The Legend of Bloody Mary, Ghosts of Cambodia, The Pool Boy

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[00:00:36] And a hand is coming out of the fan, reaching towards me, trying to grab me. Welcome to Tell Me A Ghost Story. The late night call-in podcast where we delve into the world of the supernatural and explore the eerie and unexplained.

[00:01:03] I'm your host, Michelle Newman. This podcast features true stories from our callers that will send shivers down your spine and leave you questioning the existence of the afterlife. So grab a cozy blanket, turn down the lights. Hi Michelle, this is Cindy. I have one more story for you today. It's called the legend of Bloody Mary.

[00:01:33] Bloody Mary was a ghost. They think she might have been a witch who was hung or she might have been a young girl that might have committed suicide or died in some mysterious ways and her death was never proven. Well, anyway, the legend holds true today. Back in the 1980s, my brother Brian and I were at home one Halloween evening and we locked the door to the bathroom so our mother wouldn't catch on to what we were doing.

[00:02:03] You got it right. We were trying to get up enough nerve to play the ritual of Bloody Mary. Does it really work? Well, we had the candles lit and the lights off and we were looking into the mirror but we only had the nerves to say Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary twice.

[00:02:25] We did not have no judge to say Bloody Mary for the third time because we thought we heard something moaning behind us. Was she in the bathroom with us? We'll never know. We never turned back. We got the heck out of there. Thank you, Cindy, for your story.

[00:02:55] There are a few theories about the origins of Bloody Mary. Some say she was based on Mary the first of England, better known as Bloody Mary because of the way she persecuted Protestants. Others believe the spirit is Mary Worth, a woman accused of witchcraft centuries ago. The ritual itself has deep connections to folklore about mirrors. For centuries, people believed that mirrors were portals to the spirit world. Staring into one too long? Risky business.

[00:03:24] When you stare at a single point for an extended period of time in dim lighting, your brain starts to distort what you see. This is called the Troxler effect. Facial features melt away, shadows shift and suddenly, you might see something that isn't there. Or is it? Hey, Michelle, this is Rax calling from Los Angeles and I have a ghost story for you.

[00:03:52] In my early 20s, I went to Cambodia to report for a daily national print newspaper at the Pham Penh Post. And for anyone who's been to Cambodia, the land has a deep and torturous memory of the Khmer Rouge regime, which was started in Cambodia in the 1970s.

[00:04:18] Authoritarian, totalitarian, repressive regime that targeted ethnic minorities and also any perceived political enemies of Khmer Rouge. And these enemies were tortured and killed in killing prisons in Cambodia. And I live close to one of the most infamous and horrific of these killing prisons, Tole Slang, which was in the capital, Phnom Penh.

[00:04:47] What I know about ghosts is that ghosts might remain in the human realm because in deaths or in their dying days, there was something that wouldn't allow their soul to be at peace or at rest.

[00:05:08] And for many of the martyrs of Khmer Rouge regime, I know that they were in extreme pain and distress in their final days, perhaps hinting at why the landscape of Cambodia feels so haunted. The first night I was there, I went out for, you know, just a classic raucous night out to see Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.

[00:05:38] And being a lifelong stoner from Southern California, I was past a joint, which I've never said no to. And, you know, I tried the good Cambodian kush and not sure if it didn't agree with my constitution or what, but I didn't get very good sleep that night.

[00:05:58] I'm lying in my bed just blocks away from Tole Slang and I'm lying on my back. I remember waking up and kind of cracking open my eyes and I see a woman floating on her back, suspended close to the ceiling in a long dress. And she's not moving or looking at me or doing anything.

[00:06:26] She might have been a friendly ghost, who knows? But it was enough for me to wake up from sleep screaming. And kind of hard to explain to your brand new roommates who you just met that day, just moved into their place, that you've seen a ghost the first night. And my roommate comes running in with a baseball bat, you know, throws the door open. And I'm there, not sure what to say.

[00:06:58] A few weeks later, I'm in the same room, lying in the same bed. And it's so hot. Every night I would have a fan blasting air on me and I roll over on my side to face the fan. And again, crack my eyes open slightly and a hand is coming out of the fan, reaching towards me, trying to grab me.

[00:07:28] So maybe it became less friendly. It was so interesting, like this relationship to, you know, otherworldly spirits, the divine. When I was living there, I felt like there was a compulsion to tell the stories of the people in Cambodia and tell what I knew. But I was so young.

