Dead or Alive?
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I burned the books of wind and rain, of sleep and rage and joy and pain, and all the books that gods could write. Why did they hide the book of light? You're listening to Spooked. Stay.

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I don't hear voices anymore. Don't see the dancing shadows. And I can't even remember the last time my grandmother sat at the foot of my bed to tell me stories of back when she was alive. To sing songs, to rail against my aunties.

No more visits in the nighttime. And at first, this absence, this quiet, it comforted me. Huge, uninterrupted stretches of sleep without the nocturnal parade. Glorious. Wonderful. But now it's been a while. A long while. And I wonder if a door has locked fast behind me. One I didn't even notice. And now...

I'm refused entry into the castle I've lived in all my life, a passage I assumed as my birthright. Sometimes I wonder too, in the middle of the now quiet night, what price I would have to pay to make them return my key. Spook stars. Now, Ireland. It's one of those places where some claim the veil between the quick and the dead is particularly thin. Everyone seems to have a ghost story or two or three.

And our storyteller, Aisling, she is no exception. Except Aisling, she spent a lot of time thinking about what a ghost even is in the first place. Spooked.

I was raised in such a way that's not unusual in Irish families, where the supernatural ghosts and the afterlife are kind of talked about as if they're a normal everyday thing. They're not talked about as if they're a fantasy. As a child, Aisling didn't question the existence of ghosts at all. It was just a fact. It was just ghosts existed and that's how it was. I didn't really start

thinking about it more critically and start thinking, well, what does that mean until I was older? I'm 17 when my son is born and very quickly after that, I want to move into my own place. I don't want to move too far away from my parents, but I feel like I just need my own space.

So I find a house that's up for rent and it's only a short walk from my parents' house. So it's at the end of a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of the village, just underneath a big mountain.

It's a brick house, two-story, three-bedroom, with a pretty big garden actually that came the whole way around to the front. It's a pretty standard Irish terraced house, which means there's a row of them connected to each other, but this house is at the very end. And this house, until very recently, had been a priest's house. The priest who baptised my son had lived in that house.

Aisling doesn't have much money. She's a student and a young single mother. But still, she wants to do everything she can to make her new house her own. Someone gave me paint. I painted the kitchen. I got wallpaper, sort of very cool, funky 70s vintage wallpaper that I found in like a

a junk store. It's a really psychedelic sort of arabesque kind of pattern, swirling purple and pink and I put it up myself. I had absolutely no idea how to do that properly but I figured it out and tried to kind of make it feel like my space. But I don't feel happy in that house. I don't feel comfortable. Part of it is probably just moving out of my parents' home for the first time and being a bit afraid of

all the responsibility that comes with running a house by yourself. Part of it is kind of picking up that I'm not the most popular person in this street. Some of my close neighbours at the time are really judgmental and really unwelcoming and kind of make my life a misery, to be honest. I have a neighbour who persistently calls pest control, even though I didn't have a pest issue.

I'm kind of walking around under a cloud of judgment a lot of the time. And it was really hard, you know. But also, I didn't feel welcome on like a subliminal level. So there's one evening I'm watching TV and I'm the only person there. Baby's asleep upstairs. And my chair is positioned with the back of the chair to the door. And I just get this feeling that there's something moving towards me.

Something has come in through the door and it's moving towards me and it's standing behind me. When there's somebody else in the room you just know that they're there. It's that feeling, that kind of indefinable sense of another presence. I turn around, there's nothing there. But I can't shake this feeling that there are eyes just looking at me, that there's someone behind me. I fairly constantly have a feeling that if not that I'm being watched, that I'm not alone.

So it's about 2am, it's pretty late. I'm reading and I have a little lamp on beside my bed but the rest of the room is pretty much in darkness. And I become aware that in the corner of the room that is more in darkness there is the figure of a woman.

