October 24, 2023 • 27 mins
Smiley describes a crack head zombie invasion and the witch who nearly dragged him to hell. Narcy meets Muhammad Ali in Africa. And Belly has another paranormal fright fest.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
There's a place beyond this place, a middle ground between
the light and the darkness, the natire and the zenith.
For some, it's a bridge between the living and the dead.
Yet for others, it's something else. Entirely, it's the place
where our nightmares dwell. Each one of us has touched
(00:25):
the other side and felt the presence of something beyond
this world. We now venture into a realm where the
(01:05):
Boogieyman are real. And this tale ripped from the darkest
corners of urban life, a story that unfolds in a
West Toronto neighborhood where the vulnerability of.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Youth collides with the terrors of the adult world.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Smiley unpacks his haunting encounter with this man, seemingly possessed
and one among the army of drug addicted zombies roaming
the streets. Brace yourselves for a heroin journey into a
nightmarish underworld that exists in the shadows have been all
too real urban landscape.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
My name is Smiley and this is my hip hot
horror story. So as a kid, I used to watch
Krela de Ville and then I always used to dream
of her. I have scary nightmares of her coming in
like in my basement, and she would come out the
furnace room and I how to wake up. And that
(02:10):
was the scariest thing to you as a kid. My
last dream I had of her, she came in the
in the dream and like my I for some reason,
like I couldn't move, like I couldn't move, and then
she was walking towards me, and I see my friends
pass me, but like for some reason, the words couldn't
come out my mouth. I was trying to say help me,
but like I wouldn't, like you know when you try
(02:32):
to scream but nothing's going out. So it's the weirdest feeling.
Then she was walking towards me in the dream, and
then my friends just passed me, and I was like, no,
she wasn't scary when I watched the movie, but in
the dream she.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
Was scary because it's.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
You and the it's one on one in the dream,
it's say, everything's scary in the dream. I would always
try to escape the basement in the dream, and she
would grab me by my legs and drag me them
up to the furnace, Like the furnace room was dark
and everything.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
That's where she came from. So I think that's where.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
She was trying to drag me in there and I
would disappear somewhere wild olds, wake up. I think she
wanted to take me to you know, Narnia. I think
there was a secret thing, all right. So when I
was a little kid, I lived in this neighborhood in
the West End in Toronto, around like a lot of
(03:27):
a lot of fiends, a lot of like like a
lot of crackheads. Like our neighborhood was a neighborhood where
the crack has just walked in, Like there would be
one hundred crack has walked in and the dealers just
stand inside and they don't have to move anywhere.
Speaker 5 (03:44):
That's the type of neighborhood, like you know in the wire.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
There was a something happened like around my neighborhood. It
was this girl, rest in peace, Holly Jones. She got
she got murdered around our neighborhood. Some pedophile guy kidnapped
her and chopped her into like a hundred pieces and
dumped her in the lake, and they found the body
(04:08):
with all the remainders.
Speaker 5 (04:08):
That actually happened. So that was going on around the neighborhood.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
The neighborhood was just like spooky at those times because
after that happened to the little girl, it was crazy.
That was super like sat in the neighborhood because she
went to the school in her neighborhood. And then like
she was missing for like a week, and then once
we found out in the news the guy lived right
(04:33):
like in the neighborhood. We walked past that house every time.
So then once they said the police kicked the door everything,
but they found the body bag in the lake in
a thousand pieces, and like it was crazy because they
actually that guy he had her in his house for
like probably four days in the in the refrigerator or
(04:56):
the freezer, and while he had her in there, the
cops actually were knocking at each door, and they knocked
at his door too, and he talked to them also,
like that's what they said in the news. And then yeah,
they just found out after like a week later they
found the remainings, and yeah, it was super said, we
(05:17):
couldn't really they didn't want us to walk by ourselves
in the neighborhood. You start seeing less kids walking by themselves,
like there was a lot of things changed, you know,
but we still went outside because like we're in a
larger group. And then every time after school, me and
my brothers will go walk around to the store or
(05:40):
we'll go we'll go walk to like our friend's house
or something. We had to always walk the furthest also,
so now we're just walking and like we're not even
talking and we're just trying to get home quick because
we're hungry, too tired. And then like one day it
was actually like a sunny day, was sunny day. It
(06:01):
was like six pm, summertime around like summertime times, and
had of nowhere.
Speaker 5 (06:08):
He's seen this tall black scary man. He was huge.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
He was like probably like six foot three something like that.
He had no noise, he had like he was super skinny.
He was serious look, serious, short hair. He had big
like cargo pants, extra extra large T shirt for like
a skinny guy, scary man look. So that he would
(06:37):
always like look at us. He would follow us, and
then we just thought it was a joke. Like then
we realized the man was following us for too long.
So then at some point we just ran away. He
lost them. Now like two days later we see him again.
