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 eerie journey through the pages of history.
0:33
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.
0:49
We'll unearth stories, long buried secrets, dark folklore, tales of the macabre, and discuss parapsychology topics from ancient legends to more recent enigmas.
We're delving deep into locations and accounts all around the globe, with guests joining me along the way.
1:10
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.
1:26
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.
2:07
Mike Strange graduated from London University in 1960 and studied politics and sociology at Birkbeck College in 1976.
He grew up in a little hamlet called # green in East Sussex and later lived at a house on the edge of Ashdown Forest.
2:25
Mike has taught for most of his life in schools and colleges of further education.
In the late 1970s he spent some time as a single parent and now lives with his second wife, Elizabeth, at the centre of a large, reconstituted family.
2:41
Apart from writing, Mike has built a large workshop and pottery studio at the bottom of the garden, where he and his wife make ceramics to sell at their annual Christmas sale, at their home, and at a variety of art festivals and galleries.
Mike is the author of War Baby, A Dyslexic Life and Further Adventures of War Baby.
3:02
Both of these books chronicle his life.
It is the strange encounters experienced by Mike, as reported in Further Adventures of War Baby that is the subject of the podcast today, and joining me to share these personal supernatural encounters is none other than Mike Strange himself.
3:21
In 1964, Mike's life took a chilling turn when his romantic escapades with Emily, his first wife, for whom the name has been altered, led to spine tingling encounters with the unknown.
From strange drumming noises and empty bedrooms to levitating beds, Mike is here to take us through some of his personal experiences with mysterious apparitions and unexplained phenomena.
3:48
So get comfortable and let's introduce our guest.
Hi, Mike.
Thank you so much for joining me this evening.
Oh, it's good to hear from you, Michelle.
Do you want to just start by telling the people listening a little bit about yourself and your background, Mike?
4:10
Yes, I I was born in East Sussex in 1938.
Little place near Buxted called # green.
I can remember going to Brighton Beach as a little boy going on the well.
4:28
In fact we couldn't go on the beach because the whole of the beach was mined and there was barbed wire entanglements and notices saying keep off.
So that was my very first experience of the war.
My dad was in the ARP and he used to go around warning people of air raids and so on be before he joined up.
4:53
And we live next to a farm which was raised above us on a bank.
And my dad and Uncle Dugout, a great big groove in the soil and put beams on top with corrugated iron and more earth was a bit like a First World War dugout.
5:16
And that was our shelter.
And I can also remember, you know, air flights overhead looking up at the sky and just seeing the vapour trails.
And on one occasion one of the fighter planes game, very close, probably a German one.
5:36
And there were bullets ripping into our lawn and my dad sprawled himself on top of me and ducked me down to escape from that.
Later on I went on a rather middle class evacuation, first of all to Swansea.
5:54
The theory was that Swansea had been flattened and my grandfather had had a tailor shop there, and the idea was that we stayed with somebody called Ethel.
We called her Ethel Pentrequis in a working class suburb of Swansea and we stayed there for a short period of time.
6:14
She was terribly tidy and it was quite an experience.
All the women in the street would kind of Blanco their front step, and poor Auntie Ethel had lost her fiance in the First World War, so there was one room which was a shrine for her dead lover.
6:35
And of course I crept in there to poke around.
I spied out and I caught her shovelling dust under the carpet and I said, oh, mum, Aunty Ethel shovelled dust under the carpet and of course all hell broke loose.
So then we had to leave.
6:51
I can remember getting into an army truck and driving into the Welsh mountains with my mum and granny.
And we had a tiny little one up, one down, not really a cottage, a tiny little place right next to a big river.
7:09
And there were genuine working class evacuees there from the East End.
And you know, I played with them and so on.
Eventually when I came back after the war, everybody thought it was over and I thought, oh, that's interesting.
7:29
And I saw a a light in the sky and I thought it was a plane on fire.
And I can remember doing horrible drawings really, of people bailing out of planes with parachutes and so on.
7:45
So I looked up in this.
I got up on top of a haystack to see better and I waited to see a parachute come down and suddenly the the noise of the plane shut off and there was utter silence and then a huge explosion and I was blown off the hayrick onto a lower hayrick.
8:06
The back door of our house was stoved in, our greenhouse was smashed The Smithereens.
