Welcome to this edition of The High Strangers Factor, copyrighted on the Paranormal UK
Radio Network. I am your host, Steve Ward, Annie Mercer and I
have been interviewing interesting people covering all aspects of the unexplained for several years,
and now Andy and I are joined by Susie Bastile as part of our motley
crew. Let's see Aramis, Porthos, and Athos. I guess it doesn't
worry to work, but I would like to be d'Artagnan in the fourth one
away. Well, tonight we're going to do something a little different, and
we're going to do a sort of a round table. If you can have
three corners as a round table, I guess that'll work, and the conversation
could just go anywhere. So let's just strap in and what I want to
do is start with Andy, please tell us about your publishing company. By
the way, what's the name of your publishing company? I popeis the company
is called Ninth Circle Press, which is from Dante's Inferno. As you probably
remember, I'm a rather large fan of Dante and this very the tales of
his exploration. Well, I say exploration. It's kind of a psychological exploration
of the underworld first of all, and then onto purgatory and offering to paradise.
It's really did set the tone for how we view Hell, the inferno,
that part, the various levels of Hell, and I've always been fascinated
by it since I was a kid. On my first redit. I didn't
understand a lot of it when I first read it, but it was like,
let's give me a nightmare as well. It's his brilliant stuff. I've
always been a dentist, as we are called, interested in Dante's works and
set of the company. I thought that's an ideal name. Actually, Ninth
Circle. It's the ninth circle of Hell. According to Dan to himself,
we would all end up in the Ninth Circle, just in the supernatural and
paranormal and the occult that would tend straight down there. So I from you,
so it seemed to be a I can need that out. It seems
to be a good choice for the name of the company, so I went
with Ninth Circle. I mean totally various names over the years. It's been
something to do for a long time, but never really got around to it.
And then, as you know, I moved from one part of the
UK to another part into much quiet and more rural area. Finished my work
as to psychotherapist, and so it's time to get this publish company off the
ground and start running. So my second publication has been out for about a
month now. It's saving pretty well. I'm just in the process of dispatching
orders off the first retailers around the world who want copies of it. So
I sell it myself directly first of all, and after a while they of
retailers get it. So that's going very well indeed. And where do people
go? How did they want to order your books or find a list of
your books that are available? How would they do that? You can go
to Ninth Circle Press dot com or Ninth Circle Press dot co dot UK.
I own both of them, so it's just as written as words Ninth Circle
Press and they'll find two titles that have been published. The first was my
own work on the thing called the citu Akra, which is the dark side
of Jewish mysticism. It's the alternative to the Kabala, or at least it's
not the alternative of the Kabbala as written about as being as something to do
with the Kabala. It's not. I won't voarue you the whole story again
because it's quite lengthy to explain. The second book I've just published is much
easier to understand. It's on Esseens witchcraft and magic, written by a good
friend of mine, Richard Ward, who has been a practitioner for many years,
and he covers the history of witchcraft in Essex, which is a particularly
important county for the history of witchcraft. Overall, some very important figures have
come from Essex, including very real, very important people, and one that's
a bit of a mystery, bit of myth that has spread around. Again
I won't boy with the whole story, but called Jews Picking has been credited
as being one of the fathers of modern witchcraft and wicker and it's not he's
entirely i gonna say, made up, not exatainly made up. But a
lot of things have been attributed to him that had nothing to do with him,
the work of somebody else. And my friend's book goes very much to
the detail of that as long with much more modern material about the occult and
witchcraft in ethics. So that is my current business, which is going quite
well. I've got at least two titles already in the works being prepared ones
by another writer, and it's very good. I don't say talked about it
yet because I'm just working through proof radio. And another one I'm working on
myself is on an old medieval grimoire which has been translated before, but I
think it's time for new translation, so I'm working on that at the moment.
So it's keep me quite busy, pretty good. And as soon as
he remind us about your websites and what you do and don't leave out as
Susie Camp, of course we can't. So my website is Paquages dot blogspot
dot com and they're you can find some of my musings on the origins of
Puck Wedges and the Lord behind them, as well as some eyewitness accounts,
and there is also a contact form there in case anyone ever sees one and
would like to let me know. I'm always happy to hear it. Even
if you don't want your name attached to it, you can, I will.
If you just need someone to talk to to not feel crazy, I
am more than happy to do that for you. And my YouTube is the
Puck Wedgy Whisperer. We talk about a lot more than just puck wedgies there
though, So there you will find my adventures through swamps and looking at some
old ancient stone structures in New England, as well as some interviews. What
I tend to do if I get upset about some misinformation out there, I
tend to find an expert in that area and have them on to talk about
it, to try to counteract all of the bad information going on out there
and on there. We do have a Susie Cam compilation on there, but
the individual Susiecam footage is on my Facebook. So if you would like to
see what it's like to be a five foot two person trapsing through a swamp
in New England, pov cam is available. And just to put it out
there, I am very very bad at spotting anomalies and videos, so please
look at them and tell me if there's anything there, because I guarantee you
I would miss it. Well, there was this big, strange black thing
fulling at one point. I don't if you've noticed it on all tho this
is uh, this is shadow, this is I went to the animal shelter,
thought I donate a big bag of cat food and I made them a
taken saying I think I'd like to see the cats. And so I was
looking at all the cats there that needed to be rescued, and then I
said, well, have any been here for a long period of time?
And uh, they said, well, this one little black cat had been
kind of overlooked for a while. Uh, and this is Shadow. She
had me at her with her green eyes and being the sucker that I am,
I have four cats now, so I posted on Facebook. I think
in this day and age, you can identify as anything, including inanimate objects.
So right now I'm identifying as a cat lady. But now something you
said, Susie. You said that if people were feeling a little crazy,
they could talk to you and contact you. Is that when you put that?
Yeah? Absolutely no. See I thought I thought Andy was the licensed
therapist. Very good. Uh. So Andy had a good idea of how
we could start out of this. Now. I know I probably told my
mini biography many times, but just so people can get a handle on where
we're coming from and how we contracted the strange virus that is a fascination with
the paranormal, we thought we'd kind of go over our origins like a superhero
group like the Justice League or the Fantastic Three. So Andy, would you
care to start? And how how is it that a young man in England,
maybe a young boy was when it started, that got into this strange
field. Well, it was actually rather young. I was about about nine
or ten, I would say, around that kind of age. I used
to live in Essex, which is say, my friend's book is based on
Essex, which trop magic. So I had the reputation already. But there
was a country park not far from where we lived, and there was a
large fault in the middle of the park. The fault was built original in
the Polonic times in early eighteen hundreds, and then built up during the First
World War and built even bigger in the Second World War. It's on the
Thames Estuary, so it was obviously a route that the German bombers would come
over. Soviously it was an important point to protect the landscape on the country.
But by the nineteen seventies we're talking about here, it would become derelict.
It was a bit of a mess. It was boarded up. There
was corrugated iron the way around to keep people out because it was obviously it's
old and dangerous. Some parts were collapsing. There were metal railings on the
first floor, or what we call the first one, the second thing you
could call, so it was very dangerous to go up those areas. A
bit were kept out, but of course, kids being kids a nice sunny
afternoon, there were lots of gaps in the fence and so we broke through
and there were a few kids playing football you called soccer in the ground.
So it was a large courtyard, gravel courtyard. We just kicking them all
about. And I was there, so just Johnny and I didn't really know
the other kids, of just other kids were there, and the very one.
This is a sunny summer's afternoon on Sunday. So I looked up and
I saw two men in military uniform walking past, I know more about ten
fifteen feet away. It was clear as anything, fully solid figures. Two
men in what I discovered later was the First World War uniform because they had
like a webbing bandaging around there below the knees onto the boats, which is
a World War One uniform feature. Don't get World War two. And they
walked past completely silent, no sound, no footsteps, nothing, and for
a second didn't register. I looked at them before well they didn't and then
look back at the what there, and they were gone. I looked at
maybe five seconds, six seconds, you know, but they were definitely there.
It was only a few seconds to say, but they're walking towards what
was a war. There was no doorway there, so I was like,
okay, that's pretty strange. I wasn't sort of freaked out or scared just
because there's been of a Sunday after thing. Just thought it was very odd.
And I remember going out and talking to my parents, who were obviously
there in the grounds in the country park. Part of it intaid I've seen
this figures. Mom was like, oh, really, that's interesting. I
don't think you believe me for a moment, but I knew what i'd seen.
I was absolutely convinced of it. And of course you lead self off
to the local library. In those days there was no internet obviously, so
had to just look at books and see what I could find and start reading
about ghosts. And that was really started my interests. Was just that weird
experience, whereas I say, we're talking about forty years ago now, and
more than forty years it's terrifying. But yeah, it was like it was
yesterday. I can close my eyes now and I can still see those two
men walk past. It's the freakiest thing. It's like they looked real,
looked solid, completely human, normal, but apart from there was no sound.
That was very strange. Men people say, oh, ghost exist,
blah blah blah, what did I see? You know? Over the years,
I've do various theories about these sorts of things. It was some kind
of I think, replay of the past somehow, like an i'ld what they
call the stone taps through, which doesn't quite work. In fact, stone
takes theory comes from a writer. It's fiction, but the idea of the
environment, the em fields for like, containing imagery or thoughts or shapes,
forms of everyone to call them that can be triggered off when we interact with
them, and I have to be looking for them to see them. I
mean, it's probably the best ghost sighting I ever had in all the years
of doing ghost investigations, which have been years of doing them on a fairy
regular basis. In the early two thousands, almost weekends every weekend was taken
up by doing it because I was working for a public company. But that
was probably the strongest, most impressive sighting I've ever had, and it was
pretty something. Now, you started out kind of interested in ghosts and that
sort of thing. As time went on, your interests obviously expanded to all
aspects of the paranormal. Yeah, and I just described that a little bit.
