S1: EP 24 — " Who's Watching Us from the Window?”

Shania Twain, Vanessa Carlton, that song from the Lizzie McGuire movie. Len's repertoire is a lot of Broadway show tunes and pre Saturday Night Fever Era BeeGees, which was crazy because Andy Gibb showed up and I swear to god, he was making eyes at me the whole night

grown up with. He'd spent a lot of time with him, and his parents were needing to sell their home because they were getting older. My dad, who had spent a lot of his childhood growing up in that home, had always liked it. He liked the house, he liked the area, and he had mentioned when he was younger that if they ever wanted to sell the house, to think of him. So when it came time to sell it, Butch called

my dad to see if he wanted the house. My dad took my mom to show her the house, hoping that she was going to love it as much as he did growing up, and I went with them. It felt like we were driving out into the middle of nowhere. The house was on this long, windy, curvy road and it was very narrow. I'm not even sure two cars

could fit on it comfortably. But then when we got to the house, you come around a corner, and there were about four or five houses that were pretty close together, so it wasn't completely isolated, but to me it felt like it was. We pull into the driveway. The house was cute. It was yellow. It had flowers and things all around it. It seemed inviting. We walk up to the house, there was a little screened in porch and were greeted at

the door by Butch's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Pike. Mister Pike was shorter than my dad, but he had this arrogance to him that was unmistakable. Even at my young age, I could recognize that he was kind of mean, so I did not like him. Mrs. Pike was frail, thin, short. She had these long, thin, bony fingers and had kind eyes. I could tell that she was nice. Mister Pike immediately asked my mom and dad if they would like to walk through and look at all of the rooms in

the home. And missus Pike turns to me and says, you can stay here with me while your mom and dad go and tour the house. I sat down on the couch. She starts talking to me about random things, just kind of trying to entertain me, I guess. I tell her that I don't really want to move out there. We lived right beside my cousins. My closest cousin she was four years younger than me. You know, this was the eighties, so we were outside all day every day. So I felt like I was leaving all of that behind.

Like I was scared I was going to be isolated out there with just my brother. But we're sitting there, and she leaned in closely and put her hand on my knee and said, Oh, I'm sure you're going to like it. I know it seems like it's out in the middle of nowhere, but you're going to love it here. Then she whispered, don't worry, sweetie, I would stay here forever if I could. The way she said that and how she said it gave me an uneasy feeling. So I was like, ooh, like why'd she say it like that?

Like what does she mean? And why does she call me sweetie? We were there maybe fifteen minutes if that, because my dad already had his mind made up that he was getting it. He was just kind of like courtesy showing it to my mom and luckily she loved it too, so it worked out. We moved in almost immediately. My room was huge compared to my last one, and it had like a huge walk in closet. It felt like a mini playhouse. It was so large, so I was happy about it. It was on the corner of

the house. I had two windows, like a view to the backyard, a view to the side yard. I was trying to find the positives of it, but I was still not excited about moving so far away from my cousins. It was just normal every day going to school, I was in dance. Everything just kind of continued on as usual, and it did suck. Like after school, I was used to going and playing with my cousins and stuff, but

now I didn't have anything to do. I would just come home and that's when I started reading a lot. A couple of months after we moved in, my dad got a phone call from Butch telling us that his mom had passed away. Two months after that, things started happening at the house. My mom was noticing things going missing or showing up where they shouldn't have been, and

she's very like OCD on where she puts things. After a while, she said that she kind of put it together that it may be a ghost, but she didn't really want to think, Okay, you know, is Mrs. Pike back or whatever. And then she said that she would be like, okay, Mrs Pike, if this is you, can you move this over here? And then it would take a few days, but then she would find what she said moved where she asked it to be moved, so she was like, okay,

that was Mrs. Pike. I didn't really have anything significant happened to me until I was in my room reading one night. It was a school night. I got in trouble all the time for staying up too late to read. My mom had already came into my room twice to tell me to knock it off to go to bed, so I told her I would be done with it. I put my book over on my nightstand and then as soon as she left, I just grabbed my flashlight and got under the covers to go back to reading again.