We're just like, oh, like this guy must have just
moved in the neighborhood or something, and we're so young,
(07:00):
super young, being my two brothers.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
And then this time he.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Followed us again, but like he's speed walking, and then
we're just saying, no way, this guy is a serial killer.
And it was kind of like funny at first, like
we kind of liked the excitement, you know, with that,
what we realized this guy's actually following us. Now it
(07:26):
wasn't funny, don't worry. So we're just like, this guy
is a serial killer. So then we started running away again.
Now and now we told our older brother and he's
just trying to look for this guy now. And now
like probably a week later now we haven't seen him
again since this day. Now a week later, we're playing
soccer and a lady. It was just me and my
(07:49):
brother and one of our friends. Now we see him
out of nowhere, and this is further than where we normally.
We don't see him in this little part of this area,
you know, so it's kind, i know, weird. He was
in the back of a you know, also where we
were playing soccer. He was walking towards us and we
seen them and then he just looks in the air
and like his eyes rolled all the way back, and
(08:11):
he was kind.
Speaker 5 (08:11):
Of like shaken.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
He's doing like this exorcist, look like he's getting possessed,
and how we're running and he starts chasing after us.
Speaker 5 (08:21):
And then I was.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
Scared because I'm like, oh fuck, these guys are gonna
leave me. These guys are faster than me. I'm gonna
get caught by myself. So I ran, like, no tomorrow,
I went in a neighbor's a neighbor's house, and the
guy would disappear. We never seen him after that. Growing up,
I realized he was just a super crackhad you know.
(08:43):
I don't believe it ghost that much, you know, but
like as a kid me seeing this this man, he
looked like a something scarier than ghost.
Speaker 5 (08:54):
At that moment.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
He looked like he was ready to kidnap me and
my brothers, and no one was see us again.
Speaker 5 (09:01):
There'll be in those Sphinx, in.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
The world where the monsters of our imagination vie for
space with the very real demons that walk among us.
Smiley's story is a testament to the resilience of the
human spirit, as well as a chilling reminder that sometimes
the scariest tales are those that lurk just outside our
front doors. But maybe that vivid imagination allowed him to cope,
(09:35):
to endure, and to eventually emerge scarred but wiser from
his gauntlet of youth. In this next story, we grapple
with the unknown against the backdrop of music, art, boxing rings,
and sacred African rituals as Narcy sets out on a
trip to shoot a music video, only to find himself
(09:57):
entangled in a web of phenomenon it defies logic and
transcends time. His expedition is marked by a tragic event,
the passing of boxing legend and global icon Muhammad Ali.
As they proceed with their production, Narsy and his crew
find themselves with the uncanny feeling that there's a presence nearby,
(10:21):
the essence of the Greatest himself, reaching across realms to
touch another artist's life. The line between the mortal and
the ethereal is often blurred, leaving us with more questions
than answers.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
So in like twenty seventeen, I had the opportunity to
collaborate with a group called a tribe called Red at
the time, they call the Hallucination Now and we got
in a studio with the Yac Bay and record song RD,
which is, you know, one of the major moments in
my career. And somebody gave me a call. One of
(11:07):
my friends gave me a call who was the producer
on the video, and he said, listen, we got to
go to South Africa in like four days to go
shoot the music video for this. Are you down to
direct it? So I've never directed a video. I mean,
I've always been involved in the direction of my video
has been ever like directed at myself. So I had
to come up with a concept, do all my visual research,
get on a plane.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
And fly to South Africa.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
I've never been to the continent before, so it was
all very overwhelming. But you know, what I tend to
do in these moments in my career is like embrace
the magic and let the you know, the quote unquote
universe or allah like take take control of the whole situation.
And as soon as we got on the plane, it
(11:51):
was an extremely turbulent flight. You know, there was a
lot of like moments of fear. I'm already a pretty
fearful travel where to Dja cat it. But then we
landed in South Africa and as soon as we landed,
my friend walks off the plane and he's running Muhammad
Ali Jersey and we find out Muhammad Ali passed away.
(12:15):
We had a very like friendly kind of vibe around us,
but it was definitely like there was something that was
coming to us, and it was that news that you know,
that Muhammad Ali had died. So there was a bit
of heaviness in the air that we felt. I guess
the people around us knew, but we didn't know until
we got to the apartment to the air banbing and
(12:36):
we get on the ground. We go meet Yah scene,
we brief him on the video idea.
Speaker 5 (12:40):
He's down.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Next day we go and location scout and as I'm
location scouting, we have this specific place that we want
to end up in as they take these old like
shipping containers and they turn them into bodega's in South Africa,
and I really wanted to hit this specific one because
the sun set right behind it as we were location scouting,
so I'm like, this is the one, right. So day two,
(13:03):
I pick up the newspaper and I filled in the
car and we start our shot. We go to bukap
which is like the majority Muslim area in the city.
