Haunted Cosmos - Ghost Stories?

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, Brian and Ben continue Season Two by talking through some of the most exciting ghost stories we could find. What is a ghost? Or, is a ghost? If they exist, what are they? We explore answers to these questions and more in this show!Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!This episode is sponsored by Indigo Sundries Soap Co.! Tired of soaps full of seed oils, preservatives, artificial colorants, and other nasties? Check out Indigo Sundries Soap for a better experience and smell that is also better for you! Go to indigosundriessoap.com to learn more—and as our gift to you, use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!This episode is also sponsored by Squirrelly Joe's Coffee. Visit their website here to purchase your first bag!  Share Coffee. Serve Humbly. Live faithfully. This episode is also sponsored by Private Family Banking Partners. Email them at:  banking(at)privatefamilybanking.com . For a free copy of a new book "Protect Your Money Now!  How to Build Multi-Generational Wealth Outside of Wall Street and Avoid the Coming Banking Meltdown" by Private Family Banking Partner, Chuck DeLadurantey,   go to www.protectyourmoneynow.net . Or, if you want to make an appointment to talk to a wealth advisor, click on the calendar link here: https://calendly.com/familybankingnow/30min.Support the show

This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Right Response Ministries, private family banking, and Squirrely Joe's Coffee. Did you know that patrons of Haunted Cosmos get access to a weekly patron-only bonus show called The Dusty Tome? And the top two tiers of patrons get early access to add free shows. Join today on patreon.com for these benefits and more. And now, on with the show. A man walked through his cornfield sometime before harvest in 1817.

The hot Tennessee sun and the thick southern air weighed down on his already very tired shoulders. He didn't mind it too much, though. The slow trickle of constant sweat from his hair down into the collar of a shirt just meant he had worked hard that day, and that was good. The evening walk through the field was a bit of a treat form, in fact. Long summer days meant that by the time he was finally able to come out here, golden hour was in full swing. The perfect light and the soft sounds of cornstalk leaves

rubbing together from the breeze created a perfect setting to sort of decompress after all the day's labor. This man, John Bell, had gained a reputation of diligence, integrity, and piety and the local community over the 12 years or so that he and his family had lived on the banks of the Red River in Adams, Tennessee.

The Bell's farm prospered each year, allowing Bell to assume the status of wealthy, a status in life heretofore unknown to him. The hospitality that Bell and his wife Lucy exercised gave them a rich group of close friends they could enjoy. John's work as a lay elder at the local Baptist church gave him great influence in the town, and it meant that people really trusted him. And the six Bell children had begun to grow into well-adjusted and respectable youths who were well-liked by all. To John Bell, it really seemed like his risk had paid off. You see, before settling in Adams, the family lived in Edgecombe County, North Carolina.

They had done quite well there too, but after John and Lucy had been settled there for eight years, they packed up all they had and punched out for the Red River, following rumors of rich lands full of potential profit. The opportunity to really be a part of building something great and new. The Journey West wasn't an easy one for the Bell family. They were forced to cross the Appalachians and Smokies and the dead of winter with a livestock and young children in tow. But of course, they had finally made it to the Red River. And as John walked through the rows of tall corn, considering how things had gone for them

since that treacherous journey, he was grateful to God for it all. Unfortunately, John's good fortune would soon be disturbed by terrible shadow. Even as he basked in the late golden sunlight of that triumphant summer afternoon, a grotesque portent of this fast-approaching doom met him in the fields. While he meandered down one of the rows of corn, carelessly looking for weeds or pests every now and again, he caught sight of an odd shape in his periphery. He glanced up to see some strange creature standing about 40 feet in front of him. The thin pillars of shadow from the corn shrouded the figure at first,

but John's sight was keen and so he quickly made out what he was looking at. A great dog stood in the way. It wasn't moving a muscle, not even a flick of the tail, but its eyes set in the statuesque figure. fixed John with a glacial stare. As John's mind made sense of what his eyes were seeing, adrenaline flooded his bloodstream. The sounds of rustling leaves and bending stalks weighed down by heavy ears of blue corn

faded away in an instant. All was silent for John, save the pounding drum of his heartbeat, a heartbeat that grew quicker with each breath. John shouldered his rifle and took aim at what he later described, sober as a judge on his bench, as a great black dog with the head of a pale rabbit. What wicked man would make such an unnatural beast? John fired, snapping the terror-drenched silence like a dead branch.

But when the smoke of the rifle cleared, the beast had vanished. Just a couple of days later, Betsy Bell, John's oldest daughter, took her younger siblings outside to play. As they filed down the wooden front porch steps, Betsy glanced over to the tree line of tall oaks surrounding the property. She suddenly stood motionless in shock as she watched an airy-looking little girl in a green and white dress swing like Tarzan on one of the low-hanging branches. She giggled and climbed the branch, her face blurred, until she dissolved into thin air.

What did it all mean? John wasn't given to hyperbole, and he and Lucy had certainly raised their children to tell the truth. Why were they suddenly seeing such disturbing oddities? John would have little time to consider an answer. As the family slept one night, soon after Betsy saw the vanishing girl in the trees, the younger boys began to stir. They heard a sound in their room like someone casually tapping their fingernail on a wooden board. The boys, remembering the unfortunate truth that mice and rats sometimes get into the walls of a home,

brushed off the noise and tried to go back to sleep. But the noise persisted. The noise persisted, even growing louder. Eventually the sound, and it's hard to describe exactly, sort of evolved. It wasn't really in their room anymore. Now they were hearing sounds outside of the closed bedroom door. Sounds akin to metal chains being dragged across the hardwood planks, gentle and steady like a fisherman reeling in his spinner bait.

The boys were wide awake now, buzzing with a cocktail of curiosity and fear. But they didn't yet try to wake their parents. That would mean going out into the hallway, out into the presence of whatever was moving those chains. So they sat, quietly alert in the dark. Finally, for a moment, everything ceased. No tapping, no dragging, just a dark and quiet room dimly lit by the moonlight through the window.

But it was only for a moment. In a mad rush, sound exploded out of the silence, as if someone was punching as hard as they could against the line, walls, like a frantic someone was trapped inside their bedroom walls. The chains outside, or whatever they were, slammed hard against the ground again and again, like a cruel chariot driver whipping his horses into a foaming gallop. The deafening sound of barking dogs rang in the room, disorienting the boys and making them sing out tearful screams for help. John and Lucy burst into the room, having heard not only the boys' screams, but everything else too. The pounding, the

dragging, the barking. It wasn't just the boys. It was the whole house. But just as soon as they pushed the door open and filled the room with candlelight, it all stopped. Moonlit silence regained her footing, as if the house itself breathed a deep sigh of relief. Nobody spoke a word. John slowly walked over to the bed of one of his younger sons and knelt down. He shone the light on one of the bedpost with a concerned look on his face. Bite marks. The bedpost looked like a mad dog had chewed it up. Just then, desperate and gargling screams rang out of Betsy's room.

John ran to her while Lucy stayed with the boys. He slammed against the door and stumbled in to find Betsy screaming and convulsing on the bed. Not knowing what else to do, John called out his daughter's name, gently trying to shake her awake. After a few seconds, she quieted and came to. utterly confused as to what had happened. She did know one thing, though. Something was trying to kill her.

Thus began four years of supernatural terror for the Bell family, in all-out assault by an entity now known as the Bell Witch. Over the coming months and years, John and Lucy Bell, along with their children, would experience countless inexplicable events ranging from mean and malicious to seemingly miraculous and helpful at the hands of a so-called poltergeist that seemed bent on tormenting them as a family. It soon became obvious that the bell witch poltergeist took special interest in John Bell and his oldest daughter Betsy. After that

first night of raucous noise throughout the house, John would be struck with a sort of lockjaw. For almost a full year, he would go days without saying anything or eating anything. claiming that when the fit struck he was unable to move his tongue at all and so could only drink liquids, and even that was difficult for him. The family tried to keep all of this a secret for many months. They were certain that it was just some sort of random coincidences that kept piling on one another. Finally, though, the bells, led by John, became convinced that something more was at play. In the night, the whole house would be startled awake by the sounds of Betsy's screams,

half scared and half painful screams. Her bed sheets would be yanked off of her throughout the night before her skin was pinched by unseen fingers. Her arms were pricked with unseen pins and her face was repeatedly slapped and hair was pulled out by unseen hands. Like I said, unfortunately for them, Betsy and John seemed to be this thing's favorites of the family.

As the stakes kept getting raised and the consistency of events proved too much to chalk up to mere coincidence, John asked for the second opinion of one of his friends, James Johnston. After the families enjoyed a lovely Lucy Bell dinner together and retired to bed, the Johnston's immediately realized how severe the situation was. John Bell had not only not exaggerated, he had actually undersold the activity to his friend. Right as the house went completely quiet and fell asleep,

Johnston and his wife were awoken by the alarming feeling of their sheets being ripped from the bed. They felt handled and tossed around slightly, pinched and poked and prodded by some force that was in the air. The next morning, after a night of no sleep for everyone in the house, John looked at John and said, it's a spirit, just like in the Bible. You see, Johnston thought this because after he and his wife had been harassed by this invisible force in the night, he sat up in the bed and tried to speak with whatever it was that was doing it. The man was convinced that whatever it was was intelligent. Ultimately, he heard no reply, but that would all change very soon.

As more and more visitors came to the house to experience the strange haunting, more and more requests for the entity to speak were offered up to the house's walls. Finally, after one such supplication had rendered everyone in the room silent for a moment, They all heard a faint whistling that seemed to originate from all around them. A whistling whisper grew into a bold hiss and whine in response to questions that eventually evolved into intelligent speech. In response to the question, who are you and what do you want? Came a weak, feeble voice in reply. I am a spirit.

I was once very happy, but I have been disturbed. A stunned silence followed this declaration, probably only a few seconds, but which felt like minutes to the witnesses. But once the shock of the reply had passed, the natural follow-up question worked its way out of one of the guest's mouth. How are you disturbed? What makes you unhappy? I am the spirit of a person who was buried in the woods nearby and the grave has been disturbed. My bones disinterred and scattered, and one of my teeth was lost under this. house and I am here looking for that tooth. John Bell sat utterly stunned. Forgotten memory from years earlier rose up in his mind. Some of his workers had been clearing a plot of land on the farm

when they suddenly stumbled upon some Indian graves. One of Bell's sons and his friend, a lad named Corbin, went out to inspect the site for themselves, hoping to find some valuable relics left there by men long past meant to help their fallen brothers float across the sticks into death. Unfortunately for them, no such valuables could be found among the bones. But in a macabre move, young Corbin decided he didn't want to leave empty-handed, so he snatched away one of the jaw bones lying there in the earth. He brought it back into the Bell's house and while playing in the hallway, let go of the bone and launched it across the room. When the bone slammed into the wooden hall, a tooth knocked loose and fell through the cracks in the floor deep into the home's

crawl space. John Bell, for his part, remembered reprimanded. commanding the boys before giving the jawbone to a slave who was tasked with taking it back to the gravesite and filling in the dirt that had exposed them in the first place. In the hopes of ending the haunting once and for all, he ran over to that same crack in the floor and pried up a couple of boards there. The ground was sifted and raked and even dug into, but nothing was found. As Bell and his visitors wiped sweat from their brows and brushed dirt off their hands, a cackling, mocking laughter rang out all around them. The ghosts rebuked Bell for his foolishness, claiming it was all a prank just for Old Jack. See, Old Jack is what the witch, who eventually gave herself the name Kate, called John Bell. Kate continued to hate John and Betsy, but over time, her unmotivated ire towards Betsy waned away.

Kate, the Bell's own poltergeist, wanted to give all her energy to destroying Old Jack. and so she claimed that before all of this was over, she would kill the man. The years wore on and the haunting continued. Kate would talk openly now to anyone who asked her questions. She pulled malicious pranks on John and Betsy, but always seemed fond of Lucy, old Jack's wife. Kate would bring Lucy fresh fruit and cold water to drink in the afternoon. The woman didn't know what to make of it.

At one point she even saved one of Lucy's younger sons who got stuck in a cave on the edge of their property. In every instance of uncharacteristic kindness from the ghost, admiration for Lucy seemed to be the motivation. Kate would have deep theological arguments with clergymen who came to visit. She would quote great lengths of scripture at once and would never waste an opportunity to so doubt among the visitors about the more difficult verses in the scriptures.

She would make sacrilegious and even blasphemous jokes before suddenly taking on a deadly serious tone and correcting what she perceived to be faulty theology set forth by various elders and deacons of the town. She would claim to know what was happening in other states at the same moment that she was speaking. And as alarming as it may sound, many of the witnesses had any skepticism shattered by her proving herself right in this regard. She'd make some claim of something happening in the town of a visitor's close relative. the visitor would write to their relative and seek confirmation of Kate's lies, but they never caught her in one. Every time, the visitor would return utterly bewildered.

Kate had been exactly correct in her reporting of events in the distant town. Eventually, despite the party tricks that drew so much attention from everyone in the area, which reportedly even led to a visit from then-general and future president Andrew Jackson, John Bell grew weary. His son, Richard William Bell, recounts his father's last days with the most sincere words of affection to the man in his book about the events, the book titled Our Family Trouble, the story of the Bell Witch in Tennessee. He describes the immense hero of faith, love, devotion, integrity, and even joviality that his father was, and laments that such a man would suffer such anguish for so long that cost him so much. He concludes the story of old Jack in that book with the following account. Quote, the crisis, however, came on the morning of December 19th.

