Ghosts, Poltergeists, And The Unknown With Dr. Richard Sugg

0:17

Welcome to Haunted History Chronicles, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of the past, one ghostly tale at a time.

I'm your host, Michelle, and I'm thrilled to be your guide on this Erie journey through the pages of history.

0:34

Picture this, a realm where the supernatural intertwines with the annals of time, where the echoes of the past reverberate through haunted corridors and forgotten landscapes.

That's the realm we invite you to explore with us.

Each episode will unearth stories, long buried secrets, dark folklore, tales of the macabre, and discuss parapsychology topics from ancient legends to more recent enigmas.

1:03

We're delving deep into locations and accounts all around the globe, with guests joining me along the way.

But this podcast is also about building a community of curious minds like you.

Join the podcast on social media, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to share your own ghostly encounters, theories, and historical curiosities.

1:27

Feel free to share with friends and family.

The links are conveniently placed in the description for easy access.

So whether you're a history buff with a taste for the supernatural or a paranormal enthusiast with a thirst for knowledge, Haunted History Chronicles is your passport to the other side.

1:47

Get ready for a ride through the corridors of time where history and the supernatural converge.

Because every ghost has a story, and every story has a history.

And now let's introduce today's podcast or guest.

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In today's episode, the past, the paranormal and the unknown converge as we dive deep into the world of ghosts, poltergeists, and the mysteries of the afterlife with our special guest, Doctor Richard Sugg.

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Richard's journey into the spirit world began in 2012, and over the last decade he's delved into fascinating cases that have reshaped his understanding of what happens beyond the veil of life.

From his initial scepticism, he's become a leading voice in the exploration of supernatural events.

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Together we'll explore his early views on ghosts and the afterlife, the influence of vampire law, encounters with curious individuals like Mike Strange at Saint Albans College, and the challenges he faced when publishing his ground breaking works on these subjects.

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We'll also hear first hand experiences and more about Richard's studies into time slip cases, fairy poltergeists, and ghostly encounters involving children, as well as hearing more about intimate moments from his own personal life and reflections on how the deaths of his parents impacted his evolving beliefs on life after death.

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From timeless mysteries to silent witnesses and striking paranormal cases, this episode is a deeply spiritual and reflective exploration into the unknown.

Join us as we navigate these haunted histories with Doctor Richard Sugg.

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Stay tuned.

You won't want to miss this incredible journey into the heart of the supernatural.

Hi, Richard, thank you for joining me on another podcast.

4:07

Many thanks for the invite on this.

It's been great going back through all these many, many stories and many, many events of, yeah, 12 years now, roughly.

You really do seem to have been on this, this adventure, this journey, just exploring, you know, all things to do with the spiritual world.

4:25

Do you want to just explain how you got into this subject and your previous opinions on ghosts in the afterlife?

Yeah, if, you know, 13 years ago you'd started talking about this, I wouldn't really have listened to any of it and it wouldn't have been much of a conversation.

4:43

And certainly as regards ghosts in the afterlife, I I lost my father when I was 20, very suddenly.

He had three heart attacks perhaps.

And some of you are always kind of back there, really.

5:00

Some of you always stays there.

And no one could convince me in this state of trauma and shock that he wasn't simply gone forever.

He left us some poems and a very lovely coffee pot, which I still have downstairs and a guitar.

And I stood up and read one of his poems, very fine things at his funeral.

5:20

But he was he was gone.

And the same held, unfortunately, I thought for my friend Carolo when she died, She's only about 53, very long battle with leukemia in 2002.

And that was a heck of a time, partly because it went on so long.

And it was a kind of bad normal, if you like, for well over a year.

5:40

So, yeah, you know, I had lots of reasons to want to believe in either ghosts and all the afterlife and did not.

And I think Christianity has been a part of that.

I think Christianity has made a mess of this.

So often there's this wonderful exceptions to that in from of individual people, but the actual structure and theology and the rigidity of it, it is hopelessly misguided and wrong footed over and over again.

6:05

So there I was in that sort of situation, as very left brain if you like, you're irrational academic in 2012 and suddenly bang, crash into the side of my head from nowhere with no invitation come the vampire Poltergeist, researching a book called The Real Vampires and it's all full of craziness and strangeness and more weirdness than you can imagine or make up, really.

6:31

But all of it you can.

You can work out how it's folklore and see the logical kind of roots of it, if you like, and how you know the defending themselves against real dangers of disease and crop failure and droughts and so on.

Vampires and scapegoats for just about everything, but you can't work out why they keep saying the vampire throws stones at them, it throws them out of bed, it hammers on their roofs, it throws things around their kitchen, and so on.

6:55

And you cannot grasp what's going on.

So I dutifully start reading some poltergeist books and calling, including Chevrelle's excellent collection, and I've got this and many others on my desk in the British Library one day during a research trip there, and it's making my head hurt and my head spin, really, and I can't really think about much else.

7:18

It's very, very strange, but it's consistently strange across the world, across time.

It's got a certain kind of pattern in the craziness.

And I come out for lunch to a nice little Cafe and a dance school just opposite on Houston Rd. the British Library being disgustingly overpriced for any food.

7:36

And I have lunch with a friend of mine, Alice.

I've been known for seven years, gone through quite a lot of heavy weather in in Durham together.

She's had some troubles with her colleagues and many as the evening can sat with her and another colleague around the table trying to sort it out over some wine.

So we're pretty, pretty close, pretty intimate.

7:53

And we were sitting talking about various things for about an hour.

And finally, with this in my head all the time, I say, have you ever come across poltergeists?

And at this she goes white and she freezes up and she goes silent and presently says, can we go somewhere more private?

8:09

And this was my first experience of what would happen again and again and again, sometimes with complete strangers, which I only met, you know, a few moments ago.

But here was somebody I've known for seven years and we spend I don't know how long and this more private place, Little Quaker Garden down the Eastern Rd., talking about how she's had a poltergeist in her house and at her workplace has moved house.

8:35

Just normally, I think, not fleeing the poltergeist, but normally moved house in those 18 months with a husband and a daughter.

Daughter's about 11, I think, might have been an agent for the events to some extent.

But I think probably Alice was as well.

I mean, they were happening at her workplace.

8:51

So, yeah, here I am thinking, OK, now something's going on here, isn't it?

I mean, it's going on.

AI know this person I know I I know I can trust them and I also find it to be odd they haven't told me anything.

Are there all these other people sitting around with these rather dark weighty secrets in their heads?

9:10

And it turns out there are.

And chap I've known sometime head of a history department.

It should be said to show you this is somebody pretty no nonsense and pretty worldly.

And in fact, he is in very many ways that's kind of his style of academia, very sort of postivistic, very nice guy.

9:27

But I 12 years, not a whole whisper or a word about the fact that he's he's grown up in a haunted house back in Chichester where he was in his teens, in his early 20s, I think.

And his daughter's sister, much younger, seemed to perhaps be an agent for it.

9:44

They were both witnesses to.

And it's quite mild stuff really.

I mean, sort of playful and, you know, make sure, you know, I'm here.

They would cook the supper, pop it on the table, on the plates, go to the bathroom, come back.

They find the plates underneath the table, all neat and undisturbed and unspoiled and everything.

10:03

But, you know, they certainly didn't put them there.

And sometimes he got pretty bad.

His mother, who was of Italian heritage, I think, used to shout at it.

And that did a good job for a while.

It smelled pipe smoke.

Nobody in the house smoked.

And what's interesting here, this was a crucial moment, was that in the course of this or a slightly later conversation, he says to me that in this house he used to see a nice man on the stairs, nice man with glasses and a football shirt.

10:32

Now he was about two or three when he saw this.

And presently he says to his parents about this nice man on the stairs, not in any sort of alarmed way, but you know something, I've seen somebody in the house and they get the description quite carefully off him.

10:48

This is Frank, who sold them the house, but who died some time ago, or I think cancer, I think probably fairly young.

And that is what he looked like.

Now, my friend had never seen this man alive, but he's giving a very precise description of him.

He's got no reason to do this.

11:04

So this was an eye opener about children and ghosts.

But there was also a a moment which I look back on now, and I realized that I wasn't really listening.

I did ask a few questions about this, what did he look like and so forth.

But I wasn't really listening in the way that I would listen.

11:20

I would ask more questions and more questions about poltergeists.

So at this stage I was starting to get poltergeists, but I wasn't really getting ghosts, and I got lots of opportunity to get the poltergeists.

Students are telling me this kind of stuff at Durham all the time.

11:35

And again, it's only because I asked them, it's only because I raised the subject.

Chap called Francis, terrific student, very clever, very likable.

Become a barrister since that gives you some idea of his kind of type of mind.

He'd had, I think, 3 poltergeist experiences in his family.

11:52

One went back, right, right back to perhaps the 20s in a Maltings, the Brewers in Yorkshire, and it involved a female member of staff who clearly was the agent and had to be dismissed eventually.

And I got precise descriptions of that from him and his family.

12:10

And I'll give this case now, I think, although we'll see echoes of it when we talk about children and ghosts.

He stayed with his girlfriend in a house in the country outside Bath when he was about 17.

So youngish girlfriend's perhaps 16, I'm not sure.

12:27

But anyway, they're in separate bedrooms.

Obviously, you know, mother is there in the house.

I don't think it was a father, but there was a, a young daughter, quite a lot younger than than his girlfriend. 7:00 or 8:00 somewhere in the house on the on the 1st floor, which is relevant, as you'll see in a moment.

And in the night.

12:43

Francis, who's, I've got to say, not just a barrister and a law student, but a sort of no nonsense rugby playing guy really.

He wakes up and he's absolutely spooked to hell.

He can't hear anything.

He can't see anything, turns the light on, There's nothing there.

But the moment he decides off, for Christ's sake, go to sleep, turns the light flies back down.

13:01

Something kind of goes what?

And I can't really do justices because Francis and I were in a bar at this point, pretty noisy place in Mayfair standing at the bar and he sort of slams his face right into mine in the kind of way that, you know, if the police had seen it, there's going to be a fight now.

13:16

So this is something clearly not happy with him there.

Clearly is not going to let him get any peace.

Clearly wants to make sure he knows it's there.

And so he thinks finally sought this and he goes off the stage in his girlfriend's bedroom.

Unsurprisingly, he comes down quite late in the morning for breakfast, apologizes to the girl's mother and says what happened?

13:39

And she's oh, that's interesting because my daughter, younger daughter, about 8, came down earlier and she said to me, mummy, who was that man outside my window last night?

So this is the first floor.

Bear in mind man outside the window.

13:55

And what's interesting here, I think, is you not only get the child and a ghost, but you get a spectrum that Francis is that bit old to actually see anything.

The daughter is perfect age.

As you know, many followers of this kind of stuff will know she's the perfect age and she doesn't quite know that she's seen a ghost, even though he's on the he's on the middle of the air and Francis does, but he, you know, he doesn't see anything.

14:19

So interesting kind of continuum of awareness, if you like, of of the paranormal.

Perhaps if he was in that room at the age of 3040 fifty, he wouldn't experience anything at all.

I don't know, but that was another one.

Once 1 tutorial.

We were sat there.

14:35

There was just four students at this point.

