The Basement: Brian Laythe | Ghosts, Possession, and Shadow People

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"I used to be an exotic dancer. My stage name was Magic Pike." "Oh, you're so jelly on my wrist." Today we're covering what ghost hunting shows get wrong about those blinking meters. Why Brian isn't convinced hauntings are dead people. And a personality scale that predicts who has these experiences. "I'm not dead people. I like a scrimmage of the hook." Off the hook for what? "Well every noise in the attic we've blamed on you for like 20 years. Turns out it's probably just a raccoon or a squatter. Who knows." And there's an abandoned rectory in Cincinnati where he told the owners to shut down. That story ended his field work, and after hearing it, I wouldn't go back either. After our conversation, I'll come back and break everything down. Let's go down to the basement. Okay, I read your dissertation. Loved it. You hired actors to insult fraternities to attack their beliefs. Yeah. What was going on there? When I was in graduate school before I officially got into Paris Ecology, I was really interested in the idea of social identity theory, which is, in essence, a theory that says, "When you label groups and make them different, you will instantly get bias. You will instantly get prejudice." And it's silly because it's not talked about a lot, but it is a hugely robust area of social psychology research. It's not two or three papers, it's a couple of hundred, I bet. And so the whole point of the dissertation was, if I bring an actress or an actor into these groups, and I basically tell the group that they're a piece of crap, right, well, put us in the room. Who's the group and what are the attacks? Well, man, 20-some years ago. So I did religious groups. I did fraternities and sororities. And I did a couple of political groups. And I actually had to extend my dissertation time, because I actually ended up going to, I think, I want to say at least three, if not four colleges or universities to get enough groups to do it. It was a chunky paper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm surprised you pulled up a dissertation. So what would -- Well, hang on, your dissertation is the whole theme of your career at dissertation. You think so? I do indeed. It's all about beliefs and how, if someone has a belief that's strong enough no matter how much you assault or attack it, they will not waver. Yes. No, I mean, you're absolutely right. That was incredibly insightful. I should have cut that. [laughter] Well, yes, because the reason I even got into graduate school was, I started in psychology religion, right? So the idea was, let's look at group differences. Let's look at what happens when you bring a actress in who says, "I am mad at your group. You did this to me. You did that to me," which was essentially what they would do. They would claim to be from another student organization. Tell us what, specifically, give the attack. I am trying to remember. It's like -- They make it up, didn't they? Oh, make it up. Okay. You look funny and smell. No, there was. If I remember, like conservative kids, liberal kids, several sororities, several fraternities, the claim was, they came from a rival student organization, and that they had complaints about people's behavior in the group. And I did actually keep the manipulation rather generic, because I didn't want them to be able to track or trace, right? By the way, ethics review for that one was not fun, getting that approved. Oh, Lord. So they would just basically come in and make very generic complaints about other people's behavior in the group and how they should know better and you shouldn't treat people this way, et cetera, et cetera. And I set up like a three-stage assessment, right? So how much did you like the group before we did this? Then I'd have the person come in and give the complaint, and I'd be like, now that you've heard this complaint, because my whole claim for making this believeable was, I'm a representative of the student council and various bureaucracies of the college. This is a new technique we're trying out, because we want to give people voices and let people respond to complaints, right? So I tried to make it sound be right, you know, be a bureaucratic and believable. It does. Yeah, I tried. I think some of them saw through it, but you did the best you could. It was a pretty overt manipulation. So then I'd give those same ratings again after the complaint. And here's what's interesting. So I'd have the actress come out, then I would do a complete debunking, right? Guys, I'm full of crap. I would literally say that, like, guys, I'm full of crap. None of this is true. This is Talia. She's an actress. I was one of her name was Talia, a lovely person, you know, come in and say hi and she'd wave and kind of bow and walk out. And I'd say now, but before you go, I want you to fill out this sheet one more time, because one of the variables I was interested in was what's called belief perseverance. And it kind of ties into confirmation bias, which is more popular nowadays. But there were earlier studies that basically showed that once a person buys into an idea, right? And of course, we see this in marketing and everything else, right? You see this everywhere. Yeah. And also, of course, you know, where campaign money goes to effect too, right? Democrats never try to influence Republicans and vice-verses. You go for the middle. But belief perseverance research basically says, once you establish that somebody is good or bad at a thing, and it's given not even really, have to be given by an authority figure, they tend to persist in that belief. The early studies were interesting because they divide groups into people who are going to evaluate suicide notes. Wow. Whether they were, and I'm a bad academic, I can't remember the actual names of the authors of that study. But they would come in with group A and go, you know what, you were really good at distinguishing these suicide notes. And then they'd come into group B and they'd go, oh, man, you suck at this. You're only getting like 10% of these right. And then at the end of it, they'd do the same thing I did in my dissertation, which was, guys, reliers, none of this is true. We're academics. We're the experts that told you this. And by the way, we just lied. Does everybody understand that, right? And they're like, oh, before you go, how good do you think you are evaluating suicide notes? They completely persisted in their belief. They did. Yes. So the people that were told they were good at it, even though the whole thing was a sham, improving to be a sham, they're like, I'm really good at evaluating suicide notes. And the other group was like, I'm bad at it. It just, it persisted. True to form back to the dissertation, I do ramble, I used to be a professor, sorry. And I'd look at your student ratings, by the way, to mention that. The student ratings? Yeah. Have you read your ratings from students? No, I don't. No, you don't look good. Did you look at your comments? Absolutely not. Exactly not. Your reviews are very good. Oh, thank you. They say you're snarky. You will insult someone, but you can take it. You ramble, but it's always brilliant. Well, that's, that is awesome to hear. And I'm still not going to look at my comments. It's been about seven, eight years now since I've been a regular professor. No, the point of the dissertation, and I am rambling again, there was about a 15 to 18% shift if I remember, in negativity. So what was your value of the group beforehand to after my actress insulted you? And you'd see about a 15 to 18% drop. And then of course, after we said, hey, this is all BS, their ratings didn't change a bit. That 15 to 18% drop persisted, even after we gave them every excuse in the world, not to believe it anymore. And it was across ideology. And that was one of my major claims, and it's not a unique claim, but I was kind of driving home the point, which was, you know, this stuff happens regardless of whether we're dealing with religion, whether we're dealing with politics, whether we're dealing with affiliation with the sorority or fraternity. This appears to be a generic phenomena like this belief perseverance, tendency, and group ideology is just something it doesn't matter what your belief system is. You can be pro-red cross, you can be pro-feminist, you can be pro-magga, doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. The group effect is the group effect. Well, you had an interesting hypothesis that I think turned out to be wrong, which was, if you are attacked from within your group, it will sting more. And that turned out not to be the case. Well, yes. So what was that like with a committee watching? It's midnight. On three hours deep into research for next week's episode, cross-referencing declassified documents and half-crazy witness statements, and my brain is starting to fog. That's usually when I'd reach for coffee, except coffee at midnight means staring at the ceiling until 3 a.m. instead of sleeping. That's the exact trade-off Ultra was built to solve. Ultra focus pouches use something called Infinity Parasanthine, a caffeine metabolite that gives you the mental lift without the jitters, the crash, or wrecking your sleep later. No nicotine, no caffeine, just Parasanthine plus LTHNN, alpha-GPC, ginseng, and B vitamins doing the actual work. 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Well, actually the easiest way to think about this is Protestant religions, right? 400 years, 4000 denominations. Why did that happen? You start with one church, somebody decides that God's toe is blue, a subset decides that God's toe is green. Let's fight about it and what happens, you get a schism and you get a new denomination. This is one of the really big points about the power of belief systems, which ties into conspiracy theory and all the stuff that you guys carry on about, which I love, is whenever you get a disagreement within a subgroup, you have this risk of creating a new nested in group outgroup. And on how severe it is, you may end up getting that schism and a split. And of course, organizational psychologists and really anybody in business or anybody with an organization knows this as well. But the data is pretty clear on that. So yeah, that unity and that need for unity drives, I think, a lot more than people realize in terms of what people advocate and don't. We were talking before we went to air about academic gatekeeping. It sounds like this applies there as well. Oh, God. Yes. And you know, it's like, it's almost, it is religious, you know, how dare you speak of the heteracy of non-objectivity, but it's never been objective. And I think, and to be fair to academia, is there really any business, any group anywhere in the world that is truly objective? And everyone from experience, whether you're working at a Walmart or whether you're working for a large corporation, like I don't like that mythology that we promote, that somehow there are these groups, these organizations that are pure and clean of human nature and behavior. Ha. Yeah, exactly. So, but no, academia is political. And even though that's heresy to say, we shouldn't be surprised by that, everything is political. So yeah, you know, I will say you can publish a parapsychology related topics more easily today, particularly in the last 10 to 12 years. More mainstream journals will accept, you know, anomalies, right, anomaly psychology, anomalies psychology or parapsychology. And now you do have to jump through a few more hoops. And if you got a decent editor, they may just desk reject it. You won't even get to peer review. They're like, no. And in some ways, like, thank you, right, because, but it can be done. You know, I think maybe 20 years ago, if you had an anomalous topic, you were going to have to go to the parapsychology journals or the anomalistic journals, you know, JSE PA, all of those, right. Nowadays, there is a select set of maybe 10 to 15 different journals that if you don't get too ridiculous in your claims, they will take your manuscript and the peer review will not be atrocious. There are sometimes exceptions. Dr. Eric Wargo sat right there and he's a pretty accomplished social scientist. And he said, psychologists were the most aggressive, most heinous on the subject. Yes. Like, almost like we're attacking their belief system. Yes. Yes. It has been my, this is just my personal experience. So I'm not trying to judge the entire field. I find that there is more ideological capture in the social sciences than there is, like in STEM fields. I think I've, I think I've even seen some, some surveys. It suggests that the physicist and the, you know, biologist is like, yeah, ghost, maybe. But you get over into psychology, sociology, even anthropology. And they're like, no, this is left brain, left brain, right brain drift. That's what's happening. He's, I mean, social sciences are emotional. They are. But I would still expect them to do the things that scientists are supposed to do, which is I don't care what your topic is, what your research design look like when it's a data say. Yes. But that, I think, has probably been a myth in all science. But again, it's not a condemning thing for me to say this, where are you not going to find ideological bias in a social human system where everyone has attached belief systems that they prefer to use? And then of course, monetary and reward and everything else structures that are piled on to. Sure. Funding. Yeah. And to pretend that that doesn't matter. Like the ethical person will, you know, kill their family and go without a job so that their kids start, no, they're not going to. No. So it's, it is a political game, not one that I enjoy, and I try to stay away from it as much as possible. Yeah, it's like, what's the NSF into this year? Yeah, tell me about the VHS tape that you wish you still had. Oh, oh, the fire experiment. Yes. Man, you dig. This was, okay. So a story time. This was when I first decided, I think it was 2009, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to grab me some community college students, and we're going a ghost time. I'm going to do it. I'm going to go all in. So I got the equipment, you know, because I'd loved Paris Psychology for years. I was in the closet, you know, in the download reading it, you know, reading a bunch of books. And of course, had a strong religion background, it already started studying various religions and various magical and esoteric practices as well. So we went to this house that the story was, and I think it was our first official investigation, had a nice camera set up, had some EMF meters, I'm like, yay. And the lady had a disabled child. And she told us that there were toys turning on and off, right? Nothing, you know, that's, that's happens, right? And that her kid was seeing scratches. Wow, okay. They couldn't account for some of the wounds and scratches that were on the kid's body. And so they asked us to come and do an investigation. And of course, we did. And we set up cameras. At the time, my dear friend Kay Owen, who kind of trained me on the ways of ghost hunting back in the day, was with us and she had old school VHS tape, recorders, right? Yep. So honestly, not a super eventful night, I think, in particular, nothing, you know, just insanely crazy happened, but of course, we assigned the footage and started to do the review. One side note, did see kind of a shadow person, like figure, in one of the films. But this is, and I've never seen this since, and on our scale, this is one of the rarest things to see. On the SSE, this is like, you know, you do not get a high endorsement of this. I get a call from her. She's like, you got to see this. I'm like, okay, okay. What's going on? She's like, you just got to see this. She pops in this VHS tape. And I want to be clear, this was a, a double wide, like a double wide trailer, right? So we were in the kitchen, dining room was, I use my hands. I hope that's okay. And, dining room was right here, kitchen was right here, we had the setup right here. We're talking six, seven feet away. We had eyes on that dining room the entire time. There was never a point in time that anyone wasn't just because that's where the base camp was, right? So we're watching this video. And I did not see this. We, like I said, we watched this the entire time. And on this video, I kid you not. There was a four, let's say, probably a four to six foot gout of blue flame. Blue. Blue flame. Yes. I'll swear to it to my dying day, strut, and this had carpet in the dining room shot straight up out of the middle of the dining room carpet, I had to say for about two and a half seconds. Just tall. I mean, a gout like somebody had stuck a fireworks nozzle, right, or a gas nozzle and shot straight up. And never seen it since. And what was interesting was it was only on film. You know, what was the room like? The room was again, it was one of those small, you know, kind of dining room areas that you see in like a double wide trailer, but was it residue? Was there smell? Nothing. Nothing that I, nothing that I can remember because we saw it post-hawk. It was only on the VHS tape. Blue flame is a chemical fire. Wow. So yeah, I wish you had that tape. I wish I had that tape. And it's probably gone by now. And so, you know, it's an anecdotal story at this point. But no, to this day, I'm like, how the hell did that happen? You know, and I would definitely put that as, you know, that was anomalous because again, we walked back and we had wires set up and we walked past that room and into that room probably 50 times that night. We would have seen a scorch mark, and it would have left a scorch mark. 'Cause there was four, six feet. - Yeah, of course. - There was no tube, or in other words, it appeared above the grave, it was straight up out of the carpet. So I would imagine, you know, certainly, and certainly the owner would have been like, "Hey, who's been smoking cigarettes in my house?" - Right. - Right. - No, nothing. And again, now, K, at the time, was like, this is a bad sign. She said, "I've only seen this three times." She had like a 20 year history at that point. She's like, "Normally, people's houses burn down." And this comes when I'm like, "Oh, luckily, that didn't happen." - Within a month and a half or so, she said, right? - Yep. - The house. - The house stayed standing. - Yep, nope, no problems. - Did you ever figure out what was going on in that house? - Well, you know, that's kind of a loaded question, because even from the get-go, we never tried to do overt explanations. And I have to admit, looking back on it, I wish I'd have done more care support. 'Cause, you know, at the time I was young and eager, and I wanted to capture objective phenomenon. I was trying to devise a method for kind of reliably separating this stuff kind of objectively, right, you know, into core classifications. To my knowledge, you know, I don't know if it ever resolved. I do know she had two friends, and they were like drinking margaritas on the front porch. I mean, I also remember Kesha's TikTok had just come out, which is an odd memory, just to kind of put together there. But no, we never had a clear explanation. We did go through the toys. They did turn on for us, kind of by themselves, and behave oddly. So, you know, a little bit of anomalousness there. But in terms of finding any source for where the scratches or cuts could come from, or, you know, deep voices, you know, from beels above telling them that the child was possessed. Nope, nothing like that. - When you're doing the research like that, especially when you're blown away by, I guess it would be pyrocanesis. - Yeah. - Do you forget that there's people there? There's people in distress there. - Yeah, and, you know, one of the things we ended up doing fairly early on in those days was we moved away from residential, residential hauntings because they are, and of course now with more years and experience, you know, you need a lot more support for those individuals, you know. What happens on the television shows, I'm not saying it's wrong, but it is promoting a particular point of view. And nowadays, I would say, absolutely, you need to ask what their expectations are, and you need to investigate what their state of mind is. You know, psychological history. And then really just ask, what do you want us to do here? - Right. - Do you want us to try and debunk this? Do you want us to just document the evidence? If you're looking for a cleansing, we don't do that. You know, and hindsight, you know, it could have been done better back in the day. - But most people just went validation. I just want someone else to see this. - They do, but that becomes problematic with residential investigations because if you don't get the evidence, or you go, actually, this is really explainable. They don't tend to like that. - No. - 'Cause we're back to your study again. - Yeah. And in those days, I really, really tried to say, you know, we're being scientists here. We're gonna come in, we're gonna, you know, try and get the best data we can, and we're gonna try and rule out whatever we can. And beyond that, we'll let you know if we found something, but, you know, we don't, we'd say upfront, you know, we don't do exercises, we don't do cleansings, we don't do X, Y, and Z. - Yeah, the belief component, obviously, from Ghosted and other papers, is such a powerful component, there's almost quasi therapy going on. - Yes. - And that raises some ethical issues, too. - Mm-hmm. - Well, before the vocabulary and transliminality and all of that, before you knew what any of this was called, what happened to you, like, as a five-year-old? I have had a long series of, you know, and to make the skeptics happy. If you want to say Hibnagogic episode or altered state of consciousness or, you know, whatever. Fine, I don't even really care. But I've had a series of kind of paranormal experiences from a young age, including some, some pretty negative encounters in my early, early years, like, say, 12 or 13, that actually led me to become religious, because it scared me so bad. I was like, okay, I need to have a talk with God. - Yes. - And I won't lie. I think that's probably shaped a lot of the course of my life. Now, if, you know, it's tricky. I don't know if I'm really different or not, but I try to make a distinction between explaining the thing doesn't tell you why it occurred in the first place. - Of course. - But I don't think that distinction is commonly made in science and I don't think it's commonly made in a lot of discussions of the paranormal. Let me kind of tangent, give you an example. - Okay. - But let's say I had a Star Trek tricorder, right? - Cool. - And so I got to time travel. And I'm gonna go back and I'm going to witness the resurrection of Jesus, right? And so I put my tricorder out and, hopefully, this isn't offending anybody with blasphemy. And now, suddenly, I have all the information, right? I'm like, "Oh, look, the cellular structures did this." And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I can explain this now. 