The Sonic Hitchhiker Podcast

Paranormal Journeys in a Gingerbread Home

• billy shadow • Season 1 • Episode 8

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     Imagine living in a house where the footsteps of unseen beings echo through the halls and mysterious orbs appear in the cellar. Our guest, Lee Welch, once a skeptic, found himself in just such a scenario in Albany, Georgia. His eerie experiences, alongside my sons Aaron and Isaac, unravel a tale of intrigue and fear, marked by encounters with ghostly apparitions and unsettling family histories. This episode promises a spine-tingling journey into the supernatural, as Lee shares how his disbelief was shattered by the haunting reality of his surroundings.

     Elsewhere, a family member recounts their own nightmarish experiences in a home filled with inexplicable phenomena. Imagine waking up at 3 a.m. to find your door mysteriously ajar. These continuous disturbances took a toll on family dynamics, leading to the unconventional advice of communicating with the presence haunting their home. Surprisingly, this attempt at dialogue provided a temporary reprieve from the nightly terrors, illustrating an unconventional path to peace amidst chaos.

     Then, we meander through an old house reminiscent of a whimsical gingerbread structure, where architectural charm meets the paranormal. This dwelling, with its unique mother-in-law suite brimming with antiques, becomes the stage for ghostly encounters experienced by Aaron, Isaac, and Lee. We also explore the notion that some individuals might be innately more connected to the supernatural, as evidenced by the myriad of haunted locations we've visited. Join us as we navigate these captivating stories, where acknowledging the spirits within might just be the key to coexisting peacefully in a world where the line between the living and the dead blurs.


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Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, it's producer David Fine here Before we get into another exciting and amazing edition of the Sonic Hitchhiker Podcast, which today, folks, it's another amazing one. It's going to have the hair on the back of your neck stand up the entire time. Trust me, it's an amazing one. But just wanted to give you a little inside baseball. Our guest, lee Welch, has some great stories, and some of the stories he refers to two kids, aaron and Isaac. And you're probably saying who are Aaron and Isaac? Well, they are Billy Shadow's kids. So I just want to give you a little inside baseball, but without further ado. An all-new Sonic the Hitchhiker podcast, a first-take audio production, begins now.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the Sonic Hitchhiker podcast dedicated to all things strange, mysterious and just plain out of the ordinary. Your guide on this audio odyssey is billy shadow. Billy's travels and experiences have led him to witness exorcisms, cult mind control events, ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. It is because of his interest in these experiences that this podcast was created. And now your host, billy Shadow.

Speaker 3:

Hello, my friends, welcome again to the Sonic Hitchhiker podcast. I am your host, billy Shadow, and today we have a very special guest, lee Welch, out of Southwest Georgia, that is going to be telling us about a haunted house that he lived in for a little over two years, or nearly two years, until it was time for him just to get out. But, as you're going to hear, this story is fascinating. A lot of things happened to him in this house. So, without further ado, our guest, lee Welch.

Speaker 4:

Just a mechanic, dad, you know, usual everyday stuff, nothing special. But you know I didn't really believe in ghosts and stuff like that until I lived in that house. So it was a rude awakening, I guess you could say, when I moved there initially. The house is in Albany, off of Baker Avenue. I'm not going to give the address because people still live there, but it was my ex's family's house and she convinced me to move there from Worth County and she said you know, my dad's going to cut us a sweet deal on the rent and everything and back then $300 a month was, you know, normal and we were like man, that's a great deal compared to the $500 we're paying now.

Speaker 4:

So we moved in and um, it was like the second day of unpacking and starting to um, pack all you know, set the rooms up and everything. We were just talking about the house. I was like man, you know this is a nice place, you know it's got really old bones and everything. And she was yeah, and she just slipped in the little details. She was like a lot of family members have passed away here and that caught me off guard and I was like like how many? She said I don't know like seven or eight, maybe nine, something like that, and I was like, oh, that was very out of the blue and it caught me off guard. And she was like, yeah, I know if I would have told you that you would have never wanted to move here. So I kind of got swindled. So I guess it started, um, the very first time I experienced it she was at work and back then she was working and going to school and I was working full-time, so the weekends it was usually me and the kids, until she got home in the evenings and you know you, I would just hear random noises in the house and sound like footsteps, but the kids are down for a nap, because you know, back then they were little babies and, um, you would go and walk through the house and they're, they're just passed out and you would wave it off as, oh, it's an old house, you know, maybe stuff is creaking and you know, from there it kind of progressed Noises, you know, weird footsteps.

