LULU MILLER: Before we start, please note that some sections of this episode contain frank discussions about pediatric cancer, and may not be suitable for young or sensitive listeners.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today we're gonna feature a story from our friends over at Reply All.

ROBERT: Which is a podcast produced by Gimlet Media.

JAD: Hosted by PJ Vogt, Alex Goldman.

ROBERT: We're gonna let you hear a taste of Reply All.

JAD: You know, because it's an amazing show. The entire staff's, like, secret favorite show. Not even secret, actually. And this story, it just kind of grabbed us.

ROBERT: Now we're not gonna play you the whole story that they did. We're gonna play you most of it. And we may intervene from time to time just to sort of—because we bubble over with questions sometimes.

JAD: Exactly. And this story actually comes from one of their producers, Sruthi Pinnamaneni.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Yes.

JAD: And the story sort of centers around a couple and their son.

[car door slams]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: So let me start by introducing you to the couple, Amy Green.

AMY GREEN: Hi!

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Hi.

AMY GREEN: Come on in!

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And Ryan Green.

AMY GREEN: Oh, we have our buffalo chicken. Oh, wait, you got hot wings from yesterday?

RYAN GREEN: No, I already ate those. I think that's why I'm suffering this morning.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: They live in a small house in Loveland, Colorado. They fell in love chatting online, got married as soon as they turned 21. They moved into this house the very next day.

RYAN GREEN: Let me respond to some emails and then we'll head down.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: They had their first son, Caleb, their second son, Isaac. Ryan was a computer programmer, and Amy took care of the kids. They were just living in a mess of diapers and toys, going to church every Sunday. And then in 2009, they had Joel.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: When Joel was born, how old were you?

AMY GREEN: I—gosh, I was thinking about this the other day. If I was 25 when Caleb was born, and then when Isaac was born, I would have been, like, 27. Yeah, I think I was 28. I was 28 when Joel was born. Figured it out. [laughs]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Everything was normal. Fine. And then just a little before his first birthday, Amy noticed that his head was a little tilted, just kind of cocked to one side. A couple days later, he starts throwing up. Can't keep any food down. And so they do a bunch of tests, and the doctor says, "Listen, your son has a lesion. It's a cancer." So they biopsy the tumor, and then they come back with this news that it's something called an AT/RT. It's very, very difficult to treat.

AMY GREEN: So when you have an AT/RT, you go through all the most intense chemotherapy and all the most intense radiation. They throw the kitchen sink at it. And doing that, you have about a 50 percent chance of surviving for five years.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: I double checked this, and it turns out the odds of survival are even grimmer. It's a 50 percent chance of surviving just two years.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: When you hear this kind of news, is there any part of you that's like, what if you don't do the treatment?

AMY GREEN: I remember before his first surgery asking them a lot about, like, will he have to have chemotherapy? And thinking to myself, because I can't—we can't—we can't do this. This is crazy. We can't do this. But then as time wore on, and by the time we actually even heard about the tumor, then you're just thinking like, "Oh. Well, 50 percent. Like, that's half. Like, we've got a good shot that he gets through this."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: What do you think, Isaac? He's in the hospital, so they're taking care of him.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: This is from a home video of Joel's brothers meeting him in the hospital. Isaac is two and a half, looking kind of scared. Joel is a little over a year old. He's lying in a small red wagon, hooked up to an IV. He's skinny, and his head is perfectly round.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: His food goes through that tube. Yeah.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: So they start going through this treatment. It starts off with intense radiation, and then just, you know, months of chemotherapy, which I didn't know what that meant. It means that you just hold the baby for six, seven, eight hours a day, and you just lie in a bed with them while they get these infusions.

RYAN GREEN: And so it'd be, like, this eight-hour pump. And you'd hook it up at night, and it would be this, like, this white milky substance that would provide all of his nutrition because he couldn't swallow very well.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: One day, it was Amy's shift. She was holding Joel.

AMY GREEN: I was sitting in his room with him. I was singing him a song and clapping, and he was clapping his hands. And then he was sort of like, babble-singing along. And so, like, for me, it was just one of those moments that you felt like, "Oh, I'm always gonna remember this." Like, sometimes you just have a moment and you go, "I'm gonna remember this the rest of my life." And then that made me sad because I thought, oh, like, but the reason I think I'll remember this the rest of my life is because he could die. Until eventually I did just kind of decide, like, I think I need to be all in. Like, I think I need to love him like mad. And I think we need to live our lives like he's gonna live.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And that's what they did for a year. And then in November 2010, just before Joel's second birthday, the doctors call them in, and they say, "We're really sorry. Joel has another tumor. All these chemicals we've been pumping into him, they didn't do anything, and so it's time for us to stop. He will eventually die. We're not sure, but we think in about four months. You know, this is it."

JAD: But as Sruthi goes on to explain in the story, that definitely wasn't it. Because there's this one night when the situation was pretty much at its worst, when something happened.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Joel had a stomach bug. He was throwing up, got dehydrated. So Ryan spent the night with him in the hospital.

RYAN GREEN: I just remember him really wanting apple juice because that was one of his favorite things at the hospital. But then I'd give it to him, and he'd just throw it up again.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And he's crying and crying, and his cries just get more frantic and animal, and there's nothing that Ryan can do.

RYAN GREEN: By the end of the night, he had just such sunken eyes. But I just remember, like, I wanted to hold him, and I couldn't put him down because he would get so upset.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And when Ryan finally did put him down, Joel would start hitting his head against the wall of his crib. Eventually, Ryan himself started to lose it. He was crying, too. And then in the early hours of the morning, he lay down and prayed.