My colleague knocked on the door, Mary banged on the door and I said, oh, sorry, but I just wanted to tell you that they've approved your membership of the SPR, the Society for Psychical Research, which so baffled the secretary that she wrote it down as Society for Physical Research.

14:52

Anyway, I say to students what this is all about and one of them very keen to talk to me.

American student, young woman, very keen to tell me about being in her aunt's house back in America.

It was clearly haunted.

They were upstairs one day in a room full of toys and a toy.

15:09

Boss shot across the room.

Both of them shot out of the house.

Not just out of the room, but out of the house.

Now I got in touch with the aunt later on.

Emma had some interesting stories from her beyond that actual house, and she was AUS Air Force pilot.

15:25

It's just one example of very highly trained, very brave, fearless people scared out of their wits by poltergeists.

So yeah, these stories kept coming at me.

The friend Mary that I mentioned grew up on a very small island in Scotland, used to trot about on her pony from quite a young ages as people did there.

15:44

And she was trotting about one day past her an abandoned cottage, no one in there.

So she decided to check her posture.

I'm told by horse riders, this is most important that you check your leg position against the stirrup and the horsey.

And so she did this in the in the window and the reflection.

16:01

But then she was doing it, realized that hang on, there's a chap sitting in his chair, typical old Highland chap in his tweets and his cap.

I know it was very rude.

I'm staring it's blooming window now, can I?

So she trots off on the pony leg position unchecked and goes back to her parents.

16:17

I thought that house was empty.

And they look at each other like, kind of, you know, dark Thunder.

And presently she finds out.

Yeah, he's empty.

He's died, you know, quite some time ago.

So yeah, just just one among many.

I mean, I'd have to actually check the file to remember all of them.

But.

But they're coming at me, you know, all the time, and only really because I raise it.

16:36

But I, I would say that if you really went to the effort and you'd get a lot of Flack for this, but in a university, you would get a hell of a lot of stories of the staff of the students if, if you, you know, make a systematic effort.

But that was the first phase.

16:52

Very, very strange and very revealing.

So was there anything else important about the real vampires in this respect?

Yeah, the other thing was something called sleep paralysis.

Sleep paralysis and and a nightmare, which clearly this was happening a lot to people in real vampire country.

17:13

For a long time I tried to put it down as a medical phenomenon that they were misinterpreting.

I mean, it seemed to scare some of them to death, especially with repeated attacks.

Just to describe it briefly for people who've not come across it.

You'll wake up in the night.

It's worse, obviously, when you're on your own, but even if you're actually sleeping next to somebody, the problem is that you're completely paralyzed.

17:35

You can't speak.

You make perhaps the most inarticulate tiny little sounds.

You have a feeling of extreme terror, perhaps breathlessness, and something, if you get a nightmare as well, is coming at you outside from the corner of the room.

17:51

It has a a power of menace, an aura of evil completely disproportionate to what it might loosely seem to be, a cat, a a goblin, etcetera.

A shape, a shadow.

And hardened.

Atheists talk of evil, talk of their soul in these contexts.

18:08

So medical science tried to say that historically, well, probably prehistorically, if you're having your awful nightmares and you start thrashing about in your sleep, you draw attention to yourself.

And so a hungry cannibal, a nasty tiger comes along and that's the end of you.

18:25

So it's not a good idea to to act out your dreams.

In fact, people have done.

And Lord Longford was once playing tennis against Martina Navratilova when she hit the ball so hard that he was sure he had to return it with his head and his wife Woking Marks, who's banging his head against the the furniture in his sleep.

18:41

So fairpoint that you shouldn't do that.

But I don't think this really covers it all.

I'd never heard of this until researching that book.

I'd never certainly had such an experience.

I had no idea what it meant.

But I was away probably 2012 again in a Welsh farmhouse, lovely spot on the coast of Wales, and I was sent off my girlfriend to a separate room, so I'm supposedly snoring.

19:05

Anyway, despite this appalling slander, I went off to sleep quite comfortably.

But I had had a heavy meal and lots of wine, as you do on holiday, which no nose for sleep paralysis.

Apparently a long sleeping on your back.

I was sleeping on my back.

I woke up, no obvious reason, didn't allure anything in the middle of the night.

19:23

And there was a a figure about two to three foot 4, three foot tall, kind of humanoid, but as if it were made of old television snow.

Everyone's probably seen that even on an old movie if they haven't seen it on a a real TV.

It looks like that.

19:39

And I was so rational about this.

I come across it all over the world now, you know, time and again thought I thought, oh, right, that's nonsense.

So I I just swore it in my head.

I couldn't actually speak, but this swearing at it seemed to work.

So happened again in Durham at one point when I was staying there and it wasn't a big deal.

19:56

It was very mild.

Happened a third time.

And at this point I'm pretty blase lying there.

One hand's lying outside the bed covers those touched very tightly in on the other side.

And I am thinking, oh, right, yes, sleep processes what's going on?

I seem to be able to see the room, I should say, and it's not really clear whether my eyes were open or shut.

20:14

So I I much later on it.

This is possibly an out of body experience as well.

Anyway, I'm just my head sort of muttering to myself silently, you know, Yeah, yeah, go away, go away.

And while I'm doing this then suddenly my.

Arm that's dangling out of the bed snap.

20:31

And yeah, you need to see this actually.

But from nowhere, I, I saw this, I saw a hand snap around my wrist.

And it was as though something was saying, well, if you think, you know, people all say about this, well, watch, watch that.

So yeah, personal experience and something which I would hear about from my students once I started asking them, they'd had this terrifying experience in their childhood, quite a few of them out of a small class at the time.

20:58

Back then, there was no help on the Internet.

There was no help from their parents.

Their parents thought it was slightly crazy.

And I must say that when I was first researching it, there was very little on the Internet except frightened kids on little chat rooms.

It was quite a bit later on you got a documentary on it and you got sort of official US and NHS sites on it, you know, but you were really in the wilderness until quite a way into the 21st century on that one.

21:22

So yeah, that was that was revealing.

There's a really powerful short like 5 minute video that is available on YouTube that was reduced by Edinburgh University through the parapsychology department.

To.

Give a sense of the visual aspect of sleep.

21:39

Paralysis and the.

Auditory kind of sense of the sleep paralysis.

Obviously you can't put yourself physically into that space and experience it, but to give that soundscape and the visual scape of it and just watching that is terrifying alone.

I can't imagine imagine possibly what it is like to go through something like that as an experience.

22:00

Just terrifying.

That's that's an achievement to pull that off.

Yeah.

I've seen one where a guy was kind of recording himself habitually and yeah, you can see sort of rapid eye movement on his face.

And I think he's he's seeing things when his eyes are closed.

22:16

I think that was one advantage of doing the film, you know, because I've wondered about that.

He's very tricky to work out if your eyes are open or closed actually, but you're seeing what looks absolutely to every detail your your usual room.

Yeah.

No, I mean it's, it's interesting how that's come on because I could really could find very little, you know, until about, I don't know, 2015 or so probably.

22:40

And of course, for many, this is an experience for whom becomes associated with Are they experiencing something paranormal or is this just simply a product of the mind?

Is it them really seeing a ghost or experience a vampire, you know, sighting encounter as reported historically?

22:58

Or is this, like I said, just a product of the mind and and the brain playing tricks on them in this state of being?

Yeah, it really splits down that line, you know, and there's a whole book on it about the early abduction side by AI think it was a Yale lecturer.

23:15

It's it's a good book.

And I was in touch with her a bit, but, but I think she kind of fudged about, you know, there's a lot of long words where something you don't understand is described by a phrase which you don't really understand either.

And that was going on quite a lot.

I, I felt and you really, I think it's one of those cases where throughout the paranormal, you need to listen to what people say.

23:38

You really do.

And that can be quite hard if you're not because you come to this cult, but you need to listen to what they say.

Because even just in writing over and over again, I know what you say.

I know the medical side.

I know the theories, I know the rational explanations.

23:53

I will tell you there was something in that room, you know, and I, I think that does need to be listened to.

I mean, if this is the most terrifying experience in someone's life, and sometimes it, it happens over and over again.

I was in touch with a woman.

It was happening to her several times a week I think.

Well, I mean, I've spoken previously to you and on the on the podcast briefly about having experiences when I was young and experiencing a presence of a woman in my room late at night.

24:20

And that happened every single night for a very long time.

And for many it was dismissed.

As you know, that's just a night terror.

It's you not being fully awake.

And I had no parents saying similar things.

You know, if I mentioned it to people I knew at the time, you know, grown-ups, my grand, my grandfather, for example, used to say the same.

24:40

But it's never something that I could dismiss as that.

And part of that was that not only was I experiencing this strange encounter regularly, often, nearly almost nightly, but my sister, who is 2021, so over, you know, 10 years older than me in the bedroom next door, was hearing things at the same time that were not coming from me in my bedroom, weren't coming somewhere else in the house.

25:07

So you had another strange experience by another family member who was hearing something as auditory crying as I'm seeing a distressed woman at the foot of my bed, the side of my bed sitting on my bed stood right to the side of me in various different poses around my bed.

25:26

So it's it's something that I've always had and had to kind of face that precise.

Well, this was simply just experiencing a bad dream.

It's it's a, it's a terrible kind of example, you know, very vivid, one of children really not getting listened to where they're often the very best witnesses.

25:46

And I'll give some examples of that in a while.

And and also, I think terrible example of the taboo that's been created around something, you know, in a society which likes to break taboos and to put people in that position, that weird kind of double speak, double vision.

But I would add also more more positively, listeners bombard Michelle with messages that cannot be ignored to get her to write this story because it will be a classic and a bestseller when it when it comes out.

26:15

So do you want to tell the listeners about Mike Strange and Saint Albans College?

Yeah, somebody also with great stories.

I recommend highly his his memoir going back to the first, sorry, Second World War.

Mike Strange was a wonderful actor.

26:31

He was kind of a whole world really to us.

Everybody loved him.

And yeah, he he, he was somebody unforgettable.

He was somebody very hard headed, I should say, very, very good.

With his hands, he could make almost anything.

26:47

He was famous briefly in 1979 for making a talking robot that strode up and down on television shouting about Margaret Thatcher.

As we know, sadly, to no avail, if we heeded that robot, life would have been so much better for a long time.

27:04

But yeah, he's a wonderful sociology lecturer.

And when he got bored, so when he thought we were getting bored with sociology, he would simply tell us a story from his past.

He had this great fund of stories which are in many of them are in war Babies, his memoir, and one of them was his poltergeist story that he with his young fiance, let's call that Anna.

27:25

He was wondering about Saint Dorman's one day when they saw a derelict house with a sign outside saying free wood, help yourself.

So in they go, because they say he makes anything with his hands.

Immediately Anna doesn't like it.

She wants to get out.

Mike thinks it's a bit clue me, but you know what it would be.

27:41

So anyway, he gets the word.

They come out now, weirdly, in half.

Not long afterwards, the house is knocked down.

New houses are built on the site.

They move into one very small house and I, I can only really telescope this account, but it was a long one.

27:57

Poltergeist started off by hurling Mike out of bed.

I mean, it was a heavy bed.

