Speaker 1: Hello, he'll be in nations. How the heck are you?
How would your a week? Last week? What's a good?
What about your weekend? What's it even better? Other than hot?
And what has it been hot? How has it been?
Tell you what? How about you go to our Facebook
group ageandall tell us all about it? How would your week?
Speaker 2: Just?
Speaker 1: She'll think, if I didn't happen, I have gout some
good news till something good happened. I will admit nothing
really excliting has happened on this side other than spending
the last two weekends split in the firewood getting ready
for winter. Thank the Lord for machinery between my tractor
and my wood splitter. I don't know how I can
get all this done? Thank you technology. Not a whole
out of house keeping A do today actually known? So
let's get right into it, Shelley. This week, Jerry Trace
talking about the legend behind Robert the Dog. You know,
we all know what Jerry thought about poor old little Robert.
From what I understand, he even uh tipped and hit
the feet a few times and uh and I'm pretty
sure Tracy got onto him my asking so mission for
pictures and on all that fun stuff. Happily talk about
Robert the Doll. They have a spectacular interview with the
master of Weird John he L Tenny, y'all enjoy the
sweet show here. We'll talk to you later.
Speaker 3: Bob.
Speaker 4: It's about to.
Speaker 5: Be your pune ride. Following long watch as we slapped heavy, normal,
just hit the lights, goose bumps through the night, mixing
just a little bit of twains that girls show can't
do a thing together. He winsane, that's so hard, and brain,
how can't you won't ever change?
Speaker 2: He's too hit.
Speaker 5: He got the recipe, sat on back and listen in
dies some of Gor talk his histories day.
Speaker 4: Welcome to you, Bill and Horror Stories.
Speaker 2: And Mal he is yours, Jerry, Tracy Pauline, and they're told.
Speaker 3: Men, what are you doing here? Don't you know? Jerry
and Tracy and live here. They're coming. They hear you there.
Speaker 4: Hey guys, you're and Tracy back for episode eighty six
of Hillbily Horror Stories. Of course I'm Jerry because I
just said that you did. And I'm joined by what
was your name, ma'am?
Speaker 6: My name is Tracy Paully. So nice to meet you.
Speaker 4: We are so excited to be back. It seems like
we were just here a couple of days ago and
we were Yeah, it was we hope you guys enjoyed
your little bonus episode that we did. We've already gotten
some good reviews on that. Keith Linder was a fantastic guest, yea.
And tonight, of course we are going to do our
second revisit. We did the revisit just a couple of
weeks ago on Bobby Mackie's and now we're going to
revisit the Robert the Doll story and I try to
dig up some new information and take a different twist
on it. So hopefully you enjoyed this one.
Speaker 6: Yeah, hope you do.
Speaker 4: Obviously, before we jump into the stories, we like to
always give thanks to all of our military and civil
servants all over the world, no matter what country you support.
Speaker 6: God bless every one of you. And we'd also like
to say a special prayer for the firefighters in West Virginia. Yes,
it's such a sad thing, you know, these these guys volunteers,
guys and gals volunteer their services and unfortunately the firetruck
wrecked and I think it was two of the firefighters
were killed and they were actually on their way to
uh fatality, which already involved three people. So I just
want to say, you know, we're praying for you guys.
This is such a terrible, terrible loss. But we do
appreciate you guys so much and everything you do for us.
Speaker 4: We realized that you never know when heading out to
something as simple as just an automobile accident, how you're
putting your life on the line without even realizing.
Speaker 6: All right, so but we we love and appreciate every
one of you, and please please be safe and take
care of yourselves.
Speaker 4: A couple of itune reviews, let me rephrase that one.
Speaker 7: Why one is the loll nes numb And I had
to work more this week because I didn't have.
Speaker 6: Time to just you know, I could just read one
one review, But we love that review. And that review
came from deb fifteen sixty nine than you.
Speaker 4: Why do you love that review?
Speaker 6: Because it says love Tracy's laugh.
Speaker 4: So we get one review the entire week and it
says love Tracy's laugh. That's all that. It says, thank you.
Speaker 6: That means a lot to me.
Speaker 4: Now, on more positive notes, Patreon supporters, we had four
new ones this week. Ray Teresa Rowland, thank you so much.
Thank you, Melody Harrison, thank you so much. Jackie Moss
actually edited hers and actually switched to a higher tier.
Speaker 6: Oh thanks, honey, thank you.
Speaker 4: And I hope I pronounced it like it's spelt like
Keriston Cooper. But I could see how some people may
say that's Kristen if you say way, but I think
it's Keirston Cooper.
Speaker 6: So yeah, I love that name is really pretty.
Speaker 4: It is pretty. Thank you guys so much for all
of your patronage.
Speaker 6: Thank you. We appreciate you and love you.
Speaker 4: And as usual, we are getting really close to that
time the first of the month where we put out
our Listener Stories episode. So if you guys have a
listener story that you would like to tell on our
Patreon episode, send us a message and we will get
in touch with you because we were probably doing those
this week. Oh yes, the first is what Sunday is Easter?
Easter ball yep, so Easter. We have a Patreon episode
coming out and a regular episode on the same.
Speaker 6: Day, and Easter in April fol is on the same day.
Speaker 4: What the heck four things happen in that day.
Speaker 6: That's crazy. Yeah, So I have a feeling that a
lot of Easter egg planters are going to be having
a lot of fun with the Easter egg hunters. Do
you feel me?
Speaker 4: What are you saying?
Speaker 6: Because it's gonna be April full choke and the go
back like they hit each eggs and then in fact
they really didn't.
Speaker 4: You remember when I was watching that episode of Parks
and Recreation where they were out there all looking for
the Easter eggs in the way you could find.
Speaker 6: Them because I didn't them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she said so, and SO was in charge. I
had them, and he's like, oh, yeah, I forgot.
Speaker 6: So it's how to be an interesting holiday, for sure.
Speaker 4: It should be fun, should be fun, It'll be fun.
I can't remember Easter ever being on April fools.
Speaker 6: It's me either.
Speaker 4: I can keep up when the Easter is. I can't
remember what the protocol is for what Sunday it is.
But I mean sometimes it's in April. Sometimes no, you can't.
Speaker 6: May I mean one year it was on my sister's
birthday and it's the fourteenth of April.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I don't know. I had to go look
and I'm sure somebody's gonna write me and tell me.
Speaker 6: But I really can't.
Speaker 4: Well, I remember it's on a certain certain Sunday of
the year or something. That's what throws everything off. But
I mean it's got to do with obviously the religious. Yeah,
but I'm saying, okay, I'll just get off of it
because I don't know people will start pointing my mistakes
out like they did on the Tower of London episode.
So let's jump into that real quick. Because when it
comes to stories such as supernatural, paranormal, that type of thing,
a lot of that is subjective, so you can't really say, oh,
they didn't see this ghost or it's all our opinion.
But when we're dealing in actual facts, those are facts,
and a couple couple of facts that we well, let
me say, I misput out there on the Tower of
London episode. I wanted to address and give thanks to
people who pointed.
Speaker 6: Out, oh yeah, absolutely that.
Speaker 4: So the first one we got to go back into
Anne Berlin. Now this wasn't as much of a me
being wrong as I probably said it wrong. What I
said was that King Henry the Eighth wanted a male
heir to the throne and she could no longer have kids,
so that's why he put her to death, and the
reality of it is she could have kids. Matter of fact,
she was. I think Queen Elizabeth was her daughter, so
she had had already had a daughter, but she had
had several miscarriages. So when I said that she couldn't
have kids, I didn't mean that she wasn't fertile. I'm
just saying that they weren't having any success having any
male kid because of several miscarriages and stuff. So that's
what I meant by she couldn't have kids. So I
could have probably put that a different way, maybe like
I just did, rather than just sending, but I was
trying to move along. And the next one obviously had
to do with we were talking about Sir Walter Riley
and he had the situation with Bessie where he was
married to her, and I said she was a maid
of honor, and I said the Queen was irritated because
she really liked Sir Walter Riley didn't like the fact
that he got married. And I made the comment that
she was already married, she shouldn't care. The reality was
she was not married, and Bessie wasn't her maid of honor.
She was like a lady in waiting. I guess from
when that happened. So I was wrong on that aspect completely.
And I made an assumption because the one article that
I did read said that she was a maid of honor.
When I think made of honor, I think at a wedding.
So I made the assumption and that was my fault.
So there we go.
Speaker 6: You made an assumption. That's surprising whatever.
Speaker 4: So I was wrong, and I have no problem making
corrections with you.
Speaker 6: Yeah, thank you for that information. Anyway, we love it,
especially love.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I started saying I didn't love it. I'm sure
you loved it. So let's get into Robert the Dall.
I'm not into because that's it could be some kind
of fetish. I don't know, but I'm not getting into Robert. Okay,
so let's talk about the story of Robert Dahl. So
we're going to start off by me painting a picture,
which is good because the main character.
Speaker 2: Was an artist.
Speaker 6: Oh okay, good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, since the surprise in your voice, since you had
no clue, all right, so everybody closed her eyes unless
you're driving, and just think. So it's the middle of
the night. You got a ten year old child. He
awakens to find this stuffed doll staring at him from
the foot of his bed. His glassy eye's expressionless face
is just unnatural. This is a child's best friend during
the day, but now the child is paralyzed with fear.
Across the house, the child's mother is abruptly awakened by
her child's screams and sounds of furniture being overturned. She
rushes into the room, panic stricken, only to find the
door locked. On the other side of the door, she
can hear this sinister giggle and a commotion going on.
She hears her son calling out to her, begging to
be rescued. She finally gets the door to open. She
finds her son in a fetal position in the bed.
His room's destroyed. There's a doll sitting on the bed.
The little boy, visibly shaken, can only whisper Robert, did it.
Speaker 2: All right?
Speaker 4: You can over your eyes now.
Speaker 6: Man, I was totally into that. I saw every bit
of it.
Speaker 4: Look, it's not uncommon for kids to have imaginary friends.
Most kids do. It's definitely not uncommon for you to
blame their imaginary friends for doing stuff that you wasn't
supposed to do. Like like when I rode on a
lamp when I was like six years old, even though
I was the only one in the house that could
write as far as the kids go, and I blamed
my imaginary friend. They weren't falling for it though I
was pretty stupid.
Speaker 6: I like, you said, you rode on a lamp. I'm
like wrote, Okay.
Speaker 4: Look, this is what kids do. They have imaginary friends.
They try to stay out of trouble. So they say,
whoever did? Most parents they'd used to usually kind of
dismissed this because saying, you know, either child's got a
great imagination or something of that, you know nature. But
what really happens when your imaginary friend or in this case,
a doll, begins to torment the child and terrorize anybody
who lives in the household. This is the story of
Robert the Dall.
Speaker 6: Wow, Like I did like that?
Speaker 4: So look, we did this before. This is this is
the third episode of Hibberly Horror Stories. If you go
back to Ricky and I did, I don't have to
tell everybody if you listen to it. It was a little crude.
There were some jokes in it that we will not
rehash tonight, but we did kind of glance over it
and not get as much into the story, which is
what we're hoping to do tonight. If you listen to
that version, we told basically one legend, and I'll gloss
over that tonight so you can hear what that legend was.
But what I hope to do is, just like with
the Bobby Mackie deal, is get into more of the facts.
So are we ready to get this thing rolling?
Speaker 6: Let's go?
Speaker 4: All right, So let's talk about the legend, the legend
of Roberts Dog or something like this. In nineteen hundred,
when Robert Eugene Otto's mother was about four months pregnant,
she sent her husband to the Bahamas to bring back
four servants to bring back to Key West, Florida, which
is where their home was to obviously be Yeah, what's
that makes sense? So I knew he was on top
of it. Apparently her husband took a few liberties when
with the servants because one of them was pregnant. When
they got back, ooh that dog. Missus Otto was not pleased,
to say the least, and she locked a pregnant servant
in an outhouse and she kept her there for the
duration of her pregnancy. Some people said nine months. I
got a feeling that would have been less than that
because she must Yeah, yeah, she was already pregnant when
she got there. That's not her fault, so fukture in
this outhouse. She would only feed her once a day,
bread and water. The servant has the baby, but it
died soon after from mount nutrition oh Man. Miss Otto
then released the servant, but then forced her to start
caring for her new baby, Robert Eugene Otto. That's not nice,
Well it's not, but the servant fell in love with Robert.
