- My grandmother, whom I loved dearly, would've been dismissed as being an evil, would've been, would've been castigated as a witch if they knew what we talked about.

Knew what knowledge she was passing on to me.

I don't think my grandmother was a witch.

I think that she had a particular map of the world, and she, and people, and people, oftentimes, even the people who came to her desperate when she couldn't help them, that's when they turned that they, they'd use that witch term, that evil term they would throw that they would throw that back at her, even though, you know, maybe five minutes before they're on bended knee as supplicants asking for the witch to help them.

- Welcome to Forum.

I'm Mina Kim.

Spooked, your favorite podcast about the mysterious, the inexplicable, the supernatural.

It's back for another scary season and host, Snap Judgment's.

Glynn Washington is with me once again to hear your stories about the encounters and events that left you with the chills, or wondering if you could believe your eyes.

Glynn, it's so good to have you back.

I, I really love the last time we did this.

- It's so good to be back.

- Our producer, Caroline, actually pulled one of the listener calls from the show We did two years ago on Friday the 13th.

It was from listener Sophia in Albany.

- I have a story that happened about 10, 15 years ago.

My twin sister and I were traveling in Europe, and we were in Vienna in Austria staying in the, all the hotels are old, obviously, and we were sleeping right next to each other kind of European style.

And she got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and it woke me up.

So I was like, Ugh.

You know, I see the light on.

She comes back to bed and I close my eyes and I see this person like in my mind's eye, it's dark in the room.

He is not, you know, you open your eyes, they're not there.

But in your mind's eye, I see this evil, evil person, like a man in the like right hand corner of the room.

Mm.

And so I just closed my eyes back again and I said, get outta here.

Leave immediately.

You know, I don't believe in these things, but I thought maybe that would work.

So it did.

So the next morning we're having breakfast and I said, oh, you know, why'd you wake me up last night?

And she said, oh, I had this really bad dream.

And I was like, what?

What was your dream?

She's like, well, there was this guy in our room and he was really evil.

I said, I swear to you, this is true.

And I said, where was he in the room?

And she's like, he was in that corner.

And I'm like, oh my gosh.

- Alright, listeners, if you had something weird happen to you or a scary story, we'd love to hear it.

You can tell us by calling (866) 733-6786 by emailing forum@kqed.org or finding us on our social channels.

We're on Discord, blue sky, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads at KQED Forum.

So I loved that particular one that Caroline pulled because Sophia says two things in it that made me think about what you've said in the past about what makes a "Spooked" story.

So Sophia said, I don't believe in these things.

And Sophia also said, I swear to you this is true.

- Yeah.

So "Spooked," we started this kind of an offshoot of Snap Judgment, got to- on the first season of Snap Judgment, we got to Halloween, so what are we gonna do?

It's like, well, let's treat these stories like we treat any other.

And Snap is not about celebrities or anything like that.

We want real people with real stories.

But we also for this kind of had the instinct, I don't want someone who's got on a bunch of beads or, you know, a tarot card necklace or anything like that, because I wanna find stories from people who are not of this world who were surprised themselves.

And it was crazy because what happens is, you know, all of us, almost every person you talk to, they have one or two of these stories.

And oftentimes they don't share them, they don't share them with their spouse, they don't share 'em with their, with their best friends.

They don't share 'em with anyone.

And what happened when we did the first episode is that it was almost like permission.

And this dam felt like it broke, that people started sharing their stories of this world.

I sure I had a few of my own.

And, and, and the, the deal is I get all these questions about, you know, what does it mean?

What does it mean?

What does it mean?

I have no idea.

I don't have anything I'm trying to sell you.

I don't have any elixir, I don't have any of that kind of stuff.

I, all I have is these stories that really impacted me.

And what's interesting about these stories to me is that believe them, don't believe them, whatever, people make life decisions on these stories, they sometimes impact who they marry, where they live, where they move, when they retire, what they do, how they see themselves in the world.

These are oftentimes, these stories are the most important stories they have are oftentimes these stories are connected to the most important things.

And those most important, like our culture right now, we don't have a good place to talk about the things that do matter.

Things like, where'd granny go?

What's gonna have to mean when I pass on?

Where's that puppy dog we have?

These, we don't have a place to talk about this stuff.

We don't have a place to talk about the big questions, except every once in a while, you know, if you're lucky, you might gather around a campfire or you have, you know, some kind of safe space, some kind of ritual space where the stories that you don't normally tell are free to come out and without the judgment and all that sort of thing, where you can kind of look at the fire and not the person and hear what they're really trying to say.

