Otherworld - Episode 47: Voice in the Hallway

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

An archaeologist named Brieann spends every day working in what most would assume to be a source of paranormal activity, ancient burial sites. However, she remained skeptical until she recorded a startlingly clear EVP in her own home. To see photos related to this episode, click here Subscribe to Otherworld on Patreon for exclusive content and bonus interviews Check out our Merch Follow us on: Instagram, TikTok, Twitter If you have experienced something paranormal or unexplained, email us your full story at [e-mail] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. Today's episode revolves around a woman named Brianne. She's an archaeologist in California, which is actually why I decided to talk to her in the first place. People always say that the United States is a young nation, only 250 years old. It's really not. The government is that new, but the land isn't. People have been here for a very long time. It's estimated that there were 18 million, Native American people living above the Rio Grande before contact.

Most people live their lives unaware of what's buried underneath all of our strip malls and subdivisions that we're used to in this country. Brianne is not one of those people. She is the one that gets called in before they build something to safely remove burial sites before they either build on top of them or just plow directly through them. And it seems to me that most of the time, construction companies and develop don't even bother calling people like Brea Ann when they discover something. So it was very fascinating and a little unnerving talking to her about all of this,

but the story she originally emailed me about surprisingly does not have anything to do with her job. However, we do talk about it quite a bit, and I thought it would be interesting to hear from somebody whose day-to-day life intimately involves something that most people prefer to ignore. I'm going to let Brie tell her story for herself, but let's get it started. This is episode 47, The Voice in the Hallway, and you're listening to Otherworld. Is Bobby? Yes, it is. At its core, the science, you can't argue. I'm not worried about all the science.

It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm going to die. It's slimmed. We're just like wrong. Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a minute. My name is Brian Deornella. I'm 37 years old. I am a single mom. I live in Sacramento, California, but I was born and raised in San Jose, California, in the Silicon Valley, essentially. And I'm an archaeologist. The type of archaeology

I do, like technically it's CRM, it's cultural resource management. I work primarily in the state of California in prehistoric archaeology, which is Native American. I specialize in human osteology, so the analysis of human skeletal remains in an archaeological context. I studied under Dr. Lorna Pierce, who was the forensic anthropologist of Santa Clara County for decades. Brilliant, brilliant woman also informed the show bones. I was asked by her to TA for a couple of semesters, so I would be in her classroom, like I said, like kind of putting together exercises and preparing lectures for the class. And the exercises would involve, like we had a really good teaching collection,

So we had both full real skeletons, a full male and a full female, and then fragmentary bones, which is really the most helpful thing because when you're out in the field, you're not usually seeing this like pristine full individual. You're finding fragments of people and you're having to kind of put things together and analyze, given what you have. So I would be preparing these things. And I would get kind of regular visits from Alan Leventhal. who was a retired archaeologist who worked in the dean's office of the social sciences.

And he would come down and kind of chat with me and things like that and saw kind of how studious I was and I think how much I knew. And also how passionate I was for the political issues that local tribes or just tribal people in general are facing. He had been working closely for decades with the Mewakma-Aloni Indian tribe of the South San Francisco Bay Area. who have been working to reinstate their federal recognition status. And they were in the process of excavating one of their ancestral cemetery sites. And he asked if I would like to work for the tribe. It wasn't so much that I was really eager to help excavate their ancestors, you know, from the ground. It was really to like use not only like my expertise to be able to as carefully as possible

remove these individuals for repatriation and reburial rather than, you know, some backhoe coming in and destroying them. But also, whatever we could glean from their ancestors and their habitation sites to help them build a case to present to the federal government to try to get this federal recognition back. So it was kind of also like a political thing. And I felt really, just really stoked to actually get to work for the tribe and not an artist. Archaeology firm and get to be concerned with their interests and representing their interests. What I've learned as an archaeologist working all over California, but even in the area that I grew up at a number of sites, was how extensive the Native American habitation was in the state and the density and amount of cemetery sites that are all over. and have been essentially torn up and homes built on.