She raised him just like she would her own kid.
And I would think that she lost her kid and
now has this baby that she can raise, then she
probably it was a good replacement for her. She raised
the child so much as her own that she even breastfeedting.
Speaker 6: I had a feeling you were going to say.
Speaker 4: That when Robert was four years old, there's an event
that took place that would change everything for him. His
entire life would be hinished on this event. See miss
ottil walked into the backyard one night and she witnessed
these four servants from the Bahamas practicing Santaia. Now, if
you remember we talked about Santa Ria being basically like
a blend of different religions, but most people will think
of it more like a voodoo type ritual. This ritual
involves cutting off the heads of chickens and stuff like that,
and that's kind of what she walked out on. She
starts seeing them doing stuff with chickens and stuff like that,
and she just flipped out. She demanded that all these
servants would be sent back to the Bahamas. Well, Robert's
nanny was heartbroken because she's four years now, basically raised
his kid and been around his family. She felt like
that she was completely being scorned, was being mistreated, and
she wanted to, I guess, get a little bit of
revenge on the family. So she made a doll to
get the Robert. Now, Robert used to wear a sailor
shit all the time, and Robert also had a stuffed
animal that was a little lion. So this doll was
made about a little over three foot tall, which you
can imagine at four years old, that's about the same
size as Robert. So it was life size. She had
a sailor's suit on it, and she had a little
stuff lying that it was holding, so it was like
a perfect replica of Robert.
Speaker 6: So she was doing the ritual with the other guys.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well I don't know if there were guys or Yeah,
she was part of it. That was their religion. But
I guess miss Otto hadn't been a part of any
of this stuff until she just happened to walk out
and see it. And it's like a doser reality for now.
She made this doll, but supposedly she put a voodoo
type curse.
Speaker 3: On the doll.
Speaker 4: And it's like I said, that's the legend of how
Robert inherited a doll. Now, there's lots of stories about
how Robert actually got the doll because the story's been
passed down from family member to family member through several
several years. It was actually given to Robert by his
grandfather after a trip that he made to Germany. Now,
if you remember, we've talked about this before, because the
story I had always heard before doing more research was
the story we just talked about. He got it from
the servant that was from the Bahamas. Then we were
watching the Lord TV show, if you remember, and it
said that his aunt gave it to him, sent it
to the mail. Because I remember we were talking in
about Well, that's completely different what I've heard. The story
that we found out is true is that his grandfather
gave it to him, And I'll tell you a little
more later about how we know that's true. So it
was given to him by his grandfather after trip to Germany.
Robert is kept today at the Fort West Martello Museum
in Key West, Florida. Their research found out that it
was never intended to be a doll to begin with.
It was made by a company named the Stife and
was part of a clown or a court gesture display
like that would be kept in their store window. So
I don't think, I don't even know if it was
even meant to be for sale. But his grandpa saw it,
he liked it, and he went ahead and shipped over.
So let's talk about Robert the doll as far as
we know where he came from. Now, what's he made of?
Robert's one of a kind, handmade doll, created around the
nineteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds. He's forty inches tall and
he stuffed with a wood wool known as excelsior. You've
heard of excelsior. It sounds like a drink.
Speaker 6: Mike doncha selser something like that.
Speaker 4: I guess maybe he's dressed in a sailor suit, as
we talked about, but that sailor suit did not come
with the doll, and all the research tells us that
that was probably Robert Eugene's autos clothes. The little boy.
It was probably his sailor suit, and they it on
the doll because it just happened to be about the
same size. The doll's face is vaguely human. It's a
weird look to it. It's got kind of a nub nose,
and it's got a smirk that's on his face, and
it's got these little brown nicks that are kind of
like scars all over it. His eyes are beady and black,
and he's holding a stuff line as we spoke of.
But apparently that stuff line was already what he came with,
not put there because that's what Robert.
Speaker 6: I feel like I have to stop you because I
feel like I'm really lost. Okay, Okay, So the lady
made the doll and put a hex on it.
Speaker 4: That was the legend.
Speaker 6: The legend. How did the doll get to the to Grandpa?
I think I missed it.
Speaker 4: It didn't the grandpa bought the doll in Germany and
gave it to Robert.
Speaker 6: So all that stuff you just told me about the
Heck's and all that was not true.
Speaker 4: Yes, thus me saying how he actually got the doll
was from his grandpa.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I knew that, but I guess I was thinking
that it was it got to grandpa somehow. Okay, go ahead, sorry,
you're fine.
Speaker 4: So but you bring up an entering point though, just
because just because the story of the origin was wrong
doesn't mean the rest of the story we're going to
tell you is wrong, because the rest of the story
is as much factual as we can do. Robert the
Doll is known for having a turbulent and we'll skits
will say malicious pass, but it didn't start out that way.
So in the beginning things seemed a little more innocent,
like any boy with a brand new toy. Robert Eugene
Otto took the doll everywhere he went. Some say that
Robert was four when he got the doll, but I've
seen other stories it said he was seven or eight
years old, but we'll stick with four years old. Regardless,
the doll was as big as he was, so that
doesn't change things. Now, Robert was often heard whispering to
this doll, no big deal. But when this really deep
voice was heard answering back, that's when things started to
get kind of strange. So it was about that time
that Robert changed his name to Eugene or Gene, which
is his middle name, because the doll's name was now Robert.
So you follow me on this, and now they were
both It was just Robert was the kid, but he
decided to name the doll Robert, and he changed his
name to Gene. So as time moves forward, the story
became stranger. So this dolls started to have somewhat of
a hold on Eugene. We'll say he'd had these violent commotions.
I mean, you could be hearing these things from Eugene's
room on a nightly basis. Toys would be ripped apart,
furniture overturned, and when they got into his room, Eugene
would always be on the bed, cowering in fear. And
the answer was always the same, Robert did it.
Speaker 6: So this only happens at night.
Speaker 4: But at this point, yeah, as you can imagine, his
parents would only take so much of this crap. Robert
the doll was banished to the attic. Now there was
an aunt that was the one that actually put him
up in the attic, and the story goes that she
died later the same night after putting him in the attic.
Speaker 6: What the same night? Yeah, wo homie, don't play.
Speaker 4: Apparently not, so they had servants. Still, servants would arrive
and promptly quit because of hearing the doll giggle and
moving around from the attic. They would hear footsteps and
stuff like that. So it freaked him out. So it's
kind of hard to keep some help. So as Jane
got into his teenage years, he became even closer to Robert.
Now you would think this would be the exact office.
You get a loader hanging out with people.
Speaker 6: Play with your doll.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but he did because Gene didn't have any friends.
Robert was his only friend. He'd walk around in the
streets of Key West holding Robert as a teenager. When
Eugene was about nineteen, his family moved to France and
guess who got left behind?
Speaker 6: They did not?
Speaker 4: Did he left Robert in the attic?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 6: What in Gene not taking? I don't know, do you think?
Speaker 4: Well, sure, I'm sure he was forced not to take him.
But that is an interesting question that I really didn't research,
because you would think, as addicted as he was to
this doll, that he probably would throw a fit about
him not leaving.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: So they get over to Paris, and Robert became a
completely different person. He became very social, he began painting,
and he met a woman named Anne, and they eventually
got married. Oh so, what a big difference for Robert.
Speaker 6: He changed his name back.
Speaker 4: No, I said that, because hell, I can't keep the
story straight. Eugene, what a big He still kept his
name Eugene with Eugene's parents gave him quite the nice
wedding gift. They gave him the house in Key West,
so they moved back. Was not the parents, you know, Eugene.
Eugene and Anne moved back very in Key West. Shortly afterwards,
Eugene finds Robert in the attic and didn't like Robert
the doll at all. And she could see him move, laugh,
and just an odd feeling about so, in her opinion,
there was something freaky about this doll. She didn't like it.
On the other hand, Eugene picked right back up where
you left react. Oh, it's just like not even like
they'd left. I mean, he's back to spending all his time.
So and demanded that the doll be sent back to
the attic. Well, after hearing furniture moving and foots steps,
she became kind of scared.
Speaker 6: Yeah, would do.
Speaker 4: Now. Eugene, on the other hand, said that Robert told
him that he was not going to stay in the
attict and he demanded to be moved to a room
of his own. So, being a good little boy and
doing what he's told, Eugene takes Robert, gets him out
of the attic and he puts him in his own room. Now,
this is one of those houses that has a turret.
As we discussed before, it's kind of a castle looking
rounded room, and that's the room that became Robert's room.
Eugene made a small bed for him, He made furniture
that was scaled the size for Robert, so he'd like
like a little couch and stuff like that and there.
But primarily he would prop him up in the windows,
and school kids would go by there and they would
swear that they would see Robert moving in the window,
and that sometimes he would disappear and then reappear like
he walked away and then came back to the windows.
So little kids are freaking out out. But Eugene himself
started spending all of his time in that turret room,
and Robert became right back to being his number one fascination.
So he would spend this is where, this is the
room that he chose to do all of his painting
ad and like I said, he became a pretty accomplished
painter throughout and even we're going to find out even
some architecture and stuff that he responds with. This guy
was kind of a genius when it came to art.
So Ann said that Eugene would show hatred towards her
and be real angry and lash out, and then he'd
go right back to normal, kind of like what you
would think of people being bipolar or something today. But
she one hundred percent blamed the doll that this doll
was causing him to do that. Even if it wasn't
physically you know the case, she at least felt like
that Eugene thought in his mind that that was the cause.
Speaker 6: So then she got sick of it and left.
Speaker 4: Well, no, that didn't happen, but she did have a
situation where she was out by the outhouse and she
was shoved into it and locked in it for like
three days.
Speaker 6: Who did that?
Speaker 4: Well, Eugene did it. But guess what he said, Robert it.
Speaker 6: Oh he blended on him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Robert did it. Robert did it. So Jene continued
to live in that house and have a super tight
bond with Robert all the way up until nineteen seventy
four when he died. Now, Ike, remember Jane was born
in nineteen hundred, so he was like seventy three seventy
four years old when he died, and had that doll
for the majority of his life with that kind of
a weird bond, I mean crazy, Like I said, even
as an old man, he would walk down the streets
and stuff with this doll. He was seventy three years old.
He died in a tourt room with Robert the Doll present.
There are rumors I don't know how true they are,
but there are rumors and legends out there that when
they found his body, that Robert the dall was on
top of him with his hands around his throat. That's
not funny, I see. I try to make that all
dramatic and shit, and you start laughing.
Speaker 6: Well, what happened to Anne?
Speaker 4: Well, that's a good question because An seen this as
I guess, well, not payback. But she was still married
to him and everything, so she was she was like,
she decided to sell the house and she sold it
to a woman by the name of Myrtle. I think
her name is Ruder r e U t e r Myrtle.
Ruder sound like rot. So she sells the house. When
when Myrtle bought the house, guess what she also got.
Speaker 6: It comes with a really cool Doll's.
Speaker 4: Exactly what it was. She got Robert the doll because
Anne left at the house because Anna wasn't about to
take it anywhere. So Myrtle confirms some of the Robert
stories out there. She said she would often find Robert
in a completely different room than she left him at
visitors to her new home, which is now called the
Artist House because he was an artist. So that's what
the name of the home is. It's a bed and
breakfast now, by the way, so I don't know if
it's a bed and breakfast, but you can rent rooms
the hotel room, So how cool would that be? No, well,
we're going I don't think. Well, the dolls not in
the room. We'll discuss that else. He's in the museum.
