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Welcome to The SciFi Podcast, a wretched hive of scum and villainy a bi-weekly podcast focused on in-depth discussion of all things Science Fiction. The SciFi Podcast features three hosts—Mattroid, Solo, Brain, and Station!—and frequent guests. Each episode we look at a science fiction theme or franchise and take the discussion where no show has gone before.
Who you gonna call? The question should probably best be posed differently: When you call the ghostbusters, will you use a payphone or a smartphone? In this spooky episode, Brain, Station! and Mattroid discuss the differences between the original Ghostbusters movie and the recently released, female-fronted version. Which do you prefer and why? Let us know in the comments section.
Theme music courtesy of I Hear Sirens, featuring Matt on bass and Liz on keyboard. Hear more of I Hear Sirens ethereal, instrumental, post-rock at BandCamp. Podcast production and artwork by Mattroid. Additional tracks by Infectious Grooves. Check out Stewart Craig’s amazing artwork at www.stewartmortimer.deviantart
Best ghost story? Man, I’m going to be really disappointed if everyone has all of these great stories and I’ve never had a single story. The closest I’ve come to having ghosty experiences would either be hearing noises in my house at random times of the day or having just weird experiences walking in a dark hallway and suddenly feel as if I’m not safe until I move away from a part of the hallway.
I suppose my family had a couple of stories. My grandfather was a hoarder and when he passed away in 2000, the family had several sessions of big clean ups of removing a bunch of crap from my grandmother’s house (To give my grandfather credit, he was a clean hoarder, he just had a ton of stuff). Anyways, my mom was down in the basement alone at one point and as I’m told, she felt something touch her back. She ran up the stairs, looked all white, and refused to go back down into the basement for the rest of the day. Keep in mind, this was a middle age woman, not a kid or anything.
My grandmother (Same grandmother mentioned above) claims she has ghostly experiences all the time. Sometimes it’s as simple as being in her chair in the evening and seeing a figure walk from the hallway into the kitchen. There’s been a few times in her life where she saw a recently passed away loved one sitting in her car in the parking lot when she leaves a store. Once she gets up to her car, the figure is no longer there. Then there’s the stories of her waking up and seeing a figure at the foot of her bed. For all I know, she might just be bat shit crazy though. Ha
my brother and i once saw an old man on a bike ride by us and smile but he didnt look happy he looked a little angry even though he was smiling. later our dad told us that was an old guy that lived down the lane who committed suicide before we were born. pretty scary stuff.
That’s freaky.
hell yea it was
Ok, this is a long story that I sent in to Jalien a year ago for Horror Movie Podcast’s Campfire Tales segment. He never used it (Space Wolf ignored me, too), so I’ll share it here. It’s long like my johnson, and is probably just a bunch of normal occurrences taken out of context, but freaked me out nonetheless. Anyway, here it is…
It was winter of 2012. My wife was doing her residency in Southern California, so we had rented an apartment in Orange County. We lucked out by finding a great apartment in a beautiful section of Irvine at a really good price. The previous tenant was looking to get out of her lease, so we were able to take it over and avoid having to put down any deposits or up-front money that you normally would when renting. The previous tenant also said we could keep the deposit money when we left at the end of the lease. Like I said, we really lucked out… or, so we thought.
My wife and two-year-old son lived in the Irvine apartment full-time that year, while I traveled back and forth between there and our permanent home in New York. My travel routine and having to be separated for several weeks from time-to-time was difficult, but we loved California living – the weather, the relaxed atmosphere and the outdoor lifestyle made every day feel like a vacation despite the circumstances. Indeed, we were beginning to settle into our new temporary situation.
A few months into this arrangement while I was back east, I received a phone call in the middle of the night. It was my wife. I was startled awake because I knew there was no good reason she would be calling at that time. My mind immediately began racing through the possible scenarios as I reached over for my phone. Maybe our son was sick. Maybe the smoke alarm had gone off. Or, worse, maybe someone had broken into the apartment and they were in serious trouble. Being 3,000 miles away, I felt completely helpless. Dread filled my body like a cold, black cancer as I answered the call. I soon found out that nothing my mind conjured in those fleeting moments could have prepared me for what I was about to hear.
“There’s a ghost in the apartment,” my wife said to me, her voice trembling as she was clearly shaken. After a few moments of silence, trying to process what I just heard, all I could muster in response was a puzzled “huh?!”
She continued, explaining that she was awoken by a loud noise coming from our son’s bedroom, which was on the other side of the apartment. She quickly jumped out of bed to go check on him. As she approached his room, she realized the loud noise was music – somehow, his white panda iPod speaker was switched on and playing classical Indian music at full volume. She opened my son’s bedroom door to turn off the music, hoping he would still be asleep or at least in bed and not too upset so she could quickly get him back down. But he was not asleep, and he was not in bed.
