Sharp Tooth Boy - Classic

Speaker 1 Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
But if I die before I wake,

Speaker 1 I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Speaker 1 You're listening to Spook.

Speaker 1 Stay

Speaker 1 tuned.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 we didn't celebrate traditional holidays growing up. Easter, Valentine's Day, Christmas.
Those were something other people did.

Speaker 1 Later on, thankfully, I had friends and I finally did get to celebrate these holidays that I always heard about.

Speaker 1 I spent my first Christmas at my buddy's house in such good times.

Speaker 1 So warm, so happy, such love.

Speaker 1 These were the things missing from my home at the time.

Speaker 1 And the food.

Speaker 1 Good Lord.

Speaker 1 My buddy's family, they're Hindu, so on top of their tree, in their family home, rested the figurine of Ganesha. the elephant-headed god.

Speaker 1 And seeing Ganesha, golden, serene, looking down at us, blessing us,

Speaker 1 it made me feel warm,

Speaker 1 inside, loved, safe.

Speaker 1 And I'm not Hindu.

Speaker 1 I'm not, but since then in my own home, with my own kids, Ganesha sits on top of my tree.

Speaker 1 He still makes me feel safe, warm, and happy, like in my surrogate home when I was younger.

Speaker 1 And I know how lucky I am

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 I still remember an older figurine.

Speaker 1 It was silver.

Speaker 1 Two masks, hollow-eyed, one mask grinned, but his twin sneered.

Speaker 1 and sat near the lamp in my grandmother's TV room.

Speaker 1 And it felt like both pairs of eyes stared

Speaker 1 stared at us while we watched cartoons

Speaker 1 as we ate cornflakes when we were playing hide-and-go seek to the point where we would retreat to the kitchen or to the porch we'd tell granny that we didn't want to watch tv anymore

Speaker 1 and i don't know

Speaker 1 that that figurine that it caused the sadness of that place

Speaker 1 or if it just reflected what was already there. I just remember

Speaker 1 how those empty eyes burned.

Speaker 1 My name is Tim Washington.

Speaker 1 I told you it's in my home.

Speaker 1 Tell me what's in yours.

Speaker 1 Spook starts

Speaker 1 now.

Speaker 1 Now then,

Speaker 1 slumber parties, it should be all about friendship, staying up too late, making soda come out of your nose, right?

Speaker 1 But what if someone shows up with a book of spells and starts invoking spirits? Wow, you'd run the other way, right?

Speaker 1 Well, this is spooked.

Speaker 1 And we've got to tell you, what happens when you stand right in front of the mirror you chant someone's name three times and wait to see what happens.

Speaker 1 Bonnie Blagg lets us know her tale

Speaker 1 spooked

Speaker 2 My name is Bonnie Wagg.

Speaker 2 I grew up in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, and I lived with my mom, my dad, and my two brothers.

Speaker 2 I was 11 years old. I was having a sleepover with my friends Amanda and Sarah.
We were sitting in the living room, which was right outside of my bedroom.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we were sitting in a circle.

Speaker 2 We thought it was really cool that my friend had got this book of spells.

Speaker 2 The last thing I wanted was for my mom to find out what we were doing because I know that she does not approve of

Speaker 2 messing around with the spiritual world.

Speaker 2 She wouldn't let us have a Ouija board. She didn't want any of that in the house.

Speaker 2 My mom told us that it was 11 o'clock and it was time to go to bed, so we went into my room, but nobody was really ready to go to bed.

Speaker 2 So we turned off all the lights,

Speaker 2 turned on a lamp, and my friend put a scarf on top of it.

Speaker 2 There was just kind of a red hue and a dark room full of shadows. That's when my friend Amanda decided that she would try and do Bloody Mary into one of the mirrors on my furniture.

Speaker 2 My friend Amanda stood in front of the mirror on the vanity that was next to my bed. My friend Sarah and I stood behind her,

Speaker 2 not sure if we should be in the reflection of the mirror or not, because we weren't sure if we wanted to be involved. Amanda said, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.

Speaker 2 My friend Sarah, who was taking it really seriously, you know, was like, you guys need to, you know, quit messing around.

Speaker 2 She thought that this was, you know, sacrilegious or that it wasn't what God would have wanted.

Speaker 2 And we all panicked that something might happen,

Speaker 2 but nothing did happen.

Speaker 2 And Amanda was so sure that it was going to work, and she was really disappointed.

Speaker 2 So at that point, I think we gave up and just went to bed.

