Somewhere in the Skies - Karl Pfeiffer: The Science and Philosophy of the Paranormal

Episode Date: October 8, 2017

On episode 26 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we hear our first listener ghost story. Katie shares with us a terrifying night she experienced in a dark rec center in Florida. It was a perfect paranormal primer as we count down the days until Halloween. Ryan then sits down to speak with author and paranormal investigator, Karl Pfeiffer. They discuss Karl's time on the Syfy channel where he won the very first season of Ghost Hunters Academy. We hear about the filming process and how influential his time on the show truly was in helping him become a better investigator. We then talk about his five years of both working at and investigating the famous Stanley Hotel, best known for being the location of The Shining. Karl and Ryan then go deep, discussing the science v.s. the spiritual debate that often fuels the paranormal fire. We then get a sneak peek at what Karl is working on now with the dynamic paranormal duo, Greg and Dana Newkirk!  Guest Bio: Karl Pfeiffer is a writer, photographer, and paranormal investigator. He won the first season of Syfy's Ghost Hunters Academy and appeared on Ghost Hunters International. He worked for five years as the Resident Paranormal Investigator at the famous Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where he conducted more than 250 investigations and created a webseries featuring his Spirit Investigations Team called Spirits of the Stanley. He lectures across America about approaches to the science and philosophy of the paranormal. Karl is the author of the novel, Hallowtide, and the short story collection Into a Sky Below, Forever. He was a staff writer at publications including the TAPS Paramagazine and the Paranormal Pop Culture Blog. He's also a portrait and conceptual photographer based out of Northern Colorado. For more info, visit: http://www.karlpfeiffer.com Closing music, "Bones", was provided and composed by Ichabod Todd  Audio Clip provided by www.TheDarkZone.tv and Karl Pfeiffer. Patreon Campaign: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Produced by THIRD KIND PRODUCTIONS, in association with ANTICA PRODUCTIONS. To learn more, visit www.anticaproductions.com Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, Ryan Sprague here. Before we get to this week's episode, you may have remembered that on last week's show, I asked for listeners to send in their creepiest personal ghost stories or monster sightings to share with everyone to get us, you know, in the Halloween spirit. The response was incredible, and I am so happy and horrified to share this personal account by Katie, where she remembers something very interesting that happened during her college years when she was working at a rec center in Florida. Hi, this is Katie. I wanted to share this story that happened to me in my early 20s. During college, I worked at a recreation center after school, you know, watching little kids. And also during the summertime, during summer camp. I guess it was, it was kind of like YMCA, but it was, you know, run by, owned by the city. Anyway, this rec center, I don't think it was super old. It might have been built in the 60s or the 70s.

in a pretty decent area of my town in Florida. I had worked there for a year or so, and one of my girlfriends, my best girlfriend, she worked there as well. She worked with middle schoolers. I worked with elementary kids. And her boss was, you know, over all the teen programs and everything. And he was really, really cool, really fun. And we got to talk in, you know, I have to work one day and find out, you know, he's into

the paranormal as well as she and I are. And he says, hey, you know, I've had a lot of experiences in this rec center. I've seen things before closing up. You know, I've seen a person in this, you know, in one of the rooms as I was locking the door, seeing through the glass, you know, doors, et cetera. And he'd done some, you know, a little bit of kind of ghost hunting EVP work after hours. But then, you know, got the idea. He said, hey, why don't we do a ghost hunt sometime?

because, you know, he had the keys to the place. And if it was a weekend, it wasn't being used. No one really would know. I mean, I don't even think there were cameras. No, I mean, there weren't cameras or anything. Monitoring if anyone came in after hours. So one weekend, it was like a Saturday night. It was my friend's boss, my friend myself, I think two other friends about our age.

We brought like 20, 21. And then my friend's boss, the rec center manager, teen manager, he allowed like two of his, I guess, you know, teens students to come along because they were cool. I mean, I guess they were kind of cool for like 12 or 13 years old. Obviously this was something that they probably weren't supposed to tell their parents and they didn't, thank God, or we'd all be fired. But we had El's equipment. I mean, he had, you know, handheld cameras. he had, I think he had an infrared camera as well. He had quite a big setup.

And so we split up. The rec center wasn't huge, but it was large enough where you could split up into different groups and be in different rooms and not hear each other. I mean, granted, you know, this, maybe you could still pick up someone talking out of the room if you were in a recorder across the building. But, so it wasn't perfect.

It wasn't an ideal situation. Anyway, I was assigned to the main room, the main playroom when you walked into the building. It was probably about, gosh, 30 feet by, like 30 by 20 maybe. And it was myself and one of my friends. And we were just sitting in the room along one of the walls. And we were, you know, asking questions out loud. We had the handheld video camera. And we were just, you know, filming the room.

