Sense of Soul - Poltergeist Investigation

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

Today we beginning our two weeks of spooky episodes!  We had a spooky conversation with author John Fraser, Council Member and Spontaneous Case Coordinator for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). John’s active interest in the paranormal dates from the 1980s. Where in 1988, following a research project regarding supernatural occurrences at Sandwood Bay in Sutherland, he was invited to join the Ghost Club, where he became the ‘Vice Chair’ (with investigations portfolio) 1998-2004. His the author of Ghost Hunting, a Survivors Guide and he’s here to talk about his new book Poltergeist! A New Investigation Into Destructive Haunting. Available where books are sold! www.mysenseofsoul.com  

Welcome to the Sense of Soul podcast. We are your hosts, Shanna and Mandy. Grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. We welcome John Frazier. He's a council member and spontaneous case coordinator for the SPR. John's active interest in the paranormal dates back to the 1980s, where in 1988,, a survivor's guide. And he's also going to be talking about today, his new book, Holtergeist, investigation into destructive haunting. And we're very interested in having him on today because Mandy and I have been talking a lot about ghosts lately. It's a pleasure to be on your podcast. Yes, thank you so much. And he joins us from the UK. So correct me if I'm wrong, you say that you like where you live, but not everybody

does. People describe where you live the most boring worst place ever, according to your book. It gets into the list of the worst towns in the UK to live sometimes. It's got some nice places, but it's a bit of a commuter town, quite a lot of skyscrapers in the centre and good transport links and easy to get into London. But it's probably overall not a place of beauty. But it does have quite a few poltergeists. Have one really close to your house. Did you knock on their door and be like, hi, neighbor? Not sure that would be strictly ethical.

It's literally the next street to where I live. Well. I don't put the street in the book for the same reasons. Yeah. If you Googled it enough, you'd probably find the street in the book for the same reasons. But if you googled it enough you'd probably find the street. The street's mentioned in Nandor Fodor's book. But it was a people-centered thing and chances are nothing's happened for decades. Bring him over like a neighborly pie or something. You haven't seen my cooking. They might not talk to you again.

Oh, buddy. It might trigger off all kinds of paranormal reactions. Or pie. That's hilarious. Multiguise pie. I want to know how you got into this. If we're talking about paranormal in the wider sense, I was just fascinated. I actually saw a program called the ghost hunters

would you believe in the late 1970s when they were making programs about ghost hunting i couldn't believe that anyone took it seriously and i was fascinated about the fact they did that probably triggered my interest this program actually had a chap called Peter Underwood on it, quite a famous ghost hunter, who at the time was president of the Ghost Club. So I decided when I grew up, because that was in my early teens, I wanted to do the same thing. And ultimately, I swapped letters with Peter Underwood and was invited to join the Ghost Club. And since then, I've been doing it on and off for probably a good few decades. Wow I didn't even know there were true like meetings and a council I had no idea. Can you tell our listeners what the SPR council is? The SPR stands for the Society of Psychical Research. It's been going around since 1882,

though obviously I only joined more recently. It actually came about at the time when there was a lot of new science going around and it had a lot of eminent people, including a chap called Arthur Balfour, who, after being president of the SPR, went on to be prime minister of the United Kingdom. So that kind of shows how seriously it was taken at the time. I mean, could you imagine maybe Donald Trump, after he retires, whenever that is, suddenly joining and

being president of a paranormal research organization. What do a bunch of guys do when they get together at a ghost club? Well, there's two separate organizations I'm a member of. The SPR, which has a lot of connections with universities and gives out grants for serious paranormal research and has a spontaneous cases committee which investigates spontaneous things that are happening such as if somebody has a ghost or poltergeist outbreak. And there's the Ghost Club which is even older, founded 1864, and there's investigations but it it was founded to be a gentleman's dining club though thankfully they did start letting in ladies in the 1930s and probably is as close as you'll get

to being a club where they have speakers and then social events afterwards have people of like mind coming together and talking about the paranormal do you guys actually go out and ghost hunt the ghost club does since about the 1960s has done some ghost hunts as well yes yes it's as much a meeting point for people as it is for doing serious investigations do you guys also investigate like psychics i saw that you did some research on regression we can investigate psychics i haven't done too much myself recently i have done some experimentation in hypnotic regression where both as a subject and under supervision from an expert hypnotist i was trained in hypnotic techniques uh so don't look too closely at my eyes don't do it i'd be i'd be excited

