Dearly Departed
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If one could peel back one's own skin and peer at that which lies within, then one might search and still not see. There is no you and there is no me. It's time. You're listening to Spooked. Stay.

Who likes skipping breakfast? I know I don't, but I like to keep money in my pocket. Thanks to McDonald's, breakfast on a budget has never hit this good. I can grab two McD faves, like a sausage McGriddles, sausage burrito, hash browns, or the savory sausage McMuffin. I can even add a premium roast coffee for $1.69. Any size, any time of day. And order ahead in the app so it's ready when I get there. Bite into breakfast without breaking your bank at Mickey D's. Ba-da-ba-ba.

Prices and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer or combo meal. Valid for item of equal or lesser value.

Americans love using their credit cards, the most secure and hassle-free way to pay. But DC politicians want to change that with the Durbin Marshall Credit Card Bill. This bill lets corporate megastores pick how your credit card is processed, allowing them to use untested payment networks that jeopardize your data security and rewards. Corporate megastores will make more money, and you pay the price. Tell Congress to guard your card.

Because Americans lose when politicians choose. Learn more at GuardYourCard.com. My mother and I, we don't often see eye to eye. And as the years pass, I feel our chances for reconciliation, for healing, I feel they're slipping away. Like we're missing basic understandings of why our core values so offend the other. And I want to understand, my mother, I do. I want to know better.

from where she came. I have so very few pictures from her younger years. So few. It was a rare thing to aim a camera at a skinny brown girl when she was a child. But recently, a cousin sent me a gift, a photo. Dammit, water stain. There she is.

A teenager beaming relaxed with her sisters on the precipice of the unfolding of her life. And I stare at this crumbling picture into a happy space. This person I've never known constantly smiling back at the camera. I want people to be nice to that girl. She is so sweet. She has such a big heart. I want to dive into this photo and tell people to please, please, please be kind to this little girl.

treat her gently. I want the world in this picture to give her flowers and sing her songs and make her feel safe. And I know, I know it will do none of those things. It will not. And I want to tell her to run because girl in the picture, the bad thing is coming and you need to get out of there right now. The dark thing is coming. Run away. Please mother, run away. Spook stars. The dark thing is coming.

The dark thing is coming. Our first storyteller, Lynn, takes us up to Canada, the small island city of Victoria, British Columbia. And this Victoria, it's the kind of place that still feels like an old English village. Protecting tea is a popular pastime. But as Lynn learned one night, this curtain, this curtain's more like a veil. I let Lynn take it from here. Spooked. This was in the early 90s.

I was with my two friends. It was a Saturday. We decided to go for a drive along Beach Drive in Oak Bay. It was raining a little bit when we left and we were riding in my red Volkswagen Bug. The friend in the front seat was my best girlfriend and the friend in the back seat was another best friend of mine.

We were wanting to have a bite to eat and we decided that we would go to Oak Bay for some fish and chips. And by the time we were finished with our fish and chips, it was dark and we weren't quite ready to go home yet. We thought that we would just cruise around a little bit along Beach Drive and try and catch the moonlight and just sort of kill some time before we went home to watch Star Trek.

Well, Beach Drive is an old drive in Victoria. There's a marina there, an old hotel called the Oak Bay Beach Hotel, which has since been remodeled, and then a golf course. We drove past the golf course and we could still see the moon. It was dark. And then we continued on towards the Oak Bay Beach Hotel. It was quite dark, but it seemed to get even darker than dark. And it started to rain heavily.

What I first see is the moonlight coming through the trees and then we didn't have any music on but we all just sort of naturally fell silent because it just seemed darker than it should be. And in that darkness I saw a shadow. I was quite worried because it was so stormy all of a sudden that there was a person caught out in the rain and I turned on my high beams.

And as soon as my high beams hit the object, what we were looking at really was a glowing woman in a white dress. And she wasn't walking, she was floating. And she had no face. It was like a shifting nothingness. A glowing, shifting nothingness. And throughout the car was this sound of, oh. When we finally realized what we were looking at, my friend in the backseat screamed, step on the gas!

because we just needed to get out of there. I didn't know what was going to happen. But I did slow enough where we were able to watch her walk. She was walking towards the hotel, and at least that seemed like it was her destination. Like she knew where she was going. Like she knew what her fate was going to be. And she just seemed really sad. My friend in the back seat started to cry.

And I just kept on saying, "I think we just saw a ghost. You guys, I think we just saw a ghost." And we were a little nervous about the whole thing, but we were also quite excited that something like that had actually happened with us all in the car and we all saw the same thing. When I got home, I called my Auntie Joyce because I used to like sharing exciting things that happened to me in Victoria.

