Speaker 1: Welcome to Destiny.
Speaker 2: Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning.
Speaker 3: Okay, I am going to go another week of promoting
Speaker 3: AI and I'll tell you why I told you about
Speaker 3: the prompts, which are these elaborate questions. I just discovered
Speaker 3: that chat GPT will automatically generate a very sophisticated prompt
Speaker 3: when you ask a basic question. So you put a
Speaker 3: question to tru to the prompt. What was what's the
Speaker 3: original look of the Eiffel Tower, how was the Eiffel
Speaker 3: Tower built? And hold on stuff like that, and it'll
Speaker 3: come back with very detailed the points of view from
Speaker 3: various people that built of the engineering team. You might
Speaker 3: get if you ask for it. You might get schematics
Speaker 3: and things like that when the prompt comes up, and
Speaker 3: not always it doesn't always come up. It always it
Speaker 3: comes up as a kind of an aid. It's very strange,
Speaker 3: almost intuitive. When the prompt suggestion comes up, you have
Speaker 3: three to five times more detail added to your question.
Speaker 3: And that's what they call the prompt. It's getting into
Speaker 3: what was the weight bearing size of the main pillars,
Speaker 3: what kind of steal was used, where was the still
Speaker 3: made and was it imported? I mean those kind of
Speaker 3: details are now readily available. They may have been available
Speaker 3: from the very beginning. But like I mentioned before in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two, when I first became intrigued with AI,
Speaker 3: mostly as a writer, I was getting I was getting junk.
Speaker 3: It was more of a gimmick. And now and this
Speaker 3: is exponential growth. Now it's really a tool, I think,
Speaker 3: and I I'm sure other people have thought about this. This,
Speaker 3: This makes each of us a genius because nothing is unlimited.
Speaker 3: You can ask a variety of questions, you can inquire.
Speaker 3: In my case, as an amateur archaeologist, a mayanist, what
Speaker 3: I've been doing lately is taking broken statues, broken steely
Speaker 3: These are the Maya standing stones that have carvings of
Speaker 3: dates and things that are in pieces, putting them together,
Speaker 3: uploading them and saying make me or I should say,
Speaker 3: render the original features and position and look at this statue, steel,
Speaker 3: the building, twmple, whatever. And I am getting just miraculous results.
Speaker 3: It's just so much fun. And I gotta say this.
Speaker 3: I think there is a community that is growing in
Speaker 3: the archaeological community that's beginning to look at it. But
Speaker 3: I don't know if they take it serious or not.
Speaker 3: And I'm getting some very very accurate reproductions. In fact,
Speaker 3: I have one of the rams of Ramsey, the second,
Speaker 3: this monstrosity, it's known as the Colossus. It's located in
Speaker 3: a place called the Ramseum, which is kind of a
Speaker 3: memorial building to him. And out in front is this toppled,
Speaker 3: huge colossus of a statue, and this monstrosity which has
Speaker 3: never really been placed or attempted. No one's ever attempted
Speaker 3: to put it back together because it's too big. The
Speaker 3: thing when it was put together weighed over a thousand tons,
Speaker 3: one thousand tons. So on the upcoming cliff notes you'll
Speaker 3: be able to see exactly what I'm talking about. I
Speaker 3: take it from the broken pieces and I actually assemble
Speaker 3: it using AI and I gotta tell you it is
Speaker 3: a fun, fun, fun tool. So when I say everyone's
Speaker 3: going to be using it soon, I don't know some people.
Speaker 3: I mean you might be where I was two years ago.
Speaker 3: It's like, oh, this is a gimmick. It's not working
Speaker 3: for me. But I'll tell you it is access to everything.
Speaker 3: You have literally access to anything. You can come up with,
Speaker 3: any ideas, any concepts, diagrams. All you need to do
Speaker 3: is type it in and I'll tell you, I'm reading
Speaker 3: a book right now on developing prompts. And that's the key.
Speaker 3: The more sophisticated you can describe what you want, the better,
Speaker 3: the more accurate, and just the more brilliant this technology
Speaker 3: can reveal your thoughts. It's a little scary when you
Speaker 3: think what's happening in the next two, three, four or
Speaker 3: five years. What happens next, Well, this is where you
Speaker 3: begin putting AI into automatrons, robots. I don't know if
Speaker 3: they're putting in cars, because they have driverless cars, and
Speaker 3: now we have them here in San Francisco. I have
Speaker 3: not gotten used to that. By the way, I see
Speaker 3: I go to visit people in the city, are going
Speaker 3: to meet somebody, and you see these cars driving with
Speaker 3: nobody in the driver's seat. I'm like, God, if you
Speaker 3: don't see them on the freeway quite as quite yet,
Speaker 3: but you are seeing people, you know, attempted without a driver.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I don't know where AI is going,
Speaker 3: but I'll tell you this guy's a little And that's
Speaker 3: why our government here in the United States is throwing
Speaker 3: tens of billions of dollars. And it's not just chat
Speaker 3: GPT anymore. It's about I want to say fifty, maybe
Speaker 3: close to one hundred breakoffs who took the data and
Speaker 3: they spun their own AI. As an example, I'm using Claude,
Speaker 3: which is a writing tool where you can upload a
Speaker 3: sample of your writing and it'll reproduce it pretty close. Now,
Speaker 3: I'm not going to write a book like that because
Speaker 3: it gets pretty goofy, but it's great for chapter reviews
Speaker 3: and consistency. As a writer, you want consistent You want
Speaker 3: the messages to come through consistently with accuracy and readability.
Speaker 3: And it looks like Claude is one of those tools
Speaker 3: that can really help you. So AI is here and
Speaker 3: I urge you to play with it, and you can
Speaker 3: get it. You can download pretty much any of the
Speaker 3: fifty to one hundred tools for free. But when it
Speaker 3: comes into really getting into some detail, they ask you to,
Speaker 3: you know, become a member. So really really really fun stuff.
Speaker 3: Today's program is on monsters, creatures, and Poultergeist's all kinds
Speaker 3: of cryptoids as well, And I had fun with this.
Speaker 3: It turns out here in California there's a creeper in
Speaker 3: a place called Fresno that I didn't know about but
Speaker 3: everywhere in the world there are manifestations of monsters, which
Speaker 3: are when they say monsters, it's more like I don't
Speaker 3: know what this is, so I'm calling it a monster.
Speaker 3: The classics like the Lockness monster, the bigfoot sasquatch. We
Speaker 3: even talk about the chupacabra, which is this doglike creature
Speaker 3: most notably found in Mexico. So we're gonna go in
Speaker 3: and out. You're gonna hear about some unusual topics. Let
Speaker 3: are a little chili but not too far. So today's
Speaker 3: program is Monsters, Myths, Legends and Real Encounters, and my
Speaker 3: guest is author research investigator Richard Estepp. We have a
Speaker 3: paranormal investigator with us. Today's name is Richard Espp, and
Speaker 3: he has written quite a fascinating new book called Dark Spirits, Monsters,
Speaker 3: Demons and Devils, and this is a look at everything
Speaker 3: from kryptoids to hauntings and everything in between. It's kind
Speaker 3: of a an overview of some of the strangest events
Speaker 3: and cases ever recorded. And I'm happy to have him
Speaker 3: on because I have questions about some of these historic places.
Speaker 3: Richard is originally from the UK, and you know, we
Speaker 3: don't get or have the history that Europe has on
Speaker 3: hauntings paranormal events, and so here's somebody who's really investing,
Speaker 3: geted a wide range of topics. So hey, Richard, welcome
Speaker 3: to Destiny. Great to have you on the program.
Speaker 2: Good morning, it's a pleasure to be a good afternoon,
Speaker 2: I should say, now thanks to the invitation, Cliff.
Speaker 3: Do you notice or suspect that there are different patterns,
Speaker 3: these paranormal patterns of these creatures and these hauntings that
Speaker 3: are cross cultural? Are they? Obviously America is a younger country.
Speaker 3: But what do you discover? What do you find when
Speaker 3: you're out searching? Is this something that's historic?
