August 25, 2020 • 16 mins
George Noory and paranormal investigator Jeff Belanger discuss some of his personal experiences at haunted sites across the country, including the Lizzie Borden murder house, the haunted Queen Mary ship and a haunted prison.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norty
with you. Jeff Mellinger back with us. Jeff jumped into
the unexplained and leads a very haunted life himself. He's
been fascinated with the supernatural since he was ten, and
over the years, Jeff has interviewed hundreds of people about
(00:20):
the experiences with an approach to the subject that truly
makes the supernatural accessible to a wide group of people.
He's the writer researcher for the Ghost Adventure series on
the Travel Channel. He hosts the online talk show thirty
odd Minutes. He will be part of a stream, a
four day stream event which starts August twenty eighth. You've
(00:43):
heard it on the show before, the Lizzie Borden Murder House.
That's going to be Friday through Monday starting this Friday,
the August twenty eighth. Will tell you more about it,
but you can get information at dark Zone dot tv.
Dark Zone dot tv. Jeffrey, Welcome back to the program. George.
Always a pleasure to talk to you. Boy. This Lizzie
(01:04):
Borden thing is going to be spooky. So I live
less than an hour from Fall River, Massachusetts, and I
have been to this house many many times over the years,
and this is a cool thing. We did this back
at the Conjuring House of a couple months ago, and
the whole idea was raw locked inside. Let's put cameras
on twenty four seven, bring in different people who know
(01:24):
the case and stream it and let people have just
round the clock access. So that's the idea with the
dark zone, and we're doing it again this time at
the Lizzie Borden house. Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave
her mother forty wax what she saw what she had done,
gave her father forty one. We teach that to our
kids here in Massachusetts. She got acquitted. No, I love it.
(01:47):
It's not any worse than ring around the rosie, right,
that's about dying from the place. Why did she get
acquitted in this thing? And here's the thing. If anyone
is interested in this case, all the court transcripts are
up online for free. You can sit and read them
for hours. You can read everything. You can read her depositions,
you can read her interviews. The best I can come
up with is that the all male jury figured there's
(02:11):
no way a woman would be capable of such a crime, unbelieving.
Now there was another person in the house at the
time too, wasn't there, Bridget the Maid? And if have
you been to the house, George, we ever had the chance,
I would not go in there if you paid me. Jack,
come on, So okay, first of all, it's not like
something I'll watch it on the stream. That'll be good
enough for me. Well you'll see that it is not
(02:32):
that large of a house. I mean, you know, it's
bigger than my house, but it's not like a breaker's
mansion in Newport. And all I can think of is
if you were on the third floor, which allegedly Bridget
the Maid was, and someone is getting hacked to death
with an axe one floor below you, I don't know
how you wouldn't hear that and at least come around
the corner and say, hey, everything okay? Exactly was And
(02:55):
her father was a wealthy banker too, wasn't he he was?
And he was home taking an app on the couch
and never got up that you know, he met his
end right there. And Lizzie claims in the span of
just maybe fifteen twenty minutes while she was out back
picking pears and then going up into the barn to
get some fishing weights together for a fishing trip she
(03:16):
was taking in a couple of weeks. Someone went into
the house, stole nothing, murdered two people, and then quietly
left violently. You would think if there was going to
be a murder, they do it and get out quick. No,
they wouldn't whack somebody forty times. It was balanced and
it was like eighteen but still that didn't work for
the nursery rhyme. But yes, it was a crime of passion.
(03:37):
And anyone who has watched even one episode of any
CSI knows when you've got no sign of struggle, no
sign of a break in, nothing stolen, it's obvious that
these victims knew their killers. Yeah, absolutely clearly. We'll come
back to the Lizzie Board thing and you can tell
us about Dark Zone they've been sponsoring. I've been hearing
them on our program. Yeah, they've been a matter of fact,
(03:59):
they have a couple spots next hours, so we'll listen
to that too, And yeah, good, pretty innovative. And we're
all stuck inside. We can't go investigate personally, but we
can do this. You and I went to the Eastern
State Penitentiary with Tom dan Heiser in Philadelphia. Remember that,
I remember doing prison time with you. Of course you didn't.
(04:21):
You have a computer with you. We had all kinds
of stuff with us, and one of the tools we
were using was it was called the x cam at
the time. I don't even know what they're calling it now,
but it's what it is, basically is it looks into
the infrared part of the spectrum and it looks for people.