And you know, I was lucky not to be badly hurt really.
So then we went on another little middle class evacuation to a kind of bathing Hut that belonged to one of my aunties in a little place called Dunster where I learned to swim.
8:31
So that was my early beginning.
In the first book I mentioned being dyslexic, and nobody of course knew about dyslexia.
At that time.
I had terrible problems spelling.
I used to love writing stories, but I had my own cobbledygook spelling, which nobody else understood.
8:52
And of course I hated school originally.
I went to someday school and then.
You know my.
Parents tried a freedom school which was almost worse than the Dame school run on the sort of principles of AS Neil but not very well managed.
9:11
And then they for averted the other way and said, oh, look, you'll have to go to some karstly public schools or I had to go to a prep school, fortunately just as a day boy.
And then eventually I passed the common entrance exam and I went to a school called Daunts's in Wiltshire and I hated that single sex environment and you know, just couldn't wait to get out.
9:40
Finally, I passed enough A levels to go to Regent Street Poly, where I did an external London degree in Economic Special Subject Sociology, and I had a lovely time there.
9:56
I had a lovely Chinese girlfriend and you know, life suddenly looked a lot better at the.
End of the.
Course, I thought, well, I really like life in the Poly.
Maybe I could become a a lecturer.
10:12
And of course I hadn't done teacher training and I can remember going for an interview in Brighton in a college which later became the university and.
Surprisingly, I did.
Quite well in the interview, but they didn't appoint me, but they called me aside afterwards and said look, you know you're almost younger than some of our students and you haven't got any teacher training or industrial experience.
10:40
We suggest it will be a good idea to work for the electricity generating ball or get a job in some place like that where you could get your industrial experience.
So I became a graduate trainee for the Electricity Generating Board in London and I did find that pretty boring, routine clerical work and so on.
11:03
I slightly enjoyed public relations, but where I had a a hand in editing a magazine called Power News.
But it wasn't very exciting.
So in my spare time I tried to get experience of other careers I might pursue.
11:19
And I did a bit of part time social work down the East End of London in Cable St.
And then I attended a a a workers educational course in sociology conducted by a very good lecturer from London School of Economics.
11:38
And at the end of the course you said, oh, somebody's dropped out of doing a course in Reigate.
Do you think you could fill in?
And I jumped at the core of the the opportunity had to catch catch the suburban train down to Reigate, walk across a ploughed field to a Scout Hut, and there was a woman's group there, totally unacademic.
12:02
They were much more interested in knitting and cooking.
And after halfway through my first lecture, the whole thing came to a halt and there was a cake judging competition.
And then there was a knitting competition at the end.
12:18
Or, and you could see when there I was talking they could their lips were moving 1 purl 1 stitch one drop one.
But I did have enough experience to apply for a lecturing job in Saint Albans.
12:33
So in 1962 I went for an interview.
I found St.
Albans, a lovely little cathedral town and I thought this is going to be interesting place to live.
And that's when I got my first lecturing job as an assistant lecturer in social studies.
12:53
So you've had a really interesting and varied life, Mike.
And I know that your early childhood experiences growing up during the Second World War, etcetera, are something that heavily feature in your first book.
But you've written two books, haven't you?
Do you want to just explain the two titles of those two books?
13:11
Because it's the second book we're going to focus on which.
Takes.
You into your later life and a particular chapter in your life which has elements of the supernatural.
Something very unexplainable happened to you and your wife at the time.
So before we dive into the kind of that next chapter of your story, like I said, do you want to just mention the name of the two books that we we're kind of referencing here before we then go into the next part of your life?
13:35
Yes, I mean.
The, the.
The.
First book is called War Baby, a Dyslexic Life.
It's published on Amazon, but we'll just go to the site and type in Mike Strange and the title of the book.
The second book is called Further Adventures of War, Baby.
13:57
And that's about, you know, me getting married and settling down in Saint Albans and then some of the rather, well, ghostly experiences we had.
So I courted a girl who was a almost a mature student.
14:19
She'd come back from South America.
Her father was a South American sociologist, and she came to one of my classes just out of interest.
And, you know, when she left college, I met up with her and we courted.
14:36
She lived in a big house in Saint Albans opposite the Bishop's House on the way to a famous pub called the Fighting Cox Pub, which is supposed to be one of the oldest pubs in England, near the Big Lake in Saint Albans and close to the Roman ruins.