We have state laws that allow for some protections, but a lot of these tribes were formerly federally recognized. And during the Indian Termination Act in the 50s, their federal recognition status was stripped from them. So they lost a lot of power as well as land. And so these state laws are not really, they do something, but they're not quite adequate enough to protect ancestral cemetery sites from being disturbed or destroyed.

But before these laws passed, there were no laws. Like construction crews would just tear through bodies. I can't imagine how many homes in the Silicon Valley and malls and parking lots are built on top of native cemetery sites. I know for a fact that I've been there working collaboratively with tribes to carefully remove individuals, repatriate them for reburial. I mean, just hundreds, hundreds of individuals in areas where they're putting up homes for, you know, the tech boom and the expansion of living.

Sometimes we're monitoring heavy machinery and things like that. And they're impacting burials. Then we say, like, we have to stop all work. We have to, you know, have them pull the machines away. And then we have to carefully excavate the individuals that have been impacted by the machines. there is it sucks

actually it's really sucks to say I feel really bad people get pulverized by these things so there's pieces of human bone and everything in the dirt in the mud and so one of the stories I remember hearing was a construction worker who had been walking around

in the dirt started having weird experiences and I can't recall exactly what they were but he felt like he brought something home from the site and then realized at some point that he had all these like dried mud that had caked into the bottom of his boots. So I've definitely heard stories of people, not necessarily colleagues. I think maybe my colleagues are also, we're maybe like a lot more careful. I don't know. As an archaeologist, as a person who has studied the sciences, albeit the human sciences or social sciences, I am, I would say more intrinsically skeptical.

I do want to be able to kind of systematically test things even in my mind to make sense of something or to kind of explain something away. I've also learned in this field the extent and pervasiveness of the human history in these regions, in this region that I grew up in. I've had experiences. I've had other people that have had experiences. I've worked with tribal members that have had really intense experience. and when you have so many things that are similar and that are reported repeatedly by very different

people with very different life experiences, that starts to become kind of like a phenomenon that is like repetitious, right? And like, so when you see something like that, it's like you should pay attention to that. Knowledge and science like is always changing. We should always be open to new information that comes in and maybe we just don't know entirely how to test for these things yet. My experience starts in the region that we currently know as the Silicon Valley and specifically my mother's childhood home. The house was brand new when my grandparents and mom and brothers moved in. They were children.

My mom would have these experiences, which she told me about later on, where she would see shadow people and she would hear these strange sounds. and it was something that was recurrent and it was distressing to her, but nothing ever really happened to her. And I remember, you know, sometimes I would be playing with whatever, I was playing with my dolls or Polly Pockets or Ninja Turtles or whatever in my bedroom. And every once in a while, I would feel suddenly something behind me, something that was bigger than me.

It's like, it's weird to say how I could feel the size of something. thing, but I could feel something looming over from behind me. And it felt like dread, like deep dread inside me. And I was so afraid to see what it looked like. I could just feel it. And so I would kind of bury my face in my hands and into the carpet and kind of curl up into a fetal position face down and call out for my mom or my grandma. And when one of them would show up, I would feel safe to kind of open my eyes and and usually the feeling would be gone. There were two bathrooms in this house on opposite sides of the house, and there was one bathroom, and I was probably like 10 or 11 at the time.

In particular, when I would wash my face in that bathroom, I would get this kind of like a mental image of someone grabbing me by the hair from behind and slamming my face into the faucet. and it was a really jarring image, and it happened several times, only in that bathroom. It didn't happen in the other bathroom. It's not something that happens to me otherwise. I don't know where that thought came from. Because I feel like when you're thinking of something

or when I'm thinking of something, there's usually some kind of train of thought, however fast it is. You know, like someone can say something about a battery and then I can end up on a train, you know, like thinking about a train, but there's like this like thought process that connected one thing to another to another.