[00:07:57] I didn't know what I wanted for my writing, for my career. And I didn't know what to make of these things. And I never resolved it. So I hope I can do some justice to these memories, to the memories of the people that I might have interacted with those nights. And hopefully this call for you, Michelle, is a little balm to the spirits that I might have interacted with.

[00:08:25] For anyone who wants to follow along with these memories and my ghost story, my Instagram handle is at BigFoodie69, F-O-O-D-I-E. I'll be writing more, sharing my writing, and hopefully coming up with some kind of narrative that puts into perspective these events I experienced. Thanks so much for listening. Thank you, Rax, for your story.

[00:08:55] According to the United States Holocaust Museum, 14,000 to 17,000 prisoners were held in Touls' slang prison during the Khmer Rouge regime. Which is the size of a sold-out concert at the Hollywood Bowl. And out of that many people, only 12 prisoners are believed to have survived. Verwandle deine Leidenschaft mit Shopify in ein Business. Und knack Umsatzrekorde mit dem Checkout mit der weltweit besten Conversion.

[00:09:24] Du hast richtig gehört. Der Checkout mit der weltweit besten Conversion. Der legendäre Checkout von Shopify vereinfacht das Shoppen auf deiner Website bis hin zu Social Media und überall dazwischen. Ja, das ist Musik für deine Ohren. Wie du es auch drehst und wendest, mit Shopify kannst du zu einem echten Hit werden. Starte deinen Test noch heute für nur einen Euro pro Monat auf shopify.de. Hi, my name is Jennifer. I have a story for you.

[00:09:53] When I moved to a town in the South Bay of the Los Angeles area, I moved into a home that was owned by a guy and he was renting a room. And I'm a professional psychic medium and something that happens to me every time I move to a new place is that there's a lot of activity.

[00:10:20] And in this house, within a week, we started hearing footsteps on the stairs. No one was there. One morning, the door was not only unlocked but wide open, seemingly by itself in the middle of the night. And luckily, my roommate was both into what I did and he believed in the supernatural so he wasn't too, you know, nonplussed by it.

[00:10:44] But the pool bugged me because it was kind of full of leaves on the bottom and LJ on the sides because we didn't have a pool boy. And I remember being frustrated about that and thinking, oh, I wish you would just hire a pool boy. And within a few days of having that thought, the owner of the house asked me to come outside one morning. And he said, did you fill up the pool? And we're staring at the pool.

[00:11:14] And not only had it been filled up about four or five inches to the top, but it had been miraculously clean. And he thought that I did it. And I said, I have no idea, like, how to fill up the pools, how to clean the pool. And he showed me an empty cardboard box that had been full of two gallons of different kinds of pool cleaner and pool shock. And those bottles were now empty.

[00:11:43] And it was impossible for anyone to sneak in in the middle of the night and do this because there was a big six or seven foot fence all around the property with a locked door. So as if that wasn't weird enough, a couple weeks later, I'm sitting outside in the evening by the nice clean pool now. And I'm home alone. And the front door is locked, as always. And I'm in the back with, you know, the locked gate.

[00:12:12] So I am alone. No one is able to get into the house or into the yard. And I look up and I see in the lighted kitchen window this kid. And he looks about, I don't know, 14, 13, 14 years old, fluffy, sandy brownish hair. And he's looking down where the sink would be. He's not looking at me through the window. And I think, who is this kid? And how did he get in the house?

[00:12:40] And as I start to get up out of the lawn chair to go in and ask him, like, who the hell are you and what are you doing in the house? I see this kid turn to his side and he walks into the wall where the cupboards are. And he just, poof, dissipates into the wall.

[00:12:58] And I realized that this was a ghost because at first I thought it was a real human boy because it didn't look wispy or translucent or transparent like they, like ghosts always appear in TV shows and films. This looked like a real bonafide flesh and blood kid. So, anyway, he wasn't scary and he filled up the pool and cleaned it.

[00:13:25] So, I guess the moral of the story is not all ghosts are bad. Some of them can be actually very helpful. And I've had lots of crazy stories like this. Mostly just people knocking on the door and walking around, usually in the middle of the night I'll hear it. But this one took the cake. Thank you, Jennifer. I'd love to hear more of your stories. What do you think, listeners?

[00:13:54] Is the pool boy a benevolent spirit just keeping things tidy? Or is he waiting, watching, looking for someone to join him in the deep end forever? That's all we have this week, folks. Do you have a ghost story? Call 701-484-2666.

[00:14:19] That's 701-484-2666. Or go to tellmeaghoststory.com and leave your story there. Thank you to all the callers who left messages this week. And as always, I'm your host, Michelle Newman. Signing off. See you next week.

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