This is Microsoft technology that's open source. Anybody can go
(04:42):
downloaded because they you know, the game the connected system
that you put yourself into video games. People, they allow
that out there so you can develop games. The software
was used in order to look into the infrared part
of the spectrum and look for people. That's what the
software does. And once in a while, something turns up
(05:04):
that you don't see in the environment, and the software
is just doing what it does, it's looking for people.
And that was intriguing, right, I mean, so when when
something turns up that's not there or not or you know,
you see a living person and then next to it
another one, you start to scratch your head. This was
developed by an engineer named Bill Chappell. We've used it
(05:25):
on Ghost Adventures and now you've seen it on just
about every paranormal TV show. But way back then that
that was the first you know, versions of this new system. Well,
it was strange being an al capone cell. It was
just a weird feeling. Yeah, not all prisoners are created equal,
are they? How many years was he in there? Twelve
(05:46):
something like that. I don't know, but I don't know,
but just to set it up when when you go
into Eastern State, it's the design is incredible, right, So
it's like a wagon wheel, meaning if you're in the
middle where the guards were, you three or four people
could stand back to back and you could see the
entire prison. You could look down all the hallways and
keep track of things. Really intelligent design. And this is
(06:09):
where we get the word penitent right, penitentiary comes from
Eastern State because back then, before Eastern State prisons were
I mean they were they're still awful places, but back
then they put everybody into one big courtyard. I mean
you had debtors and you had petty thieves, and you
had murderers and rapists in all in one area, and
(06:29):
it was just so incredibly dangerous for everyone. But at
Eastern State they said this will be different. Everything was
supposed to be solitary confinement. There was a window, a
slit in the top so you could look out into
the sky and you could pray to God and be
penitent for your sins. You talk to no one. If
they had to move you from one cell to another,
(06:50):
they would put a mask over your face so you
couldn't see any people at all. It was unlike anything
that had ever been done before. Now that of course
is like spending years and solitary confinement, which is maddening
at the same time. But it was different, right, They
were trying to do something different, and that I believe
leaves a mark. It leaves a stain, and when you
(07:10):
walk through there you could feel it. I mean you remember, right,
we were there at night. Oh yeah, it was weird.
It's very weird. And of course you start your mind
starts to wander too, well, who was in here? I mean,
we know Capone and Capone's cell was different from all
these these wings, right, it was off on its own.
It had a nice, nice furniture. They used to keep
(07:30):
the door open for him so he could kind of
come and go, not outside of the prison grounds, but
come and go outside of his cell because he was
al capone. But yeah, the rest of it though, that
was just a place where, you know, we keep the
worst of society. And when you walk through, I don't
know if you remember some of those cell blocks where
you could walk down the middle and you can kind
(07:51):
of see where you're going, but you look to your
left and your right and you see these cell doors
and some are open, and it's just blacker than black
in there. You know, it's just so so dark, and
you you just you wonder who was in there, who
was in that one, what did they do? And that
makes us connect to this location. We understand its history,
we understand its purpose, and it just takes it to
(08:14):
a dark place. A couple of years prior to that, Jeffrey,
we all hooked up at the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California,
we did. And that's a very different kind of haunt,
isn't it. I mean pretty different from a prison. Yeah,
the Queen Mary is one of those places that I
think you just keep coming back to. You know, it's
number one, what I love about it. It's kind of
(08:36):
like the Lizzie Bordenhouse. When you walk on to the
Queen Mary, you're stepping back in time. You're you're you
can forget what year it is. You're back in the
nineteen thirties on a transatlantic ocean liner. Yeah, you feel
like you're on the Titanic. Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah. You
go up to the observation bar and you have like
a sidecar or an old fashioned something you'd never drink
anywhere else, right, You just you say, yeah, this makes
(08:57):
sense here, and you walk down those old hallways and
you can just imagine this is exactly what it looked
like nineteen thirty one when it made its maiden voyage,
built to hold three thousand passengers comfortably, which of course
would make it a dwarf today compared to some of
the modern cruise ships. But back then this was a
(09:18):
state of the art. But it was short lived, right,
I mean, the reason this place is so haunted is
because it didn't make it as a ocean liner very long.