Father, sick as he was, had not up to this time failed to awake at his regular hour, according to his long custom and aroused the family. That morning he appeared to be sleeping so soundly. Mother quietly slipped out of the room to superintend breakfast, while brothers John and Drew looked after the farmhand, and feeding the stock, and would not allow him to be disturbed until after breakfast. Noticing then that he was sleeping unnaturally, it was thought best to awaken him, when it was discovered that he was in a deep stupor and could not be aroused to any sensibility.

Brother John attended to giving him medicine and went immediately to the cupboard where he'd carefully put away the medicines prescribed for him, but instead he found a smoky-looking vial, which was about one third full of dark colored liquid. He set up an inquiry at once to know who had moved the medicine, and no one had touched it, and neither could anyone in the place give any account of the vial. Dr. George Hobson of Port Royal was sent for in great haste and soon arrived. Also neighbors John Johnson, Alex Gunn, and Frank Miles arrived early,

and were there when the vial was found. Kate, the witch, in the meantime broke out with joyous, exultation, exclaiming, it's useless for you to try to relieve old Jack, I've got him this time, he'll never get up from that bed again. Kate was then asked about the vial of medicine found in the cupboard and replied, I put it there, and gave old Jack a big dose of it last night while he was asleep, which fixed him. This was all the information that could be drawn from the witch or any other source concerning the vial of medicine. Certain it was that no member of the family ever saw it before, or could tell anything about it.

In fact, no vial and no medicine of any kind had been brought to the house by anyone else except Dr. Hobson, and then it was handled very carefully. Dr. Hobson, on arrival, examined the vial and said he didn't leave it and couldn't tell what it contained. It was then suggested that the contents be tested on something. Alex Gunn caught a cat, and brother John ran a straw into the vial and drew it through the cat's mouth, wiping the straw on its tongue. The cat jumped and whirled over a few times. times, stretched out, kicked, and died very quick. Father lay all day and night in a deep stupor,

as if under the influence of some opiate, and could not be aroused to take any medicine. The doctor said he could detect something on his breath that smelt very much like the contents of the vial that he had examined. How father could have gotten it was a mystery that could not be explained in any other way except that testified by the witch. The vial and contents was thrown into the fire and instantly a blue blaze shot up the chimney like a flash of powder. Father never revived or returned to consciousness for a single moment. He lingered along through the day and night, gradually weering away, and on the morning of December 20th, 1820, breathed his last, end quote.

The story of the Bell family's poltergeist, Kate, is just one example among literally thousands that land in the broad and messy category that we might call it. ghost stories. Whether it be the haunting of a family by a poltergeist like what you just heard, a person seeing a crisis apparition of a loved one or a friend soon after their death, a residual haunting that seems to occur with the same events at the same place no matter who's there to observe, a dark place that seems to attract restless spirits to itself, or even an object that seems to be haunted in some way. The concept of the ghost has captured man's imagination for time immemorial.

Perhaps it is captivated him for as long as death has been exercising his horrible curse over man. But what is a ghost? Or maybe a better question would be, is a ghost? Are they real? If so, where do they come from?

Are they good, bad, both? Can we neatly file ghosts away in some well-defined folder of being in God's spoken world? Do we have reason to believe these seemingly phantasmagorical stories like the one told by the bell family what happens how do we react when the lines between the scene and the unseen blur and melt together in this episode of haunted cosmos we're asking all these questions and more though we may not have all the answers to

our own satisfaction we will try to sift the ghostly tales and find the truth behind the phantasms Well, welcome everyone to this episode of Haunted Cosmos. We're so locked in, we didn't rehearse that at all. We've never done that before. And it was so good. It was perfect. Welcome to Minute 23.

That's right. Roughly of this podcast when we are just now. A lot of podcasts are 23 minutes long. Our cold opens are 20. Someone on YouTube said, why is the cold open so long? Stop. Because we just want it to do.

And then we said for every time, for every like this comment. gets, we're making the next cold open one minute longer. It's up to 500 likes. Guys, this is still the cold open. It's gotten a little out of control. Well, Ben, it's good to be here. And we're actually sitting here recording this on All Hallows Eve. That's right. All Hallows Eve before the Hallow Tide begins. Our Blessed Hallow Tide. This is providential. We didn't plan that at all. We're dressed up. I am actually dressed up as Ben. That's right. I am dressed up as our associate Dan Burkle. Dan Burkle. So it's kind of a chance. matching perfectly. Nobody could find a way to dress up as me because it's just not a way to... It's too handsome. Like, you can't get that hands up. You can't capture that physiognomy in a mask. I mean, you have to get one of those latex mission impossible things and it's just, it's not the same. Those are really expensive. The magic is gone. They do have them. Yeah. Yeah. But they're very expensive. Brian, do we have any housekeeping to get into before we actually go to the meat and bones.

We're going to get to some bell witch stuff. We're going to go back over that story a little bit. You know, sometimes we forget to do that with the cold open. We're actually going to do that. and then we have a lot of other great stories for you. This is a story-rich episode. Yeah, it is. Absolutely a story-rich episode here. But one of the things that you guys might not actually know is that this show is a full-time job. This is actually more than a full-time job when you really factor it in here.

Ben actually works full-time for Haunted Cosmosos. It's a dream scenario. Yeah. Ben went to school to become an engineer. I was an engineer. Knowing that eventually the arc of that would be a spooky story Christian podcast. Like it's obvious. Most engineers, that is their real aspiration. God tells the best stories. God writes the best stories. Honestly, they're hilarious. Ben works full time for Honda Cosmos. We put in more than 40 hours of work per episode. Yeah. We hope it shows. Yeah, we do hope it shows. You know, in these multi-hour deep dive episodes with hours and hours of research and writing and 10 to 15,000 words of writing per episode. Which is like three of my sermons. And then the dusty tone each week is usually at least a 5,000 word manuscript.

So every week. You know, writing on average between 10 and 20,000 words a week. That's a lot. It's a lot. And then hours of research. Dude, it's so much fun. It's so much fun. We have a great time.

We couldn't do this without all of your support. And so thank you to all of our supporters at patreon.com slash hona cosmos. You, if you are not supporting the show, if you like it, you can sign up today. You get lots of benefits, even while you're helping keep. That's one benefit is that we can keep doing this. Yeah, yeah. You're an integral part of making the show. But you get other, I mean, most of the tiers of support get early access to the main episodes.

All of them get ad-free episode to the main episodes. Every patron gets access to the dusty tome, that Ben mentioned. Yes. Which is a freestanding weekly podcast just for patrons. Yeah. And it is, I think, every bit as good as freestanding podcasts like lore. Yeah. So it's 20 to 60 minutes, depending on the week.

Yeah, I feel like we're really hitting our stride. Our longest episode's been 45 minutes. Okay. Yeah. But it was all scripted. And it's just one story. It's coherent. Or we'll do a deep dive into a topic over the course of a few episodes.

Ben's done a multi-part series on the Salem Witch Trials. A historical show. You should... It's really good. Come a patron. And very informative. Ben does a great job with that. Wow.

You do. That's kind of you to say. My wife agrees. My kids agree. You do a great job. We're also really thankful for our sponsors who sponsored the show. I know you guys, like not everybody loves ads. Only crazy people love ads.

Yeah, no one. Like people don't skip back and relisten to the ads. Right. Like no listener loves the ads. But they're important to keep this thing going. And we try to partner with Christian brothers and sisters who are going to provide you with genuinely helpful products and services. So listen to the ads, check them out. Go look at the services they're offering. One partnership that we're excited to just let you up here, this isn't an ad. Don't click out. This is actually important to the show is that we're trying to identify companies like that to partner with long term and even have related. relationships that are mutually beneficial over the long haul. Yeah. For companies we really believe in, like, that we want to see this become a household name.

One of those we just started working with is a family company, Indigo Sundry's soap company. Yes. Which you can find online at Indigo Sundrysoap.com. They make extremely high-quality soaps, liquid soaps and bar soaps. And it's true. Like, I've used the soap. They're really good. It's really, really good.

I use them on my hair and everything. Like everything down. Just don't picture it. Stop there. Hey, don't picture it. Just a delightful family too. Great family. Actually, he's also a luteer, and he made a guitar for me that's actually phenomenal.

You're going to have to tell people what luteer. It means someone who makes fretted instruments like violins or. And he like handmaids and guitars. And it's immaculate. Yeah. It's very, very well made. That's the kind of family they are. But these soaps, what I love about them is they're completely free of

seed oils. They're free of nasty pharmaceuticals, fake chemical scents, hormone disruptors. It's a family-owned Christian company. We really want to see long-term become a household name. So go check them out. Support what they're doing. And you can replace your cheap. A lot of these soaps that are like a buck a bar on this, they're not even called soaps. They can't legally be called soaps because they're technically not soaps. They're like chemical cleansers. Yes. This matters to me. If you listen to Brightheart, one of my other podcasts, you know that this matters to my wife and I. These guys are making real soap the way your great, great grandmother would. I really like the Cambrian blue clay soap and the homestead hero soap.

I had a, it was either a morning or evening like sunset rum. And it was, it smelled so good. My wife really loved it. It was awesome. Yeah. So while I can't say that indigo sundry soaps will keep the moth man away, I have never seen the mothman anywhere close to somebody who's using indigo sundry soaps. Which is important to know. Not even one. There is actually in recorded history, there is no instance of the mothman attacking someone who has cleansed with these soaps. And if you get some indigo soap and then you encounter the mothman, you are the problem. Not the son. It was you. It was your fault. Stop with the weed chip board. It's all your fault. You know, cut it out. All right. So then that's, that's what we got for housekeeping. Let's get into it, my guy. Okay. Let's, let's,

Get, tell us how we're going to handle this episode. Yes. Because we have, we're on page nine of like 134 for this episode. Of 27. 27. It's literally a third of the way. So got a lot. Let's do it.

This is going to, I mentioned it earlier. It's going to be a story heavy episode. The reason for that, partly, is to hide how a few concrete opinions I actually have about this. This is kind of a weird topic when you get into it, ghosts. Yeah. And I think it's important. to define, what would you say a ghost is, Brian? Yeah, so that is the question, though, isn't it?

Okay, yeah, so what do we think of as a ghost? I would say that when people say ghost, they're generally talking about an undead spirit of a person who was formerly alive. Yeah, normally what people are referring to culturally when they say a ghost, they're talking about the spirit, the disembodied spirit of a dead human being, that for whatever reason,

it's either left some kind of, psychic energy imprinted on an object like the stone tape theory that like a vinyl record where when they're making it, it's a needle that's literally putting the impression into the vinyl. Of the sound waves. Yeah, the sound waves. So there's a theory, again, this is, we're not endorsing any. This is just, we're saying this is what people believe.

There's a theory that if a highly emotional event, like an execution or a slave that was mistreated, you know, hear that in early America. Injustice, yeah. know, an injustice that's occurred or a young child or, you know, a king in Britain who had successors to the throne when they were children, killed and buried in the staircase of a castle. And that you hear their laughter. And it's just the stone holding their psychic energy and maybe the spirit's not there, but some kind of energy is.

Or it is a human spirit. But sometimes people even mean that there is a category of spiritual entity that is different from a human spirit that's a trickster and maybe not even a human, but some kind of other thing. A demon or an incubus or there's a million different things that people might mean when they're and they're kind of like, and they're able to get information somehow about people that lived in a place or whatever. And so they're kind of wearing their mask and they're pulling tricks on people. Sometimes they predict the future. Sometimes they will tell you things happening in distant places. Sometimes they'll. I mean, the Bell Witch for example. For example.

So here's what we're going to do, because there's a bunch of different categories, and all of them kind of fall under or into the big bucket of ghost. Yeah. So the plan going forward is to talk about the cold open, discuss that. Throughout the whole show, we're going to be talking big picture about ghosts in general. But we're going to address these different categories of ghost. The first being poltergeist, which was the bell witch, poltergeist. The other one being a crisis apparition, where someone has a love of, one maybe that passes away, and for whatever reason, within the first 24 hours of their passing,

or some other big tragic event, they see an apparition of that person. That person appears to them. Yeah, exactly. And it seems just, it's not like ghastly or anything. Sometimes it's totally normal. Right. It seem to be a totally human person, and sometimes it is a little bit more ghostly. Like, Brian could be a crisis separation for me right now. There's no way of really- That would mean I'm dead. Exactly. Like, again, we're not endorsing any of this yet. We're just telling you this is the category that people describe. And then the other one is a residual haunting, which would be like the story of resurrection, Mary. You know, she's, she's dancing with a guy at a ball. They have a great night. Yes. She kissed in the night. And she's like, oh, can you drive me home because I don't have a car?

I don't know why she's rich. Can you drive me home? Yeah, she's from, she can you drive me home? Yeah, Podoskey. So anyway. That's not what she sounds like. And then they get in the car, they drive. And eventually she just says, stop the car. She gets out and she walks across the street to the cemetery and she just disappears. So a residual haunting is like, it's a pattern. Yeah, it happens over and over. It happens the same to different people, no matter who it is or what time it is.

