The Don't Look Back! Special - Snap Classic
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It was maybe the happiest I've ever been. Holding my brand new baby boy. You couldn't tell me nothing. Joy, joy, joy, joy. And I'm thinking I have a little girl and now I have this baby boy. Both of them perfect, created in love. Everything I've always wanted come true. I weep with happiness, with gratitude. And this bliss, it followed a few moments later.

by the most horrifying time in my life. We realized that something is wrong and I can't tell you that story right now. Not right ever. I can't. I will tell you that a few days later, exhausted, spent terrified for my little man. I'm leaving the neonatal intensive care unit, the NICU. Waiting for a moment to go home, to hug up my baby girl, maybe shower, eat something before returning to the hospital.

My father's at my house for some reason. I don't know why it's all a fog to me. What I do recall is that he says, son, I know we don't share the same beliefs, but I want you to know that I'm praying Jesus. I'm praying on Jesus for you both. And I'm praying on Jesus for that baby. My father and I, we don't share the same beliefs, but I can't recall telling him, pops, if you have any prayer, any God, any faith, any magic, any healing, any power that you can send to my little boy right now,

Whatever you have to do, do that. And he does. Bows his head to his God right there. And I bow my head to a force I had long ago stopped believing in. They say there are no atheists in foxholes. There are no atheists at the neonatal intensive care unit either. Crystals, magic lamps, amulets give me all of it. I don't care. Just help my baby boy. Help. And a few weeks later, pushing that stroller down,

Out of that place with that boy, I thought I was happy before. And Pops, he asked me later, isn't his God good? And I don't know who did what. The prayers, the gods, the nurses, the doctors, the faith, the angels. I don't know who let us depart from that place as if escaping a tomb. I do not know. And I do not care.

On Snap Judgment, we proudly present the Don't Look Back special. My name is Ken Washington. You don't know what you don't know when you're listening to Snap Judgment. Now, every year right around this time, we do a Look Back special. But this year, we're chaining up the soup and featuring amazing supernatural stories from our sister show, Spooked. And our first story, it does have a tiny bit of screamishness,

But not to worry, I promise. Because we get to meet Bill. And Bill's headed home from college for the holidays, driving to see his high school sweetheart. But he's got to make it through the Appalachian Mountains first. Snap Touchment. It's kind of a rainy, misty Sunday morning. I'm driving through an area that there are trees on the left, trees on the right, and I'm going down a hill. ♪

And it kind of swerves back and forth, back and forth, you know, like a snake. But my father used to say, you know, going around these curves, we can almost look out the car window and see the back of the car. But, you know, I was going to see my girlfriend. So, it's all worth it. The road makes a big swing to the left, right there. And on the right-hand side is this big muddy gully.

And when I tried to make that curve into the left, I slid off the road into the gullet. But I gunned the motor, trying to get out of the ditch and back on the road, like you do. And when the tires were spinning really fast and they caught, I sped up. And when I got on the road, I started to slide diagonally across the road over this cliff. And I realized at one point there...

I'm not going to stop. This car is not going to stop. And then, once I left the road and started going down that crevice, I don't remember that part. The next thing I knew, the car was right side up down at the bottom of that hill, sitting in a little creek bed, which had some water in it because it had been raining. And there I was, sitting in the car, still inside.

And I looked down and I had little pieces of broken glass in my arms. And it had just started to bleed. So I figured, well, I haven't been here very long. You know, I just blacked out there for a second as I came down and here I am. So I got out of the car and this is the strangest thing. I locked it and then realized this car was a total loss.

The windows were all broken. The engine was almost out. It had been dislodged. And I thought, well, I'm going to have to get out of here and get some help. And what am I going to tell my father? So I looked to where I was and I realized that I'm over a cliff out in the middle of nowhere. Anybody driving down that road, even if somebody does come down the road, they don't know I'm down here. They're not going to be able to see me. And it's raining heavily.

And I really thought about this, too: They're gonna have their windows up, because it's raining. So, I can yell all I want to, and nobody's gonna know I'm down here. There's not gonna be any help. If I make it, I'm gonna have to get out of here myself. The cliff was very steep. There was a light rain happening at the time. So, all of the leaves and the little saplings and everything... everything was wet.