RYAN GREEN: And I remember that's when he stopped crying, and he fell asleep. And it was just one of those—it's one of those few moments in life where, like, it felt like an answer from God. And it wasn't like I heard a voice or saw, you know, a burning bush or anything like that, but it was just. It felt so much like mercy.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And beyond just sheer relief, Ryan had this other thought—frankly, a weird thought. This whole ordeal reminded him of a video game. Like, you have to get the baby to stop crying. So you keep trying things: give him juice, bounce him, talk to him. But the weird thing is, in this awful game, none of those things actually work. They're all, like, fake choices. Ryan thought, what if I could make a game like this where you, the player, you don't really have control? And so he started to think, like, I wonder if I could make that, if I could make that scene.

ROBERT: If he could make the scene of Joel in desperation and then give him an option? Is that the thing? Is there an act of saving?

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: No.

ROBERT: No.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: No.

JAD: So wait, he's gonna make the video game where everything you do doesn't work, the baby still cries.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Yeah. I think he was just intrigued by that because it seemed bizarre.

JAD: Yeah, I'll make a video game where you can't do anything except pray.

ROBERT: I don't know if that has a very high likelihood of being a popular game.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: I think the popularity of it was so not essential. He wasn't even thinking that because he wasn't thinking, "Oh, this is a game that I will release." It was almost like a thought experiment, right, in his brain where he's thinking, you know, usually people come into a game trying to solve it, and I wonder how if I could make this game where they couldn't, they would understand me and how I feel right now.

JAD: Oh!

AMY GREEN: I remember he really was like, "I want to make a game about that day that Joel was dehydrated in the hospital." And I said, "That's terrible! That's not a game, and no one will want to play that." Like, I think that that word 'game' meant, like, something you do in your leisure time, you know? And so who wants to spend their leisure time reliving the worst moment of a man's life? So I said, "Do not make that. That is horrible."

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: But he clung to the idea. So finally, Amy said, "Okay, I'll give you three months."

[applause]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: Thank you.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: So a few months later, it's the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Alongside Assassin's Creed 3, Battlefield 4, the new Oculus Rift VR headset ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: Hi, everybody. My name is Ryan.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: ... there was Ryan.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: I'm gonna talk to you about a personal game that I'm making. My son Joel had just turned one year old the day that we found the monster in his brain.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Ryan is standing in front of a bunch of young tech dudes. They're listening kind of half heartedly.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: Joel is alive and fighting his eighth tumor. Our doctors fight for him. Our family fights for him. And we serve a God that's the God of the living, not the dead. In the middle of all this pain and suffering and mud and morass that cancer has wrought in our family, we have a drink of water that's made of hope and love and light, and we hope to share it with you.]

[applause]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Amy stayed home, fretting because they were almost out of money, and she was worried that Ryan would come home feeling crushed. But that's not what happened. Ryan got back and said "It was amazing. This person introduced me to that person. That person. There's two or three different people who want to fund my game."

JAD: Wait, so you're saying there's actually a market for a game like this? Like, there's people ...

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: So I want to be clear. The world of these kinds of emotional games, it's a small one, right?

JAD: Yeah.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: But there are people. There are investors in there who are looking for games that are doing something different, looking for games that are meaningful in some way. And so I think a few of them played through the scene, this dehydration scene, and they thought, "Okay, let's see what a full-fledged version of this would be." And we're just—you know, it's like the video game generation has grown up, right? Like, if you were born in the '80s or the '70s, like, you played games for certain reasons when you were a kid. And now we're grown up, and we're having these different experiences, like a child going through cancer or, you know, the death of my father or these things, which suddenly you're like, why can't I tell these stories with video games?

JAD: Hmm. And what was Amy's reaction when she heard people wanted to fund the game?

AMY GREEN: It really blew my mind, because I'm still just like, "Because of your dehydration game that I told you to never make" And he realizes, like, you've never played it. Like, you've never played the scene. So I put on the headphones.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: She finds herself back in the hospital room. You don't see Joel. You see an empty crib, and you can hear him crying. You're playing as Ryan. You can move your mouse around the screen, and options appear. You can give him juice. You can try to bounce him. You can walk into the bathroom, look out the window. But no matter what you do, his crying just gets worse and worse.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Okay, buddy. Okay. I'll hold you. Please stop!]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: After five or six minutes of this, Ryan sits in a chair, drops his head into his lap, and prays.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: And you've brought us this far. He's still here. And not dead, not there with you.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And then with you, the crying stops.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Peace. He sleeps.]

AMY GREEN: So I put on the headphones, and I just lost it. And I was just crying and crying. And I knew Joel was okay, and he was, like, right there. Like, Joel was right there with us. And yet it brought me back to that space in a much more real way than I thought that a video game could.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Amy didn't need any more convincing. She said, "Okay, let's do this. Let's pull the rest of our savings and make this game." They named it That Dragon Cancer. The first scene is at the pond. You start off as a duck. You paddle towards a little boy. It's Joel, or this origami version of him. He doesn't have eyes or a mouth, but he has a voice.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: [child's laughter]]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And that is actually Joel's laugh as you hand him pieces of bread and he throws them into the water.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Here you go, Joel. Here's a piece. Okay, now you throw it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Joel's almost five, right?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Yeah.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: The kid speaking here is Isaac, Joel's brother.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: But he can't talk.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: That's true.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: I can talk.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Yeah, I know.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Why can't Joel?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Well, Joel got sick right after he turned one, and ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Kind of slowed him down a little bit, buddy.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And there's other vignettes. Like, there was this one time in a hospital when to keep Joel entertained, Ryan blew up surgical gloves like balloons. It's this gorgeous scene where you see Joel floating into the nighttime sky towards the moon, holding onto these surgical balloons. And then you see these black burrs appear from the corner. That's the cancer. And they pop the balloons one by one. And throughout these scenes, you play mini games, you discover rooms, listen to voicemails from Amy. There's even little levels you can beat. But the cancer is always around the edges of this world, thorny and black and creeping in. And at one point, you'll arrive here, the waiting room where doctors tell Amy and Ryan that Joel's cancer is terminal. As they break the news, rain starts pouring into the room and Ryan slowly starts to slip under the water.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: We've given you a lot to think about already today, but we're going to have you come back Monday and we can talk about palliative treatment.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: We're very good at end-of-life care. We're very good at managing pain and masking symptoms at the end of life.]

