S1: EP 2 — "Its Hand Looked More Like a Claw"

In this episode, Therésa and the Haunting team (aka just her producer Len) hire a new intern Naomi, a succubus from hell. Congrats! We also hear from Greg, who had to deal with the former owner of his new house refusing to leave even though his body had already peaced out from this realm. And KD, who also had a mysterious presence lingering around her.  

If you would like to reach out to the Haunting team and share your own ghost story, email us at [e-mail]. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Therésa (00:15):
Good morning to all of you in the land of the living,
and a good eternal twilight to the rest of us.
Now I'm starting to get some haters in the comments,
a lot of Therésa "ghost aren't real." Well, I'd say, I'm non-
living proof that that's not the case. But fine, fair. I
used to think the same thing. Of course, my psychic
back in L.A. was always telling me otherwise. All "a

(00:38):
thin veil betwixt hell and Earth brings spirits around to lay
their curse." But I always figured she was just kooky. Not
to mention completely off base with my ex Jeremy, by
the way. It turns out we weren't "star- cross lovers, our souls reuniting in their
mortal incarnations as they'd had from time immemorial." He was
just a narcissist. Swear to God. Len

Len (01:05):
(mumbles)

Therésa (01:08):
Oh, sorry, I keep forgetting. This actually brings me to
my next order of business, and further proof that ghosts
are absolutely real. We have a new member joining the
Haunting team. She was doing undergrad at UCLA, and now she's
a succubus from Hell. Everyone, please give a warm virtual
welcome to our new intern Naomi!

(01:32):
Naomi gets really triggered by the god word college kids,
But what can you expect from a general studies major? However,
credit where credit is due. Naomi found our next totally
true haunt, Greg, who hails from our former neck of

(01:52):
the woods, Los Angeles.
What I wouldn't give for the chicken parm at Dan Tana's right
about now. You living are so lucky. Back to Greg,
we all know roommates can be a bit of a challenge.
My old roommate, Miranda, almost burned our apartment down with
a Dyson air wrap on three separate occasions. She's what we
call clumsy, yet somehow she's still alive. But what's worse,

(02:18):
roommates you don't even know you're signing up for. Like
in Greg's case, I'll let him tell it.

Story A (02:25):
I was newly single and I moved into my new house.
Weird things happened for a good three years. It started
with subtle things, but over the years just increased and
it happened more often. It got to the point where
it was scary. My name is Greg, and I moved

(02:47):
in with a ghost named Elmer.
This was at the time when real estate was at
a premium, and I thought, there's no way I'll be
able to afford a house. But I think that the
reason the price is so reasonable is because the kids
were selling the house on behalf of their dad, who
died in the main bedroom of that house. His name

(03:12):
was Elmer. It might sound awful, but I was actually
kind of happy to hear that somebody had died in
the house because I thought I would reduced the competition.
And it didn't bother me that he died there, because
in a way, it made me feel like that's where
people should die. He was an old man and he
died at home. That's the natural progression of life. So

(03:32):
it made me almost feel nice that this old man
died in his own home. And if it's driving other
people away, then I'm fine with it. I made an
offer on the house. They accepted it right away, and
I was very excited about that.
I lived there alone for about a year and then
my partner, Mario moved in. That's when I noticed strange

(03:55):
things happening. It started with subtle things. In the living
room we have these two free standing lamps and they have
three way bulbs on them. Every once in a while
they'll flicker, and I'm thinking, well, it's a three way
ball maybe they're dying, maybe they need to be changed.
I would test the lamps regularly, like tighten the bulb

(04:16):
or see if the switch was broken. Nothing was out
of order. Their bulbs were new, the bulbs were in
there tight, the switch was not janky. Everything was in working
in order. I've always heard that ghosts or spirits communicate
through electricity or light. Even so, one night I had

