Speaker 1: You're listening to everything out there with your host Steve Stockton.
Speaker 1: Hello friends, Hello, hello once again, and welcome to everything
Speaker 1: out there on the Clyde Lewis Grounds. He wrote Radio Network,
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Steve Stalktor. Welcome in tonight, joining me
Speaker 1: on the phone. Friend of mine for many years. You
Speaker 1: might know her from her work on Caravan of Lore
Speaker 1: or some of the scripts she wrote and narrated for
Speaker 1: me over on my thirteen Past Midnight YouTube channel. Or
Speaker 1: you might know her from her work with Seth Breedlove's
Speaker 1: Small Town Monsters. And she's also a classics professor at
Speaker 1: Kent State University. Welcome Heather Moser, Heather, come on in.
Speaker 2: Hi, Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Nice to have you here on the phone with
Speaker 1: us tonight. So what's going on in your world? I
Speaker 1: haven't seen you in I've probably been over a year.
Speaker 1: You and Seth showed up in New Mexico in the
Speaker 1: Four Corners area and filmed me for documentary. We're working
Speaker 1: on what's happened since that transpired? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we showed up and we kidnapped you for a
Speaker 2: little bit so that you could tell us some stories. Well,
Speaker 2: let's see, that does seem like a long time ago.
Speaker 2: We have been filming other films, filming other movies and
Speaker 2: the one that you're in American Werewolves too, which it
Speaker 2: was kind of it should have been out by now,
Speaker 2: but then we had an issue with our distributor, so
Speaker 2: it's kind of been put on the back burner. It
Speaker 2: should be coming out, though very soon. I don't think
Speaker 2: I'm allowed to say yet, but we have an official
Speaker 2: date now, so it'll be within it'll be within the month.
Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to that. I've been expecting my copy
Speaker 1: in the mail just any time. I'm anxious to see
Speaker 1: how it turned out. But it was great meeting Seth
Speaker 1: and the crew and then getting to meet you in
Speaker 1: person finally.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, it was great to finally meet you. Let's see,
Speaker 2: we went to British Columbia and we filmed there for
Speaker 2: on the trail of Bigfoot the Origin, So we've done that.
Speaker 2: Right now, we're in the midst of and this is
Speaker 2: about the only thing that has my brain occupied at
Speaker 2: the moment. We're in the midst of our Kickstarter and
Speaker 2: that takes up all of February for us, So that's
Speaker 2: the biggest thing right now, trying to get our kickstarter
Speaker 2: funded as much as possible and that'll help get us
Speaker 2: through the year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I saw the notification on Facebook. I'll put
Speaker 1: a link to that in the show notes for the
Speaker 1: kickstarter there and everybody go pledge or support to that.
Speaker 1: It's a great franchise they've got going there out How
Speaker 1: many are they up to now with a small town
Speaker 1: Monsters series? Uh?
Speaker 2: How many movies? You mean?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness, Well, I don't know, it's got to
Speaker 2: be close to twenty at this point, if not more.
Speaker 2: I don't have the number off the top of my head,
Speaker 2: but it's a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know it's out there. And then there's a
Speaker 1: great great cannon have worked there. I've only seen a
Speaker 1: few of them, but they are all just incredible movies
Speaker 1: and really looking forward to see the one that I'm
Speaker 1: in now. Is that going to be premiering like at
Speaker 1: some film festivals and things like that, or some conferences,
Speaker 1: paranormal conferences or are you allowed to say so?
Speaker 2: American Werewolves two did actually premiere last ball in Kentucky
Speaker 2: to an audience and it was very well received, But
Speaker 2: as of right now, it's not scheduled for any premieres.
Speaker 1: Now, Okay, that's still good to hear though. At least
Speaker 1: it's out there, and it did get good reception and
Speaker 1: hopefully nobody laughed at my part too hard.
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. And our Kickstarter backers they've had access to
Speaker 2: it so and it's gotten good reviews from them as well.
Speaker 2: So that's the other bonus of kickstarter backing is that
Speaker 2: you get access to films, even if we have issues
Speaker 2: with the distributor, you get access to the films early.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and I've worked some in film and getting
Speaker 1: that coverage right away to see how it plays, that's
Speaker 1: just invaluable. Think of those people as your test audience
Speaker 1: if you will.
Speaker 2: Yep, definitely.
Speaker 1: So let's just start at the beginning here. Like I said,
Speaker 1: you wrote and narrated some things for me over on
Speaker 1: my thirteen Past Midnight channel, which is still on hiatus.
Speaker 1: I'm going to be bringing it back, but I'm back
Speaker 1: on Missing Persons and Mysteries. I now own that channel,
Speaker 1: so that's getting a lot of my time and attention.
Speaker 1: Just under two hundred and seventy five thousand subscribers over there,
Speaker 1: and then in the interim, I started among the missing,
Speaker 1: and I've gotten I think one hundred and four k,
Speaker 1: hundred and five k over there now. So I've been
Speaker 1: a busy guy that just published my twentieth book this
Speaker 1: last year, if you count one that Cisco and I
Speaker 1: co wrote, and had a couple other co You're just
Speaker 1: in there on some of these recent ones. But yeah,
Speaker 1: uh no, moss growing under this rolling.
Speaker 2: Stone and that's good. That's good.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you. But what garnered your interest in the paranormal?
Speaker 1: Did it start like so many of us in early
Speaker 1: childhood or were you a light blimmer when it came
Speaker 1: to all things dark and scary or what's your personal story.
Speaker 2: Oh, it definitely started wheneber I was young. It's very
Speaker 2: very much tied to what was on TV at a
Speaker 2: very young age, unsolved mysteries with something that was on
Speaker 2: the TV every week, and that garnered my attention, almost
Speaker 2: like a morbid curiosity to a certain extent. I remember
Speaker 2: very vividly an episode about the Yeti and being afraid
Speaker 2: of the Yeti as a result of that. Also, spontaneous
Speaker 2: human combustion was one of the episodes, and I had
Speaker 2: this unrealistic fear that that was going to be how
Speaker 2: I'd meet my demise at some point in my life, hope.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that one always scared me too. I remember reading
Speaker 1: about that when I was a kid, probably in the
Speaker 1: of those readers digest tales of the Paranormal books, or
Speaker 1: maybe even the Time Life Library had the picture of
Speaker 1: the lady there that I think I legged was all
Speaker 1: that was left a burnmark on the chair, and that
Speaker 1: used to to scare the daylights out of me. I'm like,
Speaker 1: what if I spontaneously combussed that and quicksand? Now I'm
Speaker 1: a little bit older than you are, maybe a lot
Speaker 1: older than you are. But if you watch TV in
Speaker 1: the late sixties in the early seventies, particularly westerns, quicksand
Speaker 1: was the thing, and it got a lot of people
Speaker 1: and almost got you know, some of my heroes, Daniel
Speaker 1: Boone and his son Israel and Davy Crockett and gun Smoke.
Speaker 1: People are always getting in quicksand. But yeah, shc spontaneous
Speaker 1: human combustion. Bigfoot. I used to actually go out looking
Speaker 1: for bigfoot when I was a kid. I don't know
Speaker 1: what I've done if I'd found one.
Speaker 2: But that's a great question.
Speaker 1: What would you Yeah, I've wondered about that. These people
Speaker 1: that go out looking for it and they play the
Speaker 1: mating calls and stuff. Well, what if that works and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden an amorous bigfoot comes charging out
Speaker 1: of the woods. Do you run? Do you stay in
Speaker 1: teck one for the team or in that situation? I
Speaker 1: often wondered about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, things to think about, for sure. Yeah, another thing
Speaker 2: you mentioned Quicksand I do remember also being extremely afraid
Speaker 2: of the Bermuda Triangle. Even though I have yet to
Speaker 2: go over the Bermutera Triangle, I was positive that if
Speaker 2: I did, I would disappear. That was another thing that
Speaker 2: was very common when I was younger.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Charles Burlitt's book about that was out in that
Speaker 1: era anyway, And yeah, that one frightened me. I've yet
Speaker 1: to fly over it as well. I've been in the
Speaker 1: edge of it, but that's about as close as I
Speaker 1: want to get. But and some of my research and
Speaker 1: things that I've done, there are a lot of triangles
Speaker 1: out there. They are all over the place. Here in
Speaker 1: New England where I'm at. You've got the Bennington Triangle,
Speaker 1: then you've got the Nevada Triangle. There's an Alaskan triangle,
Speaker 1: there's a one in northern California. What is it with triangles?
Speaker 1: Maybe you can enlighten us from your work as a
Speaker 1: professor there and then look back into history or maybe
Speaker 1: even prehistory. Is there something mystical about the triangle?
Speaker 2: Well, it's one of the strongest shapes. Right. We've got
Speaker 2: pyramids and we're always fascinated by those and how they
Speaker 2: were even built. But with these triangle areas, it seems
Speaker 2: to be that you've got the a conglomeration of sightings
Speaker 2: in one area, and I think, just human nature, we're like, okay,
Speaker 2: we're the outer limits of this. Let's make three points
Speaker 2: and oh, it's a triangle. It also sounds a lot
Speaker 2: better than like the Bridgewater Rahmas or some.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or the Alaska do decahedron or something like that. Right,
Speaker 1: there's something about those being able to find three points.
Speaker 1: And I know it's always easy to connect the dots
Speaker 1: in reverse, but it does appear to be within a boundary.
Speaker 1: And again there there's a mysticism with the triangle. You know,
Speaker 1: from a mathematical perspective and then from an alchemical and
Speaker 1: metaphysical perspective. But a lot of those pesky triangles out there,
Speaker 1: and I hope I don't get caught in any of them.
Speaker 2: Well, and that's the one of the things of small
Speaker 2: town monsters that we've started in the last At this point,
Speaker 2: it's been a couple of years now, we started a
Speaker 2: publishing company and one of our early books was The
Speaker 2: Texas dog Man Triangle by Aarondese, and that the whole
Speaker 2: idea of the dog Man Triangle came about after Aaron
Speaker 2: had accumulated all of these stories through historical and modern
Speaker 2: day times and realized, oh wait, they're pretty concentrated in
Speaker 2: an area, and look, lo and behold, there's three points.
Speaker 2: Let's make that the Texas dog Man Triangle.
Speaker 1: I'm saying, I find that fascinating. I haven't I heard
Speaker 1: anything about this. I'll definitely have to read that book.
Speaker 1: Can you elaborate on that a little bit without giving
Speaker 1: too much of the book away?
Speaker 2: So the Texas dog Man Triangle, the points are roughly
Speaker 2: around Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Houston, So it's
Speaker 2: a pretty decent size triangle. But then again, Texas is massive,
Speaker 2: so it really isn't that big on the general scale
Speaker 2: of things. But yeah, there are stories back from even
Speaker 2: the eighteen hundreds of these creatures that are bipedal canine,
Speaker 2: half human half canine creatures that have been aggressive. They're
Speaker 2: very rarely. I mean, you just don't hear stories necessarily
Speaker 2: about them being something that you want to encounter. They're not,
Speaker 2: I don't know. They don't seem as friendly as maybe
Speaker 2: your local bigfoot, but they're sightings that are accumulated in
Speaker 2: that area between those three points that are historical and
Speaker 2: modern day. And even after Aaron put the book out,
Speaker 2: which I'm sure you can attest to this from being
Speaker 2: an author as well. Once you get the book out there,
Speaker 2: then you get more sightings. You get more people coming
Speaker 2: in that have read the book and they're like, actually,
Speaker 2: I live in that area as well, and I had
Speaker 2: an encounter.
Speaker 1: So his.
Speaker 2: Database of sightings has grown since the book has come
Speaker 2: out as well, just kind of adding to yes, this
Speaker 2: is a definitive area where there seems to be a
Speaker 2: concentration of dog maned sightings.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's been my experience too. People read the book
Speaker 1: and then they want to add something to it. Every
Speaker 1: single one of my books, and a couple of them
Speaker 1: have been updated to new editions. But like Strange Things
Speaker 1: in the Woods, that's actually two volumes combined. That was
Speaker 1: originally Strange Things in the woods and more Strange Things
Speaker 1: in the wood my publisher combined. But I've got enough
Speaker 1: for a second volume of those, and that's just things
Speaker 1: in the woods. I mean, there's strange things in the water,
Speaker 1: strange things in the sky, strange things on the farm,
Speaker 1: strange things in the city. It's just strange as a
Speaker 1: relative term there. But people seem to be more aware
Speaker 1: of it. I don't know. Maybe it's just me since
Speaker 1: I've published those books and gone on a lot of
Speaker 1: shows and have my own shows and stuff now, but
Speaker 1: there seems to be just a higher interest in it.
Speaker 1: There was a lot in the seventies, particular nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: three that was a big UFO year. There was a
Speaker 1: huge UFO flap in seventy three, and even my family
Speaker 1: jumped on that bandwagon. My brother lived on the highest
Speaker 1: point around where we lived, and a lot of like
Speaker 1: a Friday night or Saturday night, we would go over there,
Speaker 1: get lawn chairs set out in his yard and watch
Speaker 1: the skies and we saw anomal of stuff, stuff that
Speaker 1: made no sense, stuff that wasn't airplanes or jets or
Speaker 1: anything like that. But then it all just kind of
Speaker 1: died down. Those things tend to come in waves like that,
Speaker 1: flaps they call them, and I think that's true of
Speaker 1: anything cryptid or paranormal. There seems to be certain times
Speaker 1: when it's more active or more prevalent. And I hear
Speaker 1: from people now that the study that side of it,
Speaker 1: that the veil is thin and that's why. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's always it's thin around a certain time of year
Speaker 1: in the Pagan and Celtic beliefs, but now I've heard
Speaker 1: people say that it's getting thinner all the time, all
Speaker 1: the time, year round, and that's why all this is
Speaker 1: ramping up. Maybe that's so, or maybe it's just with
Speaker 1: the advent of the Internet and being able to communicate
Speaker 1: worldwide with somebody. I mean, you're sitting in Ohio, I'm
Speaker 1: sitting in New England, but we're talking like we're right
Speaker 1: here next to each other. I think that's just It
Speaker 1: has indeed made the world a smaller place and more
Speaker 1: people are willing to share. Because back like one of
Speaker 1: the strange things in the woods, a lot of those
Speaker 1: stories were from friends of my family and people that
Speaker 1: my it's new and things like that. The ninety nine
Speaker 1: percent of the people in that book had passed on
Speaker 1: now and they were read some to tell those stories.
