S1: EP 16 — "An Overwhelming Sense of Dread”

a massive, great horned owl. Anyway, I've been trying to make the best of it by accompanying Merlin on his hunting expeditions in the mortal realm. As a familiar, Merlin has access to both the physical and spirit world. It's nice getting to look down on everything from a bird's eye view. It reminds me of my dad's company jet, which we sadly lost access to after the indictment. So this one morning, Merlin's flying through the Poconos and there's this adorable nature boy.

He's got his little binoculars and camera, clearly a birdwatcher, and he's like, obsessed with me.

his window and tap on the glass. This seemed to really excite him, again because he's a huge bird nerd so I might need to get a bit more explicit with my messages. But I have a little romantic gesture up my sleeve I think should do the trick. I'll have an update on that later. For now, let's get started with our first story of the episode. This one comes to us from Nicole, an LA native just like me who's had her fair share of disturbing paranormal experiences.

brush her hair while she was sitting there. This was then passed down to my mom, who has always had premonitions. My mom has even been approached in the supermarket by people saying, are you aware that you have psychic abilities? These people are just drawn to her. That was also passed down to me. I was in sixth grade. It was the last year at my elementary school and there was a big Washington, DC trip that the sixth grade

class would always take. Having been in LA this was cross country, it was far away, so it was the biggest deal. It was a class of thirty and every kid in the class ended up going on this trip. It was the trip. We were probably the most annoying group of kids for the other people on the plane because a red eye, you know, there's business people trying to fly to Washington, D C. for their meetings in the morning, and none of us could shut up. We

were talking the whole time, laughing, yelling. We were probably driving everyone crazy. I don't think any of us slept on that plane because there was just this air of excitement. This may be hard to believe, but I was so excited for the history part. My grandpa was a history buff and my grandma was a docent at the Huntington Museum out here in LA basically a volunteer leading tours

and everything around the Huntington Museum. So she just gave me a love for history that was shining through in sixth grade. Once we landed, we went to the hotel, we checked in, we were immediately shuttled to our bus. We went to the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, that whole area of Washington, D.C. We had a tour guide that lived there that would take us to all these monuments and all these museums.

She knew everything about everything and as she would speak, I would notice that she'd always work in these tidbits about ghosts or spirits and things that she had seen or things that someone on her tour group had seen. I thought that was the coolest thing. One of the main highlights that we were all looking forward to was heading over to Colonial Williamsburg. As our bus entered the area, it felt like we were in a completely different time in space, like we were being

transported into the seventeen hundreds. Our tour guide told us there were so many different spirit encounters that she had seen and that people that she led on tour groups had seen. We spend the whole day in Colonial Williamsburg churning butter, weaving baskets, making blankets, making candles. At the end of the day, our entire group was absolutely exhausted. It's dusk at this point, it's starting to get dark.

Our big group was walking back to our bus. As we were walking, there's a man standing at this fence. He was in traditional colonial garb. He was wearing khaki capris with white socks up to his knees, black buckle shoes, a white blouse, a black overcoat, and a tri-corner black hat. I thought it was odd that he was wearing a black overcoat because it was the middle of May and it was so hot and humid out. But I noticed that this man was just glaring at me. Not just staring. He's glaring.

In this moment, I could not take my eyes off of him. I'm just feeling this overwhelming sense of dread and this overwhelming sense of guilt. He was making me feel as though I had done something to disturb him or to upset him, and I could not look away from him. As I walk past him, he is moving his eyes along with me, but not turning his head, just moving his eyes to follow me and to watch me. As if I were the only kid in that entire

group of people that were standing there. He just stared at me singularly, as if to say, I see you. My eyes are burning at this point. I've been maintaining this stare for so long. And then I blink, and then he was gone. I have a million thoughts running through my head. Why did he show himself to me? What did he want from me? Why was he glaring at me? I described this person to the people in my class. I told them what he was wearing. No one else saw this person. I knew what I had

seen was real. I knew it wasn't made up. I knew it wasn't a hallucination. That feeling could never have been fabricated. I knew I had seen spirit. It wasn't until several years later that I had my next experience. I went up to Oregon to visit my friend. I was so excited because I'd never been to Oregon before. I couldn't believe how beautiful it was there. She pointed out her house from down the street. It was a very cute cottage model, with lots of vines growing on

the sides of the house and a cobblestone driveway. Before we even got out of the car, my eyes were immediately drawn to something on the second floor. All of a sudden, I felt ill. I was nauseous, my stomach dropped, I felt feverish, but I had chills. I could feel the goosebumps all over my body. We unload the car, walk inside, and what looked very cute from the outside