Speaker 2: I feel like when it comes to cryptids amongst the stories,
Speaker 2: each culture has its own unique lens that it tends
Speaker 2: to view the kind of creatures or through. You know,
Speaker 2: So for example, if I say vampire, as we live
Speaker 2: here in the West, you know, we tend to think
Speaker 2: of depending upon our age, like you and I our generation,
Speaker 2: we might think of like Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee,
Speaker 2: you know, the classic kind of Dracula with the long
Speaker 2: cape and things of that nature. Some folks might think
Speaker 2: more of the sparkling vampires from Twilight, you know. But
Speaker 2: if you go a little further around the world and
Speaker 2: I research vampires in India, vampires there come in the
Speaker 2: form of naked women riding tigers called cheapey. So oh,
Speaker 2: we've made the vampire like a very kind of pale skinned.
Speaker 2: We owe the Victorians, that I think, and a lot
Speaker 2: of our vampire mythos comes from that kind of New
Speaker 2: England Puritan Victorian world. We go around the world and
Speaker 2: vampire stories are very different. You've got these big winged
Speaker 2: bloodsucking creatures, you know, and then I think you look
Speaker 2: at other countries and the supercabra, the bloodsucking the goat
Speaker 2: goat sucker, you know, is again roots kind of in
Speaker 2: the vampire myth But that's a whole other take on things.
Speaker 2: So every culture has its variance on these stories and
Speaker 2: they can change over time. They can change with geography
Speaker 2: and over the generations. It's something that makes them fascinating.
Speaker 3: When when we hear the term per normal, what does
Speaker 3: that mean to you? I mean, also I want to ask,
Speaker 3: I want to double this question up for you, why
Speaker 3: are you so interested in these phenomenon? I mean, because
Speaker 3: I can see getting being interested in one or two,
Speaker 3: but you made a career out of it. It's quite fascinating.
Speaker 3: It's always like you're looking for this. You're, you're, you're, you're,
Speaker 3: you get a you have a huge interest in this.
Speaker 2: Well, I feel that we live in the twenty first century.
Speaker 2: You know, we have these You and I are talking
Speaker 2: now across the country via the wonders of technology. I
Speaker 2: have a magic device right here where which contains more
Speaker 2: information at the touch of a few buttons than was
Speaker 2: in the entire library of Alexandria. And you know, we
Speaker 2: like to think we know everything, or we know how
Speaker 2: the world works, the universe works. But increasingly there are
Speaker 2: these strange corners, these strange tales, whether it's haunted places,
Speaker 2: you know, UFOs, UAPs, things of that nature, whether it's
Speaker 2: cryptids and monsters, and they remind us that there are
Speaker 2: these areas that science has not yet explained, and they
Speaker 2: fascinate me. I like, I'm interested in the shadowy corners
Speaker 2: of our world and what may or may not lie there.
Speaker 2: I mean, at the end of the day, who.
Speaker 3: Isn't Yeah, uh, do you have equipment that you carry
Speaker 3: when you're doing it, like checking out a haunting or
Speaker 3: a Poulter guys, do you carry special prayer? I think
Speaker 3: of the movie series where they had all this equipment
Speaker 3: with it, but some of it might be valid when
Speaker 3: you're checking frequencies and energy feels and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, different tools for different jobs. So usually that's that's
Speaker 2: the kind of stuff you would employ investigating a haunted location,
Speaker 2: you know, checking where well the baseline electromagnetic field levels are,
Speaker 2: identifying where there might be whether utilities might come into
Speaker 2: the house, sources of energy, things of that nature, temperatures,
Speaker 2: So yeah, definitely there is a place for that. Less
Speaker 2: so when it's it's something about monsters, you know, so
Speaker 2: when I'm when I'm writing a book about cryptids, you
Speaker 2: are more kind of getting out there and putting boots
Speaker 2: on the ground and going out and looking for this
Speaker 2: kind of stuff and chronicling the story. So less equipment
Speaker 2: involved with this kind of project.
Speaker 3: Mmm. Interesting. You open a book with Where Wolves, and
Speaker 3: I've been fascinated by Where We was said, how far
Speaker 3: back in history do they go? Do they go? Do
Speaker 3: they do they go back to the Romans? Or how far?
Speaker 3: How far back into the history do we look at Wherewolves?
Speaker 2: I think Wherewell was born out of this idea that
Speaker 2: the human beings can change into animals with various forms,
Speaker 2: and you can find that in Greek myths too. Those
Speaker 2: kind of stories were mostly attributed to the gods though
Speaker 2: and demigods back then, you know, I mean, you look
Speaker 2: at Zeus in myth, and he turned into a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of animals, you know, usually to pick up women.
Speaker 2: He had, as Neil Degrass Tyson politely put it, a
Speaker 2: complicated social life. But you know, I write in the
Speaker 2: book about the Viking berserkers. We still use that word today, berserk,
Speaker 2: And what it really used to refer to were these
Speaker 2: Viking raiders that were dom wolf pelts, so the skins
Speaker 2: of wolf that the you know, the heads and the apes,
Speaker 2: cloaks made of wolfa and then they would go rate
Speaker 2: these villages and they would just be absolutely savage in
Speaker 2: their attacks. And you know, it's believed that some of
Speaker 2: our werewolf stories, man wolf tales come from these berserkers
Speaker 2: that would just shed blood everywhere. They would be immune
Speaker 2: to pain, the attacks would be incredibly savage and beasteel.
Speaker 2: And it's something that we still see today, you know,
Speaker 2: we still say so and so went berserk today and
Speaker 2: that's the origin of the word and as this wolf
Speaker 2: beast connotation to it. So those werewolf tales and under
Speaker 2: so much.
Speaker 3: Talk a little bit if you can, about the effects
Speaker 3: of becoming awarewolf. What were the circumstances of somebody transforming
Speaker 3: into this. I don't know if it's not really a deity,
Speaker 3: it's more of a monster.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think so. Firstly, a clinical like anthropy
Speaker 2: is a real condition, and I like to start with that.
Speaker 2: I'm a medical professional. But to be clear about what
Speaker 2: that is. That is a psychological belief that one can
Speaker 2: turn into a wolf, you know it is It is
Speaker 2: not an actual literal transformation, but it is being so compulsively,
Speaker 2: you know, convinced that you can turn into a were wolf,
Speaker 2: that you believe it and act in that way and
Speaker 2: may go so far, as you know, attacking biting living people.
Speaker 2: A lot of myths and old wives tale superstitions surround
Speaker 2: the werewolf stories. One is that if you were born
Speaker 2: on Christmas Day, you were more likely to be a werewolf. Cliff,
Speaker 2: So if that were true, then that would give us
Speaker 2: Annie Lennox from Eurythmics, you know, the singer would be
Speaker 2: a were wolf. If we Wigart, the actor would be
Speaker 2: a candidate, which I think would have made Casablanca a
Speaker 2: very different movie. And going even further back, great Sir
Speaker 2: Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day and he sure
Speaker 2: spent a lot of the time look at moon and
Speaker 2: the night sky. So who knows, but you know, there
Speaker 2: are also claims that if your eyebrows met in the
Speaker 2: middle of the unibrow that made you was a possible
Speaker 2: indicator of being a werewolf, which if that were true,
Speaker 2: statistically four million people would be were wolves around the
Speaker 2: globe right now. So those were some of the kind
Speaker 2: of you know, signs of being a were wolf? How
Speaker 2: did you become one? You could be cursed by someone
Speaker 2: who knew what they were doing, so the curse of
Speaker 2: the werewolf is a common concept, and there have been
Speaker 2: a few old monster movies along those lines, you know,
Speaker 2: the Wolf Man, where somebody gets cursed. You could also,
Speaker 2: of course, be bitten by a werewolf and have it
Speaker 2: transmitted that way as some kind of presumably bloodborne pathogen.
Speaker 3: M The moon has a big effect on this condition,
Speaker 3: this being awarewolf have you documented or I mean, because
Speaker 3: lunacy is a big one, just general craziness is what
Speaker 3: they attribute to the moon rise. Yeah, is there any
Speaker 3: validity to that at all? Not necessarily the werewolf side, but.
Speaker 2: I so lunacy is also a word we use today.