Speaker 1: But the tea I'm kind of going me sometimes it
Speaker 1: was like they had to get a log chain and
Speaker 1: drag it out of them. And one old gentleman, Auto Daro,
Speaker 1: He's been passed for several years, but he would tell
Speaker 1: me things when he found out I wasn't going to
Speaker 1: laugh at him or make fun of him that he
Speaker 1: hadn't even shared with his wife. She'd be sitting there
Speaker 1: while we were talking. She's like, you never told me that,
Speaker 1: and they'd, you know, have some lib responsible you'd never ask,
Speaker 1: or something like that. But I think people are more
Speaker 1: open to talking about it now. And has that been
Speaker 1: your experience with the small Town Monsters? Is it easier
Speaker 1: the longer you do it, Is it easier to find
Speaker 1: witnesses to come forward and talk about what they see
Speaker 1: or in some cases didn't see.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it definitely has helped that we've I mean,
Speaker 2: small Time Monsters has been around since Minerva Monster came
Speaker 2: out in twenty fifteen, and just the fact that we've
Speaker 2: been around for a while and people can actually look
Speaker 2: at our body of work and see that we're not
Speaker 2: going to make fun of them has been a boon
Speaker 2: for us as far as getting people to feel comfortable
Speaker 2: talking to us. As a researcher for small town monsters,
Speaker 2: what I've noticed is there are certain cryptids where it's
Speaker 2: a lot easier to get people to talk because it
Speaker 2: is more accepted. Bigfoot, it's a lot easier to get
Speaker 2: people to come forward and tell you that they had
Speaker 2: an encounter with Bigfoot because it just seems to be
Speaker 2: more socially accepted. Right now, dog Man is a little iffy,
Speaker 2: But when you get into other things like sometimes UFOs
Speaker 2: can be a little trickier. Although that is starting to
Speaker 2: shift as well with everything that's happening in our culture
Speaker 2: on the news, you know, the government's coming forward and
Speaker 2: saying yes, there's been UFOs or UAPs rather, that's making
Speaker 2: it a little easier. But I have stories from people
Speaker 2: that had odd encounters of things that don't necessarily fall
Speaker 2: into the pop culture look at the at the strange
Speaker 2: if that makes sense, and they're more reticent to come
Speaker 2: forward with anything. So and then as far as the
Speaker 2: movies that we've done, it was difficult to get people
Speaker 2: to American werewolves too. That you're in that's titled the
Speaker 2: skin Walkers. It was very difficult to get people to
Speaker 2: come forward and talk about any type of skin walker encounter,
Speaker 2: which is not surprising. But I don't think that that
Speaker 2: stigma is necessarily going away, even if we have shows
Speaker 2: out there like Skinwalker Ranch. That is just a cultural
Speaker 2: thing that isn't going to change.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree, And just because they put it on
Speaker 1: TV and put it where it can be consumed by
Speaker 1: a mass audience, I think that raises the awareness and
Speaker 1: gets more people interested in people. I spoke to a
Speaker 1: guy not too long ago that he thinks finding Bigfoot
Speaker 1: or something like that that he'd caught an episode of
Speaker 1: and had no interest in it prior to that, and
Speaker 1: then suddenly he's hooked and devouring everything he can find
Speaker 1: about the subject, reading books, watching other shows, actually going
Speaker 1: out in the field and doing some research. So I
Speaker 1: think sometimes it's just that little little spark that Genny
Speaker 1: ciqua if you will, that excites these people like, Hey,
Speaker 1: I didn't know this was out here, and there's all
Speaker 1: this work and media that you can consume. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if people like that will stay in it,
Speaker 1: but at least it's nice to have an interest in
Speaker 1: it for a while, even if you go on to
Speaker 1: something that I'm on. My personal taste and interest even
Speaker 1: in the paranormal change. While I was big into UFOs
Speaker 1: as a child, I kind of grew out of that
Speaker 1: went more into Bigfoot and then from that into other cryptids,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of what got me into the missing
Speaker 1: people stuff too. And now I'm kind of circled back
Speaker 1: around and coming another interest in UFOs, but I like
Speaker 1: the classic cases. I've got a new YouTube channel. It's
Speaker 1: not very big, about thirty five hundred subscribers, called from Beyond,
Speaker 1: and we're looking at some of the classic UFO cases recently.
Speaker 1: First episode we covered the Betty and Barney Hill alleged
Speaker 1: abduction from here in New England. The week prior to
Speaker 1: that we looked at Rendalstrom Forrest, which has been called
Speaker 1: the UK's Roswell, and there's some some good stuff out
Speaker 1: there back during that era, you know, before all the
Speaker 1: abduction tom foolery and not discounting anybody's beliefs or theories
Speaker 1: or anything there. I spoken to UFO conference and met
Speaker 1: a lot of abductees that they believe what they say,
Speaker 1: and that gives me, you know, the belief in their testimony,
Speaker 1: I think, but I like it when it was, you know,
Speaker 1: everybody that was men from Mars or moon men or
Speaker 1: the Little Green Men and their flying saucers and things
Speaker 1: before it got beyond that. And so you mentioned UFO
Speaker 1: or UAP. What do you think the reason is for
Speaker 1: the name change this far into the game. Why would
Speaker 1: they suddenly just start calling it a UAP when we've
Speaker 1: been used to UFOs for decades?
Speaker 2: Well, that is that is a great question. I I'm
Speaker 2: not sure other than they're trying to make a broader term,
Speaker 2: perhaps to cover more things, and maybe UFOs just seemed
Speaker 2: outdated for them, or maybe we're actually behind the times
Speaker 2: and they don't actually use that anymore. Maybe they're just
Speaker 2: throwing us a bone and saying, yeah, we called it
Speaker 2: UAPs while you guys are busy calling it UFOs. Could
Speaker 2: be that now we have another term.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I had a comment or on one of
Speaker 1: my live streams this week on from Beyond he said,
Speaker 1: it's to make it harder to search for things in
Speaker 1: a four you request a Freedom of Information Act? Thought
Speaker 1: about that if you're I hadn't either. If they're calling
Speaker 1: it a UAP now, but you're looking for UFO information.
Speaker 1: People that just come along and get into it now
Speaker 1: maybe not even realize that UFO was the preferred nomenclature
Speaker 1: before it went to UAP, So it could be that's
Speaker 1: a good point, classic mixed direction there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would not put it past anybody.
Speaker 1: And full disclosure. Do you think that it's coming or
Speaker 1: do you think we'll ever find out for sure? Or
Speaker 1: is it just too immerse, too hidden from view that
Speaker 1: to ever be revealed, because that would destroy a lot
Speaker 1: of paradigms, if you will, if we did get full
Speaker 1: disclosure in the way that people expect. What's your thoughts
Speaker 1: on that.
Speaker 2: I think that that is definitely a concern that it
Speaker 2: would cause issues, especially in the religious community. But I
Speaker 2: feel like at some point it'll just be I think,
Speaker 2: on down the line, not anytime, probably not in my lifetime,
Speaker 2: but I think that it'll just it'll be something that
Speaker 2: they can't deny anymore and we will all know. We
Speaker 2: may not know the extent of anything or but I
Speaker 2: don't think that we're going to be able to live
Speaker 2: forever with this with blinders on that there's nothing else
Speaker 2: in the universe except us, So I think it'll come
Speaker 2: out eventually. I think it's kind of it'll probably be
Speaker 2: a situation where the government's hand is forced, so to speak.
Speaker 2: That would be my guess.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I agree with that. And I don't know
Speaker 1: at this point what it would take to convince everybody.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's been people that have been with people,
Speaker 1: have had these first hand experiences and they didn't believe
Speaker 1: what they saw. So again, I don't know if if
Speaker 1: one landed on the White House lawn and came out
Speaker 1: and shook hands with people, people, Oh, that's that's AI
Speaker 1: generated at CGI. It's a deep fake or Project Bluebeam?
Speaker 1: Are you familiar with that? I am not. It's supposedly
Speaker 1: Project Bluebeam one word. It's a type of I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's an apparatus or how it works, but
Speaker 1: it's a militarized thing where they can project a hologram
Speaker 1: that you can't tell the difference from the real thing,
Speaker 1: and according to which conspiracy theory you subscribe to, they
Speaker 1: can beam it straight into your head. It doesn't even
Speaker 1: have to be a physical manifestation. They can cause you
Speaker 1: to see it in your brain. I guess I'm not
Speaker 1: sure all the ins and outs of it. But you know,
Speaker 1: used to they say to believe what was it a
Speaker 1: quarter of what you read and half of what you
Speaker 1: see or something. Now we can't believe anything that we
Speaker 1: see or hear with all the AI. I know a
Speaker 1: lot of people they're scared of it, and it can
Speaker 1: cause some problems and things, but I see it as
Speaker 1: a tool. It can be beneficial. It's like anything like that.
Speaker 1: Like when my dad was small, people were scared of electricity.
Speaker 1: He said, he's heard creatures in the pulpit talk about electricity.
Speaker 1: You know, you're fooling with something you shouldn't fool with it.
Speaker 1: It's going to destroy the world. But yet it didn't,
Speaker 1: and it change everything. And I heard the same about
Speaker 1: nuclear power and things like that, and then that came
Speaker 1: to you know what's next, and somebody's going to be
Speaker 1: afraid of everything. And there are people that are averse
Speaker 1: to any kind of change, and I get that. I
Speaker 1: don't like especially swift and sudden change. But I'm open
Speaker 1: to new ideas. But what do you think about CERN
Speaker 1: and what's going on over there? Do you think they're
Speaker 1: tampering with something they shouldn't add to as the saying
Speaker 1: goes or what's your belief on that? Is it changing
Speaker 1: things like the Mandela effect? I've heard people attribute that
Speaker 1: to CERN. What's your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's funny. I didn't realize that people were attributing
Speaker 2: that to CERN. No, I think that they're I don't
Speaker 2: think that they're messing with something that they shouldn't mess
Speaker 2: with over at CERN. I there's I don't know. This
Speaker 2: also comes from more of a personal perspective as well,
Speaker 2: because there was someone that went through my school that
Speaker 2: worked over at CERN for a while, and like I
Speaker 2: knew him, and he was super nice and kind, and
Speaker 2: I would like to think that he would have the
Speaker 2: sense to not mess with something that he shouldn't mess
Speaker 2: with and that this is absolutely all in the name
Speaker 2: of science and furthering our understanding of the universe. So
Speaker 2: that would be my thought on it. I don't how
Speaker 2: horrible if they started to mess with something, yeah, and then.
Speaker 1: Advocate here though, what if it's compartmentalized and people that
Speaker 1: are good and just are working on this project and
Speaker 1: don't exactly know what they're working on now. I draw
Speaker 1: from personal experience. Both my parents were a part of
Speaker 1: the Manhattan Project and they had an idea of what
Speaker 1: they were working on the whole of it. But still,
Speaker 1: you know, you had this person doing this and that
Speaker 1: person doing that, and the people up above who were
Speaker 1: coordinating everything. They knew what they were doing. That's why
Speaker 1: part of it was an oak Ridge and part of
Speaker 1: it was in Los Almos. They wanted to keep those
Speaker 1: visionable materials separate until they got ready to arm everything.
Speaker 1: But there was a lot of people there was prior.
Speaker 1: There was Clinton Engineer Works prior to O R n
Speaker 1: L and the AEC and other agencies that worked out there.
Speaker 1: But again they knew they were doing something for the
Speaker 1: greater good, but they didn't know exactly what they were doing.
Speaker 1: So if that many people, No. Coridge at that time
Speaker 1: didn't even exist. It wasn't on any maps. It was
Speaker 1: a behind the fence and you had guard shacks at
Speaker 1: every entrance into town and you had to show a
Speaker 1: badger you didn't get in there. So but nobody talked.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was again part of the war effort,
Speaker 1: and your silence was necessary and people got called on that.
Speaker 1: I've heard about people that attended dances inside the fence
Speaker 1: and maybe whispered to their date about something they were
Speaker 1: working on and then it was found out that they
Speaker 1: had again talked a little more than they should have,
Speaker 1: and they were chid for that. If not fired or
Speaker 1: you could be arrested. My dad he talked about some
Speaker 1: of the documents and things that he had signed. Even
Speaker 1: far into retirement. He said there were certain things that
Speaker 1: are classified and that are still classified that he wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to talk about ever unless he could lose
Speaker 1: his pension and his insurance and all that stuff. So
Speaker 1: those people, but again they understood they were doing it
Speaker 1: for the greater good. But sure people can they told Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what they were told, And I know, it's just astounding.
Speaker 1: And then another conspiracy theory that that gave me particular
Speaker 1: insight into was Project paper Clip. And I've heard people
Speaker 1: debunk that and say, oh, that didn't happen, it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: But yet my dad, who was a scientist at Olkridge
Speaker 1: National Laboratory, he worked right alongside some of those German
Speaker 1: scientists that were brought over after the war. And personal story.
Speaker 1: I went to school, elementary school with a kid who
Speaker 1: was from Germany, and I went home with him after
Speaker 1: school one day and his dad was a scientist out
Speaker 1: there as well, I spoke fluent German and the kid
Speaker 1: my age spoke English. His dad had a heavy accent.
Speaker 1: But we were down in the basement. They had like
Speaker 1: a wreck room. That was the big thing to have
Speaker 1: downstairs in the seventies was a family room or rec room.
Speaker 1: And he's like, come here, I want to show you
Speaker 1: something and I'm like okay. He push us on the
Speaker 1: paneled wall back there and it swings open, and I thought, okay,
Speaker 1: he's going to show me a bomb shelter. A lot
Speaker 1: of houses built after the war had a bomb shelter,
Speaker 1: and because of the Cold War and all that going on,
Speaker 1: and I thought, okay, he's going to show me his
Speaker 1: bomb shehulter. We didn't have one, but I knew other
Speaker 1: kids that had a bomb shelter in their basement. So
Speaker 1: he opens it up and he flicks on the light
Speaker 1: and here is the biggest display of German war memorabilia
Speaker 1: that I have ever seen before since. And what I
Speaker 1: don't know if his glass or plexiglass case. There was
Speaker 1: a uniform, a very high ranking uniform. And I said, wow,
Speaker 1: your dad really loves his war memorabilia. And he said, Steve,
Speaker 1: you don't understand. He said that was his uniform. So
Speaker 1: he had this little shrine to the fatherland in his basement,
Speaker 1: yet he was out working at There's No laboratory right
Speaker 1: alongside my dad. So that project vapor clip is not
Speaker 1: a myth. So again, you never know. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of people that keep a lot of secrets out there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the compartmentalizing thing, I mean, I understand it, but
Speaker 2: it's also scary to think that way, to think about
Speaker 2: all the things that people may be working on and
Speaker 2: not knowing the full extent of it, and then what
Speaker 2: the actual purpose is behind it on a larger scale,
Speaker 2: and then you.
Speaker 1: Have places like Area fifty one, you know where there's
Speaker 1: things going on that again, everybody there doesn't know what
Speaker 1: they're working on. But then you have a whistleblower like
Speaker 1: Bob Blazaar. What do you think of his testimony? Do
Speaker 1: you think that he's on the up and up ors
Speaker 1: he just found a way to opportunize all this.
Speaker 2: I was actually just watching Bob Lazar last night, watching
Speaker 2: his interview with Oh what is that? Oh? Joe Rogan,
Speaker 2: and I would say that if he's not being truthful,
Speaker 2: he's come up with a lot of a lot of
Speaker 2: de tales that make it extremely believable. Like I, this
Speaker 2: is just first first glance at these things. I did
Speaker 2: not detect him lying about anything from from that interview anyway,
Speaker 2: because there were just too many, like I said, too
Speaker 2: many nuances that he had in there that he's either
Speaker 2: a fantastic storyteller or a great a great liar, or
Speaker 2: he's telling the truth.
Speaker 1: That was my takeaway from that too. He believes what
Speaker 1: he's saying, or seems to me, Yeah, I can say
Speaker 1: that of a lot of in the in the UFO
Speaker 1: culture things. I've heard Travis Walton speak and you know,
Speaker 1: saw him at a conference and listen to him speak.
Speaker 1: He believes what he says. He believes that that's what's
Speaker 1: happened to Either that or he's the greatest actor that
Speaker 1: we've ever seen or the most accomplished liar ever. And
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people like that. Even Whitley Strieber,
Speaker 1: I've heard him speak before. I don't think he as
Speaker 1: the conferences anymore, at least he doesn't do them in
Speaker 1: Las Vegas because the casinos don't in force of no
Speaker 1: smoking policy. He or they didn't when I was there.
Speaker 1: But I believe that he believes what he saw, and yeah,
Speaker 1: he made a fortune off books and movies and things.
Speaker 1: But I think he is telling the truth as he
Speaker 1: knows it about those experience he has been starting with
Speaker 1: Communion and beyond m.
