S1: EP 2 — "Its Hand Looked More Like a Claw"

their curse." But I always figured she was just kooky. Not to mention completely off base with my ex Jeremy, by the way. It turns out we weren't "star- cross lovers, our souls reuniting in their mortal incarnations as they'd had from time immemorial." He was just a narcissist. Swear to God. Len

credit where credit is due. Naomi found our next totally true haunt, Greg, who hails from our former neck of the woods, Los Angeles. What I wouldn't give for the chicken parm at Dan Tana's right about now. You living are so lucky. Back to Greg, we all know roommates can be a bit of a challenge. My old roommate, Miranda, almost burned our apartment down with a Dyson air wrap on three separate occasions. She's what we call clumsy, yet somehow she's still alive. But what's worse,

roommates you don't even know you're signing up for. Like in Greg's case, I'll let him tell it.

able to afford a house. But I think that the reason the price is so reasonable is because the kids were selling the house on behalf of their dad, who died in the main bedroom of that house. His name was Elmer. It might sound awful, but I was actually kind of happy to hear that somebody had died in the house because I thought I would reduced the competition. And it didn't bother me that he died there, because in a way, it made me feel like that's where people should die. He was an old man and he

died at home. That's the natural progression of life. So it made me almost feel nice that this old man died in his own home. And if it's driving other people away, then I'm fine with it. I made an offer on the house. They accepted it right away, and I was very excited about that. I lived there alone for about a year and then my partner, Mario moved in. That's when I noticed strange

things happening. It started with subtle things. In the living room we have these two free standing lamps and they have three way bulbs on them. Every once in a while they'll flicker, and I'm thinking, well, it's a three way ball maybe they're dying, maybe they need to be changed. I would test the lamps regularly, like tighten the bulb or see if the switch was broken. Nothing was out of order. Their bulbs were new, the bulbs were in

there tight, the switch was not janky. Everything was in working in order. I've always heard that ghosts or spirits communicate through electricity or light. Even so, one night I had the idea of, why don't I just yell at Elmer to stop playing with the lights. And so I yell "Elmer, stop it!" Sure enough, they would stop flickering. If I have people over, they'll start flickering again, and I will jokingly say, "oh, that's Elmer." Somebody says, "who's Elmer?" "Oh

the guy who died in the house." And I'll yell "Elmer, stop it!" The minute you yell, they'll stop flickering. And it worked one hundred percent of the time. I'm definitely not an electrician, I'm not even technically savvy, but I'm pretty sure that lights don't stop flickering when you yell at them. It was almost like Elmer letting you know, hey, I'm still here, this is still my home. I'm convinced that Elmer was a militant non smoker. Because I would go outside to have a cigarette and I

close the sliding glass door behind me. My partner, Mario's watching TV. I sit have a cigarette, that takes about five minutes, and I can see Mario's still on the couch, still watching TV. He didn't move one foot. And when I am finished, I walk back to the door, try to open the door, and it won't open. It's locked. It was a basic sliding glass door with a lock that is just a latch up as unlocked down as locked, you have to lock it from the inside. It wasn't old,

it wasn't broken, it was in fine shape. So I pound on the door. He comes over and says, "why didn't you just come in?" I said, "you locked me out." He said, "no, I haven't even gotten up off the couch." I totally believe that's the case, because we have wooden floors. I would have seen or even heard him walk over to the door, and I would have heard the door click locked. None of that ever happened. Nobody had touched the door, and I wasn't the only person that's happened to.

I have a good friend who also smoked. I would be on the couch watching TV. The friend goes out to have a cigarette. From my vantage point, I can see her outside smoking that entire time. She tried to come in, knocked on the sliding glass door, and I went up to let her in. I said, "how were you able to lock that behind you?" She said, "I didn't. You're the one who locked me out." I said, "no, I haven't gotten up off the couch. I haven't even moved." Anybody that I would have over to go out and

have a cigarette, same deal. They would get locked out every time. I don't know if the door locked behind them from Elmer, but it only happened when somebody was smoking. Other strange things started happening as well. This was the day of the iPod dock. If you're not familiar, you just put your iPod into a little speaker system and that plays your music for you. The iPod dock I had in the bedroom, next to the bed. We have two nightstands. There's the main part of the nightstand and

then a little lower shelf. That's where the iPod dock is kept. It's plugged into the wall, but the plug for the iPod doc is behind the bed. I love to play a certain album by one of my favorite bands, Nine Inch Nails, And I know exactly how long this album is, and I listened to it all the time. So I'm cleaning my house and I heard the music stop. I knew the album wasn't over because it had only been a few minutes. So I walk into the bedroom. I looked down and there's the iPod dock on the middle

