Spooked LIVE: Glynn Washington x John Blake

I turn to the sound, I look to the ground,

I'm on the hunt down after you.

I'll run from the town, I'll swim or I'll drown,

cause I'm hungry like gold.

You're listening to Spooked, Season of the Wolf.

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Spooksters, in celebration of Season of the Wolf, we're taking you back in time.

To Friday, the 13th of October, 2023, I am backstage, pacing the hallowed halls of LA's haunted Orpheum Theater, where over 2,000 spooksters have gathered, waiting right now on the other side of that that curtain in real life

preparing to summon the shadow for the first ever spooked live show

yes

i am scared but i'm calling on a spirit of my own

because spooksters i have a story

that i need to tell

Stop

live

and fly for life and life

Okay.

So

four years old.

Detroit City.

Got my PJs on.

Brushing my teeth.

Wash my face.

My mother, she

bends down

right next to me and my little brother.

We say our prayers.

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray

my soul, the Lord, to keep.

She tucks me in the bed right next to him, pitches us both on the forehead.

Monday night,

night at night.

I'm out

instantly,

sleeping until

I feel this pressure.

I sense this presence.

I open my eyes

and floating above me,

I see a face

looking intensely at me and

I'm too terrified to scream.

I hear whimpering next to me and I know my little brother sees it too.

This face, it's intense.

It's blinking.

I'm looking at it as it gets closer and closer to us.

It looks

kind of like us

and it's

looking us up and down, getting closer and closer

until

it bursts into this big, big smile

and vanishes.

And

we

are going nowhere.

Something else might come out the dark.

We stay in the bed

until the light comes out enough from the sun till it's safe.

Then we jump up, run down the stairs, top speed, or tell my mama,

get to the kitchen.

It's not my mother.

It's my grandmother.

She'll be back, babies.

Where she at?

She'll be back soon.

She doesn't come back that morning.

Doesn't come back that evening.

She doesn't come back to the next night.

And when she does come back,

she's different,

changed.

When she thinks I don't see her, I see her

weeping.

Mama,

what's the matter?

Mama's okay, okay baby

I was alright

next day

my auntie comes over with my cousins

and we get to play in hide and go see

one Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi everybody scrambles and I wait Till they're gone, I can get into my special place.

Right underneath the stairs, right by the kitchen.

Ain't nobody never gonna find me there.

I get in there, quiet, quiet, quiet,

still,

still.

And in the kitchen,

I hear my mother and my auntie talking.

My mother says,

My mother says that she lost the baby.

I didn't know there was a baby.

And

I know there's things that

I can't talk to my mother about.

She has her beliefs, but I want to tell her.

I want to tell her that

I think

I saw.

I think he came to see his brothers.

And I think after he saw what he saw,

he went home

laughing.

Next on the stage,

this brother,

He is

we're elevating things right now.

We're elevating the whole situation.

A celebrated CNN correspondent

covered some of the biggest stories of the past decade from Ferguson to George Floyd.

He's been there to help tell the stories that America needed to hear.

And tonight,

he's going to tell his own story in a way in this setting for the first time.

Please put your hands together for Mr.

John Blake.

It starts off like any other night.

It's the early 1970s, and I'm an eight-year-old boy growing up in an inner-city black neighborhood.

It's one of these bitterly cold winter nights.

The temperature is falling below freezing.

I go to sleep in a bunk bed.

Me on top,

my younger brother Patrick on the bottom.

Sometime deep in the night,

I bolt awake.

I'm drenched in a cold sweat.

Something is wrong.

I look over to my dresser,

and that's when I see him.

A white man is standing there

with his back toward me.

He has a yellow shirt on,

like the color of a banana, and it's one of those vintage shirts from the 1950s.

And he has cold black hair styled in a crude cut and a very square jaw.

And he's rummaging through my dresser like he's looking for something.

My heart is racing.

I can't scream.

I can't move.

I'm waiting for him to turn around and attack me.

But he keeps rummaging through my dresser, ignoring me.

Then I look closer,

and I see that

below his waist,

there's nothing there.

It's invisible.

No legs,

no feet.

He's just floating there.

This can't be real, I think.

Must be a dream.

I fall asleep from exhaustion.

Now, when I wake up the next morning, I'm thinking, that was a bad dream.

But then I look at my brother Patrick.

His eyes are as big as saucers.

Pat,

did you see something last night?

Yeah, I did.

Some man.

Was it a white man?

Yeah, yeah.

Did you know him?

I don't know him.

I go to my dresser

and I pull open one of the drawers.

And there's a folder in there where I keep birthday cards that are mailed to me by my relatives.

And I notice

that some of the birthday cards, they're missing.