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Plus, qualifying purchases can receive up to $25,000 in free silver. Go to yfileslovesgold.com or text files to metals. 638-257. That's yfileslovesgold.com or text files to metals. And do it now while you're thinking about it. - Right, right. I mean, so he still didn't. Yeah, the Y is not the how. - Right, so, you know, I had-- - That's exactly right. That's a great way of putting it. You could show the data and people would say, "Yeah, but he did it." - Yeah, that's neat, but he did it. - Yeah, because really we're digging into what are the fundamental mechanisms of the universe? - Right. - In the sense of, and here's a bit of a bender, and I promise I'll come back to paranormal experiences. We talk about chance all the time, right? And there may be some flossers of science that really get mad at me about this. How do you know it's chance? I'm talking about the normal distribution. There's a distribution of odds for dice, right? And we say it's gonna perform in this certain way, and we know there's a certain odds of getting, you know, two six-sided dices. There's a certain odds of getting two. There's a certain odds of getting 12. And those are universal. But with a particular role, I got a seven. Well, that's chance. What's the actual mechanism? What's the actual thing that gave you a seven? And the honest answer is, we don't know. You can call it God, you can call it chance, you can call it, you know, probability gremlins. There's no answer for that mechanism. So I separate this idea of, you know, obviously laws and probability and math works. Another way to think about it, we know this relationship of really well done relationship between depression and anxiety. And you might see in a research paper, you know, depression is significantly related to anxiety. Well, what happens if I change that language to sadness demons bring anxious demons? I just change the words. I can't say it for your own. Yeah, I mean, the math isn't change. The physical outcomes don't change. The methods don't change. As someone who has depression and anxiety, it does feel like demons. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and, you know, well, that's a whole nother tangent, but there's, but again, I'm not doing this, you know, to engage in sophistry, I'm not, but one of the things that I've really had to struggle with over the decades is making sense of God, the universe. It's something that I've just kind of been obsessed with for a long time. I'm not claiming to have those answers, but it is something that I think about all the time. If you claim to have the answers, I wouldn't believe you. Well, and you shouldn't, you know, I don't require anyone to agree with what, and that's the point. You don't have to agree with me and you might not want to. But I do recognize when humans pretend to know something versus when we're like, we have these rules, we know these rules work well, but the map is not the territory. And that's not even an opinion. That's objectively demonstrable. Yes. So full circle, you know, I had an experience when I was 12 or 13. I had some hypnagogic episodes when I was younger. Hitting a guy, meaning, before sleep. Yeah, yeah. Or waking up, or I actually had a spiritual experience. Who knows, right? Too young and it's not like the worst psychologist to do a checklist at the time. I had one too, and we're gonna talk about it a little bit later in this show. Well, I remember before that happened, being nine or 10 waking up, and I swear to you, there was a Tyrannosaurus Rex downstairs. Downstairs? Yes, so you got out of bed. No, I didn't. I sat up and I heard a T-Rex. whole roar, Big Footsteps. Roll, Pee, Roll, Pee. How do you know it wasn't like an alisor or a triceratop? 'Cause I'm psyched. - Okay. - Never mind if the hallway was only three foot wide, it was a T-Rex, dammit. And honestly, it was freaking me out and I remember screaming. I remember screaming from my mom at the time. Now, I did start to catch on after about the 20th foot step, I'm like, wait a minute, there's like 12 steps here. Right? And then of course the next thing I know, and that's why I think it wasn't even a guy's experience, is my mom was in the doorway. I didn't see her coming to the doorway just, right? - Right. - And for the listener, if you're not familiar with these, either hypnagogic or hypnopompic episodes, it's stage one sleep, right? So you're kind of in the sleep stage, but you're kind of awake. It allows for full auditory, visual and kinesthetic hallucinations. - This audience knows this is the land of the shadow people. - Yeah, yes. But by the way, when they say we know this occurs, they've classified it this way. But in terms of deep research that's gone into this, I think about Hufford's classic book about Nighthag, right? And the curious note that in some cases, there'd be very weird objective paranormal phenomenon in association with Nighthag, that was independent. Like, oh, the dresser drawer moved by itself. Again, I'm not a fan of, oh look, we took something mystical and turned it into a science term. Now it's all better. I'm like, bullshit. There's. - That's what they do. But that's a problem. Because here's my thing. I don't think that science can do it. I think they can. I tend to look at that as if you really wanted to do it. You get down and dirty. And you would do a series of papers and you would figure out how to operationalize this stuff. And you would separate the weed from the chave. But I don't think that gets done. I think we very often will take a term. It was a mass psychogenic illness, no sick building syndrome. Have you ever seen the papers on sick building syndrome? They're like, oh, all this weird stuff occurred. Well, it's sick building syndrome. What's that mean? - What does that mean? - Yeah, good question. 'Cause the paper isn't really gonna tell you either. There's no explanation for why this phenomenon still occurred or why it was isolated to a certain area or why this entire group of individuals had these weird physical problems and illnesses and everything else. They're like, nope, we'll just call it sick building syndrome and we'll move on. And I think that's where there's areas where parapsychology is basically bled into the mainstream. It just hasn't been sufficiently covered. Just my two cents and I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with me on that. But I am rambling. Do we wanna go back to my experience or do we wanna let that go? - If I need to bring you back, just trust that I will. - Okay, everything is fine. - I trust you, AJ. - Just trust me. - We talked a little bit about that you were pre-seminary. What's your relationship with God like now? - I have a very, when I say good, I have a very, very intense relationship with God. But most, probably a line, a line, I'm less heretical when it comes to Catholicism. I think the standard Catholic would accept me a little bit more than a Protestant would, but I'm definitely a heretic in the sense of, - Oh, yeah. - Well, again, I've dabbled with a lot of spiritual systems, and I have a lot of, I've been heavily influenced by Kabbalah, particularly, you know, Victoria and Kabbalah, after Golden Dawn got a hold of it and everything else. - So, Theosity as well. - Indirectly, you know, of course Blavotsky kind of fed, I mean, they don't say it a lot, but Blavotsky definitely fed into, you know, the Golden Dawners, not a fan of Crowley for the record, but that's a whole other story. And I don't take, you know, Golden Dawn material at face value, but I will say that, and forgive the butchery, the Ahchim, you know, the tree of life, if you really look at it as a structural metaphysical system, you know, ten manifestations of God, each representing different aspects, conveniently tied to various planetary influences, which are universal, and, you know, of course, the tarot applications where you see the various paths of the tree, and then you apply as above so below, and the four systems of them, and I'm like, this is an insanely good classification system. - It is, the Emerald Tablet is right behind me. - Yeah, and I've never been able to let go of that. So I think in some ways, I might be more of a Jewish mystic, or a butcher Jewish mystic, or a bad Jewish mystic, 'cause, of course, I'm not Jewish. But no, I think a lot of my view of God and Christianity and religion in general is very Kabbalah in nature. - And Nostek as well. - Yes, yes. Although I don't know to what extent, Nosticism is complicated. - It is. And again, I tend to get a little gun shy when people are like, yes, I've seen heaven. It's got 72 layers. Here's the 72 names, right? You know, 72 angels of the shim, hama, foration, all that. - But an ancient Jew would say Jesus was Nostek? - Yeah, yeah, he would. And I wouldn't go against basic Nostek principles. And if you've ever kind of dived into the history of that, Elaine Pagels is, I think, is not a bad source. And of course, and then I never say this right, nag, hama, and dear, nag, hama, I can't remember. I think the idea of Nosticism early on before the more orthodox size of Christianity decided to structure the churches was kind of close to Protestantism. - Okay, well, I mean, think of it this way. Not modern Protestantism, if you think about the idea of we're not gonna worry about structure, we're, God is an individual searching sort of thing, right? You must look inside. - God is in here. - Yeah, he's not in that building. - Which, if you think about it, if you're trying to make an organized religion, that's a little tricky. - Yeah, we need to leave those books out. - Yeah. - Well, and to be fair, right? How do you create a unified church if you're going to say, hey, here's a few rules, you need to find, you need to find God on your own. - No good. - Yeah, you're not gonna, you know. And in fairness, you know, with young Christianity, and, you know, unfortunately, a lot of Christians are not familiar with early Christian history. They're not even aware of how the Bible was formed, which frustrates me some days. - Why? - Would you have included all the books, The Apocryphan? - Enoch. - No, man, you're about to make me say several controversial things. So I guess I'm gonna say, I'm. - What's the worst thing gonna happen? - Oh, you'd be surprised. (laughs) - Actually, you probably wouldn't. Let me think about how to say this. - pseudo-pigrafa, I love it. - I love all those books, but maybe I'm a little bit of a snob in the sense of, if you are a person of faith and you care a great deal about your faith. And by the way, I don't have any judgment about whatever faith a person has. I really am. - You do what? - I really am a, if God has called you, God, quote, unquote, universe, God has called you to something, I believe there's a purpose for that. It's not my business to muck with your relationship. - We're just having conversation. This channel knows I have great respect for religion all of you. - Yeah. So I don't, you know, if a person's been called traditional, traditional Catholicism, in my mind, that's your path, you should follow it. But I don't have any sense of exclusionism with religion, which gets me in trouble. - Why? - Why would they get you in trouble? - Well, because a lot of people's fundamental religious beliefs require that exclusionism, right? I mean, you know, even modern, Catholic Catholicism has some loopholes that get around. But, you know, particularly with Protestantism, which is, you know, the younger form of Christianity, this is the way, this is the path, and this is it, and this is best. - And if you don't follow this way, you don't go to heaven. - Yeah, right? - I don't like that. - I don't either. But again, if that's where a person is, that's where a person is. I think everyone can get to heaven. That's your way. - Yeah, I've got my way. - Yes. - Now, I would say there are universal morals, you know, don't be an asshole, right? - Sure. - And, you know, but I also think there's a distinction between what we might call the social morals that we have. And, of course, as a social psychologist, understanding that religion is not the same. You know, the rules, the rules we follow now in various religions are not the rules that were followed 60 years ago. Very much a difference between dogma versus the core books upon which religion is established. All that having been said, I love the apocrypha. I certainly love the Catholic apocrypha. And, I like the Gnostic texts. But, we also want to be balanced in, say, if Paul and the various, you know, the various future bishops, you know, those New Testament books, all of which came before the Gospels. - Yes. - You know, they did have a goal, which was, we need to keep this alive. And, and I do have to, I do have to give due credit and say, how else were you going to do that if you weren't going to unify under churches and rules? - That's a great point. And, how were you going to survive? You know, because at the time, early, early Christianity was occult. - A cult, not occult, right? - Right. - You're going to go mainstream if you're going to spread this good word, so to speak. - There's no difference between occult and religion. - Well, just numbers. - Just numbers. - Now, in secular conveyance, right? That's, you know, people here are cult. They're like, yes, and we kill children and goats and do like, you know, that, but no, in a very technical moment. academic sense numbers is what makes you a religion. So no, I'm kind of open-minded about both sides of it. I see why it happened. I see why orthodox religion, so to speak, occurred the way it did. But I do think going back to the Nostics that some of that introspection and personal enlightenment, and if I remember pegels correctly, the fact that various people would take turns being the priest or the minister or the rabbi. In the way pegels sets it up, this just was not going to work for an organized religion. I'm just a fan of the Nosticism. Not so much the modern form where there's, I can't remember, 36 layers with passwords that you have to get through. I think that might be a little too much. Sit. I agree. I'm more like the book of Philip and the book of John. That's more of my speed. So you're in social sciences, psychology, and you start to talk about parapsychology and someone said you will never speak to another human being again. Who was that? Who told you that? Well, actually, I don't, did I say that? Someone said that to you. Oh, don't go into the field because you'll never be taken seriously again. Honestly, that was my undergrad advisor. And in fairness, the degree of bias when you're looking at the 80s, early 90s towards parapsych was significantly more robust. We've gotten, you know, society as a whole has gotten a little more loosey goosey in the last 30 years. I call it open minded. Yeah, that's fine. And in terms of psychology, religion, lit, there's been about a 10% decline in orthodox religion in adherence to it in our society. Really, I think persistent now for about 30 or 40 years. So we are seeing a cultural paradigm shift. That's interesting because church attendance is up. It is now. It is now. And if man, because I am not going to go into politics on here, but if you objectively, if you objectively look at what has occurred the last 10 or 15 years, we have had a lot of challenges to what we would call the unified social fabric. That's not left or right. That's yeah, that's all of them. Yeah. But as a result, you know, if you're kind of familiar with the dynamics of it, if you don't have a message, many messages will compete. Yes, back to social identity theory. Now you have your in groups and your out groups. So I would say that the onboarding of religion recently is a counter move against the 2015, right, kind of left leaning material. And so I don't even know how that's going to pan out. I don't, I don't either, but I'm glad it's happening. Balance is good. It is good. I think where you are professor by day and then giving ghost tours at night and terror readings, because you started a, I guess a student club, right? Yep. And I think it had a terrible acronym. Was it with ASF? Yes, yes. ASF. Okay. Okay. In my, in my, in my defense, go ahead, in my defense. And I'm going to own this for the entire field. Social scientists are shitty at naming things. I see that. We have multiple names for the same theory. We, it's, it's, we're bad at it. I will own my sin. Yeah, it turned into Israel, which isn't necessarily the best name either. I noticed that. We went from ASF to Israel. Yeah. Yes. In, in 2014, I believe. Yeah. Yeah. So what were you doing? Where were the tours? Well, actually, we did the tours as part of fundraising for when we actually filed for non-profit status. So the whole non-profit started originally as just students volunteering and me kind of showing them the scientific method. And us, basically me having a gaggle of research assistance. What were you teaching at the time? Um, sociology and psychology. So would you have students coming during office hours with ghost stories? Um, actually, what I would do is I'd just make a pitch every semester with that caveat of this is work, make no mistake. If this interest you, it's available and with all the appropriate ethical caveats of this will not affect grade. This, there's no brownie points to be had here. I do this. If you're interested, you want to learn about science and poke ghosts, so to speak, um, come see me. Um, and we never, I never had a problem recruiting a gaggle of people. Of course. Yeah. Um, you were teaching first years, second, first and second, or second, but I also did university. I'd do junior and senior level classes too. Um, because yeah, I think I was a social psychologist, but, um, they basically asked me to do a sociology. And I'm like, yeah, sure. Why not? Right? Most of the stuff in sociology comes from social psych and I'm like, go, um, so you know, for, for a long time, for about 10 years, um, it was really just a student organization. And then we did, uh, local historical tours, uh, down in Jeffersonville, Indiana, where we collected all the stories and we would actually do some investigations on the site, and then we give tours as fundraisers, uh, to get a little bit of money because, uh, anyone who does investigations knows that the cost of actually buying equipment is insane. Um, and I had the amount of money you would expect of being a community college slash student university professor. Well, take us to one of the stops in the tour. Tell us it goes story. Well, okay. Um, there is a nice little bistro free advertising, uh, called the Red Yeti. Um, already love it. Yeah, it's, it's in, uh, it's in downtown Jeffersonville on spring street. Um, and their owners reported, in fact, somebody stole our material was doing a recent report on them about a year ago in a newspaper. I'm like, how dare you? Content thieves. Yeah. Tell me about it. Ah, whatever. Uh, but, um, so, uh, they were, there was an apartment upstairs, if I remember correctly. And they, uh, were reporting shadow people in various weird disturbances. The restaurant itself reported some pretty strong psychokinesis. So in these things, we're moving. Yes. Yes. Psychokina, uh, glass, glassware being flung off a shelf. And we're not talking about like oops, tinkle. Uh, there was, uh, several reports, if I remember correctly, flinging objects being flung. Okay. Um, so at the time we were, uh, a local organization, right? You know, student professor, whatever. Um, and I can't remember if we asked them or if they invited us, uh, to investigate, but anyway, there we were. Um, interestingly, we set the, all, you know, we've set the equipment up and in those days, I had, you know, a full range of data logging EMF meters, multiple cameras, hotspot method, right? Because again, my goal was let's capture objective phenomena, right? Uh, there's a whole discussion there, but I wanted to catch weird spooky shit. Um, which interestingly enough, did we see objects move? No. Uh, did a couple of our members have psychosomatic effects? Uh, and we had some members that, you know, like, oh, I feel kind of nauseous. I feel weird. Uh, yes. The interesting bit was, and I'm mad because again, this was almost great evidence. We had three people in the kitchen. They swear up and down, they saw roughly an 18 inch to two foot orb glowing blue. Wow. Pop through one wall and pop through the other. Now, I can't say this. We did have a camera in the kitchen and I did catch the corner of it. You did. We caught the corner of it. We didn't catch the full, so in other words, if this was the screen, right, you could see it, like you saw this bright light, like just around the corner, but it wasn't a full capture. So I mean, it definitely corroborated their experiences. And there was obviously some sort of light anomaly that we captured on video. Um, but yeah, that was, they saw a full-bodied quote unquote orb crackling blue solid popped right through it. Uh, all of about a half second. Did something happen on that property? They think it was trying to remember. Well, okay, Jeffersonville was known both for illegal gambling and a fair amount of, if I remember correctly, and I hope I get this right, mob activity. Yeah. There's a fair amount of murders. Okay. And a fair amount of burdens and a fair amount of people dying under suspicious circumstances. Sure. And I can't remember the specifics of that because it's been like 15 years, I think. Um, but it did have a history of some kind. I just can't remember what was specifically the case. Supposedly, it's still haunted because like I said, I saw a report on it six months to 12 months ago in some newspaper, advertising, Jeffersonville or maybe it was a Facebook ad. Um, but no, we never got into the objects moving, but we did, uh, did have three witnesses that saw a full blown orb, you know, not like a bug, but like a, oh, look, this is emitting its own light. It just flashed through the kitchen. What the hell is that? Um, pretty spooky. Very spooky. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we can talk about the gear, the science and how K two meters may be a waste of your money. Yeah, they are. Um, we'll be right back. Okay. The dumb question. Here's the dumb question. Hit me. Everybody sees on TV the ghost hunters with the box with the lights. Uh, he's rolling his eyes. And it's spiking. What is the box? What, what is it measuring? Um, usually with an EMF meter, like the K-2s and stuff, they're measuring mains frequency, EMF, which in America is 60 Hertz. And in England, I believe 50. It's 15 England. So this is just electricity in the walls. Well, it, it's, it's not so, you know, any electrical current will give off, by the way, I am not a physicist. This was me doing side research to figure out how to put together meters back in the day. So not an expert, just someone that's read on it. The experts are then in the common story about it. Okay, of course they will. Well, actually, uh, So any electrical field is going to give off a magnetic field, right? So the vast, you know, so anytime you have mains frequency, 60 hertz, right, EMF, it's coming from, yes, the electricity's in the walls. Now where people make a mistake is that electronic field's decay on an exponential rate. So something that is 100 milligals of close will be 10 milligals, 1 feet away. And that gets, sometimes you'll see people make claims like, "Well, the power lines, I'm like, well, the power lines after about 10 feet go to nothing." Right. But in terms of EMF spikes, in my experience, you know, back when I did field stuff, we rarely would get spikes. And you do see on the shows, you know, they're like, "Oh, you know, 1.8 milligals." I'm like, "Well, okay, but that's not really abnormal." Now that I mean, there are some time-- 1.8 milligals? Yeah. Doesn't, isn't the earth somewhere between 200 and 500 milligals? Well, but that's geomagnetic fields. Yes. And those are down at the two to 10 hertz range, if I remember correctly. They are. And I think somewhere between 1 and 2 milligals is the norm. Oh. Maybe I'm wrong. Okay. 'Cause it's been a while since I've dug into that. But no, not a high field. Now, and this is like per, Stan Koren's would be the person you'd want to talk to on this one in detail, if he ever watches this, he's going to be mad at me. But yeah, you can have various geological features that will increase or decrease geomagnetic activity. In fact, he did a whole series of studies suggesting, are you familiar with the person jurifact? Yeah. Yeah. Right? So God helmet? Yes. The God helmet. And the claim for a while, and I personally do not agree with this. Doesn't mean I'm right. I just don't personally agree with it. Under the claim was, look, there's naturally occurring geomagnetic fields at these haunted locations. Yes. But I believe in the papers he did looking at 40 or 50 locations, maybe two of them actually met criteria. But it gets more problematic because for you to get a God helmet effect, you need, if I remember correctly, six to eight hertz applied to the brain consistently, six to eight hertz at the temporal lobe. Yeah. And that is going to be a tall order in a natural geomagnetic field. Right. The God helmet's got magnets right next to your brain. We did buy one of those, by the way, and set them up back when we did the Black Moon Manor study way back in the day. And we had people, because ghosts are perverts. They were wearing the helmet, and they felt an earthquake, and then they got fondled. And it was just a very messed up day. So we're like, okay, let's not mess with that here too much. It's freaking people out. Didn't the person here say that the people were creating the ghost phenomena? Yeah. The idea was you're basically having a hallucination, or you like vernacular, tripping balls, off of a geomagnetic field. Yes. I don't think that explanation is sufficient. And I've also done several studies now at this point showing, and I can't tell you why. There's just a relationship, there is a time sync relationship between objective and subjective paranormal phenomena, and EMF wiggle, right before the event occurs. And it's time sync. Well, yeah, I would say, if I'm going to be formal about it, a correlation in time, with either suppression of EMF, or expansion of EMF, right before observable paranormal phenomena like objects moving. Right. And why you want all your video, audio, everything, time synced. Yeah. And that was really the original goal of, of Israel back in the day. We're like, okay, I want, I want to see if all the shows with ghost hunting are true. Let's test the EMF theory, right? And to be fair, the research we did, I mean, in fairness, I did three papers out of it, and there's, they replicated across the board. What frequencies? I remember correctly, we got the effect both with geomagnetic and mains frequency. So the phenomena is affecting frequencies that exist already, so you don't have to filter anything out. They're not living on their own part of the spectrum. Or are they? When you say there, you're referring to like ghosts, disoriented entities. Whatever caused the wiggle. Okay. I'm not a believer, to be honest. Okay. I'm a hopeful believer. I'm not like I want to believe. I actually do fully believe in discarned agency. I also believe in psi. That doesn't mean I can prove it as a scientist, right? Right. And I want to make that distinction clear. There's what science can demonstrate, and then there's what anyone particularly believes about it. The science answer, and then we can get to the ghosty answer, is in the first study at Black Moon Manor, no electricity generating fields at all, half mile away from power lines. This was a nearly abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. We captured three videos of shadow people coming out of a basement with no exits, right? So there's no entry or exit to this point. And I'm proud of this one. This is one of the best phenomena we ever captured. The video sucks, unfortunately, because it was 2009. I'm just going to ask you if this is available. Well, it is. And I can find it. In the video, it's clear. Well, I have some pictures in the book, but the book pictures don't capture it well. Right. Sorry. But the point is, there was three videos where you would see a scenario. Camera here, camera here, okay? So this camera, and this camera is pointing the opposite direction. So obviously for criticism or skepticism, nobody could have been behind this, right? Everyone was accounted for in the house they were all outside at the time. In fact, we were doing sweeps around the house to see if there's anything we needed to be aware of, right? That might be influencing what was going on inside of this location. So the front camera is here. It's pointed to one door. The door only goes to a basement with no entry and no exit. And we had three episodes. We had about an eight foot tall shadow come across the door. It's very clear in the video, right? And then five of various heights come out. And in each instance, there was either an expansion or suppression when you look at the data of the electromagnetic fields. There was. Yes. So it was correlated with this, and when I say compression, this is the one caveat we found. If you want, if this thrice-done research is solid, right, could have been wrong, could be a null finding of somebody else did it, but three times not too bad, right? What we found was not a spike, right? Oh, God, the milligauce went up. What we found was wiggle. So the only way you're going to find this stuff is if you were data logging. Is this wiggle like amplitude wiggle or compression of the sine wave with amplitude, right? So you would get, like if this is the average wiggle amount, you would get with EMF over time, you're sampling one, two, three, or 15 times a second, whatever the sample rate is, right? We would either get an expansion, so the peaks and the trials get higher or we get a suppression. And we found that to be the case in all three of the studies that we did. So quality EVP in the 2013 study, those shadow figures, which, oh, and by the way, the shadows were in infrared. They were in infrared. Because actually, it wasn't bright enough for full color video, so it was the black and white infrared that picked up the shadows. Wow. So well, that means there's heat. This was a place I kid you not. I haven't seen application happen very often. This was a place where I personally witnessed, I can't prove it, you know, those five pound plastic chairs. You can buy Walmart. One was just in the middle of the room, I don't know where, proof, five pound chair. Just a beer? Yeah. Like I look away, I'm doing my thing two minutes later and it's not like somebody brought plastic chairs to the site. Next thing you know, there's a damn chair in the middle of the room. We rolling camera on that? No. No video for that one. Also, there was a milk crate in the basement that people were sitting on that, again, there was only one exit entry and it's not like you can, you know, the old milk crates that you are. Not like you can shove that under your shirt. No. That thing disappeared. That it disappeared. It disappeared. Did you look into the history of the house? Here's something a lot of us don't like to admit. The reason we haven't started a GLP one isn't because of the cost, it's about the needle. Nobody wants to jab themselves every week just to lose weight. Weight loss by hymns is changing that. Losing weight is one thing, but feeling good in your own skin again, that's what you're really after. So now weight loss by hymns offers the Wigovie pill alongside the Wigovie pen with the same appetite regulating science, just no needle involved. You can see up to 20% body weight loss with Wigovie hymns combined with diet and exercise. 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Yeah, 'cause the claim back in the day was like, "Oh, I think it's working, I think it's working." - Sure, kids in the back and people are dead people and suicide, we actually, and I'll be fair, I have never been, it's good to do the history, but I've never been big on the history, 'cause again, my focus at the time was like, "No, I wanna capture spooky shit, right?" I wanna capture the weird stuff. But we did in that one, do some historical research and debunked all of it. It wasn't, like there was no historical evidence of dead bodies or anything like that. I'm not even sure the suicides were true. - I don't think they were. - And my understanding was that the owners of the property got so mad about the legends that that's what ended up getting it bulldozed and torn down and everything else. Yeah, that's what I got to count it, that's what I got told anyway. But no, that place also change, change in candy, which show up on the floor. - Change. - Like coins. - No, I know what you mean. Check the dates on those. - I didn't know. Well, because again, honestly, me being skeptical, I'm like, who's got a hole in the pocket? - Right, I just didn't take anything after the milk crate, the chair over comes just like, yeah, maybe change. - Coins appearing happens in all kinds of things. It happens on skin walk or ranch all the time you're finding coins. - And a fair history of it with poltergeist phenomena over the years too. So no, I would call that place legitimately active while I was around. Like, you're gonna have a hard time debunking some of that stuff. - Did you feel anything? - Yeah, there was a lot of a sensation of a presence there. - There was. And again, now, I guess person would have agreed. - Well, I mean, although if I remember the readings, I'm not sure really it would have qualified for a person to your effect in terms of the Hertz rate that was going on over there. - Not at 60, but at five. - Maybe. - I mean, you know, but again, and I'm not saying it can occur, I think under controlled laboratory conditions, you absolutely get that person to your helmet effect. I'm just, and I could be, you know, somebody may write me and correct me, but I find it suspicious that nature would provide such a sustained Hertz rate over an extended period of time to produce that effect. And it's certainly not gonna account for psychokinesis, and that's not gonna open up, you know. So for subjective events, absolutely. - No, that's been proven to, in testing third man syndrome, is stimulate the temporal lobe. - Yeah. - The frontal lobe, and you suddenly feel a presence. - And I think something like one out of five, or maybe 10% of people actually had full blown visions. So I remember, and although this makes me a bad researcher, and because I can't remember the name of the researcher, but there's a fair amount of studies into mirror gazing, where vast majority of participants, after about a minute, we'll see distortions of the face. - Yep. - And then a small percentage of those will actually go on to see additional. I suspect that's correlated with transliminality, but that's another sidebar. - I've read those studies, and quite a few subjects bailed out, they said, I don't wanna do this anymore. - Yeah, well we had that in the sound study. Part of the EMF relationship we're talking about, I actually got permission to set up a sound study. So we had 10 or 11 participants, each do 10 sessions, five and four, five and six, 10 sessions, and we set up the cameras in the EMF meters. And we didn't actually capture any phenomena, but my goodness, they verbally reported an insane amount of phenomena, and low and behold, we got that suppression expansion effect with EMF in time to their verbal reports. - What were they talking about? - Well, we went whole hog on this one. This one was almost as bad as my dissertation. I had them purposefully do an invocation and meditation, and even a kind of a small, slightly occultic summoning. - Wow, okay. And then the rule was, any time you're experiencing something, we want you to verbally report it, because we were also interested in contagion effects, to what extent, if you're saying you have a chill, well other people were like, yeah, come to think of it, I'm having a chill, by the way, massive contagion, right? So a lot of that can be explained by conventional psychology, in that sense. Unless you wanna interject a little bit of spiritual wiggle inside the contagion, which you can. - Yeah, you can, I actually think that might be the case. - But I think with the Ouija board is just contagion. - Maybe. - Okay. - Maybe. - Well, and I say maybe, because nobody's really dug that deeply into it. - No. - You know, two or three cool studies does not a thorough investigation make. And I'd say the same about my EMF data. I would stick to that and really be like, yes, that is real. If I had three or four other researchers decide to do their own study and replicate the results. But I have to own that this was me doing repeated studies. So it's not independent verification. So I would say, yep, I think something's there. I'm not gonna die on that hill over it. I mean, it is replicated three times. That's, you know, so I'd say, hey, look, it happened. But I'd love for somebody else to pick it up and give it a try. - Sure. - But no, with the say-ons thing, no, they would report all sorts of phenomena. We even had one who swore that they saw a spirit and it freaked them out so bad that they were out. They left the study. But no, we'd have people get exhausted, headaches, put their head on the table. A whole range of subjective psychosomatic phenomena, if you will. - What about EVP? Did you ever get into that? - Not from the say-ons study. It didn't get a thing that would be objective. - Ever get anything on EVP? - Yeah, but I'm pretty snooty about EVP. - Go ahead. - In the sense of, I'm like, I wanna hear a voice, dammit. - I don't want-- - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - I'm like, okay, Peridolia, which also hasn't been sufficiently studied, also takes me off. But yeah, no, the Black Moon Matter case, we had a couple of very clear voices. - You had voices. - Yeah, saying what? - I remember this one we didn't include in the study 'cause it got shown later, but evidently, there was a recorder that got some grandpa-like voice. Been like, dang, kids walking around here. Thump, thump, thump. - Wow. I mean, I like an awareness of you guys. - Yep. I've been lucky enough to run into some stuff. It's just outright creepy. - Go ahead. - Well, I mean, you know, between the fire, between the shadow people, let me think. The EVP is what's creased me out the most. - I don't, I have some designs that if somebody wanted to help me with it, because I'm starting to get to the age where I'm like, I am not carrying this 400 hour project on my own. I'm not doing it. I'm like, I'm too tired. - Yep. - One of the things I would love to see, and actually, I might be moving towards this the next couple of years, is starting to study the common myths of investigating. And there are several designs I could think of off the top of my head where we could start to crack at EVP in a very meaningful way. Parodolia is tricky, right? - Yeah. - I mean, not to get too geeky, but, you know, you can set a baseline for the average amount of noise. You would get on a naughty recorder. - Sure. - Then you could, right, start statistically sampling, if you get a significantly different rate when people are asking questions, versus when they're not, when people are present, versus when they're not. The whole radio interference theory of EVP, of which there's not a single fricking study to test, and that annoys me, 'cause it's like, it's called a padded soundproof box. - Right. - So when you're a radio tower, put one in your house, are there noises? You know, that's not hard, that's a citizen science project. If enough people wrote me and said, hey, I'd be willing to do it, I'd be like, let's go, 'cause it's not hard. But again, that's where we get, skept pseudosceptics who don't really have a background in science, making very grandiose claims about things that can't happen when they haven't ever cracked