Paranormal podcast changes my perspective
(Originally published November 2022)
On the way to bed a couple of weeks ago, I was about to walk past the bedroom closet that serves as our laundry room. Suddenly the dog, two steps ahead of me, stopped so fast his brakes squealed.
With the fur on his spine bristling, he growled at something in the darkness of the little room.
Normally, I wouldn’t have given it a thought. But I had just been listening to the Spooked podcast, in which people share stories of their paranormal encounters. In this episode, a man’s first hint that his apartment was haunted was when his two cats kept staring in alarm at an empty corner (and things got much scarier from there).
In my heightened state, I wondered briefly if a demonic force could be lurking behind the washing machine. But I knew the more likely answer: The dog had spotted something out of the ordinary and panicked accordingly.
Following his sightline into the laundry room, I saw the threat: a terrifying eight-count package of toilet paper I had set on the dryer that morning. I grabbed the package and showed it to him, causing him to set a new vertical jump record.
The dog might fear the unknown, but I didn’t. And though I enjoyed Spooked, I felt that the stories in it couldn’t be real, or the people would react differently.
I didn’t get, for instance, why a couple would remain in a house where, every night, the apparition of a little girl holding a knife stood at the foot of their bed. “Sure, sometimes we wake up and find bloody claw marks all over the walls,” they’d say. “But the school district is the best in the tri-state area.”
In real life, I tended to scoff at people who attributed every odd experience to a ghost, poltergeist or curse. Of course, I might be more charitable if anything truly creepy had ever happened to me.
Then it did.
One morning around Halloween, shortly after finishing another Spooked episode, I glanced out the kitchen window and froze. Someone—or something—was standing out in our field.
Probably just one of our nephews scouting for deer, I thought at first. But the shape didn’t look right.
It sort of resembled a man, about six feet tall, wearing gray pants and a black sweatshirt with the hood up. He had his back to me, and he didn’t move. His demeanor unnerved me.
Unable to make out any detail, I grabbed our crappy binoculars. Though they had only slightly more magnification power than a pair of toilet paper tubes glued together, I could tell that the figure was impossibly skinny, too skinny to be human. I couldn’t make sense of it.
My heart raced. What I was seeing didn’t comport with reality. What if there was no rational explanation?
Then the thing shifted, and I gulped.
Slowly, it half-raised one unnaturally long arm, and I noticed that its black sleeve hung down in tatters, like the robe of a visitor from the dead. Would it turn and point a skeletal finger at me?
My extremities went numb. In that moment, the curtain between the normal and paranormal was being pulled back, challenging everything I thought I knew.
When the figure moved again, hunching its narrow shoulders, I gasped, afraid of what it might do next.
My hands shook as the hideous thing began to twist its head toward me. It stretched out both arms, the ragged sleeves flapping in the wind. Was I about to stare into the hollow eyes of death?
Uh, no.
In an instant, I understood. The shape was not, after all, an evil creature in a torn black sweatshirt and gray pants. It was a turkey vulture perched on a weathered fencepost. Oblivious to me, it began preening its long wing feathers (not sleeves after all — how about that). Not a malevolent entity. Just a bird grooming itself.
I knew it, I told myself, pretending I hadn’t almost fainted. There is always—always—a rational explanation. The relief I felt was, however, tinged with disappointment that the world as I understood it had not changed.
Neither had I. I’m still listening to silly ghost stories. And I still don’t believe in the paranormal.
But I will be leaving the light on in the laundry room for the foreseeable future.
(Besides Spooked, I like to scare the crap out of myself with Uncanny, The Battersea Poltergeist, and The Witch Farm.)
