The Intruders - Classic

When you go to bed at night you lock the door for a reason, but what if whomever is trying to get in doesn't need a key. You're listening to spooked, stay tuned. I remember when he came to our house, I hear him say he can fix the septic system, something, and my mother tells him that he should maybe come back from a father's home from always seeing tall, wierry, red face, red hair, he says, sure he can come back later, of course. This wants to know, I never had no problems with colors living here, no matter what the neighbors say, I always thought colored women were the most beautiful women on the earth. And you know, I'd be willing to cut a deal, cut a deal to get some of this work done. I need a round here, cut a deal to find colored women like yourself, you know what I mean. If you know what I mean, I step out them from the hallway. He draws back surprise. I walk past both him and my mother into the kitchen. I open the civil war drawer and I pull out a knife. I will it to be sharper than the butter knife it is, but it is steel. And I will stab this red-headed man with it. I am only nine, but I will stab this man, or I will break glass or a fine fire. I know this, like I know the sky is blue. Like I know the taste of a summer peach, I know I will kill this person. I just been drinking a glass of milk, washing the flesh down, but I know with other certainty that I will kill him or perish in the process, almost as if it has already happened, I know it. I walk back into the living room, touching the knife, tight in my fist, maybe he has already decided to take his leave, maybe he sees the cold rage in a nine-year-old boy's eyes. He places his cap back on his head, nods to my mother and backs out the front door. In the window, I seem to get into his truck and pull off, I throw the knife into the safe, walk past my mother, go back into my room, but the anger doesn't subside. The rage doesn't leak away, instead it builds, my skin feels hot, my jaw clutch tight, I see myself inning the red-faced man in different ways with knives and guns and scars and sticks and shots, and I wonder if in another world there waits another meme sitting in his room, not clinched, not furious, but relaxed, sitting in the same chair after washing the blood from a butter knife. Now then, our first story takes us to New Mexico, which, because it was the land of many, many battles, is now a land of many, many spirits, but as one ghost in particular, she's not a ghost of a war battle. She's a ghost of a 19th century Jewish immigrant mother, and she's made one hell of a made for herself, split. So the ghost is named Julia Stob, and she's my great-great-grandmother. We started hearing stories about a pale woman in a black Victorian gown, who kept being seen by guests at the hotel that had once been her home. The hotel is called La Posada. I wanted to know just what she was like. So I went on a quest to find all the information I possibly could about my great-great-grandmother. I think the idea was just anything and everything and trying to approach it from any angle I could, which included newspapers, reading old newspapers, doing oral histories with family members. I tried very hard to interact with her. I started with a tarot card reader, then a phone psychic. I went to a psychic colony in Florida. I met with a clairvoyant in the library of her house. I even ate a marijuana cookie, hoping to open myself up to communing with the beyond, and that didn't go well at all. I never had the encounter with Julia's ghosts that I so wanted to have. She never spoke to me. But I've spoken to a lot of people who've had interactions with her, and the one that struck me the most was a man named Jonathan who had worked as a concierge there. Well, a concierge is essentially the ambassador of the hotel. What we do is many people think we just make dinner reservations for people, but we don't. We do a whole bunch of things. I considered it an honor to see La Posada has such a good reputation in town. It was considered a badge of honor to work at La Posada. I was hesitant at first. Everyone knew about Julia's job and how she was still there in the house, and I was just hesitant. Julia's house that's now La Posada Hotel was built by her husband Abraham in 1883, and it was an elegant Victorian with a man-certed roof or Nate Brass work, beautiful mahogany woodwork. It's all still there. Abraham was the richest man in the territory at that point, so the family always hosted lots of events in the house. They had salons, lectures, sewing circles. According to newspapers from the time Julia was often the hostess at those events. The house was the center of the social scene and her entire focus was on the house, keeping it up, entertaining. That was her life. She was a very busy woman. She had seven kids, and all of them survived to adulthood. But she then had an eighth baby who died at three weeks old. They say that after Julia lost her baby, her hair turned white overnight, I found a bunch of newspaper articles showing that for a few years after the baby died, Julia was still out in Santa Fe doing things, going to