Speaker 2: We all know what lunatic means. And the moon has
Speaker 2: had this powerful influence in human beings for as long
Speaker 2: as there have been human beings, and I think it
Speaker 2: goes back to the earliest days when we used to
Speaker 2: sit in groups around fires and you know, under the
Speaker 2: light of the full moon and tell one another's stories.
Speaker 2: Every culture has had its moon beliefs going as far
Speaker 2: back as we have recorded information. What kind of fascinates
Speaker 2: me is that going forward to the modern days. I'm
Speaker 2: a nine to one one paramedic for a living cliff,
Speaker 2: and our medicine is evidence based, you know. We base
Speaker 2: our practice upon studies and research and data. That's how
Speaker 2: medicine should work. And yet so we are not superstitious
Speaker 2: people apart from we all have this belief that on
Speaker 2: full moon nights we are going to see more nine
Speaker 2: one one calls and that they're going to be weirder,
Speaker 2: you know, And so this has been studied. They actually,
Speaker 2: as you shared with medicine, they actually did big studies
Speaker 2: and they looked at some major emergency departments during the
Speaker 2: period of full moon, several consecutive full moons, and they
Speaker 2: found that they were no busier. And they did the
Speaker 2: same with psychiatric emergency departments too. So do people seem
Speaker 2: to be acting, acting out, experiencing behavior of emergencies more
Speaker 2: often during the light of a full moon. You talk
Speaker 2: to any nurse, doctor, paramedic, pop, firefighter, you know that works,
Speaker 2: and we're all the same. We're all like, full moon tonight,
Speaker 2: here we go. We believe it, but the data tells
Speaker 2: a different story. Pops are the only ones that really
Speaker 2: have a claim to this, because crime is generally more
Speaker 2: prevalent during the full moon, and that's simply because it's
Speaker 2: a burglar's moon. It gives people who are going to
Speaker 2: break into cars and houses some more light by which
Speaker 2: to see. So that's purely a practical practicality. Yeah, there's
Speaker 2: no evidence at all in twenty first century, you know,
Speaker 2: North America or anyway that the moon in fact causes
Speaker 2: people to act out. I've got stories, and I'm willing
Speaker 2: to bet if you went into any emergency department they
Speaker 2: tell you stories too.
Speaker 3: That's pretty funny. As a Paranormal Investigator. You've listed a
Speaker 3: few places like Amityville, and some of these horror houses
Speaker 3: are possessed locations. Are those blown out of proportion just
Speaker 3: because of the terrible murders or events, or are they
Speaker 3: truly areas that have negative energy or energy of spirits
Speaker 3: that have not crossed over what little we know about
Speaker 3: the spur world, you know we've made into movies, actually,
Speaker 3: But what's your feeling on that?
Speaker 2: I have pretty strong feelings about it, and I should
Speaker 2: open by saying that Amiteville, which I have written about,
Speaker 2: I've never been inside that house. Very few people get
Speaker 2: to It's been a private residence for decades, and it's
Speaker 2: haunted primarily by public interest. What I mean by that
Speaker 2: is the owners took out those you know those iconic eyes,
Speaker 2: the windows, these two windows like eyes. Yeah, they took
Speaker 2: those out. They had it obscured on Google street View,
Speaker 2: or because people feel like they have the right to
Speaker 2: trespass on that property. The real tragedy at Amadeville, we
Speaker 2: can say for sure, is that a whole family, the
Speaker 2: DeFeo family, was murdered there in cold blood by one
Speaker 2: of their own while they slept. That's tragic and it
Speaker 2: is horrific. The ghost stories have been debated and I
Speaker 2: think will be debated forever when you look at the
Speaker 2: evidence that I have. Ronald de Feo, who committed those
Speaker 2: murders with a rifle in the house, wrote to a
Speaker 2: reporter who said and said to him there was only
Speaker 2: one demon at Amadeville, and that demon was me, meaning himself. Also,
Speaker 2: there's the fact that no subsequent owners of that house
Speaker 2: have reported any disturbances of an aaronormal kind whatsoever. Defeo's
Speaker 2: lawyer outright came out and said that he cooked up
Speaker 2: the whole story over a couple of fotles of wine
Speaker 2: with George and Kathy Lutz, and then they went on
Speaker 2: to you know, get a book deal. The author, Jay Amson,
Speaker 2: wrote this multimillion dollar best seller, which became a massive
Speaker 2: movie franchise. There are over fifty Amiteville movies at this point,
Speaker 2: which is just insane to me. Amadeville in Space, you
Speaker 2: name it, and it's so and some of them are
Speaker 2: really fun, but it's so easy to forget that this
Speaker 2: whole thing is borne on the back of tragedy and
Speaker 2: a family that was murdered in cold blood, and so
Speaker 2: that does not sit well with me, Cliff. Honestly, I
Speaker 2: think it's been exploited for generation after generation, and we
Speaker 2: need to remember what really matters in Amiteville, and that
Speaker 2: is the loss of those innocent victims.
Speaker 3: Wow, fifty spinoffs, that's pretty amazing. I wouldn't have thought
Speaker 3: that as an investigator. Have you ever been to a
Speaker 3: location with a rumored either haunting or spirit interaction and
Speaker 3: felt something was going on? Or is it more made
Speaker 3: up by the people, as you say, who were perhaps
Speaker 3: once living in the residence, or a rumor to God
Speaker 3: started and it's just you know, grew from that type
Speaker 3: of idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I've spent thirty years investigating claims of haunted houses,
Speaker 2: and if I didn't think there was something to some
Speaker 2: of it, I wouldn't be wasting my time, you know,
Speaker 2: I'd be spending my weekends like sitting on a beach
Speaker 2: or something, or at a Denver Broncos game. So I
Speaker 2: do think that, yes, you get many cases which are exaggerated,
Speaker 2: that are made up for profit for attention, but there
Speaker 2: is still this core of genuinely inexplicable or apparently inexplicable
Speaker 2: phenomena which is taking place, and that is what keeps myself,
Speaker 2: and I think the majority of other investigators and enthusiasts
Speaker 2: coming back. The trick is identifying those genuine cases. And
Speaker 2: you know, kind of you have to pan through a
Speaker 2: lot of silt before you get to the gold in
Speaker 2: the paranormal field.
Speaker 3: And so are you saying that most of these claims
Speaker 3: are rumors and a small percentage or actual hauntings or
Speaker 3: paranormal events or what are you suggesting?
Speaker 2: It's been my experience that about ninety percent of what
Speaker 2: is believed or claim to be paranormal has, if you
Speaker 2: look hard enough, an entirely mundane rational explanation, and that
Speaker 2: about ten percent of it defies or seems to defy
Speaker 2: easy explanation. So it's like ninety ten in my experience.
Speaker 3: That's funny because you just give us the Amnyville suggestion.
Speaker 3: Is there one that you believe actually crosses over into
Speaker 3: the paranormal hardcorese We're looking at some perhaps testing, I
Speaker 3: don't know how you guys test to determine that this
Speaker 3: is coming from a different free can see a different reality,
Speaker 3: a different dimension. Talk about that.
Speaker 2: I think that one of the problems we have is
Speaker 2: that we all set at our bar for what constitutes
Speaker 2: evidence in different places. So a good example, a case
Speaker 2: that I find fascinating is the case of Ronald Huncolor,
Speaker 2: which you probably know as the Exorcist case. It's the
Speaker 2: case the movie The Exorcist was based upon. Oh and
Speaker 2: this was.