When the moon is full, and you look in the Victorian matter window, you will see the little slave girl that jumped out to her death to escape the horrible abuse of her death. You will see Little Sylvia and she's crying for her father. Yes, every time. Yes. Ah, great voice. Residual haunting.

Haunted house. Haunted house. Hotted house. Another category where you have a parent paranormal activity that seems to be tied to a location, a home. And like the history of that location. Yeah, and what happened there and all of them, where people are often trying to find, you know, like the taps, the ghost hunting show.

Yeah. They're always like digging through. Did anybody die here? Was there anything suss that happened here? Like if a house. I mean, okay, but look at this. You say that. But a lot of people get freaked out by that.

Yeah. Real estate agents in the state of Utah, I know this because one time I took a class, they have to disclose if someone has died in a house. before because a lot of people are like, I don't want to buy a house that someone has actually died in because it could be haunted. And then the emo goth kid shows up and he's like, you don't have to convince me. I was already going to buy the house. I'll pay double. Or a haunted object. A haunted object. So the most, uh, the most common example would be like a haunted doll. Yeah, creepy. Which all of them are haunted. First of all. It's just,

every doll is honest. You should just be safe. Just assume. Those like really, I mean, they say they're like lifelike, but they're just not. Just. to show how unscared I am. Porcelain dolls. When I go to sleep at night, I surround myself with various dolls, and I put a kitchen knife in each of their hand. And I just say, I don't believe. Just to show you how courageous I am, one time I was sleeping in my aunt's house in her guest bed. And she had, I don't know why old women did this, but she had a bunch of porcelain dolls set up all over the room, looking at the bed. Oh, come on. And I, I, like, Nana knew what she was doing. I went and slept on the floor in the living room.

Nana went to her room and cackled. She was like, oh, he's not going to sleep. I was like, he's going to be scarred for life. Come on. Was Nana like a therapist? She was like looking for future business. No, she was like a very normal, just old Southern woman, you know, like really good. Was your Nana, the Bellwitch?

Actually, funny enough, that same trip, this is a total rabbit trail. That same trip I saw the movie The Skeleton Key, which is a very, having. I haven't seen it. Well, at the time, it scared the crap out of me. I was seven years old watching this. And then we watched The Grudge later. I'm like, my older sister, why did you let me do this? I don't watch horror movies.

I've been trying to convince Lexi, my wife for, it's my wife. Right. Did you know that? I did. For every night this week to watch signs with me, such a good movie. I want to watch it so bad. And she's like, I won't sleep for days. So I'm a good husband and I'm like, do it.

it's like the clockwork orange thing where they like force your eyes open which by the way is a horrible movie that you should don't even know it i have not seen it i just know that i didn't even know that was a movie it's like they they reprogram his mind i've never even looked at anything before ever i haven't even opened my eyes yet anyway first time you're so handsome it dude first thing i saw first thing i see nowhere to go but down nowhere to go but down so why don't we talk first let's let's go back to this poltergeist bell witch scenario ben let's talk through it a little bit. Let's talk skeptical account. Let's talk what do we think. Yeah. So the thing that separates the the poltergeist type haunting from just a haunted house

is that the poltergeist doesn't seem to necessarily be tied to a history of events in the house. It's just more trickster, more trickster-ish. It will pretend like it is. Exactly, which she did. Just to mess with you. Right. And there's even this whole history of this woman named Kate Bell who used to live in that town who got accused of witchcraft you know back in the day as one did as one did her last name was Bell Kate Bell

the same as the family? Wait a minute, wait a minute no no no it wouldn't have been Bell no it was something else it wasn't kissing Kate Barlow I know that it was something else but her name was Kate something and she was accused of witchcraft and they found out that like actually that just couldn't be it because she was she was just

I think it was Kate Kardashian it wasn't it was in her early Kardashian. Although they are all witches. Kardashian's hardest hit. If the shoe fits. Yeah. So it would lie.

It seems to have knowledge of things that are going on. Okay, first of all, let's just get our, let's get all of our footnotes out of the way here. People say this is all made up. And it could have been. Some people are like, this is just early folklore. People mistake it for history, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. People accuse Lucy Bell of being, faking in. The Kate Witch.

Yeah. And there's literally, a hoax. If any of the, of like the visitor accounts are to be believed, that's impossible. Right.

The whole family would be with them in the room. Like, everyone would be in the same room. Yeah. And these things would happen. So if the witness accounts are to be believed,

it wasn't a hoax. Yeah. But you have to believe the witness accounts. So there you go. Some people say it's a hoax. Like just, again,

as with anything when you're talking about something that happened several hundred years ago, that you can't replay the video or the tape. Yeah. Like, this is like, so we know Bigfoot exists.

Right. Because we, of the Patterson Gimlin film. Exactly. We know for sure. And there's no question. I mean. And if you question it, you're not a serious person. Yeah, like, you believe we landed on the moon and the Bigfoot is fake?

You believe birds are real? You believe birds are real? No, so getting, getting that, like, just, just, yes, we understand guys, folklore, these early accounts, sometimes they're hard to sift. Yeah, yeah. But if you, if you believe these historical accounts, and there are many others that rhyme with with respect to poltergeist activity, then I think the first thing that makes me really,

at least I think an obvious category first, is that it's not good. Okay. Let's just start there. Yeah. It's not a good thing. This isn't like something that you should want or seek or be like, oh, I wish I had my own poltergeist.

Look, it brought Lucy fruit. Yeah, but it also brought Betsy horrible pain. And killed. And brought John death. And murdered John, okay? You don't want that. Even go back to our Skin Walker Ranch series, the Sherman family claimed to have poltergeist type activity going on in their home.

And that was more like, you're being very rude and inconveniencing me. Stop being rude. But it still was bad. Poltergeist are like toddlers. They care about nobody but themselves. Maybe they're just toddler ghosts. I'm kidding. The teething.

It's like, these students so rude. That was the bite marks on the bed. They're just rude. They're just rude. So to me, there's kind of like two categories here that are, I think, even interesting to discuss or possible. Yeah. One of them is much, like, closer to the shore in terms of something that we know for sure exists and has parallels. And that would obviously be demonic activity where this is trickster, hates people, you know, trying to deceive, trying to, again, the things.

theological argument that would take place in this would say, yeah, that could easily be some kind of demonic activity. The thing that gets me with that, though, especially with stories like poltergeists, where it's not all just horribly evil on its face, is what is the end game deception really? Like, Kate achieved, if the stories to be believed, Kate achieved the death of old Jack, which according to his children meant the death of, you know, a real, Titan of faith in their family. He was, according to them, a good man. But what else was achieved?

Was it just like this malicious attack on one good Christian man? It kind of reminds me of like, well, what's even the point of the man chained in the graveyard? Like, or throwing someone in the fire or it's just malicious activity that is supernatural, that's oriented in a way that is opposed to God and to his image bearers. Yeah. So that's a category. It certainly could be. If nothing else, it's so despair in the rest of the family and in all the visitors,

a doubt of faith where Kate Bell would argue with the clergyman. And she would, at every turn, she'd be trying to sow doubt in people's faith. Making fun of them, making sacrilegious jokes. That's a big red flag of like, okay, this isn't just like you're pulling pranks. That's a red flag in anybody that wants to marry your daughter or in a ghost. Yes. Either way, red flagging. either way if they do that kind of stuff.

So demonic activity is going to be with just about everything that we see in the supernatural world is an obvious possible category. The other category that's a little further out from shore that has, but here's the thing, but when I say you're going to be like, whoa, that's great.

It has legs. But it has historic, it has a lot of historic legs because it's a category of being that many Christians throughout the centuries have not only believed in, but considered to be like, well, obviously. Like, duh.

And that would be like the fairy or spiritual category that's almost like the spiritual version of an animal. Yes. It's not a person and it's not an angelic being or a demonic spirit. But it's somehow it's a spirit. It's sometimes people would put, think Bigfoot is in this category, hobgoblins. A lot of people think even like aliens and UFOs would fall in this category where some are good and some seem to be not.

Sometimes you'll hear him referred to elemental spirits, which there's debate about what Paul meant in Colossians when he talks about the elemental spirits. Is he talking about a literal being or is he talking about just the elementary principles of man-made religion? Yeah, the Old Testament law. There's debate. But this is certainly a category that many Christians over here. We're going to do episodes on this in the future. Yeah, yeah. This is like a scratching the surface thing. But to Brian's point, it's not just like, oh, well, the medieval Catholic. thought that the fairies existed. No, it's not just them. Of course they did, because they believed everything. They did. They definitely did. But the patristic fathers believed this all the way up to the Puritans were like, yes,

of course the fairies are a category of being. But the Puritans took this very Puritanical stance on it where they said, well, clearly it's a category of demon. Where they would say it's real and it's a demon. Right. Which is. But just before the Puritans, you know, you have figures like King, James, which said like, yeah, you know, maybe, but it also could just be this kind of spiritual

animal where they have a level of spiritual intelligence that we're not comfortable with, but they aren't necessarily always good or always bad. This is one of those things where you get to a guy like C.S. Lewis. He's clearly very comfortable. Yeah, in these regards. He's clearly very comfortable, especially when it comes to his fictional world. Yeah. Which is just a reflection of his view of the real world, by the way.

He had no problem saying that there were river daughters and that there was the triads and the naiads and the tree spirits and the spirit of the river. And there was all these things that to the human mind and even the Christian mind for centuries, this was a normal feature of how they thought about the world. Right. And even, sorry, just to interrupt. Just because I think this is really cool. Lewis does this really well in the Space or the Ransom Trilogy series where he's saying, that each planet, you know, has a spiritual person, a spiritual personality that's guiding its motion in accordance with God's will. And that could even fall in a fairy type category

where you're saying that some of the planets and stars fell in rebellion, but others, and he's actually, by the way, Lewis isn't borrowing just from his own imagination. He's borrowing from men like Thomas Aquinas when he's saying things like that. Aquinas was like, yes, of course. The planets are guided by spiritual intelligences. Yeah, this is just. So anyway, like just, that's not a crazy idea, even though to our modern sensibilities, it sounds very speculative and crazy, if not outright dangerous. So you have modern kind of reformed Christians, a lot of circles we would swim in. Some people would be totally comfortable with this discussion.

Others would be like, wow, that's crazy, that's unhinged speculation. It's unmoored from the word of God. We know there's a category of demon. Why isn't that enough? And to them I would say, I 100% respect that instinct. but the point we're trying to make isn't whether or not you should 100% conclude that this kind of thing exists or not. It's actually just to say, first reckon with the fact that you're not, if everyone

who thinks that is stupid, then most of the Christians of all time were just dumb. We're stupid. And they were, and we immediately get into that like chronological snobbery. Yeah. Of like, well, we understand the world so thoroughly in the modern day because of our scientific method and our post-enlightenment rationalism and our empiricism and and I would just say often we need to have more skepticism about our own instincts when it comes to on top with epistemology then we currently have epistemic humility is very good it's important but then also and also like

not not having such a dualistic view of the world where the the god that created the world and redeems it, didn't actually reveal himself as he is in nature, which is not true. No reformer would say that. The other thing, though, that I would say is, I mean, in a sense, yeah, it is speculation. A lot of what we do in all of life is speculative. The reason that you speculate, though, is because you're reading the book of nature. This is why Christians have had a category like this for all of time. You're reading the book of nature and you're seeing something that you're like, yeah, but it just doesn't fit. Yeah, you go, wait. But is this really a part of this category?

Like there's the experiences that people have are various enough. And they don't fit into the mold enough where they're just saying like, there must be some other thing that God and his wisdom didn't reveal to us in scripture. Maybe it's a mystery we're supposed to find in nature. Maybe not. Maybe it is just those two categories. So closing out, and one of our goals with an episode like this is to give some big categories and hooks that we can hang later episodes.

on that maybe are more of a deep dive into one poltergeist thing or one haunting supposedly of a house and maybe do more of a deep dive. So we're going to keep moving. Yeah, we want to plug along. It doesn't mean that we're done with that whole topic. We're trying to give some broad categories here. So again, think fake that this is hoaxed or fake or mythology, like complete fabrication, folklore out of whole cloth is one category that this story or these stories can fit in. That's true. People make stuff up. or tell stories and then later those stories are confused for historical fact. Yeah.

That's one thing. It could be, if it's real, some kind of demonic spiritual activity that would certainly fit with the grain of much of the activity. Or number three, there has been belief through Christian history in other types of beings, fairy activity that this could potentially also fit with. Yeah. And that would have been how more of the ancients and the medievals and would have probably explained an event like this.

They probably would have gone to the third category before the strictly demonic category. Just based on until maybe she killed him. Right. And then they meld in that again, in the Puritan era, forward in the reforming thinking, in the reformed thinking is that they are often melded then where they say, yes, those things are real,

but they're just a different name for a type of demonic activity. Right, which is pretty compelling. could also be a compelling view. So let's move on. Let's move to the crisis apparition. Yeah, we want to get into crisis apparition. Again, a crisis apparition is when something happens that's tragic to someone else, usually a death.