I just suddenly notice that she's there. Like she could have been there already for some time before I noticed that she's there. But my attention is somehow drawn and then I'm just transfixed and I don't move. I just freeze. She's facing into the corner. She's quite short, sort of a short squat woman. Like she's on the heavier side and she's wearing a housecoat.

like something you put on over your clothes to protect them while you're doing housework. And it's white with big orange and brown flowers. And she's got quite thick legs. But I can't see her head. There's nothing where her head should be. And then I thought, I don't want to think that. She's just hunched over. She's hanging her head down. She does have a head. But what I was actually afraid of was that she had no head. I just stare at her.

I just look and wait to see what's going to happen. Is she going to turn around? Is she going to speak? I'm just waiting.

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She's perfectly still, but not so much that you would think she was frozen. You can see her shoulders move slightly when she breathes, and then she just goes. She's just not there anymore. Like a puff of smoke, she's just there one instant, then she's not.

That's when the adrenaline hits. It's just an electrifying jolt. My heart starts beating. I start to feel shaky a little bit. I start to feel freaked out. And I know that I'm not going to sleep tonight. No way. I go downstairs and go into the living room because I don't want to be in that room. I turn on the TV. I watch MTV until it's time to get my son up in the morning.

The next day, Aisling decides to tell her mom about what she saw in the house. I describe her and my mother said that she knew exactly who that was. It was this lady who had lived in this house before it became a priest's house. My mother's family lived in that village 400 years. So my mother lived in the village at the time that this woman lived there too, which was the 60s.

and she always wore a house coat just like that one. White with orange and brown flowers. I had kind of been trying to talk myself into, oh, that was some sort of a dream or something, you know. So when she said that, I just felt my blood run cold. She lived alone in the house. She was single. She didn't have any kids. She had died on the front porch of the house just before she got her key in the door.

She had a brain aneurysm and dropped dead. I understand that she was found by neighbours. I don't know how long she lay there before someone found her. I have wondered if there's a reason why she appeared to me. I wonder what she would think of me as a woman from the 1960s in Ireland when things were so much worse than they even are now. I'm a single woman also in that house by myself. Maybe on some level that's what that was about. It was a

Kind of maybe kinship or reaching out. That's when I started really actually thinking critically about ghosts and the afterlife and how these things could exist. I start getting quite philosophical about what a ghost is. What is a ghost? I moved to the city and about six years or so passes. I meet my partner and we move in together into...

a house that he his whole life had wanted to live in. There's this house in Belfast that is called by many people the John Hewitt House. John Hewitt is a famous Irish poet. He lived in that house until he died.

It's a beautiful little cottage. It was built in the 1930s. It's got like fruit trees in the garden and a kitchen garden, a herb garden, stuff like that. And it's so pretty. It's got roses around the door, that whole kind of thing. We love it. We move into this house and my sister drives the moving van for us, which is very nice of her. And after we drop off all the boxes, we say, hey, let's just go to the pub.

and have a pint because that was a really long day. And when we're in the pub, not very long even, this guy I've never met before in my life comes straight over to me and says, you live in the John Hewitt house? And I said, yes, I do. I actually just moved in today. And he said, it's haunted, you know. I've seen his ghost. And when he said his, he means John Hewitt. And my friends who lived there before me, they've seen it. Lots of people have seen it.

And he says, so if you see him, don't be freaked out or anything. He was a really nice man. And anyway, he doesn't know he's dead. And I said, well, that makes it much worse because then he's going to be thinking, what are you doing in my house? You know, I do feel apprehensive. I don't want to see a ghost, even a good one. I just don't want to see one full stop. And it stays in the back of my mind.