but i keep an open mind but i'm not totally convinced in past life uh regressions okay what is a poltergeist? What does the word poltergeist actually mean to you? Poltergeist comes from the German phrase noisy ghost and is conventionally thought of as being some kind of entity that makes a lot of banging and tapping noises, can throw objects around, make a general nuisance of him or herself,

can also create pools of water and very occasionally small fires. It gets all the, for want of a better phrase, exciting bits on the paranormal spectrum, as opposed to your old traditional ghost that basically just appears, walks a walk, and maybe makes a few mumbling sounds there and again. But I tend to think, if we're talking about what a poltergeist actually is, let's put it this way. You've got lots of so-called unexplained paranormal powers, from witchcraft and New Age meditation to poltergeists to ghosts and so on and I tend to

think that if there is a power that we don't understand it probably is just one power and if you look at poltergeist cases there's a heck of an overlap between poltergeist cases and ghost cases there was a survey done once by some of my colleagues and at least 30 percent of poltergeist cases had sightings of ghosts different 30 percent had sort of audio you know ghostly sounding noises so I think they overlap immense and I tend to think they're probably all one and the same thing the question is what is that thing when you say all of them are is that like in your book where you were talking about all different cultures and religions and all different places around the world they have experienced things like this but but they call it something different. Like Chinese called it one thing, the Romanians called it another thing. Is that what you mean?

That's what I mean, yes. You've got a lot of vampire mythology, not just in Transylvania, Romania, but in most of Eastern Europe, where when something paranormal and frightening occurs, it's called, I think in Greece it's a vrekloklis. I can never pronounce that correctly for any of your Greek listeners. In Romania, it's called a stigoi, which is basically both terms for vampire. Now, we don't tend to take vampire sightings or vampire activity seriously because it's an alien concept to us. But when you actually look at some of the vampire cases that have been recorded, there was one that was reported from Serbia in the 1920s, another Eastern European country,

which basically consisted of this vampire entity throwing chairs around, throwing stones and breaking the windows of a house. Now that is by any other name a poltergeist. It's just because there's a different terminology. We don't take it seriously and we don't realize just how worldwide this phenomena seems to be. You know what? What's up with these poltergeists throwing stones? Good Lord. In all the research you did, it was like all of them were throwing stones.

Yeah, that's what makes it so interesting. For example, you've got the duande in Colombia, which is basically translated as a goblin. And again, we don't take it terribly seriously because you know I can just about get away with being a ghost hunter but you know being a goblin investigator you know it would probably ruin the street credibility but when you look at these stories about what the duande was up to it's basically throwing stones making lots of noises, and so on. Exactly the same thing as what the North American, Western European poltergeist is. So it does show there's something happening all over the world in cultures and countries that don't necessarily talk to each other and swap notes.

And the fact that such similar things are happening gives them a lot more credence I think. I saw that research shows that poltergeists show up in families with domestic issues and where suicides have happened and you also mentioned in your book that teens seem to trigger poltergeists more. Is that correct and why do you think that is i tend to think it's the um possibly the opposite of what you guys do you guys are very much into reiki and relaxation and you know positive in the powers of yourselves and it seems that poltergeist type phenomena along with ghost type phenomena as well seems to be triggered when there is a lot of negative energy around now for want of a better expression um people are under stress now that can happen for

a lot of reasons it can be loss of a job loss of a loss of a relationship and engagement broken off and so on but if you think of of puberty and as an adolescent i mean let's face it for most of us that was probably three or four years of sheer stress which um can happen a lot to girls and boys of a certain age although that's not the absolute cause it can happen for a lot of other reasons as well but because that's such a stressful time it's kind of been identified with happening to them john what's the difference between having like a ghost in your house or what is a ghost if you could explain if there's a definition for that and so what's the difference between having a ghost in your house and having a poltergeist

or is there a difference? I personally don't think there is though about two-thirds of the paranormal community would probably disagree with me. What is having a ghost in your house? Most people would think it's being visited by somebody from the afterlife and that is definitely a possibility. But I tend to think it's more likely just you're under stress, subconscious powers, creating images and possibly throwing lots of things. What's the main difference in how Ghostbusters and how anomalistic psychologists study paranormal? Ghostbusters, eh? Paranormal investigators.

