Mysterious Universe - 35.07 - MU Podcast - 30 Years Among the Dead

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

Thanks for joining us! This week we dive into another older book by Dr. Carl Wickland, who describes decades worth of firsthand experiences with the dead speaking through his highly sensitive wife. He approaches these cases with clinical skepticism, but by the end of his research it's clear he had resigned himself to the reality of these communications, whatever they may actually be. Welcome to your Plus+ extension! We are here to ask if the Bible and its contents were created as a means to pacify a potentially dangerous, Messiah-seeking populus by offering a contentment-encourager in the form of a Sun god. Slangin’ holistic parables that align perfectly with the 40 year rule of the most famous Ceasars of Rome. This comes from the work of Joseph Attwell in his book "CAESAR'S MESSIAH: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus." Check out the link below and get the new Inescapable Podcast out now. Plus+ Members can now find the new feed on your Dashboard and add it to your preferred podcast player. Thirty Years Among the Dead Full Movie! CAESAR'S MESSIAH: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus  Book - Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus: Flavian Signature Edition KJV Bible, Charcoal Leather, Touch Crown of Thorns, Red Letter, Pure Cambridge Text, Full-Color Maps NABRE, New American Bible, Revised Edition, Catholic Bible, Comfort Print: Holy Bible Which Translation of the Bible is the Best? Video - Relief from the Arch of Titus, showing The Spoils of Jerusalem being brought into Rome The Heritage Anglican Network  Jesus is my Homeboy T-Shirt  LinksPlus+ ExtensionThe extension of the show is EXCLUSIVE to Plus+ Members. To join. click HERE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost! Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Welcome back to Mysterious Universe. This is Season 35, Episode 7. How many times do we have to try this before we get it right? That was it. You did great. Okay. I'm Joe Hodgton. Joining me is Brandon Thomas. Thank you. Thank you for joining us again this week. And if you missed it, the boys are back in town. They are Inescapable is live. It started on Valentine's Day. Actually, what a nice gift from them. Adorable.

Back in our ear holes. And you have until April. April 14th, they extended it. So if you are into this, or if you just want to listen to Ben and Aaron, that's fine too. But you get both shows for one price. And there's so much content. I've been, I totally forgot that they're doing the same schedule. So their new plus episode for Inescapable came out on Tuesday. And I'm like, yes. So I get, I get them twice a week. I was uploading the episode for Tuesday and I looked and they'd already beat me too, because they're in the future. They're a day in the future. So if they're promised in Tuesday releases, they're just going to come out before us and that's just how it works.

But I saw up there it was published. Aaron Wright published. And I was like, man, it's nice to see a break in my name on the published and see his. It was really cool. I'm like, man, that's awesome. And it sounds great. The guys are just, man, they're coming back with the heat, aren't they? And good on them.

Yeah, you can tell they've been wanting to say these things for a long time. And M.U. is not really the place for that kind of a show. But I'm so stoked to get a peek behind their mental curtain. And it's amazing. It's Ben and Aaron. It's funny. I told them months ago, I'm like, dude, you guys can sit there and talk about washing your feet for two hours, I'd probably still listen because I just want to hear you guys. I'd listen to at least an hour of it.

Yeah. Yeah. Because they've got some good rapport and back and forth. But they're doing great. And really the inescapable should be all the targets that they've got on their sights, which is all this nonsense and bullshit. Man, they're calling out fuckery. I love it. I absolutely love it.

Not holding back at all. Nothing is inescapable from their gaze and grasp and tongue lashing for sure. And just so witty, so witty they are. So fucking witty, man. Well, I'm pumped about this episode, dude, for sure. Hope everybody had a great week. We're both dealing with some plumbing issues in our house. Opportunities.

Opportunities in disguise. That's right. And so it's been a fun week trying to wedge all of this in between, you know, normal life stuff that everybody has to deal with. But I won't go over the weather report today because it's just cold and I don't like it. It's sunny and hot here. Wild. Yes, we're going to be like 90-something this weekend.

Holy crap. Or next week, yeah. Yeah. Well, it's cold for us. This weekend, and then we're going to be in the 90s next week. And this is Texas. We don't get a winter. We get cold fronts.

So we had a cold front blow through. We'll have another one. And the trick to Texas, this is something, you know, this is some fun facts for some folks here coming out of winter that don't go to the store and start buying all these plants and planting them. The rule is before Easter is what the Farmer's Alman Act says. But I will say this. If you've got pecan trees in your area, they will be the last to bloom. So they won't throw a false positive at you like some other plants. And we know who we're talking about around in the yard there.

But these will only bud and bloom when the last freeze is done. They just know. They've got the inside scoop through the roots or something. And they just know. So wait until you see your country's bloom. Yeah, there you go. Absolutely. Wait to see a pecan's bloom.

Just that first little bud there. And then you're good to start planting. Yeah. I mean, cold to us here in northern California is like 43 degrees. but it's a really, it's a dry, dry cold unless it happens to be raining. But I think I've mentioned it before, if nobody's familiar with this area, we're surrounded by this horseshoe of mountains on three sides. South of us is just more valley, but all three sides, the other three sides is nothing but

ice and snow. So we're in this little bubble of just cold. And it feels colder than it is, especially with the wind. I know that we did it ironically, but that has truly been the MU. The other report. It has been. It was great. But we are going to get into the book I'm covering today, and this is 30 Years Among the Dead by Carl Wickland. And this is an old book from 1924. And it documents his, I guess you could call it parapsychological. He was a psychiatrist in that field. And he started documenting all this weird happenings. And his wife is a key figure in this. Anna is her name. she is quite a gifted psychic, or she was, I'm imagining she's long since dead. But thank you to Mandy K-77 on Twitter or X, sorry, for pointing this book out. And as soon as I saw that recommendation, I'm like, oh, let's check it out.

And it was on Kindle, perfect. And started digging through it a couple days ago. I woke up at 7 in the morning and just started reading. So that's how this comes about. You're making good decisions, man. You really are. This transition's been interesting. you're just doing great with it. You're just choosing better. You know, you could have been

scrolling, you could have been anything. And you're choosing to read and take up suggestions and shout out for the recommendation. Thank you. Yeah, and we appreciate that. Again, anybody who has recommendations, Joe or Brandon at mysteriousuniverse.org, and we would be happy to look over the stuff you guys send us. I think half the shows I've done have been listening to recommendations. That's outstanding. Definitely appreciate it. So Mr. Wickland here, Dr. In 1909, he became the chief. psychiatrist at the National Psychopathic Institute of Chicago, and this is back in the days of, you know, insane asylums were kind of a big thing. It seemed like there's a lot of people that were committed back then.

Yeah. No, the metrics for that nowadays, but it seemed like that time period, late 1800s, early 1900s, that was a big thing. There are interesting theories around it. Like, there was this new world being adopted in, which was heralded by the world's fairs. And then also around that time, he had the cabbage patch babies you had the orphan trains yep nailed it yeah and this perspective aligns perfectly with that because if you were still going uh that's not the way it went down allegedly you were rounded up and thrown into some of these buildings that were adapted for folks who spoke out and then they were just quietly dealt with so that the regime and narrative could continue kicking along and that's a baby incubators and cabbage patch kids all that stuff uh there's a great author side note real quick

There's a great author Guy Anderson that does a, he has a whole book on that. I think it's called Tesla and the cabbage patch babies or something, but he goes into all kinds of crazy stuff. It's great. It's really entertaining. So he continued at Carl Wickland, he continued in that position at the Chicago Looniebin until 1918 when him and his wife moved to L.A. in California. And in kind of a collaboration with his assistance, he wrote and published this book in 1924, 30 years among the dead. He went from a looney bin to L.A.? Yeah.