Speaker 2: I think that's a good way to put it, that
Speaker 2: they it's the truth, is they believe it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's like with my own experiences. I've had
Speaker 1: people try to debunk stuff that I've seen, like you know,
Speaker 1: you didn't see that, or that didn't happen, or how
Speaker 1: could you remember it in that much detail. Well, that's
Speaker 1: just the way my brain operates. I can remember things
Speaker 1: just an infinite detail. I've got a near photographic memory,
Speaker 1: so that's one way I can remember all these details. Plus,
Speaker 1: when you have one of those encounters or experiences, it just,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it crystallizes in the mind. I can
Speaker 1: go back to any of my several especially the really
Speaker 1: really scary ones and things that I can remember every
Speaker 1: little detail of everything around me, what I had for
Speaker 1: breakfast that day, what was going on, what I did afterwards.
Speaker 1: I don't know how I could not remember all that,
Speaker 1: And just the fact to me that I can recall
Speaker 1: it in that grade of detail just shows to me
Speaker 1: that that's it's real. You know, in my mind, I
Speaker 1: was there, I know what happened. I know what I
Speaker 1: saw or didn't see or felt or heard, and nobody's
Speaker 1: ever going to convince me otherwise.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, exactly. I mean you were there, you had
Speaker 2: the experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so especially, I don't care if anybody believes it
Speaker 1: or not, you know, like Ripley's believe it or not,
Speaker 1: this is Stockton's believe it or don't. I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't care. That might be a name for a podcast.
Speaker 1: I like it, but again, you know, I'm not here
Speaker 1: to win any friends or influence any people. I'm just
Speaker 1: sharing what's happened to me and hopefully make it a
Speaker 1: little easier for other people to share what's happened with them.
Speaker 1: And that was one thing I wanted to ask you
Speaker 1: with small town monsters, have you ever had a showing
Speaker 1: of those, like in a retirement home or an old
Speaker 1: folks home or anything like that. No, but that's the
Speaker 1: things I do with my books. I like to go
Speaker 1: and do a reading, and especially with strange Things in
Speaker 1: the woods or even my strange world, and a lot
Speaker 1: of times they'll just be like somebody like, ah, what's
Speaker 1: this scrap? There's no beingo tonight, And they'll sit there
Speaker 1: and they'll do their knitting or their crochet or whatever,
Speaker 1: and then they just get up and leave. But usually
Speaker 1: there'll be a couple of people hang around after the
Speaker 1: reading is over, and I know what's coming up, And
Speaker 1: usually it'll be an older gentleman and he'll sidle up
Speaker 1: to me and say that story you had about the bar,
Speaker 1: and he said, let me tell you what happened to you,
Speaker 1: what happened, sorry, let me tell you what happened to
Speaker 1: me when I was a kid. And then the story
Speaker 1: just comes out, and maybe you know, this guy's been
Speaker 1: sitting on it for decades, and yet by hearing me
Speaker 1: tell my stories or tell other people's story in the
Speaker 1: cases chrange things in the woods, it frees him up.
Speaker 1: And otherwise that story might not have ever seen the
Speaker 1: light of day. Maybe he didn't tell to anybody could
Speaker 1: have taken it to the grave with him. And that's
Speaker 1: part of the commission that I'm doing here. I'm getting
Speaker 1: these stories out there so that they'll live on longer
Speaker 1: than the people that told them, like instoring things in
Speaker 1: the woods, or longer than me I'm hoping, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm building a legacy here, and I've encouraged other people
Speaker 1: to write Cisco Murdock, Mark, Anthony Wyatt. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff here that you know, I've kind of been
Speaker 1: like a Johnny apple Seed to some of this. But
Speaker 1: I wonder what kind of response you would get if
Speaker 1: you showed those in that type of setting. If it
Speaker 1: would scare the pants off those old people, or if
Speaker 1: there would be some that would stick around and share
Speaker 1: their stories. You might might want to give that a thought.
Speaker 1: Mentioned that the sentence about any things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that would be really interesting, especially because we are
Speaker 2: so close to where like Minerva Monster. I mean, I
Speaker 2: live in Minerva, so we're not far at all from
Speaker 2: where that happens. So to show that and then see
Speaker 2: what their reaction would be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you could do it, you know, in the library,
Speaker 1: you could do it in schools. That's another thing. Another
Speaker 1: undermined segment. I said, old people or senior citizens are
Speaker 1: one of our greatest wealths as far as folklore and
Speaker 1: stories and things. But another audience that I found is
Speaker 1: the teenagers. I go to a skateboard park or anywhere
Speaker 1: where teenagers congregate and say Hey, if you were going
Speaker 1: out on a date and you wanted to go parking
Speaker 1: someplace spooky, where's the Craybaby Bridge, where's the white Lady
Speaker 1: walk or the lady in white or whatever? And those
Speaker 1: they know all those places too. I did when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, right, The adults didn't pass it around
Speaker 1: like kids did. And I think that's the way a
Speaker 1: lot of these urban legends. And in the South, particularly
Speaker 1: in the Appalachians, there's there's a cry Baby bridge in
Speaker 1: every little community. And I don't know if it's like
Speaker 1: a version of the telephone game, or somebody heard it
Speaker 1: and then just retold it, but they added in a
Speaker 1: location that their audience would know, or if there's really
Speaker 1: I mean Texas, there's cry Baby bridge there. And then
Speaker 1: the same with the tunnel where the or the there
Speaker 1: it's a railroad track, I think where the kids put
Speaker 1: their hands on the car and push you over.
Speaker 2: Oh right, yes, there's a.
Speaker 1: Railroad tunnel in the Kingsport, Tennessee. It's like that since
Speaker 1: about tunnel. There's just the same stories in different locations.
Speaker 1: So it makes me think somewhere sometimes that really happened
Speaker 1: and it just got passed around. Another example, my mom's
Speaker 1: from East Tennessee. She grew up, was born in the
Speaker 1: CAD's Cove area or the Smoky's like my grandmother. And
Speaker 1: then my dad's from Middle Tennessee over on the Cumberland Plateau.
Speaker 1: But a lot of the stories that she would tell
Speaker 1: that she heard as a child, he had heard them
Speaker 1: as a child as well, even though they were six
Speaker 1: years apart, but in a local setting, you know, hours
Speaker 1: apart by car so again, and this was before the
Speaker 1: days of you know, and I guess they could have
Speaker 1: heard it on the Red You or something, but this
Speaker 1: was stories that they told around the woodstove in the
Speaker 1: wintertimer in front of the fireplace. But to me, that's
Speaker 1: fascinating the way these stories get passed around and they change.
Speaker 1: It is it's like a version of telephone game. Did
Speaker 1: you ever play that when you're in school?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, things are vastly different sometimes by the
Speaker 2: end of the game.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well you mentioned being there enter near Minerva. Now
Speaker 1: there's something about you can agree or choose to disagree
Speaker 1: with me here. There's something about Ohio in general that
Speaker 1: has the strangeness to it that there's the little pockets
Speaker 1: of weirdness there. And I mean that in the kindest
Speaker 1: and best possible way, that's good. But yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know if you know the brothers from the belief Ale podcast, Chris,
Speaker 1: Jeremy and John. They're out of Ohio and they are
Speaker 1: among my three favorite Ohioans, and they've investigated a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff there and realize that there's just something strange there. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. I think we've got something here between
Speaker 2: the we're in the foothills of the Appalachians and then
Speaker 2: we've got the rivers all around here. I think when
Speaker 2: you get the confluence of all of those things together,
Speaker 2: plus the history, just the history in the area, the
Speaker 2: tribes that were once here, the mountain builders that were here. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we've got We've got a lot going on in this area,
Speaker 2: that's for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then of course you have stuff around the
Speaker 1: West Virginia area and the Kentucky areas that goes over
Speaker 1: into Ohio. Moss Man and the point pleasant things and
Speaker 1: how that all connects. But yeah, what I was on
Speaker 1: their show, they interview me. That's one of my favorite
Speaker 1: interviews that I've ever done, if not they favorite. I
Speaker 1: said to them that I was sharing some my Ohio
Speaker 1: experiences as a child, and I said, you know, any
Speaker 1: state they gave us Dean Martin Larry Flint and the
Speaker 1: Cramps is a great state. And they laughed at that.
Speaker 1: You know, we've had astronauts and presidents and stuff.
Speaker 2: But yep, excuse me, how to.
Speaker 1: Clear my throat? But again, that's just divergent things that
Speaker 1: I could think of that make it strange. It's not
Speaker 1: like it's not your normal state, if there is a normal,
Speaker 1: but there's just there's an extra weirdness there that I
Speaker 1: can appreciate, and it sounds like you can too.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Yeah, I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 1: Now. Minerva Monster, you mentioned that for those of listening
Speaker 1: that might not have heard of that. Can you give
Speaker 1: us a little background on what the Minerva Monster is?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's a bigfoot creature. That was a bigfoot
Speaker 2: creature that was seen in nineteen seventy eight in Minerva, Ohio.
Speaker 2: And he made his appearance with the and why did
Speaker 2: their name just escape my escape my brain? Oh, for
Speaker 2: goodness sakes, he made his appearance in Mi Nerva with
Speaker 2: a family and they called the local sheriff's department, and
Speaker 2: of course people came out and looked and pretty soon
Speaker 2: it got in the newspapers and then without fail, people
Speaker 2: were showing up from all over the place to try
Speaker 2: to hunt this monster. And yeah, that was I mean,
Speaker 2: the family faced a decent amount of ridicule and it
Speaker 2: wasn't until we had the documentary come out that some
Speaker 2: of them actually got a little more let's see, how
Speaker 2: do you say, like a little more acknowledgment. I guess
Speaker 2: things were put the peace a little bit better when
Speaker 2: the documentary came out, Like, oh, okay, I guess maybe
Speaker 2: that did happen. You guys weren't just making stuff up
Speaker 2: at the time, which why anybody would make that up.
Speaker 2: I don't know why anybody would want that kind of attention,
Speaker 2: especially then, but that was what happened. It was in
Speaker 2: the seventies and there were a rash of sightings. So
Speaker 2: it was the Caton family, that's right, the Caton family.
Speaker 2: I knew it'd come to me eventually.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I enjoy those stories like that kind of
Speaker 1: a one off. I mean, I don't know necessarily that
Speaker 1: that is or not, but the things where it just
Speaker 1: happened over a short period of time and maybe a
Speaker 1: handful of people were like here in New England and Massachusetts.
Speaker 1: You have the Dover Demon, which was basically spotted over
Speaker 1: two nights, and I think it was nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: seventy eight, and then it was just gone and nobody
Speaker 1: ever saw anything again, although now looking back, there's people
Speaker 1: that claimed that something similar to that had been seen
Speaker 1: before and since. But the story that I'm familiar with,
Speaker 1: it just happened. And I love that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: I love to go to those places. I'm more of
Speaker 1: a legendarypper than I am an investigator. I like to
Speaker 1: just go and if you will, basking the ambiance and say,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm in Dover, this is where this happened.
Speaker 1: I have interesting story about that. Back in the eighties,
Speaker 1: I'd going to visit a friend that was going to
Speaker 1: NYU and one weekend they said, hey, we're going to
Speaker 1: go to this house party. Go with us, and it
Speaker 1: was in Massachusetts. It was a good drive and ended
Speaker 1: up we were in Dover. We went to these people's
Speaker 1: house out in the suburbs and they're like, so, Steve,
Speaker 1: what do you think of Dover? And I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: it's it's different, you know, I'm Tennessee. And then it
Speaker 1: was kind of lost ball in highways in New York
Speaker 1: and even more so at that time in New England.
Speaker 1: And I said, oh, I think it's great. I said,
Speaker 1: I've heard about the Dover Demon. They're like the Dover Demon,
Speaker 1: and they start yelling for this guy. They're like Bill, Bill,
Speaker 1: come here, come here, and this guy. And then there
Speaker 1: was two guys named Bill, one William and the other
Speaker 1: was named Bill. I don't remember which one exactly that
Speaker 1: I met, but he was at this house party in
Speaker 1: Dover and he came out and he just he seemed
Speaker 1: kind of embarrassed or kind of humbled because his friends
Speaker 1: are making a big deal. But I spoke with one
Speaker 1: of the witnesses about it a year or two after
Speaker 1: it happened, and again he believed what he saw, sure,
Speaker 1: And I believe it was the one that drew the
Speaker 1: initial pictures of it. So if again, there was a
Speaker 1: Bill and a William that were eyewitnesses, but I don't know,
Speaker 1: you know, lost in the mists of time. I was
Speaker 1: in college at the time, and a lot of that
Speaker 1: is in a haze.
Speaker 2: I understand the years after the fact. If you were
Speaker 2: to come to Minerva now and you would go past
Speaker 2: the Caton's house, they still live in the same house.
Speaker 2: They've embraced it. Now they have a big foot statue
Speaker 2: outside of their home. Yeah, they'll talk to you about
Speaker 2: it now.
Speaker 1: And I talked about that it was on this show,
Speaker 1: or I do a blog called Around the Campfire. I
Speaker 1: might have talked about it over there. How a lot
Speaker 1: of times communities have learned to embrace these cryptids or
Speaker 1: these strange occurrences and they turn it into something that's
Speaker 1: good for the local economy. They saw soupers. They have
Speaker 1: a festival and they get people talking about it, like
Speaker 1: they have the Mothman Festival and then right the flat
Speaker 1: Woods Monster. You know, that's a big deal. And I think,
Speaker 1: what better way to share this than to make it
Speaker 1: a community wide thing. And yeah, it's kind of kitchen
Speaker 1: with the souvenirs and some of that, but it's fun
Speaker 1: and it gets an interest up. I mean, kids will
Speaker 1: always remember, you know, when I was a kid, they
Speaker 1: took me to the Mothman Festival, you know, and we
Speaker 1: saw this and we saw that, And I think that's
Speaker 1: a great way to continue interest in all things weird
Speaker 1: and spooky.
Speaker 2: Oh, I agree. I think it's one of the smartest
Speaker 2: things that community could do right, especially right now, it
Speaker 2: seems that pop culture is wanting more of these stories.
Speaker 2: There were wanting to hear about more monsters, and these
Speaker 2: festivals are just they're doing well. So you're not only
Speaker 2: preserving the story, you're helping, like you said, helping the
Speaker 2: local economy. I don't know what a town like Point
Speaker 2: Pleasant would be like without the Mothman Festival.
Speaker 1: It'd be a new age mill town without the mill
Speaker 1: I agree.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's one of the best things that they
Speaker 2: could have done for their for their town was to
Speaker 2: have that Mothman festival and have the museum and really
Speaker 2: embrace it and not shun it so much. Now there
Speaker 2: are places where we've been uh Louisiana, Missouri, I believe
Speaker 2: is the name of the town where Momo was the
Speaker 2: which was another Bigfoot creature in the seventies nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 2: I believe they embraced the story of Momo, the whole
Speaker 2: craze of it early on after the initial sightings, but
Speaker 2: then have shunned it. So when small town Monsters went
Speaker 2: over to do the Momo documentary, they were actually told
Speaker 2: by some locals, you might as well just leave because
Speaker 2: you're not wanted here. But that's another river town that
Speaker 2: I think would greatly benefit if they were to embrace
Speaker 2: Momo and start to have a festival or something, draw
Speaker 2: people in, bring bring tourists, and there's there is something
Speaker 2: encrypted tourism, you know that and scared tourism. Good ways
Speaker 2: to bring bring in money to the local economy and
Speaker 2: then to keep the story alive as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and especially with some of the places now that
Speaker 1: they're doing excuse me, like the the overnight ghost hunts
Speaker 1: and things. Those things would have been demolished or just
Speaker 1: left to collapse back into the earth, like Brushing Mountain
Speaker 1: Penitentiary in Pittross, Tennessee. You know, now you can go.