And this is more of, a flash. It's more of something that just, it's like if you saw an image on a TV screen and it's not something that came from internally, it comes like almost external. And it's just this image suddenly that's there. And nothing that you were thinking led to that place. And it's a very, it also has a feeling to it as well. I almost wasn't sure like if it, if it was something that was going to happen to me or if it was something that already happened. But it made me feel really nervous. And another thing that happened in that house, we had a TV, as most families do, in the living room. And it would turn on and off by itself sometimes in the middle of the night. The first time that

it happened, I remember really vividly. I think like once it continued happening, I was just kind of like, you know, it just kind of became background noise. But the first time that it happened, I had I had a young stepbrother. He was probably five or six years younger than me. And I'm falling asleep and then I hear the TV and the living room turn on. And I'm thinking, oh, my little brother is trying to sneak and watch TV. I'm going to go catch him, you know, kind of thing. So I walked past his bedroom and he was fast asleep.

And I walked into the living room and the TV was on and no one was in there. Looked in my mom and stepdad's room, they were asleep. And it was kind of on one of those staticky channels. I don't even know if those exist anymore. But, you know, I don't know if you remember that, like, static-y sound, kind of the crackly white dots. It was on a channel like that. And I tried to turn off the TV with the remote several times,

hit power, power, power. It did not turn off. So I walked up to the TV and tried to press the button manually several times. It wouldn't turn off. I got freaked out at that point and just kind of, I mean, because this is a TV that. functions normally every other time. Like this is not something that happens. Like if it was, you know, like, oh, every once in a while, you can't turn the fucking thing off. Like, it's fine,

but yeah, it wasn't something like that. It was kind of peculiar that it was doing this. And I kind of freaked out. So I just started walking back to my room and just didn't, I wasn't going to touch it anymore. I wasn't going to deal with it anymore. And as I'm walking back to my room, it starts flipping through the channels. You can hear the like flip, flip, flip. And like, I can't recall if they were other staticky channels or if they were actual channels, if there were people talking, like, I really don't remember that. I remember kind of turning over my shoulder and, like, seeing that, like, flash as the channels changed and the numbers changing in the corner. And then I just kept walking to my room. I was like, though, screw this, you know. And right as I walked into my

bedroom, the TV clicked off. Like, I heard it turn off and the light from the screen was no longer emanating down the hallway. And I was just like, that's really weird. I don't understand why that happened at all. And that happened several times. I'm really not sure how many times that happened, but that first time was really, really memorable for me. So my stepdad had a sister who lived in the East Hills. Her and her husband and son were away on vacation, and they asked my stepdad to feed their dogs. And my stepdad was like, he was kind of, he was a jerk in a lot of ways, but absolutely didn't believe in the paranormal. And I think like as a kid, like kind of would almost like belittle me for, you know, kind of entertaining the possibility that they existed. So given that, I was very, very surprised when he came home from feeding the dogs at his sister's house and was like, I'm not going back there alone and told me and my mom, you guys are going with me next time.

there's something in that house. So anyway, we went with him the next day to feed the dogs and, you know, fed them downstairs in the backyard. And once that was all settled, we went back into the house and my stepdad kind of prompted us to sit at the foot of the stairs and just wait. And so we did. And sure enough, like, I don't remember how much time, you know, elapsed. I was like 12 at the time.

I was really young. but sure enough you can hear someone walking around from like one room to the next you'd hear drawers opening you could hear rummaging through papers you could hear as if someone was just in a house not like not like someone had broken in and was kind of frantically going through things to find something of value but really more like just someone doing their thing you know like oh I'm going to you know go into the study right now and grab some papers and do whatever and I remember like I don't I think that I only felt so bold because my mom and stepdad were right there but um I did go up the stairs and looked in the bedrooms.

And I went by myself. They didn't come with me. Yeah, I went up the stairs and I looked in the bathroom. I looked in the bedrooms and I didn't see anything. I didn't see any open drawers. I didn't see any papers like blowing in the air conditioning or anything like that. Anything that could explain what we were hearing that was just so, like such a specific sound or set of sounds. My stepdad's like, do you hear that?

I didn't feel like it was dangerous. Again, like, I probably wouldn't have done that if they weren't there. But it didn't feel threatening at all. It just was like, what is that? I don't even know that they talked too much about it afterwards. I don't really remember that. I think it was more, do you see what this is? Like, this is freaky.

