What are the MOUTH PROPORTIONS?! | Your Urban Legends 109
/Some kids are gay. Some kids are obsessed with death. Some kids are gay AND obsessed with death. And we love that for them! Also featuring astral projecting to family functions and helping your family break the cycle of buying haunted houses.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of defecation, drug use, death, misogyny, and violence.
Housekeeping
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Cast & Crew
- Co-Hosts: Julia Schifini and Amanda McLoughlin
- Editor: Bren Frederick
- Music: Brandon Grugle, based on "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod
- Artwork: Allyson Wakeman
- Multitude: multitude.productions
About Us
Spirits is a boozy podcast about mythology, legends, and folklore. Every episode, co-hosts Julia and Amanda mix a drink and discuss a new story or character from a wide range of places, eras, and cultures. Learn brand-new stories and enjoy retellings of your favorite myths, served over ice every week, on Spirits.
Transcript
[theme]
AMANDA: Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends and folklore. Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I'm Amanda
JULIA: And I'm Julia. And Amanda, hey, it's another Hometown Urban Legends episode.
AMANDA: Wow. I'm loving this, like, '70s scatting— not that. Scat, is that— do you call it scatting when you say—
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: —when you sing scats?
JULIA: Yeah. When you, "Doo, bi, doo, bop, bop," yeah, that's scatting.
AMANDA: Julia, why the same as a poop board?
JULIA: I don't know.
AMANDA: You know what we gotta do, Julia, when I get Gretchen McCulloch back on the show and ask her all about the haunted etymologies, by which I mean both cringy ones that she can't believe are true, and also like, literally, the etymologies of words like haunting and spirits.
JULIA: That's— that would be very fun. Check out Gretchen's podcast. Lingthusiasm, because it is great and it is mostly about that kind of stuff. But I do think that we could kind of come up with a series of words for Gretchen to tell us the origins of, that are ghostly or vaguely ghostly related.
AMANDA: I believe in us. I think this is a great idea.
JULIA: I think that would be fun. But in the meantime, not thinking about research that I have to do in order to do that episode, why don't we talk about some stories that were submitted by our listeners? I'm happy to go first, Amanda.
AMANDA: I would love if you would.
JULIA: Now, see, I've had a little bit of a dream kick lately when it comes to Hometown Urban Legends episodes.
AMANDA: Okay.
JULIA: And especially, our bonus Urban Legends over on the Patreon. I've been, like, collecting them. I've been, like, creating my little dragons horde of them. And I want to share this one from Lindsay, [2:13] who titles the email, My Narcoleptic Great Aunt Experiments with Astral Projection.
AMANDA: I am so in.
JULIA: So Lindsay writes, "Hi, Spirits team. I've been a listener since the early days, and I've been sitting on this one for a while, so here it goes. I'm from a small mining town in Pennsylvania that saw its heyday during the coal boom of the early 1900s. Immigrants moved in for the mining jobs and settled in different parts of the town. My ancestors moved into the Slovak part of town. Consequently, so did my husband's. Now, the Slovak part of town was particularly known to be, quote-unquote, 'witchy.'"
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: "My husband has quite a few stories from his family, and even feels some spooky vibes of his own, namely a specific part of the woods in which he will never go due to recurring nightmares of the supernatural variety, but he's been meaning to send in that story.
AMANDA: Lindsay, I love that you and your husband are both listening to the show. However, you are our favorite, because you have written in this urban legend first, so—
JULIA: You win. You win the race for our love.
AMANDA: You win. Yeah, exactly. Love is a race, and someone can win, and you are winning.
JULIA: There you go. You know, it's a competition. It's a continuous competition for our love.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: So don't think that you just, like, nailed it and you're ready to go. Our love continues to grow. Now—
AMANDA: You're right. You're right. Julia, like you and I are both watching Love Island, and like a toxic relationship where everybody is just these 24-year-olds are just saying to each other, "I like it when a man feels insecure and wants to chase me." That's us, but regarding Hometown Urban Legends emails.
JULIA: Yes. Lindsay continues, "If my family has more than this one story, I'll never know. My grandmother was the sort of tight-lipped, no-nonsense woman who grew up during the Great Depression and she didn't like to share much of her past. My knowledge of this particular story stemmed from my mother, who was present for the ordeal and shared the details after a few glasses of wine.
AMANDA: So much to love here, Julia. Number one, do you think that millennials, like the silent generation, we're sure not going to be silent. Okay? We know that.
JULIA: We're so loud.
AMANDA: We're so loud. We can't stop.
JULIA: We all have podcasts.
AMANDA: Are we going to be the kind of generation, like the silent generation, where if you ask them about the past, they were just like, "It was worse. Why do you want to know?" Will that be us? Where it was like, "We used— it used to be good, and you could dream that things would be okay, not no more. Move on.
JULIA: I really think, unfortunately, we might end up like the boomers, where we were like, "Oh, man, the past was— when we were kids, the past was so good."
AMANDA: It was.
JULIA: "And now, it's terrible."
AMANDA: No one cared about plastics. As a child, they were, like, assigning—
JULIA: [4:57] cared about plastics.
AMANDA: —micro plastics to eat. Like, that's how it worked.
JULIA: Yeah. That's like all of the McDonald's, like, plastic cups they would give away were.
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: You know?
AMANDA: And every time I used it, a little bit more paint would just fleck off in my mouth and I go, "This is normal."
JULIA: And you're like, "Man, I hope that's not made of lead, but who could possibly say?"
AMANDA: And then second, Julia, I am here for getting your parents tipsy and making them tell you about the past. Okay?
JULIA: Yes.
