Episode 149: Saint George

[MUSIC] Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode is about a guy named John, but it was originally sent in by his girlfriend, Julia. It takes place when John and his coworker had to travel to Utah for a week, while they're opening a new restaurant, and Julia decided to come with. They were all staying in an Airbnb together, so Julia had lots of time to herself, while the other two were at the restaurant, having meetings and getting things set up. And during that time, Julia swore she was not alone in this Airbnb. In her email, she said that she constantly felt like somebody else was in the house with her, to the point where she would have to call up a relative, while she checked every single bedroom, closet, window, and door for any signs of an intruder. Because that's what she thought it was. At this point, she just thought another human being must be in this home. And I think Julia did her best to keep this paranoia to herself, but later on in the trip, it was revealed that the others were going through some strange things on their own. Now, there are a lot of creepy Airbnb's out there in the world. I've stayed at quite a few of those myself. This Airbnb is not one of them, at least not visually. And I think that's important to note while you're listening to this story. This is a house that was probably completely renovated for the purpose of being an Airbnb. It's a four bedroom house, very clean, very cozy. Everything is brand new, lots of white and gray floors and cabinets. I think the best way to describe this place is that there are lots of frames all over the house that people buy from home goods or TJ Maxx, frames that have phrases written on them, like cursive lettering that says life doesn't have to be perfect to be wonderful or simply blessed. There's even a sign in the laundry room that says wash and another one above the Wi-Fi router that says connect. I think everyone has probably been in a house like this, and while there may be several adjectives for this style of decor, creepy is probably not one of them at least not in a way that would make a group of people who are staying there while they're working hard on getting a new restaurant set up to be unsettled and paranoid to the point of distraction. So I'll let John take it from here. This episode is called St. George and you're listening to Other World. Hello? Is this Bobby? What's it called? At that it's core of the science you can't argue with. You don't have a story to bow to science. Something's gone. It's almost frustrating that it's happened to me. I'm gonna die a project. If it's limbs were just like the wrong. Everybody knows that can do the right even if it takes them a minute. [Music] I'm John. I'm currently a bartender in San Diego. I've worked in restaurants and hotels for the last 15 years. I'm going up until this didn't really have any belief in, you know, any paranormal or afterlife or anything like that. You know, not to not to throw shade at my family but when whenever I'd see something I couldn't explain as a kid just as an example they'd tell me, oh you know, kids see angels all the time. It's you know, it's not a big deal. You just see an angels. So my opinion was really just that up until probably when I was about 15, 16 and then I was just kind of like, you know, there is no afterlife. There is no spirit realm, anything like that. You know, we die, we die. So ghosts aren't real, angels aren't real. None of that's real. Wait, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just going to say, what's the great little world? What about the angel? Sorry, kids, the angels all the time. Why did they say that? That's what I mean. I don't want to throw shade at my family. My mom's a very sweet lady but her explanation for everything that couldn't be explained was, you know, kids just see angels. They're close to God so they see angels. That's all it is. The most vivid example was what I was probably about. It wasn't too much, yeah, I was pretty young. I was probably eight or nine. And I was helping my dad out in the garage, you know, just cleaning up. Our garage was always just a mess. The chaotic mess is a kid. It was our extra storage room basically. And I want to say we were trying to move some stuff around so we could get the lawnmower out for the first time in a couple of years. I was looking at my dad and behind him, I just saw like, someone kind of like standing in the corner of the garage. And it wasn't, you know, a dimly lit garage by any means. It was pretty bright. There wasn't any wind blowing anything around. But I just saw kind of like the right half of a person go behind this stack of boxes. And I told my dad, I said, oh, there's someone in the garage. And he snapped his head around and looked and, you know, he would both walk over there and peeked around the corner of the boxes and there just, there wasn't anything there. So he told me, he's like, you sure? Like, his side door was open. It's possible someone came in and I said, no, like, there's no way they got past us to go back out the door because they were back into a corner. And he said, oh, no, it's just your imagination. Don't worry about it. And then he went in and he was laughing to my mom about it. And she said, oh, yeah, he just sees angels, kids see angels. I just remember even then thinking that was, you know, that was bullshit. But I, I felt like it was very dismissive. Because I, I described it to them and I told them, you know, that one was the first one. But I told them, I