grimoire III

Marley Eppihimer is recording a paranormal podcast episode about haunted apartments. She discusses the online folklore of the supernatural, including creepypastas and Slenderman. Marley enjoys listening to scary Reddit stories and found one related to her previous interview about haunted apartments. The story involves a man whose father-in-law, who had recently passed away, starts messing with him through his granddaughter's toys. Marley draws parallels between this story and the idea of trapped spirits in a place. She emphasizes that haunted spaces can be anywhere, not just houses or asylums. Apartments can also be a liminal space for supernatural occurrences. Hello, so I'm Marley Eppihimer and I am recording my Grimoire Part 3, Sharing the Supernatural for my Folk's Abuse 275 Supernatural Folklore class. And I will be doing an ear-to-ear piece, so this is kind of just like a little paranormal podcast episode. And I'm going to be incorporating some of my previous Grimoire parts, which is the interview I did with Nick Becora, who talks about the experience he had in his duplex near Bowling Green. So this is a college apartment, two sets of apartments, three people live in each one. So I thought that was really interesting because you always hear about haunted houses, you never really hear about haunted apartments, so I kind of wanted to delve into a little bit of that. So part of what I really enjoyed about this class is kind of delving into the online folklore of the supernatural. You know, stories like creepypastas, Slenderman, I remember being a kid and looking those things up or just stumbling across them on the internet and being absolutely terrified. Like I said, the Slenderman stories and other creepypastas that really stuck with me. And obviously, when you're like a really young teen or a kid, you kind of think that they might be real or are just kind of creeped out in general by them, but it kind of stuck with me. And as the internet progresses, the folklore in its dynamic nature becomes kind of different and you just get all of these like kind of spooky stories. And personally, I, in my free time or while I'm doing homework, studying, or just doing the dishes, I like to listen to scary Reddit stories. So I went into the Reddit forums and I found some stories that kind of relate to my previous interview about just like haunted apartments. So in the merit of doing a similar sort of ghost story reading podcast, I'm going to read one of these and kind of relate it to the story that I've experienced or the story that I interviewed with Nick. All right, so from the r slash paranormal subreddit, Florida Trash Man from one year ago says, when the wife and I got married, we had an apartment on the north side of Chicago that belonged to her parents. My father-in-law was suffering from Parkinson's disease and was bedridden from several strokes. My mother-in-law had her issues as well. So for about two years, we all lived together so that the wife and I could help care for her and her father. Two weeks before the birth of our first child, my father and I, my father-in-law had his final stroke and he passed away. He and I did not get along well at that point prior to his medical decline, but for the most part, I thought we were good once he came to help take care of him. I have a very strong work ethic, he's at least 67 years old and he had not held a job for longer than a year in his entire life, with the exception of his years in the military when he got drafted in the mid 1960s. He thought I was just a mindless work drone and he thought I was kind of a, and I thought he was a bum. After three days after he died, things got really weird. I started waking up at night in a panic, unable to move, and I would see him standing over me laughing. At least two times I remember visibly hearing him leaning down over me and trying to suffocate me with a pillow. These dreams, or waking nightmares, lasted until after my daughter's birth and then completely stopped. I've always been a gamer since the days of dial-up. In this time frame, I was deep into EverQuest, I'm guessing that's a game. Late night raiding on the weekends was the norm. I often caught movement and shadows just for a second in my peripheral vision, but never really saw anything, 100% certainty. It wasn't until my daughter was big enough to use a walker did I become convinced I was being messed with. Her walker had a bunch of lights and sound makers on it for her to play with when she was in it. Late at night while gaming, it started making noises like someone was playing with it. While it sat there 4 feet away from me, the lights on it flashing, the horn beeping, and it stopped for a while. Then back up to 10 minutes later, I would be really freaked out and pull the batteries out and it stopped completely. I went back to my game and I heard a new noise. We had a toy that was a caterpillar with each leg on it a letter of the alphabet. You pressed down on the leg and it would say the letter of the alphabet that was on it. I was sitting on the table about 10 feet away from it and in the room I was in, it just started going off, specifically the letters H and I. Ooh, that's kind of creepy. It got going faster and faster with the sounds and it started to blend together and it was sounding like the word, hi. At this point, I'm practically, it says a not good word, so it's actually pooping my pants. I tossed the toy into a chest and we had for toy collection and turned on the lights. I couldn't sleep and stayed up all night until my wife got up in the morning. These things and a few others went about for two months and slowly got less and less frequent. My wife and I saw shadowy figures in the hallways and this entire apartment just felt creepy after my father-in-law passed away. After a year, we bought our first home and whatever was messing with us did not follow, thankfully. TLDR, father-in-law dies and messes with me by playing with granddaughter's toys. Yeah, so that is a super creepy story and it kind of draws some parallels. What I was talking about with my interviewee was the idea that spirits kind of get trapped in a place, so it kind of brings about some ideas of a person's energy just not passing on and so in the interview, I was talking with him about that's what he thinks happens when there are creepy, unexplainable, supernatural things that most people would determine as a ghost going on and this has a lot of similarities like random objects in a place just being messed with, lights not working, so that has a lot of similar themes and the biggest theme is that it's in an apartment. So most of the time, like I said before, you usually imagine a haunted place being like a haunted house or like a haunted asylum, but apartments aren't necessarily brought into that and I think that in terms of when you're considering the supernatural world of ghosts and stuff like that, that a liminal space can be anywhere at any time or any place. It doesn't have to be a house or a specific place where lots of really bad things happen. It can just be a place like an apartment or a duplex and those scary things can just kind of come about. So I thought that was really interesting and I hope you enjoyed that story, but yeah. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.