JAD: Just to jump in for one second. We asked Sruthi, so as Ryan and Amy and the team were crafting these scenes, what was happening with Joel? And she says what happened surprised everybody.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Thing that happened was that tumor where, you know, the doctor said, "Listen, he's terminal. It's gonna be over soon." They radiate the tumor, and it goes away. And then a few months later, he gets another tumor. They radiate, and it goes away. And then this happens again and again and again. And so he's two years old, he's three years old, he's four years old. He's doing things that the doctors never thought he would do. Like, he turned two and a half and said his first word, "Uh oh!"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: Mmm. Num num!]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: He starts to swallow again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: Joel, don't jump the food.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Starts to walk when he's three.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Amy Green: Way to go!]

AMY GREEN: He just became this miracle baby.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Somebody in their church said they had a vision. A woman in the church told her that she had a vision that Joel would do great things. Another reason they wanted to make this about Joel is because they felt as if, you know, as Christians, they were living a miracle, and they wanted to share this with people and show them. And then a doctor calls them in and he says, "Listen, Joel has a new tumor. But this tumor is different. It's in a place that we've already radiated."

AMY GREEN: He explained to us that he cannot continue to radiate an area too much or it can cause brain death. And it was right on the brain stem.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: The doctors say we're not gonna radiate this time.

JAD: And what happened to Joel?

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: His condition, like, very rapidly deteriorated. He's having more trouble breathing. He can't swallow again. A lot of the things that he was able to do like walk and eat, he stops. And so they invite their entire church community to come to their house and pray.

AMY GREEN: We had a prayer night just praying for him to be healed. And we just had everyone over, and we spent, you know, hours just worshiping and praying.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: There's video footage of this night. It's in their small living room. There's family members, friends, people from their church community. Ryan is holding Joel, and they're praying.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: All we have is death here on this Earth. That's all we have. The only hope we have is your resurrection, God. So why would hope hurt us? All I have is my disappointment. That's what I start with. But I have hope that you can fill my disappointment, that you make it right, that you redeem it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Amy Green: God, it's the blind who see, and it's the deaf who hear, and it's the dumb who speak. And God, I believe you do all of those things. I believe that you could do all of those things in my child.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: What's your strongest memory from that night?

RYAN GREEN: I think it's just realizing that he was going to die that night. It's that space of being with a bunch of people that desperately want the same thing that you will, and are crying out for that grace and that mercy to kind of invade a situation.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Joel died later that night. It was March 13, 2014.

AMY GREEN: I feel like, in a way, because we were believing that he would be healed, and because we were believing that even if he died, maybe he'd be raised from the dead, like, which is wild. And you don't have to put that in your story, because it's weird. And I so get that it's weird, but because we still believed that he could live, I feel like we didn't go through all the processes of getting ready for him to die, the way that maybe you would if you were certain that this was it.

ROBERT: So at this point in the tale, Sruthi tells us, well, they had to finish the game. I mean, they'd invested an enormous amount of time and heart and talent in building this game, but now the facts have changed.

JAD: Yeah, it started as a game that was supposed to be about the experience of fighting cancer, but also the experience of triumphing over cancer. But can't be that game anymore. So, like, what do you do as game designers, as parents? How do you finish a game where you don't have many choices—and you can't win? For this part, as we were talking with Sruthi, I mean, it's so visual.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: She just sat down and walked us through, as descriptively as she could, how Ryan and Amy—particularly Ryan—tried to solve this design problem.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: The end of the game, they weren't sure, but it was basically gonna be a two-part scene where there's the moment of his death. You know, and they weren't sure how to do that, but there's a moment of his death, and right after that a moment where he goes to heaven, essentially. There's this little island. And so Ryan sets about making the scene of his death. It starts off pretty simple. It's in a hospital. There's little Joel sitting on a green chair, and there's some tubes of this neon fluid feeding into him. And there's these pipes that rise up above him, which are like pipe organ pipes. And there was a little bit of gameplay where you can play the pipe organ. Anyway, and then after that, he said, "Well, this isn't enough. This is the scene where my son dies, and so it must be just, like, epic." And so he creates this almost European-style oversized cathedral where the walls are soaring up and the ceilings are intricate and contain all these different—like, it's almost as if he's coding Joel's body into the architecture. So he has pieces that look like ribs, and there's this part that looks like his heart. I can show you guys these pictures. So I'm trying to think how I do that.

JAD: Maybe just hold up your laptop to the glass.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Yeah, this is—so just quickly, I want to show you. This is ...

JAD: Oh, wow.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Yeah. So that's ...

JAD: Oh, that's amazing!

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Right?

JAD: That's amazing. It's so pretty!

ROBERT: I was not prepared for the beauty of this. Very intricate interlacing arches, light cascading down.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: That's the ...