14:53
And you know, we caught it and so on and eventually got married in 1964.
And I was quite keen to do up an old house, but we could couldn't get 100% mortgage on an old house.
15:16
So we were forced to put in for a new build, I think one of six in a terrace block in a road called Ramsbury Rd. in Saint Albans, which was a cul-de-sac.
And almost by chance we wandered down the road just before they started building and there was an old Victorian house which was in the process of being taken apart.
15:47
They were just going to smash it to pieces and then build on the land with the new houses.
And I said, gosh, I've got some wood in here, I'll see if I can find some wood.
I'm quite keen on woodwork and we went into this old house and it was quite spooky because some of the stairs have been knocked around.
16:10
There were bits of old faded furniture.
There were pictures hanging off the wall but we managed to get up the the steps into the upper rooms and looked out out of some mullion windows.
And of course, I mean that environment almost inspires you to think that something creepy is going to happen, Emily said.
16:33
Oh, I can feel a cold hand on my shoulder.
We got out of there pretty quickly and eventually, anyway, we did occupy one of the the houses in the middle of the little terrace block, basically 2 up to town.
16:53
And the other thing I might mention is that the soil in the garden came from a deconsecrated graveyard.
Anyway, things started to happen, which can only really describe as, you know, some kind of ghostly apparition.
17:15
I observed the niceties of the time and I slept in the house a couple of nights.
But before Emily joined me after we got married and I was doing up at my old dad's bed that he'd given to us and using some beams I'd got from the second hand woodyard to strengthen it.
17:39
And I was sleeping on it and it was a very substantial structure and I'm sleeping there on my own.
And suddenly the the bed reared over on one side and I was chucked out of the bed and I thought, God, I must have had a terrible nightmare.
17:55
So I thought, well, you know, it can't be that bad getting married.
So I, you know, dropped off to sleep again and a few minutes later exactly the same thing happened.
And I tried once more time and then I was literally thrown to the floor.
18:13
So I simply went downstairs and slept on the floor.
So that was my first experience of things.
Next occasion was when Emily was washing up in the kitchen.
18:29
It was basically a kitchen and downstairs room and there was two-bedroom upstairs and a bathroom.
And she thought I was standing there drying up.
And in fact I kept off to look at television and I suddenly heard a scream from the kitchen.
18:47
Emily dropped a whole load of crockery that she had and I said, what the Hell's happened?
You had an accident And she said I happened to look behind me and there was a man standing there in a bowler hat and he suddenly vanished and just gave me a terrific shock.
19:09
So that was our only real experience of seeing what you might call a ghost.
But later on, other things happened.
My old dad said that he was going to sell his old Hillman minx and I didn't want to bother Emily coming all the way down by train to Sussex and my dad lived on in a on Ashdown forest and so I went down by train and collected the car.
19:47
It was snowing quite heavily, so I had to delay my departure.
And I drove back early in the morning and when I got home I couldn't find Emily anywhere and I thought, where the hell is she?
20:03
And I looked around the house and then I went upstairs and the bathroom door was locked and I said what are you doing in there?
And she opened the door and she said, oh, she said when you were away at night time, I heard strange noises downstairs and I thought there were burglars and I got scared.
20:25
And the bathroom is the only room that I can lock.
She actually slept in the bath.
And so I said, oh, don't worry too much, you know, maybe you had a nasty dream.
I'll go downstairs and make us a nice cup of tea.
20:41
And I went downstairs, put the kettle on, and while it was boiling, I just happened to look in the front room and I noticed that a whole load of books had been pulled out of the shelves that I'd built because there's a lecturer, I've got stacks of books and I love reading, and there were about 10 books open at different pages.
21:06
There were some books written about detective stories or other novels, a whole variety of books.
And The only exception was a a little map.
A book of maps of and North London opened at A at a page in North London.
21:29
And while the kettle was boiling, I looked at what was in the books at the page and they were all about hauntings of various kinds, supernatural experiences.
And I thought, goodness me, this is a bit rum.
21:47
Anyway, you know, we tried to forget about it.
Didn't think.
Too much more of it.
And then about.
A week later we came down to breakfast and exactly the same books have been pulled out of the shelves, open at the same pages, all about haunting together with the map of London roads.