We shoot by a mosque. We only have the rights
to shoot on this specific street. And there's this kid
following me around the whole time, and it was him
(13:24):
in a soccer ball and he kept following me around.
So as we took a break, I started talking to him.
And he was an Arabic kid. He was playing in
the streets, so he wasn't like decked out. I remember
him being in T shirts and shorts and I looked
at him and I was like, you know, you live
around here?
Speaker 3 (13:39):
He said yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
I was like, you know, how old are you think?
He said like seven or eight? And then I was like,
what's your name? He's like, what's your name? I said,
my name is yees Seen. I said what's your name?
He said, my name is Mohammed Ali. And there's no
way he would have known like that. There's no way
he would have made that up. You know, no way, bro.
So you know, we went, we prayed, and then we
(14:01):
were a bit delayed because of traffic. Obviously, I didn't
know that Cape Town would be so busy at the
time that we were shooting. So we end up by
the corniche to shoot the scene before we go to
that bodega. But we end up like an hour late
and the sun is setting, so we shoot the video.
We shoot the final scene, A get in the car.
(14:22):
We missed the scene that I wanted to get by
the bodega, and I grabbed the newspaper that I bought
earlier in the day and it tells the reader about
the last time Muhammad Ali was in Cape town of
what he did, and he walked from the street that
we shot on. He prayed at the mosque that we
prayed at, and then walked all the way to the
(14:45):
location where we shot on the corniche and ended his
day there and caught the sunset there. So for me,
it was like two things. Number one, it was that
we were guided by some know, bigger spirit than us.
You know, Mahmad Ali is really big to me and
to Yasin Bey and to the producer. I saw a
(15:07):
guy of the video, so we were like.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Really in awe.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
So I was like, listen, guys, I need a moment
like this is a bit too eerie for me, you know,
It all felt very like guided by a spirit outside
of us. And I go by the water and there's
another little kid running towards.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Me with the soccer ball arm on the.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Water and he's rocking the Montreal Canadians jersey as he
approaches me and I asked. I was like, man, your
name better not be Mahamad Ali, you know. And his
father comes with him and I was like, you know,
where are you guys from. He's like, oh, we used
to live in Montreal, but we moved to Cape Town recently.
I was like, that's crazy. I just got here from Montreal.
(15:48):
And I was like, what's your name and he's like,
my name is yes. And I was like, there's no
way this is happening to me right now.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
You know, none of this, none of this.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Is cap by the way, this is all like real,
real life events. So I remember just going back to
the hotel and really like cleansing myself and just clearing
the air and feeling like, you know, I gotta learn
to just like go and embrace the moment. But I
feel like if I let go and embrace the moment
too much, the moment might carry me away and take
(16:17):
me to places I might not want.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
To go to.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
So that's one of the stories.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Was it a coincidence or was it something far more profound?
The spirit of the greatest reaching across realms to touch
an artist's life. The line between the mortal and the
immortal is often blurred, leave us pondering what the answers
to the questions are.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
We'll let you decide what's up everybody.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
This is Belly and this is my hip hop horror story.
So this story is kind of like a two part story.
Starts off with something that affected me when I was
a kid. Let's say the year was probably nineteen ninety five.
I was walking home from school. There was this long
(17:11):
path that you can cut through, so I would always
use this path and cut through, and the whole way
walking home, it was like a cloudy day, kind of
drizzling a little bit, and I just felt like someone
was watching me. So as I'm walking towards my house,
(17:33):
walking alone, I kept turning around like as if someone
was there watching me. So, you know, I finally approached
the house. I'm getting to the neighborhood.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Same thing.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
As soon as I get to the corner, I turned
around quickly. I felt like someone was watching me. So
now I get to the house. My older brother.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Is there.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
As soon as I open the door, I go to
explain to him that it felt like someone was watching
me and he cuts me off and tells me my
grandfather passed away.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Now, something.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
That I think people should know is me and my grandfather,
at a all of dozens of grandkids he had, we
had a special relationship in bond. I was like his
best friend. I was the only person that could, you know,
talk out a turn to him or you know, he
was like kids swear words with him. But you know,
(18:35):
he was in the army, so he was very strict
with the other grandkids, and everybody'd always be like, yo,
how come your relationship with him is so different? But
you know, I grew up kind of sick. I had,
like I was in and out of hospitals when I
was young, and I think he just, like, you know,
(18:58):
he just felt like he had a soft.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Spot for me. Because of that, I think, you know, so.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
You know, I still feel like, you know, his presence
is around whenever something major happens, I can still feel him,
and I still feel his presence now because of that.
The following summer, we end up going to Jordan to
visit the family. You know, my mom wanted to see
(19:27):
her brothers and sisters and extended family. So we end
up in Jordan, and we're kind of moving around from
relatives to other relatives, just you know, making our rounds.