(04:37):
the idea of, why don't I just yell at Elmer
to stop playing with the lights. And so I yell "Elmer,
stop it!" Sure enough, they would stop flickering. If I
have people over, they'll start flickering again, and I will
jokingly say, "oh, that's Elmer." Somebody says, "who's Elmer?" "Oh

(05:00):
the guy who died in the house." And I'll yell "Elmer,
stop it!" The minute you yell, they'll stop flickering. And
it worked one hundred percent of the time. I'm definitely
not an electrician, I'm not even technically savvy, but I'm
pretty sure that lights don't stop flickering when you yell

(05:21):
at them. It was almost like Elmer letting you know, hey,
I'm still here, this is still my home.
I'm convinced that Elmer was a militant non smoker. Because
I would go outside to have a cigarette and I
close the sliding glass door behind me. My partner, Mario's

(05:43):
watching TV. I sit have a cigarette, that takes about five minutes,
and I can see Mario's still on the couch, still
watching TV. He didn't move one foot. And when I
am finished, I walk back to the door, try to
open the door, and it won't open. It's locked. It

(06:04):
was a basic sliding glass door with a lock that
is just a latch up as unlocked down as locked,
you have to lock it from the inside. It wasn't old,
it wasn't broken, it was in fine shape. So I
pound on the door. He comes over and says, "why
didn't you just come in?" I said, "you locked me out."

(06:25):
He said, "no, I haven't even gotten up off the couch."
I totally believe that's the case, because we have wooden floors.
I would have seen or even heard him walk over
to the door, and I would have heard the door
click locked. None of that ever happened. Nobody had touched
the door, and I wasn't the only person that's happened to.

(06:46):
I have a good friend who also smoked. I would
be on the couch watching TV. The friend goes out
to have a cigarette. From my vantage point, I can
see her outside smoking that entire time. She tried to
come in, knocked on the sliding glass door, and I
went up to let her in. I said, "how were
you able to lock that behind you?" She said, "I didn't.

(07:09):
You're the one who locked me out." I said, "no,
I haven't gotten up off the couch. I haven't even moved."
Anybody that I would have over to go out and
have a cigarette, same deal. They would get locked out
every time. I don't know if the door locked behind

(07:31):
them from Elmer, but it only happened when somebody was smoking.
Other strange things started happening as well. This was the
day of the iPod dock. If you're not familiar, you
just put your iPod into a little speaker system and
that plays your music for you. The iPod dock I
had in the bedroom, next to the bed. We have

(07:53):
two nightstands. There's the main part of the nightstand and
then a little lower shelf. That's where the iPod dock is kept.
It's plugged into the wall, but the plug for the
iPod doc is behind the bed. I love to play
a certain album by one of my favorite bands, Nine
Inch Nails, And I know exactly how long this album is,

(08:13):
and I listened to it all the time. So I'm
cleaning my house and I heard the music stop. I
knew the album wasn't over because it had only been
a few minutes. So I walk into the bedroom. I
looked down and there's the iPod dock on the middle
of the floor. And then the iPod itself ended up

(08:37):
a good ten feet away from where the dock was. So,
it looks like it was violently kicked or almost shoved
off the shelf of the nightstand. I'm home alone, so
what could the answer to that be? And it got
even weirder. It only happened when I listened to my music.

(08:59):
My partner Mario listen to Adele, Jennifer Lopez. That never
got messed with. But when I would play Nine Inch
Nails or The Killers, something louder and heavier, it would
inevitably end up in the middle of the floor, and
that's when nobody's in the room. Unlike the flickering lights,
the iPod thing was even more strange. A light doesn't

(09:23):
require physical touch, it's more of an energy. An iPod dock
being kicked or thrown across the room. That is something
to do with physics that we can't even explain or understand.
My partner, Mario, has a background in sales and was
considering working in radio sales. So, I had a friend
who was an anchor at a news talk station. John