There was no one else in the room except for us, you know, just scanning along the walls with the camera. And we noticed that the camera, and this was also the night vision, this had night vision on it. The camera was, and it was fully charged, by the way. It was fully charged before we started this. We tried, we were scanning and we noticed in this one corner that it just wouldn't focus. And I was like, okay, maybe because it's dark. But then that, that portion that wouldn't focus started to move. It kept moving.

And so we were kind of following it. And this was just for a few minutes, and all of a sudden, the camera shuts off. It's out of battery. It's dead. And so we go get, you know, our boss, like, hey, this happened. He's like, I literally just charged that. Okay, fine. Here's the plug.

So we literally plugged it directly into the wall. And it worked for a little bit. Same thing. We're getting the spot that keeps moving, and the camera keeps dying, and then just won't turn on. I mean, it wasn't broken. It worked after that. It just wouldn't work.

during that. Also, something interesting was during that, I guess, ghost hunt, ghost stakeout, a couple days later at work, my friend's boss calls us into his office and he's like, hey, I'm going over the audio because, like I said, some of us were stationed in different areas and two of us, not myself, but two friends were in the gym and he's like, I want you to listen to this recording. And I've heard a lot of EVPs, believe me, I don't. I don't think half of them or anything, you know, it's all kind of suggestion. But this was clear as day and it was a little girl's voice saying, Mommy, mommy, mommy. And something like, are you my mommy or have you seen my mommy?

But really, really clear. So that is one thing where I, it was too good, it was almost too good to be. So that one I will say, okay, maybe he was messing with us. So I do want to contact him one day and say, like, look, were you messing with us? Was that a real EVP? But it was pretty neat. And it was quite an experience. So we did another ghost hunt another time.

And there were only three of us. And it freaked me out too badly. There was too much going on. So I was pretty much done with it. I was kind of done with ghosts in the paranormal for a while. But anyway, I hope you enjoyed my story. Thanks. Mommy, my, ugh, that kissed me the hebi-jibis.

You know, now that I think about it, I've always wanted to know where that term came from, hebi-jibis. Well, I did a little digging, and it actually was coined by an American comic strip cartoonist, W.D. Beck in 1905, so there you go, little etymology for you here on somewhere in the skies. Thank you so much to Katie for sharing this, and it's not too late, guys. If you have a story, you want to tell, just use the contact tab on the website. at Somewhere In The Skies.com, and we will take it from there. The countdown to Halloween is upon us,

and this week's guest will surely get you in the mood. So, let's get on with the show. This is Somewhere in the Skies, with Brian's bread. What if a world-renowned philosopher and professor of psychiatry at Harvard suddenly announced he believed in ghosts? At the close of the 19th century, the illustrious William James led a determined scientific investigation into unexplainable incidences of clairvoyance and ghostly visitations.

James and a small group of eminent scientists staked their reputations, their careers, even their sanity on one of the most extraordinary quests ever undertaken to empirically prove the existence of ghosts, spirits, and psychic phenomena. What they pursued and what they found raises questions as fascinating today as they were then. The previous words drawn the back of the book, Ghost Hunters, by Deborah Blum, and I believe it fits quite nicely with this week's discussion. Building off of the work of visionaries like William James, it's quite apparent that paranormal investigators of all walks of life

are stepping up and trying to find those answers by asking new questions. And such is the case for today's guest. Carl Fyfer is a writer, photographer, and paranormal investigator. He won the first season. of sci-fi's Ghost Hunters Academy and appeared on Ghost Hunter's International. He worked for five years as the resident paranormal investigator at the famous Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where he conducted more than 250 investigations and created a web series featuring his spirit investigations team called Spirits of the Stanley.

He lectures across America about approaches to the science and philosophy of the paranormal. Today, we dive deep into his time on Ghost Hunters Academy, separating the fact from fiction when filming a ghost hunting television show. We then move into his extensive investigations into the famous Stanley Hotel. We wrap things up all about the science and philosophy of ghost hunting, even diving into the seminal work of Jacques Valet. This was a perfect interview for the Halloween season, and a guest I think you're really going to enjoy. So, without further ado, here is my ghostly communicative. with Carl Fyfer. Carl, thank you so much for joining me today on Somewhere in the Skies.

This is a departure for me, actually. Usually we are talking all UFOs, but today, brother, we are going total ghosting. So again, thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. This is exciting that we can finally put this together. I'm pumped. We have tried to make this work for a while now, so I am so happy it's finally happening. And we have some strange synchronicities with one another that we will

to later in the show. But first... It might not have been just us putting this whole thing together as late as we did. That is very true. There is an architect at work. I have no doubt. So, you know, I'm sure a lot of my listeners, they may be familiar with your work for it. But for those who aren't, how did you first get involved with paranormal investigation?

