Speaker 1: You're listening to the poor you whisper on the parent
rad your network.
Speaker 2: Hi.
Speaker 3: Everyone, we have a real interesting subject tonight, a little
bit different and something that is personally relevant to me
as well.
Speaker 4: Uh So hang tight and we'll.
Speaker 3: Be back to talk about post traumatic growth and also
a potential link between trauma and the paranormal.
Speaker 4: With Jackie and Bill Cuslis. Jackie, Bill, thanks for joining me.
Speaker 5: Hi, Susie, thanks for having us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, my pleasure.
Speaker 3: So off the bat before we get too far into
your your research and your books. I am always very
curious about couples that are involved in the paranormal together.
Were you both already interested in the paranormal when you
met or did that develop with the relationship.
Speaker 5: What do you think, Honey?
Speaker 2: Well, I've always been interested in the paranormal, and I
think that you probably were too because of the Mothman
prophecy which was very paranormal and other stuff. So yeah,
I think we're both interested in it before we met.
Speaker 5: That's fair.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's great. So can you give a little
bit background on your book, which I am currently in
the middle of reading.
Speaker 5: Sure, sure, So Jackie was talking about, you know, our
backgrounds with you know, to answer your question. And I'm
somebody who has been into the paranormal really my whole life,
but I kind of got away from it because life
gets interesting and busy and crazy and all these different
things and career and family and all that. In my
early thirties, I saw the Mothman Prophecies movie just on
a whim, and I'd really been kind of away from
the paranormal for a little while, not totally but not
totally into it either, and I saw the movie and
it just it really spoke to me. And I think
what really spoke to me, besides the bizarre stuff that
happens in the movie, was at the end of it
when they talked about this was based upon a bridge
disaster and events that happened in Point Pleasant, West Virginia
in nineteen sixty six in nineteen sixty seven, and the
couple things that resonated with me were the weirdness of
the movie and the fact that the bridge collapsed in
the same year that I was born, And for whatever reasons,
those things just really spoke to me. And a few
years later, I got John Keel's book read that, I
got the audiobook I listened to that I would be
embarrassed to tell you how many times I've watched the
movie and read the book and listened to the book.
I couldn't count them. It's in the hundreds, if not thousands.
So it just really grabbed me, and we decided to
visit Point Pleasant in twenty sixteen. We met Carolyn Harris,
who ran the Mothman Diner, and Jeff Walmsley, who runs
the Mothman Museum, and a guy by the name of
Mark Griffith, and long story short, it just began. It
became a home away from home. And as much as
we really enjoyed our time with Carolyn, she passed away
before we got a chance to go back to see her.
But she gave us such a sense of belonging in
Point Pleasant that we kept going back, And after four
or five years of going back, we decided to write
a book about the bridge disaster in which Carolyn lost
her two year old son and her first husband, And
it just had a profound effect upon the community of
Point Pleasant and on us.
Speaker 3: Was it going there and talking to the local people
that kind of gave you the idea and helped you
kind of put things together.
Speaker 2: What do you think, Well, sort of but it was
actually my idea for the actual topic of the book.
But Carolyn is the one that inspired us to write
the book in Point Pleasant, I think, but.
Speaker 6: The idea came to me to write a book.
Speaker 2: About trauma or trauma and like the Mothman thing and
post traumatic growth. So that's kind of how the bridge
disaster and all the paranormal stuff came up for the
topic because we literally wanted to write it on Carolyn's
life instead. Bill wanted to do that, and since she
had passed away, then the idea came to me to
do that instead, because that way we could combine all
of the interests that we had in Point Pleasant in
the Ohio River Valley because we have interests, so we
were able to do it that way. I think that's
answering the question.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. So one of the things that has
kind of struck me about the personal experiences in the
book is, you know, I realize I am from not
only a different part of the country as these people are,
but also a different generation. And the way they talked
about their trauma was almost like jarring to me, Like
the attitude and you know this from like watching you know,
old TV shows that the attitude was very different in
the sixties and seventies than it is today. But it
was very much like, oh, yep, this just happened, I
have to deal with it. Let's you know, push it aside.
And was that something that you guys felt as well
or is that that personal to me?
Speaker 4: Because that was very very jarring to me.
Speaker 3: Just to hear it from individuals giving their first hand experiences.
Speaker 5: So when you asked that question, Susie, I'm kind of
going back in my head to the interviews that we conducted,
and the ones that jump out to me would be
Linda Lane and Susan Sayer, And if you're not all
the way through the book, I don't know if you've
read Marva Bailey yet, but all three of them said
things along those lines. They didn't have counselors, they didn't
have grief therapy, they didn't have what we have at
our disposal today where we break a shoelace and we
can go talk to somebody about it. They had this
major disaster happened in this small community and you know,
a really big proportion of folks. There are forty six
people drowned or died in the Silver Bridge disaster four
thousand people in town, so it had a profound effect
upon the lives of these people. But yeah, I mean,
I think about some of the challenges that I've faced
in my life, nothing is profound or as powerful as
what they went through. But I have help, you know,
I have people I can go talk to, and they
they did have a good, strong sense of community. But
they didn't have psychologists. They didn't have psychiatrists, they didn't
have grief counseling. So that, yeah, it was very when
you talk about, you know, Harriet. Harriet talked about in
her interview that just pull yourself up by the bootstraps
is the West Virginia mantra and I get that. But wow, powerful,
powerful disaster.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And to your point they that was another takeaway
for me is that that community really did come together
through that. I'm from a town that was about population
seven thousand maybe, and I'm you know, once in a
while you'd have, you know, a death in town one
and it would have a huge impact. So I can't
imagine forty six in my town was almost twice as big.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Susan Sayer mentioned that she remembered the day when they
went in and took out. I can't think of the
late I feel really big because I can't think of
her name now, Kathy Bias when they took her desk out.
Speaker 5: And.
Speaker 2: She said, it was really really sad. It was really sad.
And they all watched this desk going out of the room.
