Otherworld - Episode 68: Dark Match

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Professional wrestler and firefighter Shantelle AKA Taylor Wilde talks about her strange experience while staying at the home of another WWE wrestler and how she believes something may have attached itself to her afterward. 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 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. Typically on the show, there's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes with a story before you ever hear it on the show or before we even book the interview. Usually, there's lots of back and forth over email, sussing people out, asking a lot of follow-up questions. But with this episode, I pretty much booked the interview before I even finished reading the email. It read, Hello, Jack. I love your show. I've had several paranormal experiences in my life, including one that happened to myself, and another female WWE pro wrestler. That's right. This story comes from a female pro wrestler. Her name is Chantal Malowski, aka Taylor Wilde. She's a Canadian pro wrestler, three-time TNA women's knockout tag team champion. She also did a bout in the WWE, and on top of that, she's also a firefighter.

for all of these reasons, I was really interested in talking to her, and it's one of those interviews where the non-paranormal aspects of this person's story was as fascinating, if not more fascinating than the paranormal part. I thought it was so interesting hearing the details about how she got started as a pro-wrestler and what that job is actually like. So there's a good chunk of this episode that's just about wrestling, but the paranormal incident that she wrote in about took, place while she was staying with her friend. Also a W.W.E. wrestler, her name is Tegan Knox,

and she lived in Orlando at the time. Something strange happened to her in that house, and Chantal thought that something might have followed her home. Because of that, she ended up having to seek out the help of a few of her friends to help fight this thing off. And part of the reason I like this story is that there's a surprising amount of parallels between her paranormal stories and the wrestling world. In fact, it was occasionally hard not to say some very corny wrestling puns while I was doing this interview with Chantel, like for instance saying something like this is a story of a reigning champion finding herself in a pin she couldn't escape, or that sometimes you need teammates to tag in in order to defeat a mysterious opponent. But no,

luckily, I would never say corny things like that. Let's get this episode started. This is episode 68. The title is Dark Match, and you're listening to Otherworld. Is this Bobby? Yes, it is. At its core, the science, you can't argue. I'm worried about all of a science. Open the sky.

It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm going to die. I'm going to die. It's slims were just like wrong. Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a minute. My name is Chantelle Molloski, and to the wrestling world, I'm known as Taylor Wild. I started wrestling when I was actually just shy of 18 years old. I signed up to a wrestling school in Toronto, and it was run by a man who was kind of a big deal in the Toronto wrestling world in the 70s, early 80s, and it was exactly what you would picture, like a school of hard knocks to be. It was disgusting. It was in a basement. There was 100% cockroaches. and bedbugs and all the things that go bump in the night. And the ring itself was a disaster.

It was broken two by fours with, you know, an inch of foam across the entire ring. My parents had to sign a waiver because you have to be at least 18, so they needed parental consent. And the reason I even found this wrestling school was I was in grade 12 and did like a co-op so you help in a work setting and you basically do like job shadowing stuff for six months. And it was a Parks and Rec, city of Toronto gym. It was at the Olympium, which wasn't far from my home. And the guy who fixed the gym equipment was a local professional wrestler, which probably should have been my first red light or stop sign.

And he told me, I trained at the school and they're always looking for women. Is this something you'd be interested in? That's how I ended up in the dungeon. I think I trained for about six months, and it was a large amount of money for, I want to say it was 2004, I believe. And I want to say it was like $2,000. And my parents signed me up. They paid this $2,000, which was supposed to be like a lifetime membership. Like you pay that installment and then you train for however long you need to train for.

And then at the six month mark, we showed up for training on a Saturday and the doors were locked. And there was no one there. and they were gone. Yeah. And the gentleman who I will remain, who can remain nameless, because he did train a lot of Toronto Legends and who are still on WW and AEW today. And he actually didn't show up.

I think he showed up like once to wave his little hat, but he had his right-hand man there training us. And for the negative aspect of my parents losing their $2,000 and it being like very carnie-esque or a con man thing, It taught me from a very young age, like, don't trust things for, as they appear. Like, don't trust a book by its cover. And this is not a business for people with thin skin. And then not too long after that, I was redirected to a school called Squared Circle in Toronto,

who was, it was run by a man named Rob Fuego. And he was actually trained by the traveling circus that closed their doors and took my money. and he had trained every woman that was from Toronto that made it to the big time. And I said, okay, I'm going to give this a good go. I'm going to do the things I'm supposed to do. I'm going to finish high school. I enrolled in university. I started like a generalized year in a BA and I'm going to wrestle as much as I can.