So visitors to her new house, Myrtle's house, didn't like
Robert at all, and she found out the same thing
from them, that he would appear and just disappear at will.
So she and her visitors also claimed that his smirk
on his face would change when Eugene was being talked
about in a negative way. In nineteen ninety four, Myrtle
donated him to the Fort East Martello Museum in Key West, Florida,
where he resides the day. Now, if you know anything
about Robert the Doll, you know that he is locked
in a glass case down there, and he's got all
kinds of rumors and stuff attached to him. And we're
going to talk a little bit about some of those rumors.
Interesting fact, though, the museum that you donating to, the
Fort East Martella Museum, was designed by Eugeneatto. Oh, so it's.
Speaker 6: Almost like they're still together.
Speaker 4: Almost like they're still together. So I thought that was
pretty cool. Now, as soon as Robert moved into the museum,
he goes He didn't start off in the glass case.
He earned that. He worked his way into the class
case because the museum staff noticed a change of energy
as soon as Robert arrived. Now, when he first got there,
he wasn't initially put on exhibit, but word got out
that he was there, and people was just started showing
up when they heard that he was there. So eventually
he was put on display, and cameras and electronic devices
started malfunctioning in his presence.
Speaker 6: Oh man.
Speaker 4: Soon people started sending letters and they were addressed to
Robert the Doll. So when these letters started showing up,
they would museum staff would open them up and they
would find out that they were like asking forgiveness to
the doll for being disrespectful or behavior or not asking
to take a picture with him. So I guess people
were taking pictures and stuff with him, and they started
having all these horrible rashes of bad luck and stuff happen.
Robert's been blamed for car accidents, broken bones, job losses, divorce,
and even death.
Speaker 6: What what a herd.
Speaker 4: And at the end of this, I'm going to read
you some of the letters that have been said cool,
but there's been hundreds upon hundreds, so we're not going
to read all that weird in the museum before Robert
was locked in his little glass house. There were reports
that the crew would walk into a mess in the museum,
just like in Robert's troum. It would be a complete mess,
and Robert would have like dust and stuff on his
feet like he had been running around in there.
Speaker 6: That is funny.
Speaker 4: There was one case where there was a hurricane that
did damage.
Speaker 6: Like a whole hurricane. You mean, like a realin.
Speaker 4: Yeah, oh well not like a you know, Miami hurricane.
It wouldn't like you, you know, Michael Irvin came in
there and started causing damage. I'm just saying the museum
suffered damage from the hurricane, and I think it ripped
some of the roof off. And when it did, it
did a lot. There was a lot of you know,
stuff in there that got wet and stuff got moved around.
Speaker 6: Oh, nothing happened to him.
Speaker 4: Well, Robert was actually up in a rafter, just kind
of hanging over one of the rafters, but he suffered
no damage at all. Well, a bunch of the other
stuff got wet inside the museum.
Speaker 6: He ain't trying to get blowed away, apparently not. I
am so thirsty.
Speaker 4: It's a fantastic Sorry, y'all.
Speaker 6: I've just drank a whole big glass of stuff and
now I'm drinking Jerry. Sorry, go ahead, that's awesome.
Speaker 4: So that affects the show none, but I'm sorry. People
know that you're thirsty. Now, we talked about the Artist
House being like a not a bed and breakfast, but
like rooms you can rent and stuff. Now the Artist
House is supposedly hanted, hanted, let's try that again, haunted
by the ghost of Anne who's trapped in the Torrent
Room with Robert.
Speaker 6: Wait, what yep?
Speaker 4: What yep? Supposedly she's trapped in the Torrent room. That's
what the ghosts have claimed to see her, and ghosts
also claim to see Robert in the Torrent room.
Speaker 6: Man, what a bummer. It sucks to be her.
Speaker 4: Well, I told you that we were going to tell
some or read some letters. But what I want to
do first before we read the letters, We're going to
end on that. But we've got our interview with John E. L. Tenney,
and I'm telling you, guys, I've mentioned just a couple
of shows before before I could even put this up here.
This guy you will love. If you've never listened to
him before, you're going to love this interview. It's one
of my favorites. He is funny, he's smart, he's into
every aspect of weird, and he takes pride in weird.
That's what his lectures are called. And we'll get into
all that. But this guy is an expert on ghosts,
paranormal investigating UFOs. He's seen a couple of UFOs, He's
talked to a lot of famous people. He's performed with
Kid Rock. I mean, he's got so many different things,
and we talk about all of it. So let's give
this a listen and we'll come back and we'll play
some or listen to.
Speaker 6: We will we will read the stories. Since you can't
seem to spit it out today, we'll.
Speaker 4: Read the Robert of Doll letters when we come back. Well,
I have got a super special guest on tonight, and
I'll be honest, I don't know how to introduce you.
Most people, John, I would bring on and say, hey,
they're a paranormal investigator, or they're an author, or you,
my man, are literally a jack of all trades. So
let me just say John E. L. Tenney, and I
think that says enough for most people. But let's be honest.
You literally are an author. You are a musician and
a painter, paranormal investigator, ufologist. I mean, you name it
and you're into it, and I just don't see how
you find a time to do all of that.
Speaker 2: You know, it's thanks for It's absolutely true. Like, I
don't know how I do it either. It's just part
of my nature. I think it's because I drink so
much coffee, but I don't know. It was just it's
always since I was a kid, like, whenever anything seemed
exciting or new or weird to me, I needed to
explore it to its full depths. And that's the good
thing about high strangeness and paranormal phenomena is that you
know there's no end to the depth of it, so
I can just get lost in it. And it's just
everything with arguing. I was in punk rock bands all
in the eighties and nineties, and we have If you
want to talk you were talking before we went on
the air about a George Bush story. If you want
to talk about kid rock, I've got a good kid
rock story.
Speaker 4: Well, it's funny you mentioned that because that's on my list.
Because I mentioned you were a musician and I saw
that you had performed with kid Rock and that's on
my list to ask, So let's go ahead and get
it out of the way.
Speaker 2: Well it's not I'll tell you what. It's not going
to be a good story. Bob and I do not
get along very well. I met him. I was in
a punk rock band in the eighties early nineties and
he was strictly rap at that time, and we used
the same recording studio, so he needed someone to lay
down guitar tracks and I was there late one night
after my band recorded, and so I laid down some
samples for him, and that's how we kind of met.
And over the course of the next few years, i'd
play for him, play with him, and he would, you know,
come and sit and listen to my band and go
to our shows. And he got signed to a real
small label in New York and they were looking for
a rock and role act, and so he asked me,
do you guys want to be on this label? And
I said, yeah, sure. And so he had a big
studio in Michigan that he built his dad built. A
lot of people don't know, but Bob come. Bob is
a very wealthy person. He started off very wealthy, Like
there's this idea that he's straight out of the trailer park.
I know he says in one song, right, But he
was the richest kid. I knew growing up. He had
a forty acre order and servants, and so his dad
had him this studio built for him, and we went
there and we recorded a whole album. We ended up
breaking up, and then about a year later, Bob put
out this record called Devil without a Cause. Vaguely familiar
with it, right, And that's that's really the album that
made him famous, and it was where he went from
rap to like rock rap, and all of the music
that you hear on that album is the rock and
roll album that band recorded.
Speaker 4: Oh Wow.
Speaker 2: And so then there was lawsuits that went on for years,
and friendships dissolved and fell apart, and it got pretty
hairy there for a while. And I think the last
time I talked to him, we just kind of nodded
at each other. That was about probably about eight years ago.
We just nodded at each other and kept walking. We
didn't even really say hello, wow.
Speaker 4: And I never would have guessed that when I when
I heard that you had performed with I didn't really
think it was going to take that direction. But you're right,
that's not the story you were expecting here.
Speaker 2: You know, it's strange. I mean, I don't harbor any
will now it's a good story to tell, but we
were both young, and you know, obviously he's used it
and become very successful, and I have no idea what
he's like now. So you know, I can only I
only have these memories, these fleeting memories of the two youths,
Bob and John, sitting around in a room trying to
come up with songs. So I'm I mean, people think
I dislike him, but I really don't dislike anybody. I mean,
we all grow up and change, right.
Speaker 4: I would hope, so I would hope. So I know
I'm a lot different than I was twenty thirty years ago.
Speaker 2: Oh for sure. I mean that, you know that ties
into like my paranormal stuff. When I started off in this,
I was a gopher. My mentor specialized in political assassinations
of the nineteen sixties and seventies. I got my start
in conspiracy theory, and I never thought that I would
be a researcher of all things that are strange, you know,
A bigfoot in UFOs and ghosts. I helped my mentor
Craig for years doing his lectures about JFK RFK, Malcolm
x MLK, the Kent State University shooting, Black Panther Party murders.
But when I was eighteen, I had a kind of
freak heart attack and died and was dead for three minutes,
almost three and a half minutes. And when I came
back and kind of recovered from that, I was like, Oh,
so I've been doing what Craig loves this whole time,
and I loved it too. But I realized there was
this whole other realm that I was able to explore now,
you know, the realm of ghosts and psychic phenomena and
how that ties into UFOs and cryptozoology and what happens
to my consciousness once my biology dies, and that really
that started me on this track.
Speaker 4: Well, let's backstep a little bit now. When you and
Chad Linberg were doing Ghodstalkers, one of the things that
was highly publicized was putting you two together, and what
you two had in common were both had near death
experiences that had got you on this path to the paranormal.
Can you explain to me a little bit about what
you saw in your near death experience.
Speaker 2: Sure, it's hard, it's hard to talk about because what
I experienced was really nothing, and so to call it
something is kind of does it a disservice. But when
I died, I had an awareness of existing, but I
was existing within infinity, and in infinity, there's nothing except
your awareness of being inside of infinity and being inside
of nothing, and you are nothing and you are infinity.
It's this kind of very deep metaphysical idea that's hard
to get across because we just don't have words for it.
You know, if you try thinking of an infinite string
of numbers, your brain will just eventually shut off after
a couple minutes because you'll realize there's no point to it.
If you try to imagine nothing and you imagine black,
you're already imagining something, so you're not imagining nothing, like
you can't do it, so your brain just stops thinking
about it. Well, when I died, I experienced nothing in infinity,
which is something that our biological brains just can't handle.
We just can't deal with it. So the biological brain
shuts down. And for me, it was a truly terrifying
experience because you know, I knew I was me, but
I knew that, Like my first reaction when I became
this awareness inside of infinity, my first reaction was to scream.
And then I realized I didn't have a mouth and
so I couldn't scream, and I wanted to cover my eyes,
but I didn't have hands, I didn't have eyes, And
that went on. That experience went on forever because I
was inside of infinity.
Speaker 4: That's exciting and depressing all at the same time.
Speaker 2: I've heard people tell me that, you know, oh, it
seems like hell or some kind of you know, purgatory
something like that. But the reality for me is that
it was a very traumatic thing. It took me about
a year to kind of cover from it, and I
went to therapy for years afterward, and I still have
PTSD from it. Most people who have near death experiences
suffer some form of PTSD. But what I realized with hindsight,
and like we were just saying earlier, you know, we
change and grow. That kind of horrifying experience, what was
horrifying to me at the time, turned me into a
much better person. It was a transformational experience that I
look back on now with a lot of insight and
happiness as to how it shaped me and molded me
to become the person that I was. So I think
even though the experience itself sounds horrific, the end result
of it was something that was unimaginably beautiful.
Speaker 4: Here's what I like about that story. And people call
me weird too. I know you're one of those guys
that if I brought on anybody else and said, hey,
this guy is extremely weird, they would probably take it
as an insult. But I'm sure you'd don't because you
like to label yourself that way. Yeah, and I'm a
little on the weird side too. Like, I like the
fact that your story doesn't involve a white light everything,
and it seems like everybody has a near death experience.