How maybe some of that came about, Well, it was a bit
of a diversion of what really happened. Nice idly looking into books about witchcraft
the magic, because I'd heard when I was again younger as a teenager,
that Essex had a history of witchcraft in magic as well. It was just
my reading ghost books. I read about pets called Buckley Pluckley Sorry, which
not far away, that's very haunted. Also Border Directory, probably of the
most famous places in the UK of ghosts, which was in Essex, so
it was my county. So I started looking for other field and started to
tar me more about UFOs and the occult and witchcraft the magic. So they
all kind of started to spread out from getting more and more books on the
general kind of paranormal or supernatural more referred to in those days, and that
just broadened my interests and started to develop various theories about what these things are,
which mixed in with my interest in psychologists have got bit older still,
so I have very different ideas about ghosts and UFOs and thinking there are probably
the same phenomena seen in different ways, which is obviously we've talked about many
times before. So for me the interest grew there. I was never strictly
into UFOs as such. I've still this day don't think I could say I've
seen a UFO as they've described. I've seen some anomalies in the sky,
but nothing that would say look as the spaceship. And I've come to that,
as we know from my discussions many times, the conclusion that there are
in a UFOs spaceships, not nuts of about craft and other planets. There
from old realities around us, different levels of being existing around us. And
that's what these things are for me. Very cool. But Susie, what
about you? How did you you know a young innocent lady growing up in
New England? You know, how did you become I don't know what the
word is damaged mentally? Perhaps we're into okay, we are telling so my
mom jokes that I was born spooky. So I was born the day after
Friday the thirteenth, and the day before a full moon during the thunder storm,
and I was born still in the amniotic sack, which I guess there's
folklore around that it's supposed to be like some kind of omen So that's how
I came into the world. And I also grew up hearing that story repeatedly,
so I think that does some mental damage there, like a self fulfilling
prophecy kind of type thing. And then I spent most of my childhood with
my grandma, so we didn't go to daycare or a babysitter. I went
to Grandma's house and she was, I don't want to say into the paranormal,
but she just kind of had connection to things in the world that other
people don't understand. So one of the things that I grew up doing with
her every day is every day she would go for a walk through the woods
where we had indigenous stone work as well, and she would, you know,
tell me about the stone walls and you know, show me what different
plants were. But also every day before we went out, she would leave
an offering and she said it was for the forest spirits. And I've just
now started connecting that with what people do with the we folk little people,
puck wedgies, makiah we sag in this area, and I think that's what
she might have been leaving treats for. It was usually fruit, so it
might be hereditary that I got into little people, I think. And also
your interest have expanded also into various areas. Yeah, yeah, that When
I first started looking into puck wedges and little people, I was very I
had blinders on, was very focused on that didn't have I had no interest
in UFOs. Ghosts were kind of like cool stories, not very interesting to
me. But then the more you start learning and researching, the more you
can see a connection between everything and you. And that was a misstep I
took when I first started really getting into research, was not looking at things
holistically. So you know, once I started seeing the similarities between you know,
other areas having similar phenomena and similar kind of beings seen with other beings
in these areas, started to put it together. Eventually I actually thought you
were on the verge of mentioning John Keele at Okay, it didn't happen,
that's all right. I've never revorted his name as well, just to say,
couldn't be the first. They're all taking a drink right now, Okay,
very good. If if Susie mentions it, you take two drinks for
me. And I've said a lot of this on the show, I'll try
and make it very quick. I was a huge science fiction fan and also
astronomy in space, anything anything that TV show or a movie. You know,
we had a great theater we could walk down to and usually be a
science fiction movie and a western on and a million cartoons. It was.
It was a great for a quarter, just for a quarter, and so
I was very much into that. I even had a Solar System map decades
before they demoted Pluto. So anyway, Pluto will always be a planet to
me. But as time went on, you you'd hear things about flying saucers
UFOs. My buddy Bill came down one time he had seen a TV show
called you asked for It? And apparently did you asked for it? It
was something you you could write in and ask them to show you anything.
Well apparently they. I think it might have been one of those films from
the fifties. They maybe the Utah film or there was another one where you
see the people had probably seen it with the white dots. It was it's
in daylight and the moving to the sky, and some said, well,
it's just the sun reflecting off birds or whatever. But anyway, the idea
was you know, he said, he said, Steve, that's like real,
real uf real flying saucers coming from other planets and the thought man,
and that just uh extended our imaginations. We just have a great time.
Early on, I read the books of Frank Edwards, the anthologies, where
I learned about the flat Woods Monster, uh and uh uh, the Kelly
Hopkins Thrill Goblins and so forth, and uh and then uh, I think,
uh, I guess uh that leaves us up to the point where that
there was that march in Michigan where we had a wave of UFO sightings,
uh, that with a lot of credible people. And then uh, shortly
after a few months after it was the first flyover of the Mothman. And
in November of sixty six that same year, and we had a we had
our UFO club and so forth. Now I'm not unlike like and unlike Andy
and unlike Susie in more recent times, I'd never had any kind of experience.
Now I was. I was kind of afraid of the dark point my
Dad finished off the attic and became a room. It was all finished off,
which was very cool in the daytime, but at night there were monsters
in there, and I had to of course, the covers protect you from
monsters, but I had to have a kind of a peephole so I could
breathe fresh air. And so I don't know how I think that went on
till I was about twenty seven, but I got over it, so anyway,
and then you know, I was People know I was very much into
the ech frame, and unlike you guys, I had no use for ghosts,
absolutely none. And I confessed one time on this show that when I
would buy my Fate magazine in the nineteen sixties, I would cut out the
UFO article and maybe if there was one on Lockness or something like that,
rip off the front and back cover and then stayp them together and throw away
the rest of the magazine. I had no use for true mystic experiences or
haunted houses. But I had I reformed. I went, I went to
some kind of therapy, and now I have I have complete Fate magazines.
So that's really kind of how it started. And of course people know my
journey through uh leaving the et behind or at least uh thinking there was more
to it with with people like John Ke and Jack Fula and so many great
researchers that have followed them. So that's that's it. I'm kind of a
non experiencer. I had one weird experience, but I will not re recap.
Just go back in the archives you'll you'll hear me talk about it.
And so that's that's pretty much it. So uh but uh, you know,
we we think, all three of us have come to the point where
uh we see that there are connections, uh, parallels and patterns uh and
in all these things, and it's very difficult to completely separate everything out.
Absolutely. I have a question for you, Steve. I've been thinking about
you not being an experiencer more since I have started to have experiences. Do
you want to have experiences? Yeah? I think so. My frame of
mind is this, you know, how people there was a guy who he
was one of the witnesses on finding Bigfoot. I saw him speak and he
said he was in his car. They had the camera right next to him.
He's on kind of a pathway and he sees this bear across the road
and he doesn't react. I mean, he could have just picked up his
camera and taken the picture. The problem is that people, even even John
Keel had a situation where he had a classic, brilliant UFO in a movie
camera and he was kind of founded he didn't pick it up. I would
want, hopefully to be in the present moment, and even if I didn't
have a camera to document it, I would hope that I was as aware
as possible so I could remember it in detail. But yeah, I would.
I would, Well, it depends, you know, if it's some
kind of a banshee dragging chains or whatever and making horrible noises. I think
I could. I could bypass that one. But and also I'm not really
interested in h being abducted, even though there's no deductible or cope, you
know. I just I don't want to go through that either. So there
would be certain experiences I would I would like love to have I had.
I guess maybe a couple of minor experiences, or at least one in Waverley
Hill Sanatorium. A group of us went down there from Michigan a few years
back, and we got they went through all the you know, we got
the tours and so forth, and I was standing in the moarde with some
people and I felt like a couple of fingers brushed the top of my head,
my hair and I could have been a bug, I don't know,
but that that was about it. Another thing my my ex wife and I
some years ago, we went to the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas,
which was highlighted on a ghost hundreds, Yeah, ghost Hunters episode and
h and again we went through the long two hour tour and I was I
was not feeling too good. I had hurt my knee a couple of days
earlier and the doctor put me on vicodin. That was my first experience with
that particular painkiller, and man, I was tired and anyway, so we
went to bed. They told us about how sometimes people feel spirits or something
or something sit on the bed well through the night. My white and then
wife Sarah felt something pressed down on the bed. She's looking over to see
if I'm shifting around, and I'm not. I'm dead to the world.
A flesh and e zambies could have been gnawing on me. I wouldn't have
known it. And so that was so a lot of times things have happened
around me that other people have experienced, but I seem to have I don't
know, sort of an aluminum foil, a barrier on a natural one that
keeps these things away. That's what I was going to say. That's the
really odd thing is, as you know, I used to work for a
three different panel events companies that hide locations out for the night and people would
pay to come along, hpen part of the staff that the manned the events.