And we want to make our own campfire, our own sort of safe space where you can tell us these stories, these things that mean something to you.

And what's great about it is this, again, Some of the stories that you hear, you say, you know, we're all, we're rational people here.

This is the Bay Area, this is technology, this is science.

And that's cool.

But you can have that rationality and at the same time hear someone tell their story and think, ah, they're not lying.

We can hold several ideas in our head at the same time.

We, we are that, which, you know, we still have a couple things on AI for at least a couple minutes that we can still do that, that the machine learning can't do.

We can hold these contradictory ideas in our head at the same time and we can go places with, with these people.

And so I love, I'm, I'm loving that, you know, people call in and such, but these stories themselves, it's amazing again, how much they tell us about a person.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Actually, I feel like we should talk about the first story then of this season, which is called Dead Battery.

Do you wanna say anything about it?

- No, no, I won't.

- Before we listen to a clip.

Yeah.

- This is a story and kind of like this season, it, the idea this story takes place in the south.

And the idea that you can have places that were drenched in the types of horror that happen in areas of the South and then not have a repercussion, an echo, a, a memory that's attached to that spot sometimes come out and sometimes come out in the most unexpected ways.

That's kind of what this story's about.

- Yeah.

Let, let me read the a little bit from the episode description.

So Rameen is a civil war sites tour guide.

And his company asks him to do an overnight ghost tour, which involves giving the guests so-called ghost hunting tools his coworkers made with Radio Shack bits and bobs that can grab radio frequencies and give guests an experience.

Rameen thinks the so-called spirit boxes are garbage.

And he kind of thinks the paying guests are suckers, but he agrees to chaperone them anyway because the pay is pretty good.

And he goes and checks on them occasionally, or comes in when they need him, let's listen.

- I get summoned by one of the groups.

They say, Hey, we're having trouble with our spirit box.

It's telling us that the battery's dead.

It's saying battery dead through the speaker.

And this is unusual because there is a battery indicator on the box, and I can see that the battery's full.

But if they're telling me that the battery's dead very well, I have a pocket full of AA batteries.

So I go ahead, I pop the back off the spirit box, put some new batteries in there.

I can see still that the battery indicator says that it's full.

And I hand it back to them and I turn to walk away.

No sooner have I done so, then they call me straight back and they say, the batteries are dead again.

And I just got this weird feeling, I know that these batteries are not dead.

I know they're good.

And sure enough, the, the radio scanner, which is really all that this device is says clear as day, battery dead.

The voice coming through the machine, it's a male voice is clear, it's strong.

It is not like the snippets of speech that sometimes we hear from this device as it's cycling through radio frequencies.

There, there's an urgency to the words.

- That's the first story from the new season of Spooked called Dead Battery.

You know, the thing you were saying earlier about how people will make big life decisions based on moments like this that they have, that they share.

It made me think that these stories, not only do they kind of break a dam and give permission for other people to share those stories, but it must also reveal some deeper truth in themselves that they maybe were aware of and were operating sort of unconsciously around, - Yeah, these stories, now, mind that Spooked stories.

It's not like I saw a ghost that's not gonna get it.

We're looking for stories that have an emotional import.

And so these stories are stories that mean something to someone.

And oftentimes that supernatural element happens when you are desperate.

When you are in the middle of a panic, when you need something, at least, at least when you want something, that's when maybe something will happen.

And I'll, and I'll say this as well, Spooked, it's in the way that Snap Judgment is about empathy, storytelling.

Spooked is about wonder.

And it's about making the universe about, about showing the universe as maybe bigger than we imagine it to be.

It's not necessarily about, oh, scary, scary, which we have some of that as well.

But it's about, oh my goodness, this is a, oftentimes the episodes unfold like a real life twilight zone that I see something, I've experienced something, I'm hearing something that shouldn't be here, and it's making me question my map of the universe.

And it happens oftentimes when we are pressed in a way that we're not normally being pressed.

- Yeah, you'll have to listen to that episode listeners to hear how Rameen has changed by this experience.

More after the break with Glynn Washington.

This is Forum.

I'm Mina Kim.

And welcome back to Forum listeners.

We're talking this hour with Glynn Washington, host and executive producer of Snap Judgment and Spooked podcasts.

And because it's the season, we're talking about Spooked, we're talking about the encounters with the unknown, the things that make you rethink.

