Spirit of the Mountain
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There's a cow in this can. The can's for the pup. I open the can. Eats it up. The tin hides the truth of what lived and who died. My pup doesn't care. And I don't either. You've crossed over to Spooked. Stay. Let me tell you about the online cannabis company that's revolutionizing how we deal with life's challenges.

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Okay, sixth grade, rural Michigan. Close to where we live, there's a livery stable where the rich folk keep their horses. They let me and some of my buddies come through and muck stables, move feet, do chores or whatever for the exalted privilege of getting to be around horses. No, we can't ride the horses. At least we better not get caught riding horses.

Still, we get to tend the most beautiful animals that have ever breathed air, and there's one just not bae-like from a story. Looks like a Patronus. Glorious. No one can get near her. She bites. She whinnies. She kicks. We call her demon. You can't even walk by her, except for the owner's son, Chad, the one that hisses at us to keep your head down. Don't you look me in the eyes. The one always blinkin'.

One day, my buddy steps too close to Demon's stall. She nips him on the shoulder hard enough to draw blood. He screams bloody murder. Demon screams back. All the horses answer. The stable explodes into pandemonium. The owner's son, Chad, pads through, walks right up to Demon, pushes his hand into her stall, places it on top of her head.

Her crazed eyes still. She whinnies, presses into his fingers, knickers, snorts, and she's silent. Every other horse grows silent as well, and I am in awe. I've never seen this kind of control, this type of certainty. It's magical. And I hate this guy. So much I hate him, but...

But he speaks hoarse, like no one I've ever seen in life. So I watch him, hoping, hoping maybe someday, maybe I can speak hoarse too. The owner, Chad's father, always laughs that he wants to train Demon not to bite. Says she'd be worth a million bucks. I'm not getting anywhere near her, but I shadow Chad from a distance. He always has sugar cubes in his pockets, so I make sure I have sugar cubes everywhere.

in my pockets. I always carries apples as a special treat. I start carrying apples and one day after someone else runs bleeding from the stable, I see Chad press sugar onto Demon's tongue. And it occurs to me he never gives her treats when she doesn't bite. He only gives her treats when she does. The bigger the melee, the larger her reward. He looks over, sees me seeing him and quickly, quickly

Before he gets angry and they never let me back in here again. I turn my eyes down spook stars now Why wouldn't animals? Plants have a different way of knowing a different relationship with the world seems exactly what you might expect What's odd is those rare moments when they let us see what they see now watching me Adam as a kid Adam used to travel a lot to Puerto Rico to visit his family in Yauco

A town surrounded by mountains and jungles and there he would spend time with Pepito, his great-grandfather. Everyone knew Pepito in town. He was almost like the chief of the mountains. Everyone respected him from his kids to his great-grandchildren, even the animals. Pepito held all the knowledge of the Tenient People. He would always tell Adam that the mountain is aware of things. Something that Adam was about to find out by himself soon.

When I was about nine years old, I spent a whole lot of time in my papito's house, my great-grandfather's house.

It sits on one of the many mountaintops of Yaoko. It's on this little plateau that overlooks the cliff and the valley. And there's forest, forest, forest everywhere. It's like a jungle. It's very difficult to see a neighbor. The only other neighbors that were near were his brothers and sisters who owned their own houses on this big property in the mountains that was all owned by my great-grandfather.

So one day I go up to Papito's house, which is a walk from my grandmother's house. I love to hang out there because he had a bunch of interesting random farm equipment and tons of farm animals, cows and horses, goats. But nearby there was an enormous bull. And I was deathly frightened by this bull because it was enormous. It was huge. So much larger than me. Huge horns. Huge horns.

So I was hanging out and playing in the front of his house and this big bull came nearer to me. So I go to my papito and say, "I'm scared of the bull and it's coming close." He laughed because he saw the city kid being scared of the bull that no one pays any attention to. The bull was walking away from the house.

And Papito did this super powerful whistle, like a Fourth of July firework echoing through the mountains. And then the bull just stopped and started coming back towards us. That was really scary. I said the last thing I wanted, I was like pulling away from him, but he wouldn't let me go. And the bull is just lumbering over very slowly. And then he says, no, no, no, no. That's all he said. He said, no, no, no, no.

And then he grabbed the bull by the horns and he lowered it down into the ground and made it like bow its head and put its horns towards the ground. And so he just grabbed me, picked me up, threw my leg over. The next thing I know, I'm riding on this enormous bull and holding on to the horns. And it was scary, but it was awesome and exciting. I felt much better because I saw that this thing did whatever he wanted it to do.

