Robin covers a ghost ship & Adam details a mystery at a lighthouse.
Robin & Adam return with Episode 7 of Scary(ish)! This week, our Homegrown Horror segment is bursting at the seams with listener’s stories. Robin tells the tale of a doomed passenger liner that still roams the waters, and Adam unsolves the mystery of the missing lighthouse keepers of Eilean Mor. Listen, Share, Subscribe, and Review!
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Alicia’s Homegrown Horror:
Hi Robin and Adam! First off, I have to say how much I really really enjoy listening to you guys podcast. I love everything scary and creepy and it’s so much fun to sit and listen to you guys explain theories and stories. Other podcast seem so scripted and intense so it’s nice to have a podcast where everyone is super real and laid back and it’s like just chatting with friends. If I’m being honest, I had this email typed out for a couple days before I finally decided to send it in because I was a little nervous. I haven’t talked about what happened for a while but I actually really enjoyed writing everything down, it almost felt therapeutic. So I hope you guys enjoy reading it as well. Love you guys loads!
Everything began about 5 years ago when I was a junior in high school. My English class was doing group projects and my group consisted of myself, my best friend Riley, and a girl named Kayla, who I hadn’t met before this class. The group decided to meet at Kayla’s house to work on our project and this is when she revealed she had gotten a ouija board just a few months earlier. Riley and I have always been super interested in the paranormal so we didn’t object when Kayla began looking for the board. She continued to tell us that she had used it multiple times since she had got it and nothing bad had ever happened. (which looking back, this is the most foreshadowing shit I’ve ever seen in my life) As much as I love the creepy and scary, I was still a little hesitant to play; so I sat out the first few times and let Riley and Kayla continue on their own. They ended up contacting a couple spirits through the board and everything seemed to be going okay. This is when my friends convinced me to join.
I was still a little on edge but was also completely fascinated by what was happening. We began talking to what was supposedly an older lady named Ana. While talking to Ana, I noted that the planchet was very slow and intentional with it’s movements and then after a few minutes it suddenly changed. The planchet started moving sporadically and extremely fast. It wasn’t even spelling out words anymore it was just moving over random letters. We asked if we were still speaking to Ana and the planchet abruptly stopped and immediately went to “no” before continuing to spell out random letters. Kayla then started to ask it questions like “who are you” and “what do you want” and each time, the planchet would go down to the numbers on the board and start form 0 and and work its way across to 9. By this point, we were all terrified and began asking the entity to say goodbye but the planchet kept moving to “no.” This is when Kayla decided to completely nope the fuck out and took her hands off the planchet and moved across the room. Now I myself don’t know a whole lot about ouija boards, but I do know that the fastest way to screw yourself is to take your fingers off the planchet; so it’s safe to say that my fingers were fucking glued to that baby. Me and Riley continued to say goodbye until we finally forced the planchet to move across the words ourselves and then immediately closed the board.
A few days after is when I started noticing strange things happening. They were very minuscule at first so I really didn’t think anything of them, but looking back now I can tell that they probably weren’t coincidences. Like this one time, I was in my kitchen and I heard a prominent thud come from my room. I thought absolutely nothing of it because I was so sure it was one of my dogs jumping off my bed and landing on the floor. I have heard this noise a million times so I casually walked back to my room only to find nothing there. I soon found out that both my dogs were outside the entire time. Another day, I was home alone and again in my kitchen. For my back door, my family has a very large gated door which makes a very loud and distinct noise when you lock or unlock it. I was in my kitchen when I heard my back door being unlocked. Again I thought nothing of it because this was about the time of day when my dad would usually get home from work. So I literally stood there in the kitchen waiting for him to walk through the door, but he never came. Eventually I walked back to the door to see that it was indeed unlocked but no one was there. I even looked outside to see if I could see my dad’s car, there was nothing. Now this is the same door that I use to let my dogs outside everyday, so I wasn’t too freaked out thinking that it was very possible that I simply forgot to lock the door back after entering. What made me freak out was the noise that came from my kitchen as soon as I got to the back door. It wasn’t loud or threatening, but it sounded just like someone took a mug and roughly placed it down on our counter. But of course, when I went back into the kitchen nothing seemed out of place.
Most of the things that happened early on could be put away to coincidence or simply mishearing things but this next one I really can’t explain. My mom was of course in our fucking kitchen and I was in the living room which is the next room over. My kitchen and living room are connected by a doorway so even through you can’t directly see into the kitchen, you can still hear and communicate pretty well. My brother and I were in the living room when we heard a HUGE bang come from the kitchen. I can not stress enough how loud this bang was. I had headphones in and I still jumped when I heard it. I sat there looking at my brother confused until my mom appeared in the doorway with wide eyes and her mouth hanging open. She looked at us and asked if we had heard that noise and continued to tell us that she hadn’t done anything. I followed her into the kitchen where she told me that she was putting away dishes when the bang happened. We searched the entire kitchen and checked every dish and pot to see if anything had fallen and we couldn’t find a single thing out of place. The best way I can describe the noise is as if someone took the oven door and slammed it closed as hard as they possibly could. It didn’t sound like a glass braking or a cabinet slamming, it sounded like metal on metal, as if there was a car crash in our kitchen.