I don't know how much longer it had been since my mom had originally left. I'm reading for a while, but then I hear the door open again, so I'm like, oh my gosh, I am busted big time. She's coming back to like take my book. So I immediately flip the flashlight off and try to pretend like I'm asleep, and then I feel her sit down on the bed. I wait for her to say something like give me the book or whatever, but she just kind of pats me on the leg and then she whispers, don't worry sweetie,

everything's going to be okay. I was like, what the hell? What does that even mean? What was going to be okay? And why does she call me sweetie? Like I'd never heard her call me sweetie. And it was like the way it was said, it was so creepy. The whole interaction was weird and it didn't really make sense. After I heard her leave the room, I had all of these things going through my mind. I waited for a little bit trying to process like what she meant, and

then I thought, no, I can't sleep. I'm going to have to go ask her. When I went into her room, she was asleep. The first words out of my mouth was what did you mean by that? And then she like jolted awake. I could see the look of confusion on her face, and she's like, what are you talking about? I said, what did you mean? Everything's going to be okay? She was like, I don't know what you're talking about. I have been in here the whole time. I just

went back to my room. I was like laying in there trying to figure out what had happened or why that was so creepy. And it was because it was familiar, Like I knew the voice, but I couldn't place it, so I just kept laying there. But when the memory clicked, I shot up in bed. It was Mrs. Pike. She had called me sweetie when I met her. That's where I knew the voice.

all of the board games and things like that. Shortly after Mrs. Pike came into my room, it was almost Christmas and we had a lot of presents that we needed to wrap. My mom had turned the basement into like a gift wrapping headquarters. We had everything down there you could possibly think of, tons of boxes, ribbon, different types of wrapping paper, scissors, tape, everything you would need to wrap up gift. I go upstairs to get more tape, and when I come back down, my mom is sitting

there confused. She's looking around everywhere, lifting up paper and things. And she asked me, did you take the scissors with you when you went upstairs? I'm like no, and she said, I set them down right here, but now they're not anywhere. I'm as confused as she is. Scissors don't just disappear into thin air. We looked in all of the boxes, we shook out all of the like scraps of paper. We checked under the couch cushions, we looked under the end tables. Then, I noticed a spot under the coffee

table that's like a lump under the area rug. I turned to my mom and I'm like, did you notice this lump over here? What's that? She comes over and she looks at it and she's like, I don't know what that is. I'm like, let's just move all of this stuff and roll the rug up. I almost wanted to prove that it wasn't the scissors. We moved the couch, the two end tables, the coffee table, everything off of

fifteen by twenty massive area rug. We each get on one end of the rug to start rolling it, and the rug is so heavy and we're having to push it out of the way. And then there were the scissors. We both look at each other. My mom just picks them off really quick, and then we really never talked about it again. It would have been impossible for either me or my mom to put them under the rug. There's no other way that they could have gotten there, because there was no way to get to the middle

of that rug without rolling it up. It was in the dead center, like you could not reach underneath it. Mrs Pike had to have put the scissors under the rug. A year later, my mom enrolled me in a new school, so I finally, after a few weeks, found a group of girls. They would be what you would call the cool group of girls, the main one and I clicked pretty quick. And then she came to me one day and she was like, Hey, why don't we have a

sleepover at your house? Oh, hell yeah, she wants to come to my house, you know, like they really do want to be my friend. I asked my mom. My Mom's like, yeah, it'll be fine, we can get movies, pizza. And then I'm like, you think Mrs. Pike would do anything while she's here. My mom assured me. She said, it's going to be fine. Just you know, be a kid, have a good time. For like the next week, I just like, out loud kind of whisper, Miss Pike, please don't ruin this for me. I have a new friend.

She's going to be coming over. I don't want you to scare her. When I would get up in the morning, I would say it. I would say it when I got home from school, before I went to bed. Anytime I was by myself, I would out loud ask her not to scare us. Finally, that Friday came, Melissa brought everything with her to school, so that afternoon, when my mom picked me up, she could just ride home from

school with us. We're downstairs playing board games. We watched one of the movies that we'd rented, had some pizza, made some prank phone calls, and then we got bored and decided we wanted to go outside. It was probably around seven, but the sun was still up. We go to the trampoline. We're jumping. I'm showing her a few tricks, like easy things to do, so she's trying to learn those, and then she stops and points to my bedroom window,

and she said, oh, your mom's watching us. We see my mom in the window, but she's wearing this black dress. It was long sleeve and had a white bow in the front. So I would do a trick, then Melissa would do a trick, and then she would do like a thumbs up clapping. You know, just rooting us on everything that we were doing. This goes on for a few minutes and then we hear someone say, hey, who are you waving at? We both stop and turn around

and it's my mom standing behind us. So then we turned back to my window and the woman was still in the window. It scared me because if it wasn't my mom, who is this woman? As soon as Melissa sees my mom behind us, she turned and looked back at the window, and then she screamed out, who's in the window? And drops down to her butt and scoots and hops off the trampoline and runs and gets behind my mom.