The number of people would say the same thing. The more they did
those events investigations, the more they experienced stuff. So it does seem that
usually you become more attuned to whatever's going around you and the fact that you
still haven't seen it's quite interesting. I mean, I do believe we play
a part of these phenomenal experiences, and we're not just passive observers watching a
universe that's separate from us. We play our part in the events. Many
times, if the night was particularly quiet, the crowd were quiet, they
weren't doing very much, they weren't really into it, and it would be
that the place would respond and not a lot would happen, and a group
people that are really up for it when you're really rare to go. More
would happen. It wasn't there. They weren't faking it at all. It
was as if the energy they were generating was manifesting the phenomena that we're experiencing.
But I think if there was a subconscious desire to not experience something or
keep the hell away from it, it could be that you block it without
even realizing. I think we talked ricently about a particular occasion where I was
on an investigation where the table we were sitting around was vibrating. It was
literally moving. You could feel it moving, except one person couldn't. I
when there was like six of us around the table, which were saying six
or something like that. Five of us you could feel it. You could
feel it vibrating. Sixth person, No, I'm not feeling it, not
any He wasn't making it up. He was an adamant that something's happening here,
and yet we could feel it happening. We were talking earlier on about
dry thunderstorms, you know, without rain, and there was a par particular
occasion at Woodchester Mansion, which is a place I went to a lot in
the early two thousands. It's a large mansion house, a Victoria mansion that
was never completed. It was not finished because the guy who was having it
built, he was a owned sugar plantations in Carian and quite literally one terrible
storm wrecked his entire plantation, so he lost everything, lost all his money
as well for the help whole lot. So it couldn't afford to get the
building finished, so it was left abandoned, unfinished and has become In the
eighties it became very much the haunt of local kids were doing all the strange
things in it was rumored there was a ritual a cult group that was used
on the second kind and don't know, but there was a part of it
was actual chapel so that had they found black candles in their animal parts,
all the sorts of things. When the council took over the building in the
nineteen eighties and it set up a trust which runs it for the nineteen nineties
onwards. But you could hurry it out for the night, and it was
a fabulous location. There were so many things that had happened in there.
And one particular night we had this dry thunderstorm nowhere in thunderstorm and it was
on this first wild Clorida. It was about twenty five of us, and
each flash of lightning you could see shadows of figures at the forehead of the
corridor must be lit up by the light from the thunder the lightning coming in.
But there were people then you said, we didn't see that. Others
literally like, oh, every time the light they went because he could see
these figures when I was tourds the front, like iuld see them very clearly.
But they gave them people and said no, never saw anything. I
don't know what you guys were talking about. It was like, well,
that's it's amazing that they weren't lying. They just weren't tuned in whether they
didn't want to see it, and I don't know. They said they were
there more often tho. It was people who were there with a partner who
was interested in the event, wasn't then themselves had gone for it. They
left the wife, the husband and their kids, their friends, whatever.
And there was one guy in particularly. It was quite hilarious, just little
brief aside. We used to meet and the pub quite close to the village
pub quite close to where Winchester Mansion building was, and we'd meet all meet
there and I was sitting at the table the friend of mine who had brought
me along, and the couple sat with us and sat down and was just
like chatting. And as the wife was into it, he'd come along.
It wasn't that bothered. He didn't really believe me. He said, that's
not my kind of thing. I brought work. As she's into it,
I'm not interested at all. Really not fair enough. Anyway, when we
got down to the woodshef itself that staff were running the event. We give
a little talk. I did what called mediumship about the location, was explaining
the moment. But I did my speech, and he looked at me,
and he looked really embarrassed. And I said to him after he said,
don't worry about you know, because he thought, well I was. He
maybe thought I thought he was taking the mickey at me, and wasn't bothered
at all. But I said, now I'm not a believer. Now.
He was on that corridor towards the front during the lightning, and afterwards he
came and found me. He said, I don't know what if I saw
that, I saw that that was real. I still don't believe, but
I know I saw those things at the corridor that was amazing, So you
know that was the thing. If even if your mind is skeptical a bit
closed, sometimes the door gets ripped open and you start saying stuff. But
yeah, as I said, there were times when people would say they hadn't
seen heard anything, and yet the rest of us were clearly experiences something so
in that really built up my idea that we do play something a part in
this. Psychologically speaking, we are giving them energy. It's not just a
passive observer of an active phenomenon around us. We are engaged with it.
And what I used to do on these events was I just have the knacker
be able to see places, what they looked like before, how they used
to appear. I could describe them. I didn't communicate with any in particular.
I can sometimes take voices of people talking that was in the past and
related back to what I was hearing. I didn't really interact with them directly,
but I could sense them, and I would do my best to not
know about place for the first time I've not been there before, and in
times when after say, I've been pretty accurate actually about what was going on
there, including things it didn't make any sense at the time to me.
But when I explained what I'd seen and to the person who knew the history,
I said, well, yeah, that's spot on. So that was
how I was involved. Again, for me, I think it's because of
my interest in that early experience, I developed a connection with these sorts of
things. I was mentioned briefly about witchcraft the magical. There On, I
discovered books about a group called the Golden Dawn from the eighteen hundreds in the
UK that were the founders of real modern magic, and I started using the
books and using the rituals in them, which are designed to attune you to
these energies and vibrations. And certainly the more I use ritual the more I
felt more attuned to what I was experiencing. So that for me was what
made it more. Really, I don't think I was like some kind of
inheritability. I think it was just something that was passively there that I woke
by doing what I was doing. I just find out years later my dad's
grandmother was from Wales and she was the wise woman of the village, so
she was a woman that people would go to. Obviously, I'm not actually
directly descended as a public expace before I was adopted as a child. So
my father feels like he's not my birth father, not my genetic father,
but maybe there was something there, maybe some kind of connection was formed of
me as a baby. I don't know vibration on stuff. But ironically,
both my parents have no interest in this sort of stuff. But I met
my birth mother about ten years ago and she's very interested in the sort of
stuff. So it's almost as if that did travel down the old is really
quite strange. Yeah, interesting what you said about like a subconscious block.
I think that's what it was for me. I very much believe that if
you expect something bad, you're going to find something bad, and vice versa.
And you know, I had to kind of let go of a lot
of things in my life. I had to learn to look at the world
in a more positive light where everything is not scary. And I think,
you know, like Steve, I didn't want to get abducted. I didn't
want to get scratched by a demon, you know, things like that.
So while I had always like wanted to have experiences, I still was scared.
And when I kind of like dealt with that and dealt with like my
own mental health, issues too. Not that I'm calling Steve mentally ill,
but maybe it is. Well. I used to have a nickname mental award.
There you go, though, funnily enough it got on the more serious
moment topic for a second. That does seem to be the case. A
lot of people who have paranorl experiences are able to connect with this sort of
stuff, have had traumas of their own in their past. Something's happened to
them that's knocked them sideways or had an effect, and it seems to cause
that kind of opening up in the subconscious. And maybe Steve, you've not
had that when you were younger. I mean, i'll go down to your
personal life here, but maybe you didn't have that experience. I mean a
really good example of a guy aout of years ago who's part of my old
investigation team called James. He was a salesman. He went around the country
selling stuff. He was came we worked for now some kind of tech company
who was working for. But he had the gift of the gap. He
was a great blug you know, he was good salespersonally, he was hit
his targets and had no interest in the paranormal whatsoever. Not a c no
interest, and they had a car crash, and it was quite a bare
crash. He actually came flying through the windscreen and got a severe head injury,
ended up quite a bit of time in hospital, came out of it
and was psychic afterwards picking up on stuff. He said, he'd lived in
the same house for years, nothing had ever happened with in his own languae,
which it's like happening in his house. Plates used to fly for the
wall, and all sorts of polier guys like activities like to occur that had
never happened before. And he could do the same thing as I could.
He could pick up a location, sense what had gone on there in the
past and become aware of it. Now, if you'd met the guy,
you'd never in a million years think it was into this sort of stuff at
all. And I said, he never was until this accident, until the
head trauma clearly triggered something in his psyche and subconscious and became very, very
psychic, doing a bit of a medium. You know. I was picking
up on sort of families and that's sorts of which I never did, but
he could. I said, It's just it's bizarre, you know. He
had no interest, couldn't do this stuff, and all of a sudden this
happened. To say, he contacted a few groups this is back in the
late nineties looking for information, and the group I was a part of at
the time were the only ones who responded. So it was very grateful to
find us and talk to us about So there is a correlation between mental state,
I think, and being able to pick up on this stuff. And
I do think what I tend to refer to as a Hollywood hollywoodization of this
stuff, and it's all deemers, it's all monsters, all evil, and
it's all going to get you all scary frightence people when they come on and
go investigations, they want the scare and the spook. But do they really
you know, if they've seen too many films, like any supernatural film,
really that gives you the idea it's all demonic, it's all all more scary,
then of course you might be maybe I don't have that experience. Well,
you both talked about abduction. I am absolutely convinced, totally convinced that
abductions don't. OK. This is also do hypnogogic dreaming and sleep paralysis and
when I've did a lot of research on this quite early on my career as
a psychotherapist, and I noticed something quite interesting with that particular phenomenon. I
had, actually, I tell the story briefly, had an early client of
mine came to see me. He had quite bad anxiety. He was an
accountant, private accountant, and would when it came to year end doing accounts
for his clients, used to get very very stressed about you to worry,
and he was having a really difficult time. So it was coming fro some
help with that, and we're having an induction questionnaire where you asked first questions
about their past, their life to assess whether you can help me not.
One question always asked is do you have trouble sleeping? And said, well,
usually around the time of the year end figures, I do get really
bad sleep. They s I had this one occasion that was really weird.
I don't know what happened. There was the middle of the night, so
I woke up and just felt really uncomfortable and just it didn't feel right now.