The way it works back home is like they take
it disrespectfully if you stay in a hotel. So everybody
(19:51):
was like, yo, this night to this night, you're over here,
so and so and so on and so forth, and
you know, so we just ended up every like you say,
like a week, we would end up in a new
household of a relative. So now we end up at
my aunt's house. My cousin Bilado was there, and my
(20:17):
older brother Rider. So now we're all at my aunt's house.
We're playing cards every night, We're staying up and sneaking out,
you know, we're going out in the daytime and flipping
rocks over and finding lizards and snakes and just dumb
shit kids do, especially Arab kids. So we start to
(20:42):
hear about like this young girl that lives in the
same neighbor the same not neighborhood, lives in the same
house or like duplex triplex that my cousin and my
aunt lived in. So well to hear like she's been
acting weird and like.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
People feel like she's possessed.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
She's using like swear words that she shouldn't know stuff,
not even from our era, you know, swear words I
probably wouldn't even understand in Arabic. She's given her grandmother
like a super hard time, and this is a really
young girl. They don't got TV, they don't got radio, so.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
Super sheltered.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Seeing the little girl once and she just looked like
no one was taking care of her. Like she looked
a little disheveled. You know, her hair wasn't done. She
looked a little like skinny even for that, like she's
you know, she almost looked malnourished, Like I don't want
(21:54):
to say that, but she did. She just didn't look
like anyone was really properly taking care of her, you
know her her her hair wasn't done. Yeah, it looked, uh,
it looked like she just like woke up from the bed.
So that the mystery was like where could she have
learned any of this? So people started to worry, and
(22:18):
then you know, we kind of just told the story
and and moved on. So a few nights later, we'd
sneak out and there was a vacant apartment across from
my aunt's apartment, so we snuck out, got into the
vacant apartment and we wanted to smoke cigarettes. That was
(22:39):
the whole reason we snuck out. We wanted to s
smoke cigarettes and drink soda at night, and the moms
wouldn't let us do that cause we would stay up
all night. That night for me at least, felt weird
from the beginning. The weather wasn't like it usually is.
It was a little cooler that day, so we snuck
(23:00):
out some glass bottle Coca Cola, brought it.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
Into the vacant spot.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
We went and bought a pack of cigarettes earlier that
day because you could buy cigarettes are like three, and
you know, we had the cigarettes. They lit up cigarettes.
I was younger than them by like five years. My
older cousin, Bilad and my older brother, so I was
younger than them by at least five years, and they
(23:27):
were kind of like trying to be the authority on me,
and I'm like, man, pass it past that shit, bro.
They were like, nah, you're too young. So we having
this argument and then we just hear a screech and
we all stopped and looked at each other. It was
like blood curdling. We all looked at each.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Other, like what the hell's going on. Then boomed, it
happened again.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
So my cousin was like, it's probably two cats fighting,
like two street cats going at it.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
You know.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
They're like they're like fucking ninjas, those street cats. They'll
jump off of shit twelve feet high. They do spins
all kinds and then they be screaming. So we're like, yeah,
for sure, a couple of straight cats. Then it starts
to intensify. Now we're hearing swear words, you know, mixed
(24:20):
in screaming. I'm talking vile shit. I'm not talking like
light swear words like this is shit i'd be embarrassed
to say in front of most people. So now we're
actually really scared. Hair stands up. I'm like, I just
want to go home. I want to just I wanna
(24:43):
get on a plane to Canada at this point, but
you know, keeps going, and then we.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
Start to hear prayer.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
So there's somebody praying, and the prayer keeps getting louder
and louder, and the person.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
Being exerciseless.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
It was getting louder even in the prayer, and it
kept going and going and going, and this went on
for three or four hours, and as soon as the
sun started, the crack. Everything stopped me and it was
like silence, and I wasn't on I mean, I drank
(25:29):
coca cola. I was probably on a sugar rush, but
I couldn't sleep regardless. It was the scariest, like the
sound that I ever heard in my life. And we
couldn't just sneak back into the into my aunt's house
because at this point we knew there was a lot
of like things that could have woke up the house,
(25:52):
so we wanted them to just think we were sleeping.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
So we had to post up in.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
The vacant apartment, and the wind weren't even really set
up properly, so some of the windows were kind of
like six inches eight inches open and we couldn't close them.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
It was like screws. So we're literally having to sit.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
In this room with no furniture, so everything's echoing off
the walls, and we're listening to what I believe to
be a live exorcism. So we decide to not tell anybody.
We decided to keep it kind of like a pack
between us, and probably like five days later, we're outside,
(26:39):
you know, we're like shooting marbles or something, and the
grandma walks out with the little girl, and like it
was like it was like any story that they had
told before about craziness wasn't there. It was just a
grandma her granddaughter walking to the store. I don't know,
(27:04):
if memory serves me right, I think she was even skipping,
you know. So I don't know what I witnessed that night.