22:12
So that was a a pretty odd experience.
Well, it is because you're you're detailing apparitional experiences, so seeing something, but then also hearing things on several occasions that have caused your wife at the time to be incredibly frightened, but you also to be frightened to the point where you also moved yourself downstairs.
22:36
And then of course now you're detailing things physically being moved and would appear to be intentionally left open on certain pages to draw your attention.
I mean, it could just be coincidence, but it is a very strange coincidence given the type of experiences that you were having at the time.
22:56
It was very odd that the same books on the 2nd occasion were opened exactly as they had been on the 1st.
So we did find that rather extraordinary, very difficult to explain.
There's another incident which is also very odd.
23:16
I because I grew up in East Sussex, I like going to Lewis and Brighton and I I went to Lewis to have a look around, caught the bus out there and I just as I was leaving, I went to a second hand bookshop and I thought there might be a few books that might be useful for sociology or psychology.
23:41
And just as I was leaving I I saw a book called The Reach of the Mind and I thought this is an interesting book.
It was a Pelican book, but it was a reprint of a very old.
Book.
That had been published in the 19th century and when I got back to Saint Albans I was living in a a flat with a mate of mine.
24:04
Talk with the times before I got married, actually, when I acquired the book and I started to read it.
And part of it was all about poltergeist experiences, supposedly, you know, documented in the 19th century.
24:23
And another part, which I found even more creepy, was about dreams and foreknowledge.
So it was about people having a dream which would subsequently come true.
And the one particularly awful one that was cited in the book, a woman dreamt that her father went out riding on horseback when there was snow on the ground and his horse stumbled and he was thrown over its neck and he crashed the ground and he broke his own neck.
25:00
And in the dream, the people he was out with bring him in and bear him upstairs.
Just Rick and Mortis is setting in.
And I thought, my God, this is pretty horrible stuff.
So I didn't want to throw the book away.
25:16
I showed it to one or two of my mates and they all found it was pretty awful.
We didn't didn't like particularly the dreams and the foreknowledge aspect of it.
So when I built the bookshelves I've originally previously talked about, I wedged the book very tightly in at the top, and I had to, in the course of my work, to teach some supervisors about management studies.
25:44
I didn't like management studies particularly at all, but the principal was much keener on developing management courses and sociology.
But part of the course was to look at an Open University lecture on television about supervisors and the problems of work.
26:08
And I was looking at this program and this book, of all books, flew out of the shelves and hit me on the shoulder.
And I thought, bring him in hell, you know, that's a a pretty odd experience.
26:24
Well, yeah, because again you're talking about something physically moving, but this time it's it's something that's that's hit you.
So you've been struck by it.
I think it'd be great if you could kind of go from that point in terms of how then things continue to escalate because that's quite destructive.
26:42
So it'd be interesting to hear if there were other examples and other elements that you would consider quite destructive behaviour that you and your wife observed during this during this process of experiencing the the various different things that you did.
There's one event that I've I I hadn't.
27:00
Mentioned which occurred earlier.
My mum died, I think, in the second year.
I was teaching at college and my dad had to live on his own in a house in in Sussex, quite near a common, rather isolated.
27:26
And I got worried about him and went to visit him.
And then when I was going out with Emily, I decided to take her along for the weekend.
In one sense, I think that my mum probably wouldn't have proved of Emily.
She was very vivacious, very attractive girl, rather an extrovert.
27:47
And you know, probably my mum would have preferred somebody a bit more conventional.
Anyway, when we were there, Dad got on well with Emily and he said, well, look, I've got to go out and get some food for the evening meal.
28:05
I'll just leave you two to your own devices.
This was before we got married and so, you know, it's the swinging 60s and we decided to get down to a bit of premount or hanky panky.
But as soon as we started to do that, there's huge, great thudding upstairs from my mother's and father's bedroom, and it was absolutely very, very loud.
28:32
It was spoke sodding on the floorboards and the whole house began to shake.
And I hadn't got the courage to go up the stairs to find out what was happening.
And it went on for a considerable period of time.
28:48
And eventually we got so scared we got out of the house, even though it was quite a cold winter's evening, and stood around rubbing our fingers against the cold, waiting for my dad to come back.
But the whole house was roading and swaying.