Yeah, I don't mind being called a Ghostbuster. What? You don't got one of those cool guns, you know, and those little jumper outfits that's so cute with your last name across the front? Just about every paranormal group has a t-shirt these days, actually. We don't

yet, but you never know. The only reason I might balk at Ghostbusters is we don't try to clear anything. It's usually counterproductive. I'd never trust somebody that goes into a situation calling themselves, for example, a demonologist. Because that is such a ludic term. It's liable to frighten the heck out of people and quite possibly if my theory is correct cause phenomena in itself you know if somebody comes in and says oh there's a portal there to some weird dimension and nasty spirits are coming out I mean you do not want

to do that you do not want to let let your beliefs run away with you. Nevertheless, some paranormal investigators, go standards, start with an open mind or should start with an open mind as to whether any phenomena happening is paranormal. As do parapsychologists who, to their credit, are probably based in seven or eight universities in the UK at the moment,

and I think quite a few over your side of the pond as well. However, there's also this new trend called animalistic, anomalistic as opposed to animalistic, anomalistic psychologists who are interested in the reasons that people perceive phenomena as paranormal but start from a pre a definite preconception that they are not having a real paranormal event so if you like they are the opposite of the demonologists that go in with their belief-led system that you've something nasty in your house and they actually if they did investigate they tend to stay in their classrooms but if they did investigate they would go in with a preconception that it's definitely just the mind playing tricks.

And I disapprove of both, although I do disapprove of demonologists a little bit more because by the nature they can have quite a dramatic effect bringing their belief system in. What does psychokinesis mean? What does psychokinesis mean what does psychokinesis mean technically speaking it means um the controlled ability to be able to move objects and make things appear through the power of the mind again you've got interesting terminologies if you go to the east um there's also a concept called tulpas which is sort of creating an entity as a kind of thought form which is probably not too dissimilar. Now the interesting thing about psychokinesis is normally performed by people that have psychic

powers or at least claim to have psychic powers, but the actual phenomena is very similar to that of the poltergeist. And so you're left wondering, could it not be the case that poltergeist phenomena is just uncontrolled psychokinesis? And to make it even more interesting, you've got examples of people such as a very famous medium called Matthew Manning, who started out as a young boy in his house, suddenly having poltergeist phenomena happening all around him. He was definitely one of the primary causes because when he went to his private school, boarding school, he was nearly expelled because the tables and chairs kept toppling over. But from there, he learned to control it. And in between writing a bestselling book, good luck to him, in the 1970s,

then became a more conventional medium and a healer. He's still around, actually, and the fact that he made that sort of switch makes it even more probable that poltergeists are indeed something within us. Shall I give you another quick example, just to possibly seal the deal? Though, as I say, I'm probably a minority. Two-thirds of my colleagues would probably disagree with me that's what makes the debate so interesting now it's even possible you can build your own poltergeist not to be done at home without supervision probably or not to be done not to be done even with supervision be done. Even with supervision.

I don't know. I haven't tried it myself, I must admit. But there was this experimental group in the 1970s in Canada who called themselves the Philip Group. They were a bunch of paranormal investigators, but they decided to try to, in effect, invent a ghost. They called him Philip the Cavalier. He didn't exist but they drew pictures of him. They gave him a wife and a mistress. I don't know how to make the story more interesting. I think the wife committed suicide. Philip was heartbroken

and when he died he was going to haunt somewhere forever. Now they kept talking about Philip, drawing Philip, concentrating on Philip and out of the blue poltergeist type incidents started happening. The table they were sitting next to started moving. Now that's even been recorded in Canadian TV and basically they created a whole event, again very much like Tulpa in the Far East, by simply concentrating on and inventing a purely fictitious entity. in and the energy or what have you and that's possible as well but it seems to me far more simpler if you set out to cause something if you do have some evidence psychics can produce this phenomena already and then by inventing a poltergeist you can actually start causing the phenomena as well it does start to at least to balance it perhaps we all have special powers that haven't yet been tapped into. Wow. I found it interesting that unfortunately, a lot of poltergeists and stories that have been reported have been tweaked or changed,

