You're listening to the Paranormal UK Radio Network, the best in paranormal talk radio
in the UK and around the world. Hello world, you're listening to Eleanor
Wagner's Strange and Scary World here on the Paranormal UK Radio Network, where we're
always creeping it real. I'm your host, Eleanor Wagner. Please join me
and welcoming to day's guest at their researcher and musician, Joshua Cutchen. Hi,
Joshua, Hi, it's so nice to be here. Thank you for
coming. I appreciate it. Yeah, you're absolutely welcome. I'm glad that
our mutual acquaintance josh from What Alerts Beneath put us in touch, and yeah,
I'm looking forward to our conversation. We were talking about strange and piery
phenomena and he mentioned to me that you had some really great knowledge about fairies,
and it just lightened up my mind. I was like, oh,
my gosh, because I have this elderly gentleman. He's like eighty six years
old, and I don't even know if I told you this, but he
loves to take his dog for walk and go and check out the deer in
his neighborhood and he's great with the camera. But I also think he's very
sensitive to spirit and to the unknown, and he catches things that are just
crazy and he gets excited and the messages me and sends me these pictures.
Do you see this? Do you see that? In this one picture he
sent me, look like this little leprechn guy hanging out with the deer.
And he says, this thing lives in this field. And he says,
I see it all the time, and now I want to see this picture.
I will definitely send it to you. What I'm all settled in.
I will send you the picture. You have a look at it, because
it is crazy cool. And that's kind of what put that first thought in
my mind. Because now that I've been doing this for about five years or
so, I'm talking to all these people via the podcasting, and I realize
there's a lot more out there that we're not aware of. I feel like
my scope was this absolutely. Yeah. You start with something simple, it
gets its foot in the door, you know. So it's like, well,
we all think that maybe ghosts are possible, and then you look into
that and things start to snowball, and eventually you wind up at something as
frankly patent leaf silly, as as fairies and faith fulk which you know,
when people discuss these topics, that's kind of a punchline that people use.
They're like, well, they saw a UFO. It's not like he said
he saw a Leprichn And for me, it's for me, it's like,
well, you know, there's such a long, extensive history here, and
a very strong argument to be made that a lot of the a lot of
modern UFO encounters are actually sort of variations on these older fairy stories. So
you start to say, well, maybe there is something something to this.
So, yeah, it's that that's a that I've heard of a lot of
people who have had that sort of similar journey, myself included to a degree.
Why don't we start with how you got involved in how you guys started.
So I was always a I was always a monster kid. You know,
anytime there was a creature feature on TV, I would be watching that.
Yeah. Yeah, and naturally that sort of I think spills over into
you know, the unknown, the unexplained, those sort of things. So
for the longest time, my primary interest, you know, was Bigfoot.
It wasn't until years later that I discovered that my father actually was a subscriber
to the big Foot Field Researchers Organization newsletter. I'm like, okay, well,
maybe there's something or editary here. But you know, I grew up
in a household that never told me that I couldn't look into these sort of
things. You know. It was, you know, there's sort of an
attitude that as long as I had a book in my hand, at least
I was reading, and that's a good thing. Be receptive to everything.
Yeah, exactly. Even though I grew up in a Christian household, there
weren't any religious barriers to any of this stuff or anything like that. Yeah,
which is, you know, a refreshing take that I don't feel like
I hear a lot from young religious families nowadays. But that's not here.
We're there anyway. So, you know, ghosts kind of were a little
bit passe for me. I've had some ghost ish experiences in my past,
and you know it's kind of like, well, yeah, of course,
you know, that was sort of mad at food regarding that the Bigfoot thing.
I was on this sort of train of thought that Bigfoot might be a
giant undiscovered primate. My thinking has shifted in that regard significantly, but we'll
put that aside for the time being. I was very much skeptical on the
UFO question because if you look at, you know, even a cursory reading
of the sighting reports that have happened over the past seventy years, and arguably
the UFO question has been in the background from I'm much much longer than that.
