Welcome to the world. I'm your host Jack Wagner. This is the Lake House part three. If you haven't heard the first two parts, you should go back. And start at the beginning. Jennifer is one of the only people from this entire story who is still around. The only other one is her little sister Sarah. Jennifer told me that the very day Sarah graduated high school, she packed up all of her things, moved out of the family home, and never looked back. She left all of it behind and completely started a new life. In fact, you will hear that her and Jen have totally different accents. I was able to speak to Sarah on the phone to confirm some of the details of the story and also hear about some of the memories she still has from this period. We're gonna start with that, then get into the rest of the story. The final chapter of this house and some of the lingering questions Jennifer has had about how much her mom was experiencing in it, and whether all of this started the day they moved in or sometime long before. Once again, I want to give a strong warning that this story covers many different disturbing topics that will be difficult for some listeners, please be advised. This is the Lake House part three, and you're listening to other world. Hello? Is this Bobby? What's that? That it's a core of the science you can't argue with. I'm not sure what I'm talking about. It's almost frustrating not to talk to you. I'm gonna die a project. It's WIM's, we're just like we're wrong. Everybody knows that. Even if it takes them a minute. All right, I'm going to start recording here. Jen, feel free to jump in if you have anything to add. I really, Sarah, what I will say is I really tried to tell this story respectfully from my point of view, and I did not, I really did not want to just speak for you. I know what I mean. I want you to introduce yourself, however you'd like. Jen, I don't know if you were using her name, or if you were just saying her sister. For her name, I just said Sarah. Yeah, so my name is Sarah. 42. I lead a very happy, fulfilling life with my husband's, and a career that I'm actually enjoy very far from where my sister and I started in our childhood. I remember pulling up and unloading, and I remember looking at the house, thinking, wow, it's a two-story house. I never thought I would be able to live in a two-story house. It just seemed so big. It was this year's, yeah. Yeah, coming from our backgrounds, we were probably on the poverty line, and when my step-dad got this job opportunity to move, it came with benefits, including more money. So looking back, it wasn't a nice house, but it was to me as a child in second grade, it was a very grand upgrade from what I was used to or what I was expecting. I noticed a very heavy energy, and I remember being scared all the time, even before things started to happen in the house. Probably the first instance of something unsettling happening was when we were sitting down, eating dinner, and various things from our bedrooms started coming down the stairs, like stuffed animals, books, things of that nature. And again, we were all at the table, and for me, it made me terrified as a little kid, and my older siblings just kind of fed into that me being scared. But as things progressed, like toilets flushing by themselves, TVs changing, radios coming on, everybody in the house, excluding, I think, my step-dad kind of felt the presence and the fear that I was fearing. That was the first time it happened where we were all sitting down together. Other times that would happen when somebody was alone in the kitchen dining room area, which the stairs led down into the kitchen directly into the kitchen. And it would be books, toys, sometimes it would be paper, with no one upstairs. And so it was very, I guess, as a human being, you try to rationalize how that happened. And we all had our own comfort level with, believing what we told ourselves. For me, I just felt that somebody was throwing them down the stairs, or something, not someone. It wasn't a part of my family that was just part of the house. So, you know, back in the '90s, we would have movie nights. And I got in trouble because I didn't eat at all my dinner. And so I had to go to bed without watching a movie. And I was so disappointed because we used to get these big bags of popcorn from the grocery store and watch movies and eat popcorn. And I was sent upstairs by myself, and my sister had a pile of blankets on her bed. And I'm sitting there, or I'm sitting laying in bed, it's still daylight, looking at her bed. And the cover's just flattened out like somebody sat on them. And I ran downstairs, even though I was in trouble and technically grounded into my room for the night. And I just was crying, and told my mom I couldn't be up there by myself. And she was sympathetic because she was experiencing similar things as well. So we could see Lake Hickory literally, it was a cross-street mess. And so I would go there quite often, again, being a Lachke kid and just being by myself a lot. And I remember being down by the water, and I was putting my foot in the water, and I was holding on to this tiny tree. And I looked up, and maybe a foot, two feet above my head, was a snake in the tree, a water moccasin. And I was scared of death, so I slowly backed away and started running towards the house. And in my bedroom window, there was someone standing in the bedroom window. And I knew it wasn't my sister because it was big. And I walked in the house, and I went upstairs, and nobody was there. And I just sat with that. And honestly, I don't remember being that scared that I saw that. It was, for me, of course, it