I run down the hallway and I knock on the door of my Aunt Sylvia.

She watches us on the weekend when my father is sailing overseas.

He's a merchant seaman.

She opens the door.

Aunt Sylvia, Aunt Sylvia, there was this man here last night.

Stop playing, boy.

Then I point toward the footsteps.

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This man had left footprints when he had visited.

They were footsteps like someone

had stepped into paint,

more the color of blood, and they were scattered all over the bedroom floor.

And some of them marched right up to my bed, like he had been standing over there

looking at me at night.

When I pointed toward them,

the smile on her face disappeared.

And I saw a look in her eyes that I had never seen before.

It was a look of fear.

Now I'm even more afraid.

Now,

those footprints

stayed there for a while.

They were a constant reminder to me that this really happened.

And when I went to bed in the nights that followed, I couldn't shake this feeling

that this man

was going to return again another night.

So I try to put this visit behind me as I get older.

I focus on school and by the time I turn 17 I discover I'm a good student and I'm about to go to college.

One day my father calls me into the bedroom.

He's watching a price is right on television.

And he looks at me casually and pauses and he asks,

do you want to meet your mother?

This is a bombshell.

We had never really talked about my mother before.

My parents met in the mid-60s when interracial marriage was illegal in Maryland and much of the country.

My mother disappeared from my life.

not long after I was born, without any explanation.

The only thing my father's family told me about her was this:

Your mother's name is Shirley.

She's white, and her family hates black people.

And now, all of a sudden, I'm presented with this choice: Do I want to meet my mother?

I was so shocked by my father's question that I remember just staring at him with my mouth open

as I heard the audience on the Price's Right burst out into applause, and the announcer said, Come on down.

Three days later,

I, along with my brother Patrick,

were driven to the countryside in Maryland.

There's this menacing red brick building before us.

It looks like the set from the Shawshank Redemption film.

We're escorted into this waiting area.

We look to our left, and the door opens.

And I see a slender young white woman walk in.

And when she locks eyes with me, she has pale blue eyes.

They light up.

And she says,

oh boy, John.

Oh boy, Pat, it's so good to see you.

And she half walks, half shuffles toward me with her arms outstretched.

And she wraps me in a hug.

I don't know what to do.

I've never even used the word mom before.

But there's another reason

that I feel so awkward.

It's because of where we're standing.

We are in the waiting area of a mental institution.

My mother had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

I didn't make that discovery until that day in the waiting room.

Nobody in my father's family told me because they didn't know how.

Back then, if someone had

someone in their family who had a severe mental illness, they didn't talk about it.

It was a mark of shame.

But now I know the truth.

My mother didn't abandon me.

She was taken from us.

So when I leave the Institute that day, I become one of my mom's caretakers.

So, I try to establish this relationship with her, to visit her, mail her letters, get to know the people who are taking care of her, because she's been moved now from a mental institute into a group home.

And I'm also trying to establish a career at this point.

I've graduated from college, and I've got my first job in journalism.

It's at a place called the LA Daily News.

So one day when I'm working at the L.A.

Daily News, I get a call from the mom who runs my group home, runs the group home where my mom stays.

And she says,

your mother's sister,

her name is Mary, and she wants to meet you.

I'm like, hell no, I don't want to meet her.

I'd heard stories about her from my father.

He told me that she hated black people.

She was ashamed to have two black nephews.

And unlike my mom, she wasn't ill, so there was no excuse for her not reaching out to me.

So I was like, why should I reach out to you now?

It's too late for that.

But on the other hand, I was curious.

I've never met anyone from my mom's family.

So a week later,

it's just

pretty summer day.

I, along with my brother Patrick, we drive up

to the group home where my mom stays in Baltimore.

I spot the slender white woman pacing on the porch.

She has salt and pepper, thick hair.

We walk up to the porch.

My brother Patrick, he greets her with a hug and a warm smile.

And then she turns to me.

She holds out her hand and says,

hi, I'm Mary.

I'm your mother's sister.

And for an agonizing second or two, that hand just lingers there.

I don't want to take it.

But I give her a limp handshake.

And then we walk inside the group home.

And as we walk inside, I'm thinking, oh, she's probably going to apologize and say, I should have been there for you, but I'm so racist.

My family's so racist.

Can you ever forgive me

instead

when we sit at the dining room table she says i want to show you something

she reaches into a supermarket bag and pulls out a ziploc bag

and she takes out these pictures and she spreads them across the dining room table

and i'm looking at all these pictures of white folks

And she says,

this is your mother's family.

And as I start to look at the photos,

I see all these photos of white people at dinner, in park benches, on park benches, smiling,

having a good time.

And I realize these are my family.

And this is the first time I've ever seen anyone from my mom's side of my family.