But if you look at just the past seventy years, it seems to
paint a picture of multiple civilizations coming here, when in like, you know,
hundreds of different styles of craft and an equal number of configurations, everything
from little short airy dwarves to giant black people. And it's kind of like,
okay, well, you know, I can buy the a species as
a visiting here, but you know, one of the odds that there are
so many different species of visiting here. So I ended up finally coming around
to the UFO possibility and really entertaining it as something that might have an objective
basis probably around the year twenty fifteen, and that was the year sorry twenty
twelve actually because twenty fifteen was when I left my job, But twenty twelve,
twenty twelves when I got a job and I had an hour long commute
to and from work, and I started listening to podcasts, and I,
you know, having always had a little bit of an interest in this stuff,
I started listening to some paranormal podcasts and they introduced me to the possibility
that some of these things that people encounter are not necessarily being encountered in this
reality. They're occurring, those experiences are unfolding in an altered state of consciousness
that's allowing us to see into another world. And for that mean for me,
that was a very parsimonious way to sort of explain the variations that you
see across these different sightings, because if they somehow are interacting with our minds,
then they could literally appear like anything they want to right, And you
know, there's some indications through their various folklores that something like that is going
on. So I started being more open to the UFO question, and my
interests kept on growing, and I had a I think it was a Christmas
It was either Christmas gift or a Birthday gift. That was an Amazon card
from my sister in law, and I decided that I was going to get
a big footbook and I got a wonderful bigfoot book, Jay Robert Aliy's Raincoast
Sasquatch. It's all about sightings that happened on the coast of Alaska, and
I recall reading in there that there is a bit of folklore among some of
the tribes that one of their bigfoot analogs, the Bequas. It's believed that
if you accept food from the Bequas, number one, it isn't really food
at all. It looks like salmon, but it's actually dried tree bark.
And number two, if you accept this food from the book Was and you
eat it, you'll be trapped with the book Was forever. And that was
when something triggered in the back of my mind. And I don't know why
this detail always stood out to me, but it did. There's this long
standing prohibition in the fairy folklore or Western Europe that if you take food in
fairyland, you're destined to be stuck there in fairyland forever. And it was
so confronting to me to see that bit of folklore juxtaposed against indigenous folklore in
Alaska, which is it's it's practically the same prohibitious, practically the same taboo.
What accounts for that? And you know, I came to the to
the conclusion that it had to be one of several things. It had to
be either the least exotic, which I still find really fascinating, is that
there is a sort of young and collective unconscious, this well of motifs that
we draw upon regardless of where we are in the world, which is a
fascinating idea and of itself. Or there was a lot more exchange of culture
between the old and New worlds prior to Columbus or the Vikings, or that
these things have an objective reality all of their own. That people are coming
up with these similar rules and things about interacting with this other world because they've
all experienced at firsthand, Sony. Any three of those is absolutely fascinating to
me as as a possibility, And I said, well, someone should write
a book on that. And you know, I got a death job at
the University of Georgia at the time, and jumping into this field is not
something one does lightly because I dare say, it makes you times are changing,
and this is not necessarily the case now, but is right it?
Yeah, it sort of sort of makes you unhirable there were some, There
were some. There were some job interviews that I progressed through about three or
four realms, and then I think they finally decided to google me, and
it was like, oh, he's a koop. But I just I felt
a calling to put together my first book, which was A Trojan Feast,
which looked specifically at this sort of food taboos as it appears in different cultures,
and it really is widespread amongst every inhabited continent. People will have this
idea that if you go to you know, the other world, whatever that
might be, spirit world, underworld, the astral rail, wherever where whenever
we go to this other reality, don't eat or drink anything. And you
know, I still find that fascinating that that's such a pervasive myth. But
I wrote my first book on that topic and it was well received. To
my absolute shock, there were folks whose books that I read in middle school
who were saying kind things about a Trojan Feast That must have like tugged at
yahr strings right, because the two were actually accepting you in giving you good
feedback. I could not have hoped for a better and warmer reception. And
it was kind of like being a basketball fan and kind of enjoying basketball,
but not knowing you had any aptitude. And all of a sudden, you
know, Lebron's like, hey, good job kid. It's like, oh
wow, did you say that to me? Yeah, I'm still in shock
at Like sometimes I looked through my phone and some of the names of people
that I count as friends now not just acquaintances but friends kind of shocks me.
It's been a wonderful what trap. So yeah, I ended up quitting
my job and just working as an author and a musician, and eight years
later, it's finally become profitable. It took a while, but it's finally
become It happened. I've been writing since I was a kid, and I
actually wrote my first book before I had children, so this is way back.
And then when they were full grown and on their own, I decided
to publish it, and all of a sudden it took off. And you
know how you always have that time in that place the universe has it for
you when they want to do it, and you just have to go with,
well, well, my career started when I'm fifty, and you know,
being an author, it's a struggle just getting your book out there.
