“SPI U.K.: ‘Somerset Paranormal Investigators U.K.’” founding researcher, CAROLINE MCKENDRICK-GIBSON, interview AVAILABLE NOW!!

Hey guys, I'm Sofia Temparelli and you are listening to the Ghost Tos. Today my guest is SPI-UK Somerset Paranormal Investigators UK. Paranormal researcher, author, writer, lecture, BBC Radio Somerset Contributor, the unearthly bureau, producer and podcast host, Caroline McKendrick Gibson. Everyone visit spiuk.org, Facebook, @SomersetParanormal Investigators UK, Instagram @spi_u.k @Caroline.McKendrick_gibson, Twitter @calmc_gi. Hey Caroline, thank you so much for coming on today. Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you for inviting me, Sofia. So to start off, I always like to get to know my guest better and how their journey into the Paranormal began. So can you tell the audience what that really sparked you in the beginning? Was it an experience? Was it interest? How did you begin this journey? Well, I think really it started from when I was around 10 years old. My parents had bought this four-floor Victorian building in a place called Wameth, endorse it in England and started to happen as soon as we moved in. So as a 10-year-old, it was a little bit disconserting of the stuff that was going on, but yeah, I think that's where really sparked my interest. Yeah, as someone that lived in the haunted house, it's definitely a different experience to have to go through. Really, any point in your life, but especially as a child, because you're still trying to grow and figure out life yourself. So dealing with the after life is not always easy. Especially when you have a devout Catholic mother and you go to a convent. So the people that you would trust and ask questions to you obviously don't believe necessarily in ghosts. So if I was to say there's odd things happening in the house, then they probably send a priest around to throw holy water over us all. Yeah, it's an interesting thing when you have that religion, because there's so many people in the Paranormal too that have that Catholic or Christian upbringing, but they don't always have that acceptance growing up with it, whether they're psychic or like yourself lived in a haunted house. Yeah, it was strange. My mother, she, even though she was Catholic, she believed in something. And she used to say about experiences that she'd had when she was a nurse on the wards when I was little. She used to tell me odd things that happened, but my dad wasn't somebody who believed in anything like that. So it was very difficult to try to get answers because it was almost don't tell people what it is that's going on in the house because they're going to look at you like you're crazy. And you know, you're either going to get a priest come round and say it's your fault that you've done something or you're going to end up in an institution because people think you're crazy. I went to Catholic school and the kids definitely thought I was crazy, but I didn't really care. I didn't necessarily fit in any way. So wasn't anything new. How did you go from having that upbringing and not really being able to ask those questions and understand what was going on with the people around you to actually diving fully into it? I think what I did next was to look at, you know, who else was talking about ghosts, spirits and things like this. So I started to go to these fairs that were medium fairs or psychic psychic kind of fairs where you have everybody from all walks of life who look at anomalous phenomena and see if I can find answers that way. And it kind of led me to spiritualism and I thought that I might be able to get answers through mediumship and through spiritualism. I kind of got a few questions answered, but not a lot. So my journey continued after that and I didn't just sit within that area. I wanted to know more and then I wanted to test things out myself. So although spiritualism almost gave you the answers, I needed proof, which is what led me then down to the research side and developing my own team because for me, I'm not somebody who takes someone's word. I need to have scientific-based facts and not against verbal fiction and things. So that's how I've ended up where I am now, which is firmly rooted within the scientific skeptical believers camp, if that makes sense to you. Yeah, 100%. Like I said, I lived in a haunted house, so I 100% believe in the paranormal, but I think when you're hearing stories and everything from other people, not to say what they went through isn't true, but it's always good to be skeptical about it and in try and find out if there was a root cause or there wasn't. Because that's so important in the paranormal, if you just think everything is paranormal, then it really doesn't allow for the real evidence to actually be shown. Exactly. And of course, back in those days, I wasn't so educated with my understanding of what the phenomena was. And I'm sorry if it goes against anybody who's listening to this programme when it goes out, but after scientific rigor and testing and education within that field, I now know that Orbs are not dead family showing themselves on camera, that there is an explanation to some of these things. So obviously we've got dust and moisture, not to say that that's the only things, you know, with bugs and such like, there can be occasions that we've got a normalist