How was he able to tell the difference? He probably didn't. Shots fired L.A. Nice. So he starts out with almost kind of defensively because, especially at the time, I mean, this is right before the spiritualism movement, you know, in the late 1800s, early 1900s. It was a big thing, especially in the 20s, the seances and Ouija boards and mediums and all this stuff. for some reason in that time, people were really getting back into that kind of thing. I'm really into it.

So, yeah, I don't think it was accidental that he was defensive because he knows what this sounds like. And he's a professional, right? He's a doctor. So he's kind of walking on eggshells with it. Let me go and separate out from this bullshit right now. Yeah. He's kind of bracing for the eye rolls right off the jump here. Yes.

So he's saying, I'm not a mystic. I'm not a spiritualist. I didn't go looking for this. And that tone never really leaves. through the whole book, even at the wildest moments later on in the story, he still sounds like a guy who would rather be doing literally anything else than explaining to you why a dead drunk is writing shotgun in one of his patients. Oh. So this is kind of a cross between walk-ins, but it's specifically people who are dead or ghosts. But he goes, I'm going to start out with how the book starts and it's what he thinks they are or how they're related at the time. it was more the mainstream view is that it was insanity. And there's a lot of different, he goes into quite a bit of different ideas of what they

called it at the time and the way that they treated insanity. And he's not talking about insanity philosophically or abstractly, just clinically, from a doctor's point of view. He'd seen thousands of cases. He worked with every classification available, which was things like mania, melancholia, dementia, hysteria, moral insanity. And he knows the textbooks and he knows what improvement is supposed to look like. And what bugs him is that some people just don't follow the rules when it comes to typical treatment.

They don't deteriorate the way a degenerative disease should, but they also don't stabilize the way functional disorders should. And they weren't responding to rest or routine, medication, any of that. And he noticed more of a fluctuation. And they shifted and they argued, not with the doctors, but with these invisible counterparts. And every so often they speak with a confidence that doesn't belong to them or at least shouldn't belong to them. And Wickland says more than once that what finally broke his resistance wasn't belief, it was repetition, the same strange mechanics showing up in different cities, different hospitals, different social classes, all having these, you know, he's tracing patterns. He's doing science. Yeah.

And that's when he started having this thought that he clearly didn't really enjoy is what if some of what we call insanity is actually interference. And that's when he, that brings us to what he thinks these entities are before the stories even start. So, and this is what I mean by kind of like tiptoeing being on eggshells. He's like really clearly laying out. There's pages and pages of just introduction of him laying out like, I know this is going to sound crazy, but hear me out. So perfect M.U fodder. Mom, just as scientific, trust me. I don't really believe in this stuff.

I love you, all that. And you can tell he's struggling with the correct words to use too, because, and we've mentioned this too, that people call devils or demons could simply be discarned entities. There's so many different ways you can go about it. As soon as you say demon, people say, oh, you're a Bible thumper or you're this or that, you know. Labels, man.

And this is another level to the need for him to put this workout. And so apprehensively is probably why he felt that. way. It's because there's a lot of tiptoe and he did need to do just as a scientist because he's finding things with his observation that shouldn't jive with scientific observation established at the time in the new narrative. Even though there was spiritualism and things like that as a clinical doctor, you can't, you know, you're not supposed to, you're supposed to have separated yourself out from the woo-woo. And so it's interesting that, plus the other mindset element to it, that is, again, observations are challenging to express just to make it, it's just ineffable to a level for

for him because he feels pigeonholed whichever way he goes with it. It's very interesting. Yeah. And yet still he put it out. The way the book is written too because of the time period it was in is really, it's old-timey language. I love that. I read the whole book in the, was it the transatlantic accent? Yes, in my head. Yes, when I'm reading Florence Scoville Shin or, God, what was that dude? Napoleon Hill. Anything like that. I do it in that transatlantic. Well, let's see now. It's great. Grainy 30s radio.

Yes, and it sounds like, oh, here we are. And I'm like, why do I do that to myself? I can make it really clean audio in my own head. But it's an experience we're after here, for sure. Yes, it was analog days, right? Yes, time period appropriate in your monologue. So before he even starts with any of the possession cases, and he even hesitates with possession,

sometimes he calls it obsession. It's like a spirit obsessed. And we'll get into that a little more. Yeah, yeah. He wanted to make one thing clear, though, he's not talking about devils, and this matters to him. He spends a surprising amount of time drawing a line between the more theatrical idea of demonic possession and what he's actually seeing. These entities are not masterminds or ancient intelligences to him, of course. They don't speak in riddles or prophecy.

They're boring. They're boring. They're petty. They're confused and obsessive. I like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what's funny is that's exactly why he takes them seriously. He starts using the word discarnate, not ghost, not spirit, but discarnate, a consciousness that once operated through a body and now doesn't, but hasn't fully reorganized itself around that idea. He kind of leans into scripture and actually has quite a few verses he included, and not to preach, but just to show that this idea isn't anything new.

Right. He references passages about unclean spirits, about spirits seeking rest, and finding none about voices speaking through people who aren't themselves. And he's careful. He's not saying the Bible explains this. He's saying the Bible noticed it. Hmm. So just a couple I grabbed out of here is Hebrews. It says, we are, we also are encompassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses. Another verse says, beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God. And I think about that verse all the time when people are talking about these entity experiences. It's not, even the Bible isn't saying, these things don't exist. It's saying watch out for them. Yes. Look out. And it's funny. We haven't even said it yet. So we'll just briefly touch on it here. The plus extension involves the Bible. It's funny that you're bringing this up.

And there's a little moral insanity that we're going to cover in that thing. So stick around for that. And we'll talk a little bit more about it when you're done. But just popping that in there. Nice little spoiler. Not supposed to tell me what you're doing first. Well, you have to plug the plus extension. So there you go.

Oh, right. Okay. There you go. In another verse in Samuel, David took a harp and played with his hand. and Saul, the Saul guy, I don't know, was refreshed and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him. So, if you have a possession, just grab a harp, Bob will be your uncle. Wow. And so to Carl, Mr. Carl here, death isn't a moral sorting hat.

You know, it's not like heaven or hell. It's a transition. And like any transition, some people screw it up, especially people who die emotionally, just destroyed, deeply addicted. If they die violently, and that's it. It's a big thing. You know, people who die suddenly from a violent, that seems to produce a ghost more than... See, and that's messed up too, because they may end up in some fucked up realm, but they're like, dude, I was the one that died in a weird, fucked up way. How did I end up in some dark realm?

But really, it was their disposition that drug them to the dark realm in the post life, life, that then perhaps is the motivator for it. Basically, like, what is talked about in many, in a lot of disciplines, is that it's your disposition at the end of this thing, which is why it's so important to remove all attachments so that you don't end up back here because of some... You're like, oh, man, I really like cat videos. And then you're like, back in the soul portal. You got to like remove all of that shit. Right. And that's the Buddhist way. And you don't have time to do that if you die violently, you know?

Yeah. And he also mentions people who are completely unprepared. And that's why a lot of these ancient mystery schools, like in Egypt, where all those ancient mystery schools, they focused on practicing dying. Like getting you ready for the transition. That was the whole point is to get you. ready for that so that you don't end up as a ghost, I guess. I heard this doctor. He had a great quote. This was years ago on the old show, man. And I thought about it the other day, and here it is.