Whether you see a profit or not is one thing. But it's the joy
of writing and getting that story out that's the right. And that's how I
do it for the sheer joy of it out. I try to emphasize this
to folks because I run into people who are trying to chase trends, and
it's that's never been my guiding ethos. I mean, I write these I
write books for myself and I do projects for myself. I have been fortunate
enough that people want to come along for the ride. I just felt what
I do is I try to make it the highest quality that I can be,
even though it's just for me, and people seem to want to share
in that journey. Now here we are, keep on doing it then,
yeah, so here we are, depending on how you count, seven or
eight books later, and yeah that's great. Well, when I when I
first started writing my first book, it was a psychological thriller and that's where
my thing was. I mean, I was always into Stephen King and Dean
Cools and so all that was the stuff I read. And then I went
to school to write for children. So you think I had to write a
children's book along the way, But I never really thought that I was going
to end up writing true account hauntings. But my joy was always in that
phenomena. When I was a kid, it was all about ghosts and creature
virtual like Ustad and in Surgeon. That was my thing. So the universe
had a plan and I just needed to wait to find out. And before
I knew it, I was writing books on true account hauntings in the community
where I live. But what I wanted to share with you, which was
a little story. It was going to just be ghost stories, true account
ghost stories in the neighborhood. And then when I put it out on social
media, all these people came to newick stories about big Foot in my community
and UFOs and there were such good stories I could not leave them out.
So rather than it just be Sussex County hauntings, I did Sussex County huntings
and other strange phenomena so I could put those stories in, which turned out
to be a really good thing because now it's enabled me to write about,
yeah, the UFOs and big Foot and other things like near death experience and
carnation And now I'm talking to you about fairy so yeah, and I'm sure
you've noticed this because this is this is where my greatest interest, if we
want to get really niche sort of originates is the more you look into this
stuff, the more porous these boundaries become between these phenomena. You know,
you have bigfoot stories that sound like a ghost story because the thing just winks
out of out of sight and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, you know,
you have people who who see dead loved ones and alien abductions or see a
UFO and their house fills with poulter geist activity. And it starts to appear
as if a lot of these boundaries that we draw between these different phenomena are
sort of arbitrary. And that's that's sort off. If I if I had
to speak highly of myself, which I am always hesitant to do, but
if I had to, I have to say that I try to be a
disrupting force and say, hey, let's mix all this stuff up, and
then you can see, like how it might be that we're looking at multiple
facets of one bigger picture, bigger reality. And you know that the fairy
folk stuff, I think to a certain degree an argument could be made that
it's one of the underlying substrata of these things in addition to consciousness. As
alluded to earlier, a lot of stuff falls within that fairy umbrella that we've
been I don't think, I don't think willingly. I don't think it's a
sinister agenda. But we've been deprived of how truly powerful that body of folklore
is because we have this idea of what fairies are in popular culture being these
sweet little vixens with wings, and that's not really what's indicated in the folklore.
If you go back, not even that far, your sinister or the
idea of fairies in our current form that we think of them and being sweet
little things is pretty much in Elizabethan idea. In fact, you can't really
find depictions of fairy wings much earlier than some of the stagings of Shakespeare's plays.