or like the Fox sisters that you mentioned in your book who came out actually admitted that it was they were frauds so a lot of these accounts and movies that have been put out where they add stuff in when it wasn't necessary is really taking away from the true substance and reality that people experienced. Absolutely. I suspect the Enfield poltergeist is quite well known over in the USA. Now, the movie The Conjuring 2 probably has very little to do with it, even though it's technically based on it, which is a shame. We also had a docudrama over here on one of our TV channels on the Enfield Poltergeist that was far more closely based on it and used one of the main investigators,

a chap called Guy Playfair, who was also in the SPR until he passed on recently, as one of the consultants. And Guy was actually annoyed with them because they chucked in a couple of pieces of phenomena, including his actor, you know, the person that was acting him, being flung against the wall by the poltergeist. And one of the reasons he was actually quite annoyed is because he said,

why didn't you just have the fireplace lifted out, the gas fire that lifted out of its sockets and was like twisted a good couple of feet into the air? Because that actually happened. It seems silly that you need to add something when in cases like Enfield, you've got tons of things you got, apparently, I mean, you have to always look at these things and see if there was a natural explanation, but you've actually got a book, apparently, flitted through the wall of the house into the next-door neighbour's room, which was exquisitely entitled Fun and Games for Children which would have made a perfect bit of television. You've got claims that the girls levitated

possibly there are possibly the jury's out in them but you could quite easily with a case like that easily fill a horror movie and have plenty of thrills and spills but without going off the plot um it always disappoints me that horror movies have to have the third act where everything you know they have this really nice suspense build up and then then you've got blood coming out the walls and everything and it just it's so predictable it's like the movie poltergeist itself and that's one of the reasons why i think that your book stuck out to me because mandy and i live in aurora colorado we live on an aerial ground do you know how much truth was in that movie. In the movie Poltergeist? Yeah, Carol Ann, Carol Ann. I must admit, tell me, I didn't know it was based on fact, actually. But if anyone is having minor Poltergeist activities out there,

I can absolutely guarantee you, you will not be sucked into your television. Oh, yeah. Thank God, because i am for the past two months we've had some very odd activity in fact the last time mandy and i were zooming with one of our guests i saw a pen move right in front of me and i'm not the only one who's experiencing it we've all witness stuff move or you know when we're talking about it like lights blinking I'm clairvoyant I see energy like all the time and I've been touched someone's like trying to wake me up and my daughter has had the same thing and this has been over like two months so I feel like if we ignore it it goes away and then someone brings it up again and now we're seeing stops

couldn't tell you what's happening in your absolute specific circumstances easily obviously without without having a going over there and having a good chat and what have you funnily enough um i was having virtually the same conversation in a uk podcast i was doing and we were looking at reasons because the female presenter was having very similar things and she actually said well I wonder if it's me because I'm clairvoyant and psychic and so on it could be that you're a little bit more whatever powers you may have are already a little bit more fine-tuned and possibly slightly have the capability but it may be many other things as well are you near water

by any chance none you're on an Indian burial ground which is um a sacred site which always seems to how long have you lived in in this area i've lived here for like 30 some years but in this house in particular it has been four years four years and but it didn't start immediately now um you know i've had stuff at every single house i've been in so since i was very little i feel like i'm definitely you know one of those very sensitive people that can sense whether energy is good or bad or neutral. You have more insight than I do, and certainly in one aspect,

in that I'm as psychic as a brick, and I can understand what you're saying by neutral energies, but I can't understand it in the having felt it thing. I mean, to be honest, poltergeist, and for that matter, hauntings, do seem to be equally placed, and sometimes people-centered. For example, to be honest, poltergeist and for that matter, hauntings do seem to be equally placed. And sometimes people centered, for example, that chap, Matthew Manning, he went to boarding school that kind of followed him around. But it is certainly at the minor level, absolutely harmless. And I personally find it fascinating. us too in a family situation we're not scared