It got pressed into service during World War Two to
become a troop ship. That's right. It carried thousands of
troops all over the place. So remember I said three
thousand passengers, that's what it was built to hold passengers
(09:39):
and crew. In nineteen forty two she was painted gray.
They called her the Gray Ghost, and at its max,
Queen Mary carried sixteen thousand, six hundred and eighty three
troops at once. Why would it be haunted? Jeffrey? So
during World War Two, so many things happened when you
had sixteen thousand plus on deck on the ship. Rather,
(10:03):
you had to take eight hour shifts, eight hours in
a bunk, eight hours just standing on deck because there's
nowhere to put you, eight hours doing work of some kind.
It was just packed, and the ship had to run
these zig zag patterns to evade the German U boats,
always moving, never stopping. And the Queen Mary had what
a target? God? Well, right, I mean yes, imagine taking
(10:24):
out sixteen thousand troops in one shot and obviously not
well armed. It's a cruise ship. So on October two,
nineteen forty two, the Queen Mary's Mary's running these zigzag
patterns and the Sirocco is her escort ship, and through
some mishap, the Sirocco gets in the way of the
Queen Mary and the Queen Mary cuts through the much
smaller ship, sinking it almost instantly. Three hundred and thirty
(10:48):
eight men go into the ocean, and the worst part
is the Queen Mary can't stop to help. They all died,
every one of them. And that's what life was like
during World War Two. That's what life was like on
that ship. And that's just one event. Of course, they
had POW's on there. Some who died on the ship.
There were accidents and things like that. It's just got
(11:09):
so much life and history moving through it that I
believe it's still kind of echoes. And some non troops
died there when it was the luxury cruise liner. Right.
Of course, people have heart attacks, people have accidents. There
was an accident down in the engine room. The doors.
I don't know if you remember being down there, but
these doors are made to seal shut in the case
(11:31):
of some sort of leak, right, they have to become
air tight. They got to protect the ship, of course,
But if you get in the way of that mechanism
as it's closing, which one person did down in the
engine room, you literally could be cut in half. And
this that did happen to one of the crewmen. And
that's one of the events that haunts down there. And
I'll tell you, I don't know if you were you
get to be down down there during the investigation part
(11:54):
for that one section, But you're down there in the
engine room and you're looking up at all this almost
century old rusted metal all around you. It's you know,
it's it's very heavy, it's old. It's a creaky ship.
It's it's creaking and groaning. It talks, you know, and
you feel it and you connect to it, and you say, wow,
this is where so much happened, so much history took
(12:19):
place right where I'm standing. And that's that's my That's
the thing I'm most passionate about when it comes to
looking at haunts all over the world, but especially here
in America, is maybe I have an ancestor who is
on the ship at one point. Maybe maybe right all
these connections. Why do you keep doing what you do? Jeff?
I mean you are into this in a big, big way. Yeah,
(12:42):
somehow I turned it into a career, which is just amazing. Right.
One of your biles that I had seen years ago said,
you're obsessed with the un explained. I think I am
because These are the biggest questions we've ever asked. Right,
is their life after death? I'm not the first to
ask it, You're not the first. This goes back thousands
(13:02):
and thousands of years and endless generations. What happens after
we die? Why is it important that we preserve our history?
Why do we need to connect to it? I believe
that there's some lesson, right, These are sermons from our
own past related to us, lessons that we haven't learned yet.
And every one of these buildings has some lesson to
(13:24):
teach us. And I love that connection because when you
go into a haunted place, you're connecting with that building.
It's history, it's a community. And when we share these stories,
we're connecting with each other. And that's the key, right, absolutely, Yeah.
I mean we get to snap out all the weird
dogmas and rules of religion and just talk about one thing.
(13:44):
It's haunted, and if you believe it's haunted, if you
believe in ghosts as I do, then you must believe
in some sort of afterlife. And from there we can
argue and you do whatever. But before that, before we
start arguing, let's just break it down to that one
simple conclusion, what was the supernatural experience when you were ten?