There are a couple of references in poetry, but if you actually go
back and look at the folk tales in Western Europe, they not only lackwings,
they've always been attributed powers of levitation and flight and things like that,
but they also were not always you know, short and tiny. Sometimes they
would appear just as tall as a human being. Oh really, Yeah,
And a lot of these terms are are really fluid. That's something else that
you're quickly discovering them. Elves, trolls, fairies, mermaids, giants,
they kind of all fall under that generalized fairy umbrella. But there's always this,
you know, this assumption that fairies, being shape shifters, can be
whatever size they dang well please. And then the other thing that I find
really fascinating about it is if you look, you know, we normally think
of fairies as being though English, Scottish, Irish, you know, that's
that's sort of the yeah. And then you know, if if if we
want to say elves, then we're looking into Scandinavia and that's sort of you
know region, and you know Germany with dwarves. But what you find out
is that after looking at this long enough I would hazard a guess that any
region in the world that is that as people, there is some culture that
has stories of beings who tend to not exclusively in their variations on this,
but beings who tend to live on the margins of society, have supernatural powers,
tend to be short, often dwell underground, and are fond of kidnapping
human beings, sometimes replacing them with changelings. Yeah, so I mean like
nat and you know, it's no more it's no more stark for me than
if you look at some of the the Cherokee Missing legends from here in the
New World. And it gets so specific that I have to ask myself if
there might be cultural contamination from some of these early ethnographers because it is so
specific. Sometimes I read a story and the only thing differentiating it from a
story in Ireland is just the proper nouns. You know, there's this belief
that time would fluctuate in the presence of fairs in Ireland, and you see
the same story among the Yunmi Sunsi or the Nayah here in here in the
Southeastern United States. There are these ideas that they are associated with earthworks,
sometimes burial mounds, and that's something you certainly see in the Old World,
and you also see down here in the Southeastern United States. And again there's
that question like if there wasn't any cultural exchange between these two populations in pre
Columbian times, then why is why do the why do these things look so
darn similar? There is a sinister aspect to the fairies, but I like
to call them more capricious you know, it's strange that because you have Disney
is very known to portray everything is to just the wonderful and glorious and the
mermaids, and so people get this this perception and then it's not a reality,
and then you find out, like the original fairy Tales, they were
killing people and not loving people. Yeah, if it's sort of the same
sanitization that you see if you go back and actually read Brothers Grim, you
know you can see that sort of same sort of cotton candy facade put on
things. Yeah, but you know, there was this there was this idea
that you know, time would dilate in this other realm. They could be
forces for good or forces for I wouldn't even say evil again, I'd say
just the negative forces. You know, if you if you kept your fairy
that was associated with your household, maybe it was a brownie or a French
goblin or something, if you kept them appeased with offerings and you treated them
kindly and didn't speak all of them, they could bring you great fortune.
And if you even accidentally offended them, then your life would fall apart.
And this could be this could be something as relatively innocuous as cutting down the
wrong tree, you know, or even you know, there's a story from
the Isle of Man where somebody ran into its fairy tree just like happened to
brush into one, and you know, I think they were stricken blind in
that particular story. So yeah, it's that they are not to be trifled
with, and they are unpredictable. Again, capricious is the adjective that I
like to use, but exactly what they were what they are you know,
a lot of our modern conceptions of fairies again using that as an umbrella term
to encompass things like gnomes and elves and sprites and all this. Our modern
conception of fairies really ties them to this sort of idea of like being earth
elementals and helping vegetation grow and being you know, stewards of nature at the
bottom of the garden. And while that's indicated to a degree in some of
the folklore, and we could get into time permitting and interest permitting, we
can get into that, but that is mostly an outgrowth of this late nineteenth
century spiritual movement known as theosophy, which you might have run into. It
was closely tied with the spiritualist movement dealt with a lot of channeled material.
Helena Petrovna Blovotsky was the leader of this organization, and it's from that tradition
that we see this idea of fairies being elementals and inhabiting a flower and helping
it grow. That's sort of where the roots of that sweeter version of theories
kind of originate. If you go back into the folklore, and again this
is a consistency that I've voted, you find lots of connections between fairies,
regardless of what cottony you're looking at in the human debt, whether it is
that you can die and become a faery or that you die and you go
to the fairies, or it's not entirely clear, and it's often get some
conflicting information in that regard, but some of the origins seem to be tied
to the human dead. Some of the origins for fairies seemed to be to
seem to suggest that they were demoted pagan spirits or that they were you know,
smaller deities that were associated with individual areas as well, really specific spirits
of place, you know. And then of course to Christianity comes along and
can't abide any degree of nuance in this regards. So you get these stories
that become Christianized that you know, oh, the fairies are demons, or
you get the stories that fairies were the angels that were too good for Hell
and too bad for Heaven, or the fairies who happen to be on the
outside of Heaven when the gates were shut after the word of it. I'm
sorry, you have to put a title. Yeah, you have to put
a label on it. This this this compulsion that we all we all feel
as human beings. My mentor Greg Bishop calls it the certainty fetish like we
have tubby able to say, this is what it is. That's probably been
the most surprising thing about looking into the fairy folklore is how just messy it
is, to the degree that you will talk to fairy scholars and yes,
those people do exist, and they will they themselves will tell you that no
one really knows where this sort of archetype of the fairy came from. It
just sort of appears and the sort of back engineered to be to be one
thing or another. Yeah, I know this is a far out question,
but you hear about all these missing people, do you think they have something
to do with as you mentioned kidnapper. Well, you know, it's so
a lot of them missing for one one stuff people who go missing in national
parks. I've often said that missing for one one is a paranormal worshact test,
you know, So whatever you're really interested in is why you're going to
see. So you talk to somebody, you fit the pig foot, It's
like, oh, it's a big foot. You talk to somebody who.