of the floor. And then the iPod itself ended up a good ten feet away from where the dock was. So, it looks like it was violently kicked or almost shoved off the shelf of the nightstand. I'm home alone, so what could the answer to that be? And it got even weirder. It only happened when I listened to my music. My partner Mario listen to Adele, Jennifer Lopez. That never

got messed with. But when I would play Nine Inch Nails or The Killers, something louder and heavier, it would inevitably end up in the middle of the floor, and that's when nobody's in the room. Unlike the flickering lights, the iPod thing was even more strange. A light doesn't require physical touch, it's more of an energy. An iPod dock being kicked or thrown across the room. That is something to do with physics that we can't even explain or understand.

My partner, Mario, has a background in sales and was considering working in radio sales. So, I had a friend who was an anchor at a news talk station. John knew everybody, knew everyone in the industry, so had him over for dinner. John said, "I have a great idea for you. Let me just write down a few people that I know." So I grabbed a notepad. This notepad was five or six inches and about two inches wide. He wrote down a name and a number on each page,

ripped the page out. "Oh, I remembered another guy, Let me give you his number. Oh I remember this woman I used to work with. She's still in sales. Let me give you her number." So by the end of the night I had six pages of names and phone numbers. I left them on the kitchen counter. Next morning, I walked into the kitchen and in front of the kitchen sink,

we have an area rug. I looked down and on the floor there's these six pages with those names and phone numbers on them, and they are all lined up in a perfect line, right along the edge of that rug. As if you used a ruler to make them straight along that rug. Absolutely no explanation for that. I played out the scenarios in my head. I knew that I had left them on the counter right before going to bed. I checked, there was no breeze, there was no open window,

there's no other people, none of the above. There's just no way that these papers could have ended up on the floor lined up like that on their own. It just doesn't make sense. But one of the most noteworthy experiences in that house I found what I thought was a handprint on the back cushion of my couch. My partner and I every single night, much like you make the bed in the morning, we would what I call make the couch at night.

So before going to bed, we brush all the cushions from left to right so it looks all uniform, and then we would make sure that every pillow is at a right angle, make sure the throw blanket is folded just properly and draped over the chaise lounge so it looks like it would be ready to be photographed for a catalog. It had to be perfect every night. Still do that to this day, so obviously a handprint would

stand out to me. When I walked into the living room the next day and I saw it, I immediately thought, that is not my hand. And what made it even more strange it was upside down. It definitely was not that way the night before. The couch was right up against the wall. In order to make that upside down print, you either had to be standing behind the couch, or you'd have to be climbing down from the ceiling, like

somebody crawled down the wall and onto the couch. It's too small to be my hand, and Mario and I are the same height, we have the same shoe size, we have about the same size hand. This is not either of our handprint. The more I looked at it, I realized that the thumb of that hand looked more like a claw, like long fingernail. A ghost could be a former loved one, a relative, a friend who died, But this is more like an otherworldly thing that was not formally human, like a demon. That was scary.

Unlike the locking doors and the flickering lights, the iPod thing, the notepad thing, and the claw on the couch, those were scary because it was a physical representation of something that I could not explain. After selling the house, I was very tempted to reach out to the new buyers. I wanted so badly to ask them if they ever had any ghostly experiences. It would be a weird conversation to have, "Hey, by the way, I'm pretty sure that house is haunted."

Okay, Naomi, Naomi, whoo, sorry, Jesus, that's getting old. Okay, in most cultures, he was just a guy and a NEPO baby at that. Whatever, before Naomi spontaneously combusts, our next haunty hunter, haunty, haunty, is taking us all the way back to 1989 , the same year my dad got out of prison the first time. Oh, don't feel bad. It was white collar, low security. His tennis game was never better.

My name is KD, and one night along the road in the dark, my deceased mother in law saved my life. It was 1989, my marriage was not good. I've left my husband, stayed with my mom for a short period of time, and then I found this advertisement in a little local paper for this carriage house at this estate. It has a big mansion on the shore of Lake Erie, where this doctor and his wife lived. It was built in the late eighteen hundreds. It was a very rich

part of town. The estate was probably fifteen acres. There was a mansion and the carriage house and a little road that cut across. I was really eager to be living by myself for the first time, because I went right from my parents' house to marrying my first husband. I was young and brave, and I was like, "Okay, yeah, I'm going to do this. This is really cool." The carriage house was kind of a little bit decrepit because they weren't really working on the carriage house and they

