Hey all! First, again, I’m so sorry this update has taken so long to get to you.
So personal update first.
I started a new job, moving away from Lyft and Uber. A great set of jobs that I love and hate to leave. But I need insurance I can afford, and a steady paycheck. So I’ve recently started working for Discover Financial Services out here in West Valley Utah.
Its an amazing job with people I’ve already come to care about.
The building was a little bit odd, and I feel like I’ve seen some things there. But still a great job and one I’m grateful to have.
Podcast Update: I’ve had my eye on a new location, but after talking to several people, it seems like it might not be as paranormal as we had originally been led to believe. Meaning, it might not be worth it to investigate. However, I’ve got a few more feelers out there and when I hear back I’ll make that determination and let you guys know I’ve decided to move on to a new local.
What does all this mean? That going through the process of starting a new job, starting that job, and then trying to settle into that new schedule has really put a damper on what I’ve been able to do with this podcast lately.
Good news: I’ve settled in and things are getting back into a more regular rhythm.
Now, to keep with the norm for this podcast, I will share with you a story or two about some of the thing that make me a believer in the strange and unexplained.
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Now I can’t point to a single moment in time and tell you, “that’s it!” That’s when I started to believe. I come from a family of women that both see and believe. As my sister has delved into our family history we’ve found more and more examples of women and men who have seen what some couldn’t or, in some cases, wouldn’t see.
I can remember waking in the night at a very young age, and seeing things or people standing near me, or over me, looking down or simply going on as though I wasn’t there at all. My sisters and I have several shared experiences from out youth that we still can’t explain
As many of you may know, I haven’t lived in Utah my whole life, my family hails from this wonderful state, and even though I spent most of my life in California, I feel as though making the move here to SLC is basically me coming home to my roots.
A few years before we would eventually make the move north easty, my then boyfriend and I, along with my good friend Chibbi, and my brother in law, decided to rent a larger house on northeast side of town. It was a beautiful house that had gone through a serious renovation. Including a jet tub and double headed shower.
There was a built in California King bed frame, surrounded by curtains on a raised step, with running lights underneath. It was a beautiful home. And a house full of doors. In just the master suite, there was the door into the room. The glass French pocket doors across from the bed that lead out into the back yard, the pocket door into the bathroom, a door into the water closet where the toilet lived, and then, at the end of the counter, was another glass door leading out into the backyard.
A room full of doors.
A few days prior to this night, my family had lost our gorgeous Cocker spaniel, Nakita. She was the first dog my family had the privilege of knowing from birth to death. We loved her and affectionately called her poot. It was late that night. My friend and her young son were asleep in their room across the hall, my soon to be fiancé’s brother had moved out by then, and my guy was at work.
I was watching a show on my tablet as I drifted off to sleep, the cat, Squeaker asleep beside me. Suddenly, I shot up out of bed, a dog barking pulling me out of my sleep.
“Kida?” I demanded groggily, “What’s wrong Kida?” My hand hit the tablet that crashed into the small tv tray I had next to the bed with a book on it, and both went careening to the ground. Then there was another sound, one that came from the bathroom.
Alert I slipped from the bed and grabbed the pistol from where my boyfriend kept it, and careful pulled the pocket door open. The light was on, the drawers and cupboards were wide open, as well as the door leading into the back yard. I crept forward, the light from the bathroom illuminated the backyard, there was no one there. I pulled the door closed and locked it. Then I ran from the room and out into the hall, pulling my bedroom door closed as well. I woke my friend, telling her what had happened, and instructing her to turn her lights on and not open the door for anyone other than me.
I called my boyfriend and told him was has happening. He left work to come investigate.
Sure enough, he found evidence of someone having jumped the fence and come through the back yard. Our medications were gone, but nothing else was gone. The police officer I spoke with told me was assumed the sound I made when I woke up scared off the burglar. I would never had made those sounds if I hadn’t heard my deceased family dog barking at me.
Not too long after that, I got engaged, and then married. Our lease was coming due and after thinking everything over, we decided it was time to purchase as house. Especially since we were hoping to build a family. We started looking for a house, a couple of months before our lease expired, and crossed our fingers that things would work out.
Weeks went buy and we’d found some decent houses, but nothing that we could afford monthly. We were renting storage units and preparing to stay with my inlaws for a while, as we continued to search seemingly in vain.
We ended up finding a nice house on Mayberry ave in Hemet, that we thought would be just what we needed. As we rolled up, following our Realtor, Sadie, who was amazing by the way. The current owner was there doing work on the house. My husband at the time and I headed in and wondered the house, followed closely behind by the owner. I won’t lie, there was a vibe in the house, but at the time, I chalked that up to the owner watching us. Especially so after we found out this particular gentle man was nearly $50,000 upside down on the house.
Needing to move and not having much time, we put in and offer and it was accepted.
A month or so later, we moved in.
Super eager to get out of the place we were, I stayed the first night in the house with my brother in law, on air mattresses, with no power in the house.