no no don't don't don't be it's um yeah if i'm right i hope i am it's it's your power um you wouldn't be using it to any harm as i say after a bad day in the office it might it might move a couple of pens but you know in a lot of cases poltergeist stuff goes away in a few weeks obviously it's a little bit longer term, but it's partly the fear of the unknown that can even feed on it. So if you're relaxed about it and the odd unexplained incident happens, it's a special gift, power, probably internal, even if it's external. It's certainly 99.9 percent of the time

isn't in any way harmful it's a fear of it they can get people carried away obviously yeah you have been to a lot of places that people have claimed are haunted and you wrote about some really scary ones and put some pictures in your book of them as well. You also have a place about 300 meters from your home. Have you ever experienced paranormal yourself? I'll repeat the fact I'm as psychic as a brick before answering that. Except as some people think bricks can hold energy maybe I'm being unfair to bricks but I've had one or two trivial possible paranormal events I've had an instance where

I've been investigating an old Lincoln bomber in an aircraft museum and somebody thought he saw a shadowy figure of an airman, which I didn't see. But when we put the lights back on, all the fire exits of the aircraft museum, this was like nearly midnight, were open when we're 99.9% sure they certainly weren't open before. I mean, it would be a big security lapse on anyone's part. So that was strange. Do you ever get scared? I would have pissed my pants. I'm 100% I would have pissed my pants.

You've had pens moving around. That's far more interesting than that. I didn't even see them open. I just, as I say, I'm sure as I can be, they were closed previously. No, I, well, if we're talking about trying to stay the night in a haunted house, a couple of decades ago, let's say, just as I was entering ghost hunting, I kind of thought, well, the only way you can really do it is by spending the night in a haunted house by yourself.

And the only way you can really do that is if you're trapped in a haunted house. So I got out all my ghost books and this was like when I was in my early 20s and thought um where shall I go and I chose this place um ruined cottage in the north tip of Scotland because a it was ruined and accessible. B, it was two and a half miles from the nearest road and it was surrounded by marshland and shifting sands. You can go by the track by day but you can't really practically wander around at night. It's in the wilderness area so you wouldn't want to start walking at night and ending up in the peephole. Slight twist is I had a rechargeable torch, which I charged up in the restaurant, paid the bill, walked out without the torch.

Didn't realise it until I got there and it was getting dark. I was actually all by myself in a haunted house. Oh my God. three or four miles from the nearest road then suddenly seeing white shadows appearing on the top of the hills oh hell no come on admit it you pissed your pants come on i was i was probably the only time i've been a little bit nervous i also did it in april which is incredibly stupid because it can be really wild in April up there but it wasn't thankfully. But once I kind of adjusted my vision I realized those white floating shadows were sheep. And the flickering light was from the lights which I couldn't quite see.

I actually did a lot of research. Nothing much happened in the end, actually. I just quite like that story, I must admit. I would have been afraid of the sheep. I would have been. I'm afraid of the sheep, too. So we have a girl that's coming on that we've interviewed before who's a paranormal investigator, and she's here in Colorado.

She uses a spirit box. What do you think about these things? Have they ever picked up anything? Equipment is what equipment is. None of the equipment is false or fraudulent. A spirit box I never myself use but off the top of my head, it's an instrument that taps into various random radio frequencies. Somebody started out with the belief that by tapping into various random radio wave frequencies, it can make spirits communicate with you now if she comes on your show and has a genuine example of a genuine conversation i.e she asked a question how old are you and immediately afterwards the spirit box said i'm 56 i'll start to get quite impressed so to be convinced of that i'd want to hear a coherent two-way conversation spirit boxes pick up radio waves and um you can interpret it that i mean emf meters pick up

electromagnetism now i'm a lot more interested in them i must admit because quite a lot of paranormal activities do seem to possibly be on faults in the ground. There's a lovely case in a place called Langenhue in Essex where it's right on the epicentre of the last major earthquake we had in late Victorian times. So there's obviously, you you know geomagnetic forces about there and that's that's a particularly famous poltergeist case the next door house is also very haunted as well with both poltergeist activity and conventional things and quite a few people have contacted me about poltergeist claim to be quite electrical sensitive so there's something to be said for measuring electricity and electromagnetism and it may in some way trigger off powers of energy the jury's

still out but certainly a walkable theory likewise infrasound i think there's a possibility it might give a impression of seeing a ghost because it can kind of, at a certain level, you know, fry the mind a little bit. So, I mean, equipment is what equipment is, you know, I mean, thermometers do temperature, but there's no such thing as a ghost detector. Mandy and I, one of our biggest things that we talk about and experience on a daily basis is synchronicity. And then you connected that to these JOTs or JOT experience. And I was like, dang, that's insane. I never heard that before. You guys ever had a JOT before? Yes.