And if I can make it in a year and a half, then I'm just going to go for it or two years sort of thing. And just shy of my 20th birth. I got signed to WWE. That was kind of the beginning of my career. And I was there for a year. I basically ran the end of my contract. They had nothing more for me. I came back home.

Reenrolled in university. And six months later, TNA, which was total nonstop action at the time, called me out of the blue. They said, we want you. Will you move back to Florida? And I said, absolutely not. I will fly out of Toronto. And then I flew every two weeks to film

in Orlando at Universal Studios, which is where their residency was. And then I had a career for five years. And within a week of, or no, within like a month of the storyline on the show, I was put in the audience as a plant to challenge Awesome Kong for the $25,000 challenge and a shot at the knockouts title. As you've seen for the last several weeks here at T&A wrestling, the T&A knockouts champion, Awesome Kong, along with Raisha Saeed have issued an open challenge to any female in attendance tonight over the age of 18

that feels she can defeat Awesome Kong. And I leapt out of the crowd and I fought the, it was like the quintessential David and Goliath story. You are getting the opportunity to fight Awesome Kong tonight. Sign the contract, Taylor, and you will be stepping in the ring for $25,000. This contract signed. Here we go. Wow! Look at Taylor!

And I fought the Beast, and eventually I won the $25,000 challenge, and I became knockouts champion. So it was a real turn of events from when I started. I will be on YouTube. Taylor Wilde versus Awesome Kong, $25,000 challenge. Yeah, that was really the moment that made my career. That's what took me from, you know, being this indie wrestler that had a lot. lot of momentum because at the time, like you said, when you watched, when it was the divas, it was very much about these like Jenna Jameson, Pamela Anderson looking girls who were, you know,

just doing like brawn panties matches and doing a lot of catfights. And when Trish Stratus and Lita came in, then this like athleticism started. And that's when I was really into wrestling when Trish was like kind of the top of her game. And I was thinking to myself like, wow, she's beautiful and she's from Toronto, but she's so athletic, and that's really what I gripped onto. So my career, the trajectory went up pretty fast because I was really athletic. And I still am, you know, I'm 38 now, not 20, but that's where I kind of hit the ground running. So five years with what was then called TNA, and I kind of had the same mindset. If by 25, I'm not rolling in the dough and my life is solid and I could see myself doing this for the

rest of my life. If that wasn't the case, then I was going to retire from wrestling at 25 and try a different career. And because, you know, you reach 25 and all I have on my resume is I can yell at the camera and fake fight and walk through smoke machines and look good in a sparkly outfit. So it wasn't exactly where I wanted my life to go. And I did retire at 25, which made me the black sheep of wrestling because that was arguably the peak of my career. And within a couple years, I became a full-time Toronto firefighter. And I joined Toronto Fire in 2015.

And that's what I still do full-time. Well, the reality of being a professional wrestler is you. you just literally don't ever know where you're going to end up. Like you don't know if, you know, your career is on an upward trajectory, if you're going to get hurt. Like, it's just, it's wild, no pun intended. So the first thing is I want to focus on that I don't think a lot of people talk about is you have zero job security.

You are not in a union. Your contracts are usually, they benefit the company. it has nothing to do with who you are as a person, your work ethic, your loyalty to a company. At the end of the day, your job is dependent on a team of writers or a creative team, and they have to connect you to some storyline on screen that will keep you relevant on the show. And you can't be relevant forever. Like even Stone Cold and The Rock, who are some of the biggest names in professional, wrestling. At some point, they have to walk away or they have to focus on someone new and build

someone else new up so that you can care about them and then feud with the rock or stone cold. So the career is not forever. Then there's the actual physicality aspect of it. It hurts. It hurts. I did a show for the Discovery Channel in my very early years, like my first two years. and it was the science behind professional wrestling and what that does to your body. And we did a lot of tests like dropping a watermelon from the top rope and how that would smash. And they said, don't quote me exactly,

but every time you hit the mat, even though you're hitting it safely, it's like being on a head-on collision going 60 kilometers an hour or whatever the equivalent is miles per hour. So it takes a real toll on your body and wrestlers don't make a lot of money in the beginning, so you're not taking care of yourself.