Speaker 4:

But one night I was telling Aaron and Isaac about it and they came over and we were in the sunroom outside and it was nighttime and you know, we had the laptop out there. We were playing music, messing around on I guess it was like Omegle or something like that and there was a cellar and I was like you know, I've never been down into the cellar, let's go down there. So we got a wild hair and went down into the cellar and it's like maybe like a 10 by 8 room with a dirt floor, concrete walls and there's like these random antique glass bottles all along the shelves on the side of the walls and everything, and there was just one hanging light bulb in the middle with a switch. So we we cut the light on, we were looking around and we're like, man, this is weird. You know, this is really creepy. You know, let's get out of here.

Speaker 4:

I don't remember if they brought the camera or if I had a camera, but we started taking pictures in the sunroom downstairs and we were looking at them. You could see orbs and you know, little lights and stuff that um are obviously not there and we were just, you know, in shock. We're like that um are obviously not there and we were just, you know, in shock. We're like, oh, my God, man, look at this stuff. Like it's everywhere, like it looked like someone was blowing bubbles in the pictures, wow, and um, one of them, I think I think Aaron pointed it out he's like look, that looks like a face in the window.

Speaker 4:

And that's when we started getting really creeped out and we ran outside because we were like you know that's. We got creeped out, went outside and outside the sunroom was a carport and it was just, you know, thrown together carport with some chairs, and there was a door on the side of the house that goes under the house for, you know, repairs and maintenance. So I sat in a chair in front of that and we were kind of like nervously laughing, like man, that was crazy, you know, just talking about it, trying to calm down a little bit. Well, out of nowhere and they'll vouch to this to this day the door behind me it sounded like someone kicked it three times and we immediately ran and jumped in aaron's truck got away from the house.

Speaker 4:

So we, um, we were freaked out and I told aaron Erin I said take me to Caitlin's work. I said take me there. So we got there and I was telling her. I said look, we were messing around and everything. I told her everything that had happened and the kids were at their aunt's house on this weekend, so it isn't like I left them at home and she was like she got super mad and she was like like you really made it mad. You made it mad.

Speaker 4:

I was like made what mad? What are you talking about? She said the freaking ghostly. You made him mad. I said, oh so this is a normal thing and she's like when I grew up here, she was like you, you didn't mess with him, you just didn't do that. So we went and ate and then we drove home and it started raining and in the middle of the backyard there's a large pole with a light on it in the back and it was flooding and we pulled up under the carport and it's like as soon as she cut the car off and we opened the doors, that light went out and she looks at me and she's like you better make things right. That was like the first experience with any ghost or anything like that I'd ever had firsthand. And then it just it snowballed.

Speaker 3:

After that got worse after that way worse, like okay, now tell us how it got worse, because this is super creepy man so the house setup was weird.

Speaker 4:

Where the Sun room is there's a small staircase that goes into the master bedroom, which is where me and her slept. There's a hallway that connects from there to another room which is my youngest son's room, and then that leads to another hallway which goes down the middle of the house and all the rooms kind of branch off from there, off this main hallway. So from there it wasn't day after day after day, it was randomly, and the first occurrence after that night I went to go take a shower and my youngest son was I think he was like almost two at this point maybe Went to go take a shower and you know he was in his room playing and I take super fast showers, I don't take long ones. So it's like as soon as I get in the shower I hear him screaming and I'm like man, I was like, you know, he know he done, you know, ran out of juice or something, because he was dramatic and uh, he kept screaming and he was running.