AMANDA: I've been hanging up my grandma a lot recently. Just start that voice memo, put it on the side table and go, "Gran, tell me about World War II." She goes, "Let me tell you." And it's just— you know, in my gran's case, she has caffeinated tea. She is good to go.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: So whether it's couple glasses of wine, you share your weed gummies with your folks. You know, you just get them all kind of sun drunk on nostalgia, record it.
JULIA: That's all we want.
AMANDA: It's a good idea.
JULIA: Yeah. That's what our voice memos and our voicemail are for, so—
AMANDA: And just yourself, just like for life. It's lovely.
JULIA: So here comes the story. "One day in the late '70s, my grandmother and some of her sisters were gathered in the kitchen of my mother's house, which was something they often did. They'd drink coffee and chat while the kids played together. They had a sort of open door policy, especially as many of their neighbors were relatives and friends. So it was no surprise when one neighbor entered the kitchen and interjected, "Yinz didn't tell me Mary was in. Where's she at?" Yinz is apparently is Western Pennsylvania for "you guys."
AMANDA: Yes, it is. One of my favorite dialects.
JULIA: Now, the following conversation ensued, "My grandmother, 'What do you mean? Mary's at home?' Neighbor, 'No, she's not. I saw her in my kitchen. I started talking to her, and then I turned around, and she was gone.'"
AMANDA: Oh, boy.
JULIA: "Grandma, visibly confused, 'She's not here. She wasn't supposed to be here this weekend.' For some context, Mary is my great aunt, one of my grandmother's sisters. Mary has narcolepsy and lives one state over in Ohio. Because of her diagnosis, she does not drive," probably for the best, "so unless she is accompanied by family, she wouldn't be just showing up unannounced to a family get together."
AMANDA: Got it.
JULIA: "Now, this encounter had the room baffled, so to put this nonsense of Mary suddenly visiting and not telling anyone to rest, my grandmother decided to call her. When she picked up, she confirmed that, yes, she was still at home in Ohio, and then inquired as to why my grandmother was asking."
AMANDA: Like, how did that call go? Just like, "Hey, Mary, just checking, you're picking up the phone. You're in Ohio, right? We don't have call forwarding."
JULIA: "And you have been in Ohio, right?"
AMANDA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. "Like, this morning, maybe two hours ago?"
JULIA: "Now, my grandmother explained that the neighbor swore she just saw her in her kitchen and was checking to be sure. Through the telephone, everyone in the room could hear Mary exclaim, "It worked!" Even more confused, my grandmother asked what she was talking about."
AMANDA: "Hey, Mary, what?"
JULIA: "Apparently, Mary had been trying to experiment with astral projection. She had been reading about people with narcolepsy and their connections to the supernatural, and she thought she'd dip a toe into the realm of the spiritual."
AMANDA: Julia, not me assuming Mary died, and that's how she was astral projecting.
JULIA: Uh-oh.
AMANDA: I'm so glad Mary was alive.
JULIA: Mary's fine. Mary's good.
AMANDA: Great.
JULIA: "So she had felt an episode coming on, and knowing her family was all gathered together, as they usually were on Sunday afternoons, she thought she would try to be present spiritually, even if she couldn't be there physically."
AMANDA: Amazing. I'm speechless. This is so good.
JULIA: The next slide will leave you even more speechless, which is, "This is where Mary's plan went awry. She had overshot her mark and landed in the kitchen of the neighbor next door, instead of the kitchen where her family was gathered. When my grandmother hung up the phone and explained this to the room, she was met with silence."
AMANDA: Listen, from Ohio to Western PA, landing one house over is incredible.
JULIA: Pretty good, pretty good. "Though I never knew my grandmother to swear, I can imagine an audible, 'What the hell just happened?' rippled through the room."
AMANDA: Uh-huh.
JULIA: "I never heard if Mary had any more success with astral projection. Still, this has to be one of my most 'What the fuck?' stories and apart from the odd, 'What's the dog barking at?' the only exposure to the supernatural I have. Please see the attached picture of our aforementioned dog, for dog tax purposes."
AMANDA: Thank you.
JULIA: "His name is Fenrir. He is an 80-pound Bernedoodle and a certified snugly weighted blanket."
AMANDA: Aw.
JULIA: Now, Amanda, I am going to share an image because of this very cute dog.
AMANDA: Thank you so much.
JULIA: This is what I'm here for.
AMANDA: Yeah. Oh, my God. What a sweetie pie.
JULIA: It's a good dog, a very good dog.
AMANDA: Man, I am so glad that Mary was, like, feeling it coming on, thinking about, "What can I do with this? I've read about others. Let me give it a go." And then imagine that she— you know, whatever she experienced during that time when she was trying to astral project, you know, she sat down in her chair, reading a book, magazine, whatever. And then the phone rings. She goes, "Huh?" And then someone says—
JULIA: Hmm?
AMANDA: "—Hey, just want to check, are you home?" She goes, "Yes." And then just—
JULIA: "Yes, it worked!"
AMANDA: —the audible, "It worked!" I just— I love that for her. It's like I was there.
JULIA: I love that for her, too. It's quite incredible. I really hope that Mary was, like, astral projecting into places all the time after that.
AMANDA: Oh, yeah. It's like, "Oh, new movie? I'm not gonna pay for it."
JULIA: "Hell no. I'm just gonna sit there while I have my narcoleptic episode."
AMANDA: Well, Julia, I have a couple of voicemails because we are very lucky, and our listeners come the heck through. So why don't we start with a nice, chunky one from Victoria. [10:47]
JULIA: Please.
VICTORIA: Hi, Spirits friends. This is Victoria from Durham, North Carolina, and I want to tell you guys about my family's clairvoyant house dreams. They're always oddly specific and big at the same time, like not seeing pictures of houses or how they are, but they usually have a weird element or elements that stick with you. My mom has told me this happened to her at least twice. Once she was dreaming about, you know, the string of lights over a bathroom mirror, and how one light bulb was out. And then she went to see a house with my dad, and they walked into the master bathroom, turn the lights on, that exact light bulb was out.