Speaker 4: A young boy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this was a young boy in Mount Rainier that
Speaker 2: ended up being exercised over an extended period of time
Speaker 2: in Saint Louis primarily, and there were multiple witnesses We're
Speaker 2: talking about double digits here, multiple witnesses who saw this
Speaker 2: boy behave in ways that they genuinely believed he was
Speaker 2: possessed by the devil or a demon, or some kind
Speaker 2: of external force, call it what you will. That he
Speaker 2: displayed abilities that you just couldn't attribute to a human being,
Speaker 2: let alone a teenage boy. So these writings that would
Speaker 2: appear on his skin, these symbols, this prodigious strength. Well,
Speaker 2: what's interesting about that case to me, Cliff is number one,
Speaker 2: you have a lot of eyewitnesses that all say they
Speaker 2: saw these things, and they all testified to it. But
Speaker 2: also every single one of them, every single one pretty
Speaker 2: much was a Catholic, And with the greatest of respect
Speaker 2: to Catholics, what I'm saying here is that they all
Speaker 2: viewed his behavior through the lens of their belief system,
Speaker 2: because we all do that, whether you're an agnostic, Christian
Speaker 2: and Muslim, you know, Jewish, whatever you may believe, we
Speaker 2: all view the world in that way. So you have,
Speaker 2: you know, twenty thirty people looking at his behavior and
Speaker 2: they believe it's a demon because that's their mindset. And
Speaker 2: what fascinates me is clearly something was going on. You know,
Speaker 2: the debate rages today. Was this what they would call
Speaker 2: at the time, a disturbed kid, a troubled kid, or
Speaker 2: was this a kid that was genuinely possessed by some
Speaker 2: kind of dark force. The people that encountered him in
Speaker 2: person and spend time around him absolutely believed that he
Speaker 2: was inhabited by diabolic powers. If we could get him
Speaker 2: today into a modern medical facility, would we think, would
Speaker 2: we conclude the same thing?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: So these are the kind of cases where I think
Speaker 2: there's enough of a question mark, enough of a gray
Speaker 2: area that they can be endlessly studied and debated.
Speaker 3: We're going to take a short commercial break to allow
Speaker 3: our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly
Speaker 3: with my guest today Richard Estep discussing his latest book,
Speaker 3: Monsters Will be right back. My guest today is Richard Estapp.
Speaker 3: He is a paranormal researcher who has studied unusual phenomenon
Speaker 3: around the world for over twenty years. His new book
Speaker 3: is Monsters, Mths, Legends and Real Encounters. I don't want
Speaker 3: to get it into the movie The Extracist because it's
Speaker 3: kind of dramatic, but can you give us a point
Speaker 3: in fact of some of the what this kid was
Speaker 3: able to do or what made him seem possessed? I mean,
Speaker 3: how old was he at the time of the.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so initially you're looking at like a fourteen year
Speaker 2: old boy. And the you know, critics of the case,
Speaker 2: and indeed of most cases of demonic possession, they talk
Speaker 2: about the fact, well, how do you know this isn't
Speaker 2: a mental health disorder of behavioral issue, which is a
Speaker 2: very valid point point, you know. And as we you
Speaker 2: and I talked to earlier about were wolves, the same
Speaker 2: case has been made about people with clinical hycanthropy. They're
Speaker 2: they're running around snarling and biting and snapping their teeth
Speaker 2: at people. You know, we don't actually believe there were
Speaker 2: wolves and that they're going to turn into some kind
Speaker 2: of hairy creature under a full moon. But what thing
Speaker 2: about Ronald Hunkoler is that the beginning of that case
Speaker 2: holtergeist activity, objects flying across shelves or flying across the room,
Speaker 2: and apple flying out of the fruit bowl when the
Speaker 2: kids nowhere near it. He's sent to go spend the
Speaker 2: night with the family's priest. And the bedshakes, I mean,
Speaker 2: the kids not doing this. Furniture moves around him when
Speaker 2: he's not touching it. That's not mental illness. There's you
Speaker 2: know this, We're talking then about physical effects which manifest
Speaker 2: in our material world. So to me, these cases get
Speaker 2: much more fascinating and credible when the effects take place
Speaker 2: beyond the human body, beyond the human brain and in
Speaker 2: the surrounding environment. It's possible that he had psychokinetic powers.
Speaker 2: We've all seen the movie carry right Cliff, you know,
Speaker 2: which is yeah, Stephen King's book ow being a teenager
Speaker 2: and the hormonal Maelstrom. That teenager's experience can manifest telekineticut
Speaker 2: It will obviously carrious fiction, but it just kind of
Speaker 2: makes me wonder if if you take in a situation
Speaker 2: like the one that Stephen King made up his story
Speaker 2: about could you just as easily have believed that Carrie
Speaker 2: was possessed by a demon? Very similar symptoms, very similar behaviors.
Speaker 3: And yet you know, here we have the Catholic Church
Speaker 3: with this exorcism division. I don't know if it's called
Speaker 3: a division or whatever. What do we know about this
Speaker 3: young fourteen year old in the face of a priest
Speaker 3: who is trained to perform exorcisms? Did they report on success?
Speaker 3: I think you said very early in our discussion that
Speaker 3: there were multiple exorcision exorcisms. Is that true?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Or rather one long, protracted one cliff that went
Speaker 2: on over several weeks. So when you look at the Exorcist,
Speaker 2: and by the way, the movie The Exorcist and the novel,
Speaker 2: they both contained a great Although they're dramatic, especially the movie,
Speaker 2: there is more than a grain of truth in both
Speaker 2: of them. You know, they exaggerated, of course for Hollywood effect.
Speaker 2: But the Exorcist that worked on this father Bowden. If
Speaker 2: you dig into his background, this guy, prior to his
Speaker 2: his fairly quiet life in the civilian world, was a
Speaker 2: military airborne paratrooper. He parachuted into these hell holes during
Speaker 2: World War two and gave the last right to his
Speaker 2: American soldiers to comrades, you know, while under fire. I mean,
Speaker 2: this is not a man that spooks easily. This is
Speaker 2: not someone that is given to flights of fancy or
Speaker 2: the imagination. And he was shaken by the behavior of
Speaker 2: this young boy. So it's important to kind of factor
Speaker 2: that in. He was considered to be a very reliable
Speaker 2: pair of hands, someone that could make a sober, valid
Speaker 2: assessment of this teenage boy. And had it just been
Speaker 2: a kid that was acting up to borrow a phrase
Speaker 2: from the Times, he would have spotted that. Absolutely. He
Speaker 2: believed there was a genuine possession at work, and he
Speaker 2: secured permission from the diocese to perform an exorcism, which
Speaker 2: wasn't just handed out easily. It had to be recommended
Speaker 2: and assessed carefully before an exorcism was permitted. So today
Speaker 2: the church requires quite riotly that before permission is granted
Speaker 2: for an exorcism, a rigorous mental health screening is performed
Speaker 2: in order to rule out the fact that this person
Speaker 2: should in fact be receiving clinical care, you know, not
Speaker 2: an exorcism, but Richard, but you do hear that Catholic exorcists, Cliff.
Speaker 2: They say they're busier than ever, that the demand for
Speaker 2: exorcisms has never been higher right now, right now?
Speaker 3: Wow? What does that say to you? When the church
Speaker 3: is opening the door to exorcisms, is it? I mean
Speaker 3: it's a belief system, you know, I mean, here we
Speaker 3: go again. The church is validating possessions, abnormal behavior attributed
Speaker 3: to demons. How valid is that?
Speaker 2: We have to talk about bias because I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 2: you know, we all view the world throughout the lens
Speaker 2: of our own beliefs. I'm an agnostic, so I look
Speaker 2: at this and I think we live now in the
Speaker 2: twenty first century when belief. It's interesting. The church is
Speaker 2: struggling for membership. You know, church membership is on the decline,
Speaker 2: meaning its influences waning. So as an organization, it's not
Speaker 2: doing as well as it was. And you have, on
Speaker 2: the other hand, you know, belief in demons has never
Speaker 2: been higher either. Why is that We've got a multi
Speaker 2: billion dollar movie franchise, The Conjuring. Yeah, we've got all
Speaker 2: these TV shows which you know, a certain ghost enthusiasts
Speaker 2: on TV. We'll find a demon in every basement. And
Speaker 2: you put those two things together, and I think it's
Speaker 2: been an opportunity for the Church to say, hey, we're
Speaker 2: the demon people. You know, we got this. Were the
Speaker 2: experts when it came out, the Exorcist. This was one
Speaker 2: of my favorite descriptions. Cliff I wrote a book called
Speaker 2: In Search of Demons where I looked at this whole phenomenon,
Speaker 2: and they described the Exorcist as top gun for the
Speaker 2: Catholic Church. When the movie Top Gun came out. I
Speaker 2: don't know if you remember that, but US Navy recruiting
Speaker 2: just went sky high. It was like a ninety minute
Speaker 2: you know, recruiting ad for the US name. Everyone wanted
Speaker 2: to go that. Yeah, yeah, So the Exasis came out,
Speaker 2: and then you know, you see these shows on the
Speaker 2: Catholic come interested in the Catholic Church just just skyrocketed
Speaker 2: as well, because the idea is, hey, the devil is real.