We were living there not too long before strange things started to happen. Taps would turn on quite often just for no reason. Cabinet doors in the kitchen would just open by themselves all the time. Little things like that pretty regularly. The front door, it was a double front door as in there are two doors that you open and now and then they would just fly open for no reason. We smell

Pipe smoke, which I recognise as pipe smoke because my grandfather, who lived with us until he died, smoked pipe. And I can smell it clear as day. Multiple people can smell it in the house. We don't smoke in the house. We don't light a fire even, you know, so it's like a puzzle where this is coming from. At this time, I'm working in theatre and we are working on a production project

for the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic for Belfast City Council. The Titanic was built in Belfast, so it's a big deal. And we're recording recreations of the messages that were sent from the wireless room on the Titanic to the other ships that were on the sea that night. We use our living room to do recordings. It's a very quiet room. It's a quiet house. We turn everything off. We do all the stuff you're supposed to do when you're recording something.

No one has a mobile phone that's going to go off, all that kind of thing. We don't have TVs on, radios and nothing. Everything is controlled so that we can get a good quality recording. We did all the recording and the actors have left and it's just myself and our musical director and we're packing up and suddenly we hear the sound of a man singing

and he's singing the song 'Working Man' by the Chieftains. And we both know the song really well, you know, so we recognise it instantly. It's a working man I am, and I've been down underground, and I swear to God if I ever see the sun. We didn't say the words, it's just our eyes communicated, what is this? This is weird.

We're going around the room and we're looking under seat cushions. We're, you know, looking everywhere, going, where is this coming from? And we finally pinpoint where this sound is coming from. It's like maybe a head height if someone was sitting, maybe three and a half or four feet high in front of the fireplace. And then it stopped just like that. I don't feel scared. I feel kind of excited. There's a kind of a thrill in that.

knowing that something happened that we can't explain. One day, an old friend of John Hewitt's drops by the house and she gets to telling stories. And she tells us that many times she sat in this room with John and she said he tended to sit in front of the fireplace and he would sing and they might read poetry and they would talk and there'd be a lot of people there and they would have a really nice time.

What I experienced in the John Hewitt house was very different to what I experienced in the priest's house. They also are two very different parts of my life. In the priest's house, I felt anxious and scared a lot of the time, whereas when I was in the John Hewitt house, I was in a much better place in life. When I was there, it was a happy house, and I get the feeling that he was happy there too. He lived there for a long part of his life until he died. Maybe it was just somewhere that...

He'd had so many positive experiences that a positive part of him was still there.

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But there was something else. Remember the day they moved into the John Hewitt house? Ashley and sister had helped them out. And that night, they'd celebrated by going down to the pub.

Afterwards, Aisling's sister had decided to sleep over. Because it's so late by the time we get back from the pub and all that sort of stuff. So she's sleeping upstairs and in the morning she comes down and I'm making pancakes. I say, did you have a good sleep? And she says, no, I had the worst sleep of my life. She said, I had terrible nightmares and then I woke up in the middle of the night and

Or at least I thought I woke up. And the little cupboard in the wall into the eaves, the door opened. And a little boy crawled out. And he had glitter on his face, long blonde hair, real dark brown eyes. And he was wearing a sort of a blue robe with multicoloured ribbons sewn to it. She says that she wasn't asleep.

She's not dreaming. She's positive that she was awake. But at the same time, it's so crazy. You know, I must have been asleep, but she was sure that she was awake. He says, what are you doing in our house? And he stood at the bottom of the bed and he just glared at me like he didn't want me to be there.

My blood runs cold instantly. I've never had such a feeling like someone dunked a bucket of cold water on me at this moment. I just, right from my head down to my feet, I went cold. And Aisling remembers, before she and her partner had moved in, a day when she'd stopped by the house to do some cleaning and to make sure there was nothing left over from the previous tenants.

There are three bedrooms in this house and one of them is in the attic and it had obviously been a little boy's bedroom. It's blue, there's like a couple of dinosaur stickers on the wall still, that kind of thing. And a little tiny door into the eaves, there's like a cupboard built into the attic. And when I open that and go inside, I find...

a bag full of kids stuff, you know, drawings, art projects. And there is also a few photographs. There is one photograph in particular, which is from a production of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. There's a little boy and he has long blonde hair and he's clearly playing Joseph because he's got the ribbons and everything, the Technicolor Dreamcoat, you know. There's even a little bit of glitter on his face.

