S1 Ep23: Unwanted Houseguests
FS 6Astonishing LegendsApr 1, 2025
Summary
This episode dives into chilling childhood experiences of unexplained phenomena in a Canadian family home. Listeners hear about a spectral boy and disembodied voices, which the family initially associated with playful ghosts. The narrative becomes eerie as the spirit of Robert Barber connects to a local mill and possibly the listener's grandfather, raising questions about family ties to the supernatural.
Key takeaways
- 1A childhood filled with unexplained phenomena, including sightings of a spectral boy and disembodied voices.
- 2The family's playful view of their ghostly encounters, initially perceived as a joke.
- 3The dream encounter with the spirit of Robert Barber, linking back to a local mill.
- 4Potential connections between Robert Barber and the listener's grandfather.
- 5The narrative highlights the deep-rooted nature of ghost stories in family lore.
Glossary terms
Source
▸Transcript
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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 Blanket Fortiana as we dig through your intriguing messages to the Astonishing Dead Letter office. Tonight's episode, Unwanted House Guests. This week's letter comes from a listener who wishes to remain anonymous. She grew up just outside of Toronto, and she shares some memories of experiences from her childhood home that she was reminded about while she was listening to our Sally House series. Aha! Well, she does describe a range of phenomena, from objects inexplicably moving to the persistent feeling of being watched, to the same thing that happened to our executive producer, Tess, at the Sally House with hearing unseen voices. Yeah, and it's not just sounds. The whole family repeatedly sees a particular figure around the house. And we're talking about things that are difficult to explain away with just simple rationalizations. Oh, those are the best ones. And the spirit of a particular ghost makes contact with her dad in a dream and even gives his name. A name completely foreign to the family. And when we looked into that and asked her some more questions, that's when things got really strange. Hi, Scott, Forrest, and Tess. I just finished listening to the Sally House episodes, and I'm now thoroughly freaked out. They brought up memories of my childhood that I had totally forgotten about, or maybe repressed, and sent literal chills down my spine. While I've never experienced anything like what Scott recorded, I could identify with a number of the feelings and phenomena he and Tess described. I grew up just outside of Toronto, Canada, in a house that had only one previous occupant and no history of being haunted. But from as far back as I can remember, my entire family would joke about the ghosts to explain the weird things that happened to us there. A lot of it was the mundane sort of stuff that's easy to rationalize. Objects going missing only to turn up months later in a really odd place. Toys or furniture that seemed to move when you weren't looking. Odd feelings of being watched, etc. But all of us, at some point, have seen a little boy out of the corner of their eye. I have a younger brother, and for a while we thought it was just him being mischievous. Until he grew older, and we still saw the little boy. My mom told me once that while she was sorting laundry one day, she was hit in the shoulder with a shirt she had just hung up. As if someone had thrown it at her. And when she turned in that direction, she thought she saw my brother hiding behind the furnace. She thought he was being playful, but when she went to look behind the furnace, nothing was there. As for me, besides seeing the little boy, I've seen black shapes move behind me while looking in a mirror. Or glide across a window and then vanish. But I've also heard things. Most nights growing up, as I started to drift off to sleep, it would start to feel like I was in a crowded room of people talking. I could pick out individual voices now and again, as if someone was closer to me than the rest. And every now and again, I could actually make out what they were saying. It sounded as if I had headphones in, like another person was speaking directly into my head. Not at all like my own inner voice. Most of the time, I could ignore it and go to sleep. But every once in a while, someone would say something right to me, like they were speaking directly into my ear. And it would startle me awake. Sometimes the voice would yell angrily at me, and it would freak me out to the point I had to sleep with a light and radio on. I definitely identify with the feeling of cold water being poured over you, like Tess described. I often played in my own room or in the basement for hours at a time, and usually I was perfectly content. But every once in a while, a feeling would come over me in the middle of whatever game I was playing. It was a sudden awareness of my surroundings, like I was being watched, or