[SPEAKER_00]: Paranormal experiences don't really work to a time scale, and therefore we invite you to listen to a dark miniser.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, every single last one of you and welcome to the mini-sode finale for Season 24.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now as I mentioned to our patrons through the week, people have asked if, as I've announced, that the dark paranormal as a show will also be turning into a video podcast, as well as an audio podcast, is there anything different they need to do?
[SPEAKER_00]: And the simple answer is no.
[SPEAKER_00]: because the audio will be separated from the video by the networks themselves and they will go right into the RSS feed that you use already so you don't have to change a single thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only thing that you would need to do if you wish to watch the accompanying video
[SPEAKER_00]: is go to youtube.com forward slash the dark paranormal and hit subscribe and then not only will you be able to watch the accompanying video you'll also be notified when a new one is indeed released.
[SPEAKER_00]: As usual we will save our shoutouts for Patreon at the end of this episode but I will say if you want to submit your experience for the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: As always, as I always say, we are a very fluid show.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yes, we have Season 25, the entire scripting all worked out, but if the right experience landed my mailbox the day before an episode, there's a good chance to get air the very next day.
[SPEAKER_00]: it all about the right timing for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So please do not think we're working through a backlog of emails, although we technically are, everyone has read as soon as they arrive.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's more about the right fit in terms of where we are, or where we feel we are, in terms of progression and what we've been speaking about recently, that dictates what it's where.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, if you've got an experience that you won't be chit, the season 25, be it on a mini sod, on a main episode, or indeed, going into one of our dark fight episodes for Patreons, any experience you perform will find is, we will make sure it goes to an audience.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not one of the sort of shows who just resigned emails to the bin.
[SPEAKER_00]: We ensure everyone get heard because that's the sort of show we want to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: As I said last week we want this to be a catalogue of this era's darkest paranormal tales.
[SPEAKER_00]: So either go direct to the dark paranormal.com and click on to a bit my experience or click the link in the show notes.
[SPEAKER_00]: But right now for the final time this season, I implore you to find some moments for yourself, get yourself a nice warm drink, find yourself somewhere to be alone, put your headphones in, and join me.
[SPEAKER_00]: For a few moments, as we travel into the darkness, as through our final submission for this mini-sode series, we hear from our listener Emily and her experience with the scent of
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, Kev.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right off the bat I would like to say I am a skeptic by nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, I do love your show.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love all things horror because I don't believe it's real.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or should I say, I now 80% don't believe it's real.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, forever, 100%, however the experience I'm going to now inform you of was the thing that knocked that final 20% of its perch, and now I guess I'd call myself a skeptic with a small S.
[SPEAKER_00]: My name's Emily, and I'm a practice nurse.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've worked in a GP surgery for 11 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: My job is to find rational explanations for things, symptoms, patterns, causes.
[SPEAKER_00]: That how my brain is wired, that how it needs to be wired.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've sat across from people having panic attacks and I've talked them down with nothing but fact and a calm voice.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why I don't frighten easily, and I don't reach for the supernatural if something ordinary fits.
[SPEAKER_00]: And prior to this, something ordinary fitted every single time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Until it didn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 2021, my mother passed away after a six-month hearty battle with cancer.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was 73 and had been living alone in the house I grew up in since my dad died in 2009.
[SPEAKER_00]: The house is a 1960's Semedy Tatte in a quiet part of Perth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three bedrooms along back garden, the kind of house that hasn't changed much in 40 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: After she went into the hospice in November, I stayed in that house to look after the place and also be closer to her, and also start the rather morbid task of trying to sort out the estate of someone who was still alive as if they'd already passed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mom and Dad only had two kids, me and my brother.
[SPEAKER_00]: My brother lives in Canada and couldn't get back straight away, so it was just me.
[SPEAKER_00]: My boss gave me two weeks compassionate leave, and I went about settling in.
[SPEAKER_00]: But before I go any further, I need to tell you about my grandfather.
[SPEAKER_00]: He died in 1997.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was 19.
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd lived with us for the last four years of his life, and I won't dress it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not a kind man.
[SPEAKER_00]: The one that didn't talk about feelings, didn't apologize, didn't say I love you, and didn't see children as people worth much consideration.
