Snap, judgment, studios. I shall be telling this with a sigh. Somewhere, ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wooden eye. I took the one less traveled by. And that is me, all the difference. Listen to spooked. Stay tuned. Why, you can't get enough of spooked? Sign up for the summer of spooked. Our pop-up newsletter launched in partnership with KQED and get monthly highlights from spooked episodes, eerie stories from KQED and accounts of supernatural experiences as told by fans.
Head to KQED.org slash spooked and sign up today. From KQED and PRX, you've crossed over to spooked. The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The People born to the sunshine. But the warm breeze of their back. These rare and wonderful people often do not understand their eventual calamity. How could this happen, they say? What have I done? What have I done, or even why have thou forsaken me? While those born under a shadow they laugh.
They learn early to suspect that even their good fortune may hide a trick. What will it cost me? How will it hurt? I'm born on a spinning wheel, where gamblers corn in my fortune follows unknown seasons. Watch me, because my day shines brighter than the new time sun. My music can make the angel stands but my nights. No dawn wakes up my horizon, no stars shining in my midnight. I sit in the dark of the cave, the dark of the prison knowing that this black season will be my last.
Pick clean, waste it to bare bones. And it's only, only when I can no longer live my head to well. Only then the spinner spins, leaving me to wash up upon the shore of the daytime, to reap under the glow of the sun, then I wonder, am I cursed or am I blessed? And with the universe, please decide. My name is Dunwashington, the wheel spins. Spook starts now. This piece of Love and the Holy Pure is well applied to the world's ages since I have been painted beautifully.
Now, today we're traveling all the way down to a small town in Wilhaka, Mexico. And from Cisco Vasquez, he's 22 years old in the prime of his life, but he's about to discover all that can go away in instant. The village had grew up in East Coast and Jose del Progreso, in Guajaca. That was my home until I was 22 years old. This was at my own's Verde party. She's the oldest sister in my dad's side. I wanted to bridge the gap between the families.
I wanted to reach out to them because they had not spoken to each other for so long. It was inner time. They start serving soda and water, but I didn't like soda. And the birthday woman walked over to me and said hi. She greets me, she hands me the cup of Hamayika, he biscuits me, then we all sit down and have dinner. So I lived a party and I felt fine, but four or five days later I can start to feel like some kind of dissiness. I felt my vision suddenly getting blurry.
I started to feel my knee hurting, my right knee at first. Some really strong stomach pains on my belly really find that first then getting worse later. Much worse. I come back home. Once I'm home, I do that typical thing. Take off my clothes, get ready to sleep, and looking inside my pockets, my pants pocket, there's a doll. A tiny, tiny little doll. I find a tiny doll, a tiny doll. It was enlarged and an inch. And it's made like I was sniffing an orange or a piece of panelist out cheese.
But struck me about the doll was that it was a very small doll, but it had really fine features. I see her little mouth, the nose, everything. Even the short hair over her shoulders, she looked like she was wearing a headband, just like little girls do. So the first thing that I thought was, somebody must have sleepless in my pocket, maybe someone from the family. I didn't think too much about it. I just left it there. I put it on an ice-tank, I had next to my bed. I got to sleep.
The next morning I just left for work. After work, I went to my bedroom and took off my clothes, my pants. And for the second consecutive night, I found another doll. A little doll, the same size as the previous one, but a different color. Different color this time. I looked at the nightstand where I had left the doll that I before thinking, maybe I picked it again by accident, but no. There she was, the doll from last night. And this was a new one.
Well maybe someone at work or school, they're playing me jokes, that's it. I'll give it also a way later. I went to sleep and next day, same thing, same routine, always the same. I took a shower, breakfast, got to town, did the work, but the pain was getting so much worse, it was getting much, much worse. The pain around my belly was getting sharper and as the days went by, my vision was getting blurrier. So for the third night, I come back home from work and once again, a new doll.
