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some people say if you believe something strong enough it will come to pass maybe maybe but what if the problem is you don't know what to believe from snap judgments underground layer you're listening to spooked stay tuned

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When I was eight years old, my brother refused to get out of bed. He lay moaning on top of our sheets, sweat pouring from his brown body. My parents had long told us that the doctors were of the devil. Instead, they called the pastor, and the pastor came. My mother led him to our shared room, the open door revealing my brother contorted in pain. And then from a small leather folder, the pastor removed a vial of olive oil and a clean white square of linen. He pressed several drops of the oil onto the cloth. Then he pushed it hard onto my brother's abdomen. My brother screamed. Then the pastor and my parents knelt down to pray. They prayed to Lord Jesus to heal my brother. Heal him, Lord Jesus. Heal your servant's child. We claim your bounty, almighty God, in Jesus' name, in Jesus' name. And I became angry. So angry because I knew they were doing it wrong. My grandmother had long told me that the more sick you are, the more power you need. my grandmother could even use her own spit her saliva to turn away a blister or a headache but for bigger things she struck matches set fire, lit dandelion powder burned, high john the conqueror root hyssop, thyme, nettle each made their own smoke and each smoke had power born of fire for things that mattered things that had to be my grandmother said never mess around and that's why her fingers were lying with the crosshatches she would take my grandfather's razor strap and slice her own

skin, harvest her own blood if she had to. That's real power, baby. That's what she told me. So I was angry as a pastor pressed into my baby brother with olive oil from a glass jar. There was no power there. No smoke. No fire. And no blood. Spook starts now. Now then, our first story comes to us from three very special women. A daughter, a mother, and a grandmother. who began with a daughter, Sarah Finnerty, spooked.

It was October, I was 14, and I just started high school. And then, I don't know what happened. My mom and grandma remember.

I think it was fall. It wasn't cold enough for coats, heavy coats. Oh boy, it was a while ago and I don't even like thinking about it, remembering. She didn't get out of the bed.

And she was a bigger girl, bigger than me, much big. And I said, why you don't get up? You remember who you was? You know, you don't remember that time? I'm surprised.

I don't remember it. It's like a hole in my memory.

Boy, I went in all the time, and sometimes she would relent a little bit and talk and sit up. But most of the time it was, could you just let me rest? What, are you going to scream? Pull her out of bed? Dress her? You know, she's as big as I am.

She had her long legs, beautiful. And I said to her, look, you're strong. You can walk. I don't feel my leg, she said. I pinched her with a needle. She didn't feel something strange. She was alive. She didn't feel the pinch in her leg. It's ridiculous.

I think it was at that time that, Sarah, you even used aluminum foil to block out light. And I said, oh, my God, this is like Bobby Fischer pulling out his fillings, you know, not wanting any, I don't know what I was thinking, but she was very, very despondent. You wasn't sick, Sarah.

You wasn't sick. You acted like a bull. I'm 93 years old. I have a very strong mind. I remember everything. You was possessed. Okay?

my grandmother thought the only thing that could explain my state was that I was possessed by a demon or someone had put a curse on me we're from a very small town in Italy

and we emigrated when I was a child and they had beliefs that were primitive in a lot of cases. So anything was possible to help save, you know, one of your own. And she came up with interesting solutions.

The first thing my grandma did to try to make me feel better was to get a priest to come to our house.

I called the priest was a priest from either

He came over here, and he went to every room, and then I bring him upstairs, in Sarah's room.

this is one of the only things i remember is a priest standing in my bedroom door and throwing holy water around my room my grandmother probably arranged it so the priest came while my mother was at work so she wouldn't

have to tell my mom. She denied what she was doing. You know, when I discovered stuff, she would flat out deny it. And then when it was undeniable, she'd worm her way around it, saying, it's not a big deal. I'm not paying for it. It's just a little thing. My friend told me to do it. You know, she's depressed. We have to do something.

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but nothing changed after the priests so my grandma contacted people in Italy who she thought could help. They were witches.

Of course somebody put a curse at you. Sarah, an alt-person Sarah, that was the devil. The devil it was.