We are going back to the origin story, brother. The origin story, the first comic book. Yep. Yeah. So basically, back in the day, it's... I don't know where it came from, but from my entire life, I've just been so deeply passionate about all this stuff. I find that there's two ways that people get into this whole field of weirdness and high strangeness. And they either have that experience that kicks things off or they're just passionate about it.

And I was the latter side where I've always been into the creepy stuff. I've always been into the mysterious and the weird and the spooky, whether that's just as a kid and being into like the Tim Burton Batman movies, you know, and Ghostbusters. or as I got older and started doing more research, just all this slightly more concrete, which is funny to say, paranormal stuff being concrete, but that's where those like creepy and more mysterious things start to cross over actually

into our experiences, that you don't just have to engage with like a Stephen King novel, but you can actually go and engage with the weird in whatever form that takes, whatever's actually going on out there. You can kind of pursue it. So I've spent my life just trying to pursue these things in high school. The Ghost Hunters Boom hit.

And I was into that and learning as much as I could. And then did a little bit of research here and there with like a ghost hunting group. It was pretty rag tag those first couple of investigations before I was swooped up on Ghost Hunters Academy, the sci-fi spin-off show from Ghost Hunters, kind of that competition reality show. And we shot six episodes and I was one of the co-winners. of the first season and threw myself back into college and wrote a couple books and just kind of figured out what the next step was, which was working at the Stanley Hotel, which I did for a couple of years up there leading the weekend public ghost hunts. Right, yeah, and we will definitely get into that.

That is, when I first heard that, I say, oh, my God, I got to interview this guy. I am sure you have some stories about that. But backtracking back to Ghost Hunters Academy, we always hear in the paranormal realm, Ghost hunting on TV is a completely different beast that it's all fake, this, that we know that's not true. And you know that for a fact it's not all true. But I'm going to put you on this spot here. I would love to hear how the process of a ghost hunting show, how you may think it differs from like an actual paranormal investigation where you're spending 12, 13 hours in a place, you know, waiting for anything to happen. And I know this probably happens on television as well.

It's just edited out unlike real life. So could you give us maybe a little insider scoop of what it was like filming those six episodes? Totally. It was a really interesting experience because for me in a lot of ways at that time, sort of the TV shows were my framework for like what an investigation kind of looks like. And so a lot of that was supported by the shows and then sort of evolved afterwards when, my thinking outside of the box was also thinking outside of the TV show box as well. But, you know, and it was interesting too because Ghost Centers Academy was like so much more of like that reality based where they spent a little bit more time on like whether or not

we were struggling with the setup or not or, you know, teaching us stuff or learning stuff or dealing with the hijinks versus just when I was on Ghost Centers International. Everything was just like, yeah, like it just takes a while to set up sometimes. We're going to get to it. So there's some elements that kind of got in the way just by nature of our show. But I think one of the interesting things was, from what I've seen after the TV show, in some ways, we actually spend more times than a lot of the other ghost hunting groups, like when we're in a location. Because we would sit and have it relatively scheduled out where we were in a room, just like a normal, boring old room for like two hours waiting for something to happen. And I remember being at Eastern State.

And we just sat in one of those prison hallways for like three hours, just every single question you could possibly think of to ask a ghost. We were like EVP experts from an interview perspective by the end of that show because we just, at a certain point, being as novices, we were too, that was just all we could do was just try to think of any possible question that could engage the spirits or whatever it was that was around us and try to associate them and talk about their experience, whether that was when they were living or when they were dead. And just the amount of creative questions that we just had to draw upon was pretty nuts. Yeah, I was going to say that's pretty cool just to know that, like, you're coming in it. You're coming at it fresh and with, I would assume, a passion and hunger that maybe some of these veteran ghost hunters may have lost throughout time, possibly. You don't know. But it's interesting to hear that your attention to detail as a, I guess, kind of a new person in the field, I can only imagine would help an investigation as well. Absolutely, yeah.

And I mean, there's also that, like, being thrown in the deep end where, like, all you can do is swim, you know, like, you have to swim. And that was where we're at, where we're like, we're in this hallway or we're in this room or we're in this situation where nothing's happening. Like, how do we coax it out? Whereas I think when it's in a bit of a less controlled scenario that a lot of ghost hunting teams were doing around that time and still to this day, you know, you might spend 20 minutes in a room and be like, oh, it's pretty quiet in here and move on or check something else out or rendezvous. And, you know, while I don't really agree with that, I think you should give at the time. This was where I got that background and giving at the time because you had to sit there for two hours. you couldn't switch it out or you're going to get yelled at by Hell Lake Stephen Tango on that show. So yeah, I mean, that was that was kind of my first example of being thrown into it.