'cause Glynn says, your map of the world change you forever take you to new places.

Have you ever had something happen to you that you couldn't explain?

Have you ever made a bargain listeners with the devil so to speak, or been tempted to, or tell me what you like about this season?

Some people love it, some people don't.

And you can email forum@KQED.org.

Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, or threads at KQED Forum.

And you can call us at (866) 733-6786 Sarah from Redwood City is on the line.

Sarah, join us, you're on.

- Hi.

Thank you so much.

I have a story from about 20 years back.

I was walking down the street with two friends and all of a sudden I just blurted out "fire" out of nowhere.

And we all chuckled and couldn't make sense why I, you know, why I would say "fire" at that moment.

And as we were walking by, we passed a corner and around the corner there was a car parked and a guy was pouring some gasoline out of a canister into the car.

And as we walked by, that canister caught fire and we just ran off.

And, and it seemed as if I was somehow, you know, as if I had some prior notice that this was going to happen, because not even five minutes passed between that moment when I blurted out "fire" and we walked by something that, that caught on fire.

So, and, and I mean, I'm normally a very rational person and I'm not, I don't believe in supernatural, but this, this is just one experience that somehow stayed with me and I can't make sense of.

- Yeah.

And again, you sound just like somebody who tells a Spooked story, somebody who does not think of themselves as someone who would normally believe in these kinds of things.

So I think you were starting to touch on this, Glynn, before the break, but talk about why you've named this new season "The Crossroads."

- The crossroads is a reference to kind of a liminal space where all types of different cultures have this time period and this space oftentimes that you would approach for whatever it might be, when you want to approach the supernatural element of your particular belief system.

African American culture specifically has a, a notion of a crossroads being a place where two roads intersect as that, that's being a place of power.

You'll see this now in like an old slave homes.

You'll see the symbols for this.

They come from Africa of this crossroad, this crossing place.

This crossing place is where a lot of you can meet a deity, you can meet, you can, it can ask a boon favors, but you also have to be very, very careful there.

And this, that was the idea.

We wanted to dive into it because the more we looked into it, this is not just an African American construct, this happens all over the world.

That there becomes this place.

Where do you go to beseech this other side?

Where do you go to meet this power?

Where do you go to call upon it?

And what do you have to give?

I mean, when, and oftentimes I think that, and we, so we, the the season starts off with a retelling of the Robert Johnson story.

Mm.

Robert Johnson is, a lot of people might know it was a guitar player who was reputed to have gone to the crossroads to make a deal with a spirit, and all of a sudden could play like nobody's business.

And the price that he paid.

I believe he died when he was 26 years old.

And we, this, it starts off with the retelling of that story to kind of help us frame the season.

This is what we're talking about.

This is where you go, this is this liminal space.

It's the center of so many stories.

And we want to take people there in a lot of different aspects around the world this season.

- We have a, a little clip of this moment when it seems like Robert is desperate to try to almost take back that that bargain that he made Bobby, as you call him, let's, let's listen to it.

- Starlight shown bright enough to read by, no one from miles down either stretch of the road then "Hello."

Bobby spun around to see the shadow man walking toward him.

Only thing kept him from screaming was his mission.

Yes, yes sir.

Yes sir.

So my mama's sick, doctor might have, some, some medicine for, for to make her better.

Bobby kept his head down.

Don't look in his eyes, only take what you come for.

I I brought you my, my guitar and trade.

It's a fine guitar.

It it, it's real fine.

Real, real fine.

Bobby lifted the instrument outta the cardboard box he still carried it in, held it out to the man.

It just, it just needs sprangin is all Thought maybe he might have some, some medicine and trade - Again from the year's first episode of the "Spooked" season called the Crossroads.

And so, you know, at the crossroads, as you say, you could meet a deity, but it sounds like, and you used the word earlier, desperation.

The desperation brings out something that may not have your best interest at heart.

Can you talk about the connection between desperation and making a bargain with the devil?

- Absolutely.

I mean, I, well again, a bargain with the devil is not, not what we're talking about here.

We, I don't know who that is, that the, and then you think about the African American tales.

Yeah.

That wasn't a devil.

- Yeah.

- That was, it was something, it was a spirit, something sort of a tricks or spirit sometimes.

But the devil was kind of a construct that was put on things later on.

- Yeah.

I should say so to speak.

Like not.

- Yeah.

Well, yeah, not exactly we, that's what we talked, but that, that's how it's been popularized.

Let's deal with the devil.