You know, that's just how things were done back then,
and to me, it just seems unreal.
Speaker 6: And then the other.
Speaker 2: Thing that seemed really kind of unreal to me was,
and this is something I'd never heard before and I've
not heard it since, was Charlene Westwood said that one
of the teachers.
Speaker 6: There were two teachers on the bridge. They both passed away.
Speaker 2: One of them was on the way to the hospital
to actually give birth to her a baby. And I
don't know if that baby's life was considered a fatality
or not. Probably not, because they probably didn't do that
kind of stuff back then, you know it probably I don't.
Speaker 6: It wasn't named.
Speaker 2: And when you look at the list of the names
of people that are memorialized, there's that baby such and such.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And no one ever talks about that part of it, right,
you know, everyone's so focused on Mothman. And I understand
that but this particular tragedy is so glossed.
Speaker 4: Over and it gets kind of buried in all of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she said they had to go back to school
and everybody was just numb, just numb. And I know
how that I just lost my mom like three and
a hal months ago whatever. And I've told build today
that I pretty much have been numb. I cried every
a little bit here and there. But that's what happens.
People go numb on that kind of stuff, you know,
And we have people we can talk to.
Speaker 6: Now I don't know how they survived.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. So as you're you know,
speaking of these people.
Speaker 3: And you know, seeing the similarities of differences, how do
you guys relate that to the paranormal experiences.
Speaker 5: That's a great question. When we put our research plan
together for bridging the tragedy, and we contacted the local
newspapers in Point Pleasant because we needed more participants. We
had a number of people that came forward, but not
enough for the study. And so Ashley Walmsley, who is
Jeff's daughter, said, why don't you get a hold of
besth Surgeon. She's the main person over at the newspaper
here in town, let her know what you're looking to do,
and you know, talk to her and see if she'll
help you. So we scheduled a phone call with her,
and I talked to her, and she said, we don't
mind you guys coming to town doing this. We think
it's great, you know, but what you can't do is
you can't combine the Silver Bridge disaster with Mothman. You
have to be very sensitive to that because this is
still very real here and even though it's been fifty
plus years, it's still very serious in our community. And
so I assured her that we would not do that.
So we came up with two research questions. One of
them was what are the dimensions of post traumatic growth
people who experienced as a result of going for a
bridge divester? And the second question was what are the
dimensions of post traumatic growth for people who experienced the
high strangeness in the Ohio River Valley in nineteen sixty
six and nineteen sixty seven. So we did them separately,
and we asked everybody both questions, but not everybody answered
both questions. I think everyone did answer the Silver Bridge
even though we had a couple of people who were
in Charleston so the Silver Bridge was a long way
away for them, and they were seven years old at
the time, so it didn't impact them directly like their
paranormal experiences did. And then conversely, the people who were
in Point Pleasant that we talked to, none of them
were actually Mothman witnesses. A couple of them had seen UFOs,
a couple of them had had some strange things happen,
but they didn't really experience the Silver Bridge I'm sorry,
the Mothman or the paranormal activity. So when we conducted
the research and did all the questioning and through the interviews,
and we went through what's known as coding process, which
is where you analyze the data and then put it together,
we ended up with dimensions of post traumatic growth, but
they weren't necessarily showing a correlation between Mothman and the
Bridge disaster, which is exactly what Beth asked us to do,
and really it was the way that we wanted to
go with the project anyway. So in that book, we
aren't necessarily investigating a relationship between Mothman, UFO men in
Black poultergeist activity and the Silver Bridge disaster. We're not
doing that in this Our next book is going to
do exactly that, but not with the Silver Bridge disaster
unless we interview somebody who has been through the Mothman thing.
But I'm not sure if I answered your question directly
or not, but that was the thoughts behind the process
that we followed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I personally feel like.
Speaker 3: That was, you know, the silver Bridge collapse being related
to Mothman kind of got put onto this after the fact.
But you've spoken to these people firsthand. Do you feel
that they agree with that that it was, you know,
something a theory that came up with afterwards or did
any any do any of the local people, even if
not in the book, do they ever relate that or
is it completely you know, out of left fields.
Speaker 5: Can you speak to that.
Speaker 2: I would think that that's out of left field because
I don't think people in Point Pleasant combine them at all.
Like like we were told early on that people would
be offended by that, and they were. There's a shirt
at one of the stores, and I won't say which store,
doesn't Point Pleasant that has the Mothman on the bridge
and they really do not like that. Because every body
we have spoken to in the study and Endpoint Pleasant
all have said They've never heard of anybody ever seeing
Mothman on the bridge before it went down.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I think.
Speaker 3: Sometimes times things get sensationalized down the road to for
views or to sell.
Speaker 5: I've one that really believes that we talk about Mothman
today because of the Silver Bridge disaster, not because they
were related, but because in folklore they've been combined. And
if you think about having thirteen months worth of paranormal
activity going on in a community and then at the
very end of that, this horrible disaster happens, which really
quiets down the other sightings and other experiences. They didn't
go away, they didn't stop happening. Jeff Walsley told us
people didn't want to hear about that stuff anymore. Danny
Bellamy told us they didn't want to talk about that
crazy thing anymore. We're burying people now, so this is
really very real to us. So I think I think
that because the Silver Bridge fell when it did, it
really marked the whole Mothman saga with a depth and
a gravity that it wouldn't have without the bridge disaster happening.
I'm not one that believes Mothman caused the bridge disaster.
Excuse me and I don't know that it necessarily foretold,
although that's popular and I like to think that that
it foretold and warned the people, But I don't know
that that's the case. I do think because the bridge
collapsed when it did, that's why Mothman has become so famous.