know what I saw. You know, that was, that was a person. Like, they didn't have a face, but it was just a, like, a gray person kind of shifting behind the boxes in our garage. And even as a, like, an eight or nine-year-old kid, you know, I knew that that was there. I knew that that wasn't, you know, just the wind blowing something, casting a shadow. It was way too vivid, way too through dimensional. The next time I saw something, I think, was probably about a year or two later. So it was nine or ten. And again, cleaning, I was just cleaning my room. And I had my blinds open and, you know, all the walls in that room were painted to look like clouds. So it was just white and white blue. And I was facing my parents and they had, they were facing the door, which is opposite the window. And I'm looking out the window over my mom and dad's shoulder kind of between them. And I just saw someone walk by and again, you know, no facial features, anything like that. Just kind of a gray, almost kind of a gray, blue kind of shade to them. And they just walked by slowly and, you know, they didn't stop and look in the window or anything. It was just a figure moving by. And it cast a shadow on the ceiling and on the wall. And I told them, there's somebody in the backyard. You know, turn around. There's somebody out there and they both looked with, they just kind of peaked out the blinds and turned around. And they said, well, what did they look like? Because there was somebody in our neighborhood at the time that was going through back yards. But that was, we know what he looked like. You know, he was, he was this really tall guy. I just kind of sketchy looking, but he had a face, you know. And whatever this was, didn't have a face. It didn't, you know, it didn't really have like a, like a solid body to it. It was just kind of a figure. And, you know, they asked me to describe that to them and I did. And my mom just looked at my dad and said, oh, see, he's, he's seen angels. He's still a kid. So he's still seeing angels. And as much as that felt dismissive at the time as well, same with the first time, it also, I realized it was kind of comforting. You know, it made me realize, maybe I'm not seeing something scary and unexplainable. Maybe it's perfectly explainable. Maybe it is just an angel and they're just checking out on the family, you know, checking in to make sure, okay, so that was the second one. The third one happened actually at my grandparents' house in, in Fallbrook, which is a little north of San Diego, but they live kind of out in kind of, out in the country a little bit. A lot of ranches and stuff out there. And they had this two-story garage where upstairs were just the attic, basically. And I was up there with my cousins and my mom was up there. And they had this rowing machine in this little barber shop chair that we always used to just play around on. And I remember I was on the rowing machine with two of my cousins and I looked over across the room with the barber chair and there was just someone standing next to it with their hand on it, but they were kind of out of view because it was dark in that corner. So that one, I tried to tell myself, oh, no, that's, that's nothing. you know, I was probably 11 or 12 at this time. I looked back again a few minutes later. and there was still like a figure over near that barber chair. So I told my mom, I was like, "Mom, look, "look in the corner over there, "and by the time she looked, there was nothing there." And she asked me again, and I explained it, and I said, "It was just like a figure. "It's kind of a dark gray this time." And she said, "Oh, wow." Like, well, you know, grandma and grandpa are, you know, very religious. They're very close to gods. It's just angels. I wouldn't worry about it. That's when I kind of started forming my own beliefs, and I started to think, you know, "Oh, well, "maybe it's nothing." You know, I don't need to be scared of this, if it's easily explained by it's an angel. Because angels, I mean, they're unequivocally good. So far as we all think, you know, if I try to put myself in their shoes, 'cause we're still really close to this day, but we don't really talk about this. I don't really, you know, bring it back up with them. I think for them, they were kind of as scared as I was when I was seeing these things. So for them to just calm me down and say, "Oh, no, like it's nothing to worry about." You're just seeing angels. Definitely seem to comfort them even more than it comforted me, because the first two times they gave me that, I just felt totally dismissed, you know, same as any kid, but when someone tells you, you don't know what you're talking about. But I noticed that once, you know, I'd kind of push back on that, and I noticed once I'd stopped pushing back, each time we were having that conversation, they seemed a lot happier. So yeah, from then on, you know, I just kind of ran with that for a couple of years, and, you know, once I got into high school, kind of stopped being religious, stopped believing in heaven and hell the afterlife. And I never, I think just because I didn't want to think about it, I never really went back to think about, you know, what does that mean? Because if I don't believe in God or an angel or in the afterlife, then what was I seeing as a kid? So I've lived in San Diego pretty much my whole life, and about eight years ago, I met my upstairs neighbor, Julia, and we've been together ever since, and we've been lucky enough to work together at a couple different jobs. And, you