S1: EP 21 — "Then Whose Hand is Resting on my Shoulder?"

the meaning of death, how to preen a great horned owl. Yep, it's all starting to click. Might even be the year I finally cross over to the other side. That would make sense considering how at peace I feel. No, nothing, fine. Truth is, there is a little unfinished business from twenty twenty four that we have to attend to. The Haunting HQ holiday party. Yes, our team is small, but somehow Len, Merlin, Carol from Accounting and I overdid it on peppermint schnapps

and got into a little trouble with the HR overlords. Yes, yes, we know you're watching. We all have to share written apologies and formally forgive one another in order to expunge this from our professional records, So let's get this over with. I'll go first. Len, I'm sorry that during our office holiday party, I drunkenly started calling you Little Boy Boo, and every time you tried to speak, I loudly said, do you guys hear someone crying? Even though it was

a pretty solid bit and people were laughing. Fine striking that last part. I'm sorry.

like that. We flew up to Napa, got into our rental car, drove to the hotel that my husband had booked, and it turns out he had booked wrong frickin' hotel. I was really annoyed and really frustrated because it was an hour away from the wedding festivities. So we get back in the car and we're looking to see what hotels were available. We kept scrolling through different places, calling, but because it was a holiday weekend, nothing was available.

We finally stumble upon this hotel named the Napa River Inn. That sounded really charming and it was an old home on the river right in downtown Napa. My husband called and they said specifically, we have one room left. I was instantly excited just because it looked really charming and beautiful. When we finally get to the Napa River Inn, it was really late at night and it was very quiet. It was against the river, so it's just very picturesque.

The hotel was all brick and it was very small, but it was just a charming home converted into an inn. I loved it just because of my design background. It's not like a regular lobby when you walk in, it's set up like a home. I'm an interior designer and I love architecture. It was just absolutely stunning all the interiors. The exterior was just beautiful. It just had charm, and the furnishings were gorgeous. It did not feel scary or terrifying.

It didn't look gloomy or haunted. It looked charming. So we check in and they said that our room was actually a suite, so I was like, yes! I was so excited. We go up to our room and we go up like the main staircase, and then we went down the hall and our room was beautiful, and I'm thinking, why was this room available? You know, like it seems

a little too good. There's a gorgeous four poster bed with a canopy, beautiful linens and window treatments, a fireplace that was lit in this beautiful separate living area, very romantic. And there was a big bathroom and it was all like a neutral marble that had gorgeous claw foot tub and it was all the old plumbing fixtures, which I adore. I said, Okay, I'm just gonna wash up and take a bath. So I drew the bath and I tried to unwind from the crazy day, but I just kept

feeling uncomfortable. I physically felt a heaviness on me, on my shoulders and on my head, almost the heaviness of something sitting on me, and it was just eerie. But I also felt the sadness and that somebody or something was trying to communicate that sadness to me. I tried to, you know, just brush it off and just not think about it, because the main room didn't have that feeling, and it was late and I was tired, and I was just like, I just need to sleep.

I got out of the bath. I didn't tell my husband about that feeling because I think I attributed some of that feeling to being exhausted, and I was also really excited for our trip, so I didn't want to put a damper on things. But that night I had a dream. It was about a woman and she was very pretty. She had very very long, dark hair, and

she had a very long white dress on. She was standing outside in a field with her finger straight out, pointing to a man with a huge grain sack on his head, and she was standing about ten feet away, facing him, but looking at me. I woke up. I wasn't scared or fearful. I just felt emotionally sad and almost drained from it. It just felt like this woman was reaching out to me, not to scare me, but just to communicate something that happened, and it didn't seem good.