You're not going to physiotherapy and massage or going for cryogenic baths, what we could do in the later part of your career and look after yourself. So you kind of, you beat yourself up before you even get going. And something like developmental, when you first get signed to WWE,

you train Monday to Friday in the ring. And to get to the point where you actually make it to WW, you've already been wrestling for a few years, your body's already breaking down. So even though you are living the dream and you're there to train Monday to Friday and take balls on the mat, which we call bumps, and to wrestle and to work on strikes and matches and your body is just screaming at you. Your joints are screaming at you. And that's just the training aspect.

That's just to keep the job. then you have to perform at the highest level possible at least once a week and put on a stellar match for an audience and come across like you're fresh as a daisy and it's just physically really hard on you. And then there's the mental aspect. There's the dieting. There's having this sisterhood in a locker room, but you're all directly competing with each other. So it's this weird your friends, you keep people close but not too close because you might want to leapfrog their career. There's just an immense amount of politics going on and you don't really know who your friends are and everyone's hungry. And then there's the aspects of the partying that's gone on

historically with wrestling. So now you have people who are hung over or maybe have taken one too many pain pills to cope with the lifestyle, like that Elvis effect kind of thing where you take something to go to the gym and then you take something to get you hyped for your match and then you take something to cool out for the night and be able to sleep. And I just think that wrestling is a place where misfits find one another and we don't fit in anywhere else in the world. And it's your home, it's your family, but it really is a traveling circus. That's where wrestling started was the circus. And yeah, it's really, it's a hard career mentally and physically. It's some of the best years of my life. But it's not something you can just do forever.

It takes its toll. I always say the movie The Wrestler with Mickey Rourke. People just say, oh, it's so dark and it's so heavy and it's sad. And we see one side on TV where everyone's thriving and larger than life. But for the most part, it's anywhere from like 200 to 220 days a year on the road, you kiss weddings, funerals, birthday parties, the birth of children, goodbye, and you sell your soul to become the weekend entertainment. And all those things combined really take their toll on you. So I had had this great career started really early with WWE within two years, which in itself is an accomplishment.

People can go their whole careers and never make it to the big show. And then I pivoted. I went to T&A wrestling and I had this great career and I was the knockouts champion and I started the knockouts tag team titles. I had so, I could so much I could look back on and I, you know, I say I'm proud of myself and I had a great career. Then I became a firefighter, which is again not the, not for the faint of heart for a multitude of reasons. You know, it's an old boys club. It's very physical, but I've kind of been a lifelong adrenaline junkie, and I like a challenge. But then the pandemic hit, and being a first responder during the pandemic was a very trying time for all the reasons we know.

And like a lot of people, I also decided to get a divorce during the pandemic, which made everything that much more relaxing. And through it, you know, through a bad marriage, through a messy divorce, custody battle, you lose yourself. And I was lost. And I thought, you know what, it's been eight years away from wrestling at this point. And when I retired from wrestling, unlike a lot of people who retire from a limelight position, I was done. I wanted nothing to do with wrestling. I would stay connected to my friends and wrestling family. I'd watch the odd show, but I was done.

I had no intention of ever going back to it. But I thought, what better time? My life is completely upside down. Let's go back to wrestling. And I returned to what is called Impact Wrestling now, formerly TNA. I had a few good months, but due to being in a nasty divorce and custody battle, and being Canadian, with all the extra rules around quarantine and traveling, it basically stunted my return to wrestling.

And I decided, okay, I'm just going to take a trip to Florida one of these weekends when I don't have my son. And I'm going to visit a few of my girlfriends who have known in the industry for a long time. And we'll just sit around and talk about the world of wrestling that's weird and wonderful in all those ways. And just kind of get my mind off of everything. And I met up with my girlfriend, Tegan Knox, who is a current WWE superstar. and she was going through it at the time as well. She lived in Orlando, and she had been with WWE for a few years, and then lost her job.

A bunch of people lost their job at this time. It was during the pandemic, and she is actually Welsh, and was just on the cusp of getting her green card situation sorted out, but then it got slammed to a halt because of COVID. So here she is kind of in a similar position as me. She's lost her job. She doesn't know the status of her, like, legal work situation. And, yeah, so here we're two miserable ladies just trying to have a nice weekend, sit on the beach, and, you know, hang out, catch up.