And a loved one of that person sees them after and talks with them as if it's an everyday experience. So can you tell us about this woman Nina DeSanto? Yeah, absolutely. In the late winter months of 2001, a hairstylist named Nina, De Santo diligently worked away in her little New Jersey salon. She was not extravagantly wealthy, nor was her salon the biggest or most popular in town, but it was hers. She was very proud of that. She had worked for so long to get this place, was firm in her decision that even the tough days of anybody who's owned a business knows she was going to enjoy every moment of owning and operating

this business. This resolve really helped her make the best of it, too. Her salon's atmosphere was always lighthearted, a relaxing place. It wasn't quiet like a spa. She didn't want it to be. She was always encouraging her clients and friends to just drop by anytime they wanted to. She was genuinely friends with her clients and aimed to make those kinds of relationships.

I mean, you know, you're talking to these people as you take care of their salon needs. I've never been to a salon, don't know personally. It's just hair. But you can imagine that all of these salon needs and many conversations, you could genuinely get to know somebody across these hours and hours of their life sitting in your salon chair.

Her door was always open for people to hang out, cut loose after a long day at their own jobs. As the early setting of a winter sun led to a starry and cloudless night, one of her oldest friends came to take her up on that open door policy. Actually, DeSanto was in the early process of closing the place up after just bidding farewell to the final clients of the day. So when she saw Michael, her friend, standing just outside the door and waving, she quickly walked over and let him in. She could tell that he was in a great mood from the peaceful, almost serene smile on his face.

It was one of the things that she liked most about Michael. You could always tell from his face whether he was happy or sad or mad about his, he was just an open book kind of guy. Today he was happy. Nina, I can't stay long. I just wanted to stop by and say thank you for everything. He got like this sometimes. His hopelessly romantic view of life made him lapse into the,

the occasional heartfelt thank you to all of his friends for just being great friends to him. DeSanto soaked it up with Dwight. She was always so encouraged by Michael when he talked to her like this. So the two chatted a bit more, mostly small talk stuff about how the day had gone, before Michael, keeping his promise, gave one last farewell, shuffled out of the store and back out into the cold night. DeSanto, grateful for such a great treat to end the day, finished closing up, and made her way home.

The next morning, a Sunday in DeSanto's only off day each week, she woke up late and started making a nice breakfast. Soon after beginning, however, she received a strange phone call. It was from one of her employees at the salon. The girl spoke through choked words and tears describing how Michael, their dear mutual friend, had died. The man had taken his own life. The body had just been found. DeSanto reeled at the news.

How could this be? She had just spoken to him the night before and he seemed so chipper, so jovial. How could a man go and end his own life in that kind of attitude? How would she not noticed that something was off? She could have saved him and she didn't. She failed. And while DeSanto said these things to her friend, the girl on the other line quieted her sobbing.

In a low and worried tone, she said, Michael died yesterday morning. Like 24 hours ago, you didn't. see him last night. He was already dead by then. But if Nina DeSanto had not been talking to Michael, who at that point had been dead for over nine hours, who had you been talking to? What sort of categories may exist for this sort of thing? Do Christians actually have the ability to speak to this kind of experience? Or do we have to settle for the modernist psychology explanation, that it's all a construction of the experiencer's mind, that somehow there's a latent and psychic signal sent

out by the deceased or troubled person that reaches the minds of their loved ones whose brains then form this entire scene that plays out before them as if it's really happening. We must reckon with the fact that some researchers claim that up to 30% of people say that they have experienced a crisis apparition type of event. And many of these people are proclaiming Christians. So do we have anything to say? Well, I think so. The Sea of Galilee is the lowest freshwater lake in the world.

It actually sits nearly 700 feet below sea level in the Jordan Valley and is surrounded by the Golan Heights. Housing the famous Wheel of Giants, by the way, call back. Yes. That Golan Heights to the east and foreboding Mount Hermon to the north and the west. All these factors play into it being a place that experiences frequent, sudden, and very violent storms. One night, little less than 2,000 years ago,

one such storm hit the vulnerable lake. Unfortunately, there were still people on it. After the Lord Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist, a man Christ himself claimed was the greatest of those born of women. He withdrew to a desolate place on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee, a bit south of Bessata. Though he had gone there by himself, great crowds found out about it and followed him there

to hear more of his words of life. having pity on these tired people, the Lord performed one of the greatest miracles recorded in the scriptures when he fed a crowd of 5,000 men, not even talking about the women and children, by multiplying just five loaves of bread and two fish until it was enough for all to enjoy with plenty left over. After this marvelous event, the Lord bid his disciples to go before him back to the other side of the lake while he stayed behind to formally dismiss the crowd of people who had received his gift before going to pray by himself. Some time passed, and as the disciples were well into their journey to the western shore of Ganeshra,

a brutal wind ripped across the water and met their little boat with great force. Their trip had just turned into a great test of physical endurance and even courage. The Apostle Matthew tells us that this wind continued to rage well into the night and that during the fourth watch of the night, the disciples saw something in a distance. now visible on the peak of a wave, now hidden in the valley of the next swell. A man was walking upon the surface of the water. Those who first noticed it cried out in shock and woke up the others. Soon they were all terrified by the spectacle.

But why were they so terrified? Sure, someone was walking on the water, which is quite amazing and completely unheard of, but is it scary? We read thus in Matthew 14, 25 to 27. and in the fourth watch of the night he came to them walking on the sea but when the disciples saw him walking on the sea they were terrified and said it's a ghost and they cried out in fear but immediately Jesus spoke to them saying take heart it is I do not be afraid the disciples were afraid why because they thought that what they were seeing was far from the incarnate lord they thought

that they were looking at a ghost but surely they must have realized the uncanny resemblance this ghost bore to the son of man, right? In the midst of raging winds, if they were close enough to speak to Christ, wouldn't they also be close enough to make out his features? So what gives? Why were they so scared? Perhaps they thought that they were seeing the ghost of the Lord coming to them. Perhaps the terror came from them believing this meant that something terrible had happened to their rabbi while he was alone praying. Perhaps they thought that this was his spirit, speaking in strictly human terms, who had come as an ambassador in the night to give them the horrible news. What you might notice is my very precise and repetitive use of the word, perhaps. We don't know

the disciples' motivations for being terrified of what they saw that night before learning that it was the Lord. But the story does betray something. The disciples seemed to have had a category in their minds for a ghost, an apparition, or a spirit that is want to appear in the midst of something. kind of crisis. The reason that I say that, that last bit especially, that the disciples had a category in their mind, is because the Greek word used in the text is phantasma to describe ghost. It's used only one other time and it's Mark, I believe it's Mark 7, which is Mark's version of these same events. That is the only time in the Old and New Testament that that word is used. Would you like to get control of your money and set up a system that will guarantee for the

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by sending an email to banking at privatefamilybanking.com with the subject line, tickets, and all caps, and include your full name and mailing address in the body of the email. The ticket entry period will end at midnight central time on February 13th in 2024, and the winner will be notified via email on February 14th. You must be 18 years of age or older to enter, and only one email per person can be entered into this giveaway. Thank you. At all other instances, the word for ghost, you know, or spirit or shade,

is also the word for necromancer, which immediately gives an evil connotation to things. where it's obviously evil. It's clearly evil. But in this case, it's just the word ghost. And that's a common use in the ancient world by other Greek writers. Plato, Plutarch, Euripides. They do have this category very clearly in their understanding, at least, of a human spirit that's not necessarily a negative or a positive thing.

It just is. That's what it is. They're seeing the spirit of a person that is disembodied. It's not in the body. It's not in the flesh. but it's walking about or it's interacting with people or you can sometimes see it. Yeah. It's very, so one of the Old Testament examples of a word that's used that's translated as ghost

into the English, which is very rare, is Samuel. Yeah. But then also Isaiah 29 in verse 1 through 4. Yeah. So Christ is talking. Christ. God the Father. But Christ also.

He's the word. Yeah. Is talking through the pen of Isaiah. And he says this. This is chapter 29 verses 1 through 4. Ah, Ariel Ariel, the city where David encamped. Add year to year. Let the feasts run their round.

Yet I will distress Ariel. And there shall be moaning and lamentation. And she shall be to me like an Ariel. And I will encamp against you all around and will besiege you with towers. And I will raise siege works against you. And you will be brought low. From the earth you shall speak. and from the dust your speech will be bowed down.

Your voice shall come from the ground like the voice of a ghost. And from the dust, your speech shall whisper. So this is an example of a modern translation being ghost. But the Hebrew word used there is actually the word for necromancer, which I think plays into what's actually being said in the passage, which is that these people, God is judging, have become reprobates. Yeah. They have,

they have sundered the covenant and the love. The pulpit commentary for this passage says that the word refers both to necromancers and the spirits they claim to summon. So again, familiar spirits. Familiar spirits. Clearly an evil connotation there. Yeah. But then we have Samuel.

Samuel. Very highly debated passage or instance where Saul goes to the witch of Endor and she, or she, and he asks to speak to Samuel. who's dead at this time, the prophet Samuel. And they, she does it. She calls him up. She seems shocked when he actually comes up. And here's the, here's where this passage is highly debated.

Yes. We've talked about it before. We land on the side that we actually think that Samuel was the one speaking. I've done a whole lecture about this. Yeah, the real Samuel. It's actually in our Patreon stuff. It's their strange Bible story stuff. But some people believe that this is just a counterfeit again of Samuel, and a lot of reformed theologians believe that as well. So it's not like a, it's not a crazy position or anything like that. But the text doesn't seem to present it that way. Right. You have to bring that. The text very much just says, it was Samuel said this. Right. It doesn't say, and then the fake Samuel. The familiar spirit of Samuel. And they get there by arguing the impossibility of the contrary, by saying that given what we know about the.

spiritual world or what happens to human spirits, which is when they're sundered from the body, they either go to Sheel the grave, which is a holding place for the spirits awaiting judgment. In the Old Testament prior to Christ, it also had a portion that would have been a place for the righteous. Yes. For those of the time in faith. That I believe was liberated by Christ at his resurrection, death barrel and resurrection. And that now you either go to Sheel.

awaiting shield being poured into hell, or your spirit goes to be absent from the bodies to be present with the Lord. You go to be with the Lord in paradise, with awaiting the resurrection. So it's not the final state. It's not fixed. It's not fully good yet.

You want to be resurrected and embodied. Because Paul even called in Second Corinthians 5, I believe. Paul even says that when the soul and body is bifurcated, the body goes to the sleeping intermediary resting place. Yeah, it's like a sleep. So your body's in the ground. part of you really. Yeah.

Your body is part of you is in the ground and your soul is with Christ. Yeah. And your soul is with Christ. So because we know that, they do argue like, okay,

so it's impossible for the real Samuel to come up. But the problem is that passage is presented as a weird thing. Yes. Where the witch is like,

see, what she's normally expecting to have happen is her familiar spirit, which is an evil spirit, a demonic entity, is going to pretend to do commerce

with the dead, so that she can give messages to the living. From Samuel. But she's like, oh, wow, I've actually, that's not my familiar spirit. That's not the demon I'm used to dealing with here. That's Samuel. That's the real deal. So she's, it's not good. It's all bad for Saul and for her.

But Samuel gets up, and he says everything you'd expect Samuel to do. Exactly. What are you doing? You're done. It's over. Why would a demon give a very godly message to Saul? It's exactly what Samuel would say. So I bring all of that up to say that we have biblical examples of the human disembodied soul as being a category of being.

Yes. Okay. But yeah, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, so clearly Samuel's thing is a major exception. It's something weird. It is something weird that is not normally supposed to happen. Where even the practitioners of the dark arts are like, that's not supposed to happen. The only other example I can think of is transfiguration,

where Peter, James, and John see Moses and Elijah with the Lord on the Mount as he's transfigured. Yeah, they appear with them. That's the only other example I can think of that would even come close to something like this, unless someone were to try, which I'm not doing, to force the argument that the disciples were seeing an apparition of Christ, which I don't, obviously, it's not true because it was actually true. There's another passage that it can be argued in Acts, I think it's Acts 12, where Peter is in prison and the angel of the Lord comes and frees him from prison. It's a funny story. They then go to Mark's house. I think is Mark's house or is it Barnabas? I thought it was Peter's like mom's house,

his mother-in-law. I may be completely right. Details are fuzzy. In Jerusalem. Because the disciples are there praying for Peter. Yes. All night. Because they think he's going to be died. I think he's going to be executed. Yeah. So then Peter. Peter goes and knocks on the door. The angels like freedom from prison, angels not with him anymore. Right. And the little servant girl, I can't remember her name, comes to the door. And she's so excited that Peter's there, that she runs back, she doesn't even let him in. Yeah. And she says, Peter's here. And they're like, no, Peter's not here. You're seeing, maybe it was his angelos. Yes. Maybe it was his angelos.

Now, there's an argument here that I think we'll link to. There's some people who argue that this is actually that a better way of translating this would have been it's his ghost. It's his apparition. Yeah, like it's his spirit. And that the people were saying that maybe it was something like a crisis apparition where Peter's actually dead. Right. Yeah. The argument is that he's already been killed.

And his spirit comes as an Anglos, which is a messenger. Yeah, one last time. To inform the disciples that it's over. Okay, so I would like to draw a few threads together. Yeah. Make a little bit of a conclusion here and then get your thoughts. So the first thing I think we need to say is that that's definitely a debated reading. It does answer some problems or some questions about the text.