And sometime later, I started to have other problems, such as nightmares. I don't know exactly how long after this happened, but my mom told me one day, hey, I was cleaning your room and I found you have some dolls there. There's a line of dolls over your nightstand. What's up with that? She said, and my sister, she asked, are you collecting them? Well no, no, no, exactly, I replied. I didn't want to talk about it. I don't know why, but something deep inside was telling me not to talk about it.
Well those are quite a few dolls, she said. Those are quite a few. Can I have them? My sister said, I like them. No, no, just living in there, living there, I said. Something was also telling me, I guess, from my subconscious that I had to live those dolls alone. Every single day, a new doll, every single day, the pain is getting more intense. Every single day, I was losing weight. If the weather was cold around December, it gets real cold in Oaxaca, I would sweat. I was getting weaker.
My skin was turning yellow. I ran into a friend of mine, he said, hey, what's wrong with you? You don't fit in your clothes anymore. You look sick. What's up with you? You have eye bags. Aren't you sleeping? Your eyes are turning yellow. I think you should visit a doctor. No, you know that if you have to consult a doctor. I went to the doctor. I think he was Friday. So they plugged me into every single machine in the office. You know how doctors are?
He immediately lays me down because I was way too skinny already. He's making a visual examination. He looks at my mom. And he says, you know what, don't you, Silvina? I'm sorry, but I can't give back to any prescription. That's my nickname ever since I was a child. A packer. And my mom says, but why? Just look at him. He was fainted on his way here. He says, yeah. Every test showed negative results. He's not sick. I wasn't sleeping anymore.
It had been months, weeks without any sleep, weeks without drinking water. I had a terrible urge to drink water, but I knew that if I tried to drink some, an intense urge to throw up would overcome me, but nothing would come out. Everything was already too frightening. I even lost my job. Hey, I'm Pindavish Harasha. Host of the right now is podcast from KQED. Every week I talk to the cornerstones and the creatives, making art and culture in our Bay Area communities.
Everywhere you walk in San Francisco, you're on native land. I love being brown. It's what makes me so beautiful. It's what makes me so special. And I'm owning that. You feel that marriage between Africa and the Americas. And I just stand on this hyphen and write my poems over here. Check out right now with Shfamke QED. Wherever you find your podcast. And so one day, it must have been Sunday. Yeah, it was Sunday. I went for a walk in downtown Wahaka City.
And I clearly remember that I sat down on a bench in the Wahaka City Square. Well I was sitting there, a woman. Well in Wahaka we called them Hitanitas. They are fortune tellers. They are tarot readers. It's a young woman. She's about 30 something. She's passing by and she offers me a poem reading. Care for a poem reading, young man? No thanks. Thank you. Unsceptical, not believing any of that. For some reason she's insisting and says, I truly want to read your poem, young man. You know what?
I'm going to do it for free. She said something in the lines of young man. You should understand that what's happening to you is not natural. You can look around for the most important doctor you may find, but they won't cure you because it's not on their hands to cure you. She said, what is happening to you is a tragedy. It's very sad saying that it happened to you. Well, it was going to happen to you. So it's there at the woman. And I accept her offer. Give me your right hand.
Now you're left hand, she says. She grabs both of my hands and then she starts to speak about the things I was going through. Listen, young man, she said, I know you can heal and the woman takes out some pieces of paper and she writes down an address and a local phone number. She has been a node. She says, go to this place. Trust me. You've got to go as soon as you can if you want to leave. That's what she said. If you want to leave, go there as soon as you can. This is too much.
I took a taxi to that address as soon as I climbed up the stairs. The first thing I see in front of me is a six-speed seven-tall statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Behind La Virgen. There was another statue of a green river. There's an altar over a landing. And beyond that, there's a private room where there's a man that greeted me immediately. I'm Pedro, he said, welcome to our consultation. I told him, I met this person and she gave me this address. She prompted me to visit you.
And she said, you wouldn't charge me for this if I told you her name. So he agreed and said there was no problem. He didn't ask a thing and I didn't tell him a thing. He then said, okay, here's some money. Have it. He grows a restored yourself, any 31. And come back here with five chicken eggs. So I bought the chicken eggs. He plays me right in front of him. He wrapped a chicken egg, a creole egg, as we call them in Oaxaca. And he wrapped it with basil. He was rubbing the egg against my body.
