The Confessionals - 208: Paranormal Experiences of a Skeptic

Episode Date: February 18, 2020

On Episode 208, we are joined by Troy who has had numerous strange experiences throughout his life, starting from the day his was born. From his mother believing he had an angel in his room to pounding on a closet door that concealed a Ouija board, Jeff has several stories to share with us - the catch, though, is that even with experiences that are hard to explain away, Troy is a paranormal skeptic!BECOME A MEMBER AND GET ADDITIONAL SHOWS: https://www.theconfessionalspodcast.com/join Subscribe to our YouTube: https://bit.ly/2TlREaI Subscribe to the Newsletter: https://www.theconfessionalspodcast.com/the-newsletter Website: www.theconfessionalspodcast.com Email: [e-mail] Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheConfessionalsPodcast Twitter: @TConfessionals Tony's Twitter: @tony_merkel Show Intro INSTRUMENTAL: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyub39AXxUw Show Intro FREE DOWNLOAD: https://bit.ly/2HxNcw3 Show Art: Alika Spahn Naihe (www.hauoliart.com)

It's confirmed the content of the grand assault to McDonald's. It has arrived here a cargament of McChispy Hot Honey, double-thrichs-stack, and Straffield dip. Copied, Procedencia? Canada, Reino-United, Japan, and Singapore. We've assaulted MacDonald's of all the world to bring here its best products. Proubales all right before that they get them?

It's despierce, waiting to back the price of the coach that you want? Well, deja to expect, and it's a great variety of vehicles that offer Spottikar. More of 6,200 vehicles, of those which, more of 700, are electrics and hybrids, with

even three years of guarantee, and eight years of guarantee in the battery, and the support of the RedB of services official.com.es. This was all circulating around the base that a giant had been killed, but no one was supposed to talk about it. I saw three long, beach up underneath the door,

curl up to grab it, and then disappear. When he came over to me, dude, he slithered over to me. And this giant comes out of the door. cave and they're all frozen and he starts running and firing at this giant. Well the giant moves he's got a spear in one hand and he's running really fast and spears Dan holds him up like this. Somebody else shoot him in the face, shoot him in the face, they basically decapitated.

I feel something pulling at my leg and I look over and there are two small gray in the teeth and they're literally, I'm getting pulled off the bed. I reached my hand into this bush and I touch air. Couldn't breathe and I couldn't move because I know I'm seeing a monster. Greetings citizens of the world. This is an important message about the growing coronavirus pandemic. With each day that passes, thousands more have been confirmed as being infected with the deadly coronavirus which has recently been given the name COVID-19. For those inside China, this illness has turned life into a dystopian nightmare, where people have just to be infected.

as much fear of their government as they do for the pathogen. Back home in the West, very few people are taking this situation seriously, because from their ivory towers, this appears to be nothing more than just another media hype to drive up clicks and sell advertising space. Sadly, this dismissive attitude is a common response to the growing pandemic among many everyday citizens in the West, but this mentality overlooks the true reality of what has been unfolding in China for the past two months. Sure, there have been outbreaks in the past that we can all remember. that we can all remember coming and going, but so much about this current outbreak is unprecedented.

Never before has a quarantine of this scale been in place, keeping hundreds of millions of people confined to their homes, and shutting down trade and manufacturing for the economic engine of the world. Some skeptics have compared this illness to the flu, yet military police are walking the streets with cosmet suits, and fleets of trucks are spraying disinfectant chemicals into the sky, which are measures that would only be taken if something very serious and very dangerous was out. very dangerous was out there. The governments of the world, and international organizations like the World Health Organization do not want people to panic, so they are being very careful with how they present this information to the public, but even these sources have grown increasingly

gloomy as the casualty number continues to rise in China. Another important thing to recognize is that the numbers that are being reported from China are not really an accurate representation of what is happening on the ground, and this is something that the CCP admits. There has been a gap in the ability to test and count cases properly, there has been a problem with false negatives, and hospitals have been so overcrowded that they have not been able to admit anyone to determine whether they have the illness or not. Furthermore, there have been countless people who passed away before they were able to get medical care or get tested, and in most cases, these people are not listed in the official count. People who passed away before the illness

was identified were simply listed as pneumonia cases, and they were not named in the official count either. This could be one of the most serious illnesses that our species has faced in generations, but the illness is not the only thing that we have to worry about. A quarantine sounds like a great idea, and if done correctly, it can be very helpful at eliminating the spread of viruses. When we stay home from work or school because we are sick, this is an example of an individual quarantine. However, shutting down entire cities with millions of people, because a few individuals there may be sick can actually make the problem worse, and lead to the to many other issues. Harsh quarantine policies like the ones chosen by the Chinese government in this particular circumstance have been known to backfire. In an environment of fear, where large groups of people are subjected to punishments and constant screenings, people are more likely to hide their symptoms and less likely to take other measures to avoid germs. China has a reputation for ruling with an iron fist, but it is very possible that similar measures could be taken in other countries. In fact, the World Health Organization has praised China's response

to the crisis, saying that the country has set a new standard for outbreak response, but does that standard entail military rule and cities on constant lockdown? Yep. Welcome to the show, everybody are listening to The Confessionals. I am your host, Tony Merkel. Thank you for being here. If you've had an encounter or story you'd like to share with me on the show, go ahead and shoot me an email.