open research article ever. But no, stuff like EVP, you could do certain protocols with ghost boxes that would at least get at the idea of, are you getting an abnormal amount of response? Are you getting responses that are deviations from what you might hear? That's modellable. - Has it started? - Have you heard a ghost box that worked, and for everyone listening, the ghost boxes on YouTube is all nonsense, so listen to those. - Okay. - The ghost are nonsense. Have you ever heard a real one? This is like the test list, or the Edison spirit radio. - Now, when you say a real one is in like, one that just rotates through frequencies, or that you heard something, and my next question would be on what frequency? - I haven't dealt with them extensively. I have played with some generic ones, and there's been one or two times where the responses seemed relevant. One time I did have an obvious that we were investigating, believe it or not, a police officer training building. And that obvious went off four or five times, in about three minutes, and it said gun, danger, officer, and I'm like, holy crap. - What is an obvious? - And good question. What, how does the obvious actually, and that's one of the problems with research. An obvious is basically a device that's got a pre-programmed set of, I think, 2000 words. - Yep. - And now they have all these apps. - Yes. - They're doing all sorts of complicated stuff. And I've also watched some of those videos, where they evidently have a very complicated, obvious slash ghost box slash combo that's selecting, of course, the problem for some of them. Science is what's all that math and technology behind what you're getting right because if I don't know that There's no way I can test whether you have something normal or abnormal in the first place So I don't like them is how did you teach the ghost how to use your? Machine well, but I might counter and say you know Nelson's global consciousness project that's that's a fair response so and and all the micro PK studies nowadays are done with electronics We just finished we just finished a set of studies where we were looking at enchantment and ESP and that was all done online now that one was a null finding by the way we did a our sample our original pilot We got signals suggestive results, but we didn't get it We didn't get it with the with the main sample study But there's been a bunch of other Micro PK studies right so the idea of of influencing small, you know Electronic random number generators are true random, but those are all electronics You know techno-mancy might be a thing I mean it seems like it's all manipulating the the electromagnetic spectrum somehow. Yeah, why and Good question. Let's let's talk with some physicists I mean, that's why I wanted to have you in here is because you have a lot of I don't know But you have a lot of research that shows that something's happening on the spectrum it it is I think it is and and I will say for whatever GPT is worth And and by the way when I use GPT. I specifically say use peer reviewed studies only Which and you need to do that. Yeah, and then double check Yeah, and when you do that actually you tend to get much better responses But I did go down a rabbit hole one day and say okay, you know about these three studies What does dark matter and dark energy have to say about this? And evidently and again GPT so kind of for what it's worth and I'm not a physicist so count this for what it's worth There have been some physics studies that are showing Basically a electron-like charge with possible dark matter so You know you want to go out there for an unsubstantiated theory maybe If and if you want to accept the the research that I did Maybe EMF is some sort of secondary effect of dark matter interactions. I didn't consider that That's that's very interesting. I have to prove dark matter first, but yeah, that's very interesting exactly right Well, we have numbers that don't fit in this formula. Hey, I know. Let's call it. Yeah, let's put it over here again labeling And again, you know for for the listener that is a completely unsubstantiated theory so don't you know I'm not I'm not I'm not just having a conversation I'm just interested in this stuff. I'm just keeping it keeping it on the keep it real You have an IMDB page I have an IMDB page you do I think it's Portuguese film Portuguese documentary. Oh, yes, the bio. Yes macro macro-scius science Yeah, I did a smooth beach balls Well, that relates to the MF study. Yes, it does Have you ever heard in your time of the whispers in Mitchell, Indiana? Mm-hmm. So okay. Now. It's got a controversial history But I have been there two at least ten times. Let's tell the story um So the the haunting background story of it is Supposedly there was a doctor that performed abortions, right? And and of questionable nature and there was a girl there named Rachel who died in a fire And the legends go that supposedly the police have gotten some phone calls. Yep from her Um, I've never been a little verified that but it's awesome story. I read the same thing that they were police reports about that Um, and then they saw her. Yeah, and actually again K-O-N from back in the day Swares up and down she saw. Yep, and even had an audible conversation Once I have been there. I've never heard Rachel Um, and they also nowadays believe in something called big black which depending on who you're talking to is either an alien or some sort of I don't know that one. Yeah, I'm not sure I do either There's uh, but supposedly a big dark mass energy with claws Um, here's what I will say about the place whether the history is true or not Um, I have been to that I have uh been through that place top to bottom I've looked at the vents for you know wires. I've looked for airflow. I've looked for you know microphones Um, and I I think there were a couple of Um, people that claim they caught some hoaxing at some point Um, I've never caught it and I have been there multiple times and I have seen a ridiculous amount of phenomenon at that place Like what? Uh, it came a go-to Um, it came a go-to. Yeah, actually it's and in fact the 2019 paper where we have the beach balls was a direct result of Rachel's room But that it was in Rachel's room. That was in Rachel's room. Yes. Yeah, you have to tell us that story. It's wild So it's um, and in fact when I used to go there uh, EMF meters scooting on their own across cases Um, were you seeing a wiggle? During while they moved that was before I was doing the wiggle that's before I designed that whole system But the beach ball uh thing was I think 11 beach ball movements in an hour With two EMF GMF data logging meters two cameras one in Rachel's room one in the adjacent room, which I can't remember what it was called um Each of each balls went on the bed. Yeah, there were two and and those are regular trigger objects. They keep there Um, I've been there and watch those for nine hours not move a bit right um, we pick them up We poke them wait look for them We hit you know when this started happening Uh, and in fact, I have the whole video of it right people knocking on the headboard people jumping on the bed the ball don't fall off Right uh everything blowing on it you name it we tried to do it um and still over about 60 minutes There were 11 instances of one or the other Falling off the headboard or slightly projecting off the headboard about uh or I'm sorry baseboard about about a foot and a half Um, and of course looking at the EMF data You have the suppression expansion effect interestingly the other room No change in EMF ten feet away Really yeah, so now if you know anything about fields and vectors right um EMF traditionally right Any energy traditionally either as a field yeah comes from a source or it's a projected beam. It's a vector right um That data in the other room suggests that One explanation spontaneously generating fields with no means to produce them Because there's no additional electronic devices or anything else in that room yet We still saw the changes in EMF localized to that room And this is the adjacent room or there should have been some residual falloff from Yeah, you would have expected the other room if it was a vector right if it was a vector or if it was a large field or if it was a field You should see at least the inverse square But you didn't get that nope what the hell is going on in that room good question right and that's where you I mean, you know anomalistic psychology Well, it's not even psychology anomalistic physics, I guess um, no, I have no conventional explanation for that And that's how we wrote it up We're like we don't have an explanation for this. It looks like, you know, putative Psychokinesis and there was an EMF association And we made a point in that paper to be like we could be wrong But we've ruled out x, y and z we did all of these things And here you go um But related to that point um, I've had groups in there Uh, and I used to be a little a little rough and for anybody who's listening to this that used to be on the team I'm sorry um You know how in your team, but we would get uh, we would have uh, new individuals Uh, that would come in and and my attitude was a little bit military get on in there going up in that room said by yourself, right? um And we actually had a person uh have a pretty bad experience up there. They started shaking and crying um And so we immediately ran up to Rachel's room because that's where it happened Um, and we know as a team we got her out because we're not cold-hearted, right and you know and everybody think oh right Because there's tears and there's like shaking. What is she just sitting in the in the room? Yeah in the dark. Yeah, yeah Hey, hey, it's a bootcamp. Yeah You gotta get your sea legs if you're gonna do this I mean because whether you believe or not these spaces are are spooky and you got to get used to spooky Have you ever been in a dark room and you had to get out? Not personally, but I've just seen a lot of grumpy shit. So personally just throw the kid in there Yeah, I haven't done uh, but that's kind of the point. It's it's like a it's like a hazing. It's like sure We got you back. We got you on camera. You're good um, she could never see another beach ball again No, no, she made her get back in okay. No, she stuck around her ears. She wasn't permanently traumatized. I wasn't ethical psychologist um But the point is we got everybody in and this is what the weirdest that I can't explain this we're pulling her out And we're walking maybe you know, there's like four of us. We're walking back down the steps, you know We're gonna get a break. Let her have some coffee or whatever and I keep you not. I heard a wookie Everybody there's this weird and I'm about to make this noise forgive me like Right and everyone and I remember looking around and we all go What the was that? And some sort of audible noise out of that room like an audible voice And now that I had recorded you did yes. I have a recorded. I got to find it. It's god I got so much stuff buried on hard drives um you have to get that to us It didn't sound like a wookie. I heard it and it sounded like a wookie It did sound very audibly like some sort of odd voice coming out of the room and it was very clear Like it was there was no mistaking it. It wasn't a thump or a bump It was an absolute voice coming out of that room. I've seen some EVPs. I don't know how we're real they are. It's almost like a date of burst where you just hear this, this noise, but if you slow it down, there's voice in there. And I don't know how legitimate that is because as a scientist, it's fair to say, it's like how many layers of compression and variables and, you know, so it's hard to get at that. But I do know in the case of that whispers instance that we all heard that voice and that voice showed up on the audio recorder in there, psychosamatically or subjectively, I've seen a person knocked flat on their butt in the whispers and they slammed to the ground. Did they fall or did they, they got slammed? Wow. And in fact, it was interesting because back in the day, it was, again, I didn't expect to bring up KO in this much, but KO and I were in the, so I've got questions about K coming up in the whispers, oh, God, Lord, you get hired as a private detective. But no, we were basically taunting the supposed doctor for a good hour. How do you taunt the doctor? Oh, we were like, this is back to your study again, man, it told you it's all about that first thesis. Yeah. Well, we were in that room in the whispers where supposedly he was doing his stuff and again, I don't even, yeah, I know he existed, I don't know if that was really him or not. At the time, I'm like, sure, so we were just talking trash. We were provoking. We were like, did you kill babies? You know, like we were going out for like an hour, just basically daring it to, because in those days, I was, I was just like, do it, do it, I'll be okay, do it. I'm ready to bleed, and there's, and nothing happened. And then we had another person walk in five minutes later. He touches the headboard and I cut this on camera and he's just like, oh my goodness. He gets up, he looks around like, but that's not entirely in common for the whispers. And scratches are all over the place. And some of them go well beyond what you might call a, you know, a conversion disorder or psychosomatic reaction. I mean, you can diagnose it that way, but it's tricky, complicated, it might be a good word for that. I love to see the video on that because you'd be able to tell if it was a push or a fall. Well, and you know, that's something we wrote about in the book, because I actually bring that up specifically when that happened, which is, you know, if the resolution was high enough, could you go and maybe look for a hand print? And even if you did, you know, that's not going to convince a die-hard skeptic. No. You know, the subjective phenomena at the end of the day is really beyond our technology or science to measure in a significant way. And in the old days, when we did the three-class system, I always called those class 2s. Weird, creepy, but I can't prove it, right? It just, it goes in a maybe category, right? It will freak out, it might have a nightmare over it, but in terms of being able to really give it a good proof label. Had another colleague who's very much a friend of this day, we're very, very close. She swears she got punched in the gut, and then she vomited. So you know, this was on an investigation. Yep, also in the whispers. In the whispers as well. Yeah, all of that's the whispers. And then you know, we can talk about the Sedansville rectory, which is a whole nother cup of tea. Go for it. I don't want to. I have a science question, we're definitely getting back to it. But I have a science question. I understand how the spectrum can be manipulated by whatever this is. I get it. I don't understand how telekinesis or psychokinesis works, how, what is this, let's say something pushed the beach ball. Okay. What is the science that could make that possible? Good question. Let's speculate. And to be fair, you're not going to find a parapsychologist or a physicist or maybe even a metaphysist or that there's not a mechanism for psi. There's not a mechanism for PK. And that is one of the criticisms that is a fair criticism. We're observing secondary data, or I should say tertiary outcomes, right? We can see the effect. We can't see the mechanism that causes it to be fair, dark matter, gravity, Ramadan's right? So we're not the only field to do that, but oddly enough, we get all the crap for it. Nobody else calls the other people into account. I hadn't considered dark matter, but that or gravitons would do it, but now we're talking hyper-dimensionality. Yeah, but I mean, even gravitational lensing, which is the case they make for, I believe, dark matter, right? That is a secondary effect. Yes. You're not measuring the particle or the wave itself. And, you know, frankly, gravity. But that would mean there's black holes connected to the ghosts. Maybe. You know, this is, here's a weird mind-bender about all this stuff. We talk about how physics has these laws that are absolute, but are you familiar with sample to population, the idea of, right? So if I want to know about all daffodils on the planet, I can look at one daffodil and make a conclusion, right? And what people don't understand is this is the method for all of science, because literally it's impossible to measure everything, right? I can't measure every man and woman in the world if I want to look for subtle IQ differences. I have to take a sample and infer from that population, or that from that sample inferred to the population. Well, here's, and again, I'm not denying physics. I'm not denying quantum physics in a way, shape, or form. But the truth is we're like, well, gravity works like this. Well, that's no one knows how it works. Well, yeah, but you could say from the measurements, this is the law. Well, look at the entire EM spectrum, and let's realistically say, do we measure everything that goes on in the EM spectrum everywhere in the world? No! And it's impossible to do it. It's impossible. So one of the, when we talk about, oh, it's paranormal, I'm like, or there could be all sorts of stuff going around. And I'm not trying to make excuses for it, it's just, it's a, this is a true thing. We simply don't measure all the variability of various energy spectrums. But there would be repeatable, intelligent patterns somewhere in the spectrum anywhere, there could be, I'm not saying there are, but there could be because we sure as hell aren't measuring it. So we have to understand that with science, they're not absolutes, this is why the scientific method and inferential statistics and all the mathematics very clearly say, absolutely non-negotiable, you don't ever prove anything. You get more and more evidence that makes it likely, right? But literally because of the phenomenology, you're like our limited perception, our limited power, our limited ability to perceive our technology limits, all of these are very real non-controversial things. And that means there's only so much we can study and sample, and then we generalize those findings to everything else going on. Everything comes back to good old's theorem of incompleteness, like you can, you'll never fully know. Yeah. And I think the key point here is, this isn't me giving you a tangent philosophy. I'm like, no, no, here are the facts about how human beings work. Here is the technology. Here is factually what we can measure, and here's factually what we don't. So anytime people are making these claims, like, well, we know, we don't know, it just works really well. Doesn't mean it always works really well, and it doesn't mean it works well in Timbuktu, because if you really want to answer that, you're going to have to go take a lot of sampling and data in Timbuktu. I believe inside, I just don't know how it works. One of the great remote viewers, like Joe McMonigal, is wrong most of the time. Yeah. But he's right sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and I think the sum of side data would say useful, but not necessarily something you want to always put a bet on. Right. And that's okay. Right? I do think related to studies with magical practice and et cetera. I think there are some probably methods in esotericism that would probably improve that. But. What methods? Well, you know, this is the thing is, you know, people sensationalize the occult, right? But they really shouldn't, because it just means hidden knowledge. Yeah. And to be fair, Buddhist probably think Catholicism is really weird and creepy. I bet they do. Right. A lot of this stuff, and I think it's because of horror movies and everything else. They're like, "Oh!" Right? It's like, "Well, no, if you actually read it, it's not that much more different than some of this stuff over here. It's a different, maybe, belief system, or it makes different, you know, metaphysical or theological claims. But it's not actually that spooky, or, I say that as a person who's like, "Oh, I said in the door. Come through." But, you know, if you get used to it, it's not overwhelmingly mind-blowing. It's not like the movies. You're not going to crack open a book and suddenly you're not going to come out. Well, we all picture like Jack Parsons' basement with Elvren Hubbard and there's a pentagram in Crowley. Yeah. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Well, let's not, I don't want us to do that. Let's not mess with that. Why not? Because you said I don't know a lot during this segment, so I don't know if we should have candles and sheep's blood in the basement. Well, yes. I didn't say that. I did not advocate sheep's blood. Oh, granted, I know Parsons got a little iffy and Crowley definitely got a little iffy. But the core processes of magic aren't that different than prayer. And, in fact, you know, if you look at-- Or a mantra. Or a mantra. And if you look at the Catholic mass, objectively, right, wow, a whole lot of magical implementations, symbols, pieces and objects that have spiritual meaning, right, all around Latin or a very codified set of rituals that are supposed to produce an intended effect. Yes? Hmm. Hmm. Magic is no different. Now in fairness, you get into the grimoires, right, you start going in this, particularly from like the, you know, 15th century on, and it's all like, I'm going to call these demons. I'm like, well, you're an idiot, but okay, fine. If you want to mess with a chaos creature, hypothetically, whether it's a union an archetype in your mind or not, you go do that. But in terms of the actual procedure of magic, it's not much different than religion. It has some variations, it certainly has influenced religious history throughout in a very profound and powerful way. But the trick with modern esotericism is not so much you're doing this method or ritual, it's that you've been training your mind in certain forms of altered states of consciousness, visualization, right? And single-mindedness. In fact, everybody loves Peter Carroll, the chaos magician. I even came up with a mathematical formula, which, spoiler alert, I'm actually working on doing some maybe some actual studies that tease that formula apart, because I've found some ways to operationalize his formula. Oh, that's interesting. And I'm hoping I get to do that. I found ways to do that. Well, mathematically. Yeah, sure, absolutely. A lot of issues with science are just operationalization, right? When you really think about science, all you're really doing is I need a reliable way to measure this. And I need to make sure that what I think I'm measuring is what I'm measuring. And that's a lot of scale design, a mathematics, and you can do a pretty good job if you have a sufficient background to make sure that you're measuring what you're supposed to be measuring, which is why I don't like it when people who don't have backgrounds like in paranormal malady, or hauntings, or esotericism, or religion, sitting in a white tower in academia being like, I'm in the scale. I'm like, well, there's no guarantee that what these questions you designed with a tertiary knowledge are actually measuring what you think they're measuring. So who's the right person for that job? What background do you need? Or any given field? You need someone probably with cultural experience and the thing they're trying to measure. The current go-to measure for paranormal belief is, and I can never say this gentleman's name right, I think it's Tobitschek or Tobitschek, I'm not sure which is paranormal belief scale. But when I did the study with magical practitioners, they hated that scale. Why? Because it's basically built in 1980s, Satanic, Panic Protestantism. Okay, so what's on the scale? So then like, black cats are bad luck. Really? I believe in witches. And it's like, oh, man, for 2026, 20, I was like, it does not fit. Now, from 1980s, where you had the Satanic Panic and Protestantism was much more, you know, that would kind of make sense. But it's not culturally relevant anymore. In fact, I would personally-- Aziaz born on that list. Yeah, yeah. I would make the personal criticism and feel free to disagree. Someone can, that we probably need to retool paranormal belief measures. Because frankly, the culture has gotten a lot more broad, you know, what mediums think, versus ufologists think, versus occultists think, you know, it's-- they're-- they're Venn diagram overlapping, but they're not the same. And if we want real assessments of that belief in terms of what it predicts, I think it's probably time for researchers to get together. Each of them with a respective background in the actual culture they're trying to sample. Because it is, you know, kind of culturally specific, we probably need to go back and retool those and do new scales. I think you're right. Do we get a heaven when we die? Sure. The reason for the question is, how are we pulling discarnate entities out of wherever we go after this? How can you insult an abortion doctor and bring him back from-- he's in hell. How do you bring him back from wherever he is? I don't have-- I personally do not have fixed beliefs about the afterlife. You don't. In the sense of, I do think there is an afterlife. At the same time, I think that is one of the great metaphysics questions. And I won't lie, I've spent probably thousands of hours at night trying to think about models that might make sense about the idea of what happens when we die and how that happens. Do I think there is a heaven or a hell or maybe some version of it? I mean, yeah, I'm not sure I use the word heaven and or hell, I think depending on the religion you look at and the tradition you look at against different. I do think we persist. I'm not sure how much personally-- and I allow for discarnate agency. And by the way, the Catholic Church did too for a long, long time. Modern religion, particularly Protestantism, turned all of spiritual entities into God, angels, demons, maybe dead people, and that's it. Historically, the Catholics did not look at it that way. And frankly, they couldn't because for several hundred years, they were roaming around converting pagans, and they just kind of fit stuff in. In terms of that kind of answer, obviously, I don't have one, I wish I did. I think all the time about various models that might account for various major faiths and minor faiths and hierarchies. And again, I tend to turn back to as above so below. Personal take. Everything we see with our own naked eyes has hierarchy. We see ecosystems. We see larger and smaller. It would make sense to me that if there is a spiritual structure to the universe, that it is likely to follow a hierarchy or structure. What that looks like? Well, if prayer works, mantra's work, meditation works, you're tapping into some universal consciousness. Yeah. Manifestation, I believe that works. Yeah. I mean, we're sitting here. This is manifestation in practice. And there's a fair amount of studies that support it. Yes. Across the board. Yes. The government studied it. Yeah. Maybe these entities are part of that, or maybe we're pulling them back out of the universal consciousness. It could be. It may also be that there are levels of closeness to physical reality. That, you know, if you, well, the Kabbalic system, you know, angels, archangels, you know, astral realm, lower critters, higher critters, you know, chlephotic chaos entities, you know, you know, it's a model. Is it the right model? I don't know. But I would say from personal experience, I'm not sure. I think we overestimate how much genuine haunting where there's like anomalous phenomena. If you want to accept, you know, if you want to accept that there are, you know, intelligent agency, and I do personally believe that, I'm not so sure that it's dead people as often as we think it's dead people. That's interesting. Well, you know, if you, if you look at, you know, all of the folklore accounts of the sea, you know, with with Ireland and in Scotland, and even, you know, Native American myths, a lot of cultures account for nature spirits, middle spirits. And again, if we're going with an as above, so below, sort of hierarchy, there's going to be a tear. There's going to be, there's going to be a system of, of lower to higher entities. And I don't mean that like a evil good, sort of sense, you know, basic critters, just like frogs or not human beings, right, or animals or slightly intelligent, or maybe possibly, you know, if you move to animism, certain degrees or levels of current consciousness, you know, up to, you know, big boss management level angels and archangels that are handling the cogs of the universe, if you will. I'm not so sure that, you know, it's very popular to go, oh, it's a ghost. It is a dead person that is hanging around for some reason, and they're angry because they didn't get a Snickers bar before they died. Give them a Snickers bar. But if that was the case, I would expect to see a higher correlation between highly traumatic events and a history of a location and actual verifiable phenomena. And I have not found that relationship. I don't think that relationship is as solid as people think it is. Could it be something that's really just the intelligence of a critter that's just knocking glasses around just a disturbance in the force? I don't think it's entirely unintelligent. And in fact, I would even say like, in a lot of experiences I've had in haunted houses, if you again, you want to take it at face value, right? It is weird how many times there will be a phenomena that will kind of ramp up, that will be kind of spooky, until someone flips their litter, freaks out, cries, screams, strong emotional feed reaction, and then it goes quiet for the rest of the night. Almost as if it got fed. It got fed by negative energy. Why would it want to eat that? Well, if again, we're going with an ecosystem of spirit, things have got to feed on something. And I mean, this is demons, this is fairies, this is gin, this is in the east, they have spirits. It's all the same stuff. They all feed on negative energy. Or some kind of energy or some sort of output or, you know, there is some sort of interaction between the human and the spirit. In fact, I'm not sure I'll ever get to it, but I would love to start doing cross-cultural comparisons and actually getting large scores of accounts of various entities from gin, demons, angels, fairies, right? Strip the labels off. Look purely at the interaction, the behaviors, the consequences, the outcomes, the phenomenological pieces. They're going to line up. And yeah, to what extent do they mathematically line up? And then when you put the labels back, do you get the hierarchy you think you would? Probably not. That's an interesting turn. You know, again, that stuff's doable, but also that's. several hundred hours even with AI, you know, and that's always an issue when it comes to this stuff, which is labor and funding. Sometimes, you know, Jim Haran and I have put in insane amounts of time, and it's not our day job, just to do the work that we have. But, man, I would love to get my hands on a project like that, because it makes the skeptic happy and the believer happy. If you want to treat it purely as an anthropological or sociological cultural comparison of spiritual beliefs, great, that works. That works. If you want to infer that it's somewhat real, does that give us some implications about theological or metaphysical structure? Sure, you know, I wouldn't take much funding to do this. It wouldn't, it'd be more time and labor. And in fact, I've dug with AI a little bit, be like, how much can you actually get a hold of to where we can actually get, you know, actually database the raw accounts and it's like, I can get a hold of a fair amount, and I'm like, hmm, but again, I'm trying to slow down right now. But yeah, I mean, I do have, aside from the mainstream research, I have a lot of theology questions, and I have this burning desire to dig into it. I don't know how far I'll get, I don't know if it's good for me, but, you know, I'm just going to keep praying a lot and thinking about it and seeing where, where things go. Yeah, keep praying while you do this. KO, and you talked about her pulling up with a truckload full of stuff. What was in the truck? Oh, that's the original rig system. That's right, the rig, what is all that? Okay, so rigs is basically, you know, back in the day with the tech in the early nauties, you know, you had to, oh goodness, what's the tri-filled meters, right? Well, you had to specially pay just to get those connected with the jack. And then you had to run actual wire to an actual computer box with very specific software to data log the EMF. And so, Kayone was the first person who actually, by the way, kudos to her without a whole lot of educational background. She's like, by God, I'm just going to teach myself internet was young back in those days. She put together the first system, and then I put together an improved system based on her tech. But yeah, when we were doing, by the time we were doing black moon, it was a full truck bed of equipment. What made her go to EMF in the first place all those years ago? Did she start in like the 70s, 80s? I think she was active, I want to say she was active in the late 80s to the 90s. Okay. And, you know, again, I don't want to tell, I guess, too much of her story, but she was originally tapped to be the Ghost Hunters group. It would have been great, but they went with the plumbers. But no, she kept meticulous records for the time. I owe her a fair amount. She taught me the ropes of the original investigation, and I kind of went with her. Yeah, you guys did scientific method. Yeah. And that was our deal, because she was like, I can collect this data, I need help with the math. I'm like, I can do the math. And so that's where that started, and it built on from there. Tell me about Nell. Nell. You're going to have to contact me. Which one of the study. Oh! She's the retired healthcare worker. Yes, with the San Antonio Disturbances? Yes. Yes. So that was one of our haunted people syndrome, case studies, that we did down in Texas. And that is a complicated story. I mostly want to know about Nell. Well, I want to be careful, because I don't want to break ethics in terms of. Don't do that. Just what kind of person she was. She was, and I don't think it's unethical to say this, haunted by a lot of difficulty. As we say in the paper, she had moved in five locations over I think ten years. The reported phenomena that she said she experienced, with her every time. What happened to her? Oh, let me thank. It's been a while. Because she could not get away from it. No. She had a whole lot of physical signs. She reported a lot of personal Aboriginal experiences. She reported a fair amount of psychokinesis with smaller objects. If I'm remembered correctly, don't quote me on this, a fair amount of physical illness. It did spread, the phenomena spread to her daughter and her granddaughter. Her husband was involved with it. Even after they left that left her, this is a hitchhiker effect. And in fact, I was talking to Jim, and she has moved a couple of times since. We did that paper, and the phenomena has still continued. Wow. In terms of how much of that was verifiable, when we deal with that case, that is very much more of a cultural psychological manifestation of haunted people syndrome. What are the conditions by which this person is persistently haunted? And what are the disease or psychological effects that are happening as a result? And she has persistently just continued to have problems. Did you have some early trauma? When did the. She reported, and I believe this is also in the report, so I think I'm safe there. She reported very negative spiritual experiences in childhood. Yep. By the way, there's not a lot of good studies on this, but I keep getting this is trauma-related too. In fact, we have another reporter who's kind of digging into that right now. I really do think there is a relationship between childhood/supernatural, spiritual, and normal trauma, and people being kind of prone to anomalous experience. Because could this be person here again? I don't think so. You don't think so. And actually, in a Nell's case, I believe her family, if I remember incorrectly, oh man, I hope I'm not wrong on this, maybe you take cognitive psychology, and then you proactive and retroactive memory interference, and then you never trust your memory again. And you're like, "Dah!" I want the certainty back. Yeah, let me know how that works for you. I'm looking for mine too. Well, middle-aged doesn't help either, but no, if I remember, because I think we were in the car and we were talking about it, we were driving around one time, both her grandmother or her mom reported a whole lot of spiritual negative experiences, and she reported childhood experiences that were near-terrifying. So these were not hitting the gag experience now? No, I believe they were awake. And then there might have been some that were, but no, I think spiritual intrusion, if you wanted to find out that way culturally, was very much part of her life and has been since childhood. No, her story is very sad. And I feel bad that we weren't able to provide her better methods for relief. I have some more questions about her, but let's take a quick break and we'll come back and talk about haunted people. Okay. I'm going to get a little random now. All my questions that don't fit into the structure. Ask your questions, Bridgekeeper. I'm not afraid. Well, the first one's kind of scary. It's only about the baby and the gas demon, put us in the room. The baby and the gas demon. Oh my goodness, you're going to have to give me some reference for that one. It was kind of like an exorcism. Oh, I don't even know. You're referring to something I saw when I was like 15 or 16 years old. Back in the day, I used to spend time with various different churches and denominations. Some of those were Pentecostal and Pentecostals are so interesting. And I remember specifically I was at a friend's house and these individuals were very devout and they picked up the baby that was crying and they literally did a prayer over the baby to exercise the gas demon from the baby's tummy. Did they mean that? No, no, no. Seriously? Yes, they were very serious. They were very serious. I was very devout, too, but I mean, I was a Methodist, so I was like, okay, I did spend some time with Pentecostals. I saw some very awesome instances of Glossalaya where the speaking and tongues occurred. I even saw in those Pentecostal churches, people taken over by the Spirit, slain in the Spirit, where the preacher would be like in the Spirit is upon you and they would flop over and roll around and laugh and you know, bubbles in their stomach and in fact, I even had an episode. Now looking back on it, I'm like, wow, that was some just interesting suggestion, persuasion effects, but I actually had an episode back in those days where the preacher hit me and I'm like, huh? What? I didn't work. You did. What's happening there? If I remember this sensation, it really did create some moderate psychosomatic symptoms. I felt very kind of light-hearted and kind of bubbly. I felt strange almost tingly for a minute or two and then I came out of it. But I do remember being kind of ambushed. I think I ended up going up, I mean, this was several decades ago and of course, you know, the preacher hit. By the way, for the record and college classes down the road, I would use this in terms of suggestion hypnosis responses, right? And I was going to ask, do you need to be suggestible for that to work? Like, if I don't believe that's kind of don't believe he can do that, I kind of think you did that. - If we move into the psychology of it. - Yes, and on-- - Well, let's wrap up the baby demon. - Oh, okay. - How do we solve the baby gas demon? - Oh, they actually praised God after the baby farted or belched. I can't remember. - And demon was expelled, evidently. - Evidently, yes. - Okay. - Well, there's some parenting advice. - Yeah. - So, okay, good. - I'm going in and test while the stress gets bad. - It's just demon and just fart and you're fine. - I need a young priest, a young old priest. Yeah. - But no, you're now you're talking about hypnosis. - Yes. - Right, conscious suggestibility. And of course, you know, the funny thing is with production and television, it's not like those effects are used in various ways to create various effects. - Sure. - But suggestion is insanely powerful. Now, the official, you know, the official data suggests that maybe about 10% of the population is fully suggestible. So, in other words, you know, I can run routines. And in fact, I used to have a hypnosis class in psychology where we would, for, you know, poop and giggles, I would do conscious suggestion effects. And we'd even do exercises. We'd do the balloon exercise or the balloon exercise your left hand has a balloon tied to it, you're right. - Well, we've all been to those shows. I've been to one here in Vegas and one of my friends, she went up there and was clucking like a chicken. - Yep. - And she swears that she didn't, wasn't playing along. And she actually did that and I'm like, come on. - Yeah, no, no, it is real. I did that, I stopped doing that class after a while because I had one person went fully under. - Really? - Which is from a suggestion exercise. Like, I would do mild induction just to see if they were suggestible. And that student went completely under and blacked out for like five minutes. And I'm like, okay, time to stop. - Yeah. - I mean, no harm, no foul. She was fine, nothing inappropriate. Got her out, no side effects, yay, right? But no, you can do with, I used to use the balloon exercise, balloon brick exercise with hands, with deep breathing, I turn off the lights and everything else, to see who was suggestible. And then I'd say, you know, are there students who are willing to go further with this? And I do the whole, you can't pull your hands apart. - Sure. - And it's not hard with a person that has a mild degree of suggestibility. And of course, no doubt being an authority figure as a professor adds to it, right? So there's all these components, a lot of that has to do with belief. - What makes someone suggestible? Is it physiological? - I don't believe they actually know. - Is it, is it have to do with intelligence? - I don't think that would be the case either. - Really? Now, again, this is me talking outside my area of expertise. But to my knowledge, they've never really done a whole lot of neurological correlates or physiological correlates with hypnosis. Which, you know, notably as a side note, is pretty much an occult technique they ripped from. - Sure it is. - Or ripped from esotericism and then slapped label on it. - I bet the military has studied this. - Oh, I'm sure they have. And that's one thing I'm discovering the more I try to dig around on data. That's proprietary. I'm like, it's sort of a buck. I have, you know, I have a feeling a lot of social psychological and artifacts are sitting either in the military or a corporation or a marketing firm. And we're never gonna see that data. - Yep. - Which makes me sad 'cause I really wanna see that data. But, you know, they did it, they have rights to it. But no, there is, and of course, you know, that also raises the question. To what extent you're like, oh, well, you're just consciously effect. Sub-facial cues and your actions are causing, I'm like, is it? You know, I have questions about contagion effects. Is there possibly psi going on in a contagion effect? Because when you look at the way it's measured, same thing with suggestibility and hypnosis. You're, you can't explain the mechanism. You're looking at person A, trying to influence person B, and then you observe the effects of person B, but it is very unclear in any objective sense. What is going on in between there? - We don't have any brain scans of someone who's under. - We do. - No, no, because, and this is, this is-- - Why not? - Well, but okay, you're making me talk away outside my field. So, I'm sure-- - I do that for a living. - Yeah, the comment section's gonna be unpleasant. - Nobody wants to hear to my knowledge. And actually, I feel fairly confident about this. Technology in terms of neuronal structure, right? What can we actually do in terms of measuring the brain? They're still using EEGs, and EKGs, and maybe MRIs, but there's only so much you can do with a person in a $2 million donut. - Right. - True. - And it's only so fast, right? Offhand, I can't remember how many times a neuron fires per second, right? If you want to get at the hard problem of consciousness, you want to get at all this stuff, then you're gonna have to have technology that not only fits on your helmet, but it measures at a resolution and a frequency so much beyond what we're currently doing, unless the military, or the grays have it. 