validated my feelings and other things that I had gone through. Like feeling someone was in the bathroom with me while I was taking a shower, or feeling like someone was standing over my bed. In a weird way, it validated my feelings. For a long time, I just thought it was the house as a child. And later on, I kind of developed there someone here, that feeling. It got to the point where I would even shower or bathe by myself. I would have to have someone in there with me. Because I was so scared to shut the shower curtain. I just felt like something was on the other side. The house was on at least two plots of land, over an acre. And in the back of the acre, I would spend hours outside. I would be climbing trees. I would be looking for four-leaf clovers. I would be at the lake. I was outside until dusk. But in the back of the property, there was this weird cage, and cage is kind of an understatement. It was this huge rot iron. If you think of like an open from the ceiling gel cell that had several different little rooms in it, I honestly don't know to this day what the purpose of it was for. But you know, like us being kids, we would bring our dogs back there, and you know, want to put them in there, or you know, play in there. I always felt really uncomfortable going in there. But our animals, 100%.
As soon as we would approach it, start growling, they would start barking going crazy, they would not go in that pen. I think about that a lot, and I even Google Earth, the house trying to look far enough back, of course you can see it. Because to me, it was huge, right? It was like seven feet tall in this expansive room of a jail cell. I always thought that was odd. So something you do not know, Sarah, is that mom did go back there with a trash bag. There had been some discarded animals that were done so in a pretty weird way. From what I understand, like cats, dogs, some kind of domestic whatever. She knew that we were playing back there, right? So she made a run through with a trash bag and loaded it up with a bunch of things while we were at school one day. So she told me that years later that she had found like domesticated animals back there. But she really didn't go into detail of like the wind, the what, just that she had. This whole topic scared the crap out of her. Yeah. It was like pulling teeth with her due to fear. And I have not come across another topic where mom just wouldn't tell you exactly like a fucking one is, right? Other than the Ouija board. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Yes. Well, whatever this whole thing is. We had typical very hands-off parenting. The only thing I can remember her telling us not to do two things, hard drugs and Ouija board. We would talk a lot about like things that we both experienced. And I remember her telling me you wouldn't want to be home alone during the day in that house, because she was quite often with five children, right? She would be there doing laundry waiting for us to get home, you know, all the things that she would do. But she wouldn't go into great detail about things that I wasn't already aware of. I do know that one of my stepbrothers did not like being in the house by himself, but he would never tell us why. And we would make fun of them for it. Because he would always act like, oh, I'm this big tough guy like Karate, like, you know, just very macho, but he did not want to be in the house alone. Everyone else in our house was experiencing probably the worst period, one of the worst periods in their life, up till then, and even now. I mean, my mom has always had problems with substance abuse, but the alcoholism at that time was something that, through degree, that she had never gone to or gone to sense. It was, wasn't good. I know one of my stepbrothers had such bad behavioral problems when we moved back to Texas. He actually moved to a completely different city to live with his grandmother. My step-sister, she was super depressed, having, I mean, just a lot of emotional issues and not hanging out with the right people that she should be, but also self-harm. And then, of course, you know, my sister was going through a lot of her own issues. Just these things that, like, it was just a culmination of everyone doing or experiencing their worst. In the house itself, I just, I think the thing that was there was not a human, it wasn't a ghost, it wasn't someone that passed their energy. I think it was something else and what that is, I don't want to pretend like I know, but it wasn't good. It's, it's got to traumatize you and leave an impact in some way, right? And I think it certainly did for my mom. So just the tension in the house had really, really ramped up. And my mom, I think that she was trying to find a way to take back some control, okay? And she, she took it upon herself to try to bless that house by herself. That only made things worse. Me and my sister started praying. God, please help us. That made this a lot worse. In terms of the feeling of never being alone, the feeling of somebody standing over your shoulder, the feeling of turning off your bedroom light and the room is full of people. Like, you never had a feeling that you were alone in that house. Ever to the point that even the footsteps and the loud walking around and people coming up and down the stairs at night, that's not what scares you the most anymore. So it's almost like it push your boundaries a little bit. You'd get comfortable and accept some things. Then it's going to push them a little more. There was an intelligence to whatever this was that I cannot explain. All of this came to a head that day that my mom was alone in the