Almost like I was feeling her sadness. The next morning, it was my birthday and my husband woke me up singing Happy Birthday, and I was like, yay! I'm not going to say anything. Let's just enjoy the day. We were out wine tasting, We had a beautiful lunch, came back to the hotel, got ready for the wedding. The wedding was really beautiful and we just had the best time. It was getting really late, so we ended up going back to our hotel. We go up the main staircase

and there was a security guard standing there. I said, is everything okay? He's like just checking things out, and he literally giggled, which was very odd and uncomfortable. We didn't know why he was giggling, so I proceeded to ask him, is this hotel haunted? My husband looked at me like I had twenty heads, like why would you even ask that question? But the security guard said yes, and then I looked at him again and I said, is it still haunted and he said, yes, your room.

My husband is completely freaked out. We said goodbye to the security guy as we went into our room, and I proceeded to tell my husband about what I was feeling the night before and the dream that I had had. And at that point he was really worried and said should we leave? And I said, she's not trying to harm or anything. Why don't we call down to the front desk and see what they say. I pick up

the phone. There's a dial tone and then you hit the button for front desk and it started to ring, and then the person would pick up, and then the phone would cut out. I tried again, and then the phone cut out again. We tried this three times, and at this point my husband was just standing there more freaked out, and I wasn't. I was just kind of cool, calm and collected. I said, why don't we just walk down and talk to them as opposed to the phone,

because it keeps cutting out. We go downstairs, but instead of going to the main staircase, we turn and go down the back staircase, which was closer. As we're walking down, the walls were filled with all these black and white photographs. There were photos of the exterior of the Napa River Inn, photos of the view overlooking Napa, photos of downtown Napa from when the building was built, and there were family photos. When we got to the front desk, I said that

I had been trying to call down. They said, well, we picked up, but the phone kept cutting out. We proceeded to tell them about the security guy and how weird that was, and that our room was haunted. And then I told them about the dream that I had had the night before and the feeling of heaviness and sadness that I felt in the bathroom. And they told me that the son of the building's original owner, Albert

Hatt Junior, married a woman named Margaret. Albert Junior hung himself from a beam in the warehouse, which is a bakery now, and the room that we were staying in is directly above that bakery. They also told me that other guests have had experiences. People have seen Margaret in a white dress and she seemed to be looking for someone. People hear sounds, they've heard footsteps pacing back and forth. My poor husband, he was scared. He was terrified of the story. He looked at me in terror.

At that point, we decide that we no longer wanted to stay there. We go back up the back staircase. I see those photos. I noticed one of them looked like a wedding photo. The woman was really beautiful. She was wearing a long white dress and she was standing with this man. That's when I realized that it was the same woman that I had a dream about. I was frightened, but also feeling like what I was thinking

or feeling was validated at that point. It looked at my husband I said, that was the person in my dream. He was like, I'm getting the hell out of here. We got into the room and started to pack up our things. I looked over at the nightstand with the telephone on top of it, and the cord had been pulled out from the wall and was dangling back and forth. Before we had gone downstairs, it was plugged in. Now,

it's unplugged. It was very bizarre. On top of that, while we were packing up, the bathroom sconces kept flickering on and off, and it just kept going on and off until we left. After we got back from our trip, I did some research to see what else I could find about the Napa River Inn and lo and behold, I found out that Margaret's husband, Albert Junior, hung himself with a grain sack on his head. I just remember

feeling sad. I guess she was so in love with her husband that her sadness still lingers.

my first baby. He was about six months old. We had just moved into this kind of crappy little rental house. It was an old house, I would say close to 100 years old. It was a one story house, had a little bit of an odd setup. The bedroom that was our bedroom was an add on to the back of the house. You had to walk through the kitchen in order to get into our bedroom, and then the other door went into our son's bedroom. It wasn't very nice, but it had everything we needed, so we could put

up with all the little weirdnesses of it. The water heater doesn't work that great, the washer and dryer don't work. The stairs are falling off the front of the house a little bit. Well, we could maybe fix that. The rent was so cheap. We felt really lucky that we were able to start our lives together in an affordable, safe neighborhood. My husband and I both worked at the same restaurant. It was the restaurant district, so we could

walk to work. We had a system where I would normally work during the daytime and then he would work at nighttime, and that way we avoided having to pay for childcare. But sometimes there would be an event at the restaurant and we would both have to be at work at the same time, so we would take our son over to my mother in law's house. So on this day we both had to be there for lunch. We left in the morning, dropped off our son, went to work. The event ended early, so I got to go home.