29:04
It wasn't just there was a bit of wind going through the rafters or anything of that kind.
Of course, when my dad came back we told him about it and he said, oh, we'll fit and sticks, you know, you've got an over lurid imagination sort of thing.
29:20
But I suppose deep down I thought, well, my mum was fairly puritanical, her brother, it was a ministry in the Congregational Church.
Mum played a piano for a male voice choir in Wales, where she grew up, and I'm pretty sure she would have not like premarital sex.
29:42
So part of me thought, well maybe that's a ghost of my mum.
It was coming from my mother's and father's bedroom, the original noise, but that was a scary thing that I didn't mention, which happened really before I was.
Married to.
29:59
Emily.
If you've been enraptured by the chilling tales and enigmas unveiled throughout our podcast Spectral Journey, now's your chance to become an integral part of our ghostly congregation.
30:16
You see, as we delve deeper into the mysteries of the past, we need your support now more than ever.
But fear not, for there are a myriad of ways you can help keep the supernatural flames burning bright.
Firstly, have you ever considered treating our podcast to a virtual coffee?
30:34
Picture it a humble offering to fuel our relentless pursuit of haunted histories.
Just head over to ko-fi.com/haunted History Chronicles and join us for a caffeine infused seance.
But that's merely the beginning of our spectral soiree.
30:51
For those intrepid souls yearning for deeper communion with the paranormal, consider joining our exclusive Patreon family.
From March onwards, our Patreon page will be a haven of clandestine content with weekly podcasts and daily long and short form offerings.
31:09
Yes, you heard it right, daily doses of the supernatural a veritable paranormal advent calendar for your soul.
So why hesitate?
Journey forth to patreon.com/haunted History Chronicles and become a patron today.
31:27
But wait, The spirit of generosity lingers still.
If you seek to flaunt your allegiance to the Haunted History Chronicles in more tangible ways, venture into our newly unearthed merchandise crypt.
From mugs that whisper their secrets to clothing that echoes with ghostly laughter, Our shop is a sanctuary for the discerning paranormal aficionado.
31:50
Just visit teapublic.com and traverse to the Haunted History Chronicles Shop page to adorn yourself with our spectral regalia.
Whether it's bestowing a virtual coffee, joining our Spectral Society on Patreon, or donning Haunted History Chronicles apparel, your support keeps the ethereal flames alight.
32:11
Remember, every spectral contribution fuels our pursuit of unearthly truths, propelling as ever deeper into the realms of shadows and whispers.
So heed the call, dear listeners.
The links to our spectral sanctuaries await in the shadows of the podcast description notes, as well as our haunted haunts on social media.
32:30
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 that is returned to the mysteries that beckoned from beyond the veil.
32:49
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 the the the other events seem to become more and more odd.
33:11
Really.
Emily got a a part time social work job and she did a bit of social work training in Watford and I was going on teaching and at the college.
33:30
But to one day there was a really nasty storm and students were allowed to go home early and classes were cancelled.
So I came back to Ramsbury Road and they got in the house and I thought, I wonder if there's anything going on in Wimbledon.
33:49
It was that time of year in July, so I switched on the old black and white telly that was mounted on the shelves, only to discover that the Wimbledon had been rained off because of the storm.
So I reached for what was in the Manchester Guardian and sat down, started to read it, and I happened to look up and we had a wedding photo on the shelves quite close to the big window overlooking the garden.
34:20
And the wedding photo was upside down.
So I thought, oh goodness me, silly old Ebbly, you know, not very good at housework.
And I I just turned it the right way up and went on reading the paper.
And then I glanced up again and it was wrong way up again.
34:38
I thought, goodness would be I I can't possibly have put it the wrong way up again.
So I adjusted it, put it the right way.
I went back to reading the article, but by then I was pretending to read the paper and looking up as quickly as I could and I could never catch it turn upside down.
34:58
But in the course of that afternoon, it must have turned upside down 9/10/15 times.
And I thought, goodness me, this is very, very odd.
So when Emily came back from her social work.
Job, I told her about it and she said, oh you silly chump, you know you're just trying to scare me with that story.
35:21
I said I wouldn't dream of doing that, and we had a bit of a quarrel about it.
Emily was fairly volatile personality and in the end we decided to go out into the garden to see if anything happened to the picture when we were both absent because Emily was.