parties, but then she spiraled into a severe depression. In 1893, after years of trying to get better, she went into her room and there's no evidence that she was ever seen in public after that. And one thing that really struck me was her daughter got married in 1894, and the newspaper article says that Julia wasn't able to come because of her health. So she was in her room at the top of the stairs, and her daughter was getting married, and she was unable to come down to be there. She died in that room in 1896. I think I was working there three or six months or something like that. John, would you take these people up to see Julia's room? And I said, "Oh, no, please, no, I don't want to go up." And as I go up the stairs about halfway up, it's like I hit this wall of, well, I actually like magnets, to magnets of the same pole trying to, and you want to try to make them attach what they want, there was like that pushback that I felt, and I felt, and I said, "Well, it's just me, because I set myself up with a fear." But as I continued to walk out, I was like, "Oh, I don't want to go up, I want to go up." I started getting dizzy, I started sweating, my ears clogged up, and so we get to the top landing and we're walking over toward Julia's room, which is from the landing you go to the left. I had to stand against the wall because I was starting to really get dizzy and my knees were starting to buckle. And I'm talking to them, telling them a bit about Julia and the haunts from the stories that I had heard, you know, the legend of Julia's stop, but by this time I was really starting to slide down the wall and I said to myself, I got to get them out of here because I have to get out of here. And by the time I got down to the bottom of the steps, everything just went away. All of that feeling just left me, like immediately, and I said to myself, whoa, she was there, I really felt her. There's, you know, bartenders who said that she would like throw glasses across the room. I was told that the cleaning staff would not go into the room alone because at one point a cleaner got blocked in there by Julia, apparently. The second time I went up, which was, I think, a little later that week, I went up, same thing happened again, a little bit stronger this time. It was almost like I couldn't breathe properly because everything seems so tight. I got to cut this one really short because I am not wanted up here. And then I realized I said myself, wait a minute, wait a minute. I know exactly what's going on. I got up from my desk and I walked over to the bottom of the stairs and I looked up and I just said, Julia, I know that was you. I will make this deal with you, Julia. And I will keep this promise to you. Every time I have to come up to tell people and show people about you and your room and I will let you know in advance. I walked, I think I took two steps up and I said, this is the other thing I will do, Julia. I have a pin, it's a broach actually, that I had bought for my mother to give my mother. And it's a Rosetta design, it's mother of pearl with silver. Julia liked roses. And I said, I will wear this broach on my lapel and you still hold roost over the house. And that'll be an introduction to what you're really talking about you. But I promise you, Julia, I will wear this every single day I come to work. And I did. All the ghost stories said that she was fond of roses and flowers. And all the psychics and mediums I spoke with when I was trying to learn more about her, also mentioned that she loved flowers. Perhaps that was just a Victorian thing, I don't know. Husband and wife with their two kids had come, they were just stayed, I think they were there for two days. They had heard about Julia and the sun had a little rose in his hand, one of those little inexpensive 99 cent roses that you get at the convenience stores at the server stations or wherever. And the poor thing looked like it was on this last gasp of breath. And he wanted to put it in Julia's room. And I told him to go put it in the corner on the nightstand. So he did and the poor rose, when he put it down, it just turned and the butt of the rose, just turned into the corner like it was being a punished child. I thought, but you know, Julia is going to love it because it's from you. Well, that was in the afternoon, the next day they were having breakfast. The boy came over running over and he says, can we see the rose? Can we see the rose? I went into the room. I wasn't expecting much of that rose, not much at all. You turned out to be the most gorgeous, crimson red, healthy rose I had ever seen in my life. And still, not to this day ever seen a rose like that. I went down and I told the mother at the house that you've got to come up and see this. You've got to come up and see this. I'll tell them to just leave your food where it is and heat it up when you come back. They all came up. Dad, mom and the kids, the mother's expression on her face was like, oh no, impossible. And the sun was just so happy. It was bouncing with her. And so was the daughter. I said, that's Julia. There's been lots of stories about Julia, you know, chandeliers