So needless to say, we were both going through some dark times. So I got to her house and I just thought, okay, this feels really heavy and dark, but I didn't really want to judge it that much. and I was going through my own stuff, so I thought, oh, maybe I'm just projecting the way I'm feeling energetically into her house. And so we were going to go to the beach that day. And for whatever reason, we both just felt overwhelmingly exhausted. And we ended up just sitting in her dark living room, catching up, talking. And throughout the day, she has two dogs.

I noticed that her, I think he's a golden retriever, or she, was just sitting in front of what was her game room and was just staring into the room. And I watched it throughout the day. And then finally, I said to Deegan, I was like, what is up with your dog? Like, why is he not going in that room? And she's like, oh, man, like, I've been having problems in this house. There's something with this room. I seldom go into that room. There's always noises coming from that room. and my dogs will just randomly bark. And as she's telling me this, I notice that there are a little like orbs kind of happening.

And I just thought, oh, whatever, I'm tired or maybe, maybe there are orbs. It was just like little sparkly white dots that I could see in my peripheral, like just going by. And I feel like throughout my life, I've seen things like that where they're orbs. or it seems like wishes of energy. And it's not something scary. I always just think to myself, like, yeah, okay, there's probably something here, but just making themselves known and I'm getting get on with my life. I was like, okay, there's definitely something going on in this house. Animals are always the most susceptible to energy. And they see things that we can't see, and they can never tell us what they see or feel. So it was probably around, I don't know, 11 o'clock.

we had our day and we both resided into different sides of the house. Like the two bedrooms were like opposite ends of the house. Her bedroom and the guest room I was staying in. And the guest room was at the front of the house and her room was in the back of the house. And so I went to bed, no issues falling asleep. And then some hours later, I was just in a dead sleep. and it sounded like every sprinkler in the neighborhood had turned on, which, you know, in a normal neighborhood, that's, you know, as the sun's coming up, when everyone's starting their day

and you're, you know, making your coffee and, you know, fetching the newspaper. So this was like in the middle of the night. Like it felt really abrupt. Like I was probably in the middle of REM sleep. And it was loud enough that it woke me. up out of a dead sleep. And as I'm laying there listening thinking, that's really weird that the sprinklers are on. What time is it? As I went to reach for my phone, not only did the sound get louder and more intense, it literally felt like it jumped into the room. And it, it was like

it was on surround sound. That's the best way I can describe it. It went from this noise outside that was loud enough to wake me up from sleep, but now it is in the room with me and it is everywhere. And it became deafening. And as soon as it became deafening, then that's when I felt like this pressure jump up onto the bed, which was then at my feet. And that pressure just felt like a human rolling pin that kind of spread from my feet all the way at my body and like in a really even manner. And if I looked down, I felt like I could see like the pressure moving up the bed.

and this like noise was still in the room. So now it's like this maddening noise of what sounds like a sprinkler that just keeps getting louder and louder and louder. And this pressure that is pinning me down on the bed and it's holding my shoulders down. And I remember it was like I looked down

and I could see the bed moving and I could see that there was like pressure and it was like literally a rolling pin at my body. until it got to my shoulders. And it was like this pressure, this heaviness of somebody sitting on my chest or pressing my shoulders down. And it wasn't that I couldn't move my feet. It was just pure fear and shock. But my mind was working perfectly fine.

There was nothing I could see, but there was obviously this indescribable thing that was happening. And then the only thing I can think of doing is try, to scare or, you know, be bigger than the bear that you can't see. And I just closed my eyes because you can't battle something that's not there. And the only way I could fight back on it was close my eyes and say, go away. You're not welcome here. I'm not interested in whatever you're bringing to this room. Just go away. And I just kept saying it on a loop. And eventually, like all in one fail swoop, the pressure stopped, the sprinkler sound stopped, and that's when it just, everything felt light.

It was just like, and then I heard a toilet flush. It was a really strange way to transition out of that. But everything stopped, and I heard a toilet flush. And I thought, okay, Tegan's wake, maybe I'm going to dart across the room, jump into bed with her and be like, dude, your house is haunted. You need to sort your life out. We need to burn some sage. But it was matched very quickly with a sick feeling.

And I thought, fuck it. I'm going to just turn the light on, check the time. And I'm just going to pretend none of this happened. And I'll tell Teagan about it in the morning. And I checked my phone. And it was a really obscure time. It was like 247 in the morning. And somehow I fell back asleep.