He said that there's this wonderful quote about death. And it goes to something to the effect of, I'm not scared of death. I'm scared of an unprepared death. And that's an interesting correlation to this whole concept, is that you want to be ready for it. So you're just kind of like always ready to die kind of a thing. Like you don't have any attachments. You're cool to just leave that project. Somebody else can finish it, whatever. Release it. So instead of shifting their awareness away from the physical world, they kind of remain oriented towards it. So they crave, you know, sensation, the 3D sensations, agency over their own body. And what's the easiest way to get that attached to somebody who's already neurologically or emotionally vulnerable?

Yes. And that's the hypothesis he walks into this asylum with a lot of these stories. and that is that does go back to the idea that things like drugs or alcohol especially meth very specifically methamphetamine seems to be this portal, this gateway to allow these kind of discarnate spirits in. So stay away from meth kids. Not a good one. And maybe that's what the correctivities are. It's not them. It's just that they're so vulnerable that something else has hopped in that sucks at life and being a human and is fumbling around in their vessel because they've just offered it over because they're just phoning it in anyhow.

They're like astral carjackers. They just see an unlocked car and go, boom. That's exactly the reference I was going to make is seeing a bunch of cars out in the parking lot and thinking, well, nobody's driving that one. So I'll just hop into it. Nobody will notice that it's missing or nobody will notice that I'm driving it. The other one isn't. It's so interesting. This is the other thing.

It's the agency over your life. You know, presence in the moment. Don't, you know, choose your distractions wisely. All of these things, you could get one of these vessel hijackers. Yeah. Choose your nothing box wisely. That's right. You don't want to get a Netflix ghost jumping in.

Oh, we're going to talk about Netflix and the thing too. Man, you're right on. Wow. Fascinating. Our periods really have synced. It's a quick jolt to in because of propaganda, but, well, man, fascinating. Nice. So this is where he gets into his wife, Anna, and her abilities.

And he does it kind of awkwardly like he's confessing something he knows sounds bad on paper. Such a coming from a doctor. So she doesn't convulse or dramatize or she's not performing. she just sits and relaxes, gets quiet, and then someone else answers questions. Just that easy. Like she's not even meditating or going into a trans or she just sits there and the ghost or whatever comes through.

It's really weird. And you think of how many times you're talking to somebody and this is what's occurring. You're not talking to that individual because they're so checked out. Yeah, every time you see Biden on TV, you're like, oh, that's not that guy. That's something else.

Probably most politicians and actors and everything. I mean, another quick side note, you think about these alter egos that musicians talk about or actors. Beyonce, she has an altar. She calls Sasha Fierce. She's like, when I get on stage, Sasha takes over, and she does the performance. And this is the lady that's whipped her head back, and we've seen demon face in her hair as she whipped it back. Remember the still that was from a performance of some kind? And it was like this witchy demon, a huge, it looked like a two-face from Batman or something with the eye bulging out and the face all great.

She definitely gets a weird face when she starts performing for sure. I would not be surprised. Sasha Fierce, I think is what she calls her, her altar. Sasha Fierce is fugly. And what convinced him of her abilities early on is the consistency of this apparent ability. The personalities that came through Anna weren't like symbolic. They didn't speak metaphorically. Like he said, they weren't speaking in riddles or prophecies or anything like that.

and they don't reference Anna's life or anything to do with Anna. It's really strange. They complain a lot. They interrupt a lot. They misunderstand questions and they get bored. And most importantly, they don't know they're dead. So that's a big thing. And that detail kind of hits Wickland like a brick because if this was fantasy or a subconscious projection or a role play of some sort, why would ignorance be, you know, the default?

Why would these personalities need convincing? Like, no, bro, you are dead. Is it, so a dude hops into this lady's body. And is one of the questions that they're upset about, the lack of penis? They're like, where'd my penis go, dude? So that actually comes up. Of course it does. Of course it does.

But before that, so he does reference a couple cases that he wasn't directly a part of. I have the book pulled up here. And I've heard this story before, for sure. It was a newspaper reported a young man named Frank James. He was a thug of New York City who, after a fall from a motorcycle when he was 10, changed from this cheerful affectionate and obedient child into a surly, insolent boy,

developing into a confirmed robber and criminal. After several terms in the reformatory and five years in Sing Sing Prison, he was declared hopelessly insane and sent to the state insane asylum. But he escaped, and when the pursuers tried to capture him, they clubbed him over the head and knocked him out.

So he was taken to the hospital. The next morning he woke up, totally changed. He was back to the sweet boy that he used to. And that comes up a lot with I can't remember the word for it, but when people have a brain injury and all of a sudden they have a Chinese accent, you know, all those

kinds of stories. Kicked in the meal, you go cross-eye, kicked again, they go back. Then one asks, is this a technique then that they, you know, go in the back room, they hit the dude in the head real hard. You know, they say, what was your injury? I got hit real hard, and I'm a dickhead. Oh, they take you in back, they have some huge stick that just pops you in the head. They've got it all

all sorted. And they just pop you in the back of the head with this thing. And then you're good to go. You're not a dickhead anymore. I wonder if this is a protocol because it's so recognized. That's the thing. That's the thing. We all know about this.

I wonder if it is part of it. If they could figure out the exact spot to clubb you, you could probably fix a lot of things. And that's the thing is could you just, you know, like bumping a TV or something in the signals out? It's like, oh, there you go. Just give it a web. Man. Yeah. Which is funny, too, because if you think of the brain as a receiver, an antenna, then.

That makes sense with the TV. And maybe your tin full hat is the bunny ears that you used to put full on to get a better signal and stand there and hold so your growluck and watch TV. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans start at $35 a month.

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Tickets on sale now at Yamavaheater.com. Only a Yalava resort and casino celebrating its 40th anniversary. U.N. must be 21 to enter. So one of these first cases is a alcoholic woman who is institutionalized for uncontrollably drinking all the time. And what's weird is that her personal history doesn't support that at all. She didn't drink before, no family history, no obvious trigger or anything. The craving came out of nowhere and overwhelmed her entire personality. So during a session with Anna, his wife, a male presence comes through immediately, this coarse, impatient, irritated, he wants a drink.

He assumes Wickland is obstructing him. And Wickland just asks simple questions, what's your name, age, occupation, and the answers don't match the patient. Then he asks about the family, then about how he died. And the man becomes totally evasive, more irritable. He insists nothing happened, that he was fine, that he was just drinking, that everyone else. else is being dramatic. So when Wickland tells him directly that he died, not metaphorically, not spiritually, but physically died, the response isn't rage. It's laughter. He starts cracking up. Dismissive drunk laughter. Only after Wickland describes details surrounding the man's death,

verified independently, does the laughter kind of trail off. And what follows is one of the most haunting moments in the book. It was silence, then confusion, then this total fear. He had no concept of elapsed time. He didn't know years had passed. He didn't know the body he remembered was gone. He had simply just been writing. And when he finally disengages, the woman's alcoholism recedes, not gradually, but rather abruptly. And Wickland's disturbed by this. How did he disengage? Did the doctor, like, talk him out of it? Or was the fear, like, recognition and then he was able to, air quotes, move on? It's, that almost every case is pretty much that easy. Once he convinces them that they're dead, they just kind of leave. And he does have what he calls his, uh, his invisible

coworkers, these probably entities or whatever that kind of, he's even got a Sasha force or whatever. It's not he does, I think it's, it's outside of himself or outside of Anna. It's just these, they're using Anna and Carl to get these people to move on. And my question was like, why do you, why would you need humans to do that if you're there to help people move on? And it's because they, the way, from what I remember, the way he puts it is that they can't directly, you know, it's like the non, what do they call it? Non-interference clause. Non-interference type thing and not really because of a cosmic law.

It's just they can't. That's bullshit because every, it's all interfering. So who's holding the ones accountable for the ones that are interfering, but the ones that tell you they can't? It seems like a big circle jerk to me, if I'm honest. It seems like something's obsessing with these people. I do like that obsession over possession. That's funny. Because then they're just in there.