phenomena on a camera and we've not been able to explain away what it is. So there is occasionally some things that catch you and you have to ask yourself, how can I explain this? And that's the stuff that we love in our group because it makes you think. Absolutely. And tell us more about your group. What's the regions you guys investigate? Do you do residential and who are the members within the team? So yes, we have calls from members of the public. We take businesses, we take homes. So any kind of level, if people have odd things that they've experienced and they wanted to go and check it out, mainly it's based around ghosts or spirits type of phenomena, poltergeist type activity. But if somebody wanted us to go and I mean one of the weird ones, you're going to like this, a haunted camper van. Oh wow. Yeah, so that one is interesting. We're trying to find reasonable answers why there's massive bangs on the vehicle and we've gone all times of year, cold hot and we're trying to see if the temperature adjustment makes the van bang at a certain time. Yeah, it's one that's intrigued us and it's been looked at. That's a very old one. But yeah, we take all types of hauntings, even cryptids. So if someone says that they've seen you know, like a beast of Bodmin more, for example, and they wanted us to go and look at that, we would be tempted to go and see if we could find anything like footprints and photographs and put cameras in place to see what we could find there. So we have a very varied group. I used to work in public sector side. So things are government and police officer and there's another chap called John who also used to be a police officer. We've got Kim, Kim as a social worker. I guess you've heard of that in America. People who look after family problems. So she's one of our teams. You know, they're all very, very level headed so far. My husband Martin, he's a psychotherapist. So he's very grounded and he also can look into more of the mind side what might make somebody experience something more and what could the possible reasons be why they've experienced something more. We've then got the lovely Becky and Becky is our professional photographer that she comes out with us. She gets involved in all of the investigation side but she's incredible behind the camera and for anybody that's read any of our articles in Haunted magazine, she sometimes supplies the photographs for that as well. So her talent has been rewarded through publication on that side as well. Then we have the wonderful Karen and Karen works in sales and she's so level headed and methodical with her thinking. You know, it's just refreshing the different thoughts that all the team bring into the thought process of what it is we're experiencing, all of their life experiences and the way that they think is so vastly different. And I think that we've got a very strong team at the moment. Especially with your husband's background is a psychotherapist because you know, like when you're doing residential, that's something you always have to take into a can is what's the person's state of mind? Do they have a mental illness? Do they have a mental illness and a haunting? What is the situation? And there's trauma associated with living in a haunted house too. And so it's good to have someone that knows how to deal with people's emotions and help them work through what they're going on, whether it's paranormal or something that can be explained away and help them overcome that fear. Exactly. We do have quite a methodical way that we investigate and when people make a first contact with them, us. It's me that they come through to and I have like a mini interview with them so that I can assess what is that they're experiencing. We take all the details down and it's generally through the general conversation of what they're experiencing. You would be able to tell if somebody was suffering from a mental illness or are they, is it the effects of drug taking or alcohol abuse and if it is, we are so ethical that we would not involve ourselves within that investigation. We would offer them the help and assistance elsewhere and suggest that they speak to a doctor if we thought that they had mental health problems. There has been one occasion where I've had to contact a medical professional because somebody was at a point that they were of danger to themselves and to others. It's a job for us not only just looking into the paranormal. It is a type of social work that we are looking after people's mental wellbeing. I started investigating it eight but even at 27, I feel like there's a certain life experience you have to have in a certain knowledge you have to have that you gain through life or through your work. When you're dealing with residential, I personally don't think I have at this point in my life. It's really important that you have those specific people that can go out there and work with people and be tactful about it and not demean someone but also not encourage that everything they're hearing is paranormal. Yeah, especially for John and myself, I think having police background does give you transferable skills that you can take through into the research and investigative side. For myself and John, we're really good at note-taking, obviously, and creating logs, so things like this, but the investigation side and the