So when I was ten, it started because I grew
(14:07):
up in Newtown, Connecticut, and it's a great historic, little
old town. It was the town next to Ed Lorraine Warren,
who lived in Monroe. I knew them since I was
about twelve years old and their stories. But I had
a buddy who lived just down the street. His house
was built in seventeen sixty, right, His house was older
than America, and we would have sleepovers and he said, oh,
(14:27):
by the way, it's haunted. I said, what do you
mean it's haunted. He said, well, there's this old guy
that seems to live here with us. He's not heard
in anything. He just kind of walks down the hall
and disappears. And I was intrigued. And his parents said, yeah, look,
please don't tell your parents. They'll think we're crazy. I'll
have it blocked up, you know. But it was so
matter of fact, it was so not dangerous or they
(14:49):
didn't even seem all that frightened. And I'm saying, can
I live here for a week. I want to see
this for myself. I want to connect to it. And
that sort of started me on this path. And then
in a town like that, I had other friends and say, oh,
my house is haunted too. Of course it is. It's
it's you know, two hundred years old. And I thought, well,
what does that mean? I was raised Catholic, you know,
(15:09):
And uh, I had that's that's the baggage I carrying.
And I said, well, where'd ghosts fit in? Father birds?
You know? And then he would say, well, you know,
there's a lot we don't fully understand. God bless him.
He was very open minded. And uh, and I think
just that started me on this journey of wanting to
see it for myself. And that's still you know what
(15:29):
I'm doing all these years later. I mean, you have
turned it into a career, haven't you. Yeah right, I
mean that the career started. I mean I went full
time in two thousand and four, so sixteen years ago.
I was able to to make the leap and just
just do this. And it was never a career that
you plan, you know. I think sometimes it finds you.
You know. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted
(15:50):
to do that that I knew, and I was writing
for newspapers and magazines and uh, and then eventually I
got my first book deal, and then I started working
on TV projects and things like that, and I think
I woke up one day and I just said, oh
my goodness, this is my job now. And that called
my mom. I said, hey, Mom, guess what I do.
You know our colleague Dave Schrader he loves this stuff too.
(16:12):
Oh I know. Yeah, I've known Dave for years. And
yeah the Queen Mary. Wasn't that his event? Where where
we got to? I think so, yeah, that was one
of his events there. Yeah, it's and it's such a
great way to connect with people that are also asking questions,
like inquisitive minds who want to know, are we alone
in the universe? What happens after we die? What's one
(16:33):
of the creatures that walk to the earth with us?
These are the big ones. Listen to more Coast to
Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go
to Coast to Coast am dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norty
with you. Jeff Mellinger back with us. Jeff jumped into
the unexplained and leads a very haunted life himself. He's
been fascinated with the supernatural since he was ten, and
over the years, Jeff has interviewed hundreds of people about
(00:20):
the experiences with an approach to the subject that truly
makes the supernatural accessible to a wide group of people.
He's the writer researcher for the Ghost Adventure series on
the Travel Channel. He hosts the online talk show thirty
odd Minutes. He will be part of a stream, a
four day stream event which starts August twenty eighth. You've
(00:43):
heard it on the show before, the Lizzie Borden Murder House.
That's going to be Friday through Monday starting this Friday,
the August twenty eighth. Will tell you more about it,
but you can get information at dark Zone dot tv.
Dark Zone dot tv. Jeffrey, Welcome back to the program. George.
Always a pleasure to talk to you. Boy. This Lizzie
(01:04):
Borden thing is going to be spooky. So I live
less than an hour from Fall River, Massachusetts, and I
have been to this house many many times over the years,
and this is a cool thing. We did this back
at the Conjuring House of a couple months ago, and
the whole idea was raw locked inside. Let's put cameras
on twenty four seven, bring in different people who know
(01:24):
the case and stream it and let people have just
round the clock access. So that's the idea with the
dark zone, and we're doing it again this time at
the Lizzie Borden house. Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave
her mother forty wax what she saw what she had done,
gave her father forty one. We teach that to our
kids here in Massachusetts. She got acquitted. No, I love it.
(01:47):
It's not any worse than ring around the rosie, right,
that's about dying from the place. Why did she get
acquitted in this thing? And here's the thing. If anyone
is interested in this case, all the court transcripts are
up online for free. You can sit and read them
for hours. You can read everything. You can read her depositions,
you can read her interviews. The best I can come
up with is that the all male jury figured there's
(02:11):
no way a woman would be capable of such a crime, unbelieving.