ROBERT: Catacombs.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: ... stained glass. These very ornate ceilings. And so he starts building that, and it's beautiful, and it just gets bigger and bigger. And then suddenly he feels like, you know, this is too light. And so then the cathedral becomes a place of darkness, and all the lights are neon.

JAD: Oh, so now it's very dark. There's trees growing into the cathedral now.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: That's the cancer.

JAD: Huh.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And then he's in this space, and he's like, so what should people be able to do in this space? We have all this, you know, these tubes and things for chemo. I want to put in the machines that were keeping Joel alive. So we were feeding him with these nutrition IV things. We had these oxygen tanks. And so he starts building actual equipment that the user would have to, like, fiddle with the levers and, you know, make things just right so that Joel's getting what he needs to stay alive. But then he thinks, "Oh. Well, if they do it wrong, then they'll feel as if Joel died because of them, and that's terrible." And so then he says, "You know what? Scrap this whole thing."

JAD: Sruthi showed us maybe 60 different sketches, different iterations of the cathedral that were all super detailed in a kind of Terry Gilliam on steroids sort of way. Like, for instance, there was one sketch where Ryan had built an entire amusement park in the cathedral, and that was supposed to represent all of Joel's favorite things.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And then he's like, "Wait. But now there's just too much stuff. It's distracting." So then he takes out the whole amusement park, and then he puts in these prayer candles because he's like, "You know, really what I want people to take away is this feeling I had on the last night of Joel's life, where all you can do now is pray. And so you light one of these candles, and you hear a prayer from that night."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Lord, my God, let this boy's life return to him.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Amy Green: I will not let you go unless you bless him.]

AMY GREEN: And it's been hard, I think, for both of us to get to a place where we say it can't say all the things. The cathedral can't say all the things we want it to say.

RYAN GREEN: I just had to cut something else in the game because we couldn't finish it.

AMY GREEN: And it's hard because you just want to never finish it and make it as beautiful as possible. And I don't know, like, there's part of me that feels like we betrayed a project by finishing it and by saying it can only be so much.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: But of course they have to finish it. There's investors, there's a release date.

RYAN GREEN: What's disappointing to me is how quickly it fades. Joel, how the memories and the person of Joel fades because he's not here. He becomes more and more an idea. This game is not him. It's just an echo of him. It's not—it's not even the best echo of him. I think that's the thing that I'm struggling with as we're approaching the end of this, like, what did we do all this for? Why—why is it that—why did we do this?

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: The game is coming out mid-January. The cathedral, to Ryan, will always be unfinished.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Can you show me the last scene with the pancakes?

RYAN GREEN: Sure.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Ryan was able to finish the place that comes right after the cathedral. It's the scene where you say goodbye to Joel. You find yourself in a boat next to Joel. There's no oars. You're headed towards an island. You get there, you walk along a small path, and you end up in a clearing in the woods. There's a picnic blanket, and Joel's sitting on it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: I remember you. You made it, too. I'm glad you're here. I love it here. I bet you like it, too.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And around him are all the things he loved the most.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: Look at all of these pancakes.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: A huge stack of pancakes, way, way bigger than him. A little dog.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: I always wanted a dog, and now I got one.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And bubbles. You can blow him bubbles.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: I love bubbles. So bubbles. Look, I can catch one!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: You can blow them for as long as you want. Okay. Okay, Joel.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: I love the bubbles. Come here, Mandy. Have another pancake. Mandy loves syrup. Me too. Syrup is my favorite part.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And you just keep blowing bubbles.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: I love bubbles. So bubbles.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And at some point ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: Look, I can touch one.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: ... you just walk away.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: I want my bubbles. Mandy loves to catch the bubbles. She likes to bite them. I love bubbles.]

JAD: It's like, wow, that's the choice you get in the end at the end of this game is to not stop until you're ready to walk away.

ROBERT: Hmm. It's not much of a choice.

JAD: No.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Erica from Yonkers. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

DENNIS CONROW: I think there's a lot of moments in your life that you find yourself doing something.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: Okay, if there is anybody in here, my name is Brittany. I'd love to be able to talk with you.

DENNIS CONROW: And you take that moment and step back from it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: Are you here?]

DENNIS CONROW: And you realize ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Larry: Come through to us.]

DENNIS CONROW: What the [bleep] am I doing? What just happened? Was this real? And I think that was one of those moments.

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab and today on the podcast ...

[screams]

JAD: ... a ghost story.

ROBERT: Really? We're gonna do a ghost story?

JAD: Yeah, it's Halloween, dude. You don't even know. Just listen. Just let's listen, okay?

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: This one comes from our producer, Matt Kielty.

MATT KIELTY: Yeah, so I first heard this story from a buddy of mine.

ANDY MILLS: Do do do dee do do do.

MATT: His name is Dennis Conrow.

ANDY: Dennis?

DENNIS CONROW: Andy?

ANDY: Hey, what's up dude?

JAD: That's producer Andy Mills. You guys are all buddies.

MATT: Mm-hmm. Total buds. Anyways, the story ...

ANDY: All right. Well, Dennis ...

DENNIS CONROW: Yes?

MATT: ... it's about a lot of things but in particular, a house.

MATT: So let's start with the house. When did you move back in?

DENNIS CONROW: Well, let's see. I was probably, I don't know, age 20.

MATT: Dennis had been going to college.

DENNIS CONROW: Yep.

MATT: By the way, what did you study?

DENNIS CONROW: Creative writing.

MATT: Okay.

DENNIS CONROW: But, you know, I just kind of got bored there, kind of stopped going to class. [laughs] I think once my parents realized that they weren't very happy.