Speaker 4:

But I heard like footsteps, like of a grown man or something like that, running too, and I'm like what is going on? Throw a towel on, run out and um, it's just him running down the hall and you know I'm in a hot shower. I come out and I still feel warm, but it's like he runs down the hall and you know I'm in a hot shower. I come out and I still feel warm, but it's like he runs down the hall towards me, as my son does, and I pick him up and then it's like this rush of cool air hits me like wind and all the.

Speaker 4:

You know, all the doors are shut. So I was like what, what is going on? So the next event after that is when my sleep schedule started getting messed up. It didn't matter if I went to bed at eight, nine midnight. I woke up at 3 am on the dot with my arms crossed over my chest. No matter what, I sleep with the bedroom door closed, and every time I'd wake up it'd'd be open and my arms would be across my chest like I was in a coffin and I would never be able to fall immediately back to sleep.

Speaker 4:

It always felt like someone was over me and it just kept wearing me down to the point where, like, my co-workers are like are you okay? Like what's going on? And I was like man, like I'm not sleeping good, I can't sleep through the night. And then I woke up, up as usual three o'clock, but I heard my son crying in the next room and I was like you know, maybe he'll stop in a few seconds, because I was like super tired. And then, um, I hear footsteps and I'm like what is happening? Like why, what is going on right now? And the footstep sounds like someone's walking. And then it stops and I was like okay. So at this point I'm kind of sitting up in the bed she's asleep, and then you hear the footsteps, like someone's sprinting, crying. So the sprinting starts, you hear it and then it stops and my son immediately quits crying, just like goes quiet. So I jump out the bed, run to his room and he's fine, like he's just asleep, like nothing's ever happened. So I told her what was going on. I was like you know, and her thing is like you got to make things right. You know you made it mad. You need to do things right. Make it not mad at you. You don't know what you need to do. You need to figure it out because it's not messing with me. Mad at you. You don't know what you need to do. You need to figure it out because it's not messing with me, it's messing with you.

Speaker 4:

So there was the footsteps constantly messing with the kids constantly messing with me, constantly the lights flickering, um, the all that stuff was just random, like the lights would just randomly go out in the kitchen, you'd have to go cut them back on the bathroom. You'd have to cut them back on even though you left them on, and then it started breaking things. There was a in their bathroom. We had it was an old bathroom so you had like a top shelf and then there was another shelf behind it built into the wall and it had some, you know, just glass, porcelain figurines. And you know, one night I heard something break in the bathroom and I was like, you know, great, the kids done broke something. So I get up and go in there, the kids are in their room playing, watching tv and, um, I go in there and I clean it up and I see that, uh, it's just completely thrown off the shelf from where it was from, like there's no way the kids, kids could have reached it. You know, we didn't have animals in the house.

Speaker 4:

So it started breaking stuff and then it got to the point where if I was home alone, I would get locked out in the house and my keys would usually be in the house. So I had to figure out how to break in and eventually I just I talked to the guy that was training me at work. He was an older guy and I told him what was going on and he was like, have you tried talking to it? I said no, I don't know how to do that. He's like just talk to the house. I guess he was like that's what I would do. He said because, uh, he said it looks like you never sleep Cause I I looked rough at this point Cause this has been carrying on for about six months, yeah, and uh, I finally just tried talking to it Like, hey, I'm sorry, you know we're not going to mess with you again. Um, we didn't mean disrespect.

Speaker 4:

Like I was just talking into the hall and I was like, okay, so that night I actually got to sleep all through the night and I woke up and I felt so rested and I was like, oh yeah, I was like maybe this worked and it did for a little bit, but it would just show itself. I guess. Kind of like I'd be walking through the kitchen to go to the hall and I would get a glimpse of somebody standing in the doorway by the living room entrance and I would turn over there really fast and you didn't see anything but out of your peripheral you seen like a tall, shadowy figure. So, and then that carried on up until I eventually moved out of that place. I got to sleep throughout the night. Footsteps never went away. Um, I seen the shadowy figure more after that but, um, it did, let me sleep and it quit messing with the kids and stuff, so that was the best part of it. I guess, uh, a very big believer in you know afterlife and ghosts, apparitions, and I learned to not toy with them.

