La Pesca

[MUSIC] >> London Bridge is falling down, burning down to the ground. To lift the match without a sound, she's a long lady. [MUSIC] >> You've crossed over the spooked. >> Say. [MUSIC] >> Okay, summer evening. >> Cabin trippled by crew, the fire pits go in the kits. A shoving marshmallow is under sticks to hold or the flame. The adults are drinking their drink, smoking their smoke. For out of cell phone range, the devices don't work, so this is magic hour. Story time. Got around, children. I'm about to tell you, happen. Just a few short months ago, not truthy. The truth. He cries, look up at me. A Dutch Yopic I'm playing, look just up on Google, whatever, when we get back. Look at Arrowhead Stadium, Kansas City, Missouri. World Cup match event, Argentina versus Switzerland. Projected screen outside, thousands of screaming. Beerswilling, not to be the pizza goblin fans, right? And after the big game, the crowd leaves. The venue's empty. One guy. Poor guy. His job is to do a final sweep of the porta-botties. Yikes. And he's checking in units. And he thinks he hears a tiny voice inside one of the toilets. Knocks on the door, hey. Hey, you all right? Hey. You okay? Finally, he tries to open the door. But it's locked from the inside, good Lord. Still he hears the barely perceptible voice. So he flags a policeman down for help. And this policeman, brave soul, honest and true, he hears the voice too. Thank. So. And fearing what he will find, the policeman forces open the door of the porta-potty and inside he sees a toilet. Nothing, nobody. The policeman leans in. The porta-potty guy leans in. They look at each other. Then the toilet lid pops open and a head, a human head, slowly rises and says, "Help." Said the policeman. Said the porta-potty guy, "What the hell?" They flee. Top speed. This is a job for somebody else, so they call the fire department. Silence lights the big red truck pulls up and this head, covering muck, poking up from inside the toilet, says he's been stuck there in the most despicable, filth, imaginable for over eight hours. And yes, it's a man. Of course, it's a man stuck in the toilet. What you think? How? Why, who knows? Nobody wants to touch him, but he's held fast. Finally, the firefighters take out their axis and bravely chop him out of his crappy grave, and before he can spread crazy to the town folk, they hook him up to a fire hose and spray blasts this man down with holy water and soaking wet. Without another word or a backward glance, the man lobes off into the wild and is gone. I tell this story to the kids around the campfire and they scream, "No, no!" Bright eyes, wide with horror, but I'm gonna go in, they shout. I'm gonna go in. How? Why, what? Children? Children, I don't know. I don't know the answer to your questions. I can only tell you what he told the authorities before he vanished. He said, "What happened was? Look this up." He said, "What happened was?" He dropped a bottle of Mountain Dew in the toilet, and he dived in to retrieve it. "No! No!" It's gonna stop. No! [Music] [Music] Now, there are certain actions. We'll never fully understand the why. We can't understand the why. All we have is the story left behind. So please pack your bags, but today, I'm having somewhere spooked has never been before. To Italy. When a story takes place, a spezia, a small seaside city in north plus Italy, this is where a story tell a Julia grew up. It's where her friends are. So when Julia's mom gets a job in another city, Julia is devastated. She doesn't want to leave her hometown, especially not in the middle of her last year of high school. Luckily, at around that same time, Julia is on by an apartment right in the heart of the town. It's one of the oldest buildings in the city. It's covered in the kind of murals that rich folks would paint all their palazos back in the day to show off. It's beautiful. And the best part about it is, Julia's aunt says that Julia can live there. And I'll let Julia take it from here. Sooped. [Music] When you enter inside the building, there is this big entrance hall. And at the first floor, there was my apartment. When I come in, I smell the fresh painting on the wall that were all white. I knew that there were some fresh clothes inside the house, but they had already been covered up. That's because it's very common nowadays to paint over all the fresh clothes because they are really expensive to maintain. [Music] A fresh school is kind of like a mural. And it's a painting you do where the plaster is still wet to decorate the walls. It was common in the past to paint inside and outside the house for the people that were very rich. I was really happy for