Speaker 2: He's out there. We're not talking about some creepy old
Speaker 2: horror movie, you know, said in a Puritan village in
Speaker 2: the eighteen hundreds. We're talking about you know, Georgetown, and
Speaker 2: we're talking about an apartment or you know, an ordinary
Speaker 2: house like the one you live in, the devil can
Speaker 2: get you there. You're not safe, but don't worry. We're
Speaker 2: the Catholic Church and we've got you. We've got our
Speaker 2: superheroes on standby. We'll come exercise that devil for you.
Speaker 2: You've just got to believe and get on our train,
Speaker 2: as it were, you know. And I don't know that
Speaker 2: it's necessarily that cynical, but that is the effect of it,
Speaker 2: the idea that the forces of light and darkness are
Speaker 2: clashing and that you can get on board with one
Speaker 2: side or the other. So I think that's a very
Speaker 2: attractive worldview for a lot of people. You know, we
Speaker 2: all see the news, right we look at the world
Speaker 2: essentially going to hell in a handbasket with every passing day.
Speaker 2: It's very easy to blame the devil as opposed to
Speaker 2: you know, human stupidity and greed. And if you blame
Speaker 2: the devil, well, guess what. There are these people in
Speaker 2: black with colors that can come and engage in spiritual
Speaker 2: warfare on your behalf. And if you want, you can
Speaker 2: even be one of them.
Speaker 3: M hm. Real quickly, then, I think that's as we
Speaker 3: as we. I want to just ask another thing on
Speaker 3: this possession with your background, do you see this young
Speaker 3: boy perhaps unusually open. Two the energies. I don't know
Speaker 3: how you would explain it. I want to see. I
Speaker 3: want to say, uh, being easily influenced as a young person. Uh.
Speaker 3: And in this case possessed documented being possessed by a spirit,
Speaker 3: a topic that we don't really know about. We don't
Speaker 3: have any interaction. We may hear about it, and and
Speaker 3: and then exorcist having to come in and say, you
Speaker 3: must leave this body of this child. You're this evil
Speaker 3: spirit must leave. And here's the sacraments and the holy
Speaker 3: water and whatever hell what else they use to rid
Speaker 3: the child of this of this evil. But as a parapsychologist,
Speaker 3: where do you find this in history? Or where do
Speaker 3: you define it as a possession? And what is the possession?
Speaker 3: The consciousness of the child leaves and this evil spirit
Speaker 3: comes in like a like a you know, I mean,
Speaker 3: how do you define that? I'm just curious.
Speaker 2: And I just want a slight correction. So I'm not
Speaker 2: a parapsychologist. A parapsychologist holds me a doctorate, and so
Speaker 2: there are there are some out there. I just oh, no,
Speaker 2: that's okay. I just want to make sure that I
Speaker 2: don't still investigate as it actually, you know, did the
Speaker 2: work I am. I'm an investigator and an enthusiastic amateurs.
Speaker 2: So just to be clear when we talk about possession,
Speaker 2: this is also a belief that is as old as humanity.
Speaker 2: I mean, it predates biblical times I know that we
Speaker 2: tend to think of. In the Bible, there is the
Speaker 2: story where Jesus expels the spirit you know, which is
Speaker 2: possessing a human and drives it into a herd of swine,
Speaker 2: and then the swine goes stampede away and they all die,
Speaker 2: you know, and the demon, the demon has been exercised
Speaker 2: by Jesus Christ himself. But the notion that humans can
Speaker 2: be possessed goes all the way back to antiquity. Ancient
Speaker 2: Babylonia and Sumeria they had these beliefs. The Jewish tradition
Speaker 2: slightly different, but they they've also had that belief since
Speaker 2: time immemorial. The idea that there is this kind of
Speaker 2: dark passenger that can come in from outside and can
Speaker 2: influence at first attack, influence, and then ultimately possess you
Speaker 2: and take over you. It's as old as people cliff,
Speaker 2: you know, and the idea of exorcism, the ritual behind it.
Speaker 2: This framework I think makes it more formalized. You know,
Speaker 2: it was the church's way of saying, we need to
Speaker 2: have some kind of a standard approach to deal with this.
Speaker 2: But most cultures have some variation of exorcism. It may
Speaker 2: not be called that, but a ritual for driving out
Speaker 2: dark spirits from individuals. Well, no matter which continent you
Speaker 2: go to, you know, Africa, those cultures have their own
Speaker 2: way of addressing it. We have our own way of
Speaker 2: doing it here in the West as well, different faiths,
Speaker 2: but all with this same goal of taking this unclean,
Speaker 2: negative dog energy and driving it out of a living human.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I just find it fascinating that this one boy is
Speaker 3: probably the best example of a possession. And I guess
Speaker 3: I don't know if you have documents. I don't know
Speaker 3: if the church releases documents. How many exorcisms are the
Speaker 3: real thing and how many are just mental health issues?
Speaker 3: That's huge.
Speaker 2: No, you make a very valid point, which is and
Speaker 2: that's something that I wrote about in In Search of Demons.
Speaker 2: It's a very valid question. It also begs the flip side, though,
Speaker 2: how many of what are written off as mental health
Speaker 2: issues may in fact be possessions. If you believe possession
Speaker 2: is possible, you know, and you believe that mental health
Speaker 2: behavioral emerginggencies can be mistaken for possessions, doesn't the door
Speaker 2: swing both ways? Could someone in fact be possessed instead
Speaker 2: of having a mental health issue. But I do think
Speaker 2: now that you know, demonic possession is a recognized clinical
Speaker 2: condition as well. But just like clinical lycanthropy, the medical
Speaker 2: profession is not saying that spirits are real and can
Speaker 2: possess people. They're saying that a clinical syndrome exists whereby
Speaker 2: someone is so convinced that they are possessed, they act
Speaker 2: as if they are to all intents and purposes. What
Speaker 2: we cannot objectively prove one way or the other, though,
Speaker 2: is is this an external exterior thing? Is this really
Speaker 2: something else coming in from outside? Or is this such
Speaker 2: a strong pathological conviction that you've been possessed that you
Speaker 2: essentially are I interviewed a guy from my book in
Speaker 2: Such a Demons. He is a world class illusionist. You know.
Speaker 2: His job is to make you believe things that aren't
Speaker 2: real are real. His job is to make people believe
Speaker 2: in magic. And I was interested because I wanted to
Speaker 2: know you know you mentioned the movie The Exorcist. I
Speaker 2: asked him, could you convincingly stage in exorcism where you know,
Speaker 2: you make somebody levitate floating above the bed like Linda
Speaker 2: Blair does in the movie. Could you fake this so
Speaker 2: that we couldn't be convinced? And he said, well, you know,
Speaker 2: once you got within about six feet you would know
Speaker 2: what I was doing. Like, there's no way to truly
Speaker 2: convincingly make some of this stuff happen. And then he
Speaker 2: told me, Cliff that he went to a real exorcism
Speaker 2: as an observer, that the church had asked him to
Speaker 2: go observe in exorcism and see if if he thought
Speaker 2: that this was a genuine case of possession or if
Speaker 2: it was fake. And I asked him what happened and
Speaker 2: he said, well, the lady was It was a female
Speaker 2: in Wyoming. And he said that the lady was in
Speaker 2: entirely pleasant and nice until nightfall, and then she began
Speaker 2: to behave in such a way, this animalistic way, that
Speaker 2: she had to be held down. It took several fully
Speaker 2: grown males to hold her down and prevent her attacking others,
Speaker 2: attacking herself. And so he said, I took a Saint Michael,
Speaker 2: you know, a prayer card, and he slipped it into
Speaker 2: her pillow so under the pillowcase on which her head
Speaker 2: was resting. And he said, she could never have seen
Speaker 2: me do this. This is a guy that makes cards
Speaker 2: appear out of thin air, and you know, he doesn't
Speaker 2: pull rabbits out of hats, but that's his wheelhouse. And
Speaker 2: he slipped this prayer card into her pillow case. And
Speaker 2: he said, the minute she laid her head back down,
Speaker 2: she came up like this, as if she'd been burned
Speaker 2: when her head came into contact with that prayer card
Speaker 2: through the pillowcase. She shut up, as if he just
Speaker 2: burned her in the back of the head. And he said,
Speaker 2: there's no way she could possibly have known he had
Speaker 2: done that. He didn't have a good explanation for it.