But obviously, like the TV show aspect, at least on the one I was on, it was very much about just like letting it unfold. And so it was not very intrusive. It got intrusive in like the transitions, you know. And that's just normal when you're filming when you're walking down a stairwell. And the camera guy says, all right, stop, rewalk down that stairwell. I'm going to shoot it from down this time. I mean, that's where it's like a very TV-ish and everything's being like set up and organized and orchestrated. But once we were in those rooms, once we were doing it, the camera guys just turned into absolute ninjas and just let everything unfold.

And there was very little to none influence from outside. We just had a sound guy sitting on the headset listening in. We had the one camera guy just shooting us and very, very much just letting it unfold. That's good to hear. I mean, we have these, you know, preconceived notions. that it's all scripted, that, you know, everything's planned. And, you know, there are certain shows that we won't name that apparently do do that. But I mean, everyone is different in the spectrum of a lot of stuff like that.

Absolutely. It's tough for them, the more I think they have to coax out a story or something, the more that there's a missing beat, they've got to try to – it's tough to edit that footage when you've got a night or two, you know, to try to make it there. So I don't support any mischievous stuff on that side of things, But I understand the challenge of trying to make a compelling story every week. Exactly. It's TV.

Yeah, it makes sense. Well, you know, moving away from TV, you did Ghost Hunters Academy, and that brought you to actually working at the famous Stanley Hotel. And so now we're moving to the silver screen, known best for being the location of The Shining. So what did you do at the hotel? How did you get hooked up with this job? and then eventually countless investigations there. It was a really interesting journey. The way that the pieces kind of fell together.

It felt like one door in the paranormal closed, and then a couple months later, another one opened. The whole thing revolved around kind of, I brought my buddy from Ghost Hunter's Academy, Chris McHune and his now wife, out to Colorado. They wanted to check it out, hang out a little bit. And I was like, well, of course,

we have to go up to the Stanley. Now, ironically, I'd spent, you know, 10, 15 years in Colorado at this point, and I'd driven past it before, but I hadn't really visited ever, before. So it was like, I have to visit this too. So it was a good excuse and we were up there checking it out and we just kind of wandered around like tourists and then we tweeted it out that, you know, we just checked out to Stanley. This was this was super cool. It'd be fun to ghost on sometime. And the woman at

the time who ran the ghost on the weekends, Callie, she would just kind of like troll around on Twitter and like look for people posting about the Stanley and she would kind of hit them back and be like, you know, reply to them just like, it's a great place or like, yeah, you know, the ghosts are super cool. just sort of like a little bit of reach outing or reaching out there. And the interesting thing was that she would normally like search for Stanley Hotel because if she just looked up Stanley, she would get too much miscellaneous stuff. But she had happened to look up just the word Stanley that day. And I had tweeted not saying Stanley Hotel.

I just said we were up at the Stanley. And she saw our tweets and she was like, oh my God, like I watched Ghosts Enter's Academy. Like you guys should have let me know. Like we could have hooked something up. And so Chris and I look at each other and we're like, well, what are you doing tonight? you know and so of course like our girlfriends were like rolling their eyes they're like we're going to go back up there and do a ghost hunt and chris and are like hell yes we are and we're dragging you guys along and so we went up we did it we rolled through the night and it was a lot of fun a lot of weird

stuff very interesting and wound up getting super hooked and so i sort of did that like so you know like this would be fun to just kind of come and be like a guest on some of the future hunts and on a weekly basis just started popping up up from week to week and around that January then because I was in August, they were looking to expand the ghost hunts and bring on some more public guests and they needed somebody else to help out. So Callie threw my name into the mix and got me all hired up. And then five years later, the ride kind of ran to an end. But it was by my account around 250 investigations in between there that we worked up there. So wound up. The crux of it was leading groups of 10 to 20 people.

people around on the weekends and kind of doing part of it at tour and then three hours of like sitting in a room seeing what we could get and then kind of an hour of letting them kind of wander amongst themselves and apply what they've learned. But a really fascinating job in terms of like, yes, getting to ghost hunt multiple times a week as a job at a place as as famous as the Stanley and as active. But also the nuances of trying to try to get everyone their money's worth, whether a ghost showed up or not was the interesting like the work of the job, the nuance of it, that it wasn't just ghost hunting. It was about telling stories and education and talking theory and wacky ideas.

And my goal was always to kind of focus on the skeptics. And if I could get the skeptics to leave feeling like they got their money's worth, not as believers. Like I didn't really want to convince them of anything per se, but if they could have a respect for what it is that we do, because we get so many boyfriends and wives and stuff that were like, oh, I'm just humor. my person. This is so stupid. And all the moron here. But if they could leave and be like, wow, like what you guys had to say was very compelling. Like, it's interesting how you approach this. You're not just running around screaming in the dark. Now was always kind of my goal was to pull back the curtain on more of the actual thought that went into this. That wasn't just like, did you hear that?