research side and diving into the histrionics. I'm incredibly surprised at how good Martin is because it's not just the paranormal that we research and investigate. We also look into true crime and also other things like cryptids and anything and everything that we research and we do documentaries for TV as well. So his experience with research, he's incredible and he's turned stuff up in research that I've not found as an ex-police officer. You'd think that I would have it down to a fine tea, but no, he's incredible. He would have made a brilliant cop. Yeah, I mean that definitely helps with the investigative background and make sure like you said, you have good notes and timelines and everything. I was actually recently on a radio show and they were asking me about the Queen Mary and why something that can be moved around could still be haunted. And in the case of the camper, something that can be moved around, why do you think that the actual camper itself is haunted and not just the land it's on? We haven't actually guaranteed that it is haunted as yet. We're still trying to find reasonable explanations before we would put that into that kind of an answer for the client. But I don't believe that the paranormal is structured and set to one place. I believe that it can move about the place. And this has been found to be the case on several haunted buildings. I've heard of that there's an apparition or a spirit that's been seen and visualized in one particular area. And when they've built a new extension or they've built a new part to the building, that spirit then is seen in the other part in the new part of the building, which is odd. Now, is it the land that they can move to maybe? But I also feel that I had something in my last house that I lived at. Only for a short time. And it was after my husband passed away back in 2014, literally straight away, things started happening in the house. And then coming out here into this house, and it was very specific, it followed me, the behaviour and the pattern of the activity followed. So I lived in this house for the last house for months and months. There was no paranormal activity, nothing that I would say was haunted until three weeks after my husband passed away. And then things started to happen. But it was the smoke alarms. And the smoke alarms would go off for three rings, very specifically, three rings at three or four o'clock in the morning. And then they would ring for that. And it's normally on a day that it was a birthday or some kind of anniversary or celebration. So it would ring for three rings and go off. And this became a regular pattern. And I carried on living in that house for about another two years after that date that he passed, moved to this house. And of course, the smoke alarm phenomena was something that happened on a regular basis. The day that I came out here, we started to renovate in this property that I'm in now. He's never been in this house, never would have even been in the area that I'm aware of. And a family friend popped over. She was my son's friend growing up and very much like an adopted daughter to me. And when she came here, she said to me, "I really miss Daddy Steve." And I said, "Well, you know, that's really lovely to hear." And at that time, the TV turned itself off. And then on again, and I thought, "Well, that's odd. I've never had that experience. All that happened." So I just put that down to an odd thing. I thought the batteries might be running out in the remote control. And I just said, "Oh, ignore that. That's probably just, you know, an on-odd fluke. Just ignore that kind of thing." I said, "He can't get through to show you the alarms going off because the electrics had all been stripped out in the house. And we had electricians in for six weeks to do a total rewire." So the smoke alarms were disconnected. But on the back door, there was a smoke alarm and it was a battery-operated one. And literally, so fear within seconds, the smoke alarm went off for three rings. Oh, wow. So you tell me, can spirits detach from where they passed or the area that they were connected to and move? I obviously ghosts have never been proven to be real. Spirits have never been proven categorically to be real. So we're going on the premise that ghosts are real and, you know, they're very much watching or observing what it is that we're doing. What it is that ghosts are, I don't know. But oddly, that same phenomena started to happen in this house. So I then started to, I contacted the person who bought my old house and I said to them, "Have you ever had phenomena?" And this must be, I think it was a year and a half ago that I asked them this and I said, "Have you ever had phenomena happen in the house at three o'clock in the morning that the smoke alarms go off for three rings and then nothing?" And they'd been in the house for seven, eight years, something like that. And they said, "No, never." The very next morning, I had a phone call to say, "What the hell have you done?" The smoke alarms went off night before that three o'clock in the morning for three rings. And the only reason why I asked them is because a friend had taken me to a psychic medium for my birthday and my late husband allegedly had come through and he said to remind myself of the person who bought the house. He said the person's name and