Yeah, everyone seems to have had them. They're quite fun. JOT, everyone's familiar with them, but it's more of a categorization by one of my former colleagues, a grand old lady called Mary Rose Barrington, who actually sadly passed on earlier this year. It's not been a good year. She was on the council of the Society of Psychical Research, I think since 1963 until earlier this year. She's obviously had a lot of paranormal investigation experience, but one thing she was particularly fascinated by were these things called jots, which is basically when an object seems to disappear

and either reappear in the same place after you've looked high and low for it or reappear in a different place or there's one or two other types of jots as well and jots is just a way of saying just one of those things these are things we have no explanation for and even more interesting that something that seems to happen in the early stages of a poltergeist case, things disappear and reappear, that's often overlooked because it's kind of minor phenomena compared with something actually being seen being thrown across the room. But I hypothesise in my group book, Poltergeist, A New Investigation, that these might actually be minor poltergeist events. Possibly they never develop into anything else. But if you've got them related to poltergeist events, and you've got things happening, which really don't have any explanation at all and you just kind of scratch your head and get on with life and say well it's just one of those things but how do these things actually happen what is the

best evidence do you know anything like major that my best evidence of any type um haven't haven't had a groundbreaker yet i must admit we did have one brilliant incident in the next door room to where I was organizing an investigation where a wooden mushroom flew across the room, hit the floor with an incredible bang. They didn't have the tape recorders on. Oh, darn it. Yeah, I know. Even the next door room heard it. We're talking about a little wooden mushroom, incredible bang, witnessed by a few people

who didn't actually know each other. So possibility of collusion is very small. Also witnessed by a skeptic who became a non-skeptic overnight just based on that one incident. I did a little experiment at this place called the Cage Witches Prison in St. Joseph's, Essex.

Oh, that sounds awful. Shanna's the wussy of the two of us. I'm the one that's like, let's do this. Let's go. I'm not going to a Cage Witches anything. If you're over here, you'll go to 113 Colchester Road and you can go to the witches. Sounds horrible.

What happened here? There's a legend behind it, of course. It is actually just a small house, but it is built into what was a village lockup, which in Victorian times is where people used to put the drunks, subject to either letting them loose or more serious crimes until the magistrate arrived and so on. It may be on the site of an older place, that's really up for speculation, but what's definitely true is there were witch trials in the area and a herbalist witch called Ursula Kemp plus some of her associates were kept in

sentos before being taken for trial and two of them were hanged at Chelmsford. There's a local history plaque on this house that says this is a site where Ursula Kemp was kept. It's debatable as to whether or not this was the actual site. Lock-ups barely go back more than two, two and a half centuries. So there may have been something older there, but that's up for debate. But genuinely, there's a history plant there. Nobody's quite sure who put it up actually, to be honest, but it's been there for decades. Got this wonderful story behind it, which justifies

it being called Cage Witches, Prisons and Toasters. But there may have been some minor phenomena beforehand, but there was a lady, unmarried mother, bought the house, went to stay there initially with lodgers who were also friends. And all kinds of strange things started happening. She saw various apparitions, including an old lady. The others had sensations of being pushed. All of them saw a cook can just sort of fly from one side of the table to the other. And then the lodgers moved out, and she was there with a young child by herself. She stuck it out I think about another nine months but the place was so oppressive, she saw so many things, had so

many things happening to her, she basically had to leave the house, let it out to lodgers. They didn't stay more than a couple of months, at which point she actually contacted various paranormal organizations including the SPR asking what to do and would anyone be interested in investigating it and since then lots of people have investigated it and lots of people have actually picked up on various bits of poltergeist activity and quite a few people have actually been so freaked out they couldn't spend the night there now over and above the average haunted house i'd say but that's subjective but as a little exercise what i did was to actually try and get as many of these people