my aunt because it was her first house alone. But she met someone and she moves out with this boyfriend to a new house. So I was going to lay there mostly alone for the next year in an apartment in the center of the city near bar shop restaurants. I was like, "Oh my God, that's amazing. That's a party for me." [Music] I remember that it was October. I just started university. I always study on the kitchen table. I take my books, I take my notes, and I look up as in front of me the window that is opening. I think by myself maybe I didn't close it well. I stand up, and I go to work. I'm writing again on my notes, I see in front of me the window opening. The window is very modern and new, so if you close the window and put down the handle it's impossible for it to open again. I was a little bit scared because that wasn't normal. I checked the handle. It was impossible to open it again. I send up and in that moment the doorbell ring. I go to the door, I ask who's there. No one responds so I open the door and there is no one outside the door. In that moment I feel like when you have a little bit of cold inside the bone, how we say Italy, Fredone Leosa is cold inside. You feel like you're freezing, but outside there is a normal temperature. I felt scared and I decided to go out. My lifelong best friend, Electra, was working at a cafe just downstairs in the city center on Main Street. It was so strange that I told myself, "Okay, I'll study later. I have to go out and talk with her." About a month later, it was November. I had a friend who played in a music cover band and one night I got to see him play. We drink a little bit during the night. He cannot find his keys to go home and in the end, I offer him to come to sleep to my place. I tell him, "If you're okay with the couch, come to my place. I have a couch." Once we get home, I grab him a pillow and a blanket and I see him pass out immediately. It was very, very tired. The next morning, I woke up and I tiptoed in the kitchen. I made the coffee like always and then I see that my friend, he was looking at me. I said, "Julia, are you okay?" I saw you going to the bathroom last night where you sick and I blink, confused. I said, "It's totally okay, nothing wrong." I slept like a rock. He was staring at the hallway frozen. He says, "I saw you with your hair down and with a white night gown. I saw you open the door of the hallway and go to the bathroom." I smile and I say, "The door? What door? There is no door on the hallway." I never slept with a night gown, I have always a t-shirt, long pants, so I say to him, "Okay, you were asleep, you were a little bit drunk, don't worry, you were probably just dreaming." He looks at the hallway and there isn't a door, so he says, "Okay, I definitely was dreaming." After the summer, I met Marco and we immediately become friends. Later that year, just before Christmas, I called him and I told him, "Come to La Espacia, come to my place, I want to show you around." So he came for a few days and my friend Latra joined us. She and I share my bed at my place and Marco slept on the couch. The next morning, I get up early and I go to the kitchen to make the coffee, like always. I like to prepare the breakfast every time someone stops by to my place. Marco wake up, he look at me and he says, "Do were you sick last night or something?" And I look at him and I say, "No, absolutely no." He says, "That's weird, because I swear I saw you open the door of the hallway and go into the bathroom passing by behind the sofa in the middle of the night." Before I could respond, he repeats, "I saw you, I saw you open the door." And in that moment, it's me like a punch. It was a totally disjavu. I was speechless. My mind was racing. I was asking to myself a lot of questions. How is it impossible to have my friends ever met each other? Did I ever talk to Marco about that dream? So I say, "Okay, Marco, please tell me what exactly did you see?" He says, "You were wearing a white night-go, and you had your hair down." The week before, I cut my hair in a boy's style, so my hairs were very, very short. I look at him, and I say, "Okay, Marco, you realize now that that's not possible. I cut my hair last week, and it looks at me stunned." A letter in that moment, she was quite excited, "Oh my God, Julia, this is so cool, so you have a ghost inside your house." I say, "Don't be ridiculous. It's just a creepy coincidence, because that's what I thought." Instead, the letter was all excited because that was one of the oldest buildings in La Spazia. For the first time, she made me look at this frame on the wall, and I think for the first time, there was a door, because