Old Man Dayton

**Scott Philbrook** (0:02)
Astonishing Legends Network.

**John Bull** (0:07)
The views and opinions expressed by hosts and listeners on the Astonishing Dead Letter Office are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Astonishing Legends Productions, the Astonishing Legends Network, or any affiliated entities or guests.

**Forrest Burgess** (0:37)
When something unexplainable happens to you, it can make you feel isolated or alone. But trust us, you're not. For over a decade, you've been sending your strange stories to Astonishing Legends. And now it's time for our fellow legenders to hear them too.
Join us weekly in Blanket Forteana as we dig through your intriguing messages to the Astonishing Dead Letter Office.

**John Bull** (1:11)
Tonight's episode, Old Man Dayton.

**Forrest Burgess** (1:17)
You know, there's a moment in a lot of Dead Letters where there's fear, but then it turns into something stranger, which is familiarity. Like you stop bracing every time you pass that thing on the stairs, and maybe you just start nodding at it on your way to the kitchen.

**Scott Philbrook** (1:33)
It's a lot like renovating a house. You got strangers hanging around so much, you're starting to have breakfast with them, the roommates you never agreed to. At some point, you quit telling people that something strange is happening, because the people you tell just decide something's wrong with you.

**Forrest Burgess** (1:46)
Yeah, that's a very specific frame of mind and feeling to be in, where you feel like maybe you're alone, maybe you're just the only one imagining all this, especially when people tell you that. That happens a lot in these letters, where the writer, the author spends half of the story being told it's just their imagination, even by the people they trust the most. But here's the tell, you could say it always gets our attention. When people give the thing a name, so there's a familiarity and a connection there, and we've talked about this before, like how do you set a lot of name? Well sometimes, I think a lot of it from people who've told me directly, it's just something you feel.
And you only name something that is going to stick around for a while.

**Scott Philbrook** (2:27)
That's right.

**Forrest Burgess** (2:28)
People don't name their farm animals.
But it means a name is given to something that you have some connection or familiarity with, as we said, or an affection for. Because it stayed around long enough to become part of the family or just the household furniture.

**Scott Philbrook** (2:47)
Yeah. And as we often say, it seems like a high number of times when people name the things they're interacting with, paranormal specifically, and they do a little research later, more often than not, you can find a historical connection to someone who actually lived and died there. Now, in this story, the road itself was the likely inspiration.
But here's the part that got me with this one. What happens when the next family moves in? People who never met you, never heard a single word of what you experienced, and then they've already got a name for it too.

**Forrest Burgess** (3:16)
Right. And imagine a stranger turning up years later to your same house.
They're living in the same place, you go to visit them. There's always that moment of nostalgia, but also you're looking for some connection, some verification, some confirmation. And when they start using the same name for whatever it is they're seeing, then you know something's real about it.

**Scott Philbrook** (3:37)
That's right. And this week's letter is exactly that house. One building, and the oldest part of it is genuinely old, with a run of families who never crossed paths, separated by years, who each got introduced to the same two former residents. There's a little boy, and there's an old man. And which of them you meet seems to come down to who you are.

**Forrest Burgess** (3:57)
And three families in that house across the years, in this case, two of them saw the same old man with their own eyes. And before either of them, a psychic had already described him to the family living there first, to their knowledge. And our listener Heather didn't piece it together until she was standing in a doorway years later asking a total stranger a question she wasn't sure she wanted answered. So that's one of the ideas we're going to be talking about tonight, whether this is something a couple of families, and a psychic who gave a reading about the home, talked themselves into, or was part of their collective imagining perhaps, or was someone still genuinely home?
All right, Scott, my friend, it is your turn.

**Scott Philbrook** (4:48)