You hear, Ah, there was a white light and then
I saw everything was white around me, and then there's
all these ghosts that people see. They're always the lady
in white, And it just makes me think that the
afterlife is like a giant progressive insurance commercial or something,
and that's more scary to me than the alternative.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, there are three The three most common
near death experiences are number one is obviously the tunnel
of white light, and you've got you know, all your
relatives over there with balloons and puppies and candy, and
they're waving you in and it's gorgeous and wonderful. That's
the most heard about one, and that's because it's a truly, like,
immediately positive experience, so people are willing to talk about it.
So that's the one you hear all the time, the
one that you're talking about. The second one that you
hear pretty much most frequently after that first one is
people die and they are in the room where they die.
They're outside of their body. They're looking at the doctors
resuscitating them, or they're floating on the top of the
ambulance that's taking them to the hospital, so they have
an awareness, but they can see the experience of life
going on outside of their body, and even though it's frightening,
it's weird and cool, so people talk about it. The
third experience is this void experience that I have. And
because it's traumatic, because it takes years of kind of
therapy to get through, because some people never get over it,
you just never hear about people talking about it because
they don't want to revisit that trauma. But yeah, like
you were saying, the one you hear the most white
light puppies, it's shining and candy. Everything's great over there,
come on through. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, there's so many different versions. Like
you said, there's three different versions of that. And you've
got people that claim that they've went to hell and
you've got people that claim they went to heaven and
were brought back. It's you know, it just kind of
makes you wonder how much is something that they feel
like is real but really wasn't in some cases, Because
I think there are cases where people like yourself experience
something and there's no doubt about it. But then I
do think there are people that think they experienced a
near death experience when it was probably more of a
dream type state. I mean, I don't know what your
thoughts are on that.
Speaker 2: Uh, No, you're right, I mean there's a lot of people.
I mean, whenever you have any kind of traumatic experience,
the brain does a multitude of things. I mean one
of the as a sidebar to this conversation, one of
the things, like you ask how I have time to
study stuff, well, like with near death experiences and neurobiology
and chemistry for a person like me to have a
near death experience. The first thing I did was dove
into the research and made friends that were neurobiologists and neuroscientists.
I wanted to know how my brain worked. I wanted
to know what had happened to me, And so you
become a de facto expert on this thing. I mean,
it's like if you get any in our normal, everyday lives.
If you get a red patch on your elbow and
it doesn't go away for a week, you become an
expert on red patches on skin because you're constantly trying
to figure out what it is. Well, the same thing
for me with near dead experiences, and a lot of
it is perspective. Like you were saying, this experience, the
void experience that I had. If I had come from
a very religious background, if I was brought up my
whole life with some kind of very strict religious background,
I probably would tell people that I had gone to
Hell because that'd be my frame of reference. Or if
I experienced a tunnel of bright white light and my
relatives were there, I'd probably tell people I went to
heaven because that would be my perspective on it. So
you know, you can have people experiencing, you know, a
few similar things, but because of their own unique personality
and their own perception and awareness of reality, they call
it by what they're most familiar with.
Speaker 4: Man, And that definitely makes sense, because, like you said,
it's all about perspective. So let's let's change gears. I'm
gonna bounce all over the place. People know that when
I do interviews, I like to get to know the
person and maybe discuss some things that you haven't discussed
openly a whole lot in these forums that you do.
One of the things that really draw me to you
as far as a connection is the fact that I
am a stand up comedian former stand up comedian more
or less these days, and I know you are in
that Saint Ball Park. You do some stand up, You've
had some comedy podcasts, So tell me a little bit
about what kind of comedy you like that sucked you
into that part that made you want to get on stage.
Who were some of your favorite comedians.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you what, when I do stand up, I
am not a good comedian. I most of the time
I do stand up comedy to keep my ego in check.
Like I know that my lecture is about ghosts and
UFOs and bigfoot and weird stuff. I know those lectures
will go fairly well. But I know that when I
get up on stage and try and do comedy, there
is a very great chance that I'm going to be
mocked and booed and shut out and dead silence and
just bomb like crazy. And that I think is really
good for me to say, like, listen, you're not You're
not good at some things, You're you're better at other things.
Stay in your lane. But when I was growing up,
I loved Monty Python, Benny Hill. There was a comedian
named Dave Allen about He's missing a finger, missing a
finger he used to and I loved his whole kind
of shtick of just sitting in a chair drinking a
scotch and mixing it with his missing finger and telling jokes.
I loved that stuff. Of course, you know, when I
was growing up, I shouldn't have been, but I would
sneak up and watch like George Carlin specials when my
family finally got cable, and I think that's There were
a couple of comedy albums that my mom had two
and I'd listened to them as a kid, probably eight, nine,
ten years old, and I didn't know they were funny.
I just knew that they were really strange. So, like,
one of the albums that my mom had was The
Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart, and I used to
listen to it, and I was just fascinated because I
didn't as a kid, I didn't understand how it was funny.
And then you know, as I got older, I kept
listening to that album, and then all of a sudden,
you start realizing the timing and what he's talking about.
You start catching more references because you're getting older, so
now you're understanding what he's talking about, and that stuff
was super fascinating to me. So that was those those
albums where Bob Newhart the Button Down Mine. There was
one of the albums was Red Fox, which was like
straight like dirt and film like. It was probably the
first time I heard someone just saying dirty words.
Speaker 4: It was the exact opposite of Bob Newhart.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, absolutely. And then I think the other one
was my dad had the I'm trying to think of
what the name of the album was. It was called
like the First or the Greatest Astronaut and it was
an album by Jose Jimenez.
Speaker 4: Huh, that's a new one on me.
Speaker 2: There was a comedian his name was Bill Dana, and
he had a character that I think was maybe supposed
to be from Mexico, and so it was just this
really kind of weird character that for an entire album
where he would just keep saying my name is Jose
Jimenez over and over and over again. And as a kid,
just his construct his voice made me laugh so hard.
And so you know, I would do. I love to perform,
I love to stand up in front of people. I
love to play music. I love to do lectures and
that stuff. So it just kind of seemed natural. I
think the first time technically I ever did comedy. I
don't think I've ever talked about this on a show,
So I'm glad that this. I have no secrets. When
I was in sixth grade, I asked the teacher if
I could do in front of the class on a Friday,
the Cruel Shoes. Do you know what that is? No,
it's a Steve Martin bit and I used to have
My mom had a forty five of it, and it's
just Steve Martin talking to a shoe salesman, and the
shoe salesman has a pair of cruel shoes, and the
teacher said I could do it for some reason, who
knows what was going on in that era, but she
let me stand up the last like three minutes of
class and do this entire Steve Martin monologue about the
cruel shoes, and when kids were laughing, it was no
better feeling like ever. I can remember it to this day.
Speaker 4: It is a good feeling.
Speaker 2: It just.
Speaker 4: There's very few things in life that can just give
you a natural high, but something getting on stage and
getting people to appreciate what you do, no matter what
it is, is one of those things that just can't
be touched.
Speaker 2: So, since you're a comedian too, you realize that people
who do comedy we are damaged people.
Speaker 4: Absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 2: I mean there is something wrong with us to get
up in front of strangers and know that a lot
of the time it is not going to go well.
Speaker 4: Well, maybe not for you, It always went well for me,
But that's that's a better story. Also, I'm a composive liar.
Speaker 2: Let's do well. You're a comedian, Yeah, that's.
Speaker 4: Right, that's what we do we on age for the
most part, and or where you hope you're lying. You'd hope
if most of this stuff was true, think what a
tragic life. But unfortunately that is the truth of most comedians.
Some of the best comedians had a tragic background and
just used comedy to basically escape. And you know, it
is sad to thank the Robin Williams of the world
and Jeff Jenna, I mean not Jeff Jenna, but Richard
Jenna and some of these others that have tragically, you know,
committed suicide just because they just couldn't cope if they
weren't on stage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're just trying to fill that hole with laughter.
You know, there's something in them that's missing, and laughter,
you know, filled periods of time, but eventually it just
gets the best of them.
Speaker 4: Well, we'll segue getting up on stage in front of
a bunch of strangers to what you've spent a big
part of the last twenty eight years doing, which is lectures.
We talked about the whole weird aspect earlier. How you
embraced that. Tell us a little bit about the lectures
that you've been doing and how that started and how
that fits into your life right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I, as I said earlier, I used to
help my mentor Craig do his conspiracy lectures back in
the late eighties beginning of early nineties, and at some
point someone asked me, I think it was probably in
ninety someone asked me I was doing a JFK lecture
if I thought JFK had been killed because of what
he knew about UFOs. And I didn't have an answer
for them, and that felt really terrible. It was like
bombing at comedy and so I went home and I
always liked weird stuff, and I had, you know, one
or two books on UFOs, but nothing massive. And I
went to the libraries and I started just reading, just
with a fury because I wanted to have this answer.
And the more that I read about UFOs, you know,
names would come up that crossed over into my conspiracy lectures,
and that was super fascinating. And then there were a
few UFO books that led me into ghost books, and
then there were some ghost books that led me into
cryptozoological books. And I realized very early on that if
I was going to do a lecture, sure I could
do a UFO lecture. Sure I can do a conspiracy lecture.
I still do you know, in July around Roswell, I'll
do a UFO lecture. In November, I'll do a Kennedy lecture.
But for me, I always wanted people and I still do.
I want people to diversify their weirdness. It's great to
love ghosts, it's great to love UFOs, it's great to
love cryptis. But I think that when you compartmentalize your
weirdness or what you think is weird, you're missing a
much bigger picture. So I started doing these lectures where
I'll start off talking about ghosts, but by the end
I might be talking about time travelers and reptilians and
the detrimental robots that live underneath the ground that control
us with mind controlling rays. Like I want to get
as weird as possible and get the seeds planted in
people's heads that our reality is far stranger than we
give it credit for. I mean, we are these tiny
little beings in this seemingly endless cosmos, and we seem
to have a shared reality. And millions of people for
thousands of years have had been having the most bizarre
experiences with no real explanation as to why, and we
think that it's either not real or it's outside of normal.
Like I have a problem with the word paranormal because
I think this stuff is going on, and paranormal would
suggest that it's not normal. I think it is normal.
We just don't know how to discuss it. We don't
have the words for it. It's a philosophical conversation, at
least in my mind, because we're talking about what happens
when you die, is their life in outer space? Is
there different types of life on our planet? These are
very deep philosophical questions that we should be having with
each other. And whenever you have any kind of philosophical conversation,
it usually starts with sitting down and saying, Okay, this
is what this word is going to mean, and then
you can all be on the same page. But even
in the paranormal community and the ghost hunting community, we've
never sat down and said, what's a ghost? Because everybody
you know that ghost hunts, they have a propensity to
believe in ghosts. But what I think of a ghost,
and what you think of a ghost, and what someone
else thinks of a ghost, we're thinking of three different things.
Speaker 4: YEP, I can see that.
Speaker 2: So we really need to talk to each other about
the weirdest parts of our lives, and even the things
that might not seem so weird. I talk at my
lectures a lot about synchronicities and coincidences, because you know,
I say this on a lot of podcasts, even at
a lot of a lot of lectures. I tell people,
you know, when something strange happens to you, when a
coincidence happens. The Dictionary definition of a coincidence is seemingly
unrelated events which seemed to be related for no seemingly
relatable reason. So I mean, the definition is kind of
a bullshit definition. What it happens is a coincidence is
we don't know why that happened. And so if you
don't know why it happens, it should fall into the
realm of what we call paranormal phenomena. Why do those
things happen to us? They're just as strange as seeing
a ghost. The example I give it some of my lectures.
When I moved into my house, I was digging through
an old box that I hadn't opened in fifteen years,
and I found a high school yearbook in there, and
I opened it up and it was my freshman yearbook,
and there was a note from this kid, Scott, and
it was, oh, you know, I hope to see you
next year whatever. And he and I had been friends
my freshman year and then we were never friends again,
and I hadn't seen him and I don't even know
twenty years, twenty five years, but I thought him. I
was like, oh, Scott, now I have the internet. I
can look him up on the internet, see what he's doing.