You know, that everyone kind of thinks it is when they're not passionate about it. Yeah. And I think what's really cool is anytime I've gone on a ghost tour or I recently went on my first ever ghost investigation, which I can touch on briefly in a moment here. But I love hearing the stories, the legend tripping, the history behind a place. And that has always appealed to me more than the actual spirit that may be in a place or in an object or just in, you know, in general. So that's cool that that almost became 50% of what you were doing there. And I can only imagine that that would only enhance the experience both for the people attending and just the activity happening there. You know, I think with more context you give a person, the more they're going to be open to the possibility that something might be able to pierce that veil, might be able to communicate with you.

And that energy just manifests. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like having, it's clarifying what we do and having some fun with. it, you know, and when other people start having some fun, when they start realizing the possibilities, we think a lot, too, about how much difference it makes when there's sort of that one, like, person in the group that's a jerk about it, you know, that's, we got a lot less activity when that happened. So if you could kind of start things off by trying to, like, bring them into that perspective on it, of, like, having more respect for it, have, having more respect for

how we think about it. And then they're a little bit more open to the point. possibility that's like, well, if these guys aren't total idiots about this, if they're thinking a little critically about how they approach it, maybe there's something here. And when you start to pull down those barriers, that's when that, whether it's that energy dynamic or just the social nuance of like spirits feeling comfortable with 20 strangers, whatever that is, we found that that dynamic was really important. And by approaching it from multiple different angles like that, the results tended to be better than just letting everyone run around or by being idiots about it being like, goes surreal and you're dumb if you don't think so, or what, you know, however

terrible approach you could imagine, you know. So in terms of the Stanley, I'm sure you experienced some pretty crazy stuff there. You even started a web series called Spirits of Stanley. This was pretty cool. For me, I mean, there's always been a presence about the place. Whether it's the first time you visit or whether you're well into 200 plus times, there's something powerful. here. It's just like in a room all we feel like this isn't right.

That was weird, man. Dude, we had a whole fucking conversation. Holy crap. Oh, I'm going to go that way. My brain is screaming. I'm weird. I loved watching this. Can you tell us about the show and maybe about some of the key moments you remember that really stuck with you during filming this?

Yeah. So the whole process was pretty. interesting because it was kind of multi-tiered. We were both, it kind of kicked off in September 2015, Michelle Tate from Ghost Hunters, moved up to Colorado to work with us at the Stanley Hotel leading these ghost hunts because our other investigator at the time got real busy with family and needed to take a step back. So it was kind of an unique opportunity for Michelle to come up and join us. And we had a Facebook page that we didn't use much. So we blasted it out that Michelle was with us on this project now. And we got some engagement with that post and we thought,

why don't we use this more, you know? But instead of just telling the stories and a status of what happens on the weekends, like let's try to document it more. So it turned into throughout the fall, just kind of documenting little, like more vlog style, just interview sit downs with like evidence clips. I hate calling them evidence. But with the little clips of the activity that we got, which at the time we were working with the Dark Zone project, which is sort of a slowly up-and-coming, developing like media network online.

with different, like, web series style paranormal content. And that Spirits of the Stanley, what developed from that was sort of for that, that Dark Zone project. So it was a good excuse to, like, get more serious about it and shoot it a little bit better and make it more engaging. So, yeah, when we came back in January of 2016, we hit it hard and went for about three months of just, like, shooting not only some of the public investigations and what happened there, but a lot of questions were starting to pop up, with the spirits there that we started coming up there more and more in our free time or after the public investigations to continue our research and our questions and doing crazier stuff. And that was kind of the crux of the series that came to an end a little bit sadly too soon when the hotel decided to shut down some of the more paranormal aspects and go for a classier

direction or whatever the reasoning was for taking away some of that ghost angle. So it was kind of short-lived, but just a real. really fun opportunity to just have creative control as a creative myself to create, create this project that documented what we were doing. And the biggest mysteries at that point were evolving around which spirits were there. We had a spirit named Eddie show up about probably two and a half years before we started that web series. And he was, he was fascinating because it seemed like he was a recent spirit who was almost figuring out how to be a ghost. Okay. Yeah, he started with just a smell, kind of like a,

smell of like body odor, right? In this one room. And there's the first night it happened, there was three of us in the room. And we're smelling each other to make sure that like it wasn't any of us. We're like, I think we would have noticed a couple hours ago. One of us was a little ripe. But so it was the smell, the sourceless smell. We couldn't figure out.