And so I called her and I said, Auntie Joyce, we were driving along Beach Drive and we saw a ghost. And she paused and she said, you're very lucky. You saw Doris. Well, the story my auntie told me was that in the 1930s, Doris was a nurse and she had a husband who had an alcohol problem.

and they had separated. And on this night, he had invited her to try and reconcile to the Oak Bay Beach Hotel. She had gone there that night to meet with him. And they had had an argument in the hotel, but they decided to take it outside. So they started to walk towards the golf course. And I guess they did make it to the golf course and go quite deep into the golf course because it's quite dark at night.

So they were there at nighttime and they had an argument and he beat her to death. And the next day a caddy found her body and they looked into the water and her husband was floating in the water. He killed himself shortly after killing her. She's the most famous ghost in Victoria.

Who likes skipping breakfast? I know I don't, but I like to keep money in my pocket. Thanks to McDonald's, breakfast on a budget has never hit this good. I can grab two McD faves, like a sausage McGriddles, sausage burrito, hash browns, or the savory sausage McMuffin. I can even add a premium roast coffee for $1.69. Any size, any time of day. And order ahead in the app so it's ready when I get there. Bite into breakfast without breaking your bank at Mickey D's. Ba-da-ba-ba.

Prices and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer or common meal. Valid for item of equal or lesser value.

Americans love using their credit cards, the most secure and hassle-free way to pay. But DC politicians want to change that with the Durbin Marshall Credit Card Bill. This bill lets corporate megastores pick how your credit card is processed, allowing them to use untested payment networks that jeopardize your data security and rewards. Corporate megastores will make more money, and you pay the price. Tell Congress to guard your card.

Because Americans lose when politicians choose. Learn more at GuardYourCard.com. So the question is, why? Why? Why after such a horrible experience, why couldn't she relive some of her better experiences? Why is it that one that she comes back to? And the thought of this person repeating their steps again.

over and over again, probably still trying to figure out what happened and why somebody they love took their life. This woman is still walking and still experiencing these things. It was September that we saw her and it was also September that she was killed. And I wonder if she was re-walking her path. Maybe she does it every year, trying to figure out what she could have done differently.

Whenever I go back to Victoria, I still drive that road, hoping that I'll see her again. Thank you, Lynn, for introducing us to Doris. Folks, Lynn is a spooked listener. She shared her spooky story with us, and we want you to do the same thing, spooked, at snapjudgment.org. The original score for that story was by Andrew Butler. It was produced by Greta Weber. Now, spooksters...

You may want to pull up close for this one because we're going up north to Canada. The storyteller Desiree, it's a beautiful summer night. Desiree is sitting around a campfire with her nearest and dearest. They're just settling in. It's around that time when folks start to tell stories. Spooked. I'm 28. I've just finished working for the summer as a tree planter. And I'm back at my parents' cabin on this beautiful lake called Clearwater Lake.

And this is my most happy place. It is starry, it's warm, it's clear. It's just like the perfect summer night. We have a fire every night. And the bonus is that my Auntie Carol and my Uncle Ken are visiting. I hadn't seen my Auntie Carol in a while. She and my mom have been good friends for well over 40 years. So I was very pleasantly surprised and pleased to sit around the campfire with them after work.

After dinner, it's getting dark around the campfire so that when you're sitting with everyone, everyone's getting that orange glow. I was sitting at the picnic table. We had scooted it closer to the fire. We were just sitting around chatting. Desiree and her family do not usually talk about ghosts. But Aunt Carol is that kind of an aunt. More of a friend of the family, not a blood relative. The rules don't really apply to her.

So as the fire dims down, the shadows get longer, and Auntie Carol brings it up. So Auntie Carol describes how at night when she's in her bed, she hears footsteps pacing around. And she really connected that to loved ones watching over her. And then she said she would, when she was away from her daughter, she would ask those same spirits or people to

to watch over her daughter. And her daughter would hear footsteps around her bed. Auntie Carol's daughter is Jen. And Jen doesn't share her mother's love for the spirit realm. She says, you know, Jen doesn't like that. So I had to ask the spirits to go away and not bug her so much. The back of my neck starts to tingle right when she says this, when she brings in her daughter Jen. And I get this memory flood back to me. And I just went, oh my God.

And I just launched into my story. Desiree was only six, and Jen was just a baby. Auntie Carol dropped Jen off at Desiree's house for the weekend. The two of them slept together in Desiree's bedroom. I woke up in the middle of the night, and what woke me up was her crying. This very loud screaming crying.

