Haunted · Panoply

I See Dead People

December 12, 2017·31 min·2 clips

Judith's five-year-old son tells her a ghost has been asking him to come with it — the same age she was when her own sightings began.

A child resists bedtime. Her father gives the usual answer: car lights, shadows on the wall. Judith feels that answer fall apart before she even gets to the room. Her name is on the door. Inside, the bedroom feels too big, the bears look watchful, and the dark brings the moment she has been trying to avoid. She senses him before she sees him. When she turns, he is there. Frightening at first, but with kind eyes, and careful enough not to come closer. Then he simply becomes part of the room. Judith's first ghost is not a one-off childhood scare. In her account, the dead keep showing up. The host gives the story room without flattening it. He follows her into a later scene where a ghost seems to dance with her, a moment that almost plays sweet and funny until it starts to feel off. The question shifts. If a living person watched someone in a bedroom, or danced with a wife while her husband was away, that would feel threatening. Judith does not see it that way. She does not hear jealousy in it, which leaves the host with something messier than fear. Maybe she held nothing at all. That possibility leads to the harder part of the story: how do you separate a haunting from an imaginary friend, a private vision, or a mind under strain? Judith cannot prove it. She allows that a psychiatrist might have another view, while still insisting it was not imaginary in any meaningful sense. Skeptics and a parapsychologist both hesitate. Their hesitation makes the host notice how quickly people label someone who sees differently, so he turns to a psychotherapist trained to listen without judgment.

As heard by us

A patient ghost story that treats belief and doubt with equal seriousness.

Judith's childhood bedroom anchors Haunted's eighth episode, and Danny Robbins lets her story breathe before widening the focus to the larger questions around it.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a ghost story that lingers after the lights go out.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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