swaying, lights flickering, and a few people have described her ripping the covers off of them while they're sleeping. But I haven't met anybody who actually said they had conversations with her in terms of having ongoing relationships and conversations, Jonathan's the only person that I have found. The night that I did see Julia or she allowed me to experience her, it was Halloween, I never liked Halloween when I was a kid and I still don't care for Halloween. But it was Halloween, I was sitting at my concierge desk and because people coming in and out wanting to know Julia, Julia, Julia, Julia, now it's getting more and more anxious. The anxiety was just building and the tension was building up in me and I'm thinking, why is this going on? I don't understand it and then I realized it was because of Julia. And I went over to the stairs and I said, Julia, I know I'm feeling your anxiety about this. You don't like this, it happens year after year after year and nobody pays any attention to how you might feel about this while I care. You don't have to show yourself to anybody because everybody is expecting her to show herself. You don't have to show yourself to anyone. I could feel that she was present there and she was on the stairs, but I just talked to her, focusing my energies in my mind toward her, talking to her and you know I adore you, Julia, I love you much and I just want you to rest, I want your spirit to rest. And as I started to walk down, I looked at the window and the reflection was Julia standing right behind me in the corner. In her dark robe, her Victorian black cloak, I could see that there was a face under there but I couldn't see because it was dark, but I did see her paper white, white hair. Just coming out from underneath the cloak was hood. And I smiled and I just said thank you, Julia, thank you so much. I got down to the bottom of the stairs and there was no one in the bar. The bartender was there and there was a cocktail waitress there. And they looked at me and they said no because I'd never said that I haven't said this, but I'm an African American or a black person. And the cocktail waitress said, oh my God, I've never seen a black person look so pale in my life. The bartender looked at me and said, yeah, you okay? And then they both looked at each other and they said, Julia, oh, Julia, and they dashed out of there. She let herself be known when she wants herself to be known. Julia was a very, very caring person, very caring, very alone person. I'm not going to say lonely, but she was very much alone. And the fact that I took the time to talk to her on many occasions and just be with her, with her spirit, Julia and I became very close. I felt sad for her. In her family, there was a lot of depression. Her children, two of them took their lives. Of course I would like Julia to be happy and at rest, so the fact that she's found a friend in Jonathan, I mean I guess it makes me feel better that Julia has a friend. Well, as I said, Julia and I became, we had started to become very close so that I could more or less read the mood that her spirit was in. There was the one time when they did the most recent remodeling. That was where I could feel the anxiety starting to build. It's her home. And would you like some strangers coming into your home and just start moving things around and changing things? I don't think so. And that's the same thing with Julia. She's holding on to what she knows. I could feel the anxiety starting to build. And it was building over a few days until one day when the operations manager came into the lobby with two of the interior designers, and I looked at them and it was like a red flag in front of a bowl. And I said, I don't even know. I don't even remember coming out from behind my desk and I went over there and I just more or less verbally attacked them. And I could hear myself talking and I'm saying to myself, what am I saying? Why am I talking? What's going on? angry at these people for that moment in time. and I was essentially possessed, I was possessed. It scared me a bit. It really scared me a bit. Because it just happened so quickly, it came over so fast, and I had to fight it. And then I realized my fist was in a clench. And I'm going, I backed off. I had to force myself to back off. Because I remember turning around and sitting back down on the dusk and I was absolutely exhausted. And I realized when I started clinging, my head started clearing. And I said, Julia, Julia, no, Julia, this was wrong. Julia, this was wrong. I understand why you did it. I know why you did it. My understanding, no, this is wrong. No, we have to, I have, Julia, I have to cut ties with you. This has to stop. And it will stop. I can't do this anymore. I love you dearly. I'm, I'm, I'm stopping this right now. And I did. Because ironically, the very next day, I got a call from another hotel. Jonathan, we'd like to have you appear with us. We do mind coming up and talking to us and see if you'd like to come work with us. And I said, yes. I recognize, I'm not the kind of person who's able to open herself up to these kinds of communication with, with the dead