Speaker 3:

So well, that man that's. Yeah, that's a lot worse than I thought it would be. That story that I would. I don't know how long I could have handled that. So how long total would you say you stayed in the house? How many years or months I?

Speaker 4:

think I was there about two years total until me and her went our separate ways and I moved out Towards the end. I think the last three months it was peaceful. It kind of left me alone.

Speaker 3:

So, out of the two years, the last three months were decent.

Speaker 4:

Yes.

Speaker 3:

I wonder do you know, do you have any idea who moved into it after you?

Speaker 4:

It was one of her friends. The house went up for auction and one of her friends that she went to school with bought it, but I'm not 100 sure who. Um, I had a service call over there about two weeks ago in the area to guy locked his keys in his truck so I had to go over there and unlock it and I had to ride by it and it looks like it's abandoned now, but I'm not sure. Maybe they're doing renovations because there were vehicles there, so I think someone lives there, but I'm not 100% sure.

Speaker 3:

I would be so curious to know what the people behind you experienced in that house when you left Me too.

Speaker 4:

I wanted to reach out to them. I tried to convince her too, but she didn't want to bring it up, just in case they weren't experiencing anything. Yeah, well.

Speaker 3:

Also, I wanted to ask you this, because I'm always curious about these things as well um, describe the. What did the house look like? What give me an idea? Did it? Was it? How old was it? I know you said that a lot of people had died in there, so obviously it was an older home, but was it like a two-story?

Speaker 4:

lots of windows what was it like there was a honestly the best way to describe it.

Speaker 4:

It looks like a gingerbread house, your stereotypical gingerbread house red door, small brick front porch with three steps, two wrought iron rails that went down. It um hardwood floors throughout, um, it was a brick house. Um, the sunroom was actually a patio. You would go downstairs from the back of the house. To ground level.

Speaker 4:

The house was on like a two and a half foot foundation, I think, thinking back, and they her dad had built around and over the patio area, so the floor down there was literally just brick and it was um, basically a sunroom, tons of windows down there, and then there was a french doors that went out to the carport area, which is a concrete slab and, you know, just a makeshift cover for a car, and, um, about 100 feet behind that there was a old mother-in-law suite, I guess you could call it. They had upstairs and downstairs. That was um, really old bricks and stones, um, that was rotten and falling apart. That had a bunch of um, really antique stuff out there. I still have, um, and I think it's from the 30s or 40s. It's a ping pong, a tabletop ping pong game in the box and everything that I kept from that place, out of that mother-in-law suite, but had a big yard, I mean, but it looked really normal, nothing out of the way.

Speaker 3:

Now you've talked. I just want to tell the audience this you've talked about these two guys, aaron and Isaac. Aaron and Isaac, as I said earlier, are my two older sons, and Lee was a friend of theirs and used to come over to my house often, and now they've remained friends to this day. Used to come over to my house often and now they've remained friends to this day. And my son, aaron, told me about some of the experiences that you're telling me about that you guys had together in this house, which fascinated me and that's why I wanted to talk to you about it. What's unusual is that—not unusual, I'm not going to say unusual. Is that not unusual? I'm not going to say unusual. What's fascinating is that someone told you to talk to the spirit or whatever that was occupying the home and it seems to have kind of the activity seems to have dissipated somewhat based on you talking to him.

Speaker 3:

I worked for a ghost hunter one time. She was pretty big into it and she told me that sometimes the houses that she would go investigate the spirits would follow her back to her home and she would have to talk to them and tell them that she acknowledged them, that they were there and then they would they soon to be happy with that. So she almost made it seem like that, as long as someone acknowledged that they existed, it kind of helped. So I wonder obviously I don't know this for sure, but I wonder if just the very fact of you just even acknowledging that this spirit existed and apologizing or trying to make amends, just the very act that you communicated with it, maybe helped satisfy it a little bit.