together as i possibly could and interview them separately some of them live um went to St. Joseph's for a few days and some of them on the telephone internet and so on and there was quite a lot of similarity of experiences in the same sort of place staircases one particular door banging you know opening and closing so no reason the heck of a lot uh through people that hadn't necessarily been talking to each other i actually found that evidentially a very very very good exercise even though i spent a few hours in the place and so as is the case with myself absolutely nothing just bringing all the evidence together just like if you were in a court of law, if you only had one witness claiming they saw somebody steal something, it would be pretty circumstantial. But if you had 10 witnesses saying they saw roughly the same thing, it starts to get more interesting.

Even though I haven't got anything on tape or anything like that, I think that exercise is well worth doing. It should be done in a lot more places, just to have a good record of who saw what and when, whether there's a possible natural explanation or not, and so on. Another interesting thing that happened to at least five people is they came out of that place with unknown bruisings and scratchings, and one case of mine, a burn. And as the lady was actually wearing jeans at the time i'm not quite sure how that could possibly have occurred so again as a one-off you just sort of

say that's strange but happening to five different people it starts to get i'll just say interesting because there might be natural explanations people may have went in with scratches not realized and then when they have a paranormal experience suddenly they find the scratches suddenly more obvious but when it happens to a lot of people it starts to become a lot more interesting you know i enjoyed that part of your book it caught my eye where you talked about how in the court of law when numerous people have seen something similar, we actually sentence criminals based on that evidence. But when people have seen, you know, all seen the same thing, paranormal, that it's kind of dismissed. If enough people say the same thing,

I don't think you'll ever get absolute proof of the paranormal through witness testimony, but what you have is a good case for doing further investigation. This was something I was kind of looking at without quite finding the terminology for it, but strangely at the same time, you're talking about synchronicity. A colleague of mine is actually president of the Goose Club at the moment called Alan Murdy, was presenting a paper on exactly this. Now what gives Alan a big advantage over me is he is a goose hunter and he is also a barrister so he

is as trained in law as they come. So that wonderful combination actually helped formulate that theory to indeed try and quantify witness testimony and try and see if enough people are having what is known as similar fact occurrences. Because that in particular is very persuasive. A judge would say is very persuasive. It should be very persuasive to a jury. Absolutely. Speaking of synchronicities, your story and your book blew my mind. So here you are in a place that you're not familiar with. You can't find somewhere to go

stay. All the hotels are booked. Somebody hands you a flyer and you look down and you decide, okay, and you call and you check into this hotel and you go to the fourth floor and you get comfortable and you open the book that you're reading. And then right as you're reading the book, you find out that the author of the book is describing the exact place that you are at and where you're sleeping and the fourth floor. That is like the most crazy synchronicity ever. So is what you're saying that sometimes synchronicities can be paranormal well certainly meaningful coincidence would be paranormal in some sense because we don't understand them i must admit i was um it was a little bit of an anecdote in that it didn't

fit into the mainstream of the book but i it blew my mind enough as well to want to tell that story and see if anyone else had had that sort of experience um uh but just just for just for anyone that's interested the author is Milan Kundra a Czech author and the book is called the book of laughter and forgetting I think which is an interestingly ironic title Quindor was somebody who was oppressed during communist times and ironically lived opposite a police station and for some vague reason described his first floor apartment where he lived in Barathon New Street or something like that. And yes, I suddenly was reading this book

and I was looking over at this big police station, which was now an innocent police station. At the time, it was actually the headquarters of the secret police in Prague. And it really blew my mind. And I was kind of traveling by myself and it did give the whole trip new meaning. And I was kind of on the lookout for other amazing coincidences. And I was kind of quite tuned into myself, as you do when you kind of travel by yourself and have adventures and so on. So I'm wondering whether that might have helped

trigger off an interesting experience. You were being incredibly mindful? Probably being incredibly mindful. So I probably had good energies, probably not the type to have random poltergeist experiences, but maybe something to have a little bit of insight or maybe my subconscious led me a little bit, or maybe it was just wild coincidence. I mean, Milan Kundra's still alive, I think he's well into his 80s. Now I did actually