As I was opening my eyes, there was just lightning. There was a thunderstorm and it was just crashing and booming and crashing and booming. That lightning that was happening would just flash and light up the whole room. And a second would go by and it would go dark, dark, dark. And then it would flash and light up the whole room. I was looking at her because she was so upset. She was standing up.

in her crib towards the door with her arms outreached. That's when I looked at the door because I was like, what is she doing? And I could see someone standing in the door and I just thought it was my mom because that's who would come and get the baby if she was crying. But as I focused in my eyes to like look closer, like why isn't my mom moving? So like, why hasn't she gotten the baby?

The figure didn't move and then my attention kind of started slowing down of like something's happening here. This person was wearing like a long old-fashioned style nightgown. It just seemed very unlike something my mom would wear but I couldn't see anything on the front. It was just dark. The lightning is backlighting this person.

It's so dark in my room, but the windows from the living room behind are lighting her up from behind. And that's when I see that there's this white puffy hair on top of this person. And my mom has straight jet black hair. And I just froze. I could feel this weird sense coming over me like, that's not my mom. Who is that? And why is this baby...

screaming so loud and looking at it. The baby is seeing what I'm seeing. I knew I was looking at something that wasn't supposed to be in the house. Like everything tensed up and I couldn't move. And when I did move, it was the one movement of diving under my blankets. And I just stayed there, petrified. I wasn't going to look again just in case. I just didn't know what would happen if I looked again.

I just remember it going black and dark, and I don't remember anything after that. I knew I was scared at night a lot after that, but I think I pushed it so far down, and I didn't think of that memory until that night around the campfire. And as I'm telling Auntie Carol this story, she turns white, and I look at her, and she just looks at me and says, that's the weekend I went to my mother's funeral. That had to have been my mother's.

That's why I left Jen with your mom that weekend. My mom had passed away. I just excitedly said that had to have been it, had to have been your, it had to have been your mom. And I described her. I said she had fluffy white hair. And Carol said yes. I said she was short. And Carol said yes. Hearing that story, she was pretty emotional and she was really happy. My mom got to say goodbye. My mom did come and say goodbye. And it was such a

Desiree had never known her own grandma. Six months before Desiree was born, her grandma Daisy passed away. Her mom and dad never showed her pictures or videos. It was too sad for a kid. But when Desiree was just old enough to form her own sentences...

I started just saying random things about Gramma Daisy and I would relay these little tidbits of information that my mom would look at me and go like, "How do you know that?" She just knew that it was just such weird information that a little girl would know, like just randomly. It's just, she just always thought it's not something you could absorb from a conversation because we didn't have conversations about Gramma Daisy. And then it came one day when I was about two, two and a half, not quite three,

that I came and I was just sobbing and I said, she's gone. And I cried all day. I just cried and cried and cried. And my mom did not know what to do with me. It's like I grieved her, like out of nowhere, for no reason. Like it just hit me. And after that, I refused to let anyone speak about her. That was part of my grief. So for my mom, that was a really powerful moment of thinking there was something going on of my grandmother maybe being around me.

because of this intense day and this intense outburst that she could never explain.

Who likes skipping breakfast? I know I don't, but I like to keep money in my pocket. Thanks to McDonald's, breakfast on a budget has never hit this good. I can grab two McD faves, like a sausage McGriddles, sausage burrito, hash browns, or the savory sausage McMuffin. I can even add a premium roast coffee for $1.69. Any size, any time of day. And order ahead in the app so it's ready when I get there. Bite into breakfast without breaking your bank at Mickey D's. Ba-da-ba-ba.

Prices and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer or combo meal. Valid for item of equal or lesser value.

Americans love using their credit cards, the most secure and hassle-free way to pay. But DC politicians want to change that with the Durbin Marshall Credit Card Bill. This bill lets corporate megastores pick how your credit card is processed, allowing them to use untested payment networks that jeopardize your data security and rewards. Corporate megastores will make more money, and you pay the price. Tell Congress to guard your card.

Because Americans lose when politicians choose. Learn more at GuardYourCard.com. As Desiree grew up, the intense emotions faded away, and it became more of a nice idea that she could still feel Grandma Daisy's presence. Then one summer when she was on break from college, she was up in northern Manitoba out in the middle of the woods planting trees.

It's really hard manual labour. You get up in the morning and you've got to get your clothes on quick because you're chilly. You know, out of your warm sleeping bag, into your warm clothes, into the mess tent to get your breakfast and pack your lunch. Tree planting is monotonous. You have bags around your waist that you carry the little saplings in. You just put your shovel straight in the ground, straight up and down, wedge a hole, wiggle, wiggle, throw a tree in, quickly close it and then take two more steps.