He's pretty big guy held him out of bed three times, not just sort of, you know, tumble and thaw, but properly flips him out of bed.

And yeah, books get flung out of the bookcase.

28:15

Picture of him and Anna at the wedding gets flipped upside down over and over again.

You can never see it happening, but it happens 12 times when I sat there with the paper.

And yeah, I mean, the weirdest of it, it followed them incidentally to A, to a family house down in Sussex at one point, hammering noises going on in in that house.

28:36

But probably the weirdest thing of all was that at some point he'd come home.

He knew that Anna would be there.

He always got back after her.

And he'd shout, hi, I'm home.

Anna, where are you now?

It was tiny house, really tiny place, and two up, two down.

And he'd wander around the house and she's not here, was it?

28:53

Hang on, she called my name a moment ago.

Where is she?

And he presently realized that she's actually dematerializing.

It's the only way we can describe it.

But she's actually invisible.

And she admits to him that this happens.

She doesn't know why it happens.

She can't control it, but it it does happen.

Now, this whole thing was extraordinary for me because this is about 1990.

29:14

My father had only recently died.

And you could sort of see it as a bit of karma that, you know, here's someone trustworthy like Mike.

You cannot disbelieve telling you this at great length to great detail.

He himself seems quite baffled by about it, but he sure, he sure it happened.

29:30

I, I couldn't really believe or disbelieve this and that.

That messes with the head a bit.

So I think, you know, when people get angry about poltergeist, they get derisive and so forth.

I, I can kind of grasp that because information that you unconsciously or otherwise, you feel that I can't put that in any box.

29:49

I can't put it in the true box or the false box.

I can't put it in the fact box or the hoax box that we don't like that.

But, you know, I think most of us don't like that.

Some people might be more comfortable with it, but but most people in this world do not.

So that was my experience for yeah, you know, 22 years more or less with one more poltergeist experience in in Edinburgh later on.

30:11

Anyway, just quickly.

But we're in 2013 now in the chronology of this 12 year journey and Boxing Day.

I'm back with the family in Saint Albans where Mike still lives, and I should have gone and seen him sooner.

I think really he lived just opposite my uncle.

30:27

But I got in touch with him and we had this lovely toughly afternoon on Boxing Day.

Afternoon, champagne mince pies.

New kittens are on the table trying to get the mince pies, Mike's squirting water out them and he tells me this story in massive detail with loads of things that make much more sense now.

30:44

All the reading I've done and things that he hadn't mentioned to the class before.

Anyway, I could have stayed there longer.

It's about 3 hours or so, I don't know, but I had to go keep a meeting with my brother just down the road.

So it's lovely gathering lots of food.

31:00

My mother, his mother-in-law, his his wife Danny and most of all my my niece Freya who's definitely too young to be listening to this.

But I should just been born few months ago at this point.

So lovely jolly gathering not to all go to sleep, lots of food, lots of warm thoughts of wine.

31:19

And at this point I didn't know Sandra, Danny's mother, Chris's mother-in-law terribly well.

Lovely person but just hadn't had a chance to talk to her much.

And I end up not really talking to anybody else in the room except Sandra because she is working in a haunted house.

31:36

She worked and still works in a care home for people with learning difficulties.

And it's a 24 hour operation as as you might imagine.

So yeah, she's pretty startled and she realizes by now that I'm studying this.

She wants to get my opinions on it.

31:52

And we spent two hours in a kind of little huddle of our own talking about this now.

OK, so I went to check the mic thing because I already knew about it, but it's still pretty weird.

On the same afternoon you get 2 very heavy poltergeist stories.

32:07

I mean, hers was still going on at least six years later.

I think it's probably still going on now, you know?

So it's lasted the span of my whole journey as well.

Strange whisperings when you're trying to sleep, eventually just thrown them out, but smell of burnt toast when there's no toast, the door handles becoming burning hot, and much much more going on at the time.

32:31

Interestingly, I wouldn't really understand it as a ghost later on, looking back things she told me, I think it was a ghost, actually, and it was probably one of the former residents who died.

But yeah, you know, it's coming at me.

It's coming at me all the time.

Even though at this point I don't quite get ghosts.

32:47

I just see poltergeists as the surplus energy of troubled teenagers who often feel better when they hold something across the the room inadvertently.

So what were your experiences at Durham with fellow lecturers?

Well, this was, to put it politely, a bit of a Divine Comedy.

33:04

I mean, I've just, you know, stated that I've had two colleagues, one of them at Durham with these experiences.

The, the, the, the female colleague from Durham described it as the most traumatic experience of her life.

And I, I have a lot of library orders going to the Rep for books on the paranormal, ghosts, time slips, etcetera.

33:26

And he's bit bolded about this until I put my foot down politely and explained that it's not his job to police what books you order.

So I have to say, there's a nice collection, I hope they're all in one place of paranormal books solely thanks to me, from which I hope some people have learned a few things.

And I'm getting all these stories from my students as well, you know, not just from staff.

33:47

And yeah, March 2014, I'm quite a way into all this.

I have a late lecture.

I think it was a 5:00 or something stinking, which nobody really wants.

But after this, I forced myself to walk up a a typically steep and persistent Durham hill to a heavily touted lecture by a visiting fellow on levitation.

34:05

Now, I'll spare you this because I had to suffer.

I don't see why you should.

But it's one of those almost absolutely pointless things where somebody says almost nothing slightly enjoyably for about an hour.

You know, Mary Poppins levitated Catholic Saints said they levitated Superman.

34:21

He levitates my This is an interesting bundle of jobs you've got here with some pretty pictures.

And people make knowing laughs and knowing jokes, and it's all very cozy and divinely bloody pointless.

That's the polite expletive for this absolute waste of time.

So I'm sitting there thinking, God almighty, wait.

34:39

I've just been reading the Enfield Poltergeist.

Now some of you will know that this contains one of the most extraordinary moments in any poltergeist case.

Two women are out in the street when the the main daughter agent of this, whose name is something I escape, he'll come back in a moment when she's in her room and she seems to have been locked in her room by something because one of the investigators is outside.

35:01

He can't get in.

The door is jammed, and the people in the street, two women who are very alarmed and don't really want to talk about it afterwards, but two witnesses see her at this upper dormer window of the house.

They see her actually spinning around in midair.

35:18

And fascinatingly, they see in the same kind of vortex, whether it's clockwise or anticlockwise, I can't remember, but objects, a towel, a book spinning around.

So there's a whole field of force.

You know, there's a kind of physics you can begin to graft here.

So I described this now.

35:34

Fair enough.

You know, nobody else has read this and all these books.

Probably it's a fairly small audience and academics tend to read fairly narrowly, unfortunately.

But anyway, the chair is not happy about this, is quite irritable.

And so who says madman's invaded the talk?

And, you know, I'm making this point, I'm saying about the Catholic Saints.

35:53

One of these Protestants went down there, not very fond of the Catholics, but, you know, he converted to belief in this levitating St. because he saw it.

He bloody well saw it happen.

So I'm thinking what a waste of time, Let me get out of here.

And this guy suddenly taps me on the shoulder from behind.

36:10

He says, can I talk to you?

Can I talk to you?

Yeah, Christ, Get Me Out of here quickly.

So we get out into the corridor.

This chap says it's really good you talk about this.

It's really good because we miss all these things.

People don't talk about them.

I think because he's some sort of new age, you know, is he religious?

Whatever.

No, He's a physics lecturer.

36:26

He's a physics lecturer from Iran.

And he, he says to me, you don't need to convince me about this.

You don't need to convince me.

When he was a child in Iran, there were these lovely kind of courtyards, mainly to keep you cool, I suppose, most of the time.

And he was out in this courtyard of the house, just playing around.

36:43

He's a very young kid when suddenly something, a force came at him and it washed him up the wall.

I mean, he actually pushed him up the wall and held him there.

Now, he wasn't frightened, as far as I can tell.

His Islamic culture obviously different sort of take on this kind of thing because he ran into the house shouting and laughing to his his family.

37:01

I've just seen an Angel, you know, And yeah, this guy and I spent many hours afterwards talking about this, the possible physics of it and all sorts of things.

Other cases were, were more comical as, as hinted.

I mean, I, I was asked to give a talk to the postgraduates in which the head of department was also talking in the same slot.

37:22

And you could see the poor chap here, one of these terrible poker faces where he couldn't hide his emotions.

And as I'm, you know, outlining these various poltergeist cases from the Century of Supernatural Stories and the Century of Ghost stories, you can more or less read him sort of signs saying, oh, my God, Rich is talking all sorts of utter lunacy and it'll be very impolite and I'm British, to try and stop him.

37:42

What can I possibly do?

So yeah, we had that.

I had a chemistry lecturer.

So another scientist listened to this quite seriously.

And tell me about an old Polish village.

He was, he was from Poland, which was so kind of remote.

He didn't have a phone at that point.

37:58

And yet somebody was called up on the phone, you know, in this, in this place, in this ghostly fashion.

There was another colleague who I probably really won't get time to talk about here, but he was one of the most extraordinary paranormal cases I've ever come across.

38:15

And I didn't really meet him, but I knew his wife very well and never heard a word about it from, from her.

So it was all hiding there in plain sight, if you like.

But really, I think it was summed up for me by somebody else I'll talk about in a little while.

I was terrific researcher, private researcher.

38:32

And he said, you know, universities are very good places for brainwashing people.

And I think they do terrific research, terrific teaching.

A lot of the time.

They do open people's minds in lots of ways.

But they really do succeed by repeating the same narrow truths over and over again and denying, you know, what's going on right around them under their noses and what really probably ought to be classed as pastoral care in, in, you know, in some cases.

38:57

You know, just coming back to one of the, the experiences that you just referenced, which was Janet in the in the Enfield poltergeist.

Janet, thank you.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's one of those very classic images that for many is very much something that they will be familiar with, with the the photographs that were taken and obviously published.

39:16

Yeah.

And that perpetuation of those pictures, the the way that they get reprinted and shared and obviously then cements for most people in their mind that this was something hoaxed and set up.

And of course the information behind those photographs gets lost alongside it.

39:36

The fact that there were witnesses to these experiences, the fact that the photographer acknowledged that those photographs were staged to try and recreate the experience witnessed by so many others.

And it's it's that back story that often gets glossed over in order to tell the story that's, you know, is out there.

39:58

And it's, it's that that I think can sometimes be so damaging and so harmful when really analyzing these types of cases because it's such a common experience in poltergeist cases.

Salkey with levitating.

They had levitating mustache shavers and razors.

40:18

You had levitating slippers at Enfield, pillows, all kinds of different things.

I mean, it's just so very common and and not talked about very much.

Yeah, Are you?

You know, it's a very glaring case where you've got to listen to the witnesses and a sad case where Wikipedia, which has a lot going for it in these areas, if you can answer that entry for the for the Enfield political, it's it's garbage.

40:42

It's absolute garbage.

And it convinced me for a little while that it hadn't happened.

But you've you've got to do the research if you want to have an opinion.

Do not look something up on Wikipedia and say that's the end of it.

You've got to read the book.

I mean, it's an absolute classic with two, you know, main investigators.

40:59

I think the film, unfortunately, is a mess.

McFadden admitted to not having read the book.

They did meet with.