Now there was another person in the house at the
time too, wasn't there, Bridget the Maid? And if have
you been to the house, George, we ever had the chance,
I would not go in there if you paid me. Jack,
come on, So okay, first of all, it's not like
something I'll watch it on the stream. That'll be good
enough for me. Well you'll see that it is not
(02:32):
that large of a house. I mean, you know, it's
bigger than my house, but it's not like a breaker's
mansion in Newport. And all I can think of is
if you were on the third floor, which allegedly Bridget
the Maid was, and someone is getting hacked to death
with an axe one floor below you, I don't know
how you wouldn't hear that and at least come around
the corner and say, hey, everything okay? Exactly was And
(02:55):
her father was a wealthy banker too, wasn't he he was?
And he was home taking an app on the couch
and never got up that you know, he met his
end right there. And Lizzie claims in the span of
just maybe fifteen twenty minutes while she was out back
picking pears and then going up into the barn to
get some fishing weights together for a fishing trip she
(03:16):
was taking in a couple of weeks. Someone went into
the house, stole nothing, murdered two people, and then quietly
left violently. You would think if there was going to
be a murder, they do it and get out quick. No,
they wouldn't whack somebody forty times. It was balanced and
it was like eighteen but still that didn't work for
the nursery rhyme. But yes, it was a crime of passion.
(03:37):
And anyone who has watched even one episode of any
CSI knows when you've got no sign of struggle, no
sign of a break in, nothing stolen, it's obvious that
these victims knew their killers. Yeah, absolutely clearly. We'll come
back to the Lizzie Board thing and you can tell
us about Dark Zone they've been sponsoring. I've been hearing
them on our program. Yeah, they've been a matter of fact,
(03:59):
they have a couple spots next hours, so we'll listen
to that too, And yeah, good, pretty innovative. And we're
all stuck inside. We can't go investigate personally, but we
can do this. You and I went to the Eastern
State Penitentiary with Tom dan Heiser in Philadelphia. Remember that,
I remember doing prison time with you. Of course you didn't.
(04:21):
You have a computer with you. We had all kinds
of stuff with us, and one of the tools we
were using was it was called the x cam at
the time. I don't even know what they're calling it now,
but it's what it is, basically is it looks into
the infrared part of the spectrum and it looks for people.
This is Microsoft technology that's open source. Anybody can go
(04:42):
downloaded because they you know, the game the connected system
that you put yourself into video games. People, they allow
that out there so you can develop games. The software
was used in order to look into the infrared part
of the spectrum and look for people. That's what the
software does. And once in a while, something turns up
(05:04):
that you don't see in the environment, and the software
is just doing what it does, it's looking for people.
And that was intriguing, right, I mean, so when when
something turns up that's not there or not or you know,
you see a living person and then next to it
another one, you start to scratch your head. This was
developed by an engineer named Bill Chappell. We've used it
(05:25):
on Ghost Adventures and now you've seen it on just
about every paranormal TV show. But way back then that
that was the first you know, versions of this new system. Well,
it was strange being an al capone cell. It was
just a weird feeling. Yeah, not all prisoners are created equal,
are they? How many years was he in there? Twelve
(05:46):
something like that. I don't know, but I don't know,
but just to set it up when when you go
into Eastern State, it's the design is incredible, right, So
it's like a wagon wheel, meaning if you're in the
middle where the guards were, you three or four people
could stand back to back and you could see the
entire prison. You could look down all the hallways and
keep track of things. Really intelligent design. And this is
(06:09):
where we get the word penitent right, penitentiary comes from
Eastern State because back then, before Eastern State prisons were
I mean they were they're still awful places, but back
then they put everybody into one big courtyard. I mean
you had debtors and you had petty thieves, and you
had murderers and rapists in all in one area, and
(06:29):
it was just so incredibly dangerous for everyone. But at
Eastern State they said this will be different. Everything was
supposed to be solitary confinement. There was a window, a
slit in the top so you could look out into
the sky and you could pray to God and be
penitent for your sins. You talk to no one. If
they had to move you from one cell to another,
(06:50):
they would put a mask over your face so you
couldn't see any people at all. It was unlike anything
that had ever been done before. Now that of course
is like spending years and solitary confinement, which is maddening
at the same time. But it was different, right, They
were trying to do something different, and that I believe
leaves a mark. It leaves a stain, and when you
(07:10):
walk through there you could feel it. I mean you remember, right,
we were there at night. Oh yeah, it was weird.