house. My mother had gotten a little job at a insurance office. The kitchen, the dining room, were connected, right? And right off the dining room was the master bathroom and my oldest brother's bedroom. My mom said that she was putting on her makeup. She was standing in the bathroom with her little makeup bag and there's a big mirror that she was using to do her makeup. And if she looked into this mirror, she could see reflected behind her the dining room and the hallway in the mirror, right? And she's looking down at the vanity going through her stuff and she said that she starts to hear something like a noise going from loud quiet, loud quiet. She said it sounded like somebody was turning on and off the TV or the volume on the TV, but she didn't have the TV on. She had her stereo system on. It was the cars just what I needed. My mother loved the cars and she said that she heard the noise, but she really wasn't paying attention and she grabbed whatever she was getting ready to apply to her face and looked up in the mirror and standing behind her. All I know is that it was in the shape of a human and it was completely devoid of light. And she said then I looked over my right shoulder into the hallway and it is still standing there, still there. I don't know if she ran through this thing or ran past it, but she got out of that bathroom. And when she got into the kitchen, she noticed that not only was the volume on the stereo going up, down, up, down, up, down. On top of that her bedroom door, which doubled as our living room, where the radio was, was opening and closing on its own. It really scared her. And she said that she ran out of the house. She literally sat outside on that porch with the yellow pages and a cordless phone until she got somebody to agree to come out to the house. And the way that my mom tells it is that he got there and found her sitting on the front porch with the yellow pages and the cordless phone. And he had her go through everything that had happened. This guy walked in like it was just another Saturday night at his local hangout, right? There was no big prayers. There wasn't the pageantry of what you would expect. She said that he prayed with her, that he walked through the entire house and he blessed it. And he left that day and he basically just told her.
It's going to be all right. This is all going to be all right. She did not go to work that day. She-- she couldn't have, because she was there when-- when we got home from school. And we didn't know why she was there, so that was weird. Probably a week later, my dad brings us all in and sits us all down, and he's like, we need to have a family meeting and talk. And we're thinking, oh, my God, what? And he said, guys, I'm sorry to tell you, but I got a job transfer, and we are leaving in a month to go back to Texas. It was right at the end of my sixth grade year. So I finished my last day of sixth grade, got into that U-Haul, and we drove straight to Houston, and I could not have been happier to leave. The timing was weird. We moved right after that. So we moved to Houston. And what had started in that house in Tennessee continued, in terms of my brothers escalated into severe drug use? I mean, this was all so quick. When I got to Houston, the problems with depression continued. And my little sister fared much better than everybody else. I don't know if she had a better mechanism to protect herself. I really don't know. What started in Tennessee continued to just go on? And it's almost like we all individually had to deal with the aftermath of the trauma and the problems that were created from the three years of living in that environment decades later, I still think about this. So I do not have contact with my older siblings because they are not safe people for let alone-- not only their kids, but let alone what I'm trying to do with mine. I don't want her knowing any of this. But my mom went to work at a little insurance place in Houston. My stepdad was running pawn shops. Life happened. I went to graduate school. I got a job. The things-- all the things that you're supposed to do in your 20s. And my mom-- I don't know. She always struggled with feeling like she was making the right decision. And I had sat her down one day and I said, hey, Mom, I said, I'm 26 years old now. And I feel like as both adults, we need to really get to know each other. And I want to be close to you. And I think that there are better ways that you could cope. And I know that this shit that went down in this house in Tennessee still scares you on a daily basis. She said, yeah, Jen, it does. And I said, Mom, I want to have a baby one day. And I want you to be here for that kid. I want you to be able to meet your grandkids. And with all the party in and fast-living, you guys did when you were young. I really-- there's just one request I have. Can you please get clean? And she did. And I had her for nine years. It wasn't one of the most beautiful things. I had my kid. My daughter was born. She had two and a half years with my child. Because I was very lucky that I had a lucrative career. My husband does well. And I told my mom, I'm like, fuck what you're doing for a living. Whatever you're paid, I'm not. I'm going to pay you, come to my house Monday through Thursday and spend time with your grandkids while I travel and we work. And she was thrilled. I mean, over the moon, she had signed up for Obamacare and was super excited to have health insurance for like the first time in decades. And so she was going through and just getting routine stuff done, and she went and she had a physical. And she said, well, I've got this pooled muscle in my