or with what we think are the dead. And I wish in some ways that I was. But finally, when I was ready, I decided I would spend the night in Julius room. And went and put my bags up there, went out to dinner, came back and got ready for bed. [MUSIC] I was really nervous and I, at one point I did, I thought I was still awake and I dreamt that Julia was pulling the covers off of me and I sat straight up and the covers were still on me. So I had fallen asleep and right before dawn, I opened my eyes. And on the wall in front of me, there were green lights. They were moving. At first thought, they were like smoke detector lights or movement sensors. But they kept moving around sort of in a weird way and then they went faster and faster. And just as I was about to sit up and look closer, they turned red and orange and zipped off to the right and disappeared. When I checked out, the woman at reception asked me if I'd seen anything or had any experiences in Julius room and I told her what happened. And she told me that a woman in room 310 had also woken in the night to dancing lights in her room. That was it, that was all I saw. That was my only encounter with Julia's sob. There were no conversations like Jonathan had, I saw no visions. I didn't see a sad lady in a Victorian dress. I didn't feel scared at all. I felt touched, that makes any sense. It felt very real to me and it really did feel to me as if Julia had come to say hi. I still have that brooch but every time I do look at it in my jewelry box, I do touch it and I offer a prayer to Julia that she's content and I ask that her spirit be resting. Thank you Jonathan Mason and Hannah Nordhouse for sharing your story with the spookt and if you want to know more about the life and times of Julia's style, check out Hannah's book "American Ghost" for the link on our website, spookpodcast.org. Now, let me return some young people to discover that just because the place looks empty, because it means it's necessarily so in just a moment, stay true. Welcome back to spookt, and our next story comes from our friends at Endless Thread, a podcast from WBUR in Reddit that tells stories of the so-called "front page of the internet" and on Halloween time, they dive deep into the scary stories that folks share in this story. This one comes to us from a redditor named Alex. Alex was a kid. He and his best friend Ryan, Alex. They like to make trouble. Spookt. Ryan, I met him when I was in third grade, actually. We met riding bikes. He was outside Ryan's bike. I was outside riding my bike, so we just grew up just trying to make huge fireworks, shooting fireworks out of pipes and graffiti on the light poles, trying to climb up them and throwing ropes over them, making swings, and then eventually we got into exploring abandoned homes. We used to go around the old neighborhoods, I don't know, urban explorings, what they call it now. So the story takes place in Modesto, California. The city I grew up in during the housing crisis. Here in there you'd see abandoned houses. New houses or houses that they were fixing, or pretty much like abandoned houses, stuff like that. Some of them looked like they were hit pretty hard. Other kids and gang members would tag it up and break into it and just smash it to pieces. That place wasn't too far from school over there. We walked by a lot. We finally went there and then just curiosity kind of drugged us that way, I guess. So the house looked like it still hadn't been mowed in a little while. Grass was pretty tall. Why not? Let's go inside. I had this really crappy flip phone. That was our only source of light. And I set the thing to full brightness. We reached the other side of the house and we could hear a bunch of banging in the other room. There was definitely someone in the house, like there had to be someone else in there with us. So me and Ryan kind of just sat there staring at each other, kind of scared, because we didn't know what the hell that was and maybe there was someone squatting in the house. We thought some homeless person might have been in there trying to scare us out. And we were going to find him, because he's scared of us. So we did a full search to the house. So we looked around, we didn't see anything, we checked every room, every little space, stuff in there. So after we did our full round through the house, we found ourselves back in the kitchen. And we were just too scared to go any further. So we left through that back door and we started to make our way home. My name's AJ. Alex is a friend and Ryan's my brother. Ryan and Alex came back one night for this story and was like, "Dude, this crazy stuff happened." Of course, I'm like, "Yeah, right." But they're like, "Yeah, let's go look at it. We'll show you." And it's like, "Okay, so I'll go and look. Just hang out with them and walk over there to the house." I don't know why we were attracted to that, but we decided to go back. "You till a kid not to poke a beehive and what's the kid gonna go do? It's gonna poke a beehive." That point, then we were actually looking for something, you know, wanted to see what we might see. We make our way through the