My email address is The Confessionals at the Confessionalspodcast.com. That's The Confessionals at the Confessionalspodcast.com. Or go to the website, The Confessionalspodcast.com. hit the contact section, and you can reach me that way as well. Either way it works for me, just get a hold of me. And if you want more shows every week, we release an extra show on Thursdays for members only on the website. So you got to be a member to the website in order to get that extra show. Go to the Confessionalspodcast.com. Hit the join button and become a member today if that interests you. Now, what you just heard in that trailer was a little bit of an advertisement for a

upcoming show that we're doing. We do live member only call-in shows every other month. month and on March 7th, we are doing another live call-in show. And we're going to actually release the first half of the show live to the public. And then the second half of the show, we're going to keep it for the members only. But this is going to be a live call-in show where we're going to be talking about the coronavirus and we're going to be talking about pandemics, world population control, Georgia Guidestones, and everything circling around the idea of something eliminating the human race or dramatically knocking down the population. globally. So if you were interested in checking that out, mark your calendars and make sure you

don't miss this live exclusive show where we're going to be kind of just talking out loud and thinking out loud with callers and thinking about what are the possibilities here? Where could this be going? And anybody that has information about it is free to call in. Now, we have a public appearance we're going to be doing on May 2nd, 2020 at the Ohio Bigfoot Conference. Me and my family are all going to show up. We have a vendors table there. So if you're interested in coming out and meeting us, go to the Ohio bigfootconference.org and purchase your tickets for the conference. If you just want to hang out in the vendors area, though, that is free entry.

So all you got to do is show up to Salt Fork State Park, walk in through the doors, and say hi. So hopefully we see you there. Now this week we have Troy coming on the show, and Troy has a lot of different experiences. Parano-well, I should say I think they're paranormal, but Troy is actually a skeptic. So Troy really doesn't know how to define his experiences, but he did have experiences and he comes on to share with us today. So without any further delay, let's bring on Troy right now. Okay, today we have Troy coming on. And Troy has a lot of different paranormal experiences that he's experienced throughout his life.

He saw a UFO. And one of the other things that he's described to me sounds like a UFO, but I don't know if he would describe it like a UFO. So we'll let him kind of get into that today and stuff. but Troy, how you doing, man? I'm doing pretty good. How are you? I'm doing well. I'm doing well. So, let's just kick it off from birth, man. Like, day one. Let's talk about this.

You have some paranormal experiences there where your mom says there was an angel in the room, the day you were born. What happened there? So from what I understand, she's told the story a couple times. I guess towards the end of labor, she was, it was her. my dad and the nurses and doctors. And she looks over and she sees what she describes as kind of an old woman in a chair rocking back and forth. I think she was watching. She's kind of unclear about it.

Of course, she's in labor, so she's preoccupied, so she forgets. And a couple days later, she asked my dad, who was the old woman in the room? And my dad was puzzled. and she has always kind of, she described it as like a comforting presence. She wasn't too worried about it. And so she's always interpreted that as either her angel or my angel. And that's kind of where my story all starts. Wow, man.

That's interesting. That's definitely interesting. And maybe that was a marker on your life as to for things to come, you know? So I know you said that you mentioned to your mom about this show or the story and she kind of came to you with even more details about other things that you didn't include in the email. So why don't you just kind of go into that right now and get that going? So my mom grew up in Great Falls, Montana, which is near the Malmstrom Air Force Base. And so she made a point to say that around the time of the encounter, I'm going to tell you, about 1975 or so.

There's a lot of cattle mutilations UFO reports. her and her friend were driving down the road one night. They were passing Lincoln, Montana, and there was this massive rainstorm. It was darker than usual, she said. And her friend is kind of driving. They're between three semis, and everything's kind of going normal. And the next thing that they know that she says is her friend, who I'm not going to names, she said she didn't want to talk about this.

The passenger window just drops. Like if it suddenly became the track it runs on, if it was suddenly removed, it just dropped. And that scares them. And they look. My mom described seeing this kind of face in the window just hovering. And she said it looked initially like a man in a kind of a gas mask. The semis they were traveling between,

none of them stopped their brakes. And this is, of course, all while they're driving. So I pulled over at Clearwater to calm down. They go into the bar, and the bartender gives them allegedly shots of alcohol because they looked like they'd seen a ghost. In 1987, my mom sees the cover of communion, you know, that classic alien face. Yeah. And she calls her friend and tells her to look at this book, and her friend sees it and tells her allegedly to never mention that again. and this is, you know, kind of where that Malastrum Air Force base is.