And this is when things started to get scary and not just scaryish. I started noticing a change in my attitude and demeanor. It wasn’t drastic and I doubt anyone was able to tell a huge difference, but I could. I found myself becoming frustrated much more easily and I never really wanted to leave my house. I noticed that I was having much more negative thoughts and always felt very drained. This is also around the time that I started having the same dream just about every night. The dream almost had an out of body feel to it, because in the dream I would be standing in the corning of my room and I would be watching myself sleep in my bed. Then I would see a tall, black shadow figure walk into my room, stand next to my bed and watch me sleep. The figure never did anything to me nor did it ever acknowledge me standing on the other side of the room. It simply stood there and watched me sleep. I also started hearing noises at night. The first time was a few weeks after the ouija board, I was in my bed, all the lights were off and I heard footsteps in my room. I was half asleep so I couldn’t tell if my mind was playing tricks on me or not, but either way it scared me enough to run to my mom and have her sleep with me that night. DID I MENTION I WAS FUCKING 17 AT THE TIME. That’s how scared I was, a grown ass 17 year old got their mom to sleep with them.
By this time, I was definitely becoming aware that strange things were happening and that they very well could be related to our ouija board experience. However, I wasn’t to the point of being super alarmed nor was I looking for help because even though I felt uneasy at times nothing physical or malicious had really happened. Until one night, I was sleeping in my bed when I was woken up by a scratching noise. I was half asleep at this point and I wasn’t too worried by the noise thinking that is was just a mouse in my room. A mouse had found it’s way into my room about a year prior so it wasn’t outrageous to think another had found its way in. I remember a year ago when a mouse first came into my room I could hear it at night scratching at the wall or running over a piece of paper, so with this theory in mind I allowed myself to go back to sleep. In the morning I told my dad about the mouse and he proceeded to put out mouse traps in my room. The scratching noise continued for about three or four nights and we still could not catch the “mouse” nor did we ever see any mice running around. Then one day, everything came together. I was in the shower shaving my legs when I noticed I had scratches on me down by my ankles. I was very confused because I had no recollection of doing anything that could have caused the marks. I have woken up with weird bruises before but never scratches. My dogs crossed my mind as a possible suspect but neither one weighs more then 12 pounds and they have never caused me harm in the past so it seemed unlikely. I was still confused about the scratches until later that day when I was sitting at the foot of my bed putting on my shoes. I have a very large wooden bed frame in my room and it protrudes over the top and bottom of my bed. I looked at the foot of my bed frame and there were deep scratches all across the wood. I nearly had a panic attack as my mind raced back and fourth between the scratching noises I would hear at night, to the scratches on my legs, the strange dreams of a shadow watching me and now this. I was fucking terrified. (I included a picture of the bed frame since I still have it in my room)
Now I live in the south so I’m about half a mile from a church in any direction. So I found a well known Catholic church in my town and went to talk to the priest (we’ll call him Father Paul.) I explained everything to him. I told him about the ouija board and everything that had happened afterwards. I told him that I was extremely scared and wanted him to come bless my house, which he agreed to do, but then proceeded to tell me that it was probably not just the house that has something attached to it. He said since we did not play the ouija board in my house, something probably tried to latch itself on to me and then followed me home. He said he didn’t want to scare me but he believed that I was under partial influence of an evil entity or spirit. He said that there are a couple stages when a possession is developing, and an influence is the first stage. He said that those under a partial influence have a negative entity hovering over them that affects the person’s emotions and ability to interact with others. The entity isolates that person to make them feel alone and make them more vulnerable. So Father Paul asked if he could bless me immediately and come bless my house in a day or two. He grabbed his Bible, and used what I assumed to be holy water to draw a cross on my forehead and started reading a passage from his Bible. Even though nothing crazy happened during this blessing it was still by far the most intense few moments of my life.
It sounds super cliche, but I set up a time for Father Paul to come bless my house and honestly everything has pretty much gone back to normal since then. I could feel a huge emotional difference in myself the day after I met with Father Paul and nothing strange has happened in my house since. I did give Kayla Father Paul’s information just incase she needed help with anything but honestly I never really talked to her again after that class ended. But just to ease my own conscience, I’m going to say that everything worked out for her as well.
I’m very aware that my situation had one of the best possible outcome and I am extremely lucky for that. So please be extremely careful when dealing with this kind of stuff and when given the choice to mess with it please just say no. Because I have heard plenty of stories where people are not so lucky and have had their lives ruined. Stay Safe.