I think so. I absolutely demanded that you not do anything nutty. That I didn't want you even hearing anything like that. That that would be bad, it would be damaging. No talk about witchcraft, no talk about that crap. None, I absolutely forbid it. And, you know, we fought, we argued. What could come of that, no seen person would have allowed that. And I sure the hell wasn't going to allow it. But she got that cockamamie idea. Oh yeah, I want to take

My mother says that she watched my grandma take my birth certificate out of her drawer,

put it behind her back, and run down the stairs. When my mom confronted her and asked her what she was doing, they ended up getting into a big screaming match.

I'm not going to allow her to go there. You know, it's not like they're going to visit the Mona Lisa there. Yeah, they're going for voodoo crap. No way. It's never going to happen. Forget about it.

So the witches had wanted my grandmother to take me to Italy so they could perform an exorcism. But my mom refused, so they came up with a compromise.

She called it a paraprofessional or I don't know what. They had all kinds of names. to make it seem better, but that they contacted someone in Italy. So, Grandma, what exactly did the witches want to do?

It's his job. I don't know what he did. I don't know nothing. I'm not a witch. I just pray God. And maybe with him and me pray God.

So my grandmother, without telling my mother, of course, sent the witch $3,000. In exchange, he promised to cast a spell that would break this curse that was put on me.

I discovered it after the fact, after all this money had been sent. That was a long time ago, so that was a lot of money. You know, and here I am working on sole support, going to work every day, you know, knocking myself out. And you're doing what? You're spending what? It's preposterous. It's out of the question. Because, you know, we were very frugal people. I often say, you know, until I was able to get a job myself, and buy my own clothes. My mother sewed everything I ever wore.

My grandparents had the most decrepit, dirty, old, falling apart Buick you could ever imagine. There were parts falling off of it onto the street. The ceiling was falling onto the seats. They never spent money on anything. $3,000 was a huge amount of money for them.

That guy, that $3,000 was worth, pay me $3 million.

So one day my grandma called the witch in Italy because she was scared the anti-curse he was concocting wouldn't work.

I was crying, and he said, don't cry, don't do anything. just take care of her. I didn't know what to do with you. You know, I love you so much. I didn't know what to do with her. I didn't know what to do. And he reassured me I'd have thought it was going to work.

Anyway, Mitriarch does what she wants.

So the witch in his coven cast a spell that would travel over the Atlantic Ocean. I think he told my grandma it would take three weeks to arrive. Meanwhile, he mailed her a card, told her to put up on my bed, so the spell would know where to go.

So they sent this card, this ridiculous card. I remember it was a gold, like a gold American Express. It looked something like that. Weird. and it was placed in a strategic place to be, you know, leaning up that would be, I guess, a channel of some kind for the spirit that they were sending over and they said it would take three weeks. And the uncanny thing is that three weeks to the day Sarah got up and announced she was going to school. It was a Thursday, I remember that, a Thursday morning, and I said, this is f***ing unbelievable, you know, this is nuts, but she's going, so I'm.

ecstatic that's why i believe she get up the bed the day after she went to school she take a shower she become like a miracle

it's uncanny the timing was uncanny and it did happen so is there a part of you that thinks the witches actually helped me i won't allow myself to to to believe stuff like that i think the allow says it all my mom could have said that she doesn't believe in it but instead she says she doesn't allow herself like the impulse to believe is there but she's forcing herself not to. And I've had periods of very intense depression, but there's never been such a large chunk of time that I have no memory of whatsoever. There was some kind of dark energy that kept me in that bed. And one day it was there. And the next day it was gone. And I don't know what to call that dark energy, but I know it exists.

Big love to Sarah and her family for sharing that story. When you return, what you don't know can hurt you. You're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned. Now, over the years of producing this show, we've learned that the supernatural doesn't just obey commands. you can't just take this stuff and make it do your bidding but see our next storyteller Paul well Paul he doesn't know that yet