And I'd never heard that story before. And I was creepy for sure. I don't know anybody who wouldn't say it's creepy when you're driving and the window drops and you see a freaking face there. So, I mean, I don't even know what to have to even describe something like that. Did they say that they noticed this thing just moving along with the car speed? like it just, it didn't phase it? Or did it seem like it was maybe something more physical on the car holding on? But she told me it sounds like it was,

it sounds like if I was like standing beside your car and looking in the window, but so it was like standing right next to it hovering from what I understand. It wasn't like, she didn't indicate that it was physically on the car. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, it didn't sound like it to me either and stuff. But the description just, I mean, I don't know how they didn't crash the car. I mean, if that happened to me, I'd probably just drive off the road, you know?

Yeah, my mom's pretty stubborn, so I didn't let it face her. Yeah, well, there you go. That kind of stubbornness comes in handy sometimes. But so you mentioned that you had some kind of weird thing happened with electronic horses around 2 a.m. That your mom would hear or something like that. What is that all about? So after we moved to Moses Lake, I'm maybe two or three years old. My sister was just born.

So she's not even one probably. And we had these in the 90s. They're like horses' heads and they were on the sticks. You'd like ride around and pretend you're a cowboy or something. And you hit the ear and they make those really cliche, annoying noises. Those that we played with, I remember I must love these things. And I'll back up a little bit. Before this happened, this was about 1991, my mom's 32-year-old cousin died in a car accident.

I was wearing a seatbelt and he was thrown from his truck. Interestingly, he died three times before he finally, you know, died. So shortly after that, my mom's sister says she sees him back in a dream. There's this fence. He's fine. He's not in pain, but for three dreams, he gets closer to this bright light. And about that, the final dream, so I can get the straight, she says that he says in the dream he's going to go comfort others and the family that he's okay. Shortly after that, my mom was woken up at about 3.10 in the morning in our new house.

And it was this horse winnie's. It was going off, and it did this a couple nights, two nights. So she gets up and she comes into me and my sister's bedrooms. And we're dead asleep. We're not what I'm looking for. She describes us, we weren't pretending to sleep. We were like knocked out cold. And the horses were where they were put away the night.

before and they just in my room I had this little you know those little car that you ride when you're like a toddler and they have a little carousel on it. Yeah. Play music and whatnot. A month after

that toy horse thing happened that little toy car went off in my room and it was at about three in the morning again and she walked in and I was again just out cold and my mom has always kind of wondered if this was her cousin who'd come to say goodbye so close temporally.

What do you think about that? Again, I don't really remember these because I was like maybe two or three. Sure, right. It's definitely, it's definitely creepy. And my mom isn't one to kind of lie about these kind of things. Well, she doesn't really lie in general, but I don't know why she'd make this story up. So I think it's weird. And like most of my experiences you're going to hear, I just kind of think it's weird,

and that's about as far as I can take it because I don't have any other information. Yeah, absolutely. I understand that. Totally. Talk to me about the exploding head syndrome and sleep paralysis. Okay. So I don't know if your patrons or listeners, I've heard of exploding head syndrome, but it's essentially you hear these really vowed noises in your head.

they used to think that it was caused by seizures, but last that I checked, it's no longer kind of attributed to that. So it's just this thing that happens and nobody knows why. It's happened to me since I was in community college. And it seems to happen I'm going to sleep. The first time I heard it, it was a nice, calm, peaceful night. I'm kind of dozing. And the next thing I know, it sounds like somebody's hitting a metal. trash can with a metal baseball bat

inside of my head. I must have jumped like a foot when I heard this because it was just the most bizarre, frightening thing. It's happened to me quite frequently over the years. It is related to

stress and lack of sleep, which as a graduate student who doesn't get a lot of sleep, I'm well acquainted with. I've heard everything from gunshots to people screaming to just vowed amorphous sounds. And I've been experiencing

sleep paralysis a little bit longer. When it first happened, it was this guy was standing by my bed with a knife, and it freaked me out, and then I kind of woke up, and everything was, you know, fine. There's no guy about to murder me, much to my relief.

So every time this, you know, having had this happen to me, twice. I then start to, you know, research it, figure out what it is. And now when it, it happens every once in a while, but now it's kind of like this annoying thing that happens. About a year or so ago, I had this bad, really bad incidents of it where someone that scared me or I was having this really weird nightmare involved, like this weird zombie baby thing. Like if you've ever seen the remake of Donald a dead. That kind of thing.

It's, uh, so I'm in this dream and there's just dead baby, zombie baby thing, and it's chasing me around. And I kind of wake up and I'm, you know, go to sit up, but I can't move. So having right about this, I immediately know what it is. But I can just feel that this thing that was in my nightmare is now in the room with me. And I must have sat there for, it felt. like five or ten minutes, it was probably more like 30 seconds just with this dread of this thing was just watching me and I knew it. I did not open my eyes because I didn't want,

I didn't want to see if there were any hallucinations or not, but it was the creepiest thing I've ever experienced. Yeah, it sounds pretty creepy. I would definitely wouldn't be in that kind of situation at all. The exploding head syndrome, now I have had experiences where when I'm sleeping. I am woken up to a loud bang, but I, there, nothing, nothing is seemingly exploded or banged

or fell over. But it's like I heard it in my head. Is that, do you know what I talking about? Is that something similar or is this something that like you straight up like, it's like very real and heavy on the brain? That sounds actually really similar. It kind of depends

on like the, I guess the strength of whatever it is. So that first time I had exploding head syndrome, it felt like there was substance to it. But now when I'm just kind of stressed, there just sounds that I know aren't in the real world, but they're not like super heavy experiences. Okay. I got you. So tell me about this UFO experience that you had. This was about 2011, 2012. You know, I'm really into fishing at the time. I can't catch anything to save my life.