I tried to get out of bed and I couldn't move. So it
was really frightening. And for some reason they had the two young boys,
my two kids at the bottom of the bed. We're like running around the
end of the bed, and I thought, why are you what are you
doing out of bed? And I tried to speak to them, So I
remember I was trying to shout. And then it was morning and it was
it was daytime. It was light. That was the weirdest thing. So
I spoke to his wife that morning at breakfast, said like, do you
remember what happened last night with the boys running around and gest sip the kids?
What were you doing out of bed? We weren't out, We didn't
do anything. And his wife said, no, you'll see it the whole
time. It was slip paralysis, get dreaming, because he had no interest
in anything weird or wonderful. For him, It's just his kids running onund
the end of the bed. So I became very interesting and write quite a
long artic for a clinical psychology magazine about this and did some research and what
I discovered was really quite interesting. I asked lots of people via the into
and just around if they ever had this experience. And one of the things
I discovered that was very interesting those that got back to had this experience,
they either experienced what you might call alien abduction scenario with aliens in the rooms
or probes and that kind of thing, or they had what's called the old
Hag experience, which is decided of his which scary creature in the room that
was trying to possess you or take you over. What was interesting was those
that were interested in science fiction, UFOs or even just Star Trek had the
abduction experience. Those might be interested in ghosts or even just history stuff had
the Old Hag experience. So how this thing presented itself very much is preaded
upon your interests, your experiences, and those who had noticed in any of
those things, like my former client, will have things like the kids end
of the bed, or just strange person or the wife moving around for no
reason. So that's why I say I don't believe reductions actually occur. I
think it is this very strange phenomena of sleep paralysis and hpgogic dreaming. Sleep
paralysis is perfectly normal. It happens whenever you dream, but it stops you
thrashing around and throwing your arms legs about, so you don't injure yourself or
anyone with you. It's a normal function of the brain. But hypnogogic dreaming
is a very odd phenomenon where you go from quite deep sleep to being virtually
awake in an instant. So you combine that with the fact you can't move,
your brain will come to conclusions something stopping you move, rather than the
idea you're not gonna realize that your body is in paralysis because it's supposed to
be, but you're gonna think, oh, I can't move, something stopping
me. And people often talk about things like the anal probes and being fiddled
about with. Well, obviously that Jenna Taylor has some of the strongest nerving
He's in the body, so they are naturally going to respond first. So
people do experience that kind of thing because that's the first part of the body.
It started to come out in the paralysis, so of course you have
that kind of experience, but it was they just compiled themself. Was absolutely
fascinating And one particular guy I spoke to I masaged to get hold of again.
I knew when I was training drinks. When I was training, I
was also working in London in the retail shop and this guy I was working
with was doing his Masters in art and we'd just talk about phenomenal stuff.
And he said, I had that kind of weird experience. Is it used
to happen whenever I was coming towards the deadline of presenting work for my university
degree. The photogra was up in Edinburgh and he moved to London for his
masters, and so he used to live in a little flat in Edinburgh when
he's a student there undergraduate, and he said, I knew this thing was
happening because I'd wake up the middle of the night and there'd been an orange
yellow glow outside my window, except like a street light. Basically, he
said, there was no street lights out there, there was no lights near
me. It was out there, and so it would come into the room
and move across the wall and then disappear. So it only ever happened when
I was really stressed out, and I thought, it's just me being mega
stressed. And he said it only happened when he was having worked to be
handed him and they'd move to London and was doing his masters, completely different
flat, totally different area, the same thing happened. He said, they'd
wake up in the middle of night and that orange light would appear on one
across the room and it would disappear. Now these said, that's ufo,
it's aliens coming from again. But he knew for well, it was just
his He knew of the paralysis as we talked about it. And because you're
not interested in the panel at all, Yeah, it makes perfect sense to
him. Body just goes in paralysis and it's horrible. I discovered over the
years it's actually quite common. But because people think it's really strange and scary
and weird, they don't talk about its. People don't tell other people that
have had this experience. They tend to keep to themselves because the first thing
they do is google it. Of course, the abductions and ghosts in the
bedroom and the old hags, it on your chest, all that kind of
stuff. I mean, it's even mentioned in Shakespeare to line in Romeo and
Julia's about the old hat city on the bed. There's famous painting a woman
lying down with this goblin group on a chest and this sort of ghosty horse
appearing beside her. So it's been a philomen It's been around for a very
long time. So that's I've got on this topic. Kind of drifted into
a little bit but yeah, that's my experiences as a psychotherapist. So in
psychology about why we have these weird experiences, because I would often say that
people sleep is a very complicated thing. We think you're straightforward, your lad
and you four sleep, wake up again. Now there's different levels of sleep,
there's modes of sleep, the different ways to watch you sleep. We
can sleep for eight hours and have a terrible night sleep because you don't get
into rem properly. You don't spend so such time in REM or delta waves
sleep, the very very the healing sleep, and all these things happen.
People often say, you know, you get blind drunk and you fall asleep,
but that's a terrible night. You work with a bad hangover because you
don't sleep properly. You're into this stupor effect instead. It's not proper sleep
at all. So it's a complex process and so often people have these kind
of experiences in the middle of the night. Now I'm not saying that none
of them are real. Certainly not ghosty experiences in the middle the night quite
possible an old house, but I don't think aliens are coming on and having
on my spaceship and doing things you put you back again. So it's funny
because when I get stressed out, I sleep walk. Ah yeah, So
I think that sounds like the opposite side of the same coin. There,
whatever is supposed to keep me from moving does not ye, it's the disordered
sleep of effect of stressed anxiety disorders and sleep. If you'll do that.
They're talking and say, by a girlfriend years here to have a fullll in
conversation with which is fast asleep? Mister come out with that nonsense? But
you could talk? You do answer you fast asleep? Yeah, I'll go
ahead. No, I used to do that. Also, there was one
incident where I was living with my college boyfriend and he came in and was
trying to talk to me about something. I had no memory of this when
I woke up, but I actually sat up and I picked something off my
nightstand and threw it at him. No memory of it later was It's interesting
that certain people that have interested in star trek or whatever or having the abduction
experiences, and we're having the old Hag experience. I'm just wondering what you'd
have to do to have the big abducted by wild amazons. Now not asking
for me, okay, but I just, you know, just thought I
throw that out there. It's called be hopeful. One thing that did stop
the one anomalist the feature was the fact that you tend to be those kinds
of experiences. There were those kind of beings no one saw, like the
favorite movie starle in the bedroom or a horse in the bedroom. It was
always that kind of If it was the old Hag syndrome, it was literally
the old Hag. It was like an old typical witch kind of characters,
small and interesting. I mean, whether we believe witch stream or not.
One of the things I thought was interested in his communion and stuff was describe
these little blue doctors, little blue creatures bolts as they were described that they
kind of fit the kind of description you could possibly have an old hag with
small, wrinkled, you know, heavy set. They kind of fitted a
little bit. So it was almost if he was having both experiences both a
tall, willowy alien figure and than the witch hag at the same time.
Whether we believe what the stree when I'm a little dubious of into perferance you
is, it's a different matter entirely. But I thought that was interested brot
of those ideas in together. And there are people that say they can astro
project or do lucid dreaming and things like that, and those those seem like
positive experiences, but maybe somewhat similar. You know, I've heard people convinced
that they actually travel somewhere else in their sleep. But I think like the
mind is more powerful than a lot of us want to admit. Absolutely,
absolutely, certainly, if you're of my sort of mindset of the young in
psychology, thed have collective unconscious deep within the connectors altogether anyway suggest the possibility
of this kind of mind to mind movement, that you can literally move out
of yourself into another person and experience life through their eyes. My personal theorizing
things that past lives is exactly that you don't see your own past life.
You see the past through someone's eyes because you're it's all stored. When a
deep levels of the collective unconscious, those personal experiences are actually in there.
That's not necessarily Young himself say, I'm not actually agreed necessarily that idea,
but I think you can extend the idea of collective unconscious, which I think
does it is. I mean, the evidence of that is probably strong,
but the idea of personal experiences stilled within it is someone who can lock into.
Could also be an explanation for things like ghostly experiences of the past,
like my two guys in the World War One uniform, that you're locking into
a shared memory experience of that event there. And that was one of the
things I noticed a lot doing the panel investigations for the Fright Nights Company and
then London Panormal Society would go to locations that had histories of supposed ghosts,
ghosties, ghosts described. That's perfectly as they should go to the experiences people
have described and like in books that you could read about what's supposed to have
happened that people have seen, and we didn't see that. We'd have different
experiences. We'd have something that was not recorded before would occur or be seen
in those locations. It was quite fascinating that we didn't see the classic things
have been described in the ghost books that people have written about this sort of
things, but instead have very different experiences. So and often I think the
most fascinating thing was that it was never, not necessarily anything big and dramatic
that was experienced. It was often mundane things being observed, people walking past
but standing in doorways, you know, that kind of thing, not sort
of scary kind of as doing beasts or whatever. It was always the more
mundane experiences of, you know, walking into a room and seeing somebody just
standing in the room and disappearing. They weren't doing anything. I always fought
that was quite fascinating that they didn't always adhere to the supposed legend of our
location. Susie, were you telling us about your weird lightning phenomena during the
show or before the show? That was before the show? Okay, well
people will know what it's okay. I was going to say that if you
might want to do is grab a lightning rod and just run outside when it's
happening. You might if you get a strike, you might be able to
be turn psychic, or you might be able to become a superhero, even
there is some risk. I actually was indirectly struck by lightning once, and
I was at another time in a house that got struck by lightning, but
I didn't get the jolt. But the house I grew up and got struck
by lightning when I was in it. But then the house I rented in
college also got struck by lightning. And when that happened, I happened to
be touching the VCR. It just got it was enough to knock me back.