know, we've been lucky enough to do a bit of traveling together and get sent to some interesting places just through work, honestly. You know, places like St. George, Utah, where I never thought I would go. Yeah, so from the time I was about 13 or 14, until this trip in 2023, I just, I didn't believe in anything. You know, if someone told me they saw our ghost, I would have been the first person to say, "Oh, this person's just high out of their mind." You know, they're making this up. And that definitely all changed in Utah, because we had been working for this sassy little fried chicken chain for about a year, and they were opening locations, you know, in Utah, Texas, Colorado. And they asked us if we wanted to go out and open this store in St. George and train the new staff there and just get it up and running. And, you know, we jump in the chance, because one else we're going to get a chance to go to a tiny little podunk spot in Utah. You know, we like that. You know, we like the off-the-beaten path, kind of, small towns and places you wouldn't normally find yourself. So in May of 2023, we got the call, and they were going to send us out to St. George. So we got all the details, like we, you know, everything was set up by the training manager for the company. We got on the plane, and we were just thinking, "Cool, we're going to have a nice chill, relaxing week in this nice Airbnb and a quiet town in Utah and, you know, go work and train people and just have a nice time." And that's going to be that, and then just come home. You know, refreshed and recharged. It was me, Julia, our sous chef, Clarissa, and another coworker, Bridget. We got in, you know, after Delay is all day. You know, every flight was Delay, but we got in about one o'clock in the morning. You know, our co-workers, Clarissa and Bridget, they just greeted us at the door. They kind of walked us around the house, gave us a little tour to show us where everything was at. Basically, the front door, we barely used it. So we were all coming in through the back kitchen door. Yeah, after you exit the kitchen, those stairs going up are going to be off to your left, and then there's just a big, huge living room right there in the middle of the house. And then the other two bedrooms that were downstairs were off to the right from the stairway. And there was one, like, tiny bedroom upstairs. It had one of those, like, a slanted ceiling. Like, it felt like it was definitely meant more to be a kid's playroom than, like, an actual bedroom. You know, not a big house. You know, definitely felt old. You could tell it had the AirBnB remodeled treatment, just a quick remodel and a bunch of decor from Michael's and Target. But it definitely felt old. You know, you could feel the floor move a little bit under you. And you could tell from the outside that it was, you know, it was an older house. And it definitely had some history. I mean, they even call it a historic home on the AirBnB listing. That first night, probably around 2 to 30, you know, we weren't up too long. We were ready for bed. Definitely we were exhausted. Julia, my girlfriend, Julia, luckily, she fell asleep super quick. So she was already out. But I was kind of tossing and turning and just, you know, I don't sleep well the first night in a new place. So I was just kind of up, you know, eyes closed, not really asleep. And I just heard steps on the stairs. Like one time coming down. And then nothing. And then maybe 10, 15 minutes later, it sounds like someone comes down the stairs again. And I thought, you know, there's only one person sleeping upstairs. So that's, that's kind of weird. I don't know. Maybe she's just trying to be quiet. And I didn't hear her go back up. Or maybe there's only a couple stairs that squeak. And I only heard those. Maybe half an hour later, I'm actually starting to drift off to sleep. And I hear, I don't know how to describe it, but kind of the squeaking you hear and the floorboards are like the ceiling, like from up above. And I heard that. And I realized like, that's not where the bedroom is upstairs. It wouldn't be right over my head. It's kind of off over the living room. You know, I was kind of weirded out by that. Then the next morning, just because I'm nosy, I went upstairs and kind of poked around up there. And I realized that there was like a locked room up there that was just storage. You could kind of peek into it. And there was just a bunch of packages of toilet paper and like laundry detergent and stuff in there. But it had like a padlock on it. And that was, that was the space directly above our room. So it wouldn't have been Clarissa or Bridget moving around up there. But there was definitely somebody moving. If it wasn't just the house creaking, there was definitely someone moving around up there. And you know, same with, you know, just giving myself a nice excuse. Like with the angels, I just said, "Oh, it's just an old house. No big deal. I'm not hearing anything. There's nobody in here. Everything's fine. We're alone. It's just the four of us." And then that second day, like the first day, I'm going to work. And Julie, I think, started at either 11 or 12. So we, you know, we finished up breakfast and she got ready. And then, you know, I walked her outside. Well, where she got into an Uber and took off her work. So I assumed Clarissa was to love stairs. You know, I came back in and just started getting ready. And it was pretty quiet. You know, I wasn't hearing anything. And I felt like someone was in the house. But