The Banker - Classic

Ah, ah, the lesson to spook, stay true.

[Music] 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 from sun up to far paths and down. Every night, with the exhaustion, I heard the fear. The terror behind my father's good night 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 swim in 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 want to be alone.

I like being alone because I never felt alone.

I saw the mostly out of a corner of my eye, 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, them.”

My mother and father would holler and weed 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 they're fasting. I 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 the word about who I really spent my time with.

“And that's why when the darting shadows shrink from, warn of a new force 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. I couldn't watch them. Spook stars. Now.

[Music] Who do you trust? Who makes you feel safe? When Antonio and his sister need him, we're growing up in Texas. The 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 rundown.

[Music]

“The people that my parents bought from live there for about 50 years.”

They just got in disrepair, often you pull a pack, the wallpaper, and you see an old article from the Eastern European Gazette that we've never heard of as kids.

We've stopped the words, look 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. If I were six years old and one night in my bed, I decided to look to my doorway.

And there's a man standing in the doorway who I couldn't really tell who it was back in 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 great 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 gobsmap 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, then 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 some 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 looked back, 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 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. 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 a nice, 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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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. But when the banker and his wife died, they left no children to maintain them. Anita and 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, um, 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 this is 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, I'm burning. He's still in Kennedy, Texas. Her eyes water a bit.

She kind of shakes her head and walks off and knowing what we never really wanted to talk about

that the spirit visited again. 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 and your little, you'd ask for you 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 a banker. For the first time, she's verified something that I knew all along.

We now have a name for the person that has visited. So then she relates the story to us that one night, probably when I was about four or five, she's reading a book, I'm dosing off. She decides to lay down next to me and she and doses 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 the presence, she said, she felt the presence of a man. And as she tries to call out, she feels pressure 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 her air.”

And apparently I asked what was wrong and she played it off like nothing happened. We're 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 have 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. 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 him. They know about him. My dad was 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 my mother and he says, well, what we're going to do is something very simple, less the house. So we all proceed through the house ceremoniously. We go to the front door.

And it has a wand at the end and he pulled this wand out of the bucket and started flinging the wand into the different corners of the room and praying.

And then he does sign of the cross, turns around, we're now in the living room. Bless us the top of the door, walks through each room, bless us 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 they 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 bless us 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 had 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?”

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 tweet 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 eyelash is almost just brushing the hand.”

It's just letting me know. I'm not leaving. You try any ceremony you want. This is my house.

And I'm petrified. So I moved 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 forks. I don't want to touch it. I know what I'm going to do. We're going to turn on the lights. I'm going to see where 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 leap 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, got you the damn light bulb bust. 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 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. Eventually Anita and Antonio moved out of the house. They went to college, started their own lives. But their parents still lived there. And now that they were empty nesters, they started using Antonio's old bedroom as a TV lounge.

And so my mom would often go in there to watch shows. She likes Bella novella's and movies. And so when I came home, I said, why don't we create a nice space for you here?

It's not in a good shape.

“So we decided to renovate my brother's room.”

And moved all the furniture out of the room, tore off all the wallpaper, tore off all the carpeting. White washed everything. We moved everything back in. And my mother really, really loved it. I did stutter a little bit thinking of myself. Or what if they changed something that's not supposed to be changed?

What if they moved something that doesn't want to be moved? Or what if you, hmm, nah, I better not, it's probably for the best. And if it happens, at least I don't live there anymore. But only six months later. 10 days before Christmas, we were getting ready to come home.

We're making our flight plans.

“And we get a call in my mom says you need to turn on the news.”

The whole house is on fire. She's distraught. And when I turn it on, there's somebody standing in front of our house that I grew up in. Saying 10 days before Christmas, family, tragedy, and I'm in disbelief because there's two fire trucks. Like you would see in a movie with the flames shooting out at the top of our house. Like a bomb was dropped. When the fire started, the parents were asleep.

After the smoke woke them up, they got out just in time to watch their house burn. We lay their own talk to the fire inspector, and he goes, man, something I don't normally see. Some I dad and I ask him, what do you mean? He says, well, this is an electrical fire. Okay, so why is that unusual? Well, because of this, and he pushes away a bit of debris. And we look on the wall, and there's a wall, plug, and outlet, which is in perfect clear, non-burnt shape.

He says, well, this is the origin, and all the memories flood back. The origin of where my feet were burned.

The origin of where the second light bulb burst. The origin of where I always saw him.

The man, the banker. That was the room, that was the precious room, and we literally ripped everything out of it. And I think it was the final straw. My parents would never come out and say that the ghost started the fire, but we know it had to have been the ghost. There's no way someone else.

For Anita, it felt like the worst possible ending to her family struggle with the banker.

“I think we all lost the banker, loved that house, and now they don't even get that house anymore.”

So everyone loses. I'm thinking to myself, well, hey, there's the spirits probably gone, and so maybe this fire was the opportunity to cleanse the spirit from the earth plane, to wherever they're going. And then I ask, where are you going to go, Mom? Where are you going to go, Dad? Are you going to go somewhere else? You have the opportunity to move anywhere you want in the city.

And they say, no, we're going to rebuild. And since you're an architect, we want you to do it. I think to myself, wow, that would be great. But also scared of what if we bring it back? Visiting my home after the fire, walking to the house to see what we can salvage.

And I look up to the sky, a leaf from the tree hits me in the face, and I take to myself. What if I built a design to house? It's open to the sky. And so that then became the design idea for the new house, a courtyard house, one that you would see in Mexico. It has an open-air courtyard to simultaneously honor, but also not allow the spirits to be in there anymore.

I had the opportunity to create and put the position of the bedrooms far away from any experience that my sister and I had with regard to any sightings, any spirit. The design that such that that room will never be enclosed ever to try to give poetic release and spiritual release to whoever's there and say, "Hey, you know, this is still your space, but we are going to occupy the rest of it."

What I thought about when I entered that courtyard for the first time is this is a truth.

If this is can't be my parent's house, it can't be your house either. And so that courtyard to me was an offering, an olive branch, say, "Look, nobody's going to have this is going to be no man's land. Come and go as you please, just leave my parents alone." I do honestly feel that the banker has moved on. I don't sense him anymore. It does seem like it worked.

Antonio and Anita, we are so glad your family is safe and so glad.

You shared your story with us at Spoot, original score for that piece was by Rinsal Gorreal, was produced by Anne Ford.

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See, someone or something passed through a brick wall, feel, desperate eyes searching for you in the dark experience that you can't tell anyone about? Well, tell me, I want to know, Spoot that snapjudgment.org because there is nothing better than a Spoot story from a Spoot Lister, [email protected].

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Spootker's created by the team that trust everyone at some point to do the right thing, except for Mark Ristich. There is an assessment of two Spootsters, Eliza Smith, Chris Handbrick, any to win Lord Newsom. Leon Morimoto, Davy Kimman, Rinsal Gorreal, tailed at Cotton Ristich Dot, Zoli Furrino, Tiffing to Lisa and Ford, Doug Stewart and Isaiah Sims. Spoot Beam Song, despite Patmasini Miller, my name is Mr. Washington, and we like to think that in our darkest moments, the times of fear of horror. There always be someone else there to share the burden to carry the load, a parent, a friend, a relative, a spouse, let me tell you, and no uncertain terms that on this thought path you walk alone.

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Which is why I advise and no uncertain terms to never, never, never, never, never, never, ever, to out the last.