He did meet the investigator before, before he died.

Guy Playfair as part of his kind of, you know, research for the for the role.

41:15

But.

But yeah, I mean, Playfair said before he died, he said if they just filmed what actually happened, it would have been much weirder than their film, you know, And this is surely right.

It's.

It was a hell of a case.

Yeah.

So what happened when you started to to publish more widely on this topic then?

41:33

So yeah, by 2014 I published a Halloween article, which as we know now is always a good time of year for this.

And with the Times Higher Education supplement on hauntings in universities, some good old Victorian ones in Oxford and elsewhere.

41:49

And very quickly I, I, I put out a little call at the end for any I've got similar stories.

I got a chat, respond to me and say well, let me tell you about this.

Oddly enough, for those working in Scotland, his family had a connection with Durham where I was and his young grandson had a very important choral event, which was a big kind of ritual thing with lots of formula that have to be got right.

42:15

And he's a very young boy I think.

So they were quite impressed with him.

And so you did that all very well.

You didn't hesitate, got all the transitions right and everything moving around the cathedral and and he said, yeah, well, there were nice monks helping me all the time to do it.

I mean that, you know, there weren't no monks in there.

42:31

And they also added his his grandfather added, your grandfather would have been very proud of you if he could have been here today, then died a while ago.

And the little boy says, yes, he was watching from just there, you know, points to the side of their Pew.

So another cracking example of a child with a ghost.

42:49

Grandfather was doing exactly what you expect him to do, exactly what he'd expect a grandparent to do.

Boy, not frightened at all.

Now, this chap was a Scottish law lecturer, I think it was the head of department.

So he was not any kind of, you know, woolly, new aged character predisposed to believe in any of this.

43:08

And what was interesting was that his wife was clearly psychic.

They were out at a theatre 1 evening trying to watch a play and they, his wife just could not settle to it.

She could not stay.

So they had to leave early.

43:24

Anyway, when they get out, she directs them in a very kind of peculiar way to drive to a certain place it it's almost as though she's in a trance.

And luckily she stopped driving, I don't think.

But he drives them to a set of garages, you know, the type that belong to, say, flats or houses where you've got a row of eight or ten and one of them should stop there.

43:49

So they stopped there.

They managed to open the door.

It's not locked, but you have to kind of flip it up.

And there's a chap inside trying to kill himself with his car.

And they saved his life.

The the way that, you know, she's kind of walked through this, that she's not entirely in control of it.

44:05

She's the medium for it, as it were.

The channel is is fascinating.

I mean, there's many other cases of people having this weird experience.

They're just sort of forced to do something.

They don't know why and they find out, you know, later why it was so that was just one example of something I would never have heard if I hadn't put that call out.

44:25

And certainly as a hinted, there's a context in which you could easily be silenced if you were a tall timid or, or, or easily cowed or embarrassed, very much a culture of embarrassment.

I, I once talked about getting Matthew Manning up to talk and a friend of mine, pretty close friends.

44:41

I, I don't think we have someone like that talking here.

So you're actually, you know, it, it kind of opens your eyes that you're in a context where there is nothing more sacred to them than freedom of intellectual integrity, freedom of belief.

I mean, there was a case in Durham where one of the lecturers was talking about paedophilia and they actually defended this guy for quite a long time on the basis of intellectual freedom.

45:04

And in the end, he, you know, he boxed himself into such a corner of madness that they booted him out.

But, but that's kind of how it can be at a university.

But no, your sense of what you, you cannot believe in, what you don't want to hear, what you don't want to know.

And that that was clearly what what they would have done, despite the fact you can have pointless lectures about Superman and Mary Poppins at great expense.

45:32

As the days grow shorter and the winter nights draw near, the chill in the air invites us to gather closer to the fire where the flickering flames dance.

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45:54

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46:11

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46:30

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47:19

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48:21

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49:05

Dare to embrace the unknown, to journey deeper into the veiled corridors of history.

For only together can we keep the ghostly embers glowing, illuminating the darkness with tales untold.

Now, as the fire crackles and the wind howls outside, let us return to the mysteries that beckon from beyond the veil.

49:30

What spectres await?

What secrets lie dormant, waiting to be unearthed?

Let us venture forth, for the journey into the unknown has only just begun.

So in autumn 2016 you first came into contact with Keith Linda.

49:53

Do you want to tell us a bit more about this meeting and and his story?

Yeah, I'll do my best because this has been an epic case.

I only got in touch with Keith while you got in touch with me because I'd put out this call for stories.

50:08

I got a very no nonsense e-mail. 11 evening, I think I was sitting at this exact same spot and it read, Hi, you asked for stories.

I've got one if you want to hear it.

Can we get in touch?

So we ended up in America on the West Coast, Seattle.

We ended up doing lots of Zoom meetings, first time I'd ever done them, I think.

50:27

And he simply moved into the wrong house in his early 40s with his girlfriend.

I think also about 40.

He simply moved into the wrong house in a place called Bothell suburb, suburb of Seattle.

And never had any paranormal experiences all his life, broadly religious background, but nothing really very life forming for I don't think.

50:50

And they very, very happy, delighted to be sharing their first house together.

It's a rental house.

The landlord gives them the keys, gives them a bottle of wine.

Off he goes.

They're laughing, drinking the wine, really delighted to be there together.

And from upstairs they hear the sound of a child coughing.

51:06

I think it's just one cough, actually.

This is the very first little kind of throat clearing, as it were, in an epic bellowing Horror Story of God.

Yeah, more than 12 years.

I mean, it's still going on to him now.

51:22

He, he suffered what?

I don't know how I could have lived through it in that house for years.

There was something really malicious.

There was a sense of agency, a sense of personality.

It it started off with them watching TV one night, Very large pot plant being lifted up and spun round.

51:43

It progressed to fires which seemed to be deliberately started when he was in the shower.

Baffled the firemen as to how they'd started a fire on a poster.

Things were hurled about.

I mean a wardrobe of about £250 was hurled repeatedly across the top floor.

52:01

Now, this new house, about 10 years, had a quite suspicious lot of tenants.

The landlord was quite suspiciously easy about the fact that there was damage to his cooker, to his floor, to God.

I mean, God, you, you'd have to, you know, sit and enumerate how many dozens or scores of things were smashed, were thrown around, were moved.

52:22

But the landlord yelled, Keith, these things happened.

You're thinking, if you've read Keith's book, they bloody well do not in most people's houses, luckily.

So the landlord knew something was going on.

You know, he knew he was lucky to get a tenant for this place, the the entity there.

If it was just one, it might, I think it was more than one actually really seemed to have it in for Keith particularly.

52:41

But it also seemed to want to mess up his relationship with his girlfriend Tina.

It would drop a random earring somewhere and Keith, naively enough, would say, hey, Tina, is this your earring?

And it was not Tina's earring.

You imagine how this went down with a quite hot tempered girlfriend.

52:58

So yeah, he's a tech guy, Keith.

He, you know, sort of thinking they're messing with the wrong person.

He sets up cameras.

He sets up cameras that give him alarms when he's at work.

He sets up a wonderful alarm system with a kind of beam across the stairway on the basis that you come right in the door, you go straight up the stairs.

53:19

Anything going through that cat person, whatever, he's going to set off the alarm.

Now one day he comes home.

This is very typical.

Comes home to find all his kitchen chairs arranged upstairs in his office.

How did they get up there?

Obviously it was paranormal, but something apparently did not carry them up the stairs.

53:40

If you did carry them up the stairs, they're in a very strange condition.

Not to sell off that a lot.

So just one example of lots of tech stuff that Keith got, which is terrific.

And I should say, you know, now if you want the 21st century poltergeist case in America, possibly in the world, I mean, hugely well documented, somebody who really speaks out, who really, you know, shares his experiences.

54:03

That is the book to to start with.

If you haven't read it, The Bothell Houses is terrific.

I know I've read it.

I entered it for Keith.

So that was a hell of a baptism of fire.

I just to round up and so much of this, but something followed him.

Something followed him and it's never really gone away.

54:18

It's persecuted him.

He's in a bar with a potential new girlfriend.

It knocks her drinks off the table.

He's on a plane.

He gets buffeted around at 35,000 feet.

He's sitting at work.

He gets spun around on his chair by something that's not there.

He's a big chat, by the way.

54:33

He's like 6 foot five.

And yeah, he's had this at his mother's home in Texas.

He's had this at hotels for work all across America.

He's had it at, I think, 2, maybe three different addresses.

And I don't blame you if some of you will just stop scowling and swearing now.

54:50

But I swear to you that this happened and that there's no one more trustworthy than Keith.

One afternoon evening, he was supposed to be out for drinks.

So we're looking forward to it with friends.

And he had something wrong with him, his back or something like that, something he just couldn't leave the house.

And so he's sitting there annoyed on his own in the house, wishing his other drinks.

55:11

So summer evening, I think they're up on the roof of some bar.

Anyway, this friend of his sends him a message on the phone saying, hey, Keith, I thought you weren't coming.

I'm not coming.

I wish I could come, but I'm here at home and the guy has just seen him standing on the roof, you know, in one of Keith's shirts.

55:28

He's he's a hard guy to to kind of, you know, mistake.

He's a black guy of 6 foot 5.

So yeah, by location has been a a recent one and follows that classic pattern.

You know, somebody who really wants to be somewhere that they can't be and boom, there they are for at least, I don't know, a few seconds.

55:47

So in your in your book Century Ago Stories, you discussed time slip cases.

How did you first become interested in that?

Yeah, I can't think who put me onto this guy, but I must have had a few contacts by now and one beautiful kind of comical afternoon.

56:08

I mean for the horrific ritual that is known of borders studies, which is so divinely pointless they could almost make you believe in hell on earth and really should be spelled BORED.

And just before I go to the board of studies in the afternoon to sit there trying to pretend I'm paying attention, this guy called Karl Grove sends me a massive file of time slips, which at this point I think I've barely come across before, if if at all.

56:36

And colossal.

Great Internet file, which he interestingly he also had in an old fashioned big ring binder, big lever arch thing, huge.

I think it's 500 pages or something.

And he said it was pinched.

I mean, as far as I can tell, Poltergeist pinched it on the 1st of April.

56:53

Luckily he had all the stuff on on computer.

But yeah, he's got all these these time slips, which I still haven't got through the whole lot, but I'm sitting in this board of status of people just talking about basically nothing.

You know, just the the driest choking sawdust of bureaucracy is being munched by these poor cattle around you and and you're sitting reading this other world.

57:16

You know, they're thinking, I hope they don't notice, you know, that I'm in a sort of buzz of fascination here when I should be basically nodding off to sleep like a a 95 year old over his paw.

And yeah, time slips.

What the hell is going on?

You know, your whole understanding of time, which is also thrown into a lot of question by premonitions as well, is is radically revised by these things which surely have happened.

57:39

I mean, a police officer reported this in Liverpool, which is particularly notorious for time slips.

He's in the middle of the town centre for a Saturday shop.

His girlfriend goes off one place, he goes off to another place due to meet her at the bookshop.

57:55

I think it's a Waterstones on.

I don't think it was a what was the other one before Waterstones took over the world?

