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You can subscribe pretty much anywhere, True Stories with Zeth Andrews. There
is a video of the conversation today. That YouTube link is in the description
box of the show. I know a lot of atheists, they don't believe
in gods, but what about ghosts, the spiritual other, the unknown?
Ah, there are many atheists who do believe. And I find this fascinating,
and I myself would like to believe. It's like that Fox Mulder poster
in the X files. I want to believe, and I love ghostly things,
but I want to talk to a what I call you a debunker,
I would not. I would call me a just an investigator. That's all
because, as far as I'm concerned, debunking is the result of an investigation.
That's when you get all your data together and you come to your conclusion
based on that data, and it says, hey, you know what,
the original claim is false. And that's what debunking is, taking the falseness
out of a claim. So so you say debunker, it's essentially you're broadcasting
that I'm front loading that I think this is bunk where you want to be
more of a neutral observer. Yes, you know, it's it's no different
than calling someone a believer. If you just go in and say, well,
you're just a believer, and I get the same thing, you're just
a debunker. Those terms are automatically setting a bias. It's already setting you
up that you're on one side or the other. And like you said,
I just want to go in neutral. I want to be Switzerland, you
know, go in there. It's telling somebody, though, Kenny, I
was telling somebody that I was going to talk to you, and they believe
in spirits and stuff, and they were like, well, you know,
they're not going to find anything, because I mean they may say that they're
open and they just want to find evidence if there is, and they're genuinely
curious, but you know, deep down there they think it's all a bunch
of crap. And I'm sure you've heard that. Yeah, yeah, you
know what. And for those people, I say, you're making an assumption
for me, you're speaking for me, and you really can't do that because
I know me better than you do. So for me, I'm fascinated with
the entire idea of the paranormal ghosts and monsters and UFOs everything that goes along
with that. I'm fascinating and I would absolutely love to find something genuine and
like this is proof of the afterlife. That would be great. I would
love that. Unfortunately, every investigation I go and does not conclude that way,
and it's not because of me. It's because that's where the data leads
me. Now, why are you stealing my joy? When I go to
the Conjuring movies and I see the Warrens, they just seem so real incredible
to me. I'll get to the Warrens. Really, I'll get to them.
No, I'm just I'm full of crap. I'm just I'm just blowing
smoke. Let's do a formal introduction. Kenny Biddle. You may have seen
his work as featured in Skeptical Inquiry. You're still running the blog. I
know you've got the podcast. Kind of tell everybody who you are, so
yeah, right now, my current position is the chief investigator for the Committee
for Skeptical Inquiry, and before that, I and still do. I host
a show called The Skeptical Help Bar every Friday night. It's a live show.
I also do videos for this Center for Inquiry YouTube channel called Ghosts in
the Machine, and that's videos. Basically it's the same idea of my articles
in Skeptical Inquiry. It's basically taking like ghost hunt in equipment or I take
it apart, or I go out to locations that are alleged to be haunted
or have a big foot and you know you follow me along. I take
you along on the adventure, and I do lectures. I've spoken at science
conferences such as Psicon about solving mysteries. I have a whole strategy that I
followed that I try to teach during workshops, and that's it. I mean,
I started as a ghost hunter. I was a ghost hunter in a
the late nineties early two thousands, and I transitioned over to the skeptical side
of the fence. Come on, Kenny, you can't throw that out.
So I mean, are you like those guys at ghost Adventures for your Like,
the temperature just dropped fifteen degrees, I saw an orb in the camera.
And the reason I'm doing the accent is because I have been And this
is not an insult to you, Kenny, but I have come to the
conclusion that the people, the experts who go on television to investigate are just
as thick as a post like these are the least qualified people possible. What's
a ghost hunt look like in your ghostly past? Honestly, I mean,
it's embarrassing now to talk about it, but it's important to talk about it.
