Hey it's Michelle Newman, and tonight every caller was somewhere they were supposed to feel safe. None of them stayed that way.
Our first caller was driving solo from California to Portland when she pulled off Interstate 5 near Gilroy and checked into a Motel 6. She dozed off, looked across the room, and there was a man sitting in the chair by the credenza. Gallard mustache. Baggy pants. Both hands on the armrests. Just watching her sleep. She woke herself up screaming for her mother and slept with the light on until dawn. Calling for your mother in genuine terror is one of the most primal human distress responses we have. It bypasses everything rational and goes straight to the oldest part of the brain. Her mother was alive and in another state. It did not matter.
Chase from Mesa, Arizona, takes us to a basement in Salina, Kansas, in 2008. His roommate was showering. Chase was sleeping next door. A woman's voice said, " Hey, do you know me?" Thirty seconds of silence. Then again. "Hey, do you know me?" Only the two of them were in the house. Whatever was asking that question was asking it directly and waiting for an answer. Chase says there is more, but that is the real weird one. Chase, please call back.
Our caller from San Antonio describes years of escalating paranormal activity from 1987 to 1991. A glowing old woman in a 1900s dress watching from beside the bed. A young woman in white on the stairs his father stepped aside to let pass before she vanished. Voices calling his name from empty rooms. Someone poking him on the back in an empty bathroom. And persistent water leaks that got worse no matter how many repairs were made. Chronic water damage can cause toxic mold exposure with documented neurological effects including auditory and visual hallucinations. Whether that explains it or whether something else was there that the mold could not account for, the family eventually had to leave.
Finally, Cindy Ketron from Haunted Avon, Indiana, takes us to a cemetery in Seymour in 1987, to a section filled with children's graves from the Spanish flu of 1918 to 1919. The Spanish flu killed between fifty and one hundred million people worldwide, devastating numbers of them children, and that concentrated grief still lives in small town cemeteries over a century later. Cindy had no relatives there. They were simply curious. Then her son Brian said, " Mom, look." A disembodied child's hand was crawling up through the grave, raising its fingers as if feeling for where it was going. Her mother said, "Run!" They ran. When they came back months later, there was nothing there at all.
00:00 Intro
00:00 Road trip caller and the figure in the motel chair on Interstate 5
07:37 Chase from Mesa, Arizona, and the disembodied voice in the Kansas basement
10:50 San Antonio caller and years of paranormal activity with possible toxic mold
15:50 Cindy Ketron from Indiana and the child's hand from the Spanish flu cemetery
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