It's very weird. And of course you start your mind
starts to wander too, well, who was in here? I mean,
we know Capone and Capone's cell was different from all
these these wings, right, it was off on its own.
It had a nice, nice furniture. They used to keep
(07:30):
the door open for him so he could kind of
come and go, not outside of the prison grounds, but
come and go outside of his cell because he was
al capone. But yeah, the rest of it though, that
was just a place where, you know, we keep the
worst of society. And when you walk through, I don't
know if you remember some of those cell blocks where
you could walk down the middle and you can kind
(07:51):
of see where you're going, but you look to your
left and your right and you see these cell doors
and some are open, and it's just blacker than black
in there. You know, it's just so so dark, and
you you just you wonder who was in there, who
was in that one, what did they do? And that
makes us connect to this location. We understand its history,
we understand its purpose, and it just takes it to
(08:14):
a dark place. A couple of years prior to that, Jeffrey,
we all hooked up at the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California,
we did. And that's a very different kind of haunt,
isn't it. I mean pretty different from a prison. Yeah,
the Queen Mary is one of those places that I
think you just keep coming back to. You know, it's
number one, what I love about it. It's kind of
(08:36):
like the Lizzie Bordenhouse. When you walk on to the
Queen Mary, you're stepping back in time. You're you're you
can forget what year it is. You're back in the
nineteen thirties on a transatlantic ocean liner. Yeah, you feel
like you're on the Titanic. Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah. You
go up to the observation bar and you have like
a sidecar or an old fashioned something you'd never drink
anywhere else, right, You just you say, yeah, this makes
(08:57):
sense here, and you walk down those old hallways and
you can just imagine this is exactly what it looked
like nineteen thirty one when it made its maiden voyage,
built to hold three thousand passengers comfortably, which of course
would make it a dwarf today compared to some of
the modern cruise ships. But back then this was a
(09:18):
state of the art. But it was short lived, right,
I mean, the reason this place is so haunted is
because it didn't make it as a ocean liner very long.
It got pressed into service during World War Two to
become a troop ship. That's right. It carried thousands of
troops all over the place. So remember I said three
thousand passengers, that's what it was built to hold passengers
(09:39):
and crew. In nineteen forty two she was painted gray.
They called her the Gray Ghost, and at its max,
Queen Mary carried sixteen thousand, six hundred and eighty three
troops at once. Why would it be haunted? Jeffrey? So
during World War Two, so many things happened when you
had sixteen thousand plus on deck on the ship. Rather,
(10:03):
you had to take eight hour shifts, eight hours in
a bunk, eight hours just standing on deck because there's
nowhere to put you, eight hours doing work of some kind.
It was just packed, and the ship had to run
these zig zag patterns to evade the German U boats,
always moving, never stopping. And the Queen Mary had what
a target? God? Well, right, I mean yes, imagine taking
(10:24):
out sixteen thousand troops in one shot and obviously not
well armed. It's a cruise ship. So on October two,
nineteen forty two, the Queen Mary's Mary's running these zigzag
patterns and the Sirocco is her escort ship, and through
some mishap, the Sirocco gets in the way of the
Queen Mary and the Queen Mary cuts through the much
smaller ship, sinking it almost instantly. Three hundred and thirty
(10:48):
eight men go into the ocean, and the worst part
is the Queen Mary can't stop to help. They all died,
every one of them. And that's what life was like
during World War Two. That's what life was like on
that ship. And that's just one event. Of course, they
had POW's on there. Some who died on the ship.
There were accidents and things like that. It's just got
(11:09):
so much life and history moving through it that I
believe it's still kind of echoes. And some non troops
died there when it was the luxury cruise liner. Right.
Of course, people have heart attacks, people have accidents. There
was an accident down in the engine room. The doors.
I don't know if you remember being down there, but
these doors are made to seal shut in the case
(11:31):
of some sort of leak, right, they have to become
air tight. They got to protect the ship, of course,
But if you get in the way of that mechanism
as it's closing, which one person did down in the
engine room, you literally could be cut in half. And
this that did happen to one of the crewmen. And
that's one of the events that haunts down there. And
I'll tell you, I don't know if you were you
get to be down down there during the investigation part
(11:54):
for that one section, But you're down there in the
engine room and you're looking up at all this almost
century old rusted metal all around you. It's you know,
it's it's very heavy, it's old. It's a creaky ship.