JULIA: Now, Amanda, I think if that happened to me— and I often have, like, some sort of form of Deja vu, which I am of the belief that means that I am in the right place at the right time, like where I'm meant to be.
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: You know what I mean? If that happened while I was house hunting, which I've talked about on the show, was like an eight-month affair for Jake and I, even if I didn't like the house, I think I would have been like, "I think we have to put an offer down. I think we have to."
AMANDA: "Something about this house is calling to me."
JULIA: Yeah. And then I would check in with Jake and his like, you know, ghostly ways, and I would be like, "Is this right? Is this supposed to be happening?"
AMANDA: Uh-hmm. You're meant to be in that house at that time, even if it does end up being the house for you.
JULIA: Okay, give me more.
VICTORIA: "They ended up buying that house.
JULIA: They ended up buying that house.
VICTORIA: Another dream she had was a house that had a brick foyer. Years later, they moved into a house where the previous owners had put brick wallpaper on the entryway of the house.
JULIA: Tacky, but okay.
AMANDA: As the daughter of a brick layer. None of whom are unionized, by the way. That's anti-union. I'm just gonna say.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
VICTORIA: Time has come, you know, my partner and I were looking for our first house. During the process, I had this dream, got a house with multi-shaded flooring. There was a weird area in the living room that was like a perfect circle that was different from the flooring somehow, and it was built next to a river.
JULIA: Odd.
AMANDA: Now, Julia, is this like that bar we learned about one time in England where it's like a haunted little well that goes all the way down?
JULIA: Oh, I've been seeing a lot of those on Instagram lately, too, Amanda—
AMANDA: Right?.
JULIA: —which is very spooky, and I don't like that so much. But I think maybe it's just an older house, and a lot of times, like, they'll do very ornate woodwork in, like, dining rooms or living room areas or the parlor, if it's a very fancy, old house. My husband's aunts were in town recently for a, like, memorial service, and they rented an Airbnb in my town, and it was a very nice, older house where they preserved all of the original woodwork on the floors. And they had something very similar, where there was like a cool, kind of circular pattern in the middle of the dining room.
AMANDA: Nice. Oh, and yeah, if somebody, like, tried to restore or couldn't save, like the filigree, then there would just be kind of like a round circle of, like, random.
JULIA: Exactly.
VICTORIA: I remember looking up, like, interpretations online. I was like, "What does this mean?" And then two days later, we went to visit this house, and it had multi-shaded flooring. It had a spot in the dining room where there had obviously been a circular rug, and so the, like, sun had bleached the floor in a perfect circle around it. And it, the neighborhood that it's built in, has access to trails along the river. We just closed on that house yesterday.
JULIA: I was gonna say, you better have gotten that house.
VICTORIA: It seems kind of weird, but that might be [14:19] my family's. But, yeah, just figured you guys would find that interesting. Thanks. Love the podcast.
JULIA: I also love that because, like, I feel like it would be so, like, disappointing if you had a dream about that house and then you didn't end up getting it, because the housing market is a piece of shit right now. So that delights me to no end. I'm so happy for you. That's fantastic, and well-deserved.
AMANDA: Victoria, huge congratulations on owning a freaking house. Huge.
JULIA: Huge.
AMANDA: I'm so glad that your dream gave you a little preview as to what's to come.
JULIA: Again, Amanda, another dream.
AMANDA: Another dream, we're on dream kick.
JULIA: How about a little one before we take our break, Amanda?
AMANDA: Please.
JULIA: All right. This is from Mahd, they/she, and it's titled Something in the Woods, Midwest College Cryptids and Narrow Escapes. "Hi, Amanda and Julia. I just wanted to say, first off, that I'm a huge fan of the show, and I've been listening for years. My favorite episodes have been, of course, Hometown Urban Legends and the Advice From Folklore, which are always fun to listen to. It is why, after all these years, I'm excited that I finally have a Hometown Urban Legend of my own to share with you."
AMANDA: Like, we don't want you guys to get haunted in your daily lives, but when you do, come to us, you know?
JULIA: It is a delight for us. Thank you.
AMANDA: It's a silver lining.
JULIA: I also love the trend of people being like, "I thought I didn't have one, and then I had a conversation with my mom and I realized this traumatic experience that I kind of hid from myself for a very long time."
AMANDA: Yeah, yep. Uh-hmm. Classic moms.
JULIA: Uh-hmm. "Now, I want to preface with a few things. I am a practicing folk witch, and have been since high school. I am also a big believer in the supernatural world, so in no way Team Ignorant. I wish, though, it seems nice. That being said, there are usually mundane explanations for most things in life, and I look for those before I look to the supernatural. Unfortunately, there was nothing mundane about this." Great line, good line. Getting stoked. "My story begins on a warm spring evening, last night, from when I'm writing in." So hot and fresh.
AMANDA: Oh, my God, I love a hot and fresh Urban Legend. It's like wild caught flash frozen salmon. It's like you— you've caught it. It is fresh in the mind. Sent it right into Spirits Podcast.
JULIA: "So my story begins on a warm spring evening when I decided to join two of my friends on a cathartic walk. My college has acres of fields and forests that are easily accessible to students, and on this night, like many others, we decided to take full advantage of them. It was warm, but with a light breeze, and we encountered only one person on our path, fairly early in the walk. There being three of us, I felt totally comfortable being in the woods at night with flashlights on and a big yellow moon looking over us above the trees. The walk was mostly uneventful. The path before us as familiar in the dark as it was in the light of day. It was nice to be out now that the biting cold of the Midwest winter had given way to a pleasant spring. Near the end of our walk, we crossed a bridge into a part of the forest that I had never been in before, in day or night. At first, everything was fine, until the three of us stepped off the bridge and into the forest again. Almost immediately, there was a scream. It wasn't a human scream, but rather something more animal."