I go fishing for carp with my dad. Once, you know, I, of course, don't catch any things. I'm out there from maybe late afternoon to early evening and we're coming back home. He's driving. I'm in the passenger seat. I'm kind of, you know, not really paying too much attention. I'm, you know, obviously bummed. I didn't catch anything.

We live in a subdivision outside of Moses Lake and I'm kind of, I'm just looking around. I look out the window and the sky is still kind of blue, but it's starting to kind of turn a little bit. You know, when you can kind of vaguely see the other colors, but you're not sure if they're there. And there's this round, it looks like there's a hole in the sky. And it's this weird kind of bright,

light orange color and it looked it looked like maybe there was a between where this thing opened to where it ended and there were two like must have been the size of my little bit of my hands

cross beams in there and it was over this house with a great big driveway and there's two girls looking up at it I have no clue what this is I tell my dad I tell him to turn around

because I want to see what this is. I'm thinking maybe it's one of those Chinese lanterns, although having crossbeams that wide would be weird, I would think. So we turn around and we drive back and this thing is nowhere to be seen. And I've seen pictures of Chinese lanterns.

It doesn't really look like what I saw. It was just one of the most bewildering things I've ever seen. It was almost as though like if you had a feeling painted the color of the sky and then you just had a white fixture in it, like one of those concave light pictures. It was, I can't really think of any other way to describe it. It was the most bizarre thing I've ever seen.

Did it make any sound? I did not hear anything. The window was closed and we had the radio on, so I didn't hear anything. There wasn't anything over that. And there is, like, there is, like, a Grant County internet. national airports. So we do get helicopters and planes, and you can usually hear those over the radio, but this made no sound at all. Well, I mean, what do you think about that? I mean, with UFOs and that kind of phenomenon, obviously it's grabbed you enough that you're still thinking about it

today and talking about it. What do you think they are? I mean, do you think they're extraterrestrial, interdimensional, governmental? What do you think? I used to, like, back when I was a believer, So I mentioned the email that I'm a skeptic, which is ironic. Yeah. I used to think that they were aliens. They're coming to Earth. And I don't know. Like, I just don't have enough information.

I think all the hypotheses are pretty cool. But, you know, I'm pretty logical in my thinking. And I don't necessarily think I have to have an answer for this. I would love to know. Right now, I'm leaning a bit towards that's it. I don't know. That's fine. That's fine.

And we're going to get into the skeptic part of you in a few seconds. What I want to know is you have had some paranormal experiences here that we're going to get into. And I just, like, for somebody who experienced it, I want to get into the mind of why you're still a skeptic. And we'll get into that in a few minutes here. But first, tell us about some of these shadow people you see because I don't know when it started, but even to this day, you said that you're seeing the shadow people. Yeah, so shadow people started when I was, again, in Trinity College, it seemed to have been an important paranormal milepost for me, apparently.

Me and one of my friends at the time, we were playing with her Ouija board, and we didn't get it to work. And so I'm walking home from her house. She lived maybe two or three houses down, and I come across the, it's a night, right? In my parents' house, we have these two garage lights and I turn and I'm minding my own business. And I see these two like big shadows with no obvious cause racing across the Vaughn. There's no sound. If you've seen Dream Catcher, the movie, it looks like Mr. Gray when it's like that big slug thing.

At the time I was freaked out because I had never seen these things before. and it's kind of happened ever since. I've seen them running across roads. I'm driving home late at night. It used to be really kind of this creepy, weird thing that freaked me out. But again, like the exploding head syndrome, I've had this happen to me enough where I just kind of ignore it. The vast time that they were really kind of predominant in my life was

I was finishing up my undergraduate degree and I was working really hard and really kind of trying to get stuff done and I would see these black shapes moving in my peripheral vision and at the time I was doing undergraduate research with lizards and I swear to you, the only reason these things caught my eye at that point was I thought there were two-foot-long lizards running across my bedroom floor and so I turned to see what it was, and there would be nothing there. But these things looked like they had actual substance to them.

So these shadow figures that we'll call them, is there any chance now, like the first one you mentioned, you were driving, right? The first one I was walking home. Walking. From friends of us, I've seen them when I was driving, yes. How fast were you moving? I mean, how fast were they moving, I should say? Like, I mean, are we talking like a second, two seconds?