Speaker 2 Two nights later, it had to at least have been,

Speaker 2 you know, 11 or midnight,

Speaker 2 I was just laying there trying to fall asleep.

Speaker 2 And I felt uneasy, And I don't know why, but I turned to look at my nightstand,

Speaker 2 the Vanity, which is right next to my bed.

Speaker 2 And in the reflection of the mirror, I could see a small child standing next to my bed in front of the Vanity, picking up all these little bottles that were on the Vanity.

Speaker 2 They were full of like, you know, bath salts and, you know, little crystals and just, you know, sand from different beaches I'd traveled to.

Speaker 2 Just different things that I'd collected in these little glass bottles. And he was picking them all up

Speaker 2 and smelling them one at a time and then putting them back down.

Speaker 2 He existed like a hologram that was being projected out of the mirror.

Speaker 2 He was being really quiet and very delicate, so the only sound that he was making was just a little bit of, you know, like

Speaker 2 that much noise. Just picking something up and putting it down.

Speaker 2 My initial feeling when I saw this little kid was complete confusion.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 he looked like he was from American Victorian era.

Speaker 2 He had a hat on. It looked like it was a hand-me-down.
It looked like it was too big for his head. He was wearing rags and he was kind of dirty and

Speaker 2 he had a kind of soft face.

Speaker 2 He's standing

Speaker 2 facing the mirror and I'm basically looking at him in the face.

Speaker 2 But he doesn't seem to notice me.

Speaker 2 When he noticed me, that's when he turned and smiled like the Cheshire Cat.

Speaker 2 It was so wide and unhuman looking. It was much too wide.

Speaker 2 His eyes went from being kind of a dullish gray to almost an intense black cherry jello color.

Speaker 2 As he smiled, his teeth grew into daggers

Speaker 2 and he unclenched his jaw and they started dripping with blood.

Speaker 2 I panicked.

Speaker 2 I felt completely immobilized and I had no idea what to do.

Speaker 2 I was trying not to breathe, I was trying not to make any sort of visible signs that I was alive or there.

Speaker 2 All I thought about was: if he doesn't notice me, he'll go back to leaving me alone.

Speaker 2 I pulled the blankets over my head and I stayed like that motionless

Speaker 2 for pretty much the whole night.

Speaker 2 I woke up for school the next morning extremely tired.

Speaker 2 The first gut reaction that I had the next morning was,

Speaker 2 well, I hope that that wasn't real.

Speaker 2 I wanted to talk about it, but I also also didn't want to sound insane.

Speaker 2 I didn't mention it to my friends either because,

Speaker 2 you know, I had been making fun of my friend who was taking it seriously,

Speaker 2 and then I was also making fun of my friend who thought it was religiously wrong to be messing around with ghosts, so I just didn't say anything.

Speaker 2 The second night, I'm laying in bed and I'm reading my book, and every page or two I glance over at the mirror.

Speaker 2 That's when the uneasy feeling hit me.

Speaker 2 And I looked over and the boy was there again.

Speaker 2 He's wearing the same outfit.

Speaker 2 He's

Speaker 2 picking up things off of the vanity. He's just inspecting them.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 as soon as he notices that I can see him, he turns, his eyes get angry, he does the evil smile,

Speaker 2 and his teeth turn into

Speaker 2 bloody knives.

Speaker 2 I pulled the covers over my head and pretended like it didn't exist. Now it's real.

Speaker 2 So now this seems more of like a problem that I need to solve

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 I don't want to get in trouble for there being ghosts in my mom's house.

Speaker 2 I don't know if I fell asleep or if I managed to stay awake the entire night, but eventually

Speaker 2 I could hear my mom making coffee and I knew it was safe to take the blankets off of my face and get up.

Speaker 2 And so I thought maybe if I could figure out a little bit more about this kid, I could,

Speaker 2 you know, make him go away by figuring out what it is that he needed.

Speaker 2 So I got up and immediately started inspecting the vanity to see if I could tell

Speaker 2 what the boy had touched, you know, if there was any fingerprints, anything that would help me figure out who he was or what he was doing, or even just to prove that it had happened.

Speaker 2 And as far as I could tell, there wasn't.

Speaker 2 When I got ready to go to bed the following night, I do

Speaker 2 normal bedtime routine, brush my teeth, and I hoped maybe,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 maybe he got it out of his system the first two nights. Maybe he was over it.

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 was only sleeping on my back

Speaker 2 because I didn't want to sleep on my side facing away from him

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 what if he was gonna do something?

Speaker 2 I didn't want to sleep on my side facing him, because then I'd just be staring at him.