35:40
Coming up with all the ideas that I was manipulating the picture with hidden wires or something of that kind.
So we went down to the bottom of the garden, got soaking wet and stayed there for two or three minutes and came back and the picture was the right way up and Emily was triumphant.
35:58
Look, I told you.
And then she let out a scream, because right across her face a cross had been scored into the photographic played.
Really, it wasn't a religious cross, it was just a cross like you played noughts and crosses.
36:18
But it had really kind of, you know, stripped threads of the photograph away from her face.
It's quite horrible.
And so we didn't know what to do.
36:35
And we, I had to meet some of these supervisors on this wretched management course I was teaching.
And you know, Emily said.
Well, maybe it's an omen, you know, perhaps we're going to drowned when we go over a Ford in our car To where?
36:50
The pub?
Was but we?
We went and met them, came back, nothing else happened.
But that was a very odd experience.
One really odd experience that I really find it quite difficult to describe because it's so odd and totally against, you know, my positivistic training as a social scientist, but that it sometimes appeared that Emily could disappear.
37:22
And I'll tell you about the events that occurred, but they are very extraordinary.
Sometimes I came back from work and I got in the house and Emily would call me from upstairs.
So I'd run upstairs to find her, and then the voice would come from somewhere in the kitchen, perhaps downstairs.
37:43
I'd go downstairs and look for her there, and then the voice would come from the smaller bedroom and I'd look for her there, and she wasn't there.
I'd go in the bathroom.
She wasn't there.
And I kept on saying, where are you?
And the voice would come from, you know, different places.
38:01
And I couldn't see her at all.
And then sometimes I'd go downstairs where we had easy chairs and I'd bellow out, you know, I was getting quite frustrated.
Where are you?
And suddenly she'd be there sitting in a chair to disappear.
38:20
And I said, where have you been?
I said I've been here all the time and it was just incredible.
And she didn't really want to talk about it.
And I said, look, it sounds incredible, Emily, but can you actually disappear?
38:37
And she said, well, I hadn't got any control over it.
Sometimes it happens and I can't control it.
And I just found that quite incredible.
I mean, I suppose some of what we've been talking about might be described as poltergeist activity.
39:02
And I think there are some books which suggest that often poltergeist are possibly created or in a sense managed by, you know, relatively young adolescents.
39:19
I mean, Emily wasn't that young, but he was about 8 years younger than me and that's the only link I can think.
But absolutely incredible because as I said, you know, I'm a conventional social scientist and I wouldn't even go on a ghost hunt or do a Ouija board under my own volition.
39:46
But I did find myself confronted with something which seemed to be absolutely unbelievable.
Well, I think it's unbelievable because you're documenting and you're talking about something that was sustained over a number of years that you experienced and your partner experience.
40:08
So it wasn't one of you in isolation, seeing things, hearing things.
Sometimes you had joint experiences and then other times each of you had your own individual experiences.
But like you said, you know, you weren't seeking this out, You weren't looking for this.
40:23
It wasn't particularly something of interest to you.
And so the fact that then something happens is unusual and it's interesting because it's not something you would necessarily go to thinking, first of all, given that it's not, it's not something really on your radar or something that you've had an avid interest in, but yet you have these very strange experiences happening to you and your wife at the time.
40:49
Well, that's right.
I mean, I mean, as it happened, the relationship lasted for 10 years, a fair number of quarrels.
We had some happy.
Times did lots of camping and we had two lovely boys.
And of course when the boys started to run around, things got moved all over the place.
41:10
So it was sometimes difficult to find out whether supernatural activity was involved in moving keys from 1:00 room to another or something of that kind, or it was just like part of the mess that young children make.
But sadly the relationship did breakdown in 1974 and I had so period as a A1 parent before meeting another one parent, my lovely lesbians, who what I had another child with.
41:43
So we formed what sociologists call a reconstituted family, my two boys and Lisbeth's boy and girl.
And then we had our own child together, called Louise.
42:00
Would you say that you experience things throughout the course of your marriage with Emily was were there certainly things that you could point to from before the marriage all the way through to the very end of the marriage, in terms of experiences that were rather unusual?
42:17
I think The thing is that the only really supernatural experience I've ever had were with Emily, and I think, you know, she had a very volatile personality.