I'm not sure, but it was definitely a night that
that I always remember in a sound that I'll never forget.
(27:52):
A
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
There's a place beyond this place, a middle ground between
the light and the darkness, the natire and the zenith.
For some, it's a bridge between the living and the dead.
Yet for others, it's something else. Entirely, it's the place
where our nightmares dwell. Each one of us has touched
(00:25):
the other side and felt the presence of something beyond
this world. We now venture into a realm where the
(01:05):
Boogieyman are real. And this tale ripped from the darkest
corners of urban life, a story that unfolds in a
West Toronto neighborhood where the vulnerability of.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Youth collides with the terrors of the adult world.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Smiley unpacks his haunting encounter with this man, seemingly possessed
and one among the army of drug addicted zombies roaming
the streets. Brace yourselves for a heroin journey into a
nightmarish underworld that exists in the shadows have been all
too real urban landscape.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
My name is Smiley and this is my hip hot
horror story. So as a kid, I used to watch
Krela de Ville and then I always used to dream
of her. I have scary nightmares of her coming in
like in my basement, and she would come out the
furnace room and I how to wake up. And that
(02:10):
was the scariest thing to you as a kid. My
last dream I had of her, she came in the
in the dream and like my I for some reason,
like I couldn't move, like I couldn't move, and then
she was walking towards me, and I see my friends
pass me, but like for some reason, the words couldn't
come out my mouth. I was trying to say help me,
but like I wouldn't, like you know when you try
(02:32):
to scream but nothing's going out. So it's the weirdest feeling.
Then she was walking towards me in the dream, and
then my friends just passed me, and I was like, no,
she wasn't scary when I watched the movie, but in
the dream she.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
Was scary because it's.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
You and the it's one on one in the dream,
it's say, everything's scary in the dream. I would always
try to escape the basement in the dream, and she
would grab me by my legs and drag me them
up to the furnace, Like the furnace room was dark
and everything.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
That's where she came from. So I think that's where.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
She was trying to drag me in there and I
would disappear somewhere wild olds, wake up. I think she
wanted to take me to you know, Narnia. I think
there was a secret thing, all right. So when I
was a little kid, I lived in this neighborhood in
the West End in Toronto, around like a lot of
(03:27):
a lot of fiends, a lot of like like a
lot of crackheads. Like our neighborhood was a neighborhood where
the crack has just walked in, Like there would be
one hundred crack has walked in and the dealers just
stand inside and they don't have to move anywhere.
Speaker 5 (03:44):
That's the type of neighborhood, like you know in the wire.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
There was a something happened like around my neighborhood. It
was this girl, rest in peace, Holly Jones. She got
she got murdered around our neighborhood. Some pedophile guy kidnapped
her and chopped her into like a hundred pieces and
dumped her in the lake, and they found the body
(04:08):
with all the remainders.
Speaker 5 (04:08):
That actually happened. So that was going on around the neighborhood.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
The neighborhood was just like spooky at those times because
after that happened to the little girl, it was crazy.
That was super like sat in the neighborhood because she
went to the school in her neighborhood. And then like
she was missing for like a week, and then once
we found out in the news the guy lived right
(04:33):
like in the neighborhood. We walked past that house every time.
So then once they said the police kicked the door everything,
but they found the body bag in the lake in
a thousand pieces, and like it was crazy because they
actually that guy he had her in his house for
like probably four days in the in the refrigerator or
(04:56):
the freezer, and while he had her in there, the
cops actually were knocking at each door, and they knocked
at his door too, and he talked to them also,
like that's what they said in the news. And then yeah,
they just found out after like a week later they
found the remainings, and yeah, it was super said, we
(05:17):
couldn't really they didn't want us to walk by ourselves
in the neighborhood. You start seeing less kids walking by themselves,
like there was a lot of things changed, you know,
but we still went outside because like we're in a
larger group. And then every time after school, me and
my brothers will go walk around to the store or
(05:40):
we'll go we'll go walk to like our friend's house
or something. We had to always walk the furthest also,
so now we're just walking and like we're not even
talking and we're just trying to get home quick because
we're hungry, too tired. And then like one day it
was actually like a sunny day, was sunny day. It
(06:01):
was like six pm, summertime around like summertime times, and
had of nowhere.
Speaker 5 (06:08):
He's seen this tall black scary man. He was huge.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
He was like probably like six foot three something like that.
He had no noise, he had like he was super skinny.
He was serious look, serious, short hair. He had big
like cargo pants, extra extra large T shirt for like
a skinny guy, scary man look. So that he would
(06:37):
always like look at us. He would follow us, and
then we just thought it was a joke. Like then
we realized the man was following us for too long.
So then at some point we just ran away. He
lost them. Now like two days later we see him again.
We're just like, oh, like this guy must have just
moved in the neighborhood or something, and we're so young,
(07:00):
super young, being my two brothers.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
And then this time he.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Followed us again, but like he's speed walking, and then
we're just saying, no way, this guy is a serial killer.