(09:46):
knew everybody, knew everyone in the industry, so had him
over for dinner. John said, "I have a great idea
for you. Let me just write down a few people
that I know." So I grabbed a notepad. This notepad
was five or six inches and about two inches wide.
He wrote down a name and a number on each page,
ripped the page out. "Oh, I remembered another guy, Let

(10:09):
me give you his number. Oh I remember this woman
I used to work with. She's still in sales. Let
me give you her number." So by the end of
the night I had six pages of names and phone numbers.
I left them on the kitchen counter. Next morning, I
walked into the kitchen and in front of the kitchen sink,
we have an area rug. I looked down and on

(10:33):
the floor there's these six pages with those names and
phone numbers on them, and they are all lined up
in a perfect line, right along the edge of that rug.
As if you used a ruler to make them straight
along that rug. Absolutely no explanation for that. I played

(10:53):
out the scenarios in my head. I knew that I
had left them on the counter right before going to bed.
I checked, there was no breeze, there was no open window,
there's no other people, none of the above. There's just
no way that these papers could have ended up on
the floor lined up like that on their own. It
just doesn't make sense.

(11:15):
But one of the most noteworthy experiences in that house
I found what I thought was a handprint on the
back cushion of my couch. My partner and I every
single night, much like you make the bed in the morning,
we would what I call make the couch at night.

(11:37):
So before going to bed, we brush all the cushions
from left to right so it looks all uniform, and
then we would make sure that every pillow is at
a right angle, make sure the throw blanket is folded
just properly and draped over the chaise lounge so it
looks like it would be ready to be photographed for

(11:59):
a catalog. It had to be perfect every night. Still
do that to this day, so obviously a handprint would
stand out to me. When I walked into the living
room the next day and I saw it, I immediately thought,
that is not my hand. And what made it even
more strange it was upside down. It definitely was not

(12:23):
that way the night before. The couch was right up
against the wall. In order to make that upside down print,
you either had to be standing behind the couch, or
you'd have to be climbing down from the ceiling, like
somebody crawled down the wall and onto the couch. It's
too small to be my hand, and Mario and I

(12:44):
are the same height, we have the same shoe size,
we have about the same size hand. This is not
either of our handprint. The more I looked at it,
I realized that the thumb of that hand looked more
like a claw, like long fingernail.
A ghost could be a former loved one, a relative,

(13:07):
a friend who died, But this is more like an
otherworldly thing that was not formally human, like a demon.
That was scary.
Unlike the locking doors and the flickering lights, the iPod thing,
the notepad thing, and the claw on the couch, those

(13:30):
were scary because it was a physical representation of something
that I could not explain. After selling the house, I
was very tempted to reach out to the new buyers.
I wanted so badly to ask them if they ever
had any ghostly experiences. It would be a weird conversation

(13:52):
to have, "Hey, by the way, I'm pretty sure that
house is haunted."

Therésa (14:09):
Okay, Well, I guess I'm just gonna say what we're
all thinking. Elmer hated the smokers. But in his defense,
I would have made a fuss about the constant Nine
Inch Nails too. A much more Mario speed J Lo, Adele.
Funny story, I actually got kind of tight with Jenny

(14:30):
Lopez in line for the bathroom at the Chateau Marmont.
She asked if I was waiting, and I was like yeah,
and then she smiled, and I let her cut. God,
she's really got the voice, face, and ass of an angel.
Okay, Naomi, Naomi, whoo, sorry, Jesus, that's getting old. Okay,
in most cultures, he was just a guy and a

(14:53):
NEPO baby at that. Whatever, before Naomi spontaneously combusts, our next haunty hunter, haunty, haunty,
is taking us all the way back to 1989 ,
the same year my dad got out of prison the
first time. Oh, don't feel bad. It was white collar,

(15:17):
low security. His tennis game was never better.