So no superpowers, though debatable, you know, I've sure I read
some of it. If you askedruck by lightning, the chances have been struck
again are increased. You become some kind of conducting rod, that it somehow
affects you, that it means you actually more like somewhere I know you,
that you're more likely you're struck again. Once happens more than once. He
was struck on a golf course three separate occasions. He did have a lot
of like on the property. So it was a dairy farm, and our
house is at the bottom of the hill at the and then there was a
pasture in the barn, and on top of the hill there was a big
tree and there was a lightning storm, and the cows all went under this
big tree for cover because they couldn't get back to the barn fast enough,
and lightning hit that tree, and it called seventeen cows. Oh M.
Well, if Andy's right and lightning may strike again, there's still hope,
Susie, I could be what was that movie Powder oh yeah, yeah,
yeah, I could be the next powder right, and you are listening to
the High Strangers that you're copyright and on the Paranormal UK Radio network, Andy,
Susie and I are imparting our vast knowledge and experience on the unknown through
podcast land Uh. Susan and I were talking before the show about a couple
other possible topics. One was if we were we seem to be contacting a
spirit or or or somebody that's supposed to be in the Great Beyond, how
do we know the communication is legit? And also another topic came up was
the Philadelphia experiment. Now, it may not take long to go through that,
but I'd be curious to know what both you guys think about it.
Maybe we haven't looked into it too much. I have a little bit,
and I have some ideas on it, but just to kind of change change
subjects a little bit, I must have met. What I've read of experiments
suggests to me it never happened. I don't know if that's the case,
but certainly the more I tried to look into the more kind of confused and
mixed up it seems to get that what rehappened or even didn't happen, so
I must have been. I'm skeptical of it. But if you have more
information, Steve, I'll be very interested to hear. Yeah, I forget
what year it's supposed to have happened. But a man named Carl Allen that
called himself Carlos Allende. He got a hold of the UFO, The Case
for the UFO by MK Jester. He was an astronomer, and he wrote
a couple of books on UFOs, actually a few books. He eventually committed
suicide, and there's all kinds of rumors about that, that he was murdered,
you know, on and on. That's a whole other subject. But
what what this guy did, as Carl Allen, is take a copy of
of his uh, the Case for the UFO, and write uh in like
three different scripts, uh and UH like I was something about A and B
and then somebody else and they were It was as if aliens or some kind
of intelligence is commenting on this book to the whole thing. The uh.
The military got into it. They actually printed a bunch of copies of this
with the notations and he became a really big deal. And uh, it
turns out now some people have bought this hook line and sinker I think it
was Charles Bolitz wrote a book on it, and uh uh there was I
have. I didn't really prepare for this, so I don't have all the
detail. But Ivan Sanderson had a a publication called Pursuit. He started the
Center for uh uh, let's see the Center for the Unexplained sit to I
can't remember anyway, Yeah, Center for the Unexplained, I guess, but
uh uh. There was an article in there by a gentleman I don't remember
his name, but he did a kind of an investigative report and he tracked
down Carl Allen talked to a lot of his his uh neighbors and so forth,
and a lot of them said, oh yeah, Carl. He was
a practical joker. He was always you know, doing so you know,
the whole thing starts to fall apart. I know a guy that claims his
father was there during the Philadelphia experiment. But this this moon also believes that
Indrid Cold murdered his father. Yeah, we're not. We won't. We
won't follow that up. And also, if you go to the uh,
a place called the Faded Disks Archive a great resource uh and you click on
under Wendy Connors. There's a there's like a historical UFO section the contacts,
Close Encounters of the third kind, fourth kind, a high Strangers section.
You actually there is an interview with Gray Barker of all people, talking to
Carl Allen and where he admitted that he wrote in the Margins and all this
and it wasn't the cosmic space people that so many people thought so, uh
but anyway, and then of course they made a cheesy movie on of it,
which was certain pretty awful. But it's just it's it's uh, I
mean, we might expand this a little bit. How many of these things
that are that that really are just hoaxes that take on a life of their
own and they just never die. Yes, that becomes an issue some of
the I think some of these things they probably are graining truth to them,
they begin to grow out of all proportion. I mean, the oldest one
stands is ross would of course how that began and how that's grown into this
mythological story that's spread all over the way. Something that's the whole thing about
the video of the supposed that aliens being autopsy that you've spoken to the guy
who's behind making the video. Even he came out and talked about it,
the interviewed about it, and I still people, I said, no,
no, even paid off by the government to lie about this thing. The
guy's English, actually, I mean he's a Greek dessement, he's English.
You know. I don't think they pay him anything. But he told exactly
how they did it. And yet people still believe that that real. You
just can't kill the belief for people that don't know that. The Philadelphia experiment
was supposed to be where they were trying to teleport a Davy ship to another
spot, and when it re materialized, some of the sailors were refused in
the metal and so forth. It just just uttered nonsense. Some people thought
there might have been, like you say, a greater truth to it,
where they were trying to degouse the uh degoussing is where they every every ship
or submarine has a metal signature and they do something to it so it's not
so easily detected by the enemy. And so they thought maybe there was something
to do with that. But anyway that was I wish people would would just
put that one to bed and just bury it in a shallow grave. See
that's interesting because the version I'd always thought was that they try to make it
invisible, that the idea was trying to build and bend light around it the
course of a very stronge. So there's the mythology, of course, of
these sorts of things that begins to grow and expand away beyond the original story.
Right, if there is an original story, of course, it entirely
could be entirely made up and created, which kind of brings me on to
I wanted to talk about because I was checking a Susie on a message earlier
on today about this. Susan's discovered the thing called the Philip experiment, which
I think you probably know of, Steve Well. The group of people literally
invented the ghost, gave him a history and identity, and they became real
it started to respond, that was responding on its own. It was causing
sorts of strange phenomena in the house. So the idea that you could literally
create a ghost is possible, because that's what the Philip experiment was. It
was a littitly designed and when they tried to dispel it, it didn't.
It carried on for some time. It kind of figured out by itself eventually,
but it certainly was called Philip Experiment. Now I engaged on a similar
experiment all of my own a few quite a few years now. As I
mentioned before, working with Friday Nights Loved and Parenal Society, I did all
sorts of locations around the country and one particular pace and I won't name it,
and the only person knows where it is my wife, and she's swansed
secretly as well. I started to create a story about a ghost in this
particular section of the building. The building was definitely very haunted, and people
had seen a figure in the area, but I described it as a very
very tall, slim man in the top hat and gave him a name as
if I was picking this up, and people around me started seeing it as
well. But it was also people on investigations that were there when I wasn't
there were seeing it and describing the same figure and the same name. Now,
they were not part of anything I'd been involved in. There were completely
different private groups that were going there because I was very friendly with a person
who ran the locations, and I knew from them who'd been there, and
they said that this name was coming up with small private groups who I didn't
know any of them had not been any our event, and they were getting
the same person, the same name and the same description. One person came
to actually video the figure in this area. Now no one had seen this
figure in this area before. The name was real, but of a completely
different place, nearly different history of Supermatch activity. The name I gave it,
but it was the same time frame as I said it was a Victorian
tim I said this car was from. It was the same timeframe as the
real person by this name I had been seen and located, but it wasn't
anywhere near where identified as being So it was as if it kind of again.
It didn't just make it out on the spur of the moment. It
was a deliberate plan. I had to try and manifest this particular person at
this particular location, and as far as I could see, it worked.
So my own personal experience of the Philip experience was to create a mythology of
a particular figure, and it, as far as I know, worked.
I've not been to this location a long time. I don't always been there
for a long time, so I don't know if it's still manifesting, but
certainly when I went there probably a year or so later, having someone else
who was new to the location tell me they were picking up on this figure,
describing and naming the same name I've given it. That was quite remarkable.
It's quite taken aback by that. For this works. Isn't just a
case I've made a story that people who remembered or passing the story. It's
not chine vispas here. This is a manifestation of what's called the Tulpa,
which is this idea that Tolpa's created entities. If you like that, I
created the Tulpa that was now existing at this location. Yeah. I've been
thinking about this a lot in the last twenty four hours or so. This
is all I've been thinking about, and the subject of haunted cemeteries came to
mind. You know, all of these old cemeteries in New England, they
all have a ghost story and a lot of the time they don't really tie
to an actual person, or you know, you can't you can't figure out
who this person is. But you have all of these people going, living
people going to this place with very strong emotions that probably very much would like
to connect and see something. And I think that like living human energy is
very powerful, and I think that might explain a lot of things, and
you know, not just cemeteries, but like the monument I was at where
I had an experience, and you know, I think you've mentioned the concept
of lay lines being created by people traveling in the same paths for years and
years. We have something similar like that here as well. Interesting there was
a legend of old graveyards that they are protected or guarded by called Genius Loki
geni i Loki, which can sometimes be can sometimes be the first person that
was buried there. They became like the guardian of the site. But people
do talk about seeing these sort of strange figures, small figures in churchyards that
aren't linked to a particular person, that seemed to be the spirit that guards
the place. And I've something along those lines many years ago. This is
a bit of a long story. I try and keep it relatively brief.