then said, "You know, I'll make a connection." And that was the message that the psychic medium gave me. I didn't know what it was that they were talking about. So I just made a connection and said, "Have you ever had this phenomenon?" And they didn't. And then the next morning, the smoke alarms had gone off. And yeah, that's strange. And they haven't had it happen since and that was maybe two years ago now. That's amazing. First off, I'm very sorry for your loss, but that's great that he's coming through like that and showing you, maybe not three in the morning. I'm sure you might like to be asleep then. But it is nice when you have those times that are unexplainable, but you can kind of tell who it is. After my aunt passed away, she passed away in November a few years ago. And we had these pencil trees in my grandma's house with fairy lights on them, you know, battery operated. And my grandma called us one day because we live across the street and she goes, "How do you turn the trees back on?" Because they were on every day. So we assume she had been doing it. They had multiple settings. They have different battery packs. They were both on. They have a timer. They shut off after eight hours. They were on every morning by themselves for three days. And they never did it again. And that was about a month after my aunt passed away. And they're hard buttons to push. We couldn't find any explanation for not one. It's not like one was malfunctioning for both of them to be turned on. There are some strange things that happen. I mean, I'm still not 100% going along the lines that the phenomena are of the smoke alarms was my late husband, I'm not going to go along that. But this is so weird because if you say to me how much on a scale would I trust a psychic medium to be accurate, it would not even be over 10% I would say because it's subjective. It's very much subjective and I'm a scientific minded background that I need to have more than just subjective. It needs to be fact-based. But this woman, she was saying stuff that I've never told anybody else and nobody of my friendship group that I was with knew anything about the smoke alarms that were going off you know some eight years previously nobody knew about this and it was very very odd. And you know the morning that I got up to go to this psychic mediums at three in the morning my smoke alarm had gone off here because it was my birthday. So you know things happening on a certain date and are we just looking for patterns Sophia are we just looking for reasons why for comfort are we looking for reasons why things can happen is it just a glitch? I don't know I haven't found the answers this is why we're not going to give up questioning and we're not going to give up trying to find that answer. Yeah I'm wondering why it would happen at three or four in the morning too because that's I mean three or four in the afternoon would be a little bit better is it because you're more susceptible to things while you're in your sleep and there's more of an openness or what could cause a spirit to want to do that at that hour? Well if you are talking to my husband he would like now Martin he would tell you that your brain goes into a download dump so all of the stuff's rubbish of the day it files it starts getting rid of all the unnecessary information and it does this sorting through process to it's like putting things away in a filing cabinet and it downloads all the rubbish gets rid of it puts the stuff that it doesn't need to concentrate on in the bin and for stuff that's not sure of it looks for patterns so pattern matches so it says all that day you know today when I walked out in front of a car you know and almost got knocked down then it sorts it out and that's a danger you'll need to remember that fast moving cars is a danger and it it goes through and it sorts it out and it helps you to make sense of what you've had today and gets rid of the stress. Now that generally happens between a certain time and that's around three four o'clock in the morning so is it when you're doing your brain download that you're sorting things out that you're more susceptible and more open? I don't know because there is so much not known about the brain and how it works but I wish Martin was here because he would be able to help us unfortunately he's not. Yeah I mean the brain and just being human in general is kind of a crazy being when you're on investigations or just in normal day to day like if you can feel when someone's watching you or if someone's standing behind you and that definitely translates into paranormal investigations but that's just normal human functions it doesn't have to be a ghost you can just tell when a living person is doing that so we always have these built-in little survival instincts. So quite a while ago now late 1800s there was an experiment that was done and it was done via Oxford University in England. I've currently forgotten the chat's name but he did this experiment of being watched so he had some students all set up and there was one subject who was blindfolded and when he felt as if he was being watched by the rest of the group you know or one person in the group he had to turn round all put his hand up and this then was repeated this experiment by a chap called Rupert Shell Drake and he's quite experimental today but he's a