'Cause who the hell knows? You have to have a resolution of technology that we're not even close to. And I respect, I'm not saying that brain chemistry functions or that neuroscience is incorrect. I'm just owning that the technology in terms of what we can really claim about it, which essentially still relates to this area lights up and this area lights up. - Right. - Now what's going on in those areas, right? - It's on or it's off. - There's still a bunch of neurotransmitters, they have no clue about what they do. So, and I'm not saying it's not a noble field, it's a good field. I think the claims that get made about, we've proven that the brain, I'm like, eh! - Have you? - Yeah, it's like you've found evidence that supports a theory to a certain percentage extent, which is a true and fair statement. - It is. - That's good research. - But it's not, you know, again, I keep coming back to this theme. There's a whole lot of stuff that we haven't dug into sufficiently to, I would say, merit some of the claims that get made. Particularly when it comes to this idea of materialism and the brain is consciousness. I don't think, we're no, we're close to that. In fact, I've made some people angry, and I'm sure there's something that would disagree. They're like, well, this proves the brain causes them, like, well, unless it's a receiver. - What do you think? Is it a risk here? - I personally, not being an expert, think it's a cloud model. - So, universal consciousness, and we're at a terminal? - Well, yeah, very similar to, you know, if you use Google products, right? If you use Google Sheets, right? There's a little bit of software that's in your browser. - Yep. - And then there's a lot of processing going on somewhere else. And I've seen some theorists suggest that some quantum behavior is now possible in the brain. Like, before they were saying that, it's just too hot and liquidy in there. - No. - First up, but I think the new research is suggesting, or at least the theorists are suggesting, like, oh, contrary. - Oh, contrary, yeah. - Again, outside my expertise level. - No, quantum processing in warm, wouldn't. Animals has been proven. - Yeah, that's a fact. - But if I was gonna put money on something, I would say I think more of a cloud model. I think there's some processing I think that's going on, but I do believe in a soul. - So, you know, an individual unique soul? - Yes, but I've been influenced by, like, Dion Fortune and some other thinkers who are like, well, you kind of shed part of the personality and there's like a core component that goes up. I'm not saying I buy into that lab. I'm not saying, like, that's it, but I'm like, okay. - I lean there. - Maybe. - Yeah, you know, fitting in reincarnation and all this other stuff into a universal model, I, good luck. - It's, I kind of feel like we log out. We take our, whatever we learned back to wherever we go. - Yeah. - Your soul group or whatever says, how was it? You go, that was okay. Let's try it again and you come back and you do it again. - I will say, since I'm giving controversial opinions today, I do get nervous of the spiritual messages that conveniently only reflect moral values that we only gave a crap about for the last 50 years. - Like what? - Well, you know, if aliens or medium spirits come down and they're like, you must care about the environment. The environment is, you know, it's like, okay, so no deep spiritual truths, no like, be nice to one another, we all need to hug and recycle. I'm like, no, not so much. And I only say that because as a social psychologist, I'm like, how is this not just a reflection of current social values manifesting? - It is. - Right? Now, you start to show me accounts where people are showing me sort of like kind of deep and sustaining moral tendencies or belief. I might tend to take that more seriously. But I tend to get suspicious as soon as I hear a trendy moral response out of a person that's, you know, either channel to UFO or had a UFO experience or had, you know, or medium, mediumship sort of responses. But that's my bias. I think that seems to be more of, well, I'll reframe. We're dirty test tubes. It's obvious we're dirty test tubes. And so I think if you wanted to go into like a metaphysics model or a spiritual model, there's the idea that we can have this divine pure, right? You know, channel come down, but because we are dirty test tubes, and that's not even an opinion, right? We know that we don't perceive everything around us accurately. We know, you know, I can't know what's going on in your head. We have used language symbolically. We've got limits. We have our belief systems, our culture, right? That shapes how we're going to interpret this information. I think it's difficult to assume that a person is ever getting a pure message. Personal take, but I mean, there's a fair amount of good philosophy and evidence that would support that claim. - There is. So yeah, I'm not sure what to make of the modern revelation. over the last hundred years. I'm not saying there's not some legitimate cases and I certainly wouldn't debunk all of them as not paranormal or not having some sort of quote unquote truthiness to them. But my general rule with all this stuff is we should critique ourselves. You know, the difference between a Jim Jones cultist and someone that is spiritually seeking is their ability to look inside themselves, be introspective and go, "Hmm, this might not be a good idea." And in fact, if you go back to magical practice, one of the, you know, one of the things that Victorians consistently said is, "Yeah, get in the therapy." Don't get you some therapy. In fact, the golden dawn, not that it's the end all be all, but they're like at some point you need to go see a psychotherapist. And I think the reason for that was very clear cut. You need to be able to go, you know, if we accept that people are getting spiritual messages or messages in general. But let's be clear, these are internal to the mind, right? So these are some form of, if you wanted to convert this completely outside of spiritual outing, but let's just go Jungian. Let's accept that the unconscious can split off and it can. We know that. Multiple personality. Right? So that's not a stretch. So let's say that you've, and I think that's a good part of magical practice, which is you're getting these conversations or intuitions or information almost like a dialogue. And, you know, the rule of thumb is, if it's telling you you're awesome, it's probably bullcrab. And I think this is also why people that move, that can move into mediumship or magical practice of any form. If they're not, and this isn't easy, I want to be clear, this isn't an easy step to take. In fact, I think it's difficult. If you can't develop the ability to critique yourself and your own internal thought mechanisms. That stuff is dangerous. You know, you will look at a lot of, you know, once you get past the grimoires into the Victorian age, you will see a lot of people making claims going, this is not for everybody. It's not. And I don't think they were, I mean, yes, they were all rich. So probably I wasn't a little bit of a lead, but aside from that, I think there's an underlying message, which is the case. Not everyone is mentally prepared to dig inside their psyche and go on a voyage. And if there's a lot of denial in your life, if there's, you know, if you haven't come to terms with the fact that you can be an asshole sometimes, because a lot of people don't like that, right? A lot of people don't, you know, and our culture doesn't value that either. You know, everyone else is the bad guy, but not you H.A. You're special. You know, and in every human being, you know, you know, classic, you know, and classic Freud, right? Everybody has a dark side. And, you know, and that's why, particularly with you, he was like, you're not going to become enlightened, individuated, right? Until you embrace your shadow. And what was the shadow? All the repressed crap you do that you don't want to earn or own, right? You know, so if you want to look at spiritual experiences as a, just a union psychological journey, I don't care. You know, if it works, who cares? That is a serious journey and it does have dangers and it requires a degree of honesty with the self that our culture doesn't engender. Our cultural culture does not teach people to be selective and critical of their own thought processes. So let's say I'm not mentally prepared to do it. I do it anyway. What could happen? I think you are going to end up in a state of existential crisis. I think depending on genetic reclivity and the degree to which you are in a state of denial, you may end up in a breakdown state. I think I might facilitate anxiety. I think, so don't mess with this. So is this why golden dawn says see a therapist? How do you need to rule out everything else? Yeah, I wouldn't even say rule out. I think it's more of, you know, the magicians in those days, the left hand pile from the right hand pile. I just do it for spiritual enlightenment, like, oh, practical magic is dirty. I'm like, yeah, okay, whatever. But the truth is you are messing with your own mind in this process, whether you want to accept, whether you want to accept the spiritual component of it or not, you are still internally going into the imaginal state, into your own internal thought processes and poking around it things that we don't train people to poke around at. And yes, this doesn't need to be parapsychological at all. No, this is just you messing with your own head. No, and I've had volunteers back in the day who frankly just were not a fit to do investigations. I remember there was a minister who joined for a while, and the phenomena did match the belief system and it was causing crisis and it got out. My guess would be people that are highly suggestible would not be good on an investigation. As subjects, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, yes, but no, in terms of their mental health now. And we've had a couple of situations over the years where that has gone very, very south. So do you want to tell us one of those stories or no? Oh, okay. Well, I think you're coffee. Mental courage. I'll have some nicotine or buckle, buckle it up. So the reason, the reason we stopped doing investigations, oh, you stopped. Oh, yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. So we had what you can either call a dissociative fugue or amnesia or a full-blown possession. This is dissociative fugue, so you don't know what's going on at all. Yeah, blank out for 30 to 45 minutes with radical change in behavior. It happened to two different people on two different occasions. One went into a full-blown, you know, again, I'm sorry, I always whiffle waffle on terminology. One went into what would look like a full-blown possession. And this happened in the same place. Yep. Same place. Yep. And in fact, entity with two people. Looks like it. What? And this is where you just throw science out the window and you're like, well, this happened interpreted as you will. Is this the place where you said I'm not going anymore? Yes. And in fact, that place was so bad we called the owners and said you need to not let people in here anymore. What happened to those people who went into a fugue state? So okay, we did four investigations of that place over a period of about a year and a half. It was an abandoned rectory. I think it's actually been on a couple of ghost hunting shows back in the day. Since Cincinnati, I think was called the Sedomsville rectory. It did produce knocking and wrapping. It did produce really loud, weird noises. But I think it was the second session or the second time we were there. My very good friend and we're still a great friend. She helps me with the business. I remember sitting across from her and I looked over and I know her really well and she got this look in her eyes that said, I'm about to beat the living crap out of you. I mean like it was just seething anger. I know her really well, which is a switch or was this just sitting there doing nothing, not talking enough and all of a sudden just this and I'm like, did I do something wrong? And she got up, walked out of the house with a five pound flashlight, which is why I was kind of being careful with her, because I'm like, that's brain damage if it hits. And basically for about 10 minutes was just roaming around in this state of extreme rage and anger, half out of it, half in it. By the way, historically, psychologically, never saw that behavior out of that individual before. Not her nature. What was she saying? She didn't talk. I remember correctly. She was kind of grit and her teeth. Did she eat anything? No. It was just awful. And it was outside. It was cold that night, I believe. And after being away from the building in about five minutes, she basically said, I was going to murder you. Wow. She was like, I thought, now here's what's interesting. The owners of this location were suffering from similar problems. The marriage evidently, if I remember correctly, was in great degree of discord because either the husband or the wife, and I think it was the husband, was going into these fits of uncontrolled rage. And it was becoming a persistent issue, but only him, if I remember correctly, yes. And so, you know, and again, there was no, there were no triggers to this whatsoever. There wasn't a conversation. I wasn't poking her. The other team wasn't insulting, like in other words, there was just quiet, we were doing our shift in those days to minimize interference. I was like, look, we don't roam around, okay? We set up our hotspot areas. You pick the spot, sit your butt down, and that's where you're going to be. If you're going to get up, great, but say, hey, I'm leaving this area for the auto recorder, and then, you know, go to the new area, and then sit down. Let's not make shuffling noises. Let's not make right. Let's minimize contamination as much as possible. And so, yeah, for about, I think, it was about a duration of 15 or 20 minutes. That's a long time to be in that state. I mean, you have to be, when do you start to panic? Like, is she ever going to be okay again? Well, I wasn't worried on that when it's the next one that scared us, because she did come out. And then, yeah, basically, you know, long story short, it was like, I really felt like murdering you. isn't fully disassociated, she was-- No, but she was somewhat disassociated. So she said she felt kind of detached and that she wasn't herself and that getting out of the house helped. So move forward. And we had another member who was perfectly fine going up the stairs. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. And then they went into a full dissociative state, except at this point, same anger in the eyes, except-- and this is completely personal. Something else appeared seemed to me to be there. Like, my intuition went off bad on this one. I was like, OK. So you weren't questioning, did I do something? You saw-- Yeah, I was-- You recognized this. Yeah, and if I remember correctly, I still have these tapes, and I'm almost afraid to go through them. No, we need to see them. Well, this was mostly audio. I don't think we caught a whole lot of it on camera, because here's what went down. This person started behaving completely opposite to their nature. This is an old directory? Yes. And at that point, I actually went-- and I never did this in the group. I kept it scientific. But at this point, I'm like-- and kind of growling angry. At the time, I still have leg issues. But at the time, I had to use cane, because I blew out my hip and my leg a little bit. So I tried to actually kick my leg out from underneath me. And was proud of it. It was like, I'm going to kick your leg out, all right? So interestingly enough, because we had had this episode before I actually took the time to make holy water-- black a bit of words. Old school was salt in it, right? So I actually made a circle around her. And it took her five minutes to get out of it. Holy water circle? Couple of invocations made a circle. I'm like, because I was like, this might be serious. So I took it as kind of serious. And so yeah, I made a circle. And she struggled with it for about three to five minutes. And when she got out, she was proud. She said, she said, I broke your circle. Wow. And I was like, me being a cocky bastard. I'll just make another. But I was dealing with a different person. Now, whether you want to call that dissociative identity, whether you want to call that some sort of psychological condition, I ended up, by the way, consulting some other PhD clinical psychologists to be like, what was this? And the one guy in particular was like, I was a possession. I'm like, well, shit, I don't know. But we, at that point, it went from a scientific investigation to a, we may have a possession on our hands. What the hell are we going to do here? And so this individual, we finally got them outside. They were physically resistant. Physically resistant. Yeah. So they were, they were combative. One of the members there who had just come with us started asking some questions in Latin, to which she was responding correctly, even though she didn't have a Latin background. Oh, no. And interestingly, there were some reports. And again, you know, you don't have to believe in it. I'm just telling you the story. There were some members that were claiming that they were getting impressions from her, even though they weren't in the same room. So there was a lot of weirdness going on. And to this day, we're not entirely sure. But at the end of the day, she was outside for about 30, 40 minutes and 20, 30 degree weather. We were chasing after her. She remained violent. She remained obstinate. She was cussing. She was-- and then finally, with a fair amount of prayer and a cup of holy water on her head, she snapped out of it. To which she blacked out. She said she didn't remember a thing. She didn't remember any of this. Nope. Now, interestingly, post-hoc, she would find herself-- if I remember correctly, the story is correctly-- she would find herself coming back to the website of the location and not notice that