And it does seem that quite a lot of these events seem to be linked to her, or in some way mediated through her or transmitted through her.
42:45
I mean, I don't think I've had any ghostly experiences.
In my second marriage.
I had one odd experience when we were staying with some friends in Italy and I had this terrible nightmare and I dreamt that burglars had broken through the window, removed the wooden partitions and I was grappling with them.
43:15
And I.
It was such a violent dream as I I woke up standing as if I'd been wrestling with people and I I was convinced they were still in the house.
So I was partly awake, but I went running round the bedrooms and running around the bathroom, disturbing the other guests, thinking that burglars were there, and of course they weren't.
43:37
And the next day we left for home.
Our friends gave us a lift to the airport, and when they returned, the house had been broken into it exactly the same way as my dream had predicted.
But that's the only, you know, slightly kind of clairvoyant thing I could add my name to.
43:59
In other respects, I haven't had any other experiences that were totally similar or remotely similar to the ones I'd experienced with Emily first time round.
So do you have any thoughts on what could have been causing those experiences that you you did seem to have predominantly during that period of that marriage?
44:19
Then that would point to what you think might have been happening.
Well, I did mention.
Earlier about my old mum as a sweet woman who didn't enjoy very good health, died quite early.
As I said, she was fairly puritanical, so I'm quite sure that she would have disapproved of We me marrying Emily.
44:41
And I wondered if particularly with the wedding photo that there was some possible link because that was a period of our marriage that where the relationship was becoming more and more rocky.
44:58
And you know, it was almost as if my mum was saying, you know, Emily is the the guilty part.
But, you know this is this is the one that's causing the the trouble.
But there are other possibilities.
45:14
I mean I'm, I'm no longer quite as positivistic as I would have been when I first graduated or even when I did my second degree in Birkbeck.
So that I'm more open to ideas about supernatural experience.
45:33
There's kind of psychokinesis, which implies perhaps that your mind can possibly even influence objects in some way.
So there was no doubt about the fact that, you know, I was quite concerned towards the end of the relationship about the way things were going.
45:53
So it's just possible that my own mind projected my fears onto Emily's picture, or when it turned upside down, or when the terrible cross appeared.
Well, it's such an.
46:11
Interesting kind of case, because it could be any number of those things.
It could be, like you said, something connected with your mum, something poltergeist in nature.
Or it could be like you mentioned could be something to do with, you know, the the state of the marriage, the relationship and the emotions of that tension being ricocheted out in some way.
46:36
I mean, psychokinesis is something that is a fascinating aspect and it could have been something that your wife was, was kind of part of or you yourself was part of, based on that high tension, that high emotion between the two of you.
If things weren't going very well, or it could be a combination of all three, it's a really.
46:54
It's a really.
Interesting case because it's something that you saw presenting for a number of years and did very much seem to focus on the duration of that relationships from before the marriage to the end of the marriage with it, with it then stopping.
47:11
So it does seem to be centric to that in some way.
That's the kind of the the factor that ties it all together really, I think.
Yes, I think, I think that's probably right.
I mean, I'm totally pleased now that, as I've said, I don't have any of those experiences.
They certainly were, you know, very odd and difficult to explain.
47:34
But they, and I'm I'm sure they were terrifying as well, very, very emotionally charged at moments as well.
Because when you can't explain something and you're experiencing it, and yet you're also trying to be the impartial observer to rationally understand what's happening, that's quite difficult to keep doing that, to keep bouncing back from those types of experiences if you're having them happen more than once.
47:57
So, for example, you know the books opening onto those specific pages.
That happening once is is strange, But for it to happen more than once and for it to recur makes it much harder to dismiss that and to not take that much more seriously and be frightened by that.
48:16
When you've got the same scenario presenting to you with the same pages and the same types of information being shown to you on a second time.
And I can imagine that must have been really scary, really daunting for both of you, to be honest.
I think it was.
I mean, Emily tended to imply that she wasn't worried about things.
48:39
I was the one that was odd and peculiar.
But I think we were both bit disturbed by the situation.
I mean, I suppose that the fact that the new block of terraced houses we lived in the middle was literally built on the site of the old house that had been pulled down.
49:04
We never got around to exploring, really, who had lived in the house previously.