My mother in law wasn't expecting me to come pick up our son until later. I had like a full hour and I could go home and maybe, as a new mom, get a little sleep. So I left work, ran home. I'm going to make the most of this 60 minutes. I go lay down. And then I'm like noticing that the atmosphere is just odd and that it's really hot in the room, and I'm like, well, it's August, it should be hot here. The little air conditioner probably wasn't able to keep up with the heat. But furnace heat is

different from humid outside heat. It's dry, and then there is this burning smell, and I'm like, that's really strange. Why would the furnace be on. So I get up and I go look at the thermostat. The dial is cranked all the way up to the highest temperature and the switch at the bottom is switched from cool all the way over to heat. Maybe somebody bumped it, but I'm like, I'm just going to try to go back to sleep. So I go back in the room. I

try to lay down. Something still doesn't feel right. It's still hot, and I'd get up look around the room. The space heater that we use in the wintertime is plugged in and turned all the way to the highest heat setting. It had been stored in the back of the closet under the clothes rack since the end of Winter. Now the space heater was in the middle of the room,

and it was plugged in the very specific way. Exactly like I would do, which was put it in the middle of the room and then take the cord and loop it around the leg of the desk to make an L shape to keep the cord out of the path of the chair wheels. When I walked into the room the first time to lay down, the heater wasn't there. It wasn't plugged in. Just appear behind my back while I was laying down. It was almost like somebody has seen me plug it in and knew that the space

heater was in the closet. I sat there and thought about this for awhile. I was like, well, my nap is ruined. What really made me think some things weird in this house was pretty soon after that. After work late at night, we would start our nighttime routine of making dinner. My husband was the better cook between the two of us. He would typically come home from work and make dinner

for us. I really wanted to make sure that I wasn't giving up on my dream of being an artist, so I would pretty strictly make time for myself after work. In the bedroom, had an L shaped desk, and it had a chair and it was shoved into a corner. So I'm sitting at the desk and the baby is asleep in his room. Over to my left side is our bed with some windows out into the backyard. And then to my right is a door that opens up into

my son's nursery. Now, a little farther behind me to the right is the door that opens up into the kitchen. And I wasn't able to see what was going on behind me. Had a pretty detailed drawing that I'd been working on for days at this point. I was making a wedding invitation for a friend's wedding. It was very detailed that every single word was hand lettered. The whole thing was a pen and ink drawing that I couldn't really make an error on. I was working at my desk, the baby's asleep, and

my husband was in the kitchen cooking. It's about twenty feet away. He's at the stove. He's making some kind of sauce. I could hear him taking like a spatula and banging on the side of the pot to shake the excess sauce back into the pot. And he's also a pacer, And so because it's an old house, every step and noise is very creaky. You sort of get

used to your own partner's behaviors. I'm deeply focused in this drawing when I start hearing my husband walking around the bedroom behind me, I can hear the noises of the steps on the wooden planks, and I hear the dresser drawer opening. My husband had learned to recognize when I was doing my like serious focusing time, I'm not necessarily going to look up or speak to him or interact with him. That went on for a little while. He's just pacing around, but I'm still, you know, face

down in my drawing, working working. At some point, I hear him walk right behind my chair, and I can tell that he's got his chest to the back of the chair because it's not moving when I move anymore. It's being held still. I still never looked up or really acknowledged him in any way. He put his hand on my shoulder and he did a massaging motion, and then he patted my shoulder and he rested his hand on

my shoulder. So I set my pen down, and still without looking up, I said, "Hi, babe, how's your sauce coming along?" I could physically feel his hand on my shoulder, and then I hear his voice shouting to me from the kitchen, "What did you say, babe?" The voice that I'm expecting to hear answering me should be right in my ear, but it's not. It's coming from probably twenty feet away, and in a loud voice, the way you would yell to somebody across the house. I just freeze.