MATT: I would assume so.

DENNIS CONROW: And so I was kind of asked to come back home.

MATT: Back to a town just outside Kansas City.

DENNIS CONROW: A little town called Grandview.

MATT: Did you grow up in this house?

DENNIS CONROW: I did. I did. And the house was ...

MATT: Fairly old.

DENNIS CONROW: Yeah, it was about 105 years old at the time.

MATT: Two-storey white house, nice little porch, awning over it.

DENNIS CONROW: Typical farmhouse style.

MATT: And so you were at your parents' home back in your old bedroom?

DENNIS CONROW: Yeah, in my old childhood bedroom. Yeah, so there was always a sense of, like, I need to get out of this house. It's holding me back somehow from things.

MATT: So he got a job.

DENNIS CONROW: Worked a job and got laid off.

MATT: And one year turned into two. And then three, then four and then five.

DENNIS CONROW: It was not a great time to be there.

MATT: In what way?

DENNIS CONROW: Just that I felt like I was still 16.

MATT: He says he'd overhear his mom telling people on the phone ...

DENNIS CONROW: "Well, he's never gonna move out, is he?" [laughs]

MATT: [laughs]

MATT: And then she started circling classifieds.

DENNIS CONROW: Jobs for typists, printing press, sales rep, typesetter. I don't know. I think everything in my life, however I mean for it not to, sort of moves at my own snail's pace.

MATT: And eventually ...

DENNIS CONROW: I was fairly old, like 27 maybe.

MATT: Actually, he was 28. After eight years in this house, Dennis gets a steady job, finds this cheap apartment.

DENNIS CONROW: This ratty six-plex apartment.

MATT: He starts packing up his things, but right when he's set to move out, to finally leave home ...

DENNIS CONROW: My mom got really sick.

MATT: Dennis's mom had been in remission from breast cancer for, like, nine years, but that summer her doctors told her that it had returned.

DENNIS CONROW: And had spread quite a bit. I said to her, "Do you want me to be here or do you want me to go?" And she was like, "Well, if this is my time," she wants to go knowing that her kids can take care of themselves.

MATT: So Dennis moved out. About five months later, his mom died.

DENNIS CONROW: Yeah. She went pretty fast. About a month or so after my mom died, my dad found out he had stage four prostate cancer.

MATT: Wow.

DENNIS CONROW: And he was really too sick to take care of the house and just be the guy by himself at that point.

MATT: Now Dennis pretty much had to come home.

DENNIS CONROW: I'd take care of him ...

MATT: Three, four times a week.

DENNIS CONROW: And as he got worse, he had said to me, like, "Hey, let's try to find you a house to buy so that I can teach you how to do all of the kind of stuff that one has to do. Men know how to do things, like change out plumbing." All this kind of stuff. And so we put an offer on a house.

MATT: But that fell through. And before they could find something else ...

DENNIS CONROW: The cancer from his prostate spread to his brain and the last week of his life, he was really not there. I can remember, one day, maybe a week or so after he had died ...

MATT: Dennis was walking through the empty kitchen.

DENNIS CONROW: And there was so much stuff. There was so much stuff. Papers all over the place, junk mail all over the kitchen floor.

MATT: Down in the basement ...

DENNIS CONROW: Tools all over the place. I had this moment of, "Here are his tools, and now I have them in my hands." And, you know, I just remember picking up this claw hammer and just crying because this is now my hammer, this is now my house, this is now my problem.

MATT: But a few days passed and he starts thinking ...

DENNIS CONROW: Okay.

MATT: "I can handle this."

DENNIS CONROW: Yeah.

MATT: "I've just gotta get in there, clean it out, sell it."

DENNIS CONROW: Clean and flip, that was the plan.

MATT: So at the age of 32, moves back in.

DENNIS CONROW: There was all this just junk in the basement.

MATT: Put that stuff on the curb.

DENNIS CONROW: Sale after sale after sale.

MATT: And one day he finds himself standing in the downstairs bathroom looking at the nasty floor tile.

DENNIS CONROW: It was just horrible.

MATT: His dad had meant to replace it before he died but, you know, couldn't finish.

DENNIS CONROW: And my thought was, like, I'll just do this one bathroom so that it looks pretty good to sell.

MATT: The problem was his dad had never showed him how to do any of that stuff.

DENNIS CONROW: It was at that point that I was like, "YouTube."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, YouTube: Now hold the tile in one hand firmly and begin with your ceramic tile.]

MATT: So he went online, learned how to tile, do some plumbing. And he redid the bathroom.

DENNIS CONROW: And it turned out pretty good. It was kind of fun. And then the next thing I knew I was taking wallpaper off in the kitchen. That's gotta go. Hardwood floors, insulation in the attic, glass block windows in the basement.

MATT: Pretty soon ...

DENNIS CONROW: That turned into the whole house.

JAD: And how long did that take?

DENNIS CONROW: Five years.

MATT: Actually, it was six.

JAD: Wow.

MATT: And he says the whole time he was doing this renovation, at night ...

DENNIS CONROW: I would have these dreams where my parents just kind of came through the back door, and it was just like, "Oh, what are you doing here? Oh, that's right, you're dead." And then I would turn my back, and then they would have somehow undone all of the things that I did.

ANDY: They had brought the house back to the state it was in when they were alive?

DENNIS CONROW: Yeah.

ANDY: Huh.

DENNIS CONROW: And I probably had this dream, I'm not kidding, at least a hundred times.

ANDY: Wow.

MATT: Night after night, after night.

DENNIS CONROW: It just kept going on and on, and ultimately kind of drove me crazy.