It's like I knew nothing about this entire side of my being.

And so now I'm seeing my two identities merge in real time.

And then she says,

and here is a picture of your grandfather.

I hear those words.

I get bad vibes.

I already heard horror stories of my grandfather.

My father told me that when he first went to date my mom,

he answered the door.

Instead of her.

Tried to punch my father out and push him off the doorstep.

Then he called him the N-word.

And then he called the police on him and had him arrested.

He was nothing but a monster to me.

So my aunt slides across this photo, across the dining room table.

And it's a vintage photo.

And it looks, I see this picture of this young white man staring into the camera with these cold, brooding eyes.

And he has thick, cold black hair and he has on a suit like an alcapone gangster

and as i look at it a cold shiver goes through my body the goosebumps go on my arm i look to my brother patrick and his eyes are big and he nods at me

that was the man that came into our bedroom when we were boys

That man was our grandfather.

Now, I don't really know what to say at this point.

I mean, I couldn't say, oh, yes, we've met before.

He came into my bedroom and took my birthday card.

Please tell them I want him back.

The meeting was already tense enough, so I let it go.

So we moved on.

And as I got older after this meeting, as you can imagine, my curiosity about my mother's family had seriously diminished by this time.

I didn't want to know more,

so I focused on my career and I joined CNN.

I joined CNN just at the time that President Obama is elected for his first term.

And I get a front-row seat into all the racial sickness that's spreading across America.

Ferguson, the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the Freddie Gray protest in my hometown of Baltimore.

I cover it all.

And along the way, my email gets filled with in-word this and N-word that.

I get threats from white supremacist group.

I grow cynical.

I grow jaded.

I think there's nothing that can change a racist white person.

I bury myself in work,

but then...

My personal life starts to look up.

Someone says, I want you to meet someone.

It's a blind date.

I go to a vegetarian restaurant in Atlanta and I wait.

And I wait.

She's a half hour late.

But she shows up and we hit off.

Her name is Terry Lynn.

We go out again

and eventually we get married.

And it's not that many months into the marriage that I wake up one morning

and I look to my right and she's already up.

Her clothes are drenched and like she's been sweating.

Her eyes are puffy and red like she's been crying.

What's wrong, I ask.

She says, there was a man here last night.

My heart starts to race.

What man?

She says, I was awakened.

And I saw this man standing on your side of the bed, standing inches away from you.

He had a suit on.

And he was looking down at you with this troubled expression on his face.

Now, I pretend like maybe she's wrong, maybe she's mistaken.

You see, I had never told her anything about my grandfather, not one word.

Heck, it took me two years to tell her that I had a mom with a severe mental illness.

So I'll go into my office study.

I grab a photo, and I bring it out to her and I show it to her.

Was this the man you saw?

She looks at me, her eyes are even bigger.

It is.

Who is that man, she said?

Who is he to you?

It's my grandfather, I say.

Now,

I don't know what to do now.

I'm not a ghostbuster.

But

I get an an idea.

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My wife's father is a minister and he worked as a missionary in Central America.

And I recall that she once told me that he participated in an exorcism, but he never liked to talk about it.

So I said, said,

why not call your father?

So I place a call to him.

His name is Alberto.

And Alberto has this deep berry white baritone that always intimidated me.

So he answers the phone.

We make small talk.

And then I say,

Alberto,

I have to tell you a story.

I know it's going to sound strange, but I really need your advice.

And I proceed to tell him the story about the preceding night's visit and my grandfather's history.

And he just listens in silence.

And after I finish, there's more silence.

And I begin to think I'm going to hear a click.

And the next day, there's going to be a U-Haul truck parked outside with Albertos come to take his daughter.

But instead, he says something that I don't expect.

He says,

Have you ever visited your grandfather's gravesite?

I'm stunned.

I don't, I never thought about that.

You have to let him know that you forgive him, Alberto said.

I hang up the call

and I have to admit that I'm conflicted.

On one hand, I'm kind of angry.

Why is it that black people are always being asked to forgive white people's racism, I think?

And then I think to myself, I spend most of my life trying to reconcile with my living white relatives.

How the hell do I reconcile with the dead?

But then on the other hand, I feel good because someone is giving me advice.

But I really don't have time to fly to Baltimore to search out for his grave site.

I have to handle this now because this man has shown up at my house and scared my wife.

So I turn to my wife and I say, Terry, what if we just pray for him?

It can't hurt.

So I take her hand

and we kneel before the bed.

It starts off as a standard prayer, but in the middle I improvise.

I start directly addressing him.

I don't remember much of what I said, only that I want you to know I'm taking care of mom.

I want you to have peace.

I want you to know that I forgive you.

We finished, opened our eyes.