Speaker 3:

I've heard a lot of stories about homes being haunted, occupied by otherworldly presence, and once they started communicating with it. Now I've heard it go the other way too. But I guess there are malevolent spirits as well that, no matter what you say, they're just there to disturb you. Well, that, no matter what you say, they're just there to disturb you. But it sounds like this one. You know, however, you, whatever you did to piss it off, it wanted to make sure that you knew it was pissed off.

Speaker 3:

And so it was irritated it was, it decided it was going to get back at you, even to the even, to the point of breaking things, which I'm telling you, man, you stayed in that house a lot longer than I would have.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, my options were limited, Well.

Speaker 3:

I get that and that's what a lot of people say, and maybe you know it never hurt you physically. Another thing I wanted to ask you about you mentioned that when you woke up, your hands would be crossed over your chest. You think that, yeah, you think that whatever did that to you, yeah, you don't you think that the whatever did that to you or you don't think you did that on your own?

Speaker 4:

I sleep on my stomach and sprawled out, and you know, everywhere I've lived up until there that's how I always woke up, where I'd wake up on my back sprawled out. I've never woke up cuddled up with my arms crossed or anything like that. And once I moved out of there, if I remember right, when I moved out of there, I actually lived with Aaron for a short time and when I lived with him woke up, normal and everything. But every time I woke up at 3 am at that house my arms were crossed and my feet it was like I was in a coffin.

Speaker 3:

every night my arms were crossed and my feet. It was like I was in a coffin every night yeah that I've never heard anything like that where it actually positioned how you slept while you were asleep. That's, that's, that's pretty creepy. So did you ever do any research just to like get an idea of who lived there before? I know you said quite a few people. Did you ever look look up, look it up to kind of see what they looked like or what the background was in the house? Did you ever do any of that? Or you just decided it was time to go and that was it?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, once I moved out and everything you know, before I moved out I talked to her dad about it and he just told me that it was like their family home, that he had lived there when he was a kid and aunts, uncles, like it was just a big family home and um, you know, I just took that for what it was worth and I was like, okay, I understood and I wasn't really big into looking stuff up back then. So but I did do research on the house I live in now and you know I moved here in 94 and I moved out when I turned 18. And you know, throughout my childhood there was weird stuff that happened. But most of my friends and even my fiance now, they all say this place is haunted too. But I agree with them.

Speaker 4:

But this, whatever is here, it's really cool, it doesn't mess with you. You'll definitely hear footsteps, doors opening and closing wee hours in the morning because, um, she gets up super early for work, so she hears it a bunch. Or sometimes you'll be watching TV at night and it'll smell like someone lit up a cigarette, like right next to you. None of us smoke, but um, it'll move pictures, just turns them sideways, but um, it'll move pictures, just turns them sideways and stuff like that, but he doesn't hurt us, he doesn't aggravate us Um and um.

Speaker 4:

I'd actually looked around and asked um, the neighbor across the street, miss Elizabeth. She's been here 75 years, 80 years, before she moved and she said, yeah, um, she said before your grandmother got the house there was a Vietnam veteran that had it and he had a mental episode and tried to kill his family. He couldn't, so he killed himself in the front yard. And then it was a few years after that my grandparents bought the house, remodeled it and then they gave it to my parents. Then they moved and then I got the house.

Speaker 3:

So and that's the house you're living in now.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, down here in Leesburg.

Speaker 3:

So you seem to be, I don't know some kind of you have a way of not attracting these things, not attracting these things, but they but you seem to be. There's something like some people, or their mind is open to things and they see things. I'm not sure how that works exactly, but I feel like with some people, there's some kind of connection between them and the other side which I I feel like. I've had some of that throughout my years, but nothing like you're describing. So I would love to know more about that, how that works. So if you're living in a house now and you're smelling cigarettes and pictures are being moved and things like that that's I'm not either one or two things happened. Something followed you, like this ghost hunter was telling me about, but apparently it's not malevolent or you just moved into another haunted house and it's just bad luck on your part. Only, in this case it's a good one and not a bad one.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, with my luck I wouldn't be surprised. I don't know if Aaron ever did he ever tell you about the cottage I had on the creek?

Speaker 3:

No, he didn't.