So yeah, I was basically what you saw on TV. I went
in with gadgets that I honestly didn't know how to use, and I sat
in the dark. I talked to the dark. I asked questions, thinking
ghosts were all over the place. I thought anytime I got a shiver,
like felt a cold spot, that it was a ghost. That pictures of
little balls of light in my images, or smoky substance going across the scene
I thought was evidence of a ghost. All of this stuff, I was
right there with you. I got my start right before the ghost hunting shows
came on the air. Ghost Hunters was actually the first show, first modern
reality show that would come on the air. And I grew up with things
like in Search of Sightings and shows like that where they presented all these mysteries.
So I wanted to do that, And for me, I called a
local group that I found the first time I got a computer, back in
the nineties, when you know, like the Internet was a brand new thing.
I called up a group. They said, yeah, come on out.
And my first ghost hunt was a cemetery, of all things, because
you know, by the time that people get there there, they are already
dead. So I don't know why cemeteries are haunted, but I didn't know
any better. So come on, I mean, I've seen those shows where
they take you to one of the most I don't know, creepy. Please
a cemetery. It's an old abandoned asylum, a prison, with the electric
chair or whatever. I mean, by the time you walk in the door,
aren't you just you're ramped, right, You're already scared. Before you're
scared, right, exactly, You've already read the stories you I mean,
if you look behind me, there's tons of books back here, and many
of them are regional ghost story books that you can pick up at any bookstore
or any tourist trap in the area. So as a ghost hunter, that's
what I used to do all the time. As soon as I got there,
it's like, all right, what can I buy? And buy the
books, read the stories, and that's where I want to go. So
when you're arriving at the front door, you already believe the place is haunted.
You already believe that all the gadgets that you brought with you do something
either communicate with ghosts or capture ghosts or detect their presence. And then when
you gather everything up, you're so hyped up. It's like you you drank
like a dozen red bulls all at once, and you're walking into this building
and you're like, yeah, I can't wait. I mean, I can't
tell you how many times I see people preach that I can't wait to get
all these evidence tonight, Like they're not even there yet, and they already
believe that they're going to get this big, huge body of evidence that the
place is haunted. So yeah, you walk in, you set things up.
You're like, oh, you know, I'm on a ghost hunt.
I'm in the dark, and I'm with a bunch of people that I barely
know, and that's gotta be a bonding experience. Though. You're all in
a box hoole together, right and your tribe all of a sudden, Yeah,
you're you're You're part of a group, you know, and everybody shares
their beliefs, and as soon as something weird happens. It's not during my
ghost hunting days and even today when I go out, because a lot of
times I go and with like pay to play events where I pay a few
dollars and I attend an event, a ghost hunting event with a group,
and they teach you all the stuff that they do. And when you're sitting
there in the dark and something weird happens, it's not usually a hey,
let's investigate and see what caused that noise or that shadow down the end of
the hall. It's I think that's a ghost, and then everyone else times
in Oh, I think so too. Oh you know what, that's where
they'll ghost is supposed to be seen, like people have seen that before,
and they justify it. They convinced themselves that what they experienced was a ghost
without actually investigating it. And that's what I did. I used to do
that. I mean, truth be told. I just I didn't investigate.
I didn't fact check, I didn't check up on what I was doing,
and I didn't bother to find a source. I just believed. And that
was my problem. You've mentioned the gadgets a few times, and I want
to talk about the tools of the trade, but I don't want to put
you on the spot. You don't have to answer. But when I was
watching The Scariest Places on Earth and Ghost Hunters, etc. I just couldn't
help but think that one of the production assistants ran in the other room them
and through like a piece of lead pipe on a concrete floor to make a
sound, right, And I staged, Come on, did you ever get
the vibe that you know, someone yank in our chain? Yeah? I
mean I can't speak for all of them, and I again, like I
have not been on set. I'm not wanted to get invited onto the ghost
hunting shows. I don't know why. I mean, I'm always available,
strange, but yeah, I would see there's certain scenarios where like, well,
that just looks staged. It very much looks staged because one camera placement.
