I'm Not Your Brother

Speaker 1 I am my brother's keeper, is what I vowed to be. But while I watched my brother,

Speaker 1 Shadow, watch for me.

Speaker 1 You've crossed over to Spook.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned.

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Speaker 1 Okay, so. What I did was wrong.

Speaker 1 And I'm not proud of this, right?

Speaker 1 Actually, you know what?

Speaker 1 I'm kind of proud of this because in high school, this was an odd day. A very odd day because I get home from school.

Speaker 1 And instead of the usual chaos, the craziness, there's no mom, there's no dad, no sisters, no hangers on. The house is quiet,

Speaker 1 tranquil.

Speaker 1 I go downstairs to the bedroom I share with my brother and there he is.

Speaker 1 napping peacefully on the lower bunk bed after what I assume was a long day.

Speaker 1 Do I leave him be

Speaker 1 and quietly exit the room? No.

Speaker 1 Now this is wholly impossible. I am the older brother and this is both an opportunity and a responsibility.
I take it very seriously. No, instead

Speaker 1 I push my awake face

Speaker 1 right next to his sleeping one

Speaker 1 less than an inch away from his ear.

Speaker 1 I take a deep breath.

Speaker 1 Then I shout at the top of my lungs. Get up!

Speaker 1 Get up!

Speaker 1 His head pops up and slams against the upper bump. Get up, I said.
Murderous rage. What is your problem? You don't understand.

Speaker 1 I tell him, Jesus has returned. Huh? Jesus, fool.
Jesus is here. Mom and dad took off with him.
The rapture is happening right now.

Speaker 1 Horror on his face. What? Jesus! Ain't much time.
I told Jesus you'd meet him at the 7-Eleven, but you got to go now, huh? Go! Quick as you can.

Speaker 1 No time to argue. He leaps out of the bedroom, up into the garage, jumps on his bike, and starts pedaling away with a speed.
Hurry! Hurry!

Speaker 1 So then.

Speaker 1 It makes me a snag.

Speaker 1 Peanut butter and jelly. Watch a little TV.
Chilling.

Speaker 1 My mom, dad, baby brother, sister return from the grocery store. Mom starts cooking.
I help my sister with her homework. The mama's like, where's your brother at? It's almost time to eat.
Hmm.

Speaker 1 Midway through dinner, he comes in.

Speaker 1 Boiling with anger, with fury, with shame. Where you been?

Speaker 1 Mama asks,

Speaker 1 now,

Speaker 1 he can't really say nothing because he ain't a snitch, right?

Speaker 1 So he mumbles at my parents, hisses at me,

Speaker 1 and heads off to plot his revenge.

Speaker 1 I think about this

Speaker 1 often.

Speaker 1 My brother with his bicycle,

Speaker 1 how scared and afraid he must have been.

Speaker 1 Waiting alone at the 7-Eleven for any sign of his savior. No Snickers bars, no steals, just standing by the slurkey machine under the fluorescent lights, knowing

Speaker 1 the world had come to an end.

Speaker 1 Hoping Jesus would not forget him, like a pastor promised.

Speaker 1 I think about this.

Speaker 1 That frightened boy,

Speaker 1 and I laughed myself wretched,

Speaker 1 just like older brothers everywhere.

Speaker 1 Now

Speaker 1 Okay, so picture this:

Speaker 1 you're just 12 years old, Living with your mom's in a big house in a small village near Puerto Rico.

Speaker 1 You're both sleeping. And you're definitely not expecting any guests tonight, but

Speaker 1 well,

Speaker 1 Fernando Hernandez brings us a story of Luis Peña.

Speaker 1 Spooked.

Speaker 4 It's almost 3.30 in the morning and Luis Peña is in his bed sleeping.

Speaker 1 The only thing you would get to listen to is crickets and nature or wind.

Speaker 1 I'm pleasantly sleeping and then I hear my brother Alvaro calling me.

Speaker 1 Mega, Mega, wake up. Wake up, please.

Speaker 1 Against my wheel, I wake up and I see him right there.

Speaker 1 It's his voice, his thin, tall silhouette. He's just there,

Speaker 1 laying on the doorframe as he usually does.

Speaker 1 I'm like, what's going on? What do you want?

Speaker 1 He's like, what are you doing? And I tell him, well,

Speaker 1 I was asleep until you woke me up, you asshole.

Speaker 4 Oh, to have a big brother.

Speaker 4 But yeah, Luis's brother Alvaro was infamous for dropping by in the middle of the night. But the thing is, Alvaro was not supposed to be home that particular night.

Speaker 1 Then I tell him, I thought you were gonna be waiting for Michaela in pass station to go and pick her up. So, what are you doing here?

Speaker 1 And he says, I'm not your brother.

Speaker 1 And then I just have this

Speaker 1 freaky moment of realization.