My mom was holding a clothes basket. She immediately dropped it, turned around and gave Melissa a hug and tried to comfort her, tells her, you know, it's okay, it's okay, it's fine, don't be scared. Melissa's asking her who is that? My mom said, oh, well, she used to live here. She's a friend of the family. She just pops in every once in a while. She's not scary though. And then Melissa's just kind of looking at my mom and then goes silent for a moment and then yells, so

it's a ghost? I was like, oh my god, this is it. Mrs Pike has done exactly what I thought she was going to do. She's scared, Melissa. Mrs Pike has ruined everything. We went back downstairs. We turn on one of our movies. Melissa sits like really close to my mom hugged up to her on the couch watching the movie. But then she started to relax a little bit as the movie went on and noticed that nothing

else was happening scary in the house. While we were watching the movie, I was twisting my bracelet because I was nervous. She was kind of like, that's a cute bracelet. Where'd you get it? I had the bracelet kit in my room, so we went upstairs to my bedroom. I drug it out from under the bed and we opened that up. We're sitting in the floor, we're going through it. Picking out the threads and the things that we like. And then that's when she says, who is Mrs Pike?

I tell her about how we moved into the house when I was eight, and that she used to live in the house with her husband, and I said I'd met her before she passed away and she was really nice. She said, well, you said she's nice, but I think she's a jerk. And I just stopped and told her, don't say that. You're gonna make her mad, and then she's going to do something. She's like, oh, yeah, do you hear that, Mrs Pike? I think you're a jerk.

I immediately scoot away from her. I like distanced myself in between us is this bracelet kit with all of these beads and charms and things. A minute passes and we're both staring at each other waiting for something to happen. Then, we noticed one of those thick red beads lifts up from the center of the kit and it just kind of hovers. We're both watching it. She hadn't been thinking the same thing I was. There's no way that this

bead is levitating in front of us. Then it just shot across and hit her right between the eyebrows above her nose. So Melissa immediately both hands clasp over where the bead had just hit her, and the bead fell down and landed in Melissa's lap. She was sitting criss cross apple sauce. It landed right down in the center. So she puts both hands over her head and just goes, no way, and she moves her hands away, and I put my hand over my mouth and I just was like,

no way. I said, you have a huge red mark on your forehead. And she reaches down and picks up the bead and she's holding it. That mark stayed on her head for about four hours. I was in shock that I had just witnessed it, but I felt like she kind of deserved it. That's what you get. Then when she said what do I do now? I was like, you made her mad. I said, if I was you, I would apologize. She's like, Missus Pike, I'm so sorry.

I didn't mean it. You're not a jerk. So then we both just sat completely still, waiting to see if anything's going to happen. We probably sit there for like fifteen minutes. Nothing happens. The next morning, she's getting ready to go home and she asked me for a pen and paper. She said, I want to write Missus Pike

an apology letter. I want to tell her I'm sorry because you said she pops in and out, so maybe she wasn't here when I apologized, I'm going to tape it to your door, and I want you to leave it there for three days. I was like, okay, it said, Mrs Pike, I'm so sorry for saying you were a jerk. Please forgive me. I'm like, are you gonna go tell everybody that I'm weird? And she's like, no way. Everybody's going to love this. From that point on, everyone wanted

to come to my house. I experienced a lot of things in that house growing up. Most of them weren't very scary until years later, when one night I see Missus Pike and her husband, Mister Pike, both of them standing in the living room.