just wanted somebody to live there. They could have fixed it up, but his wife at the place was haunted. It was secluded and spooky and kind of falling down hearing that she did not want to live in the big house. I thought, maybe there's something in those houses. I don't know, but I don't know didn't bother me. I had things that happened to me in that house that were a little weird. One time I was upset

over something. I was in bed crying, and I felt somebody sit on my bed, like you would sit on somebody's bed and you would reach over to comfort somebody. I don't know if I was just imagining things or maybe I'm more open to it, but I wasn't really afraid of it. Other people had experiences too. I had a friend from work to come over and see me, and then he didn't come over, and I couldn't get a

hold of him. And the next day he said, I went into the driveway and I saw a woman in a wedding dress standing halfway down the drive towards the mansion. And then he just leaves, just turned around and leaves. He doesn't even answer the phone when he goes home, but I'm calling him, you know? He's like, he goes... I was so freaked out he goes, I just, I just went home and like drank a beer and went to bed. He swore he would never go back there.

And then like two months later, I was at a friend's house and I'm driving home and it's twelve o'clock or maybe one o'clock in the morning, and I'm driving down this suburban road, maybe a mile or two from my house. I see this figure standing by the side of the road. It was the clothes that was really the weird part, you know, you see the grim Reaper with the scythe and everything. Honest to god, it looked like that. All dressed in black and baggy and like a shawl, like you

put a shawl over your head, you know? I don't know what's going on, but I'm driving very very slow, and this figure just kind of looks up at me and it was my deceased ex-mother- in- law. It was about three years that she'd been passed, but I swear it was my mother in law. It was my mother in law's face, and she just kind of lifted up her hand, not like waving at me to stop, but kind of like, "hi, here I am."

I was so scared I just accelerated the car. When I got to the end of the road, I thought, what if that was my mother- in- law and what if there's something she wants to tell me? So I thought, I'm gonna turn around and go back and look. But I didn't turn around. What I did was I just took left turns in a big square. That area was probably about two miles to do a big square, and I went down the road again. But there was nothing there.

There was no sign that anybody had been there. Nobody's gonna believe this. I was so scared at that point, I didn't want to really go home, and there's nobody I want to wake up at like 1:15 or whatever it was. So I thought, I'll go to the Greek diner, like three or four miles away, and I'll just sit there and I'll have a cup of coffee and i'll just, you know, I'll just calm myself down and then i'll go home.

I had some coffee, and I said, well, you don't really know, and maybe you're imagining things, and maybe that person was just out and their family found them and took them home. You know, you try and talk yourself out of those things. I was maybe at the diner a half an hour or forty five minutes, and then I went home. I'm still thinking about seeing my dead mother in law on the side of the road waving at me. I drove into the estate, and I drove into the courtyard and I parked my car. I can

see that there's something wrong with my door. The door's broken and there's glass everywhere. This is an old door too, so like a one hundred year old solid oak door. The door is cracked in half horizontally almost, and all the glass is broken out of it, and my house had been broken into. At that point, everything about my mother in law is driven out of my head. You know how they tell you should never go into the house. You should call the police. I didn't

even think of that. It's like one thirty, two o'clock by now. I just went into the house. Besides the door being broken down, nothing seemed out of place or anything. I called the police and they came over, but they never found anybody. Eventually I figured out that there was a few items of my clothing missing, a big knife and a jarful of change missing. A few days later I found a crowbar, like, had been thrown off to the side. It landed over where the stables were. I think that that's what they

used to pry open my door. And it was very upset. I lived in this place, it was very isolated. If I had gone home and there was a violent person there, I mean, I would have been in trouble. I could scream at the top of my lungs and nobody would hear me in that house. And then I remembered my mother in law at the side of the road, and I was like, "is it possible that my mother in law had been trying to save me from whatever it was." With age, you get more accepting of things that you

can't figure out. When you're young, you have to have an answer for everything or it's just going to drive you insane. But I think when you get older, it's like, maybe what I get out of the experience is more important than being able to explain it. If I could go back and I saw my dead mother- in- law standing there, I would stop the car and I would open the door, and I would hug her.

It's not her fault that the small demonic smudge on her ethereal soul burns at the mention of anything holy. It's not because she's bad. She's just sensitive, and that's okay. Anyway, that's all we've got for you this week. If you or anyone you know has had any dust stops with the undead, write to us via email at [email protected]. We'd love to share your scare. Oh, and hit us up in the comments with your craziest mother-in-law stories, and I'll haunt the

shit out of whoever's is the worst. Just kidding, well, maybe I will. Okay, Love you always and see you next Eternal Twilight for more Haunting.