ended up being very creepy on the inside. The house had brick walls with nothing hanging on them, hardwood, creaking floors, and the house just looked old. We stayed in for the rest of the night, made dinner, and just sat together catching up. About ten o'clock we decided to go to bed. I fell asleep very fast. At some point in the middle of the night, I woke up and was very thirsty. I walked slowly down the hall, make it into the kitchen, pour a glass

of water, and turn around to head back to the bedroom. Immediately, I feel the energy shift. I start to feel a darkness surround me and a very negative energy all over the room. I feel fight or flight take over, like my body is having this visceral reaction to the shift. It feels like a physical being is in there with me. It feels like someone's eyes are boring into my back. But I refuse to turn around because I didn't want to acknowledge that presence

because of the evil that I felt with it. I can feel my adrenaline starting to pump, and I feel this energy getting closer and closer to me, so I start to run down the hall. I feel like I'm in danger. I jumped into bed and pull the covers up over me. I was thinking, do I need to leave this house in the middle of the night and

find myself a hotel? Am I in danger still? I pull out my phone to distract myself, and I eventually feel the energy go back to being peaceful and calm, and ended up falling asleep. The next morning, I was very excited because we had a big day planned, going to tour Oregon State University, going on a hike, and then going to breweries afterwards. We're getting ready upstairs in the bathroom, and I mentioned to my friend that something weird had happened last night.

I told her that I was in the kitchen and a dark presence came over and followed me back to the bedroom. She's quiet for a moment and gives me a look of oh no, this is happening to you too. She tells me there had been multiple experiences with this presence. Her and a friend had seen a pen levitate above the desk on its own, suddenly drop and roll onto the floor. She'd seen the same thing happen with a roll of duct tape at that same desk. She also told me that she had been locked out

of her room before. Leading to the upstairs was a very old wooden door with paint peeling and an old style lock that required a skeleton key like you see in movies to be physically turned. How was she getting locked out when there was no one in the room? She told me that a man had died in that

house a long time ago. They believed that that is the presence that I felt that was stalking about the house, and not to be too scared because they had been living there for many months at that point and that entity had never fully approached them before. I had a great rest of my trip and was left undisturbed and believe that in my first night there, this spirit wanted to test the limits and see how

far it could push me. Since my trip to Oregon, I have had other encounters with spirit and the paranormal, but nothing has ever come through again that has felt as sinister and nefarious as that presence did.

name bird guy Toby. I pulled up my social accounts on his laptop and cut the power so I could flash "Hey Cutie" in Morse code with the lights, but he just started seizing. How was I supposed to know that would happen? Once the paramedics left, I sent Merlin to his window to calm him down, and he threw ahead of garlic at him. Yeah, not cool at all. We're not vampires. Ignorant. Toby slept with the lights on

the rest of the night. But I'm hoping once he's less on edge, he'll be curious enough to pick up a Ouiji board or organize a seance so we can have a proper rendezvous. I'm killer on a first date. Anyway, let's keep things moving. Our next story is from Jade, who spent an extremely unsettling night at the mercy of a pretty pushy spirit.

I grew up with my mom in Washington State. My father lived in Las Vegas, and I would visit them once or twice a year. The summer around the time that I was seventeen, I was visiting my father and my stepmom in Las Vegas. I didn't have my own room in the house. The setup that we typically had was that my baby brother would sleep with my parents during the time that I was visiting, and I would take over the nursery as sort of a guest room

for the duration of my visit. The outside of the house was pretty common for what you might see in a Las Vegas suburban area. It was a white stucco one story house. There was an overhang of the roof that kind of cast a shadow on the overall house. The bottom floor was the entire living area. Kitchen, living room, sort of a front room as well. In the middle of that living area, t here was a staircase that led up to a very small landing. The landing was surrounded by

three bedrooms and a bathroom. But for being such a hot and sunny place, the house did seem to be a bit shadowy for some reason. The last night that I was staying with them, I was up in the nursery room and I was reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Everyone had gone to bed before me around ten o'clock. My father and stepmom were with my baby brother in one room. My other little brother, who was about twelve at the time, was in his bedroom. They sleep with their doors open. I do not. I

had just gone to the bathroom. I returned to the nursery. I closed the door behind me, and I'm continuing to read my book. I'm up late. I'm seventeen years old, you know, it was pretty typical of me to stay up till one or two in the morning. Everyone was sleeping and then from the bottom of the stairs, I hear something strange, and I realized that the noise is footsteps. The footsteps stop at the top of the stairs, and I hear them go back down. This continues maybe six times,

back and forth. The nursery was directly next to the staircase, so I could tell that the footsteps were coming from the bottom of the stairs. This landing was quite creaky. I would have heard someone kind of coming out of their rooms and walking down the stairs. This sound did not start at the top of the stairs. This sound started at the bottom of the stairs from