Let's never talk about it again. But I also remember him not going alone to that house anymore. And I think that was the only time that we really sat there and, like, waited to listen for it. Okay, we have to take a quick break, but we will be right back. So I moved back into that house in my young adult years. My grandmother had advanced Alzheimer's. And, I mean, if anyone, you know, knows what that's like, you know, the person that you love, like, dies long before.

They die. So they're just kind of this shell with some shadow of. of a living person inside of them. And it's really sad. But my mother and I moved back in to take care of her until she died in her home. And I had given birth to my son during that time. She passed away when my son was two. And I remember in the two or three days preceding her death,

when I would go into her room to give her medication. or feed her or things like that. The air felt thick and electric. And if you've ever been in a really intense lightning storm, it's kind of like that feeling where you can feel this like electricity and the surface of your skin. It was like that. And I mean, where there's a charge in the air.

And I mean, you can absolutely feel that in a really intense storm. Like, I don't know if everybody does, but I certainly do. But that is, it's almost exactly that feeling. That's what it felt like in her room for two or three days before she passed away. And it felt like there were just people there waiting for her, kind of, if that makes any sense at all. Probably doesn't actually, but that's what it felt like. It felt like there were people there waiting for her. One night I was sleeping and I woke up because my phone buzzed and I got a text message.

But when I woke up, the first thing that I thought was Ma died. then I thought, well, no, my mom would just wake me up if she had gone to, you know, check on mom and found out that she had died. And she wouldn't send me a text, right? Like, I'm in the same house. Also, like, even if I wasn't, she would call, you know. But I went and checked anyway, and it was just a text from a friend, like, randomly. And so I was like, okay, well, I'll just go back to sleep. And, like, less than an hour later, like a few minutes later, like a few minutes, like,

I'm not even sure how much time lapsed because I was half asleep, but my mom woke me up and said that Ma died. And I don't know if that thought came into my head at the same time that she passed. But it was kind of an interesting coincidence to say the least. Were you expecting her to die around then? She definitely was not doing well. And it wasn't as easy to tell because she hadn't been really speaking for a very long time. And then she got more and more quiet. So it wasn't like as detectable as maybe somebody who is more lucid on the way to passing away.

But she really wasn't doing well even for her at that point. And then there was that feeling for those couple of days leading up to it that just was really intense. And I think that was a part of it as well. Six months after she passed, I was in the living room of the same home watching TV with my now ex-husband and the father of my child. my son was asleep, my mom was asleep. And out of nowhere, I was struck by the really strong scent of human urine. And I say human urine because different urine smells different, you know, like cat piss smells like cat piss. But I was really, really accustomed to that smell. I had changed countless diapers at this point, both my sons and my grandmothers, a lot. And it's not, you know,

it's not a pleasant scent, but it was something that I was very, like, aware of. And so I'm struck by this smell. And I'm kind of like sitting with it for a second and just like, all right, it's not going away. It's not like just something that kind of, I don't know, wafted out. It was just really strong. It was there. And it wasn't going anywhere.

And I asked if he could smell that and he said he could. And so I went to check on my mother. and I went to check on my son just to make sure that they like I hadn't somehow smelled them letting the bed from a distance or like no one had a stroke or anything like that you know and everyone was fine sleeping soundly

and they seemed to be dry so I went back out to the living room and the smell was still there and then at some point it just wasn't it was just gone as quickly as it was and then I just started thinking it's maw it's got to be my grandma, just because I associated that with her, like I said, because of, you know, kind of being a caregiver and kind of where she was in the last year of her life.

