Hello, my haunting crew. Welcome back, Welcome back. I hope everyone had a fantastic Halloween. I spent the evening appearing to strangers and making prolonged, unsettling eye contact with only one member of a large group. Oh my god, Len Len, how did that get out of cage?
[MUMBLES]
Just grab it, Merlin. No, no! So I applied for a familiar, you know, cute little animal who typically belongs to a witch and has ties to the physical and spiritual realms, thinking I'd get like a black cat or maybe a golden doodle. Well, in what I have to assume is the do of my old caseworker, Sharon, who I didn't even think wanted to see me cross over by the way, I've ended up with a great horned owl. Ugh I have to feed him four live mice a day, and he coughs up whatever he can't digest.
[BURP]
It's like halfway between a hoot and a burp. I'm calling them hurps and no, not like Len's flaky cold sores. These are phlegmy globs of bone, teeth and fur we keep finding around the studio. It's disgusting. I mean, before Purgatory, I was a California vegan, which is essentially just a regular vegan, except when you're at Nobu, Mastro's, or blackout drunk. Merlin, down! Oh, He keeps mounting Len. We think he's trying to mate,
which I can actually understand. I've always thought Len looks a little like an owl, not much of a blinker.
[MUMBLES]
It's okay. Some people just aren't.
[HURP]
Oh great, another hurp. While Len cleans that up, let's get into today's episode. This story comes to us from Steven in North Carolina, whose life took on a supernatural hue after an unexplainable encounter during a religious retreat. I once attended a religious retreat, well sort of. I tried peyote at Burning Man with a guy who referred to himself as a wisdom keeper. After the purging ended, we cried together for eight hours and then baptized ourselves in
a neighboring camp's water reserves. Turns out he wasn't a wisdom keeper after all. He was just some guy who worked the Enterprise counter at the Reno Airport. But it was still pretty profound.
I'm Stephen, and I saw something terrifying while on a religious retreat. I grew up in a small town in North Carolina, just outside of Winston Salem, right in the heart of the Bible Belt. And so, I grew up very religious. I was the poster child for Southern Methodism. I got involved in a lot of youth group activities, mission trips, youth retreats, mostly with the churches that I attended, but I got involved with a faith community that was
very secretive. Essentially, the idea of this community was weekend retreats. You would sponsor people to go and they spend the weekend going to worship services, listening to talks, hearing messages, and at the end of the weekend, there's big celebration. But we were not allowed to tell anybody what was going to go on for the weekend. What they don't know is the people sponsoring them are there behind the scenes entire time. We're there making sure meals get cooked
and activities are set up, rooms are clean. The fact that we weren't supposed to tell other people strikes me as a lot weirder now than it did then. I remember one time I was at the retreat. It was a camp that was run during the summer as a camp, but also was a horse farm. It was out off the highway, in the middle of nowhere, not a lot of people around. I was all jazzed from this worship service that night. I was eighteen. I was all full
of bravado. I sat there and I thought, okay, I'm on like a spiritual high. So little Christian Steven did something you should never do. I challenged the darkness. I essentially said, I feel like I could take on anything spiritually right now. That was a mistake. As I said that, out of the corner of my eye, I saw this shape shoot across the field. I thought, oh, horse ran across the field, but it was too fast. This thing crossed a horse pasture in
one or two seconds. I turned and followed where it had gone, and I saw that there were these three trees, two trees kind of behind one, forming a little triangle of trees. So I followed where the shadow had gone. And there's this silhouette of a human being, no features, no anything. It was completely shadow, just black, and it's sitting on the ground, leaning against one of the trees, the front one. It's sitting on the ground, knees up to its chest, hands resting on its knees. I close
my eyes, like, that's not real. I could feel that it was looking at me. I open them up, and there it is. I start moving around the area. I'm like, the moon's probably catching the light weird. There's shadows here and there. It stays that same sort of figure no matter what perspective I'm looking at. And I realize as I'm moving, its head is turning following me. At this point, I'm terrified. I closed my eyes and I said, this isn't real. I opened my eyes. Now there's three shadow fingers and
each of them is leaning against one of the trees. Okay, three shadow figures. At this point, I'm a good little religious boy, and I just start praying "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name." I pray every prayer I can think of because I'm terrified, but I stop because my curiosity got the better of me. It sounds like a dumb thing that someone would do in a horror movie. But I start asking out loud, what are you doing? What are you?
No response, and then I rattled off a few more questions, no response, and then I said, what do you want? And the front shape snapped his head to the side and turned and looked at the building where all of the campers and retreat attendees were, and then turned its head back. "Our father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come." So I turned my back on this and started praying I was just terrified "and lead us not into temptations, but deliver us from evil," and when
I opened my eyes, they were gone. About that time, my friend stepped outside. He's standing over on the porch, just enjoying the evening. He came over and could tell I was clearly rattled, and so I'm explaining to him what's happening, saying, yeah, they clearly wanted something, and he looked over at the building where everyone is. About that time, one of the adults comes walking up to me and he said, your person that you sponsored has had a seizure.