AMANDA: Worse. I'll take a human scream any day.
JULIA: "The second I heard it, the hair on my arms stood up, and I felt like the air was pressing in around me. I had never felt anything like this before in the forest. The trees seemed to lean in around the path and blocked out the moon. Without my flashlight, it would have been pitch-black. I told my friends that we should hurry because something wasn't right. They assured me that everything was fine, but very soon, we were all linking arms and quickening our steps. As we walked the uneven crunch of underbrush from something just next to me in the forest, just beyond the light of my flashlight was following, keeping pace. At first, I told myself it was a fox or a squirrel beside me, but I felt so uneasy that I knew it was something worse. I was afraid to even look at the woods, because what if there was something looking back? What I didn't know at the time was one of my friends heard the same thing on his side of the forest, the same tension in his body."
AMANDA: Okay, best-case scenario, you're both gonna leave this forest with your new witch's familiars. Worst-case scenario, being absolutely herded by bad spirits,
JULIA: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm. Or, you know, if we're looking at the practicality of it, too, wolves, I don't know if there's wolves in the Midwest. There's probably bears, right? Bears are in the Midwest?
AMANDA: Definitely foxes. Those are huge.
JULIA: Yeah. "As soon as the path turned out of the forest, we took it, and the strange crunching followed until we cleared the tree line. We walked until the moon was fully visible in the sky, before we turned back and began talking about what had just happened. Something had wanted us out of those woods and had been making sure that we left. I have no doubts that if we had stayed on the forest path any longer, whatever that something was would have continued to follow us. As my friends and I relished in the safety of moonlight and familiar campus pathways, we noticed that the crickets had come back. While we were in the forest, there had been nothing but our voices, footsteps, and the thing in there with us. Whatever was in those woods, even the insects didn't like it. Needless to say, I don't think I will be crossing that bridge anytime soon. I've never felt anything so hostile before on campus, and I doubt I will again. The good news, of course, is the campus Cryptid did not get us this time. And I have something to send into you all, which makes it all the more better. My first thought once we were safe is, 'I can send this into Spirits.' So here you go."
AMANDA: Well done. Well done.
JULIA: "Anyhow, thanks for reading this. If you want to hear about the Antique Store Bones that never wanted to be touched, or the Ghost Cat that might be living in my house, let me know. Stay creepy, stay cool. Mahd." I mean, obviously, Mahd, we want to hear about those things, obviously.
AMANDA: Mahd, you know.
JULIA: You know.
AMANDA: You know. We don't have to answer.
JULIA: You know.
AMANDA: You know.
JULIA: You know.
AMANDA: You know what to do.
JULIA: All right, Amanda. Why don't we go ahead and grab our refill?
AMANDA: Let's do it.
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AMANDA: Hey, everybody, it's Amanda, and welcome to the refill. Welcome especially to our newest patron, Mel R. Thank you so, so much for joining us and helping us support this podcast and make it our jobs and pay our researcher Sally, and our editor Bren, and all of the fabulous folks, Talia, who does our social media. We so appreciate your support, and we could not make this our jobs without you. So thank you so much to you and our supporting producer-level patrons, Uhleeseeuh, Anne, Hannah, Lily, Matthew, Rikoelike, Scott, Wil and AE (Ah), and our legend-level patrons, Audra, Bex, Chibi Yokai, Michael, Morgan H., Captain Jonathan MAL-uh-kye Cosmos, Sarah, and Bea Me Up Scotty. If you would like to join the Patreon and have your name read out loud in a refill, go on over to patreon.com/spiritspodcast. Listen, y'all, we have had so much fun recording Urban Legends episodes recently. You came through with your submissions. But you know what I want to challenge you to do next? Send us a voicemail. If you are outside the US, just send a voice memo. You can take one on your phone, on your computer, whatever you want to spiritspodcast@gmail.com. That's also the address that you can just attach pet or plant photos to at any time. Or if you're in the US, give us a call at 617-420-2344, 617-420-2344, and that number is in the episode description of every dang episode. Okay? I want to hear from you. There is a ton of going on at Multitude these days, which is very, very fun, including some excellent episodes of This Guy Sucked. This is, of course, Multitude's history podcast for haters, by haters, hosted and created by historian Dr. Claire Aubin, who is a historian of Nazism, specifically Nazi perpetration in the US. The US, by the way, loves to bring people in from other countries when they have scientific knowledge that's very useful to the US at the time that happened. And having Dr. Aubin, having Claire talk to fellow historians about the subject of their research, who they hate, is such a delicious concept for a show, and it delivers every dang week. Okay? Episodes are out every Thursday wherever you listen to podcasts, and you have got to check it out. I have been recommending this show to everybody I meet, and every single person's eyes light up when I say it's the for and by haters history podcast. So go on over and listen to This Guy Sucked. This episode is sponsored by Blueland, which I have been using the heck out of recently. I've been in a real spring cleaning into summer deep clean mode, and I totally love their everyday cleaner. The All-Purpose stuff smells amazing, and it does well on kitchen counters, on floors, on, like, my plant pots when I want to get them extra clean in between repotting. I love this stuff. 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JULIA: Amanda, we are back. And I gotta ask you, what have you been enjoying lately, cocktail, mocktail-wise?
AMANDA: Julia, I am sweetly enjoying some family time this summer on Long Island, and you know that's the home of Blue Point Brewing. So I had the chance to have a Blue Point toasted lager on tap the other day, which I know you are an aficionado of. And it's different, so good.
