S1 Ep1: Depends Who’s Looking

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It matters that CVS is here to fill your prescriptions and here to fill your craving for a tasty and, yeah, healthy snack. At CVS, we're proud to serve your community because we believe where you get your medicine matters. So visit us at CVS.com or just come by our store. We can't wait to meet you. Store hours vary by location. The views and opinions expressed by hosts and listeners on the Astonishing Dead Letter office are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Astonishing Legends Productions, the Astonishing Legends Network, or any affiliated entities or guests. When something unexplainable happens to you, it can make you feel isolated or alone. But trust us, you're not. For over a decade, you've been sending your strange stories to Astonishing Legends. And now it's time for our fellow legenders to hear them, too. Join us weekly in the vault beneath Blanket Fortiana, which we call The Astonishing Dead Letter Office. Tonight's episode, it depends who's looking. This is it, folks. The very first episode of The Astonishing Dead Letter Office. We've been working on getting this produced for many, many months now, and we're excited to finally bring you our new weekly show from the depths of the Blanket Fortiana Vault. That's like a disorganized basement workshop in your great-grandpa's 100-year-old house. Well, I think there is a wet bar, though, right? That's true. It is greatly, vastly understocked, but I think it's there. It's the perfect place to store all of the stories you've been sending in over the years, and on top of that, it's always cool down here. That it is. And here's what to expect. We'll aim for weekly, year-round episodes. The format is shorter than Astonishing Legends, but length may vary based on the letter. For example, tonight's letter is one of the longer ones, but it's October 29th, so that makes sense. Sometimes Forrest will read the letter, sometimes I will. And finally, for this show to work, we will need to hear from you, dear listeners. Check the closing credits for the new email address to send your stories. It's a new one, and unlike our older inboxes, we'll be monitored with alarming regularity. All right, enough of that. This cold open is already twice as long as these will be in the future. What's on tap for tonight, sir? Well, our first letter comes from Jeff, who formerly ran the hugely successful doggy Instagram account, Harlow and Sage, with his wife. They sent this to us back in 2023 for Halloween, and it wound up in the dead letter office. But it's a great story, so we're going to share it here tonight. Yes, the pups Harlow and Sage have passed on since then, but there are new furry faces on their Insta, which still has over 1.6 million followers. So check that out if you're a dog lover and haven't seen it yet. But tonight, we're talking about something a little darker. It would seem Jeff and his wife have a ghost problem. Indeed, and get this, as of this dead letter, they were still living in the house despite years of paranormal activity. My name is Jeff. My wife and I run the Instagram Harlow and Sage, and we've been listening to Astonishing Legends for years. We're big fans of the show, and we wanted to tell you about a pretty odd experience that we had when we bought a house about four years ago. It was the perfect home in the perfect neighborhood, and when we walked through it, it already felt like home. It was such an odd feeling, but we were super excited to move in, but the owners were staying out of the country, which delayed our move in, and dates with movers. It is super important to tell you that I've never had an experience quite like this in my life, and I'm still trying to understand it. It's definitely hard to talk about with someone thinking you're crazy, so it's easier telling it like this. We received the keys on a Thursday, and the movers weren't scheduled until Saturday morning. To save time and money, we decided to make load after load in our cars with everything we could transport ourselves. We were so excited, and the first night, we did this until midnight. My wife was super tired, but I decided to make one more run. By the time I pulled in, it was about 1 a.m., and I began to unload my last trip of the night. I can't explain the feeling, but something was off. I walked in, and it felt so much darker than it should have felt. I turned on all the lights close to the stairs, but honestly, it felt like someone was always behind me. It was making my skin crawl, and I almost left, but I really wanted to unload my books into the closet upstairs. As I walked up the stairs, it felt like electricity running through my body, but also like the darkness closed in around me until I was curled up on the stairs and couldn't see a thing. I felt like I was drowning in it, or like I had to scream to get it off. There was a feeling of complete dread, and when I said, Get off me! It was like the room was normal again. I never felt something like that, and felt like I was being pushed out of consciousness. I hurried and took the load to the closet, and unloaded the rest on the garage counter and left. But it didn't stop there. It was late July, and our first