Speaker 2 So I was just

Speaker 2 sleeping on my back, like staring at the ceiling,

Speaker 2 trying not to look either direction.

Speaker 2 So after about an hour of laying in my bed, I looked over,

Speaker 2 and he was there

Speaker 2 again.

Speaker 2 instead of pulling the covers over my head, I looked to the other side of my room and

Speaker 2 in

Speaker 2 the street lights coming through the windows,

Speaker 2 in the reflections of the two mirrors that were on the opposite walls from each other,

Speaker 2 there was a whole party going on in my room.

Speaker 2 It was the same time period, but these people were much better dressed.

Speaker 2 And I could only see the portion of them that was being projected from the mirrors.

Speaker 2 I couldn't see anything that was below the mirror line.

Speaker 2 And there were probably,

Speaker 2 I would say about 12 people in the room. And it looked like they were having

Speaker 2 a tea party or a dance or something

Speaker 2 and they were all having a very good time

Speaker 2 until they noticed that I could see them

Speaker 2 and then they stopped they all turned

Speaker 2 looked at me and did the exact same thing that the boy did

Speaker 2 Where their eyes got dark

Speaker 2 and their mouths sort of curled up and they smiled and their teeth all turned into these sharp pointy daggers that were dripping with blood.

Speaker 2 I was absolutely terrified. Now I'm outnumbered.

Speaker 2 And then I did start chanting, just go away, this isn't real, this isn't real, this isn't real, you're not real.

Speaker 2 Dear God, if you fix this, I'll never screw around with supernatural ever again. Like, please just make this go away.

Speaker 2 So I stayed under the covers until I could see the sun coming up through the blinds, and then I got up.

Speaker 2 Day four was a little bit harder for me because it was very hard to ignore the fact that that happened and I very desperately wanted to tell someone, but at this point, this is sounding like a crazier and crazier thing to tell someone.

Speaker 2 So it's getting harder and harder to talk about because

Speaker 2 that's, it's not just, oh, I saw a ghost once. Now it's, well, now I'm being haunted.

Speaker 2 I didn't want to drag anybody else into this with me. The The last thing my mom needed was more stress in her life.

Speaker 2 At the same time, even if I told her and she was really receptive to the concept, what is she gonna do about it?

Speaker 2 I went to school and

Speaker 2 everything seemed fine.

Speaker 2 The fourth night was terrifying.

Speaker 2 So, my plan actually that night was I was gonna gonna try and like talk to them

Speaker 2 Because at this point they're clearly not going away. They're clearly not getting any less aggressive and

Speaker 2 After these three nights I absolutely had not been getting very much sleep

Speaker 2 I Was gonna

Speaker 2 say whatever came to my mind when I saw whoever appeared that night

Speaker 2 I was basically going through my mind like, hi, I'm Bonnie. Who are you? It's like that's weird.
Do you introduce yourself to a ghost? Is that

Speaker 2 better or worse if they know my name?

Speaker 2 Like, what do they already know? I don't know.

Speaker 2 You know, like, do I should I be formal? Should I try and shake hands? Do you shake hands with a ghost? Do I want to touch a ghost?

Speaker 2 But I was like, I'll try and talk to them tonight, and then we'll figure out what the problem is,

Speaker 2 and then we'll fix it.

Speaker 2 And then nothing happened. The boy didn't show up.
The people didn't show up. Nothing happened.

Speaker 2 I just stayed in bed, not moving, waiting for them to show up.

Speaker 2 I woke up the next morning and I wanted the mirrors gone.

Speaker 2 The mirrors are heavy, so I had to move all three of the pieces of furniture away from the wall and then unmount them. And I wanted to get rid of them.

Speaker 2 My mom didn't want to get rid of them, so we wrapped them up in cardboard and shoved them in the back of like the closet with the water heater or something.

Speaker 2 The first night that the mirrors were off the furniture, I felt so relieved. I just felt like that eerie, creepy, lingering feeling was gone.

Speaker 2 Whatever realm had been opened was closed, that I felt like I could go to sleep. I just felt like a weight was lifted off of my chest, like physically lifted off of my chest.

Speaker 2 I felt like I could breathe.

Speaker 2 I never talked to anybody about the ghosts, but they were always there in the back of my mind.

Speaker 2 And every time we moved,

Speaker 2 the mirrors came with us.

Speaker 2 So the next time I had to make a decision about the mirrors was when I moved to Chicago when I was 18.