So I made a mental note. I put the yearbook away,
I closed the box up, and I went to the
grocery store and he was standing behind me in line
at the grocery store.
Speaker 4: That's crazy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is as strange as the two and a
half seconds that you might see a kind of ghostly
form flick through the darkness. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And I get a lot of that too, you know.
I don't know, it's not this exact same thing. But
I was talking to my wife, we were riding down
the road, and I said something to her about just randomly.
I said, have you ever heard the song Running Bear
Loves Little White Girl. It's an old song from the
late fifties, maybe early sixties. And she looked at me,
like I was crazy and it's like, no, I've never
heard that. And we were listening to this real old station.
I mean we were out in the middle of the
country and it was playing. That's what they played. They
played these real old songs. That's what made me think
of it. And don't you know, five ten minutes later,
that song came on yep, and that just like blew
both of us away that things like that could happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's stuff like that that we need to pay
attention to. It's strange. It's, like I said, it's just
as strange as hearing an EVP or getting a knock
when you're sitting alone in a dark room asking for
something to knock. Like it's this little way that the
universe says, Hey, I'm stranger than you think I am.
I mean, we have people have this stuff happened to
them all day long, and they don't pay attention to
it because they're oh, it's just a coincidence, doesn't matter.
But if you paid attention to them, if we all
really paid attention to them, we might notice that there's
something underneath it that might be trying to send us signals.
Speaker 4: I got a couple of what I would consider to
be weird phenomenas that I don't know that you have
an opinion on them, but I find it hard to
believe you wouldn't. But let's talk about Are you familiar
with the term death knock?
Speaker 2: I don't think so. Maybe if you explain it, well, no,
by a different name.
Speaker 4: It's mainly more of a German type tradition is how
it got brought in. But it's it's where if you're
like in the middle of a sleep, or sometimes you
don't have to be asleep, but if you get awoken
by like three knocks that sounds like somebody knocking on
the front of a say like a castle door, that
big echoi sound that usually somebody passes right after that.
Have you ever heard of that before?
Speaker 2: I haven't. I heard there's a similar phenomena, you know,
the baby train.
Speaker 4: Now that one's new on me.
Speaker 2: It's when you were talking about it. It sounds to me.
There's a phenomenon that's called the baby train, which is
a man and a woman will be sleeping and they'll
wake up because they hear a train, and then since
they're awake, they'll have sex, and then usually a baby
is produced out of that one time that they have
do they have that union. And so there's this phenomena
that's called the baby train because people for one hundred
years talk about hearing this train. It woke us up
in the middle of the night, and we didn't have
anything to do. We were trying to get back to sleep,
so we just had sex, and then the woman ends
up pregnant from that.
Speaker 4: Well, I was familiar of some trains that resulted in babies,
but that was usually back in the sixties, so that's
something probably something completely different. What about spontaneous human combustion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an interesting phenomena. You know, we don't have
a lot of great reports about it. It doesn't seem
to happen so frequently that we've gotten any good data
about it. One of the things that does seem to
be pretty similar about it is that the majority of
people who we think have spontaneously combussed have been alcoholics,
which I think is interesting because there's this idea that
they've kind of become an alcohol soaked wick. And obviously
we're around naturally occurring electromagnetic fields all the time, sparks
on the on the floor, people smoke cigarettes, and so
there's this idea that the alcohol has so saturated a
person's body. You know, sometimes if you go out drinking
too hard, you can actually smell it on your skin
the next day. And there's this idea that somehow or
another slow burn starts inside someone and they actually combust.
But I don't know. It's it's interesting to me just
that stuff like that. Again. You know, Charles Fort, who
is one of the collectors of high strangeness and weird phenomena,
studied stuff like that and never came to a good
conclusion on it. I don't really have any ideas of
what it could or couldn't be. I mean, for me,
I allow the universe to be as strange as possible,
in the sense that maybe sometimes the universe just blows
somebody up.
Speaker 4: And sometimes sometimes that should happen. Let me ask you this.
You were on a good friend of ours, a good
friend of the show Rob Christofferson's show Our Strange Skies
a couple of weeks ago, fascinating interview. In anybody listening,
I'd advise you to go listen to that because you're
gonna get a lot of different stuff than what we
cover on this one. But Rob, I asked him when
he was on our show a couple of weeks ago,
the same question I'm going to ask you. You may
or may not have heard this, but there's a story
that Jackie Gleeson was actually taken to an air Force
base by Richard Nixon and showed aliens and it kind
of messed him up. And this story came from Jackie
Gleeson's wife. After Jackie had passed, she put the story out.
Have you ever heard that story, and if so, do
you have any belief that that may have happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it's interesting because Gleason and Nixon were friends, Like,
that's something we know that's true. But then you get
into the whole nineteen seventy three, they take a late
night drive to Homestead Air Force Base and that they
see aliens. I really feel like in situations like that,
First of all, I have this notion that presidents don't
know about if there are aliens, presidents don't know about it.
I feel like a president is someone who comes into
office and at the most will be there for eight
years and get all of the deep secrets, like they
might get as sidetracked and scurious information that we get,
like they might tell the presidents something keep them from
thinking about it. They might even have fake aliens somewhere
that they show them just so they can say, he,
there's the aliens for you. But I don't really think
that they would tell the president. And I don't think
no matter how good a friends Nixon was with Gleason,
I don't think that he could have gotten the security
clearance to get Gleason to see if there were actually
aliens there.
Speaker 4: That makes sense. Way to ruin a good story. Thanks,
I like it, though.
Speaker 2: I mean, I would like to think that Jackie Gleason
saw aliens, but there's a lot of famous people who
have seen aliens, just they don't have the You know,
they weren't friends with Nixon at the time. You think
Nixon was good friends with Elvis too, You think Elvis
would have a good Nixon took me to see aliens story.
Speaker 4: Well, with as many drugs as Elvis was on, I'm
sure he saw a lot of stuff without Nixon's help.
Speaker 2: That's absolutely true.
Speaker 4: So we brought up Rob Christofferson's show, and I heard
you tell a couple of stories, so I want to
give him credit for asking these questions. You told a
story about a couple of UFO encounters, and I want
to know if you could tell us about that and
then follow it up with your George Bush story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, you know, I actually it's so strange to
me to think. So the first time I saw something
that I think I think was a UFO, I was
working a midnight shift and I went out into an
alley and it was a dark night, but a very
bright moon, clear sky, and I was just smoking a
cigarette staring at the moon, looking at all the craters
and shadows on it, and something in the kind of
beneath the moon. Out of the corner of my eye,
saw something just moving, and I didn't stop looking at
the moon. I just thought to myself, Oh, that's a
really strange bird. And it kept going, and then I
finally looked at it, and I thought to myself, that's
a really weird plane, and looked back at the moon.
Then it kept coming across the sky and I looked
back down at it and I thought, someone is flying
a kite around here. That's really weird. It's late at night.
And then I looked back at the moon. And then
right before it disappeared over the tops of the buildings.
I had looked back at it and I was like,
holy shit, that's a UFO, and then it was gone.
And the thing that fascinated me about it, and still
does to this day, is that, as a person at
that time I was giving lectures about UFOs. I had
already been studying UFOs for years by that time, and
here I am seeing a UFO and it was the
last thing on my mind. It was either like this
paradigm shift where my mind couldn't handle seeing something like that,
or I really have talked about it my lectures before
about someone having the technology to block you from realizing
that you're looking at a UFO until it's too late
to see it, and then you only have this kind
of wispy notion that you saw something weird. It was
really strange. It was blacker than the sky, which is
how I saw it, and as it passed over the city,
you could see just the slight illumination from underneath it
from the city lights coming up on the bottom of it,
and no sound whatsoever, just a straight, slow glide. And
the funny thing, I don't think I said this un
robbed show either, but the funny thing was as soon
as I realized, Oh, my gosh, I think I saw UFO.
I ran back inside of my work and I called
the police station to ask them if anybody else had
seen it. And it couldn't have been any more trite.
The woman that answered the phone at the police station
said to me, no, we haven't got any other calls.
Maybe it was a weather balloon. Nice, And I thought, oh,
come on, like she obviously knew UFO stories to give
that response, like she had watched an episode of Unsolved
Mysteries or Sightings or something, or read a book about
Roswell to know that. Tell this guy it's a weather balloon.
The next time I saw UFOI was it was on
a busy street. Actually, it was the middle of the
day downtown, the city that I live. I was out
having a break again, smoking a cigarette. This weird silver
teardrop came down out of the clouds and just hung
over the street, and I was running up to people
trying to get them to look at it, and for
some reason, no one would look at it. And I
was kind of manically running down the street just saying like,
could you turn around and look at that? Just turn
look at that, just look up, and people would look
at me and then think I was crazy, you know,
So they just kept walking, but I couldn't get anybody
on the street to turn around and look at this thing.
And finally, like it went back up into the clouds
and I looked down about a block and a half
and there was a girl standing on a corner and
she was just like slack jaw, staring up at the sky.
And I ran down to her and I was like,
did you see that? Did you see that? She was like, yeah,
I did. She's like, oh my gosh, I'm some glad
somebody else saw it. I was trying to get all
these people to look, and no one would look at it.
And we just kind of sat there, and I told
her that that's what I had been doing, Like I'm
trying to get people to look at it. No one
would look. Why wouldn't they look? And we just kind
of stood there for a minute, and then what do
you do? You just go on with the rest of
your day. And it just reinforced this notion that, you know,
either people are too busy, or they just think everyone's crazy,
or there's some type of phenomena that just keeps certain
people from seeing it.
Speaker 4: Well, and you know both of your situations right there,
you were outside smoking. It just made me wonder if
it was actually a cigarette you were smoking, or maybe
something else.
Speaker 2: Or I don't do any drugs well, caffeine and nicotine,
those are my two drugs and alcohol. But I mean,
that's it's really interesting to me that there is this phenomena.
You know, one of the things when I encounter something
that seems strange to me, I start to research it.
And one of the things that's interesting is that in
a lot of UFO cases, there are people who see it.
I mean, they'll be in the same car and one
person will see it and the rest of the people
will refuse to look That someone will see something in
a crowd of people and no one else will look
at it. And that's a repeating phenomena that happens in
a lot of UFO cases that people just for some reason.
Like I said, it seems like some people have some
type of block on them to where they don't want
to see it or they just don't know that they
can see it well.
Speaker 4: And that's something I was unfamiliar with until just now
that that was even something that was happening out there,
that some people just didn't see even being in the
same car. Yeah, that's an odd phenomena.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of really weird stuff about UFOs that
people for some reason, I don't know why, I talk
about everything at my lectures, but there's a lot of
weird stuff that people talk about with UFOs that I
never hear anyone talk about. There's a huge number of
people who have experienced what they think is alien abductions
or that they have some kind of close encounter of
the third kind where they're actually see an alien, or
they see a ship land and aliens get off. And
one of the things that never gets talked about it's
because it's weird. I mean, the whole experience itself is weird,
So to think that there's something weirder that isn't discussed.
Something that happens in a great number of cases is
that the person who experiences seeing an alien or being abductive,
ban or taken on an alien craft, they also have
a memory of seeing someone in some type of historical
military uniform, so like a French Revolution outfit on American
Civil War outfit. This is something that happens a lot,
but because it's so strange, UFO researchers don't talk about.
Speaker 4: It, huh. I mean, like I said, that's all news
to me. So I mean, that's just feel like we're
breaking some ground here.
Speaker 2: But this is I mean, like I said, that's why
I love weirdness. When I talk about you know, bigfoot
one of the things. You know, people go out into
the woods, they see bigfoot. That's a massive experience, and
so they talk about seeing Bigfoot. But when you talk
to a lot of people who have had a bigfoot
encounter and you drill down into their story and you
really sit down with them and get them to talk
through the whole day, the whole night, whenever it was
that they saw it, and you start hours before and
go to hours after, you know they saw this creature.