There was no angelic choir, no harps playing, but it felt good.

But here's something about

forgiveness.

It's hard to forgive somebody you don't know.

So I put on my reporter's hat.

And I had to figure out who was this man stalking me.

And there was only one person who could help me with that.

And that was my aunt, my aunt Mary.

So I give her a call and another call.

And we begin to talk about the type of man my grandfather was.

He was a man who was born in 1896 when lynching was commonplace.

and racial segregation was accepted as a norm.

He drops out of the elementary school to support his family.

But along the way, he loses contact with his family because of his drinking.

He was a man who was desperately poor all his life.

He worked as a mechanic, a janitor, but you can never tell it by looking at him.

He always wore these sharp suits, starch shirts, and he shined his shoes so well.

that you can see your reflection in them.

His hair was brilli cream to perfection.

He gets married, but then he watches as his wife develops a mental illness and has to be institutionalized.

And then he watches as his oldest daughter, my mother, develops the same illness.

And then he watches as both of his daughters are taken away from him by social services.

because he's too poor to take care of them.

But he never liked to talk about his problems.

What he would do instead was go to Mass and read Catholic prayer books at night.

He died three weeks before his 70th birthday,

not long after I was born.

What did he die of?

I asked Aunt Mary.

I don't know, she said.

I think he just gave up.

And then she tells me something that really throws me.

She said, just before he died,

he called his best friend.

His best friend was a man named Brownie.

Brownie was a maintenance man.

They used to go to mass together and have beers afterward.

And get this,

Brownie was a black man.

So I don't know what to do with this.

But there was one question Aunt Mary couldn't help me with.

What about those footprints?

What about those birthday cards?

Well,

I found a very wise friend and we talked about it and he gave me the answer.

He said, those missing birthday cards?

He said, that's something a loving grandparent would do for a grandchild to keep track of their birthdays.

He was trying to get to know you.

And what about those blood-red footprints?

Oh, he says,

he left you a trail to follow.

He wanted you to know he was there.

Now, I know this story sounds unbelievable.

But to me, what happened among the living in my family is more remarkable than what happened among the dead.

That aunt I told you about, the one whose hand I didn't want to take,

she changed in ways that I never imagined for the better.

And my mother,

when I first met her at 17 years old, I only saw a broken woman.

It took me years to realize how wrong I was.

The same strength that it took for her to love a black man when she, when she did, was still there.

I just didn't see it at the time.

And of course,

there's my grandfather.

I now know

that he was a victim of his racism, not just me.

He didn't just haunt me.

I haunted him.

I no longer see him as a monster.

He's my grandfather.

His name was Bill Michael Daly.

And since I prayed for them that morning,

he's never returned.

Thank you.

Amazing.

Thank you, John Blake, for sharing your story on Spook's first ever live show.

To learn more about John's story, reconciling with his mother's family, check out his amazing memoir, More Than I Imagined.

What a black man discovered about the white mother he never knew.

You can also follow his work on CNN and his website at johnkblake.com.

The original score was created and performed live by Doug Stewart and Brigine Murphy.

The story was produced by Zoe Ferrigno and Davey Kim.

Spooked Live.

People ask, when are you coming to our city?

I hear you.

Spooksters know this.

Plans are in the works.

I promise.

We'll let you know as soon as we can.

And do you have a story that needs to be heard on the spook stage that you can rock in front of the very best audience in all the land?

Do you really?

Really?

But we'd love to hear it.

Let me know, spooked acceptjudgment.org because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener.

Spook theme song is by Pat Masini Miller.

Spooked Live.

It was summoned in the dark of night by the team that knows not to mix different tarot cards together in the same deck, except for the Mark Ristich.

His deck is an abomination.

His oodle cards in there and everything else.

The wizards that made Spook Live possible include Davey Kim, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Frigno, Doug Stewart, Regine Murphy, Zoe Jakes, Tale DeCot, Miles Lassie, the amazing Ryan Davis, and big, big, big special thanks to Michael Issup, to Holly Kernan, to John Cohn, and Rebecca Stume.

My name is Lim Washington, and I love, love, love, love, love that these stories are a shared thing.

That in telling his truth, John Blake creates a fraternity, a community you and I,

all of us, are now just a little bit different.

Bound together, keepers of a secret we've experienced together, and make no mistake this community is magic

because it's all well and good to know that the shadow waits but knowing that the person next to you knows

well that makes all the difference

because the shadow wants barriers the shadow wants walls stories destroy walls

tying us together.

Sorcery of the highest order, spellcasting.

In fact,

without this sacred community,

without this special trust, how would we ever discover?

How would we ever know

to never, ever,

ever,

never, never, ever, never

turn out

the lights?