Like, why didn't they invite the angel? If it was an angel, like an angel that was associated with guarding over Peter, why wouldn't they invite him in, that kind of stuff? So one of the things I think we can say from the two main things that we've pointed to in the New Testament, Jesus walking on the water and the disciples reaction to it. The only time the word ghost, ghost ghost really appears. And it is an odd reaction. It's weird.

Yeah. And then that situation is that along with the other ancient texts outside of the Bible, I believe that it's pretty clear culturally that just like in our day, people, or at least a lot of people believed in the idea of of the human spirit being able to appear to people after death in some circumstances. Right. I think that's beyond dispute. Even apparently faithful Second Temple Jews. Yes.

Yeah. Even those Jewish people believed that that seemed to be a category that existed. Okay. I think that's indisputable. Yeah. Where I am going to go in a disagreement from that is that I actually think they were incorrect. Sure. I don't believe, I think they believe that. Even the disciples, I think, believe that. And I don't think they're correct. I don't think that

the human spirit lingers after death. I don't even think crisis apparitions are actually human spirits appearing to people. That's my conclusion. I know some people disagree and there's like this weird short term like on their way, I guess, kind of like they appear for different reasons. Let me explain why I don't believe that that's the case. I believe number one, I just hit my microphone, sorry guys, I believe that number one, the example of Samuel, which I do believe is Samuel, is clearly in the text, a very strange thing that's happening, like Balam's donkey talking kind of strange. It's obviously a providential intervention. Yes. I believe number two that the scriptures don't teach that the human spirit is able to appear like this to other people. So it's, you have to, it's silent on that matter. And then I think what it does say positively would, lead us to conclude that the human spirit after death is in Sheal or with the Lord. Yeah.

In today, in the ancient times, in one of the two compartments of Sheel. So I believe that's the case. And then I would even point at this crisis apparition story we told. And there are many others like it. And I think that what you're happening here isn't that people are always making this up. I think sometimes these events do happen. People witness and experience these things. And this is a category where I would say is solidly demonic in that if you think about the example we gave, the man murdered himself.

He commits suicide. Yeah. Which is self-murder. It's a violation of the command not to murder. And then he appears to this woman, but he's serene, he's peaceful, he's happy. A lot of these stories will underscore the idea, the lie, that death, that all death is an escape to heaven, that all death as an escape to a better place, which is one of the most dangerous lies that you can possibly believe. Right. Because that's not all death as an escape to heaven.

It totally undermines the truth. And so to me, it just, it ticks all of the boxes of a demonic deception where it's convincing people of a spiritual reality, but one that is nefarious. Right. And teaches a false view of the real nature of the spiritual. Right. So it's that classic, a lie is strengthened by a mixture of error kind of thing like you see in the last battle with the lie of the Calermans and the lie of the ape is that they mix in when they find Puzzle the donkey dressed in the lion's skin, then they realize that Puzzle the donkey whom they've been parading as Aslan is gone. Then they lie and they say Aslan is not going to appear to you anymore. He's angry. But also there's, He's so angry because there's been a donkey dressing up like Aslin.

And they strengthen the lie with the little bit of truth. They're the ones who dress the donkey and the lion's skin. But now they're using that lie to make their, that truth to make their lie cast iron. Right. I think that's what I'm, that's in my opinion, crisis apparition. I like that. I agree. I think that when you, because I was thinking like, okay, but again, like, what's the deception?

I mean, of course, you have this example with the guy who killed himself is a very obvious one. But what about the ones? Like, I heard one listener, they sent in a story and they said that their aunt or, you know, grandma, someone was telling them that one day when they were younger, their father passed away. And something that the father used to do when they were like really young, you know, like toddler age. He would sneak into their room in the morning, he did this to all the kids. and he would wake them up by like tugging on their toes, like pinching their toes, you know? Like you do these weird rituals with your kids.

Yeah. And that would eventually wake them up. Yeah. And she was saying that her grandma said that that morning, she had felt, clearly felt someone pulling on her toes. And it woke her up. And she was like, that's weird. That's exactly what my dad used to do.

Yeah. And then she found out later that day that her father was dead. And she asked her brother about it because she was like, like, this is going to sound weird, but, and he said, oh, no, the same thing happened to me. Where, like, that's, both happened to him that morning. They were in separate places completely, but they had this, like, memory almost of their toes being pulled on, and it's this nice memory of their father, and then you find out he's gone. All that to say, I would hear stories like that and think, okay, so where's the deception? Yeah, where's the deception there? Like,

where's the deception? One answer could be, sometimes the Lord is very kind. And he, he, he, he, He gives you gifts and they seem completely trivial, but actually they speak to people and they're very kind. Another thing would be, well, we don't know necessarily the long game of the deception. I think that what you're saying makes a lot of sense where they just want to undermine the message that's clearly presented in Scripture. Yeah. The other thing to note is that in agreeing with you, Scripture leaves no room for a third way to go after death. Right. It is either you are in Sheel now after Christ.

You are either in Sheel or you are with Christ. There's no lingering category that happens. Even the special cases of exception, Samuel coming back with the Transfiguration, they don't linger. It's a quick providential. This happens and then it's gone. And we have no reason to expect that anymore. And so the problem is that one of the deceptions that could happen when this gets undermined is purgatory. Like you could get a doctrine of purgatory

that infects your theology that clearly wreaks havoc on it as we saw in the Catholic Church and one of the reasons as far as my understanding reading the history one of the reasons for the development of purgatory at all is so many people

were having experiences like this where they were seeing ghosts or what they thought were ghosts that were like walking around in fields or in graveyards. They were having crisis apparition experiences. They were telling the priests about it. All these things were happening.

Then you also have the political side of indulgences and stuff. And the Catholic Church was like, we actually have to develop an answer for this. But instead of saying, well, clearly it's a demonic deception. They went for the, maybe there's something in nature that we're not fully aware of. And it's this third category of spiritual location before you eventually go to either Sheel or Abraham's bosom or Christ. And I just don't think that's right. So I think that you can have experiences that in the moment actually seem relatively benevolent. And yet, all it's trying to do is just undermine.

What's clearly taught in God's revelation to man. Whether subtly or overtly. Exactly. And if it's undermined at all, it is successful. And that doesn't mean that it has to be openly malicious all the time. Right. So all that to say, I agree with you. Dude, it's so tricky.

We just tried to dab, but the table is really wide. The table's wide. But you guys should hear when we dab up good, it like echoes through the whole world. All right, guys. Well, we're going to shift gears here. And I hope that that would, again, overview stuff here. We're not just going to try to go deep on everything, crisis apparition. Maybe we'll talk about that later.

As much as I would love to. There's one about an ocean liner trip across the Atlantic that I just, It's a great story. Yeah. There's so many. I'm not going to tell you right now. There's some interesting ones. But what we want to do now is turn to more of a residual type haunting, stone tape type theory.

And to do that, we're going to go to one of the darkest periods in American history. Yeah. Truly one of the most horrific series of years in our entire history as a nation, which is the Civil War. So, Ben, why don't you take us through Gettysburg and let's talk about some of these residual hauntings? Yes, let's. The American Civil War painted the states with the blood of her own from April 12, 1861 to May 26, 1865. As the war raged into the late summer of 1863, the Confederate Army, led by General Robert E. Lee, continued its grueling press into the northern territories, the famous Gettysburg Campaign that had begun two months earlier after Lee's victory at Chancellorsville.

Little did the men on either side know just how pivotal the next handful of days would be for them, for their families, the war, and the entire history of the land they were marching over. In every war, there's some turning point that historians and laypeople can point to as the point at which the tide swung in favor of the winning side. The Great War had Verdun. World War II had D-Day. The long conflict between Rome and Carthage and the Second Punic War had the Battle of where the General Hannibal was finally defeated by Scipio.

But what would the American Civil Wars Waterloo be? Perhaps some of the soldiers wondered this even as that moment approached them on the morning of July 1st, 1863. Finally, at the end of three days of all-out and almost desperate fighting from both sides of the conflict, the Confederate Army of Virginia began its retreat. Having suffered one last great loss of infantry due to well-timed artillery-fighted, Hillary fire from the Union forces, the Southern Army was simply unable to continue, lacking the reserves of men and munition and nourishment necessary to continue against the larger Yankee force. As the Confederate soldiers wandered out of Gettysburg, exhausted and uncertain

of what the future might now hold, then President Abraham Lincoln sat in his office in Washington, pondering how best to capitalize on this great Union victory. The Battle of Gettysburg was the deadliest battle in the American Civil War and accounts for the deadliest battle ever fought on American soil. Somewhere between 46,000 and 51,000 of the country's strongest, most competent, most promising, and most courageous young men were either killed, wounded to incapacity, or captured. For all intense and purposes, it was the theoretical end of the war. The southern states could no longer muster any real threat to the northern cause. A little less than two years, later, after some objectively valiant but hopeless attempts from the Confederates to turn the tide

back in their favor, generals Lee and Grant sat in the Appomattox courthouse and signed a treaty agreement. The war was over, and the north ultimately had Gettysburg to thank for their coming out on top. And that's it, right? The war ends. The country changes completely overnight, and decades of civil unrest and tension ensues even into our present day. But the war itself at least ended. If only that were true. There's a famous photograph that was taken of the battlefield just after the fighting had ceased. Shows a rolling hill of otherwise lovely green grass littered with the corpses of Union soldiers. Men who had just moments and hours before been filled with the vitality that comes from the fighting spirit. Fortunately for these men, they would all be buried in the Gettysburg

National Cemetery, or at least most of them would. But the same cannot be said for many or most of the Confederate soldiers, and many people believe that these soldiers left to rot into the soil they bled and died for might still cry out for help in the night. Gettysburg remains one of the most allegedly haunted places in the world. What follows are just a few of the haunting tales that creep up from the annals of time after the deadly encounter there. On the battlefield itself, which is now a living museum called the Gettysburg National Military Park, hundreds have reported seeing shades and apparitions of the fallen soldiers, roaming through the cannons and stepping over the fences on foggy mornings,

armed with rifle and bayonet and trotting along, as if following some order from an undead officer that is also stuck there with him. In the heat of battle, it seems, the men failed to notice that they died. In their confusion, they continued the fight as a ghastly memory. One particular part of the battlefield is a rock formation of huge boulders called Devil's Den. It got the name for being home to a legend that a massive serpent, some 15 feet long, lived within the cave at its center, and would devour any who ventured too close. Nowadays, the name fits for different reasons. People report hearing the beating of war drums

and distant sounds of gunshots peppering around them, even in the clear light of day. Others have said they encountered a withered old man dressed in shabby clothing. No matter the elements, he's always barefoot. They say he will approach a party and attempt to give directions to some unknown and difficult to understand place. Some had said that he has even held their hand. There's an old wooden bridge, Sacks Bridge, spanning the Marsh Creek close to the battlefield. Legend has it,

three Confederate soldiers attempt to abandon their posts by fleeing over the bridge when they come to terms with how hopeless the battle has become. Unfortunately, whether it was a Confederate officer enforcing justice for their disloyalty or some Union Jacks just doing what they saw as right, the three men were killed as they ran through the covered bridge. visitors have claimed to see the clear silhouettes of three men walking through the bridge with rifles and packs if they look in at just the right time of day.

As you were reading that, I had a thought. And I'm not saying that I think this is true, but it's probably worth exploring. Because I was thinking like, okay, this clearly differs categorically from the other hauntings we've talked about. Because it's some massive, like, national tragedy and epic tragedy. And it seems like there's some shared memory within the land. or within the people that are there. And I think it's worth mentioning that it may not be completely out of the realm of possibility

for something like this to be more true. And the reason for that is not what I'm about to say, but what I'm going to say after it. Okay. I was thinking of Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious. Yeah. And how you have actually, like, men like Bovink address that and say that, no, Young was actually on to something there.

because we clearly have motifs of thought that are peppered throughout the ancient world and they all had to have some origination and there are different ways to explain that. But one of the potential ways to explain it is a view of the propagation of the soul. So when you ask yourself how a man's soul is created,

there are two predominant views. There's creationism and then this other one called truth. Judaism. Creationism is the more popular one, which says that at the moment of conception, a new soul is made by God. God creates a soul. Exactly. Now, and the traditionism agrees that of course God creates the soul, but it says that it's actually created in the new human a little bit differently, where at conception, this new person inherits pieces of their parents' soul. Luther held to this view. Calvin, he waffled back and forth.

Augustine also waffled back and forth. And the reason that that view even became a thing is because the theologians were observing nature and they were saying like, why is it that that boy right there, he walks just like his grandfather, but he never met his grandfather. But people would say like,

I swear, you walk just like your granddad. Or you lounge in a chair and you prop your feet up and put your hands on your chest crossed. And no one ever taught you to do that. but your grandfather always did that. Like, why do you do that? And the kid would just say like, oh, well, this is just how I've always done it.

This is how I know it to do it. And so anyway, the idea is that traditionism can answer that because you actually do inherit some kind of memory of the habits of your forefathers in the form of your soul being created. Where I'm going with that is... Wow. Yeah, I know.

