Doctor's falls throughout the land.

The midnight hour is close at hand.

You're listening to Spooked.

Stay tuned.

Thank you. Okay, so I'm claustrophobic.

Have been since I was teeny tiny.

Tight spaces for me are the stuff of nightmare, which is why on a recent trip to Vietnam with my family.

I keep refusing our guide when he invites me to explore the caves to see for myself

where the Viet Cong hid, where they live, where they fought during the Vietnam War, or or as he calls it, the War of American

aggression.

I tell this nice man, this smiling man, I tell him that as a corn-fed Michigander, there is no

way, no power on God's green earth that is going to squeeze me

into a tiny underground hand-dug sliver of a cave constructed for someone half my size, no way.

Then my boy, my son, he says, he'll do it.

And look at he split.

He hops down into the hole of the earth and he disappears.

Pride, shame, pride.

And I think, wow, wow, if he can do it, I think, how bad can it really be?

So I crawled down after him, trying to follow him down this tiny space, bent over, hands forward, hands forth, boy!

I make the first turn pitch blackness black like there has never been light black like there is no such thing as light the dirt walls of this, they press on my shoulders from each side, and I can't even scream.

I can't move, I can't breathe.

I can, I can, I can.

...