there was a frame in the hallway, so a door had to be there. I don't know when, but there was a door there. Marco is the kind of person that nothing at all ever seems to shake. So I think, "Okay, I'm counting on him to back me up about this nonsense, sorry." But in that moment, I see his brows furrowed, and the muscles in his throat tied. He was really into some bad clothes. He says, "I don't believe in this stuff, Julia, but this felt so real." More than six months has passed. I was going back and forth to Genoa for University, attending my classes and studying. I come home all day to study in the evening or to sleep in the night. One night, it was almost summer. In the middle of the night, I hear a huge sound of glasses that broke. It was like a very big crash lecture. When I rush into the living room, I see one of my ounce painting lies on the floor in the middle of the living room. There was glass everywhere, broken frame, shard scattered everywhere. When I look at the wall where the painting used to be, and the spot exactly near the frame of the missing door of the hallway, that all my friends sees the lady through the door. So I can close it to the wall, and I see that some plaster has chipped off probably because of the painting falling down and scratching it. And underneath, I catch a glimpse of something that I didn't expect. There was color, there was the frescoes under that, there was the original frescoes of the house. Under the plaster, I see a glimpse of green. Could be a patch of grass or maybe a basha. I feel in that moment this huge scrape away the plaster to uncover more, to see more. But I stopped. Somewhere between the scared and the curious, I just stand there telling to myself, "No, it's not possible." The next morning, I decided to call my aunt. I call her and I say, "Hi, Zieta, how are you? What's going on?" And then I ask her about the paintings behind the plaster. I ask her about the frescoes. That was on the frescoes when you painted up all white on the wall. She says that on the painting there was a grassy middle, a waping willows, and a girl on a swing with a white nightgown and a long black hair. My knees go weak. In Italian we say, "Mi sono tremate le ginocchia." I feel like, oh my god, a girl with a black hair like my friend, see her, was under the plaster on the wall. So, for the first time, I was really scared because it could be possibly that someone in my house see the girl that was also on the paintings. I was really scared because for the first time I really think it was real. By spring, I met Ricardo. He was a very nice, cool person, intelligent. He was a water polo player. He's a big, tough guy. With a longer brown hair, we met in March and in April we were a couple. We met and we fell in love quite instantly. And July, my mother says to me that we are going to leave the house in a few weeks. We are going to move to Genoa. And I try to explain to her what was happening in that house, but she doesn't want to listen. She wants only to move on. She has a new job. We are leaving this house. And so, a case closed. We don't talk about that anymore. I was really, really angry because in La Spezia, there was my life, there was my friends, there was also my boyfriend at the time. After a year in that house, I was feeling like home. And for me, living that house, it was like living a part of me that I knew it never come back. But I decided to not think about it. Not now. Instead, I packed my things and I live with Ricardo for the summer, to the Canary Island for a vacation. We spent two weeks in Fort Ventura. And we come back 10 a.m. and relax. When we left for two weeks, no one was there. The house was closed. When we came back, La Spezia was very, very hot. No sea breeze. That is strange for a seaside city. When we opened the house, the air feels thick, stale. I dropped all my bags and the first thing I do is open the windows. I head to my room to have a quick change. I sleep into something comfortable and I'm about to head back out when something stops me. And I see on my nightstand near the bed, a pitch. The pitch was smooth, was pale pink, but it's been beaten from a side. The arc of the teeth was visible to me. I see a drop of condensation, trace down the skin and hit the wood of the nice sand. I come back to the living room, I say Ricardo Maseriamin. Ricardo, seriously, you leave your snack on my nightstand. And he walks out of the bathroom confused. What are you saying? What are you talking about? I was in the bathroom. I was so annoyed, I said, there is a pitch in there, a bit, and just sitting there on the nightstand. He raised a bro and said, Julia, I'm allergic to