I was, you know, I was assuming it was just Clarissa. And, yeah, I just went about my day. And I think it was, I think it was when I was coming out of the shower. I heard somebody at like the top of the stairs. And I just said, "No. There's nothing we could go on here. It was just Clarissa. We're fine." So I figured, you know, maybe she was running around trying to get ready last minute. And that was the day that I, like left her work, got to work. And then Clarissa had already been there for a couple hours. I just said, "Hey, when did you get here?" And she said, "Oh, yeah. They called me in a really late. So I've, you know, been here a couple hours." And I just kind of looked at her. I didn't say anything because I didn't want to seem weird. And I didn't want anybody like I'm in a house with, you know, three women. I don't want them to think there's someone creeping around our house. So I just said, "Oh, okay. Cool. Yeah, no big deal. That's totally normal." By the time we're going to bed on that second night, the first day we had worked, I was just telling myself, "It's just an old house." You know, I wasn't really suspecting anything yet. I was just kind of fully, fully all in on, "It's just an old house." You know, there's nothing weird going on here. Old houses do that. Every house I've ever lived in has done that. So no big deal. You know, just because I'm in a tiny town in Utah, doesn't mean anything's going on. And, you know, that night we just, we all just kind of hung out. Clarissa got home probably about midnight. And, you know, nobody else mentioned anything. No one mentioned feeling uneasy until the next morning, actually. The next morning was when Julia told me that when she got home from work today, before she felt like someone was in the house. Like she felt like someone was there had been there. That wasn't the four of us. She either called her mom or a friend and was just kind of on the phone for some support just walking around checking all the rooms, checking the closets, making sure the front door was actually locked and the back door. And I still wasn't thinking too much of it yet just because it is, you know, we're in an unfamiliar place. We've never been to this house. It's old. We're in a town where we know nobody. And, you know, kind of a weird vibe to the town at that. So that was when I kind of started thinking, "Ah, maybe someone was in here. Maybe I heard somebody, but it's not likely." So I don't know. So I just, I gaslit myself and we kind of gaslit ourselves and just said, "No, it's just nerves or whatever." You know, we're tired. We've been on the road all day yesterday. We worked all day, the day we were able to day before. We worked all day yesterday. And, you know, it's nothing. It's no big deal. You know, we're just a little anxious. Day three, you know, Julie and I woke up at the same time every day. You know, we'd, you know, obviously, hopefully same for everybody, but we love spending time together. So we get up. We're daily ritual by then. You know, it's only day three, but we've gotten our daily routine to be we wake up. At the time this, this town, St. George, they had those rental scooters everywhere still. So we'd, you know, grab one of those and ride that over to the cafe and get breakfast. And honestly, it was just really nice, you know, this really pleasant way to spend your morning. You know, we come back after that. It's day three. Julie, I think, worked at NAM. I think she had to leave by 945 to get the lift. Everybody else, you know, they all worked early because, you know, Clarissa, she was one of the head chefs trying to open the place up. Bridget, our other coworker, definitely had worked by, I think she opened front of house that day. So she would have been in by about 830 or 9AM. You know, I'm just kind of going about my day getting ready for work. I've got laundry, you know, waiting. And I hear the dryer chime go off. And without stopping, I just walk right out of the room. And I get maybe three or four steps out of the doorway. And I look straight ahead. And I don't even stop walking, but I just lock eyes with just this little boy on the stairs. My stomach dropped immediately. And I like, could not breathe. And he's just standing there, staring right at me. And he looks terrified. I imagine I probably looked terrified, but he was just standing there. And, you know, he's wearing, he didn't have any like, skin color to him. I couldn't make out any like skin texture or like, texture of his hair or anything. But he was, you know, a little boy, maybe 10 years old. I want to say around 10 years old. And he's wearing, you know, like beat up overalls. And he's got just like a kind of a shaggy, kind of a janky like 60s bull cut. And we just locked eyes. And we didn't break eye contact for like three seconds. I felt like based on his haircut and the style of the overalls that he had to be from like the 50s or the 60s and had been wherever he was, you know, where he was at for a long time. All right, we'll be right back after this quick break. I'm just looking at him and we're not breaking eye contact. I'm still walking. And we're just eye to eye. And he's not moving. I'm, you know, continuing about my way because I don't want to stop. He had this, this look in his eyes that he just, he looked shocked. I was there. He looked scared of me. And at the same time, I was, you know, really scared the crap out of me. I just wanted to run for it. I also was like kind of worried for him because he had this look in his eyes and his eyes