Speaker 2: Can I say one thing about the pure normal link
between Mothman and the bridge that nobody can deny in
my opinion, So November fifteenth, nineteen sixty six, the very
first reporting reported sighting to the police department of Mothman
was it was reported and then thirteen months to the
day the bridge collapsed. There are so many thirteens in
an investigating Mothman of Point Pleasant and Mothman of Chicago
Land Area, Chicago, Lake, Michigan, whatever, that that in itself
is paranormal, because it's either that or it's highly coincidental
that it's exactly thirteen months to the day, because you
can find thirteens and thirty one's all over Point Pleasant
and all over Chicago Mothman sightings and reporting and things.
So I mean, it's I guess it depends on what
people consider paranormal, but in my mind that's significant in
paranormal research when you're finding mirrored number correlations and we're
not making Oh it was thirteen months. It was thirteen
months to the day.
Speaker 3: So and you've done I believe it was spirit box
activities in Point Pleasant. You had some interesting I'd call
it almost like trickster.
Speaker 4: Activity there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, go ahead and talk about honey, you like talking
about it.
Speaker 6: Uh, oh, he's muted. So yeah, because.
Speaker 2: The spirit box has taken us all over the place,
which is very strange because we were actually investigating Chicago
mockman stuff in Robinson Woods because it's near the O'Hare
Airport and it's one of the most haunted woods in
Chicago land or in Illinois actually, and the spirit box
we asked what thirteen and thirty one have to do
with any of it, and it set a place to
go visit. So when we looked at intersections of thirteen
and thirty one in Illinois and in West Virginia and Ohio,
it literally took us to right outside Parkersburg in a
little subdivision or a little suburb called Vienna, and there
was a thirteen and thirty one there, and all of
the stuff that we were getting from that took us
to to Anyway Park because it was giving us things
like keys, box, bones, obelis. I can't even remember all
the different things. I could look back because I have
all the transcriptions and I studied them quite a lot
a few years ago.
Speaker 6: And so where do you go?
Speaker 2: We go back to Point Pleasant and to get Bill
because he wasn't with us on that. And when we
got back to Point Pleasant, we're like, wait a minute, bones, obolas,
the key and all these other little things that you're getting,
and it's like today Park was another one park. So
Way Park is at the point in Point Pleasant where
Chief Cornstock the seven remaining bones of his are buried there,
and he's got an obelist in his for a memorial.
Speaker 6: For him there.
Speaker 2: And so we did a spirit box session there and
I don't remember a lot of that because I was
the one that was receiving that. Bill was asking questions
and our friend that was with us was asking questions.
And from there we ended up going to the T
and T where we were going to do a spirit
box and I can't remember what led us there, but
once we got there, I said, I think we need
to be going to Charleston and doing a spirit box
there instead, because we can always come back to the
T and T anytime.
Speaker 6: We've been there hundreds of times. And we ended up
going to.
Speaker 2: North Charleston and doing spirit Box sessions there, and the
very first one there was the scariest and shortest we've
ever done, and it told us to leave, and we left.
And our whole purpose besides going to go to this
one area, was we also wanted to go to the
confluence of the river where the bridge collapsed on December
fifteenth in Charleston. And we got there and we literally
forgot everything after that, and we went and ate lunch
and went straight back to Point Plusant and We're like.
Speaker 6: What what are we doing? We didn't even go to
the confluence, you know.
Speaker 2: That was the whole point of wanting to go on
that visit to Charleston was to check out the confluence
of the two rivers there. So there was all kinds
of strange, strange stuff on that on all of those
spirit Box sessions, And I even remembered one that I
had forgotten about before we even took off to go
to Parkersburg. We were getting we did one in the
hotel room and we pulled a tarot card and I
can't remember, but it was significant and I wish I
could remember what it was. And the spirit box talked
about a big man, an orator, just like all these
all these other things that later on we learned that
Chief Cornstock stood six foot six and was an orator.
He was like famous for his speaking, you know. So
there was all of this too before we even got
started with spirit boxes in Point in West Virginia. We
had all of these indications. And then there was also
stuff about Mason, the family name of Mason. So I
did all this tracking back of Mason County, Mason, George Mason,
and all these other Masons that are linked to Point
Pleasant and it was just like the stuff when you
really start to just take apart all of the data
of the spirit boxes. Definitely some major stuff. And then
the dance studio one that was huge. We really had
somebody messing with us. There were four of us there
at the dance studio, and it was literally messing with
each and every one of us, but specifically Bill, because
Bill kept getting indured over and over in his spirit box.
We had two spirit box going and two people asking questions,
So I mean we were all getting messed with. But
he kept saying again again, and we're like, okay, well,
we don't know what you're hearing. You're not telling us,
but we got cold asso and we thought that was
probably something to do with the bridge going down. So
I don't know if that's what you were like keen into,
because I don't remember everything I talk about when I
talk about the spirit boxes, because we just get too
much information. I mean there's a lot. I have a
bid of transcriptions on those.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I remember when we had talked about the Chicago mock
Man and you had talked about kind of the wild
Goose Chase on your spirit box sessions, and also the
numerology behind it as well. You briefly touched on that,
but from what I remember from Chicago Mothman that the
numbers involved had some pretty big significance as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, there's an awful lot of thirteens and thirty one.
It's it's like almost unreal. You just keep finding more
and more and more of these things, and it's like, yeah,
I mean one of the parks as Park actually in
Chicago Land area, where a sighting was at, which that's
where the ruby red Eyes come in, you know, And
we have these red eyes and Mothman in Point Pleasant.
Now we have ruby red Eyes in Chicago, and os
Park is thirteen square miles, so it's like it's just
I mean, it's just all over the place, all over
the place.
Speaker 5: We had a conversation, Susie with Steve a few months
ago with Sam Moronto that you have the move on
person who's a good front of ours, and he he
got us really kind of introduced to all of the
stuff that was going on with the Chicago reports and
all this. And although we believe the reports are very
highly suspect, there is a strange undercurrent that underlies all
of what's happened. And that's what Jackie's talking about with
the numerical coincidences, the reverses of the thirteens and the
thirty ones. Thirty one is very prominent in Chicago, thirteen
is very prominent Point Pleasant. But there seems to be
some type of a guiding force that's underlying what's going on,
and maybe maybe the phenomena is being co created by
the people who are getting involved with it. Like John
Keel talked about that it kind of takes on. It
takes on what you expected to based upon your own
belief systems and what you're bringing to the table with
the way you research. And my voice is going a
little wonky on me. I'm sorry about that. I drank
something and it went down my windpipe and that's why
I've been so quiet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's happened to the best of us on these things.