That wasn't very interesting. The tradition is the case for the stone tape theory hauntings. Well, where I'm going with is like, what if you do have some kind of national memory of some big tragedy where it almost is as if when you're in the setting and the weather is just like it was on that day, you almost can like hear the gunshots. You know, like the theater on which it happened is so, you know, mirrored and the event was such a massive and epic event that it's almost like, I, it's almost like I can't. hear these things happening or something like that. And it's because of traditionism. Again,

I do not believe that that is true. I want, I can't emphasize that enough. I don't even know that it follows. I know. I mean, it seems, but you know what, though? But it would explain why some people see it and some people don't because, no, it would explain why some see it and some don't because if there is any like actual kinship. Yeah. Then your soul would remember. I'm I'm not, I am laughing because I thought about like a kid who draws something. He's like, it's an elephant. And your parent says, that was so creative of you. It means it doesn't look like an elephant at all.

We are not going to put it on the fridge. It's like like these theological giants. It's like the horse. Yeah. The horse head is beautiful. And then it gets like to a two year old who's right handed drew with his left hand at the back. Yes. And it's like Augustin is coming up with this view of traditionism.

and then like some podunk deacon with a ghost podcast takes it to the battle of Gettysburg. Who's so hungry because we've been recording for like eight years at this point? Anyway. Then I can't even remember a time before we started recording this episode. I think that people are going to be like, wow, Ben's really on to something. And I have to say, I disagree. But it was worth saying. I'm not even a traducian, so it's okay.

That's fine. I think it's possible. I think it's an area where we don't know. I don't know what I am. Where it could be either. Like it could be. I don't think there's a reason to say either one is, must be false. The scripture speaks like both are true.

Yeah, it says things that could make you go. Yeah, it could be attributed to both. So anyway, very interesting. The stone tape theory overall, man, I, this is another one where I get the powerful draw. of that sounding totally reasonable. Right. You know what I mean?

Like that powerful emotions. We know that the land is affected by the actions. Yeah, that it could have a powerful effect on. So this is one where I'm like, I totally get it. I get why that sounds so good. It's just that I don't have a good reason to say that that is not just like other hauntings type phenomena. Right.

A deception of some. Again, I actually, I almost never hear of phenomena and think everyone made it all up. I almost never hear that. I rarely, maybe that's bad. Yeah. But if anything, I think, could this be a situation where the deceptive spiritual world is giving you what you expect? Is it serving up to you what you think should be reasonable to, again, just subtle. paint a different view of the spiritual world and of the realities of life and death than what

the scriptures present. It's just, the scriptures just don't speak to this kind of thing. Yeah. Like, it doesn't speak to the question of, is psychic energy of, or emotional energy of people? That's a real thing, first of all. I mean, it actually is a thing. I mean, it kind of, it doesn't, obviously, explicitly. But when I am reading, like, really the Pentateuch and Leviticus and Deuteronomy especially, there is sort of a donagality of those books which says that because of the sins of the Amarites and because of the blood that the earth has drank there, it's spitting them out. And it seems to me like that's a clear reason for the incredibly high standard of holiness that God puts into the Levitical law.

Yeah. Because of the place where they're going, the history of the, the people that have been there, there is such a massive proclivity to slip on the slope back into the law of Canaan. And so, of course, not only is God holy, and so his people must be holy, but of course his law has to be incredibly holy. Because otherwise his people will quickly slip back into the depraved ways of the people that were there before them. Maybe that's reading too much into it. Well, and there is such thing as desecrating. There is such thing as sacral desecration of a place or a thing or an altar where Israel was expected to go in and take the high places and the altars where these horrible, where the blood had drunk or the ground had drunk

the blood of human sacrifice. Yeah, yeah. And where cities have been founded, where kings would sacrifice their infant children and put their bodies in the gates or the foundation of a city to strengthen it as an offering to their demon gods. And Israel was to go in and utterly, utterly wipe those things out and desecrate and even sacrily desecrate the altars. Yeah.

Intentionally. Like, so there is something that's true about the nature of death and sin and evil that it leaves a mark. Yeah. It leaves a mark and it does matter. I think this is one of those, like when it comes to the stone tape thing, I tend to think, um, if there's anything to it that's related to, like, like stone tape theory. Again, I actually don't think stone tape's true. But if there were,

I think biblically we could say certainly that it's not actually the spirit of that person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not actually there. We've established that already. Yeah. In no case, is it the spirit of the dead human? It's just not. It just isn't. So I tend to think that where it's real, it's possibly some kind of spiritual deception or it's some kind of, but I think there's at least a category where I don't know. That's just really I think the answer is, I don't know, but I don't think that it's not happening. Like, I don't think that everyone is making this up. Sure, some people are.

Some people want to go and see something. Some people want to go and feel or hear something. Yeah. Of course. But then there's also accounts where you're like, yeah, I just, I don't know what it is. I just don't think that you're lying. I think that you believe that you saw something and you probably did. Yeah. And the ditch to avoid would be to look at the fact that we don't really have a clean category for that.

And then to start entertaining ideas like, oh, well, so maybe it's a glitch in the simulation. It's a computer program by a sixth grader in some alternate universe. No, it's not that. It's certainly not that. The thing is, no one has a good answer for that kind of category. but it's I think at least worth entertaining some potential answers that could start to get you there, but you have to hold them really loosely.

Yeah. Because you're from Jump Street with something like this, speculating wildly. You know, we probably need to go into the canon, if we're really to answer this, and talk about the Lord of the Rings. When they're passing through Holland, you know, Holland?

Yeah. I think is what's called. Is that the... Let me look it at. When Legolas is hearing the stones and they're passing through this region... Is it in the plains of Rohan? Like what...

It's Holland. Yeah, it's called Holland. So they're passing from Rivendale in the first stage of their journey. Okay. The fellowship. This is earlier on than I was thinking. The elves once dwelt in this place called Holland

and they're passing through it. And Legolas says he, I think he says, like, deep they delved us, fair, they wrought us. The stones are speaking because they've had, the elves are like this supernatural people, right? Like they're this immortal, the fair ones. Like they wrought. And so the land has a memory of them. Okay. So this is clearly an idea that's attractive to us.

It ends up in our lore. It ends up in our fiction. It ends up where we think of like a land remembering. But then I think in the scriptures, there is such place, there is such thing as a place where the land itself is cursed. Or where. Or blessed even.

Or blessed. Or when the blood of your brother cries out from the earth that drank it up to Cain. Like we again, we so quickly dismiss like this whole other reality of the sacred. and the immaterial interacting with the material world. The way I think about it is that, you know, generally I think Christians think about these two worlds as if they are two parts or compartments

that are basically sealed off. They might touch somewhere. It's dualism. Yeah, like a two-story house kind of thing. What I think about, what I think would be a more apt metaphor would be it's like a tapestry where the spiritual and the material are woven together in ways that you can't tug on the one

without tugging on the other. You couldn't pull all of the threads out of the spiritual without completely changing the material as well. They're woven together in that way. So again, I'm not saying therefore residual stone tape hauntings of the Civil War battles are that. You're right. But I am saying there's at least a category for this where the stones, the land, the earth, the material remembers and has interface with. And there's commerce. Yeah. So a lot of the, I mean, Lewis did this too. But my understanding of Lewis's and Tolkien's view of reality,

and it's derived from a lot of Scandinavian myth in this regard, is the River Daughter or the Old Man Willow type trope, where they did see the natural geography as governed by an intelligence. Yeah. But they said that intelligence was in the fairy category. So you could have a good river. or you could have a bad river. Yeah, some of the rivers went over to the evil one.

Exactly. Tolkien did it with the trees. Some of the trees are bad. Yeah. Yeah. And so they had this category. And clearly, yeah, it's fiction, but the fiction is an extension of what you already believe is true, just repackaged. And so I am compelled by that idea.

Like maybe there is some sort of intelligence over different geographies that are set to govern them. Maybe not. You shouldn't be married to that idea. And perhaps there can be such a desecration like what you're saying, such a sacral desecration that that elemental spirit is now like tainted or corrupted or it latches onto that and not the victory that came later. I think that that's possible. And then there's also just the element of the very human and impossible to deny element

to me of when you go to a place with a storied past, you do sense a weightiness and a reverence when you go into I got the chance to go into the Vatican and go to St. Peter's Basilica and when you walk into that it's not just the fact that it's beautiful

and it's ornate and it is all those things it's also just like the history that's taken place in this building is difficult to describe but you do feel a weightiness when you go in or the Pantheon is the same you go into the Pantheon. Yeah yeah you feel

the weight of the centuries pressing in on you. And the reality is we are transcendent. We are physical, spiritual beings. And so we do. Our soul has commerce with God. Hi there, faithful listener. If you've been enjoying the Haunted Cosmos podcast and you'd like to see Ben and I live, then come and meet us in person at the Right Response Ministries Conference, happening March 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. The title of the conference is Blueprints for Christendom 2.0, seven doctrines for ruling the world. Some of our other speakers include Doug Wilson, Joe Boot, and the host of the conference, our friend Joel Webbin.

Yes, the whole conference is going to be really awesome. But the best part to me is that Brian and I will be on stage with Joel talking about the most unhinged things imaginable. Plus, by coming to the conference, it'll give us a chance to meet each of you in person. You can register for the conference by going to rightresponseconference.com. Again, that's right responseconference.com. And don't forget to use the promo code haunted to get 20% off of registration exclusively for our listeners.

Lastly, if you're looking for another fantastic podcast, you've got to check out Joel's podcast called Theology Applied. It's on Apple and Spotify, but you can also watch Theology Applied by searching Right Response Ministries on YouTube. Check the links in the description. Brian, you know how sometimes you wake up in the morning? Uh, yeah, hopefully everybody does that. Sure, maybe. But do you ever feel tired when you wake up? Well, yeah, Ben, I used to all the time, but then I started drinking this new drink. It's actually called coffee, and it helps you wake up.

No way. There's a drink that does that. Man, I should give it a shot. You definitely need to try this. And when you do, you should buy your coffee from Squirrely Joe's coffee. They're a thoroughly Christian company who sends you a great coffee at an affordable price, Plus, they even donate some of their proceeds to Operation Underground Railroad, helping the effort to end child trafficking. Okay, wait, I actually have heard of Squirrely Joe's Coffee, and they are really great. They make it super easy to order exactly what you want if you go to www. that's www.squarelyjo's.com and click Shop Coffee.

And first-time buyers can sign up to receive 20% off of their first order, just go to www. www.squarelyjows.com or use the link in the description below. Squirley Joe's Coffee. Share coffee, serve humbly, live faithfully. Wow. I mean, in a sense,

we look to the great cloud of witnesses in their example and we know that they are looking on, that we're living on a stage, and it's a stage that is just where one act in this great play of history that God is writing. So there's a weightiness there. There's a, you think about, I mean, man, the Civil

War was just fratricide, massive mass fratricide. Yeah. Brother killing brother. And a horror. I mean, horrors beyond comprehension if you haven't experienced that kind of combat or, I mean, just absolute horror. Right. So this is the only, like this is one of the only, I don't know, supernatural, like haunting-ish stuff, that I back away and I go, I honestly. I really don't know. If at the end of when we see as we, as we are seen and we know fully and we look back, if God was like, yeah, when the Canaanites desecrated it became a haunt of jackals and shades, that there was a spiritual element there that was genuinely in a spiritual way desecrated.

That when you go to Gettysburg and there was this blue. blood spilled unnecessary, crazy, intense human suffering, whole families and sons and husbands and just being plucked up before their time. And blood, you know, the ground has drunk gallons of blood. That had an effect. And I honestly, I don't know. And then, I mean, I'm not going down and like in my system. Yeah, I know. I'm going to be like here. Yeah. But it is an idea that when you think about it, you go, but the world really is a place. where the material is touched. Yeah, like it's the God who made,

the God who made creation is the same God of recreation. And so they don't just walk side by side of one another. They are, I've described it as salt that's dissolved in a bucket of water, where both are now fundamentally a piece of each other. Yeah, like you said,

you can't tug on the one thread without pulling the other, but we should move on. We should move on. We have two more stories and we... It says a buck fifty-two on our board, even though we paused and we had a couple things, but it's like we're deep. Yeah, we're very deep here.

We need to move on to haunted. We got two other types, haunted house and then haunted objects. So I'm going to walk into the story here of the haunted Limp Mansion. Yeah, L-E-M-P. L-E-M-P mansion. Yes. In 1838, an ambitious and optimistic young man named Johann Limp traveled across the ocean from Germany to America.