Camera placement is always in the right spot at just the right time to
capture exactly what they want to capture and nothing more. So that's always a
red flag for me. But I don't know if they're all staged. I
think there's a lot of misinterpretation. I also think that in some cases,
maybe with certain shows ghost adventures, that they maybe a two way radio to
make some of these gadgets go off. A few of them do operate off
of radio frequency or are affected by a radio frequency. So if you have
a like a two way radio that you picked up at Walmart, you can
go like in the basement or a floor above or in the next room and
key it up and wave it around and it'll make some of these devices light
up or beep. And you know, nothing excites a ghost under more than
when a gadget lights up and beats. Doesn't matter what the measurement is it's
as long as it beats tools of the trade. Now I've seen the ev
stuff and the white noise, I don't know what doing a very poor job
of. I mean, tell me what the tools are as a hunter of
ghosts. So you have a bunch of tools, I mean pretty much.
The standard is a EMF meter, so that basically stands for electromagnetic field meter.
And these meters are actual tools. I mean you can get them in
like home depot, or you can get more sophisticated and accurate ones from science
websites. But they measure the strength of an electromagnetic field. So like anything
electrical will give off a field when powers flowing through a line, you'll get
an electromagnetic field from that that wire, and you can read that you can
measure to strength of it. And I think that is really based off the
pk E meter from Ghostbusters. I honestly think that's where it came from,
because you see, I mean Ghostbusters was a big influence and you can actually
see you like above my head here there's a PKE meter on the shelf.
But when Ghostbusters came out, that was in nineteen eighty four, and that
was before you saw these reality ghost hunting shows, and not many people used
gadgets. Of course, you had like SBR. They were using practical stuff
like rope and powder and candles, stuff to check four footprints and airflow through
a hallway or out a window, practical stuff like that. It wasn't until
after Ghostbusters came out that all these gadgets started peering with groups where they're like,
oh, what can we grab that's handheld that we can walk around with
and that'll give us readings. So I think, yeah, the EMF meter
was the first one that came up, and it really doesn't do much.
There's another one called the rempod and I don't remember what rem r em stands
for, but it's it's not anything real. We're technical. I think it's
more of a made up word, but basically it's a junior Thermin device.
So a thuramin is a musical device. It works without touching it. It
has two antennas. One controls the volume, one controls the pitch or the
tone of the sound coming out of it, and it's a really cool machine.
You don't actually touch it to play it. You just get closer and
closer to the two antennas. And it creates sounds. So a junior THEURAMIN
is a novelty version of it. It's based electronics toy and this is used
inside usually three D print bodies, and it lights up. It either plays
beeps at different tones or some music that it plays. You can switch between
the two. But the closer anything that's conductive gets close to it, it
starts making noises and it starts lighting up. This is one of the things
that can also be used with a two way radio. I can make those
things go off from like two or three rooms away, so it's very easy
to manipulate, just like the K two meter. What else we got.
We got motion sensors, we got temperature guns that read the infrared energy coming
off of surface objects. And we have ghost boxes. Oh, ghost boxes
are very popular because you know ghosts, but these are broken radios. They
are literally broken radios. So what that does is sweep through the AM or
FM band, So it sweeps through and instead of stopping on a station that's
coming in clear, it continues to cycle through. So the disabled the feature
where it stops on the next available station and it just cycles through, so
you're getting snippets of each local station. Coming through, so you can hear
bits and pieces of music, news commercials, any kind of radio broadcast,
and ghost hunters will make a habit of sitting around in a room with one
of these boxes going off, and honestly, it's so annoying when you have
to hear this, When you have to listen to this for like more than
thirty seconds, it's so annoying. Is there anybody here with us? We
have family members here and we're here to be friendly. We just wanted to
come say hi and see if there's anybody here that wanted to say hi or
talk or tell us something. They ask questions thinking that they are communicating with
a ghost and that somehow a ghost can manipulate the radio frequencies coming into that
box and create words. I don't know how it, Kenny, it manufactures
the box? Like is that ever? A question like where did this come
from? Who put it together? What are the components? How do we
know it works? So the first one that I remember seeing was the radio
shack hack, and it was basically a radio shack radio. It was a
white radio, yeah, and you opened it up and there was one connection
in the back where you snipped it and that connector was the one that controlled
when it started sweeping through the station, it would stop at the next available
station. So when you snip this little connector, it stopped that action,
so it would continually sweep through it. And I have I have one out
in the display case here. Basically it came from that people were plugging speakers
in and they were going, hey, you know, can you tell me
your name? And they were hearing different things, and you're hearing you're basically
hearing phonetics. You're hearing these different saying and when you're primed to hear something,
when you're expecting to hear an answer, such as a name, that's
what you're going to pick out. So in all this static and all this
clutter of different radio stations, and again you're talking about like commercials for furniture,
for vacations for you have news broadcasts that have politics and sports, and
you know the local murders that happen. All this stuff is going through this
radio and coming out the speakers. So if you say, hey, what's
your name, I guarantee you're going to hear something that sounds like a name.