Speaker 1: They've they've getten some wonderful EVPs and experiences and stories
Speaker 1: out of there. Some of the true crime locations of
Speaker 1: Aliska Axe murder house, you know, the Lizzie Borden House
Speaker 1: that's a bed and breakfast. Now, you know, it's just
Speaker 1: and it's kind of morbid, but there's I think just
Speaker 1: that's one of our characteristics as humans. We haven't innate
Speaker 1: curiosity about the darker side of things. Said, I'm thankful
Speaker 1: for that. It's provided me the opportunity to go to
Speaker 1: a lot of places and talk to a lot of
Speaker 1: people in front of a lot of people, and and
Speaker 1: you know, write a lot of books and things and mh.
Speaker 1: But yeah, embrace the strange.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And having these places open to the public
Speaker 2: allows for the folklore to continue, right, We get to
Speaker 2: actually be a part of it, morphing and changing, like
Speaker 2: in real time, something like Lizzie Borden House or like
Speaker 2: you mentioned Brushy Mountain when we're when we're now, it's
Speaker 2: focused on ghost hunting in the paranormal. Now that gets
Speaker 2: to take on a whole other chapter in the story
Speaker 2: of those areas, and that's pretty awesome. We have a
Speaker 2: place not far from here, Mansfield Reformatory, which is where
Speaker 2: Shoshank Redemption was filmed.
Speaker 1: I heard a lot about it. Have you been there?
Speaker 2: Oh, I've been there multiple times.
Speaker 1: And do you share with our audience a little bit
Speaker 1: of your experiences there? I've only seen it on but.
Speaker 2: Wow, sure, sure. Yeah. It's it's a gorgeous a gorgeous
Speaker 2: piece of architecture. It just looks like a castle when
Speaker 2: you drive up up to it. It's one of my
Speaker 2: favorite buildings. But the Mansield Reformatory is where I had
Speaker 2: probably the most terrifying encounter that I've that I've had
Speaker 2: to that I've witnessed. And it's weird. It's weird to
Speaker 2: stay terrifying because I wasn't It's not like a bigfoot
Speaker 2: running out of the woods, you know, and trying to
Speaker 2: eat you or something. I didn't think that I was
Speaker 2: going to die or anything like that. But up in
Speaker 2: one area of the Reformatory, it's called the West Attic,
Speaker 2: it is where once upon a time, okay, when the
Speaker 2: Reformatory was built. It was built literally as a reformatory,
Speaker 2: meaning that they wanted to reform the people that came
Speaker 2: in there, they had some issues. They would come in,
Speaker 2: they'd stay for a while and then hopefully be able
Speaker 2: to go back out to society and join the rest
Speaker 2: of the world without an issue. It was never meant
Speaker 2: to be a place for murderers and those who could
Speaker 2: never go back to society. But in the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: the Ohio State Penitentiary, which is where they had death row,
Speaker 2: there was a horrible fire. This was around Columbus, a
Speaker 2: horrible fire and the place burned down. Lots of people died,
Speaker 2: but they had inmates then that needed to be rehomed
Speaker 2: for a little while until they could rebuild the penitentiary.
Speaker 2: So what they did was they shipped some of these
Speaker 2: hardened criminals up to Mansfield and they put them in
Speaker 2: the West Attic, which is just one massive room that
Speaker 2: is about half the size of the prison itself because
Speaker 2: it's all in one wing, the size of one whole wing,
Speaker 2: just one big open room, and they shoved all the
Speaker 2: guys in there and just kind of left them be
Speaker 2: to their own devices. So today, as you can imagine,
Speaker 2: from what I understand, the guards didn't even go into
Speaker 2: that room. They just kind of let them do their
Speaker 2: own thing, but the them up in the West Attic
Speaker 2: so that they would be away from the other criminals
Speaker 2: that were in the regular cells. They didn't want the
Speaker 2: bad influence to infiltrate. So anyway, today, when you go
Speaker 2: to mansoord or Formatory and you're going on a paranormal investigation,
Speaker 2: if you go up to the West Attic, what it's
Speaker 2: most famously known for is you go and sit. There
Speaker 2: are no windows at all in this room, there's just
Speaker 2: one door in and out, and you go to the
Speaker 2: far end of the room. You sit down and you
Speaker 2: just watch, and as you're watching, you'll start to see
Speaker 2: like ghost lights start to fly around the room different colors,
Speaker 2: So that in itself is pretty neat. That's one of
Speaker 2: my favorite things to see or like the ghost lights
Speaker 2: like that. But what happened when we were there, and
Speaker 2: this has happened multiple times now that I've been there,
Speaker 2: but the first time that it happened, it was the
Speaker 2: most stunning. Of course, we were sitting there and these
Speaker 2: lights showed up and then all of a sudden, on
Speaker 2: the floor at the far end of the room, this
Speaker 2: light being it's like the opposite of a shadow person,
Speaker 2: Like a shadow person that you see, it has the
Speaker 2: defining characteristics of a human, but it's in shadow. Except
Speaker 2: that was this, except it was in light. Because the
Speaker 2: room was completely dark. We were sitting there in the
Speaker 2: pitch black, and this was illuminated being that was walking
Speaker 2: back and forth, and it would walk closer to us,
Speaker 2: and it would get within I have no idea how
Speaker 2: many feet because it was dark, so it was very
Speaker 2: difficult to gauge distance. But when it would get fairly close,
Speaker 2: then it would drop down on all fours and crawl
Speaker 2: at you, and then it would back up, but it
Speaker 2: would pace in the room, and it was illuminated. It
Speaker 2: wasn't like I mean, it was a self contained light
Speaker 2: system light source, but it illuminated enough that when it
Speaker 2: would go by the wall, you could see the walls
Speaker 2: start to light up, so we could tell when it
Speaker 2: was by the wall. We could tell when it was
Speaker 2: by the cross beams that were in the middle of
Speaker 2: the room, because those would light up with it. That
Speaker 2: was terrifying to me, just because that shouldn't exist, or
Speaker 2: at least in my mind, shouldn't exist. And so that
Speaker 2: is the probably the most terrified I've ever been on
Speaker 2: an investigation. But after I had that experience, I was
Speaker 2: not alone. There were other people with me, so at
Speaker 2: least I had other people to verify what we had
Speaker 2: all seen. But after I had that experience, I would
Speaker 2: go on different podcasts or talk to other friends that
Speaker 2: are in the paranormal community, and I would try to
Speaker 2: explain this, and no one seemed to have a similar story.
Speaker 2: They didn't know, like, I don't know what to call this.
Speaker 2: I still have no name for it, And people would
Speaker 2: talk about it and want to know if they could
Speaker 2: see it, if they went as well, and Luckily, I
Speaker 2: was fortunate enough to go back to Mansfield just a
Speaker 2: few months ago with some friends who had known the story,
Speaker 2: and I told them, let's go up to West Attic
Speaker 2: and just see if anything happens. You know, I can't
Speaker 2: guarantee that you're gonna have the same experience as I did.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but the night that I saw it,
Speaker 2: we were able to see it multiple times throughout the evening.
Speaker 2: We would leave and go to other areas of the
Speaker 2: prison and then come back and that figure would show
Speaker 2: up again. Well, sure enough, a couple months ago, when
Speaker 2: I was there with a whole new group of people,
Speaker 2: they all saw it as well. It manifested again. They
Speaker 2: all saw it. They were all equally as nervous as
Speaker 2: I was, and they it would get close and then
Speaker 2: a couple of the women would say, turn the lights on,
Speaker 2: turn the flashlight on, flashlight on, and then of course
Speaker 2: when the lights on, then you don't see anything. But
Speaker 2: that's my scary, scariest story from ghost hunting in general,
Speaker 2: but also my story from Mansfield. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's amazing And if I'm ever in the area,
Speaker 1: I definitely want to check it out. Now, did the
Speaker 1: people you were with either time or both times. Did
Speaker 1: they see pretty much what you saw or was it
Speaker 1: different experiences for different people maybe based on their cognition,
Speaker 1: or was it a shared experience.
Speaker 2: So it's interesting that you asked that. The first time
Speaker 2: that I was there, the first time I had that experience,
Speaker 2: we all seem to see the same thing because we
Speaker 2: would sit there and as we're seeing it, we're like,
Speaker 2: what are you seeing? What are you seeing? And asking
Speaker 2: each other consistently, and everybody's repeating the same things that
Speaker 2: they're seeing the same colored same colored lights, same action
Speaker 2: of the figure, and so on. So we were all
Speaker 2: seeing the same thing this last time that we were there.
Speaker 2: Everybody was seeing it, but it seemed to be and
Speaker 2: this was odd as well. It seemed to be doing
Speaker 2: different things depending on who was seeing it. Like I
Speaker 2: could see it walk along the wall, because I could
Speaker 2: see the wall illuminate. But as I'm saying that, someone
Speaker 2: else is saying, it's coming right down the middle of
Speaker 2: the floor, or you know, it's coming to the other
Speaker 2: side of the room like they seem to be. Or
Speaker 2: the one person said they saw it walk up the wall,
Speaker 2: which I didn't see that at all, but they were
Speaker 2: seeing different things and sometimes different colors than what I
Speaker 2: was seeing, which was odd, and.
Speaker 1: I've always found that interesting. But I liken it to
Speaker 1: the parable, if you will, or the Blind Men and
Speaker 1: the elephant. You know. Once, oh, it's got a trunk,
Speaker 1: I said, No, it's flat and wide. The other No,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have a trunk, it has a tail, you know.
Speaker 1: So even though they're doing the same thing, there's a
Speaker 1: different takeaway, but yet they all experienced the same thing.
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of like that, and again, just
Speaker 1: a different perception. Maybe it presents itself to different people
Speaker 1: in different ways. Some of the things that I've experienced,
Speaker 1: I had people right along with me that had either
Speaker 1: a lesser experience or no experience at all. And I
Speaker 1: came to conclusion a few years ago because every house
Speaker 1: I've ever lived in was haunted to some degree, and
Speaker 1: I finally decided, it's not the houses that are haunted,
Speaker 1: it's me. These things choose to reveal themselves to me
Speaker 1: for whatever reason. I lived in a very very active
Speaker 1: house in Las Vegas, probably one of the most active
Speaker 1: places I've ever lived. Yet the person I shared the
Speaker 1: house with that lived there before I did, they'd never
Speaker 1: experienced anything. And it's like when I got there, then
Speaker 1: all hell broke loose, and then they eventually began to
Speaker 1: experience things, or at least that they'd admit to. I
Speaker 1: think before maybe they were just in denial of what
Speaker 1: was going on there. But again, I don't know what
Speaker 1: it is about me. Something imbued to me. Is that
Speaker 1: the negative rh factor and the green eyes? Is it
Speaker 1: all that? Am I an alien? Or you know? I
Speaker 1: subscribe to that theory. I don't think I'm from this planet.
Speaker 1: I'm just visiting here, got stranded here or something. Take
Speaker 1: me home. As long as I can take my wife
Speaker 1: with me, let's go. And she's like me, She's always
Speaker 1: been an outsider, even among the outsiders. Is I'm not
Speaker 1: from this planet? I would go to family reunions and
Speaker 1: things and things. I can't really be related to these people,
Speaker 1: can I? And I had had proof, you know, had
Speaker 1: pictures of me right after I was born and all
Speaker 1: that I used to take. You know, am I adopted
Speaker 1: or something? What happened to me? And you know my
Speaker 1: father and mother are on a spaceship somewhere. They're gonna
Speaker 1: come back for me one day if I get abducted.
Speaker 1: They took me home, but no, I was. I was
Speaker 1: born there. My grandmother witnessed the birth and according to her,
Speaker 1: my mom was knocked out. That was back when they
Speaker 1: gave women in labor twilight sleep. But I was born
Speaker 1: with a veil over my face what they call it
Speaker 1: in southern Appalachina the call just the amniotic sac was
Speaker 1: still stretched over my head and had to have it
Speaker 1: cut away. But in my superstitious granny's eyes, that was
Speaker 1: that marked me as a space child. Out of all
Speaker 1: the grandchildren, and there was a lot. My mom came
Speaker 1: from a big family, her and nine brothers. I was
Speaker 1: the only grandchild born with that condition, and that put
Speaker 1: a bullseye on me as far as Granny was concerned,
Speaker 1: and I was the one she had to pass her
Speaker 1: legacy onto. And a lot of stuff like that that
Speaker 1: I've read about, it does tend to skip a generation. Now.
Speaker 1: My mom had some precognition and things that I don't
Speaker 1: claim to have any special abilities or anything. It just
Speaker 1: is what it is. But I know things sometimes that
Speaker 1: I have no way of knowing, not as strongly as
Speaker 1: my grandmother did. But I think to some degree you
Speaker 1: have that and script you wrote for me on thirteen
Speaker 1: past midnight. You talked about your children shame things and
Speaker 1: experiencing things that leg you believe that maybe they were
Speaker 1: reincarnated or had had experiences. You want to expound on
Speaker 1: that a little bit for our audience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this happened. I have three children, and this
Speaker 2: happened with two of them, my two oldest. I remember.
Speaker 2: My oldest daughter was probably three at the time, two
Speaker 2: or three maybe, well probably three because of how much
Speaker 2: she was talking, I guess. But we were on our
Speaker 2: way home from my parents. It was Christmas, I do believe,
Speaker 2: and we were stopped at a stop light and she
Speaker 2: looked out the window and she looked at the pedestrian
Speaker 2: signal and she asked what that was and I said, well,
Speaker 2: that's to let you know whether you should walk or not,
Speaker 2: you know whether it's safe to cross the street. And
Speaker 2: she was like, oh, okay, yeah, I remember, but I
Speaker 2: didn't know. I didn't know what that was like or
Speaker 2: how'd she say? I forgot it? I know that now,
Speaker 2: but I had forgotten it then. And I'm like, what
Speaker 2: do you mean? And she said, well, back before, when
Speaker 2: I was really old, I was coming home from getting
Speaker 2: groceries and I could see my house across the street.
Speaker 2: So I was almost home and I saw that sign
Speaker 2: and it was lit up, so it was lit up
Speaker 2: to say that she shouldn't cross. She's like, but I
Speaker 2: forgot what it said or what that meant. So I
Speaker 2: crossed the street anyway, and I got hit by a
Speaker 2: car and then an ambulance came and picked me up
Speaker 2: and took me to the hospital. And she was like,
Speaker 2: nobody was at the hospital. I was alone and it
Speaker 2: was cold and it was dark. But she and she's like,
Speaker 2: I was so scared, and I'm like, what do you
Speaker 2: And as she's explaining this, she's sobbing, she's just crying,
Speaker 2: like hysterically, and we're trying to calm her down because
Speaker 2: we're driving and you know, a kid in the back
Speaker 2: seat that's freaking out is no fun whenever you're you're
Speaker 2: trying to drive home in the middle of the night.
Speaker 2: But uh, she was. She just kept going on. She
Speaker 2: was very hung up on the being cold and dark
Speaker 2: and alone part of it. So we eventually got her
Speaker 2: calm down, and we'd asked her some questions after that,
Speaker 2: and essentially she just had this memory of her death.
Speaker 2: Her everything was cold and dark until all of a
Speaker 2: sudden there was a light and then she was here
Speaker 2: with this family, is what she said. So she just
Speaker 2: had this story. She said she was very old when
Speaker 2: it had occurred. And I think she gave me a
Speaker 2: name at one point in time, but it was just
Speaker 2: the first name. And that's not enough for me to
Speaker 2: go on to find any records or anything like that.