MATT: So one day after yet another one of these dreams, Dennis is finally like, "All right, I'm selling it." Puts it up on the market, starts waiting for a buyer, and then something strange happens.

DENNIS CONROW: Well, something kind of strange. I had made this friend, and she came over for the first time.

ANDY: It's like a date, a lady friend?

DENNIS CONROW: Yeah, it was a lady friend.

ANDY: All right. You've gone on a date. You've taken her back to your house.

DENNIS CONROW: [laughs] Uh-huh. And so ...

MATT: Dennis was giving her a tour, showing her all the improvements. Until ...

DENNIS CONROW: She was in the kitchen.

MATT: Right by the basement door in the kitchen, when ...

DENNIS CONROW: She was like, "Oh, there's some kind of weird presence here." And I was just like, "Okay." Well, that was a sign that was not gonna last. [laughs]

ANDY: [laughs]

MATT: Fast forward a few years.

DENNIS CONROW: I didn't really think too much about it.

MATT: Until one day Dennis's realtor is having an open house. No one shows.

DENNIS CONROW: So she was in the house by herself.

MATT: And Dennis starts getting these text messages from her.

DENNIS CONROW: It's like, "Dude, your house is haunted. Like, I can hear people walking around. And ..."

MATT: She texted that there was definitely something weird going on.

DENNIS CONROW: Right by the basement door.

JAD: Wait, that's the same spot?

MATT: Yeah.

DENNIS CONROW: You know, I'm just like, "Huh. That's kind of weird." But then here's the crazy thing.

MATT: Not too long after this, Dennis bumps into an old friend of his and he's like, "Hey, funny thing. Two different people, two separate occasions, had come over to the house and they said they felt this weird presence."

DENNIS CONROW: And she was like, "Wait. Right by the basement door?"

ANDY: Get out!

DENNIS CONROW: Yeah. I was like, "Okay." So I've got Heather, I've got Stacy, I've got Carla. All three who say they feel this weird presence.

ANDY: Did you consider yourself a bit of a skeptic about such things?

DENNIS CONROW: I would say so. Rationally, I'm just gonna say no.

MATT: You don't believe in ghosts?

DENNIS CONROW: No.

ANDY: All right. What happened next?

DENNIS CONROW: Well, this also happened to be right at the time that I sold the house.

MATT: Dennis had finally put some pen to paper, signed the contract, packed up all his stuff.

DENNIS CONROW: And so Carla, the girl that first felt this thing ...

MATT: The girl he went on a date with. They stayed friends.

DENNIS CONROW: ... said to me, like, "You know, I'm really curious about this. Would you mind if I call these ghost people to come and check out this place?" And I was like, "Well sure. I don't care, why not?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: Very shortly, in a few minutes actually, we are bringing paranormal investigators to find out what's in the basement.]

DENNIS CONROW: You know, I'm just kind of walking through the house. And I think I got this on tape of just me walking through the house. I'm like, "Well, this is probably a waste of time," but I'm still kind of curious about it.

ANDY: It's Friday night, what else are you gonna do?

DENNIS CONROW: Right. It's a Friday night, mid-November.

MATT: Around six o'clock.

DENNIS CONROW: I can see some cars parking on the street, so I go downstairs.

MATT: People start filing in.

DENNIS CONROW: Maybe 10 people.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: We all have different specialties. Larry's our tech guy.]

DENNIS CONROW: About four techies. Two sets of clairvoyants.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: Chantelle's the psychic.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: She's very gifted.]

ANDY: Who are all these people?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: Can I get you to just say your name?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: My name is Brittany Elaine.]

DENNIS CONROW: Well, they're part of the Kansas City, paranormal investigators club, or some kind of thing.

MATT: And pretty much right off the bat ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: When you guys came in and you were saying you could talk ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: When we first got here, we both saw a woman looking out the window at the top.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: So what did she look like?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: I didn't really see what she looked like. Katie can describe her.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: She had, like, long hair. It was, like, gray, and she was wearing one of those weird, old-timey dresses.]

MATT: Dennis was like, "Whatever."

DENNIS CONROW: They set up cameras in the basement and then the kitchen.

MATT: And the clairvoyants decided they wanted to try to talk to this woman, or maybe any other spirit in the house. And so Brittany ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: I don't know if I even explained to you what we do.]

MATT: ... who was like the ringleader of the night ...

DENNIS CONROW: She sort of explained how she does things. She was like, the best way that she could get them to talk to them was through flashlights.

JAD: Huh.

MATT: Yeah. So what they do is they take a few flashlights, turn them on, and then they unscrew the tops of them just enough so that they turn off. And then they just kind of set the flashlights that are now off in the room by themselves. And the idea is that if the ghost or the spirit wants to communicate, they can just sort of touch the top of one of the flashlights with their ghost-y finger and that'll turn it back on.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: It's barely connected. All they have to do is either push or pull a tiny bit of energy.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: I see.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: It's not that hard. It's obvious for them to do.]

DENNIS CONROW: And I was like, "Okay." And so she took three flashlights, and we all sat in this dark room in a circle. And ...

MATT: Brittany sets the flashlights in the middle of the circle by themselves. No one's touching them.

DENNIS CONROW: And she says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: If there's anybody in here, my name is Brittany. I'd love to be able to talk with you. Can you turn one of those lights on?]

DENNIS CONROW: And they sit there and they sit there.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: Are you here?]

DENNIS CONROW: And then all of a sudden this light kind of barely blinks on. And then she said, "Okay."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: Thank you.]