So I realize, having made that statement, that there's a lot of irony
in the fact that I would attribute most of that to fairy activity, because
I'm sort of outing myself in my own worshact. But at the same time,
there are some specifics that I don't think any of the other explanations.
If we're going to solve one unknown with another with another unknown, there's some
specifics to those cases that I think fit the fairy folklore model very well.
Some of the David Pelatis's work, he talks about how people sometimes he's known
as a trend of them wearing bright clothing, perhaps the color red, sometimes
before they disappear into these national parks. And I'll be darned if you don't
look through some of that fairy folklore, they could be offended by certain wud
clothing and this was often regions specific, but one of the clothing, articles
of clothing, or colors of articles and clothing that they would be most offended
by and be inclined to take you would be if you wore red. And
again in some other folklore in different parts of Europe, if you wore red
it could repel the fairies. But there's still this connection between bright clothing and
disappearances. There's also in those David Pelatis reports these stories of you know,
the search has to be shut down because the weather rolls in and it's a
horrible storm that sort of shuts down the operation. And I have trouble making.
I have trouble coming up with a scenario where UFOs are controlling the weather
or big Foot controlling the weather. But fairies have always been associated with storms.
It's been one of the one of their primary powers. So that ticks
another box. Yeah. One of the most fascinating things that I fascinating connections
that I saw was, you know a lot of these missing four on one
stories, the person is sometimes found face down and they've got their clothing neatly
stacked beside them, which is always very geary sort of thing to see.
There is an article, an academic article. I can't remember what journal it
was, nor can I remember the author, but I do have it cited
in one of my books that there are stories in Hawaii that if you run
into the night Marchers, who are not explicitly fairies, but sort of share
a lot of the same attributes that you'd see with fairies in Europe, including
this tendency to troop across the landscape on certain nights. If you were to
encounter the night marchers, and the one thing you should do to protect yourself
is before their king walked by, you should strip yourself make and lie face
down the ground. It's like, oh, that's that's kind of great.
So so yeah. I do see a lot of a lot similarities between these
disappearances and the faithful stuff, and I think that it suggests some things.
It suggests that these older phenomena, if they do have an objective reality,
never really went away. They just sort of change their appearance of their name.
You know, I'm not sure that calling these things feries is an accurate
reading, you know, I think that we're using language to try to tack
onto something to make it seem more comfortable to wrap our heads around. But
you know, the other thing it sort of becomes a problem too, is
that the term faery, again just looking specifically at Western Europe, was applied
to a lot of things much in the same way that we would just throw
around the term paranormal or supernatural. So when you're looking back through these older
books, it might not be as explicitly phenomena from the good folk or the
gentry or the we folk, whatever you want to call them, as much
as it is just their language for describing something that explained, oh it's fairy,
you know. All that being said, though, I do see throughout
a lot of the paranormal phenomena that we talk about the thumb print of this
older folklore and this older mythology that just really refuses to go away no matter
how much we try to keep reinventing the paranormal wheel. So we were talking
about fairies, we were talking about big foot, and then you threw away
nons and all that other stuff. So there then we realize obviously, yeah,
or you know, sometimes I entertained the idea that there's a lot less
more than we realize, but a lot less than we think. And what
I mean by that is that these are just masks that this other thing likes
to switch out and put put on and take off. Stephen King, Well,
you know, it's interesting in Katherine Briggs's Encyclopedia Fairies, which I have
sitting over there in two pieces on my shelf because I've looked through her so
much. She was a pretty fairy scholar and wrote several books on fairies,
and there's an entry in her Encyclopedia of Fairies about a shape shifting, supernatural
fairy that would appear just like your deepest fears, and it was referred to
as it So, yeah, that's that's a bloody yeah. All. It's
another thing that I'm fascinated with is is how we as a culture sort of
laugh about fairies, but they are. They're everywhere, like you know,
their influence is with us to this day in ways that we don't fully comprehend.
I mean, you know, the medical term stroke is a derivation of
the fairy stroke, which would be when somebody was, you know, touched
by a fairy, they would have the symptoms that we normally associate with a
stroke nowadays. But that term literally comes from that older term for fairy strike.