It started coming back randomly week to week. When we started talking about that smell and it being unpleasant, the, the smell started to change. You could kind of catch it on the edges, but it was more of like a flowers type smell. It was more pleasant, like it was consciously being changed. And then there was some physical interaction. People started feeling like they got touched. And then when we started getting more like EVP type device interaction, where we started

flushing out the story, we were getting consistent names coming across like Ed and Eddie coming through. We weren't talking about it publicly. We didn't have the web series at that point. So then we get like self-proclaimed psychics coming on the ghost hunts. And they'd be like, I'm feeling like there's like an Eddie spirit here. And we're like, how the hell did you know that? You know?

So it was really fascinating to put those pieces together over the course of a year and a half and kind of build his story. And towards the end there, with that all in mind, too, we would look at all the activity and how it changed every week as we studied it. And it seemed like there were some new spirits at the time. And that some of our more classic spirits like Lucy is one of the famous ones. She might have been gone at that point. Like we hadn't heard from her in a year or two.

But he got to the point that we really wanted. if her story had changed drastically that she had moved on if that's what happens or she just like went somewhere else on the property or whatever happened with her. That was kind of a mystery too. So all this stuff kind of developing right there in the spring, just lots and lots and lots of questions, which happens the deeper you look. The moment you take that extra step, all the questions just yawn out in front of you. Yeah, I can only imagine. Well, you bring up the idea of a medium, Carl, and I want to touch on that in just a moment. Something that I found pretty interesting is that you started working with a spirit box when you were at the Stanley.

This is kind of a newer tech approach, I would say, in the ghost hunting field. And this really caught my attention. You had some pretty interesting results with the ghost box when you were at the Stanley. And it kind of brought you down a fascinating and strange rabbit hole. Now, I recently used a spirit box for the first time on my first ghost hunt. So that was kind of exposure therapy right from the start. But would you mind sharing your story with us of what happened with this, this ghost slash spirit box? Yeah. So the spirit box is a really controversial device. And for the folks that hate it, I don't blame you a bit. There's a lot of people in this paranormal field that utterly hate that thing. and I respect them a lot.

And I'm like, I wish I could hate it too. And because, I mean, it just scans through normal FM or AM radio stations. And you hear commercials and clips of songs and DJs talking. And it's scanning through really quickly. So there's not very often that you can make stuff out as far as like going every, you know, two seconds. Like you're hearing something distinct. But there's a lot of room for false positives, basically. And one of the first couple times I used it, though,

We heard some really, like almost shoutingly loud direct responses to the questions we asked, like names. We're like, hey, Paul, if you're here, you got to shout it out over all this other noise or we're not really going to be too sure. And we just hear like Paul just shout it out right through it. And it was very loud and very clear in a way that made me think something more is going on here than just random matrixing by the ears or hearing what you want to hear or just forcing something to make sense. It seemed like something more. But I always kept that critical mind with it because it is so easy to just hear what you want to hear. But we, and again, I don't know where the source of this idea came from. It was, I think probably from a conversation between me and Cali back in the day, where we were just spitballing ideas in the middle of the night.

But at some point it came up that we had this idea of thinking about what happens if you plug somebody in on a pair of headphones and they're listening to the spirit box. but no one else in the group can hear what the Spirit Box is saying. And the person with the headphones on can't hear the questions being asked. You crank it up real loud. You get some good super soundproof headphones. And you see if they just speak aloud, anything clear that they hear at all, any single voice, whether it sounds like a commercial or not, anything they hear, they just say it. Meanwhile, everyone else is asking questions.

And we wanted to use that as more of an objective, like take out the manipulating your expectations. bit and just it's either an answer or it's not you know and uh we started to get weirder and weirder stuff with it and it was this it turned into this giant rabbit hole of an exercise in terms of trying to imagine skeptically like how many different responses to something could be possible in the realm of coincidence and how many like specific type answers could really you know validate something like that how many back and forth questions and conversations could you go through that would start to be beyond just random chance or likelihood, which is complex when it comes to conversation, you know, like or even topics coming up on the radio.

So, I mean, if we're asking about like, hey, if your favorite football team is the Broncos, because we're out in Colorado, right? Say, say Denver Broncos through this device. Like the odds, of course, of Denver Broncos being talked about on AM radio or like decent, you know, or like, hey, what did you think of the political status of this year right now? Like, you might hear a political thing come through the radio because that's what's being talked about on there. So the skeptical nature of it, like, there's a lot to chew on. But we were getting, like, at its peak at one point, we had like a whole three minute back and forth conversation.

It was, it's still so bizarre to watch that the video footage of it had been a quiet night. We were up in the balcony. We introduced Blindfold, too. So it's like Connor, our team member, he has these drummer headphones because he's a drummer. So they just knock out tons of noise. You can barely hear anything with those things on. And he's got the blindfolds on. And we're up there.