It's it's creaking and groaning. It talks, you know, and
you feel it and you connect to it, and you say, wow,
this is where so much happened, so much history took
(12:19):
place right where I'm standing. And that's that's my That's
the thing I'm most passionate about when it comes to
looking at haunts all over the world, but especially here
in America, is maybe I have an ancestor who is
on the ship at one point. Maybe maybe right all
these connections. Why do you keep doing what you do? Jeff?
I mean you are into this in a big, big way. Yeah,
(12:42):
somehow I turned it into a career, which is just amazing. Right.
One of your biles that I had seen years ago said,
you're obsessed with the un explained. I think I am
because These are the biggest questions we've ever asked. Right,
is their life after death? I'm not the first to
ask it, You're not the first. This goes back thousands
(13:02):
and thousands of years and endless generations. What happens after
we die? Why is it important that we preserve our history?
Why do we need to connect to it? I believe
that there's some lesson, right, These are sermons from our
own past related to us, lessons that we haven't learned yet.
And every one of these buildings has some lesson to
(13:24):
teach us. And I love that connection because when you
go into a haunted place, you're connecting with that building.
It's history, it's a community. And when we share these stories,
we're connecting with each other. And that's the key, right, absolutely, Yeah.
I mean we get to snap out all the weird
dogmas and rules of religion and just talk about one thing.
(13:44):
It's haunted, and if you believe it's haunted, if you
believe in ghosts as I do, then you must believe
in some sort of afterlife. And from there we can
argue and you do whatever. But before that, before we
start arguing, let's just break it down to that one
simple conclusion, what was the supernatural experience when you were ten?
So when I was ten, it started because I grew
(14:07):
up in Newtown, Connecticut, and it's a great historic, little
old town. It was the town next to Ed Lorraine Warren,
who lived in Monroe. I knew them since I was
about twelve years old and their stories. But I had
a buddy who lived just down the street. His house
was built in seventeen sixty, right, His house was older
than America, and we would have sleepovers and he said, oh,
(14:27):
by the way, it's haunted. I said, what do you
mean it's haunted. He said, well, there's this old guy
that seems to live here with us. He's not heard
in anything. He just kind of walks down the hall
and disappears. And I was intrigued. And his parents said, yeah, look,
please don't tell your parents. They'll think we're crazy. I'll
have it blocked up, you know. But it was so
matter of fact, it was so not dangerous or they
(14:49):
didn't even seem all that frightened. And I'm saying, can
I live here for a week. I want to see
this for myself. I want to connect to it. And
that sort of started me on this path. And then
in a town like that, I had other friends and say, oh,
my house is haunted too. Of course it is. It's
it's you know, two hundred years old. And I thought, well,
what does that mean? I was raised Catholic, you know,
(15:09):
And uh, I had that's that's the baggage I carrying.
And I said, well, where'd ghosts fit in? Father birds?
You know? And then he would say, well, you know,
there's a lot we don't fully understand. God bless him.
He was very open minded. And uh, and I think
just that started me on this journey of wanting to
see it for myself. And that's still you know what
(15:29):
I'm doing all these years later. I mean, you have
turned it into a career, haven't you. Yeah right, I
mean that the career started. I mean I went full
time in two thousand and four, so sixteen years ago.
I was able to to make the leap and just
just do this. And it was never a career that
you plan, you know. I think sometimes it finds you.
You know. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted
(15:50):
to do that that I knew, and I was writing
for newspapers and magazines and uh, and then eventually I
got my first book deal, and then I started working
on TV projects and things like that, and I think
I woke up one day and I just said, oh
my goodness, this is my job now. And that called
my mom. I said, hey, Mom, guess what I do.
You know our colleague Dave Schrader he loves this stuff too.
(16:12):
Oh I know. Yeah, I've known Dave for years. And
yeah the Queen Mary. Wasn't that his event? Where where
we got to? I think so, yeah, that was one
of his events there. Yeah, it's and it's such a
great way to connect with people that are also asking questions,
like inquisitive minds who want to know, are we alone
in the universe? What happens after we die? What's one
(16:33):
of the creatures that walk to the earth with us?
These are the big ones. Listen to more Coast to
Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go
to Coast to Coast am dot com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
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George Noory
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