The Fog - Classic

Darkness falls throughout the land.

The midnight hour is close at hand.

You're listening to Spooked.

Stay tuned.

Okay, so I'm claustrophobic.

Have been since I was teeny tiny.

Tight spaces for me are the stuff of nightmare, which is why on a recent trip to Vietnam with my family, I keep refusing our guide when he invites me to explore the caves to see for myself

where the Viet Cong hid,

where they lived, where they fought during the Vietnam War,

or as he calls it, the war of American aggression.

I tell this nice man, this smiling man, I tell him that as a corn-fed michigander,

there is no way, no power on God's green earth that is going to squeeze me into a tiny, underground, hand-dug sliver of a cave constructed for someone half my size.

No way.

And my boy, my son, he says, says, he'll do it.

And look at his split.

He hops down into the hole of the earth and he disappears.

Pride, shame, pride.

And I think, wow, wow.

If he can do it, I think,

how bad can it really be?

So I crawl down after him.

Trying to follow him down this tiny space, bent over, hands forward, hands forward.

Boy!

I make the first turn.

Pitch blackness.

Black like there has never been light.

Black like there is no such thing as light.

The dirt walls of this tomb, they press on my shoulders from each side and I can't even scream.

I can't move, I can't breathe, I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't.

On my knees, I flee, crawling backwards, backwards.

And out

into the open air, open sky, tourists taking pictures, kids eating popsicles, a beautiful sunny day.

I look around.

And 100 feet away, my boy pops out from underneath the ground, laughing, laughing.

Dad!

It's great, right?

Right?

My name is from Washington.

I'm saying this right now, begging to whomever might be listening, when my time comes.

Scatter my ashes.

Shoot me into space.

Do whatever you have to do.

But please, please, please, please

don't bury me underground.

Now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now.

Now,

today we're going down under

to Australia, the original upside down cake.

We're going to a tiny rural town called Yungabara.

It's inland, it's chilly, it's foggy, and our storyteller, Blair, he'd go there with his parents on vacation.

They'd stay in an old cabin surrounded by bushland, red earth, towering eucalyptus trees.

And out in the wilderness, behind their cabin, was an old farmhouse.

And the locals said it's one of the very first buildings built in Yungabara.

But I'm gonna let Blair tell you more about that.

Spooked, spooked, spooked, spooked, spooked,

The farmhouse, it was about 500, 600 meters away from the cabin that we stayed in.

It was a lot older.

It had paint peeling off it, the corrugated tin roof was rusting, all the steps were rotten and

It was in a desolate state.

The driveway leading up to both of the houses, it went in a

zigzag direction, going up and up.

And along the side of it, there was a cliff with a pond at the bottom, only a small cliff.

It was a normal trip.

It was one of the usual ones we would take.

I was about 13 at the time, so I was a bit older.

That night, I was with my friend Alex and his sister Olivia.

They were my childhood friends.

They lived there full time and I was just at their house in town.

We were playing video games, you know, playing some board games.

I think we had a pretty big game of Monopoly that night.

It was getting late.

It was about 11.30 and I decided I had better get back to the cabin.

I'm sure my parents were worrying about me.

So I was walking along the streets of Youngerborough and I made my way back to the cavern.

It was cold.

I was really cold and I only had like a really thin jumper on so I was like shivering a lot.

I thought to myself I should have gotten a bigger jumper or I should have left earlier.

It was my fault and I should have done something beforehand and thought about it a bit more but I was cold and I was walking along.

The town was dead quiet.

There was no traffic.

And I managed to work my way through the little streets of the the town to finally find the driveway,

the start of this somewhat steep incline of a zigzag dirt road back to the cavern.

But at the foot of the entrance was the driveway.

It had no street lights.

It was pitch black.

It looked ominous.

Yungaborra borough is one of the only few places in northern Queensland that gets fog because it gets cold at winter.

So, when the fog, very light fog at first, started to roll in,

it started to scare me.

I started to think something's going to happen or something's going on.

So, it started to form all around the street, and that's when the lights became a bit dimmer from the street lights from the main road.

And that's when the heavier fog came in.

Then it started to get really, really heavy.

I could no longer see my feet below me, and all I could see in front of me was white.

Like there was.

I was in the middle of what seemed like a cloud, and I just could not see anything.

There was, I couldn't see the street lights, and that's when it's when the heavier fog, fog that I've, like I've never seen.

And I thought to myself, I don't know what I'm going to do.

I felt stuck.

My torch was useless.

There was nothing that it was doing.

It was definitely not giving me any headway in front of me.