Speaker 4:

So when I lived there, I lived there for a brief stint by myself next to the Kitchen of Mooney Creek. It was a one-bedroom cottage and our mutual friend, tyler, came and spent the night. I think Aaron was there, or it might have been Isaac, I can't remember for sure. But Tyler spent the night and he woke up at like 6, 7 o'clock in the morning and he was freaking out. He's like I got to go, I got to go, I got to go and we're like you know what's going on. He's like I got to get out of this place and he just leaves and doesn't tell us anything.

Speaker 4:

And then later on that day what he experienced it sounds like sleep paralysis, but he swears there's like a ghost in that place and he never came back and everything he said. He woke up, he couldn't move, felt like someone was breathing on him and you know I never had experiences like that in the cottage. But Tyler said that was the second time he felt like there was a ghost there and he never came back. But as long as I lived in that cottage I never felt anything out the way or nothing weird happened besides you know the neighbor slamming my screen door because it's open on a Saturday morning and waking me up.

Speaker 3:

So wow, dude, yeah, and waking me up. So, wow, dude, yeah, you seem to have a a knack for for moving into these places, but you seem to be okay with the place you're in now. So, even if it's, even if it's haunted, as they say, you seem to be okay with it, I guess. I guess it's not as bad as the last place you lived in. So you, you're like, as long as it's not as long as the last place you lived in.

Speaker 3:

So you, you're like, as long as it's not as long as I'm not waking up with my body reposition, I'm okay or someone running up and down the hallway. You know it's weird, it's, it's there. A lot of people think that this kind of stuff is just, you know, bullshit. But um, I'm telling you, man, man, I've heard so many stories just personally of, but you know there's so many stories of these things happening. I have a couple of my own, like I said, nothing like yours, and I've talked to a lot of people through the years that have experienced the same thing. So there is definitely something to that. And I think every house, obviously every house, especially older homes, do have a history, good and bad. I mean, people live there, they live out their hopes and dreams there. Bad things happen there sometimes. Sometimes really tragic things happen, and I think it's for me, I feel like it's almost like either their spirits somehow get stuck in some kind of limbo or I just I don't know. I don't know if anyone exactly knows how that works, but I definitely believe in those things and I also believe your story.

Speaker 3:

So when Aaron told me about you having the stories that you had, I really was anxious to talk to you about it and I appreciate you coming on and telling us about it, but if you have any friends that have similar experiences too, tell them to reach out. I love these stories. I love the one you told. The one you told probably, as of yet, is the most involved as far as a ghost story. It is the most involved as far as a ghost story is the most involved. I've heard that I've been up from the people that I've interviewed so far. So that's a lot, man, for two years to stay there for two years with all of that going on. That I know you had no other options. That's a lot.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, it was rough and, like I said, I didn't believe in that stuff until I lived there, but after I moved out I was you believe it.

Speaker 3:

Now, I'm a believer yeah that's the way everyone is.

Speaker 3:

People are always quick to judge these stories until it happens to them, and then they're. They either decide to be in self-denial or they accept it, and it definitely sounds like you accepted it, and me too I have to. And, um, I know my. I know Aaron for sure has had some experiences he's told me about. I doubt I mean, I don't know if he would ever come on the show or not but they definitely wanted you on. So I really appreciate you doing this. Man, thanks a lot. Well, what did you guys think about that story with our guest, lee Welch Quite? A story he had about his haunted house, and we really appreciate him coming on the show and sharing his story with us. And stay tuned, we'll have a lot more stories like this, similar to this, or even on a few different subjects like UFOs, out-of-body experiences, those type of things that are coming up that we'll be talking. We'll have guests that we'll be talking to about these things. So until next time, I'm your host, billy Shadow.

Speaker 2:

That'll do it for another edition of the show. Join Billy Shadow next week for another all-new Sonic Hitchhiker podcast. Thanks for checking out the Sonic Hitchhiker podcast. Follow us on Instagram at Sonic sonic hitchhiker podcast. Follow us on instagram at sonic hitchhiker podcast and get new episodes wednesdays, wherever you get your podcasts.