little bit off the curve and this is the stuff that I'm interested in. This type of science how the brain reacts how it works and I mean this the experiment can be looked at it's written up for universities and you know the SPR have analysed his work and then it's been re-done again by a chap called Professor Callum Cooper from North I think it's Northampton University apologies Callum if you're listening to this and I've got the wrong university but I think it's that and he's re-done this experiment as well and there definitely seems to be a part of the brain that is active in receiving information and I think it goes back to your primeval part of the brain so it's your your maybe a migdala again I wish Martin was here because he's the expert it's the primeval and the part of the brain that the reptilian part of the brain there we go I remembered it and it focuses on things obviously when you're a caveman and you're you're there trying to survive back in those days you would be not able to communicate as well as we are with being articulate nowadays but they would then have developed a sense of fear and you know safety and they would know what to trust and what not to trust and I guess that they probably use this part of their reptilian brain because other parts of the the trodlodite or caveman brain wasn't quite as adapted as we are today so I think that part of the brain with us in the reptilian is still something that we rely on and it's what we nowadays were called our sixth sense and with your scientific approach obviously there's different facets of the paranormal like you said psychic mediums people who just want to communicate and maybe find some answers but just experience this virtual realm and people who are into the scientific area like yourself what advice would you give to people trying to actually dive into the paranormal through a scientific route what equipment do you find is the most reliable and what type of readings do you look for? So if they're just wanting to start out I would just suggest sitting watching and observing so a really good audio recorder if anybody wants to have a look they can check out my website I I offer suggestions of what it is that we use it's not profit to me you buy it direct from the the retailer and I'm sure that Amazon would have an American version of you know how you would order it but we personally use a zoom recorder which is quite a high quality sound recorder it's used professionally they are a little bit more expensive but obviously just get the best that you can afford even if you've got a good phone like an iPhone to sit and use their facilities within the phone is acceptable to start with the only problem with your iPhone it's recorded to MP3 and that compresses quite a lot of the sound so you're not getting a true reflection you really want something that's going to be recorded on a wav and it's a better sound quality with less compression so you get better results with less anomalies that's attached to it then the next thing I would suggest is a torch obviously a notepad and pen that's all you need to start with once you've you've started to facilitate a lot of experiments you need to be minded to make sure that the experiment you're carrying out are scientific and not just like well I've you know I've got this piece of equipment so that makes it scientific look up the things that would make it scientific so you really need to benchmark it has to be repeatable and it has to be achievable so you know as long as you know that you do a set experiment that you would do over maybe a ten minute period and as long as you can repeat it and then you can test it against what you have achieved or your results from the last time this is where you need to start looking if you're way advanced and you're your way way down the line there are some good bits of equipment by the best that you can afford a tri-field meter and that will look at your radio your telephone masks and your ambient like radiation and things like this a really good quality thermal camera and I kind of think that's it really you know unless you want to go really mega scientific and we're now looking at things like air pressure which we get anomalies when we have we found inside properties particularly the house that we live in because it's incredibly haunted alleged again I must just have not been proven to be 100% accurate but we're having weird stuff and we find that we have air temp sorry air pressure anomalies and background radiation so that it's almost like the the kit that we we've got set up it's all different parameters within environmental readings and you can see this wave of air pressure coming towards you and the instruments are reading and you're you're seeing it on the TV screen of this air pressure graph and you think something's going to happen and in all of a sudden the radiation just drops dead. And anybody who's scientific will know you cannot dismiss or get rid of or eradicate background radiation is constantly there. But it's almost like somebody's putting a Faraday cage over the house and it just stops. So every time I was looking at this or radiation monitor, the Geiger counter, I would look at it and it would stop. And we'd start noticing that when I looked at it, it would stop. So we started this experiment where I would have noise-cancelling, headphones, you