kitchen and we're all just sitting there chatting. I feel like I'm tugging on the back of my shirt. And just like, you know, just like thinking it's one of the guys, I'm like, "Hey, dude, knock it off." Well, there's nowhere behind me. I'm realizing that everybody's in front of me. And then it like pulls the back of my shirt and I fall down. At first, I thought he tripped, but you know, there's nothing on the floor. I just remember him going right. through the, right through those doors, like the doors open, and he just kind of went into the room. - To me, it looked like someone pulled him into the room, like they wrapped a rope around his waist and whatever it was, just yanked him into the room. He was so scared, like he was hanging onto the walls for dear life, like he was just smacking everything, just trying to hold on to something, but it pulled him hard, and he couldn't hold on to the door frame, so he fell on his butt, and as soon as he fell on his butt, he jumped up. - And I'm like, okay, that's what that's what I was like, yeah, it's time to go. - As we were leaving, I just had this burning pain in my back. I lifted up my shirt, and I guess there was three long scratch marks from like the top of my neck, all the way down to my lower back. It looked like somebody with like three fingers or a claw or something, and while I'm gonna say something, it looked like somebody with three fingers, just like scratched him from his shoulder all the way down to like his hip. They were pretty deep, but they're really thin. He drew blood. - Honestly, at that point, I did think it was something, like, carrying a normal, something to do with me, because no one else is there, and all of a sudden, I mean, if someone does that, you know, you're gonna notice. - At that moment, honestly, we were like, really scared. And, you know, kind of pretty much just like telling ourselves, we're not gonna go back there. And then we start making our way home further, and then Brian notices his pocket knife is missing. And he was like, I gotta go back for that. And, you know, I'm kind of, I was pissed off. I was like, dude, how did you, how did you lose that? You know, at first, we were just like, we'll come back in the morning or it's gone. He was just like, no, I do this, my favorite knife. - It was a fold-out about, I'm gonna save five inches long. It was a fold-out knife. They had a round tilt with little brass end, with little brass or gold end on each side. It was sentimental to me. It was something that we'd given to me, and I cared about it a lot. - So, I, of course, I'm not gonna let him go back in there alone. So we go, we both go back. That's when the banging got really loud. It just sounded like someone was thrashing inside the walls. And we could hear it all throughout the house. And then every room we looked in, like, there was no, I mean, there was nothing, no evidence of his knife anywhere, like, no hallway, no bedroom, it was, it was gone. And then finally we were, we make our way to the back room. And as we're going down the hall, you have to pass the front door. And as we creep up on the front door, you could see the big-ass knife, like someone with all their, all their might shoved it into the door. And the knife was just sticking in the door. - And, you know, it was just stuck in the wall. - We thought, okay, yeah, that's, that's, that's, uh, malicious. We could have pinned something evil or something we were just annoying. - So we grabbed the knife and I, we went home and I never went back after that. - At one point, I think it was used like a carol or something like that. It was vacant for a while, until I'm not sure who moved in, but they had some old lady there and she was creepy. Like, she, her hair was really thin and she kind of looked always like she was in a daze sitting on her porch. And I'm not sure I found her creepy as hell because I knew I was going on in the house or she was just genuinely creepy. But every time I walked by the house, I always stared at it. And sometimes she'd be outside, staring back at me. - Thank you, Alex, AJ, and Ryan for sharing the story with the school. And thanks to Ben Brock Johnson and the folks at Inless Thread for sending that tale our way, check out their show for incredible stories from Reddit. Please understand, no apologies. Good Lord, we're ripping apart the curtain separating the living from the dead. And if you dig it, let somebody know. Spookpodcast.org. And if you love storytelling from the bright light of the day, check out our sister podcast, Snap Judgment.org, at Storytelling at the Beat. Spook was brought to you by that cold touch in the middle of the night, and Mark Ristich and assessment Eliza Smith, the magical musical sound of this day, through this journey was created by Renzo Borrio, by Leon Morimoto and Pat Macidie Miller. Remember this, temptation lurks. There are those who I have you. Taste this, touch that smell, this. And that's all well and good, till they're intoxicants, and seductions, and perversities lead you astray. But whatever you do, wherever you go, never ever. Never ever, never, never ever. Turn out the lights.