We went on with our lives. We both set our alarm for like eight in the morning. We had a photo shoot we were going to do together. together with a local photographer that day. So we both wake up. I meet her in the hallway and I said, dude, your house is so haunted. I explained to her what happened. And I said, and then I finished saying, I heard you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and I was going to run into your room. And she said, I didn't go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I was like, you didn't flush a toilet? She's like, no. Because I did have the urge to go to the

bathroom, but when I looked in my bathroom, I saw this dark entity standing there, just looming in in the corridor of her bathroom. And I said, what time was that at? She said, 2.47, because I looked at my clock. And I was like, okay, cool. So whatever that was, that was jumping on my bed, I don't know, was it going to lure me into the bathroom? Was it going to catch me in between rooms? But yeah, that was kind of the long and short of it. And As much as it freaked me out, that wasn't the first time something like that had happened to me. All right, we have to take a quick break, but we'll be right back. I've never had sleep paralysis, but I worked at this firehole the first few years of my career.

And it was this old part of the city called Swansea. And it was what was then its town hall. And there was a jail cell in the basement. And there was a hayloft upstairs where the dorm was. that's whole the building was, but they'd functioned it, or they had converted it into a fully functioning, um, fire hall. And the, the, the, the folklore is there was someone who was arrested in that jail cell, hung themselves and that person forever haunted the basement. And that's where the gym was. And I remember working out that day and being like, this is a creepy ass

basement and normal things. I saw the normal swishes in the side of my eyes. And then we went to bed. And at Toronto fire, we worked 24 hour shifts. So in our dorms, we, we go. We go. we all sleep in the same room. And I fell asleep like on my stomach and my head kind of turned to the right. And we play pranks on each other all day long. It's like being part of a hockey team. It's how we get along with each other. And I thought somebody was messing with me and jumped on my back and they were holding me down.

And this was like after we had all been in the dorm for about an hour. And then I start looking like left or right, like very funny. guys, you're hilarious, and I can see everybody is in bed and snoring. So it wasn't sleep paralysis, because again, it was the same thing. I was very well aware of what was going on. I thought it was a joke. And yeah, it was the same thing. I just went through the same mode of, go away, you're not welcome here, leave me alone. And then it just stopped. And it's like, I feel like my life connection to the paranormal has always been, like, like, like when things want to make themselves known, they do it with me because they, it's like they

know I'm not scared, but at the same time, I don't know what they want to tell me. I don't know what it means. I don't know if I'm sensitive, but it has happened so infrequently that I just, you know, it's something that happens. I tell a few friends that think ghost stories are cool and then I just, that's it. So this was like really, really different. It wasn't something that I could wrestle my way out of. And, you know, we have two professional wrestlers in the house. And then I'm like an extra paranormal nerd where I got down the rabbit hole of trying to Google this address because my Tegan was just renting there.

So I wanted to know what happened in this house. And that's the other thing. Like being a firefighter, I deal with death all the time. I deal with someone who's been deceased in the house and then the neighbors are calling in because they smell something that's not so wonderful. I deal with doing CPR and first aid when people kind of cross over. Like I've literally felt people go from warm to cold in my hands. And sometimes I think my connection to the paranormal and the occult has really helped.

me in that because, you know, if I do lose somebody on the job when I'm at work, I do my best, I do what my training enables me to do. But you leave that house knowing that this family has just lost a loved one or someone just lost their partner. And the like spiritual ritualistic part of being into witchcraft and the occult is I have a ritual to kind of cleanse myself of that. I always burn sage and I'll light a candle at the end of a day and, you know, hold space for someone who's just lost their life. So, yeah, just it's always been woven in and out of my life, some sort of connection to something that I believe is like we are just all energy.

And when you pass over, I've seen just that like, I felt it, that energy leave a person. And it's literally just a meat suit. and it's respectfully a m h suit but we are just our energy so it has to go somewhere so a lot of my girlfriends are tarot readers or mediums and psychics or rakey masters so when i tell them these stories they they not only can align themselves with it they they treat them or they kind of channel this stuff on their own so i leave tegan i leave her in this house i tell her she needs to call somebody. Like she needs to start staging this place by herself. She needs to find someone in the witchcraft community or someone who can help cleanse the space because it's not

