Chapter 1: What was Antonio and Anita's childhood like in Texas?
A tisket. A tasket. I trapped him in the basket. He begged for me to set him free. But I knew he would come for me. But listen to Spooked. Stay true. Your body is unique. And what worked for some influencer might not work for you. With True Diagnostic, you get personalized recommendations based on real data, not trends.
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Choose True Age, True Health, or the Combo Kit as a one-time purchase or subscription. As a young child, I felt that my parents, my mother and my father, I felt they loved me very much. I did, truly. It was just that they and those people from their church, they were fighting something titanic, something urgent, demonic.
because their apostle Herbert W. Armstrong preached that this was the end of days, and they had to meet with each other, had to pray, to fast, to study their Bibles, to listen to cassette tapes from the headquarters church in Pasadena, California, and run the farm. Farms, even failing farms like ours, do not run themselves.
So they worked and they worked and they worked from sunup to far past sundown. Every night, with the exhaustion, I heard the fear, the terror behind my father's goodnight apologies. Don't worry, he promised. The kingdom of God will be here soon. Then we'll have all eternity to play ball and go swimming and climb trees. I told him it was okay. But I didn't mind. And it was true, I didn't mind.
Even as he asked forgiveness for not having the time to spend on me, I just wanted to be alone. I liked being alone because I never felt alone. I saw them mostly out of the corner of my eye.
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Chapter 2: What mysterious figure did Antonio encounter in the house?
The shadows, the shapes and figures darting in and out of sight. Sometimes they would even make themselves plain. Women, men, my grandmother, even a baby once. Other stuff. I knew this was my secret that... My mother and father would holler and weep and call for a pastor if I told them who really kept me company.
They would say I can sort it with the very demons they fought every single day through their prayers and their fasting. They would call the pastor for an exorcism to cast them all away. And I couldn't have that. I wouldn't. So I kept my world hidden. Never breathed a word about who I really spent my time with.
And that's why, when the darting shadows shrank from, warned of a new force in my periphery, something that chased the laughter and the light, something that radiated an evil I had never encountered before, something that for the very first time scared me. Scared me. I realized that I had kept my secrets too well. My name is Gunn Washington. Spooks Starts. Who do you trust?
Who makes you feel safe?
Chapter 3: How did the family's experiences with the supernatural evolve?
When Antonio and his sister Anita were growing up in Texas, their family didn't have much money. That's why they were so excited to move into their very own home. Even if it was a little bit run down. Spooked.
the people that my parents bought from lived there for about 50 years so it just it just got in disrepair often you pull back the wallpaper and you see an old article from the eastern european gazette that we'd never heard of as kids we just thought the words looked funny and you know picked it off the wall
When the family moved in, Antonio was only three and Anita was a newborn. So their parents decided that all four of them should share a bedroom. Anita in her crib and Antonio in a bed against the wall.
I'm five or six years old and one night in my bed, I decide to look to my doorway and there's a man standing in the doorway who I couldn't really tell who it was beckoned me to follow. I want to know who it is, but then in the exact same breath, I don't want to know who it is. I get up out of the bed. I start walking. I can only see just the shape of the person, just haze beyond.
And as I get to where I think I'm going to interact with this figure, the haze turns to darkness. I then realized that I'm standing on the floor furnace, the grate searing through my feet, and my parents find me, screaming. My parents just look at me bewildered, wondering, why did you do that? And I didn't really know.
I couldn't, I was just kind of gobsmacked, thinking, well, who was I following?
The whole family was shaken after Antonio's injury, especially after he told them that he'd been following someone. But no one had been in the house. There was no intruder. So Antonio's parents dropped it, and life went on. And as the children grew older, it no longer made sense for everyone to sleep in the same bedroom.
So it is summer and so neighborhood kids, friends of the family, family members, our cousins, we were all playing in this very large room in the house. And my grandmother was looking after us. But I keep looking up into the corner and I keep seeing this man standing there and he's staring at us. He has dark black hair. It's slicked back.
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Chapter 4: What role did the 'banker' play in the family's life?
He's wearing a suit, which is strange because it's in the middle of the summer. He's standing very straight with his arms alongside his body. And he's not moving. He's just standing in this corner and he's staring at us and staring at me. Nobody else seems to think there's anything wrong happening. They don't feel creeped out in the same way that I feel creeped out.
And he doesn't look like anyone I know. He doesn't look like any of my relatives. And I keep looking over at my grandmother. She's not reacting to him. And I say, Grandma, who's that man in the corner? And she says, what man in the corner? And I said, that man who's just standing there staring at us. She quietly gathers up all of the little kids and gets us out of the room.
That was the first time I experienced seeing the banker.
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What Anita and Antonio didn't know at the time was that back in the 1920s, a wealthy banker had built the house as a love letter to his wife. He chose the finest furnishings, imported wallpaper from France. In the backyard, fruit trees blossomed over a coy pond. And for many years, everything was beautiful.
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Chapter 5: What events led to the family's decision to bless the house?
But when the banker and his wife died, they left no children to maintain the home. Anita, Antonio, and their parents moved into a house that had fallen into decay. After Anita saw him, she and her grandma knew someone was lingering in the house. But they didn't talk about it. No one in the family did. And Anita thinks she knows why.
The Mexican side of the family is, I feel in touch with the spiritual world. And it's fairly normal to speak to your ancestors and for sometimes for them to speak back to you. And that's a very positive thing, you know. But if it's a stranger, if it's someone not in your family, then it's less clear what to do about it.