that I wasn't alone anymore, and I would go cold and numb. I felt acutely aware that I needed to leave the room I was in. I never stuck around to find out what would happen if I didn't. There were a lot more strange and disconcerting things that happened in that house, but I just wanted to share some of the parallels I noticed when I listened to Tess's experience. We had the distinct feeling that there was more than one entity. Some were tricksters and didn't give off any bad vibes. My dad even spoke to one in a dream once. He told us his name was Robert Barber, so of course we blamed Robert Barber for anything weird after that. But there was at least one that I was sensitive to that felt particularly malicious. It wasn't always there, as if it would come and go. But when it was around, I always felt it. It had a particular presence I could sense. Like how you can sense the individual presence of a family member or close friend. Except this was a cold, uneasy feeling of dread. What really chills me, though, is that I had totally forgotten about all of this until I listened to Tess describe what happened to her at the Sally house. It was such a daily occurrence all through my childhood and teens. But as soon as I moved out, I never experienced any of that again. Okay, so here we are again. We've got the whole family seeing a figure that they think is a little boy out of the corner of their eye. It's something we've talked about on the show so many times already on a few dead letters, actually. And we talked about it on our main show. It always, for us, anchors back to, you know, what's the earliest show where we heard about this on? That's when my friend Mark Brignone was on. He actually came on twice to talk about two different ghost stories that he encountered. One at his home in Woodstock, New York, where his mom would be outside gardening and see a British redcoat up on the tree line in the woods. But if she looked right at him, he wasn't there. But she knew he was there. And so this is a thing that keeps coming up. And it's come up in the dead letter offices as well. And now here we are again. The whole family is like, there's somebody there, but it's a peripheral thing. And I seem to remember an episode where you described how they thought that might work from a physiological standpoint. But whatever the reason of that is, it's interesting to me that they're all seeing this little boy. And the other thing is, they were like, well, it's got to be her little brother, whatever his name is. Because maybe it's about the same height. But then her little brother grew up. He got bigger. It was like not him. They thought maybe he was messing with them. And then they're like, wait, he doesn't even fit the profile anymore. And we're still seeing this thing. Right. Which is, it strikes me as funny. Now, you and I both grew up without any siblings. But in a family like that, if you have the little boy, and of course, part of the mischievousness is like, are you doing this? Do you got to stop it? I'm not doing anything. You know, it's like at some point, it's like, okay, you got to stop this kid. Yeah. You would confront the kid and put a stop to it after so long because it's creeping everybody out. But that's what's kind of fun about the story, too, is that it seems like they didn't really ask too many questions about it or get the boy, you know, like a sit down and say like, hey, I know you're having fun hiding behind the furnace and whatnot. But yeah, don't do that. It's weirding us out. But apparently nobody did. And they just waited for the real boy to grow up. And it's like, okay, we're not seeing him as a tween doing the same thing. The thing is, when you're hanging out in the house, and I know, like you said, I'm an only child, too, but I do have a large family, lots of cousins and stuff like that, that were all younger than me. And there's a thing about when you're in a house and there's lots of family in it, you don't always think about the little person running around or whatever. No, I know. And this happened to me the other day, by the way. I've talked about on our main show and in some of our sponsor ads for the main show, I've talked about and shown on Instagram this kitten that we rescued a few months ago as of this recording. His name is Biscuit because we got him. We were getting breakfast in the drive-thru line at a restaurant, and he was abandoned there. Took him in, whatever. He lives in the house now. He's been with us as of this moment, seven months, I think. Now he's just everywhere, and he's dead silent. He's the perfect predator, as all cats and kittens are. And so unless he's going crazy and making a lot of noise, you might not always see him. And like, for example, he spends a lot of time closed up in our upstairs because he lives mostly in my son's room and his bathroom. That's where the litter box and the food is. And we have two dogs, and we don't kind of trust everybody to hang out alone