safe. Like that's a lot of energy that this thing has because it, you know, negative energy usually feeds off people that are going through it or that have shown fear. And like this this is something that made itself physically known to me. So it's only going to probably get worse. So I fly home from Orlando to Toronto. And when I land, I'm getting all these text messages from my podcast partner. So I have a podcast called Wild on. And she is really angry at me about something that doesn't make a lot of sense. Like we have a have a really good relationship. And there was nothing I could do or say that seemed to be turning the conversation around. I wasn't remedying what seemed to be making her angry. So,

you know, things get lost via text, tone, just generally understanding. So I picked up the phone and I called her and we're partners, but we're also friends. We don't have any issues with communication. We don't ever get short and angry at each other. We just talk it through. And And it just seemed like she continually kept getting more and more angry. And it just, it was so confusing. I didn't understand. It was like I understood the words she was saying to me, but it didn't match her anger. It didn't match how this just kept spinning like in a more dark and an almost like sinister way. And it just, it continually became more confusing. And it, it just, it continually became more confusing. And it. made me more scared and the more scared I got, the more I realized, like, there's something bigger at play here. Like, there's, did this thing attach itself to me? Is this thing injecting itself into my life? Because this was something that I've never experienced before, and especially not with Michelle. We had a great easy relationship. And we're both adults. We know how to

communicate. We've both been to therapy. And that is what prompted me to make an appointment, like the very next day with my girlfriend, Anna, who is a very next day. And I'm a, who is a Reiki master because I thought, oh God, like, how is this going to play out in my day-to-day life? If this thing is attached to me, what is going to happen? And I will say, like, the benefit of being someone who's been in the world or who's always been interested in the world of a cult and witchcraft, like I had the guidebook 101 to what potentially happened to me and what potentially can happen to me if I don't kind of grab this thing by the horns.

So I talked to her quite a bit about this. The fight with the friend, it seemed to be basically about nothing and out of nowhere in a way that it made her feel like something was just off. Like something was wrong. The way I understand it, it sounds sort of similar to when a person's dog will start barking or get really angry out of nowhere. And in a way that causes the person to think that something else might be present, that's how Chantel felt something was just not right. which made her decide to reach out to her friend that does Reiki. For those who don't know, Reiki is a type of alternative medicine and energy healing.

The practitioner uses hand movements to move energy throughout the body. They don't touch you. It's not a massage. If you don't believe in Reiki or energy healing at all, then it's basically just a person slowly moving their hands above you for 60 minutes. Which is interesting because I've heard that people who try it often have some very intense reactions to it. Rakey actually came up in one of the first episodes of the show, The Uninvited Guest, but I would say that most of the time, people who are seeking out

Reiki are not seeking it out to fight off some kind of mysterious angry spirit. However, in this situation, that's exactly what Chantal is doing. I'll let her get back to her story and take it from here. I called my girlfriend, Michelle. So Anna at Spanelle, spellbound. She is a woman I've gone to for the past two and a half years for Rakey. And my girlfriend, Michelle Sanctuary, is someone who did a tarot reading for me three years ago. And she's become my girlfriend. So first I go to Anna for Rakey. And I explain to her, this is what's happened. I'm terrified. Whatever was in that house has tried to attach itself to me.

like what can we do here and she you know was like I'm gonna kick this thing's ass don't worry I got you girl like let's sort you out energetically so Reiki is typically an hour for those who don't know what Reiki is it's you lay down on a massage table or really any flat surface and you close your eyes you're in like a perfect like supine position

like the anatomical supine where you're laying on your back your hands are to your side, your palms are facing upwards. You close your eyes. Typically, there's either like Reiki music playing or just like what they would play at a spa or you put headphones on so it's like sensory deprivation kind of thing. And the art of Reiki is kind of checking in with every different section of your body and mind that has energy that needs to be moved around because it's stuck or something is blocking it. and it's supposed to be this energetic release and healing. So they start at the top of your head and they don't touch you and they move through

every single section of your body. So what is supposed to happen is you basically have fleeting thoughts or you might see colors or the temperature and your body will change. You'll go from really hot to really cold. but it's supposed to be like a very still treatment where there's not a lot of anything going on. It's all like very cerebral. But what can happen over sessions when you become, when you really like relinquish to this process and you stop being, you stop trying to control it in a way that like if you're having a surgery

and they put you under an anesthetic, you think to yourself, oh, it's not going to put me under and you count backwards from 10 and then you never make it to 9.35. It's similar to that when you kind of give in to this experience and you just, I guess, turn everything off. That's disbelief. You start feeling these things and you do feel temperature changes and you do have these thoughts that aren't yours. And you don't really realize it until after the session. But also some people like flutter their eyes or they move their hands. But specifically for me, when I start.