And it was kind of like funny at first, like
we kind of liked the excitement, you know, with that,
what we realized this guy's actually following us. Now it
(07:26):
wasn't funny, don't worry. So we're just like, this guy
is a serial killer. So then we started running away again.
Now and now we told our older brother and he's
just trying to look for this guy now. And now
like probably a week later now we haven't seen him
again since this day. Now a week later, we're playing
soccer and a lady. It was just me and my
(07:49):
brother and one of our friends. Now we see him
out of nowhere, and this is further than where we normally.
We don't see him in this little part of this area,
you know, so it's kind, i know, weird. He was
in the back of a you know, also where we
were playing soccer. He was walking towards us and we
seen them and then he just looks in the air
and like his eyes rolled all the way back, and
(08:11):
he was kind.
Speaker 5 (08:11):
Of like shaken.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
He's doing like this exorcist, look like he's getting possessed,
and how we're running and he starts chasing after us.
Speaker 5 (08:21):
And then I was.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
Scared because I'm like, oh fuck, these guys are gonna
leave me. These guys are faster than me. I'm gonna
get caught by myself. So I ran, like, no tomorrow,
I went in a neighbor's a neighbor's house, and the
guy would disappear. We never seen him after that. Growing up,
I realized he was just a super crackhad you know.
(08:43):
I don't believe it ghost that much, you know, but
like as a kid me seeing this this man, he
looked like a something scarier than ghost.
Speaker 5 (08:54):
At that moment.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
He looked like he was ready to kidnap me and
my brothers, and no one was see us again.
Speaker 5 (09:01):
There'll be in those Sphinx, in.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
The world where the monsters of our imagination vie for
space with the very real demons that walk among us.
Smiley's story is a testament to the resilience of the
human spirit, as well as a chilling reminder that sometimes
the scariest tales are those that lurk just outside our
front doors. But maybe that vivid imagination allowed him to cope,
(09:35):
to endure, and to eventually emerge scarred but wiser from
his gauntlet of youth. In this next story, we grapple
with the unknown against the backdrop of music, art, boxing rings,
and sacred African rituals as Narcy sets out on a
trip to shoot a music video, only to find himself
(09:57):
entangled in a web of phenomenon it defies logic and
transcends time. His expedition is marked by a tragic event,
the passing of boxing legend and global icon Muhammad Ali.
As they proceed with their production, Narsy and his crew
find themselves with the uncanny feeling that there's a presence nearby,
(10:21):
the essence of the Greatest himself, reaching across realms to
touch another artist's life. The line between the mortal and
the ethereal is often blurred, leaving us with more questions
than answers.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
So in like twenty seventeen, I had the opportunity to
collaborate with a group called a tribe called Red at
the time, they call the Hallucination Now and we got
in a studio with the Yac Bay and record song RD,
which is, you know, one of the major moments in
my career. And somebody gave me a call. One of
(11:07):
my friends gave me a call who was the producer
on the video, and he said, listen, we got to
go to South Africa in like four days to go
shoot the music video for this. Are you down to
direct it? So I've never directed a video. I mean,
I've always been involved in the direction of my video
has been ever like directed at myself. So I had
to come up with a concept, do all my visual research,
get on a plane.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
And fly to South Africa.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
I've never been to the continent before, so it was
all very overwhelming. But you know, what I tend to
do in these moments in my career is like embrace
the magic and let the you know, the quote unquote
universe or allah like take take control of the whole situation.
And as soon as we got on the plane, it
(11:51):
was an extremely turbulent flight. You know, there was a
lot of like moments of fear. I'm already a pretty
fearful travel where to Dja cat it. But then we
landed in South Africa and as soon as we landed,
my friend walks off the plane and he's running Muhammad
Ali Jersey and we find out Muhammad Ali passed away.
(12:15):
We had a very like friendly kind of vibe around us,
but it was definitely like there was something that was
coming to us, and it was that news that you know,
that Muhammad Ali had died. So there was a bit
of heaviness in the air that we felt. I guess
the people around us knew, but we didn't know until
we got to the apartment to the air banbing and
(12:36):
we get on the ground. We go meet Yah scene,
we brief him on the video idea.
Speaker 5 (12:40):
He's down.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Next day we go and location scout and as I'm
location scouting, we have this specific place that we want
to end up in as they take these old like
shipping containers and they turn them into bodega's in South Africa,
and I really wanted to hit this specific one because
the sun set right behind it as we were location scouting,
so I'm like, this is the one, right. So day two,
(13:03):
I pick up the newspaper and I filled in the
car and we start our shot. We go to bukap
which is like the majority Muslim area in the city.
We shoot by a mosque. We only have the rights
to shoot on this specific street. And there's this kid
following me around the whole time, and it was him
(13:24):
in a soccer ball and he kept following me around.