He inspected the basil. He would look at me in the eye and then the basil. He cracks the egg in a crystal ball. And the water in the ball turns into blackish blue, something like that. He says, have you ever seen an egg with a black or blue yolk? No, of course not. All right then, grab another egg. He says, I'm going to crack this egg, okay? I want you to know this carefully what is going to come out or what shape is going to show up, he says.
But before I crack the egg, do you have in mind that you're the one who brought the eggs? Yes, of course I do. All right, I'll crack it. And when he cracks the egg, instead of a egg yolk, there was some mouse fields wrapping some kind of slime, some kind of white reddish membrane. And it was still fresh. Oh my, that's the only thing he said. We didn't talk that much really. Let's take a look at that leg of yours, he says. And he touches my knee. Does it hurt? Yeah, pretty bad.
He says, okay, let's get to my desk. So I sit down, he goes around and sits in front of me. He grabs a notebook, a pencil, and he stares directly to my face and says, don't look away at any moment. He asked about the place and date of my birth, my last name. And he stares, writing or scribbling. And when he's done writing, he closes the notebook. He says, how many doctors have you visited? All of those tests, it doesn't matter how powerful they are.
They won't detect a single illness because you're not sick. You have nothing, a doctor can cure, but you're dying. I'm going to tell you what, the way that this is going. If we look at what the people who are doing this to you are planning, it will be such a miracle if you're still around after six or seven months from now. To put it in my own words, you have one foot here in this world and the other in the grave. He says, I'm just going to give you the name of a person.
This is a woman who you haven't talked to me about because we just made a few minutes ago. You didn't have a close relationship with this woman, but she's the one that is causing all of this. And this woman, she wants to see you dead, to kill you, to send you to the grave immediately. A therapy. I'm going to give you the name and he gives me the name and I said, of course, she's my grandmother. Well, that's her. Are you telling me that my father's mother, my grandmother, she wants me dead?
No, she doesn't. I mean, if it was up to her, she did that already. And then he gave me another name. And I said, of course, that's my aunt. The birthday woman, he replies immediately. I tried to recall, yeah, it's true. I've been sick since her birthday party. How long after the birthday party did you start to feel like this? Yes. I don't really remember. I mean, it was a very short time. All right then. And what about that hamaca? Ike, tell her about hamaca.
He said this, if you ever want to fuck someone up with this kind of witchcraft, Hibiscus tea is a really great option. And so it's everything that is red colored because that's how you hide it. In your grandma's stove, he says, there's a pot full of water. It's a pewter pot. And underneath, there's ash, ash left from the burning wood. And underneath the ash, that's where you are.
That's the place where you'll find what's been causing you to stop eating and drinking and keeping you from walking and playing and hanging out with your friends. All of that. He says, look, young man, you're going to go home and speak to your parents. Make sure your dad goes to your grandmother's house and see for himself. In there, he's going to retrieve a photo of you. Both your mom and dad must know when that photo went missing. That's a much deeper one.
Now he says, you're going to buy two pieces of flannel, one red, one black. You know what? I have some scraps here so you won't have to buy anything. Tomorrow, when you're on the racing, you take those flannel scraps out and put them back in the right pocket of the next set of pants you'll be wearing. You put them in your pockets. You put those scraps there because the amulet won't have your back tonight, he said, referring to the dolls. He called the dolls amulets.
He said, look, I'm going to cure you in three months. During my hour and a half commute back home, I was thinking, among my thoughts, I was considering the possibility of my dad snapping out like, hey, what's wrong with you? Are you going crazy? What's your problem? I expected this because I was going to deliver such bad news. So I arrived home and as I was telling them this, I noticed that mom and dad were just staring at each other. My dad starts crying and he says, I'm going to do it.