he's on the bottom. He falls asleep, and then I start hearing him snore, and I'm like, I cannot listen to this anymore. My brother had a very bright night light, so the room was still pretty lit up. I started to go down the ladder. As my foot hit the bottom wrung of the ladder, I felt something cold brush against my foot. I look down to see what it was. That's when I saw a hand coming out from under

the blanket. I knew the hand wasn't my brother's. He was sleeping at the other end of the bed, and it was this bony, frail, very white hand crawling out from under the comforter. Before I could even like realize what was happening, it jolts out and grabs me by the ankle. I scream out and fall backwards, like hit the deck and land on my back and scramble backwards, watching the hand right there on top of the mattress. My mom heard me fall, and she comes running in

and she kneels down beside me. She's like, what happened? What's going on? What happened? How did you fall? I was like trying to catch my breath, and I just point at the bed and said, she grabbed me. My Mom's like, who grabbed you? I recognize the hand that looked exactly like Mrs Pike's hands. I knew it was hers because when I met her when she was alive, she was like really thin and she had long, bony fingers, and I was like, it's Mrs. Pike. Mrs. Pike's hand

grabbed me. I lift up my pajama pants to show her where she had gripped me so hard, and I had like red lines where her fingers held on to my ankle. She said, maybe you hit it on the ladder when you fell. I'm like, no, Look, it looks like a handprint. In between each finger was a red line, almost like when you have a sunburn and then you push down on it and it'll turn white when you lift off of it. That's what it looked like. Also, my skin where the handprint was felt colder than the

rest of my body. I was in shock. I couldn't believe that it actually left a mark. Mrs. Pike had patted me on the leg once before, but she'd never touched me in a way that it hurt. So this time was really different and I knew I was never going to sleep in that bunk bed again. When I was sixteen, I'd just gotten my driver's license. I was babysitting my little brother. My mom and dad had gone out for dinner when this freak storm just rolled in. It was like this massive shake the windows

type of storm coming. As soon as it started raining, I went downstairs and collected candles and flashlights and things, because I knew that the power was going to go out. It always did when it rained. So we were in the living room watching TV already had a few of the candles lit when the power went out. Now I'm like, great. How am I going to keep him entertained? He wanted to go back to his room to play. I was like, that sounds great. We'll go back there. Let me grab

a book on the way. So I stop in my room, I pick out one of my books, and we go into his room and we set up all of these candles and lights everywhere to light up the room, and we just kind of hang out in there for a little while. We're in there for about an hour, when I hear the TV turn on from the living room on the other end of the house. I was like, oh, the power's back on. And he said, I want to stay back here and play, and I'm like, well, let me go turn the TV down. It was like very loud.

I head down the hallway and I can hear the voices and I'm able to make out that it's actually two people talking. It sounds like a man and a woman. So I slow down and I'm listening to them and I can tell that they're arguing, and it sounds like they're arguing over bills. It sounded like a sitcom. I'm thinking, like, is this Roseanne or something? So I keep heading down

the hallway. Then as I passed the bathroom, I reach in to flip the switch to turn the lights on to light up the hall a little bit, but nothing happens. So I flip it back down and then try it again. Still no lights. Well that's weird. That's when it clicked in my head. The power's not working anywhere else in the house, so it can't be the TV. There's actually people in the living room. And then I hear a

woman say, someone's coming. Then a man says, I don't hear anything, so I stop, and I'm like, surely they're not talking about me. So I take a few more steps towards the living room and then I hear her say, she's in the hallway. Oh my god, they are they're talking about me. Who is in the living room? Who is talking about me? I made up my mind. I'm going to confront whoever it is. I had this maglight flashlight. I had it on already but I held it up

like a baseball bat. So I stepped into the living room, and that's when I see them standing there. I immediately recognize both of them. It's Mrs. and Mr. Pike. They both stop arguing, turn and look at me. And Mrs. Pike's face, she looked sad and he just kind of looked mean. They were both older. She was small and frail. He was slightly taller than her, but not by much. And they were solid appearing, but not really. They looked like two people, but not like living people. It stopped

me in my tracks. Mrs. Pike was wearing a long black dress with long sleeves and a white bow in the front. Mister Pike, he was wearing dark pants and a button up shirt and appeared to have like a sweater vest over it. He's staring at her, She's staring at me, and she looked like she felt bad that we had heard them arguing and caught them there. She felt bad that she'd scared me, like all of these things. I could tell just by the look on her face.

And he's still staring at her, and then when he sees that she's looking at me, he turns to me, and he was scary looking. As I'm looking at him, Mrs. Pike pushed Mr. Pike into the coat closet, but the door was closed. They just kind of walked right through it. My immediate thought was, are they still in there? I run over to the closet and I throw the door open. I could not believe it. The coats were swaying as if someone had passed through them, but no one was

in the coat closet. So then I shut it and then pulled it open the exact same way that I did the first time, and nothing happened. So I thought, well, maybe I pulled it harder than I thought to let me pull it more quickly and see if that makes the coats move. So I'm standing there just like shutting the door, pulling it open, shutting, you know, like back and forth, and I could not get the coats to sway.

