Maggie, with no experience in the paranormal, was offered a $250 gig to perform a "fake seance" for a party. What started out as innocent fun turned into a genuine supernatural problem. Check out our Merch Follow us on: Instagram, TikTok, Twitter For business inquiries contact: [email protected] If you have experienced something paranormal or unexplained, email us your story at [email protected] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the premise of the fake seance?
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The story you're about to hear is one that kind of hooked me on the premise alone when I first got the email. It's about a person named Maggie, who at the time was 25 and living in her grandma's basement in Denver, Colorado.
At this time, Maggie is mostly hanging out with her friends who are a bunch of artists that live in a huge house together and trying to figure out a way to make a living creatively, which can be very hard, especially when you're young. I know that firsthand. I was in that position myself for quite some time. And when you're in that position, pretty much any time somebody hits you up,
with a job or a random gig that is somewhat creative You kind of just go for it, no matter what it is. And that's exactly what happened to Maggie. Somebody reached out to her asking Maggie to conduct a seance at a party they were hosting. She told this person, thank you, but I'm not a psychic or a medium. I don't know how to conduct a seance. And they said, it's okay.
You can just pretend, fake it. Also, I'm going to be paying you $250 for this. So Maggie did exactly what I would have done in that situation and said, you've got yourself a psychic. So that's where this story starts off. A very unusual fake it until you make it example. But, of course, it gets a lot weirder from there. I'll let Maggie tell you the rest of the story. This is episode 109.
The title is The Fake Seance, and you're listening to Otherworld. Hello? Is this Bobby? Yes, it is. At its core, the science, you can't argue with.
A story about... All of a sudden... Up in the sky... It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm going to die.
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Chapter 2: Who is Maggie and what was her situation?
And they were like, well, it's tomorrow. But they were like, well, you drove all the way down here. Just hang out with us. It's fine. And so I was like, oh, okay, cool. So I sat on this porch with these three guys, and they were really nice, all living in this community house in downtown Denver, and I hung out with them all night, and That's how I met my friend Abby.
She was living there at the time. And she like rode her bike up and said, Hi, I'm Abby. Who are you? And so we became like instant friends. And she was like, look, just come back tomorrow night. There's going to be a real party here. You'll meet a lot of really cool people. I'm looking forward to seeing you. I went back the next night.
met all of these awesome community people in Denver, hung out with Abby, and then met her partner at the time, Tovio. I started hanging out more and more with all of the people that I met in Denver, but mostly Abby and Tovio. We were starting to do a lot of creative projects together, making music videos.
We were trying to build some musical instruments together, reading poetry, doing street performance. It was just a lot of crazy, weird fun. Nothing was super serious. Tovio, they had gotten a call from this woman that they knew who wanted to put on a party. Like every year they would do this big like haunting festival at the Central City Opera House in Central City, Colorado. And...
It's really old. It's an old gold mining town. They would have magicians and crystal ball reader, tarot cards and palm reading, ghost tours, a bunch of stuff like that. Just like a big, expensive, fancy, like 20s style, you know, like martinis. Everybody was like dressed up really fancy. Cute with feather boas and glittery dresses.
And it was kind of like an upscale event for rich people who wanted to have a little bit of the haunted experience. And so the person who was managing all of the performers for that event contacted Tovio and said, do you know anybody that could do a seance? And Tovio thought of me and asked me if I wanted to do it. And I said no.
Tovio was like, well, just talk to the lady who's running this thing. And I was like, all right, give her my number. It's fine. And so she called me. But she was just like, you should really do this thing. You don't have to do anything real. Just, you know, put on a good show and just, you know, act it out. We'll pay you. And that's when I did the dumb thing. I was really poor at the time.
I had never gotten paid to do anything like creative, not that amount of money. They paid me $250. But to me at that time, this was 2011. That was a lot of money. I had just been working like really hard manual labor jobs my whole life. And how could I turn down $250 to just go pretend to be crazy for a couple hours, you know? So I said yes.
Most of the other people that were there, the performers, were just regular amateur performers. I remember I went and got a crystal ball reading from this lady, and it was very cheesy and corny. It was just all purely entertainment to sell like a $350 ticket to rich people that want to come and have like a fun weekend. I don't think that anybody that was there was a professional.
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Chapter 3: How did Maggie get involved in the seance?
I will say that. So I'm sitting there. I put my black lace cloth over my head, waited for all of the people to come into the room. There was about 30 people in the room. It was upstairs at this opera house. This is a really old building.