As she opened the door, she saw my son standing in the middle of the room in his footie pajamas, tightly clutching his blankie and stuffed elephant from bed, blankly staring at the closet, which was on the wall adjacent to where the music was playing. He did not respond to her when she opened the door and said his name. He just stood there, staring at the closet. My wife immediately got chills. Something didn’t feel right. She ran to the speaker to switch it off, went over to pick up our son, and brought him into bed with her to try and get him back to sleep. He laid in bed with his eyes open, staring into the distance for awhile, still not responding to her, before… finally… he succumbed to sleep.
That’s when she called me. There were so many unanswered questions. How could this happen? My two-year-old son was way too small to reach the speaker, which was on top of a tall cabinet. Why would the iPod be playing classical Indian music and why would the speaker be at full volume? We would play lullaby songs at low volume for him during his night time routine, so how could the album and volume level change? Why was our son just standing in the dark room and staring at the closet? Why wasn’t he responding to my wife? And why did she get chills and sense that something was “off” when she approached the room?
She was convinced there was a ghost in our son’s bedroom. And, while I could have come up with several plausible reasons why each of those things might happen, I certainly wasn’t going to argue against her at 3 in the morning. So I did the only thing I could do, and stayed on the phone with her until she fell asleep.
A few weeks passed without any recurrence of that night’s events. I was back in California to spend some time with my family, and everything was back to normal.
One month later, in early spring, I was back in New York when I received another phone call in the middle of the night from my wife. “He won’t stop vomiting,” she said. Apparently, my son began vomiting in the middle of the night, and continued to do so in roughly 10-minute intervals for about two or three hours. She took him to the hospital, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with him. They treated him for dehydration, and sent him back home. Then, a few days later, the same thing happened; and then again the week after; and again the week after that.
After his fourth or fifth episode, I flew back to California and we took him to a specialist. The specialist performed a series of tests, but could not find anything wrong. He suspected that it might be something called Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome (CVS), which is essentially like a “stomach migraine” that some children can get. It can be caused by any number of things, such as stress, and is normally experienced by children with a family history of migraines. This made a lot of sense, since our current situation was stressful with me being away so often, and my side of the family has a history of migraines. Plus, CVS episodes occur in clusters and usually at night, just as our son was experiencing. The diagnosis fit.
But my wife was not convinced. She was certain that the strange occurrence that one winter night and these vomiting episodes were connected in some way.
Several months passed. My wife finished her residency and we were packing up to return home to New York. My son had been episode-free since the last one before we took him to the specialist, and we were ready to put this whole thing behind us.
Later that year, we were back to our normal life in New York. I typically spent most of the day at work, while my wife was back home working on her dissertation and watching our son and dog, Lulu. By the time I’d get home from work, it would normally be time to have dinner, then put our son down for bed, and wind down the evening with a good movie or TV show. One winter night after our son had gone to sleep, my wife and I were snuggling up on the couch watching TV as we normally would. Suddenly, our dog, who was lying in her favorite spot at the foot of the couch, jumped up and trotted down the hallway towards the bedrooms. I called her back over, but she did not return.
I could hear her sniffing around loudly down the hall, so I decided to go see what she was up to. When I turned the corner to go down the hall, I saw that she was vigorously sniffing at our son’s bedroom door, shoving her nose into the door jamb as if she was trying to open it up and get inside. I was worried that maybe she smelled smoke or heard something, so I opened the door. She quickly went in, nose to the ground, sniffing around the room. Her trail led from the door to the center of the room, where she sniffed around in a circle once or twice, then branched off to my son’s bed and then over towards the closet. She stopped a few feet in front of his closet, paused for a moment, and then began to growl and bark at the closet.
This was completely out of character for our dog, who rarely barks let alone growls. By this time, my wife came into the room to see what the commotion was all about. We tried shushing Lulu, but she continued to bark. After a few seconds, our son awoke and sat up in bed, dazed and confused. At that moment, Lulu stopped barking, ran over to me and sat down, looking up towards me with her tail wagging nervously as she does when she’s expecting praise or a treat. My wife and I then helped our son back to sleep, and we returned to the living room to continue our show.
The next day my son asked my wife why she was in his room last night talking to him while he was trying to sleep. We told him we were trying to help him fall back to sleep after Lulu’s barking had woken him up. He said he knew that, but he meant BEFORE Lulu started barking. We told him we were in the living room watching TV, so he probably just heard the TV. He then said “NO” emphatically, and explained that he heard a woman whispering in his ear while he was trying to sleep, and the next thing he knew, Lulu was in his room barking.
