ANDREA SEABROOK, host:
All of these stories of mysterious disappearances and reappearances brings us to this story and your homework. Last week, we asked you to send us true tales of a time when you were scared out of your skull.
Well, we heard from this listener whose story of woe began innocently enough on a quiet evening at home.
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Ms. SAMMY CAROL(ph) (Resident, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania): My name is Sammy Carol. I was a newly married woman living in a large Victorian house in Dayton, Ohio. My husband at the time was on business.
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Ms. CAROL: We have the attic floor. On the second floor, lived a couple that was often intoxicated, loud or both. So my husband was out of town, I was in this Baroque house and the couple on the second floor had had a rather ruckus argument. And it occurred to me that I had not seen the girlfriend in a number of days.
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Ms. CAROL: And on the second floor where this couple lived, there was a shared commercial-sized freezer locker. And I had distinctly remember a bag of perogee that I wanted to go down and get.
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Ms. CAROL: As I lifted this very large freezer lid, I looked down into the freezer and I believed there are six or seven large, long plastic garbage bags filling the entirety of this freezer.
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Ms. CAROL: I instantly thought of my missing neighbor. I counted, well, if one is an arm, and one is a leg, and one is a head, and one is a torso, then there are the exact number of body parts that might be missing, laying in this freezer.
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Ms. CAROL: I decided I was going to figure out what was in the bag, and I went with a pair of scissors, I lifted up the freezer lid. As I cut open the bag, I see very clearly a pink frozen flesh with two red mittens in the bag as well. So I ran back upstairs. I called my landlord. I told her what I had found in the freezer. And I thought that my landlord was crying.
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Ms. CAROL: But once I'd stopped talking on the phone, I realized that she was laughing. And she was saying meet me in the laundry room. I said, no, we can't. We can't go to the laundry room, you know, he'll kill us too. And she said I know what it is. Please, meet me there.
So I brought my scissors with me, just in case, and I met my landlord back in the laundry room and she said, fish, it's a fish from my deep-sea fishing trip. They flash froze the fish for us and my mitten stuck to the fish so I just left them there and that is fish in the freezer.
Our neighbors heard us laughing and came out. And so then, of course, I had to tell the story. And needless to say, we didn't live there much longer.
SEABROOK: Listener Sammy Carol lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Now frozen fish, a fine dinner make. But what about those animals we never intend to eat.
Next week, we'll speak with the dog whisperer - Cesar Millan. Now, we're not going to ask this guy about dogs but we're going to ask him about people, specifically what you can tell about a person by watching her dog.
So that leaves us to your homework of this week. Send us your true stories about lessons you've learned from an animal. Go to npr.org and click on the Contact Us tab at the top. Type the word homework in your subject line or call our new homework hotline and tell us your tale. The number is 202-408-5183. Again, that's 202-408-5183.
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SEABROOK: And now we have these parting words for you today. This from James Alfred Wight, better known as James Herriot, the humbler veterinarian who worked in the English countryside in the early 20th century. He wrote about his work in a book called "All Creatures Great and Small and Others After It."
Herriot wrote: If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of us humans.
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SEABROOK: That's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Andrea Seabrook. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.