manage to get in contact with his publisher and actually asked if there was any reason he mentioned why he was in the first floor flat, but he couldn't think of any, unfortunately. But yeah, now that's meaningful coincidence. It blew my mind. It was like the most super synchronicity I've ever heard in my life. You know how in your book you use W-T-H-I-G-O? I changed it to W-T-F-I-G-O when I heard that story. I meant W-F-I-G-O, but I decided it wasn't good to put it in a published book. So I looked for the next more innocent one. Well, on this podcast, what the fuck was going on?

That was the craziest story I've ever heard. And also, I have to say, I appreciated your sarcasm in your book, too. I was cracking up out loud, surprised I didn't wake up my husband when I was

reading your book, and you added in about the Spice Girls. I was laughing so hard. Well, that's the, is that the Fox sisters being the Spice Girls? It was so funny.

Oh, my God. So, yeah. Well, I'm British. I do irony, don't I? Yeah. I love that. That's awesome. I swear, I love you Brits over there.

We have you guys on all the time, and you're so poetic and freaking hilarious. Do you believe in afterlife? I'm not desperately religious and I'm probably agnostic. I think the only way I'll know is to wait 30 or 40 or 50 or whatever. But I actually, it might surprise you I my belief system is skeptical I kind of hear about poltergeists and occasionally have the odd thing happening and my gut reaction is these things can't happen but that's just my belief system I try and put my belief system to one side and I look at all the people that have had all these strange events all around the world, very similar.

And one thing you can't say is it's, there's a absolutely obvious natural explanation. There might be a very unobvious one, but we haven't found that yet. Even if it was natural, whatever natural means, it's certainly going to be something that we haven't thought of so that's going to be very interesting maybe it's aliens john maybe it is i loved how you ended your book too correct me if i'm wrong but i felt like you were encouraging people to continue this research you said earlier it's been a hard year. A lot of really

amazing researchers that have spent many years and a lot of their lifetime researching this have passed on. So I kind of felt like you were encouraging people to not let the next book or the research come out in 30 more years to just, you know, keep this going. It seems like you're very passionate about it and it's been a huge part of your life. Life needs to be full of mysteries, I think. And I certainly like exploring the few that have left. And I like the way that you managed to mention the last chapter without,

well, I've hinted at my conclusions, but without making it a spoiler. So thank you very much for that. I couldn't wait to get to the end because I'm like, I have to know. I have to know. But I appreciate the time that you put into this book. As I was reading it, I was like just blown away at the amount of research that you've collected and the details and the way you presented it with, you know, no bias. And I'm not going to lie. There were times where I had to set it down and go,

oh God, I got to relax my brain for a minute. And I'm kind of scared. And I'm going to go drink my 10th cup of coffee. Did you see anything through the corner of your eye? There's some really kind of scary places in there and hauntings that you mentioned so it's kind of a thriller too and now it's time for break that shit down i am going to use a quote from nicola telso the scientific man does not aim for an immediate result his work is like that of a planter for the future his duty is to lay the foundations for who are to come and point

the way and i just took my book dessert a little bit love it where can our listeners find you let's give a shout out to all the places they can get your book amazon every other online bookshop you can think of uh your side of the pond contact me on twitter at ghost fraser that's ghost doesn't ghost fraser in the old scottish way not the American sitcom. That's F-R-A-S-E-R. Are we like on the other side of a pond? Is there a pond between London and the U.S.? Or why do you guys say on the other side of the pond? I thought you said it.

I've never heard it before. You've never heard of that? I thought it was an American expression. I was trying to make everyone feel at home. No, I'm not. I'm not. John, you've been awesome. We really appreciate you.

Thank you so much. Been a pleasure. Nice to meet you, John. Thank you so much. Pleasure. Have a good one. Thanks for being with us today. We hope you will come back next week.

If you like what you hear, don't forget to rate, like, and subscribe. Thank you. We rise to lift you up. Thanks for listening. We've not officially started yet, have we? No. I don't know. I might add the pie in there.

That's pretty funny.