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April 8, 2021·34 min·3 clips

A boy finds a giant golden bullet at soccer practice, triggering his father's chilling warning to never touch it again.

Family Ghosts host Sam Dingman opens this episode with a memory from childhood: while distracted during soccer practice at Cameron Run Park, he found something gleaming in the onion grass that turned out to be a large golden bullet, approximately four inches long and heavy in his hand. When he showed it to his parents after practice, his father got very quiet, took the bullet from him, stood it upright on the mantle next to an old clock, and told Dingman never to touch it and never to move it. The bullet remained on the mantle for months, seemingly inert but radiating menace, before Dingman's father quietly wrapped it and gave it to Dingman's Uncle Dick, a hunter, on the way to visit grandparents. Years later, Dingman would learn that Uncle Dick had taken his own life with a hunting rifle. The episode uses this memory as a frame for exploring how families transmit knowledge about pain and death to children without speaking it aloud, through objects, silences, and inexplicable household rules that children obey without understanding. Dingman connects this object-memory to the broader Family Ghosts project of unearthing stories that families carry but do not tell. He reflects on how the bullet, standing upright next to the ticking clock for months, was doing something that words could not: holding the shape of a secret until there was a place for it to go. The episode then transitions to a guest story in keeping with the format of Family Ghosts, in which a contributor shares their own experience of family history that has been passed down through objects, silences, or partial truths rather than direct disclosure. The tone is intimate and reflective, consistent with Dingman's characteristically literary approach to personal history. The audience is anyone drawn to quiet family mysteries and the ways grief gets transmitted without being spoken.

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