[SPEAKER_00]: Plus, he smoked continuously, and I do mean continuously, change smoking, stopping one out and lighting one up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sagar's was his smoke of choice, and I recall on several occasions saying to my mother, he should at least go to the back door.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rest of us have to live here too.
[SPEAKER_00]: But she would try and shush me and say he's in the last years of his life love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let him do what he wants.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, we did.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that also meant the smell of him was inseparable from
[SPEAKER_00]: his armchair, his cardigan, the landing outside his bedroom door, my mother would wash his bedding twice a week and that smell never shifted.
[SPEAKER_00]: That smell was him.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we were kids my brother and I were frightened of him already.
[SPEAKER_00]: For some reason that fear lingered into our adulthood.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not because he'd ever done anything, he hadn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, not exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: But because of the way he would look at us, like we were in his way, even if he was looking at us from the back kitchen as we played in the backyard.
[SPEAKER_00]: As if our presence was an imposition, he was tolerating, but not especially well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when he died, I remember feeling something I was ashamed for four years, relief.
[SPEAKER_00]: But by this point he'd been gone so long, I hadn't thought about him for so long.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not consciously anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first few nights back in that house were fine, or as fine as they could be in the circumstances.
[SPEAKER_00]: The house felt empty in the way all houses feel empty when the person who wanted animated them is no longer that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That, strange stillness you get when routines and sounds, and the small domestic rhythms of a life, stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like my teenage self-word, I slept in my old bedroom.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't go into the room that had been my grandfather's at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: I noticed the smell on the fourth night.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not my mother, him, tobacco smoke.
[SPEAKER_00]: stale and close, coming from the upstairs landing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not his bedroom, the landing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I stood at the top of the stairs and it was right there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thinking of that I actually looked around for a source of smoke, I checked the smoke alarm out of instinct, nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one had smoked in that house
[SPEAKER_00]: My mother had repainted, recovered, replaced furniture 24 years of ordinary domestic life had sat on top of, whatever he'd left behind.
[SPEAKER_00]: It faded after about 20 minutes, and I told myself the walls were old.
[SPEAKER_00]: Smells can get into plaster, into joists.
[SPEAKER_00]: I told myself that for four days, my mother died on the Saturday.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd headed home at 1 a.m. and they roam me at 20 past 4 in the morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: After getting back from saying my goodbye, the sun was up but I decided to take a shower and the smell hit me immediately.
[SPEAKER_00]: The smell was more overbearing than ever, more powerful.
[SPEAKER_00]: I stopped dead on the landing and I didn't know how to explain what I felt.
[SPEAKER_00]: Except to say it wasn't grief, it wasn't the ordinary disorientation of bereathment.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was something older than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The feeling I used to get as a child when grandfather's bedroom door was open, and I had to walk past.
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the next 10 days it would come and go, never in the same place, it'd began to move from that landing area to the rest of the house, the kitchen, the back bedroom, my bedroom.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once even in my car on the way to the solicitors, which I've always been less certain about, but the others were different, sudden, immediate, and definite.
[SPEAKER_00]: the way his presence had always been.
[SPEAKER_00]: You would never hear him coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was just there.
[SPEAKER_00]: My brother arrived in the second week and I didn't say a thing to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though I declared myself a skeptic, he was the most skeptical of the two.
[SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, I didn't want to say the
[SPEAKER_00]: because it felt strangely, like an invitation.
[SPEAKER_00]: That part I tried not to dwell on too much because my logical brain tells me that ridiculous.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, having listened to all of the shows you've put out, I know that saying someone's name, specifically, a deceased person's name, is allegedly some way of calling them forth, or at least can be, if you believe in all that.
[SPEAKER_00]: which of course I didn't, at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: The final night before we handed the house over to the estate agent we were doing a final walk through.
[SPEAKER_00]: My brother took the downstairs and I went to do the bedrooms.
[SPEAKER_00]: I went into his old room last.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was bare, which my mother had already done.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I say, she'd redecorated, but for some reason she'd left the carpet in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: As I say I'd not been in, and this to me was validation the smell of smoke was coming from the carpet.
[SPEAKER_00]: I even knelt down to have a good sniff, but it was fresh or at least it smelled like fabric and not smoke.
[SPEAKER_00]: I stood back standing in the doorway looking at the room.