It's something like backward masking. During the Satanic panic. You know,
the pattern seekers in us are going to find something, and then we're going
to find something that validates what we expected to find in the first play exactly.
There's even a problem where the conversation switches depending on what the radio says.
And this is what blows my mind. You can have a group of
people ask something like hey, what's your name, and somebody will say,
well, I just heard chair. I just heard chair, and instead of
saying or, the logical thing to me would be like, well, that's
not answering my question. I asked for a name, the conversation will switch
and say, well you have a chair? What chair? That chair in
the corner? Did you die in that chair? And that's it, Like
the conversation just shift. It completely shifted from what they were asking to something
different because the radio told them. And I'm just picture you watching some of
these shows, just vibrating in your chair like you're on the ch like what's
wrong with you? Ask this question? What do you do? I just
picture that you're doing that, dude. People still use divining rods because I
was scanning the other day and sobody. First of all, for those who
don't know what a divining rod is explain what it is and what it's supposed
to do and why it's why it is bullshit. Yeah, I'll say it,
go ahead, go ahead. So defining rod Originally they were used to
find minal rules or water and people used a divining rod, but it was
a stick. It was a forked stick that they picked up from a tree.
I think it was usually like birch or something like that. But they
go around and it held it in a weird way, like in a way
that promoted the stick wanting to go down because you can't hold the position.
And if you look at older photos you'll see like the way they're holding it,
and it's very uncomfortable, very awkward, and very just dumb to put
it bluntly, But basically, people thought they could find water, sources of
water underground or minerals. And there's there's a historical context with this, and
forgive me, it escapes me now. But the first person that wrote about
it, I think was in the seventeen hundreds, and he wrote a manual
about finding minerals and he touched on the idea of divining rods and dowsing,
and actually the first paragraph of his description is used to promote divining rods as
you know, something that's real. But if you actually read on the rest
of the paragraphs, you find out that the the author just dismisses it.
He's like, no, it doesn't work. And he explains that why because
you can actually find vegetation and pretty much anywhere you dig you're going to find
water. So he explains it, but that part is usually left out modern
times, people use two usually like either brass rods in holders in handles so
they swivel easier, So they are making it easier to get an anomaly.
Here, can you point me towards the nearest buried silver? See how that
both the rods are pointing in that direction. That's where we're going to walk,
and the rods have crossed. Look what happens when I step back the
rods open. The rods are crossed. Now I'm going to walk forward.
See what happens to the rods They've opened, so we know around this area
it's buried silver. So they're in the handles, they're two of them,
and they usually ask questions of ghosts. They think they can communicate with ghosts
with this because they ask yes or no questions and if the rods cross,
that's a yes, and if they split apart that's a no. Or you
can ask for direction and the rods apparently go back and forth. So that's
basically what I see dowsing rods used for divining rods. There, it's interchangeable
divining rods. Dowsing rods ato my subconsciously maneuvering. I mean, because a
lot of these people I think are sincere. Oh look it is leaning left,
it's right, it's crossing, and I don't sense and who really knows,
but I don't sense that they're in on it. Yeah, well,
I mean it's a juggle. It really is because some people I just flat
out think they know exactly what they're doing. Other people, yes, they
don't realize what they're doing, and until you show them, they believe that
something is manipulating in rods. Some time ago, a friend of mine named
Mit Silverstein made a simple device and I have it here. So this is
a simple device for testing dowsing rods. It's two acrylic blocks and there's a
bubble level up there. You can see that that's on the lower thing and
the handles here. So these handles are the original handles for the dowsing rods,
it's what comes with them, so they are locked into the blocks,
so now I cannot manipulate them independently, which is great. And if you
try to tilt the whole thing first, I'll see you tilting it like a
steering wheel, so that's an obvious red flag. But if you tilt it
in any way, the bubble level will let me know that you're moving it.