Anyway, he's crossing the road to get back to the Waterstones and this strange fan beeps at him very loud and almost runs him down.

And he looks at this fan in his very old sort of fashion looking van with the name of the department store on the side.

58:13

Anyway, he gets to the book shop and something's gone wrong because it isn't the Waterstones.

It's a bookshop, but it's not Waterstones.

And there's a woman, a young woman is not his girlfriend outside.

You know what's happened to the bookshop?

So you've got two witnesses here.

One of them is a policeman.

He's always been run down by a van which seems to notice him because it oats it's horn at him.

58:33

The sign on it later proves to be a defunct old Liverpool department store.

Another one in Liverpool, perhaps you might say a less reliable witness, but there's two actually on the other side of the law.

A young guy called Sean, I think about 2007 is a is a a petty thief.

58:49

He he shop lists things all the time and he's running through the middle of Liverpool One probably Saturday being chased by a security guy.

He's got a pair of jeans or something in his hand and he runs down an alley hoping to get away.

Young guy's pretty fast, but he rushes a blind alley and then, oh Christ.

59:07

So he's standing there frozen, giving it up, waiting to get a hand on his collar and a lot of abuse and nothing turns around.

There's no one there slowly out the alley, no one there.

Nothing but presently starts nose.

Hang on, what's going on?

What?

People look really old fashioned and the cars look really old fashioned.

59:26

And so he goes to a newspaper stand and he picks up a paper and it says, I think it's the exact date he gives.

I think it's sometime in February 1961.

I'm pretty sure it's the 60s.

So he walks up and down, round around and thinks crashed.

I'm trapped in the 60s.

59:42

I, I would die to stay there for the rest of, you know, the decade.

But you know, he wants to be back with his friends in Liverpool in this century.

So he gets quite panicked.

He can't get a signal on his phone.

He's he's running around and presently he gets signal on his phone.

Suddenly he's in one particular St. quite a long one I think.

1:00:00

And he's looking in either direction and in One Direction is 1961 and the other direction is 2007.

And the guy who who researched all this talked to the security guard as well, and the security guard, to give you the other side of the law here, said he just vanished into thin air in front of me.

1:00:22

So yeah, I mean two amongst absolutely hundreds, I'm I'm sure thousands if you had the time to to collect them all.

So just coming back to that book that I referenced, A Century of Ghosts, which you published in March 2017, do you want to tell us some of the most striking cases that you talked about in the book?

1:00:43

Yeah, I mean, if we get time, if I don't ramble too much, I might, I might give you another from a century of supernatural stories as well.

So I've just been looking back at that and remembered some quite fascinating poltergeist cases.

But yeah, I mean a classically haunted house.

Long, long saga in the Standard and maybe other papers in London in the 18 nineties, 1896, a chap who gives himself a pseudonym of Bruegeling, Bruegeling to know who he gets his name from, but he decides not to reveal his identity.

1:01:13

He seems a very hard headed guy.

He's a soldier.

He's been a soldier and a servant of the Raj before he comes back to England.

This is a house which unfortunately I wish he hadn't done this.

He gives it a pseudonym as well.

It's called Silverton Abbey and this doesn't exist.

1:01:29

But it's quite clear that it's it's in Bedfordshire.

It's not far from London, It's near Bedford School.

And the letters come and go.

And one day I hope they'll make a film about this, whether they can find the real Silverton or not.

But it it's quite comical.

He's furious that he cannot let this place, he cannot get servants to start with.

1:01:49

When he does get servants, he makes sure not to tell them about the ghosts.

And so this, you know, unprimed servant, I think she's German or something.

She, she's walking down the stairs one day when she hears this absolutely blood curdling scream out of nowhere.

1:02:05

And servants will see apparitions.

They will see a Mr. Somebody who used to live there died walking about.

They would also see a woman, quite tall and dark, with quite heavy eyebrows.

And yeah, it's not an easy place to live.

1:02:21

He's lying in bed one night.

The handle of his door is is pushed down and his door is opened.

He hurdles out, in true military fashion with Trifolver.

There's nothing there.

And yeah, it, it, it's unlettable.

And he's furious and he can't get the law to help him.

1:02:37

He can't get a decent rent for this place.

He cannot live in it.

He cannot let it.

And presently people get curious.

They start coming down.

They come down from Oxford, they come down, I think from the SPR.

And it kind of splits, like the 19th century often does, along an axis of ridicule.

1:02:55

Rationalism in inverted commas because there's nothing irrational about ghosts and an axis of belief and open mindedness, these different parties.

One reason I would love to see this filmed is because it was an old school thing where you didn't bring a lot of stupid gadgets.

1:03:10

I mean, I know some of these are useful, but you know that they play a rather dubious part in a lot of dubious TV programs.

Whereas in the old days you took some kids and a dog and and maybe a gun as well.

And so they wrote in the boys from the local Crown school to make a cordon around the building to make sure that no, I don't know, hoaxes or whatever can get in or out.

1:03:33

So these kids, who sadly whose verdict is not given to posterity around there, but 4 lucky kids are actually in the house and one of them is in one room alone when suddenly a wall lights up.

Now some of you'll know this happens quite a lot.

Prelude to a ghost is a light.

1:03:50

A light turns into a ghost.

The wall lights up and the lady with the heavy eyebrows walks past him and looks at him, seems to see him interestingly.

So that one runs and runs others cases that are fascinating.

You think about John Neville, masculine now.

1:04:06

He was kind of the Houdini, the John, the James Randy of his day.

You know, in the 19th century he was the illusionist who knew how illusions were done and spent a bit of time exposing fake medium mediums, fake spiritualism and so on.

1:04:22

But masculine swears openly in a letter to, I think it was a Telegraph, that when he was a young boy, he, he got into trouble in a river and he almost drowned.

He had, I suppose, probably a near death experience.

And he didn't tell his mother because, you know, get help from his mother and go out on his own again.

1:04:42

So his mother doesn't know about this, but she tells him when he comes home.

She had a very odd feeling about him and she thought something was wrong, you know, the exact time.

Also, his mother had an experience when her mother was dying and she was absolutely sure that the mother was in the room.

1:05:01

I don't think she saw her, but she's absolutely sure she was there.

So, you know, great sort of bedrock of sceptical rationality here says to everybody, yeah, but you know, something very weird very inexplicably happened to me, what would be called a crisis apparition.

And a particularly fascinating example of that in the book is after the Indian Mutiny, 1857.

1:05:21

Of course, a lot of British soldiers are killed in this conflict as well as a lot of a lot of Indian soldiers or civilians.

A character called German Wheatcroft is one of the fatalities.

He's wounded in the chest.

I think it's luck now and standard kind of, you know, letter of condolence to the wife, widow and when it happened and where it happened.

1:05:44

And you know, it's very brave and died in the line of duty and so forth, facing the enemy.

Anyway, she presently writes back to him and says, no, that's not when he died because she had seen him in London, not expecting it remotely.

He's clutching his chest.

1:06:01

I think his chest is bloody in the apparition.

And I think at least two other people, friends of his in Saint John's, would see him that same night.

Now she computes the time difference and so on.

London to Lucknow and she works out that he died before they say he did.

1:06:21

They checked their records, they checked their witnesses and they get back and say, yeah, you're right.

So yeah, there's the British military correcting itself on the basis of a supernatural experience.

The British military doesn't correct itself easily, I don't think, particularly in the Victorian period.

So they they were a couple.

1:06:38

If we get a chance down the line, I'll, I'll, I'll talk about the haunted house at Windsor as well, at CLUA, because this was this was a hell of a case that RAT ran in 1841.

So alongside the book that we've just been talking about, this century of ghost stories, you also published a century of supernatural stories.

1:06:59

Were there any striking cases that came up through doing that book that you want to talk about?

Yeah, there was a lot.

I I've been in touch with Keith for a while at this point and he had this wonderful phrase where he talks about noises and knockings in the house and he says they were, they were loud, you could hear them, but they weren't like real noises.

1:07:25

He said, imagine you, you, you took a noise and you sealed it up in a jar and then you opened it up again years later.

It would kind of sound like that.

You know, it's always like the ghost of a noise.

Now I found a case in Muchelne.

I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.

1:07:41

Lovely name.

In Somerset, a farmer called Traibes was beset by poltergeist.

You know, I think it was 67 or 681867 or 68.

They're, they're all 19th century.

So it's a century of supernatural stories, 100 stories from that century.

1:07:57

And he got these hammering noises going on.

But he notices they're oddly kind of that they'll start sort of smaller and then they'll rise to the sound of a rifle shot basically, But there won't be any echo.

They're very dead.

It doesn't make sense.

And at one point he's so fascinated by this, he stands in his doorway.

1:08:15

He's a farmer, you know, he's got various guns and he shoots his rifle out of the OR shotgun out of the door and it's a huge echo.

You know, these noises are not right.

Poltergeist acoustics I won't try and go into usually here, but they are fascinating and they're said to have their own acoustic signature.

1:08:32

They've been recorded and they've been played back on.

You know, the kind of software that will give you acoustic peaks and the acoustic signature said to be unique.

So there you've got Keith echoing along with this guy.

Barry Colvin did the recordings, A farmer from the Victorian age.

1:08:51

The other wrapping the hammering noises.

Absolutely incredible.

June 1841, Windsor Clewer, Little place called Clewer.

And I'm trying to think, yeah, Once Grove is the name of this cottage, detached cottage, elderly retired couple.

1:09:09

They're grown up, son and daughter, I think, I think 2, two children, but grown up, you know, so I don't know, 30s, forties, 50s even.

And, and a servant who's almost certainly young.

This is crucial.

So the noises are incredible.

I mean, they're hammering noises so that people are very happy in their lovely rural retreats, threaten to give notice to their landlords over and over again when they're 500 yards away.

1:09:34

You know that that that's a long way to be bothered by noises.

If you're in a detached house from another detached house and they have a police officer stationed presently at the point where the noises happen around the water closet.

One point the noises are so violent they break the door in half, they excavate, they take the floor up.

1:09:52

The witnesses are fascinating because you get various problems, of course, with Victorians.

I mean, they're constantly sacking and persecuting and actually jailing servants for supposedly doing things that a ghost almost certainly did.

But on the other hand, if you get a major, a clergyman, a magistrate, in fact, I think several of these categories, they believe them.

1:10:14

They take it seriously.

So this turns up in the Times over and over again.

And yeah, the noises are incredibly loud.

Several witnesses, you know, complain very quickly.

They cannot stay there any longer.

And then you get somebody writing in.

1:10:30

The letters are sometimes the best of this, writing into the times saying I'm sorry about the distressing tour, but I think it's really all quite simple.

The West Indian beetle is known to wrap its claws very loudly on tables and other wooden surfaces, particularly in the summer.

1:10:46

So I believe there we have our actual simple and rational culprit that can be heard 500 yards away.

So you, you start to get these things over and over again where the rational explanation is far sillier than the irrational explanation, which there is an angry ghost and it is using the female servant as an agent.

1:11:09

At one point it stops for a period.

And then it starts exactly at 6:00 AM on Sunday.

Who's going to get up at 6:00 AM on Sunday?

Nobody except the servant, you know, and I think eventually they they give her the boot and it stops.

That's my memory of it.

