In a 2014 appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” Jenny Slate spoke about her early experiences with otherworldly beings (via YouTube). Slate’s proclivity for all things spooky started during her childhood when her family moved into an old Massachusetts home. “I grew up in a genuine haunted house. … I knew it was haunted. My parents, when they moved in, they bought it with all the furniture in it, the people had died,” Slate said.
She elaborated on this in her stand-up special, “Stage Fright,” where she jokingly said, “Layers of death is what the realtor was saying.” Slate shared that when her mother decided to remove the dusty runner on the stairs, the family uncovered a stash of letters hidden underneath. The letters were apparently written by a sea captain to the former lady of the house. “They were like these romantic letters, and my dad is a poet, and he was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to write a story … I’m going to write poems about this,'” Slate said (per YouTube).
Her father brought the letters to his study which was positioned above the home’s central staircase. When her mother awoke one night shortly after and smelled pipe tobacco burning, she yelled to Slate’s father thinking he was smoking in the other room. As it turns out, he was fast asleep next to her, and when he woke up, he said he hadn’t lit a pipe that night. Fearing a fire, Slate’s mom sent her husband to scope things out.