It's funny that you talk about it in that way.
A couple of years ago I kind of had.
Speaker 4: I guess you could.
Speaker 3: Call it paranormal experiences, but mine was in the form
of nightmares, and I felt like I was getting like
breadcrumbed by. I'd have this reoccurring nightmare, I'd figure out
what something meant in that nightmare, and then I'd have
like a weird coincidence in real life. And this went
on for over a year, probably close to two years.
I was like chasing things down to try to figure
out what was going on. And this all culminated in
me finding the house that the nightmare took place in.
And I pulled up to the house and a shed
in the backyard caught on fire, and I said, okay, this.
Speaker 4: Is I don't this isn't good. I'm not getting like
good energy from this.
Speaker 3: I think this is trying to like distract me from
something maybe, and I said, I'm not putting any more thought, energy,
emotions into this. It's been consuming my life and going
to ignore it. Nightmare stopped after I made that decision
to not give it any energy or entertain it at all.
So I do think that our own thoughts and beliefs
can kind of feed into things like that sometimes.
Speaker 4: Whether it's good or bad.
Speaker 3: I think because I have had I would say the
same type of thing happen, but in a positive way
that one just happened to be negative.
Speaker 2: I've heard say that once a phenomena notices that you've
noticed it, it starts noticing you. So if you start
playing what the phenomena, it starts playing back.
Speaker 4: M h m hmm. Yep. Absolutely.
Speaker 5: I was going to say that, Oh, Jackie's got a
T shirt from the Mothman Museum and on the back
of the shirt is a saying from John Keel that
says the universe does not exist as we think it does,
and that we do not exist as we think that
we do. And I think human beings are a lot
more powerful than we give ourselves credit for. We don't
know what we don't know about our own abilities, you know,
latent abilities, and I think the ancients had a better clue,
you know, in terms of psychic ability or the spiritual
universe or what have you. They were much more connected
to that powerful reality that we were kind of disconnected
from now. And I think it's been done by design
through societies and governments and yes, in the hidden hand
and all this type of thing. But we certainly can
manifest different things, both positive and negative, depending upon our
focus our intent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you kind of just struck on one of my
passion points. And I feel like, you know, the people
that are kind of drawn to the paranormal or what
we would call like witchcraft today or paganism, it's just
us trying to get back to the point before we
were colonized. Because white people were colonized too, it's just
much longer ago. And I think it's you know, the
way we live now is not natural. It's not how
any of us we're really meant to live. Some people
have an easier time adjusting to that. But I think
that when you start to.
Speaker 4: Work on like.
Speaker 3: Decolonization and you know, get away from all of that
and reconnect with the land, that you live on first
and foremost, if you like the you know, the the
culture that my ancestors would have been before they recolonized
is now gone. So yes, there are ways I can
reconnect with that. But for me, what's been more meaningful
is reconnecting to the land that I live on, and
that's how I've been working on that. But look to
your point, the people at that point had a much
better understanding of how the universe works, in my opinion.
Speaker 2: And the abilities that we all have, and so many
people don't even believe they have that ability.
Speaker 4: I was one of those until very recently. I had
just so many coincidences.
Speaker 3: And I even had at one point a TV thrown
at me, just completely thrown at me, off of my bureau,
straight at me. And I'm still through the whole time
denying its paranormal. I actually I was talking to someone earlier.
When I was a kid, I had a dream not
about the Oklahoma City bombings, but my mother's reaction to
it before it happened, and I had had experiences where
I'd seen things that happened in the past, specifically how
the land used to look like in the past, and
I just completely would not think of it as any
kind of ability or paranormal activity for the longest time.
Speaker 2: So when this TV went flying at you, what did
you think of what's happening?
Speaker 1: So?
Speaker 3: Well, the first thing I did was figure out where
my cats were, right, because I have one that's a
little bit spirited. And then I figured I must just
not be smart enough to figure out what happened here.
That was always my default is I just don't understand
what happened. Yeah, that's what I would fall back on.
Speaker 2: I still do that, though, I still like scratch my
head and it takes like sometimes a couple of days
for me to realize that what just happened is not normal.
Speaker 6: But like when we went to.
Speaker 2: Wisconsin, the hotel room light kept switching itself off and
on in the vestibule area when you walk in, and
it's like we're there for like a couple of days
before we even realize this thing shutting itself off and on,
and it's like, wait a minute, wait a minute, you know,
and it's like, okay, so this is weird. And it
wasn't until I mean it was weird. And I got
several videos on my iPad of it going off and
on and nobody's clearly by the switch turning it off
and on, And it wasn't weird until we got back
home and the interview that we did in that hotel room,
when I went to put it onto YouTube and to
like transcription, to start transscription on my iPad, where I
did the recordings of the light going off and on
after like ten minutes, this interview that's just a guy talking,
goes into this. I mean, just like for the rust
of the entire interview. So we always record on several
devices because something strange always happens. But when that happened,
I'm like, okay, so this is legit. There was something
going on with that switch. There was something going.
Speaker 6: On in that room.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for me, it was. There was multiple things that
happened on this one day. But one of the things
that I had perceived or seen I was able to
verify was correct afterwards. And I had no idea going
in even like what I was walking into. So that
one thing I could verify because I had seen it.
I went home and I was able. I had to
make some phone calls, do some research, but eventually I
was able to verify it, and then I was like, okay,
like there's something here.
Speaker 4: It's not my brain doing something weird.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: The interview that Jackie was talking about that we did
in Central Wisconsin was with Dean Bertram, you know Dean, right, Yes, yep,
it was with Dean. Wonderful guy, fantastic conversation, had a
great time with him, spent most of the day with him.