They laugh. They know that they're not dead, but they know that they can pretend to be dead. It's like another way of going into a vessel. Like when I got bored when I was in sales and nobody was in the store for a while, somebody would then finally walk in and I would do my best to put on an accent the entire time, just because I was fucking bored, man. And I would see if I could go to the whole conversation and sail and make a sale in an accent that I was not familiar with. I usually would try a variety of them.

They always ended up like Pakistani or Australian every single time, no matter what I did. Nobody called you out? No. Oh, yeah, plenty of times, man. It was hilarious. But I did make a couple of them and with a variety of accents. Like it shouldn't have gone through. They just were nice and didn't say anything.

But the whole point here is that how do you know there's so many possibilities to this that it could be, I know he keeps claiming no demons and devils, but that doesn't rule out that it's demons and devils. and that they could just be fucking with you, even though this guy doesn't want to recognize that it's possible, or one of the options. I think it's more because, like I said, at the beginning, the consistency and the repeated way that he dealt with it, that's what I think made him think it wasn't demons. Well, then that just means that that particular demon just continues to inhabit,

pretend to change, do different things. It could have all been the same damn thing that was just cycling through in different ways, just having its kicks, you know? Yep, all possibilities. And he doesn't really take it off the table either. He's just saying this is my opinion on it. Right. And I know how we are about dead people. We have a leaning that we'd prefer not to get stuck here,

not to inhabit some poor lady's body that doesn't want us there in the first place. I'd be shocked with the sand's penis, man. Where'd that go? I'm out. Mm-hmm. So he did some dissection of bodies, too. And this one stood out to me. So he says, one day I left home without any intention of immediately beginning my first dissecting work.

Therefore, my wife's subconscious mind could not possibly have taken any part in what transpired later. Okay. The students were required to dissect a lateral half of a body. The first subject was a man about 60 years of age, and that afternoon I began dissecting on a lower limb. So he just starts he, you're just hacking him up. Yep, cutting this guy's leg off. So he comes home at about five o'clock and had barely entered the door when his wife was apparently taken with a sudden illness and complaining of feeling strange. She staggered as though about to fall. He says, as I placed my hand on her shoulder, she drew herself up and became entranced by a foreign intelligence who said, with threatening gesture,

what do you mean by cutting me? And this is his wife talking, but it's obviously not her. So it's like the spirit of the leg of the dude that came into his wife whenever he got home and touched his wife? Yeah. And he was like,

why are you cutting on me, bro? He said, I answered that I was not aware of cutting anyone, but the spirit angrily replied, of course you are. You're cutting my leg. And this is a body that's back at the institute. Yeah. The morgue or wherever,

and he comes home in his wife, the the apparent spirit of this guy he's cutting the leg off just jumps into his wife to talk to him and be like, what are you doing? Damn, this is another thing. Maybe you don't, you know, you got to be careful with everybody, right? But another STD could be if you're dating somebody that handles bodies, that if a spirit transfer can, like if it stays in a limb or a vessel, because isn't there some religions that say that your spirit stays in the body for like seven days and you want to leave the body alone and all that so that it can. Yeah, there's some religions or something. or cultures that think that, yeah. See, if you're hacking folks up right away, is that little now pieces of them like Osiris

that are going out, little spiritual pieces of them, that are now being split up, and this could be a soul fragment thing, that, yeah, my soul was fragmented, again, sort of like the Osiris thing. His penis was never found. Woman fashioned a nice gold one for him because she liked that color.

But if you think about it, it could be just this all interaction with these odd entities. Like you said, man, it's a pliable vessel, it seems that we're in. If you're not paying attention, somebody can just hop in and take the wheel. very interesting.

So realizing, he continues here, realizing that the, that the spirit owner of the body on which I had been operating had followed me home, I began to parlay with him, first placing my wife in a chair. To this, the spirit vigorously objected, saying that I had no business to touch him. To my answer, to my answer that I had a right to touch my own wife, the entity retorted, your wife, what are you talking about? I'm no woman. I'm a man. Damn. Nice balls, ma'am. He says, I explained that he had passed out of his physical body and was controlling the body of my wife and that his spirit was here and his body at the college.

When he finally seemed to realize this, I said, suppose I were now cutting on your body at the college that could not kill you since you yourself are here. That could not kill you. Like I said, this is a really strangely worded book. The spirit admitted that this seemed reasonable and said, I guess I must be what they called dead. so I won't have any more use for my old body. If you can learn anything by cutting on it, go ahead and cut away. And then he said suddenly, say, mister, give me a chew of tobacco. Again, this is his wife talking.

What? Yeah. This is so weird. So he told him that, he said, I have no tobacco. And then he begged for a pipe saying, I'm dying for a smoke. This request was, of course, also refused. The fact that Anna has always abhorred the sight of anyone chewing tobacco precludes the possibility of her subconscious mind playing any role in this episode.

After a more detailed explanation of the fact that he was actually so-called dead, the spirit realized his true condition and left. Subsequent examination of the teeth of the cadaver indicated that the man had been an inveterate tobacco user in life. Whoa, so his wife just reappeared after this dude was like, oh, I guess I'm dead, you can cut up on my body. Okay, bye. Yeah.

And he has another one about that too, where he's dissecting the body of a woman about 40 years old who had died at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago the previous June. In January, seven months after her death, a number of students, myself included, were assigned this subject for dissection. I could not be present at the first evening, but the others began their work. Nothing was ever said to me of what occurred during those few hours, but for some reason, unknown to me, the other students never touched that subject again. So the next day, there was no school in the afternoon, so I began to dissect alone, working on the arm and neck. The dissecting room was in the rear of a long basement and very quiet, but once I distinctly heard a voice say, don't murder me.

And the voice sounded faintly as from a distance, but since I am not in the least superstitious and not at all inclined to credit small incidents to the actions of spirits, I concluded that it probably came from children in the street, although I had not heard any playing nearby. Man. The following afternoon, I was again working alone when I was rather startled by a rustling sound coming from a crumpled newspaper lying on the floor. I sound something like that produced when a newspaper is crushed, but I paid no particular attention to it and did not mention these occurrences to my wife.

The episodes had quite passed out of my mind until a few days later, we were holding a psychic circle in our home, and our invisible co-workers, like he calls them, had already departed when I noticed that my wife still remained in a semi-comatose condition. I stepped up to her to ascertain the reason when the controlling spirit rose suddenly, struck at me angrily, and said, I have some bones to pick with you. What? After a period of struggle with a stranger, I asked what the trouble was, and it's struggle with his wife. Yes. This could explain some domestic violence too.

Or be passed off at some domestic violence if you're really psychotic. We don't condone domestic violence, but I get it. Talk it out, folks. Talk it out. And the entity demands, why do you want to kill me? He says, I'm not killing anyone. And the entity says, yes, you are. You're cutting on my arm and neck.

I shouted at you not to murder me. And I struck that paper on the floor to frighten you, but you wouldn't pay any attention. Then, laughing boister. the spirit added with great hilarity, but I scared the other fellows. So this woman had scared off the other people who started the dissection. And then so all these things happened and he didn't mention it to his wife. And then it comes through his wife to basically, you know, show that that's what happened. So wild.

Does she have any memory of this? Does she know what's going on? She's like, some guy steps in. I'm just a passenger. Or is she just blink and when she's back and he's gone? Wow. So every time this happens. Yeah, it's like a blackout, like a light turned off and then back on when it leaves.