spooked to this day I'll still sit there and think of what what it all meant it was inexplicable and otherworldly so i was a pretty active kid in fact an extremely active kid but as time went by in my early teens i started having problems with i'd get really bad backache and i'd get really lethargic. I'd get achy and complain about just not feeling up for it, which was unusual for me because I was usually up for pretty much anything. And on a routine checkup with a doctor, they ran some tests and my blood pressure really freaked them out. It was sky high. And when I started going to the bathroom, there was a lot of protein and a lot of blood in my urine when you grow up in Africa you spend a lot of time in and around dams and rivers and lakes and what have you and there's a parasite there and just about everyone gets it and it's fairly easy to treat and for some reason or other it had taken root inside of my kidneys and so it had evolved into something that essentially my kidneys started shutting down. By that time, my urine was pretty close to pure blood, this kind of icky, brownish-red colour. My blood pressure was just obscenely high. We were trying to treat it, having biopsies and looking at what was going on. My condition was deteriorating pretty rapidly and we... didn't really seem to have a solution. So I was in hospital and had been for a couple of months at this point. I was bedridden. I was a lot out of bed. And I was so frustrated and so scared and so tired of it all. There'd been a lot of movement around me that day that my test results, I guess, weren't doing so well and what have you. And this other kid with diabetes came into my ward. it was lights out everyone went to sleep and stuff and myself and this buddy of mine we had this cunning plan so kind of like on the tv shows where you stuff sheets in your bed so it looks like you're there we did that and then we hopped out of the window and there was this hamburger joint down the road and we went down there and we grabbed a burger and it was next

to this bar and we were 15 16 at the time we thought we were so clever we thought it was awesome. We went and got some food. We were on restricted diets. When we were breaking back into the hospital, we went through the bathroom window. Sitting in the bathroom was a priest waiting for me because my test results had come back. And Sister Sally, she was one of the nurses there, was just beside herself. She was so pissed at me. I was like, what's the big deal? And she just couldn't contain herself. She goes, Paul, the big deal is you're dying. And so I kind of went back to my bed, got into my bed, and the priest was standing there. And it was time for last rites. I made it through that 24 48 hours. I'm lying in my hospital bed, and in walks this 40-something-year-old woman with just an incredibly peaceful demeanor about herself. She came and sat down next to my bed, introduced herself, hi Paul, my name's Anne, and your mom asked me to come and say hi. At this stage, I was an incredibly cranky, scared young guy, and I wasn't going to be rude, but I certainly wasn't going to be friendly. But she sat there and she talked, and then she asked me if I minded if she would pray with me. Then I was a little pissed, because I didn't see that God was really doing me that many favors at that time. And the beautiful thing with Anne was she asked that and then she, I think she almost tricked me because we just started having a chat and we got to know each other a little better. We laughed a little bit and I felt myself relaxing and unwinding and connecting with her. And then she got back to, did I mind if she prayed with me? I said, sure. she said I'm going to put my hands here if that's okay and she kind of held her hands maybe an inch above where my kidneys were I remember laying there being fairly sceptical but by the same token there was just that little sliver of light that little sliver of hope as she sat there I felt this at first this sense of warmth And I thought, ah, okay, it's because her hand's in here. But then it started growing, and it wasn't just a superficial surface warmth. It was this warmth that was kind of growing, growing, growing from within.

And I could feel, whereas my back had been really sore, that was inexplicably easing up. not only was the pain going away but there was a level of peace that was coming in my chest didn't feel so constricted I didn't feel quite so panicked it was the most incredible sense of peace that I'd felt in a very very long time it was bizarre and I've experienced I've experienced true deep love with a child with a partner, with a friend, but nothing comes even close to that peace. I kind of closed my eyes because I thought that's what you're supposed to do when you're praying. And then I opened them and I saw Anne was sitting there, her eyes more or less closed, but she just had this look of complete peace on her. And then she opened her eyes and she smiled and she said it was great meeting me And... Would it be okay if she came and saw me again? I was like, sure, that would be great. So she left, and they came. They were doing rounds on a fairly regular basis. They came, and when they did a urine test, filled the cup, it was clear there was no blood in it. So it had gone from being looked like pure blood to no blood. When they tested my blood pressure, my blood pressure was lower than it had been since I got into hospital. I remember the nurse, it was Sister Agatha. She was like, you could see on her face, this does not compute. A few hours later, sure enough, same result. So then there was this mad scurrying of doctors and nurses. Because they've done all these tests, I've been in hospital all this time and I'm supposed to be, like, not good. Part of the protocol and finding out what the heck was going on was I flew to England to the Philly Renowned Hospital for that kind of thing. Went through a battery of tests there. They came to the same conclusion that the doctors in Zimbabwe had come up with, which was, it makes no sense. It was inexplicable and otherworldly. I couldn't explain it, but I was okay with not explaining it. Fast forward the tape almost 20 years later, and I just got home from the hospital where my daughter Erin had just had surgery for a brain tumor. She was four months old at the time, and the surgery hadn't gone well. and it was not a good time.