JULIA: Here's the thing is, I agree the Blue Point toasted lager hits different when it is on tap. It's also, like, kind of their— and I don't mean this in a bad way. It is their basic bitch beer.
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: In the sense that it is like the beer that they send out to all of the places that carry Blue Point. That is, like, their standard beer. And I like it, but they have so many great options at the brewery that they're, like, constantly innovating and everything like that, that I always encourage people. I'm like, "If you like the toasted lager, let me tell you, you're gonna like everything else that they serve." Blue point, also during the summer, their own version of Boardy Barn.
AMANDA: What's that?
JULIA: Oh, okay. I was gonna say, probably most people who don't live on Long Island don't know about Boardy Barn. It was basically a thing that they used to do, I want to say, out in the Hamptons, where it was a huge tent, where you— every time you got a cup of beer, because it was just, like— it was just beer, they would give you a little smiley face sticker. And so, like, your goal as a drunken, like, 22-year-old was to be as covered in stickers as possible by the end of the night.
AMANDA: I mean, kind of a great idea, right? Like, sometimes, you know, you're three beers in. You're like, "What's up? You're number three or beer number two?" And you just look down at your, you know, arm, or your face, your hand, and be like, "Oh, great. Thank you."
JULIA: Uh-hmm. Yes. So that is something that it closed, I want to say, several years ago, probably around COVID time, if I'm thinking about it.
AMANDA: For the best, for the best.
JULIA: But now, Blue Point is doing their own version of Boardy Barn, and I think it's kind of fun and really cool.
AMANDA: But what happened, Julia, is my favorite bar was out of Miller High Life, and I walked in, they said, "Amanda, I have terrible news." And so I think the kegs kicked prematurely during the Knicks game.
JULIA: Oh, how could they?
AMANDA: As to the next— we, instead, did a Blue Point and whiskey, which I have to say, perfectly valid beer shot combo.
JULIA: Yeah, definitely, definitely. Especially, like highlights the toastiness of the whiskey. Very nice.
AMANDA: Julia, what have you been enjoying drinking recently?
JULIA: Amanda, I've been— not that I've been taking a pause. I— here's the real answer. Last episode, we did hometown urban legends. I was talking about milk punches, right? I had a milk punch disaster happened to me.
AMANDA: No. What happened?
JULIA: I made a whole batch of— what I was gonna do a, like, Lucky Charm cereal milk, milk punch, right?
AMANDA: Great.
JULIA: Batched it. I put all the ingredients in my little glass container. I was going and I was mixing it, probably, in hindsight, a little stupidly, with my long metal bar spoon.
AMANDA: Okay.
JULIA: And it caught the glass just right where a dime-sized hole opened up at the bottom of the glass, and all of my weird alcoholic curdled milk solution poured out onto my countertops.
AMANDA: Aw, Julia.
JULIA: And I just kind of stared at it, because I was like, "Well, there's nothing I can do."
AMANDA: "This is happening to me now. This is now my day."
JULIA: Uh-hmm. So I did clean that up, and I haven't had the opportunity to get a new container to make my milk punches in. And also, I've been a little discouraged. So what I've been doing, instead, is my local supermarket had a great sale on berries recently. So I've just been trying a bunch of different berry margaritas, because Jake is a margarita guy—
AMANDA: Ooh.
JULIA: —during the summer. So I'm like—
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: —"Oh, here's a blackberry and sage Margarita." He's like, "Wow. Okay, great."
AMANDA: "Love you. Let's get married again."
JULIA: Every day, I ask that man, "You want to get married?" And he says, "Yes," because I said, "Don't tell me we've done it already. I don't care."
AMANDA: Aw. Too cute.
JULIA: Yeah. I'm sorry.
AMANDA: Too cute. Shut up. Here's a ghost story.
JULIA: I'm sorry.
AMANDA: Shut up. Here's a ghost story. Julia, this is from Anna, titled Requested Stories and More, she/her, because Anna wrote in about waking her house. Do you remember this?
JULIA: Yes, I do remember this.
AMANDA: So cute. And she told us a lot about— it was called a Wholesome Hello was the message and just how— you know, like making house rules, being kind to the house, waking it up, the specific house with, like, changing energies. The first paragraph ever of Anna's email originally was, you know, "Do I tell you the stories of my mom being stalked and harassed by strange shadow creatures and on and on?" To which we said—
JULIA: Yes, please.
AMANDA: So here are those stories.
JULIA: Excellent.
AMANDA: So Anna writes, "I was so excited when you read my first email that I made all my friends and family listen to the episode."
JULIA: Hell yeah.
AMANDA: "These are the stories that I teased in that first email. And by the way, I received permission from my mother to share these stories and quotes on Spirits Podcast. Mom was a teen in the late '90s."
JULIA: Hold on. Yeah. I need a second to process that, "Your mom was a teen in the late '90s." That means your mom is maybe 10 years older than us, and I'm having some feelings about that.
AMANDA: Yep. You're old enough to be writing in. You know, that's good, that's fine. That's just gonna keep happening.
JULIA: That's fine. It's good, it's good.
AMANDA: "So my mom was a teen in the late '90s. One night, she was the last one awake at home. She sat in the living room watching 'In Cold Blood,' a movie based on a true story."
JULIA: Uh-huh.
AMANDA: "The movie was released in 1967 and takes place in the '50s and is in black and white for context."
JULIA: I mean, that's cool of your mom watching '60s movies in the '90s. Pretty cool.
AMANDA: I was reminiscing recently with my youngest brother's fiancé, because he was on ADHD meds for a while in— probably the early 2000s. Didn't— they didn't quite get the science right.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: And so he would be, like, nauseous all day, but then, voraciously hungry at 9:00 PM and just, like, locked in and ready to go. So him and my dad would have, like, Turner classic movies, like TCM nights and just watch, like, you know, all of the old Westerns and, like, Kung Fu movies, and like anything that was running on TCM. So to this day, weirdly, Austin [32:36] has an encyclopedic knowledge of basically any movie in black and white or pre-'70s.