Yeah, the colored cobalt was originally associated with the underground mining fairies known
as the cobalt. That's that's where the Yeah, and you can just the
list goes on and on and on, connections and other things in other ways.
That's so interesting. It has not gone anywhere, gets lost in history
and gets lost amongst the mob of things that are around us. So take
somebody like you to unearth it and put it out there. These these older
ways haven't gone anywhere. They've just sort of transformed and gone underground. I
guess you could say, so suffice it to say, fairies, where your
love wiser? Or is it just about everything? I mean, it's it's
just about everything. Although you know, I keep on feeling this pull back
to that older fairy folklore. I'm at the point now where I have difficulty
differentiating the UFO experience from the fairy stuff. It's gotten so specific. So
look, let's so, UFOs are probably about a dozen different explanations, right,
some mundane and some strange. But if you look at sort of the
contact scenario with these beings, it's startlingly consistent. A lot of These parallels
were first noted in public, you know, in a public forum by ufologists
chock Fleet in his nineteen sixty nine Passports and Magonia. But you know,
I can say, I can make the following statements both about modern UFO encounters
or modern UFO and occupants and fairies, short beings presided over by a taller
being in the leadership capacity, carrying wands, capable of paralysis, causing missing
time, traveling as lights through the sky, associated with ancient structures and ancient
sites of human habitation, powers of levitation, powers to walk through walls.
It gets so specific that I could I could even say, you know,
there's a common risk recurring trope in the alien abduction community of having an implant,
right, you know, I've got like, you know, they put
something in my body that let lets them track me or monitor me. I'm
sure you've heard these stories. There's a direct analog for this, and in
Western Europe known as the fairy blast, and blast in this sense shares the
same word root Germanic word root as blustery and blister. And this idea was
that you could be hit with a fairy blast of wind, especially if you
defended the fairy and it would cause a blister on your skin, and within
this blister would be all sorts of anything, and just detry thiss right.
It would be a it might be a piece of a twig, or it
might be a bit of bone, or it might be a bit of porcelain,
or it might be a tooth, or it might be here. But
this idea that there's a foreign object put by supernatural forces in your body,
you can see that in the fairy stuff too. So it's gotten to the
point where I used to hedge my bets and say, I'm pretty sure that
if you find anything in you know, the fairy folklore, there's an analog
in the UFO stuff and vice. First I'm pretty sure, but nowadays I'm
like, I will be able to find something that, even if you have
to sort of tilt in your head and squint, is a pretty close match.
I mean, you've also got this extensive history of you know, human
alien hybrids, and long before that was ever, long before that was ever
a discussion point, you had you know, fairies taking children and fairies taking
people to breed with them, or people you know, being taken away to
the other world and coming back with a strange child that was had all these
miraculous talents and gifts, much in the same way that the UFO community talks
about star scenes and Indigo children. So it's just it's gotten to the point
where I just it's perhaps the most remarkable coincidence in the world or the these
two things are related, even if there's not an objective reality to it.
It's the same impulse that we are reinventing with a twenty first century veneer.
I think, do the Black Eyed Children fit into the spectrum somewhere along?
So the Black Eyed Children are something of a of a peculiarity. I know
some people who don't really like to treat them as authentic because the stories sort
of seem to pop up relatively recently. I'm a little bit more charitable in
my assessment of it. I see shades of the black Eyed children and the
men in black, which some people have compared to vampires in the way that
they have to be invited inside. Right but right, right, So,
so once you make that connection black eyed children to men and black to vampires,
then you're back into You're back into the fairy stream, right Because a
lot of the diseases that people would associate with vampiresm like consumption, tuberculosis,
et cetera. They would associate that with vampires. They also associate that with
fairies. Both fairies and vampires couldn't cross running water. Both fairies and vampires
specific fairies had to be invited in. Both can be repelled by certain objects,
often iron horseshoes in the case of fairies, or crucifix or crosses in
the case of vampires. So there is a connection there. My second book
was all about supernatural smells. It was called The Brimstone Deceit and was looking
at just the reports of smells and all sorts of supernatural and paranorable cases and
trying to see if there was some connection between all these different things. And
there are some stories of the Black Eyed children smelling either soul for us or
like dirt, like the earth, and do find those indicated in some direct
ways some oblique ways in some of the older fairies stories as well. So,
yeah, I think that there is a connection to be made there.