Speaker 2 They were still in cardboard in the back of my parents' laundry room.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 when I packed up my set to move to Chicago,

Speaker 2 my dad asked if I wanted to take them with me and I said no.

Speaker 2 My mom asks why I don't want to bring the mirrors with me when I move. We were sitting in the kitchen

Speaker 2 and so I finally told her about the visions about the boy, about the other people, and

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 it freaked me out and that I didn't want to have them anymore.

Speaker 2 And she didn't seem surprised.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think everyone's mom has, you know, different faces that they make that you know, what that emotion means. Like, oh, I've known about this the whole time.

Speaker 2 It's nice that you finally fessed up.

Speaker 2 Like, that kind of a face.

Speaker 2 She told me that she already knew about it.

Speaker 2 I was kind of stunned that she already knew about it. Not only that she already knew about it, but that she wanted me to take them with me.

Speaker 2 She felt comfortable keeping the mirrors in the house, and why she felt comfortable, like, telling me to move them is because she had done something about it

Speaker 2 she had been visited by the devil at the same point

Speaker 2 and the devil told my mom that I had been messing around with the spirit world and shouldn't have been and that I had invited an evil element into our home

Speaker 2 She believes that the devil is a fallen angel whose job is to

Speaker 2 take care of the souls of the dead and the damned, and not that he's trying to lure people into a life of sin, so much as he's been charged with taking care of them.

Speaker 2 It seemed that he was concerned about my soul's future and that she needed to do something about this.

Speaker 2 And so while I was at school that fourth day, she exorcised my room and had cleansed all the evil spirits.

Speaker 2 So I have no idea

Speaker 2 what she did, but it seems to have worked. It was the most matter-of-fact thing I think I've ever heard.

Speaker 2 I was like, oh, okay, that makes a lot more sense than that, like, through my complete inaction. This stopped.
It makes a lot more sense that something was actually done, and that's why it stopped.

Speaker 2 When I was 28,

Speaker 2 and I had moved into a condo in Chicago that had,

Speaker 2 you know, basement storage space and extra closets, my parents end up bringing the mirrors up to Chicago.

Speaker 2 Why do these mirrors keep following me? I don't want them.

Speaker 2 I told my friend Beth the story about the ghosts many years before this when we first met when I moved to Chicago. So she's kind of always known

Speaker 2 that this was,

Speaker 2 you know, a part of my life.

Speaker 2 And she got really excited and was like, oh my god,

Speaker 2 can I have them? She's like, you don't want them? Can I have them? Can I make them into art? And so I said, absolutely, yes, please take them away.

Speaker 2 So, I'm not an artist, so I'm probably going to tell you the wrong method of whatever she's doing, but

Speaker 2 when you make something into a mirror, you use some sort of process that puts a silver glaze onto it. And she basically did the exact opposite, where she pulled the glaze off

Speaker 2 and then

Speaker 2 superimposed old photos that she got at thrift stores

Speaker 2 Like vintage photos of people that she thought looked like the people that I was telling her about.

Speaker 2 So it's still a mirror, but there's also, it looks like sort of a window with these pictures of people in them.

Speaker 2 So when I saw them in the gallery, the pictures

Speaker 2 are of real people and they were the wrong era.

Speaker 2 They didn't look like the ghosts that I saw. It was

Speaker 2 actually kind of refreshing.

Speaker 2 Like making a joke at their expense: oh, we've reimagined you, and now you're these people,

Speaker 2 and you can't scare me anymore.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Bonnie Black, for sharing your story to Spookt. We are so glad, so very happy to hear that you got rid of that dresser.
The original score was by Leon Morimoto.

Speaker 1 That piece was produced by Chris Hambrick.

Speaker 1 You've been listening to Spookt. And if you dig stories that were not born in the dark of the night time, check out our sister podcast.

Speaker 1 It's amazing storytelling, snap judgment, storytelling with the beat, snap judgment for the ORG.

Speaker 1 My name is from Washington. Spooked is produced by Mark Ristix by Anna Sussman, our chief spookster, Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen, Tiffany Lisa, Ann Ford, and Eric Yanez.

Speaker 1 Our sound team is Lauren Newsom, Renzo Gorio, and Leon Morimoto.

Speaker 1 The mistakes,

Speaker 1 y'all make a few.

Speaker 1 Some big, some small. I just request as a favor to me.

Speaker 1 One misstep you do not wish to make.

Speaker 1 Friends, believe me when I say never,

Speaker 1 ever,

Speaker 1 never, never, ever, never, ever, never,

Speaker 1 ever

Speaker 1 turn out

Speaker 1 the lance.