So as we took a break, I started talking to him.
And he was an Arabic kid. He was playing in
the streets, so he wasn't like decked out. I remember
him being in T shirts and shorts and I looked
at him and I was like, you know, you live
around here?
Speaker 3 (13:39):
He said yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
I was like, you know, how old are you think?
He said like seven or eight? And then I was like,
what's your name? He's like, what's your name? I said,
my name is yees Seen. I said what's your name?
He said, my name is Mohammed Ali. And there's no
way he would have known like that. There's no way
he would have made that up. You know, no way, bro.
So you know, we went, we prayed, and then we
(14:01):
were a bit delayed because of traffic. Obviously, I didn't
know that Cape Town would be so busy at the
time that we were shooting. So we end up by
the corniche to shoot the scene before we go to
that bodega. But we end up like an hour late
and the sun is setting, so we shoot the video.
We shoot the final scene, A get in the car.
(14:22):
We missed the scene that I wanted to get by
the bodega, and I grabbed the newspaper that I bought
earlier in the day and it tells the reader about
the last time Muhammad Ali was in Cape town of
what he did, and he walked from the street that
we shot on. He prayed at the mosque that we
prayed at, and then walked all the way to the
(14:45):
location where we shot on the corniche and ended his
day there and caught the sunset there. So for me,
it was like two things. Number one, it was that
we were guided by some know, bigger spirit than us.
You know, Mahmad Ali is really big to me and
to Yasin Bey and to the producer. I saw a
(15:07):
guy of the video, so we were like.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Really in awe.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
So I was like, listen, guys, I need a moment
like this is a bit too eerie for me, you know,
It all felt very like guided by a spirit outside
of us. And I go by the water and there's
another little kid running towards.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Me with the soccer ball arm on the.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Water and he's rocking the Montreal Canadians jersey as he
approaches me and I asked. I was like, man, your
name better not be Mahamad Ali, you know. And his
father comes with him and I was like, you know,
where are you guys from. He's like, oh, we used
to live in Montreal, but we moved to Cape Town recently.
I was like, that's crazy. I just got here from Montreal.
(15:48):
And I was like, what's your name and he's like,
my name is yes. And I was like, there's no
way this is happening to me right now.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
You know, none of this, none of this.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Is cap by the way, this is all like real,
real life events. So I remember just going back to
the hotel and really like cleansing myself and just clearing
the air and feeling like, you know, I gotta learn
to just like go and embrace the moment. But I
feel like if I let go and embrace the moment
too much, the moment might carry me away and take
(16:17):
me to places I might not want.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
To go to.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
So that's one of the stories.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Was it a coincidence or was it something far more profound?
The spirit of the greatest reaching across realms to touch
an artist's life. The line between the mortal and the
immortal is often blurred, leave us pondering what the answers
to the questions are.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
We'll let you decide what's up everybody.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
This is Belly and this is my hip hop horror story.
So this story is kind of like a two part story.
Starts off with something that affected me when I was
a kid. Let's say the year was probably nineteen ninety five.
I was walking home from school. There was this long
(17:11):
path that you can cut through, so I would always
use this path and cut through, and the whole way
walking home, it was like a cloudy day, kind of
drizzling a little bit, and I just felt like someone
was watching me. So as I'm walking towards my house,
(17:33):
walking alone, I kept turning around like as if someone
was there watching me. So, you know, I finally approached
the house. I'm getting to the neighborhood.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Same thing.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
As soon as I get to the corner, I turned
around quickly. I felt like someone was watching me. So
now I get to the house. My older brother.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Is there.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
As soon as I open the door, I go to
explain to him that it felt like someone was watching
me and he cuts me off and tells me my
grandfather passed away.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Now, something.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
That I think people should know is me and my grandfather,
at a all of dozens of grandkids he had, we
had a special relationship in bond. I was like his
best friend. I was the only person that could, you know,
talk out a turn to him or you know, he
was like kids swear words with him. But you know,
(18:35):
he was in the army, so he was very strict
with the other grandkids, and everybody'd always be like, yo,
how come your relationship with him is so different? But
you know, I grew up kind of sick. I had,
like I was in and out of hospitals when I
was young, and I think he just, like, you know,
(18:58):
he just felt like he had a soft.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Spot for me. Because of that, I think, you know, so.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
You know, I still feel like, you know, his presence
is around whenever something major happens, I can still feel him,
and I still feel his presence now because of that.
The following summer, we end up going to Jordan to
visit the family. You know, my mom wanted to see
(19:27):
her brothers and sisters and extended family. So we end
up in Jordan, and we're kind of moving around from
relatives to other relatives, just you know, making our rounds.