Speaker 2: But that was her story. And then it was two
Speaker 2: years later my son, who was then three as well,
Speaker 2: he's the middle child. We were sitting in the car
Speaker 2: waiting for his older sister to get out of school actually,
Speaker 2: and he said he saw me on my phone. I
Speaker 2: was playing a game of some sort, like I don't
Speaker 2: know if it was candy Crush or something like that.
Speaker 2: And he's like, oh, my, my grandma used to play
Speaker 2: that or my I think he used the word that
Speaker 2: I we never use like I think he might have
Speaker 2: said mema or something like that that we don't use
Speaker 2: that word. We've never he's never said that before, you know,
Speaker 2: she used to play games like that. And I'm like,
Speaker 2: what are you talking about, thinking about my mom or
Speaker 2: my husband's mom, and like they don't play games like this.
Speaker 2: He's like, no, no, no, my mema from before used
Speaker 2: to play those games. I'm like, okay, well tell me
Speaker 2: about her. And he's like, well, she was really she
Speaker 2: was really nice and I lived with her and she
Speaker 2: was she was just really great and I loved her
Speaker 2: very much. He's like, it's really sad what happened. And
Speaker 2: I'm like, what happened? And he started to get emotional
Speaker 2: as well, and he described living with his grandmother, that
Speaker 2: they had been a wonderful family and one night or day,
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if it was a night or day,
Speaker 2: but somebody came into the house and had attacked his grandmother,
Speaker 2: and he tried to intervene to save her, but wasn't
Speaker 2: able to do so in time. Therefore, he then spiraled
Speaker 2: and he said he was so upset that he wasn't
Speaker 2: able to save his grandma that he got into a
Speaker 2: car and he started driving really really fast, and he said,
Speaker 2: I drove really fast, and then I lost control and
Speaker 2: I hit a tree. And he said, I even remember
Speaker 2: what it was like when I hit the tree, and
Speaker 2: he's like describing in gory detail how he hit the
Speaker 2: dashboard and so on. It was horrible. He's like, but
Speaker 2: then it's like I flew out of there, and I
Speaker 2: flew right into your belly. And I'm like, what do
Speaker 2: you mean you flew into my belly. He's like, well,
Speaker 2: you were sitting in the living room. He's like, you
Speaker 2: were sitting here, or you were sitting there in the
Speaker 2: lit room and you were watching TV and eating, and
Speaker 2: I flew into your belly. And then I was ready
Speaker 2: to come into this new family. And what was really
Speaker 2: odd is that, in real like an actual time, whenever
Speaker 2: I went into labor with him, I was sitting in
Speaker 2: the living room and I was I had just gotten food,
Speaker 2: sat down, started eating, and I was watching wrestling when
Speaker 2: the first contraction hit and we had to get to
Speaker 2: the hospital right away. He was a very quick labor.
Speaker 2: But yeah, both of them had those stories. Now, my
Speaker 2: third child, she's she almost seems new to the world
Speaker 2: in a lot of ways. She doesn't I don't know.
Speaker 2: Everything seems new to her, at least from watching her grow.
Speaker 2: Everything seems new and exciting. And she's not the old
Speaker 2: soul kind of thing that you hear about. But yeah,
Speaker 2: both children had that story of what had occurred to
Speaker 2: them in their previous life and that they both their
Speaker 2: their families before so, and they both had a horrible
Speaker 2: ending too. It wasn't like they had this nice story like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I grew old and I just passed away with my family.
Speaker 1: No traumatic there, But that's still amazing. And to hear
Speaker 1: that come out of the mouth of a three year
Speaker 1: old that doesn't have any concept of any of this
Speaker 1: and just so matter of factly, and you know that's no.
Speaker 1: Kids have great imaginations and stuff. But I have a
Speaker 1: whole narrative like that, your entire previous story that would
Speaker 1: that would take some doing there. I believe there's something
Speaker 1: to all that. I've had other friends that where their
Speaker 1: child would wake up in the night crying for one
Speaker 1: parent or another or grandparents. Well they're right here, No,
Speaker 1: I mean the ones from before my other mommy, my
Speaker 1: other daddy, when I lived, you know, for and again
Speaker 1: small children that had no concept of anything like that.
Speaker 1: It's it models the mind and it gives you something
Speaker 1: to ponder, something to think about.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and they grew out of those memories as well,
Speaker 2: if you were to ask them now. I'm glad that
Speaker 2: I wrote them down when I did and shared them
Speaker 2: with you, and they've been recorded because when they got
Speaker 2: to a certain age, they lost those memories.
Speaker 1: So and on hearing that now of what's their response
Speaker 1: to that anything?
Speaker 2: Yes, Well, my oldest just rolls her eyes. She rolls
Speaker 2: her eyes at anything that's weird or strange. So she's like, yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: mom my son. He just he's like, yeah, I think
Speaker 2: I remember saying that maybe, but he doesn't. It just
Speaker 2: doesn't phaze him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's strange. A lot of away. A lot
Speaker 1: of those memories, early early childhood memories like that lead people.
Speaker 1: I've known people that couldn't remember anything before they were
Speaker 1: four or five years old. But I can remember a
Speaker 1: bit of detail, like when I was still in diapers
Speaker 1: and stuff, and just again I've been blessed with a
Speaker 1: near photographic memory and it goes way back. Youngest memory
Speaker 1: that's when I was six months old.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: I remember going to a place with my dad where
Speaker 1: a house was being built and they just had the
Speaker 1: foundation and I had a roof on it, and they
Speaker 1: had part of the interior wall started. It was basically
Speaker 1: just a big open space. I remember him to pick
Speaker 1: me up and put me up in there and I
Speaker 1: ran around on the sub flooring. And I mentioned that
Speaker 1: to my dad when I was like probably in my
Speaker 1: thirties or something. When I was little. Where do we
Speaker 1: go to one time? And I described that scenario and
Speaker 1: he looked at me and he said, well, that was
Speaker 1: the house you grew up in. But he said you
Speaker 1: were only six months old. He said, there's no way
Speaker 1: you can remember that, but yet I did. So I
Speaker 1: didn't know where it was. I didn't know it was
Speaker 1: the house I grew up in. I didn't remember that part,
Speaker 1: but I remembered being there and describing that situation exactly
Speaker 1: as it happened. So starring ch house some things like
Speaker 1: that will sticking it and other things maybe have no
Speaker 1: memory of, or something that I did in elementary school
Speaker 1: or even high school, I'll come back to me like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, I remember when that happened. But I've had
Speaker 1: that happened too, where I would mention something that happened
Speaker 1: in school years and people that was there with them
Speaker 1: and I don't remember that, like yay, you were right
Speaker 1: there with me. We talked about maybe it was just
Speaker 1: so traumatic for them they blotted it out. I don't know.
Speaker 1: But getting back into the school part of this now,
Speaker 1: I mentioned in the introduction there that you're a classics professor,
Speaker 1: How do your students feel about your other fields of
Speaker 1: interest in fields of devort? Is that something you ever
Speaker 1: discussed with them or do you keep your lives separate?
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're pretty separate. They're not aware of it unless
Speaker 2: they were to look into my name, I guess, so
Speaker 2: that isn't something that comes up now. I did actually
Speaker 2: last fall speak with a college class that was not mine.
Speaker 2: It was an English class, I believe, just talking to
Speaker 2: them about kind of following, following what you enjoy whenever
Speaker 2: you go out into the professional world, and then hoping that,
Speaker 2: hoping that that becomes something that's fruitful later. So they
Speaker 2: were asking me all kinds of questions about the world
Speaker 2: of the weird and how I got to be in
Speaker 2: there and how that actually became a job, because that's
Speaker 2: always the hope, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that and it is. It's such a
Speaker 1: blessing to get to do what I do and make
Speaker 1: a living doing it, you know, Otherwise I'd be working
Speaker 1: in a bookstore or a record store or pumping gas
Speaker 1: or something, because I'm not fit for any kind of
Speaker 1: normal employment, which I've proven over time, and I've worn
Speaker 1: a lot of hats. I've been a network administrator, have
Speaker 1: been technical support for a large medical group. I've worked construction, demolition,
Speaker 1: done a little bit of everything, but writing and talking
Speaker 1: seems to be my forte. My dad gave me that
Speaker 1: when I was little, because I talked a lot and
Speaker 1: he said, boy, he said, if you can ever find
Speaker 1: a way to get paid for talking, you'll be set.
Speaker 1: And here I am so thanks that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He called it.
Speaker 1: Same one that used to accuse me of having the
Speaker 1: ability to talk until I knew what I wanted to say.
Speaker 1: And that's true. I've always been very good, had the
Speaker 1: gift of gab. And one of my favorite classes that
Speaker 1: I ever took in college was extraneous speaking. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: extemporaneous speaking. And people were panicking. You know, you had
Speaker 1: they gave you your topic on an index card and you
Speaker 1: had five minutes to prepare. And I said to the prophet,
Speaker 1: I said, that's not extemporaneous. You're giving me five minutes.
Speaker 1: I said, I want you to hand me my card
Speaker 1: when I get on the podium, and he said, you're
Speaker 1: sure you want to do this, Yes, sir, I did it,
Speaker 1: and I gave a wonderful talk. It was about the
Speaker 1: recite peace treaty or something, but I knew enough about
Speaker 1: it to compare and contrast and get through it. And
Speaker 1: he was impressed, and he said, I bet you can't
Speaker 1: do it again, and I said, I bet I can.
Speaker 1: I could do that every time. And it's just I've
Speaker 1: always read a lot and just have a broad base
Speaker 1: of knowledge, and it has provided me with ability to
Speaker 1: jack of all trades, if you will, polymath. I know
Speaker 1: a little bit about a lot of different things, but
Speaker 1: I'm really not an expert in any area. And in fact,
Speaker 1: nothing scares me away any faster than to be described
Speaker 1: as an expert in the paranormal or cryptis or anything,
Speaker 1: or for somebody to be introduced to me there, well,
Speaker 1: this is Joe Smith. He's an expert in the paranormal. Okay.
Speaker 1: I don't think there are any experts. I think we're
Speaker 1: all on a quest for more knowledge. And I gave
Speaker 1: up looking for the answers a long time ago, Heather,
Speaker 1: I've often said that now I'm just looking for the
Speaker 1: next set of questions. If we had all the answers,
Speaker 1: my journey, my personal journey, wouldn't have been near as
Speaker 1: much fun and enjoyable as it has been, and soriah
Speaker 1: Askath from where the road go. He once quipped it,
Speaker 1: it's like this big jigsaw puzzle that we're trying to
Speaker 1: put together. We don't have the box to even see
Speaker 1: what the picture is that we're trying to make. And
Speaker 1: yet the farther we get into it, we discovered that
Speaker 1: some cosmic joker has mixed maybe a dozen puzzles together.
Speaker 1: So maybe the one that we're working on there are
Speaker 1: pieces that don't fit anywhere. And I thought that was
Speaker 1: very good description.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with that. That seems to be definitely
Speaker 2: the way it is. Always coming away with more questions
Speaker 2: and answers, that's for sure, And that's the.
Speaker 1: Way it's supposed to be. And when I've talked about
Speaker 1: my first full body apparition, long story short of the
Speaker 1: little boy ran out from behind a car that was
Speaker 1: stopped at an intersection. The driver didn't act like he
Speaker 1: saw it or whatever at all, didn't acknowledge it in
Speaker 1: the least ran kund of candy corner down into our yard,
Speaker 1: fell down and disappeared a small child. I didn't take
Speaker 1: my eyes off the spot, went straight to the spot.
Speaker 1: Nothing there, Nothing I could have mistaken for a child. Nothing,
Speaker 1: no hole or anything that somebody could have followed into.
Speaker 1: I knew every inch of that yard, and we lived
Speaker 1: quite a way back off the road, two hundred and
Speaker 1: thirteen feet from the edge of our garage to the
Speaker 1: edge of the road. I measured it later in life
Speaker 1: when I was doing BMX prints, but I was about
Speaker 1: one hundred feet out in the yard. So this happened,
Speaker 1: went right to the spot and nothing there. I even
Speaker 1: went and got a shovel out of my dad's tool
Speaker 1: shed and dug in that spot to see if there
Speaker 1: was something buried there or something. And I told that
Speaker 1: story Transisco Murdock and she said, you know, stay, you've
Speaker 1: never put down that shovel. You're still digging that. I am.
Speaker 1: I'm still looking for the disappearing child. That was what
Speaker 1: started me on my journey. And I asked Mike Granny
Speaker 1: about that. She was very intuitive, self described gypsy witch.
Speaker 1: I don't know where the gypsy part came in, but
Speaker 1: tot fortunes, red tea leaves and coffee grounds, animal and trails,
Speaker 1: things like that. And I asked her about that and
Speaker 1: she said, well, very cryptic answer. Sometimes you see things
Speaker 1: that are meant for you to see. Other times you
Speaker 1: see things that are meant for other people to see
Speaker 1: and you just happen to see it. Sometimes you'll just
Speaker 1: see things that there's no rhyme or reason, no explanation,
Speaker 1: that you'll never know, even in retrospect. So there you go.
Speaker 1: I don't know, and I still don't. But it started
Speaker 1: me on this journey. What was that? It didn't scare me.
Speaker 1: It's just like, what was that? You know, what just happened?
Speaker 1: What did I just witness? And off I went.
Speaker 2: How old were you when that happened?
Speaker 1: I was four?
Speaker 2: Wow? Wow?
Speaker 1: And that's I see. I've talked to a lot of
Speaker 1: people that between the ages of three and five that
Speaker 1: seems to be the prime optimal time to have these
Speaker 1: experiences that either shut you down where you don't care,
Speaker 1: or make you curious for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, but.
Speaker 1: More so it makes you curious. And said that it
Speaker 1: started me on a lifelong quest. And I haven't got
Speaker 1: na for I'm still in that yard, digging with a shovel.
Speaker 1: It's just somebody else's yard in a different shovel now,
Speaker 1: but still looking for your answers.
Speaker 2: I like that. I like that a lot.
Speaker 1: Now the you talked about some of your early experiences.
Speaker 1: Was that the one that kind of sets you on
Speaker 1: this path or where there are several because I had
Speaker 1: other experiences. I had more around the age of between
Speaker 1: five and six, and then again around seven and eight.
Speaker 1: That just it continued on. It just was non stop
Speaker 1: at that point and still that way to a degree.
Speaker 1: But it was you was that your impetus. Was that
Speaker 1: your aha moment when you thought, you know, there's something
Speaker 1: else out here and I got to find out what
Speaker 1: it is?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I was always intrigued by, like I said,
Speaker 2: watching unsolved mysteries, but beyond that, just in a more
Speaker 2: personal vein. My mom would tell me since I was
Speaker 2: young that she grew up in a haunted house, and
Speaker 2: I would ask her questions about that, like how did
Speaker 2: you know it was haunted? And she told me this
Speaker 2: story about when she was younger that my grandmother had
Speaker 2: bought them a Ouiji board for Christmas, and she technically
Speaker 2: bought it for my aunt, but it was of course,
Speaker 2: you know, that's a group effort for to play a
Speaker 2: wigi board, but or it should be, I guess anyway,
Speaker 2: So they were sitting and playing with the wigi board
Speaker 2: my aunt's freaked out about it, but it started to
Speaker 2: spell out that there was a spirit in the house.
