Hey, it’s Michelle Newman, and tonight every place has its own rulebook for the dead. A bowl of cream, a spoon, an egg, rice thrown into the dark before dawn. By the end of the night, you’ll know what each one is for. Ghosts don’t need passports.
Gary D. from Southern Ontario was a teenager when he and his friend John fell through the ice at midnight in the dead of winter and took shelter in an abandoned 1920s dance hall. From the floor above them came big band music, a crowd, and clinking glasses, stopping like a switch, twice. The dance floor was empty.
Yvonne from the Philippines calls in with a doppelganger story she can only call a glitch in the matrix. Someone who looked exactly like her mother, and it wasn’t her. Filipino folklore says the shape-shifting aswang can take the form of a relative.
Hannah from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, works at a music school haunted by Edith, a ghost who runs the dishwasher on command, flickers the lights when the kids misbehave, and followed the school to its new building. A brownie is a Scottish household spirit that does the chores at night and leaves for good if you insult it.
Edwin Covarrubias, who lives in Mexico now, tells a story from a hostel he worked at in Ecuador. He saw a ghost, and someone unscrewed every lightbulb in the restaurant. In Ecuador’s markets, healers called curanderas perform the limpia, a spiritual cleansing with an egg and herbs. Edwin hosts @ParanormalClubPod , True Scary Story, and founded Scary.fm.
Rax tells a story from Cambodia. A woman floating above him, a hand reaching out of a fan, and encounters he ties to the country’s Khmer Rouge years. Find him at @bigfoodie69 on Instagram.
Lisa shares several stories from a period living in a remote rainforest community, including encounters with a spirit woman believed to have been murdered during the Australian gold rush, said to scream in men's ears and push them from a nearby waterfall in an act of ongoing revenge. She describes seeing a woman with long blonde hair riding in a friend's truck, only for the friend to later insist he'd been driving alone the entire time, along with nights spent listening to what sounded like a corroboree carrying through the bush, and a car that stalled mid-crossing in a rising river before starting again at the exact moment it mattered most. Connect with her at properscarypodcast@gmail.com
Elana from Edmonton, Alberta closes the episode with two encounters. As a teenager visiting her biological mother in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, she woke paralyzed to a young boy asking why she cried so much at night, a boy she later learned matched the description of a child killed in that house. Years later, wide awake and unable to move, she watched her late grandmother appear in a rocking chair, speak softly in Cree, and press a warm hand to her shoulder.
00:00 Intro: a rulebook for the dead
01:19 Gary D. from Ontario and the phantom New Year’s party
13:39 Yvonne from the Philippines and the double who looked like her mother
20:29 Hannah from Nova Scotia and Edith the dishwasher ghost
27:36 Edwin Coverrubias and the haunted hostel in Ecuador
38:17 Rax and the ghosts of Cambodia
43:52 Lisa from Proppa Scary and the ancestors in the bush
54:02 Elana from Edmonton and the boy who asked why she cried
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Theme music: Sexy Sax by Cool Cascade
Production: Newman Media