On one occasion I said to my wife, you know why don't we have the house exercised and she was dedicates that.
49:24
I said, well what you know might not do any good but it won't do any harm.
But she she was very, very opposed to any kind of exorcism.
So I don't know whether there was any link between the old house and the fact there was de consecrated earth from a graveyard in the garden.
49:46
I mean, a lot of the time we we didn't experience things, but when they occurred they were peculiar.
Of course, when we had children, as I've said, they made a lot more mess and so it was more difficult to isolate what had been moved, possibly by a poltergeist and what had been part of a play fight with the children.
50:11
And also you just have have more noise and more things going on.
And I and I think as well when you have children, there's there's something also to focus your energy on.
So in some ways the fact that it wasn't just the two of you and if if part of the issue was the relationship when you have something else to distract you for a while, it kind of also helps to diffuse that for a time being I think because you've got a joint interest to something that you know takes your attention and your focus as opposed to the relationship issue.
50:43
So maybe that helped to diffuse some of what was being experienced.
Again, we don't know, but it's such a fascinating and interesting period of your time, I'm sure, and I know this is something that you have documented in the second book, Further Adventures of War Baby, and it's it's one that I.
51:02
Think if people.
Are interested in really diving into this in more detail then absolutely finding you on Amazon, having a look at the book and of course then maybe segueing into war baby the first one, because it's you had such a fascinating and varied and adventurous and eclectic life.
51:24
I mean it's there's so many touching points, experiences and moments that are really quite wonderful and magical and out of this world that I think people would really love to dive into and explore.
As well as obviously this chapter in your life in the second book, which is really rather unusual, very supernatural, very strange.
51:48
Well, absolutely.
I have very odd reactions when I tell the story.
I mean, I mean, our mutual friend Richard Sag of course is was very much interested in it because as an old student I used to tell some of these stories at Christmas time, just on the last day, because people didn't want to do any serious work and he was transfixed by them.
52:15
And it's quite interesting that, you know, that's influenced the way that some of his writing has developed.
I think it's a real testimony to the power of this particular period of your life, though, that it's something that has stayed with you and it has been something that you have shared with people.
52:32
Even if that.
It's been in utter disbelief and not being able to explain what it is that you've experienced, but it's not something you've been able to dismiss.
It's still there.
It's still present as something that you've experienced that you can't explain.
And I think when you have something truly unexplainable, that's when you have something that Warren's discussion, It's great that you have documented it in your book and that you do talk about it with people so that people can try and understand what you went through.
53:02
Because I think it's really hard, if you've never experienced something yourself, to put yourself in that mindset of what would that be like if that were me and how would I react in the same circumstances, in the same situation?
Well, absolutely.
53:17
I mean, taken together the the books I suppose, represent a a biography of my whole life.
So there are periods in it when, you know, I'm fairly conventional teenager and so on.
53:32
There are other periods where, you know, odd things happen, like the ghostly experiences and other things at the end of the second book.
Or about Elizabeth and myself making a lovely home together, building a pottery at the bottom of the garden, making pots as a kind of hobby which all is gone out of control.
53:56
So I've experienced, you know, the the highs and lows of a slightly tempestuous relationship with my first wife to a huge amount of love in our second relationship.
54:12
And you know, I've never had any ghostly experiences apart from that odd dream since I've been married to Lisbeth.
Honestly, it's been such a pleasure to talk to you Mike, and as I say, I highly recommend both books.
54:28
I will make sure that in the podcast description, notes, etcetera, that your links for the books will be there, so it'll be really easy for people to be signposted to them.
So if they want to take a look, they know how to get hold of them.
If they want to have a read and and like I said you know it, it will be an experience to dive into your life because you've had some really quite profound moments.
54:49
Some some funny moments, some charming moments but then also elements of this in the second book coming through.
So I highly recommend people taking a look if they want to know more about you and your experiences, but also more about this particular period of your life that you've been talking about on the podcast with me today.
55:09
And you know, by no means have you gone into everything.
So there is far more to uncover if they have a read of that section in the second book.
So honestly, it's been such a pleasure.
Thank you so much for your time.
It's been really.
Enjoyable to talk to you Mike.
Well, thank you very much Michelle.
55:26
You've been a terrific interviewer.
And I will say goodbye to everybody listening.
Bye everybody.
Bye, bye.