I was involved in what's called psychic questing. Psychic questing where you get impressions
of locations and you go to visit them, and they tend to lead to
one place to another to another, and some of the lead to things,
lead to strange experiences, lead to discovering things like rituals taking place, that
sort of thing, And on one particular occasion we were led to a place
called Danbury Church in Essex. Now Danbury Church had featured a few years prior
in a book written by Andy Collins called The Black Alchemist, which was here
and another girl called Bonan's experience of basically tackling somebody who was clearly doing something
in the landscape causing negative things to occur. Previously pleasant sacred sites have become
polluted with that negative energy were very unpleasant. Again, it's all real,
it's all true stories, and we'd been interested in this, we seeing Andy
Colin's give talk to me. In fact, that's my first real, more
sort of more grown up experience of working with this stuff. I was working
with any Condoness group in the nineties were we'd gone to Danary Church just on
a whim. Really, it was a warm Friday evening, it was a
middle of summer. We walked through the gates of the churchyard and it went
cold. I mean literally you felt the temperature drop around you. It was
one of the guys in the group was so freaked out. You went back
to the car and sat in the cart. We didn't want to go any
further. It was really was quite strange. And as we walked past the
church was on our left round to where the graveyard was, there was a
figure at the back. It was a small black figure that just sort of
was standing by the tree and then ran incredible speed, just disappeared literally out
in the back of the place. Now we found out later on that the
church itself was built on the sort of the site of a Roman fort,
so been occupied for thousands of years, and that was probably a genius loci
the spirit of the site. It was definitely I think it was an orderly
person. I mean, it could have been a child ghosts about this possibly,
but there was a definite vibe there and this figure was there watching and
just ran off really really quickly. So that was an experience of that kind
of thing. So very interesting that you said it was a little figure.
So Paquaji is the oldest lore you know, before you you have the Puritan
cirsa. They were guardians of burial sites, so lots of little people guarding
burial sites. It seems well, that seems to be the whole mythology of
the underworld. These creatures that live, come out of the hills, came
out of the ground. They're really small, diminutive creatures who began in English
folks are they're all over the place to see them described for centuries as the
goblins and those sort of things that elves or small creatures. But again it's
there, obviously is a connection. And when you've talked before about the whole
idea of the fact that they'll land mass at the world was jointed here at
one point of these things perhaps have progressed across. I mean again it comes
to the ig of these aren't just sort of profession creatures there obviously are more
than that. So they could be incredibly ancient, and they always been around
us, and they've more the various forms depending on the culture and the mythology
that surrounds the folk that surrounds it. Was obviously idea is very much an
American thing, links to American natives, of course. Was over here we've
got more of the fay, the goblins, those kinds of things, which
again linked to sort of British and Irish folklore. But I think they're the
same thing. Yes, And that bloody word pug bodgy get stuck in my
head for weeks. Yeah, exactly. Yes, it does sound like a
cruise wordy, doesn't it. You know, But this kind of falls into
what Susan they were talking about before the show a little bit. You know,
how do we determine what if we're communicating with what we think is a
spirit of the dead, what you know, how do we know that?
And I have I've mentioned several times this book called Hungry Ghosts by Joe Fisher,
where he was in contact through a medium with a lot of you know,
I suppose World War two pilots that were killed and a woman that went
way back to ancient Greece and all this stuff, and he would get information
that was dead on accurate, and a lot of it were There were just
huge gaps in it. It just didn't make any sense. It was wrong.
But when I asked Susie, and I want to ask you Andy,
uh, you know, we have this tradition of imprints and people that die
and for whatever the mechanism is. Sometimes it's eave an imprint, which is
not an intelligent haunting. And then there's others that believe there are a separate,
whole, separate category that we have the intelligent hauntings. Is it possible
with all we've just talked about with a Tolpa and that the Philip experiment and
so forth, is it possible that some of these imprints eventually become more interactive
because of there, you know, people's connections with them or interactions with them.
Is it possible that that that person's essence or soul has moved on to
wherever it goes, but this this imprint has taken out of life of his
own, although it's not really that person, but can be interactive and give
messages. Absolutely, I think completely. As you know, I very much
adhere to the notion that these things don't have identities of their own at all.
They are hot, they are formed, not so biased, they've always
been here, but they will take on a form identity that fits with what
we have as a belief system, our expectations. And so if you have
a location where energy exists that's been left in imprints, these things can then
manifest those imprints. So you get that kind of different levels mean you get
the obviously of the repeating hauntings of the older sort of thing. It's walking
through doors it used to be that aren't there anymore those kind of asidual hauntings,
and then you get this more active stuff, and I think one can
move to the other again. From my memory of experience and investigations we've had
that with this thing almost seemed to be communicated and then goes back to instead
of being just in the background but observable around it's things. It's so many
different possible answers as to why that loccurs. But now I do think you
could talk about the idea that there's entry be going on here that eventually the
energy field around does fade away in time, so these things dissipate completely,
which is why perhaps you don't get very very old haunts. People talk about
why in the ghost of dinosaurs that kind of thing, they only go back
to a certain period of time. I think in time the energy just dissipated,
It just spreads out more evenly, and then this thing has no longer
has energy to manifest. Anyone stops appearing as one possibility, but I mean
also strange and homous events that don't for any of the theories. One I've
often mentioned, which is actually fascinate was a friend of mine a few years
ago was doing some research in there was actually the Freemost Library. It was
the Theilosophical Society's library. It's been there since the eighteen hundreds. They were
doing just sitting in a little desk and doing some research, making some notes,
and this figure, a man, he said, just came around the
corner one of the bookcases and was dressed in great old fashioned clothing. And
he stopped looked at my friend in complete shock. My friend looked this guy
in complete shock. So the guy then turned away and walked down another book
aisle and disappeared. It was literally we were seeing each other, but clearly
he saw a different time frame, somewhere from the past. But he was
reacting to my friend sitting at the desk. It wasn't just a residual figure
walking away, said The guy looked at me and looked shocked. It was
like, you see this man to DestinE, very strange, obviously modern clothing,
and I love he said the same way. So good you go through
the archives of the Philosophical Society and find a ghost report from the eighteen nineties
of his strange young man sitting in a desk in weird clothing. That would
be so brilliant, but we've never found anything. Of course, it was
absolutely it was said it was the weirdest thing. This guy looked straight at
me and looked surprised to see me, and I was surprised to see him.
Wow, what's going on there? But yes, I do think that
the these things exist. They don't have a particular form of their own.
As you've talked before. Often first manifests light forms, the lights that are
a bit strange and people find uncomfortable, and then they begin to fall into
something else. Whether that happens on the single event of being seen as going
to go from the light form to a being at the same time as bombers
watching, or over time they gradually morph into what is expected of the site.
I don't know, but doing that makes more sense than men just you
know, great art mastery passed away in the nineteen thirties and has come back
to visit you. I think, obviously you get mediums. You go and
see, we'll tell you exactly that's what that person is. It is art
Martha from the age of the nineteen fifties coming to see you. But I
think, maybe controversially, I think mediums are psychic. I think they pick
up this information from us. You don't have to be thinking about it then
to actually connect with our thought process and our memories, our knowledge. Because
so often you go to these events, and I've been quite a few,
they'll tell you something that you already know. They don't something you don't know.
They might say, we might look into that, because because they have
the information that you're not sure about. But usually when they tell you something,
it's something that you actually know about. That your great Art Martha passed
away, you know, in the nineteen fifties, you know, but she
left you something. You know, you know that you're not thinking it,
but they can pick up that information from you. And I think that's again
it could be that they've got these entity energies around them that are given that
information across and then to the medium. They appear to be Great Art Martha
uncle, but there are actually these things again appearing as like their spirit guide
if you like. There the being that stays with often talk about having the
spirit guys that give them information that I've taken a form that this person would
recognize. When quite famous, you had Dereka Korra who used to do the
TV stuff over here. His guy was called Sam who's actually an African native
and he's a much longer named than Sam's that he just used to call him.
It was always with him. It was always Sam was giving this information
to him. And I do want to if say, and was this thing
that attached to himself to Derek Acora. Now, some say that Akora was
a going to be fake. I don't think so. I mean, I've
atually met the guy and spoken with him a few times. He seemed very
very genuine. He genuinely believed in his abilities, whether or not he believed
in them. For certain and other mediums i've met, you know, they're
actoutely convinced that they have the spirit. Guys, they have this communication going
on. But I don't necessarily put the idea across them what I think is
going on. But they seem very genuine people. I've met people I always
say are absolutely fakes. Definitely people who know things like NLP, which is
a psychologyal technique you can use to get people to think certain things, believe
certain things. They can cold read your body, the language and when they're
telling answering you questions and you can listen to them and they'll ask you a
question and they'll manipulate the question of just answering, and it appeared to me
that they're asking something that they weren't actually asking because the answer they've given doesn't
quite fit what they think. I've seen that sort of thing often, but
I've met a few that definitely seem to have a real gift. What that
gift is is the question. I have a question for both of you.
I want to definite answers so I can sleep at night. All right,
let me just give a little background. You beat me to it. That's
that's that's wrong, that's wrong. I already talked about hungry ghosts in the
way that these uh, these spirits, these contacts were uh would give a
lot of false information. Uh. We we know about uh John Keel and
the Silent Contact, these and the Mockland prophecies. How they were receiving information
someone was dead on accurate and that they would be sent on pointless quests or
or sometimes a prediction would not come true. So and and also you've got
all the traditions in in folklore, the little people, the elementals oftentimes would
play tricks. So what I'm getting at is the trickster, which is something
that is it permeates all this stuff, or much of it. So I
want to know where does the trickster phenomena originate? How does that work?