Did she drink? I don't think so. Okay. It mentioned if she was, because around that time period, too, they were just, you know, licking meth out of bottles just saying that it was good for you, you know, healed the ghost in your blood. Yeah. Speedball and like crazy, which could explain a lot of these stories.

Well, and that's right, too. You would think that if that's one of the, you know, predispositions for this, then they would probably be an abiding some crazy shit. You know, and another thing I was thinking of is, if you're doing all this cutting on things, do animals applied to this? Think of all the fraud. Did you ever dissect a frog in middle school or high school or anything? No.

Okay. Well, yeah, because you're a homeschool. That's right. You didn't just grab one out of the yard. That wasn't part of your curriculum to murder something and then cut it open? Nope. Oh, well, we didn't need to do the murdering, but they definitely required that we cut it open. And it's interesting if you think about the symbolism with frogs and the, like the Hequette, the Egyptian, there's the Ungdad, the more Egyptian.

You got Keck, the Egyptian as well. You got Mesoamerica, China, all kinds of cultures that revere the frog. And was there something going on with the frogs that you cutting them up? Was it symbolic? Or was there some sort of little frog spirit in there that then we were kind of lily pad hopping around, passing around everywhere? Probably some kind of dark magic for sure. One of those? Yeah, shit.

And this is what freaks him out is why this keeps working. He thought this is a fluke, but it isn't. So over the years, he documents dozens of similar cases, different patients, but same mechanics. Alcoholics attached to the living, sexually obsessive entities, amplifying compulsions, depressed personalities, feeding despair. So the spirits didn't invent new problems. They were just exaggerating the old ones they had when they were alive. And here's the thing that really messes with them. Many of the spirits don't want to stay.

Once they understand their condition, they willingly leave. No force required. But this is when you shine a light in the dark, the shadows escape. They have to because they've been seen and recognized. And the thing is, it's just by interacting and pulling. playing with this guy. They've already gotten some energy from him. And then, you know, they've got other participants, his wife, all of those. I'm curious to see if anybody else was being possessed or obsessed whenever he was around. So did he make any stops, you know, on his way

home? Like he cuts something up. He goes to his butcher. He cuts a body up. He goes to his butcher or some to the grocery store to pick some up on his way home, was the next person that he interacted with possessed, or would that be the way? Or did it only need to be his wife? Or again, the myriad of ideas. Could it have been any, like, you walked to the grocery store and someone tapped down the shoulder and was like, why were you cutting on me? And it's like, oh, shit, it's that guy I was just cutting on. You know, but it's a random stranger. What I'm saying? It's like the next person you see or is it, again, depending on, because of familiarity with wife, he knew they knew they would be alone in spirits, know this shit, you know? Yeah, I think it's just because

she was so sensitive to it. And, yeah, like you said, because they live together and if this spirit's really kind of a hitchhiking on his way home it's probably waiting for the nearest open vessel to to talk shit to him but apparently it's his wife all the time and that's weird that he doesn't get possessed and talks to himself in the mirror out you know lashes out in some possession form or get any of these entities in himself it seems like he's a carrier but not a he's a host but not a carrier you know what i'm saying so he wouldn't be affected by it but he can pass it off to other people and they will then animate with the spirit that he's been toting around on his shoulder. It's odd.

Crazy stuff. This kind of raises an uncomfortable question that he never really outright asked, but it's pretty clear that if these are hallucinations, why do they respond to education when you tell them that they're dead? So this is his clinical view of it. He's like, okay, these are hallucinations, but I don't think they are because these spirits respond to the new information that they are dead. Right. So what? Or at least that they've been found out and seen and recognize this something that shouldn't be where it is. And then it's like, ah, shit, it jigs up.

All right, I got to go. Yeah. So by the time Wickland gets a few years into this work, something shifts a little bit in his tone. So early on, he's cautious and almost apologetic, like we mentioned at the beginning. But as these cases kept piling up, you can kind of feel a weary certainty, not really enthusiasm, but just resigned to it. Like a guy who's realized the problem he's dealing with is way bigger than the tools he's been getting. and what really pushes him further isn't the alcohol cases. Those are unsettling and at least kind of makes sense.

But addiction, latching onto addiction, habit-feating habit, what rattles him are the cases where the behavior is completely out of character, something sometimes grotesquely so. And those start coming fast. One patient is a quiet, withdrawn man with no history of violence. Then seemingly overnight, he becomes explosively aggressive, not just irritable, murderous. He threatens attendance.

screams of senities and has to be restrained repeatedly. Doctors chalk it up to degeneration. When Wickland works with Anna, the entity that comes through isn't confused or needy, it's furious. The voice is sharp, domineering, contemptuous. This is a man who died violently, carrying a lifetime of rage and grievance. He isn't attached to the patient because of similarity. He's attached because the patient was weak enough to be used. The entity openly admits enjoying the control.

And that detail matters to Wickland. He's careful not to romanticize it, though. Not all attachments are accidental. Some are opportunistic, just as humans are. Yeah. But even here, there's no sense of like a cosmic evil grand plan or anything, just a human personality that never let go of its worst instincts. When confronted with the reality of his death and the damage he's causing,

the entity reacts with denial first, then mockery. It takes time, several sessions before anything changes. When it does, the patient's aggression drops noticeably, not cured or transformed into a saint, but just no longer hijacked. And he kind of, he distinctly notes this because release doesn't create perfection. It just creates baseline humanity. It's like pushing reset. All right, you're back to normal now, or, you know, some kind of normal. Man, but again, you'd like some enlightenment at the end of this.

You'd like to know you're dead. You'd like to know that that was a fun ride and that you're off of it now and that you can move on. So again, these things are interesting. It takes, you know, your invest, I guess your mental and emotional investment into the idea that the dead can still walk about for this to be the way. But there are other possibilities, of course. But I like his, he's got a really interesting singular focus. And so when you come at it from that way, it will unfold that way because that's what you're looking at. This is the observer effect.

He's seeing what he thought he would, and there it is. Even though he made excuses for it the whole time, there it is. Right. He's not coming at it from any dogmatic or, you know, I mean, I guess it's biased. Everybody's biased to some degree, but he's coming at it as much as a scientist could, just observing what he sees, writing it down and going, here's what I saw. I don't know. And with the understanding and worldview that when people die, there's still something that exists after death.

Like the soul either sticks around or, you know, is just using this consciousness for the body for a little bit and then moves on consciousness interchangeably. But then maybe it can stick around. but that's a narrative, you know, that's a presupposition that that even occurs. And that's a very human narrative as well. Yeah. And the next case, it made him so uncomfortable. He almost didn't, like, he kind of hesitates to include it. This woman is institutionalized for extreme sexual behavior, public indecency,

compulsive acts completely at odds with her background and personality. The diagnosis is moral insanity. But you wonder as well if this is just repressed sexual energy, or if somebody, like, just stuffed all their serenity, nowed all of their shit down instead of dealing with it. And then that made them vulnerable as well, almost like adding into a bank account for an entity just to hop in it someday and just give it permission to carbonsch explode or, you know, go tits out, if you will. Quite literally. So this moral insanity diagnosis is just a polite way of saying, we don't know

what the hell is wrong with her. And that seemed to be a lot of the insanity diagnoses back then was just, we don't know, he's just acting crazy. So during, during trance, a male entity emerges, lewd, crude, and unapologetic. He speaks openly about using the woman's body for gratification. There's no confusion here, no lost soul wandering aimlessly. He knows exactly what he's doing. This is one of the few times Wickland is like just disgusted. But even here, same mechanics.