JULIA: That's actually really cool. I kind of dig it.
AMANDA: I thought it was really sweet. Yes.
JULIA: That's awesome. What a good byproduct of not being able to get the meds correct.
AMANDA: "So my mother reportedly doesn't remember the movie, but she does remember the story. She sat in the living room with just one lamp on, sitting on the sofa, everyone sleeping, the house is dark. And as she's watching the movie, she looks into the kitchen, where it's completely dark."
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: "Until gray matter materialized."
JULIA: Oh, okay. My first thought whenever someone says gray matter is, I'm like, "Brains. Okay, brains."
AMANDA: "So think gray blob mass, but she could see through it."
JULIA: Oh.
AMANDA: Julia. "Above the floating gray, semi-transparent mass were circles, wormholes."
JULIA: Oh, no.
AMANDA: "Mom closed her eyes and rubbed them, thinking, 'Okay, I'm watching a black and white movie. It's dark. There's one lamp on. Maybe my eyes are playing tricks on me.' But when she opened her eyes, it was still there. It opened its mouth."
JULIA: No.
AMANDA: "And mother shut her eyes and chanted, 'Go away, go away.'"
JULIA: Yep, great. Great. Love that.
AMANDA: "She remained on the couch, turn the light on brighter. And her mom, my Nana, had her bedroom on the other side of that living room. So my mother fearfully woke Nana and told her, what happened. Nana just said, 'Go to bed.'"
JULIA: Uh-huh.
AMANDA: "Mom turned off the movie, went to bed. Has never finished the movie and will never watch it again."
JULIA: Fair— hey, fair enough. My question also is— because my immediate thought was like, "What"— just closing your eyes and chanting, "Go away, go away," like if that thing doesn't want to go away, uh-oh. Bad.
AMANDA: It won't, yeah.
JULIA: But then my other instinct was like, "What are you gonna do, fight the gray blob? Like, what? What's gonna happen there?" Did it— like—
AMANDA: What are you gonna do?
JULIA: Is the implication that she closed her eyes and then it did go away, go away? I guess so, right?
AMANDA: I mean, it must have like, because she— I guess between, like, closing her eyes, shouting go away, and then turning the light on brighter, I think—
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: —that also may have helped. But—
JULIA: Okay.
AMANDA: I mean, we have not had a lot of, like, gray masses with disembodied eyeballs, and then when the mouth came in, Julia, I said, "I'm reading this story."
JULIA: Where was the mouth? What was the size of the mouth? Like, I'm trying to picture like proportions and I'm picturing like a gray cloud with, like, almost snail eyes where it's, like, attached to an antenna, almost.
AMANDA: Yeah, yeah.
JULIA: You know?
AMANDA: I was picturing a Cookie Monster situation, but the eyes were, like, on top of the head floating.
JULIA: Oh, like a frog. Got it.
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: Uh-hmm. Okay. Interesting, interesting. I don't like that, because that means it's biologically a predator.
AMANDA: Wait, what? When the eyes are on top?
JULIA: When the eyes face forward, predator. When the eyes are on the side, prey.
AMANDA: Wow. I guess every disembodied or sort of, like, amorphous haunting I have ever had described to me on Spirits Podcast has sure been a predator.
JULIA: Yeah, because, like, usually it is vaguely human-shaped, and humans do have predator face, right?
AMANDA: Don't tell me twice.
JULIA: Now, I'm picturing predator from the movie Predator. In my mind, I am also now picturing like big frog mouth when it opened its mouth.
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: And that's scarier, because it could just swallow you.
AMANDA: You're right. Like, especially if it was that far away in the kitchen and you saw that level of detail, I imagine just getting bigger as it gets closer to you, like the Gigantamax form of that trash Pokémon, you know?
JULIA: Ah, yeah. I don't like that.
AMANDA: Well, story number two, "When we first moved to Washington, my older sister and I were quite young, about four or five. We lived on a house on Edith Point Road. It was a beautiful little cabin in the woods overlooking the ocean, with just two neighbors. One of them was a family with a little girl the same age as me and my sister. The other was an older couple who had a really cool Siamese cat statue pair that I was a huge fan of."
JULIA: That's kind of cool.
AMANDA: "My stepfather, being a pilot, was gone a lot, so mom, sister, and I would be in the house all alone in the woods. And my mother began to feel uneasy in the house, like something was watching her. Something specifically outside her bedroom window. She would hear strange noises outside that specific window. She insisted that my sister and I slept in the room with her so she could protect us if it comes to it. And to my sister and I, it was a fun sleepover in mom's room when stepdad was gone. We would read books, hang out, play games. To us, so much fun. But one night, mother woke up in the middle of the night. There was a dark shadow in the corner. Before she could think about it enough to really be afraid, a ball of light shot out of the ceiling and hit the shadow. The room got brighter, and she was now able to see the glow from the night light, the air, and vibe just lifted."
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: "So my mother told my Grandmammy, stepdad's mom, about this experience. Grandmammy thought it was maybe some kind of spirit or entity, but her husband, Granddaddy, thought mom was crazy."
JULIA: Wow. A man's calling a woman crazy for having an experience he couldn't possibly understand.
AMANDA: Story at five. "The bad energy in the house after this night got worse."
JULIA: Uh-oh.
AMANDA: "It was like an oppressive, looming cloud that mother felt was staring at her.
JULIA: I also— I'm sorry, mother is inherently the creepiest thing you can call your mom.
AMANDA: I know, I know, I know, I know. I— my— I keep trying to correct it to mom in reading it, 'cause that's what I call my mom, but I'm trying to be faithful to the text here. But yeah—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: —it's scary.