The question? My feeling on it is they're more like an elemental ultraterrestrial type
thing. But I might look at it a little bit differently, where it's
a very human quality to have people do it all the time. I always
say that I love Paco because I can relate to them. You know,
I might tie your shoes together if you're not paying attention. I might hide
your car keys when you're running late for work, just to entertain myself.
And it's a good thing. You've got an ocean between you and her,
and I've got several states in between Susie and I, So I'm not going
to be looking at my shoes the whole time. But if I was a
paranormal entity, I would want to entertain myself a little bit, wouldn't I.
You know, the not so much. In the new place living,
we've had a couple of minor things happening. Ironically, I know at least
one person's died in this house, maybe possibly two. But we've had one
incidence a few times where seeing a black cat moving across the room. Got
quite a long, narrow lounge, and I'm at one end and I've seen
it at the other end, and I've seen a couple of times, definitely
seeing that a black form move past. Now you think of a black cat
because it's that kind of shape or form. I had a friend of mine
who's the author of the second book I've just published, stayed with me about
a month ago and he saw it. He said, I was sitting in
the lounge and I said that a cat covered the next door. No,
a little black cat visitor. I've had a cough, quite clear laud and
I conservative when we first moved in, but I think that's been pretty quiet.
My old house was quite a different matter. Now you think I've lived
there twenty years, doing a lot of ritual magic stuff in my office space,
and I've had people walk in with FI actually a real calm atmosphere and
really kind of powerful atmosphere. I mean, it was positive stuff. I
didn't do it if it does but sinister that I did outside, not in
the house, but that had a real strong element of tricks to ish occasional
stuff. Are things being moved just being moved around? Now? Whether it's
done because they want to be irritating or just because that's the way of showing
their present, I don't know, but we've had times where things have absolutely
definitely moved. When one story I've told a few times was I used to
have a little water pistol that was by our kitchen sink. The reason that
was one of the neighbors cats is the old place used to occasially crapping our
lawn, which is rather annoying. So basically hoping that were going to skirt
the cap of the water pestol the run away, and it usually did.
Now that pistol was by the sink. So the sink, the windows sink
just to the left, was in the corner there it disappeared, hadn't seen
it for a while. Other side of the kitchen, on cabinets, you
know, above my head high were some glass flower of arses and one particularly
after in mainly bought some flowers and took the one that get on the varsites
down the water pitstol was up there. Now how the hell it got up
there is an absolute mystery, no idea. We've had a clean because we
were lazy doing the housekis we actually rang and after you'd move and she didn't
know what we're talking about. There's no way either Manny's similar to the Suzius.
She could have reached up there and I know I didn't do it,
and it moved up there. And now you could say that's just a tricks
to being annoying, or it was having the spirit of a catch when I
prevent a spirt of water, don't you know? It was that kind of
phenomenon was not uncommon. Things would move quite a distance from where they had
been before. They couldn't have fallen there like. It was a piece of
wood just about foot long that came from the Holy Falling Glastonbury, which is
a legendary tree. Now some brack kids have broken some branches off and I
just picked on the marshes up to keep don to waste it. I'd taken
it home. I've actually polished the wood up. It was a lindseid or
so it was a really nice condition. It was in my office on one
top of one of the bookcases, and this is quite a while. I
found it moved from the bookcase to the middle of the room. Now there's
nowhere could have fallen from there. It would have to have been lift up
and put in the middle of the room. No reason to do that,
there's nothing interesting about doing that, but it was there. I had a
previous experience back in the old flat lived in London, which sorry before,
with a tub of copy decks glue which I used to use for a leased
repair Vincay's Fountain Bends. I had a small back room in the flat where
I used to do some repair work in there and there was quite a last
tub of glue. Disappeared, completely vanished, couldn't find it anywhere. About
a month afterwards I was come upstairs. It was amazing that and you can't
stairs. You see along the corridor to the back room in the middle of
the floor there was a copy decks. It's about a month after it disappeared
and it has completely vanxi. It was nowhere in that room and it buys
them more. And yet there it was back in the middle of the room.
Again. Was it tricks to spirit or was it just someone trying to
get my attention? I don't know. Again, did ritual stuff in there?
Maybe it was a residual from that, but yeah, the legend of
the trickster is ancient. It goes back ancient Greece and that kind of thing.
It's always been there, and I think there is this Your question could
be is it just trying to get your attention or it just is it trying
to be irritating. I mean, shoe tying could be a way of geting
attention and hiding keys get attention sort of thing maybe a child might do to
like a self charging because if they need the thought and the energy and all
of that to kind of move on, they need you to pay attention to
them. Right, Yes, have I told you about my my missing headphones
in that debacle? Not yet? So earbuds. They are the probably most
important part of my life all the time. Every day I have several of
them because the battery will be dead by the end of the day, so
I switch them out. Right. This has been happening for about three years
now. And it'll come in spurts, and then it'll stop for a while
and start again. But they will disappear. I leave them in the same
place. Sometimes I wake up and they're gone. They will then reappear in
like the middle of a room after I've like torn it top to bottom.
Yeah, And then so that that's like just become a normal occurrence. And
I at one point got so frustrated that, you know, I just out
of desperation, like I needed my headphones. I could not function through work
without them. I got out my grandfather's dowsing rods. I found them with
that excellent Where they had been was right when you come in my front door,
there is like a basket of shoes, and I have baseboard heaters.
It was behind the basket of shoes underneath the heater, so I never would
have found it there. And also my cats aren't capable of that. Because
they were, they were blamed a lot for it. And then most recently,
this was right around the time of the fire incident, when I went
to my great grandmother's old house, the probably the second most important thing to
me, my Messkira disappeared. And then I went into the the linen closet
because I usually have extras in there gone those that was months ago. I
still haven't found them. There's strange. These things definitely happen. We have
a little joke in this house actually, which is just remembered. Things don't
fall vertically in this house. You drop somebody, it doesn't land in front
of you. It's sort of over there, somewhere, get over there,
you know. I'll sit at my desk and I dropped it on the floor
and it's like, what is it gone? Whether it's a panicmal or,
I don't know, but it just it just seems to happen that stranger.
But yeah, one of those things. I think it's probably fairly common.
But again people dismiss it, and I think, oh, maybe I never
forgot about it. But I just that reached for normality or normalcy as you
Americans like to call it. That that's almost like it's the least probable explanation,
but you prefer it to the alternative that maybe something has moved them.
Again, I think the problem we have is that people are afraid of ghosts
for want of a better term, because of seeing the films, and unfortunately
that does create a lot of illusion. Again. I found myself only this
week talking to somebody about one of my favorite topics, the Nfield politic Glass
in the UK. The UK Field protagasts again seeing the Conjuring movie and thinks
it's real, thinks it's a true story. It's like, there's no way
near what really happened. They were amagon and etcetera. What I was saying
to them, I've had that in the past where people have just said no,
no, no, you're wrong. You know the film was perfectly true.
Warren's are wonderful, so that will No, there's nothing like what happened
with the Warrens. It was not that. I mean, as I said,
first of all, absolutely yes, they turn it uninvited. No one
actually invited. They just heard about it, was involved, stayed for a
day. Ed was overheard saying, always Moneys, we made out of this
and he was asked to leave by guy below and Playfair, who was on
the real investigators. I mean the fact that the movie leaves out guy like
in Playfair, one of the one of the two main investigators. It's ridiculous.
And one person's response was, or how do you know he was there?
Well, I've interviewed the guy, so I know you was there.
Yeah, but how do you know you as the heu like three famous here,
there's been video being there, but she wouldn't have it because he's not
in the Hundry and two movies. So you know, it's one of those
things. It's how things get portrayed. I mean, people get scared very
easy on the ghost investigations. There was one occasion again my favorite location,
or Chester Mansion, in that chapel I mentioned. We had a group of
about three or four of them army guys who were on leave, going on
with the girlfriends just for the fun of it. And we were standing in
the dark in the chapel area and we're just talking about what was picking up
and it was a little bit windy outside and the door slammed, and let
me just be offensive, but the one of the guys screamed like a girl.
I ran straight into the wall and literally almost knocked himself out. Here's
been raw marine. You out my coffee. He was a raw marine and
he's like freaked out with a door slam scared the life out of it.
And you know you're trying to kill you know, you come off from the
fire Wars, but I'm doing a hold house in the turn that hit the
wall. Maybe guys would have been all right, it wouldn't have freaked us
out. But what I wonder is that there was a U I saw this
pari psychologists on TV years ago. Don't know what his name was, but
he was talking about automatic writing, and he said that most of it's coming
from your own subconscious well, he did believe some of it might be coming
from elsewhere. He said, you have to be very careful because it starts
out being friendly and then more intimate, and then he said it can even
become very nasty and damaging even though it's coming from you. And then we
have the so called story of Alexandria David Neil and magic and mystery in Tibet,
where she supposedly this nineteen ten created a tulpa learned how to form a
tult but from the Tibetans. I don't know if the story's true or not,
but she formed this jolly little lama that the sage to see you're not
the animal. And over time it became kind of evil and nasty and trickster
ish, you know, it almost became something like a poltergeist. So what
I'm wondering is is it possible that the the the trickster phenomena which has been
with mankind since we've been here, is it possibly does it emanate from maybe
a dark part of the hue of the human consciousness, the id, so
to speak, And some of it It may not all be totally negative.