Let's see if I can put this in. So if I had to describe them, like, if you just scared a cat and they kind of bolt across the room, it was about that fast. And really, they're like, they're kind of in front of the lights, like directly in front of the lights. But so if there was a cat, I would have seen it. And I saw like no actual body that I could discern. I saw no cat or dog or whatever. I just saw the shadows. That's interesting.

A lot of people see these shadow figures and stuff and of all shapes and sizes. I haven't even heard of these shadow figures over in South Jersey in the Pine Barrens. And this guy who was towed on my truck because I had broken down at work. And he told me that he had seen on the other side of a lake that they were at at night some shadow. It was like the way he described, I think it was like 20, 30 feet high. It was very, very, very large. And when they shine their flashlights on it, he said that the lights, seemed to the light from their flashlight

seemed to be consumed by the shadow. It didn't eliminate the shadow. It's like the shadow eliminated the light as the light hit it. And it's just very odd, very odd. And, you know, I don't expect you to believe because you're a skeptic, but no, I'm just kidding. No, that's definitely a cool story.

And it does rip it, like, when I've had these more robust shadow person experiences, it does seem like there's some very definite substance there. while at the same time being this shadow, it's hard to explain. You kind of have to have had to have seen it to get the point. LPIDA said I've got to come off the bench. Yep.

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They will get back to you and start the process of your custom design. Now, you mentioned a Ouija board earlier and stuff, but you have something to do with a Ouija board in a closet and pounding on a door or the floor or something like that. Oh, what happened there? What was that all about? So this was when I was with my ex-wife about a decade ago. Did you want just that? Because it's kind of part of a bigger story. Did you want the bigger story or just the Ouija board experience? You can give us the whole big story. Okay, so I'm moving with my ex-wife.

The time I'm kind of converting to Mormonism. And so it's this weird kind of odd spiritual time for me. I bring the Ouija board that I used with my friend. I bring with me, she doesn't really like it. So we put it in a closet. I, of course, don't think they work, so I don't really mind it. I come home, and I'm looking through the closet. I realize this Ouija board is gone.

And I'm like, hey, where's the Ouija board? My ex-wife had moved it because, well, she was getting ready for work. The closet that we kept it in was, there was. the wall between that and the bathroom of our apartment, she was hearing pounding on the bathroom wall from that direction. And it apparently wouldn't stop. And it creeped her out enough that she kind of got rid of it. And I haven't bought one sense. What do you think about Ouija boards? I mean, do you think there's something to them or is it more of a frag, not a fragmentation, but something that our minds kind of almost play tricks on us. And it's not really actually

happening, but we're expecting it to happen, so it happens to us. The word for this, I cannot remember what it's called. So forgive me, but it's like a subconscious effect, right? So what I've read is that you're, you know, using the Ouija board and you ask questions like when I saw it work in, when I was a child at Walmart, one of my friends goes, what's my favorite number? And then, of course, it tells them his favorite number. And one of the things that I've read over the years is that there's this effect that the brain does where it subconsciously moves your hands.

And so you're supplying what I read is you're supplying the answer, but you're unaware of you're doing it. Kind of like when you're, it's kind of like when you're unaware of you're breathing and you suddenly become aware of it, right? And you're like, how does my brain do this? It's kind of the same issue. That's kind of what I lean towards just based on what I've read in skeptical literature and my own experiences. If it doesn't work that way, then just, you know, that'd be neat, but I'm afraid that I don't, can't bring myself to believe that. You can't bring yourself to believe what? That it works the way people suspect it works? Yeah, like, it's like angels or demons or your dead loved ones. Like, I would love if you could actually talk to your dead loved ones because we all kind of wanted to say goodbye. But I just knowing how the brain works, I find the, it's your brain.

kind of doing this thing you don't know what does to be more reasonable to me. Well, you know, you said something interesting there, and this is just a very generalization, but you did say, just said that, you know, we all wish that we could talk to our dead loved ones. So, as, you know, you've listened to the show, I'm a Christian, and as a Christian, I believe that there's a heaven and a hell. And if my dead loved one, you know, you know, you've listened to the show, I'm a Christian, and as a Christian, you know, is in heaven. Do I really want to pull them away from something so amazing like heaven to talk to me? And also on the flip side of things, if I have a dead loved one that's in hell, do I really want

to pull them away from that? And my lasting image or my lasting whatever conversation with them is them describing to me with the torture that they're going through? I don't think I do. I don't think I do. Yeah, I know. I can definitely get that. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, it's, I think it's just this drive that people don't like to say goodbye. I know. They definitely don't like really hard change. And so it's just, you know, I'd love it if I could say goodbye to my grandpa who was really cool. I was there when he died or got the right after he died. It spent the last couple days with them. But, you know, I'd still like to have that one mass conversation.