Speaker 2: It said that her name was Elizabeth and that she
Speaker 2: lived in my mother's room. So Mom would tell me
Speaker 2: this story, and she also then ended it with my
Speaker 2: aunt got too freaked out and then had my grandmother
Speaker 2: burn the board, which whatever she had her burn the board.
Speaker 2: So as I would grow up, we would always drive
Speaker 2: past that my mother's childhood home on the way to
Speaker 2: visit my grandparents because they had moved just down the
Speaker 2: road into a different house when they got older, and
Speaker 2: she would always point to the house and she would
Speaker 2: point to the window that was hers, and she'd be like,
Speaker 2: that's Elizabeth's room. And I still know because I live
Speaker 2: not far from that place now which room was Elizabeth's room.
Speaker 2: But I grew up hearing that story, and I was
Speaker 2: in third grade, I believe whenever Mom bought me my
Speaker 2: first Ouiji board, and I would play on that thing
Speaker 2: with my dad, with Mom and my mom's friend that
Speaker 2: would come over and do her hair. She was really
Speaker 2: gifted with tarot cards and Ouiji boards and things like that.
Speaker 2: We would play on it all the time, and it
Speaker 2: just was I guess. There was a Oigi board in
Speaker 2: the house, and it was something that we would get
Speaker 2: on and talk to every once in a while. It's
Speaker 2: not something that I was like addicted to by any
Speaker 2: means or anything like that, but it was something that
Speaker 2: was there. It existed, and it was what it was.
Speaker 2: Mom grew up in a haunted house. She just grew
Speaker 2: up in a haunted house. There wasn't a question about it.
Speaker 2: And I think just growing up in that in that
Speaker 2: realm helped precipitate me being in this world that I'm
Speaker 2: in now. It just was. It just existed. And then
Speaker 2: as far as where Mom grew up, many years later,
Speaker 2: it was after I had started working with small town
Speaker 2: monsters and I started writing for Shannon Legroux for the
Speaker 2: Weird Writer Blog. I decided, let me take some of
Speaker 2: my skills that I've learned as an adult and see
Speaker 2: if I can find any truth to this Elizabeth story.
Speaker 2: So I went to the county courthouse and started looking
Speaker 2: up land records and I found actually there was an
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Lighty that lived in that house. She was on
Speaker 2: the deeds, which in itself was rare because this was
Speaker 2: in the eighteen hundreds to have a female on the deeds,
Speaker 2: but she was there. So there was an Elizabeth that
Speaker 2: lived in that house for real, And it was like
Speaker 2: a full circle moment to have that come back around
Speaker 2: and see that that was something that I could actually
Speaker 2: verify from this childhood story because I just always knew
Speaker 2: the name was Elizabeth and she supposedly lived in that house.
Speaker 2: And sure enough, there she is on paper. If you
Speaker 2: go to the county courthouse, you can find her. But
Speaker 2: that's how I kind of grew up with all of
Speaker 2: this stuff. It just existed. It was there, and without question.
Speaker 2: I had a moment whenever I was younger, I was
Speaker 2: probably in probably in middle school, I would say, when
Speaker 2: my parents had left to go to the store or something.
Speaker 2: They weren't home either way, and I was sitting in
Speaker 2: the living room, playing with the dogs and the cats
Speaker 2: and just watching TV, and all of a sudden, all
Speaker 2: the animals froze and they looked behind me, and it
Speaker 2: threw me off, obviously that they just suddenly stopped and
Speaker 2: they're all staring in the same place. So I turned
Speaker 2: around and looked in the doorway leading to the dining room.
Speaker 2: Right behind me, there was a man standing in the doorway.
Speaker 2: Now he was in like Native American garb. But when
Speaker 2: I first saw him, I just had this calming feeling
Speaker 2: of oh, that's just Dad, you know, like it was
Speaker 2: just a fatherly type feeling. I wasn't concerned, I wasn't scared.
Speaker 2: I just saw him and I was like, oh, And
Speaker 2: I turned back around, and then it caught up to me,
Speaker 2: Wait a second, that's not Dad. When I turned back
Speaker 2: to look a second time, it was gone and the
Speaker 2: animals had resumed back what they were doing. So we
Speaker 2: of course asked the Ouiji Bord about that later, and
Speaker 2: I was told that it was a guardian that was there.
Speaker 2: But I don't know things like that would happen. I
Speaker 2: would hear footsteps go up and down the hallway, because
Speaker 2: there's definitely a way to tell the difference between Mom
Speaker 2: and Dad's footsteps. They sounded differently if they'd get up
Speaker 2: in the middle of the night and walk out to
Speaker 2: get a glass of water or something, and it always
Speaker 2: sounded like Dad getting up and walking. But when I
Speaker 2: would get up to check it wasn't Dad, there would
Speaker 2: be nobody there. So I would think in my head, Oh,
Speaker 2: that's just that guardian walking down the Hallway again. So
Speaker 2: stuff like that is kind of what I grew up
Speaker 2: with and I think helped helped me be the person
Speaker 2: I am now.
Speaker 1: And I agree if you're around it and you're exposed
Speaker 1: to it, especially in the case of my mom, I mean,
Speaker 1: their natural was a supernatural. You know. They had regular seances,
Speaker 1: table tapping or table tapping, Wuiji boards, card readings and stuff.
Speaker 1: They grew up with it and they just didn't know
Speaker 1: any different. And her family were a part of the
Speaker 1: spiritualism movement from around the turn of the last century.
Speaker 1: And the way they got into it initially, they had
Speaker 1: a relative that never came back from World War One
Speaker 1: and they could never find out what happened to and
Speaker 1: I think that ended what nineteen eighteen something like that.
Speaker 1: I'm a little rusty with my figures here, but that
Speaker 1: was how they got into it. And just as a
Speaker 1: little girl, you know, my mom participated in those things.
Speaker 1: He knew about those things and even up till the
Speaker 1: time she married my dad. Prior to them getting married,
Speaker 1: the first time she ever took him to meet her family,
Speaker 1: they were doing a table tapping session. And now my dad,
Speaker 1: he grew up hearts gravel, apple Achia, but he got out,
Speaker 1: went the University of Tennessee, my alma mater, and it
Speaker 1: was already on his path to civil engineering and later
Speaker 1: a scientist. But he said, I, you know, it just
Speaker 1: did mystified him. He said, they sounded like a bunch
Speaker 1: of heathens. They were all sitting around the rise table, Rise, Rise, Rise.
Speaker 1: But he said he looked around at every angle. He
Speaker 1: made sure, you know, nobody had their toe under one
Speaker 1: of the table legs making it rise. Nobody had ruler
Speaker 1: up their sleeve under the table edge, you know, and
Speaker 1: making it lift up. An old parlor magic trick or
Speaker 1: anything like that. He said, there was something unseen force
Speaker 1: raising that table. And he talked about they would even
Speaker 1: take some of the grandkids, or maybe even some of
Speaker 1: the smaller kids at that time because my mom had
Speaker 1: younger siblings, put them on the table and tried to
Speaker 1: get it to rise. And he said that old farm
Speaker 1: table was creaked and groaned and tried every way in
Speaker 1: the world to rise up with that added weight on there,
Speaker 1: and it just couldn't do it. But he said, I
Speaker 1: had no explanation for it. And later in life he
Speaker 1: would talk about things that happened in the laboratory setting.
Speaker 1: He said that there'd be times when they were doing
Speaker 1: an experiment under extremely controlled conditions when things would just
Speaker 1: happen that weren't supposed to happen. They could never get
Speaker 1: it to happen again. They don't know how it happened,
Speaker 1: yet it happened. Some anomalous result, he called it. And
Speaker 1: there used to be a zine that I read back
Speaker 1: in the eighties called the Journal of every Reproducible Results,
Speaker 1: and didn't mention things like that. How sometimes despite everything
Speaker 1: we do, the natural laws that we've made come up with,
Speaker 1: they don't always correspond with supernatural laws and things. And
Speaker 1: to me, that's just fast that. You know, here's a scientist,
Speaker 1: but yet he has a belief in the supernatural, and
Speaker 1: I get it. And he experienced things, you know, when
Speaker 1: he was growing up. Now, they weren't as steeped in
Speaker 1: it as my maternal grandmother and her family, but they
Speaker 1: had their share of it, and tales passed around and
Speaker 1: hauntings and inexplicable things in the woods and stuff. So
Speaker 1: it was there. But I said, on the belief whole
Speaker 1: thing that I was born out of the union of
Speaker 1: science and superstition and I sprang forth with the best
Speaker 1: of both and bewildered, and here I still am.
Speaker 2: So that's work.
Speaker 1: It does. It sticks with you. And I had wage
Speaker 1: board experiences too. I got my first one. I don't
Speaker 1: think I was quite six years old yet. It was
Speaker 1: between kindergarten and first grade, probably that summer. It might
Speaker 1: have been the fall that I started first grade I
Speaker 1: talk about in one of my videos. But I was
Speaker 1: sick that day and been to the doctor. Had ear
Speaker 1: nosen throat problems my entire life, had to have tomsels
Speaker 1: and adenoids out when I was five. That was traumatic.
Speaker 1: Don't catch coals or the flu. The only time I've
Speaker 1: ever had the flu. I took a flu shot in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five and got the flu and thought I
Speaker 1: was going to die. I haven't had the flu sense,
Speaker 1: I haven't had a flu shot since, so either that
Speaker 1: one worked really, really good or it gave me the flu.
Speaker 1: But I'd been for some ent malady and we had
Speaker 1: to stop by the drug store to get my prescription filled.
Speaker 1: And I'd wandered back to the toy I my mom
Speaker 1: was going to let me get something, and I saw
Speaker 1: the Weiji board and it was the old box with
Speaker 1: the dark background and the stars and like a blue
Speaker 1: hooded figure on the front of it, like a robed figure.
Speaker 1: What is this? And she kind of explained it to me, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I want one, Can I have it? So she got
Speaker 1: me one, and I still remember sitting in that I
Speaker 1: think it was a sixty two Chevy two, sitting in
Speaker 1: the back seat that with my wage aboard in my lap.
Speaker 1: And then when we got home, opened it up and
Speaker 1: she gave me, you know, some caveats. Don't ask anything
Speaker 1: you don't want it to know, don't do it by yourself,
Speaker 1: don't ask it about your death or somebody's close to
Speaker 1: you death, things like that. Don't invite anything in that
Speaker 1: you meet on the board, you know, just some general
Speaker 1: warnings about it. And then that day we used it,
Speaker 1: and school must have been in session, because I remember
Speaker 1: the first thing I ever asked it was when will
Speaker 1: it snow this year? And it gave a date and
Speaker 1: I marked it on the calendar and I looked forward
Speaker 1: to that date as I love snow, still do. Loved
Speaker 1: a snow day though, who didn't, Yeah, sure enough? A
Speaker 1: couple of days prior to that, No, not going to snow,
Speaker 1: No snow in the forecast, but then overnight where we
Speaker 1: lived there in East Tennessee, there was a load that
Speaker 1: moved south of us. And when that happened and the
Speaker 1: conditions were right with the barometric pressure in the wintertime,
Speaker 1: we get a snow snow dumped ons had a snow
Speaker 1: day on the day it said.
Speaker 2: John Pryor, that's awesome.
Speaker 1: And then the next thing, there was a record of
Speaker 1: circus music that I coveted from kindergarten and wasn't able
Speaker 1: to find it at any of the places I bought records.
Speaker 1: I was a huge, vital connoisseur even as a child,
Speaker 1: even though mostly children's records. But there was this record
Speaker 1: that they'd played for us in kindergarten that I just
Speaker 1: had to have. So we got the wageboard out, we
Speaker 1: consulted it, and it gave us the name of a
Speaker 1: fairly obscure used record store on a market square in
Speaker 1: downtown Knoxville, and sure enough, my mom looked it up
Speaker 1: in the phone book, back when there used to be
Speaker 1: such a thing as a phone book, And back then,
Speaker 1: even though they were just a few miles apart, it
Speaker 1: was long distance to call Knoxville from where we lived
Speaker 1: in Westtox County. We had an Oak Courage number, and
Speaker 1: she called the record store and I gave the title
Speaker 1: of the record to the guy and he said, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I'll look and see. He's like, I've got
Speaker 1: thousands of records in here. He used records, he said,
Speaker 1: but if I run across it, I'll call you. And
Speaker 1: I thought, okay, great, you know I'm not even six yet.
Speaker 1: That's the end of that. I'll just keep looking. But
Speaker 1: sure enough, But if it was later that day or
Speaker 1: maybe the next day, we got a call. It was
Speaker 1: the guy calling back and he said, I was in
Speaker 1: the back. I was looking for something else and I
Speaker 1: just happened to spot that because I'd given a detailed
Speaker 1: description of what the cover looked like. He said that
Speaker 1: just it fell open, and there it was in the stacks,
Speaker 1: back there in my albums, and I've got it here.
Speaker 1: I'll hold it for you if you want me to.
Speaker 1: And of course I begged my mom, and a few
Speaker 1: days later we took the trip downtown. And this was
Speaker 1: back when you shopped downtown. This was before the real
Speaker 1: advent of strip malls or any malls you went downtown
Speaker 1: to went shopping. He had to get dressed up. You know,
Speaker 1: my mom would wear he and pearls and everything. But
Speaker 1: we went downtown. We went some other places. I think
Speaker 1: we went to J. C. Pennies, and we had lunch
Speaker 1: at Crestchi's and things like that, just things that you
Speaker 1: did downtown. We had a certain lot where Weed Park,
Speaker 1: and my mom knew the parking attendant there. Her family
Speaker 1: had sold produce there. At there was a produce market
Speaker 1: not too far from there, a huge one. And sure
Speaker 1: enough we got to the record store, the guy had
Speaker 1: it and I rode home with it in my lap.
Speaker 1: Thank you with you. But again, you know, not everybody
Speaker 1: has a good experience or a positive experience. But Cisco
Speaker 1: and I've talked about that. It's a tool, and a
Speaker 1: lot of it goes on the intent what you're going
Speaker 1: to do with it. These days, I wouldn't touch one.
Speaker 1: I'm not afraid of them. I've had some experiences. Later,
Speaker 1: I'll go ahead and tell that story. I was in college,
Speaker 1: I was working at a little restaurant part time, and
Speaker 1: the guy invited me to party after work. It was
Speaker 1: at an apartment complex just down the road from before
Speaker 1: we were working there in the Cecar Bluff area. Of
Speaker 1: West Knoxville. I thought, sure, I'll go. I didn't really
Speaker 1: want to go study or anything anyway that night and
Speaker 1: I get there. It's in the clubhouse of this big
Speaker 1: apartment complex. I didn't know anybody there besides the guy
Speaker 1: that invited me from working. I didn't really know him
Speaker 1: other than just from work. So they I don't know
Speaker 1: if they had it with him, or if they found
Speaker 1: it or something. But anyway, some girls came up with
Speaker 1: a WIGI board and they decided that they would get
Speaker 1: three or four of them to do it, and they
Speaker 1: would go around this room in the clubhouse and ask questions.
Speaker 1: And they got to me, and the only thing I
Speaker 1: said was what scared me when I was a child,
Speaker 1: and I had a specific, very specific incident in mind.
Speaker 1: It was the thing in the woods that chased me
Speaker 1: out of the woods that I couldn't see. I never
Speaker 1: told that story outside the family at that point. My
Speaker 1: immediate family knew it, but certainly I never told it
Speaker 1: to the guy that I worked with, and none of
Speaker 1: the people at the party knew it. But the girls
Speaker 1: who are working the board. It starts doing the figure
Speaker 1: eight and it spells out W A T E R S.
Speaker 1: P R I t e and they look at me.