Some of it may be playful and tricksteris. But it seems it might suggest
that a lot that it kind of goes along with the parallel that a lot
of these things are uh deal with human consciousness or co created with whatever energy
is out there. So I don't I don't, I don't tend to think
of these always as separate little entities with the consciousness playing tricks. I think
maybe it could be reflectant of the reflection of the collective unconscious if you will,
or someple level of it absolutely agree with you. I think it's getting
it your expectation, your experiences, but also what you're suppressing within yourself.
I mean, this is a big thing in the of your culture. You
have to deal with that. Ego statements with yourself, you have to get
through that, you have to deal with it, a quit crossing the abyss.
It's very much as part of the journey. If you involved in esoteric
practices, you have to deal with that. A very good example, which
I'll talk about just briefly, was in Nokian magic from doctor John Dee from
the fifteen hundreds. There is a process in that in which you describe through
their tears or athears. Now these are realms, if you like, of
either deep psyche or out there when you will look at it. But you
will encounter different beings entities as you work through the Nokia levels. But how
you experience those levels definitely dependent upon your personality and who you are. Alistair
Crowley, who may have heard of rather famously, had his own experience of
walking working with these levels the Vision and the Voice the book was called,
and his experiences someone was quite negative, quite unpleasant. As a particular being
he encounters called krons On, which is called the guardian of the abyss.
It's the guardian of the way you cross over. John d himself described it
as being a version of the devil. And certainly how Alisa Crowe describes his
experience of corons and it's very negative, very frightening. But his experience was
almost unique to him. When I worked with this stuff in the nineteen nineties,
my experience was very different. It was much more of a serene,
very powerful figure, but much calmer and more serene. Was there almost like
to just to see if you could get across not literally abits, but you
could actually progress past the pounch possible fear of this strong energy. And what
I found fascinating was nineteen nineties, early does the Internet. I started looking
up stuff on anochy magic, and I found a guy in Denmark who'd been
practicing for years and accorded to all his experiences, and what he described was
far closer to my experiences than what Crowd had written in his book. And
it seemed to me that because Alsa Creley was his ego, mainly act but
possibly done rather pleasant things over the years, that what he experienced was a
manifestation his own inflated ego rather than a more relaxed date approach. So he
was experiencing in the way he'd expected it to be or reflected who he was.
So, yeah, how you experienced this stuff, it does depend on
you as a person. And as I said earlier on often if you're trying
to experience this when you're younger, seem to trigger this kind of connection.
But then ultimately you've got to probably deal with that experience. Now. As
a therapist, of course, I've helped people deal with those experiences in a
more mundane day to day way, but certainly in working with the occult there
was always that risk. You're going to have to deal with this stuff.
It was a good Jeff. It was a mystic from Russia for the eighteen
hundreds said, you know, there's always a real danger of going insane if
you're not probably balanced exploring the accountant's not literally and you start opening up parts
of your own deep psyche that perhaps you need to explore with a professional.
You don't have that facility around you. If you start exploring, you can't
self analyze, but you can create an opening in your psyche by not looking
after yourself. Probably doing this sort of stuff. Go ahead, you can
bill me for your psychotherapy, right Andy. But so whenever I have had
anything possibly described as paranormal, I feel like that means I need to do
something like go on some kind of quest, like a rescue mission. Is
that common or is that a Susie thing? I think it's not very common,
But yeah, I think usually people have a spiritual experience if you like,
it's a more broader term, and you do start to question more things
around you, and it is opening yourself up. We have been very conditioned
and don't to get under it too deeply philosophy stuff, but we're very conditioned
into thinking about what we call the subject object relation. The idea is you're
a subject and the world there's an object that's different from you and separate from
you. It's nonsense. We are all unified as one. The whole idea
of discreet independent consciousness comes back to Descar and the sixteen hundreds that it's not
true. That's not how it works conscious itself. Your own awareness only forms
relation to others around you. Your sense of self exists in relation to others
around you. You have to be the observer being observed. It doesn't form
by itself, so it's all dependent on what's going on around you. And
sometimes realizing there is a strange level connectivity that exists opens you up to all
sorts of possibilities. And these kind of spiritual experiences do open the door.
You've then got to walk through that door or walk through the tunnel that opens
up, and that totally can be quite unpleasant, But there's a bright light
at the end of it, which is the other side of that time.
And i'd better understand you yourself in the world around you. I mean,
it changes you, absolutely will change you. If you start to really explore
that. People do have to say, have experiences, and they just ignore
them or dismiss them or get on with ordinary life. I think that doesn't
mean anything. But if you watch maybe I watched Scooby Do too much.
A little fun fact that Scooby Doo. Do you realize it? Not a
single one of the cartoons had a real ghost in it, None of them.
The first time they encoure it anything paranormal is the first movie, like
actually movie you go back and watch them. There's no ghosts in a single
scubby the people have seen. Of course it was it wasn't you know,
you look it up, not a single ghost. You know. It was
always someone doing something naughty, expeting to be a ghost, you know,
the owner of the amusement park. Yeah, exactly, there's best kids spot
old man so and so, and they was exactly exactly. Scooby Doo was
a little after my time I had matured pas and cartoons. It's still like
Johnny quest, I mean, come on, well, but uh let's see
what what's our time here? We're an hour and a half. Uh should
we should we start to wrap it up? Or should we uh uh go
for another hour? I do have one more thing, so Andy and I
were also talking about somebody saying that ghosts are going extinct in the UK.
What I need anyone, any of the UK listeners to go out there and
start making ghosts just like we described and the show. We're not what.
We don't want them to meet their demise that we want them to create the
mental ghosts rights. Make that clear. We don't the stand in front of
the back. No, no, we're not that desperate Rumpy below. I
mean, I've read the article. It was a free old thing to come
out with me. I want name, but I do know who he is
and we've had discussions in the past many years. Find out for you referred
to my favorite location, Wilchester Mansion has been a haunted as a shoe box,
and I'm thinking maybe you were there, mate, But you know the
count the stories of very strange experiences that Wold Mansion. So it's one of
those things. I think what can often happen is in the paranormal community over
here particularly, people take up our position and they will defend that position no
matter what. And you want to become the go to person for the newspapers
or the TV to go to them. And we've got oh it's his name,
slip my mind. Now there's one. There's a couple of professors of
you over here, if you're like doctors of science, who're the go to
people that always pop up when they talk about goot, so the paranormal they
are, so their opinion, both names have completely escaped me. I do
apologize, but you know, it's a look at your thing to get into
because then you can do talks and you write books and they get published and
that kind of thing. So maybe this person was having a stabber getting in
those kind of headlines because obviously it worked because people have read the real idea.
But they're not there's just as many guesses as everyone was over here,
not fading away. Maybe they just don't like him very possibly, actually yes,
we might be offendable what he said about them, But it is a
strange idea that even I mean, obviously we're a very old country, but
people have been living here in societies for a very long time, so of
course we've got lots of ghosts here. It's been suggested we're the most haunted
country in the world. Has been flooded by the ghost Club. Well,
obviously, the very first ghost investigating group of any kind of ghost club was
formed here in the UK, so we have a bit of a history of
ghost hunting that goes quite a whole way back. Very good. Well,
I think we got through this show with very little dead air. In fact,
there was none. Yep, and it is of later over here Cours.
It's half plast midnight. But we could go on another rout. I'm
sure there's plenty of things that we could talk of. Definitely, Well,
we'll see, we'll do this again before too long. We've got endless stuff
to talk about. And we should also mention that the three of us are
involved in Susie's uh Paranormal book Club, which is it's still in its infancy.
We did uh the Mockman Prophecies by John Keele. Next one will be
Passport to Magonia by Jacques Boulat and uh and I guess we uh we already
gave all your information. If they have forgotten, just roll back the tape
and it'll all be there. Mm hm. So I guess we're going to
sign off. Any anybody want to say any any parting comments, any any
pearls of wisdom before we go. Nice. This has been actually good fun
It's probably the most I've actually spoken on the show for quite a long time.
Were too bad we don't get paid by the word, you know,
absolutely, yes, it will be nice to get paid as all the wonderful
Yeah, that's right, one of these. I'm not getting paid for this.
No that, Keep watching the mail, Keep watching the mail. One
day commercial, Andy, I think it's a gift certificate for McDonald's. All
right, I'm going to close out. And this was a blast. By
the way. The High Strangers Factor was created by Steve Warn and Andy Mercer
and it's copyrighted on the Paranormal UK Radio network. I want to thank our
fearless leaders here at Paranormal UK Radio, Iran Alan Block, Mark Johnson and
Andy Mercer. Also Andy as producer and composer of the closing theme for the
show and Brian Zeller for the opening theme for The High Strangers Factor. Also
Susie Bastile for the access to the streamlink, otherwise you wouldn't be hearing us
at all. I can also be heard on Mac Maloney's Military X Files Weekly
as a correspondent, whatever that means. I never could figure out what a
correspondent mean on Mac show. Andy and Susie our guest hosts from time to
time on MAC Show, which also can be heard on Paranormal UK Radio and
many other platforms. And I am Steve Word, your humble host here on
the High Strangeness Factor, a displaced Midwesterner deep in the Ohio Valley, on
the fringes of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, home of the Mothman Statue and
the Mothman Museum. Thank you all for listening. Andy, Susie and I
will see you all again in a fortnight. Take care,