were pretty clear. Like there wasn't any color to his eyes. But you could very much tell like he looked scared. Almost kind of like a kid. Like if I don't know if you guys have ever come across a kid at a mall or like a county fair that can't find their parents, but they just, they look terrified. They look like they are hopeless and have no idea what to do and they just need somebody to help them figure it out. And that was kind of the sense I got from the look in this kid's eyes. I'm looking him in the eyes and I just, I can just tell he's scared. And I, I mean, I'm also scared, obviously. And I don't want to accept it. So I keep walking and I jar my head away. Like I turn my neck so fast that I'm not looking at him. But for whatever reason, my first instinct was, I'm not seeing that. That's not there. That's not supposed to happen and it's not happening. I have too much shit to do. (laughs) There's no way I'm seeing that right now. Same way my parents used to do, I just dismissed it. It's like, nope, that's not happening. It's not what I think it is. I just got so freaked out that I just snapped my neck away so I didn't have to look at him anymore. And I'm still walking and I'm telling myself that that's not real. You're not seeing that. That's not supposed to be there. There's not supposed to be this weird, translucent little boy on the stairs in this Airbnb you're staying in. And I start realizing that that's actually really stupid. Like there's no way you didn't see that. You know what you saw. You just made eye contact with this little kid. So I keep walking but I turn my head back and he's still staring at me, like right in my eyes and he's kind of slowly creeping backwards. Like it seems like almost like he's hoping I didn't see him. And he's trying to sneak back up the stairs it seems like. In the way that little kids are like a little awkward with their movements, especially when they're moving fast, he turned pretty quick but then he took steps. And like I said, I couldn't see his feet but I could see his knees lift like he was walking. And I could see most of his legs but anything kind of below, like the height of each individual stair. I couldn't really see that. So kind of his ankle down just like wasn't there. And he just kind of went up two or three more stairs and he was turning his body but he didn't take his eyes off of me the whole time. And he was definitely not comfortable moving quickly yet. It very much felt like he was like praying. I hadn't seen him somehow and he was gonna try to just sneak out of sight before I did see him or before I could get to him. And maybe two or three steps up, there was a window. And as soon as he got into the sunlight of that window, he just kind of was gone. Like almost like the light kind of like, I don't know, it sounds weird but the light like he raised him. You know, when he got into that sunlight and just kind of faded away. Now, it was a quick fade. It wasn't like a slow fade. You know, it was like literally as he, as his left shoulder turned and kind of crossed the sunlight coming through the window, that disappeared. And the rest have been followed as he crossed the window. And once he disappeared, I think that's when it actually sank in for me that I did see that. Because I had turned and ran. I just booked it right out the back door, right past the dryer with my laundry in it. And I just sat out there. You know, I slammed the door behind me. I ran down the driveway out to the curb on the main street and I just kind of sat on the sidewalk there by myself for probably like a good 10, 15 minutes. Just processing that because that was not anything like what I'd seen before. You know, I hadn't seen anything like that since I was a kid. I'm sitting out on the sidewalk for probably a good 10, 15 minutes kind of remembering the things I saw as a kid. And remembering all the times, I saw something that I could not rationalize. But I know it was there. It was very much there. And I think part of me didn't want to accept what I had just seen or accept that it might be something similar to what I saw as a kid because that means it's all real. You know, I had kind of gotten to the point in my adult life and as a teenager where I went along with my parents and gaslighting myself with that. I was like, no, it's not real. It's just, it didn't happen. You know, and if I have to accept that that's real, then what else is real? And I'm sitting there thinking, I have to go to work. I have to go inside. I'm doing laundry for Julian. I gotta get that done. I gotta finish my hair. And I gotta do all this with a little boy in the house, a little ghost boy in the house. Yeah, I don't know what he wants, but he sure looks scared. So maybe I don't need to be scared. I'm gonna try to go back in the house. You know, I slowly kind of peel myself up off the sidewalk. I start walking towards the house and I really don't want to go back in. And I'm maybe five steps from getting in the door. And then I just replayed the moment I came down the hall or came out of the door and made eye contact with him just how scared he looked. And I realized, I'm probably fine. I don't think there's any danger here. And for all I know, me being in the house, I don't know how, I don't really know what I was thinking it would possibly do, but maybe me being in the house is a good thing for this kid. Maybe it tells him he's not supposed to be here anymore or something, I don't know. But once I got to the back door, I just stood there facing the back door for probably