Yeah. Interesting. So what's on your agenda in the months ahead? What
do you win with yourself? Well, it has someone who has also written
you said you've written some fiction too, Is that correct? Yeah, I
write psychological thrillers in children's books, so you can commiserate my foolishness and the
fact that I am about Charlie's a novel. Yeah, it's called them Old
Ways Never Died. If you've been listening to this conversation, you probably have
an idea of some of the antagonists in it. That's a proof that I
got. That's exciting. Yeah, it's it's all done, and you know,
it's simultaneously more and less difficult than working on the non fiction. It's
less it's less difficult because I tend to I tend to be very diligent with
my citations. So my last book series, Ecology of Souls, had forty
two hundred in notes, and not having to do that for a novel as
a relief. But at the same time, yeah, and nobody can tell
you you can because it's fiction out at the same time, you're staring at
that blinking cursor on the screen, You're like, this is going to come
from me. But yeah, you know, a part of it was being
sort of a loose I would loosely identify myself as a union who really appreciates
the ideas of Carl Young. I think that as essay on flying Saucers is
still one of the best things I ever written about the UFO phenomenon. But
i'd loosely identifying with Carl Young. I've I've often parroted this idea, this
observation that you know, people don't have ideas, ideas have people. And
it's the sense that there's this well of archetypes, the collective of consciousness,
just inspiration that's out there that you sort of act as a vector for right
you know. It's and I'm sure that you felt this too, like things
just sort of come to you out of nowhere. You're like, that's not
me, Like, I don't know what it is, but that's nothing.
No. I true. Some oftentimes I say, I think I feel like
somebody's channeling through me that. Yeah, I know, it's like somebody's using
me to get what they want out. Yeah. I I recently read an
interview with Ray Bradberry where he said the same thing. He said, you
know, sometimes I go downstairs early in the morning and I pick pick one
of my books off my shelf and I just sit there and cry because I
have no idea where this came from. And so I'd always always said that
thing, you know, I'd always said that thing, like I believe that
people don't have ideas ideas have people, but I'd never really experienced it in
that way. And then I'd talked to enough authors of fiction who had said
that they had interacted with their characters and like they would try to make their
characters do things and the characters would refuse, and I'm like, this sounds
really interesting. Well, yeah, And honestly, the way that I think
like that's in terms of the way that I think can conceptualize these topics.
That is a paranormal slash, supernatural slashing new menace experience in and of itself.
So I wanted to experience that firsthand, and that's why I sort of
embarked on this. Yeah, I did, And it was really interesting because
one of their favorite times to come to me would be between being fully awake
and falling asleep. Okay, And I you know, I thought i'd keep
a no pad by my best and right, I really have the pad and
the and the pen on my next fand because in the middle I will get
sentences and paragraphs and I and I've got I got a jot them down,
and I'll be like this in the dark because I don't want to wake up
my husband just so that I can get it down, because I will forget
it totally by the morning and it's happened, and I've been so pissed off
at myself, so I keep and by so it doesn't happen. Yeah,
it just evaporates into the either if you don't there are a couple of ideas
that I get away like that. Yeah, but it's it's uncanny, and
I'm very encouraged to hear that you've experienced the same thing because it's so like
you, I don't know where it's coming from. I don't know where the
verbage is coming from. It's not typically something that I would I would feel
that I'm educated enough or capable and I'm doing but it just comes and I'm
like thankful for it, and yeah, very appreciative for it. But like
you, I don't know where it comes from. Well, and I don't
know if it's you know, I don't know if it's well, I don't
know if it's a collective unconscious or I don't know if it's our thoughts taking
on a life of their own, or I don't know if it's, you
know, some sort of retrocausal thing where this thing already exists in the future
and it's projecting backwards across time to pull us into making it very clever real.
But it does feel like there's an externality to it, and I wanted
to experience that and I got to. And it's the sort of thing that
unless you have experienced it, you can't quite articulate the profundacy of it.
Yeah, yeah, Well, I'm happy for you that you did because well,
yeah, I'm right in as I've been fond of saying. Well,
as I mentioned earlier, I did it for myself, so to that extent,
I have no expectations for it, but I do have aspirations for it,
So we'll see how it's received. If nobody likes it, then I
did it for me and I got to have that experience that we talked about
so exactly. And that may be the only reason why you meant to do
it. I mean, we do things for certain reasons. We have no
idea what they are sometimes, so if that's what was meant to happen for
that reason, then so be it. But I don't think that it will
be well received because of what you have behind, you're already something about it.