she had gone to the computer and pulled up the pictures. And she would report, feeling a longing to go back there. Wow. So you know-- I don't know why that's bothers me, but it does. It lingered. Symptoms of that lingered for, I want to say, almost two to three months. And I'll be honest with you at that point, because up into that point, I'm like, I do science, right? And the members were aware. I dabbled with some Tom Follary, so to speak. But I never went in that direction. It was always we're here for the data. That turned into, basically, a religious exorcism episode. And it was so disturbing to the members that we just broke everybody up. Rumor has it. The one person that came with us as a guest never talked to us again and went into the priesthood. I don't know if that's really true, but that's the rumor. It fundamentally shook the entire group to its core. And pretty much broke the investigation team up for quite a while. Is that the only place that you said not going back? Oh, yeah. I mean, I've seen a lot about it. So it takes a lot to scare you off. Oh, yeah. And honestly, I could confront that again, but I do have a sense of ethics, and I'm like, I was not comfortable putting people at risk. Well, that's really the thing. You could confront it, but if you're not the one chosen, you put someone else in danger. I mean, at the end of the day, I was the one that tried to push it out if you want to believe it. And it worked. Yay. Wouldn't want to do it twice in one night. No. And again, this is all personal. Certainly outside of my realm as a scientist, but know the phenomena that occurred from that was mind-boggling. And to this day, I mean, I'm not throwing shade on the person to happen to. I can't prove that that wasn't a dissociative episode. I can't prove she was prone to kind of psychosomatic effects. OK. That was certainly beyond her normal mode of behavior. And of course, we called them and said, you all need to get rid of this place. You need to get rid of the furniture. You need to not let people in here. It's dangerous. Do you think if they knock that building down that the entity would still be there? My understanding is they did shut it down. Now, I don't know if the building's still there. I mean, knock that. You got to knock it down. I would not disagree. And probably salt the earth. Salt the earth. From the spiritual perspective, I'd say salt the earth. Because something, something not nice is there. You know, the funny thing is. And again, to take this for what it's worth. It was either the first one or the second one. You know, they looked at me at some point and they're like, well, they really want you. And I'm just like, OK. OK, that's enough. Yeah. So it's. And you know, if you want a frame for it, acted like a demon. Was it a demon? What do you think? But seemed to be a demon that very much fed on sexuality and emotion. So if you were going to go. Cabal classification, the clip with correspondingly niche. So nature. If you don't, then you say dissociative few or a brief psychotic episode, but not necessarily history of that. If you had no history of that, then I don't buy that. Yeah. And again, I don't formally lean one way or another. I'm like, this was a very weird, liminal thing that happened. And it was sufficiently weird and disturbing enough to prevent us from moving forward. How is she doing now? Not entirely clear. It calls, it calls splits. So I very much hope they're well. But yeah, that was a, that was a bit of a bender. I told you, I'm not really a believer of a kind of, but not really a kind of, I had a night-hag experience without knowing the lore of that before. Yeah. And maybe mid-30s happened on vacation at a kind of an old hotel. And it was the scariest experience of my life before and since. And it felt very real. Like this old woman climbing into bed or pressed down. I, it was, there was sexual violence. I've told, I've said this story on the channel so you could find the whole thing in detail. I couldn't go back in the room. My wife had to pack us up. We had to leave the building. And I'm not really a believer. You did a lesson on you to me on the night-hag. Yes. Yes. What is going on with her? Okay. Before I go into that, I'm going to back up and make a general statement, because, you know, and we kind of touched this earlier. Well, I can explain this. Well, I was still terrified. Thanks. You know, like, so there's a point where if it brings comfort to explain it in scientific terms, you know, we're almost moving to a clinical psychology realm. Great. I tell myself it's hypnagogic. Yeah. But it didn't feel like it, man. And, and, you know, in terms of the research of sleep paralysis, slash hypnagogic episodes, they're one overlapping. And, again, not well defined. You know, they're case studies. They're post-hoc accounts, again, in terms of slapping an EEG. I mean, they have done EEG studies, but with sleep paralysis. But when you get that combination of the night-hag and everything else, those accounts, you can label them scientifically. We can see a set of symptoms that are likely with sleep, sleep paralysis in particular. But why her? I wasn't, I had no prime, I wasn't primed for that at that time. Well, were you, um, were you poking around with anything, guys? No. nope nope okay um you know and again if we go beyond the you had a hypnogaga episode of sleep paralysis and your mind created it I mean if you want to go a pure scientific explanation maybe you watch some sort of horror movie or a film that unconsciously embedded in your mind my internal my but the real question is why are we why is that this old woman that a lot of us see I don't mean why don't watch horror movie I don't like horror movies so why do we see the why not an old man why not a red demon with horns well I would have you read Hufford no you might want to you might want to get a terror that comes the night oh great by Hufford well what he does is he does a cultural comparison of nighthag experiences so you might actually find some psychological comfort in that and what he does is he makes a separation between what's called the experiential source hypothesis and the cultural source hypothesis and his whole premise was either this phenomena has some sort of this experience of the nighthag has some core actual phenomenological reality right some sort of core real experience that you know culture is laying on top of it or it's purely a cultural source right now we know that sleep paralysis and versions of the nighthag occur cross culturally yes right so Cheyenne's a good resource for that there's a couple of others that have published last few years but I don't remember the names after I told the story to the audience email just went crazy yeah a thousand people we all saw the same thing and I'm trying and I'm trying not to apply I'll apply my belief I'll be like you I'll play the belief and I'll do the opposite I'll play the belief at the end okay so we know sleep paralysis right essentially is the motor cortex shuts down at night so you don't act out your dreams and jump out a window you know yes and then of course when it comes back you know it's not on yet so that's paralysis yep by the way neat trick for anyone that goes through this if you have repeated sleep paralysis the trick is not moving your body the trick is moving of single digit okay I've had one episode and luckily luckily I learned this before I had the episode so you focus on your finger your toe what was your episode I didn't have any sort of phenomena with it I just woke up and couldn't move and I and I remember it took about 45 seconds to the panic sets in because in fact the panic is a very common feature of this occurring early on unreasonable panic sure I'm a lucid dreamer so you learn to get past the buzzing yeah and I've actually got better fluency dreaming over the years but anyway but I remember my episode I'm like and within like 30 because I knew the panic was coming right I'm like I know it's coming I got to get it and I managed to get the finger wiggling and I snapped out of it in time so there is obviously a biological component to it sure a neurological biological component to it but Huffer did show that there are very much cross-cultural comparisons and Corsian in South America showed this as well in Mexico that this some version of the night hag has different representations across multiple cultures now you can say that this just is a combination of sleep paralysis which is very obviously measurable plus a hypnogogic episode right right and in fact I believe in hypnogogic episodes to the point that if a person reports haunting phenomena coming out of sleep or into sleep I tend to be like probably hypnogogic sure right or hit hypnopompic depending on whether they're awake or sleep right but again from Huffer to another sources there have been both subjective and objective paranormal that can be associated with those episodes that are more difficult to explain oh boy so if you want me to tell you with a hundred percent certainty that that was just you in your head I'm not gonna tell you that you know back to our earlier conversation when I was 12 or 13 I had a visit from something I do not remember specific trigger I do remember I set up out of bed and then there was just something in the room that I couldn't see positioned at the doorway couldn't see but knew it was there yep absolute feeling of evil yes oppression yes and again I'm in the doorway you can't get out and it stayed with me all night all night which frankly was responsible for my religious conversion it terrified me so badly that that's that's what ended up leaning me towards thinking about seminary as a teenager of course it would anyone who's had this experience knows how real it feels now you know related to what you experienced I subsequently found out that where I grew up had a lot of not friendly things around yeah I don't have a better word for this some land is friendly some land less so I happen to live next to a a Boy Scout camp with a 30-year history oh no a very very very crazy phenomena but the thing is where I live is about as peaceful and kind as you can imagine but I kid you not you drive seven miles and suddenly you're like did I just enter the set of focus focus what the hell is this you could feel that oh yeah I and you can almost even see it in the terrain it just it feels fundamentally different there was a church about a mile and a half more I lived and there's a road that goes all the way around and by the time I was of driving age none of my friends would drive around that church because we used to do it I remember particularly I had a friend we drove around it we're sitting in the car and I get this overwhelming feeling something nasty in the back seat in the back seat in the back seat like someone was hitching a ride yeah it was it was and I remember looking over at my friend and going and I didn't say a word he's like yeah I know I just gave me chills yeah he's like yeah no I know and from that point forward there's another route to my house we just everybody just took it around it and I didn't even tell my friends take that route you know one crazy hypothesis I can't back up is that whatever was there from that church could get just far enough that it came to visit me in my teenagers yeah you know if you want the non-psychological explanation yeah I don't know but you know back to your case you know if I was you I'd be inclined to start looking in my family history to see if you have practitioners see if you have people with curses see if you have lineages of people that dabbled with stuff they shouldn't oh I'm from Southern Italy and they did all that oh yeah yeah you're screwed it's full Catholicism I mean you know sometimes they didn't just stick with the Saints yeah I wear Saint Michael every day yeah you know and and also keep in mind you know why the Grimwar survived right why because preschool yes so you might want to look a little bit into your family history I might just leave it alone or just yeah just gonna leave it alone but no I mean you know you want the standard answer yep you had a hypnagogic episode with sleep paralysis that's what I'm going with or some hot old lady decided to have her way with you is sexual violence part of the con is that common it can it can be I've seen accounts that have definite sexual content to them and I would imagine that is because I make that joke but I would imagine that is even more horrifying and terrifying and we had to we had believe and sure I'm not afraid of anything sure well I mean from a clinical psychology perspective right I'm not a clinician but I play one on TV you know good move why not what do you have to prove to anybody right like I just had a traumatic experience I know I'll confront that right now nope or go home yeah yeah yeah interestingly I did in the last year get contacted by a person who repeatedly was having very traumatic succubus incubus experiences and they reported a lot of that it it happens evidently there's a reason that succubus incubus is art exist yeah so you know and again all of this comes down to it's some kind of real you know if you want to if you want to debunk it or you want to find you want to find mainstream explanations you can and you probably will there's an overlap there at the same time I think sometimes we don't pay enough attention to the fact of was it real to you sure was and and what were the consequences of that and how did you know it much more than a clinical psychology perspective and it's why we've written some papers on haunted people syndrome for clinicians right how do you address this without you know because it's not good clinical psychology be like you're full of shit that's an apple you just broke rapport bad right you're crazy like okay that's not how you start a therapy session you know if these people believe it where it's rational you know whether it's debunkable or not if it's not about I'm right you're wrong and honestly I think sometimes we get too far into that with some of this stuff you know it is about what did you experience what did you perceive how are you processing it and are you okay and if you're not okay how can we help you cope with what you're experiencing in a way that makes sense to you that fits with your value system that fits with your belief system and I don't care whether you're right or wrong I don't care whether other people agree with you or not that's really not the point the point is here's where you're at and really that's the heart of good therapy period right it's you know good therapy is not let's look at this external standard and make you conform to it a good therapy is selfish where are you at where would you like to be for you How do we take steps in your life? It's also true with anxiety and depression, right? The meds don't fix much. No, they don't. And, of course, now they have that whole line of research coming out where they're saying they've never had a good relationship between anxiety and depression alleviation and psychotropic meds. Not shocked by that. I worked a psych ward for two years. But again, if we come back to therapy, removing politics, removing ideology, and certainly removing non-data-based interventions, it does come down to let's be selfish, let's talk about you, let's talk about what you're experiencing, let's talk about are you willing to look at what you're doing? How's that working for you? That's a critical question. But again, introspection, because rule number one of therapy, if you don't want help, nobody can help you. If you don't want to look at things and change things and do some work, it's just like physical therapy. If you break a leg, you want to fix it, that physical therapy is going to suck. Well, unfortunately, therapy has a suckiness component to it, because over time, the therapist is going to have to get you to a point where you're willing to confront uncomfortable things. And in theory, in a supportive environment where you're not alone and go, okay, now that we've looked at this, what do you think we can do together to make it better? From the whole goal for therapy, should be not that you match group A, B, or C, it should be how much have we improved your well-being on a day-to-day basis? How many techniques and strategies have we given you? So that if we can't get rid of it, we can help you mediate it, moderate it, make it, and give you back really, because I think a lot of issues with psychology and psychological disorders is that theft of control. That's true. That means need a sense of control, and that full circle is back to our belief systems. Why do people stick to these belief systems, because they're using them to make sense of the world around them? Right. And human beings do not like it when they don't have control. No, they don't. And prediction is a form of control. That's true. Prediction is a massive form of control, right? That's the appeal of mainstream religion. Here is one book. The book has a complete set of answers, and it gives you a worldview and a map of the universe by which you know what the hell is going on. And you know how it ends? Yeah. And by the way, no judgment there. I'm jealous. Me too. I'm a questioner. I'm born. I'm not Judas. Oh my goodness. I'm a doubting Thomas. Right? Sure. I'm a believer, but I'm a Thomas. And I envy people. People who know for sure they're going to heaven. God bless them. And more importantly, I would never want to take that from them. Never. Because I love to have that. Because that's what they use to make peace with a world that is not a kind world. Those and those people are very kind people. They can be or sometimes they can be mean and aggressive, but they can't. But they can. But for the most part, in my experience, people who are very faithful are very, very nice. My hero is my grandmother who had a fourth grade education with stoke as all get out. If she taught, she had something to say. Otherwise, she didn't smarter than most people I've ever met in my life. I miss her dearly. She's passed away for, uh, was it 10 years now, 15 years now, um, but she lived a long time. 11 years. Yeah, she made it to 90. She made it to 90. She made it to 90. Um, and in fact, when I had those experiences back in the day, I'd end up spending a lot of time in my grandma's because my room got a little tainted, right? Of course. But she was insanely wise. Um, did you know how lucky you were to have her that long? Oh, yeah. No. She's, uh, she's missed. What a gift, ma'am. But full circle. Yep. Yeah, you had a weird experience. I did. But here's the other thing too. Um, throwing this out here, why not engage in some spiritual protection measures? If it works, who cares? It can't hurt. Right. The old Pythagorean. Yeah. Why not? Couldn't I? Stay with his heroin, uh, mind-breaking soul-destroying, uh, history, uh, definitely believed in it. He did. Don't go down that route. Um, but, um, but yeah, uh, you know, and that, that, I think sometimes that's where, uh, I'll frustrate my colleagues who are much more skeptical than I am. And they're like, but it can't be, I'm like, it doesn't work. Oh, I don't care. You know, it is. The wife will be like, why is your salt and chalk everywhere? What are you, what are you doing? Yeah. It's like, that's, that's the situation. You remember? She remembers. This is almost 20 years ago. If you need to put a full size, you know, a Solomon circle with the Hebrew and everything else into it, and it makes you sleep, but do it. I think she may have even come back about a week ago. I'll tell that story at some point. Um, transliminality. Okay. You have a, you have a test on your site. What is, we should plug your site. What, where do they go to find this test? Um, israynet.org. It's right. Is, so that's Israel without the L. Yeah. I S R A E N E T dot org. You need acronym. I know. I do. I do. It's a problem. I might have a tumor. So this is a survey to see, I guess, how psychic you are. No. Okay. Transliminality. And here's where we do go full blown science because we've been doing a lot of my Lucy Goosey fruity stuff. So let's, because you, now before you explain it, you max out on this test, right? I'm pretty high. Yes. All right. So what, so what, what is this testing? All right. And, and really, uh, Jim's been the, the majority, uh, validator. He's done the bulk research with this. I love this variable because it's interesting, um, transliminal, right? So this is, um, a measure that addresses the extent to which a person has thin psychological boundaries. Okay. So, um, no one would debate at this point. We have a conscious self and an unconscious self. And in a kind of a Freudian vein, we have a nice thick barrier between the conscious thoughts and all the stuff that we bury in a Freudian sense or union wise, you know, put down there, um, that we don't have access to. We also have a pretty thick barrier between our ego or conscious self and the environment around us. People that are highly transliminal are, or high translimitals have thinner boundaries. So material from the