know, eye masks and then blackout kind of mask. Mm-hmm. And I would look and then it was recorded does the Geiger counter stop. And this is what I was saying about making it repeatable that we would repeat this numerous of times over a 10 minute period and we would watch and we would observe and we would monitor and then you know, note down what was happening and everything was recorded. So this is something that we're playing around with at the moment, this radiation and air pressure. You know, if you're just starting like I say, don't take too much, please guys, don't take K2s out with you because they have so many anomalies that can make them happen, cat balls. You know, if you're gonna use a cat ball, know what it is that you're gonna be using it for. So if it's purposely gonna be just used as a methodology to show a vibration or something like that, set it up correctly with the point to the top because inside the cat ball itself are two metal plates. And if you've got the cat ball on an angle, the plates can anomalously touch each other, you know, and create this like mini spark that goes across towards them. And they can give you false anomalies. It can also be set off by like putting on a walkie-talk from having emissions coming through. You know, there are odd things that can affect it. Rampods get set off by walkie-talkies. If there's a taxi or a cab as you guys call them, drives fine, they have their radio on, that can set your Rampods off. So it's just knowing what failures, the equipment that you would be using would have. And maybe don't use the stuff that you know would have a high failure rate. Audio, if you've got your audio a good piece that you want to analyse, put it in through some software on your computer and have a look. Not only at the words itself that's being said, but look at the frequencies. What's happening? Have you got info sound? Have you got other things on there that are anomalies that you can see spikes in the background? Break it down. Have a look at that audio. Is there anything in the background that you've not noticed when you've listened back on the recorder? So there is a lot of stuff to help you tighten up your investigations. But sitting quietly and observing is incredible. It's a tool that we advocate and we get really good results with that. Even if it's just to analyse your background, so that you can hear ambient noise, you know, is there a certain thing that happens at a certain time of day, like the cooling down of the house and you can hear cracks, floorboards, just sit, become one with the property you're in and listen and become used to the noises because it's a new property to you. You won't be regulated with how that house behaves on a daily basis. Just get used to it and listen. That's the best advice I can give anyone starting out. That's so interesting. I've never heard of anyone using an air pressure monitor or a Geiger counter. But I mean, I think that's really cool that you guys do to get that baseline and see the differences. Because I always ask this on my show. With a lot of people, I'm from California. We don't have many weather changes, but you know, there's a lot of places with snow or rain like England. Have you found that that weather can create a type of energy that may spike these monitors or increase the paranormal activity? Alleged? Yeah. So, rain, that's a factor that we found with one of our anomalies. And also, you know, what else have we got that? See, I've got this piece of equipment that's behind me. I've got a lot that stays in the house all the time and how I knew the air pressure was starting to affect us. Have you heard of Keith Linda? I have not. So, he's one of your most famous poltergeists. He is from the Bothel Hell House, you might have heard of it. He experienced poltergeist activity for quite a while. I've got to put a caveat allegedly because again, ghosts haven't been proven. So, he is somebody that I know through the association that I also have a connection with ASAP. So, that's the Association for Scientific Study into Anomalous Phenomena. They are basically a sister association of the SPR. Have you heard of them? I haven't. So, that's the world, like these are the big three associations worldwide that are scientific and look into cases. So, you've got society of psychological research. They then created ASAP to look more into the investigation side. So, during some of our conferences and some of the training and education that we put on, I became aware of a chap called Keith Linda who we interviewed for our webinars for ASAP. And it was through a mutual friendship that we grew and he suggested some equipment that I can leave in the house and it runs all the time. And it's just, I don't know, if it's a pound to a dollar now. So, it's about 25 pounds for these two items in a pack. So, you can just put a battery in and leave them in situ and then they monitor and they download graphs to your phone. So, they're in the sky. And every time we would have a paranormal incident or something that we couldn't explain away, I would go to the graph and I would have a look and see what would happen to the environmental. And it measures humidity, temperature and air pressure. And that's the three parameters that these bits of kit and monitor. And every time that there was a paranormal incident