Yeah, well I'm eager to share the characters with with folks, and
and yeah, it ties in a lot of the themes, and I get
to say some things that I wouldn't normally get to say because you know,
you can only be there's a certain conservatism that you have to employ when writing
nonfiction. You know well, and you can speculate, but you have to
address that you're speculating and then make sure that it's clear, so you know.
Anyway, I get to have somebody coming back and saying something to you
about something, and well that was my opin. Oh yeah, yeah,
always I've experienced. I'm not thinking you might experience, but it's from my
experience. Yeah, it was really interesting. I gave my one of my
first talks was that a New Faun meeting done here in Georgia, and it
was about that sort of food exchange that I alluded to as being my first
book. And there was an experiencer in the front row and she said,
I've experienced all this stuff all my life and I've never had anybody any of
these things offer any zood to me again. And I said, I said,
I respect that, and I acknowledge that that is I believe you,
I said, I've also I've also driven my entire life and not had to
blow out. It doesn't mean it doesn't happen, you know. So yeah,
I think that you see that message when you said that, she kind
of got quiet, you know. And yeah, I wasn't trying to be
snarky, but you know, I'm just trying to say that you've got to
no, well yeah you say so, yeah, so yeah, yeah,
I think And that's something that I keep on trying to bring people back to,
especially in this era when we've got all these congressional hearings on UFOs and
they seem to be propping up this military industrial complex thing, is that the
most important as back to these encounters does seem to happen at the individual level,
you know. I mean the stories these phenomena, I don't think are
about sharing with the world or proving anything to the world. I mean,
I think if you are trying to prove the reality of these things, it's
a bit like getting a secret love letter from a lover and going around everybody
was saying, look they love me, Look this person loves me, that's
not the purpose of a love letter. You know, a love letter is
an exchange between two people. And now, so yeah, I sort of
think that we we can always use, or should we should always embrace the
opportunity to resenter these phenomena back on the experiencers themselves, because a lot of
these things seem Taylor made for the people who see them. Yeah, I
say that too. A lot of people that follow my books when they receive
messages from deceased loved ones, you know, they have people that are turning
them that didn't happen, that was just a class And I say to them,
you don't need to prove anything to anybody. You receive something, and
if it's in your mind and your heart that that was your deceased dad or
your deceased child, receive it as that it's your personal experience. Nobody can
shut you down, and they can both be right. Like to the to
the outside party, it can just be a cloud, and to the person
exactly seeing it, it can Yeah, it can be something different. I
mean, it's similar to similar to dreams, and I think that a lot
of this stuff sort of maybe unfolds in this sort of waking dream state,
not to say that I think that it's imaginary, but that rather it's just
there's another realm that we access that's neither here or there. But you know,
you'll have some people come to you with this most profound dream for them
and you're listening to it and you kind of get bored halfway through. You've
had this happen, I'm sure, and that's because it's not for you.
It wasn't your dream, you know. So yeah, I think that's always
important. I am describing it though, that was good putting it. Why
don't you please tell the listeners where they can find you, what your website
is and wait getting books and stuff, because I don't think. I'm not
on Twitter. I was on Twitter for a while and it just got to
be too much. Several years back I quit Twitter. But you can reach
me through my website at Joshua Kutchin dot com and j O S h U
A c U T C h I N dot com just like a cut on
your chin, and there's information about all my books up there, and also
conference appearances, links to all interviews that I do like this one, and
I do have a presence on Facebook. Joshua Cutchen author, and yeah,
if you're interested in any of my work, you can go to my website
and punish yourself by listening to hours upon end of me of me talking.
Yeah, yeah, it's fine. Well, I thank you so much for
joining me today. I appreciate it, and I'm gonna be looking those books
up myself. It's a pleasure. Thanks so much, I really appreciate it.
Yes, thank you, ghostly listeners, and sign up or level up
on my author Eleanor Wagner Patreon program. That's PA t R e o N,
where you will find special bonus opportunities only available to its patrons, such
as one on ones with me and co hosting opportunities on episodes of Eleanor Wagner's
Strange and Scary World podcast. Thank you, paranormal enthusiasts for tuning in today.
I hope you'll come back again. Remember to tap into your own gifts.
Everyone has them, and in the meantime, make sure you're creeping it real