day and night there, the weather was clear. Nothing strange happened until we went to bed. But then we heard what sounded like scratching outside the door, and banging coming from the patio and basement. Neither of us could sleep that night, but we were both afraid to get out of bed and check it out. I didn't really bring it up to my wife, because she doesn't really believe in the paranormal. But the next morning, when we went downstairs, our patio door was open, and our furniture was all tossed around the room. It literally looked like we were robbed, but nothing was missing. As time went by, more and more strange things happened. We started smelling strange smells around the house, and there were bugs everywhere that shouldn't have been there. We had to call an exterminator to deal with the problem. There was a smell in the basement that was indescribable. I personally ripped the carpet up down there to put down new flooring and see if it would help. I remembered that while I was doing this, I could see my wife out of the corner of my eye sitting on the stairs. But when I turned to look at her, nothing was there. I thought I was seeing things. I know people might say, oh, it was radon gas or carbon monoxide poisoning, especially since we had to replace our furnace and water heater, but those things were not a factor. In October of that year, things intensified further. We would watch TV in bed until we fell asleep, and then wake up to make sure and turn everything off, including the lights. Then later, we would wake up to the TV blasting, and all of the lights on. At one point, the speakers blasted out what sounded like a scream. But at that time, everything was turned off. My wife is afraid of nothing, but even she was starting to get shaken by things. At one point, I was so convinced we weren't alone that I asked out loud that, if anything is here, could you turn off the lamp in the room? Not only did it turn the lamp off, but the light bulb flashed and burned out instantly and had to be changed. Later that week, I was awakened by my wife screaming, and she told me an orb that looked like a big cell was hovering over my head. I was dead asleep when that was happening. Night after night, I had a recurring dream of a black figure that radiated hate. It was such raw anger that I would get into fights with it. Things got more and more intense. I could feel a rush of electricity while walking down hallways like something was running up behind me. My electronics and computers would just turn off. I called a friend of mine who told me the minute he answered my call, his power went out. It was so hard to talk about this chain of events that, even though I reached out to some people, I never really followed through with an investigation. Then my brothers and family started to witness things at family events like Halloween, where they would mock what was going on, and immediately after that, we would have a blackout like it, whatever it was, was listening. Then in early November, I saw something I'll never be able to explain. We had taken a gift to a neighbor and were walking back home, when my wife said someone was in front of our house. I ran toward the house because I could see this tall figure that looked as if it was looking for us. Looking at it was like looking into the sun. It hurt to look at it, and it was also very blurry and hard to make out. It was like looking at something we were not meant to see. It was like a tall, bluish figure that jerked when it moved. It was so blurry that it was hard to make out its movements. Eventually, it went out our back gate. I was dumbfounded and couldn't talk. My wife just stared at me. We went inside the house and just sat down, but neither one of us spoke, until finally my wife said, maybe we should talk about what we'd just seen. Her perception of it was completely different than mine. She said she saw a fleshy, naked, tall human being, but what I saw was blue and different. After that, things died down and eventually stopped entirely. I'll never understand what happened or what it wanted. A friend of mine contacted the family before us to ask if anything weird happened to them, but they said no. Nothing more happened for about five years, until very recently. We actually had a son, and we adopted several dogs, as you might imagine, from our Instagram, Harlow and Sage. My wife and son were dead asleep with our dogs, and our door was shut, until a couple of incredibly loud bangs woke all of us up. The dogs were all barking, and I ran out to see if someone was in our house. No one was there. That was the only thing that's happened recently. I know I'll never understand what has happened to us, but at this point, I'm just hoping that whatever it is will leave my family alone. Wow. That's an intense story. It was a good one to start the dead letter office with. It's probably as long as these will get, but it's very intriguing. It pulled me in, and also I have an adorable new puppy Instagram to follow, which is great. And this story, there was a lot of things about this that jumped out at me. One of the first things was the horror, the absolute horror, of trying to move your house one carload at a time, because I have been through that. I thought it was the