Story B (15:23):
I lived there about six years, people thought the place was haunted.
It was secluded and spooky and kind of falling down.
I would hear footsteps and stuff, but I wasn't really
afraid of it. I had other things that happened to
me in my life that were a little weird, but
this experience with my mother in law was so definitive
to me. I always kind of loved horror stories, but

(15:46):
after that, it made it so much more a reality.
My name is KD, and one night along the road
in the dark, my deceased mother in law saved my life.
It was 1989, my marriage was not good. I've left

(16:06):
my husband, stayed with my mom for a short period
of time, and then I found this advertisement in a
little local paper for this carriage house at this estate.
It has a big mansion on the shore of Lake Erie,
where this doctor and his wife lived. It was built
in the late eighteen hundreds. It was a very rich

(16:29):
part of town. The estate was probably fifteen acres. There
was a mansion and the carriage house and a little
road that cut across. I was really eager to be
living by myself for the first time, because I went
right from my parents' house to marrying my first husband.
I was young and brave, and I was like, "Okay, yeah,

(16:50):
I'm going to do this. This is really cool." The
carriage house was kind of a little bit decrepit because
they weren't really working on the carriage house and they
just wanted somebody to live there. They could have fixed
it up, but his wife at the place was haunted.

(17:10):
It was secluded and spooky and kind of falling down
hearing that she did not want to live in the
big house. I thought, maybe there's something in those houses.
I don't know, but I don't know didn't bother me.
I had things that happened to me in that house
that were a little weird. One time I was upset

(17:32):
over something. I was in bed crying, and I felt
somebody sit on my bed, like you would sit on
somebody's bed and you would reach over to comfort somebody.
I don't know if I was just imagining things or
maybe I'm more open to it, but I wasn't really
afraid of it. Other people had experiences too. I had

(17:58):
a friend from work to come over and see me,
and then he didn't come over, and I couldn't get a
hold of him. And the next day he said, I
went into the driveway and I saw a woman in
a wedding dress standing halfway down the drive towards the mansion.
And then he just leaves, just turned around and leaves.
He doesn't even answer the phone when he goes home,

(18:20):
but I'm calling him, you know? He's like, he goes...
I was so freaked out he goes, I just, I
just went home and like drank a beer and went to bed. He swore he
would never go back there.
And then like two months later, I was at a
friend's house and I'm driving home and it's twelve o'clock
or maybe one o'clock in the morning, and I'm driving

(18:41):
down this suburban road, maybe a mile or two from
my house. I see this figure standing by the side
of the road. It was the clothes that was really
the weird part, you know, you see the grim Reaper
with the scythe and everything. Honest to god, it looked like that. All dressed

(19:02):
in black and baggy and like a shawl, like you
put a shawl over your head, you know? I don't
know what's going on, but I'm driving very very slow,
and this figure just kind of looks up at me
and it was my deceased ex-mother- in- law.
It was about three years that she'd been passed, but
I swear it was my mother in law. It was

(19:23):
my mother in law's face, and she just kind of
lifted up her hand, not like waving at me to stop,
but kind of like, "hi, here I am."
I was so scared I just accelerated the car. When
I got to the end of the road, I thought,

(19:45):
what if that was my mother- in- law and what
if there's something she wants to tell me? So I thought,
I'm gonna turn around and go back and look. But
I didn't turn around. What I did was I just
took left turns in a big square. That area was
probably about two miles to do a big square, and

(20:06):
I went down the road again. But there was nothing there.
There was no sign that anybody had been there. Nobody's
gonna believe this.
I was so scared at that point, I didn't want
to really go home, and there's nobody I want to

(20:28):
wake up at like 1:15 or whatever it was. So I thought,
I'll go to the Greek diner, like three or four
miles away, and I'll just sit there and I'll have
a cup of coffee and i'll just, you know, I'll
just calm myself down and then i'll go home.