This is about, maybe not with the devil, maybe with somebody, maybe someone better, maybe with someone worse, but someone that doesn't necessarily have your best interest.

They have their own agenda.

And the, I I'm sorry, the, the, the question like what is this about?

How do you get there?

- Yeah.

What and the desperation.

Yeah.

- You don't go to these people unless you're desperate.

'cause you know that the bargain might not be in your favor.

One of, one of the stories that I tell on Snap, I talk about a lot actually, is this idea that my grandmother put in me early on, and she was- My grandmother... She was a seer of a type.

And people would come from miles around to ask her for her, for her power, for her knowledge.

And they only came though when the doctor was out of options.

When the pastor couldn't tell 'em what to do.

When they run low on luck and didn't have friends or family, that's when they came.

They came in desperate times.

And and my grandmother, she would help them, she would tell 'em what to do.

Most, most of 'em she could.

And one day I was, I was at her house and I was, I was wiping some candles that she'd had some, I was dusting the way she told me.

I'm a little kid and I see, and there's candles, there's Matthew, mMrk, Luke, and John, my grandmother, she's a good Christian woman, right?

But behind them are some other candles of names that I'd never seen before.

Spirits with multi, with lots of hands and different types of eyes.

I'm like, Granny, Granny, Granny!

Who they?

And she'd tell me, awww, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby.

You know, Jesus is love.

Jesus is, is pure love.

Jesus will give you what you want, baby.

But baby, Jesus takes his time.

These here, they come quick in a hurry.

But baby, you got to pay.

And that's the, that's the dichotomy here.

Like sometimes, you know, when you need it quick in a hurry, man, you gonna have to pay.

- Are you drawn also to this topic in part because you have had an experience like this or have come close where you have needed something quick and were willing to sort of, you know, trade for something that may not have had your best intentions at heart?

- I have lived in worlds that took the spiritual realm seriously.

That is my background.

I think a lot of listeners to the show know that I grew up in a, in a, in a Christian cult.

But it's something I rejected.

And actually what's interesting about it is the things that I'd seen as a child were things that I could not talk about in that context.

These were things that, you know, I were, were immediately dismissed as being evil.

And, and I've since had a more of a maybe broader idea, like my grandmother, whom I love dearly, would've been dismissed as being an evil would've been, would've been castigated as a witch, if they knew what we talked about.

Knew what knowledge she was passing on to me.

I don't think my grandmother was a witch.

I think that she had a particular map of the world and and people, and people oftentimes, even the people who came to her desperate, when she couldn't help them, that's when they turned that they, they'd use that witch term, that evil term they would throw that they would throw that back at her, even though, you know, maybe five minutes before they're on bended knee as supplicants asking for the witch to help them.

- Wow.

You saw a lot.

Yeah, a lot about human nature too.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, all the, everyone has, every, every culture has people who, for lack of a better word, are able to pass between the shadow lands and the, our current reality maybe a little bit easier than everyone else.

And for Halloween of course, that's when it's, it's it's interesting that, you know, I lived in Japan for a long time and the Obon Festival happens right around the same time.

Same thing happens in, you know, in Latin culture.

Why is it that in the same period of time - happens in China same period of time where we say that this sort of, this, the walls between our various worlds gets a little bit thinner.

Why is it happening in the same time of cultures all around the world?

And this is a time for us to celebrate this or to explore it, to have some fun with it and tell stories about it.

That means something to people.

- Yeah.

Well, let's hear some more stories.

Let go to Tanner in Sonoma.

Hi Tanner, you're on.

- Hello.

Hi, how's it going?

Thank you for this discussion.

Big fan.

And yeah, I wanna go back to something that Sarah had said really briefly, and it just kind of reminded me a little bit of kind of quantum entanglement and sort of the, you know, the two particles correlated across distances and responding to each other as if time and distance is irrelevant.

So I just wanted to say that really quickly, but I have a quick story.

I grew up in Kansas.

I'm in Sonoma.

I grew up in Kansas and on a, in a small farm town.

And we'd moved into this home when I was six years old.

We called it the gingerbread house.

It was this kind of adorable, like high a-frame house.

It was built in the twenties.

And as soon as we had moved in there, I had started experiencing this figure.

It was an older gentleman with a, with overalls, sort of like a flannel shirt, a big beard, super kind.

But I was, began walking in my sleep and talking in my sleep a lot to the point that my, my mother, I was sleeping upstairs in the attic in a finished attic.