A lot of the time when you talk to them,
they will talk about hearing a loud pop sound either
in their head or physically outside of their body. They'll
hear a loud popping sound. They'll see a bright flash
that's usually light green or dark green. But because they
see bigfoot, they don't think it's related and so they
don't even talk about it. You'll hear somebody say, yeah,
I was out in the woods, and I was walking
through the woods and someone through a fire crack or something,
and then like fifteen minutes later, I saw Bigfoot. He
was standing there, and then I tried to run after him.
And then and you go, what about that firecracker? Did
you find the person who threw that? No, it's just
the sound that I heard, like but they and they
don't realize that they're can maybe that has something to
do with Bigfoot, you.
Speaker 4: Know, it's it's funny. We were at Scarefest and I
was out back and I was talking to Steve Coles,
and I brought up the fact because Steve's a very
well known, you know, bigfoot expert. Sure, and I brought
up to him, hey, what do you think about the
fact that some people think Bigfoot could be an alien?
And the look that he gave me as he went
into how that could not even be possible. But it
was a fascinating conversation, and he had a thousand different
reasons why there's no possible way that that could happen.
But I'm you know, I've heard more and more over
the last couple of years of the theory that that
that Bigfoot actually could be some type of alien incarnation.
Speaker 2: Well, see, that's what's weird is that you know. So
this is why I always I always said earlier, like
I want people to diversify their weirdness. Like Ufo people
don't like to talk to bigfoot people. Bigfoot people think
ghost people are crazy. Ghost people think that UFO people
are crazy, like no one talks to each other, when
if we talk to each other, like Bigfoot doesn't have
to be just one thing. It doesn't have to be
just a large homini that's roaming through the forest. It
can be that, but there can also be other things
that again, because of people's perspectives, they don't understand what
they're seeing. The original legends of Sasquatch are of a nature,
spirit and elemental, which is more closely related to ghosts
than it is to a giant ape walking through the forest.
Now there could be both of those things. There could
also be biological scout ships. You know, there could be
aliens that can exist on our planet. So they have
created something that can breathe air and eat our vegetation.
They set it down to gather information and that can
exist too. So I mean, when you know, a lot
of times I'll talk to people, I know a lot
of bigfooters who you know, it's only a large ape,
it's only a relic cometed, it's only a physical creature.
I mean, that's limiting themselves on how they're thinking about
this phenomena. It's fine to want to find that one
aspect of bigfoot. I have no trouble with that if
that's what you want to do. But what I want
to do is I want to find out what all
of these different experiences are and how they're related.
Speaker 4: Well, and like I said, that's when you put yourself
in that little box and you don't think outside the box,
you really do limit yourself.
Speaker 2: Sure. I mean in Michigan we have what's called the
dog Man, which is a giant, upright walking dog. Right now,
if you were out in the woods and you saw
a seven foot hairy thing moving through the woods and
you had never heard of dog Man before, you would
tell people that you saw bigfoot. Yep.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And there's all that stuff that you know, the
Beast of Bray Road, the dog Man, you know, all
these werewolf type sightings you know throughout Wisconsin. And but
you're right, they're probably you know, if people are seeing
these things, they're probably all from the same family or
the same thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or I mean again, they can be different but
similar enough to confuse us from our own individual perspectives.
I mean, if you maybe there we don't know what
aliens look like aliens, there might be a race of
aliens that's eight feet tall and covered with hair. I
mean that's a possibility. And so if you saw an
eight foot tall, hairy creature and you didn't know what
aliens looked like, but you've heard stories about bigfoot, you
will call it bigfoot. Yep.
Speaker 4: I mean that makes sense. I mean it's like it's
like we talked about earlier. It's all about the perspectives.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 4: So let's jump on a couple of things I do
want to touch. Like I said, there's so many different
aspects of your career that I find amazing, and I
love the fact that you've been on all these shows
that I've loved. Sightings was one of the first real
shows out there that talked about the paranormal and stuff
like that. You know, that's incredible, did some of it,
but Sightings was the big one for me growing up.
I loved that show and I love the fact that
you run it and Unsolved Mysteries, just to name a
couple that you've had the privilege of working on. Tell
me a little bit about how you got started into
those aspects of your career.
Speaker 2: So when I started to go to college, I thought
that I would be a history teacher that specialized in folklore.
And so I was nearing the beginning of my second
year and I got a call from NBC. They needed
a researcher for this show called Unsolved Mysteries. They were
at the time mostly murder mysteries and missing persons stories,
and they were going to move into a direction of
more paranormal ghost tauntings, that type of thing. And they
asked if I want to be a researcher on the show,
and I said yes, And I never really kind of
looked back after I left Unsolved. There in the mid nineties,
early to mid nineties, there was all of a sudden,
a lot of documentaries and some shows being done and
who needed research. And since I had already this kind
of provenance with Unsolved Mysteries, I'd get kind of snatched
up by new shows. And that's where sightings came in.
You know, they needed someone who could do the research
and was still kind of young enough and hip enough
to get it and give them some weird information if
you would have told me. Though, Like I thought for sure,
by the time the late nineties came around, I thought
my career was kind of debt. I thought I'd just
be doing lectures to fourteen people in a library for
the rest of my life. But all of a sudden,
in two thousand and two, two thousand and three, ghost
shows came around, and now you've got all of these
shows that need research, and here I am at the time,
you know, I was only by that time, I was
only thirty three, and I had file cabinets from you know,
fifteen years of doing research, and so all of a sudden,
I wind up working on a lot of the shows.
What's funny is, in the early two thousands, working on
television shows, I didn't know if they were going to
suck really bad or be really good. So a lot
of the time, when you work on a show, they'll
have you sign a non disclosure agreement so that you
can't talk about the television show. I would actually have
the television show sign a non disclosure agreement so they
couldn't say I worked on it, because I didn't know
if the show was going to suck or not, and
if it sucked, I didn't want my name attached to it.
You know, if they were going to pay me, that's fine,
but don't put my name in the credits. And then eventually,
you know, people in the television industry they say, you know,
do you want to be on camera for this next one?
And at some point you just say yeah and do
it and see what happens. And the majority of the
time it's not great, but it makes you makes me
able to speak to larger and larger groups of people,
which is what I really love to do.
Speaker 4: Well, No, I've seen you on Paranormal Lockdown. I thought
you were great on there, and I believe you were
on camera and Paranormal State too back in the early days,
which I loved. That was one of the ghosts shows
that I loved early on. So, I mean, I thought
that was just a cool set up, the way that
was that was put out there, you know, group of
college kids putting together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that show was great because it had this kind
of running narrative. You could like really get to know
the people on the show. It was almost like a
soap opera. Perform stuff.
Speaker 4: So I got a couple of requests. We're going to
end with the George Bush thing. I will say that
to the end because I think that's a great thing
to end on. But right I had a listener by
the name of Christy tell me that she's seen you
a couple of times at the Stanley Hotel and she
said that I should get you to tell the story
about She said, a diner and a necklace, that you
had a really cool story. So I don't know if
you'll know what I'm talking about, but I'm not sure
what the story is.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'll tell you the diner story and then
the necklace story. I do a very sporadic podcast called
The Realm of the Weird, and it's the strangest stories
all that you know, I've had over the past thirty years,
and I turned them into these little fifteen minute vignettes
that are kind of like the Twilight Zone, like an
old time radio show, and just I let people hear
real recordings on it, and all of the story is
drawn from my notes. So if they go to realm,
if you go to Realm Withtheird dot com, you can
find both of these stories. But this is the short
version of the diner story years. This is probably now
eleven years ago. I went to paranormal convention in Illinois,
went down, was hanging out out there on Friday, and
on Saturday is when the big event was going to happen.
I was driving from the hotel to the event. Someone
sideswiped my car, totaled out my truck. I had it
towed away and then walked to the quarter of a
mile to the location to the paranormal convention, spent the
night whatever, and then had someone drive me back to
the hotel on Saturday night. So on Sunday, the place
that towed my truck told me that they weren't going
to be able to have it fixed for like three
or four days. It's a very small town in Illinois,
so I had to take some days off work. I
just called work told him I wouldn't be in until
I had my car done. But because the convention was over,
the hotel cleared out. So in this two hundred room hotel,
I'm the only person on Sunday night that's in this
hotel except for the guy work in the front desk,
and one made so on Monday, I asked him is
there any place to eat around here? And he said, yeah,
you know, you go out the back of the hotel.
You go left when you go here, you go right.
When you go here, there's a golf course. You go left,
go around there, and there's a diner. So this is
the middle of winter, there's huge snowstorms going on. I
had to truck out. I go out the back of
the hotel. I follow his directions as much as I can.
I get to the golf course. I find this river,
and I just, I mean, it's just blinding snow. Finally
I see the diner. I go in. There's a couple
of people in there. I order my food, I eat,
walk back to the hotel, don't think anything about it.
Next day, just stayed in, didn't do anything. Day or
a third day. I go back out into the snowstorm,
wander through this just, I mean, it was coming down.
Is that type of snow, the big snowflakes, and everything
is just white. It's just a complete white out. I
find the diner. I go back in, same people are
there is the last time I was there. I order
more food, eat, walk back to the hotel. Wake up.
The next morning. My truck has been delivered. I get
in my truck, pay up my bill, and then I
decide I'm going to go back to that diner for
one last meal and then I'll go home. So I
start driving around the roads, up and down the roads.
I drive around for about forty five minutes, and I
can't find it anywhere. And I think to myself, you know,
I've been on foot, and I've kind of been cutting
through this golf course and this state Land, and so
maybe the roads just aren't leading me in the right direction.
So I drive back to the hotel and I asked
the guy working at the front Tesco now that I'm driving,
ho I get back to that diner and he goes, okay,
come around the back parking lot and you go left
and you go right. And I said, listen, i've been walking.
When I get to the river by the golf course,
which direction do I go? And he looks at me
and gives me this really weird look, and he says,
the river by the golf course. He's like, that's the
wrong direction. There's nothing over there but state Land. And
I said, no, there's a diner over there. I've eaten
at it twice. And he goes if you're by the
river in the golf course, there's nothing over there. It's
only state Land. There's nothing over there. The diner that
I'm talking about is in the complete opposite direction. So
I get back in my truck. I drive to where
he's talking about. That's not the diner that I've been
eating at. I've never seen that diner before in my life.
I go back and try and trace my route. I
get out of the truck, I start walking around in
the snow, and where I've eaten twice in the past
four days does not exist. Well, never has.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: I remember the taste of the pancakes. I paid someone
American money for pancakes, and that place does not exist.
It has not existed. I've since that time talked to
people who have lived in that city their whole lives.
That's never been a diner there. I, you know, Google
I every now and then, still to this day, I
Google Earth it to look and see, and it's just
a state Land where I can see from Google Earth,
I can trace my own path as to how I
walked and where I walked to. And there's nothing over
there but state Land.
Speaker 4: That's awesome. That's some Twilight Zone stuff.
Speaker 2: There very much, so, so I did that as an
episode of Realm of the Weird, and at the end
of the episode, I told people, you know, I do
remember the names of the two people that I talked
to who were in the diner. If you know who
those people are, could someone email me or give me
a call so that I know I'm not completely insane.
And a few years went by with that episode, just
sitting out there, and eventually I got an email from
a guy who lives in Illinois and he said, you know,
I stumbled across your podcast and someone told me it
was really weird and I needed to listen to it.
But is this a picture of the woman that you saw?
And he had scanned a picture and sent it in
the email and I said, that's her and he said
that's my grandmother. And I we werecking forth a chat
program and I said, well, that's great because it means
I'm not crazy and he said, no, that's my grandmother.
She died in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 4: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: So I don't know what the hell happened. I mean,
you can call it a time slip, or that I
slipped through into an alternate version of Earth something, but
one of the weirdest, strangest To this day, I still
can't wrap my head around what happened.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't even know where to begin to try
to explain what would happen. I was thinking time slip
at the same time you said time slip.
Speaker 2: Yeah, something. But the problem is is that there's never
been a diner there, so it can't be a time slip.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2: If it was a time slip, then someone would have
remembered there being a diner there. There's only ever been
state Land there, so I have no freaking clue what happened.