started really succumbing to this process and this energy moving, my arms moved off the table, like a couple inches. And what makes it so strange is it's not you moving your arms off the table, which doesn't make any sense at all. So it's not like I've had this thought where I'm like, oh, I'm really relaxed. You know, what would be good for me is moving my arms six inches off the table. And then they, as sessions went on, my arms would move further and further off the table until they were basically straight in the air. And this, my arms would stay up for the full 60 minutes. And I would have the thought, put your arms down. You're exhausted.

This is not comfortable. And I couldn't put my arms down because I'm not the person who put my, I'm not the person, the thing, the energy that I don't know what, that put my arms in the air in the first place. and it's not overly typical for this to be such a strong reaction, but it does happen. And that's when, you know, there's really movement going on in your body. So when Anna, Anna, excuse me, moved from like you, so you have your crown chakra, which is the top of your head, and then you have your third eye, which is over your eyes, and then you have your throat chakra. when she put her hands over my throat,

she got very strong visions of a gory, like arterial splatter amount of blood coming out of my throat. And she just felt disgust. She felt fear. And she said the energy was very negative. It was very sinister. It felt very male. And when she was at my throat,

I remember having this thought. that scared me. And I've never had this thought before, obviously, in my life. But I just got this thought like, well, you can just kill her. And it was like, this is my girlfriend, Anna. Like, I love Anna. I would never, like, it was just, and it was as quickly as it happened, it left my mind. And she said that she felt during our Rakey session like someone was tugging on her t-shirt

the whole time. it's not that this negative whatever was trying to attach itself to me. It just wanted to be known and heard. And she said what she couldn't decipher was if that was what happened to that thing, that energy, that person, or that's what it wanted to do to me. But she said that whatever it was, she fought it in the energetic field. And it wasn't my problem anymore. but she said that she's never experienced anything like that.

And also people who do Reiki, the Reiki masters, they're doing their own chance in their head. They're doing like their own prayers. They're calling in like spirit and energy and angels or whoever they work with. And she said the entire time that she was checking in with all the different planes of my body, she felt as if there was someone behind her that kept tugging on her shirt. And so it was a pretty intense experience for both of us. I felt a lot lighter after the session, that was for sure, and I didn't feel scared anymore.

Leading into the Reiki session, I actually felt quite scared, especially because I had this bizarre argument with my business partner. And then I called my girlfriend, Michelle Sanctuary, and I told her about my trip. and before maybe like three weeks before I left for my trip she called me and she said hey do you sage every day and I said no I'm pretty lazy about saging like I just do it when I feel called to do it or I just want the smell of sage in my house and she said okay well I had this dream and I don't want to really tell you about the dream because you know I don't I don't want to implant thoughts in your head like it could just be like sensory input But I had this dream that basically the outcome was you should sage every day.

And I know Michelle really well. And she has a lot of visions and messages that come through in her dreams. So I know she's covering something up. But I don't even want to know at this point. I was just like, I'm going through enough all sage every day. And so I called her and I told her what happened on the trip. And I told her that I went to Rakey and I told her about the negative entity and the argument with Rochelle, my business partner. And she said, okay, well, I'm going to tell you the truth now.

She said, when I had that dream that encouraged me to call you to Sage Moore, the dream was that you went away on a vacation to somewhere where there was water and beaches. And when you were away, a negative entity attached itself to you and it wanted to kill you. And it's like, great, because that is exactly what happened. And Michelle's been reading my cards and she does automatic writing and she channels whatever comes through. She's been doing this for, like I said, three years now. And everything she's ever predicted has come true. So that is just like a really specific dream.

And she said she didn't want to tell me the dream because it makes her seem like she's out to lunch and lunch. And she doesn't know if that's the truth. But you've got to be really careful what you tell people. You don't want to just, even if they're your friends, you don't want to say, hey, you know, I just had this little, this little dream. And, you know, there's this, like, if you go on a holiday, there's this thing. It might want to kill you. But just like ignore it. Just burn some sage.