[SPEAKER_00]: The carpet held these ghostly indentations of where his bed used to be, where his chair used
[SPEAKER_00]: I could see the indentations faintly visible in the seemingly cleaned carpet.
[SPEAKER_00]: My brother called up from the bottom of the stairs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you done up there?
[SPEAKER_00]: Nearly I replied and I gave one last looker there was a knock, a single clear knock, knock pipes, not the window frame, a knock the way you would knock on a door.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the way you were not going to do, if someone hadn't heard your first four attempts, and it came from the dead center of the room.
[SPEAKER_00]: I deliberate knock on wood in a place where there was no wood nor hand to make the knock.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once more, I found myself frozen, staring at the center of an empty room.
[SPEAKER_00]: I heard my brother impatiently march up the stairs behind me.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's taking so long here?
[SPEAKER_00]: He walked into the room.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's nothing in here why you stood in the, he paused and his face turned white.
[SPEAKER_00]: His eyes fixed in the corner of the room to my right.
[SPEAKER_00]: I spun my head around empty, nothing there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I turned back to my brother.
[SPEAKER_00]: He literally pushed me out of the way, ran down the stairs, threw up in the front door and ran into the street.
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost in a folly adieu, I was about three seconds behind him screaming, what wrong, what wrong?
[SPEAKER_00]: When I finally got outside to meet him, he had his hands on his knees and was panting.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, I've just seen granddad, I've just seen granddad?
[SPEAKER_00]: He kept repeating it over and over again.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had to lean against
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, what do you mean you've just seen Granddad, the room is empty?
[SPEAKER_00]: He looked at me as if I was stupid.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, did you not see him in the corner of the room?
[SPEAKER_00]: I just shook my head.
[SPEAKER_00]: I still did not want to say to my brother, but I'd smell him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'd heard a knock from the center of the room seconds before you walked in.
[SPEAKER_00]: I kept that to myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: God knows why, but I did.
[SPEAKER_00]: We both decided that the work we'd done was enough, and we didn't enter the house again, we locked it as we were outside.
[SPEAKER_00]: That day we traveled in his car, and we'd already booked a hotel for the evening.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we traveled to that hotel in complete silence.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next day of a breakfast, my brother acted like nothing had happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we must have this skeptical competitive nature, because I too acted like everything was okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Neither of us have mentioned the incident to each other since the day it happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have changed my name for this submission, just by chance he listens to the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as I say, here's a complete skeptic much more so than I.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether that's changed with what he claims he saw, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do know for me, as I said earlier,
[SPEAKER_00]: My skepticism level has dropped rather significantly, although if a stranger asks am I a skeptic, I still answer yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I wonder what my brother would answer if he was ever asked.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for reading this curve.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully I hear it on a mini-sode or similar.
[SPEAKER_00]: Take care, Emily.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Emily, thank you so much for giving us this our final mini-sode for Season 24.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do love it, and I'm sorry that sounds a bit shoud and Freudan, when a skeptic is kind of rattled.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or should I say the experience something which makes them question their own skepticism?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a very healthy thing to happen to a skeptic.
[SPEAKER_00]: and also big points to you for being so open to accept it as unexplainable, even if you do then park it at the back of your mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: And no one will judge you for that, believe me.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fascinating part about this from a human level is this skeptical competition between yourself and your brother.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it does mean that we will never truly know what your brother now makes of that
[SPEAKER_00]: whether he's rationalised it or chose to completely erase it from his existence, which believe me people do.
[SPEAKER_00]: But once more, Emily, I know it's not your real name, but thank you for giving us our Season 24 mini-Sode finale.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, don't forget everyone we have our finale for the Dark Paranormal on Friday after which there will be a 3 week period without any dark paranormal shows.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which means, of all the times, this is the perfect time to claim your free week trial for our highest tier on Patreon.
[SPEAKER_00]: As you will receive 2 30 minutes plus fresh episode each week of those 3 weeks, as well as the entire back catalogue of over 200 hours of dark bites.
[SPEAKER_00]: the links in the show notes or go to patreon.com for what slash the dark paranormal.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for mini-sodes, this is it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll speak to you for our next mini-sode next season.
[SPEAKER_00]: Until then, stay safe and take care.