Again, the entity died consumed by appetite and carried that appetite straight through death. The living body is simply the nearest outlet. But when confronted and redirected, this guy that's coming through just fiercely resists. does not want to leave. Eventually, though, through repeated sessions, it does. And the woman's behavior changes dramatically, not overnight, but quite unmistakably. So he doesn't try to, like, soften the story or moralize it. He just presents it as evidence that death doesn't erase character.

If anything, it just freezes it. Man. So as these cases start accumulating, Wickland starts noticing something else that really starts bugging him. Sometimes there isn't just one end. Sometimes there are several. He describes patients whose personalities fragment in strange ways, not the kind of fragmentation you would associate with like hysteria or disassociation. Hysteria was a funny, funny way, funny thing they used to diagnose people with. Just like that people?

Just hysterical. Yeah. Get out of here. You're just hysterical. So it'd be different voices, different emotional tones, different memories. And sometimes they actually argued with each other too. So in trance, Anna would occasionally become the battleground for these different entities arguing with each other, which had to have been hilarious to watch. Oh, God, that's kind of fun.

Just her voice, but arguing with herself. Different perspectives, seeing both sides. Wow. And it says one entity will speak only to be interrupted by another. They contradict each other. They compete for attention. And they accuse each other of lying. What? Wickland, he compares it to a crowded room where no one agrees on why they're there.

in these cases treatment takes a bit longer the patient's improvement is slower and more uneven each entity has to be addressed individually some leave readily and others just cling then there are the ones who are afraid one of the most devastating ones involves a young woman suffering from what appears to be deep melancholia

which I guess nowadays they'd call what depression yeah and yeah just lethargy hopelessness withdrawal and nothing dramatic or theatrical, just the slow fading that doctors dread. So during trance again, Anna has this entity pop in that is a female and profoundly sad. She describes dying alone, unacknowledged, emotionally abandoned, she doesn't express anger. She's longing. She attached herself to the patient because the patient felt familiar because she recognized,

I guess we call like the emotional topography or terrain. So she's like, oh, this is a good fit. Does it say how old this young woman was when this happened late 30s, early 40s? It does, well, I didn't write it in my notes at least. It might have the book. And I was curious just simply because of this midlife transit, it's also called the, what do you call it, midlife crisis, something like that. And that word, I think, is kind of soft for it too.

But when you go through that, you will open yourself up for some crazy shit. And this could be, and again, it's like attracts like. If we go with the model, then you would attract something like that to anthropomorphism to manifest within you to enact because you're so in that state. So it makes sense at a level that a spirit like that doesn't have to be somebody dead, but a spirit like that would come in and see the opportunity to kind of complete this lesson for you and help you really, really drive it into the ground. Yeah.

So when they, when Wickland explains what's happening to this entity, she doesn't panic or anything. She just starts sobbing. And this is when you realize that some of these attached, aren't parasitic really. They're just a grief-seeking company. Misery-leves company, right? Yeah.

So when this one finally leaves, though, the patient's depression lift lifted gradually, not cured in a, like a miracle or anything, but just no longer anchored to something heavy heavier than her own life, at least. I bet she had some PTSD, you know,

some post-traumatic depression. Yeah. I mean, yeah, especially if she knew that she was being inhabited by this depressed-ass Dead lady? Yeah. Let's just talk about that. If you know that you've been possessed, you've been put through this shit, your body feels all of that. And again, the body keeps the score. So you've got to work that out. You've got to alchemize that in some way. And I would think that it would play a psychological role on somebody, even though, yes, you're free and gone,

the demon or whatever this dead dude was is gone now. You're not pulling your vagina out on the city square anymore. But it's still got to play an impact on you psychologically, I would think, an emotional. I would think, yeah. Because then you'd be, I would think a little gun-shy. If it can happen once, it can happen again. So are you walking around just going, shit? Am I possessed now? Or if you get in a bad mood, you know, you get your mency, something like this, stub your toe, you're like, shit, am I now another guy? It did it happen again? Like, it struck by lightning? Are you more prone to the phenomenon now that it's happened once? You know, is it just a slippery entry now? A literal lightning rod for these

entities. Exactly. Loubed up. Come on in. So around this point in the book, though, he starts talking about the asylum itself. And he's not it doesn't have very good things to say about it. Okay. So ward after ward filled with these people whose conditions just worsen over time, not because they're incurable, but because the environment amplifies, you know, what's wrong with them. Like putting a crazy person into an asylum is going to make them more crazy. Probably not good.

And to a discarnate personality already disoriented, and asylum is like a lip, well, not living hell, but it's a hell. Yeah. You know, all the locked doors, the sedation, isolating people. in these little, you know, padded brooms, what do they call those, straight jackets, stuff like that. So from the NAD's perspective, these are punishments,

and punishments reinforce the attachment. He also suggests that many chronic cases are manufactured, not inevitable, that the longer obsession is allowed to persist unrecognized, the more entangled it becomes. And this is where he starts sounding like a fringe thinker

and more like a man deeply angry at his own profession. Then one of the strangest patterns, an urgency observes, is when entities are told they are dead, many of them respond not with fear, but with indifference. They just don't care. Earth still feels real to them. Sensation still flows through the hosts, so why leave?

And it begins to suspect that some spirits remain earthbound, not because they're trapped, but because they're comfortable. And that thought unsettles him more than the angry or violent cases, because it suggests that attachment isn't an anomaly. It's an option. Yes, it's a feature. Yeah, and that would make the most sense, actually, people that don't know they're dead.

And they're like, well, screw it. I'm in this kick-ass new body, so why go anywhere? Or you got this fourth-dimensional whatever's going on that is comprised completely of spirit. Maybe some of them have been in bodies before, maybe some haven't. And if you're just on autopilot, and that thing wants to drive around and go on a joyride

and you've got a car sitting there that you don't use, you're not doing anything with it. Maybe a case is made that, You get to an energetic level, it's just, again, it's slippery slope. It's just the thing hops right in and goes, well, shit, I'll take over. And then maybe even that integration process, sometimes dramatic like the cases you're talking about, maybe some of them are really good at this and can sort of get in, weasel in, and change the individual over time in small increments.

That's dangerous, man, because then you think, well, shit, I mean, you look at the psychopaths in office and things like this, the air quote, I don't call them elites. The lizard turns kind of calling shots and have their buttons on imagine, their fingers on imaginal buttons that do imaginable things. These ideals, it could just be these really fucked off parasitic entities if that's what's occurring. Again, I don't know about the dead individual thing because again, I don't know that it's necessarily got to be somebody that died for this to occur. And if that's the case, then it could be anything. Yeah. Very interesting, dude. He also did bring up that a religious belief doesn't seem to necessarily help anything.

Okay. Some of the entities of quote scripture and in says that they were saved and they just think they're being tested and others think they're in purgatory which yeah we could see that yeah and again we're going to talk about why i'm laughing at that in the extension because that's hilarious that they would uh do whatever they want with the bible they wouldn't take it to spiritual gospel and and that's and it's not holy indeed yeah so by the end of this middle section of the book he's he's no longer saying uh perhaps and he's not really tentative about his conclusions, he's saying, in my experience. So, because he's been doing it for years and he sees the same patterns over and over and over

again. So he's like, now I'm not really apologizing because I have enough data right here to show that something's happening. Still not sure what it is, but something's happening. Been through the school of the Hardinocks. He's seen it. He's been in the streets. Right.

Lived experience. So then he talks about when the dead start lying. And at this point, he's kind of settled into this. routine of doing this. It's a job. Patient after patient. Same basic mechanics. And it goes like this almost all the time. Discarnate personalities attach themselves to the living, distort behavior. They feed on the physical sensations, and then they resist leaving when confronted. And this could be some people's wake-up call. Like again, you know, it'd be traumatic, but if you go through one of these experiences and then it's exercised from you or whatever,

maybe this is your wake-up call to say, oh, man, I've got to take more, you know, action ability over my life and more empowerment over my self-actualization. Yeah. And these aren't, so the ones that start lying. So he says every now and then a case comes along that breaks even those rules, the general pattern. One of the first signs that something more complicated is happening comes from the patients with intense religious fixations.