And Jackie's right. I mean, when we first got to
the hotel room, there was something strange about it because
the light in the bathroom shut itself off while I
was in the bathroom, and I got up, turned the
light on and it came back on. But then we
heard this click click click click, and it kept going
on and off and on and off and on and off.
It was just super bizarre. And then all the rest
of the interviews besides the one, or all of the rest
that recording devices except for the one that Jackie was
talking about, fine. I mean I listened to and transcribed
Dean's entire interview, and I had no problem except he
has a pretty thick accent, so I had to listen
pretty closely. But that one that she had, I mean,
it was just really crazy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but so not everyone has these experiences. So from
the research you've done and just personal experiences. Do you
think that you know, maybe people are like I used
to be and just in denial about these things or
not open to them, or do some people legitimately experience
things and others don't.
Speaker 5: So from where I'm sitting, Jackie is the conduit in
our hot activities that we see because I've not really
had many of them. I had a couple of things
that really probably were more stress related that I experienced
some weirdness, like twenty five years ago. But since we've
been together, I've watched her obviously be present during the
time we were with Dean, and that was her device
that went wonky on us when she had a legal
issue going on within the family. She was really upset
one day and a light bulb exploded right next to her.
There was another time about a year and a half ago,
I had a traumatic back injury and I was sitting
in my recliner on morphine tablets and really was pretty
much useless, and she was sitting next to our breakfast
bar and what was it that started rolling towards you?
Speaker 2: And it was an orange It rolled like an inch
from stop, like an inch from my arm.
Speaker 5: So it's a brand new house. We've only been here
for like a month before I got hurt, and so
everything is lined up, it's all new. So it's not
like it was tilted. That the thing wasn't tilted, but.
Speaker 2: This stone countertop, so it wasn't like vibration either that
would have moved this orange because I mean, you can
pound on a stone countertop and it's just not going
to make things roll. And yeah, that was weird.
Speaker 5: And she's had other experiences like family members coming to
her in her sleep or in her dreams. I had
experienced a loss of a gentleman who passed away from
cancer about fifteen years ago, and Jackie was in a
deep meditative state and he came to her during the
meditation and told her to thank me for what I
had done for him. I mean, I've seen, you know,
countless things that other people would call, you know, coincidence
or what have you, or craziness. And I know she's
a very sane person, but I think she's a conduit
to this. And Harriet from Bridging the Tragedy is profoundly
psychic and she thinks that Jackie is also.
Speaker 3: How do you feel about that, Jackie, Well, I guess.
Speaker 2: I mean, I Harriet told me my biggest my biggest
problem is I don't trust myself, and she goes, sometimes
you will be wrong because that's just the way it is,
and that I just need to trust myself more.
Speaker 6: So now that I trust myself more, I'm even more.
Speaker 2: Demanding with Bill when I say something, listen, because for
most of our relationship, he's just kind of like, if
it's not his idea, it's not an idea at all.
So I learned, you know, pretty quick in our relationship
that I had to make it his idea for me
to get my way. But after talking with Harriet and realizing, like, yeah,
I have been in touch and in tune with things
my entire life. And I mean I literally had one
time I was fourteen years old and I was at
a payphone with my best friend and Polo, a little
tiny town that I grew up in, and an ambulance
went past and headed towards one of the big towns
that would have a hospital, and I freaked out and
I'm like yelling, Andrea, my sister's in there. My sister's
in there. And I threw up and she's like, no,
it can't be your sister. How would I know that
even you know, she talked me down off the cliff
and then okay, you know it was just my imagination.
Speaker 6: I don't know what it was. I don't know why
I got physically sick. My sister tried to commit suicide
and she was in that ambulance.
Speaker 2: So I have known all of my life that sometimes
I know stuff. And I was also taught most of
my life that.
Speaker 6: Trust myself.
Speaker 2: I was always taught that, you know, I'm just not
trustworthy or whatever. For some reason, I didn't believe that
what I thought or knew or whatever wasn't trustworthy. So,
I mean, I grew up in an alcoholic home, so
my dad wasn't trustworthy. So I think it was just
like something that was attached to all of us because
there was no trust in the house, you know, And
I mean we had stuff happening. My very first earliest memory,
I think I've told you this before, was when all
four of us kids, my brother and two sisters and
I all got up and went to our bedroom doors
and looked out our bedroom doors and saw Jesus stand,
an apparition in Jesus stand at the.
Speaker 6: End of the hallway.
Speaker 2: And it's like, not everybody can say that you're seeing
that when you're like three or four years old, you know,
it's like, so that was like my one of my
earliest memories of anything that was just really odd, but
our parents told us it didn't happen. So when you're
hearing that, you can't believe what you're seeing or hearing
or things that are happening in the house, like the
door shut and closed and shut and closed, you know,
I mean open, shut, slam and shut, you know, and
being told that you know it's the wind or whatever
it is, then you kind of just want to believe
that you're nuts that you know.
Speaker 4: Did my life just yes, that's never happened before.
Speaker 5: That's my wife.
Speaker 4: So while you're talking about that.
Speaker 3: So I've done like almost nineteen years worth of PTSD therapy,
like different types by now, and you know, one of
the things that it just made me think of is
like I can't tell whose footsteps are coming up the stairs.
I can tell when certain people's cars are pulling in,
because if you grew up or if you lived in
a home where it was a matter of safety to
know who was coming up the stairs or pulling in
the driveway, you get more sensitive to those things. So
you know what we're talking about with the paranormal, those
are just you know, if being psychic as an example,
that's possibly just a different sense.
Speaker 4: So is that something that could you.
Speaker 3: Know, maybe develop just like I've developed the ability to
tell people's.
Speaker 4: Footsteps apart, do you think it's something else like that? Perhaps?
Speaker 2: I think people can become more aware of their psychic
abilities as they grow older, just from learning that they
have the ability and that they can trust their abilities.