This was a mistake.
My brother in law slept in the add on room that would eventually become my office while I camped out in the master bedroom.
We said goodnight, over some late night del taco, and split up into our respected rooms for sleep. I was exhausted, having been currently working long hours doing a play with the middle schoolers I was responsible for at my job. I was asleep almost as quickly as my head hit the pillow. Even on an air mattress, I was out like the power we didn’t have.
And that lasted all of an hour maybe.
I rolled over and was suddenly, instantly awake.
I looked around, not sure what had woken me, but certain that I had been awoken. I sat up and checked the bed, still inflated. I opened the door and looked down the hall, thinking that maybe my brother in law was up and using the bathroom, but the house has was still. Using the flashlight on my phone I headed out and checked the windows and doors of my home. A force of habit I picked up from my father. The house was secure and my brother in law was soundly asleep on his bed.
Assuming everything was fine, I headed back to bed myself.
I laid down, rolled on my side so I faced the wall, and tried to sleep.
I was close to sleep, feeling myself start to drift, when I felt something behind me. Rolling quickly, I saw a shape by the door. Terrified I turned on the flashlight I had as quick as I could. But nothing was there. I should note that that there was a near full length mirror on the back of the door. When the light hit the mirror, it bounced off and sent shadows running around the room. Were they all natural shadows? Or was one of them the shadow I had just seen?
Breathing hard, my pulse racing I swept the light slowly around the room.
But there was nothing there.
Flash forward a few weeks and my husband, and I were sound asleep in the middle of night in the master bedroom. I woke suddenly to find two men in white coats standing over us, practically in the middle of the bed. From what I could see they had clipboards in their hands and were watching us, monitoring us as we slept. Having grown accustomed to seeing things in the night, I didn’t scream. I reached out and put a hand on my husbands’ arm. He was my ground. I closed my eyes and waited a moment before opening them again.
They were gone.
I’ll share one last story with you guys before I head back to my research.
After moving into my current house and setting myself up into the basement, a little less than a year later, my husband and I separated, and he moved into a different room. Right across from mine but still on the same floor. Sometimes at night he would come into my room and talk to me, and once I woke up to find him standing in my doorway not sure if he should wake me with his concern or not.
So, when I woke up one night and there was a man standing on the rug next to my bed, I assumed it was my ex. I checked my fitbit, which I wore at night to track my sleep, and groaned at the fact that it was only just after four that morning.
“What do you want?” I demanded of him.
After I had spoken, my eyes still on this shadow in my dark room, I realized this was not my ex-husband. In fact, this was none of the boys that lived with me at the time.
I turned my phones flashlight on and said simultaneously, “I see you.”
Sometime before that, I had read about how figures like this, would disappear if they knew you had seen them. Hence my declaration. With the light on, there was nothing there. Feeling like my heart was going to burst from my chest, I got up and switched the lights on, pacing the room, waiting for my blood pressure to normalize. After about an hour, I calmed down enough to get back onto bed and try for sleep, with the lights on.
The next few nights I fell asleep to the sounds of Hell's Kitchen, keeping Gordon on all night so if I happened to wake I wouldn’t be in the dark. Three days later, I turned the tv off as I was going to sleep. Plunging the room into darkness for the first time since seeing the man.
Around four I was woken up again, terrified I turned on the flashlight I had kept next to my bed just in case and l reached for my glasses. But I couldn’t find them. A side note, my eyes are really bad. And without my glasses I can’t see for crap. Frantically I began to search my night stand, under my pillows and blanket and even the space between the bed and nightstand.
But they were gone.
I got up and turned on the light in the room.
Sitting on the rug, in the very place the man had been standing only a few nights before, were my glasses, turned to face my where I had just been sleeping. Almost as if to say, I see you too.
I stared. Looking from the nightstand, where I keep my glasses when I sleep, to the spot on the floor, trying to find a way to explain this bizarre thing logically.
But despite my best attempts, there was no way to fling the glasses off the nightstand onto that specific spot. I have king sized bed, and now that I was no longer sharing it, I was sleeping in the middle. From there, I can’t reach the nightstands on either side, with more than the tips of my fingers. I grabbed my glasses, through on my robe, snatched my phone up, and bolted up the stairs to the kitchen, turning on every light could as I went.
I spent the rest of the morning there, cleaning and prepping dinner. And I did not go back down to my room until the sun had fully risen, and I was so tired I couldn’t stay awake any longer.
I’ve saged the whole house when we moved in and have since saged it again. While I haven’t seen anything that corporeal since then. There is something very obviously in this house. And I know the previous owner did die in the house. Whether or not that has anything to do with what I saw, I may never know.
Well guys, thank you so much for your patience, and for hanging in here with me.
I’ll hit you guys up on the website and let you know what’s going on with the next location. You can always find updates and transcriptions, along with my sources for each episode at our website, www.strangeutah.com stop by and say hi, we love having new friends.
I’m Jenn Bogle, signing off, as always, Keep it strange.