My mother actually had to put a gate on the stairs 'cause she was afraid I was gonna fall.

And then she eventually moved me down into a different room and I used to see him standing down in the hall all the time, like waving at me and talking to me and I couldn't hear him.

And you know, you know, creating false memories as you get older, even those are, that's pretty common.

But I swear I saw this.

My brother used to hear his footsteps all the time in the house.

And my mother used to in the kitchen.

She would just stop moving, like freeze like a statue.

And, and she would feel this cold air go through her.

And we kind of all just understood this guy was in the house with us and we kind of got over the spookiness.

We just accepted it.

I would still talk in my sleep up in, I was talking, talk and walk, you know, walk in my sleep, always say sleepwalk, excuse me, right up until we moved.

And it was always about that guy.

- That's all I got.

- Well, Tanner, thanks.

It's always like, it always intensifies so much when there are other people who see and feel it too, right?

Because the first instinct is always to say, oh, I, I probably just imagine that.

And it's when the other person sees it.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

We have to remember are, my favorite stories are on Spooked are like told from people in a group who are, who are witnessing the same thing at the same time.

- Yeah.

Actually, it reminds me of another story that you have from this season.

I think it just dropped a little bit ago, but this is from the story called "Sea Legs," where there is, you know, a Coast Guard person on a boat who feels like he sees somebody who is standing there, you know?

And he of course initially is like, wait, did I see that?

And then, you know, basically his superior comes out and ends up seeing the exact same thing.

Let me read a little description.

It's midnight in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

And Jordan is standing watch on a on board, a Coast Guard cutter ship, scanning the dark starry horizon with a pair of night vision goggles.

He's looking for hazards in the water and other ships.

But he suddenly sees a man standing on the front of the ship.

He calls in the officer of the deck, she sees him too.

They call in another watch stander to look, - We're on the radio, I'm yelling, we're trying to guide him to where this person is standing.

We can see him shining his flashlight right in the spot where the shadow is.

And we see the BMO walk up right where this person is standing.

We are telling him the whole time you know, he's right there, he's right there, he's right in front of you.

I, how do you not see him?

And then he walks right through the person and is still saying that there's nothing there.

My blood runs cold.

I am dumbfounded.

I don't know how I could be even seeing what I'm seeing.

I just watched a man walk through another man.

- That's another story from the new season of Spooked called The Crossroads.

And we're talking about it with Glynn Washington host and executive producer of Snap Judgment and Spooked.

And there will be Spooked Live shows this month on the 23rd in Los Angeles and the 25th in Oakland.

We've got Glynn with us now.

Have you ever had something happen to you that you couldn't explain?

What do you love about this particular season?

Have you ever been at a crossroads where you ended up doing something that may not have been good for you in the long run, but in the short term it met your needs?

Email forum@kqd.org, find us on Discord, blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads at KQED Forum, or call us at (866) 733-6786 What can people expect if they go to the live show, if they catch it in LA or Oakland?

- Oh my goodness.

The, the Spooked Live is a party crazy festival.

Delight of the season, of the storytelling.

It is a show - lights, the, the, it's gonna be, first of all, we start off with a costume sort of situation.

So everybody's dressing up.

It's a lot of fun.

It's a very, very musical show.

And the storytellers that come out are some of the stories that we, we feel like these people really take you there.

This is something I, I'm going to go for a ride with this person and on this show as well.

It's a story that I have been trying to tell about my own life for probably about 20 years.

It's the most personal story that I've ever shared about kind of this, how about growing up the way that I grew up and some, and a particular piece of magic that followed me through my adult years.

And I, I'm, I'm I, we, we just opened the show.

We opened the, the tour in Seattle and the reception was really rapturous.

And I, I'm so, 'cause you never know.

You never know.

You never know.

You never never know.

- And they, yeah.

And they don't realize how invested you are in how people respond.

- Right.

And I'm, I'm so thrilled.

I can't wait for Bay Area to hear.

It's gonna be at the Paramount, which has its own haunted history in Oakland.

And we're gonna take that over.

We're gonna, we're gonna haunt the Paramount on the 25th next Saturday.

And I can't wait to, to greet some people there.

- Yeah.

Well, Martha, I mean, you're doing a whole show.

Martha also wants to know when are we gonna experience Glynn's stories in graphic novels or on the musical stage?

- Stay tuned.

Stay tuned.

Stay tuned.

That's right.

Stay with us more after the break.

I'm Mina Kim.

Welcome back to Forum listeners.