Speaker 4: All right, let's move on to this next question, because
that's too much for me to try to Between that
and Stephen Hawking passing in the same day, that's too
much for my mind to comprehend.
Speaker 2: Stephen Hawking born on the day that Galileo died, died
on the day that Einstein was born.
Speaker 4: See's coincidence. Yeah, it all goes full circle. So Katie
wants to know that if someone wanted to get into
paranormal investigating, what advice would you give somebody on how
to get started?
Speaker 2: You know, it really got to be how you want
to start, So like, find that one aspect of paranormal
phenomena that interests you the most, and read as much
as you can about it and talk to as many
people as you can about it. I mean, that's really
where you have to start, is just growing your own
internal knowledge. And there's a lot of reflectivity that I
think needs to be done. There's a lot of sit
alone and ask yourself really weird questions about what you're
thinking about. You know, whatever you think of is going
to be good, but you should challenge how you're thinking
about something. You know, when I talk to people and
do lectures and they say, like, I heard a ghost voice,
a lot of times I'll ask them how does a
ghost have a voice? Like, the only reason I have
a voice is because I have lungs and a larynx
and a throat and tongue and lips, and I can
push air and make air move and it makes a
wave and then it bounces off ear. That's how a
voice is made. Now, as far as we know, ghosts
being the kind of ethereal creatures we think they are,
they don't have lungs and a larynx, and they don't
push air with their lips and their tongue. So how
are they making a voice? How are you hearing it?
If it's not waves moving through the air to make sound,
how is your ear hearing it? I mean, there's a
lot of self questioning of what you believe and how
you believe it that I think needs to be done
if you're going to be a paranormal investigator. And then
the other thing is too is you've got to have,
at least in my opinion, a very well rounded idea
of all of the things that you're going to be
dealing with. So not only do you need to read
about ghosts, but you do need to read about neurobiology
and neuroscience, and you need to know a little bit
of physics and mathematics. You need to know a little
bit about cosmology and space and the weather. It's an
endless octopus that I feel like you really need if
you're going to try and traverse this landscape.
Speaker 4: Well, that's I mean, it pretty much puts it all
in a nutshell. I mean, but you're right, it's at
the bottom line, is you got to do the part
that you're most fascinated with to get started.
Speaker 2: I think yeah, for sure. And you know, there are
people who want to run around in the dark with
flashlights and get scared. That's fine. If that's what you want,
that's absolutely fine. If you want to research and just
bury yourself in books and never go out in the field,
that's fine too. If you want to do both of
those things, that's fine too. You have to figure out
what it is about the phenomena that you're passionate about
that you're not going to become not passionate about, and
if it doesn't conform to the way that you know
if you I know so many people over the past
thirty years that get really interested in ghosts, and then
they read about it, and they study it for four
or five years, six years, seven years, ten years, and
when it doesn't conform to the way that they think
about it, they get frustrated, they give up, well it's
not what I thought, and then they just stop. This phenomena,
all of these weird phenomena that we deal with all
the time. They're going to be stranger than you think
they are, and you shouldn't let that deter you from
continuing to explore them.
Speaker 4: It's funny that you said that exactly the way you did,
because I was talking to a former paranormal investigator, and
he told me that after five years of doing it,
he was frustrated because he had more questions now than
he did before he started.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, I have way more questions now after thirty
years than I ever had when I started. When I started,
I was just looking for ghosts. Now I'm all mixed
up with interdimensional bigfoots and reptilians that might be disguised
as ethereal ghostly like manifestations from the future, Like it
gets weirder and stranger, and there's deeper philosophical us that
you run across. And how does your consciousness work? And
is you know what I was talking on a show recently.
It might have even been Robs when I was talking
about you know, if massively complex chemical and atomic reactions
gave rise to our consciousness. If the reason that we're
self aware is because there's a ton of electrical information
moving about inside of our brains. If that's the reason
that we're conscious, then that would mean that complex electrical
and chemical systems are conscious, which leads me to speculate
and rhapsodize about the fact that the largest chemical electrical
engine that we know of right now, in our solar system,
the one that's closest to us is the Sun, which
is way more complex chemically and atomically than our brain.
So why is the sun not conscious? Or is the
sun conscious? But it's just a consciousness so much different
from ours that we don't recognize that it's conscious. But
then you have to ask yourself why if you take
children from across the world, of all ages and all
races and all religions, and you tell them to draw
a picture of the sun, they will draw the sun,
but they'll put a face in the middle of it,
as if children know that the sun is alive.
Speaker 4: It's something I've never thought about, but you're right, every
kid draws a face on the sun.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 4: Man, Yeah, it's gonna be hard for me to sleep tonight.
You've given me so much to think about. I can't
wait to hear how you answer this, because this is
actually my favorite question of the ones. A listener said,
you being a master researcher, Tina wants to know what's
the most interesting or scary thing that you've ever done
in the name of research.
Speaker 2: I don't get scared that much. The most I first,
really in the early nineties I really wanted to know
what was going on with my brain, and so I
took a lot of classes while I was working for Unsolved,
even though I wasn't going to college. I took a
lot of classes on just the brain itself and human psychology.
I did things like I became a magician. I joined
like magicians Guild so I could learn, you know, the
hand is faster than the ihicker my brain beat tricked.
And I did flotation tanks for you know, hours on
and I think the longest I was ever in an
isolation tank was about twenty hours, maybe a little less seventeen.
I did the scariest, weirdest thing I ever did for
research was I did a sleep deprivation experiment where they
monitored me for about thirty seven hours. And you're not
allowed to sleep. You're not allowed to have micro sleeps.
There's a lot of times when you're saying that you're
staying awake, you're actually doing these little micro sleeps which last,
you know, one or two seconds, and you don't even
realize that you've fallen asleep. But when you're doing a
sleep study, they keep you from doing that. And I
lost track of time at a certain point, and I
became very engulfed in the hallucinogenic world that happens to
your brain when your sleep deprived. And I was very
frightened at a certain point because reality was very much
falling away from me right near the end of the experiment.
But after about thirty hours, I didn't know who was
real and who wasn't real. I was having conversations with
people that weren't there. And when I was done, when
you know someone has to come and pick you up,
they obviously don't let you drive home. The doctor told me,
you know, you're going to go home and you're really tired,
and you're going to lay in bed and you're not
going to be able to sleep, and you're going to
think that you're broken and that you'll never sleep ever again.
He goes, don't worry about it, You'll fall asleep, and
I was like, no way, I'm going home and I'm
fall asleep right now. And I drove home and laid
down in bed and could not sleep, and I thought,
holy shit, I'm broken, like I'm not going to be
able to ever sleep again. And as soon as I
got through that thought, probably within five or ten minutes,
I fell asleep. I woke up eight hours later and
I was perfectly back to normal. But those few last
hours of that experiment were probably one of the most
harrowing situations that I've ever done for research.
Speaker 4: See, I just knew there was going to be a
good story come about that, and so does I saw
the question This is the last question I got for you.
Speaker 2: Don't ever stay awake that long. I'm telling you.
Speaker 4: Right now, at my age, I'm able to barely stay
up past ten o'clock. I'm sitting here yelling. And now,
so Haley wants to know. Has there ever been a
time where you felt like an entity has attached itself
to you? And if so, is it still with you?
Or if not, how do you get rid of something
like that?
Speaker 6: You know?
Speaker 2: One of the really great things that I have kind
of going for me is that when I started all
of this strangeness, I got to meet a lot of
the kind of old timey big wigs in our field,
and one of them was Hans Holzer, who's kind of
the grandfather of ghost hunters. And I was very concerned
at that time as a young man with having attachments
and having things glom onto me and follow me home,
and he taught me this thing. He said, listen, he said,
you just you have to make it known that nothing
can follow you home, and that your home is yours.
And so every time you walk into your house where
you live, even decide to take the trash out every
time you come back in, just say to yourself really quickly,
this is my house and mean it. And you'll build
a force build up around your house and nothing will
be able to get in. Or when you start investigating,
just take up fraction of a second and forcefully think
to yourself before you start investigating, nothing will attach itself
to me. And you do, you build a barrier around yourself.
And after doing it for almost thirty years, I've never
had an attachment. I've never had anything try and follow me.
I mean, stuff might have tried to follow me, but
it doesn't. It can't attach to me, and it can't
get in my house. So I wouldn't really know the
kids in my neighborhood. Over the past six or seven
years that I've lived in this house, the kids in
my neighborhood and some of my adult neighbors have told
me that they see people standing on the roof of
my house at night, which is interesting, but nothing gets
in my house and nothing's ever attached itself to me,
and I really do think it's more just the force
of your own will keeping that stuff at bay.
Speaker 4: Fascinating answer expect that either. So this is This has
been such a fun interview for me because I feel
like out of every interview that I've done, I've learned
more on this one, or have been given different ways
to look that I've hadn't thought about in so many
different aspects. So I appreciate you challenging all of our
minds out there.
Speaker 2: Thanks. I like throwing seeds out there. I'm just planting ideas,
and the only reason that listen. It's not altruistic. The
only reason I do it is because I want people
to think about stuff that I can't think about and
then bring it back to me and say, well what
about this? Because I don't know everything, but I want
to know, and the only way I can know is
by working and thinking and talking to other people, because
together we construct stuff that we can't do by ourselves.
Speaker 4: All right, So tell me the George Bush story because
I love the story, and then we're going to close
with you telling everybody how they can catch up with
the seventeen thousand things that you do on a yearly basis.
Speaker 2: So in two thousand I ran from mayor of my hometown,
Royal Oak, Michigan. And when you run for mayor or
any public office, they always want you to meet all
the other candidates, whether they're from the state level or
the federal level or the county level, just so that
they can have a picture of you with that person
in case you both win, and then they can put
that in the newspaper. Well, the year that I was
running for mayor was the year that George W. Bush
announced that he was going to run for president, And
they announced that he was going to do a whistle
stop tour to meet some voters in Royal Oak, And
because I was running for mayor, there would be this
kind of photo op press moment where the three mayoral
candidates would get a moment with him. So he showed
up at this Coney Island and there were a lot
of people there just to see him and talk to him,
and then the three mayoral candidates and some of the
people who were running for city commission were there too,
and the people and I didn't really want to get
involved with a huge mess of people that were all
swamping him and trying to get his autograph and stuff.
So I went outside and I knew that i'd get
a moment with him at the end. So I was
talking to this CNN crew that was following him around,
and I said to them, so, how has this been,
you know, has it been exciting? What have you guys
been doing? And there's this guy holding a boom microphone
and he kind of looks at me and he says, man,
it's boring. These things are always boring. Nothing's going to happen.
And I said, well, I'm about to talk to him
and I'm going to ask him about UFOs and his
eyes lit up and he's like great, Like finally something
that we can film. So the event gets over and
he comes out and the mayoral candidates are lined up,
and he goes to the first guy and ask him
his question. Second guy asked him his question. Then w
Bush comes up to me and he looks at me
and kind of gives me that George w thing. He's like,
what can I do for you? And I said, listen,
if you're willing, if you're going to become president of
the United States, would you be willing to release any
and all information that the government has regarding unidentified flying objects.
And by the time I got objects out of my mouth,
security had grabbed my shoulders. Secret Service and the Texas
Rangers pulled me to the back of the crowd. They
spun him around, they pushed him in his car. He
zoomed off, and they threw me at the feet of
the CNN crew i'd been talking to earlier, and the
guy with the boom microphone looks down at me and goes, well,
that was the wrong fucking question.
Speaker 4: I just think that is so damn funny.
Speaker 2: It was one of those moments because you know, and
people say, like, well, do you think that he did
that because he knew something about UFOs or he didn't
want to talk about UFOs. The reality of the situation
is they didn't want him to be near a crazy person.
And when someone starts talking about UFOs to a presidential candidate,
their immedia instinct is they've got a lunatic on their hands.