together when we're not home. And also they play a lot and go crazy, so we keep them separated. But I'll open the door and be like, hey, I'm going downstairs. And he doesn't always run right downstairs because he's happy upstairs, but sometimes he will. But I went downstairs just yesterday morning. I opened the door. I'd been in my office because it's up where my son's room is too. I'm working on our show. Open the door. He's on the bed. And I'm like, oh, you're coming? And he's like, nah, you just sat there. I go downstairs. I go over to the sink. I put some water in a coffee cup, make coffee, turn around. And he is sitting on the couch as though he's been sleeping there looking out the window for hours. Never saw him come down the stairs. And now I'm at this point, too, where I'm seeing him in places where I'm not. And people will tell you this when they have pets. They see him. Oh, I used to see him there after they passed away or something. But I'm at the point where I see a water bottle on the counter out of the corner of my eye. I think it's him sitting there, and I don't think much about it. Then I'd look over, and I was like, oh, that wasn't him. If I didn't look at him directly, I might have been like, oh, yeah, a few minutes ago, Biscuit was sitting there. And the mistake I'm making is that it was a water bottle sitting in a strange place that had the same color as his fur or whatever. Sorry, that was a long walk. But my point is I think I'm seeing him in places that he's not. Sometimes I'll be like, oh, my God, that's Biscuit. And it's like, no, that's a loaf of bread. Biscuit is actually upstairs in his room. So there's a strangeness to that. But I'm seeing when you're living with the other people and whatever, you stop thinking about where everybody is. But like when. Yeah, I was being a little flip, I guess. I was making the point, though, that if it wasn't that extraordinary, the actions, like I said, the kid wasn't hiding and throwing something at you like every time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or jumping out and yelling boo and starting you. That gets old after a while. Right. They would just see the kid running around. Well, the kid's expected to run around the house anyway. You know what I'm saying? So it's not a big deal. He's, oh, that's, I think that's so-and-so. And then, and then it's that same kind of thing. You go downstairs like, oh, no, he's in his room. So who is that upstairs? Who was upstairs? Right. Which I'm doing with a kitten, but hey, people do it with people too. Right. Kent doesn't have loud footfalls. And you would hear small children like to run and they thump. And trust me, I live below several families. You hear the kids. And then the, you hear the Hot Wheels, you hear the three-wheeler going across the floor. Yeah. There's plenty of noise. But the point I'm trying to make here is that it probably wasn't that much of a, something to notice. So until it seemed odd. And so this is my bigger point with all this stuff. Lately, I've had a few small, odd things I've told you about, but they're never tipping the scale of what shouldn't have happened. Now, let me explain that. But first of all, I have thought I've seen things out of the corner of my eye and that what you're talking about is a really cool concept that I think I first read. We, of course, had talked about that for years and people have, you know, said certain things about you can only see them in the corner of your eye. When you turn to look at them directly, they disappear. Or like with Mark's story with his mom, the British red coat was always in the corner of her eye in which he would turn her head or turn her eyes. The red coat image stayed in the corner still, like he was traveling, like it was imprinted onto her eyeball in some fashion. But that concept where I first heard something interesting to explain that, I believe was a conversation online. I think from somebody we know, somebody who listens to the show, I'm sorry, I forgot the name. It was years ago now. And famed, noted ghost hunter, Dale Kaczmarek from the Chicago area. Oh, right. And he's with Ghost Research, GRS president. We've run across him quite a bit when we did Resurrection Mary. Right. That's a name. We've never spoken to him. I would love to one day. But that's somebody, I think, again, in that discussion or somebody heard him or his group explain, it has to do possibly with the length of the rods and cones in the eye and that they are of a different length towards the outer edge of the eye or the iris. And that may get some more information, let's say, into the eye and into the optical nerve. Whereas if you look at it dead on, you don't see anything, but you can, or apparently it's just enough to be able to see it with the, I think, longer rods and cones in the corner of the eye. Now we'll have some opticians say that's totally wrong, but I think that's the concept. It's like, that's fascinating. Okay. There's an