You know what? I'll even do it tomorrow. He said, he was going to my grandma's house to look for that puter pot. The morning after, I remember sleeping a little bit the night before. You've only an hour and a half. The dolls had stopped appearing. And when I woke up, I asked my mom, where's dad? He said, and when my dad comes back around 11 a.m. or noon, he came back angry. He immediately told me, see? Just how you told us. He had found a pot and the stuff was there.
He looked at my mom saying, look, Silvina, because my mom's name is Silvina. And he said, look, Silvina, there's the photo as it threw it on the table. I remember. It was a photo of my high school prom night. And yes, that was me. And he also shows us a black rag doll. That rag doll had little pins inside. They were pinned onto its belly and its leg, exactly where I was feeling pain.
The fabric of this rag doll was weathered due to the time that it remained buried between the earth, the ash and the stove. And I remember mom and dad sitting on the couch, and my dad tells me, look Francisco, son, the things that my parents were never on board with me marrying your mother because of the age difference. When they moved in together, my dad was going to turn 18 and my mom was 30. And my dad started crying.
I knew that they're capable, but I did not think that they would act on it, he said. And then mom and dad started talking about how my grandmother opposed to them getting married. When my mom was barely three months pregnant, my granddad and my grandmother went to her address to be their op so that she might be miscarried. My dad cried a lot that day, that night. He told me, you don't know it now because you're not at that, but once you have children, you're going to realize it yourself.
And only then you'll know what it feels like when you're told that your own family is attempting to harm your children's lives. Through this, up until today, it's a very difficult situation to overcome, knowing that your own grandmother once you did. I told my mom that everything about what Pedro, the witch doctor, had told me. The witch doctor told me to throw it all away. He said, I had to be the one to do so, but not anywhere. It had to be in the cemetery.
He instructed me to go there by myself at 5 a.m. But the cemetery is close at that time, I replied. He said, you don't have to go in. You just have to throw them over the wall and don't ever look back until you're far away enough that the cemetery is out of sight. Only then you can look anywhere, but do not look towards the cemetery. If you look back, the spell will return. I went home, and the first thing I did was trying to take a shower. I was reuniting with the water.
Yeah, I say it like that now. And sometimes it makes me giggle, but no, it is a joy laughter. Do you know what I mean? It's a way of release. Yeah, it's peace. It's a satisfaction for being alive. It took a shower. I took some fresh clean clothes, put on my sneakers, and hopped on my motorcycle. The motorcycle had some sort of saddlebag. So I threw the bag with the dolls there. As I approached the cemetery, I started pulling it out. I was a nervous wreck. I was scared to tell you the truth.
I felt fear. I had to go through 110 pitch dark yards. The street was one way and I had to go back in the opposite direction. I slowed down and I took the bag in my hand, and I threw the bag over the wall without looking back. I took off down the main avenue, and on my way home, now I'm feeling this refreshing sense of peacefulness. I already think that once I get home, I will drink a glass of water because I'm thirsty.
I have this intense thirst, feeling like I could just go up a whole gallon of water. Big thanks to Francisco for sharing your story with us. That original score was by Rinsal Giorgio and a big shout out to Eric Yanez, our spook correspondent down in Mexico and Fernando Hernandez, who produced that story. You know it's never over because the story never stops. This is not a journey for the faint of heart. Please do not step foot on this path unless you know beforehand that we do not know the way.
Be afraid. If you like amazing storytelling told in the light of the day, storytelling that might just change the life. Check out our sister podcast, Snap Judgment Storytelling The Beat Baby. The spook's brought you by a team that never plays with dolls.
Run. Run away from Mark Ristich and assessment our chief spookster Eliza Smith, Lauren Newsom, Chris Handbrick, Annie Newman, Rinsal Giorgio, Leon Monimocho, Jacob Winick, Tiffany DeLisa, and Ford, Eric Yanez, Sanajá, Marissa Dodds, a spook theme song that's by Pat Masiddi Miller.
My name is Van Washington and please go on ahead, sit your life, lock your doors, check on the kids one more time, all of that, do all of that, but you can't forget the most important thing of all the pain that can make the difference between a happy ending and a poor outcome. Say it with me now. Never, ever, never, never, never, never, turn out the lights.