These aren't your average devout believers. He's really careful to distinguish between sincere faith and pathological obsession. These patients don't just believe. they are commandeered by belief. They preach compulsively and endlessly condemn, you know, everything. They speak in absolutes and threats. And doctors at the time would label this religious mania. And initially he agrees until the voices start answering back.

In one case, a patient became convinced he is divinely chosen, not metaphorically, but literally. He speaks with authority, condemns others, issues, proclamations. His speech shifts depending on context as though something behind him is, adapting. So when I enters trance, the entity that emerges identifies itself not as a lost soul, but as a guide. This immediately puts Wickland a little bit on edge. Up to now, most entities have been ignorant of their condition. This one is quite articulate and polished. It claims higher knowledge. And yeah, that would immediately set off some red flags. It's channeling, yeah. And then he realizes that this entity is lying. So when pressed with inconsistencies,

the guide deflects. When challenged directly about its origin, it becomes evasive. It warns Wickland that interference will have consequences. Well, that's new. It sounds like AI, honestly. It just sounds like an asshole. And that could be the difference between a truly dead person and just somebody who is a low-level entity or a demon or a devil. These all sound like that.

They all sound like something that just wants to take a joy ride from. minute because they don't have a body to do it in. They do it into the guise of a story we're already, as humans, kind of attached to or at least have an affinity for, that dead people exist and all that, and then they can just kind of exist still. Maybe it is this. Well, and what a better way to do it than through somebody who does this every day for a living? Like, why not?

And again, this could be the same damn thing hopping around to each of his patients in this circle jerk because he'll heal one, hops on another one. Inevitably, it entropys back again because of the environment. Yeah. man, and then that makes the doctor the one in the madhouse because it's this masturbatory process of thinking that you're doing all this good, but you're really not and infecting your wife every now and then with some shit. Yeah, and so he kind of calls this out.

He says some spirits attach themselves not out of need, but preference. Like we said earlier, like it's an option. Yeah. And so he thinks that not all attachments are accidental and not all possession is just passive. Some of these entities are seeking hosts deliberately on purpose. They're looking for emotional vulnerability, intellectual openness, or any other things. Like we said, drugs or getting blackout drunk is a big one, apparently. You get blackout where you don't remember half the night.

It's like a car without a driver, and the keys turned, and you can just hop right in. And what's the difference between missing time? People would report it the same. Oh, I have this chunk of time. I don't know what happened. I got my car home just fine. I don't know how that happened. And I'm okay.

You know, and then his wife as well. She's in a bath now. She's all pruning. She's like, I just got into this thing. What are you doing? But really, she was taken over by something. And her conscious awareness of that time, she's not aware of. She doesn't have conscious awareness because she wasn't there.

That's odd. Yeah. It's really strange stuff. So odd. So around this time, though, he starts describing what he calls the earthbound condition in more detail. He explains that the discarnate personalities experience the physical world indirectly through the host's nervous system. Sensation is dulled but not absent.

And emotion still registers. The desires, the cravings are still there, but the experience is unstable. So they can't sleep properly, can't act independently, and just always frustrated and annoyed and irritable, all that, all that. And I guess that explains why some of them

get manipulative too. And why they lie and resist release. It's like a crackhead. They just want to stay in the body. Man, I'll suck your dick. Stay in this body. Where'd my big go? I got these cheeseburgers, man.

One of the strangest cases in the book involves a patient whose symptoms intensify whenever Wickland attempts intervention. Every time the entity is confronted, another one surfaces to defend it. They argue through Anna, as they do. They accuse Wickland of interference, and they try to argue spiritual law and all this stuff. At one point, one of the entities just admits that if it leaves, it fears being, it fears disillusion, not punishment or hell,

but loss of identity. And Wickland realizes that some spirits remain attached, not because they're trapped, but because they believe moving on means ceasing to exist. Ah, yeah. Because it's all they know.

And that makes sense, except for when we covered the NDE stories, it doesn't seem to be a ceasing of existence. It's a transition. And it depends on your worldview. This is very interesting. It does sound like spirits that don't have access to a transition.

And so they're unaware that one is even possible. Yeah. Like there's any other way to do it. Like, what do you mean go up or go to something else? I just go from where I am floating around where you guys can see me. Now I'm in a body and that's how I do things. That's my options. Yeah.

And he ends up not being really surprised by the actual possessions. What really kind of shocks him is how systematic it is in widespread. I mean, like you were saying, earlier. Like, how many people are just walking around with one of these things taking them for a ride and then we don't even know it? Most government employees, I'm going to say quite a bit of anybody involved in some of those really famous charitable organizations because they're really messed up stuff that

they do. Definitely, yeah, any municipality I'm thinking that sort of attracts that mindset. And I heard also that the police will only take you if you have an IQ below a certain level. They won't take you if it's too high. This guy actually didn't make it through the exam because his IQ is too high. So if you're able to rationally think and form good questions

and things like that, then you're not going to be a good host for one of these things and maybe that's what's being recruited for. Military also probably shout out guys, I love you and thank you for your service, but potentially one of these things because we know about the military fuckery. They could be be beaming y'all with all kinds of shit. Yeah. Blizzard turns, maybe.

Definitely all politicians. I mean, it's different different show, but the Vrill idea of putting the Vrill into the eye and you see all these compilations of all these actors and everything that have black eyes and the idea is that, oh, they're all getting Vrill inserted into their eye or something. It gets crazy, but it's interesting to look at. Is that a way of tuning your receiver, tuning your brain to make sure that there's an unbreechable gateway, just this uncut thread between you and that force, whatever that is, so it can hop in

your vessel and be you anytime. And maybe this is like the Legion thing. And really this is a huge game going on, I guess, I'm going to say above just for spatial orientation's sake. And really the idea is it's like a risk and you've just got to take over the whole place and to see maybe it's two entities. And really they're just trying to take over as many vessels as they can and influence in that way. And that's whoever wins is how many lizard turds you get into the vessels, whatever, or sands lizard turds, whatever. Who knows, man.

So I mentioned it earlier about his invisible co-workers. Yes. And he describes what he calls helpers. these intelligences that seem to have the job of assisting these newly departed entities and detaching from Earth. And they're not really a big part of it. They're not like dominating the session or anything. And they don't announce themselves either.

They just appear quickly, like right as the entities on the verge of leaving. They don't argue or do anything. They just wait. And so he says, these helpers don't force anyone and they don't threaten. They don't even persuade or anything. They simply make themselves available. once the understanding clicks in their head that they're dead and you need to move on. And so he gets this growing suspicion that free will doesn't end at death and that many cases of

obsession are the result of choice, not entrapment. And that is a bit unsettling to him. And then he reconsiders evil. And he doesn't dramatize this, but it's obvious that it kind of bugs him. So this patient was exhibiting deeply disturbing behavior. So cruelty, manipulation, just a POS. And not really violence, but, or like impulsive violence, at least. It was more like calculated.

So just evil. That's what makes him rethink this. Doctors assume congenital moral insanity. So it was the era's way of saying, this person was born wrong. that boy ain't right the boy ain't right so Anna enters trance and the entity that comes out

is cold, articulate and very self-aware and it knows it's dead and it knows it's attached and it doesn't give a shit it openly admits that earth provides opportunity not necessarily

just the physical sensations and all that but influence it enjoyed steering the patient's behavior and it enjoyed the reactions it provokes so it's like a psychopathic entity. Yeah, it likes fucking up your life.