So, yeah. And then I stayed on Tegan up until when, well, I still talk to Tegan. She's finally out of that house. But she did live in that house for another couple of years. But she's back with WDW.E. and she can leave America and go home to Wales whenever she wants and her life is good. But I did research a little bit on that house and the owner. And all I know is I couldn't get a lot of information, but doing some girl CIA work,

that person who did own the house went to jail at some point. But for what I don't know, because that was the part of the website where you probably put your credit card information. so I didn't purchase it, but something definitely happened in that house or whoever owned that house had put in something really negative. Or maybe it was built on something that it shouldn't have been built on top of. But yeah, that was pretty much the most intense, weird experience I've had with the paranormal. And the best part about it was that I didn't experience it alone because I know I'm not crazy. I had this conversation with my business partner, Rochelle.

I've had Tegan on my podcast twice now. And my podcast just speaks to my girlfriends, my sisters, and professional wrestling. And it's more of like a candid, conversational style interview. We don't really talk a lot about wrestling. We talk about our lives. So I had her on my podcast before I visited her, this paranormal visit, and I've had her on the show after.

And I spoke to Rochelle about the fight we had for the first time since it happened. And she said, you know, I couldn't figure it out then, but it makes sense now since we're speaking about it. But I felt really weird about that fight. I don't know why I was going at you so hard. It didn't make sense. Like nothing matched. And she felt like, yeah, there was something else going on that she can't describe, that

she couldn't control. And it scared her enough that she didn't really want to talk about it ever again. and I didn't really talk about it until we had Tegan on the show again. And yeah. So this experience just reaffirmed that there is more to life this world than we can explain that we know. And in a way, I feel like I have a little bit of a leg up when it comes to my firefighting job when I deal with so much death on the regular.

You know, I see these mourning families and I've been through a lot of loss in my family in the past couple of years as well. That your energy goes somewhere for better or for worse. And although you might leave this life in the physical sense, energetically, you can kind of go or come wherever you want. And there is some peace in that, even though these experiences have been a little bit on the more negative scary side, there has to be some positive in it too. Like I lost my brother-in-law last year, who's my age. And I live in his house. And that's where I currently am right now. So the first night

I stayed in that bedroom, I fell asleep, no problem. I didn't think it was weird. I know most people would think it's weird. But to me, I feel close. I feel close with my brother-in-law that I lost. and I was kind of half asleep, half awake, and I heard my glass of water dragging across my bedside table. And I just thought I'm hearing things, maybe this is part of my dream. And as I'm rationalizing with myself, as I've historically done, that this is something I'm just hearing in my dream, the glass which is completely full just tips right over. and there's spillage of water everywhere. And I just thought, okay, so I have all these paranormal experiences.

I deal with death a lot. I've been fighting for my life in my career, in my day-to-day. But you know what? I miss my brother-in-law, and this is his way of, like, communicating with me. So for all the negative, scary things, it's a bit of a blessing because I know he's here. He's part of my spirit squad. and I think he's going to be doing little funny things like that for the rest of my life

just to make himself known and present. And he has actually. There's been a few things in this house. And I have a new partner now and he lives here with me. And he is not in tuned to the paranormal and is completely not as keen on witnessing these experiences as I am. And yeah, he's learning. He's learning that being with me means you're a part of the.

this life experiencing paranormal things too. Okay, thank you so much to Chantal, aka Taylor Wilde for speaking to me for this episode. I was going back and forth trying to get Tegan Knox to give me her side of the story, but she's literally on WWE Monday Night Raw tonight, and it's just too busy, which is a very, very fair excuse, if you ask me.

But maybe one day in the future we'll end up getting her side of the story. Thank you so much to Chantal Malowski, aka Taylor Wilde for sharing her stories of wrestling, firefighting, and the paranormal. This has been episode 68, dark match, and you've been listening to Otherworld. Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our theme song is by Coberman. The soundtrack of this episode was by North Americans.

This episode was edited and engineered by Theo Schaefer. Our artwork is by Coltacac Studios. Production Help by Nikki, Kate Delgado, and Haley Pearson. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a phone. five-star review and telling your friends about the show. If you want to hear bonus episodes, you can become a patron at patreon.com slash Otherworld. Our social media is at Otherworld Pod. Thank you to the team at Odyssey. J.D. Crowley, Jenna Weiss-Berman, Learice Dennis, Rob Morandi, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Moira Curran, Josephina Frances, and Hillary Schuff.

Follow and listen to Otherworld now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something supernatural, paranormal, or unexplained, you could send us your story at stories at otherworldpod.com.