Speaker 1: I just kind of shrugged in their water sprite. It's thirsty,
Speaker 1: it wants a drink. Ha ha ha ha. And then
Speaker 1: they went on to somebody else. But my next day off,
Speaker 1: which might have been the next day, I went to
Speaker 1: the big library downtown and I went up to the
Speaker 1: reference desk and I said, what can you tell me
Speaker 1: about a water sprite or a water spirit? The reference
Speaker 1: library and goes off into the stacks. A few months later,
Speaker 1: she comes back. She's got some books there, and she
Speaker 1: showed me a bookie you probably know about this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. There was two of them. There was a
Speaker 1: naiad and a dryad. One was a spirit of the
Speaker 1: water and the other was the spirit of the woods.
Speaker 1: They're very similar, but there are elementals, a type of
Speaker 1: the fae, if you will. And according to the Luigia Board,
Speaker 1: that's what chased me out of the woods was a
Speaker 1: water spirit. And it wasn't some little gossamer tinker building.
Speaker 1: This thing shook the ground and knocked branches out of
Speaker 1: the way higher than my head. I could see the
Speaker 1: leaves being kicked up in its way. I couldn't see it,
Speaker 1: but I could see the effects it was having on
Speaker 1: the natural environment. Ran me out of the woods, not once,
Speaker 1: but twice, once at eight years old, again at fifteen
Speaker 1: years old. But according to Ouija board, it was a
Speaker 1: faithfolk at all.
Speaker 2: Mental any had Yeah, yep there for some reason.
Speaker 1: Why only me, my dad my brother both went up
Speaker 1: there and looked around. I haven't took I brought a
Speaker 1: kid home with me from school one time. I sent
Speaker 1: him up there to go and stand with the edge
Speaker 1: of the ditch and see if you see anything. And
Speaker 1: I stood way down the hill from behind a tree,
Speaker 1: and he just looked at it, you know, looking around.
Speaker 1: No nothing but nothing came out of the woods and
Speaker 1: chased him around the ditch rather and then I even
Speaker 1: got brave. I went up closer to the edge of
Speaker 1: the ditch and had him stand down the hill didn't
Speaker 1: chase me. But the two times that I went up
Speaker 1: there alone, one a eight and want to get a
Speaker 1: fifteen chase me right out in there. What was that?
Speaker 1: I mean, what do you know anything about a nyad?
Speaker 2: Just basically what you said. Their water spirits than the
Speaker 2: dryads or the wood spirits. They're in classical mythology and
Speaker 2: normally when they're talked about, they're not I mean, any
Speaker 2: spirits from classical mythology don't tend to be like tinkerbellt
Speaker 2: type spirits either, as far as that goes.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing you dig into the faith folk,
Speaker 1: and particularly in Celtic countries where that was almost religion,
Speaker 1: may still be. They're evil creatures. You had to appease them,
Speaker 1: and they would trick you, and they would. There's only
Speaker 1: like one and there's different clans and different types. There's
Speaker 1: one type of them that's kind of nice. I think
Speaker 1: those are pixies or something, but I don't I can't
Speaker 1: articulate all I know about it. But they're not nice things.
Speaker 1: But they describe things like in Ireland, the story I
Speaker 1: wrote from read from the uh these like seventeen hundreds
Speaker 1: maybe early eighteen hundreds about some little men and a
Speaker 1: horseless carriage that came down from the sky. Well there's
Speaker 1: a Ufo experience. Or there were types of them that
Speaker 1: were big hairy men that lived in the woods. There's
Speaker 1: Bigfoot or Sasquatch or Yowie or whatever. It's kind of
Speaker 1: an umbrella that everything else fits under. But you can
Speaker 1: talk to a bigfoot enthusiast or a UFO experiencer and
Speaker 1: mentioned the fae, they'll snicker at you. They're like, oh,
Speaker 1: that doesn't I think it does. I think it all
Speaker 1: ties together. Do you have any thoughts on that. I'm
Speaker 1: sorry to put you on spar here.
Speaker 2: No, it's fine. No. I think that it all ties together,
Speaker 2: and I think that we'd get more. I mean, we
Speaker 2: talked about earlier how you end up with more questions
Speaker 2: than answers, but I think that we'd end up with
Speaker 2: some more answers if we would all kind of work
Speaker 2: together and get over this. Well, you know, this is real,
Speaker 2: but that's not kind of situation. It's all weird, it's
Speaker 2: all strange. So there's definitely corresponding things about UFOs between ghosts,
Speaker 2: between is that just overlap one another. That if we
Speaker 2: were to take the time and actually communicate with one another,
Speaker 2: I think we might have more answers. I'm not saying
Speaker 2: that we would have answers to everything, but we would
Speaker 2: have more than what we have now. At least that's
Speaker 2: my belief.
Speaker 1: I agree, and it would fit it within a broader
Speaker 1: scope from which to to do those studies and things from.
Speaker 1: But yeah, people will fight you over their individual beliefs.
Speaker 1: I've seen that happen at Bigfoot conferences and then when
Speaker 1: I was spoke at to UFO conference in San Francisco
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago. Now, obviously people almost get
Speaker 1: into fist fights over stuff, and you know, like, that's
Speaker 1: not why we're here to argue. We're here to present
Speaker 1: our opinion, not necessarily to defend it, and a lot
Speaker 1: of people don't get that. On this show, I've had
Speaker 1: a couple of pastors on from sialment so far Messianic
Speaker 1: ministries and look at the paranormal and UFOs and things
Speaker 1: like that from not only a biblical perspective, but from
Speaker 1: the perspective of the Tora being Messianic Jews, they follow
Speaker 1: both thea and the Bible, and they have some interesting
Speaker 1: things to say. Again, you know, people, it's it's controversial
Speaker 1: and not everybody's going to agree with it. But I
Speaker 1: like to keep an open mind. You know. I don't think,
Speaker 1: especially when you have something like this, that there are
Speaker 1: no experts in their own, no answers, there is no
Speaker 1: right or wrong opinion. But I like to hear other
Speaker 1: people's opinion. I didn't invite them here, any of the
Speaker 1: times that they've been on to beat them up about
Speaker 1: it or get them to defend it. I just want
Speaker 1: to know what that opinion is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, And it's it's weird, like, not only
Speaker 2: do you see the fighting between the different groups between
Speaker 2: like UFOs and ghosts and Bigfoot and things like that,
Speaker 2: but we also as humans apparently like to fight about
Speaker 2: anything we can fight about, and there's infighting even within
Speaker 2: those particular communities. In the Bigfoot community, people take a
Speaker 2: side as to what they think Bigfoot is and then
Speaker 2: that's the only way they don't want to hear any
Speaker 2: other arguments to it. And the same thing with dog.
Speaker 2: I mean, it gets it gets pretty vicious sometimes and
Speaker 2: I just don't understand it. I don't get why why
Speaker 2: we're so drawn to wanting to fight and have all
Speaker 2: of this drama instead of trying to figure things out.
Speaker 2: Like you said, we don't have experts in this field,
Speaker 2: We don't have the answers like that, so what are
Speaker 2: we doing well?
Speaker 1: It reminds me of the movie from the seventies, The Warriors.
Speaker 1: Did you ever see that about the gangs in New
Speaker 1: York City? Cyrus, the leader of all the gangs, was
Speaker 1: trying to tell them that. You know, they said, we're
Speaker 1: here between us. We're fighting over a few square feet
Speaker 1: of sidewalk, our turf. He said, but if we banned together,
Speaker 1: we outnumber everybody or the police and everything, and we
Speaker 1: could run New York City. And then they killed him,
Speaker 1: and that was the whole movie was the warriors got
Speaker 1: blamed for it, and they were trying to make their
Speaker 1: way back to their turf, which was at Cody Island.
Speaker 1: A great movie. It's very dated, but that's always stuck
Speaker 1: with me. You know, we're here fighting over a few
Speaker 1: feet of sidewalk. Band together, we're bigger than everything out there. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: A nice way I worked the name of the show
Speaker 1: and there unintentionally everything out there.
Speaker 2: There you go, perfect.
Speaker 1: Unintended plug there for my own show. Heather, What have
Speaker 1: you got coming up? You mentioned some of the small
Speaker 1: town monster stuff. What else is going on for you?
Speaker 2: Oh? Well, I recently had a short story printed in
Speaker 2: something called The Dark Village. It's an anthology of different
Speaker 2: short stories. Congratulacens, thank you, thank you. That short story
Speaker 2: is called The Wind to Go. That one was a
Speaker 2: lot of fun to write, a different kind of playing
Speaker 2: with perspective a little bit on that. So I've got that,
Speaker 2: and then I have articles in the Feminine Macabre series
Speaker 2: in journals one, three, and five. So I talk about
Speaker 2: cursed objects, particularly the rocks from the bell Witch Cave
Speaker 2: in the first journal, in the third one I talk
Speaker 2: about headless ghosts, and then in the fifth one I
Speaker 2: talk about goat man, which reminds me. I wanted to
Speaker 2: ask you, Steve, if you've heard of any goat man
Speaker 2: stories from Tennessee.
Speaker 1: Not from Tennessee in particular. But let me look into
Speaker 1: my research and I'll get back with you on that.
Speaker 1: I did something about the goat man or goat men recently.
Speaker 1: Martin Nunley wrote a thing for me and I narrated
Speaker 1: it for a project I had called Weird World. But
Speaker 1: I've got some other stuff. Let me look and see. Yes,
Speaker 1: But it's just everything you mentioned there is something that
Speaker 1: I've looked into at one time or another. You mentioned
Speaker 1: the Belle Witch. Now growing up in East Tennessee, that
Speaker 1: was a big deal for me, not as much as
Speaker 1: it was for kids in Middle Tennessee. But I told
Speaker 1: you the story that you'd never heard about, a Bloody
Speaker 1: Mary type game that we played in grade school that
Speaker 1: was based on the bell and we're the same. You
Speaker 1: went into a darkened bathroom and you peered into the mirror,
Speaker 1: and instead of saying bloody Mary three times, you said
Speaker 1: I don't believe in the bell Witch. Three times. She
Speaker 1: would supposed to come out of the mirror and scratch
Speaker 1: you on the face. And I was at a kid
Speaker 1: party one time, on somebody's birthday party. I was maybe
Speaker 1: eight nine years old. The little girl went in the bathroom,
Speaker 1: did that. Sure enough, she came running out screaming, had
Speaker 1: three scratches on her face. Now probably self inflicted, but
Speaker 1: it scared to pants off all the little kids at
Speaker 1: that party. Anyway.
Speaker 2: Well, sure, yeah, you definitely don't want to mess with
Speaker 2: the bell Witch, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: And I also told you the story about how the
Speaker 1: library book at the Big Library in Knoxville was perpetually
Speaker 1: checked out you couldn't find I can't remember the name
Speaker 1: of the book. It was one of the pre eminent
Speaker 1: bell Witch books. And the story that was told when
Speaker 1: it finally did come back after a couple of years,
Speaker 1: it was just said that then it was in the collections.
Speaker 1: You could only look at it there at the library,
Speaker 1: probably because it was a rare book. But the story
Speaker 1: that was told on the playground was that when they
Speaker 1: finally found it, the guy that had checked it out
Speaker 1: for a couple of years was found dead in his
Speaker 1: bed and that was what he was reading, and he
Speaker 1: had been there for some time. Nothing but a skeleton left.
Speaker 1: But they returned the book to the library, and that's
Speaker 1: why nobody could check it out because it was cursed.
Speaker 2: That's quite a story.
Speaker 1: For interesting playground fodder. That would be a book right there.
Speaker 1: The strange things on the playground and people recount their stuff.
Speaker 1: They heard his kids. I've done stuff about urban legends
Speaker 1: and stories, you know, from a friend of a friend,
Speaker 1: the gospel truth. Oh no, that really happened. It happened
Speaker 1: to our neighbors, cousins, uncle's nephew.
Speaker 2: But right, but.
Speaker 1: Nothing shattered my world. As John or Jan Harold Brunvan,
Speaker 1: he's a think he's a professor of folklore and mythology,
Speaker 1: and somewhere in Utah. He put out a book in
Speaker 1: the seventies called The Vashing Hitchhiker was the fast on
Speaker 1: he did the first one. He did a series of books,
Speaker 1: and a lot of those stories I'd heard those as
Speaker 1: gospel truth growing up. No, No, that happened to my cousin. No,
Speaker 1: that one happened to a friend of a lady that
Speaker 1: does my mom's hair. These stories happened, but they didn't.
Speaker 1: And you know, they served as cautionary tales and kept
Speaker 1: me out of some trouble. Probably you know, kept me
Speaker 1: out of the lake because of the water moccasins, or
Speaker 1: kept me from going to the bathroom at all Mart
Speaker 1: because some kid was mutilated and there as part of
Speaker 1: a gang initiation, a runner to Walmart. We had a
Speaker 1: local store there in Knoxville, I think it was local
Speaker 1: called all Mart A L M A R T. And
Speaker 1: the story was that the kid was around his eighth birthday.
Speaker 1: He had gone to the want to go to the
Speaker 1: bathroom by himself, like, Mom, I'm too big to go
Speaker 1: to the lady's room with you. I'll go by myself.
Speaker 1: So she stands there and waits on him. He goes
Speaker 1: to the bathroom, he's gone, gone, gone, gone, never comes out.
Speaker 1: Instead of going in looking for him, next person, the
Speaker 1: next mail that starts and she said, sir, would you
Speaker 1: tell me if there's a little boy in there, and
Speaker 1: describes it guy goes in, he comes running back out.
Speaker 1: He said, lady, you better get in there with him.
Speaker 1: I'm going to go up front and ask him to
Speaker 1: call an ambulance. And as part of a gang initiation,
Speaker 1: and she had mentioned earlier in the story that she
Speaker 1: saw three dirty looking boys come out of there, three
Speaker 1: trashy looking boys come out. Well, they've been part of
Speaker 1: a gang. And as part of initiation, they castrated this
Speaker 1: little boy, Oh my godness, through his member in the
Speaker 1: parking lot where it was run over by a car
Speaker 1: and couldn't be saved. He had to have a sexual
Speaker 1: reassignment surgery and change schools. But wow, as a kid
Speaker 1: and believed every single word of it. I was just
Speaker 1: there with by parents. One time I had to go
Speaker 1: to the bathroom. I couldn't even find my mom and dad.
Speaker 1: So instead of raving this was the almart on Clinton Highway,
Speaker 1: instead of going in there by myself, I went outside
Speaker 1: around the building, around in the back in the dark
Speaker 1: and eat on the wall. It was a much more
Speaker 1: danger back there. But yeah, that was so ingrained in
Speaker 1: my head that I'm not going to go to the
Speaker 1: bathroom in there. I know what happens, and there I'll
Speaker 1: go outside be by the dumpster. But again that story
Speaker 1: was in there that I think the ever Penis was
Speaker 1: the name of it. But again I heard that as
Speaker 1: gospel truth and believed it. And the one about the
Speaker 1: Avon lady that wasn't an Avon lady, that was a
Speaker 1: man in a dress, and in his Avon sample bag
Speaker 1: he had a hatchet and a hank of rope and
Speaker 1: some handcuffs, you know, and all that, Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1: And the beauty shop, the beauty parlor, and back in
Speaker 1: by day in the late sixties early seventies, a lot
Speaker 1: of women, particularly in our community in East Tennessee, they
Speaker 1: would have those shops in their basement. Not only did
Speaker 1: they make a few extra bucks doing hair, but they
Speaker 1: got all the neighborhood gossip. I heard similar stories from both.