back. I want to go get one of those pain injections. And they said, that's cool. That's like a 45-minute outpatient procedure. It's not a big deal at all. It's local anesthesia. So they set it up halfway through the procedure. Her blood pressure just went out of control. And they gave her a lot of medication to stabilize the blood pressure. And they did not release her until about 4 o'clock that afternoon. And she told them, I feel really bad. I feel like I need to go to the hospital. There is something wrong with me. They fought her and fought her. Said, ma'am, this is normal. Don't worry about it. Now that your blood pressure is under control, everything is fine. My stepdad-- and he told her, honey, there's nothing to worry about. We've been in recovery for eight hours. Everything is stable. We're going to go home, blah, blah, blah. She got up out of bed and went and sat down in the office, I guess, to work. My dad came home two hours later. And she was sitting in that chair. She had been able to get the phone and hit 9 to try to dial 911. But she was dead. She had had a brain aneurysm as soon as he left that morning and died. This was August 24th of 2017. This was very, very unexpected because the day she died, she was supposed to be coming back to my house. I don't know, man. I was drowning. And at her funeral, I'm standing there and in walks her cousin, John. My grandma and his mom were sisters. And redhead, skinny, he was very easy to pick out. And I had no idea that he was going to be there. But I was so glad that he showed up. And we were able to kind of reconnect. Because the last time that I saw him, I was a little kid. And he had a lot of guilt for not staying in touch with my mom and staying connected to her. So I say hi to John. And he gets up to read a poem at my mom's funeral and he breaks down. And I've got to get up and finish it for him. And he meets me outside afterward. And he says, look, Jen, me and you have some catching up to do. And I was like, yeah, my mom would always tell me that you're the only man since granddaddy that was kind of in touch with things. And he knew what that meant. And he was like, yeah. And I said, I've got a lot of questions I need to talk to you. Because I've experienced some things that I need to discuss with somebody to make sure that I'm not insane. And he's like, OK, I called him the night of the funeral. And I just said, hey, John, I need to talk to you about something. And he said, what is it? And I said, we used to live in a haunted house in Tennessee. And he goes, Jen, I know all about it. And that's when he started talking about spending summers in Wago in this experience with her. All right, we'll be right back after this quick break. [MUSIC PLAYING] The wilderness can hide a lot, but it can't hide the truth forever. I'm Dylia Deambre, a host of Park Predators. And every week, I investigate true crime cases, hidden in national parks, forests, and beaches. I follow every lead, every clue, and every overlooked detail. Because even when a trail seems to disappear, the truth has a way of resurfacing. Listen to Park Predators, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Rachel. And I have a new show, Woo-Woo, with Rachel Dratch. It's an otherworldly comedy podcast where I, along with my co-host Irene Remis, talk to my funny friends about their own experiences with the eerie and the unknown. Psychics, spirits, astro-projection, check, check, and check. 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Come along as investigators, scientists, and experts, peace together evidence, clues, and data in search of the answers behind violent crimes, unexplainable mysteries, and other strange occurrences, listen to forensic files on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. His dad built power companies and power plants for a living. My mom had no dad, they were living very, very different lives. But in the summers, his mother would send him back down from Dallas to Waco to spend the summer with their grandmother, and that is where he got to spend a lot of time with my mom. They were best friends. She taught him how to fight, she taught him how to hit a baseball, I mean, all the things that he was just couldn't do. And my grandmother, my mom's mom, was working like three different jobs. She worked like cocktailing in bars at night, and then in some little office during the day, but she was always gone. Everybody's parents in Waco at this time, this was probably 1973-74. They had discovered the beautiful thing that was methamphetamines, so they were partying. Everybody was partying. Everybody's parents was never home. You had these kids run in the neighborhood doing whatever they wanted to do, and my great-grandmother lived on Leland Avenue in Waco, and like two streets over, there is a convenience store, and there is a cemetery called the Cobb Walker Cemetery. And for whatever reason, my mom and John loved playing in that cemetery. It was like their little playground, and they were there one day, and this girl comes walking up and introduces herself and says, "Hi, I'm Tracy." Tracy had an older brother that was, I believe, a senior going to be a senior in high school, and they had a real nice house. They had, like, as funny as it sounds, they had food to eat, they had air conditioning, they had cable. Oh my God. I mean, just this was the promised land for two kids running around Waco in 110-degree heat with no AC to be able to go inside somewhere and cool off. I mean, that was a big deal. And so they're immediately like, "Oh God, we got to be her friend." She's got air conditioning, like, "Let's go hang out over there," and