Speaker 2: And his entire career was built uncomming people, you know,
Speaker 2: he said, I can't explain it to this day. Does
Speaker 2: it mean she was possessed? Not necessarily, but something, something
Speaker 2: very strange was going on there.
Speaker 3: That's so funny that you're mentioning that. It's like the vibe,
Speaker 3: the vibration of good and evil, the energy behind good
Speaker 3: and evil. That's just amazing. So something's happening there. This
Speaker 3: jump into kryptoids and other strange creatures that you feature
Speaker 3: in your book. I want to talk first about something
Speaker 3: that's in my own state. Fresnel, California Nightcrawlers. What are Nightcrawlers?
Speaker 3: I saw that, I was like, what the heck, what's
Speaker 3: that all about?
Speaker 4: Damn define on Cliff, That's that's my favorite. As I
Speaker 4: don't know, they all crazy. If you look at the
Speaker 4: have you seen the video footage of the Fresno Nightcurlers?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: No, In fact, when I read that is to talk
Speaker 3: about it, I'm just really amazed at this.
Speaker 2: It's one of the weirdest things. And I realized that
Speaker 2: in a book about cryptids, you know, the whole thing
Speaker 2: is weird, but this is one of the stranger things.
Speaker 2: So these stories and we have there is video footage
Speaker 2: of it, but these accounts of what looks like a
Speaker 2: pair of kind of disembodied legs running through the night
Speaker 2: have turned up on on security cameras, and you really,
Speaker 2: anybody that's watching or listening to the show, I encourage
Speaker 2: you to hop onto YouTube or any video site and
Speaker 2: search for the Fresno night Crawlers. They are. Yeah, imagine
Speaker 2: a pair of very big, tall, skinny legs that are
Speaker 2: running of their own. There's no torso, abdomen, chest, head, arms, like,
Speaker 2: just these kind of legs that are running through the
Speaker 2: night in Presno, California. And there are a couple of
Speaker 2: instances of these, not just one. There are a couple
Speaker 2: of instances where they turned upon film and then gone
Speaker 2: like it's one of the great what ifs. You know.
Speaker 2: We have no idea what these were. There's no real
Speaker 2: legend associated with it. There's nothing like it in the
Speaker 2: histories that I could find, and it seemed like it
Speaker 2: would be extraordinarily difficult to fake as well, if you
Speaker 2: were going to post this, if it was a prank,
Speaker 2: it would be very difficult to do. Once you see
Speaker 2: the footage. So I encourage you all to take a
Speaker 2: look and form your own opinion. But I'll hand on
Speaker 2: my heart, I don't know what this was.
Speaker 3: We're going to take a short commercial break to allow
Speaker 3: our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly
Speaker 3: with my guest today, Richard Estep discussing his latest book Monsters.
Speaker 3: Will be right back. My guest today is Richard step
Speaker 3: He is a paranormal researcher, and he has written a
Speaker 3: new book called Monsters, Myths, Legends and Real Encounters. What
Speaker 3: are the reports of people who have seen them, you know,
Speaker 3: after the being captured by the film or captured on
Speaker 3: video like the local authority.
Speaker 2: And these are video anomalies. Yeah, these are video anomalies,
Speaker 2: Cliff like that. There's no it's not like they're running
Speaker 2: people down and you know, attacking them or anything like that.
Speaker 2: It's simply a very very strange looking, apparently creature that
Speaker 2: that was captured a couple of times on video cameras.
Speaker 2: And it's so strange because it appears as if the
Speaker 2: film itself, I mean one of the one of the
Speaker 2: videos was on it was an official camera. This wasn't
Speaker 2: you know, something that somebody recorded on their sony handicam.
Speaker 2: This was on I believe it was Park Service Land
Speaker 2: of Memory Serves. And we have no idea. We just
Speaker 2: have no idea what they are and the way the
Speaker 2: way that they move. It has this really odd, really
Speaker 2: strange motion to it. I don't know if you paid
Speaker 2: me a lot of money to fake one, I don't
Speaker 2: know how I would go about doing it. So the
Speaker 2: freendno nightcrawlers are interesting and they're a little skill.
Speaker 3: Yeah, describe them obviously if they're they're just a pair
Speaker 3: of legs, which could be some kind of a creature,
Speaker 3: but they don't. They're not like like somebody's been cut
Speaker 3: in half where they have pants and shoes on.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, it's not like we're looking at
Speaker 2: a human being where you digitally remove their upper body
Speaker 2: or anything like that. We see down in the movies
Speaker 2: all the time. H In the motion they move, it's
Speaker 2: almost a fluid motion. It's almost a twisting motion. So
Speaker 2: this isn't the way that human beings walk, you know.
Speaker 2: This isn't like normal locomotion. So they almost seem to
Speaker 2: flow a twist as they move. It's the weirdest thing.
Speaker 3: Weird. I gotta check out the video. Thank you for that,
Speaker 3: trip uh. I have been curious about the chupercra bra
Speaker 3: for for a very long time, probably over ten years,
Speaker 3: because it's they've seen them mostly in Mexico and Latin
Speaker 3: American countries. Describe the trooper cabra and if you can
Speaker 3: give us an update on any most recent sadines.
Speaker 2: Yeah, troop of Cabra or the goat sucker It's a fantastic,
Speaker 2: fascinating phenomenon as monster stories go, because, as we mentioned earlier,
Speaker 2: there's an element to the vampiric about it, you know,
Speaker 2: the idea that this was initially sucking the blood of
Speaker 2: goats and livestock. And one of the things that fascinated
Speaker 2: me about it, Cliff, is I think that there may
Speaker 2: be some crossover with those UFO related animal mutilation stories,
Speaker 2: you know that were so prevalent, that the castle mutilations
Speaker 2: and things like that, The idea that there's this creature
Speaker 2: out there that is feeding on the blood of living
Speaker 2: animals and livestock, and as fierce as the accounts of
Speaker 2: the Tupo Cabra are, the most common skeptical explanation is
Speaker 2: that this is a coyote with mange. Mange is like
Speaker 2: a wasting and disease process that you can see in
Speaker 2: some animals. So some academics out of Texas are of
Speaker 2: the opinion that the Supercarbo stories really relate to mangy coyotes,
Speaker 2: rabid animals, things of that nature. But the stories they
Speaker 2: cross cultural and geographic boundaries. You know, you see them
Speaker 2: in Latin America, you get stories in North America, especially
Speaker 2: prevalent in Texas and some more desert states. And they
Speaker 2: still continue to turn up, like you still do hear
Speaker 2: of them. The jury is still out on what's going
Speaker 2: on with the SUPERCARBRA. But the most the most compelling
Speaker 2: non cryptid explanation is a coyote with mange. Does that
Speaker 2: account for all of the cases? Not necessarily? And you
Speaker 2: get to some Latin American country and you see these
Speaker 2: variant creatures which are flying, like imagine a flying shupercar Bra.
Speaker 2: There's no way that's a coyote with mange, you know.
Speaker 2: So the story continues to evolve and twist and change
Speaker 2: depending upon culture and time.
Speaker 3: I was wondering if you had heard the rumor that
Speaker 3: they were laboratory experiments that had gotten loose someplace in
Speaker 3: like New Mexico or something. Did you ever hear that
Speaker 3: as kind of a lead to their original location.
Speaker 2: I'd heard that rumor. And what's kind of interesting is
Speaker 2: that that that Rima has been advanced for a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of cryptid stories, everything from the Jersey Devil through sheeperc.
Speaker 2: You know, it's it's very much a horror movie trope, right,
Speaker 2: It's I hate to say it, but it sounds like
Speaker 2: lazy writing on the part of a Hollywood screenwriter to me.