Only a year or so later, Antonio's dad was out of town on business. Antonio was getting ready for bed.
I was about 10 years old, and I feel a presence near the bed. And I think, well, maybe it's one of my parents. Maybe my dad's come home and just wants to see that I'm sleeping restfully. But as I look towards the foot of my bed, there's nobody standing there. I look towards the door. There's a figure. just standing, not speaking. And I think not to speak because, hey, it's my dad.
Maybe I should fake that I'm asleep. And I think I'm going to rotate to the side and fall myself to sleep. In the morning when I asked my mother, hey, what time did dad get home? She looks at me, what do you mean? I said, yeah, what time did he get home? He was there checking on me. Her face loses a bit of color. No, Antonio, he's still in Kennedy, Texas. Her eyes water a bit.
She kind of shakes her head and walks off, knowing what we never really wanted to talk about, that the spirit visited again.
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Chapter 6: How did the family's relationship with the spirit change over time?
But about a week later, Antonio's mom brought the subject up herself out of nowhere.
She says, he's been here before. My sister's there. We're in the kitchen. We're looking at my mom. What do you mean? And my mom says, when you were little, you'd ask about a man you'd see in the hall. Last week, that was him. And so my sister asked, what do you mean, mom? Who is him? Well, we don't really know his name, but it's the banker.
For the first time, she's verifying something that I knew all along. We now have a name for the person that has visited. So then she relays the story to us that one night, probably when I was about four or five, she's reading a book. I'm dozing off. She decides to lay down next to me, and she dozes off. All of a sudden, she feels pressure.
She tries to awake, and there's somebody putting pressure on her shoulders, but she can't see anybody. And she feels a presence. She said she felt the presence of a man. And as she tries to call out, she feels pressure of a hand on her face, almost to the point of suffocation.
And the only thing that releases suffocation is my little child eyes awaking and looking over, and then the pressure released as she gasped for air. And apparently I asked what was wrong and she played it off like nothing happened. We were like, well, you know, hey mom, why are you telling us this now? And secondly, why haven't you done anything about it? Is it going to attack me?
Because I don't know how you fight this thing. I think Ghostbusters had probably been around at that point. So we wanted her to strap on a proto pack and go take him out. My dad arrives back at the house.
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Chapter 7: What happened to the house after the fire?
My sister and I confront him. We want to know what mom said is true. He looks over at my mom, and my mom kind of just motions to him. They know about him. My dad, who's a deacon in the church, he says, okay. He seems to be like he's disturbed that we now know something that they've tried to protect us from.
And my dad looks over at my mother and he says, well, what we're going to do is something very simple. Bless the house. So we all proceed through the house ceremoniously. We go to the front door.
He came in with this golden bucket that has sort of a scepter looking thing that's in it. And it's full of holy water. And it has a wand at the end. And he would pull this wand out of the bucket and start flinging the wand into the different corners of the room and praying.
And then he does the sign of the cross, turns around. We're now in the living room. blesses the top of the door, walks through each room, blesses the top of the door. And as he proceeds to my room, he says, this is where we'll end. I was nervous and I was uncomfortable, but I did feel a little comfort, like they knew what they were doing. And he gets a small book.
And we look, because it's not the Bible. And it's a book that has the word rights on it. And he starts murmuring some prayer that my sister and I don't understand. Part of it's in Latin. So he blesses the door that I've seen the man over and over and over. He just looks at us. It should be good now. We're done.
But then you kind of think, well, he has this book, he knows about this, so he's probably done this before, so how long does it last? How much time do we have?
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Chapter 8: How did Antonio's new house design reflect his past experiences?
So there's one night, I'm now 11 years old, and as I'm drifting off to sleep, I get a sense that somebody walks into my room. So I really weakly call out, Mom? Dad? Who's over there? And nobody answers.
So all the hair stands up on my back and I can just see in the moonlight somebody standing no less than three to four inches from my face in an old tweed suit with the little pocket for the stopwatch. I immediately think to myself, dad didn't fix it.
I look up and as right as I'm about to get to the face and as this hand came and covered my eyes, not touching me, but just where you can feel the electricity, if you will, of somebody right next to your face, your eyelashes almost just brushing the hand. It's just letting me know I'm not leaving. You can try any ceremony you want. This is my house. And I'm petrified.
So I move my head and it tracks with my head movement, but I can't see directly in front of me. And I don't want to push my head forward because I don't want to touch it. I know what we're going to do. We're going to turn on the lights. I'm going to see whoever this is. And when the moment I made that decision, the darkness cleared and it was back to just dark room, not pitch black.
So I leaped to my feet. I walk as quickly as I can the 10 feet to my light switch. And I don't want to look back. I don't want to look back. I want to hit that switch. And so I go and I flip the switch and I turn around. And at the same time I go, gotcha, the damn light bulb busts. I'm like, oh my God. So I carefully plot my next plan.
I'm going to go into the hallway and this time I'm going to turn at the same time I flip the switch. So I go to the hallway. I very slowly turn. I've got my hand on the switch and I'm ready to just say, gotcha. I hit the switch and then you hear that. And so I get to my sister's room about four feet further down the hall. I reached into her room and go to flip the light switch.
It had already bursted. It wouldn't even turn on. I sat next to her bed and just slept sitting there. That is how my parents found me.
It was clear now. Their dad's prayers and holy water hadn't worked at all.
I wanted to ask my dad many times, why didn't it work? Why didn't it just fix the problem? But I felt a certain amount of guilt, like, well, maybe it's because if I only believed as much as my dad, it would work.
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