He was not interested in the industry of the country. coastlands of this thriving country, though. Instead, he knew exactly what he wanted, and what he wanted was a landlocked life in industry in the budding Midwestern states. Yohan arrived in St. Louis, Missouri, some weeks after his initial landing in New York City, and began his work in earnest. One thing that every German could bring to the table of this region, one thing that Johan knew everyone else would appreciate, was a solid brew of beer. So, he opened up a small grocery store right in the middle of downtown St. Louis, where he sold normal household items, canned food, produce, and his prized home brew recipe of golden German lager. This lighter beer immediately became

a great success in the town, since the market had up to that point been saturated by much darker and stronger beers. In fact, the home brew became so popular and profitable that just two years after arriving in St. Louis, Johann would shut the doors of his grocery store and instead focus all of his on brewing. Thus began the limp beer empire that would rule over much of the Midwest for many decades to come. Unfortunately, with the great success of the brewery, came a host of family issues and tragedies that would prove to haunt the family's heritage and reputation even up to the present day. Eventually, the patriarch of the limp line in America passed away, but it was only after he had built the limp brewery into a highly respected institution in St. Louis. By the 1860s, when Yompe

Johann actually died, his brewery was one of the largest breweries in the city and he was a millionaire. After the time of mourning had passed, Johann's son William seamlessly stepped into the role of sole leader of the Limp Empire. He had learned from the best, his father, and so his business acumen's foundation was better than any of the schooling in the world. He proved himself to be an even better leader of the company than his father had been, which yielded greener and greener pastures for the Limp family. the brewery and her employees, and even all of St. Louis in general. William significantly expanded the brewery until it covered five city blocks. He excavated the ground beneath the expanded plant to achieve better storage and brewing standards for the prized lauder. Because of his faithfulness and carrying out his father's vision in St. Louis,

the limp name eventually became synonymous with influence, wealth, and integrity in business. The Lent Brewery was finally at the very peak of the St. Louis Beer Market, and they would stay there until Prohibition hit in the 1920s. In the midst of all the great expansion projects and growing of the business undertaken by William, his father-in-law, Jacob Fikert, had begun an ambitious project of his own just down the street from the sprawling brewery. Fikert built a beautiful Victorian house in which he and his wife could dwell close to their grandkids and live out their days in comfort and luxury.

As they indeed grew exceedingly old, William Limp stepped in and purchased the home from his father-in-law, seeing it as a place where his family could also thrive in peace. He renovated and expanded the home to better suit the modern designs. By the end of his work, the mansion had 33 rooms and contained an entire servant's quarters in the attic that was quite spacious and accommodating. He even went the extra mile of digging through the ground,

beneath the mansion to create a system of tunnels that led straight to the brewery's main facility. Now he could pass to and from work and home with ease and speed, since he wouldn't be stopped on the street, unless he just wanted to see people on some days. By Williams' count, he had done right by his family and by his father's legacy. He was confident that old Johan would be proud of his boy. As time wore on, the success continued to compound on itself. Limp expanded operations even more. He hired more workers and closed greater and greater deals. He saw the great hosting potential that as home and underground tunnels afforded him and actually decided to expand that underground room of the mansion,

to create a theater and a swimming pool for his family and friends to enjoy away from the busy sounds and smells of the city that lie just above them. All of this is just to wax poetic on one simple point about the Limp's family life. It was good. But tragedy is something we all must face. And whatever tragedy may have been lacking in these golden years of the Lemp Empire would certainly be made up for later on. In 1901, William's oldest, and apparently favorite son, suddenly passed away from heart failure at the age of just 28. William was never the same.

He grew paranoid and nervous. He became a recluse who seemed to loathe the idea of public interaction more and more each day. He became an image of joviality fallen into melancholy and sorrow. In 1904, William's best friend and close business associate, Frederick Pabst, also died. The weight of sadness was too much for the aging beer tycoon to bear. So as he sat in his office on February 13, 1904, William Lemp shot himself in the head with a 38-caliber Smith and Wesson. A shot heard round an entire family line, it now seems. Soon after the suicide of his father, in just three years after the sudden death of his brother,

William Jr. took command of the Lemp Brewery as her third president. Unlike his fathers before him, though, Jr. was not as concerned with how he might set his progeny ahead in St. Louis, instead focusing on how he might just give himself a decent time in his life. With inheriting the job of running the Great Brewery also came the added benefit of an absolute fortune of personal wealth. Junior was quick to spend this money on whatever he or his new wife Lillian fancied for themselves or for their little boy, William III. Problem is, man is not so good at self-control most of the time. That which you idolized becomes that which you give more and more of yourself to, even in ways you could hardly imagine doing when the idolatry begins.

William Jr. soon learned just how true of a thing this is. As time wore on and the affluent excesses of life lost their appeal and excitement, Jr. craved more and more new things to satisfy him. He grew tired of his wife and gave her $1,000 a day to spend on whatever she liked. He hoped this would keep her busy and away from his newfangled and nefarious plans. It worked. Junior began throwing parties every single night in the hollowed out caves beneath his family's mansion. All manner of debauchery and gluttony was engaged in here.

Dozens of ladies of the night were hired to attend the parties and provide entertainment for Junior and his friends, beer flowed freely, the swimming pool was open to all, and a bowling alley was installed for added bond villain effects. As Junior descended further and further into depravity and infidelity, the consequences began to catch up to him. He sired an illegitimate son with one of his ladies. Now, it must be admitted that we have no records of this boy's existence today, but that's not because he didn't exist.

Rather, it's because later on, for reasons that will be clear later on, Most of the family's historical and contemporary records were destroyed in order to save face for everyone. In the case of this lad, testimony from dozens of witnesses confirmed that he existed and that his life is one truly marked by tragic neglect. Born with Down syndrome, the boy was not only a reminder to junior of his own sin, but was also an embarrassment to this callous-natured man so obsessed with his own image, to get back at a child for existing and to try and run away from his own evil, he locked the child away in the Lemp Mansion's attic for his entire life.

After a divorce from his wife Lillian, who took custody of her son William III, and the horrible turn of business that came about with the prohibition, Jr. was nearing the end of his rope. As he worked through liquidation paperwork for many of the brewery's assets, he received the news of yet another tragedy. His sister, Elsa Limp, had just been found dead in her house from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, just like her father.

with a mountain of doom looming over him, Junior slipped into a melancholy very similar to his fathers before him. He became a nervous wreck. He hated to be around others. He was paranoid about everything. He despaired of life itself. So he ended it. In that same mansion where his father had done it all those years before,

Jr. placed the 38 caliber gun to his temple while sitting in his desk chair and pulled the trigger with no hesitation. He was interred in the family's own crypt at the Belafontein, cemetery. With the business limping along in the family in shambles, more bad news soon came. William III had died of a heart attack at age 42. Junior's brother, Charles, was the only one willing to come to see to the mansion and to Junior's illegitimate son, still kept in the home's attic, by the way. But soon after his arrival to the estate, the poor boy would also pass away in that attic, the place in the world he knew best. Shortly after, he was, he knew best. Shortly after,

After this event, Charles too would take his own life with the help of 38 caliber revolver, but not before he also shot his dog in the basement. When they found Charles, they also discovered the dog. Though shot in the basement, the dog had finally succumbed to his wounds, somewhere on the stairwell, halfway up to Charles' bedroom. Charles would be the last limp to reside in that mansion. By 1970, the entire limp name would be erased from the world with the death of Junior's last surviving brother Edwin. The mansion sold and renovated into a boarding house for downtown St. Louis.

But nearly as soon as tenants filled the mansion's halls with life once more, her tales of haunting and ghostly presences began to circulate. Knocks from nobody at the door, clear footsteps running up the stairs, shadowy apparitions seen at the end of the halls, voices echoing through the rooms and people's goods or workers' tools going missing only to be found in the oddest of places with nobody confessing to the theft began to frequently plague any who stayed or worked in the cursed building. And even though the mansion has now passed from boarding house to a modern-day banquet hall, it appears that the hauntings have never once slowed down. The main stairway where Charles's dog was found,

the gates that lead into the debauchrous tunnels in the basement under the home, in the attic where the Downs boy was held captive his whole life are said to be the hotbeds of these terrors. Guests who stay in William Sr's old bedroom, the one in which he died, report being woken up in the night to the sound of someone kicking down their door violently. When they run and swing the door open to see what's happening, nobody's there. But it is said that on the night that William Sr. died, his son, Jr. ran up the stairs and began kicking at his father's door when he heard the gunshot. Guests and investigators often placed toys in the attic, surrounded by a thick ring of fine sand,

dumped on the floor all around them. They'll come back the next day to find that many of the toys have been moved to other rooms, even other stories of the mansion, but the sand is undisturbed. And if you look up at the mansion from the street on a dark night,

you just might see the large face of the neglected boy peeking out of the window from behind the curtain, longing to escape even just one time into the fresh air. Man, what a depressing story. Honestly, just, Just absolute sin.

I just threw a huge downer into the hole. That was like, I was, when he shot the dog, I know. I was like, and the boy? And the dog, like, the dog limping its way back up to find. That is just horrible. And the fact that it was like how many of them killed themselves four? So it was, it was William, senior, William Jr., junior, junior sister, and Charles. The brother.

Yeah, so four of them in two generations. Unbelievable. In the same way. Most of them in the same house. And then, yeah, the little boy up in the attic. That's horrible. So there's the story of someone who visited the mansion and they paid to like stay there by themselves overnight.

Yeah. So they were exploring the whole thing. And they say that like they felt really weird and they did hear a lot of weird things and see some things. But one of the things that really got me was they went up into the attic. And they were doing something no one should ever do, which is asking, stop doing that. Stop ghost hunting.

Stop ghost hunting in general. Stop it. But if you're going to do it, especially stop inviting. If you're going to do it, first step, don't. Yeah. Second step. You know what?

Yeah. If you're going to do it, repent and go home. Yeah, repent and go to church. Like, call your pastor. And you probably don't have one. But if you do, call them up. But. And tell them,

forgive me, I've sinned. I am looking for the demons. If you don't have a pastor, get a good pastor. Get a pastor. But one of the things that they claim happened is that they were up there in the room, they were asking to communicate. Like, if anyone's here, if this boy's here, can you make yourself know?

And the story is that as they said that, this little orange balloon drifted across the, across the room and like, and I'm like, okay, go home. Go home. Again. Stay home. That's all you need to see. Go home, stay home. Stop. And stop.

Here's what I think, Ben. I think that the way that flies and maggots and corruption is drawn to rotting and meat and death, that demons and the shades and the unclean spirits are drawn to human suffering and sin. And so I think they come and they give you what you want. Yeah. I think they come and they give the people what they're looking for. Right. which is a lie, but it's ultimately a lie that's often built on the corruption of sin that really is true.

You know what? This is actually pretty apropos for our show in general. And today on All Hallows Eve when we're recording this, that people are drawn to the dark, the tension, the frightening. And part of that is, I think, fine and can be fine. And that's that you're appreciating the depth of story that God has woven into history. Yeah. But sin corrupts everything. Yeah. And so clearly there's this corrupt vein in all, in everyone, I think.

Yeah. This is why the horror franchise is so popular, where they just want to glory in the melancholy, the depressing, and then also the depraved and the horrifying. Yeah. So of course, of course, the, you know, the spiritual forces can see what happens in places as far as they can, which we don't know how far they can, but, but they can. And so why would they not want to go to a place that's been the theater of such horrible things? And yeah, like you're saying, give the people what they're off.

And then indulge the people who are seeking after the demonic, even if they don't know it. They indulge them by giving them wearing a false face of a deceased person or a spirit. I'm the spirit of this dead lump brother. No, you're a demon. You're an unclean spirit and you're trying to deceive people. but you glory in death. And so it's almost like they can't help themselves. Yeah.

But go and glory and keep the glory, the in glory alive. Right. They keep, you know, welcoming it there. There's another story. This just goes to show how twisted this desire can be in people where you can rent William Jr.'s room And you can stay there overnight, you know. And he had the first freestanding shower in St. Louis.

What? Very exciting. Wow. The first ever, freestanding shower in St. And so the, the first ever, you know, And so these women, that's still working, they will go in and take a shower, and they will claim to have a peeping Tom

coming to the bathroom and peep on them while they're showering. And the story is that William Jr. used to do that all the time, where he would let guests use his bathroom, and he had a key to it. What a creepy man. What a foolish son.

What a foolish son who ruined the otherwise great inheritance of his father. Because there was a junior, but Junior's dad had killed himself too. Yeah, yeah. Junior's dad. But he genuinely had some tragedy. He got depressed because his son died and his best friend died. And he was also old already.

And he like seemed to spiral out of control and ended up killing himself. Wicked. And then Junior was like the completely selfish, self-absorbed prick. Classic trust fund kid. Illegimate kid who he hated, divorced his wife because he was tired of her. Oh, yeah. Just horrible man. The initial patriarch of the family seemed like a godly man.

I don't know if he's a Christian. I don't know, but at that time, probably. At least, humanly speaking, he was an honorable man. Yeah. But then it just shows you how wealth and how these things divorced from the glory of God can actually just bring death and corruption. And they can actually just amplify. It's a testament to generational sin, you know, where your father makes this huge mistake

at the end of his life. And it seems to plague his children. Yeah. And then the importance of catechizing your children. Because, you know, good men make good. times. Yeah. And good times make bad men.

Yeah. And then bad men make bad times. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, we should, we should, this episode's gone on long enough. Yeah. Let's wrap it up here. And this last category, that was more of a, where a place is, seems to have activity that's

not just like a repetitive thing, but actually active activity that we would ascribe the many cases this. We'll look at some more in depth in future seasons, Lord willing of the show. And like linked more to a family. family history, and then it is the history of the place itself. Yeah. Seems to be the glorying and death of the unclean spirits. This last category is talismanic.