best idea. My wife and I moved a couple of blocks, and we were like, we could just take stuff back and forth. And it's like, after a couple of trips, you're like, oh my God, what the hell was I thinking? So, three blocks. Well, the moving part of it, a lot of these elements also speak to a lot of commonalities that you'll hear with various hauntings and infestations and a spirit oppression. You could see on Paranormal Survivor, shows like that. One that reminded me of, though, was the Conjuring House. And that when you move into a place, you know, one that's maybe a little older, I don't know if we got a sense of how old this place was. And not that it makes a difference. It could be a brand new house. It could be the land. It could be the people. As we know, there's several things going on, and we may not have the answers without doing a full investigation here of what was in that place. But there are a lot of themes that kind of ring true to a lot of other stories, and some that were unique to this one, which was why it was such a great story. But moving into a place, you're disturbing the energy that's there. And like the Conjuring House, you can talk to the family that moved in after the Perones, and like, well, nothing happened to us. We've been there 30 years, and we ran a daycare out of it. Except the time that all the dishes rattled in their cabinets, and the table in the kitchen moved by itself. But other than that, nothing really happened. And so it's people specific, I think, to who's moving in there, and what's receiving them. But here, it's an invasion into something that may have been there a very long time, and now there's new energy, and it's reacting to that. As we'll say, with all these cases, yeah, if you dig at Skinwalker Ranch, if you move into a place, you redecorate, you remodel, you're going to kick some stuff up. Yeah. And I mean, how about that moment when his wife said she saw something, who, by the way, at the time, didn't believe in the paranormal. She wakes up screaming, he's got something over his head. Right. Looks like a big cell. I mean, are we talking, like, that sounds kind of Star Trek-y from the 60s, but, like, whatever it is, it's, like, hovering over, like, The Companion, one of my favorite episodes. Okay. It's kind of, like, mitochondrial thing, which I think I've brought up before. But, like, what is that thing doing? A couple of things that reminded me, personally, I've seen photos of a place where I used to work, and the building manager was, again, clearing out a bunch of office furniture and different stuff out of storage, one of the old offices. And he took some photos just for reasons of leasing it to a new company. And he said, I found these, like, these little dots that appear in the digital photo I took. Can you tell me what these are? And he, we blew up the photo. And, yeah, they're probably, it could be dust very well because, again, you've moved out, they just cleaned. But these were pretty prominent. And I know you used to make fun of orbs all the time. But when we digitally blew them up, they did look like cells. Like, there was an outer ring. There was something inside that looked like nuclei, several of them. And if you look at it, and it's pareidolia, I realize. But it looked like there were little faces in there. Okay. But I know what the cell means. I know what that description, that's another thing that kind of hit home with me, is that I know what she's describing. And I wonder now how she feels about the paranormal. Because I love it when people say, I don't believe in any of this at all. And those are usually the folks that get rocked the hardest. Yeah. Like, what happened to you? Not that you didn't believe in that, but when it slaps you in the face. In that moment, though, in that house that shall remain unnamed, I didn't believe anything was going to happen there. And I was wrong. You don't have to deny it all. It's just that this shouldn't be happening. And then it does. And like I said, people who firmly don't believe in it, if you're going to maintain that, then you have to go on pretending to yourself that none of this is real or has happened. Or something else just to quiet your own nerves. But another thing about this story that I found interesting was the figure that appeared at the door, which they also described differently. And also the cell or the orb, I've come to believe over the years is, could be the blank form or a shape for something that has no shape, or that's the shape it is, of something that's a spirit. And like we were talking about with the Beast of Bray Road and Linda Godfrey describing things that showed up on the trail cam when they left out roadkill carcass, that a mist appeared. But maybe that mist to other people looks like a dogman, or it looks like something else. And the orb is just the shape it takes. Yeah, they were seeing two completely different things. That's what blew me away about this. It's like what he saw and what she saw, like she saw something human-like, and he's seeing some crazy, like when he was thinking about it jerking around and being a bluish form, you know, you're just, you're thinking of like these weird, almost Jacob's Ladder type of special effects for people who have