So this locks it in place, won't let you manipulate them. And
when I use these, I've used these for years now, and everyone that's
tried these has not been able to get the dowsing rods to work. So
for the audio podcast, listener and check me if this is right. But
essentially, it's a device that removes, at least to a degree, a
great degree, the human element. Yea rods kind of pivot on top.
You aren't actually holding the rods directly at the pivot portion directly in your hand,
and there's a level on the device to make sure that you're not sort
of rotating at like a steering wheel to make the rods move. Is that
close enough, Kenny, Yes, that's correct, that's correct. And there's
another method too that I use when people are convinced that they are still doing
something the vine. Let's say, I usually set up a video camera at
the level of their elbows, because usually when you're you're using dousing rods,
you have your arms bent like this and your forearms are straight out and you're
holding the rods. So when I set up a video camera level with their
elbows, I get the full I'm looking directly down their arms, and I
take video of them as they are asking questions and getting responses, and then
we watch the video played back at at least double the speed. So when
you double the speed, you get the sea. All the movements of their
hands are greatly exaggerated, and it shows them that they are not holding their
hands still, that they are manipulating them, even if they don't do it
on purpose, but they are manipulating them. And once I've done that,
for the most part, people realize, like crap, it's me, which
is good, I mean they realize it. Unfortunately, most of them still
continue to do it because you know, they get paid. Kenny Biddle stealing
the joy, robbing us of the awe and wonder of possibility out there.
He just takes your dreams and smashes them to the ground. Sad sad man.
I'm sure you probably heard some of that, Like I want to believe
it's probably a great way to put it, like why would you want to
kill this in me? You know, I'm sure you hear some of that.
You know what. I find joy in solving that mystery. I used
to find excitement from being in spooky place and going, oh, you know,
I think that's a ghost. I think I saw a shadow that probably
is a spirit from somebody from like, you know, three hundred years ago
or something like that. I used to get excited about that, And then
the more I learned, the more I realized, wow, you know what,
there's a reason that I'm seeing this or there's a reason I'm getting these
on photographs. And I found that more exciting than the alleged ghost part.
I love going into a place and solving the mystery, figuring out what actually
happened, and recreating it and saying, look, we solved this. We
Scooby dude this. I mean, that's what better thing. I mean for
somebody that grew up with Scooby do Like that's the ultimate goal. I'm reminded
of that line by Hitch and I totally agree what he was talking about.
Once you've seen the wonder of the natural world, why would you ever be
impressed by a burning bush? You know exactly? And the psychology of belief
and honestly, the real world is wonderful enough. More with Kenny Biddle in
just a second, I want to talk about Ada and Lorraine Warren, best
known for the Conjuring Films, Real people who investigated real ghosts. Oh,
we're gonna get into that next. I'm talking here with Kenny Biddle, probably
best known for his work with Skeptical Inquirer. He is a paranormal investigator more
than twenty years investigating gadgets and haunted houses and psychics and evidence quote unquote evidence
of the after life. I want to come back to the Warrens, I
confess, Kenny. I'm I like the Conjuring films. Well, I like
the first one except for the last ten minutes. I mean I enjoyed it
like Hyde and Clap scared the shit out of me. Okay, I took
the journey, but the Warrens right. Whenever people invoke the Warrens, I
do die a little bit inside. Can you tell us who the Warrens are
and why people care, Well, I can tell you who they are why
they care. I don't know. Maybe maybe that's a poor phrasing of the
question, but I'm struck by them, right, I mean, I think
most of this started around Amityville, is that correct? Right? You're talking
the seventies, where, well, we didn't have the internet. It wasn't
easy to look up for information, so it really took time. You had
to go to historical societies or libraries and newspaper actually the buildings where you had
to go and research. So there was a lot of work. It was
very easy to pull off a hoax or just to perpetuate or promote a hoax.