But I think everybody's got it's an innate thing. I
think that everybody can does everybody does? I mean, I
don't think that any one person can ever say that
I've never had a thought and then something happened, or
I never saw anything out of the corner of my
eye or whatever, you know, I just don't. I mean,
the doors that were shutting and opening and shutting and
open when I was alone, I was like so scared
in the house by myself. We lived out in the
country and it was pitch black, and I was scared.
Speaker 1: I was like in.
Speaker 2: Adolescence, and I learned later on in life that I
could have been possibly been doing that myself and It's
like that just blows me away. So I literally like
look at things like and try to move it, and
I'm like screaming in my head for it to move, move, move,
you know what.
Speaker 6: I'm like, I don't have the patience to do it
is long enough. But I think that you can continue
to train yourself.
Speaker 5: A couple of things occurred to me, Susie when you
asked that question, And the first one was when a
person loses their sight, their other senses pick up the slack.
You can smell better, you can hear better, all these
types of things. I was having a conversation a couple
of months ago when we were trying to find people
to interview for our current book, and I had a
conversation with Grant Cameron, and he was talking about how
he believes that trauma can shut down shut us down
in a way that we are open to more of
the extreme possibilities and connect in ways that we don't otherwise.
And the way that he talked about it, which makes
perfect sense to me, and I think I had this
thought as well too before we discussed it was that
anything that shuts down the left brain and opens up
the right brain to whatever else is out there is useful,
and he had talked about psychedelics or different types of
drugs or chemicals. Trauma certainly forces us outside of our
comfort zone, and like you mentioned, you have to find
different ways to cope when you have an imminent threat
that might be within your own family or in your
own home. So I think that those things definitely when
we talk about losing one of our senses, that perhaps
this psychic ability is just it's another latent type of
an ability that we have, but we don't need it
for our direct survival until we do, and once we do.
And that's one of the reasons that we wanted to
start investigating the relationship between trauma in paranormal activity because
I've always believed that trauma is a gateway to these
extreme possibilities that were not conscious of. I just don't
know how or why, and I wanted to investigate, like
Jackie had come up with the idea several years ago,
that we look at post traumatic growth. Because we're positive people,
we don't want to just get into the shock value
of things. That's what the paranormal is about for the
most part. But what we're trying to do is let's
talk about the shock value. But let's flip it around
and see how people have learned to grow and to
develop and to thrive, and how they've done so by
going through some of these extreme circumstances.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So for me personally, I had struggled to find treatments
that worked for me. I can't tolerate a lot of medications.
It was a little over a year ago that.
Speaker 4: I finally did find something that worked for me.
Speaker 3: And shortly after that was when and I started to
become more open to paranormal experiences. I feel like I
had just like you can kind of shut out people emotionally,
I feel like I had kind of shut off to
the paranormal as well. But the treatment that finally worked
for me was ketamine infusions also, which it was.
Speaker 4: It was life changing, Bill. It was like.
Speaker 3: Turning down the difficulty level on a video game imediately.
Like life just got easier, right, and I could focus
on it. I could be a little bit more objective
about my own experiences and things like that.
Speaker 4: But I always wondered, because you know, ketamine can.
Speaker 3: Be a psychedelic as well. I never got any kind
of like visual hallucinations or anything like that. When I
was doing the treatments, but I always wondered like the
kenemine played a part in opening myself up to that.
Speaker 5: Maybe, so yeah, maybe it did. Maybe it maybe it'd
shut down that part of you that was on overdrive.
You know. You talked about having been through those circumstances
from nineteen years ago where you had to, you know,
listen to the car coming up the driveway to determine
who it was and how you needed to accommodate for
the fact that somebody was going to come into the
house that could be a threat, you know. And then
maybe because you had been in that mindset for as
long as you had, probably weren't even conscious of it,
those defenses were raised up to a certain degree, and
then perhaps this medication allowed those to come down in
a way you could experience things differently.
Speaker 3: I was definitely in fight or flight for an extended
period of time. Actually, I had a vagus nerve damage
because of it and started having health problems.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I actually two weeks ago got an MRI and it's
actually getting better instead of worse, So that's good news absolutely.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I've had all of these really cool experiences over
the summer since so like, what, Well, so I'll tell
you what kind of started it is. I you know,
I alluded to it earlier. I had someone I was
friends with on Facebook. I'm not even sure how we
became friends, but that was the only way we knew
each other. He had commented on one of my posts, Oh,
you should go to this location. I want to see
you know what you think about it? Tell me what
kind of vibes you pick up on there. And it
was a place called It's the Great Swamp Massacre Monument,
and it was it's a monument to the Narraganset tribe
who was massacred by the Puritans during King Philip's War.
Speaker 4: Long story short, So I go out.
Speaker 3: It's only you know, I think it's like an hour
and twenty minutes for me, So it was not that far.
So I went out a couple I think the next
weekend after he had suggested it, and I get there.
You have to walk about half a mile through a
swamp to.
Speaker 4: Get to it.
Speaker 3: And the first thing was there was an absolute swarm
of deer flies. When I tell you, I was covered
in deer fly bites. I was covered in deer fly
bites like my clothes got tight because of how much
I was swollen like it. It was an absolute swarm.
I wasn't even sure. I almost turned around at one point.
I'm like, no, I drive all the way out here,
I'm gonna go. So I finally get to it, and
it's an obelisk in the middle of the woods, basically
just a small clearing. There's an obelisk and then four cornerstones,
and there is a cornerstone for each colony that was involved.
So there's Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. And I
kind of get there and I'm taking some pictures and videos.
The first thing that happened is my digital camera the
battery drained, so I said, okay, I haven't used this
in a while. Let me just pop a new battery.
