Spooked · KQED and Snap Studios

The Wraith - Classic

January 23, 2026·31 min·2 clips

A woman in a green bowl cut walks through the screen door, says Teresa's full name, and tells a five-year-old girl: 'Nobody here loves you and nobody here wants you — come with me.'

1. Spooked's 'The Wraith - Classic' presents a single first-person account from Teresa Morligan about four decades of encounters with the spirit of a woman in green who visited her from early childhood into adulthood. 2. The episode is hosted by Glenn Washington of Snap Judgment; it opens with an original prologue about a boy raising chickens and a dream-visit from his deceased grandmother before transitioning to Teresa's story. 3. The episode's framing question is whether what appears to be a malevolent haunting might be a form of desperate suffering that requires compassion rather than resistance. 4. Teresa first experienced a spirit visit at age five or six when her mother's cousin Gary — a large, healthy-seeming man then hospitalized with cancer — appeared sitting at the foot of her bed, waved, said 'I love you, goodbye,' and was confirmed dead the next morning. 5. Shortly after, her young aunt — also in her mid-20s and dying of liver cancer — appeared in the same way, saying the same words; these benevolent visits led Teresa's mother and grandmother to recognize she had 'the ability' to see and hear people who had passed. 6. Teresa never told friends about a third entity who was entirely different in character — a petite woman in green with a 1970s-era bowl cut who walked through a closed screen door, addressed Teresa by her full name, and said 'nobody here loves you and nobody wants you, come with me.' 7. Behind the woman in green stood a group of children running as if on a playground — Teresa understood them as lost children who had come with the woman, which made the invitation to join them particularly chilling. 8. The encounters continued for years; the woman always appeared in doorways — closet doors, bedroom doors — repeating the same message that nobody loved or wanted Teresa. 9. Teresa describes the emotional effect as a specific, heavy darkness: not just fear but loneliness, sadness, and shame — 'like having a bad smell on you' — that she could not generate on her own at that age. 10. As a teenager, Teresa surrounded herself constantly with friends to avoid being alone, used crystals, sage, and candles as boundaries, and began theorizing she was 'a beacon, a lighthouse' that drew certain kinds of entities. 11. At around age 15, she sat up in bed and told the wraith directly to leave — using profanity — and found that verbal confrontation caused the presence to depart, though it always returned. 12. As an adult in Portland, Teresa was engaged to a man named Terry, to whom she had never disclosed the wraith; one night Terry woke in distress to find Teresa's face had become the wraith's face and body, with the woman repeating 'I don't love you, I don't want you.' 13. Terry shouted 'you're not Teresa,' to which the wraith replied 'yes, I am'; Teresa describes feeling the wraith's presence physically in the room during this encounter. 14. After marrying and moving to Berkeley, the wraith continued to appear; Teresa's standard method of commanding it to leave — saying it was not welcome — continued to work temporarily but never permanently. 15. A friend introduced Teresa to a homeopath in North Berkeley named Sharon, who within twenty minutes of meeting Teresa began staring at her intensely and asking what she was afraid of, running through a list until Teresa broke down crying. 16. Sharon said 'is it her, the woman that came in with you?' — perceiving the wraith's presence without having been told anything — and immediately worked with Teresa to understand what the entity wanted. 17. Teresa's ex-husband's recollection that the wraith appeared to be fighting someone off prompted the insight: the wraith was a woman who had been hurt and murdered, cut off abruptly, and left searching for belonging. 18. Teresa told the wraith 'you are loved, you are wanted, you are going to stop suffering' — and reports the presence vanished immediately and completely, never returning. 19. Teresa reflects that her decades of fighting the wraith with commands and confrontation had been feeding the encounters; compassion was the only thing that resolved them. 20. Teresa connects this insight to her volunteer work in an emergency department, saying every person in pain — whether from an accident or an attack — needs the same thing: to be told they are seen, that someone is sorry they were hurt.

As heard by us

A plainspoken haunting that stays intimate and unsettling.

Teresa Morligan tells the story plainly, and that is what makes it linger. A midnight visitation at the foot of the bed, a wave, and the words, "I love you. Goodbye," land with a quiet chill.

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Why you'd press play

You want Teresa's bedside haunting told in a plainspoken, human voice.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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