And I looked up at the saplings and I thought, well, you know, maybe I can grab a hold of them, you know, pull myself up and maybe put my foot on some of them. Maybe I can actually get up there. And I tried to do it. And when I leaned over and something wet and sticky ran over the front of my face, what in the world is this? And I reached my hand up, wiped it off my face and it was blood.

And I put my hand up to my head and I could feel my scalp because my scalp had been cut from ear to ear and flipped backwards. So my hand is on my bare skull. So I grabbed my skin and pulled it back over like a little flap, then reached back again to grab a sapling. But I was losing a lot of blood. I mean, a lot.

Because now I'm covered, covered in my pants, my shirt, everything's bloody. And that's when I got really scared. Oh, don't go anywhere. Bill's car has just gone off the edge of a cliff. He's alone. It's raining. He's injured. Find out what or who comes next. Snap Judgment. Welcome back to Snap Judgment. You're listening to the Don't Look Back special podcast.

We're featuring stories crafted in the dark of night from our sister's show, Spooked. And when last we left, Bill had just crashed his car off the side of a cliff in a remote area. And he was severely injured. He began reaching for saplings on the side of the mountain to try and somehow make his way to safety. Snap Judgment.

And I tried to pull myself up and I got up a little bit and I was able to get one of my feet on a rock to try to push myself up a little further. And I looked up the cliff and I realized it's almost straight up. Then I reached up to try to grab another sapling. I just, I was, I just didn't have the strength. I didn't feel like I could do it. Up about another 40 feet or so, I felt strong.

Somebody looking at me up to the right. And there's a guy sitting on the front porch of this house, wearing a fedora hat, slacks and a shirt, sitting on the edge of the porch. And he had one leg propped up. And he was smoking a cigarette. But from where I was, down in that creek bed, the house was... It would have been a tough walk up to that house. When our eyes met...

Then he took a cigarette and flipped it on the ground and walked over and got in his car and started backing up that driveway. And when he came to the end of that driveway, I lost sight of him. I couldn't see that part right there where his car came to the main road. And then all of a sudden he kind of appears up above me. So he's up on the main road and I could see him from maybe the shoulders up.

and he still had on his fedora. He stuck his head out the window and he said, "Hey buddy, if you can get up this hill, I'll take you in town to the hospital." Yes, when he made his offer to me, I was still pretty far down that cliff, and it was almost straight up. So that's when I started climbing up the hill.

There were enough of those little tree saplings, about the size of your wrist. They were about that size. That I could grab one, pull myself up, and then put my foot on that one, and reach up and grab another one. And you know, it seemed like I had... I don't know. When I first tried to do it, before I noticed him, I couldn't do it. But when I knew he was up there, suddenly I just...

I don't know. It was like I had some kind of superpower. I could hoist myself up that cliff. I was surprised that I did it before I knew it. I was at the top. When I got to the top of the little cliff, and I reached up, and I grabbed his door handle and opened the door, and I got in. I'm really bloody. I mean, I'm going to make a mess. His car was kind of an older car, probably from the late 40s. ♪

It seemed like his entire car, the clothes he was wearing, the house and everything had no color to it. There was no red. There was no, everything was gray and brown. And he drives maybe a quarter of a mile or so. And he had this jacket kind of wadded up in the seat between the two of us. He picked up his jacket.

And without looking at me, looking straight ahead, handed it over to me and said, you know, buddy, I was in the war and I've seen people hurt like this. And if you don't do something about it, you're going to die. Take my jacket, put it on your head and hold it real tight. I took the jacket from him. And when he handed it to me, I recognized it immediately because my father had one exactly like it.

His jacket was a military jacket, an old waist-length jacket with kind of stretchy sleeves and a stretchy bottom and zipped up the front. I just took it to the top. I do remember reaching up and making sure that my little piece of skin was in the correct place there, my scalp. And I put the jacket down on the top of my head.

and held it really firm and I held it there all the way to town. When we got close to my hometown of Paintsville, he said, "Which hospital do you want to go to?" And I said, "Well, my mom used to work at the clinic, so let's go to that one." So in about a minute or two, we're at the clinic, which was on Main Street. He pulled up in front and he said, "I can't get out of the car."