I was doing, like, ethnographic interviews and things like that for school. And so I did have a little digital voice recorder, and I did have an EMF detector that was given to me for Christmas, which is an electromagnetic field detector. So I got my EMF detector and I got my digital recorder and I decided I was going to go around the house and just try to talk to her and see if I could get anything. And I kind of started in the living room and there was nothing, no, nothing on the EMF detector, like nothing that I could hear audibly. I went into the kitchen and then kind of as you would expect, the detector gave like a moderate. at reading, like a halfway reading on, you know, appliances, like the refrigerator, the microwave, this and that. And kind of like otherwise, it went back down to zero. So it seemed to be working accurately. And halfway down the hallway, the EMF detector spikes all the way, like the max

reading. And I kind of stopped in my tracks and thought, okay, well, like, this is an old house. maybe there's some wiring issue here. So I kind of took the detector and I traced along the ceiling and I traced along the walls and I traced along the floor and it went flat. It died. There was no reading. And then I was able to lift it back up and literally in this area in the center of the hallway, it spiked to the max reading. So that didn't feel like it was any kind of wiring because certainly. if it was something embedded in the walls like that,

it would have a higher reading or would continue to have a reading at the wall or the ceiling or the floor. And it died around that area and then literally spiked back up in this area. And I could trace like this area in the middle of the hallway where it spiked fully. And so once I was doing that, I'm asking the question, are you here? Are you in the hallway? I don't hear anything at the time. and then suddenly the EMF detector falls flat, dives. So I continue down the hallway, and then I sit in the bedroom,

and I proceeded to, I mean, I sat there for like 20 minutes, maybe I'm not sure, for a while, and tried talking to my grandmother. I got no readings on the EMF detector. I didn't hear anything. I didn't feel anything. And so eventually I gave up and just kind of concluded that maybe like an hour or so later uploaded the digital audio recording to the laptop, kind of cranked up the volume and listened through the entirety of the recording. And sure enough, in that one spot where I got

that reading, when I asked, are you here? Are you in the hallway? There was a one word answer that sounds like a man whispering. And I mean, definitely not my grandma. I don't know. I don't know who was. And you can hear like also in the distance, you can hear my ex like kind of talking because he was also trying to talk to my grandma in, um, in the living room. But it's, I mean, you can tell it's a very different voice and it's, it's much farther away. So you hear my voice really close to the recorder and then you hear this one whisper that sounded like it was right there. And it either says hallway or always, I don't know, like I'm trying to make sense of what it sounds like it's saying to me. That was completely inaudible to me at the time. And I think like, and definitely when I

heard that by just chills, chills. And it's just the aggregate of everything. Like, this is one of those kind of like ways that I think like a scientific mind frame comes into play where I'm like, okay, like I tested this device and it seems to be working accurately. I can't explain why this digital recorder was able to pick up this voice that I couldn't hear with my ears, but is definitely as clear as day in the recording. Where are you? Are you in the hallway? Are you here right now?

And yeah, it got me to stop. That reading on the EMF detector got me to stop in my tracks. And had that not happened, I wouldn't have spent that time there and asked those questions. And, yeah, I got that one answer. I mean, it's the same house that my mom saw the shadow people in. It's the same house that I felt someone, you know, kind of towering over me when I was a child playing and I was afraid to see what it looked like.

So I don't know. That's not my grandma. She didn't sound like that. There's some kind of aggregate experiences that I've had that make me a little more, I'm a little more attuned with it now, a little more, or maybe I should say a little less confused. I know back then, like especially when I was young, it was really confusing and I couldn't understand where these things were coming from. And even now, I don't necessarily always.

I'm a little more inclined to kind of follow whatever my, like, feelings or mind is telling me. It's interesting. I mean, you're telling me this now, but your day job is digging up graves. Yeah, sometimes. You're an actual, you dig up bodies. So, I mean, does this happen to you at work? If I'm working on a site that has a weird feeling, I might, you know, ask to be saged or something. like that, I might take an extra step to just, I don't know, like pay attention to it and give it like a little respect, even though I don't know what it is entirely.