Speaker 1 And I started shaking, and I'm even afraid to ask him,

Speaker 1 So, who are you?

Speaker 1 And the only thing he does is laughing.

Speaker 1 He started disappearing

Speaker 1 by his waist.

Speaker 1 And then boom!

Speaker 1 He's all gone. He just vanished completely.

Speaker 1 I stopped breathing. It took me two, three seconds to just

Speaker 1 come back to myself.

Speaker 4 Luis covers his head with a pillow and waits until his mom wakes up at 6 a.m.

Speaker 1 She goes to my room.

Speaker 1 She just sees me there shaking and crying and she asks me, Miho, what's going on? Are you okay?

Speaker 1 I'm like, there was this

Speaker 1 spirit that pretended to be my brother.

Speaker 1 She just says, so relaxed, oh no, no, no, no, calm down.

Speaker 1 It was a dream. It was a nightmare.
You were half asleep. It was not a ghost.
So just go back to sleep and it's going to be okay.

Speaker 4 Then two weeks later, again at 6 a.m., his mom walks into his room. But this time, she's the one shaking.

Speaker 1 And she's like, Mijo, wake up, wake up. And I'm like, What's going on?

Speaker 1 And she said, I saw him.

Speaker 1 I saw him.

Speaker 1 Just like you said, just like your brother's silhouette and he had the same voice. And he said to me, please come, I want to show you something.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 4 I just followed him. Luis's mom followed this silhouette into the kitchen, her heart pounding in her chest.
But in a blink of an eye, it was gone. It was now outside, walking through the backyard.

Speaker 1 She said, and then I saw him just keeping walking, and all of a sudden he just disappeared in the shadows.

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Speaker 1 And as my mom keeps telling me the story, I was kind of drowning in emotions because it was a combination of

Speaker 1 shock and at the same time joy

Speaker 1 because I was not the only one experiencing it.

Speaker 4 Luis's mom knew they had to do something.

Speaker 4 So, soon after this night, they went to a church. After Mass, she pulled the priest aside for a hushed conversation, while Luis waited nervously outside.

Speaker 1 What this priest told my mom is that there's this demon or entity that usually picks the weakest person or the weakest soul in a family and that's the person they impersonate.

Speaker 1 Because they want to take their place in that family.

Speaker 4 But this explanation wasn't what she wanted to hear. So she got a second opinion from a spiritist that lived nearby.

Speaker 1 And funny enough, he tells my mom the same thing that the priest told her. He told her that usually this person is the one who always gets in trouble.
And he was right, because that's my brother.

Speaker 1 He's a troublemaker. He's usually picking on classmates, even picking on teachers.

Speaker 1 As for me, he's always bullying me, he's always picking on me or giving me nicknames like Mega.

Speaker 1 So, what the priest and the spiritist told my mom is that we had to close all of the windows and alternative exits in my house, light up everything with candles, but also adding salt.

Speaker 1 salt pads that led the ghost or the entity to the exit, to the main door of the house, and asking this entity politely to leave.

Speaker 4 So that's what they do. A couple of days later, Luis and his mom gathered candles and proceeded with this cleansing ritual.

Speaker 4 But they decide not to tell any of this to Alvaro. Why make him worry?

Speaker 1 We had to open all of the windows and all of the doors. There were at least 20, 30 candles all around the house, because they had to lead to whatever window or door we had.

Speaker 1 As soon as we started lighting up the candles, we had to start praying, and we said, We are showing you the way to leave our house, because this is not your house.

Speaker 1 It was somehow a beautiful spiritual ritual, but at the same time, it was creepy.

Speaker 1 One night, I had this very light sleep.

Speaker 1 I hear a voice, Mega, Mega, wake up, wake up.

Speaker 1 You're gonna be running late, and the teacher is gonna be picking on you.

Speaker 1 When I hear that, I think he's back, but he's trying to pull out my nerves.

Speaker 1 And I got the goosebumps.

Speaker 1 Maybe the ritual didn't work.

Speaker 4 Luis couldn't shake the feeling that this thing was back.

Speaker 4 He told his mom the next day, and she too had enough.

Speaker 4 It wasn't long before she made up her mind. The whole family, including Alvaro, was moving to Puerto Vallarta to get away from this house.

Speaker 1 When we finally moved to Puerto Vallarta, I felt happy. My brother now seems to be more connected to my mom.
He was making more money. He was having new stuff to do.

Speaker 4 Things seemed to be going well for the family. No unwanted nighttime visitor.

Speaker 4 But after a year of peace, Luis learns that his dad, after many years in the US, was moving back to Mexico, back into the house in La Huerta.

Speaker 4 Alvaro is most excited to hear of this homecoming.

Speaker 1 My brother had always been a daddy's boy, so as soon as he hears the news, he wants to go back to La Huerta with my dad.