But back then, yeah, we had the Warrens. They actually got
their start with little cases where they thought everything was demonic, everything was demonic
and ed and Lorraine Warren. They were a couple, they were married couple,
they had a museum. But I think they really started big with the
Annabelle story. So apparently they had this aparliament. There was an apartament that
was being haunted by a demon. Because that's the only thing that comes up
when they're involved. It was a demon and it manipulated this raggedy Ann doll
and moved it around, and that was the story. The doll itself is
not haunted or possessed. It was just this demon was using this doll to
play around and that became famous. It made the news, and I think
it really propelled them into like the public eye. And then you had things
like the Amityville House. Then you had the Conjuring House, which is a
famous movie. But I guess from a standpoint of watching a film, it
was entertaining. You could watch it as a horror film, that's fine,
But because it was based on a true story and I used that loosely,
then I look at it in a different light and I have a problem with
it. So edul Lorraine Warren again, were they called themselves demonologists every time
they went to a location. As soon as it popped up in the news,
as soon as there was some inkling that there was weird stuff going on
in a house, they showed up. Whether it was the Conjuring House,
Amityville, Endfield case over in the UK, there was one in Connecticut.
But they were there, and they weren't there to help. As far as
I'm concerned, they weren't there to help. They were there to exploit.
And they went in, they got a story, they added to the story,
they embellished the hell out of the story, and then went on a
lecture series and talked about it. So they charged people to come to their
lectures. They would hire a writer to write a book about that story,
regardless of what the family thought. They would get permission from the family to
write about it, with the idea that they were going to help, that
the warrants were going to help them. And in every case, if you
talk to the families, they did not help. All they did was to
exploit. So to me, and this is my personal opinion, that's my
disclaimer, they were horrible people that exploited others for their own gain. And
I think they're terrible, and I and anybody that follows them and thinks they're
legitimate, I think you need to rethink your entire life because they're just horrible
people. But now you segue us into the more insidious part of this.
I mean, you know, you drive over near area of fifty one and
you see the gift shop and you go in and get the alien figurine.
Okay, great, whatever, knock yourself out. I mean I see for
those watching on video, I see a lot of your office is like a
story that would take six months to tell because you have just so much stuff.
It is just one corner. The first step, Kenny, is to
admit you have a problem. I have a problem. I'm well aware of
it and I love it. But it's big business and people selling hope.
You know that type of thing. You can speak to your dead grandmother or
the spouse or child you lost. All we need is on and a thousand
dollars of your hard one or hard earned money kind of thing. Let's talk
about the dark side of this stuff. What do you want to talk about.
I want to talk about the grifters. I want to talk about the
people who were saying I will come to your home, or you come here,
we'll have a seance. I have a crystal ball. You know.
It's just sort of that paranormal for profit angle that you started us down.
Well. I see a lot more with psychics and mediums, not so much
with ghost hunters. Ghost hunters, I guess on the positive side, they
don't usually charge for anything. They are happy to come to your house and
you know, hang out for a few hours and enjoy the darkness and talk
to themselves. I mean, did you pay I know you recently stayed at
a ghost house. Did you pay a fee to spend the night there?
Yes? Yeah, So in those instances where I pay, usually like twenty
thirty forty dollars. Most of the time the money goes back to the location.
So if it's a historical location that is in need of repair or something,
usually that's a benefit to that. The money goes back to that.
Well. I'm going to be clear too, I'm not setting you it because
I've admitted in the past and I would still do this. I would pay
one hundred bucks or whatever to stay the night in a ghost house or whatever.