It was born wrong. Wow. So he tries reasoning with it and explaining the, you know, potential consequences of doing this and maybe he throws in karma. Like,

uh, he even tried to tell this thing that, hey, there's a possibility of growth beyond earth too. Like, if you move on, you could probably do better things like after this. And nothing's working.

Man. And what I, Eventually shifts this entity's whole thing. Whoa, my mouse just did something really weird. Sorry. That's okay. What shifts the whole situation is just boredom. It gets tired of being questioned and it gets tired of explaining itself.

And it finally does leave and disengage. But it's not out of remorse or like, oh, I'll be a better person now. Just straight apathy. It's just indifference. It's just like, I'm, you guys bore me. I'm leaving. Yeah, spite. And the patient immediately improves.

So, because this case doesn't fit the comforting idea that, you know, possession is rooted in confusion or fear. Some personalities alive or dead are simply predatory. And death doesn't seem to redeem them and it didn't damn them either. It just remove the body. And they just don't care. They're just like, I'm just continue doing whatever I want. So, yeah, just because you're dead doesn't mean you're enlightened, obviously. You're asshole.

You die and you're just still an asshole. Or you're punished either, you know, or it's just your punishment to be this disincarnate thing that thinks it's, that knows it's dead but doesn't have a body anymore and doesn't, that chooses not to move on. It does, it does feel more about choice at that point. Yeah. Not karma. And getting near the end of the book, though, he just totally stopped apologizing for these conclusions. It's kind of a different, different field in the beginning when he's, you know, like. It's just my thought process.

You're my ideas. Now he's chained smoking and going, you don't know, you weren't there. Yeah, he doesn't, he's obviously not asking the reader to just blindly believe him either, but he's kind of asking, why is it more acceptable to assume a mind is broken than ask what else might be speaking? Mm-hmm. And he's not attacking science. He's just attacking the certainty of science, which we mentioned a bunch. Yes. Just like that guy on the last book, the cellular cosmogony.

That's right. He's tired of their certainty and the scientism, not really the science itself. he kind of suggests that psychiatry rushed to close the book on possession, not because it was disproven, but because it was inconvenient. You know, too difficult to study. It was too close to theology, too, and science doesn't like that. But it still, I mean, this phenomenon still happens. So he's just kind of going, we got to look at it, you guys.

It's something that's happening. The elephant in the room, you can't medicate it away. You can't say it's not happening. There it is. Yep. So he says that the, well, near the end of this section at least, he says that the living, imagine the dead is distant, unknowable, and powerful. But in his experience, the dead are often just lost and don't know what the hell is going on. And it's not really the danger that they haunt us, it's that they confuse us for home.

Like you said, they just don't know what's going on and they think, oh, this is, I don't know, I'm just confused. This looks like a good enough body to me. Why not? It's so confusing. So confused. Blavatsky tried to like talk about this. Fort, forts talked about Kiel and,

you know, we've been mocked, warned about it, whatever. And Wickland was actually trying to treat it because none of these other idealists solved the problem really. But it's like they're all looking at the same thing

and going, hey, something's, you see that crack in the wall? Something's coming through there. Yeah. and it's just unsettling because it's possible that they aren't all wrong. It's just that most people just stop paying attention because it's uncomfortable.

It's uncomfortable. Yeah, 30 years worth of work, though, in this book, I mean, there are so many more stories. I think just the Kindle version has 266 pages, which is kind of a lot because it's not really small or it's not big print or anything. So there's a ton more stories in here that if you want, we will of course link down to in the show notes. But thanks again for that recommendation from X. We appreciate it. And that was definitely a different book for me. Like I said, I spent like two days going through this trying to pick out some of the best stories out of there.

That's amazing. Yeah. Well done. Crazy stuff. What do we have coming up in Plus, Brandon? Man, well done. That was so interesting. So on plus, we are going to gleefully engage in the unthinkably blasphemous and obscenely profane.

We're going to offer new perspectives and then ask some very great questions. Specifically, we're going to question not only the second greatest story ever told, but possibly throw out the teeny tiny little virgin-born savior baby with the water he allegedly walked on. We're here to ask if the Bible and its contents were created as a means to pacify a potentially dangerous, public by offering a contentment encourager in the form of a sun god slang and holistic parables that align perfectly with the 40-year rule of the most famous Caesars of Rome. This is called Caesar's Messiah. It's a guy named Joseph Atwell. And he claims that it was simply a parable-based book to pacify the Jews at the time and that it worked. And there are many examples of this. I'm going to do

my best to do it in one, but I know it's not going to be in one. So we'll probably go ahead and start it, which is a great reason for you guys to go ahead and sign up in Plus in the link below. So you can get that extension, get the inescapable, get all that stuff. And then also, this is definitely a monster story here. So you guys have got to hear it. A lot of names, a lot of history. And it's fascinating. It's going to make you look at life differently.

And that's our whole goal here. How controversial of you. It is because he mentions the second season. Jesus already came and went, all that kind of stuff. And it's very, very interesting. But you guys, this is a fascinating one. It's from a dear friend named Oliver Crane. He's a comedian, the contact at the canyon organizer that we both know.

We've met in person. And he's just a delight anyway. And he tapped me on the shoulder with this thing and said, hey, man, check this out. And there's a YouTube video associated with it that I'll be linking as well. But this Joseph Adwell wrote a book, the scholar. And same thing. He's got a decades worth of research into this. And it's fascinating, man.

I guess it's not a new idea of religion as a control mechanism. Not at all. I don't think I've ever read a whole book on it. So looking forward to, hearing what this guy thinks. It lays it out. It's Flavians, man. And I picture this whole Flavian thing, the Caesar, you know, walking out like, Flavian, Flav. And he's got like a sundial around his neck, right? Because it wouldn't be a big clock. And the little leaf things on his ears and probably a dube smoked back there. But yes, this is the whole thing is that the Flavians are actually

and it mirrors it perfectly. And it's backdated so that it corresponded with what it already happened so that they knew what had happened and went ahead and wrote in the book that Jesus predicted it. And then this dude pulled it off. It's fascinating. The whole story is very detailed, and we're going to get into it in the Plus extension. But again, join us for that. And it's going to spill over into another one. So go ahead and sign up, guys. You're not going to want to hear the second half of this next Friday. Just jump in on it, get in on this, get the Inescapable and all the good stuff that comes with it. And we love y'all. So yes, very much looking forward to that. No better time to go sign up to Plus, not for just our dumbheads, but for Ben and Aaron's awesome heads. Because they're cooking with gas over there on Inescapable. And I'm. so looking forward to every every week now because I've missed M.U because I can't listen to it. I'm not listening to my own show. I've missed the boys. I listen to us because we're great. And really, I do it for the audio too, like for scrutiny. But man, it's awesome. This whole organization,

it feels like just this really huge legendary podcast network that was formed right at the end of 2025. And all of it lines up astrologically. I don't know if the guys are aware of that. But Mary, of course, is huge into the astrology and does said thing. And it told me every step along the way, every major thing, even the reschedules, the early meet, all that kind of stuff was all timed up. So this huge legacy was meant to be created. Here we are. So go ahead and sign up, guys. We have a lot of stuff. It's a huge legacy. It's the biggest legacy. Nobody's ever seen a legacy like this before. Massive. Well, thanks for joining us everybody on the free feed. And if you are on Plus, stick around for the Plus show. Otherwise, we will catch you next week.

Have a good one. Sweet. Welcome to your Plus Extension. Thank you for being with us on. One plus. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.