The fog was just so thick that I just couldn't see.

I was stunned.

Like, I was frozen for the first time.

I could try and find my way behind me and maybe go back to Olivia's and Alex's place, but there was so many corners and so many streets that I couldn't really do that.

That didn't seem feasible.

But yet, to try and get up my driveway, there was that small cliff with a pond at the bottom.

And it was definitely high enough for you to fall in and really hurt yourself.

So my first thought was to actually just sit down where I was and do the right thing and just wait it out.

It was very surreal, like for the options, because I had none.

I sat down very briefly

and

that's when I saw that little flickering amber light in the distance.

It was a flame, so it was an old style like kerosene or gasoline lantern in the distance.

So I saw it start to come down the driveway and it made it to about halfway on the driveway.

that was my mum.

I heard her say, son, is that you

come here out of the fog?

Just follow my light.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

I honestly thought, cool, I'm out of here.

You know, I'm going back home and it's all good

if I walk very slowly I can just follow the light and I can follow my mum's voice and work my way up the zigzag of the driveway

so I was walking very slowly each step, each step, one by one,

and

the land would move at the same pace that I was kind of moving.

It would take about two, three minutes to get up the driveway, and I saw it walk up some steps because it went higher, it levelled up.

And when I saw the light climb up the steps, I stopped.

I stopped and thought, oh, the house is right there.

And I heard a creaky door, like a very old, rusted door, open.

And I followed her light.

But then, when it went inside the house, after the door had opened, it went out.

So I I called out.

I said, Mum, can you turn the light back on?

I'm not at the cabin yet.

You know, I'm not at the house.

Can you turn it back on?

Dead silence.

All I could hear was like crickets chirping and frogs, you know, it was just dead.

So I followed in the direction path of where I saw the light, and that's when I hit the wooden guardrail.

I was like, okay, I'm back at the house.

Until I got onto the doorstep and realized I definitely wasn't.

So

what was in front of me was that old, desolate, abandoned farmhouse that was next to the cabin.

Instantly, my knees just felt weak.

Like I felt like I was about to fall over.

Like

my legs couldn't support me anymore.

This light had

made me follow it to this abandoned farmhouse.

Then a voice that no longer sounded like my mum and instead it had a very British accent.

She said, nasty weather out there.

It was like a mother's voice.

It had a very strong British accent.

Beforehand, she had an Australian accent.

She sounded like my mum.

And then it turned into a very old style British accent and it was it was very it was a young she wasn't old it wasn't croaky it was a very clean smooth sentence

and I realized that it was not my mum this voice had transferred somehow from my mum's voice to this other person's voice and it was coming from inside the house.

The door of the house was open and it was creaking in the wind.

I saw no one in the house.

There was no lights in the house.

And I was stuck.

I was frozen to the ground.

I could not move.

This is something that's trying to lure me and get me.

That's what I thought.

I just thought it was trying to get me.

I thought to myself, you know, I could either turn around and go back into

the field

and try and and find my house because it was to the right of me so I thought maybe if I ran to the right I could somehow find my house

or I could go inside the house I was at and that option was ruled out straight away I knew I wasn't going to set a foot inside that house that I was standing on

so I thought okay I'm going to leave.

So I ran down the steps and as I was running, I heard that British accent yell at me going, where are you going, my son?

Come back here.

Like in a demanding voice.

It was very, it was very demanding.

It was just, son, where are you going?

Come back here.

Like, she was yelling.

And I didn't look back.

I just ran.

I ran for it and I was running to the right and I just I fell over.

Something hit my foot and all up my knee and

it was a huge rock.

I thought it was just a huge rock I had ran into and I fell flat onto my face and got cuts all up my hand

and I realized I turned around and it wasn't a rock but it was a tombstone.

I couldn't see much on the tombstone.

It was only a little...

I think it said something about a mother and father on there.

And

I saw that, turned around, saw that tombstone, and I screamed.

I absolutely screamed.

So I got up, and that's when six little amber lights that looked similar to the one I saw beforehand started to surround me.

And they were slowly, slowly in a circle shape, just coming together closing me in in the middle i saw a gap between two of them and ran for it so i sprinted through the gap of one of these lights running again not looking back again just looking in front of me

and that's when i ran into a wall and blacked out

and I remember my dad he came over apparently he heard something smack into the wall so he came over he got me picked me up

and he just took me inside I don't remember going to sleep I don't remember going into the bedroom that I had I just I think I just passed out from exhaustion or from just fear.

I knew the next morning we were leaving early because that was our last night there.