One day I'm in my madrina's house, which was at the top highest peak of all of the hills that we lived on. I'm playing with my sister and my cousins. My madrina, my godmother, was taking care of Papito at the time. He was in his late 90s and he had severe sort of dementia. Papito is laying in my madrina's room in her bed.

And as we play during the day, I start to get the sense that something is happening. Everybody is gathering at my madrina's house. And more and more people keep showing up. People from the town, uncles, aunts, and a priest shows up. I peeked into the room and the room was filled with people. Papito is laying in the bed. He looked down.

very small and skinny and pale. He looked gray almost. I started to feel uncomfortable. I didn't know what was going on, but I knew that I didn't want to be around at that moment. So I go to my abuela and I tell her how I feel. She told me that I could go back to her house, that the sun is just starting to set. If I leave now, I can make it before the sun fully sets.

And that I could wait for them to be finished what they were doing. So I leave my madrina's house. And I start on the path to my grandmother's house. I can hear the sounds that are fading away from the house. And it sounds like crying. And I'm thinking, oh, okay. Whatever it is that I didn't want to be around for is happening right now. I'm entering the...

lower part of the mountains, the beginning of the valley, and the forest. And I realized that it's much darker than I thought it was going to be. There is just so many trees, vegetation, tangly vines. I get to my grandmother's driveway, which is a long little road. And as I get there, I heard somewhere nearby a very strange sound, an animal sound. A dog!

The first thing I thought of was a cow because there's cows everywhere. And then a moment later, it screamed in a way that I've never heard a living thing scream before. It was almost like a human whale coming from an animal. I get this cold tingliness throughout my whole body, goosebumps going up my neck. I immediately just started to run towards my grandmother's house.

As soon as I start running, I hear another and now I'm sure it's an animal. But it sounded like someone, a person in pain. Then in the distance, a bunch of other animals start wailing. The pigs in the valley, the dogs that were randomly all over the mountainside, the cows and the horses and the bulls. Some of it sounded like it was the pigs near the slaughterhouse that were not even on our property.

They were in agony, as if they were being killed. And then the night is just filled with these wails. It's an igniting of voices that keep coming out of the darkness because I can't see where they're coming from. And so I'm running, running, running to my grandmother's house. And this wailing seems like it's chasing me. Like it sounds like it's right in the back of my head, trying to grab at my ankles. ♪

Once I get to the top of the hill, I'm panting like a madman. I pass through the gates of my grandmother's house, slipping and sliding, run up to her patio, grab the door, yank it open and slam the door shut. I'm all alone. The wailing is still going strong and it feels like it's completely surrounding my grandmother's house.

I run into the room where I was sleeping and I lay on the cot. I just started praying. I just wanted the time to pass to wait for my grandmother to come back. Eventually, the animal noises finally died down. And shortly after that, my grandmother arrives. My grandmother comes up to me and asks me if I'm okay. And I sort of stammer over my words.

I told her that when I was coming back to the house, I heard the animals screaming and my grandmother said, "Of course they're screaming. Of course they're upset." And I asked her, "Why are they so upset?" She said, "Because Papito died. Papito's gone now." At first, I'm confused. I didn't understand that. I said, "How could they know that he died?" And my grandmother said that all of the animals know these things. They sense his spirit.

Papito was like their father, their master, their protector, everything to them. Their chief. They could feel him leaving. They were sad and scared. So of course, they know. That night, I was having a lot of trouble falling asleep. I was up thinking a bunch of things. How could animals know that Papito died? And I wondered, do animals have some sense that we don't have? Or do we have that sense?

I was so restless that I got up, I opened up the main door very carefully and quietly, and then went outside into the night. There was a place in my grandmother's house that I really loved to go during the day. And it was in the rear of the house where there was a hammock hanging and there was just like a cliffside and it overlooked the valley. I went towards the edge of the cliff. I lay in the hammock in the darkness. I'm looking out over the valley.

Seeing the little bit of stars out there and just the blackness of the mountain. I hear the crickets and the coquilles, the little frogs that make a very specific sound in Puerto Rico. And I hear an animal sound in the darkness. It wasn't a growl. It was more strange and scary than a growl. I don't know what it is, but it sounded...

Scary. And it was coming from the darkness in front of me. The animal makes this sound a second time. It was a strange, hyena-like yipping excitement, but not a good excitement. It sounded very close, and it sounds like something that wanted to hurt me. I'm frozen stiff. I can't move. I was just like a deer in headlights.