explanation. That's the supernatural connected with science. I love that aspect of it. Yes. Yes. So I've thought I've seen some things or just kind of real brief shapes, but it's not enough to make me think that possibly there is some kind of specter following me around or you'll see things. It's like, I thought I, I swear I put this over here and then now it's over here when it's not enough. Like, okay, you thought you left a, a hairbrush in the bathroom. Okay. And now it's on the dresser in the bedroom. Like, well, that's expected. If you live alone and now the hairbrush is in the freezer, you don't think that's, it's even more. That's when it gets strange. Yeah, exactly. It's like with you and I, and we've talked about this story before where we spent a late night, I think going over some stuff at, uh, after recording session at your house, it was a nice night out. We had the iPad, we're sitting on your porch and we'd forgotten and left the iPad out on the railing. And then on the security cam, you could see me leaving. It's, you know, like two in the morning and then the iPad flips by itself off the railing onto the ground, not hurt, not on the corner, didn't break anything, but it didn't make sense with physics. Like it was too far over. It wasn't like balancing halfway. Yeah. I have a video clip of that. I can't remember if I put that on our YouTube page or not. We may or may not have, but the idea is that the brush around it was not moving. There was no wind. I don't see how wind could uplift that anyway. Yeah. And it just didn't make sense. And you see it and it's like, okay, that's weird. And then it just goes to other things that I experienced at your house, which you tend to deny, but it's just that there's some kind of presence there. But in this case, it's like, okay, now you have stuff piling up where it's not only that the ghost or ghostly presence of that little boy is persistent and continuous now that the little brother has grown up. There's other things going on. And then you take that all into a gestalt of, yeah, there's something here going on. And then the fact that the family believes that there's other entities is not just one. And then last thing is that we've talked about the aspect of Sally, the actual little girl ghost. And the idea is that, is it really a little girl? Because we believe, and others do, that some kind of negative entity could pose as a little girl to gain sympathy because it's harmless and innocent to interact with a child, especially a little girl. Like, oh, they're harmless. They're not going to hurt you. Right. And is that the way to get attention or chisel it's way to your brain? The cuter it is, the more danger. That's the paranormal rule. Well, it is one of the, you know, like I said, there's a trickster aspect of like playing hide and go seek. And that could just be a little kid. You know, like I said, if it's a ghost kid, well, he's hiding behind stuff. Kids do that. Yeah. But what is the purpose over at the Sally house? It seems like there's several different facades going on. And there's a gang hanging out. And that's what they always talk about. Like the superior evil being and elementals mixed up with ghosts that are trapped and all that, which, but it's part of what's interesting to me too, her talking about hearing different voices, like in a crowded room, she said, and that somebody would be closer and somebody would be further away, which reminds me of what mediums experience who think that they're communicating with folks on the other side who are maybe trapped and that they're hearing, if you believe any of this at all, but they're hearing these voices and to have ones be closer and further away, that's pretty fascinating to me that she's experiencing that. It's an interesting aspect. Spatial. Right. 3D spatial audio, basically. A friend of ours, and I don't know if I've told you this, I don't have any problem telling you in the audience, I'm not going to name them, of course, but she grew up, she has a bit of the shine to her. She's very intuitive. You could say a little bit psychic, but she had this phenomenon happen to her when she was younger, where she would hear a group of voices and we don't know, or it's never been diagnosed. And certainly how you're going to do that unless you talk to a ghost hunter or medium. But the phenomenon to her was that every once in a while, it would sound like there were a group of voices that she could hear. And it seemed like they were trying to get her attention, but they were all kind of cacophonous or kind of grouped together where the dialogue or the speech was unintelligible to her. It was just kind of, you know, shocking, frightening, annoying. It was just like, I can't understand any of you. And then after she grew up, that kind of went away. And so you wonder, is that just a psychological thing, you know, that like happens to some people and some kids, or was it some kind of shining thing, some kind of, some kind of