I don't see that that's not the same category as someone coming in and
I don't know being what Susan Gerbeck called the grief vampire. That's a different
thing, right, Yeah, yeah, I mean at there's places like you
just said, I would pay just to be there because I like going to
places that are alleged to be horne. It's the places that I've heard about
all my life. I would pay to stay overnight. I mean that's just
what I do. I also pay to go to movie locations because I like
that. I'm a big nerd. But when it comes to charging for profit,
and again, like Susan Gerbeck, that was a great way to bring
it up about psychics and grief vampires that come in and claim that they're going
to contact your loved ones, and they do it for a fee, and
usually it's an expensive fee, but they give this impression that they're talking to
ghosts, and I just I find that very deceitful and journey because you're exploiting
a person's grief. Because if somebody lost a child, especially if it's a
child or a loved one like their wife or husband or partner, and you're
you're saying, hey, you know what, I have this little bit of
hope here. I can talk to your your deceased loved one, you know,
four nine five, I can do this, And in that moment the
person is grieving, there's desperation. They desperately want to talk to their loved
one again. You know, maybe they want to apologize or something for something
they did. Maybe they want to know that it's okay, you know,
they're all right in whatever after life they're in. So they pay this money
and the psychic or medium. Usually it's a medium because that's what you know
that, that's the definition mediums the difference. So mediums are the medium before
between the living and the dead. They are the like interpreter. I guess
you can call it, yes, where psychics are ones that claim to be
able to see into the past, or see into the future or make predictions.
If mediums could really talk to the dead, we should have no unsolved
murder cases. We should have no missing persons. We just shouldn't, and
we do. We have thousands of kids every year that go missing and or
are killed by various people, kidnappings and whatnot, and their murders go unsolved.
But yet these mediums claim that, Hey, for nine five, I
can talk to your dead and glob one and tell you like how much they
love you. Yeah, it's I'll never tell you where where the pot of
gold is buried, for sure. It's funny, Kenny. I don't know.
Maybe I'm showing my hand here, but knowing what I know about my
former evangelical past, I feel like that knowledge if I wanted to use it
in a malicious way, or if I wanted to become a grifter, I
could use my knowledge of how the system works to grift this system. I
could go back and say I was wrong, I found Jesus and then hit
the circuit right at the end of an offering plate, and I could totally
cash in because I know the system. I look at you when I think
you're a guy who was seen behind the curtain and you know how the toys
work. Yet, if you were not a person of morals, you could
use that knowledge to cash in. Man, you could play that, you
could you could literally feel it'd be like printing money in my mind. I
don't know. Can you ever think about that? Like what if I wasn't
an honest guy? I do every time I look at it, like investigate
a gadget that's supposed to be talking or detecting ghosts, because I mean some
of them, most of the gadgets that I take apart, there's maybe five
to ten dollars worth of parts in there, and maybe in a half hour
or an hour of putting it together, not a lot. And they sell
this stuff for two, three four dollars each and they solved tons of them.
If I went onto a TV show and just said, hey, you
know what I'm I'm an expert. I'm an expert in the paranormal and just
said, yeah, you know like that that it probably is old Uncle Fred
haunting the attic. And and this ball of light that's not a dust particle,
that's not a bug, No, that's a spirit. And if I
kept doing that and maybe you know, made my own hair all crazy like
the crazy hair guy on the alien shows, you know, did guest spots,
or if I if I said, hey, you know, because I've
done cold readings many times, I've done cold readings in college classes. When
I've lectured college classes, humanist groups, I've just launched into the cold readings
and been able to figure out like someone's aunt passed away from a heart attack
or something like that. And I mean, I'm not doing anything special,
and I honestly I think I suck at it, but I still get through
it and convinced them that I'm real. So yeah, every time I do
that, I think I could be rich. I could be rich. I
could have I could I could make some good money and I could hit the
road. We could we could call the two, we could broadcast our own
channel and we could just go and it'd be Goden ghost baby. Well you
and I would just go and print money. It would be amazing. As
we get close to the end of our conversation and you've been so generous with
your time, come on, has there been any one just way out there
wacky even if you knew it was crap, but just wacky experience you've had
when you've stayed at a haunted place where you were like, this is just
off the chain. Have you seen anything just crazy, even if it was
human made? So I guess the craziest thing that I saw well heard because
I went to a place called Whispers Estate. This was early on, but
I went there because it was famous for hearing voices. Like people didn't have
to have recorders. They would start talking and doing their ghost hunt thing,
and then sometimes during the night they would hear the voice of a little girl
suddenly start singing lullabies and it was a big deal. It made its rounds.