Speaker 2: You know, suddenly the creatures got in there they are
Speaker 2: I mean, is it possible? I guess as sure. You
Speaker 2: know it's it's no stranger than one of any other,
Speaker 2: you know, amount of cryptid origin stories, but there's no
Speaker 2: compelling evidence for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. There was a nighttime host named Art Bell whose
Speaker 3: the legend. Yeah, for some reason, he not necessarily started
Speaker 3: the rumor, but he seemed to have a fascination about it.
Speaker 3: And I remember listening to him, and he would have
Speaker 3: people that said I saw it, I saw the troop
Speaker 3: of Cabra. So it was almost like a phenomenon for
Speaker 3: a period of time.
Speaker 2: Art Bell and I love Art Coast to Coast being
Speaker 2: on many times. It's it's to my eternal regret that
Speaker 2: I'll die before I could be on his show. And
Speaker 2: I would love to have met him, you know, I mean,
Speaker 2: he was a true legend Coast to Coast under Art Bell.
Speaker 2: They still have their own archive now of art shows.
Speaker 2: I think it's important to note that Art's heyday, though,
Speaker 2: was before the technology I mentioned earlier. We all have
Speaker 2: cell phones now, you know, we all have the ability
Speaker 2: to capture evidence of some of this kind of stuff
Speaker 2: and arts kind of crowd. His audience were people that
Speaker 2: didn't have access to this kind of thing. The technology
Speaker 2: hadn't been invented then, so he relied a lot on
Speaker 2: hearsay and anecdotes and eyewitness stories, and some of them
Speaker 2: held water better than others.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was great, fantastic. Let's head to Australia. This
Speaker 3: is something I've never heard of before, the bun yip,
Speaker 3: which is some kind of a creature. So I've never
Speaker 3: heard her talk about the bun yep. I think that's
Speaker 3: how you pronounce it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, it is the bun yep. I wanted
Speaker 2: to I wanted to look at Australia because I thought
Speaker 2: number one the the Books Forward is written by doctor
Speaker 2: Karen Stozno, who is Australian and co host of the
Speaker 2: Monster Talk podcast. And so I'm like, nobody seems to
Speaker 2: write about Australian monsters and cryptis and they must have
Speaker 2: some right and I started digging insurance they do. They
Speaker 2: have their own lake monsters. They have the bunyepe, which
Speaker 2: think about this is like some kind of crocodile like
Speaker 2: monster that will ambush the unwary and eat them. You
Speaker 2: also have the yowie, which is Australian bigfoot. And what
Speaker 2: made me laugh the most about this cliff was I'm thinking,
Speaker 2: you know, here's Australia, a country where ninety percent of
Speaker 2: the wildlife wants to kill you anyway. You know, like
Speaker 2: you've got snake biders and all these kind of things,
Speaker 2: and now they have stuff that sounds like it might
Speaker 2: be even more danger I kind of feel sorry for
Speaker 2: I kind of feel sorry for like researches in Australia.
Speaker 2: I'm like, how dangerous is it out there? You know,
Speaker 2: when I went squatching here in Colorado, you worry about
Speaker 2: mountain lions and bears a little bit in the woods.
Speaker 2: But that's a picnic for Australian researchers, right. They have
Speaker 2: spiders and snakes and you name it, all kinds of
Speaker 2: nasty stuff out there. So yeah, bun yips and yowie's
Speaker 2: and things of that nature. And I do also think
Speaker 2: that when it comes down to cryptids, we have to
Speaker 2: quite rightly ask ourselves, you know, why don't we see
Speaker 2: more reliable reports of them here in the US. We
Speaker 2: still have our wildernesses, but Australia is once you get
Speaker 2: outside the cities in Australia, the country is still one
Speaker 2: big wilderness and you have these vast areas of land
Speaker 2: which just nobody is there at all. So if one
Speaker 2: of the big kind of talking points for cryptid enthusiastics,
Speaker 2: where are the carcasses, where are the bodies? You know,
Speaker 2: where are the bigfoot remains, where are the ya remains?
Speaker 2: Those kind of things, if they are out there undiscovered,
Speaker 2: anywhere I would find Australia might well be a prime
Speaker 2: location for them to be discovered.
Speaker 3: Can you describe one of these one of these creatures?
Speaker 3: Are they like a hairy bigfoot or a sasquatch? You know,
Speaker 3: the big dimension so yep, yep.
Speaker 2: But also the ability to move fairly quietly when they
Speaker 2: choose to. That fascinated me about the Yowie stories, about
Speaker 2: how much of them, how much crossover there is with
Speaker 2: North American bigfoot sasquatch stories, the idea, you know, you've
Speaker 2: got these big, lumbering, heavy things that are eight nine
Speaker 2: feet tall supposedly, and at times researchers or experiences they
Speaker 2: talk about hearing this heavy tread, you know, and sticks
Speaker 2: breaking and hearing something big moving, and then at other
Speaker 2: times they're almost being stalked or shadowed, and they seem
Speaker 2: to be able to move, if not silently, with great quietness, stealthfully.
Speaker 2: It's as if they either don't obey the same laws
Speaker 2: of physics that our material world does, or they are
Speaker 2: so at home in the woods that they have the
Speaker 2: ability to move, you know, with all the stealth of
Speaker 2: like a ninja or something.
Speaker 3: Mm hm. You know it's funny because I have friends
Speaker 3: over there, and you would think you would hear more
Speaker 3: about these creatures, like we have our bigfoot here, but
Speaker 3: they must come and go. It must be brief sightings
Speaker 3: or something, and then they vanish.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again, you know, you have these great wildernesses
Speaker 2: out there. But when it comes to bigfoot like creatures.
Speaker 2: I know that in Nepal and the Himalayas, you know,
Speaker 2: we have the Yetsi stories, but a lot of the
Speaker 2: bigfoot sasquatch kind of like stories. They require wooded areas,
Speaker 2: and they require you know, like hilly country, if not mountainous.
Speaker 2: We still have a bunch of that. I mean, there
Speaker 2: are quite a few sidings here in the US near Sturgis,
Speaker 2: North Dakota, where the big motorcycle rally is you know,
Speaker 2: you have it's kind of wilderness but not And a
Speaker 2: lot of the sightings occur near populated areas, human populated areas,
Speaker 2: but they are very close to these heavily wooded environments
Speaker 2: where these kind of creatures could just disappear fairly quickly.
Speaker 3: Is there at least footprints that we see in Australia
Speaker 3: like we have out here, there's tons of footprints, which
Speaker 3: is kind of weird because we don't have a body yet,
Speaker 3: we don't even have scat. We have some hair hair
Speaker 3: follic calls, I think is about most we ever we do.
Speaker 2: And and also you know, there are there are the
Speaker 2: signs like, for example, the bending of tree trunks and branches.
Speaker 2: Some believe that is sign of a bigfoot sasquatch, of
Speaker 2: their presence, either marking their territory or a form of
Speaker 2: art things of that nature. And then other physical phenomena,
Speaker 2: the tearing and notting of things. You know, I've seen
Speaker 2: a couple of American flags which were flown outside cabins
Speaker 2: and residences that were torn into strips and then knotted,
Speaker 2: which seems to be a characteristic of North American bigfoot
Speaker 2: sasquatch encounters. You know, they like to braid things, so
Speaker 2: several accounts of horses having their manes braided have been
Speaker 2: attributed to bigfoots too.
Speaker 3: Oh that's hilarious.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I want to bring up a European phenomenon creature that
Speaker 3: you describe, and that's the Crampis, which is the during
Speaker 3: the holidays and I love it because they've made it
Speaker 3: an art in Germany and people wear these very elaborate
Speaker 3: masks and they bang drums, but they seem to be
Speaker 3: kind of a negative creature in a way. And I
Speaker 3: was curious, why is Saint Nicholas always hanging around with them,
Speaker 3: because you would think that Saint Nicholas is the Yeah,
Speaker 3: actually Crampis is Saint Nick's brother. So and Crampus is
Speaker 3: getting very popular here in North America too. There are
Speaker 3: Crampis events now every December in a lot of US cities.