About a week later, he had another vomiting episode in the middle of the night, and they continued about two or three times a week for the next month, always in the middle of the night. Then, they stopped.
All was pretty much quiet and uneventful for the remainder of our time in New York, although Lulu would occasionally go into our son’s room during the day and bark at his closet for a few seconds. This was a new behavior she seemed to have developed.
In spring of 2014 we decided to leave New York, and ended up moving to Cleveland (don’t ask). We moved into our new house and began settling into suburban life. Everything seemed to be going well. But then, later that year, the strange nocturnal events began happening again.
One winter night, I was startled awake by my son – he was standing just a few inches away from me while I was asleep in bed. He hadn’t tried to wake me, but I had that feeling you get when someone’s watching you. Just moments later, the white panda iPod speaker in his bedroom switched on to classical Indian music at full volume. I went into his bedroom to turn it off, but the speaker wouldn’t switch off and the volume wouldn’t lower. I had to unplug the speaker to stop the music, and then went back over to check on my son. He said he had a scary dream, but didn’t want to wake me up.
The next week, he had another vomiting episode in the middle of the night; and another the week after.
Luckily, the episodes stopped after that, but the unusual occurrences have not. Lulu has begun barking at our son’s bedroom closet again – not often, but on occasion. The white panda iPod speaker switched on, full volume, to classical Indian music once more a few months later. Now, we just leave it unplugged. And I do occasionally wake up in the middle of the night to see my son standing beside me, watching me sleep.
UPDATE: As I said at the beginning, this was written last year. Luckily, nothing particularly strange has happened since then.
O_O What the hell, all this happened? This is rough! Having a young daughter all this would be my worst nightmare.
This reminds me, I once went into the kitchen at midnight and the son of my girlfriend just stood there in his door, his dark room being behind him. Being creeped out I called his name and he just stood there, no reaction whatsoever. He was just sleepwalking but that in itself is kinda horrifying to me. I basically woke him up and he went back to bed, haha!
Once I really had a much more discomforting encounter. This happened at a time when I lived with my mother and sister in our house we had back then. We had a central corridor on the first floor, where our rooms were. In that corridor my sister used to be on the PC till late at night. Teen years, etc. 😉 So she had a webcam and whenever I left my room the people she chatted with would “warn” her of her ol’ brother. I hated that because the bathroom was just next to the computer so I always felt being watched.
So one night I went to sleep, listened to some music and was getting tired when suddenly I felt as though someone heavy sat down on the bed right next to my head – and clearly stood up again. Woah! I really felt it and it definitely wasn’t that phase right before you sleep where you sometimes feel or imagine things. Needless to say I was scared but seeing the light in the room next to mine where my sister still sat at the computer calmed my nerves. 11pm, alright. Not that bad. I was able to sleep later.
Next morning my sister told me she had trouble sleeping because something strange happened that evening and she didn’t dare to go to her room…
At roughly 11 pm 3 or 4 friends in her chat warned her with their usual message: “your bro” – only I was lying in my bed and never left my room after 8 pm. :O I read the chat log next morning. They even said that I walked into her room. At first I thought it was a prank but the casual way her friends mentioned me didn’t fit. Also it was around the same time I felt that thing on my bed.
That’s all I can remember.
Sleepwalking children are a terrifying thing. I think with my situation, it was just a series of innocuous events that, when pieced together coincidentally like that, amount to feeling like something more than it probably is.
But, MAN, that story about someone sitting on your bed. Now that is freaky. Do you think it was an intruder?
haans for the scariest story for sure
My room was rather small with no possiblity to hide, really. Also my door didn’t open, even with my sister’s friends seeing someone leave my room. I was wide awake and would’ve noticed. So, no, it can’t have been an intruder…which is good, I guess, haha! At least this happened only once, that’s nothing compared to the apparent haunting of your son! :O
The upper neighbors of a friend of mine actually had a strange situation like that. My buddy lived in a dilapidated house (multiple floors) for some years. I sometimes had sleepovers there. Most of the families didn’t bother to lock their doors because the house was almost a “hippie”/alternative kind of community. I guess that trust was gone after one night a drunk stranger stood in the middle of the children’s room. The parents woke up from the scared cries of their daughter, I think. Apart from the understandable shock nothing happened. The father guided the man outside – the main door of the building was broken so he really tried to get in. The situation must have been tense!
Thanks for the Pop! Predator figure. I’m not typically a toy guy, but I just had to have good ol’ Pussyface.