She will be leaving. And I said, when did it happen? He said about ten minutes ago, which was about the time that figure turned and looked at that building. Later that night, I was in the same room sleeping with the same buddy who had stepped out, so he knew the experience. I felt like somebody was taking a forearm and pushing on my throat and I started freaking out. We started doing the prayer thing again and it did stop. I went to sleep, and I figured that was the weirdest,
strangest incident that has ever occurred. But that's when things got weird.
Oof. I do not envy Stephen. Shadow figures are nasty spirits. Carol in accounting is one, and she is extremely unpleasant, especially when she's auditing expense reports. And yes, I needed the entire collection of Rhode peptide lip tints because I can't commune with the living if my lips are chapped. Anyway, I respect Stephen's tenacity. We need to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. But when we get back,
we'll see what horrors lie in store for Stephen. Oh, good timing, Merlin, that was nice. I think you just need to stay extremely still.
[MUMBLES]
Great horned owls mate for life, Len. He clearly thinks you're his partner. If you try to pull away, it's just gonna upset him more.
[MUMBLES]
Len, I said don't pull away!
[MUMBLES]
Well, I'm not the one who let him get out of his cage. Merlin, Merlin, you want a mouse, mousey mouse? Quick under the table now while he's distracted. Whoever thought birds should live indoors should be committed. As if we're meant to just coexist beside a living, breathing dinosaur. It's insane. Not the talons, not the talons, Oh God! I hate this fucking bird!
After that experience at the retreat, a lot of different things happened. One of the big things that took place for the next close to ten years was I experienced auditory sleep paralysis at least twice a week. I didn't see demons, I didn't see a man in a top hat or the things a lot of people talk about. I sleep on my stomach, so I would be laying there and I could not open my eyes. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get them to open. All I could do was lay there and listen and feel.
I could feel breath on my neck, just this breathing. I could feel the heat of that breath, you know when someone's whispering in your ear. The only way I could get it to go away wasn't falling back asleep. It was saying that Lord's prayer. "Our father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will..." Eventually it would stop. I was fully conscious and cognizant for these experiences. I one hundred percent believe that I was being visited by something. Something residual
was sticking to me. I was scared to go to sleep because in those moments, I was the most terrified that I had ever been. And to this day, it's still the scariest thing I've ever experienced. Over the years, I graduated college, I got married. During that time, a lot of one-off, strange experiences happened. I would be in places that I didn't know had history. I would feel things, I would be able to tell someone something about the place I'm in, just a historical fact, something of that nature.
One time I was on a historical tour western North Carolina. We're walking through this big mansion and there's this big empty tile room that used to be a pool that's been drained. I'm in there and I start freaking out out and I have to step out because I'm hearing things. I could hear splashing and screaming. It sounded like if you've ever been to an apartment pool on a summer day. The kids are playing and they're horsing around, they're laughing.
Some of them sound like they're a little unhappy. But there's no water in the pool. There's no one there, there's nothing there. That's when I stepped outside. I went up to one of the people who worked there later and I said, someone died in that pool. And they said no, And I said, no, someone died in that pool. So one of the guides talked to another guide and turns out a young boy had drowned in that pool. There's absolutely no way I would have known that. I
a few times heard things that weren't there. I saw things that weren't there. Or at least they couldn't be explained. I know, right now it all sounds like I'm talking about mental illness, But I saw psychologists neurologists, and they were like, nope, we've got no explanation for you. You aren't experiencing any other symptoms of any known mental illness. All these little one off experiences and strange things came to a head in the summer of 2019. My ex-wife
was pregnant with our first child. She was a high school drama teacher. I decided, okay, well I'll go with her up to the school and I will help her just organize her office for the upcoming school year. I went in there, the AC's out turned on a bunch of fans. I decided I was going to alphabetize all the plays on the shelves that were just strewn about from last school year. There were a lot. And as I'm doing it, I start hearing this creak, crack, click
coming from out on the stage. Her office is on the side of the stage. There's two dressing rooms in the back of the stage and then her office, so it's backstage along with everything else. I step onto the stage and there's nothing out there. I'm thinking, okay, I'm hearing things. You know, I'm in here by myself. The AC is probably just kicking on and off. It's fine, So I go back into the office. I heard a loud crack, go outside, nothing there, go back in, loud crack,
step onto the stage. Nothing. The auditorium's dark, and I am just standing there on this stage looking out, unable to see the seats. I realized, as I was thinking about it, it can't be the AC cutting on and off because the AC is broken. Got a little spooked and I decided I was going to go back into the office so I step back in and I'm alphabetizing plays, and I had a large stack that was ready to go on the shelf. So I grabbed this stack and I turned to place it
on the shelf. And when I do, no more than twelve inches from my face, there's the face of a woman. I go flying backwards into the table. Plays go everywhere. I'm just laying on the ground at this point, I look up and there's this woman, probably in her late twenties. She has long brown hair, She's wearing a brown dress. She's seen better days. She looked ragged. She didn't look angry, she didn't look happy. She just kind of stared at me,
almost quizzically. She was there for maybe five seconds, and then she was gone. I'm freaked out, and I decide I'm leaving for the day. Two and a half months later, my daughter's born. That is when everything stops. I had never envisioned myself being a dad growing up. We went through the pregnancy and I was stressed and scared. Rowan was born and all of that fear went away. I wasn't worried about whether or not I was going to be a good dad, because if you truly love it.