Have you ever had something happen to you that you couldn't explain?

Have you ever been at a crossroads where you did something that may not have been the best for you long term, but worked for you short term?

What do you love about spooky season, When we reflect on these kinds of moments, moments of deep interrogation, fear, and even magic.

(866) 733-6786 is the number to call email forum@KQED.org.

Find us on Discord, blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads at KQED Forum.

Let me go to caller Drew in Oakland.

Hi Drew, join us.

- Hi Glynn.

Longtime fan.

I am fairly agnostic when it comes to ghost stories and so I, you know, have always really appreciated your approach.

I've got one, I used to manage a bar in Tucson, Arizona.

This was, you know, 17, 18 years ago.

And it was in this historic hacienda that used to be a girl's school.

It was a place like that.

The Pillsbury's and the Westing houses would send their daughters when they were misbehaving for a season.

And eventually it became a restaurant and we had inventory problems.

Things went missing all the time.

And you know, I just chalked it up to theft or, you know, whatever.

And one night I was the closing manager and the opening manager for brunch the next day.

And the bar was locked by a physical gate from the rest of the space.

And so I had been the last one out and the first one in the next day.

And I opened the door and then unlocked the gate.

And I just had this overwhelming smell of whiskey.

And in the middle of the room there was a broken bottle and I didn't think much of it 'cause there was a busy brunch shift to be had.

So I grabbed a broom and swept it up, but it just kept nagging at me.

And so after brunch had ended, I went to security and, you know, asked, Hey, can we run back the footage?

And sure enough, middle of the night you see a bottle of whiskey come up off the bar like it was getting picked up.

And then it gets flipped.

Like someone's grabbing it from the neck to hit someone in the head and then it's just thrown at the floor with incredible force and breaks.

And after that, I never really wondered about our inventory problems.

- Whoa.

Just floated, floated like that.

- That's a good piece of tape.

You got yourself there.

- You know, when asked to describe Spooked in stories, not unlike Drew's, you like to use the word magic.

Why magic?

- Because I think that when we talk about the supernatural, especially during this season, we assume that it's something bad or something malevolent.

- Yeah.

- And I don't necessarily think that it is.

I like a lot of the stories are not, but they don't necessarily follow the rules.

They don't follow the rules.

People are doing things, hearing things, seeing things that are not supposed to be there.

And the story that actually I'm gonna tell for Spooked Live is really about magic and kind of, it's my, when I was a kid, that was the whole deal.

I think more than anything when I was a kid, I wanted magic.

I, you know, we, this whole I the, I thought that that, you know, the, I remember like reading about Gandalf, opening that door to Narnia.

I was in, I wanted magic.

And too often I found that it was dismissed, like the whole idea.

Once as soon as you wanted to do something, I started doing magic tricks.

And this is funny, when I started, I just started doing magic tricks for when I was a kid.

And I would make coins disappear.

And I would go and I would go to church and make these coins disappear.

And I'd say, Ooh, the dark powers made your quarter disappear.

And instantly, oh, don't be fooling with that.

You didn't, that the Satan done made the quarter disappear.

You need to, and they would try to put holy water and all this kind of stuff on me.

I, I just, I I thought it was funny, but I still wanted that magic.

I, I loved seeing people respond to just basic manipulations and that were not supposed to happen.

That's what magic is.

Magic is saying, I, I have control over the universe in a way that you can't possibly expect or imagine.

And if someone claims that power, well yeah, I want to talk to that person.

- Well, I wanna talk to Una in Sebastopol next.

Hi Una, you're on the line.

Join us.

- Hi.

So my story took place about 30 years ago when I was in college.

I grew up in California.

My family was in California, but I went to college in Tennessee.

So two or three hours difference, I don't remember.

Anyway, one night my junior year in college, I had this really intense dream and it was, I was in a room, the room had a unusual shape.

It was like different angles.

It wasn't like right angle corners, it was more like shaped like a kidney bean almost.

Not very big, but you know, a relatively decent sized room.

And I was standing there, there were people to my left and right like, you know, standing shoulder to shoulder.

And there was a row in back of me and a row in front of me at least kind of standing in a semicircle sort of along with the shape of the room.

And we were all looking down and in our hands were these papers, like sort of pamphlets, I don't know.

And they were written in German.

And I remember the mood being really somber, but not like scary.

Possibly somebody, you know, a couple people might have been crying or whatever.