DENNIS CONROW: "Please turn it off." And then it goes off.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: What we can do with these lights here, is if I can ask them ...]

DENNIS CONROW: And then she says, "We have three lights here. The one you just turned on we'll call, 'yes.' Please turn on one more and that will be no."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: If you could do that for us, that will be wonderful.]

DENNIS CONROW: And then a second light comes on.

MATT: No way! Are you scanning the room, looking for somebody who has a little switch or something?

DENNIS CONROW: Yeah. But, like, we didn't pay these people, so they have no reason to fake this, I suppose. But, you know, I just keep thinking, "Well, the house is really close to the train tracks and maybe the train ..."

ANDY: The vibrations of the train? Yeah, that makes sense.

DENNIS CONROW: But all of a sudden they were like, "Can you hear that? Footsteps."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: Yeah. It sounds like there is somebody walking right here in front of me.]

DENNIS CONROW: And they're going towards the kitchen. And I could hear dishes rattling on the countertop in the kitchen.

MATT: No one's in the kitchen?

DENNIS CONROW: No one's in the kitchen.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: If you're in the kitchen right now, can you turn one of these lights on?]

MATT: And so they sit and stare at these three flashlights. And then ...

[screams]

ROBERT: I am just leaving the room!

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs] What happened?

MATT: Well, actually everyone—everyone in that room died except for Dennis.

ROBERT: Oh God!

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: I have no idea why I even invited you into this building.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: They did not die.

JAD: What happened to them?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: You scared me!]

MATT: Actually, they're fine.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: Was that you?]

MATT: It turns out that there was a guy downstairs in the basement, one of the techies walking around, pitch black down there, and he just, like, bangs his head into, like, an air duct and the sound just reverberated throughout the whole house.

ROBERT: [laughs]

MATT: Scared them a little bit.

JAD: It was very Blair Witch-y.

MATT: Anyhow, the techies ...

DENNIS CONROW: Decided they want to get the three psychics down in the basement by themselves. And so, you know, these three women go down in the basement by themselves. We kind of hear them downstairs talking, but we don't really know what's going on.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: That was interesting.]

DENNIS CONROW: They come back upstairs.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: How did it go?]

DENNIS CONROW: And they said ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: The girl was downstairs.]

DENNIS CONROW: "She was definitely down there."

MATT: The old woman that they first saw when they got to the house. And they said that she was standing down in the basement next to where the old furnace used to be. And they told Dennis that she said that she'd lived here for a long time. And Dennis was like, "Wait a second." He knew that back in the '30s or something a woman had lived in this house.

DENNIS CONROW: Who was kind of not all there.

MATT: And one day she had gone down into the basement.

DENNIS CONROW: And thought she was picking lice off of chickens and throwing them into this big furnace that was downstairs in the basement at the time.

MATT: She got a little too close to the furnace, the story goes.

DENNIS CONROW: Caught herself on fire and then died there, I guess, in the basement.

ANDY: Oh!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: So then there was another man downstairs who showed himself to me, but he won't talk and he just completely disappeared.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: What did he look like?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: He was bald. He was about Rick's height but it wasn't Rick.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: Did he have a build like me?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: A lot like me?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: Not a lot, but similar. Definitely.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: If I were just to show you a picture of my father, would you have any sense of this was him?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: If I saw a picture of him. Yeah, maybe.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: I found this the other day.]

MATT: Dennis goes and gets this photo of his dad that he had, that was left over from his memorial service.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: Yep. That's the man I saw.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: Really?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: Wow.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: Yeah, that's the man I found.]

DENNIS CONROW: Let's pause this for just a second here. Like, she's very hesitant at the beginning. It's like, well ...

MATT: I should jump in here really quick and just tell you that this was actually the first time that Dennis had ever listened to this tape.

JAD: Really?

MATT: Yeah. And the reason is because for a long time, he didn't want to listen to it.

JAD: Why?

MATT: Well, I think part of it had to do with this moment because ...

DENNIS CONROW: This was the point where my skepticism kind of kicked off.

MATT: And part of it had to do with what happens next.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Svend calling from Storrs, Connecticut. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

JAD: This is Radiolab. Let's get back to Matt Kielty's ghost story. And we'll pick up with our main guy, Dennis Conrow, having just heard from the ghost hunters that they encountered a spirit in the basement of his home who looks remarkably like his dead father.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: Yep. That's the man I saw here. Yep.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: So he's here?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: Yep. He's here.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: Hmm. Can we try to talk to him?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: We can try to talk to him, absolutely.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: He's in the basement? Or here? Or ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: I feel like he went upstairs. He's not in the basement anymore.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: Can we go upstairs and just talk to him?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: Yeah, absolutely.]

DENNIS CONROW: So, you know, I hadn't really told them a whole lot about what the different rooms in the house were, but they led me upstairs to what was his room.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: Let's do this.]

DENNIS CONROW: And to the corner of the room where his bed was.

ANDY: And they had no idea that they used to be ...?

DENNIS CONROW: They had no idea. And I said to them, "Okay. Well, if he's gonna talk, he'll just talk to me."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: All right, Dad. Are you here? You could turn on the lights if you are. Thank you. Thank you, Dad. We're gonna call that yes. You can turn that one off now, and turn on the no light, any other light. Please? I need to know that you're here.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: There you go.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: Thanks, Dad.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: Do you want us to leave?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: Dad, would you like these people to leave and just talk to me?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: Yeah. That's okay, let's leave them alone.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: Dad, I want to know are you in a good spot? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay, Dad? Yes? Good. I'm glad to hear that. Okay, everything off. Everything's off almost. Almost, Dad. All right, thanks. Hey, I'm gonna ask you this. Is Mom here, too? Is Mom here, too?]