Get them away from the president, the guy who might
be president. But it's interesting because you know, bush what
I was talking about earlier. I don't think that presidents
really know about UFOs. But the Bush family, I mean,
you're not talking about just a president. You're talking about
the son of someone who was president, and Bush Senior,
not only being president and a vice president, was also
the head of the CIA. You know, he was a
career CIA agent for a long time and then head
of the CIA. So I would feel like George Herbert
Walker Bush probably did know something, if there was something
to know about UFOs, and I don't know how well
he would have kept that information away from his children.
Speaker 4: Well, John, this has been so much fun. I hate
for it to end, but I guess all things must
come to an end. Is there one spot where people
can find out all the different podcasts that you're involved
with and lectures and all that is everything you kind
of gathered in one spot, you know.
Speaker 2: I've tried to make it as easy for everybody as possible.
My website is Weird Lectures. You can get through a
lot of the stuff. You can find Realm of the
Weird on there. I have another podcast called Real Lost.
You can find that through Weird Lectures dot com, or
they can just follow me on Twitter. John E. L.
Tenny Instagram is John E. L. Tenny, Facebook is John E.
L Tenny. And I tell people all the time, if
you go to Google and you just type T E
N N E Y and then Weirdo and hit search,
it's all me and just follow it till you're insane.
Speaker 4: There you go, Well, and this is going to show
that I didn't do my proper research. But somebody actually
asked me earlier and I didn't know the answer, and
then I got tied up and didn't get to look.
What does the el stand for?
Speaker 2: Elmer Leonard?
Speaker 4: So you got two middle names?
Speaker 2: I do. I'm the last. I'm the last person in
my family, the last in my line my family tree.
So my dad after him. His name is John. His
father's name was Elmer and his grandfather's name was Leonard.
So he gave me all of the male names that
I could handle since I'm the last one. John.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for coming on, man, it's been
so much fun. And do you have any events coming
up soon? I know you're doing some stuff with Amy's
project that she's got out there, and I know I think,
are you going on the cruise too? Is that something
you're doing?
Speaker 2: Yep, I'm going on the cruise if they go to
Weird lectures dot com. There's an events page and just
click on that and I update it all the time
with the events and where I'll be. And if people
have an event they want me at, just tell the
event people to contact me or Lindsey at center stage
and we'll put something together.
Speaker 4: Brother, thank you so much for coming on. I hope
talk to you in the near future.
Speaker 2: Oh thanks for having me. I had a lot of fun.
Speaker 4: I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 4: See, how do you not love that guy? After listening
at he is absolutely hilarious. He's just fun. He's a
great speaker. We did that. It's like an hour and
fifteen minute interview. I didn't have to edit anything.
Speaker 6: That's pretty amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Good, Jo got at least my screw ups. Yeah, all right.
So we promised that we would read the Robert to
Dahl letters. No, like I said, they keep all these
at the museum down in Key West. They keep all
of these letters on file. So there's like a screen
when you go to see Robert, there is a screen
that you can look at and see all these letters.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, I would love to do that. It's cool.
Speaker 4: Now here's the deal. Robert the doll has a fascination.
So people want to go see him, and you want
to get your picture made with him. As you would think,
you have to ask Robert's permission. I don't know how
he tells you yes or no. Well yeah, but you're
supposed to ask his permission. And the legend is that
people who ridicule him, or take pictures without asking, or
somehow make any type of disrespectful remarks towards him, they
get hit with a lot of bad luck, so much
to the point that they write these letters asking for
forgiveness and trying to write the ship, so to speak.
So this is what we're going to read you. Three
of these letters that I've got. Here's the first one.
Dear Robert, You've probably received many letters like this from
people like me, people who were sure that there was
no such thing as a Robert the Doll curse. You see,
it's easy to act tough and try to impress your
friends by being disrespectful, and unfortunately this is the camp
that I find myself in. My name is Dan Schultz.
Back in two thousand and nine, we visited the East
Martella Museum. The entire purpose of this visit was to
come and meet you. We have walked by your old
house multiple times over the years and have always wanted
to visit you at the museum. Our visit was fun
and informative, and seeing you was the best part. I'm
not sure what made me act like a jerk to you.
I didn't ask for your permission to take your picture,
and I openly mocked you. Like I said, I was
just trying to be funny and impressed the people I
was visiting with. I in no way actually meant what
I said, and I realize now I made a big mistake.
Since that day in late two thousand and nine, we
had a run of bad luck. I've had multiple health issues.
I had a near death experience with anemia, we had
family members and pets dye, and bad luck with our
finances that ended in US filing for bankruptcy and still
having financial difficulties today. The purpose of this letter is
to profoundly apologize and ask for your forgiveness. I've talked
about this event on popular travel podcasts that I'm the
co host on. A podcast is a radio show that
people can hear on their computers. In case you don't know,
and We'll always speak with high respect of you again, Robert,
please accept my sincere apologies, and if you see fit
to forgive in the bad luck, I would appreciate it,
as with my family. Dan Schultz was Palm Beach, Florida.
This note stuck on it says, please post were Robert
the doll can see this. Wow, you know, and I'm
not trying to debunk anything, but over a period of years,
you're gonna have pets die, You're gonna have family members die.
You're gonna I can't. I don't know how. They just
completely blame everything.
Speaker 6: That goes wrong just bad timing. I guess.
Speaker 4: I mean, we all have bad luck. Of course, it's
just a matter what you're gonna blame it on. But
he felt like that most of his.
Speaker 6: Buss his heart.
Speaker 4: Here's the second story. This was a little letter. This
was a little shorter, Robert. Sorry, I did not ask
out loud to take your photo. Since then, my husband
lost his diamond ring, one carrot, I tore my rotator cuff,
and my daughter's wedding was canceled. All happened before I
returned home. Please stop the curse. I'm truly sorry, and
life is tough enough. Sincerely, Kathy, My goodness, so he
lost a diamond carrot, daughter canceled the wedding, and she
tore a rotator cuff all before they even got home.
Speaker 6: That's crazy.
Speaker 4: Now that one I can go along with a little more. Heck,
here's the third one. This one's kind of my favorite.
Dear Robert, I'm very sorry for not asking your permission
to take your picture while visiting the museum last week.
Since I have taken your picture without permission, many strange
things have happened to me. While driving back from the keys,
a deer ran out in front of my car. We
had to swerve to avoid hitting it and ran off
the road. We almost hit a tree. Two days later,
we had a small kitchen fire. Also, we've been hearing
childlike giggles from our basement. Last night, I was in
the home all alone. I heard a voice coming from
the basement. When I went to investigate, I tripped and
fell down the bottom three stairs. I got up to
run out, but the door was locked. My husband said
I probably turned the lock by myself without even thinking
about it and locked myself in the basement. But honestly, Robert,
we both know the truth. Please accept my deepest apology
for taking your picture without asking. So please accept my
daughter's apology for sticking her tongue out at you and
making fun of you. Sincerely, Rosie. Oh, so, what do
you think? Is it the case that a doll could
actually have a curse on it? And how did this
dog get a curse on it? If it didn't come
the way that people think from the bohemian slaves or servants,
I should say, yeah.
Speaker 6: I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of coincidences,
for sure, but maybe it's true. I don't know how
the dog was cursed, but I mean, I mean, it
sounds like it was, and it sounds like it could
provoke evil on you.
Speaker 4: I mean, you've got a lot of people stating if
you go back from the beginning, you've got a lot
of people from all the accounts of Robert's family. Yeah,
you've got the accounts of his wife, You've got the
lady who bought the house.
Speaker 6: That's what I'm saying. There's too many. Yeah, I mean
I can kind of believe it myself.
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't know about the whole people writing
letters and curses of because you don't ask to take
a picture that seems completely random from it it's a
lot like the Body. Remember we did the story of
Body the ghost town that people would grab rocks or.
Speaker 6: Bottles, oh yeah, takeaway, Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then they would have issues like that. It's very similar,
it is.
Speaker 6: But you know, but when you think about this, lady said, oh,
that guy said, all that happened before he even got home.
I mean that's kind of weird. Yeah, I mean, I
mean that's three big things.
Speaker 4: But the hearing, the stuff in the house and the
footsteps and the furniture being turned over and all that stuff.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 4: And of course that could be you know, as but
he was still a little young. But we really don't
know the age at all this happened. I mean, if
he was in puberty age, I mean, that could be
typical poultrygeist type activity that he was you know, you know,
causing himself.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'd say I'm suny five percent positive it was
a doll. That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 4: Guys. We appreciate you tune it into us every week.
We gave you a little bonus episode last week. We
hope you enjoyed it, and we love you guys. So
anytime we can do something for you. We're going to
try to do it.
Speaker 6: Yes, and let's see Wednesdays for next Sunday, next Sunday,
so we'll have put the show out and everybody get
yours through baskets ready and dye your eggs, all that
good fun stuff. That's what I'm looking forward to doing
because I love to do that with my kiddos. And
we just want you guys to be safe, love one another,
and I hope you guys have a fabulous week. If
you don't mind to leave us some reviews on iTunes
or anywhere you would like, good or bad, we would
love to see them. And any thing else fade.
Speaker 4: I'm just letting you ramble.
Speaker 6: Oh well, visit our merch store.
Speaker 4: And you're such a professional long and short of it, guys, Hey,
go join our Patreon, go buy your t shirts and stuff.
The Uh we're almost sold out of the second Waverley.
Speaker 6: Tour, I know, Oh my god, that thing is approaching.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there was like eight tickets left when I looked
the other day. And we might as well say that
the live event for Waverley is sold out.
Speaker 6: Yes, because Brohio or or Ohio things coming up really quick.
Speaker 4: Yep, absolutely, Bro how is in three weeks. There's still
I think twenty tickets left for that, but yeah, the
Waverleys Louisville show, there's two tickets left, so that's pretty
much done.
Speaker 6: Hopefully by then it won't be snowing. Yeah, but the
hell Mother Night's.
Speaker 4: Tripping, Yeah, absolutely not. Then the biggest event of all
that we got coming on is Pottern Love in August. Yeah,
I'm excited about that. So here's the details on it.
Pottern Love is August tenth, eleventh, and twelfth of this
year at the Intercontinental Hotel. It's right on the edge
of the French Quarter, so it's only like five minutes
from all the good stuffs, the cool walking stuff. Listeners
can get tickets, book hotel rooms, and see which shows
will be there by visiting www Dot pottern dot love.
So that's where you gotta go to. Www Dot pottern
dot love. We actually negotiated a room rate of one
hundred and twenty nine dollars a night for the hotel,
so that's phenomenal. That's I can't even tell you how
cheap that is for hotels in the oh, yeah, the
fifth Quarter. So go to the website, check out the
ticket prices and stuff, and when you find the tickets
that you want put in, he'll billy as the code
when you check out, and you'll save you a little
bit of money. Actually I think it's ten percent.
Speaker 6: Yeah, sounds like it sounds like a great deal to me.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 4: So go check it out and hopefully we'll see you
in August in the big easy, in the big pot.
We'll see you guys next week. Bye, Hey, Hillbilly's. If
you guys enjoy what we do here on the show
every week and appreciate all the hard work we put
into it, consider being word of our Patreon supporters. All
you got to do's go to our website Hillbilly Horror
Stories dot com, click on the tab for donations and
you'll see the Patreon link right there. Click on it
and you can go to our Patreon page. Then you
will have a decision to make. You can choose the
one dollar, the three dollars, the five dollars, or the
ten dollars donation. Each one gets you different things a month,
but regardless, you get some free stuff. Just check out
the bonuses under each tier and you'll see what you
get for free for that month. But you'll get something
free regardless. Also, if you'd like to buy any Hillbilly
horror story merch, you're also in the right place on
the website Hillbilily Horror stories dot com. Just click on
the store page and see whatever it is that you like,
Click on a few links, send a little bit of money,
and your item will be on its way. Thank you
guys so much for all of your support. We love you,
we thank you, and we appreciate you.