About thirty minutes later, my mom and dad get home from their date, and immediately I tell my mom what happened, and then my dad came in there and she told him what I'd said. He's like, oh, well, you just must have opened the door to quickly, or you must have pulled it open really fast, and the gust of wind would have made the coats swing. I told him no, I tried that and I couldn't get it to do it.

He didn't believe me, so he made me follow him into the living room so that he could show me that it was just me opening the door too quickly that caused the coats to move. He opens the door, the coats don't move, so he shuts the door. Then he pulls it open like way quicker than I could have, and the coats still didn't move. And then he said, well, you must have just imagined the coats moving, and I said, I know what I saw, and the coats were moving. Missus and mister Pike went into the closet.

Several years later, I've moved out, I'm married, I have a son, his name is Austin. There's a storm rolling in, so I decide that I'm going to need more candles and flashlights than I already have, and I knew that I could go out to my mom and dad's to get endless amounts of them. So I put Austin, who's three at the time, into the car seat and we head out to my parents' house. My mom and dad weren't home at the time. Both were at work. I knew this. I wasn't worried about it because I had

a key to the house. We pull into the driveway, I get Austin out of the car seat. We head up to the front door. We walk in and we take our shoes off, and then we head downstairs to the basement to get the candles. Austin had a play area in the basement. We go over to that area. I find him a toy. He starts playing with it. I walk over to the other side of the basement to get the candles. I pick out about five or six of them and put them into the bag, and

then head back over to get Austin. We go upstairs. I set him on the couch and then set the candles beside him, and I go to get his shoes to put back on him so we can leave. I get the first shoe on, and then as I'm putting the second shoe on, I hear a woman say, who's there? In the distance, it sounded like it came from the basement. I freeze and I turn in the direction of the basement door. Who's there? Who was that? Did I hear that?

Did I actually hear somebody yell from the basement, and I turned back to Austin and I noticed that he's also looking in that direction. While I'm looking at him, I hear, hey, don't go. But this time I could hear the creaks of the stairs. Whoever was yelling from the basement was now also walking up the stairs. I knew that my mom wasn't home. I knew that she was at work, and I knew my dad wasn't there. But this sounded like a woman. And I knew no one was in the home because I had already been

through the entire house. And then not only was I hearing it, I could tell that Austin could hear it as well. He turns to me and he said, where's Nana? And I said, Nana's at work, Nana's not here. That's not Nana. And as soon as I said that, she called out again, wait, don't go, and I could tell that she was closer, and it almost kind of sounded like my mom, so much so that Austin was like Nana and jumped off the couch to try to run

to the sound. I reached out and grabbed his shirt and I pulled him in real close, and I just whispered because I was scared. At this point, I was just like, that's not Nana, and I was just trying to be like as quiet as possible because I did not know what was going to happen next, and then having him there with me, just the mother instinct kicked in. I didn't want anyone to hurt him, and I didn't know if it was an actual person or not. When

I get scared, I just freeze. I could feel like my heartbeat in my throat, and then without giving it a second thought, I just jerked him up, stood up really quickly, and just headed straight for the front door. I ran out the front door, and I just left the door open, and I just wanted to get Austin out and in the car. I put him in his car seat. My hands were shaking trying to get his car seat buckled and make sure that he was like

actually buckled in. I shut his door, and the storm was starting at this point, so my hair was like whipping across my face, and I'm just trying to get my hair out of my face. I turn and look at the front door and see the front door just slam shut. Someone or something had slammed the door shut. I get into the driver's side seat and I see the curtain beside the front door move. Whatever I had shut the door was now looking out the window at me. I just threw it into reverse and go out of there.

I had like a death grip on the steering wheel because just my entire like my adrenaline was pumping. I called Mom and I'm like, hey, You're never gonna believe what just happened. I was like, I wanted to make sure that you were at work because we heard something in the house and I think it was Mrs. Pike yelling out to us. She said, yeah, no, one's there. Things happening just kind of became the norm, and everyone that came over had some sort of experience with Mrs. Pike.

I've had so many experiences with Miss Pike, and I remember the first time I met her, she said I would live here forever if I could. I guess she meant it.

hosted by Lauren 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