I figure that this is one of the kids who lived here. And I think it must be important to him because he kept it all. I'll hold on to this and then when they come by for their post or whatever, I'll give it to them. Now, back in the kitchen with her sister, Aisling runs and gets the bag of the little boy's belongings. I dig out the picture and show it to my sister and she says, that is the same kid. That is exactly the same boy that I saw coming out of that cupboard last night.

Both of us are totally shaken and I just thought oh my goodness these people something must have happened to their kid like you know that's immediately where your mind goes you just think something awful must have happened to this kid and I'm waiting every day thinking this family are going to come around one day because there are there are letters coming through that are for them that we're keeping and I'm sort of dreading it a bit to be honest.

And then eventually one day the door knocks and I open it and it's the woman who used to live here. And she says, "I was just wondering if you have any letters?" She has with her two little boys and one of them I recognise instantly it's the same boy. He's got long blonde hair, he's got the dark brown eyes.

And I said, I do, just give me one second. And I closed the door over just so the dog can't get out. And as I close it over to reach for the letters, I hear the little boy say to his mother, who is that woman and what is she doing in our house? And he clearly was not a happy kid. Like he said this with a kind of weight. But she said, we don't live there anymore. This lady lives here now. And that was it. I gave him their post and they left. Aisling is shocked.

She closes the door and takes a minute to process what just happened. This is probably the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me. I've never heard of something like that. Like a living vision of someone who's not there, can't be there, but that you see and they're not dead. But I was really happy that he was alive because I had this horrible feeling that something had happened to this child.

So I'm very relieved to see that he's still perfectly healthy and maybe just has a strong attachment to the house. The little boy, he lived there his whole life and he's only six. John Hewitt lived in that house until he died. So I think the thing that they had in common was that it was both of their home, that they were happy there, that they lived there. And that's why they stuck around. After that, I started working.

questioning why we would conclude that if you see a human form that that is the spirit of a dead person. It could be something else that is equally inexplicable. I just don't know what it is.

I take a certain amount of joy in not knowing the explanation to these things. For me, that's kind of thrilling, exhilarating, you know? This is weird, I have no explanation. I'm happy with that. MUSIC

Thank you so much, Aisling Clark, for sharing your story with the Spook Spooksters. Aisling makes horror movies. You heard me. You can find out more information about her work in our show notes. The original score was by Dot Kim. It was produced by Zoe Frigno. ♪♪♪

Yes, spooksters, yes. We walk this path together. If you have a story of an interaction with someone or something that should not have been there at all, let us know. Tell me all about it. Email us your story, spooked at snapjudgment.org. There's nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener. Let us know, spooked at snapjudgment.org.

You can also let those who spooked know you spooked as well. The spooked t-shirt available right now at snapjudgment.org. And remember, if you like your storytelling under the bright light of day, get the amazing, the stupendous Snap Judgment podcast, Storytelling with a Beat. ♪♪

Spook was created by the team that has grown accustomed to the voices, except, of course, for Mark Ristich. He always cranks up the white noise machine. There's Anna Sussman, our chief spookster, as Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen, Maura Newsome, Leona Morimoto, Davy Kim, Renzo Gorio, Teo Ducat, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Ferrigno, Tiffany DeLisa, Ann Ford, Doug Stewart, and Isaiah Simms.

The Spook Theme Song is by Pat Messini Miller. My name is Lynn Washington. And the power, the power of personhood, what we do since Adam is to name things. And you know, you know that names are power. You know this, but you may not know that to name something is to summon that same thing. Even a thought, a memory, a feeling can call a presence forth. That is your power. You can't stop it. You can't sever it from you. No more than you can stop your own breath.

So be careful and know that what you call forth will invariably arrive, be it from the dawn or be it from the shadow. It will come. This is just one of the reasons, one of the many reasons, to never ever, never ever, never ever, the lie.