Can you, are you okay? Can you make it? And I said, yeah, I think I'm going to be okay. I was really weak, but I opened the door, got out, and it was only like three steps that I had to step up. And he drove off. So he turned to the left and drove back in the same direction we had come in.

You know, I can't really remember much. I'd lost a lot of blood. When I got into the hospital, somehow I got upstairs to where the operating room was. The next thing I realized that I was lying on an operating table and somebody had a kind of a bowl underneath the back of my head and they're sewing me up.

They had called my mother. She came there and she was saying, are you okay? And I'm like, yeah, I'm all right. I'm fine. And she said, yeah, they gave you 55 stitches. You've got a cut all the way across the back of your head. Thank goodness you got here. And who was the guy that brought you? And I said, I have no idea. After I got out of the hospital, after about three days, I believe, my father said,

Why don't we go back out there and talk to that guy and talk to him about cleaning his car up because you evidently bled in it a lot. So we drove out to the scene where this happened. We just pulled out right there and he said, you know, right down there is where you went over and you could see the place where the car slid over and you could see the place in the gully that I had made on the right-hand side. And you could see on the left-hand side of the road where I had gone over the cliff and where I'd hit this rock.

And there was glass and stuff still down at the bottom of that little ravine. When we went out there, we pulled up to that little driveway. We just pulled out right there, and he said, there's no way you could have been in that driveway. That little road that led from the main road, Highway 40, over to his house was grown up with weeds.

Weeds like waist-high... some of them really big weeds... and there was no way a car could have been parked between that road and that house. We're talking about three or four days. There's no way those weeds could have grown up in just three or four days. Now, I know...

I just had a traumatic accident. You know, I got hit in the head. So, maybe I don't remember things correctly, but I distinctly remember his car sitting in the driveway and him walking out and getting in that car. So, I asked, you know, my girlfriend's mom and dad and other people that lived around there, "Who is this guy?" They said, "Nobody has lived in that old house for a long time." So, whoever he was, he doesn't live there.

You know, at the time, yeah, I was only 19 years old. I was just happy to be alive and healing up and back to school, get on with my life. But as time has gone by, I think about this. I don't think I'm special or, you know, that somebody saved me for something. But I've always wondered if maybe there's something I'm supposed to have done or have done. Maybe I've already done it.

Or maybe I haven't done it yet. Have you ever heard the story about the little old lady whose car is broken down and a guy comes along and stops and helps her? And she says, thank you very much. Can I pay you? He goes, no, no, no, you don't owe me anything. Just the chain of love continues. She goes in a little restaurant for a bite to eat and a waitress who's pregnant comes over.

And the lady says, I'll pay it forward and leaves her a big tip of like hundreds of dollars. And then that night, the waitress is home with her husband and says, a lady gave me this big tip. And her husband is the guy, the guy that helped the old lady. I believe in that. Ten years later, almost exactly ten years later, it was Christmas Eve, 1971.

I was driving home to see my mother in Paintsville, Kentucky and in the middle of the exit ramp was a car upside down. And I had heard that sometimes people do block exit ramps and when you get out to help, you know, they they waylay you. So, I parked on up the exit ramp. So, I was, I don't know, 50 feet away or something like that. I opened my trunk and got my tire iron, big metal

And I kind of held it behind my leg as I walked down there. Well, I realized pretty soon that this really was a wreck. And the two guys that were standing there evidently had come by next. And they were both drunk. They didn't know what to do. And I came up and I said, you know, what's going on? They said, you know, this guy's wrecked and we can see him in there. And the car started burning a little bit. It was upside down.

And when the hot gas hit the muffler, it started to flame. And this thing is going to burn up pretty soon. So one of the guys said, you know, we need to break that window. I happen to have that tire in my hand. You know, we mashed the window out, broke all the glass out. And one of those guys pulled this guy out of his car.

and one of his Christmas gifts. One gift out of his car, and he had it full. I mean, he was surrounded by, and these were all wrapped packages with ribbons, and they were all around him. He must have had the whole back of that car full of gifts for his family. When the car caught on fire, they all burned up, burst into flame, and we gave him the one gift that we've been able to save out of the car.