If I can hear my husband's voice coming from the kitchen, whose hand is resting on my shoulder? I spin the chair around. Almost immediately the hand pulled away, and then I feel freezing cold air blasts past me, cold enough to make me gasp with surprise. The windows were not open. The door to the nursery had just been cracked just enough to where I could hear my son if he started to fuss or cry. But the blast was forceful enough that it blew the door to the nursery wide open.

It was almost like whatever was behind me now passed by quickly, like to get away. I'm frozen in fear. I just kind of sat there, trying to like process what just happened. My husband walks in from the kitchen. He still has his spatula in his hand. I'm still just sitting there for what feels like an eternity, and he repeats this question to me, "what did you say, babe?" That sort of wakes me up from just this state

of shock. So then I kind of pieced together like, okay, my husband was in the kitchen, my baby's asleep in his room, and something was walking around behind me. In this moment, I'm terrified. And then it clicks in my brain. Whatever that air was opened your son's door. It's in there. My next thought is, what if he's gone?Because he's so quiet, I haven't heard any noise from his room yet. Normally, if he wakes up from his nap, he would typically

wake up and immediately start fussing and crying. So I jump up and I just run into my son's room, and my husband followed right behind me, and instead of my sleeping baby in his crib, he's sitting up. He doesn't even really acknowledge me when I walk in, which was weird. He doesn't really seem to notice that I've come in the room. He's just sort of looking over my head, just staring at a spot above his doorframe,

kind of quietly, which is odd for a baby. And so I just grab him and he just kept looking at the spot. So I turn around to see what he's looking at, and there's nothing there. J ust the empty space over the doorway. I'm holding him. He doesn't seem to be upset. He doesn't seem to be hurt, he's just quiet. And then at that point everything starts to feel like it's getting normal again, and I don't feel danger anymore. And my husband, he starts trying to

explain it away. Maybe I just imagined those noises. Maybe he wasn't massaging my shoulder. What if I was just having some kind of very strange shoulder spasm? Or what if there was some odd draft from the doors opening and closing creating suction? We had lived there for a long time. I know that there's not a situation that causes drafts to open and close doors. I know that the temperature change couldn't have just happened. And I know what my husband's hand feels like. I know it was

my husband's hand touching my shoulder. But my son convinced me that something had happened. What was he looking at? He's never done that before, He's never done it since. He was looking at something. Something woke him up. Something got his attention. Something got my attention. So it was almost like, Okay, he and I are in this together. He knows and I know something happened. The house is gone now. We got a notice that some development company bought the whole

block and they built luxury condos. So if there's a ghost in your house and then the neighborhood gets gentrified, where does the ghost go? Is he now haunting someone's luxury condo or is he just gone?

be late this week. Merlin, your turn, I forgot you pooped in Len's beer. We forgive you. Three out of four. Not bad, and at least we dodged a training module this time. That's all we've got for today. If you've ever had a paranormal experience, email us at [email protected], and if not, drop a line anyway. We want to hear your holiday party horror stories. They can't be worse than Carol's.

Until next time, From our Haunting fam to yours, we wish you a very happy New Year and may all your business be finished.

hosted by Laura Lapkus as her character Therésa. Producer Len Walker is played by Trey Morgan. Haunting is written by Aleah Welsh, with additional writing by Nancy Glass, Trey Morgan, and Ben Fetterman. Editing and sound designed by Matt Delvecchio and mixed by Dave Saia. Operations and production support by Kristen Melchiorre. Additional production support by Curry Richman and Todd Ganz. 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 Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.