communication happening when she was younger and her channels were open more, you could say. But I always thought that was fascinating because I was like, well, what did they say? It's like, well, I could never really make out anything. It was just like, they were all yammering at me, nothing angry, I don't think. It was just like, they were all trying to get my attention. It's like, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, I got something to say, but imagine 15, 20 people doing that. Yeah. And for people who haven't heard our main show or our Sally House series, we got an electronic voice phenomenon file recording there that we call File 10. It's got a whole long thing about it. But one of the things that folks have said, I perceived it as aggressive and angry, but it sounds very much like language, but it's unintelligible. But there were a lot of people that listened to that, that said, well, I don't think it's angry. I just think you can't, it's having a hard time making, creating a clear communication. Right. And that, but it does sound like it's trying to talk, but maybe the frustration comes from the inability to present a clear message, which I think is an interesting parallel to what you just said, you know? Yeah. And the fact that I've, I've used it hundreds of times now since that experience and- The recorder that made them. The recorder. And you do get, and people call it the angry man phenomenon with the recorder, that it's just a glitch. It's just a malfunctioning old piece of crap. And so you're going to get that noise that sounds like speech. But again, I'll say to me, it does sound like, because there are things that are more clear with that than others. You'll get a lot of that where it sounds like that angry man voice. But my feeling is that it's just an answer to something I asked because I will be able to make out parts of it that sound like a answer in context. And I don't think it's angry. It's just, I think it's how the ITC phenomenon is happening where it just, and the interference with that device. And then sometimes you hear it over that DR-60 Panasonic recorder and it's pretty clear. It would be like a class A. Yeah. Other times it's crystal clear. Right. So here, again, I think the interesting aspect about this is that she could make out what they were saying, and I would love to have known what they were telling her, not that it's anything revelatory. Yeah. I wonder if she remembers exactly. I have connected with her on email, which you'll hear about in a few minutes, but I can ask her if she remembers any of the specific sort of things. You know, and I think too, it's like, it's a question is, is it, is it earth shattering or is it just sort of mundane chatter? You know, it's like, oh, I forgot my keys. Right. It's more. The sweater is blue. It's like, it's stuff you're not, I'm not going to remember this later, but also I shouldn't be hearing this at all. It's almost creepier if it's mundane. Right, right. And then I was about to wonder that out loud. Is it something mundane? I think usually it is. It's if it's people, it's not like, uh, angelic beings giving you the secrets of the universe if they are past humans. Well, you know, how many humans you run into tell you something earth shattering. So it's usually kind of mundane chatter, but the anger could be in that she's not getting the message. Right. Unless it was something that, you know, she did. I don't think at this point being a, uh, a young person that there's anything like that. Like, uh, you need to solve my murder, you know, like that. Right, right, right. Any of the old tropes. It could be something where there's a frustration, like you were just saying. So that's all very curious. Yeah. And so this is a, uh, house with a lot of activity, I'll say, and different types of it. Yeah. And that's the thing too. You know, she had this sense of dread. She's having this feeling of being watched. It did seem like that there was something malevolent there, which is fascinating to me because like sometimes it's the voices, it's a little boy. It's this thing that feels safe or these things that don't feel, you know, they feel trickstery, but then there's something else. It's watching her. It's making her feel scared. And, and, you know, she went through this whole phase where she forgot about all of this too. That's the other thing I love. The paranormal apathy is in there. She completely forgot about it until she heard the Sally house series and probably file 10 too, which I've always said that like, there's some sort of interesting metadata idea that goes with file 10, you know, again, that's going back to that audio file because people were hearing different things with it. Different things are happening when they listen to it, that sort of thing. So there's that whole part of it. But then I wonder within the paranormal apathy, which we refer to a lot on the main show and on Dead Letter now, where you forget the thing, you