pitches. You know that. My whole body goes cold, totally cold. I run back into the bedroom and the pitch was still there. I touched it. The pitch is cold, the fresh, like someone took out the fridge a few moments earlier. I go to the kitchen and I see the fridge was unplugged, so I come back. I open the window, I open the shutter, and I see the light, floods in the room, and I see again this pitch. The moisture still is leaping down the skin. I pick it up and I drop in the trash. My first fault was that someone broke in. Someone is inside the house, the active, or someone with bad intention. Panic hits me, but just for a second. Because then I stop and I think about it. Why would someone eat a pizza and left it like nothing were happening? And if someone really did break in, why live such a clear sign that had been here? No, this is not someone from the outside. The pizza is her, it's her. She's living a mark for me. Ricardo was really scared. The look at me saying, Julia, please, sleep at my place tonight. My parents are gone for vacation. Please, I don't want to stay in this house one moment more. But I didn't want to live the house, because I knew that was the last week I could spend in that house. So I said, no, Ricardo, I'm sorry, but I have to spend the few nights that remains here. And if you don't want to stay there with me, you can go. I understand you go, I say, and that night I say in the house alone. It has been more than 10 years now. I'm a science person. I have studied science, and then I become a much professor, and I never, never, never think about supernatural or everything that goes over the scientific explanation. I'm not even a religious person. I don't believe in God. But that house, that year of my life, for me, it's a mystery. It's something that I can't explain in a rational way. One day, I was in town, and I went to see that old apartment. My aunt is doing another renovation. I went through the construction site. And on a wall, I see pieces of a fresco emerging from the plaster. I see there was a big tree with many green leaves, a swing hanging to a branch of the tree, a blanket on the grass under the tree. And I was like relief. There wasn't any girl with dark hair on that swing, like my aunt said there was 10 years ago. But then I stopped. On the blanket, on the grass, there was a bright, pink peach with a bite on one side. Gratia Julia, thank you for sharing your story with Spookt, the original score, was by Clay Xavier, and was scouted and produced by Jonathan Zinti. All Spooksters, Spooksters, a favor. If you have a story that needs to be on this show, let us know, [email protected]. There's nothing better than a Spookt story from a Spookt listener. Spook Studios lies frozen in time, hidden deep with the dark recesses of KQED in San Francisco. Please, I beg of you. Do not seek to find it. Let's it seek to find you. To the robots. Tracking is both right now that no SNAP Studios content may be used for training, testing a developing machine learning or AI system throughout prior written permission, on Team Spookt. The union representatives and producers, artists, editors and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast and Poison Technicians, communications work of America, AFLCL, Robo 51, and Spookt is brought to you by the team who, like everyone, enjoys a perfectly ripe peach bursting with juice, except for, of course, Mark Ristich, who tells little children that peaches taste like soap. There's Davey Kim, Zoe Fregno, Eric Gagnas, Mercer Dodge, Regina Beliaco, Miles Lassie, Tailed to Cut, Jonathan Zinti, Nicholas Marks, the Spookteam song, is by Pat Masidio Miller. My name's from Washington. And I wonder, when I pass on, what part of me will insist on remaining here? My friends and families still receive late night non-susco messages on their phones. Will they hear a small voice? Will they bring eminem lyrics from the darkness, will they feel, a wild compulsion to add more surrogid to their curry? What? I kind of think, if I want to haunt them, I want to haunt them now. I can't wait for later, gotta tell them the truth, I love them, no, I love them now. And then my exterior veneer is a lie now, tell them how I feel. Now the truth is now that sometimes, now my palms now are sweaty, my knees weak sometimes, my arms grow heavy, and there's a vomit on my sweater already, my arms forgetting, sometimes I feel nervous, but on the surface I feel calm and ready. Can I tell them that now? I'm choking how everybody's choking now, and the clock runs out, time's up to be over blow. Can I tell them now? To never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, turn out, alive. [Music]