It's the seemingly possessed object. Yeah. And this is one of those, the human mind or something about us that's drawn powerfully to the idea of magical powers imbued in an object. Right. Or in, I use the word talismanic, that we would, we have a, this is a human instinct where we want to take the living God who is spirit and we want to try and force him into a thing that then rather than by faith where we're looking to God, we can

basically say, no, I put my God into this little thing and then this little thing will protect me. So I don't need the faith anymore. I've got the talisman. I've got the thing that's going to give me prosperity in my business. I've got the necklace I can wear. I've got the saint whatever's jewelry that's going to help me find things. I got the, yeah, there's so many relics. So many examples of this. I'm like, you have an example here in the notes of the beekeepers. Yeah, so in the medieval time, there was very, there's very little record of any black magic, but there's a lot of white magic. Right. The medievals were using. And Ben just used scare quotes. Yeah, you're not, YouTube. We don't actually think white magic is a thing that you should do.

I don't think you should go and do what I'm about to describe, but these Christian medievals would, develop charms to help in their everyday life. So one example is the swarming of the bees. And they would speak, it wasn't quite the same because it's not necessarily an object, but they would speak this charm. And the way that they would do it is they would, they would, so beekeepers, if their hives were being unruly. They would take dirt, they would throw it over their hive, and then they would speak this charm. It's like an incantation. It's an incantation. And, and then they would throw more dirt or something and it would calm the bees. And apparently it worked enough for a lot of people to do it. And then there was another one where farmers would carry around

amulets that they had blessed. Yeah. And they would drop dirt that they had blessed at the corners of their property to protect the property from pests and from blight and things like that. Other people would wear amulets to ward off danger, even just personal danger. And then you see this, of course, with like the hobgoblin idea where they would protect their house from demonic forces by putting a turnip that was carved out on the doorstep and that's where we

get the jackalander. The Irish did that. Yeah, at least that's one of the origin stories. One of the origin stories for... But the negative a negative example of this would be the Icelandic witches that would carve runes and the runes were an incantation to Odin, for example.

And they would cut themselves and pour blood over the runes and speak the words. And now that monument had power in itself that was lasting. Yeah. And some, you know, we have examples in scripture of Jacob setting up a pillar or an altar at Bethel and saying like, this is the house, the gate of heaven, the house of God. Yeah, a memorial to remember. And it's a memorial. It's not in itself now imbued with divine power. You think about what Israel did at Sinai when the, um, the, the people rose up to play and they were, they made this golden calf.

And they were basically saying, this is the God who brought you out of Egypt. Right. They were making an idol that was supposed to be the God. And the idol is often a place where their God would partially or lend his power or come and dwell in in their home or they would have these altars. The human mind loves to do this. Yes.

Human beings, when we fall, when we fall short of the glory of God, we fall short of this. God who has an absolute creature-creator distinction, where he is other. He is other from the, from the material world. And what we want to do is we fall short and we lower his glory onto a physical object that's then convenient for us to direct our worship or channel our worship through. You see this anciently in the world of idols. You also see this in silly things like, I literally went to a church once. Church, I'll use this loosely. I had a church planning mentor back long time ago when I was intending to plant a church, ended up not doing that,

but actually pastoring the church, this man pastored. But we went out to Park City, Utah, kind of seeing the ground there. It needed a good church. And so I was like, let's check it out, see if it's a place where maybe I could plant. What a beautiful place to plant in church.

Yeah, absolutely. Went to this church and they were telling me the pastor, was telling me about how they had bought this crystal, this crystal that during their Sunday services, would take their worship and it would amplify it and it would shoot it up to this star or this constellation to Orion or it would it would send it up into the cloud and it would amplify the potency of their worship and it sounds made up it's so dumb I mean but this is like the human instinct is to lower our worship onto physical things

that we imbue with spiritual power and the prophet amos would like a word Right. Okay. Now see how a demonic deceiver would want to come in and take that instinct and amplify it and turn it up to 10 and haunt objects or give talismanic powers or supernatural events surrounding objects to just reinforce this fallen short of glory lowered worship instinct of human beings onto the relic and onto the physical, what's it called? Repository of spiritual power. That's not what I thought you were going on. Repository was the word I was.

And there's so many little rabbit trails to go down. Yes. Maybe we can do that in a couple episodes of the Dusty Tome around the time this episode releases. But we're just going to let that lie and then basically say, okay, with all that said, let's hear the story of Annabelle. Let's hear a story because here's a story that's going to take a lot of the commentary we just did. And we're going to leave you at this one, the story of Annabelle.

In 1970, a young woman named Donna was just months away from graduating from nursing school. She and her roommate Angie were over the moon with excitement. So many hours of work had gone into this degree that would hopefully just be the beginning of a long and exciting career. It was really a surreal time for both of them. To help commemorate the times, Donna's mom thought it would be nice to buy her daughter just a small gift. She brainstormed and searched for the perfect thing and finally landed on her. something surprisingly simple that she knew would send just the right message to Donna, and it was a Raggedy Ann doll, just like the one Donna had had as a girl.

Much to the delight of the mother, Donna loved the gift. She kept it right on her bed as a piece of decoration, just a little piece of childhood nostalgia and fond memories that she could see every day no matter how grown up she became. A few days later, though, Donna and Angie began noticing some strange things about the doll. Nothing really crazy, just small things. For example, before Donna left in the morning, she would make her bed and set up her doll in a seated position in the middle of the bed, you know, like an accent pillow between two bigger pillows.

But then, when she'd come home, she found that the doll was now lying on its back as if staring at the ceiling to find the faces hidden in the popcorn plaster. Angie would notice similar things. On occasion, she would go into Donna's room to grab a book from her roommate's shelf that she needed to reference for homework. But just out of the corner of her eye, she'd see the doll on the floor next to the bed.

The good-hearted Angie would set up the doll where she belonged on the bed on her way out of Donna's room. Now, later, when Angie was done with the book and ready to put it back on the shelf, she would be a little unsettled to find that the doll had fallen back onto the floor again.

Donna had not come home yet. She'd never heard any noises coming from the room. In another instance, the girls left for school together in the morning, having left the doll lying on the couch. When they also came home together after spending some time in the library, they did not find the doll on the couch.

Instead, they saw it propped up on the leg of a chair at the kitchen table as if it were just standing there waiting for them. Ultimately, the girls rationalized these things as best they could and moved on. You know, the kind of thing that we do and something unusual, but small and not too unsettling. We come up with explanations. we say maybe it was this, maybe I just forgot, maybe I'm not remembering it correctly.

But they continued to happen. And not only did they continue to happen, Ben, but eventually things escalated. The apartment where these girls lived wasn't very big or well furnished. They were still, after all, just college students, not deep in their careers, not flushed with cash. One of the things they didn't have was a printer. Since they didn't have a printer, they also didn't have a printer, they also didn't have any blank printer paper on hand. Some notebook paper, sure, but none of the nice blank white

stuff. Given this little detail, you can imagine the fear they might have felt when they began to find notes left around the house written in a child's handwriting. They would find messages like, help us and help Lou. The girls had a friend named Lou who visited them from time to time. And these notes would be written on torn scraps of that blank printer paper that they didn't have. The notes were always found right next to the doll. The camel's back finally broke when Donna came home one night to find that the doll had moved once again. This time she'd left it on the couch but came home later to find it lying on her bed. Now at this point the movement of the doll wasn't something that really scared them anymore. You know how a broken window on your car seems

really bad at first but after you tape it up with a trash bag and get used to it for a few days, you realize it's not so bad. Well that's what was happening. to the girls nothing too crazy was happening and the doll wasn't hurting them who cares if they have some miracles happening it's good stories for parties right the only problem is Donna felt very different about the movement this time as she approached the doll she got the unstoppable urge to turn around thinking there was surely someone behind her watching and stalking her into her room it was just her and the doll as she slowly picked it up to move it

still feeling uneasy about the whole thing. She noticed drops of some liquid on the doll's chest and hands. It looked almost like it could be blood. She showed Angie and the two girls agreed that they couldn't go on like this anymore. The whole mood of the apartment had turned to one of nervous fear in the weeks since they'd gotten the doll. It was finally too much to ignore. Not knowing what else to do, the girls decided to hire a medium to come and see if there was some sort of spirit haunting the place.

move bad move bad move bad move the medium arrived the next day and lo and behold immediately held a seance to communicate with any restless spirits their words not mine that might be in the doll it is at this point that Donna and Angie were introduced to the supposed spirit of Annabelle Higgins a girl who had lived in one of the houses that used to be on the property of their apartment building the spirit described the happy times she shared with her family long before any planners had pegged their land for potential apartments. She said that she missed the old days. When asked why she was so young, she stated that she was killed when she was just seven years old. Her body was left in the field where the apartments now stood. She said that she felt comfortable

with Donna and Angie, that the messages were just little pranks she was pulling on the girls, and that she wanted to stay with them if they would allow her to. The girls, naive and with compassion welling up in their hearts for, this little child unjustly killed at such a young age, said they would be happy to let her stay with them. They would regret that. For whatever this was, it was no girl. And what it was doing was far from innocent tricks.

Now, Lou, that friend of Donna and Angie's I mentioned earlier, had never been fond of the doll. He had told Donna to get rid of this doll multiple times, claiming it brought some kind of evil into their lives. Obviously, Donna did not listen, and Lou would be the first one to pay a high price for her mistake. One night, Lou stayed over at the girls' apartment and slept on the couch. Must have been a long night of studying for the group's final exams or something.

In the middle of the night, with the room very dark and quiet, Lou's eyes shot awake. The man was lucid, certainly and objectively awake. Only, he couldn't move. Lou was suffering an intense bout of sleep paralysis, something he had never dealt with before, and he began to panic and struggle to breathe. As his eyes frantically searched the room, the only thing that could move, looking for some answers as to why this was happening. He caught sight of some little red threads poking up from the other end of the couch.

He fixated on them, knowing what they were, what they belonged to. Slowly, the doll raised its head above the edge of the couch, an unmoving smile sewn onto its face. As the doll crawled up towards Lou's face, he kept reminding himself that it wasn't real. It couldn't be real. But as he repeated this in his panicked mind, the doll began to strangle him until he finally blacked out or fell asleep again.

When he awoke the next morning, he was terrified. He remembered everything and swore that it was not a dream. But of course, he had no marks on his neck and no way to really know what had happened. Now, with this absolutely horrible encounter piling on top of others that greatly affected both Lou and the girls, Donna came around to the idea that the spirit had tricked her.

Duh. Duh. Clearly the medium did not help things since she herself was also deceived. Common medium L. Yes. Now, slow to simply discard the doll for fears that the evil might spread to others, Donna reached out to famous paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren for help. Over the course of their study into the matter,

the Warrens allegedly experienced a number of harrowing events themselves. Right away, they concluded that this trio of freshly graduated young adults were far out of their league. It was not a haunted doll, rather it was a haunted apartment. And it was not some little girl's mischievous spirit haunting the place. It was a demonic entity seeking to possess one of the souls living there. The Warrens made very clear that spirits do not possess inanimate objects. They possess people. But while they seek a person to possess, they may latch themselves to some specific place. To them, at least, it was obvious. A malevolent spirit attached to the apartment have been using the doll as a tool to eventually invade the bodies of Donna

or Angie, just your regular Tuesday night. That's right. Accordingly, they asked for an Episcopalian minister to perform a right of exorcism on the apartment while they took custody of the doll, with Donna's permission, of course, so that they could add it to their collection of mementos from their cases. We'll end our episode with the alleged story of what happened to Ed as he drove Annabelle to his home. If true, it displays just how wrong they were about everything that was happening.

Now remember, rest in the glorious protection of Christ. Even the demons believe and shudder. Put all your faith in him and be free from the fear of lesser things. After all, those lesser things fear the one to whom you belong. As the Episcopalian minister, Father Cook, performed the ride of exorcism on the apartment. Ed Warren loaded the Annabelle doll into the back seat of his car. Despite his confidence in the job being finished, the evil purged,

he had some uneasy intuition about the whole thing. He decided to stay off the interstates, instead opting for back roads all the way home, just in case. After a couple of miles, Ed felt an immense sense of hatred in the car. He felt sure that someone or something was sitting in the back seat, staring daggers into the back of his head,

ready to attack him at a moment's notice. Before long, the car, began to swerve and slide into neutral at every corner as the brakes started failing and the power steering no longer worked. Ed came close to colliding head on with oncoming traffic dozens of times and nearly drove off the side of the road into a deep ditch just as often. This coupled with the growing and lingering air of dread in the vehicle left Ed in a state of pure panic. He desperately reached around and groped for his duffel bag next to the evil doll that sat in the back seat. He yanked it forward, unzipping the side pocket as fast as he could with one hand.

He pulled out a small vial of holy water and pulled out the cork with his teeth before dousing Annabel with the entire thing. He made the sign of the cross and called upon the name of Christ. According to him, everything stopped. The car worked again. The dread was gone and Ed could think clearly. He finished his trip and arrived safely home where he promptly stuffed Annabel into a box and padlocked it shut.

But might we conclude that even this seeming retreat at the holy water and ritual be a mask of deception? In the New Testament, demons are not dealt with via relics, via magical objects or complex rights, but rather through the direct power of the Lord Jesus Christ. Could even these flights from supposedly holy water be nothing more than a trick? A way to deceive men into trusting in relics and rituals, just more wicked magic, rather than in the power of Christ? The end of the matter Trust in the one who has conquered the grave

Crushed the serpent's head The one who throws down the dragon And through whom all powers and principalities are put To open shame Trust in the crucified And yet risen Lord Resist the devil And he will flee from you

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