It had been a terrible day. Erin had been in about eight hours of surgery and it was taking bits and pieces of her brain out and it was when she survived the surgery. And then we get to the end of the surgery and they tell us it wasn't successful. So, Carrie stayed in the hospital with her overnight at the infant ICU. Carrie was my wife at the time. And left her little body on all these life support systems and drove home because I had another child at home. And then I had this big pile of mail. So, I went and sat at the kitchen table and I'm going through the mail. And I noticed this piece from Matamwa. It's a leper colony that I'd done some work with. There was this note, and it said, and we'd like to welcome Anne Lander to our board. I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. A day that was so filled with despair where suddenly there was a ray of light, there was an element of hope. I was like, oh my God, this is awesome. Anne's going to heal her. Anne is totally going to heal her. She's going to fix Erin. I think Erin's going to be okay. So I reached out to Anne right away, and I'm like, Hey, Anne, I'm just confirming you're the Anne. It's Paul Templer, blah, blah, blah. Do you remember me? And she's like, Sure. I remember you. How are you? So I give her a quick update on what's going on with Anne. And I'm like, Anne, you have to help me. You have to heal Anne. And she's like, Paul, I don't heal anyone. I remember getting really pissed. I'm like, But you did me. She goes, I didn't heal you. It felt like a cruel trick. I was very pointed and made clear as politely as I could that what I was looking for was nothing short of a miracle. But Anne wasn't budging. We had a conversation, and rather than focusing on what she couldn't do, we looked at what she could do. She proposed we form a prayer circle. whilst less than delighted I think I still felt a glimmer of hope At the time I was living in this little bungalow and I was in this little apex upstairs roof was pretty low you had to duck your head in some areas and Erin was just laying there. My job was to sit next to Erin and to hold my hand just above her head. I remember, like, wiping my eyes

and I had my hand there. Tick, tick, tick.

and I thought I was going crazy because I could feel this incredible warmth, this energy starting to build. I do remember giggling a little because I was absolutely convinced that this was going to work. This was going to work. But then it dissipated, and as hard as I tried, I couldn't bring it back. I'm just kind of slouching there with my hand above her and I couldn't regenerate what I had experienced I just lay there and I watched her sleep I thought I knew what the miracle was that we needed and then I realized I couldn't predict the future but I could shift the focus. I could look for a different unfolding. Erin's 13 now and my daughter has profound special needs. She's medically fragile, but Erin is still alive. the thing is she has this big smile and she smiles from her eyes when i pull up at home she will run out and give me the biggest hug and then she wants to hop into the back of my truck to go wherever i'm going the more i try to control the supernatural the inexplicable the less conducive the environment I'm producing for anything to happen inside of it to me the acceptance of what is acceptance with possibilities, that's what creates the portal if you want for the supernatural

Thank you, Paul Templer, for sharing your story with Spooked. Now, if you want to hear more from Paul and his life as an adventure guide on the Zambezi River, it's a story that is incredible. It involves hippos. You've got to hear it on the amazing Snap Judgment podcast, storytelling with a different flavor. That's a snapjudgment.org. Now, Paul has a memoir called What's Left of Me, And I'm going to have a link at spookpodcast.org. Spook was produced by a tiny team of intrepid researchers that goes into dark places, that walks unlit paths, that asks questions other people dare not explore. And if you appreciate their sacrifice in search of this truth, let somebody know. Send holy water or incense or sage or something to help this team that always carries a flashlight. Mark Ristich, Anna Sussman, Liza Smith, Katya Apakina, Sarah Finnerty, Erica Lance, Jody Colley, Tao Dukat. The spook theme song was written and performed by Pat Mercedes Miller. and your original soundscape through this journey was created, written, performed, and produced by the amazing team of Renzo Gorio, Leon Morimoto, and Patton C. Miller. And remember, creatures of the dark, they wrap themselves in illusion. They appear as brothers, sisters, lovers, all the while hiding an ulterior, unholy motive There is only one, one surefire way to expose their evil plans, friends. Never, ever, no matter how much they beg and plead and weep, never, ever, never, never, ever, never, never turn out the lights.