We've been talking to it for like 30 minutes. Not much. That's super crazy. And Mark, Michelle's husband, one of our guys out of writing the cameras, he holds up his hand. He says, how many fingers am I holding up? And he was holding up four fingers. And we'd never heard it do this before. But Connor just started like hearing numbers coming across the spirit box.

And you just start spitting out numbers. And he's getting flipping about it because he's like, this is ridiculous. He's like, I'm just hearing numbers. So he's just like seven, 20, two, one. And he's just, he said afterwards, he was like, I hoped you guys asked for like a phone number or a lot of ticket number or something. It's like, I didn't know what the string of numbers was all about. But it was right when we asked how many fingers Mark was holding up. And it just starts launching off these numbers.

And the spirit, like the voice of it sounds like it's getting frustrated, which could just be interpreting like how Connor said stuff. But towards the end of it, he's just like, you know, I tried to do this. Like I'm done with this. This is, this is dumb, you know. And of all the numbers that Connor threw out, none of them were four. Like none of them was the actual number. So we were like pushing. We're like, you're so close.

Oh, it's four. We were telling him. We're like, it's four. Just say four. And it never actually just said four. And it was just, it was bizarre because almost every line out of his mouth was something relevant to like what was happening. What we were trying to coax out from the spirit. So I mean, all the questions about that and all the rabbit holes we could go down were just numerous about like, why can't they say that specific number?

Could they not see it? Could they not understand it? Could they not communicate it? Like, where was that frustration coming? Because we'd have problems with specificity before, you know? Is there some sort of rule or inability to be too specific when they're communicating? communicating with us? Is that just more of the skeptical? Like you're not going to get the specifics. The odds are too far, but you can interpret a lot more than that as being really close. Like,

it was really complex in all of the questions that were coming from that and trying to figure out how to approach it skeptically or or test it further. And we did variations on it. We finally did last year, we had a situation where we could try a debunking experiment with it that that one's complex too. So the idea with the debunking experiment is So we're in the situation. There's random stuff coming through. And we wanted to see if the spirit voices were coming out of the spirit box, if they were communicating somehow in that moment,

why don't we record a session earlier, just randomly like a day, an hour, a week before, however long. Connor sits on the spirit box at home, talks into his iPhone and just says the words that he hears. On a ghost hunt later, he will plug into that or the spirit box when we're outside of the room. and we'll come back in the room and start asking questions. And we don't know which one he's plugged into.

If it's a live session that's really happening or if he's just saying all the words the same way that he heard them a week ago. And if we get like really compelling conversation with the one he recorded a week ago, we could stay with some degree of certainty that like it's just happenstance because like that happened before we even ask these questions. But at what point if it gets really crazy how good that conversation was back and forth, do we have to start asking those questions that you probably are, familiar with looking into UFOs, like time, you know, and moving through time and how,

if you're non-physical, if time is physical to some degree, like, are these things moving through space and time in a completely different way that they could literally like listen to our questions in a week before, answer them on the spirit box. Right. Like, I don't, I don't know. Like, so it's, it's like a 98% decent debunking experiment, but that 2% like left over just opens up even more high strangeness if you do get a crazy

compelling conversation so I mean it's complex but I love it like it's a weird mediumistic twist on this controversial device that's that was super fun to just dive into that whole world of it. It is that's a good point. It is fun

and I think that's something to keep in mind too. Ghost hunting can be fun. It doesn't have to be this somber, dark you know, dramatic thing all the time. I mean, even if you do sync up with a spirit or some sort of energy or activity, you could have a good time. It doesn't have to be, I was murdered when I was 12, I'm waiting for someone to find the killer, or I'm trapped and I can't cross over. Like,

imagine it is a spirit of a person. Do you think that, like, their first means of communication is going to be, you know, depressing or this or that? Maybe they just want to talk to you. Maybe they want to tell you like what they did that day in purgatory. I don't know. I don't know. There's many possibilities. But like you said, that 2% is what sort of keeps me going in the UFO field, as I'm sure it does with you.

Like, yes, we're not out to prove that ghosts are real or aliens are real. We just like everyone else have to come from it from a skeptical angle. When that 2% is left and we have no other answers, then. you have to really start asking those questions. It could be this. It could be that. So that's pretty interesting. Another thing I wanted to touch on, Carl, is that idea of, I guess, science versus spiritual, in a sense.