But also, I don't know if people are necessarily like tied to their physical bodies when they're gone. I mean, if there is, if there is something else, I do think it would be kind of silly to just like hang out with your corpse. Like I feel like, you know, you might be somewhere else. You might be. And I don't know how that works like. Can you be everywhere?

all at once, can you be in an area that was like particularly important to you? Like, I mean, definitely go out of my way to be respectful and cautious and verbally and emotionally put out that, you know, I'm very sorry for disturbing you in your resting place. I really wish that this wasn't the case. I believe that there is something else there. I don't know exactly how that works or what the rules are or how we can totally test for it. I think that there's a little, I think that there are many ways that we can kind of try to test the existence of these things and explore it a little bit. We're just like, we're just starting to figure it out by using these little extra tools and things like that.

Or also just paying attention to our feelings, our bodies, our minds. Also, I think, I think storytelling is super important. I mean, it's important culturally. it's an important part of understanding the world that we function within, especially with things that are kind of relatively unknown. And I mean, storytelling over a lot, like over time has been ways of passing down knowledge even when it couldn't be explained, you know, like even things that like are, we take for granted now that's just basic knowledge, right?

Like maybe, you know, thousands of years ago wasn't, and there were different explanations for why to not do something or why to do something. Zoroneal Hurston was this really cool anthropologist back in the 1930s. She's an African-American woman and just totally brilliant. Her writing style was evocative and beautiful. And she wrote this ethnography called Tell My Horse. And she did her research in Jamaica and Haiti. And it was like she was primarily delving into sex and death rituals.

in these two areas. And when she was in Haiti, she was, I mean, as far as I know, the first person to really study Haitian voodoo culture and zombies. I mean, there's so much information in there. But one of the interesting stories that really sticks out with me is the concept of graveyard dirt being something that could be used to harm one's enemies. So people would reach down, you know, about arm's length into a grave, into the dirt above, you a buried corpse and would pull out this dirt and would put it in somebody's food or something like that

and could bring about harm to this person through like dark magic right there was you know scarlet fever typhoid things like that there's all kinds of like really harmful bacterium and things like that that are that's in these like the soils around decomposing bodies and so that actually would like get people really sick and sometimes kill them so it worked biointents and purposes, but it's just like the understanding of how that was was different. So in that situation, you have something that's kind of a little more paranormal or spiritual to describe something that we can now explain in the scientific way. And I think that with ghosts, with spirits, with things that we can't currently explain right now,

but we can a little bit through storytelling, through feelings, through sharing through like a collective, a collective individual experience, right? because like I'm not necessarily having this experience with a bunch of other people, but we are all having similar experiences individually at different times and different place. And it's like when you start hearing this like the repetition of, yeah, like the shadow people, of the voices, of the feelings, of the images in the mind, you have like kind of this like power and this like collective story. And it becomes something that I think we should pay closer attention to.

And even if we lack the measure of, measuring devices at this point, you know, to like really say like, oh, this is what it is and this is who it is and this is where they're coming from. I mean, like, this is still kind of a unit of measurement, at least anthropologically. All right. Thank you, Brienne for sharing her story and talking to me about her work. I'm lucky enough to have some incredible audio engineers working on this show, some audio engineers and editors whose names you've hear in the credits every episode. I don't think any of us have an explanation for that voice that you heard in the clip. I mean, it's pretty clear. You don't really even need to be an expert to know how weird it is. I've heard a lot of so-called ghost evidence over the years. Usually,

it's very noisy, subtle, mixed in with a lot of other junk. This one's pretty clear, and it's pretty remarkable. This has been episode. 47, the title is The Voice in the Hallway, and you've been listening to Otherworld. Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our theme song is by Cobra Man.

The soundtrack of this episode is by North Americans. This episode was edited by Justin Mayfield and engineered by Theo Schaefer. Our artwork is by Coltysack Studios. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, and telling your friends.

If you want to hear bonus episodes of other World, you could become a patron at patreon.com slash Otherworld. We have a ton of extra episodes up there. Our social media is at Otherworld Pod at Instagram and Twitter. Thank you to the team at Odyssey. J.D. Crowley, Jenna Weiss-Berman, Leah Reese Dennis, Rob Morandi, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Klauser, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, and Hillary Shupp. Follow and listen to Otherworld now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your

podcast. And finally, if you or somebody you know, has a experience something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained. You could send us your story at Stories at otherworldpod.com.