And I'm sure it's nothing. And so I'm kind of,
you know, going around taking pictures, taking videos, and I
noticed that if I was near the Rhode Island stone,
the deer flies would leave me alone. And it was
significant enough for that to stick in my head and
then mention it to the person that told me I
should go there later, And it turns out that's where
his father's ashes are was that that stone. So then,
so I'm kind of new at talking about this. I'm
used to other people telling me their experiences therewith, but
I had put my hand on a tree and I had.
The best way I can describe it is like a download,
like a I just kind of knew and kind of
like got a picture in my brain that where the
monument was was not where the massacre happened. And I
could tell directionally from where I was, like what direction
and where the location of the actual monument the actual
massacre had happened.
Speaker 4: And that was what I was saying earlier.
Speaker 3: I was able to verify that was accurate later on
after I left. Another thing I saw was a man
who was like standing on the edge of a frozen
lake and he was talking to people and they were
trying to figure out how they were going to take
care of all the dead. I saw two little kids
huddled together, freezing to death in the snow. Because this
had happened in December, so you know, aside from all
the people that died in the actual attack, there's people
that died afterwards from kind of like the aftermath of it.
So I that was like a pretty intense thing and again,
at the time, I'm still half in denial about like,
you know, this is an emotional place. Is my brain
just making this up? So when I left there, I
was completely wiped out.
Speaker 4: Just went home. I kind of looked through my videos
real quick and went to bed.
Speaker 3: And the next day I got up. I was going
to put together YouTube video to talk about my experiences there,
and all of the videos on my digital camera were
just black screens.
Speaker 4: So I said, all right, I guess that.
Speaker 3: You know that camera's battery died yesterday, so I guess
it's garbage now. Right then I got I had also
taken pictures and videos on my cell phone, so I
got my cell phone out, like.
Speaker 4: At least I have those those are all black also.
So the other part of this is.
Speaker 3: You know, when I had kind of seen gotten those
we'll call it visions, I had wanted.
Speaker 4: To do a little bit more research.
Speaker 3: It turns out the person who instigated the attack was
my ninth grade uncle, and the person who had told
me I should go there is you know, a descendant
of people that were massacred there as well, and he
did he did not know that, and I kind of said, like,
why did you tell me? To go there, and he
said it was my higher power told me to tell you.
Speaker 5: How about that? Boy? Does that resonate with us or not?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Tell her please.
Speaker 2: Well, So when my mom died, we had her service,
and then we had a luncheon afterwards. And my mom's
cousin the youngest cousin, so she's closer to my age.
Speaker 6: Said.
Speaker 2: She asked me if I believed in the Cornstock curse,
and I said, well, I think there's probably something to it.
And she said, well, you know, I'm really into genealogy,
and I said yeah, and she said so. Benjamin Weddell
was her sixth great uncle, and he was part of
the infantry that took out Cornstock. So not uncle grandfather,
I'm sorry. So he would be my seventh great great
great great great great grandfather, which when we first went
to point Plause that we met in Cornwall Robinson, who
was the seventh fire from Chief Cornstock. So here's her
on one side and me on the other. And I'm
not proud of it by any means. I'll tell you
that literally the last from which point flaws And I
was looking for what ELL's name anywhere I could find
it to make sure that he didn't do any damage himself.
He was just part of the infantry. He wasn't recognized
for any of it. I'm sure he did his own damage.
But yeah, so I totally get that, and you almost
feel I almost feel responsible for the death of Cornstock
because it's in my lineage.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The other similarity there is this my ninth grade uncle.
That was not the only thing he was involved in
in the Bridgewater Triangle.
Speaker 4: There is a theory.
Speaker 3: That that area of high strangeness is called by something
called the Wampum built and during King Philip's War, after
King Philip had been killed, a man named Chief Anawon
had taken over they a man named Benjamin Church finally
tracked down Anawon told him, if you surrender peacefully go
to Plymouth with me, we won't kill you.
Speaker 4: You'll be spared.
Speaker 3: And Anawon said, yeah, no problem, And he also handed
over his wampum belt, which was, you know, a secret
piece to the the Wampanog tribe. When he got to Plymouth,
Benjamin Church had to business somewhere else. He had to
leave for a few days. While he was gone, they
whenever you read it, it says the officials in Plymouth
basically said yeah, we know this guy said we weren't
going to kill you, but we decided we are anyway.
And they actually they beheaded him. They put his head
on a pike. Story kind of grabbed my attention. I
was looking at the Bridgewater Triangle stuff. There's a place
called Anawon's Rock that's known to be haunted, and I
kept saying, like, why does it just say the officials like,
I want to know the name of the monster that
did this. Ended up going to Boston Library going through
all of these old documents.
Speaker 4: It was my ninth grade uncle that did it.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 3: And I've also met the descendants of people he killed
as well. I happened to meet one in a store
and we happened to just strike up this conversation that
led to us figuring that.
Speaker 4: Out as well.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and maybe I watched Scooby Doo too much as
a kid, but when these coincidents happened, I feel like
I'm supposed to do something.
Speaker 4: It's not always clear what that is, but.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like I'm getting this information for a reason.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: So when we met Carolyn Harris, and we also met
Mark Griffith and he was in the restaurant with Carolyn
and let me back up for just a second. So
Jackie was talking about how if it's not my idea,
I don't want to do it. And after twenty years together,
I've gotten a little bit better at that. But in
twenty sixteen, when we arrived in Point Pleasant, it was
after five o'clock, and eight years ago Point Pleasant was
a lot quieter than it is now. There's a lot
more going on now as the legend has just really
taken off. But we were looking at the whole area
and Jackie noticed this little old lady in a restaurant
and she said to me, I think she wants to
talk to us. And I just kind of poop pooed
the whole idea, let's go see what else is going
on down the street or whatever, and she said, no,
she wants to talk to us. So it was almost
like she had to grab my arm to get me
to go in the restaurant. But we met Mark Griffith,
and Mark is the first person we interviewed for bridging
the tragedy. And the second or third time we went
back to the restaurant, Lynn was there. Lynn Cornwell Robinson
was there In fact, when we pulled up to the restaurant,
we saw the license plate and it said Cornstock on it,
and I'm like, oh boy, you know something about Chief
Cornstalk's going on. So we went in there, and this
lady who was waiting tables was Mark's half sister, and
she called Carolyn mom, even though Carolyn wasn't her mom.