they played together. Most of the summer, they would meet up at that cemetery, and they would play together. Like, it was right around July 4th. They had been playing with her all summer long, and she shows up one day, and they're getting ready to go to the convenience store. And I guess out of the blue from what he said, like, there was a long pause in the conversation, and she just comes out and says, "You know, me and my brother, we have sex all the time." And my mom is thinking, like, "Is this abuse?" This is all going through her head, like, "What?" Because John was like, "That is not what I was prepared for." And she was like, "Yeah, we have sex all the time." We have for a long time, and we don't tell our parents. And my mom and John are just kind of stunned, and then she keeps going and says, "You know, she has friends over from time to time, and we play games." What she was referring to was that during the day, when all of their parents were at work, that they were getting together and playing the Ouija board for hours, she invited them to come over. And they found themselves in a very sticky situation, because it's like, "Look, this is our friend with air conditioning, where we get to hang out. Her parents are never home. There's food to eat that, like, "Maybe we should just try this out and see what it is." So they started going over there daily. This became an everyday thing for them for a couple of weeks, where the older brothers friends would come, Tracy would bring John and my mom, and that they would play. He said, "Gen number one, things would move, things would fall over." Okay, and this wasn't any big, like, movie moment where it's like levitating and flies across the room, but you would have glassware or something sitting on the coffee table that would just move really quick eight inches. He said, "Number two, you've got to remember this is Waco, this is July. On a good day, it's 100 degrees. On a bad, you've got a heat index pushing like 110 plus." And he said, as bright as the sun was, we're doing this at 11 o'clock in the morning. The longer we played, it felt like nighttime. It felt like the house was really dark, almost like the sun turned off. He didn't like that. He did not like that at all. During one of these sessions, and I do not know how this conversation was delivered, I don't know the wording, he was very, this made him very uncomfortable talking about this. And he said that her brother had gotten really hardcore into satanic worship, that this is something that he had been doing for quite some time, unbeknownst to his parents, and that whatever he was doing sexually with his sister was a part of this. And during this last time that he was there with her, with my mom at Tracy's house, Tracy apparently got up and walked into the center of where they were all sitting, where the Ouija board itself was laid out. I believe it was on the floor or a low coffee table, but it was low to the ground. And John said that she undressed and that she laid down to prepare for whatever it was they were going to do. As keep in mind, there were at least two other girls and three other boys that were his friends that were there. None of them seemed surprised by this. None of them seemed freaked out by a girl and dressing herself and laying down in the middle of the floor. That also I think is what freaked him out. They got the fuck up out of there. They left. They're like, nope. Bye. Don't want any part of this. Gotta go. So they went back to my great grandma's house and they're like, dude, those fucked up. Let's go light. Whatever. Let's go to the river. We're gonna whatever. day. I did up running back in the morning.
to Tracy, maybe two, three, four days later at the cemetery. And Tracy's like, hey, everything's cool. It's no big deal. If you guys come back and play, if you guys come back and play, there won't be anything weird like that. It'll just be like the normal stuff we do. She's straight up sold them on coming back to that house. You know, we can hang out. We don't even have to play Ouija board the whole time, just the whole nine yards. John recounting this told me that this is the only time that he has ever shared this story. I was concerned that this was going to hit a nerve with him that was so deep that I may not hear back from him, but he was really shaken. And I don't know if in his wildest dreams he ever thought something like this could be real. That is how he sounded on the phone almost as if what I'm telling you is so jacked, I can barely believe this myself, Jen. He is 63 years old now. So he tells me that somehow she talked them to coming back into that house, coming back over there. And this house in Waco is like a little two bedroom, one bath row house built in the 30s, you know, cracker boxes all lined up down the street. Every one of these houses had a kitchen door that exited to the outside, so did my grandma's, my great grandma's, and so they roll up to this house and they come in and he said it's dark inside, like all the drapes and everything are like pulled to. Tracy's brother gets up and he he locks the front door and basically tells them to sit down and that whatever it is in so many words, whatever it is that he's doing with his sister is ritualistic in nature and that he believed that by doing whatever it was that he was doing allowed him to use that space as a bridge where that act as a bridge between our reality and the other side. And he looked at them both and straight up said, and this time you're not leaving. He might, my uncle, my, my mom's cousin, John. He said, Jen, if it was not for your mom, I would have just sat there. Like I