And it was just this really brief experience, this moment, nothing like, there wasn't a develop plot development or anything, but I, I was sort of jerked out of sleep, like, you know, breathing heavily terrified.

And there was nothing that I could explain in the dream that was terrifying.

But I had this really intense urge to call my mother feeling like, I'll have to check on my mom, make sure she's okay.

And my mom was not in the dream, but anyway, or I don't remember her being in the dream anyway, so I call my mom.

It's the middle of the night.

It's the only time I've ever called my mom in the middle of the night.

I maybe during that time called my mom once a month if that.

Anyway, I call her just to check on her, make sure she's okay.

Yeah, she woke up.

She's very sleepy.

It's the middle of the night in California for sure.

And she's like, yeah, okay, I'm okay.

And I tell her about the dream and we talk for a couple minutes and then I hang up and go back to sleep.

And she goes back to sleep too.

Didn't really talk about it after that.

Stopped thinking about it, thought, okay, I don't know why I had this urge to call my mother, but whatever.

It was a dream.

And go on with my college life.

A couple months later I got the news that my grandmother, my mother's mother had passed away.

And so I am able to, she actually lived in Toronto.

And so I go to the funeral along with I don't think a couple of my brothers, and I'm sure my mom was there too.

Anyway, I go to the funeral and see all these cousins I haven't seen in years.

And after the funeral service we're sort of, I don't know, hanging around in one of their homes and talking and eating whatever, drinking.

And they ask is a general question, you know, how close are you to your, to your mother?

Just 'cause we haven't talked in a while.

And I said, well, you know, we're reasonably close.

We get along fine, but we're not like, you know, not super buddies.

We don't talk all the time.

And then, and then I remember this dream and I was like, you know, just a couple months ago I had this really intense dream in the middle of the night and I had this urge to call my mother, like this compulsion to call my mother.

And as I was thinking about it, I realized that the room I was in, in the dream was the room where the funeral service had happened.

And it was a room I'd never been in, in my life is this odd shaped room.

And that the dream of looking down, you know, people to the right and left and looking down and at these pamphlets, my grandmother was born in Austria and the pamphlets were in fact in German.

- Wow.

- And so it just made me realize that I had this really intense, but otherwise kind of non-specific flash of a dream.

Yes.

That then took place two months later.

- Oh my gosh.

Una That is intense.

Wow.

Thank you.

Thank you for sharing that.

You know, it's really, you have said before, you know, thinking about funerals, so on that so much, you know, we, we think about death, we think about things that are scary.

We think about, you know, people who may not be of this world or who passed, and so many of the type of stories that we have about encounters and things.

But Glynn, you've said that so much of these stories, they're about life not death.

What do you mean when you say that?

That they're about life, - They're about people and what do people want, what do people's worlds look like?

You tend to see the, the creatures, the monsters from your own belief system.

And you know, I'm not necessarily gonna see the monsters from a Inuit perspective.

- Yeah.

- Or you know, from a Malaysian perspective, I'm gonna see the monsters are specific to my world.

And I do think that a lot of what, a lot of what's happening right now with the show, the way we're kind of frame it is yeah, there is an aspect of who are your monsters and that, and who your monsters are.

It's turned by what you're afraid of and like, and right now, you know, I will just, I'll just be blunt and say that in a world where masked beings are running into homes and snatching away mommies and daddies, monsters, what a monster is becomes very, very real.

When, when you see our, our own, our neighborhoods where you have that, that unsafety, when you see people being snatched away in the middle of the night, that then becomes part of the whole stew, the cultural stew from which monsters come from.

- Hmm.

- If you, if there's a little girl, a little boy who loses their parents because a masked, someone came and took them away in the middle of the night, their monsters are going to be just like that, that instant like that person, like that agent.

And so all I'm saying is that your, the monsters are a reflection of where you are, where you're coming from.

And the show oftentimes, I think now again, I don't have any explanation for why people, what, why certain things happen to certain people.

It just seems to me that a lot of times the, we talked earlier about how things are born of desperation.

We talked earlier about how these monsters have specific cultural context.

I wonder if we're making a bunch of monsters right now.

- Wow.

Let me remind listeners, you're listening to Forum.

I'm Mina Kim.

We're talking with Glynn Washington host and executive producer of Spooked and Snap Judgment.

And we're talking about not just the new season of Spooked called the Crossroads, but also what this season brings out.

And certainly it's made Glynn think about a lot of things.

Julie writes, I'm loving this topic.