that we couldn't explain away, there was a spike of air pressure, and that's why I started to see patterns forming. And then there is another chap that I haven't mentioned to you that we've taken on recently in our team called Andy Guy. Now, Andy Guy, you might be interested in getting him on to interview him at a later date. He creates and he manufactures equipment in the paranormal. And he has joined our team over the last year and a bit. And he has been working on the team for a couple of years and he's been working on the team for a couple of years. And I thought, hmm, you are a really good scientific logger of data. This is so interesting. Let's go and chat and sit down. And then we were finding rain, especially after a prolonged period of dry time. So we're in this heat wave at the moment that's ridiculous. And we can't see an end to it. But next week we know we've got torrential downpours. I can tell you, my house is going to absolutely kick off with activity. Now, it could just goce and what we classes goce. Could just be environmental, something normal, something in the universe, you know, something in the world as we know it, that we don't know, that we don't yet understand. But we know that when we've had prolonged periods of dry period, you know, hot, and then we have rain, stuff happens. But as for the radiation, I don't know, I cannot tell you what is going on with that. But yeah, so air pressure, rain, and this one might be something that you guys wouldn't have thought of. Not a full moon, as some people would expect, hence the word lunatic, you know, as a police officer, every time there was a full moon, it's got enough power to be able to move oceans and move water. The moon has got a lot of strength and, you know, we're 80% water as a human being, aren't we? So you can see how it would affect us, particularly the cerebral, and people would lose their mind during full moons. But it's not a full moon that we have noted on our data logging. It's a new moon that seems to create more activity. So yeah, rain after, particularly after dry periods and a new moon, and then boom, that's it, activity. Have you noticed anything in terms of laylines as well? I understand that laylines have been specifically looked at by certain individuals and belief systems, but I'm not sure if I can say that. Laylines can be five miles wide, so this is really, it's a very particular subject that's not really considered to be something that is particularly scientific within, you know, like academia. So although I understand what it is that people are saying and, you know, yes, some people would say that that laylines have an impact, but it's not something that I particularly use because, they use because they aren't reliable enough to get data from them. Oh, that's very interesting. When it comes to your investigations in the places that you've investigated, has there been one location that you can say definitively that you think it's paranormal? I know you do use the word allegedly because it hasn't been fully proven, but has there been one that really sticks out in your mind? Yeah, we've not been brave enough to go back there again, and it's because it was really, really weird. We are discussing going back there. We are, but we all had really, really odd experiences. So, okay, it all started off in the evening with a set of missing keys. Now, the woman whose car we went in is our next door neighbor car, and she's part of our team and Mike. So, I set the cameras up and I watched her go out to the car to get the last bit of equipment and on the cameras because I've gone back and I've scanned every millimeter of footage. You can see her putting her keys into her bag. Now, she went and find her keys to go back outside to the car and they were nowhere around. We're talking two hours later, three hours later, the keys still hadn't turned up. There was about 12, 15 of us that were there. We searched every single bag, then we, literally people then moved to the bag next to them and searched it in case someone didn't look properly and then moved to the next. So, I think we all looked into five different bags each and hours and hours later this set of keys had turned up in somebody unconnected bag totally unconnected after they'd been re-watching it. After they'd been witnessed being upstairs on the kitchen table and down on another table. So, it was odd that it all started off with this very odd moment. But the thing that I cannot explain, when I went into the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea during a break after this whole missing keys, I thought Karen was in the toilet next to where the kitchen was. So, I thought I would just add a little bit of humour because I am known for being quite funny occasionally. I thought I would tap on the wall and go, "Woo, pretend to be a spook." I heard this child start to giggle and to laugh. It was like a real, it was a girl kind of voice and I thought, "Oh my gosh, where's that coming from?" I went outside to have a look, nothing, nobody in this part of the area. Then somebody asked me to make a cup of tea and I said, "Look, look what I do." And of course I'd done this about three times and every time I did the "Oh, this child giggled." Another person came in the kitchen and literally we all stood there listening to it and this scenario had