In the meantime, they called the local fire department. They were putting out the fire and I drove on home to see mother. But I just wondered, maybe that was it. It happened almost exactly 10 years later. Or maybe it hasn't happened yet. Spooksters, let this be a reminder to you. Always take extra care when rounding those tight curves. You never know who's going to be nearby watching over you. A big thank you to Bill Love for sharing his story with the Spooked.

The original score for that piece was by Leon Morimoto. It was produced by Annie Nguyen. Don't go anywhere because after the break, we're back on the road headed to rural Montana and a snowstorm is coming. Stay. Stay.

Welcome back to Snap Judgment. You're listening to the Don't Look Back special. My name is Dem Washington, and we're sharing stories from our Supernatural Sisters show, Spooked. Now, I've heard some people driving, listening to Spooked. They get so engaged, they forget to make their turn. I understand. What if you really did get lost? Really lost? Who'd come to save you? Our next story comes to us from the wilds of rural Montana. Snap Judgment.

I was an EMT, which is the emergency medical technician in Dillon, Montana. This story takes place on New Year's Eve, 1987. I was having dinner with my boyfriend at that time. His name was Hank. And we were having New Year's Eve dinner. I was on call 24-7, and so I just wore a pager all the time.

And I got a page, and the page said, "Man down in alley." And so I immediately responded, and I said I had to go on this call. So I got to the young man. He was about 14 years old, and he was having seizures. The boy had freckles. He was a red-headed, green-eyed boy.

So we were trying to contain him enough to protect him, but he was 14. He was a pretty good-sized boy, and it took a lot of the police, and these guys are big guys, to control his body enough that we could strap him down. We transport him to the hospital, which was about three minutes away, and they immediately did blood tests, and they came back and told us that

there was cocaine in his system and they said there must have been something else in there, laced it with something, and that they were going to keep him, you know, put him in ICU right away. And actually as I'm thinking about this, I remember with that boy making eye contact with him at one time and he knew he wasn't going to be okay. He knew.

And yet we went for it anyway. We did everything to save that boy's life. Even though his body was still there, there was something missing. He wasn't dead. His body was alive, but his soul had already moved on. So I'm going to ask you just to imagine that it was New Year's Eve in your life and you had just seen a young boy die.

in grandma's seizures, and then you find out that the reason this boy is so seriously ill is because he got some cocaine that was laced with something, would you get mad? Especially if you knew that the man that possibly brought in the drugs was your boyfriend. When I went home, I just couldn't sleep because I knew that Hank was

was bringing in drugs. And it was just so upsetting to me that perhaps that boy got one of his drugs. I went to bed for a little bit. It's about 3 o'clock in the morning, and I got in my car, and that's one way that I can calm my little spirit is by going into nature, going for a drive. ♪

It's cold, it's dark, and in Montana these old roads, I mean they're just two-lane highways, and I just headed to where I knew where it was always calming for me, which was Yellowstone Park, which was about three hours away. So it was a nice little drive. I probably hit there maybe 5.30 in the morning or something. It was still dark there.

And I remember turning off, and then I just went, wow, this road doesn't seem like the same place that I usually go. It was cold. It was very cold, and there was probably about 2 1⁄2, 3 feet of snow. I think the biggest thing I was thinking was, I knew that they were bringing those drugs in. And it made me very mad and angry.

So my mind was really playing tapes of, if I did this, I could do this. If I did that, I could do this. I realized I was lost probably about an hour up the road. And it was just, the wind was shaking the car when I was driving. It was just blowing so hard, this blizzard. And I knew I couldn't try and turn around because I would get stuck.

And then I went, man, this is not good. As I'm driving, the snow is literally just coming over the car. It was so deep, I was pushing through it, and it was coming over the top of the car. And I reached down into my jockey box to see if I had any food, and I had half a piece of gum. And I didn't have any water. I didn't have any other food.

I still had about a half a tank of gas or so, and I decided that if I would stop and then just turn the engine off until I, you know, got really cold, and then I would start it up. I probably had enough gas for about six hours. I don't even know where I am, and there is so much snow, and the blizzard is happening. If this continues, my car will be completely covered. They won't find me, and...