JULIA: It's up there with mama.
AMANDA: See, mama, I think, is really cute. Mother is giving mommy dearest.
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: You know?
JULIA: Yeah, yeah.
AMANDA: "Stepdad tried to reassure her by putting his used shooting range target paper up in the windows." It's very Washington.
JULIA: That would also work for, I guess, human deterrent, but not a fucking—
AMANDA: Right.
JULIA: —ghost, or spirit, or malevolent energy, my guy.
AMANDA: No. They would say, "A gun? Cute." And then come in and haunt the fuck out of your house.
JULIA: "Cute. I'm already dead, bitch."
AMANDA: "Then my older neighbors told my mother the story of the original owners of our house back in the '40s.
JULIA: Oh, there it is. Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Two houses.
JULIA: This is why you talk to your neighbors immediately. We got all the hot goss on our former owners when we moved into the house, like, within a week.
AMANDA: Now, did you do any kind of reconnaissance before buying the house or you were like, "his is the house for us. We'll deal with whatever comes and then get to know the neighbors."
JULIA: Well, that's the thing is, like, you don't really get to know the neighbors until you move in. But, like, we did yard work in the front yard the first day that we owned the house, and I think that, like, invited people over to be like, "Oh, hey, I see that you're doing yard work here. You seem like a nice, young couple."
AMANDA: New people.
JULIA: "Let me tell you about the fucked up things the family who used to live here did.
AMANDA: Yoinks.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: "So the story of our house is that two houses were built side by side by best friends.
JULIA: Already gonna go bad. Already gonna go bad. I can see where this is heading
AMANDA: It's never happening.
JULIA: Never good.
AMANDA: "In one house was a man and his wife. In the other, his best friend and his wife. Over time, they came to hate each other, deeply, profoundly hate each other."
JULIA: Classic.
AMANDA: "My mother didn't know why their friendship fell apart, if the falling out was fast or slow. Maybe she's forgotten, or maybe she was never told."
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: "But she does remember the name of one of the couples, the Hellmans."
JULIA: Ooh. Oh no, it's got hell in the name.
AMANDA: That or the Mayonnaise fortune. Aaaah!
JULIA: Maybe both,
AMANDA: Maybe both. "Needless to say, she was very happy to leave when we moved out not too long after."
JULIA: Oh. I— now, I want to get the hot goss. Was someone cheating on someone else? Like, what happened here? Like, what's going on?
AMANDA: Julia, my headcanon, the wives fell in love.
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: The husbands were mad. And you had the lovely spirit of their love that defended your mother that night from the cloud and then the cloud of, you know, like hetero patriarchy, it remains. Julia, can I keep going? There are more stories from mother.
JULIA: Yes, please.
AMANDA: Sweet. So the next one begins, "Mother has several large wooden candlesticks, the largest being about two feet tall."
JULIA: Okay. I'm into that.
AMANDA: "The candlesticks are thick, beautiful carvings, colorful candles, and they were kept on top of our China cabinet in the living room at the house we later lived in. And this house on 7th Street, it had weird energy."
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: "We could never tell if it was haunted or just old and unkept, but we would hear things like clinking down the stairs at night. And one morning, we even went down to the kitchen to find the back door wide open."
JULIA: Um—
AMANDA: Hate that.
JULIA: Hey, I'm gonna assume maybe your family is done moving for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, have settled down, et cetera, et cetera. If they decide to move again or if, you know, it comes across that they need to move again, I need you to find a friend who is a little paranormal sensitive, a little bit, you know, of the vision of the site, or just better at vibes in general, because they need to come with your mom, with mother, to make sure the next place she moves into is not fucking haunted or has bad energy. Because now this is just a recurring pattern, and I'm concerned. We need to break the cycle.
AMANDA: We do. If mother likes a house, say, "Are you sure?" And maybe, let's assume that this is a little bit haunted.
JULIA: Hmm. Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: "Things would often go missing in this house, like money out of mother's wallet from her purse."
JULIA: Oh.
AMANDA: "Lights would shut off, the stove caught on fire. And creepiest of all, one of mother's large candlesticks went missing from the top of the cabinet. It was fully gone for a long time before reappearing with the dust still on it, as if it was never gone to begin with."
JULIA: Hmm. I don't love that.
AMANDA: What are they doing with that?
JULIA: What are they doing?
AMANDA: With that two-foot long, thick candlestick?
JULIA: Or is it just that, like, little pockets of interdimensional travel are happening—
AMANDA: Right.
JULIA: —and then they reopen, and then the candlestick is back where it was.
AMANDA: I don't know. "The thing that really made us believe the house was haunted and not just old, was one day when my mom was pregnant with my brother, feeling sick, watching TV. The volume on the TV began to turn way, way up. She turned it back down and it went back up again. Was the player glitching or something? So she got up from the sofa and walked to the volume bar. The bar had a small plastic knob you could turn. She crouched down and saw the little plastic knob begin to turn on its own as the volume began to rise. She turned off the TV and the volume bar and went into her bedroom.
JULIA: That's— okay. We often talk about how ghosts and electricity are a match made in heaven.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Ghosts were so stoked when electricity was a thing that was invented, right?
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Because now they could manipulate electricity in a way that they couldn't before, and interact with the world.
AMANDA: Maybe why we also have so many old-timey ghosts in the sort of, like, late Victorian Period, early modernity, where electricity is kind of like, "I don't know. Let's see, it's lightning."
JULIA: Exactly. So, you know, when we're talking about the sound bar turning up, I'm like, "All right, either it's a malfunctioning sound bar or, you know, the ghost is using the electricity in the air. That's about how electricity works, in order to manipulate the sound bar. Fine, whatever."