the living area. The footsteps almost sounded like a child barreling up and down the stairs, almost like when you hear kids kind of running around the house, very clumsy, very haphazard. So as a sidebar, my grandmother was very kooky, and she told me that if anything unexplainable or paranormal ever happened, the best thing to do is to ignore it, because if you pay attention, you'll feed into the energy,

the activity will get stronger, or something like that. This is the only advice I had ever gotten about how to interact with a ghost, so it is in my head that I should just ignore these footsteps. Of course, I can't stop listening entirely because I am freaked out, but I'm choosing not to acknowledge it, call out to my family, or interact with anything whatsoever. I did go through the logical checklist of trying to figure out where this was coming from. I didn't think that it could

be an intruder. The house had an alarm system, so if anyone had entered on the bottom floor through a door or the windows, the alarm would have gone off. I didn't think that it was anyone in my family, just because I hadn't heard them go down. Again, it was totally silent. I was reading a book quietly. Everyone was sleeping. When I was listening to this, I felt almost like a cat being up on its haunches, Like my hair stood up and I got goosebumps a bit.

I think, honestly though, in situations like that, I freeze, and I'm kind of assessing the situation. I'm trying to kind of have the body language that I'm ignoring this thing. At the same time, I am listening carefully to track where these footsteps are going, how often they're coming up and down the stairs, just to A. figure out what it was, and B. try to think of an action plan as well of how I was going to get out of the situation, if I needed to take any action at all.

The footsteps come back up and they stop, and I'm thinking to myself, maybe whatever's happening is done, and so I begin to relax. I go back to kind of pretending that I'm reading my book, when suddenly I heard what sounded like a grown man took both of his fists and slammed them against the door of the room that I was sleeping in. So hard that the door actually shook. I jump up off the air mattress and freeze.

I have this thing in my head that I just need to ignore what's going on and it will go away. So I sink back down onto the air mattress. I continue to pretend that I'm reading that nothing has just happened and again, slamming on the door harder this time. The door shook, the wall shook, almost giving me the sense of don't ignore me. I'm actually quite afraid now. I am terrified. I can no longer ignore what's going on, and I decide to take action. I throw my blanket

over my head for protection. I felt like if I were surrounded by something, I at least physically felt better if I was going to leave this room into who knows what's going on in the hallway. I flip on the bedroom light. I swing open the door, and the landing was empty. I flip on the hallway light. The stairs are immediately to my right, and I can see my family is still sleeping in their beds. My twelve year old brother's

room is immediately to my left. His door's open, so I walk in, shut the door behind me, flip on my brother's light so that there's essentially a trail of light following me. I shake him half awake, and I tell him to scoot over because I'm sleeping in his room, and he half asleep kind of just rolls over, makes space for me. I get into his bed, pull his covers all the way over my face. It's Nevada, it's

the middle of summer. I basically am suffocating myself, but I don't care because I'm so afraid of what has just happened. I'm laying in his room for about twenty minutes and I hear the bang. It's softer than when it was directly on my door, but it gave me the feeling of I know you're in there. The fact that it had followed me to my brother's room was really unsettling. My first thought was, what the fuck is this? Like?

Why is this happening to me right now? And I do remember texting my stepmom the words: Are you awake? Which was unhelpful because then I heard her cell phone go off from downstairs in the kitchen. Her phone was charging on the kitchen counter. It wasn't anywhere near her, so she couldn't save me. When I talked to my family the next morning, nobody had heard anything. Nobody had been woken up. By what was going on. I seem

to be the only person who heard it. I think that they believed me, but I think that they kind of brushed it off as maybe a one off thing, or maybe I was scared and I was kind of blowing it out of proportion. But in the months following they started to have the same experience. The banging started happening on my brother's door as well, so he would hear the footsteps running up and down the stairs, and he would hear the banging on his door when he slept

with his door closed. They also started to hear the sound of muffled arguments coming from the top of the landing upstairs, almost like you're hearing two people fight, still in the house, but almost kind of far away. Because this happened so frequently and the banging was so aggressive and terrifying, they ended up leaving that house at the

end of the first lease term. So after they had spent that full twelve months in that house, they moved into a different house because the vibes were very bad. Nothing has really ever happened in their new house.

the corner whimpering. I thought about flickering the lights again, just so they'd feel like they were accomplishing something. The whole thing was a huge turn off. I was planning to have Toby killed in a mysterious owl attack so we could be together, but that whole charade just gave me the ick. I'll leave you to your weird little hobbies so you can die a virgin at eighty. Well, that's all I've got for now. I'll be scouring the

underworld for more exorcisms to crash. If anyone has a supernatural story they'd like to share, a better one than Toby's who couldn't handle a few flashing lights, write to us at [email protected] and you could be featured on an upcoming episode. Till next time.

hosted by Lauren Lapkuss as their character Therésa. The show is directed by Aleah Welsh and produced by Trey Morgan, 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 designed

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 Mybe 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 podcasts