You know, we have a very technical side to ghost hunting, and then we have the very spiritual side. Like you said before, sometimes you brought mediums in. What do you think of the whole idea of using tech during a ghost hunt versus feeling something or communicating? with something. When it all lines up, I'm sure it's an incredible experience. But is there, in your opinion, like, does it have to be a balance? Is one more important than the other? What do you personally think? For me, it's really about, like, isolating the different approaches and the reasons why you're on the ghost hunt, like, first and foremost, because for me, like, I've got a super analytical brain and a really creative sort of practical side. So, like, I want to

pursue creative things and, you know, having a little bit more fun because I'm passionate about it. And I don't have that science background explicitly in like my college degree. But my analytical brain just like vibes with science too. So I'm constantly on a philosophical standpoint, trying to like study the two at all times and like how and where they mesh, how the believers and the skeptics mesh. I studied a lot of mysticism in college, which to me, I mean, that kept coming around to like the science versus religion debate. And for me, I kept interpreting that, like, in everything that we researched and read, I was like, ghost hunting falls right into the middle of the same debate right here because what seems to potentially be happening is this spiritual

realm, this potentially non-physical realm is somehow manifesting into the physical world. And physical things are happening on the whole. Sometimes it seems like those are more psychical type engagements and we have to question all those things. Like if you see a ghost, was that ghost actually there? Was it in your head. Was that still valid, but it might only be in your head? So there's this big dance between all these things, but I like studying that line and that balance between where those two, where those two are at? And how much of it is psychical and spiritual. How much of it is something actually manifesting. But to me, if you can watch a book being thrown across a room that seems to be from a ghost or spirit, something physical is happening, which means,

that even if all this stuff is on the spiritual plane, science can never put it in a box. Science can never like fully capture what it is because science is about empiricism, the five senses being able to distill something down and kind of test it and documented and observe it. And if this thing is like inherently like ineffable, inherently you can't ever grasp onto it. It's this platonic idea, almost emotional, psychological, spiritual realm, then maybe we'll never get it. But if something's happening there on the physical, side, like there's still more that we can learn. If there's a manifestation happening, if it's not just purely spontaneous, some sort of energy exchange or some sort of potentially even branch of science

that we don't know about yet. Like, you could have described the entire EMF spectrum in the same spiritual enigma, you know, however long, 200, 300 years ago before we knew about it now. We're like, oh yeah, science includes that too. How much other stuff is floating around in here? Is there no spiritual realm we just haven't found the spirit stuff yet that science is like oh yeah it's just this wavelength of matter or something you know like some completely weird component that we haven't thought of so from that scientific aspect i like studying and that's where the spirit box really got interesting because we're like is this a psychic impression that they're getting or are the spirits talking through this thing and they can just hear them better with headphones you know like where's where's the balance are we tapping

into something spiritual here are we tapping into another manifestation here but by that same token with all of that stuff, kind of aside, it's about those approaches and just like, why are you on a ghost town tonight? Are you an enthusiast who just wants to engage and, like, have that experience that you love watching on the go shows and you want to see a ghost too? There's nothing wrong with that, you know? Like, keep making this analogy that bird watchers are totally acceptable in our society to, like, go and watch birds and you don't need a science degree for that. But if you're into the science, if you have that science background, if you carry a degree and you're passionate about this, go do good science. Go do real science and research it. It's all about that approach and the technical teams fall in the middle where their devices,

like if they're debunking stuff for a homeowner, they're trying to get answers for the homeowner, all of that stuff is important too, but we just have to be very careful about the scientific terms that we use to describe what we're doing if we're not actually doing that science. And so for me, one of my big dump points, you know, I'll get up and yell at everyone is to separate our motivations and our approaches from the language that we use so we're not muddying the waters about the progress that actually needs to be made on the larger whole of it yeah i i think wording is extremely important you know when when you're dealing with a spirit a lot of people make the mistake and immediately go to demon or evil um so that's something i'd like to touch on

a little bit too with you if that's cool uh yeah i think people's beliefs maybe religious can also play a big part in this. It really, it really, I think it really depends on the lens in which you're viewing what's going on, the activity occurring. Could have science, you could have spirits, and then you have religion. Now, what are your thoughts on that? Have you ever encountered something that you would consider evil or demonic in a sense? Um, not so explicitly. Uh, I, I come very, very middle of the road. Like, I've got two sides to every possibility in my brain at least at all times. And so I'm always very reluctant when it comes to stuff like religion when it comes to spirituality. While researching mysticism stuff, I find super

fascinating. And I think a lot of religions are super fascinating. And I take more of a pluralistic standpoint towards those. When it comes to actually labeling something or getting practical with it, that's where I get reluctant. Because to tie up anything in a spiritual realm with a little packaging and a bow and say like this is what it is we figured it out these telltale traits mean that you know like you're feeling creeped out on a location you got scratched and uh you smelled sulfur like it's a demon like done it means evil that's what it is i take more of an an open-minded approach where like i think that that's sort of like cookie cutter thinking i mean it could be accurate for sure like i don't know but some of the