It'd be really cool if a Ouija board could do that. I just sadly don't think that's the case. Yeah, I don't, I believe that Ouija boards, there's more to Ouija boards than probably you believe, but I do believe that I don't think that if you even get through, well, I can't even say that. I just don't know. I just don't know. But I, you know, I feel, I feel for you in the sense that, like, I got to say goodbye to my grandfather, both of them. My one grandfather, my dad's dad, I was really, really close with that. I mean, I love that man. And I was there the night that he passed away. I left. you know, before he had passed. But I mean, he was dying of cancer and he was just really, I mean, skin and bones and just really gone, you know. And so I was able to put, you know, I was able to come and say goodbye to him. And I knew he knew I was there. He took my hand and he held it as tight as he could. And even, even having that moment where I know there was closure, he died that night. And I said goodbye. I told him I loved him. I said some, you know, whatever, private personal things to him. And even though that happened, I'm still torn inside

that I didn't get to have another conversation with him, that there were times that I could have had conversations with him, but I didn't make time for it. And those are things that you don't think about until the person's gone. And you start realizing, man, I wish he was still here right now. and then you start thinking, how much time did I waste when I could have been focused more on just the people around me? And it's not just with my grandfather, but it's just in general. I mean, how many times do we go through life and we get so caught up in the motions of we have to go to work? We have to do this. We have to take the kids places, all that stuff.

And we forget to focus on the people around us and make every moment as possibly impactful as possible. You know what I mean? like every moment that you have with people that you love, are we wasting those moments on frivolous things that really don't matter in the grand scheme of time? And are we going to look back at life when they're gone and say, damn,

I wish I would have spent more time with them. You know what I mean? I think it's kind of the, like if you give a job interview and you always kind of walk out and go, oh, why didn't I ask this question? I'm going to make you look really good, right? So there's one more question that you want to ask.

So even if you asked every question, you said everything you wanted to, there was always that one making thought that just got there too late. But to continue on with the story. So, well, I'm with my ex-wife. We're still in that apartment. You know, this is why I'm talking to the LDS missionaries and going to church and figuring all this stuff out. You know, we're laying in bed one night.

So I'm on the side of the bed that's facing like one of those kind of quote unquote walk-in closets. It's like really, really small, but you can technically kind of, it's bigger than like a standard closet by like a little bit. We had this, we had the top pretty packed full of stuff in storage, and there's a small TV up there, and I'm laying in bed and we're going to sleep, and my ex-wife says, hey, I'll roll over. I want to talk to you, right?

I think it was probably something about me converting to the faith. or something. So I was like in the kind of fetal position. So I turn over and we're talking and then we hear this kind of this creek from the closet. Like something's moving and then the TV falls out and kind of lands glass side first where my knees had been maybe a minute or two before. and it was probably a good two and a half might have been four. I'm not quite sure of the distance, but it wasn't super close.

It had to go quite a bit to the bed. So looking back, it doesn't seem like it had simply fallen, especially given how we packed stuff up there pretty tight. Of course, kind of wakes us up. At the time we had a little gray Persian cat. We thought, maybe the cat got it up there. That's what it must have been. It must have been the cat.

So I get up and I go find the cat. And the cat is on the window still looking out at the parking lot. And I don't know if any of your listeners have ever had cats, but they're pretty small. If you pick them up, you can essentially feel our heartbeat. And man, when I picked this cat up, it was the calmest cat you've ever seen. so it was not the cat and when we last checked that TV was securely in the closet

so that that freaked me out a little bit so I of course couldn't get back to sleep so I'm you know in the bathroom I'm you know wasting time and I hear what sounds like somebody talking in the front room I'm kind of listening to this

and it's maybe about maybe two in the morning or so, I want to say. It was late at night. I know that much. I hear this talking, and I think it's my ex-wife, because she kind of did occasionally

talking to her sleep. So I'm like, hey, are you talking? And I hear, no. No, I'm not talking. Meanwhile, what sounds like now two voices are now whispering in the front room. And I go,

do you hear somebody talking? My ex-wife tells me she does not hear a thing. And when I heard these whispers, the ambience of the air went from like a apartment at night to kind of like, not quite like there's going to be a thunderstorm,

but you know how you have that kind of the feeling of like the dense kind of, the air where you can kind of feel like, it feels like there's something kind of extra. That makes any sense. And so I walk out in the front room and there's nothing there. nothing's been

touched, nothing's been moved. The cat is again as calm as a cucumber, so if there was anything in this room, the cat certainly didn't mind. And then I didn't hear me again, I went to bed and I never heard those voices again. It was the weirdest thing. It was that same night that the television fell,

which the two together, maybe a half hour apart, was super intense. And that's one of the things that stuck with me definitely the longest. all that you've still come out as a skeptic, right? Yes, I do. I mean, at the time I didn't, the time I'm like, these are the, you know, the sons of perdition, like the LDS version of a demon, essentially.

They're trying to keep me from becoming baptized and saved, but, you know, looking back now, I definitely probably have a different opinion of what I heard. but it was creepy nonetheless. Definitely creepy. Definitely, definitely creepy. So you said to me that you might have seen a black-eyed person. Talk to me about that. Yes. Again, about 2011. It also ties in with what feels like a prophetic dream. So I'll tell the stories together.