Speaker 1 So they live together for a few months, like three months, and everything seems to be fine.

Speaker 4 At this point, Luis still hasn't seen his dad since he moved back.

Speaker 4 But that all changed on December 24th.

Speaker 4 It's early morning. Luis is at home with his mom when he hears a knock at the front door.

Speaker 1 I open the door and I see him there.

Speaker 1 Now he has these gray hairs and very, very thick eyebrows that you see in people when they start to get older.

Speaker 1 He's also so surprised to see me because now I'm a big boy and he tells me right away, you grew up a lot. Now I'm six foot two.

Speaker 1 We were talking for just a while, you know about school and friends and funny enough 10-15 minutes later he asked me hey son

Speaker 1 when you were living in lauerta did you ever see

Speaker 1 or

Speaker 1 hear anything odd or weird

Speaker 1 I ask him back, what do you mean by odd or weird?

Speaker 1 So he tells me, well, one night it was 6 a.m.

Speaker 1 And I heard someone knocking at the door and calling me, Alo,

Speaker 1 wake up.

Speaker 1 Wake up.

Speaker 1 And you know, I thought it was your brother because he was calling me Alo. You are the only people that call me Alo.

Speaker 1 So my dad says, what happened, son?

Speaker 1 He looks back to the door, and that's where this silhouette of my brother is in the dark, calling him.

Speaker 1 So he asked him, Are you okay, son? And he goes, Oh, yes, I'm okay, but I want to show you something. Come with me.

Speaker 1 So that's what my dad did.

Speaker 1 He started following the silhouette until the exit of the house,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 somehow he sees that this silhouette just

Speaker 1 disappeared.

Speaker 1 My dad then went to my brother's room and he saw him sleeping.

Speaker 1 But then

Speaker 1 he saw this silhouette behind the window

Speaker 1 and this

Speaker 1 thing

Speaker 1 was just pointing at my brother while he was asleep.

Speaker 1 This entity looks just like my brother so my dad is seeing my brother twice.

Speaker 1 That's the point where my dad thinks, what the fuck is going on?

Speaker 1 He thinks that that thing pointing at my brother is going to kill him.

Speaker 1 So he runs towards my brother and starts shaking him.

Speaker 1 And he's like, mijo, mijo, mijo.

Speaker 1 He's crying.

Speaker 1 And then my brother, all confused, just wakes up. He's like, what's going on? And my dad told him, Oh my god, I just saw this thing, this silhouette that looks like you, he sounds like you.

Speaker 1 Are you okay?

Speaker 1 So my brother just answers, Oh, I mean, yeah, Nacho and my mom have been telling me that there is this ghost that pretends to be me, but I've never seen him.

Speaker 1 I tell him, yes, yes, that's exactly what we've been through.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 all of this happened, I felt a little relief because not only was me and my mom, it was my dad.

Speaker 1 My dad asked me, why did you never tell me any of that?

Speaker 1 And I told him, well,

Speaker 1 you were not living with us and you were not even in the country actually.

Speaker 1 And my brother seemed to be doing just fine.

Speaker 4 Hearing that Luis and his mom had seen this doppelganger was enough for Luis's dad. He immediately decided to leave La Guerta for good.

Speaker 1 He preferred to rent a house downtown because of how worried he was about my brother and his soul and this thing

Speaker 1 showing up, so he decided to leave leave that house behind.

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Speaker 4 Yet, still, the identity of this thing still haunted Luis.

Speaker 4 So, the next time he visited his grandpa, who had spent his entire life in La Guerta, Luis shared everything that had happened to him and the family.

Speaker 1 I remember he was laying and hanging on a hammock he used to have in his porch,

Speaker 1 and I started telling him there was this entity that pretended to be my brother.

Speaker 1 I see my grandpa's face and he's just closing his eyes.

Speaker 1 And he starts telling me, you know, there used to be this guy called Mr. Santiago Garcia.

Speaker 1 I'm just like, who?

Speaker 1 He said, Santiago Garcia used to be the previous owner. of the house.
He used to be really tall,

Speaker 1 like six foot five,

Speaker 1 very, very thin, and also

Speaker 1 very sarcastic and annoying. And in many ways, he looked and sounded like your brother.

Speaker 1 Now I had new questions. I thought this was just a spirit impersonating my brother.

Speaker 1 And then I asked him, so what happened to him?

Speaker 4 Luis's grandpa told him the story of a tragic night back in the 1970s that started out as a New Year's celebration.

Speaker 1 On New Year's Eve, when the bells ring, Mr. Santiago Garcia wanted to fire some shots from his favorite gun.
That's usually the tradition in some places in Mexico.

Speaker 1 But he couldn't find his gun. And what his wife told him was that Mr.
Angel, one of his neighbors, had stolen the gun.