Speaker 1: My mom got her hair done two different ladies because
Speaker 1: they were both friends her friends, so she alternated. But
Speaker 1: heard those stories at both beauty shops. When I would
Speaker 1: tell you along and sitting with the dryer chairs, well,
Speaker 1: my mom was getting a permanent But again I grow up.
Speaker 1: And some of the others are the one about the
Speaker 1: kid water skiing and running into a nest of water,
Speaker 1: moccasins and dying before they could get them out of
Speaker 1: the water. My aunt from Alabama told that that it
Speaker 1: happened to a friend that her or kid that her
Speaker 1: son went to school with in Scottsboro, Alabama. Never happened,
Speaker 1: but again, there was just such a part of childhood
Speaker 1: and things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what you were talking about, the book always
Speaker 2: being checked out or reminds me of the book that
Speaker 2: was always checked out when I was in elementary school
Speaker 2: with scary stories to tell in the dark, and that
Speaker 2: that one had very similar things. It had well all
Speaker 2: kinds of scary stories, so to speak, but mostly urban legends.
Speaker 2: And so there were stories of like the spot, you know,
Speaker 2: where somebody had what looked like a pimple on their face,
Speaker 2: but it was actually spider eggs had been nested on
Speaker 2: their face and then it would just explode, and there
Speaker 2: spiders everywhere.
Speaker 1: Urban legend too, and yep, the deal that I heard
Speaker 1: from the sixties was it was a boufont hair. The
Speaker 1: girl had her hair piled up and rather than take
Speaker 1: it down, she just kept lacquering it with hairspray until
Speaker 1: it was just a solid, massive hair and spiders got
Speaker 1: in there and laid eggs and hatched out and they
Speaker 1: were like eating into her brain or something. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It was frightening, but yeah, that's another one of those.
Speaker 1: Oh it had happened, but it didn't, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but learning tools, trying to scare the kids.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'm just getting into the stories told in
Speaker 1: the dark. My wife's from that era. She was born
Speaker 1: in eighty five, and I've come to appreciate those in
Speaker 1: the Goosebumps series. I never really paid much attention to those,
Speaker 1: but she was big into that. So we've got a
Speaker 1: collection of R. L. Steinbooks going here. And I loved
Speaker 1: the Scholastic stuff when I was a kid, Missus Coverlets,
Speaker 1: Magicians and what was the other one that I absolutely
Speaker 1: adored The Mad Scientists Club by Burton Brindley. And it's
Speaker 1: just those books just spurred me on. And there was
Speaker 1: a lot of spooky stuff back then too, and Frank
Speaker 1: Edwards books Strange World, Stranger than science, Stranger than fiction.
Speaker 1: I read a lot of that was introduction to a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff within the paranormal realm and supernatural for me,
Speaker 1: and everything in there wasn't supernatural, so it was just strange.
Speaker 1: But had away the David Lang disappearance with the guy
Speaker 1: I was walking across the field and disappeared in full
Speaker 1: view of his wife and children and the two guys
Speaker 1: and a bugy coming up the road. That was the
Speaker 1: first place I ever heard that was in a Frank
Speaker 1: Edwards book. So books of the Key, yeah, were always
Speaker 1: an escape for me. I didn't have any friends, but
Speaker 1: I had a lot of books.
Speaker 2: Yeah. We used to have this, We used to have
Speaker 2: this program called riff Reading is Fundamentals. Yeah, And that's
Speaker 2: where I got introduced to a series called The Bailey
Speaker 2: school Kids. And the first the first book that I
Speaker 2: picked up from that series happened to be the first
Speaker 2: book from the series, luckily, but it was called Vampires
Speaker 2: Don't Wear Polka Dots. And it follows these kids that
Speaker 2: every time there's like a new teacher, a new janitor something,
Speaker 2: they have this theory that they're a vampire. Another one's
Speaker 2: like ghostone eat potato chips or whatever.
Speaker 1: And she's a fan of those. I need to read those.
Speaker 2: They are so good. I have like the first twenty
Speaker 2: sum still from whenever I was a child. I've got
Speaker 2: them on the shelf over here. But that also brought
Speaker 2: me into that world because there was a big foot one,
Speaker 2: there was a werewolf one, there was a vampire one,
Speaker 2: there was a goblin. I think there was even like well,
Speaker 2: I know there was a leprechaun one. But yeah, they
Speaker 2: they covered all kinds of things like that, and so
Speaker 2: I read more of those than I did the Goosebump series.
Speaker 2: I did read Goosebumps, but I was into the Bailey
Speaker 2: school kids a little bit more.
Speaker 1: And this was another touchstone for her. Are you Afraid
Speaker 1: of the Dark? Did you watch those?
Speaker 2: Yes? Yes I did.
Speaker 1: And in fact, that's one of the names she uses
Speaker 1: on YouTube is Midnight Society, and that's that's how I
Speaker 1: first noticed her when she was coming and listening to me.
Speaker 1: That name stood out to me in the chat and
Speaker 1: it just kind of went from there. But we watched
Speaker 1: those and I'm a big fan. I watch them as
Speaker 1: an adult. I was in college, but I love those shows.
Speaker 1: And DJ McHale, who wrote a lot of those and
Speaker 1: a lot of them under a pen name because he
Speaker 1: didn't want his name all over everything. He's a friend
Speaker 1: of mine. I'm going to have him on the show sometimes.
Speaker 1: He influenced the whole generation the kids there, and for
Speaker 1: a kids show, and you'll see if you agree here
Speaker 1: that was some of the scariest stuff ever on television. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they did a good job with that, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: And I'd like to talk to ri al Stein too.
Speaker 1: I've got some juvenile fiction of that turn in the works,
Speaker 1: and my wife's working on a book too, that in
Speaker 1: that same vein, and it's gonna be a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: And I love the idea of writing for kids, but
Speaker 1: I just I don't know. I'll turned sixty last year.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I'm so far out of touch
Speaker 1: that I couldn't write for this generation of kids. But
Speaker 1: I'd like to give it a try.
Speaker 2: Right, I think you should do it. I support this wholeheartedly.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, thank you. But now you mentioned the Weird
Speaker 1: Writer Blog. There was some of your articles over there
Speaker 1: that I wanted you to do for thirteen Past Midnight,
Speaker 1: and you did, thankfully. Do you still write for that?
Speaker 1: Does Heather still do that? I've been out of the
Speaker 1: loop on a lot of this peripheral stuff for a while.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what's going on.
Speaker 2: No, I haven't written for Shannon in a while.
Speaker 1: Did I say, Heather? I meant Shannon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's okay. She She basically got to a
Speaker 2: point where she was like, listen, you need to start
Speaker 2: writing for yourself and get get more things out there.
Speaker 2: Quit quit writing for me.
Speaker 1: Uh good. One that particularly stands out is Witches and
Speaker 1: silver Bullets.
Speaker 2: Yes, you remember that one.
Speaker 1: And I think you narrated that one as well, and
Speaker 1: that I you know, always heard about the silver bullet
Speaker 1: as you know, the way to fend off the wolf man,
Speaker 1: but I'd never heard of it being used against witches.
Speaker 1: So that was educational for me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's I had found a lot of that
Speaker 2: in uh Patrick Gainor's Witches, Ghosts and Signs. There are
Speaker 2: stories in there about the silver bullet. And even in
Speaker 2: the Bell Witch story there was a guy who claimed
Speaker 2: to be a witch hunter came in with a silver
Speaker 2: bullet waving it around, saying that he could handle the witch,
Speaker 2: and of course she put him to shame and had
Speaker 2: him running out crying by the end of it. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it is something like you said, most people think about
Speaker 2: it's keeping the werewolves away, but witches are known to
Speaker 2: be that's one of their weaknesses. Of silver bullets.
Speaker 1: Now, my granny used garlic and even though she was
Speaker 1: a self proclaimed witch, there were other witches that she
Speaker 1: didn't want anything to do with. And the old farmhouse
Speaker 1: she lived in, old Victorian farmhouse had the old keyholes
Speaker 1: in the doors, and she would put a cloak of
Speaker 1: garlic in there to keep witches from coming through the keyhole.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard anything like that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, not putting garlic in there, but definitely heard
Speaker 2: about them coming through the keyhole and shape shifting into
Speaker 2: like black cats and things like that to get into They.
Speaker 1: Could come down the fireplace too. And what was the
Speaker 1: other thing she used to do now, of course, when
Speaker 1: anybody died, they hung cloth over the mirror, but that
Speaker 1: was to keep the spirit from getting trapped in the house.
Speaker 1: Their porches, the feeling of the porch, the roof of
Speaker 1: the porch, the underneath of it, anyway, was always painted
Speaker 1: haint and blue. Have you ever heard of this story
Speaker 1: behind that? Yes, that a spirit coming up to enter
Speaker 1: the house up to no good would look up and
Speaker 1: see that and think it was the sky and fly
Speaker 1: up through the porch roof and be gone. Must have worked,
Speaker 1: because I don't think our house was hatted. But I
Speaker 1: really enjoy a lot of the folklore and stuff, particularly
Speaker 1: from the Southern Appleatches. I mean, that's where I grew up,
Speaker 1: but sounds like there's parts of that in the Appleatches
Speaker 1: that are close to you there too than the northern part.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, It's definitely been interesting to look at
Speaker 2: some of the overlap between the Northern and the Southern
Speaker 2: Appalaches and our stories. It's just that it seems like
Speaker 2: there was a higher degree of storytelling in general in
Speaker 2: the Southern Appleaches, if that makes sense, and that seems
Speaker 2: to be written down more, at least officially written down
Speaker 2: more in books than there were in the Northern Appalachians.
Speaker 2: And I find that kind of sad, and.
Speaker 1: I attribute to that to people like, uh, you may
Speaker 1: have never heard of them. But there was a guy
Speaker 1: in Knoxville that wrote in the paper named Bert Vincent
Speaker 1: and he had to call Umn on Sundays. I think
Speaker 1: it was like just walking about or something like that.
Speaker 1: He had two volumes out of there was a little
Speaker 1: bit of everything in there, but there was a lot
Speaker 1: of hate and booger and witch tales from the Smokies
Speaker 1: in that area. And had both those books growing up,
Speaker 1: had them around the house. An autograph copy of one
Speaker 1: of them that my mom had picked up somewhere. But
Speaker 1: it was just a part of that, the oral tradition
Speaker 1: and the written tradition. You had people like him look
Speaker 1: for him on Amazon. Hey by this interesting Burt Vincent
Speaker 1: columns for the Knoxville News Sentinel and another person that
Speaker 1: kind of carried that on wash And I can't remember
Speaker 1: the guy's name now, Sam Sam Somebody had Full of
Speaker 1: Thumbs and two left Feet is the name of his book,
Speaker 1: But yeah, wrote I call him later in the kind
Speaker 1: of the same and bird had picked it up, and
Speaker 1: I think Carson Burg or somebody like that. But that
Speaker 1: opened a lot of tales. Of course, the Foxfire books.
Speaker 1: I think it's Foxfire Volume two that has the hains
Speaker 1: and witches and stuff in it.
Speaker 2: That was also on my shelf right now, I'm looking
Speaker 2: right back.
Speaker 1: I love that one. And of course Charles own Price
Speaker 1: was from the South and he wrote a lot about
Speaker 1: little towns, in particular Haunted Jonesborough, Haunted Knoxville, Haunted Nashville,
Speaker 1: and his Canada works. I think he's passed on now,
Speaker 1: but anybody that's interested in Southern hauntings things are his books. Well.
Speaker 1: Srry Well then, of course was it thirteen Alabama Ghosts
Speaker 1: and Jeffrey. I can't remember the lady's name, but she
Speaker 1: did Alabama, Georgia, I think Tennessee too, and Jeffrey was
Speaker 1: her resident ghost. But she wrote a lot of those
Speaker 1: tales out and then of course in historic Jonesboro, Tennessee.
Speaker 1: You have to say that historic part. They're proud of that.
Speaker 1: They have the International Storytelling Convention October. I've been there
Speaker 1: as in the audience, but I've never been there as
Speaker 1: a participant. But that is some fun to hear those
Speaker 1: stories come to life from good storytellers.
Speaker 2: I bet that sounds like a great place to go.
Speaker 1: Now we talked about the bell Witch Cave. We're almost
Speaker 1: out of time here, but have you ever visited the
Speaker 1: Belwitch Cave for the grounds there?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, I've been down to Adams, Tennessee a couple
Speaker 2: of times. The first time that I went down, I
Speaker 2: actually wasn't able to go to the cave because there
Speaker 2: had been torrential downpours in the cave flood.
Speaker 1: Red River floods like you wouldn't believe right there. But yeah, Christo,
Speaker 1: the owner or her husband own that. She's a friend
Speaker 1: of mine and the first time that I went, there
Speaker 1: was nobody there who got like a personal tour. She's
Speaker 1: got photographs coming back then. This was in the early nineties.
Speaker 1: She had a couple of photo albums full of pictures
Speaker 1: that she had taken, a full of pictures that people
Speaker 1: had sent back of anominal of stuff down there. I
Speaker 1: had my first digital camera and no Kodak had like
Speaker 1: half a megapixel I think. But I got some weird
Speaker 1: pictures there too. But if anybody has an interest in
Speaker 1: that at all, it's worth checking out. Certainly.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: When I was there and actually got to go to
Speaker 2: the cave, it was a similar situation. I had to
Speaker 2: wait for more people to show up for them to
Speaker 2: do a tour. So I sat with Chris and talked
Speaker 2: with her for probably an hour or two hours before
Speaker 2: enough people showed up and they're like, Okay, now we
Speaker 2: can go into the cave.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think she had a couple of little books
Speaker 1: that she sold. I bought those, and then it's before
Speaker 1: she had the gift shop, and we sat out there.
Speaker 1: There was like a gazebo or a picnic table or
Speaker 1: something up there, and she showed me all these pictures
Speaker 1: and then talked about all the stuff that people have
Speaker 1: taken that's come back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yep, exactly. That's where you get into the cursed objects,
Speaker 2: the rocks and things. And even now now, what she
Speaker 2: does is she'll get porcelain dolls and paint them up
Speaker 2: to look like zombies or something grotesque and sell them.
Speaker 2: And they're getting sent back now as well.
Speaker 1: That way, should just sell them again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's exactly what she does.
Speaker 1: A lot of times when they're not there and they
Speaker 1: locked the gate, she said come back, and there would
Speaker 1: be a rock or something with a note tied to it.
Speaker 1: So I took this out of the cave. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: please put it back. It was near this place or
Speaker 1: that place, and I get it. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: places like that, petrified forest, other caves, Mammoth Cave. There's
Speaker 1: places where you just don't take stuff because you might
Speaker 1: take home more than you bargained with. The troll bridge
Speaker 1: outside of Portland, Oregon, I've heard weird stories about people
Speaker 1: that took troll dolls from there. You're supposed to leave them,
Speaker 1: not take them. But anyway, we're almost out of time
Speaker 1: for this episode. Thank you for joining us here on
Speaker 1: everything out there. Any parting words for the audience.
Speaker 2: Well, thanks for having me. I've loved being here. Parting words, man,
Speaker 2: just stay weird, stay.
Speaker 1: Weird, better weird than plastic. I love it all right.
Speaker 1: And I'll leave links to the show notes where you
Speaker 1: can find small Town Monsters. And again, Heather, thank you
Speaker 1: for joining us. Go ahead and sign off here once again,
Speaker 1: you've been listening to everything out there on the Clyde
Speaker 1: Lewis Ground zero Radio Network. I'm Steve Stockton. I'll see
Speaker 1: you a little further on down the trail. Tell your animals,
Speaker 1: I said, Hi. Good night everybody,