You just get into this movement that is, you know, looking for the next spot where you're going to put that tree and then getting there with your two steps. You always have to follow the last line of trees you planted because you don't want to have any holes on your land. Early one overcast spring morning, Desiree was planting trees out in the woods. I could get into the zone, like I could really zone out really quick. And I'm nearing the end of a trench at the back of my land.

And I know the tree line's coming up, but I just head down one tree after the other. And probably about three trees away from the end of the trench, I just hear this voice right in my ear that startles me, that says, you need to look up now. Just like, you need to look up now. Like, just stop what you're doing. It definitely scared me. Where I literally jumped and looked to see

the left side that I heard it. I knew there was no one near me, but I saw a bear at the end of my trench. So like pretty close. I was closer than I'd been to a bear before. And I just went, "Oh," and I stopped. You're supposed to really kind of put your eyes down. You don't want to look aggressively at a big animal. And I just waited to see what she would do because she wasn't moving.

I could see her whole side and she was just looking at me. And she just took a step forward and behind her was a baby cub. And that's when I got really scared for the first time of now what is she going to do? Because she's going to protect her baby. My heart was pounding. I've never been scared of being eaten by a bear. But being mauled by a bear is what I picture.

It would take you down with its paws and scratch you too deep. Like, you'd just be beaten up and really, really hurt. That would be what I would be the most scared of. So I tried to get as small as I could in my trench. I put my shovel kind of back behind me so it didn't look like a weapon. And I just started to back away, keeping an eye on her to make sure she wasn't doing anything to come at me.

but give her the out of, you know, you have to just take your baby and go. You don't have to attack me. So I just backed away and she ran off into the tree line with her baby. I was shaken. That voice saved me. It was so real. It wasn't in my head. Like if I didn't look up, I would have been super close to her and she would have just defended herself and defended her baby because I was so not paying attention. I just wasn't at all.

It was an outside source that told me to be careful and it had to have been my grandmother. Like my grandmother saved me. I left my piece, I grabbed my bag with my lunch and I walked down the road and I just said to my neighbor who was tree planting, I said, "I can't plant alone today. Like I just had an experience. I'm shaken. I got to plant with you today. I'm sorry." And I don't even know if I told them what happened. I just said, "I saw a bear."

I couldn't shake it for the rest of the day. I've always thought of my grandma Desiree as my guardian angel. I felt like we had a connection because I was named after her. And she just really needed to step it up in that moment. Thank you, Desiree, for sharing your story of the spooked. Spooktious. Desiree is a spooked listener. She wrote in to tell us her story. And you better believe I need to hear from you. Reach out. Spooked at SnapJudgment.org.

Original scores by Nicholas Marks. It was produced by Chris Hambrick. Now, spooksters, we walk this dark path together. Do you yourself possess an inexplicable power which no one will believe? Tell us. Tell us all about it. Email us your story at spooked at snapjudgment.org. Because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener. Let us know in the best way possible.

To let the dark side know that you're spooked is by Sporting Spook Gear, the t-shirt of your dreams 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 the Beat. It might just change your life. Spooks was created.

by the team that knows to come in from the rain, except, of course, for Mark Ristich. There's Anna Sussman. Our chief spookster is Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, A. Nguyen, Lauren Newsome, Leon Morimoto, Wenzel Gorio, Teo Ducat, Doug Stewart, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Ferrigno, Jacob Winnick, Tiffany DeLisa, Ann Ford. The Spook theme song is by Pat Massini-Miller. My name is from Washington, and recall...

But some mirrors will always reflect back more than you wish to see. And broken glass is better than the alternative. But before taking any drastic step, remember, first things first. Never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, ever burn out the lights.

Who likes skipping breakfast? I know I don't, but I like to keep money in my pocket. Thanks to McDonald's, breakfast on a budget has never hit this good. I can grab two McD faves, like a sausage McGriddles, sausage burrito, hash browns, or the savory sausage McMuffin. I can even add a premium roast coffee for $1.69. Any size, any time of day. And order ahead in the app so it's ready when I get there. Bite into breakfast without breaking your bank at Mickey D's. Ba-da-ba-ba.

Prices and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer or combo meal. Valid for item of equal or lesser value.

Americans love using their credit cards, the most secure and hassle-free way to pay. But DC politicians want to change that with the Durbin Marshall Credit Card Bill. This bill lets corporate megastores pick how your credit card is processed, allowing them to use untested payment networks that jeopardize your data security and rewards. Corporate megastores will make more money, and you pay the price. Tell Congress to guard your card.

Because Americans lose when politicians choose. Learn more at GuardYourCard.com.