Speaker 3: But he is essentially Saint Nick's brother the way the
Speaker 3: legend goes. But Crampis comes on December fifth, and he
Speaker 3: is this big, monstrous ogre like creature and he comes
Speaker 3: for the naughty kids. So of course you know there's
Speaker 3: the list, right, he's making a list. He's checking it twice.
Speaker 3: He knows who the naughty kids are and those are
Speaker 3: the ones that cramp Has comes from. But the Crampist
Speaker 3: stories are terrifying. The idea that he will break into
Speaker 3: a kid's bedroom, snatch them out of bed, stuff them
Speaker 3: into a basket that he carries on his back like
Speaker 3: a backpack, and then he will take the kids to
Speaker 3: his lair, and depending which version of the Crampers story
Speaker 3: you're hearing, he either eats them or more commonly uses
Speaker 3: birch wood, you know, sticks and beats the kids with
Speaker 3: sticks and then returns them the next day. He's trying
Speaker 3: to beat them into being good kids. And if you
Speaker 3: don't get taken by Cramppus, it means you were on
Speaker 3: the nice list and you're going to get presents from
Speaker 3: Saint Nick, Santa Claus Father Christmas instead. So he's the
Speaker 3: or else to Father Christmas if you will, you know,
Speaker 3: and he comes first too. So crampis nached or Crampus
Speaker 3: Knight is December the fifth, and so if if kids
Speaker 3: make it through to December the sixth, they were on
Speaker 3: the good list for the year. That what a lovely story. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but was it somebody's idea to manifest the crampis because
Speaker 3: there were quite a few bad kids who didn't deserve presents,
Speaker 3: or what's the history of that idea.
Speaker 2: It's just a means of keeping kids under control. I mean,
Speaker 2: history is full of these kind of examples. Myself, I'm
Speaker 2: a child of the seventies. I grew up in England
Speaker 2: in the seventies and we had a thing that we
Speaker 2: all believed in called the seven o'clock horses, and it
Speaker 2: was a tail in my part of the Midlands where
Speaker 2: if you were not in bed with the lights out
Speaker 2: by seven o'clock at night, the seven o'clock horses might
Speaker 2: would come and they would carry you away and you
Speaker 2: would never be seen again, absolutely terrifying. A tale made
Speaker 2: up by parents to get kids to go to sleep
Speaker 2: so they could finally unwind after a day. What seven o'clock.
Speaker 2: You know, it's seven o'clock and he's still not sleeping.
Speaker 2: Let's put the fear of God into him. So I
Speaker 2: think a lot of tales just like this. They evolved
Speaker 2: as a means of social control, you know. I mean
Speaker 2: a lot can be said about Santa Claus stories just
Speaker 2: there as a means to motivate kids to be good.
Speaker 2: Crampus is just the flip side of that same point.
Speaker 3: I mean, the images I've seen of this Crampis for decades.
Speaker 3: He's not a friendly looking guy at all. He's pretty
Speaker 3: devil looking, true.
Speaker 2: And if you look at the Crampus events, you know
Speaker 2: there's a lot of fire and flame and that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff going on. But look at the Christmas festival
Speaker 2: and you look at its place, you know, I mean
Speaker 2: throughout history Christmas. Of course we call it Christmas now,
Speaker 2: but that whole period long pre dates Christianity, and it
Speaker 2: was a time of darkness. You know, people, you are
Speaker 2: halfway through the winter, the old year was dying and
Speaker 2: the New year was yet to be born. Christmas time
Speaker 2: was a very dark time and place throughout most of
Speaker 2: human history, and so people used to celebrate com memory
Speaker 2: it in their own ways, some of which we might
Speaker 2: see today is being slightly warped and macabb But it's
Speaker 2: interesting now that they're making a resurgence again.
Speaker 3: I love them fantastic. The books called Monsters, Myths, Legends
Speaker 3: and the Real Encounters. And my guest today has been
Speaker 3: Richard step The books coming out tomorrow so people can
Speaker 3: get it on Amazon, but they can probably get it
Speaker 3: where they get most of their books, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, your your local independently owned bookstore. I'm sure would
Speaker 2: love to order it in for you, and I bet
Speaker 2: they could use your custom So whatever suits you.
Speaker 3: And do you have a YouTube channel where you're talking
Speaker 3: about your encounter?
Speaker 2: I have a website. Yeah, I have a website, Cliff
Speaker 2: Richard Estep dot net. You can catch up with me there.
Speaker 2: You can find me on social media Richard step author.
Speaker 2: You can see me on the TV shows Haunted Hospitals,
Speaker 2: Paranormal nine one, things of that nature. Hop on out
Speaker 2: there and connect and let me know your monster stories.
Speaker 2: I'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fantastic. As we close, our ancestors had traditions warning
Speaker 3: against contacting spirits. What do you think of modern ghost
Speaker 3: hunting kind of ignoring those ancient cautions and kind of
Speaker 3: delving into these territories that could be a problem.
Speaker 2: While I'm fifty three, I've been doing it for most
Speaker 2: of my life and I'm fine. Is my first reaction.
Speaker 2: I think any subject that you approach with respect is
Speaker 2: that's the way to do it right. Where people get
Speaker 2: into trouble, I think is when they are a provocation
Speaker 2: and aggression and belligerence and doing this for entertainment and
Speaker 2: for egotistical reasons. Those that are genuinely interested in the unknown,
Speaker 2: in researching it, in adding to our knowledge and understanding,
Speaker 2: I think I'll welcome and we'll do fine. Those that
Speaker 2: get into this for the wrong reasons and in a
Speaker 2: cavalier way might want to keep an eye out.
Speaker 3: So are you suggesting when you go to a location
Speaker 3: or doing research, that you say a prayer or you
Speaker 3: have a special intention that you are here to.
Speaker 2: If that's your belief Yeah, Cliff, if that's your belief system,
Speaker 2: by all means, I suggest I go to haunted prisons, hospitals, asylums,
Speaker 2: you name it. I make I approach them as I
Speaker 2: would approach any strangers that I'd never met before. So
Speaker 2: if I've never met you before and I'm invited to
Speaker 2: your home or workplace, I'm going to extend you a
Speaker 2: certain amount of respect, you know, which should be entirely normal.
Speaker 2: I won't come in and demand that you show yourself
Speaker 2: start performing for me on demand and do this, and
Speaker 2: you know, flip this, flip this chair over, and throw
Speaker 2: something off the shelf, making demands go in with a
Speaker 2: respectful attitude and you will, almost in my experience at least,
Speaker 2: be absolutely fine, fantastic. You know, respect the dead as
Speaker 2: you would respect the living.
Speaker 3: Richard fascinating much success on this new book, and I
Speaker 3: appreciate you coming on the program.
Speaker 2: Thanks sir, I have a wonderful day and thanks for
Speaker 2: having me on. Take care.
Speaker 3: Richard mentioned that the book's not out yet, but you
Speaker 3: can order it. I just checked. It is available on Amazon,
Speaker 3: but if you're not an Amazon fan, you're gonna have
Speaker 3: to wait a few weeks. It just was. It was
Speaker 3: just released, so it's fresh baked. Hey, if you're enjoying
Speaker 3: Earth Ancients, Destiny and Earth Ancients Special Edition and the Archives,
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Speaker 3: to remind you we have a new program. It's called
Speaker 3: Cliff Notes and it comes out twice a week. You
Speaker 3: can hear it on the Facebook page, on Instagram, and
Speaker 3: on YouTube. I'll talk more about it later. These are
Speaker 3: short twenty thirty minute brain dumps, including graphics, and a
Speaker 3: lot of this is having to do with some of
Speaker 3: this new technology, not just AI, but this SAR technology
Speaker 3: as well as lightar and other programs that are beginning
Speaker 3: to really open the door much more fully to the
Speaker 3: archaeological past, which are ruins and what we're studying. So
Speaker 3: check it out. It's cliff Notes, with yours truly, Cliff Dunning. Well,
Speaker 3: what a nice guy. All right, that's it for this program.
Speaker 3: I want to think my guest today, Richard Estepp, coming
Speaker 3: to us from Colorado, and as always, the team of
Speaker 3: Gail tour Mark Foster, Infia Pavar. You guys rock all right,
Speaker 3: take care of you well and we will talk to
Speaker 3: you next time.
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