So I woke up and I didn't quite remember what happened yet.

So I thought, oh, I better get ready.

We better get going.

And that's when, you know, mum and dad said that we're going to spend like an extra half a day here.

That's when I realized that something had happened last night and it was not good at all.

My dad, he heard the loud smack because I smacked onto the wall that was directly adjacent to my parents' bedroom.

So he heard me just thumping into the wall.

And he heard that thump and he went out to see what it was.

And he saw me there on the ground.

So he picked me up and put me back inside.

He told me that he saw one little gasoline kerosene light out in the distance near the farmhouse.

So he saw one of the things that I saw.

Alex and Olivia,

they

both came over that morning and we went out onto the patio and we sat out there

and I could just see the old desolate other farmhouse in the distance

and they told me about like I told them what happened and that's when you know both Olivia and Alex started to tell me they said that

it was one of the first buildings built and in the early if early 20th century Anne was a mum who lived there she had a son And one night during winter, her son was downtown and he was playing with some friends around 10 o'clock, I think Olivia said.

And

he realized that it was getting late.

And so did Anne.

Anne started to worry because it was getting late.

So she actually got up and went near the driveway.

And that's when her son was like, okay, well, I'm going to go home.

So he started to go home and he got to the driveway and that's apparently when heavy fog came in now Anne had a kerosene lamp and she was carrying it and she heard footsteps she didn't see her son she apparently heard footsteps so she said son is that you

follow my light and my voice

and that's what I heard and

so

her son tried to follow the light and Anne's voice.

So Anne managed to walk all the way back to her house and

she turned on her house's light and there was still all just heavy fog and that's when she realized that her son wasn't there with her like she was by herself.

So she ran back out there with the kerosene lamp going, you know, son, where are you?

Where are you?

Come here out of the fog.

and there was no reply.

She sat down and she didn't know what to do.

She honestly had no clue what to do.

Now,

the next morning, she

got up,

she went looking, she went searching, she went looking downtown, she went up and down, everywhere searching for her son.

It wasn't until she was walking back to her house that she found him at the bottom of the pond, gone.

Just passed away from falling down the cliff and hitting his head

so Olivia told me that

Anne was the thing that I heard and that kerosene lamp was hers and she was stuck in like a loop doing

That searching for her son.

So she thought that I was her son.

She mistakes them.

Whether or not it's a mistake or she knows knows and she's trying to trap someone,

that's what I don't know.

But she definitely thought I was her son and what I tripped on, that would have been the son's grave.

When they told me that,

I realized that I was lucky.

My first thought was that I am never ever ever stepping back there.

I'm never ever going back.

And I still haven't, and I'm not going to, for as long as I live, because I realised how lucky I was.

She was definitely trying to get me to come into the house.

Like, I felt like she was trying to get me to go inside.

But what she would have done after that, I don't really know.

I don't want to know.

When this happened, it felt like Anne, or whatever it was, was trying to reach out to me.

It wasn't just something that happened.

It's like she was trying to reach out and just lure me, like she had a will to do that.

But I did feel sorry for her because it's just sad that she lost a son that was probably the worst moment of her life, and that's where she's stuck in that loop.

It probably is her hell.

Thank you, Blair, for finding your way out of the fog and bringing back such a story.

I'm going to tell you this, listeners.

If a voice ever called to me from deep in the darkness,

it's going to have to mind its own business.

That story comes to us from our own spook correspondent, Bretta Weber.

The original score for that story was by Lauren Newsom.

Spooksters, if you think it's over, you couldn't be more wrong.

Be afraid, be terrified, beware, and remember, if you like your storytelling in the light of day, get the amazing, stupendous, and incredible Snap Judgment podcast storytelling with the beat.

Spook was created by a team that never gets lost in the fog.

And if you hear someone whispering in your ear in the darkest night, you can be certain that it's probably Mr.

Mark Ristich, maybe Anna Sussman, our chief spookster, is Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, A.

Nguyen, Aaliyah Yates, Zoe Frigno, Lauren Newsome, Leon Morimocho, Renzo Gorio, Jacob Winnick, Teo DeCot, Marissa Dodge, Greta Weber, Seneca Khan, Tiffany DeLiza, Ann Ford, Fernando Hernandez are your guides through this forest.

And yes,

the voice from the deep fog may wail with advice, threats, pleas on how you should handle your own light switch.

Ignore it.

Put sand in your ears, cut your ears off if you have to.

Do whatever it is you have to do.

But never,

ever,

never, ever, ever

turn out the lights.

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