I went, this is it. This is where I'm going to die. And I just kept thinking about my daughter Brandy. And then I heard a truck come up behind me. And this guy pulls up. He's got this, I think it was about a 60 Ford pickup. Blue and white. He had a cowboy hat on. He's got the guns in the back. I would say he was probably in his 50s. ♪

He was really tall, and he had a brown hat, and his hair was kind of that dirty, blondie brown. It was all straggly, and he had a beard and blue jeans, and his face was full of wrinkles. And he just said, What in the hell are you doing out here? And started yelling at me, and I'm like, I don't really know what I'm doing out here. ♪

I think I told him, I think I'm lost. And he just kept asking me, who are you? Who are you? And I was trying to tell him who I was, but he wouldn't listen to me. He just kept on, who are you? What are you doing? What are you doing? And...

I really started getting scared because he was getting pretty loud, you know, and the rifles were in the truck. And he looked at my plates and he says, you're from Montana. I said, yeah. And he says, well, do you even know where you are? And I said, I have no clue. And he said, well, you're in Idaho. And he said, I'll follow you and I'm going to show you how to get out of here. And so I got my car and I started driving and there's still no road there.

And he was so close to me that I could see him. He had green eyes. They were emerald green eyes. And he was right on my tail. And then he starts honking his horn, just laying on his horn, so I stop. And then he walks up to my car, and he says, Okay, down there, do you see the telephone post? And I could see him in the distance. And he says, Just follow the fence line. And you could see a fence line down there.

And he says, it'll get you to that town. And then he says, there's a gas station down there. Go to the house and knock on the door in the back of the gas station and they'll help you. And I got in the car and I'm driving and he's right on my butt again. I was watching where I was going, but also watching him. And then he just vanished, just disappeared.

And I thought, well, he must have taken a road or went off the road, you know, off somewhere. And so I stopped and I got out and then I backed up a little bit because it was like, where could he have gone? He just disappeared. There was no sign. And then I looked down and there was only one set of tracks and they were my car tracks. ♪

There was no other car tracks. There were no truck tracks. This is weird. Like, how could that have happened? Because I know he was there. I never touched him, and he never touched me, but I could smell his breath. I, you know, I could feel the heat coming off his body. He was so close to me. For him just to vanish like that, it was like, what could that have been?

I got chicken skin, you know, like, even though he was really angry, that man was really angry at me, there was a genuine caring about me. I remember looking into his eyes and wondering, where did he come from? And then I remembered that boy, and he had the same kind of eyes,

They were green, although the little boy's eyes were all bloodshot and stuff. It was like the same eyes, same color eyes, that emerald green. Oh my God, it was the spirit of that boy. And I know that's who came. I got back in my car after checking out the car track thing and headed towards the telephone post. And I got to a little town called Dubois.

And I stopped and went to the house, knocked on the door. They gave me some gas. And then I headed back to my brother's house where they were having a New Year's Day party. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Valerie, for sharing your story. Valerie's story comes to us from the book Trucker Ghost Stories. It's edited by Annie Wilder. Original score was by Leon Morimoto. It was produced by Eliza Smith. ♪♪

Oh, yes. This is but one episode crafted in the dark of night. If you want more spook, if you need more spook, the new season of spook is streaming right now. Spook season of the wolf. Amazing stories from people who can scarcely believe it happened themselves. Available this very moment on each and every podcast platform.

Spook was created by the team that walks under the light of the full moon. Except, of course, for Mark Ristich. We can't get those roller skates off him. There's Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Newsome, Leon Morimoto, Davey Kim, Renzo Gorio, Taylor Ducat, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Ferrigno, Tiffany DeLisa, Ann Ford, Doug Stewart, Isaiah Sims. The Spook theme song is by Pat Massini-Miller. My name is from Washington.

Know that people tend to hide the things most dear to them in the darkness, in the underground, in the shadow. The first mistake is to fail to consider who you are hiding your secrets from. As for me, everything I hold dear, I like to keep it close. And I never, ever, never, ever, ever, ever turn out the lights.