DENNIS CONROW: And the other of the three flashlights lights up.

ANDY: Huh.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: Yes, she is here. Hi, Mom. Now that you're both here, I love you very much and I miss you both. I have so many questions for you, I can't ask them all. They're just yes or no questions.]

DENNIS CONROW: But I said, "Well, have you been able to see the things that I've done to the house?" And both of the lights lit up very brightly, "Yes." And then ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: So I've lived here for six years, redone the house. I've done a lot of things.]

DENNIS CONROW: You know, I said ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: What do you think, are you happy with this?]

DENNIS CONROW: "Are you happy with the things I've done with the house?" And they both lit up very brightly, "Yes." And I said, "Are you proud of me?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: Are you proud of what I've done, who I am, how I'm doing? That's weird. [laughs] That's a very bright yes. It means a lot to me. In a few days, guys, I'll probably never set foot in this house again. And I don't want you to, like, stay here and feel like you belong here. I want you to go out and be free. Can you let go of this house, to finally move on? That's fine. I'm going to leave you guys. You've been haunting my dreams a lot about this house. And I know it's very important to you. It's very important to me. It's time we leave, right? Yes. All right.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: Are you okay?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dennis Conrow: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Katie: Do you want a hug? [laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brittany Elaine: I think you need one.]

MATT: So that's where it ends.

DENNIS CONROW: Yeah.

ANDY: Hmm.

DENNIS CONROW: That's how I recall it being. Exactly like that. And I kind of teared up.

MATT: And keep in mind that this was the first time that Dennis had heard this tape, and so we played it back to him because we just wanted to see, like, how he remembered that experience.

DENNIS CONROW: You know, I guess part of—part of my fear of listening to it was that it would change it, and that it would be a different experience. It would be a little more hokey and it would be a little more unclear what was happening, but listening to it again, it was as I recalled it being.

JAD: So in the end, does he believe he was actually talking to his dead parents?

MATT: No. No. I ended up actually calling this guy who explained to me how this whole flashlight thing works, and that there is a perfectly non-paranormal explanation as to what's going on with the flashlight.

ROBERT: It almost feels bad manners at this point to have a practical explanation, but I'm very curious to hear it.

MATT: [laughs] What's going on is you turn the flashlight on.

ROBERT: Yeah.

MATT: And when you turn the flashlight on the bulb gets really hot.

ROBERT: Right.

MATT: And then you take the top of the flashlight, and you unscrew it just enough that the flashlight flickers off. So the flashlight's off and the bulb, it got really hot so the inside of the flashlight also got really hot. And there's this little piece of plastic inside the flashlight that when it got hot, it expanded. And now since the flashlight's off, that piece of plastic, it starts to cool down and starts to contract. And when it contracts, it pushes these two tiny bits of metal together, these two little bits of metal come into contact. And that's your circuit. So the circuit opens, the light bulb, it goes back on.

JAD: Hmm.

ROBERT: Oh, then it warms again and cools again.

MATT: Then it gets hot, and so the little piece of plastic, it starts to get hot. It starts to expand and pushes the two pieces apart.

ROBERT: And these people chose this flashlight because it had that particular property?

JAD: Yeah, do you think it's like a con or something?

MATT: No, I don't think so. No, I don't think so. I mean, I even talked to Dennis about this. He's like, "I think they're just trying to make sense of randomness. I mean, I don't think they necessarily know that this flashlight does this thing and therefore they can manipulate people."

ROBERT: Well, here's why I don't think it's a con, because in this case it's such a strange coincidence that whenever he wants his mom and dad, his ghostly mother and father to approve of him and congratulate him and honor him with a yes—I mean, it's random he could get a, no but he gets a yes.

MATT: It's just chance.

JAD: And you told Dennis all this?

MATT: [laughs] Yeah, I told Dennis because you told me to tell Dennis.

JAD: That's true. [laughs] That's right, I forced him. Okay, so when you told him, what did he say?

MATT: Well, on one level, like, it didn't faze him. Dennis basically said, like, "Look, I know ..."

DENNIS CONROW: I know that the way that the world works is the way that the world works. People don't come back from the dead. People don't talk to you through flashlights.

MATT: But he also said that, like, he's not gonna let go of that experience. He wants to have it both ways.

DENNIS CONROW: I guess so. I guess I want to have both yes, this didn't happen and yes, this absolutely happened.

ROBERT: I understand that.

JAD: Yeah.

MATT: Because even if you are the world's biggest skeptic, if you don't believe in ghosts, like,there really aren't that many ways to talk about these sorts of things, these sorts of things that we all feel. You know, guilt for the things that we've done in our past, the loss of those who we've loved. That, like, ghost stories seem to stick around because they are an experience, albeit like a metaphorical experience, but an experience that lets us talk about these things that we can't adequately talk about. You know, that feeling of being haunted.

JAD: And so did he eventually sell the house and move out?

MATT: Yeah, sold the house, moved out.

JAD: No more dreams of his parents haunting him.

MATT: Well ...

DENNIS CONROW: It's been odd in the time that I've sold the house now. I thought the dreams would stop. And now the dreams are that I am the one haunting the house of the new people. [laughs] Where I will just walk in and just be like, "Hey, I'm here."

ANDY: And are you, like, going around repairing things?

DENNIS CONROW: No. I'm just, like, being somewhat shocked at what they've done to it. [laughs] It's like it never stops, you know?

JAD: Thanks, Matt.

MATT: No problem.

JAD: Matt Kielty.

-30-

 

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