1:11:24

So, yeah, one of those cases where, you know, if you've got the right witnesses, it's kind of hard to just just write it off.

And I love that case because when you get all these kind of silly OCD space wasters and time wasters who just got something really wrong with them that they have to look up poltergeist cases and try and, you know, gaslight the victims and so forth.

1:11:48

If you think that was a hoax, then you go back to a house like that and you hoax it with Victorian technology, do it.

I doubt it.

I doubt it.

So yeah, you know, if you take people's stories seriously, then actually there's much less scope, technology, etcetera to hoax in in a case like that.

1:12:09

So in your kind of best selling book, Fairies a Dangerous History, you talk about fairy poltergeist.

Do you want to explain what what's going on there?

Yeah, What fascinated me quite quickly about Poltergeist was that when you know, your supernatural demons, as it were, they are the culprit for and probably a real culprit, you know, it's actually happening.

1:12:33

For witch persecutions, those are quite rare.

Fairy persecutions, those are pretty common.

Obviously ghosts, also vampires and, you know, demonic stuff is is pulled in.

Alien abduction actually seems to be relevant as well later on.

1:12:50

But yeah, stuff that looks like classic poltergeist stuff.

Showers of stones being hurled at you from nowhere, no culprit can be found.

Wrapping noises, hammering noises out of nowhere, again with no no culprit.

In Wales, in Ireland particularly.

1:13:09

This is the work of a poltergeist to to my eyes.

But they swear that is the fairies and they've upset the fairies.

A lovely case in islands round the Ox Mountains I think chap called Paddy Bain has just married his his young wife and they they build a house.

1:13:27

The lovely thing about art in the in the past, not that long ago I think, I think this was the 1950s maybe.

But for a long time, you could simply build a house by choosing your bit of land, consulting nobody in the authorities except the fairies and the the.

1:13:42

The way to build your house was to hire a fiddler, get all your friends and the building materials, build for about an hour, dance for about an hour, build for about an hour, dance for about an hour and get it done by sunset, hopefully.

But you have to make sure you had not built it on a fairy path.

1:13:58

And this is apparently what Fat Paddy Bane did.

Suddenly there are hammering noises on his roadside wall, intolerable noise.

He consults the local cunning woman, wise woman, and she tells him, yeah, look, this corner, you've built it on a fairy path.

And the worst thing about fairy path is, unlike trees and forts, you can't really see them unless you're a a wise woman.

1:14:18

So since that's what you've done, you've even either you need to free up the right of way.

So he slices the corner off the house.

And you can apparently see quite a few houses in Ireland with corners or bits sliced off for for just this reason.

And yeah, Paul Deverer talks about other cases where they've upset the fairies, a pub and so forth.

1:14:38

People give them a warning.

You don't want to build there.

You don't want to do that there.

And and they get hell, you know, when they do it.

So yeah, underlying, you know, all these famous demons across widely differing times and cultures, there seems to be the poltergeist.

1:14:54

Different, different tricks, but a kind of master of disguise if you like.

So what were the reactions then of readers to the paranormal in your book about fairies?

Well, it it splits again very sharply.

I think it's very positively reviewed.

1:15:11

I mean, thank you to everyone who's reviewed.

It's some really nice, intelligent, appreciative reviews and I think it's probably the most popular of my book if you take an account, the number of reviews.

But you get somewhere.

It's just his two stars, you know, starts off really well and it goes off the deep end into stupidity and so forth.

1:15:27

And you know, I suppose I might have thought that in 2011 myself.

But on the other hand, if you have the courage to put out there what you believe.

And I don't think I could have done the job properly if I hadn't done that or done justice to the the whole range of beliefs and phenomena.

You get stories like this one, which I'll just give very briefly, but a woman called Victoria Thompson was a very appreciative reader and said she had a friend.

1:15:53

William, let me just get this right.

Petri Petrikowski.

So Polish, I think it's spelled with an I.

And he was studying in France.

He's American, but he was studying in France for maybe about a year at one point.

They stayed in quite an old house, a few students.

1:16:11

I think he was up at the top and they would see a dead man in, I think it was soldiers garb of the 18th century and it was a hell of a house to live in.

It was a nasty one.

It exhausted people.

He was, he was just like, he got the flu all the time for months on end and he followed him back to the USI think this was two years maybe, you know, well over a year, because I think it was the whole time he was in France.

1:16:37

And then it followed him right back to America in a way, as Keith's thing followed him.

And he got it sorted out in the end.

Fortunately, he did get some very heavy sort of Brazilian charming people on it and they, they fixed it.

But yeah, that was, that was a hell of a story, which I've got I think on file somewhere just from, from a reader.

1:16:56

And a book that we've spoken about recently, The Smoke of the Soul is, is dedicated to a fellow researcher and a friend.

Do you want to tell us more about about that and the part he played in in this incredible journey?

Yeah, so I joined the Society for Psychical Research at university, got my fees paid by the university, perhaps a bit begrudgingly.

1:17:18

And I used to get the journals and I'd read articles and I thought, oh, this chap, he lives in Cardiff.

Robert Charman lives in Cardiff.

He's done a lot of articles for them.

He's only got two or three pieces in in the journal.

He kind of kept them going, really was the the backbone of the thing a lot of the time.

So, right, OK, there's his phone number, give him a call.

1:17:35

And autumn 2018, off we go to a lovely old thatched pub on the way to care Philly.

And yeah, I, I could not really count without very carefully remembering now.

But I would say we have been to about 12 haunted pubs since then.

1:17:54

I mean, a pub is a great place, you know, nobody's got anything to lose.

If the barman looks like complete loony with the stuff, you're not going to your pub again.

The barman is probably not trying to sell you the pub as a, you know, working concerns.

He doesn't mind saying there's ghosts in it and do ask different people instantly.

1:18:12

I mean, there's one famously haunted pub we go to a lot, the Man Cloyd Inn.

And the people who run it are actually a couple.

They, they live over the pub.

So anything happening there is right in their faces, in their ears.

You know, the fireguard gets thrown off in the night.

1:18:30

You're doing some late night painting of of a bit of wood panelling by the bar and all the glasses.

Wine glasses hang upside down, start chiming against each other musically.

Knives get thrown at the staff in the kitchen.

People see different ghosts.

Usually just a woman, this couple, but mainly a woman sobbing.

1:18:48

A Victorian woman seems to have lost a child.

The cleaner comes in in the morning before Christmas is cleaning up for anyone who's around.

There's a Christmas tree with all lovely parcels piled around it.

She goes to one place.

She comes back to unplug the Hoover.

All the Christmas parcels have been moved across the doorway very neatly.

1:19:06

I could I could go on about this for probably an hour.

You know, I mean just one more is lovely because he the the landlords had some of the brewery chained people in to to kind of trial some new changes in the in the restaurant very popular, very good food.

1:19:25

So they're just explaining these.

They sat there at a table with him and the the other main should call him landlord or not or the landlords or the brewery people.

But the, you know, the IT live in guy.

He sat at the table with these guys and A1 pence piece drops from nowhere onto the table.

1:19:41

And you know, these two guys just yeah, this is normal.

You know, the outside gets wealth of bloody Hells ago and it happens twice.

Just sort of, you know, I'll let you know I'm here and I, I, I, I'm a ghost.

And you should know that ghosts don't like changes in their house and people messing things around.

So yeah, we've been to a lot of haunted pubs for lunch.

1:19:58

Always ask when you go to a pub Always.

I, I would say that about 80% of the pubs I've been in since I started asking these questions are haunted over and over again.

The detailed stories that make sense, they're given to you in a very level headed way.

One pub we went to, beautiful old pub.

1:20:14

People in Wales will probably know it, the, the Bear and Crickhow, Beautiful old inn, I think it's 13th century or something.

Real grand old coaching and you can stay there.

There's one chap that kind of sees the ghosts the most.

We spoke to quite a young barmaid and she said, oh, yeah, we know the chap who sees them.

1:20:31

Yeah, yeah, it's haunted up there.

I said but, but I haven't seen it.

But but my house is haunted, you know, So how much this is an open secret with stories waiting to be told, people wanting to tell them is, is fascinating.

But yeah, Bob has also let me, I cannot count how many well given me and let me wonderful.

1:20:50

Lots of books.

We've had endless conversations about different books, including the one I'm working on at the moment about homing dogs, immensely invaluable as a friend and a kind of colleague I suppose, in a little sort of private university, which anyone's thinking about where they're going to go to university later on.

1:21:06

And you come to talk to me and Bob.

It'll be much better value for money.

Just buy us lunch and you'll learn much more than going to to most overpriced so-called universities.

But yeah, all the books she's lent me and one that I'll come to a little bit later, extraordinary book, which I never would have known about, I don't think, by Michael Benteen.

1:21:26

It was originally one of the sort of classic comedians in in, but also had tremendous lot of paranormal experiences.

And the door marked summer.

We'll come back to that, I hope, at the close of this.

But yeah, many, Many thanks to Bob, who's who keeps thinking and who keeps asking questions that keeps being fascinated by who's never bored, which is quite a feat when you are 93 years old.

1:21:53

So can you tell us more about ghosts and children?

Yeah, this is a subject I love.

I was in Durham supervising a young woman's dissertation on ghosts, and it's nice kind of meeting.

It's one to 1, so you can talk about all sorts of things.

1:22:08

You know, you're not surrounded by people that think, oh, who's this loony talking about ghosts?

So we get into the supervision.

But I quickly say, because I'm quite well into poltergeist now, maybe about 2014 or 15, I say, yeah, have you ever come across, you know, poltergeist yourself and just oh, no, no, no.

1:22:24

Oh, but hang on.

So almost missed this story, but the the family, four daughters in in total, she being a much younger 1.

So this occurred to one of her sisters in the 90s.

They moved from the South of England to the north of England to be able to afford a lovely grand Victorian house, I think detached, I won't give its name for reasons it'll become apparent, but they moved to this lovely house and it's been badly neglected.

1:22:52

They have to do it up quite a lot.

Doesn't smell too good, needs painting.

So the mother will be at home on her own painting and she'll pop the paintbrush very carefully on the paint pot.

Not to make a mess.

Go make some tea, come back.

Paintbrush disappeared.

Gone.

1:23:08

No mess, no paint, no brush either.

The dog will run to the door greeting somebody who's not there, happy and friendly.

But there's nobody there crying from the top floor.

So it's 3 floored house the the 2nd floor.

They'll be crying in what used to be the old nursery.

1:23:24

There's no babies up there in this detached house.

The the mother, it should be said was was a gynecologist.

The father was a submarine captain.

They did not believe in anything supernatural until this happened to them.

And one day he comes back from a tour and she's all go and see upstairs.

1:23:40

I've done lots of there.

It's much better.

Now go, go and have a look.

So he goes up to the top floor, old nursery, one corridor, one room off either side, just two rooms.

And he goes in one was all much nicer, smells nice, painted.

All these Russian dolls are nicely arranged on the, the old Mantel piece, chimney piece.

1:23:59

And he goes back to the next room.

Must be, you know, a minute or 2-3 at the most.

Comes back into the corridor.

All the Russian dolls are arranged perfectly across the doorway.