five minutes before I just threw the door open. And I just told, you know, I just yelled out, I'm coming in, everything's fine. (laughs) Don't run. And just finished getting ready. And you know, got dressed, turned everything off actually. The first thing I did when I got inside was turn off the music. That was the only thing going. So I just turned the music off and I kind of listened to the house for a couple of minutes just to see if I heard anything else, any movement or anything. And just is quietly as I could took everything out of the dryer, got ready for work and just got out of the house as fast as I could. And when I was outside to wait for my ride to work, I walk into work and I manage your dad. He's just, you know, this big, you know, big man's man, he's a nice guy. He's playful, he's goofy, you know, always down to chop it up. And I thought I looked fine. You know, I didn't think I looked like it just seen something or experienced anything. Maybe a little sweaty because it was like 100 degrees out. But I walk into the, I walk into the back of the house at the restaurant and he says, "John, you alright, man?" He looked like he just saw a ghost. That just, and I just stared at him and I didn't know what to say. I'm fine. Yeah, I'm gonna go clock in. Probably the most comedic timing, the best comedic timing that's ever happened to me personally. I actually did not tell anybody until the last day when Julia and I were on our way to the airport in the morning because literally that night actually, the night that I saw the little boy, Julia got really freaked out in the house when she was there alone. And I was planning to tell her, but I think maybe it may be a little selfishly, but also, you gotta know your people. I figured there's no danger. He looks terrified. He didn't look like he was gonna do anybody harm. I just decided not to tell her until we were out of that house and we didn't have to go back. I definitely once I had gotten to work the night that I saw him, it wasn't very busy. It was a pretty small town. So this restaurant wasn't super busy. So I had maybe a little too much time to think while I was at work and I was wondering, what's how, how is this kid here? And where is this kid from? Or when is this kid from? Something I had heard in other podcasts and TV shows and stuff. And even from my own grandma on my dad's side or on my mom's side was that, you know, souls can be trapped. And, you know, I thought, well, you know, maybe he's stuck here. I don't know because he definitely didn't look like he was from, you know, from now, you know, like I was saying earlier. He was in old overalls. He had an old haircut and he looked shocked and confused to see me. So I started spinning over ideas and I looked at the, the Airbnb listing and I, I took the address and I put it on a couple real estate websites to find out when the house was built. And I found that it was built in 1949. And I said, okay, let's, you know, maybe there's something to that because this kid looked like he was probably 9, 10, 11 years old, style of clothing and haircut was 50s, 60s. And, you know, it's on, you know, it's in like a pretty podunk town where there's a lot of history, you know, like two blocks away from the house was a Brigham Young's vacation home from like 1800s. So I thought, okay, well, maybe some kind of gnarly stuff was going on, you know, in this part of Utah. And, you know, without looking at any, any other like, you know, ghost stories or anything, I just figured, you know, maybe, maybe this is just a kid that passed away in this house. You know, who knows when, but, you know, maybe he's just kind of stuck here. And I didn't, you know, I didn't really take it much further than that. I just kind of, I think just to kind of give myself some peace. I just said, yeah, that's it. That's all it is. He's, he's just some kid that stuck here until he figures out how to move on. So yeah, after that night, you know, I was still at work when, when Julia felt like there was somebody in the house, like something going on, like, something made her very uncomfortable. You know, I, I decided not to tell her that night. And, you know, she had already checked the whole house and she was so scared that she actually went outside and didn't go back in the house until, until Clarissa got home. And I think even then they just stayed on the front porch. But yeah, I came home late that night, probably around 11. And I think we, you know, we got pizza again and we were just kind of hanging out. And we went to bed and it took us a long time. I mean, I, it took me even longer, but it took Julia a long time to fall asleep. And I'm just laying there, you know, not just that night, but the, the rest of the nights were there. Not only like, I'm free to close my eyes because I don't know, you know, what's going on. And now, you know, I suddenly, now I have all these questions. Now I'm suddenly starting to wonder, you know, what, what's possible? And, you know, I'm afraid to close my eyes to go to sleep, but then once I manage to close them, I'm afraid to open them again because I don't know if there's going to be someone else standing in the corner or if that little ghost boy is going to be standing at the foot of a bed. It was, it kind of, it was kind of a tense next three days. I mean, we didn't, we didn't see him again. I mean, I didn't see him again. We didn't hear anything. You know, I still heard sounds on the stairs, but at this point, I'm just thinking, you know, if something bad's going to happen, it