would, like your mom had straight smarts and she got up and grabbed him and ran to the kitchen where she knew there was that secondary exit. And God, thank God that door was open. They hauled us out of that house and they went back to their grandma's house and told each other basically made a pact that under no circumstances were they ever going to do this again. This was at the end of July, the end of summer. And that was the last day that the two of them had been at Tracy's house. This was all of this happened the last time that they were there. And I want to say a couple of weeks later, his mom comes down from Dallas to fetch him because he's going to go do sixth grade. My mom's getting ready for seventh grade and you know, life went on. So the holidays roll around and it's Thanksgiving. And John said, Jen, we pulled up into Mammoth's driveway. I had not even fully gotten out of the car before your mom was standing there, linked up with my arm and said, let's take a walk. And he said that they walked to the convenience store right down the street because the cemetery, all that's right there. And she told him that for weeks after that experience, that there were very unnerving supernatural anomalies that were happening to her, that it took about three weeks for it to die out. And I still to this day, she did not share with him what it was, but it scared her so bad she wouldn't. And so they reupped their little pack that under no circumstances are we going to ever do this again. Now, I asked him point blank. If he saw anything manifest, if there was anything like crazy, you know, that happened. And he just said, Jen, I was so scared. Honestly, I just tried to get out of there and not even think about it again. And that's when our conversation turned to the house in Tennessee. And I told him, I said, you understand that it's almost like this in some way repeated itself. And he told me, he said, you know, your mom, when y'all were in Tennessee, saw something in that house. And I recounted the whole story that I just told you about her putting on her makeup and looking up and having this thing standing behind her and her looking and it being there. And I said, yes, I know about that. I said, John, that scared the life out of her. He said, Jen, I don't think it was the first time she saw it. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, your mom called me one day right before you guys move. Y'all were coming back to Texas. And she told me about this, right? Because I would understand I had been there with her. And she told me about what she saw, this black shadowy, just he, all he would say is it was completely void of light. And I said, that is how my mom described it to everybody I heard her talk about this too. And he said, I don't know what the link is, but she described this thing with familiarity. And basically alluded to this is not the first time that she had seen this. And he said, there is a huge, huge part of me that wonders if after I left for that summer, if that's what she was experiencing, because he said she was so scared she would not talk about it. And it would also explain her fear when we were living in that house in Tennessee, because unbeknownst to me, she had had experiences like this before. She had experienced things that she swore to herself. She would never, ever give any of her time or attention to ever again. And here you are, moving into this house. Like, what if you can't run from this? What if it binds you? Right? And I think that's what scared her the most is that that was so many years ago, and now I'm back in this situation, and I'm going through this on a different level with my children now. And there's a big part of me that's always wondered. I think she thought that she left this in her past that she created a way that this was, this was gone. And then here we are again, similar situation, living in Tennessee, just like Ouija board nightmare part two. I think that there was a big part of her that knew what was going on on a deeper level than any of us could comprehend. You know, my mom was my best friend. This is the one story she never, ever told me. And I understand why. Like, she doesn't want me to be afraid, right? Well, I'm already afraid. So that's why I'm recounting this whole story is to release this, right? It was like connecting dots. It was finding missing pieces of a puzzle that I never knew wasn't complete. I had no idea that this had affected my mother on the level that it did. It brought me a lot of peace because I'm like, God, gen this happened. Oh, God. I mean, I was physically sick. I was, I was physically sick. I don't know what it is about methamphetamine specifically, but
it's very different than smoking a joint and drinking a little bit of beer. It really blurs the line between some things and I have seen people throughout my life do things that you never ever could have imagined while using speed. I wouldn't doubt if her brother Tracy's brother was also taken it too. So I I have spent my mom died in 2017 I have I have spent a very long time trying to understand this for myself trying to pull in any lessons just trying not to feel so scared just fearful you know I I don't want to be afraid of this I don't even know what it is I don't even know what it is but I'm just like I just hope that I'm never put in experience or in a situation where I have my own part to you know what I mean I I don't want to ever relive or experience any of this in my life and the only saving grace that I've got is Jen if you or anybody that you know ever experience something like this at least you know what it is I try to think about this from every