So it's all fairly benign really, but it's enough to make you rethink your beliefs, especially when this happens.

1:24:17

The mother and the young daughter, Sorry.

The older daughter I suppose, but but this time she's about 7.

This is about the mid 90s I think.

So bear in mind there's no kind of Internet sources to get your history on a house or whatever.

Especially for a 7 year old kid.

They're in the house together, alone on the 1st floor.

1:24:33

There's a little inset balcony on this floor where you can sit, look out on the on the street and the, the daughter suddenly says, Mummy, who's that man on the balcony and takes a look.

There's no one there, sweets, No one on the balcony.

No, no, there's a, a man with a white beard in a skinny suit reading a newspaper on the balcony.

1:24:51

So this goes on for a while.

It's one of these crazy things that we've just been alluding to, you know, where kid is seeing something, the parent is not seeing something.

The parent has the last word on what's right or wrong or true, obviously, because I'm your mother, as we may have heard on various films, because I'm your father.

1:25:08

Anyway, talks to poor girl out eventually, which is pretty persistent, you know, a very precise description.

Anyway, a couple of weeks later they go to a local art gallery, looking at all the lovely Victorian luminaries in oils peering down at them from the walls.

And suddenly the daughter, that's him, that's him.

1:25:26

That's the man I saw in the balcony.

He's the guy that built the house with a white beard and a skinny suit.

So when your child tells you something, listen to them.

That's hard to have faced that one, as far as I can see.

Later on, before everything closed down in the mess that was COVID, I was in Barcelona in the autumn, October 2019.

1:25:48

I was coming back on a late flight to Bristol, still in the airport at Barcelona, and nothing's really happening.

It was all shuffling into the boarding queue because they like standing in queue, so obviously not going to happen.

So I'm sat in the cafe just waiting for it to get going and get talking to a young woman who's been going around Barcelona taking photographs and she's just coming back, or I think about a month, sorry.

1:26:09

It's been going around the whole of Spain actually.

And she's heading off back to Cornwall where she lives via Bristol.

So I asked her about photography.

She asked me what I do and I tell her about my books and I say, you know, I've done this book and I've done that, but, but the really interesting book I haven't, I haven't written yet.

1:26:25

Meaning that I'm going to write another book on ghosts, kind of definitive 1.

So I gave her an outline of this ghost poltergeist and she's very polite and sort of quiet and wondering, you know, poor girl thinking who's this mad woman?

Is he going to stop talking this lunacy to me and go away?

And then she perks up and says some.

Well, that's interesting because when I was a little girl, meaning sort of 1-2 years older than most, an old lady used to come and read to me in bed at night.

1:26:49

Note note that, you know, this old lady comes to read to her in bed at night.

She doesn't really know who she is, but it's nice.

It's a nice old lady.

It's a nice treat.

And at the age of about 18, generally 19 as we meet, she asks her uncle presently, or she tells her uncle about this and he says pointing to a photograph.

1:27:08

So was that her?

And Esme says, yeah, that was her.

Well, that was your grandmother who died before you were born.

As we saw with the grandfather going back to the cathedral to to, you know, hear the young boy singing, this is exactly what you'd expect a grandparent to do.

1:27:26

So I would stress this that Hollywood gives you a pretty erroneous idea of this.

It's not great box office copy to have grandparents coming back to read to their kids, unless they have a foul, dark, evil motive as well.

But this clearly happens a lot.

Somebody I met only I don't know, three years ago, I think, in Clandaf, where I go and sit on a on a bench and read in the sun.

1:27:50

I was sat there reading a book about The Rolling Stones.

Chap comes by with his dog Spaniel, and what are you reading?

We get talking about The Rolling Stones.

He's a bit older than me, so he's got memories of seeing The Rolling Stones play at Bristol and what have you.

Anyway, we get friendly and presently go to the pub a few days later and and talk about all sorts of things.

1:28:07

I don't want to start laying on him stuff about ghosts because I've known him very long, but we get onto the subject.

He's got a lot of stories about a very convincing spiritualist who knew all sorts of secrets about the people that came for readings.

But most of all, he's got this story that he, growing up, had lots of problems with his mother and father.

1:28:27

They got divorced when he was quite young, so it was never good really from as long as he could remember.

One night he's trying to get to sleep.

There rang away in the kitchen.

He can't sleep.

He gets up in his dressing gown and goes to the top of the land.

He doesn't really know what to do.

He's confused.

He's very young.

I think he's 9 at the most.

1:28:43

And he sees a nice old chap down the bottom of the stairs in a nice old tweed suit.

And the chap says, it's alright, it's alright, Nick, it's it's under control.

I got it, I got it.

Just you go back to sleep.

So quite a lot later, I mean a lot later, I think they go through some family photographs.

1:28:59

And Nick says, hang on, what's that chap I saw at the bottom of the stairs?

Yeah, well, that was your uncle, but he died when you were three.

So once again, you know, for a different reason, but for a good reason.

It's it's it's what one of your dead relatives would would do.

1:29:15

What's fascinating about all of these cases is that in none of them does the child think they're seeing a ghost.

So trying to pull on them, you've got wacky ideas.

You've been reading too many Duff spooky books.

You've been watching spooky films.

Someone's been telling you things.

1:29:32

That doesn't cut it, does it?

Because they think they have seen a person.

I mean, that person read to them, that person spoke to them, you know, So the sort of preconditioning, the unreliable, wacky child that's not in the picture here.

1:29:48

Coming full circle, you mentioned at the beginning that no one could convince you of any form of afterlife when your father died in 1989.

How does this thing compare with the death of your mother?

Yeah, it's very different.

You can never really sum this kind of thing up very easily because I think she was ready to go after a few weeks.

1:30:11

She caught COVID in a care home and I think she was ready to go.

She and I think I learned something that I, I would benefit from, I hope not to be in a situation like that again.

But I would advise people at least that if somebody refuses to eat, that if somebody that is the kindest and most pleasant and most lovely and, you know, old fashioned person you can imagine at 85 tells the carer, and excuse me, but I'm going to quote this directly.

1:30:35

When they're trying to feed her to fuck off, they mean it.

They mean it.

And that is their decision.

That is not our decision.

And I think we really have problems still about the sacred right to keep people alive in circumstances where they know where they're going.

They're probably halfway there and they they are ready to go.

1:30:53

And that is their choice.

I know it's not an easy thing to legislate for, but but yeah, she was ready to go.

It went on for weeks and weeks.

We're never ready for somebody to go.

The people who stayed behind and it became a kind of terrible, can't quite say normality, but I mean, lasted from November through till early January.

1:31:13

So making calls on the phone with somebody who, who you know, they can't answer you, they can't actually speak after a certain point.

But you, you'd have that strange kind of slightly paranormal thing, I suppose, of knowing that someone's listening, you know, knowing that the phone hasn't been cut off, knowing that there's a kind of breath of, of humanity there.

1:31:34

So, yeah, one night in January, about 9:00, I was sat exactly here making a call.

And what do you do when you can't exactly have a conversation with someone?

I would read poetry to her.

1:31:49

I would tell her about what I'd been doing, what I'd done in the day, who had seen friends research and so forth.

And I would, I would just read things.

And I happened to be reading Dandelion one.

It was, I don't know, was it karma?

So I picked this one passage that I didn't really see the appropriateness of it at the time, but this I'll just read a little bit of this wonderful passage.

1:32:09

If you haven't read dandelion wine the moment you finish this into the podcast, go and get a copy and read this especially at great leisure because it is one of the most wonderful novels ever written by Ray Bradbury about I think his kind of old school summer childhood in in America, mid America.

1:32:27

And the title comes from the ritual of making dandelion wine, and how the this is made in the summer, of course, when they cut all the dandelions.

So here we go.

The water was silk in the cup, clear, faintly blue silk.

1:32:45

It softens the lip and the throat and the heart.

If drunk, this water must be carried in dipper and bucket to the cell, Are there to be leavened in freshets, in mountain streams, upon the dandelion harvest, when snow was whirling fast, dizzying the world, blinding windows, stealing breath from gasping mouths, even Grandma one day in February would vanish to the cellar above.

1:33:07

In the fast house there would be coughings, sneezings, wheezings and groans, childish fevers, throats roar as butchers meet noses like bottled cherries, the stealthy microbe everywhere.

Then, rising from the cellar like a dune goddess, Grandma would come, something hidden but obvious under her knitted shore.

1:33:27

This, carried to every miserable room upstairs and down, would be dispensed with aroma and clarity into neat classes to be swept neatly the medicines of another time.

The balm of sun and idle August afternoons, the faintly heard sounds of ice wagons passing on brick avenues, the rush of silver skyrockets and the fountaining of lawn mowers moving through Ant countries.

1:33:50

All these in a glass, yes, even Grandma, drawn to the cellar of winter for June adventure, might stand alone and quietly in secret conclave with her own soul and spirit, as did grandfather and father and Uncle Bert.

1:34:06

Or some of the borders communing with the last touch of a calendar long departed, with the picnics and the warm rains and the smell of fields of wheat, a new popcorn and bending hay.

Even Grandma repeating and repeating the fine and golden words even as they were said now, in this moment when the flowers were dropped into the press, as they would be repeated every winter for all the white winters in time, saying them over and over on the lips, like a smile, like a sudden patch of sunlight in the dark.

1:34:40

Dandelion wine, dandelion wine, dandelion wine.

And this.

This has become a kind of weirdly normal ritual, as some things can be when they go on for a while.

You never know what's going to be the last conversation and the end of that conversation.

1:34:59

I wasn't really sure why, but for the first time ever, I said goodbye twice.

And about an hour later I was run by the care home to say that she died.

And I I think things I've learned after stories I've heard since I think people actually sometimes will wait until somebody really says goodbye that that happens.

1:35:21

I think anyway, she said goodbye a week later after she'd tied.

I was lying just waking up in bed quite late on a Sunday morning in was effectively detached house.

It's kind of attached on one side, but it was January.

1:35:36

All the windows were shut.

And I've been in this house for over 20 years.

I've always never smelt anybody's cooking anywhere, barbecues or anything, even in the summer.

Anyway, I'm lying in slightly sort of zone between sleep and waking, but awake and for about a minute I could smell the exact same smell of Sunday roast as our mother cooked it in the little kitchen in our council house Sunday after Sunday.

1:36:02

I can't count how many times I hadn't actually even remembered the memory of the smell.

You can't remember a smell.

You can remember the effect you had on you, but I hadn't actually remembered even the effect of it.

And suddenly I could see the roasting dish in the oven that I hadn't thought about for God knows how many, how many months or or years.

1:36:22

And yes, that is exactly how she would have said goodbye.

So were there any particular phases in the journey which convinced you that this affected a huge number of silent witnesses?

Yeah, thanks.

1:36:37

This is an important question that I I particularly in the summer of 2022 because seems a bit of a distant memory now, but we had this crazy heat wave.

We had so many beautiful, just clear, perfect hot summer days.

1:36:54

So I would go out to the park, take a book and do some some reading there.

And there were they kind of faded away as the summer went on.

But there were always a few students around in twos, threes, sometimes just on their own reading.

And I just got into the habit of asking people if they believed in ghosts.