You're going to be good at it. I had been having that auditory sleep paralysis experience twice a week for years. After she was born, I slept through the night every night. A few years before Rowan was born, I lost my father suddenly. He passed away in his sleep. We were close, we were friends. He was the funny guy at every party. I was an only child and my parents always wanted another child. He did communicate growing up. He was always little bummed he
never got the chance to have a little girl. He told me for years that one day he was going to have a granddaughter and he was going to love on her, and I wasn't going to be able to stop him from giving her all the candy and toys and everything that she ever wanted. Unfortunately, he never got a chance to meet her. Rowan was born. Knowing that she never got to meet her grandfather, or her Papu as he would have wanted to be called. It's Greek for grandfather. A few months
after my dad died, I had a dream. I was sitting in a restaurant in a booth with my back to the door. I heard Hey, pal. That's what my dad always called me growing up. I turned around and I remember saying you can't be here, you're dead, and say, yeah, I am dead. Let's talk. I knew it was a dream, but we talked and it gave me closure, and he told me at the end, I've got your back, like I'm gonna look out for you and your family. After Rowan was born, I thought to myself, all this stopped.
Maybe now that I have a family, he really does have my back. Weird little things would happen. She would always just kind of look off into the corner and smile. I would see her on the baby monitor six seven in the morning. She's standing in her crib, jumping up and down, and she is laughing, I mean hysterically, like she has seen the funniest thing she has ever seen in her life. She's two at this point she's laughing, and I walk in. I say, hey, what's so funny. She points at the
corner and she says, Paoo, Pa-poo, funny man. There was no way she would have known that he wanted to be called Papu. He always loved to make kids laugh. That was his thing. He would do anything, He would make a fool of himself to make a kid laugh and so for her to be standing there laughing her ass off, it gave me the feeling that he's got my back. Seeing all of that and seeing her reaction, and knowing my dad, I one hundred percent believe that he is there, she is seeing him, and he's got us.
This had a way happier ending than I was expecting. I was sure he was done for when we got to the part about the lady in the Bookshelf, I thought the scariest thing about high school theater was realizing your drama teacher peaked as an understudy in an off-off-Broadway production of Our Town. Papu to the rescue, I guess. Let's take another quick break and we'll be right back And we're back. Merlin has finally settled a bit. Right now he's trying to preen Len. It's actually kind of sweet.
I had hoped my conduit to the physical realm would be a little sexier with a smaller eye-to-skull ratio, but Merlin is really starting to grow on me. I like how his ear tuffs are purely aesthetic. And he can turn his head almost fully around like that girl in The Exorcist. Who's a spooky boy? Mamma's apex predator. Well, Len's got hurps to clean up and I need to figure out how to leash an owl. But we'll see
you all next time for more Haunting. And remember, if you have a spooky story to share, email us at [email protected] and you could be featured on an upcoming episode. Bye for now.
If you have a haunting story to share, please email us at [email protected], and if you like what you hear, please like and subscribe. You can also follow us on social media by searching for Glass Podcasts or by visiting glasspodcasts.com. Haunting is a production of Glass Podcasts and partnership with iHeart Podcasts. Haunting is created and executive produced by Nancy Glass, Andrea Gunning, Ben Fetterman, and Lauren Lapkus and it is
hosted by Lauren Lapkus as their character Therésa. The show is directed by Aleah Welsh and produced by Trey Morgan. It is written by Aleah Welsh, with additional writing by Nancy Glass, Trey Morgan, and Ben Fetterman. Additional production support by Curry Richman and Todd Ganz. Additional voice acting by Trey Morgan as the character producer Len Walker. Editing and sound design by Matt Delvecchio and mixed by Dave Saia.
Operations and production support by Kristen Melchiorre. Haunting's theme and original compositions were composed by Oliver Baines and Dorry Macaulay of Noiser. Music library provided by Mibe Music. Special thanks to Speakeasy Sound Studios in Burbank, California. For more shows from iHeart Podcast and Glass Podcast, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.