would have happened already. And I really didn't get the sense that the little boy was any type of a threat. So we were, you know, I was able to be in the house and I was able to kind of function there, but it was definitely pretty uneasy. So yeah, we're, you know, we wake up on our last day and we had a pretty early flight. So we packed everything up the night before, got into a lift the next morning. We're on our way to the airport and we were, you know, she starts talking about how uneasy she felt in that house. Like how much we love the house, how peaceful St. George was, how nice everybody was, how clean the house was. And then we started talking about that just overall, like, overarching discomfort, intention in the house, just that feeling of not really being alone. And talking about the night that she had to go outside and just stay outside until somebody else got there. And I said, yeah, I am really sorry, but I got to tell you something. I, I saw a little boy, the ghost of a little boy on the stairs a few days ago. And I didn't want to tell you guys because I thought we'd all freak out and it would, you know, unnecessary. You know, I didn't think he was a threat or anything. I didn't think we were in any danger. But I didn't want to tell you guys because, you know, we, we all got to sleep at some point. And if we're all freaking out and that's just going to make everything worse. And, you know, she didn't, she didn't like freak out, but she went holy shit. Like, I'm wondering if that's who I was feeling because, you know, she, she was, you know, sensing stuff in the house, like, felt like somebody was behind her a bunch of times. At one point, she felt like there was somebody walking into the room behind her because our room was downstairs in the front of the house. And at another point, she's standing there, you know, looking at the floor and the bed skirt jumped. And she just went, what? And that caused her to run out of the house as well. And, you know, we're recapping all of that and I finally tell her and we're just sitting there kind of shocked. And in silence, because I think telling her about it finally made it a like a tiny bit more real for me as well. So we just kind of sat in the back of the Uber for a couple minutes just in silence. You know, after our existential crisis for a few minutes, you know, we keep talking about it. We start sharing theories. We start researching the house heavily. You know, there wasn't much to find that we found yet, but we started researching the house a lot. I didn't want to tell anybody because, you know, I originally, you know, before this happened, if somebody told me this story, you know, I'd just be thinking they're little, they're a little nuts. You know, I'm like, that's on me. That's pretty judgmental. But now, you know, that's a little different now. So we weren't really telling anybody. And we kept talking about it over the next couple of weeks and then we decided we have to ask Clarissa if she experienced anything. Or if she felt, you know, just even if she just felt like the house was haunted. So probably two, two and a half weeks after we got back, we're all at work. It's, you know, Julia Clarissa and I all worked at the same location and, you know, we're all there together. And we go over to Clarissa and we're talking to her through through the expo window. And we say, Hey, Clarissa, just totally out of curiosity, you know, nothing, nothing, no reason. Did you feel like that house was haunted in Utah? And she froze and her eyes got huge. And she just immediately starts nodding and she goes, yes, absolutely. And we said, whoa, okay, well, what, what made you think that? And she said, well, I kept hearing people walking around upstairs. And when I realized it wasn't you guys, I started to get really scared. But I've just been telling myself it had to be you guys because there's no way like goes can't be real. And we told her like we, we were never upstairs while you were in the house. And she was your section of the house as far as we were concerned. And we all just started laughing. And I mean, we just didn't know what to say. You know, she definitely felt that there was a presence upstairs with her. She said most of the trip. So of course, you know, it's one of the most curious things that's ever happened to me. And we were just like, we were just like, you know, we're just like, we're just like, you know, we're just like, you know, we, we think about it and we, we research it. And I'm trying to find out like if there's any way to determine who this little boy was. And I forget, I forget what she asked me. But she asked me a question about like what he looked like, probably a month or two ago. And she just stopped and looked at me and said, well, what do you mean? So I told her the story about, you know, the guy, like, what looked like a man going by my window outside. And my parents telling me it was just angels. And she said, John, that's, that's God. I mean something like this is you've been seeing stuff like this since you were a little kid. Like there's got to be more to that. I don't want to believe that. I mean, I do, but I haven't been wanting to accept that because that's what Julia has been saying. She's like, that's, that's amazing. Like if anything, you should be really excited about that because I was in the house freaked out all week and I didn't see anything. But you saw this kid and you made eye contact with them and you've been seeing stuff like that since you were a kid. Like there's, you