1:37:14

And yeah, I'm one example was actually just up the road from the park outside the the library.

It comes to mind now because I think the girl was just making a phone call or smoking outside the library.

I mean, she she was wasn't there for very long.

I was getting my bike.

1:37:30

But I just thought, oh, heck, you know, I've, I've got a lot of stories.

There's always people with these stories.

Like, let me ask this girl.

So I go and ask her and I can still see the way her eyes lit up as if to say I really want to talk about this.

And she had gone to a boarding school, which apparently was Florence Nightingale's old house originally.

1:37:50

And in the boarding school, she and another friend using the gym saw heavyweights thrown across the room more than once.

Now, down to now, that summer when I was talking to her, she could never convince her boyfriend that this had actually happened.

1:38:08

And this really resonates time and again, you find women that are comfortable talking about these things.

Women want to talk about these things.

And their fathers, their boyfriends, their husbands will not listen.

1:38:24

Do not get it.

I know you think you believe what you saw.

So many words was her boyfriend's response to this.

She really wanted to talk about this.

And I don't think she got the chance very much.

And over and over again when I got extraordinary stories from people, somebody's dead grandmother causing poltergeist incidents in their house, a case where there was a shattering sound as though the TV had broken and the TV was perfectly fine.

1:38:52

You know, one of those poltergeist imitation noises that are so convincing, but nothing happened.

And yeah, a case of somebody who couldn't stay in a hotel or it was a pub room in the night, simply went to sleep in the car, you know, paid lots of money for this room.

1:39:07

Finds out later there's been a stabbing a murderer in this in this room.

One very long conversation must have gone on about an hour and a half with a young woman who came from a very psychic family.

Her mother seemed to be extremely psychic and would have out of body experiences.

She the the the daughter grew up in an old cottage in the lakes and would see dead people in the house kind of all the time.

1:39:31

I think actually just because the place had been used as a morgue in the way that, you know, it was an old post office.

Public buildings were often used like that, pubs and so on as well.

So yeah, I would sometimes get 2-3 stories in one day.

You know, really, really seemingly random.

1:39:49

One girl, I just talked to her about 5 minutes up by the Weir initially she said Oh no, no, I don't know.

She said oh but my mother, actually her mother had gone to a bird centre just outside Cardiff and she had a quite a long conversation with somebody.

1:40:05

Enjoyable conversation seemed and she mentioned it as a staff later and described the person for some reason.

And the staff told her, well, yeah, we know him, but he's dead, you know.

And yeah, sometimes without trying.

I mean, this would be most striking.

OK, you go and ask people, but they don't, they don't make things up, I don't think, you know.

1:40:25

And I was once outside the house here when my neighbours at that time next door, they were a set of recently graduated students.

And there was a a young woman in her early 20s called Anna, Anna, a young boyfriend.

1:40:44

Will they've actually known each other since they were about 10 or something in the same village.

Really lovely kind of story.

You know, they've been childhood friends and and I'm sure they'll they'll get married one day.

But she was born in a haunted house in Henley.

1:41:01

They moved from this house, I think just because they wanted to move to what seemed to be a nice house in a little Oxfordshire hamlet.

And they found themselves in another haunted house, I think probably even more haunted.

I mean, the family still lives there.

And yeah, I mean, they still go back there for Christmases and so forth.

1:41:19

And there will be what clearly sounds like a very intensive knocking upstairs as they're all sat around the dining table after after supper.

All the women are looking at each other when wondering when the men are going to pay attention.

All the men are trying to pretend it's not happening.

1:41:37

This is a seriously haunted house.

It's a very small village.

Everybody in the village loves the family.

Everybody in the village hates the house.

People who've stayed there, sleeping on the sofa, babysitters, etcetera, have seen ghosts.

Anna's had a room that she would only use when the house was full up and, you know, it was haunted since her childhood.

1:41:59

She's even seen at one point a mouse hole in the room which wasn't actually there, as though she went back in time at certain points in the room.

She saw people in the room that weren't there, shouldn't have been there.

You know, you simply couldn't really live in that house without having to accept that something was going on.

1:42:17

You can call it this, you can call it that, but something weird was going on.

And yet it seems that you know, her boyfriend, he, he, he will never believe this.

I've had long conversations with him in the pub.

He will not believe this.

I've very long conversation with her over coffee and learnt a hell of a lot of things which she said her mother would back up.

1:42:39

And yeah, this guy that she has known since they were about 10 years old, he will not believe the most important things that happened to her in her life.

I would say from, from what she told me, so yeah, I, I would say 2030% of people have had very direct experience of a ghost or poltergeist.

1:42:58

And I would really say emphatically, you're listening to this.

You probably don't need to be convinced, but if you find people who are not convinced and they could be your very close and old friends.

I know somebody like that who I've known for, well since let's let's forget the maths, but you know, since 1989.

1:43:18

And he will simply not talk about this to our conversations bearing on the phone, but he will not talk about it.

But if you get something like this, get them to ask all their friends.

If you've got a reasonable number of friends, there's almost no way that you would not know somebody to whom this has happened.

1:43:34

I would say most of my friends have had one of these experiences, you know, over 50%.

And what you want to bear in mind is that ask them.

Do not pretend that none of them have had this happen because they haven't told you. 7 years, 12 years.

1:43:50

I would never have known ever.

If I hadn't brought the subject up.

I would have known those people you know, until now and never have known about that.

So, yeah, it's out there.

It's, it's a weird open secret.

It's it's the new taboo for the 21st century.

And earlier you mentioned Michael Benteen's book The Door Marked Summer.

1:44:10

Were there any particular moments in his story which really stood out for you?

Yeah, it's a wonderful book.

I'd encourage people to read it.

It's a lovely piece of storytelling.

And I, I remembered reading it that I'd seen him on Wogan, you know, way, way back when Wogan was in his crazy heyday, 3 shows a week in what, 80s, maybe early 90s.

1:44:29

And I'd seen Wogan trying to kind of, you know, debunk him and so forth.

And Bentim being very resilient and very convincing to me, who, you know, at the time was, was not going to be convinced actually.

And yeah, I mean, just an example of how extraordinary and powerful and how unforgettable the supernatural can be in the hands of a seemingly very ordinary person, A very kind of self effacing guy that you wouldn't have glanced twice at perhaps in the street.

1:45:00

He was a Dover grocer, a shopkeeper who came to know Ben Teen's family quite well and his father.

And it was in that awful summer, you know, I, I gather that it was a lovely summer itself in 1939.

But people knew something was coming.

You know, the clouds were on the horizon.

1:45:17

And the horror of that to people who, you know, were within memory one way or another of the First World War, It's, we can't imagine it anymore.

But Eddie the, the, the grosser had a sense of this, perhaps a psychic sense of it.

1:45:32

And he he said to his father, Benteen's father.

I'll tell you what, Adam, will you drive us out into the country?

It's not far and there's something I want to show Michael.

We truly drove out a few miles into the wield of Kent, those peaceful, sheltered valleys that are one of the most attractive features of the garden of England.

1:45:52

Eddie asked Pop to draw into the side of the country Rd.

Then we got out and followed him down a short narrow track that led to some woods of the foot of the valley.

The night was calm and quite warm, with a few lazy clouds drifting across the moonlit sky.

We walked silently in single file through the lush ferns that now rustled round us.

1:46:14

The dense underbrush continued as we passed into the thick clumps of trees which made-up the small wood.

Here the light was considerably reduced to Eddy continued to lead the way effortlessly.

Quite unexpectedly, we came out of the clusters of saplings and mature trees into a small clearing which must have been centrally placed in the wood.

1:46:33

And there Eddie stopped.

The moon had come out from behind a large billowing cloud and now lit the whole scene almost as brightly as daylight, but with a soft silvery light.

You could almost hear the silence.

Eddie turned to me as I stood a few feet behind him, just in front of my father.

1:46:52

He smiled and gestured to me to listen.

Then he turned and in a low voice, halfway between a whistle and a word, gave one strange, short, gentle call.

Immediately from every corner of the wood, the birds, the beasts, even the insects, and I felt every tree and plant answered him.

1:47:18

It was a great joyous chorus of greeting to a much loved friend.

There was no alarm in that spontaneous answer, just a massive response of nature to nature.

Like attracting like.

Tears streamed down my face and I could see my father crying too, Marvellous natural tears of joy that seemed to wash away the fears and doubts that had assailed me, reaffirming that nature is far stronger than man alone.

1:47:48

I shall never forget that moment.

That's so beautiful.

I mean, it's just an incredibly powerful passage that I think really does help to sum together and tie up.

I think the journey that you've been on when it comes to the supernatural, these threads that I think tie your books together.

1:48:10

I mean, it's just remarkable the experiences and the approach that you've had to this over so long.

But you can see the threads gathering and the way that something has just naturally moved on to something else in terms of research and and understanding and a deepening understanding.

1:48:28

I mean, it's really a very powerful and incredible journey that you've been on.

Yeah, thank you.

I mean, I, I must say, you know, and I haven't done justice to all the people involved, but so many people, some that I've just met once, some that I've been lucky to meet and I've become close to so many people have contributed to this, their own stories.

1:48:48

Some of them are quite epic and and yeah, you know, I I can't imagine now having not turned Bob and I would never have come across that.

But I mean, I've never read anything like that.

You know, I have read a lot on how and I've heard a lot of stories, but nowhere else have I ever read anything like that.

But if you read Benteen's book, I mean, you know, he's he's on the level and it's it's kind of those things.

1:49:08

It's straight, straight.

You couldn't really make it up, could you?

But But yeah, you know, it's interesting that now, you know, I am doing work on, on nature in the natural world and researching homing journeys of the classic migratory birds, whales, turtles.

1:49:25

But but we're the ones that people don't know much about horses, ponies, cows, pigs, hamsters, dogs and cats.

And, and so, yeah, I suppose there's some kind of thread there weaving in in other directions in the in the tapestry, if you like.

But yeah, thank, thank you for wonderful, wonderful conversation.

1:49:44

It's great to go back for all this again.

Yeah, they'll trip down memory lane, but I also think it gives a real insight, as I say, into your books and the journey that took you from 1:00 to the next.

And you know, I'll make sure that obviously the links to you and your books are readily available so that if, if someone wants to dip their toe into your poltergeist book, your fairy book, century ghost story, supernatural stories, I mean, there's so many that we've talked about and touched upon that we've kind of given a flavour to.

1:50:17

So if people want to access those, they can easily do so via the links that will be on the podcast description notes and on the website.

That would be great just to add 1 actually just it comes to me now, but it's a short one, but I think a good one because I'd really love stories from from readers listeners.

1:50:35

Guardian article on Merlin the Spaniel.

If you just put in my name because it's unusual, you'll get that it's January this this past year.

And that gives you a flavour of the homing animals.

Because I, I think a lot of stories are out there, you know, with, with pet owners or owners of horses, ponies, livestock.

1:50:53

I'd love any more stories if people get a chance to read that that short one.

Honestly, thank you so much for your time, Richard.

It's always such a pleasure to talk to you.

Thank you.

It's it's always a delight.

Thank you and.

I'll say goodbye to everybody listening.

Bye everybody.

Thank you for joining us on this journey into the unknown.

1:51:15

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