And this room was like this long rectangular room with a long rectangular really fancy like dining table sitting right in the middle of it that almost took up the whole room. So I'm at one end of it. The door to the room is on the other far end away from me. And there's people sitting on either side of the table. In front of me, I have set up some candles.
my stack of tarot cards, a dish that I can burn stuff in. And I brought some like red wax markers with me that I had already had at my house. I didn't buy anything for this. I just scrounged around what I had in my room that I thought would be entertaining. So I have all that sitting out in front of me. Everybody comes in and sits down and this guy turns the lights down in the room and
And I started just holding my head, chanting, being like, okay, like, here we go. We're going to do a seance. I told everybody, okay, we're going to try to communicate with one of the spirits that is present in this hotel. What I would like the audience to do is to... really focus in on your space, breathe, think about what's happening around you, but don't talk.
Everybody got really quiet and I started just doing the performance. I started taking my tarot cards and throwing them out onto the table faster and faster. I started randomly picking out a card and looking at it and being like, this one means something and putting it in a different pile. And then I would take a piece of paper and be like, I think I'm getting a message.
And I would write something on it with my marker and then be like, spirit, is this what you're trying to say? And then I would burn it in the dish and then took like the red paint marker stuff and I started smearing it all over my face and just chanting and being like, oh, like the spirits are contacting me. There's someone in the room. And then right when I was doing that, I just felt like,
This sheer, utter fear. Pure disappointment in myself and cold and shaky and out of control. And I looked up and I saw that there was a man that wasn't a human standing in the back of the room by the door. So he was pretty tall, like six feet tall. But, you know, I couldn't see him. It was like, he was just a shadow. Like a shadow that was darker than the other shadows in the back of the room.
I had never seen anything like that before. Where like, it's almost this... indescribable outline of a person and you know that it's there, but if you look directly at it, it's not there, but you can still like see it standing there, like darker than the rest of the room and sense it, like sense the presence of that thing. All of a sudden, very intensely, like he was staring at me.
You know, I can't see any eyes or face, but I can see kind of like an outline of a very tall man. And it was pretty dark in that back part of the room, but he never formed into any sort of like discernible, like human figure. He always was just like this shadow of a person. with like barely, barely discernible features. Like nothing I could even like really describe.
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Chapter 4: What did Maggie experience during the seance?
Like I didn't want to get out of my sheets. What am I going to do? Where am I going to go? I don't think that it was there to even mess with me. I think it was there looking for some sort of like attention or help. Mostly it just felt like it was looking at me like, you saw me, you saw me. Like, can you see me now? Kind of like, so I just laid there. super uncomfortable trying not to look at it.
Just like being really mad at myself. Like I confused this thing. Maybe it was just like really lonely and all of a sudden saw that I was looking at it. And now it's like, well, why aren't you interacting with me more or interacting with me again? And I didn't want to interact with it. I just wanted to go away. So I just felt bad, felt like really guilty.
And I think it probably took me a really, really long time to go to sleep. But eventually I did. And then... In the morning, he was gone. And that was like something that continued to happen for about three months where I would go downstairs into the basement. And I knew that he was down there and he would pretty much just like hover around in the room next to me.
I kind of like got weirdly used to it. I didn't want to get used to it. I think I just kind of like took it as like this is the way it is. Like I live with my grandma. I live in this like creepy old basement. I'm super isolated out here. I have no internet or TV. I just have this ghost that lives in my room and And I have to just be okay with it because that's where I am at this point in my life.
And it's not going to change. I didn't want to go home. I didn't want to go in the basement. I didn't want to be at my grandma's house. You know, I really loved her and wanted to take care of her, but I was like inching further and further away from of spending time at the house. So I would be gone all day, come home and make her dinner, and then I would leave. And I would go out for the night.
Whereas before all this happened, I would just spend the night with her and make sure she was okay. Always be on top of taking care of her. And I didn't want to...
tried to do anything about it either because i had already gotten myself in this mess by messing around with things that i didn't know anything about like i didn't want to try to do some sort of like banishing ritual or anything because what would happen then A couple months go by, like three months.
I'm hanging out with my friends at this collective house called the Tea House, which is where my friend Abby lived at the time. And I would go over there a lot and just chill, you know, listen to music, drink beers on the porch, just like hang out. So I'm sitting on the porch one day of the tea house and I'm by myself. All of my other friends are inside. And this guy comes walking down the street.
And I knew he was probably coming up to the house because he looked like a total weirdo. You know, like long hair, raggedy, like black clothes, like big piercings, tattoos, probably like a heavy metal shirt on. He's walking down the street with this big black plastic trash bag. And I thought maybe, you know, like, oh, that's his clothes.
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