The way it works back home is like they take
it disrespectfully if you stay in a hotel. So everybody
(19:51):
was like, yo, this night to this night, you're over here,
so and so and so on and so forth, and
you know, so we just ended up every like you say,
like a week, we would end up in a new
household of a relative. So now we end up at
my aunt's house. My cousin Bilado was there, and my
(20:17):
older brother Rider. So now we're all at my aunt's house.
We're playing cards every night, We're staying up and sneaking out,
you know, we're going out in the daytime and flipping
rocks over and finding lizards and snakes and just dumb
shit kids do, especially Arab kids. So we start to
(20:42):
hear about like this young girl that lives in the
same neighbor the same not neighborhood, lives in the same
house or like duplex triplex that my cousin and my
aunt lived in. So well to hear like she's been
acting weird and like.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
People feel like she's possessed.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
She's using like swear words that she shouldn't know stuff,
not even from our era, you know, swear words I
probably wouldn't even understand in Arabic. She's given her grandmother
like a super hard time, and this is a really
young girl. They don't got TV, they don't got radio, so.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
Super sheltered.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Seeing the little girl once and she just looked like
no one was taking care of her. Like she looked
a little disheveled. You know, her hair wasn't done. She
looked a little like skinny even for that, like she's
you know, she almost looked malnourished, Like I don't want
(21:54):
to say that, but she did. She just didn't look
like anyone was really properly taking care of her, you
know her her her hair wasn't done. Yeah, it looked, uh,
it looked like she just like woke up from the bed.
So that the mystery was like where could she have
learned any of this? So people started to worry, and
(22:18):
then you know, we kind of just told the story
and and moved on. So a few nights later, we'd
sneak out and there was a vacant apartment across from
my aunt's apartment, so we snuck out, got into the
vacant apartment and we wanted to smoke cigarettes. That was
(22:39):
the whole reason we snuck out. We wanted to s
smoke cigarettes and drink soda at night, and the moms
wouldn't let us do that cause we would stay up
all night. That night for me at least, felt weird
from the beginning. The weather wasn't like it usually is.
It was a little cooler that day, so we snuck
(23:00):
out some glass bottle Coca Cola, brought it.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
Into the vacant spot.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
We went and bought a pack of cigarettes earlier that
day because you could buy cigarettes are like three, and
you know, we had the cigarettes. They lit up cigarettes.
I was younger than them by like five years. My
older cousin, Bilad and my older brother, so I was
younger than them by at least five years, and they
(23:27):
were kind of like trying to be the authority on me,
and I'm like, man, pass it past that shit, bro.
They were like, nah, you're too young. So we having
this argument and then we just hear a screech and
we all stopped and looked at each other. It was
like blood curdling. We all looked at each.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Other, like what the hell's going on. Then boomed, it
happened again.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
So my cousin was like, it's probably two cats fighting,
like two street cats going at it.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
You know.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
They're like they're like fucking ninjas, those street cats. They'll
jump off of shit twelve feet high. They do spins
all kinds and then they be screaming. So we're like, yeah,
for sure, a couple of straight cats. Then it starts
to intensify. Now we're hearing swear words, you know, mixed
(24:20):
in screaming. I'm talking vile shit. I'm not talking like
light swear words like this is shit i'd be embarrassed
to say in front of most people. So now we're
actually really scared. Hair stands up. I'm like, I just
want to go home. I want to just I wanna
(24:43):
get on a plane to Canada at this point, but
you know, keeps going, and then we.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
Start to hear prayer.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
So there's somebody praying, and the prayer keeps getting louder
and louder, and the person.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
Being exerciseless.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
It was getting louder even in the prayer, and it
kept going and going and going, and this went on
for three or four hours, and as soon as the
sun started, the crack. Everything stopped me and it was
like silence, and I wasn't on I mean, I drank
(25:29):
coca cola. I was probably on a sugar rush, but
I couldn't sleep regardless. It was the scariest, like the
sound that I ever heard in my life. And we
couldn't just sneak back into the into my aunt's house
because at this point we knew there was a lot
of like things that could have woke up the house,
(25:52):
so we wanted them to just think we were sleeping.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
So we had to post up in.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
The vacant apartment, and the wind weren't even really set
up properly, so some of the windows were kind of
like six inches eight inches open and we couldn't close them.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
It was like screws. So we're literally having to sit.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
In this room with no furniture, so everything's echoing off
the walls, and we're listening to what I believe to
be a live exorcism. So we decide to not tell anybody.
We decided to keep it kind of like a pack
between us, and probably like five days later, we're outside,
(26:39):
you know, we're like shooting marbles or something, and the
grandma walks out with the little girl, and like it
was like it was like any story that they had
told before about craziness wasn't there. It was just a
grandma her granddaughter walking to the store. I don't know,
(27:04):
if memory serves me right, I think she was even skipping,
you know. So I don't know what I witnessed that night.
I'm not sure, but it was definitely a night that
that I always remember in a sound that I'll never forget.
(27:52):
A
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