(20:48):
I had some coffee, and I said, well, you don't
really know, and maybe you're imagining things, and maybe that
person was just out and their family found them and
took them home. You know, you try and talk yourself
out of those things. I was maybe at the diner

(21:11):
a half an hour or forty five minutes, and then
I went home. I'm still thinking about seeing my dead
mother in law on the side of the road waving
at me. I drove into the estate, and I drove
into the courtyard and I parked my car. I can

(21:35):
see that there's something wrong with my door. The door's
broken and there's glass everywhere. This is an old door too,
so like a one hundred year old solid oak door.
The door is cracked in half horizontally almost, and all
the glass is broken out of it, and my house
had been broken into.

(21:56):
At that point, everything about my mother in law is
driven out of my head. You know how they tell you should never go
into the house. You should call the police. I didn't
even think of that. It's like one thirty, two o'clock
by now. I just went into the house. Besides the

(22:18):
door being broken down, nothing seemed out of place or anything.
I called the police and they came over, but they
never found anybody.
Eventually I figured out that there was a few items
of my clothing missing, a big knife and a jarful
of change missing. A few days later I found a crowbar, like,

(22:43):
had been thrown off to the side. It landed over
where the stables were. I think that that's what they
used to pry open my door. And it was very upset.
I lived in this place, it was very isolated. If
I had gone home and there was a violent person there,

(23:05):
I mean, I would have been in trouble. I could
scream at the top of my lungs and nobody would
hear me in that house.
And then I remembered my mother in law at the
side of the road, and I was like, "is it
possible that my mother in law had been trying to
save me from whatever it was."

(23:29):
With age, you get more accepting of things that you
can't figure out. When you're young, you have to have
an answer for everything or it's just going to drive
you insane. But I think when you get older, it's like,
maybe what I get out of the experience is more
important than being able to explain it. If I could

(23:54):
go back and I saw my dead mother- in- law
standing there, I would stop the car and I would
open the door, and I would hug her.

Therésa (24:16):
Okay, dramatically draped black shaw and matching hood sounds couture to me.
You say Grim Reaper; I say 2015 Comme des Garçons Fall / Winter collection.
But what I love about this story is that it
breaks the mother-in- law's are monster's stereotype, which is so important
these days. Well, maybe she's a monster in the literal sense,
but she sounds otherwise chill to me. Kind of like Naomi.

(24:39):
It's not her fault that the small demonic smudge on
her ethereal soul burns at the mention of anything holy.
It's not because she's bad. She's just sensitive, and that's okay. Anyway,
that's all we've got for you this week. If you
or anyone you know has had any dust stops with
the undead, write to us via email at [e-mail]. We'd

(25:03):
love to share your scare. Oh, and hit us up in the comments with your craziest mother-in-law stories, and I'll haunt the
shit out of whoever's is the worst. Just kidding, well,
maybe I will. Okay, Love you always and see you
next Eternal Twilight for more Haunting.

Credits (25:22):
If you have a Haunting story to share, please email us at [e-mail]. And follow us on social media by searching for Glass Podcasts or by visiting glasspodcasts.com. Haunting is a production of Glass Podcasts in partnership with iHeartPodcasts. Haunting is created and executive produced by Nancy Glass, Andrea Gunning, Ben Fetterman, and Lauren Lapkus, and is hosted by Lauren Lapkus as her character Therésa. The show is directed by Aleah Welsh and produced by Trey Morgan. It is written by Aleah Welsh , with additional writing by Nancy Glass, Trey Morgan, Ben Fetterman, and Kristin Melchiorre. Additional production support by Todd Ganz. Additional voice acting by Trey Morgan as the character, Producer Len Walker, editing and sound designed by Matt Delvecchio. Mixed by Dave Saia. Operations and production support by Kristin Melchiorre. Haunting's theme and original compositions were composed by Oliver Baines and Dorry Macaulay of Noiser. Music Library provided by Mibe Music. Special thanks to Speakeasy Sound Studios in Burbank, California. For more shows from iHeartPodcasts and Glass Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.