The thought crossed my mind. Oh, my grandmother's going to be so mad if I die. And immediately after I hear this whistle like a firecracker in the darkness, in the valley, and that animal sound stopped. I'm feeling like I just got shocked by electricity. And I feel a sudden flush of relief and relief.

In that moment, I knew, I knew it. I just somehow knew that Papito made that sound. Papito was there with me. Papito's spirit said goodbye to the animals and even stuck around long enough to protect me and to say goodbye to me. I slowly get up and make my way into the house. And I'm thinking, there's something after death. I knew that death was something very, very powerful, very part of life.

But Papito showed me that that death is not the end of our energy. Thank you, Adam, for sharing your story with the spook. That original score was by Doug Stewart. It was produced by Eric Yanez. Okay, so, Providence, Rhode Island. Far away from the cobblestone touristy part, there sits a quiet building called Steer House. A nursing home, it's a hospice, and in this place lived a cat, not a

purring cuddle machine no Instagram cutie no this cat is cold-blooded names Oscar gray white fur green eyes Oscar doesn't care about sitting in your lap Oscar doesn't chase toys Oscar doesn't even want to be bothered with people much unless and until you are preparing for your final journey and the first time this happens

No one really pays much attention. Oscar slips into the room of a woman who'd stopped speaking two days prior. Oscar jumps into her bed and this cantankerous feline actually curls up at her side and just wait. Hours tick by and quiet is missed. The woman passes away. The attendants think, what a sweet moment. What a cosmic coincidence to have the cat as a comfort during her final moments.

Then another room and another patient. Oscar disappears from his usual spot in the hallway and somehow winds up curled in a ball besides this man. Oscar lies still, eyes half shut, tail tucked, and this man too passes into the beyond. And then another person and another and again another still and by the time

We arrive at the strange coincidence number 25. People aren't saying that's weird anymore. Nah. Instead they say call the family. Oscar's on the bed. No heartbeat monitors. No vital sign crashes. Just a feline signal that the end is nigh. And Dr. David Dosa, he sees this and he's trying to make sense of it. He's a man of science. But Oscar's, Oscar's thrown off his game plan.

They start tracking him. Oscar, he's right over and over and over again, more than 100 times, more than 100 people and not just patients in decline. Sometimes Oscar curls up before anything looks different, before the nurses even notice. Eventually they stop questioning. Instead they start trusting. Families say that when Oscar enters the room, something changes. It was eerie when daughter recalls.

He gave us time to say everything we needed. Another man, his eyes wet, voice cracking, remembers he wasn't there for us. He was there for her. But he helped us understand what was happening. Oscar didn't howl. Oscar didn't demand, didn't console. He witnessed, still his shadow, when the breath slowed, and the room filled with that silence born of absence. And touched and moved. The good doctor wrote a book about what he saw called Making Rounds with Oscar.

How do you explain what happened? Is it a trick? A gift? A miracle? Instincts? I don't know. But of course, I tell you this story to ask a favor. Because if you have a knowledge of a non-human neighbor, it seems to have a special connection to the inexplicable. Maybe even that special non-human neighbor living in your house that you put food in their bowl twice a day. I'd sure love to know about it. Why? Because...

Dear friends, there is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. Spooked at SnapJudgment.org. Spooked is brought to you by the team that makes their own pet food for any animal in their care. Except for Mark Ristich, who always says, if I can eat kibble, so can they. There's David Kim, Zoe Ferrigno, Ann Ford, Eric Yanez, Taylor Ducat, Marissa Dodge,

Miles Lassie, Doug Stewart, Elliot Lightfoot, Paulina Kriki, Juan Diego Beltran, Sasha Wilson, Dan Yashinsky, and Team Snap. The union representative producers, artists, editors, engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, Local 51. The spook theme song is by Pat Massidi-Miller. My name is from Washington. They say that time is just an illusion.

Well, it's a pretty good illusion, right? It's a pretty good trick because time is relentless. Everything time give, time also snatches away. Nothing stays the same even for a moment. The rules are harsh. Unforgiving only for, never back, no appeals, no regard, no backdoor, no secret hatch. All the money in the world can't buy a fast pass off this ride, right? Well, I wonder sometimes if what we experience is supernatural,

It's paranormal. It's really just echoes of those that discovered an escape route. From those that decided that this moment was too important to abandon and that part of them was going to stay right here no matter what time, say it about. And what is our responsibility to those lost echoes left behind? I don't have a magic formula. The best I know to do is to never ever, never, never, ever

Turn out the lights.