completely forget that yesterday you saw a UFO and it was the craziest looking UFO you ever saw. But like now it's the next day and you're at, you know, you're at the sheets picking up a big gulp or whatever, which, sorry, that's a 7-Eleven, not sheets. I don't know if you've heard of sheets, that's an East Coast thing. But there's one more component of this story that's super fascinating to me. And it's almost a little aside because she's talking about all this stuff that she went through, which is pretty intense. But then she also is like, oh, well, my dad too had a dream. And she implies that it didn't give off any bad vibes. But she says her dad had a dream where he spoke to a ghost in the dream and the ghost said his name was Robert Barber. And then they would always blame Robert Barber for anything weird after that. And so as we were prepping this story to get it recorded and doing, you know, light cursory research on these stories, which we always do, I was just like, you know what, I'm just going to look at where this person is from, which is Toronto, Canada. And I'm going to look up the name Robert Barber, which seems like a pretty common name. And I'm probably going to come up with nothing. And so I start searching around in the various places and these articles start coming up about a mill. And so I was looking at the mill and I was like, oh, this is, you know, it's a rundown mill. It's on a river outside of Toronto, you know, not in Toronto proper, but a little ways west. I actually want to read part of this article that I found on this. This was written by Ted Brown, a writer for the IFP.ca. And it was published in 2011, August of 2011. And it talks about a paranormal researcher, Kim Hadfield of the Halton Paranormal Group, who apparently did a paranormal investigation of a place called the Barber Mill. So the Barber Mill ruins, they're at the corner of Maple Avenue and River Drive in Campbellville, Canada, which is again in Ontario. And she talks about, I could feel there's some activity there. It was very typical sort of paranormal investigation. But one of the things that is fascinating about this is that this mill was founded by the Barber Brothers, and it was a paper mill, I believe, originally. And it was a historic location. And so it had been written about many, many times over the years in Canada, and specifically Toronto. So then I went over to our newspapers.com subscription, and I found this article, which I clipped from the Toronto Star. This was published in July of 2004, and it's called A Site Worth Saving. And it's talking about a development that's supposed to be going there. A $75 million facelift is aimed at turning the old Barber Mill into a heritage site similar to the distillery district in downtown Toronto. And so what's happening is this developer had acquired the land, a big company had acquired the land, was planning to build all these condos and all kinds of stuff, and restore parts of the mill, but probably tear down good parts of it. And according to a second article here, it says, Barber Mill created Papertown. In quotes, the history of the Barber Mill, this was written by Brian Dexter, same paper, same date. The history of the Barber Mill goes back to 1854, when brothers William, James, Joseph, and Robert Barber, immigrants from County Antrim, Ireland, established a paper mill on the Credit River. In a few years, it became an important maker of fine rag paper, and in 1869, James obtained sole ownership. So, and the article explains, you know, how it started out and how prominent it was. So I just thought this was really interesting. So the next thing I was wondering was like, well, God, could this be the Robert Barber of the Barber Brothers from the mill? And so then I wrote to the person who sent the story, and again, she wanted to remain anonymous, so I'm not using her name. And I said, is Robert Barber, like, when I found this article, I thought, oh, this is just in the zeitgeist there. Everybody knows who this guy is, because this mill's kind of famous, and that was the joke. She didn't say it in the article specifically, but we said Robert Barber did it, because everybody knows Robert Barber's a ghost, and that's what I thought. It was like a cultural touchstone or something. And I was like, have you ever heard of Robert Barber, or, you know, has your dad? And so I wrote her an email, and she wrote me back, and I said, tell me more about Robert Barber. And she said, okay, and by the way, this is why we call it the dead letter office. She sent her letter to us in 2018. So pretty recent for us. Yeah, for us. But we dug it out, and she had forgotten even, you know, the details of the story she sent. So I had sent it back to her, which happens sometimes. We're like, hey, it's five years, six years later, we're going to read your letter. So she goes, I remember writing about the little boy my whole family kept seeing, but I completely forgot that I also mentioned Robert