And I'm at Walmart. My son is, I think he's two or maybe at most three at the time. Two. He's two. Sorry, I'm not great at Mass. So we're shopping at Walmart. He's in the cart. You know, I'm trying to keep him from putting all these dirty things I put in the cart into his mouth as a parent is want to do. And we're, I remember specifically we were heading towards the front of the store on one of those big, boulevardish aisles where they have like the different crates of whatever.

and they're heading towards the health and beauty section. My son, you know, he gets something in his mouth. So I stop and I'm maybe 20 feet from this, you know, health and beauty section. I get it out of his mouth. I'm, you know, chastising you can't do that, put out of your mouth, you're going to get sick. He doesn't know what I'm talking about because he's two. I look up and I kid you not, I see this person at the back wall, maybe 200 feet away

and it is the same height the exact same clothes same hair same skin tone as my high set to where her eyes are there's these it's extremely shadowy and it looks wrong kind of this very

uncanny valley it was just enough like a regular person I was like oh hey there's a person there but then when I look at it more my brain was like uh dude this is kind of weird you know, maybe looked at this black eyed

incarnation of somebody I used to know for me about five seconds before I just kind of left because, you know, at the same time I'm getting sick. All I want to do is leave. And again, at the time, I'm just like, this is, that was kind of weird. I didn't really think too much about it.

And then I go home, I get more sick. I'm hopped up on cough medicine You know The kind of sick where you would just kind of rather die And I Go to sleep one night And I'm

Have this dream where I'm on like This stereotypical city bus You know like the The cheap leather Toll leather seats and like the big The metal bar on top of the seats And I'm kind of sitting there in the stream and a person in front of me turns around my, again, my high school sweetheart.

But, you know, this time she looks normal. There's no black eyes or nothing. And she tells me that her and her boyfriend are getting married. Or, yeah, are getting married. And I'm kind of, I don't remember what I said in the conversation. All I remember was that she told me she was getting married and I had this, like, emotional response because, of course I did. And then I wake up and I think, oh, that was a really kind of specific dream. Okay.

And because this will become a point that is important. I am on Facebook, but I'm not friends with this person on Facebook. She adds me a couple days later. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, you know, what a coincidence, as I usually say. And then a couple days after that, she posts just two words, we're engaged. And it was like the weirdest thing. I'm just like, that's a bit too weird for a coincidence.

I mean, I still, to this day will tell you it's probably coincidence, but it still felt like really twin peaks kind of a thing going on there. Yeah, that's strange. That's just strange. Wow. I wonder what was going on there. Did you ever talk to her about it at all? Over a decade ago.

So I figured if I went on Facebook and brought this up, like, hey, you weren't. the dream where you told me you were getting married, it would, I would get very funny looks and probably unfriended. Yeah, like weirdo. Weird thing, but yeah. Yeah, it was, that's like the only really, quote unquote, prophetic dream I've ever had, but I do get like many, many instances of deja vu, like probably more than I should be getting. I don't know what that's worth, but there it is.

Definitely interesting. I wanted to ask you you know, you mentioned to me that you had heard a big loud boom on the roof of a house. Is that the same house that you guys had the Ouija board experience in?

No, that is not. That's my parents' house. That's where we had, like, the horse winning stuff. Which, coincidentally, this is going to sound like I'm making it up because it's one of those stories. When we moved into the house, It was my front door neighbor's parents.

My front door neighbor was also my dentist. It was a small town at the time. He, the wife's father had died in that house. Allegedly, that's what I was told. Apparently, the mother went out for, or the wife went out for milk, came back, and her husband had passed away. That's the story I was told. Kind of makes everything slightly creepier, or depending on how you look. at it.

So yeah, with the loud boom on the house, it was a really windy night, right? And we have this, my neighbors have this super tall, I think it's ponderosa pine. It's like one of the really tall, really big trees up here in the Pacific Northwest. And this thing,

this tree leans over, so we're constantly kind of worried about you know, one of these days, a big strong wind is going to, you know, crash it down onto our property. But yeah, there's a strong wind, which happens every once in a mile out here in Moses Lake, and we don't think anything of it. We're all going to bed. I remember I was laying in bed. I think I just stopped reading and just turned off the lights.

And next thing, we all know, there's just this huge shakes the walls. It rattles the windows. We kind of think this tree has fallen on our roof. Like, this is it. The tree has fallen. We don't have to go do all this, you know, home renovation insurance stuff because this is the storm. So me and my dad, we go outside and the wind's going. We don't, the tree is still standing up, right?

We don't see, you know, we have pretty powerful flashlights at the time. So we're checking out, we're scoping out the roof. There's nothing on the roof. There's no signs of damage. The next day, I believe we checked. and there was nothing wrong. Nothing needed to be fixed, but we cannot, to this day,

explain why there was that ginormous boom on our roof. And I read stories online where it's happened to other people and it was just like the weirdest thing. Yeah, and I'm assuming you went outside to investigate and there weren't like branches that could have made that. No, everything was normal.

There was nothing on the roof. There were no branches. Because, I mean, this probably wouldn't, I get this. This would not have been a branch. This was like too big and too heavy. Like this sounded like something big and extremely dense fill in our house. And there was nothing.