Speaker 1 So for New Year's Eve, everyone gathers in the main plaza. Everyone's there and Mr.
Santiago sees that Mr. Angel pulls out a gun.
He thinks that's his gun.

Speaker 1 It is identical. When he sees him firing it, he's just raging.
So, maybe because of the alcohol, he decided to shoot him in front of everyone else in the main plaza.

Speaker 1 After realizing what he just did, he tried to escape, and the whole community wanted to get him because he had just killed a neighbor.

Speaker 1 They chased him and killed him right there, right in his house.

Speaker 4 After Santiago Garcia was killed, his house remained vacant for years until Luis's grandpa bought it.

Speaker 4 Then he gave it to Luis's father, who tore the old house down and rebuilt a new home on the same forsaken land.

Speaker 1 After hearing the whole story, I felt shocked. My reaction was disbelief.
I was telling my grandpa that this entity was always guiding my parents somewhere,

Speaker 1 and that we thought that maybe he was guiding us to some sort of treasure or buried belongings.

Speaker 1 And my grandpa said, even if there was anything buried in there, no one should just discover it, because you don't know what you could unleash.

Speaker 1 There's just some things that are meant to remain hidden.

Speaker 4 Luis says that they have never tried to connect with Mr. Santiago.
Even after dad moved out, they never disturbed the land, never searched for hidden treasures.

Speaker 4 The land holds dark memories the family would rather forget.

Speaker 1 A year ago, we celebrated my brother's birthday, and he seemed so happy he just couldn't hide his smile when he was blowing up the candles.

Speaker 1 My brother tells the story of how everyone in the family saw a ghost that pretended to be him, and he says, You know, my dad was getting all paranoid, and odd things started happening to me, so everyone was freaking out, and I just remained so calmly

Speaker 1 till this day. He takes it as a joke, obviously, because he didn't go through the stress we had.

Speaker 1 I can't believe how you can be so concerned about someone and he's not concerned at all about himself.

Speaker 1 I mean, I love him. I'm still gonna be here for him, but he's not gonna change.
What are we gonna do?

Speaker 1 Thank you, Luis, for sharing your story with Spooked.

Speaker 1 If you'd like to hear a Spanish version of this story, produced by Fernando Hernandez for his podcast Esto no Es Radio, you can find the link in our show notes.

Speaker 1 The original score for this story is by Dirk Schwarzhoff. It was produced by Fernando Hernandez.

Speaker 1 Please understand.

Speaker 1 We here at Spook are trained professionals equipped to seek voices in the night. So if you have a story that you want to share, but are afraid of any potential unforeseen consequences, not to fear.

Speaker 1 Let me know. Spooked at snapjudgment.org because there's nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener.

Speaker 1 The entry to Spook Studios is a quantum state that blinks in and out of existence under and above KQED in San Francisco. Don't seek to find it.
Let's get seek to find you.

Speaker 1 We've got the special incantation from Spook Legal reading that no Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission.

Speaker 1 Spook is brought to you by the team that eats vegetarian several times a week. Except for Mark Ristich, who eats vegetarians several times a week.

Speaker 1 On Team Spook, the the union represented producers, artists, engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL, CIL, Local51,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 there's David Kim,

Speaker 1 Zoe Frigno,

Speaker 1 Eric Yanez, Teodo DeCott, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Suyi Chu, Evan Stern, Eves Jeffcote, Ishelle Lopez, Jack Darrell, and Doug Stewart. The spook theme song is by Pat Pat Messini Miller.

Speaker 1 My name is Gone Washington. And Jim Rohn,

Speaker 1 the American entrepreneur, said something like,

Speaker 1 you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

Speaker 1 And I consider this. Do I credit the people who embrace me?

Speaker 1 Or do I shame them?

Speaker 1 Because Rock said something like, if 10 regular guys hang out with one Nazi, you've got 11 Nazis.

Speaker 1 Because Because you've become who you stand next to.

Speaker 1 You become who you allow to stand next to you.

Speaker 1 Your circle of associates, it's a signal, it's a sign, a warning, an invitation, and it's interesting.

Speaker 1 Then too,

Speaker 1 watch so many of us express allegiance, the very worst amongst us,

Speaker 1 sporting signals, identifiers, sigils that say,

Speaker 1 I am on the side of the monster.

Speaker 1 I am team dark mask in the night. We wear the rainment, we wave the flags, and twist every slight against the monster

Speaker 1 into an attack against ourselves.

Speaker 1 Instead of becoming our brother's keeper, our neighbor's keeper,

Speaker 1 we become our monster's keeper.

Speaker 1 All of this to suggest that if you are the five people you spend the most time with,

Speaker 1 choose wisely

Speaker 1 and never ever ever

Speaker 1 never

Speaker 1 ever ever ever

Speaker 1 turn out

Speaker 1 the lights.

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