perspective that I can and at this point in time I just want to let go of it Jen since moving out of that house has anything ever happened similar to make you think this is still going on no not similar I had a lady approached me at my mother's funeral who told me and I know this woman she used to cut my mom's hair that she had ran into her a couple of days before my mom had passed and that my mom had just told her that something really really weird was going on of a supernatural nature that she didn't feel comfortable talking to her about it because they were in like Walmart or something but that they would need to get together and talk and she was dead a week later so I don't I don't know but she found it worthy enough to track me down at that funeral and pull me aside and tell me this fortunately this has only been the super negative experience that I've had with the other side everything else has been very very positive do we know what happened to Tracy has there do we know anything about that we do know what happened to Tracy and her brother her brother went and tried to rob somebody a few years later and gotten a car accident and died running from the scene of a robbery she from what I understand went off the deep end into drugs I don't think she lived to graduate high school there would be days that we would come home when we were living in Wago because there were so many people in my parents generation drop in dead of methamphetamine use that literally you would come home and there would just be you know bitch or you know bitchy were he taped or pinned to the door from the newspaper just hey yeah he's gone to like the fact that my mom and dad both even survived that time I'm very proud of them because a lot of their friends and our family did not you know I look back at that house the experiences in that house kind of what we all went through and I'm really really happy to say me and my younger sister we've got great lives we have real jobs we have education we have dental insurance we have food electricity you know healthy great husbands all the things that you would want for your kid right and we have those things and I'm very very grateful I just don't ever want to think about this stuff ever again and I've never been able to give it away I know this is really heavy I know this is very very heavy it sounds completely ridiculous it sounds completely unbelievable my goal in sharing this is not to be believed I could care less if anybody listening to this is like well I'm so sorry for that experience but it happened could care less however they seem to find people when they need them the most and my mother if there was any way that this helped a single person she would want me to have told this story because she never got to she never found a place where she felt safe or open enough to share this and she ended up taking this with her to the grave I don't want somebody else to have to do that I mean that's awful I'm just hoping that putting this out there that somebody is going to find some type of value in this what part of it I don't know but we got out and we're okay and I think that that is the best part of all of this for me is that my life today does not resemble at all my life at that point in time thank you to Jennifer as well as Sarah for speaking to me and sharing the story we were able to communicate with her cousin John a bit for this story but he did not want to participate in the podcast John has had a difficult life even beyond the experience covered in this episode in fact he went on to survive a pretty well-known tragedy later in life one that I'm not going to name here for the sake of his privacy but Jennifer and I did not want to push him too hard into reliving all of this one thing I wanted to say is that what was happening to Tracy was abuse even if a bunch of kids in 1972 didn't fully understand that or have the words for it it's worth pointing that out now that was a really intense and difficult story to hear personally I also could not imagine finding out something like this at your own mom's funeral the way Jennifer did so much of this story involves the extent of human depravity when people are capable of doing things so awful that it makes you question whether or not they're really human at all whether it really is an evil supernatural force or drug use or poverty or just some deep flaw laying dormant within all of us it does seem like something else must make people do these awful things or maybe it's just easier to believe something outside of us is responsible the house itself is still there it seems like it's been gut renovated multiple times over the years it also looks like the section of the property where that big metal cage once stood has had an additional house built on top of it whether or not the home itself had anything to do with this story I'm not certain and neither is Jennifer I think the hardest part about the story is that there are so many lingering questions and almost everyone that might be able to answer them is no longer here this has been the lake house and you've been listening to the other world other world is executive produced and hosted by myself Jack Wagner our producers are the O'Shafer the O'Crantz Haley Pearson and Nikki Kate Delgado our theme song is by Cobra Man the soundtrack of this episode is by Wicca Faze Springs eternal juice jackal and North Americans our artwork is by Koldasack 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 Leo Riestennis Moira Curran Josephina Frances 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 could send us your stories at
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