Interesting. Very interesting. So I wanted to ask you before we get out of here about the vocalization that you heard in the woods that reminded you of episode 460 from, I don't know, this past, this podcast called Sasquatch Chronicles. I've never heard of it, but I guess you're talking about it. You know, you have to wear a lot of flannel and have really thick plastic glasses to know what it is. Yeah.

Yeah, so this is up by Lake Wenatchie. It was the Wenatchie National Forest. It's up by this little tiny lake called Hidden Lake. You have to walk like two or three miles to get to it. And this was when I was going through my divorce, so I was spending a lot of time alone. now, you know, there are bears and cougars up there, so I'm up there alone hiking. I'm like, I'm going to stay the night out here. Probably not my smartest idea.

So I'm kind of, I've, you know, been sitting there kind of just watching the lake, reading, just kind of trying to decompress from all the stress in my life at that point. And I hear sounds like, I want to say kind of, People hollering, but there's nobody around to be hollering. It was this kind of high-pitched, well, moderately high-pitched, distant. I don't try to describe it, I don't think I can. It was, oh, boy, it sounded like, it sounded like, it sounded like a man yelling, but given how far away it sounded and how loud it must have been,

I can't see how it would have been a man. More than one. I heard it from, I heard like a response call from across the lake, which mind you, this lake is more of a glorified pond, really. But I heard two of them for about maybe 10 minutes, and I was,

nope, I'm not going to stay up here by myself overnight. Nope, mm-mm. I packed up and I left. So I just, you know, I was, you know, walked back to the car that night, all my stuff, and it was a very uneasy hike. You know, it's two or three miles by myself that night because when I heard it, the sun was

literally going down. You know, it was creepy. With you, you know, you listen to Sasquatch Chronicles, you listen to my show, you heard that howl or whatever it was, and what do you think, though? I mean, what do you think it was, do you think there's a natural explanation to it, or do you think it could have been something like a Bigfoot? And do you even believe in Bigfoot? As somebody who's more skeptical, do you believe in Bigfoot? Even though, you know, you listen to my show, you listen to his show, doesn't mean you actually believe in what people are saying. I would love to believe Bigfoot is real, but I'm sadly, like, when I was a kid, my, like, one of my clearest memories is I did not tell

anybody what I wanted for Christmas because I wanted to find out that Santa was real. So I wrote a letter and then didn't show anybody and that's how I found out he wasn't real. Wow. So I would love it if I would love it if Bigfoot was real, but I'm going to need, you know, that type specimen because I've had conversations and, you know, if we assume that there's at least one undiscovered large creature out there, maybe it was Bigfoot, but then again, maybe there's Bigfoot and something else. what if it's, you know, like the whole known, known unknowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, right? How would I know what I heard? I just can't really put my finger on it. Yeah.

It sounds like kind of the Bigfoot screams that I've heard on Wes's show, but it definitely sounded more, it was definitely like a primate howl, like a primate vocalization. And since this was a national kind of part where people go to have fun, I can't say, it was 100% that, hey, it was not a person, but I can't see a person being heard from that far away. Because it sounded relatively distant. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you have a good head on your shoulders and you're trying to think of things as logically as possible and stuff. But yet, the paranormal does definitely interest you if you listen to my show and Wes's show. So it's something... Good.

Apparently, it's very interested in me as well. I just kind of get the feeling. Yeah, so I think, you know, my, my, uh, broad assessment of you is I think you're a closet believer. You just, I think you, well, even said it. You said you want to believe, but so, uh, you know, maybe one of these days, you'll, you'll have something that kind of pushes you over the edge. But until then, I think it's a good idea for you to just be a healthy skeptic. I mean, that's, that's what I suggest for everybody. I mean, even with myself, I believe in a lot of things, uh, but I tried to approach every show with just, um,

just, you know, a healthy mindset of, you know, what else could it be or, you know, different things like that. I know there's a lot of different experiences that we have on this show and not everybody's going to believe everything that is said on the show. And that's fine. It's just one of those things where we're talking about some crazy, crazy stuff that's going on and people are just sharing their experiences on how they view things. So, Troy, man, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing these experiences. And, well, brother, take care. Yeah, you too, man. Thanks for having me.

Well, that's the show, everybody. I really hope you enjoyed it. And if you did enjoy it, please share the show with your friends, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, email, watercoolers. I don't care how you share the show. But if you enjoyed it, please share the show with your friends because that is the best thing you can do to help the show grow. And if you've been thinking about becoming a member, it might be a good time because

of this coronavirus episode we're going to be doing. We're going to call it depopulation operation COVID-19. And we're going to do a live show on it with a live call-in number. but only half the show is going to be available to the public. The second half of the show is for members only, and we're going to be doing that on March 7th. So just mark your calendars because this is going to be a good show, I believe, especially if you guys that have opinions about this, call in and add to the conversation. All right, friends, well, stay safe, take care, and remember, the truth was such a free, but first, it will piss you off. Bye.

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