AMANDA: Yeah. In the remote, they're— right. Like, shorting a circuit where, you know, the volume just keeps going up, whatever.
JULIA: The physical turning of the knob is fucked. For lack of better phrase, that's fucked. That's poltergeist activity, you know?
AMANDA: Uh-huh.
JULIA: I don't like that. I'm not into that.
AMANDA: I don't like it.
JULIA: It's bad.
AMANDA: I don't like it.
JULIA: I don't like it. Amanda, I don't like it.
AMANDA: Julia, there is a lot more in this email from Anna. I'm going to save the rest for our bonus Hometown Urban Legends episode over on—
JULIA: Oh.
AMANDA: —the Patreon, patreon.com/spiritspodcast, you're going to enjoy at the end of this month, y'all. But I do want to end on just one of the anecdotes in this treasure trove of an email, called Not a creepy kid.
JULIA: Oh.
AMANDA: Anna says, "I asked my mom if she would have described me as, quote, a 'creepy kid' and she said no, which surprised me, because I'm a creepy adult."
JULIA: That's very nice. Yeah.
AMANDA: "Now, I know a few teachers and friends'
parents who probably would have given a resounding yes if I asked them the same question. But my mom has always been special and just let kids be themselves without question or judgment. I was obsessed with death when I was young. My sister was mute for a while, just kid stuff. We all turned out okay."
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: "So mom said, quote, 'Each kid is different. Some kids are a little weird. Some are tomboy, some are gay. You can pick up on personality. No kid scares me.'"
JULIA: "Some kids are obsessed with death, some kids are gay."
Some kids are gay and obsessed with death, and we love that for them. That is our peak audience.
AMANDA: And, Julia, that brings me to a real life story that I want to close this episode on.
JULIA: Okay.
AMANDA: My mom was just by my house, hanging out with me. And she said, "Oh, what are you doing later today?" I said, "I'm recording with Julia." She said, "Oh, give Julia my best." And she goes, "You know, did I ever tell you what happened after Julia bit your brother?" And I said, "What?"
JULIA: A story I'm not sure we've told on the podcast before, for context.
AMANDA: Julia and I met in preschool. We became best friends in middle school when we were both in the theater club. And in the meantime, we went to the same schools, more, you know, around but not BFF like we are, in part because when Julia came to my house one time—
JULIA: The first time, the first time ever.
AMANDA: The first play date, yeah. Bit my next younger sibling when we were playing with blocks. And my mom said, "Nope. Gonna just not have playdates with Julia from now on, just for a bit."
JULIA: Fair enough. I was a feral young child.
AMANDA: You were a feral young child, Julia. And so my mom said, "Oh, yes. Well, after the biting incident, I put you guys outside in the yard. And I, you know, kept CeCe [46:44] in the house." She's like, "Yeah, Amanda, you were not an outdoor kid, obviously." And I was like, "Obviously." And she was like, "Yeah. So I was surprised when you guys, like, played out there, and, like, were there for a long time and then you came back in and said, "Oh, mom, do you have, like, an old shoe box or something?'" And my mom brought one to me, and was like, "There you go. Enjoy."
JULIA: Uh-oh.
AMANDA: And so, later—
JULIA: I don't know how this story ends.
AMANDA: —your mom called my mom and said, "Okay, I'll be over in, you know, whatever, 15, 20 minutes to pick up Julia." My mom says, "Great." So she calls us back in. She's getting us ready to, you know, to go, putting our shoes on, getting us cleaned up, whatever. And then she's like, "Oh, what'd you guys end up doing with the box?" And apparently, you were just staring at the box. So picture yourself, you flip open, like, the lid of the shoe box. You're staring into the box. My mom can't see what's in the box. Do you know what was in the box, Julia?
JULIA: It's gonna be a dead animal. Wasn't it a dead animal?
AMANDA: I looked at my mom and said, "Oh, all of Julia's dead bugs are in there." And you had caught, killed, and then collected a moth, a centipede, a bumblebee, various Roly Polies. How my mom knows that you killed the bugs? I don't know if you killed the bugs or just picked up the dead ones.
JULIA: [47:53]
AMANDA: I don't think you did, because there were also grass clippings in there, and my mom was like, "Oh, well, at least they have a bed." And I think we were just collecting bugs, and some of the bugs—
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: —you know, curled up, and some of them might have died.
JULIA: Because, otherwise, this does make me sound like a serial killer, and I promise I'm not.
AMANDA: No.
JULIA: I promise I'm not.
AMANDA: You are simply weird, gay, and love death. And Julia, that's what I love about you.
JULIA: Listen, listen, hey, sometimes you're a bit of a tomboy. You're very into bugs, because Lion King had a big impression on you as a child. And, you know, you want to share those hobbies, and you don't realize those hobbies are maybe not for everyone else.
AMANDA: And then the kicker of the story is, when your mom came to my mom to pick, you know, us up. My mom was like, "Bit of a biting incident." And mom was like, "Oh, I'm so sorry." You know, et cetera. "I talked to her." And then my mom was like, "One more thing, there's, like, a box of bugs." And your mom goes, "She does that all the time." And then took you away.
JULIA: Yep, yep. All right. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. That makes sense. That makes sense.
AMANDA: Julia, couldn't love you more, couldn't love you more exactly as you are.
JULIA: Fair enough, Amanda. I appreciate it. It's a real sight line into my past that I didn't remember too well, but makes a lot of sense, and I'm okay with that.
AMANDA: So next time, your kid's best friend decides that they'll go collect Roly Polies in the backyard, remember—
JULIA: Stay creepy.
AMANDA: —stay cool.
JULIA: There's nothing wrong with that child.
AMANDA: Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. The kid might be gay. That's great. Come on over.
JULIA: Later, satyrs.
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