep the light on at night.

I feel like that I need to see each corner of the room just in case there is something I would rather see it.

The next night I'm lying there and

drifting off to sleep, and something it's like something just wakes me up.

All of a sudden, I just wake and I can see this tall, dark shadow at the bottom of my bed standing, just looking at me.

I couldn't move for fear.

I just was froze to the bed.

I didn't know what to do.

The shadow disappears.

I roll over in the bed and just praying to God that I can get some sleep.

But I'm so scared.

It was the worst fear.

It wasn't like when I seen the blue lady.

This was scarier.

It was darker.

I felt like this intended harm.

This intended to be scary.

It wanted to scare me.

This oppressive feeling just seems to come over me.

Whenever I left the house, I felt completely fine.

Whenever I was in the house, I felt really tired, drained just physically.

It's like everything is just pulled from my body.

One morning, I'm getting dressed and I notice marks on my legs.

I just kind of brush it off as maybe I scratch myself when I was sleeping.

But it seemed to be the case where

every morning I'm waking up, I am covered marks, scratches on my legs and my back.

I was getting ready for bed one night and I'm brushing my hair and brushing my teeth and I look in the mirror and just directly behind me I seen a face come through the wall.

that was transparent but you could make out like shape of eyes and a nose and a mouth

and

it was there for a split second and it vanished it like it went back into the wall again.

I froze to the spot.

I could feel my heart beating.

I could really hear it in my head, the beating of my heart.

I stood there looking in the mirror.

scared to turn around in case it was going to be something standing there.

Maybe it was this dark man that I had seen before.

So when I turned, I didn't see anything.

Emma runs and gets into bed, and she pulls the covers over her head, just like she used to when she was a kid.

But she can't fall asleep.

I feel that there's there's eyes that's that's within the walls that's watching me.

I feel really paranoid.

It's it's starting to really get to me.

Emma looks forward to the weekends when she can take a break from her college classes and spend time away from Sharon Rectory.

So one night I go out and

I meet a guy called Gabriel.

We had an instant connection.

We continue to see each other.

It was love.

He spends most nights with me, which is comforting because I feel that

whenever I'm with him, that I'm safe.

I think it was the comfort of knowing somebody else was there and that I wasn't going to be on my own whenever I seen something.

We're dating probably about a year, and I found out I'm pregnant.

Emma and Gabriel have a son, Noah.

After he's born, they decide it's time for them to get their own place.

They move into a little house about 10 minutes away from Sharon Rectory.

So as we move into

the new house, I start to feel a lot better.

My mind feels clearer.

I have more energy and I feel like there's some sort of normality coming into my life.

Then one evening Emma gets a phone call from her mom.

She tells me that the house is on fire.

So I drop the phone and get into the car and I drive straight down the road to the house.

Just as I'm pulling up to the front of the house, I see these large flames coming up just out of the roof of the main part of the house.

The fire brigade are just approaching at the stage.

My mum is in complete tears.

She's just seeing her

whole

life, everything just going up in flames in this house.

She is so upset.

My dad, he can't sit back and watch.

He actually pulls the hoses off the firemen and runs into the front door of the house and tries to put out as much as he can himself.

And he has no safety equipment, no nothing.

And the firemen eventually pull him back out again.

Paramedics are saying to him that he needs to go to hospital.

So myself and my mum are left with the firemen trying to get this fire under control.

The firefighters realise that they don't have enough water to put out the whole fire because they didn't realise how big the fire was in the house.

There's a well behind the house, and the firefighters start scrambling to hook up their hoses.

And

the generator doesn't work.

At this stage, you can really see the flames starting inside the house.

That was really upsetting because

my whole childhood, all my memories, I felt like it was just being ripped away.

Finally, the firemen get the pump working.

Smoke is starting to go down, fire starting to go down.

Thankfully, it's only kind of staying in one part of the house.

The fire chief approaches myself and my mum and asks, were we in the main building at any time during the fire?

And we both looked at each other and we said no.

No, I wasn't in the house and mum says she wasn't in the house.

And the fireman, he kind of was a wee bit shocked.

He said that he had seen a woman standing between

the reception hallway and the main staircase.

A couple of the men were shouting into the house, you know, to get out and to get away from the fire, but she still stands there.

It's like she doesn't hear them.

A couple of them were going to try and attempt to go in to try and get this lady out, but it was like she just vanished.

She was gone.

And when we look at each other, we say, I wonder, was that her?

And he instantly just turns and says, I don't want to know.

He says, I'm just freaked.

This is completely the strangest thing that's ever happened.

I think that Mrs.

Waller seen what was happening to her home.

Maybe she was trying to stop it from going any further.

After that night of the seance, I think that Mrs.

Waller was at peace, but she never really, really left.

Since the fire, Emma's parents have been working to repair the house.

Emma and Gabriel have had another son, Jonah.

And eventually they move back to the coachman's residence at Sharon Rectory.

One big question everybody asks is, why would you stay in the house?

And I say that it's because it's our home.

I love this house.

My kids love this house.

I want to reside here happy with my family.

My two kids, we've never told them the house is haunted.

I'm trying to kind of protect them from it for as long as I can.

But Emma's not sure how much longer she'll be able to.

One evening, we're driving down the back lane, and suddenly, Noah starts shouting.

He says, Mom, you drove over a man.

And I says, Noah, I didn't see a man.

And he says, He was standing in the middle of the laneway.

And I says, Well, what did the man look like?

He said, He's got a black coat and a black hat.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Emma, for sharing your story with the Spoot.

And if you want to hear more about our family's haunted castle, she's written a book.

It's called The Haunting of Sharon Rectory.

You can find out more information on the Spoot luminary page.

The original score was by Renzo Gorio.

The story was produced by Zoe Furigno.

Oh, I know.

It's that time.

I know, I understand, but it is never over.

And if you have a story, not a ghost story, but a story about a monster or a creature, an alien, a gin, a change, maybe a story about someone who is exhibiting powers not of this world,

if you have a story like that, we'd love to hear it.

Spooked at snapjudgment.org.

There is nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener.

And if you like your storytelling in the bright light of day, subscribe to the amazing Snap Judgment podcast because it might just change your life.

Spooks brought to you by the team that knows better than to go traipsing through some dark castle because they weren't born yesterday.

Except for Pot Split, Mr.

Mark Ristich,

and assessment, our chief spookster is Eliza Smith, Chris Hamburg, Ayan Wynn, Lauren Newsome,

Leon Morimoto, Renzo Gorio, Tale DeCott, Marissa Dodge, Aaliyah Yates, Zoe Ferrigno, Greta Weber, Jacob Winnick, Son of Khan, Tiffany Galiza, Ann Ford, Fernando Hernandez, and Flo Wiley.

The spook theme songs by Pat Messini Miller.

My name is Tim Washington.

And in those dark, dank, drafty castles, you never know which way the chill will blow with dire consequence.

So I advise you to carry not one candle, no,

carry two.

All the better

to never,

ever,

never, ever, never, ever, never

turn out

the lights.