know, you might, you might be able to see things that other people can't. And I didn't want to connect those dots personally until she said that. And I realized like, yeah, okay, maybe I should consider, consider some of that. I mean, it's really shaken up the kind of worldview that I, that I crafted after, you know, being told multiple times. Like, oh, kids just see angels or it's just angels. You know, once I, once I got kind of away from my religious upbringing a little bit, I just completely stopped believing in anything, you know, no afterlife. We all just, we died and that's probably it. Didn't believe in ghosts, didn't believe in aliens for a long time, didn't believe in anything like that. Now like since, since this has happened, I'm still trying to rationalize that any of this could be possible. You know, I, I live half of my life staunchly believing that the ghosts are not real. None of this is real. None of it's possible. And now here I'm at 35 trying to, trying to stick together some sort of rationale for, there's some sort of rational explanation for, for what I saw. And trying to accept that there might not be one very few weeks that go by that, that Julie and I don't bring up, you know, we, we just call him our little ghost friend at this point. And, you know, there's at least once a week we talk about him and we, we try to think about who he might have been and we're always looking for, you know, people online and just on TV or whatever that, you know, might have any idea, you know, if this little boy needs help, you know, how to do that? Like, who should we contact? What should we do? What are the odds if we go back to Utah and stay in the same house? We'll see him again. And, you know, I really, I really kind of appreciate our little ghost friend because he, he really kind of shook things up for me. Like, my, my worldview is a lot fuller now after this happened because now I do leave room for things that can't be explained now, things that you can't just use science to prove or disprove. I've also kind of learned to, you know, trust my gut a little more, because that whole week I felt like something was there. And then there he was. [Music] Okay, thank you to John for speaking to us and also thank you to Julia for originally sending that in. Even though it's sort of the most classic paranormal experience, it's not very common for us to get submissions of people who saw a vivid, full-bodied apparition like that. And I'm always super interested when it does happen. You know, people experience what we call ghosts in a lot of ways, but it's really not common for people to see something as detailed as John did. And it seems like it might be something he was able to do as a kid and had very complicated feelings about it. You know, I'm not sure what you're supposed to say to your child if they tell you that they're seeing things, but telling them that all the stuff they're seeing is angels seems like maybe not the best move on several levels. Especially if what they're seeing is very terrifying to them. By the way, I feel like it's fairly common to hear that about kids being able to see things like that the way John did. But at least for me, I personally cannot relate at all. I did not see anything as a kid. I didn't even have an imaginary friend, even though I tried to have one several times. It just couldn't work. I was unable to imagine one. So I never experienced anything like that. But it's something that I come across a lot while making the show. And to me, it seems like it would be something that must be very complicated to have in your childhood memories, no matter what you end up believing about it. And I'm sure that's true for John. As for this Airbnb and the boy that he saw, I was not able to find anything related to the history of the home itself. The real estate industry tends to make that type of thing very difficult. But what I did find is that this town in Utah, where they were staying, apparently received the most amount of nuclear fallout from the above ground testing that was going on in the 50s, Northwest of Las Vegas. This caused a massive wave of cancer in the town's population, cancer of all types. And this was devastating to the town from the mid-50s into the 1980s. In fact, a movie was filmed there in 1956. And 91 members of the cast and crew came down with cancer. 50 of them ended up dying from it. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with what John saw. But I did think all of that was very striking when I discovered it. when I discovered it. And obviously, I thought it was worth mentioning. That brings us to the end of this episode. This one was called St. George, and you've been listening to Other World. Other World is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our producers are Theo Shaffer, Theo Krants, Haley Persson, and Nikki Kate Delgado. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by North Americans and Juice Jackal. Our artwork is by Koldusak Studios. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, and telling your friends about the show. If you want to hear bonus episodes of Other World, you could become a patron at patreon.com/otherworld. Our social media is @otherworldpod. Thank you to the team at Odyssey, Liyah Ristennis, Mora Curran, Josephina Francis, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Colin Gainer, and Hillary Schuff. Follow and listen to Other World now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained, you can send us your stories at [email protected]. [BLANK_AUDIO]