She just kind of ascribed that to Carolyn because Carolyn
was such a sweet lady. But Lynn was very nice
to us the very first time that we were there,
and she was a little cooler the next time we went,
and then she just kind of started ghosting us. It
didn't seem to really want to have anything to do
with us until she saw that we were in town
interviewing Mark and we put that up on Facebook. So
she sent me a message on Messenger. She said, what
are y' all doing? And I said, we're working on
a book right now. We're interviewing people for that. Mark
is one of them. Would you be interested? And she
totally ghosted me. And I wonder if now that Jackie
has found out about her ancestry, that perhaps at some
level when sensed that too, that there was something about
us that was threatening to her. I don't know. Maybe
I'm grasping its straws, but it seems like that that
is a possibility.
Speaker 4: So I think I think you should have listened to
Jackie the first time.
Speaker 5: Thank you Now, I'm not good, but I'm better. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Moral of the story, listen to Jackie, will you Bill?
Speaker 5: Yep? I do now more probably wouldn't you say, honey
than I ever have in the past, But.
Speaker 6: Maybe yes, yes, yes, I'll say yes.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the book that you're working on now gets more
into the link between trauma and the paranormal.
Speaker 4: Any idea one that's going to be coming out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we're really excited about it. The goal is to
debut it at the next Mothman Festival. We talked to
Jeff the last day we were in Point Pleasant after
the festival this year, and we were telling him how
things were coming along, and he was asking us about it,
and he said, why don't you guys come here and
debut it. You can talk about that at the next festival.
So that kind of it just it kind of crystallizes
where we were wanting to go with as anyway, now
we have a date that's kind of set in stone,
which means the book has to be done by August
to be ready for the festival in September. So we've
done I think we've done seven interviews so far. We'll
probably do at least that many more. And life has
been so crazy this year. Jackie mentioned she lost her
mom at the end of April May the end of May,
and my dad passed away last month, so we've had
both of those family tragedies to deal with here this year,
and she's retired from Corporate America, but I'm not so
I'm still I'm working at day job in addition to
writing this. So at this point, I do think it's doable.
But we're going to have to really ramp up getting
out there and interviewing more people as quickly as we can.
And we've got enough people to do the study we
need around twelve, and I think we have more than
that already. But yeah, Mothman Festival next year, we should
be able to debut it and present it at the festival.
Speaker 4: Excellent. I'm looking forward to that for sure.
Speaker 6: I am too.
Speaker 2: I'm looking forward to getting the other interviews done and
getting some of them transcribed completely.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and Susie, I'm just real quick about that. So far,
we have a mix of people who from our everyday
walk that we've just run into, that we've gotten to
know over the years. We met a lady by the
name of Jesse who we interviewed. She was at a
presentation we did in Woodstock, Illinois, which is suburban Chicago,
last summer, and we interviewed her. She was one of
our first interviewees and she has really taken off. She's
doing different conferences every weekend now in different areas, you know,
within our region. But then we interviewed Reverend Michael Carter
from the History Channel. Wonderful, wonderful conversation. He was fantastic,
What a great guy we interviewed him. Dean Bertram is
another one. I'm in the process right now and close
to halfway done transcribing uninterview we did with Monroe Nevills.
And Monroe was a guy who was part of the
Rendelsom Forest Incident nineteen eighty in England.
Speaker 4: I knew I recognized the name.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the most highly documented military UFO experience
in history. And I would love to get Jim Peniston also,
we know Jim, he's kind of a friend of ours.
But he's kind of keeping this whole thing at arms
length right now because probably some of the trauma he's
gone through just by telling his story. So we've got
some really cool people lined up to interview here. Melanie
Kirchdorffer is one who was an experiencer from the sixties.
She's in Massachusetts. So I think I asked you a
couple of months ago how close you were to where
she was, because we hoped to be out there maybe
as soon as next month to interview her.
Speaker 6: So we're not going there in December.
Speaker 5: It's exciting. Next month is November.
Speaker 6: We're not maybe November. We'll see.
Speaker 3: We've got like two days next week that are nice,
and then after that, like just wait till spring.
Speaker 2: Because I want to If we're going to Massachusetts, I'm
going to Salem. You're not going to stop me from
going to Salem, and I want to spend a couple
of days there, you know.
Speaker 3: So I can tell you like the cool less known
places to visit in the area too.
Speaker 6: I would love that. I would love that.
Speaker 5: Well, you can be our tour guide.
Speaker 3: You're pretty close to there, yep, yeah, bring bring some
hiking boots because all the cool places I know are
in the woods.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I can still walk.
Speaker 4: All right, So where can do you? Guys? You guys
have a website.
Speaker 3: Where can people keep up with you, see what you're doing,
get in touch with you.
Speaker 2: Our website is PRP connect dot org. The website, I
have to be honest, is not in the best condition,
and I keep apologizing for it because I keep thinking
I'm going to be able to get in there and
fix some of the problems, but too much has been
going on, and like that's the least I mean, just
just to put our events up there, you know that
our upcoming events and then the podcast when we get
the links to them, we put those up.
Speaker 6: But that's about it for now.
Speaker 2: So yeah, or else, you can contact us through email
at PRP connect at outlook dot com.
Speaker 5: And we're also both very active on Facebook. It's easy
to find us.
Speaker 4: That's where I bother.
Speaker 6: You never a bother.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, thank you for talking to me. You
got a lot of personal information out of me, so
congratulations on accomplishing that.
Speaker 5: All I had to do was ask.
Speaker 3: All right, thanks everyone for watching, and I will put
links to Jackie and Bill's information in the description if
anyone needs to reach out to them and again thanks
everyone for watching and have a good night.
Speaker 5: Thanks Susie, thank you.