unconscious to the conscious passes more freely and material from the conscious to the environment and back, go through more freely than the average human being. And what we have found is that transliminality, this kind of thin boundary structure is very much in multiple studies, significantly predictive of anomalous experience. It is. Yes. Uh, and we've replicated that with our own scales. It's been done in previous scales. And we've done a, uh, a fair amount of research, including previous research I wasn't involved with, it suggests they may be a little bit better at ESP. So I had a friend growing up who swore that she could see or us and I've ever thought it was nonsense. I don't think it was. I think she could. Yeah. I think she could. Um, now I'm going to go, well, let me, let me give you the official diatribe. So it's a well researched scale. It's been rosh validated, which is a very high level of statistics. It's actually with the SAT uses, right? So and trust me, the SAT wants to be predictive, um, because they got money, um, but, um, if the college is decided to use it again, but that's a side note, um, they're starting to. Yeah. Like, oh, shock of shocks. Yeah. You take that away. Performance goes down. So that's a surprise. Um, but no, the, the, the point of the scale, and it's also been significantly linked to actual temporal lobe liability. It has. Yes. So it's, it's, it's a, it originally was Michael Thalburn that designed it, uh, Jim has done a lot of revisions on it, take a lot further, uh, standardize scale. We use it all the time because it is reliably predictive of anomalous experience. Um, in fact, I just put up a survey with another, uh, podcast I did, uh, about a month ago, uh, and we're collecting data on that. We have something like 270 responses. Um, so we're, we're looking at that from a, like, kind of like a podcast listener community. Um, and I'm going to see what that, how that data turns out. Do you want more responses? Oh, yeah, sure. I'll post, I'll, I'll get it up. I'll get it up on the internet. We'll see what we can do. We've got it. Okay. Whoo. Can everybody go to Israel without the L word? Yeah. I'm sorry, everybody, for my poor acronym and see how psychic you are in fairness, institute for the study of religious and anomalous experience sounds fancy until you're abbreviated. So, um, didn't you find that certain people, maybe it was magicians or something like them? Yes. Squared low? Yeah. No. Hi. They score high. Yes. And in fact, um, I'm of the opinion, right? Are going to get more sensory information going back and forth from the unconscious and the conscious, right? And also, they're going to be more susceptible to environmental effects. And to be clear, very high levels of transliminality can definitely be associated with diagnosable mental illness. Right. So, uh, you, there's a certain degree of it, like, say, probably one standard deviation. All right. A little bit, a little bit above the mean to about, um, one and a half, where you're in kind of a sweet spot of you are just more sensitive to environmental stimulus. You're going to be more, um, you're, you're going to be more responsive and you're going to have more reactions from your unconscious to your conscious, you're going to get feelings and impressions. Well, that makes perfect sense to you. Yeah. So, I tend to think of it as a bit of a proxy measure for psychicism. I don't. And, and so far, our direct tests have had some, some support for that, some statistically significant responses. Um, but with the magicians, they actually went side missing. They did significantly worse. They did worse than they ought to. And I had them actually do, um, they did worse than random, if I remember. Yeah. Now, in fairness, two caveats to that. One, I had them do an online ESP app and online digital ESP is not the same as, "Look at me, I lit candles, I have a circle, right?" But I did have them do one with any ritual of choice and one without. And yeah, the findings went, I think we're null, we're null in one condition and sign missing in the other. So they went worse than they ought to. And I can't tell you if that was because, I'd love to replicate it, but honestly, I'd love to replicate it in a more organic structure. And then the things get real complicated because now you're talking a lab. And I don't have $200,000 to pay everybody to write, although if anybody wants to send me $200,000, anybody? But the point is, I think in organic environments, and this comes back to what I was talking about, like maybe finding ways to measure the actual meditation and visualization components involved in ritual magic, because I think we might have a bit of a cookbook recipe for how to enter an altered state of consciousness that might facilitate micro-PK vs. P. I think Buddhist may agree with you. Yeah. And the thing is, it's not that other researchers haven't said, "Do you have meditation experience?" I'm like, "Well, okay, great. I just measured a bunch of occultists." And by the way, there were mild correlations between daily meditation and visualization exercises, right? So it wasn't, I mean, it was significant, it just wasn't an insane variance accounted for. But there was a lot of preliminary evidence with these magicians that suggested that, yes, these various techniques that they're actually using, because there's a big separation between "Look at me, I'm a wizard," versus, "No, no, no, really, I'm practicing X, Y, and Z every other day, and I'm actually doing it," right? And by the way, that's not a criticism to that community. That's the same with religion, whether we're dealing with exoteric or exoteric or, I'm sorry, not exoteric. Yeah. No, intrinsic and extrinsic, religiosity. That's true with every group. If you've ever run an organization, there's two or three people you can absolutely rely on. Yeah. And there are a bunch of people that say, "Why am I paying you?" Everywhere. Yeah. So, the point is, when you're dealing with, and that's why I used rune suit, because a lot of those are really avid practitioners, and I got measures, but-- Oh, dang it. I lost my train of thought. Well, do you want to be more translational, and can you teach it-- can you teach yourself to be-- Well, the theory, yes. It's both a state and a trait variable. Right. So, you have the trait tendency of transliminality, which the data clearly showed magicians were pretty high on compared to the population. And the theory is that, actually, the exercises taught in esotericism are helping to train magicians to control the transliminal tendencies. Because think about it. If a lot of your practice is this altered state of consciousness, where you are trying to get impressions, voices, intuitions, you're going through complex rituals to try and get in contact with a force, a spirit, and energy, okay? Having thin battery structure, hey, that's a good thing. That is a good thing. Right. But what if it's uncontrolled? What if it's intrusive? And that's where you move from some subclinical symptomology into, uh-oh, this may actually be problematic for a person's well-being. Could this be your-- those possessed women, maybe, transliminal, uncontrollable? I think they were moderate transliminals, because I think I had them sample at some point. But-- Transliminality itself is not necessarily a leaning towards psychosis. Okay. Very high levels of it, if I remember correctly, were, in fact, associated with, uh, schizotypocentinces. Um, but it makes sense. Yeah. But keep in mind, one of the myths out there is that a person can magically hallucinate and just go back to normal. That-- that doesn't happen. That doesn't happen. No. Um, I've been around hundreds of schizophrenics back in the day, and I promise you, uh, the hallucinations are just one bit of a very pervasive set of--of crippling symptoms. Mm-hmm. But, yeah, high, high transliminality without any form of moderation or technique to deal with it, because really, what are you dealing with? A lot of sensory information coming from different sources that you're not dealing with well. Um, I would say one model of magic is how do I control and create rituals to control the impressions that I'm getting to have a shutoff switch? Well, especially if you do--if you're dealing with trauma, that you kind of want to keep down there. Yeah. It's good training to have. And that is, you know, again, we come back to trauma, because a lot of people do have trauma. Sure. Um, and again, I think in the paranormal community, there is probably a significantly greater amount of trauma than you find in the average population. I agree. Um, your day job is forensic psychology? Uh, I can't really call myself a forensic person because-- What do you do during the day? Courtrooms, evaluations? No, no. Actually, um, I just work with, um, I have clinical psychologists, and we help veterans get disability benefits. Where can we find that online? I'd love to support. Um, well, I mean, I work with law firms only. I don't work individually with veterans, uh, because, uh, and honestly, as a pitch, we recommend veterans who need to work with the VA. I wholeheartedly recommend they just get a lawyer because it's easier. Really? Um, so we--we--we work with lawyers, um, to, uh, help do assessments, uh, to help get better ratings, uh, so we work only through lawyers. And that's--you really have to because there's a whole lot of work with VA processing. So you're trying to get, what, I guess, PTSD diagnosed so that they can get help? Yeah, we only do--we only do with, uh, psychological disorders. We don't do with medical, um, and, again, I--no direct referrals, like there's no point in contacting me because all of the--there's a whole lot of steps before you get to a clinical psychologist assessment, and I'm not a clinical psychologist, right? I have clinical psychologists to work for me. I help with the research and the paperwork and the submission. Well, how do the lawyers help? Well, the lawyers actually are--are proficient in VA law. So rather than a veteran, uh, trying to tackle all the paperwork acquired-- Yeah, good luck. --to get disability through the VA, uh, the lawyers take it on for them. Um, and--and it's kind of like a disability claim. Mm-hmm. Um, and--and Mike's--it--from my personal opinion, it's almost always better to have representation just because the mountains of paperwork and all of the appeals and the--and, you know, those people don't have the time to read the 25 books necessarily, necessary to understand what all this paperwork entails. I really think it's just better off to get a lawyer. You get 100% right. I'm--I'm glad you said it. 100% right. To all the vets listening. That's how to deal with the VA who sees through representations. The only way. Yeah. And I mean, I--don't remember. I don't hate the VA or anything, but, again, it's--it's a complicated procedure, you know, it's government, law. It's government. Yeah. Uh, so it's just better to get representation, uh, because, again, that way, it's taken care of. And they contact you and go, "Hey, buddy, we need to do an interview." Uh, "Hey, this is happening. Here's what we need to do next." And you don't have all that stress and trauma of trying to be a person working that large bureaucratic system. Can the vets afford this? Yeah, actually, because just like disability law, um, the lawyers don't charge until after the whole thing's settled. Um, and then there's back pay that occurs, right, because there's your date of claim and it's true with disability, too, right? And so whatever your date of claim is, however long it takes for you to get accepted, um, you get that chunk of change, and the lawyers get compensated by getting a little bit off the back end. Sure. What's the name of this organization? Oh, you mean, uh, the law firms? Yeah, how can the vets, uh, get help? Um, uh, woods and woods would be, uh, would be a good one. Woods and woods. Um, also national vet help. They have a lot of vets listening. Um, yeah. I mean, save yourself the drama. Totally agree. Last question, um, is it, is it really, uh, the last question. Everyone go get ghosted. This is on Amazon, right? Uh, yeah. Fun Amazon. But Amazon get ghosted. You can love it. Right now, there's someone. There's thousands of people who like me are dealing with, with trauma, but not handling it as well as I did, uh, advice, what can they do to deal with it? So when you say trauma, are you referring to like, um, trauma related to maybe some spiritual, whether it's night hagg, night terrors, sleep walking, they just can't get, they're afraid, you're afraid to go to sleep for a little while? Sure. Um, okay. So noting, um, I am not licensed or a clinician, uh, but from, but you could talk like a friend. And also saying, but I do have a lot of clinically adjacent experience. Um, the first thing is proving it is irrelevant. Um, I've seen a lot of people who are like, but if I don't get this documentation and if somebody doesn't come and say this is real, um, now by the way, that can be dangerous in the sense of, um, every night 15 demons come to me and fairies, you know, like, okay, we, maybe you need to go talk to somebody, right? So barring, uh, a tendency towards psychosis, um, I, I don't think that proving it is actually the best thing for mental health. I think instead you need to maybe do a little bit of therapy shopping, um, you know, because again, I'm not going to, I'm not critiquing therapy, but, um, all doctors are not good doctors. All therapists are not good therapists. True. All everything or not good, everything. All teachers are not good teachers. Um, even chemistry is important to the therapist. Yeah. Honestly, the, you know, better health and the other online therapy, you know, it makes it easy now. Um, and so you may have to do some shopping, um, but I think you should be talking to someone. And I think the goal should be engaging in safe, appropriate behaviors, right? Um, that help you cope and feel better. Um, no one, there is no version of psychology where feeling like a victim is a good thing. You know, when you steal power from an individual, and there's all sorts of studies that demonstrate this, um, we know. when you take away your sense of autonomy, your sense of power and choice, when you feel victimized, that's not a good psychological state to be in. It's not healthy for the human being. I think have learned helplessness back in the day where they shock the dogs to the point in the cage where they no longer even tried. But this is, and this is gonna sound a little bit like a self-help book, you're never truly a victim. You always have choices. They may not be good choices, but you always have choices. And if that means finding a therapist or a support group where, if nothing else, you can just practically say, okay, whether it's ridiculous or not or whether someone else would approve of this or not, if it's safe and it's not dangerous, what can I do to make me feel better about this? That's what you should be doing. Again, your personal experiences, if they're traumatic, or your personal experiences, and you have the autonomy and the right to confront those in a hopefully a helpful way, and again, get consultation, get a therapist, talk with them about what steps could I take? Just anxiety, EMDR works pretty well. - EMDR? - Yeah, I can't even remember what it stands for, essentially faking rapid eye movement. - Really? - Yes, that you do in your stage four sleep. - For some reason tends to help people de-lodge anxiety. - That's interesting. - Well, because if you think about like what anxiety is, it's a persistent state of fear that you can't, it's broken tape, right? It keeps replaying, it's not rational. - You know it's not rational. - But it keeps hitting you. You can't seem to get rid of it. EMDR seems to help some people. Just spending two minutes, closing your eyes, and doing that back and forth eye motion. - I'll go through three days where I'm just living on quarters all in its sucks. - Yeah, there's meditation techniques. You know, you don't have to go into esoteric meditations. There's a whole lot of studies showing that meditation will help with some panic. And in some cases, even alleviate some PTSD symptoms. - What would your grandmother say? - Pray about it. - Pray about it. - Yeah. - Yeah, grandma would say pray about it, and then grandma would be like, "Well, what are you gonna go out and do about it?" You know, that's something I think that is missing from our culture nowadays, which is, you still get to make choices. You still get to make choices, and even if they're bad choices, eventually you'll come to some options that aren't bad choices. Because, you know, this is certainly my personal perspective. The world has suffering in it, and none of us are going to escape that. Not all of it. And in kind of a broader philosophical perspective, we wouldn't like the world if we did alleviate suffering. Because for any grizzled individual that you've ever talked to with wisdom, they will say that sucked, but I learned some of my most valuable life-changing lessons through that. - I don't know if you say true. - And by the way, not justifying what happened to someone, or any way, shape or form, like bad things happen to people and it's not fair. But I think when we, whether it's paranormal or otherwise, we can't let people take our ability to choose and make choices. And if we remember that and we have agency again, you know, work, it's work and it's effort, there is no magic pill, despite what, you know, Pfizer might tell you, there is no magic pill. But, you know, if you've had a series of terrifying paranormal experiences, then make yourself be motivated to learn more about it and learn possible techniques that you can use to take control back over the agency that you feel was taken from you. - Well said, Dr. Brylay, thank you for coming in today. It's been fun. Everybody. - That was Dr. Brylay. He said he won't die on the hill of his own EMF data until somebody else replicates it. So I would look at nobody has yet. But it's in print. In 2013, he and K. Owen published the first study in the Journal of Parapsychology. A house had no electricity and the electromagnetic field still wiggled before weird things happened. Two more studies found the same pattern, both his. He told you that before I could, which is my favorite kind of guest. Now, the directory in Cincinnati, Brian says a teammate went blank and fought her way out of a saltwater circle he drew around her. When she got out, she said, "I broke your circle." Now, at the possession, I can't check. The building I can. Ghost Adventures shot there in 2012. Brian told the owners to close it. And last I could find, the current owner was turning it into an Airbnb. Hard pass. I'm not a complete believer, but Brian debunked his own haunted house backstory and published anyway. That's a believer I'll listen to all day long. His book is ghosted on Amazon, and his institute is at isrianet.org. That's Israel without the L. And everything I mentioned is linked down below. Until next time, be safe. Be kind. And know that you are appreciated. ♪ Oh boy, oh yeah ♪ ♪ I played Bolivia's an area 51 ♪ ♪ A secret code inside the Bible said I was ♪ ♪ I love my UFOs and paranormal bones ♪ ♪ Well, as me, I'm saying ♪ ♪ So I'm singing the like I should ♪ ♪ But then another conspiracy theory ♪ ♪ It becomes the truth, my friends ♪ ♪ And it never ends ♪ ♪ No, it never ends ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I feel the crack at it ♪ ♪ I got stuck inside my old home ♪ ♪ With an K-Out truck ♪ ♪ I'll be in only two hours ♪ ♪ To stand with you ♪ ♪ Make face the moon landing alone ♪ ♪ On a film set, I wore the shadow people there ♪ ♪ The Roswell Indians just fought the smiling man ♪ ♪ And I'm told ♪ ♪ And his name was Cole ♪ ♪ I can't agree ♪ ♪ I'm dancing with the bitch ♪ ♪ She had no fish on Thursday nights ♪ ♪ We made J-2 and we'll fly, fly, fly ♪ ♪ We'll be off to the night ♪ ♪ All ever wanted was to just hear the truth ♪ ♪ So the world falls on your feet all through the night ♪ ♪ The Markman side and van ♪ ♪ The solar storm still come ♪ ♪ To Agatha ♪ ♪ To see the city underground ♪ ♪ Mysterious number stations ♪ ♪ When it's hurtful to crack a stockade ♪ ♪ And what the dark watchers found ♪ ♪ In a simulation ♪ ♪ Don't you worry though ♪ ♪ The black night set a light and told me so ♪ ♪ I can't believe I'm dancing with you ♪ ♪ I'm dancing with the bitch ♪ ♪ She had no fish on Thursday nights ♪ ♪ We made J-2 and we'll fly, fly, fly ♪ ♪ We'll be off to the night ♪ ♪ All ever wanted was to just hear the truth ♪ ♪ So the world falls on your feet all through the night ♪ ♪ Had no fish on Thursday nights ♪ ♪ We made J-2 and we'll fly, fly, fly ♪ ♪ We'll be off to the night ♪ ♪ All ever wanted was to just hear the truth ♪ ♪ So the world falls on your feet all through the night ♪ ♪ We'll be off to the night ♪ ♪ We'll be off to the night ♪ ♪ We'll be off to the day ♪ ♪ We'll be off to the day ♪ ♪ We'll be off to the day ♪ (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]