It reminds me of the film Sinners, which blends the myriad cultural lore you're describing.

African cultures, Irish herbal healing, musical traditions and religion.

Even though it's ultimately about vampires, the magical powers and cultural traditions are rich and memorable.

Nancy writes, one day, about 35 years ago, I was driving to pick up my daughter at kindergarten.

I was early, so I stopped at a houseware store to browse.

I found a cute creamer cut in the shape of a goose that poured the milk from its mouth.

They put it in a flimsy brown cardboard box.

And I put it in the way back of the car.

When I picked up my daughter, I told her, I got you a present and you'll never guess what it is.

She immediately answered, it's a milk duck.

I was so stunned.

I had to pull the car over to the side of the road.

I got out and went to the back of the car and got the box.

And when she opened it, she said, that was it.

To this day, I have no explanation for how she knew what was in the box.

- Ooh, a Ooh.

How she knew what was in the box.

I, it, it's so interesting too, like the, the, the kids, there's nothing scarier than a kid who knows stuff and that, that a lot of their stories do I mean either they're, they come from the time of childhood or they're about children themselves.

Children that are wiser than they're supposed to be.

- Yeah.

What do you love about Halloween?

- You know, I love about Halloween so much.

I have some dear friends in Alameda that I've gone to their home every year for the, almost the past two decades, every Halloween.

And what I love so much is the first wave of trick or treaters, the little one.

Tiny kids.

The little ones.

And the way that this house is, they have a beautiful home and it's made to look like a haunted house.

And at the end of the, for the little kid, they've gotta be brave because at the end of this little path, they might get some candy, but first they gotta pass through what, to a little kid or ghosts and goblins and stuff along the way.

And you see 'em steel up their courage and, and reach out and go out that way.

I love this.

I love it so much.

"Trick or treat!"

Someone who's never said those words before.

It is fantastic.

And even more than that, even more is someone who is 17, 18, when they put on a co you know, these are these kids, they're rough, they're tough, they know everything.

But sometimes they let it down for a second and they say, let's go trick or treating.

And they let, and they, and they themselves to be kids for one last moment and get the candy.

I give them double scooping of whatever it is we're handing out.

Love it.

- All right.

Let me see if I can squeeze in one last story from Barbara.

Barbara in San Francisco.

You've got one minute.

- Okay.

This happened in South Humboldt County.

I was with my husband and his brother, and I needed to go to the restroom, pitch dark.

There was a parklet there that had redwood trees and it was extremely dark.

And I went there and I did my business and my, my, my brother-in-law stood outside and meanwhile I got terrified, absolutely terrified.

And I said, I have to get outta here.

Let's get back to the car right away, please.

I can't handle this.

We got back to the car and I said, I don't know where that fear came from.

It was intense.

He said, I know as a fact that someone was killed with an ax in that forest.

- Wow.

Right.

Lord, there where you were probably in your most vulnerable.

Oh, Barbara, I'm so sorry that happened to you and I can tell, it clearly stayed with you as well.

So you've got your show coming up.

- You're gonna - Spooked Live - Spooked Live Paramount on the 25th, - Paramount on the 25th and in Los Angeles on the 23rd.

On the - 23rd, yeah.

- Yes.

- Yeah.

- And you have got more in store for this season.

Is there anything you wanna tease real quick?

- Yeah, I just want people to like the, if you haven't come out to a Spooked Live event, it is such a party, such a, a celebration.

I, I feel like, like we talked about earlier, about that whole dam breaking thing where people can actually tell their stories.

So many people come out to this event and they say, oh, I'm with my people now.

These are my people.

I'm finally get to like, to, to live in that world and, and have other the people around me.

Community is right now, whatever the, whatever the community is that you are into, do something with that community.

If you like that band, go see that band.

If you like that storyteller, go see that storyteller.

We need community right now more than ever.

And this is just a celebration of the, the Bay Area Spooked storytelling tradition.

- Yeah.

Glynn Washington, the podcast is Spooked.

The season is The Crossroads.

My thanks to you and for giving us the permission to come together and be a community.

And my thanks to Caroline Smith for producing the segment.

The forum team is also Mark Nieto, Marlena Jackson-Retondo, Susie Britton, Danny Bringer, Christopher Beale, Brian Douglas, Brendan Willard, and Katherine Monaghan, Jessie Fisher, Joy Diamond, Katie Sprenger, and KQED's Editor-in-chief is Ethan Toven-Lindsey I'm Mina Kim.

Have a great weekend.