seen that movie. Just, you know, it's scary. Yeah, there's one of the scariest X-Files, I think, where there is a, some kind of insectoid spirit being or some kind of entity. And when you see it, it skitters around. It's very shaky. Oh, yeah. It's darker than dark, and it's skittering around that office building, and that's the form it takes. But when you look at it, it looks like a human being, until you get the sight, and then you can see what it really is, as Fox Mulder does eventually. And then your label is crazy, because you can see it, nobody else can. So in this, though, I wonder if that thing that showed up, and I'm also a big believer in gut feelings about these kind of things, when they're just so indescribable and just ineffable, like you can't really explain it until you feel it. That they felt like this thing was looking for them. So this being that showed up that was tall and naked, perhaps, or just a bluish kind of entity, was it there to kind of quell things, quiet things down for them a little bit? Did it show up to help is what I'm wondering. That's right. You don't always know if the thing you're looking at is the thing that's keeping the worst stuff at bay. The other thing that's interesting to me, too, is at the end when they talk about they woke up from the loud banging and everything. And a lot of times you think, with me, I've mentioned on our main show before that I have exploding head syndrome, although nothing's happened in a long time, thank God. But you think, oh, well, that was in my head. I'm just waking up. It was a dream. I heard a noise, and I woke up. But in this case, their dogs were awake and barking, going crazy. So it's like whatever's going on in this instance of an encounter is existing in the real world for all of the creatures, all of the souls in this house right now. Yeah, and it's a very somewhat typical progression, too. Like things ramp up. They start off small. They ramp up, and there's a crescendo, and then a period of non-activity for a while. And then it doesn't really ever go away, or it can come back. But you do wonder how many spirits or entities are interacting in that location. And it sounds like there could be several. And it doesn't mean it's always bad. But that's just maybe how they express themselves. Or like if you were sneaking around someone's house, and you bumped into a table and knocked over a vase, and it made a crash. If you weren't prepared for that and woke you up in your sleep, you would think, like, that's horrible. There's an intruder in the house, where it could just be Uncle Joe getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night who's staying over. Yeah. You don't really know the intentions, other than the gut feeling of Jeff was that one of these things radiated hate. Another common feature of some of these. It's not all. But there could be several different things going on, and keeping each other in check or interacting. And that's also what you hear about sometimes when people go to do a cleansing in a house. They get rid of a spirit that was actually trying to help. And then activity ramps up. So it sounds like they haven't done anything yet. They could be fine for another 20 years. Who knows? But definitely something is there. Well, when we reached back out to Jeff to confirm we had permission to share this, part of his response was, If someone hears this, they might know what this could have been. I think the best and worst things have happened to us in this house. I do want to say first and foremost, stuff like this never happened to us before. And now that we have a two-year-old, hopefully it never will again. Well, Jeff, we hope that's the case too. And if anyone writes to us with ideas about what may have been going on, we'll connect you with them. Happy Halloween, everyone. And Jeff, thank you for sending your story into the Astonishing Dead Letter Office. The Astonishing Dead Letter Office is hosted by Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess and is executive produced by Tess Feifel. The show is edited and mixed by Sarah Voorhees-Wendel at VW Sound. The theme is based on the Astonishing Legends theme by Judson Crane at Founder Music, arranged by Alan Carissia, who composes all the other music in the show. Tommy Beaver Design created the logo. The announcer is John Bolton. That's me. Stories are lightly edited for length, content, and readability, but otherwise presented as they're sent to us. We're always looking for more dead letters, so if you have a story of your own you'd like to share, email it to deadletteroffice at astonishinglegends.com. Please include how you would like to be credited. First name only? First name last initial? Anonymous? A pseudonym? Let us know. Due to the number of emails coming in, we often cannot respond, but we do read them all. No part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Production. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of, or artificial sweeteners are doing all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. You shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious. And that's what makes Aloha stand out. Aloha protein bars nail the delicious and nutritious. 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