It was very popular in the early two thousands, and I got to
visit. I was part of a podcast that was streaming live from that site
and they invited me to go along and I was like, oh, great,
you know this is cool. I'm finally going to get there and I'm
talking to people. There was only about ten of us in the house,
and all of them have experienced this singing. They all heard it, and
they all thought it was great. And I'm getting pumped up. I'm trying
not to, but I'm getting pumped up because I'm like, these are all
people and like all they're saying, I can't I can't like figure out what's
going on yet. And then I take a look at the stairway because it
was like a foyer where the sounds were coming from, and the main stairs
were there, and it was a little just a little area, and I'm
looking at it and I'm like, well, there's a panel on the stairway.
Like the whole stair is the under side of the stairway is enclosed.
There's one panel that doesn't match. And I was like, there's something wrong
with this. And I didn't want to take it apart because I didn't have
permission from the owner to take up the panel off because it had screws in
it and you would be able to take it off, so I didn't have
a permission. I didn't do it. I went and did something else,
and when I came back a little bit later, a few of the ghost
hunters had taken up pond There's themselves to take that panel off, which was
good for me, but not for them because they The owner got pretty pissed
off. But we got to sea downstairs and we got to see that there
was a shoot. There was a metal shoot going from under the stairs into
the cross space, and so I went down to the basement, found the
cross space, crawled up into it and there was just enough room. If
I sat on my butt, I would still have to hunch over, so
it was very tight. I'm crawling around. I get to this metal shoot,
which I think used to be for coal. I think they used to
load coal into some kind of compartment and it went down into basement. But
I stood up in the shoot. I started talking and there was an echo
and everyone stopped and they're like, that sounds exactly like the Ghost Girl,
like this whole echo, this metallic echo, and I was like, really,
you know, And I start singing horribly because I can't sing, but
they're like, wow, you know, this really does sound like it.
So that made me want to crawl around some more just to take a look,
and I accidentally kicked something by one of the pillars supporting support pillars.
I kicked something. I went and looked it up. It was a speaker.
There was a speaker there, and I traced the wire. It went
around certain polls and went all the way back to the main basement where there
was a whole collection of audio equipment, and then I found another speaker that
matched it, and it was right in the same area. There was no
reason why a speaker would be there, much less propped up the way it
was propped up, And that, for me was probably one of the weirdest
things. I was really expecting to hear this music with the sound the singing,
and instead I found the best evidence for a hoax going on. So
that probably is the weirdest. I know, you were probably expecting a ghost
or something. I come away with that story, Kenny, I think I
would get a bigger rush from discovering the charade I did. I stood up.
I held that speaker up like, oh, I mean, I got
the pat on my head, like you're holding Simba up in front of everybody.
Yeah, look at this, bitches sounded Kenny. You're awesome, You're
fun to talk to. To send everybody to your stuff, kind of tell
everybody where to find you if you would. The easiest place to find me
is Skeptical Inquirer dot org. If you look that up, look up my
name Kenny Biddle, you'll find my articles. You'll see I have a whole
page of articles and then the ghosts and the machine videos that I do for
them for the Center for Inquiry. You can find me online on Facebook.
I am Kenny Biddle. I post a lot of stuff there. I'm on
Twitter, I'm on Instagram. I'm on TikTok because TikTok is a fun place
to find all kinds of really bad videos. But I recreate them. I
do love that. I do love that I have a channel. It's it's
Kenny Biddle CSI and I literally go through all the paranormal videos that I find
and I recreate them here. So we reproduce the same effects so you can
see how they're done. Because I show you what we do, like I
recreate it. You see the recreation first, and then you see how I
did it, so you can understand it better. And you know when next
time you see a video like that, you're like, I know how that
was done. Okay. I wish we were neighbors. I just wish we
were neighbers. I would be such a pest. He would be like cussing
me, like lock the door, keep him out, Like he's driving me
crazy. Because this is my that's my jam. That sounds like big fun
to me. Oh it is. It is all right, Kenny Biddle.
I'm going to include the SI link in the description box. And you're fun
and you're necessary, and I appreciate you talking to us about these alleged paranormal
and let's cross pass again soon. Okay, absolutely good talking to you,
sir. Follow The Thinking Atheist on Facebook and Twitter for a complete archive of
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