gone on for over five minutes. The child was giggling every time I looked on the wall. Karen wasn't in the next room to me. She was way down the bottom of the corridor because I didn't know the toilets where they were, where they were. I assumed, because I hadn't been there, I assumed that they were nearer. In the end, we were all there listening to this child giggling. I have no explanation, Sophia, none at all. Apart from the ultimate explanation that somebody had put a recorder there to laugh. But how could that have happened when in a timely manner, when I did the knocking and I called out, you know, to Karen. And then when I was doing nothing, when I was looking, there was nothing coming back, there was no voices, nothing. And yet, five of us all heard it. So I'm not having hallucinations, audio, parodolia, nothing like that. It can't have been a mass hallucination because we were all listening. I didn't prime them. I said, "Tell me what you're hearing. Every time someone knew Karen in the kitchen, I watched, you know, I did the same thing again, repeated it. And they watched. I said, "What are you hearing?" And they said, "A little girl giggling." And I can't explain that to you. I can't. That's amazing. Did you ever find record of a little girl who had been at that location? No, I mean, it was a mill. But as far as I'm aware, the mill didn't have that level of, you know, children dying in the premises or anything like that. So it doesn't have a horrible background to the poverty, you know, like a poor house would do. So no, I can't tell you what it is that whether or not anybody else has had experience in that place. I mean, it's called warmly cocktail. It's near Bristol in Somerset in the UK. So if anybody else has any knowledge of it that I don't then by all means please let me know. I know we're coming towards the end of the show. So I have a few more questions. If you could investigate anywhere in the world, where would you like to go most and why? Oh, okay. So with a friend of ours who's over your neck of the words, he lives and he's in security assurance. We've become good pals and I've said that I want to go to New Orleans and look at the, you know, the French quarter. That's on my top of my hit list. Yeah, that's a good place. I haven't been there. I know that from what I've heard it's haunted just all over. And if you're talking about weather patterns, it is consistently humid. So I personally went in cold during summer. I don't think I can make it. Oh, it's so amazingly beautiful. New Orleans to me. I'm not just somebody who loves scientific investigations. I love architecture and I love history. And I'm so big on venues and the heritage. So for me, this is until you obviously you have the storm damage. A lot of the historians for the buildings. I think they're incredible. I can't wait to go and have a look. The other one I think that I would look at oddly. What's your prison in the island? Alcatraz. Yeah. I've just got a fascination with maybe going to Alcatraz. And I don't normally rave about prisons because the noise that you get. But it is so rebounding for me. It wouldn't be something that normally I would choose to go and look at. But the history of the place and the level of people's reports of what's gone on there is quite active. I think I'd like to visit Alcatraz as well. Yeah, my parents spent the night there and they said it was really active and it was incredible. My dad caught a photo of an alleged ghost. But yeah, it was there was no one down the hallway. So it's definitely unexplainable. Oh, wow. I'm definitely going to have to get my ticket to America books definitely. For sure. And finally, can you please let the audience know where they can find you on social media and the upcoming appearances, events, books, interviews. Really anything you want the audience to know about let them know now. Yeah, so I regularly write for a haunted magazine. So any time that you would like to see any of the articles, you can find that online. So you can get an electronic version. We do actually sell to the states as well. So you might be able to pick up a copy that way around. Also, you can find me Caroline McKendrick Gibson on Facebook, Instagram, also history heritage and hauntings. Our group is called Somerset Paranormal Investigators UK on all platforms. And we've started a podcast myself, my husband and somebody that I run another webinar with called Christian Lander. And that is called the Unearthly Bureau. And we have really in-depth talks with people. Some of the people I've mentioned this evening are there. So that's on YouTube, Spotify, all the other good platforms. So please buy all means go and have a look free to subscribe, click the like, make a comment and share it with your friends. Well, I want to thank you so much for coming on today. It's been amazing getting to speak with you and hear all of your thoughts and theories. I will definitely have to have you back on in the future because I had so many more questions. But thank you for taking time out of your schedule. Well, thank you very much for asking me. And I've really enjoyed it this evening. I'd love to come back. Thank you. Thank you guys so much for listening to today's show. I hope you enjoyed it. Make sure to check out next week with medium paranormal researcher and author, Sean Austin. [Music]