Barber. I'm spooked all over again now. How good job. Newspaper clippings, which I sent to her, are completely new to me. I had no idea our family joke could actually have a real life or paranormal connection. And here's where it gets really interesting. She says, while I've never lived in the Georgetown district, which I guess is where this mill is, my grandfather was a commercial real estate developer in the 80s, and a number of his buildings still stand all over Toronto and the surrounding area. He was long retired by the time of these newspaper articles, the ones I sent, but I'm spooked all the same. My dad would have had that dream sometime between 2003 and 2008, which I remember because of some of the circumstances surrounding it. I'm going to forward the articles to my family and see what they think and see if my dad can remember any more details from the dream. My folks still live in that house, so I'll ask if there's been any unusual activity since we kids moved out. As far as I'm aware, the name Robert Barber has no cultural significance in Toronto. I've only ever heard that name mentioned in reference to my dad's dream. It was such a strange and specific detail to remember from a dream, which is why it stuck with us. We didn't really discuss it. The way his name came up was always something like, Mom, I can't find my keys anywhere. I swear I just had them. Dad or one of the kids, Robert Barber must have taken them. So that's the end of her letter back to us. I do want to thank her for getting back to me so quickly about this. This is a fascinating story to me. I like the Robert Barber connection. It makes me wonder about the voice. And maybe he's upset because his mill that him and his brothers started is about to be torn down or developed. And then on top of that, there's a developer connection in her family. Right, right. I was not expecting that when I started looking into this. And it seems like a strange coincidence to me. No, that's why we love stories with real world connections and context, because it adds a little something, of course. That's what I'm saying, is that when things are more random, it's harder to, I don't know, give them a, not a label, but you know what I'm saying, like categorize them in your mind of like, what's going on here? Am I really seeing things? Or is it just a play of light and shadows? And I'm interpreting my mind that it is something when it isn't. But when you take all this together, it's starting to sound more like the Sally house, like a portal house, like a thin place. Yeah. It's a little bit of a train station there. People are coming in and out. It's like also what she said about the dark negative entity. It's like, it wasn't always there. It just kind of came and went. Yeah. But there was a distinct feeling that was different from the other types of spirit interaction. I think sometimes also it's not so much, we misinterpret it. Like when your keys go missing, I don't think it's something playing a joke. It's maybe it's a little like the sixth sense. I love that scene. It chokes me up every time, but he's talking about grandma to his, his mom, Tony Collette. Yeah. And he says, grandma, you know, she's really sorry about the brooch in which you can't find it. Cause remember in the movie, she's like, where is it? Stop hiding. I need that. You know, and he says, she's really sorry, but she just likes having it and holding it sometimes. Right. Right. And so it's not to be, to play a trick. It's just that somebody picks it up and looks at it and who knows how it works. The mechanics work on the other side. And now it's just someplace else. Yeah. It's now in the kitchen. Yeah. Yeah. We're in a place unexpected, but it really wasn't a joke. It's like things could get misinterpreted, but I, I, in this aspect here, there are different entities traveling through that house. And so the little boy may just be a little boy who has some kind of connection in the afterlife to that house. And then the dark entity is something else that just makes an appearance occasionally because it's easier to get in and out of that place. And then you have the crowd of people and then you have Robert Barber. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a, perhaps a place. I think also that's my feeling about the Sally house and that for whatever reason, and we've looked into the reasons, it seems to be more of a portal, easier type of a place for a disparate interaction. Well, I would normally say your name here, but we're keeping you anonymous as per your request. But it sounds like your family and your parents are still living there in the grand central station of paranormal and ghost activity in the Toronto region. And somehow there's a connection to construction. Thank you so much for sending your letter into the 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-Wendell 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. 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