Strange Stories - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 7/9/24

George Noory and author John Olsen discuss stories he has collected of ghosts, hauntings, UFOs, orbs and sasquatches, plus his own experience with a ghostly figure in his childhood home.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Man, welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Nori with you.
We're going to have a fascinating moment with John Olson.
Born and raised in Cash Valley, at the age of eight,
he began to realize that the home he lived in
was very strange. His parents still owned the old farmhouse
built in the mid eighteen eighties. Strange experiences such as
phantom Knox, loud boots running across the stairs, missing objects

(00:31):
becoming commonplace for him as he grew up with each
run in with what he called the Man in the Hat.
John's interest in the paranormal grew bigger and bigger. Fueled
by his own experiences with the unknown, John has spent
the last thirty plus years interviewing and documenting first hand
accounts of those who have witnessed all kinds of strange

(00:52):
and unusual phenomena in the Western part of the United States.
The Stranger Bridgeland series contains first hand accounts posts monsters, hauntings, glitches,
and the Matress, sasquatch and even UFOs. John Olson back
on Coast to Coast, Hey, John, it's been almost three years.

(01:12):
Good to have you back.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
Yeah, thanks so much for having me George. It's always
such a pleasure to talk to you. I'm just a
huge fan of all your work and the opportunity to
come on here is amazing, So I appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
We are fans of your You do a great job
out there on the Western Side.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. I've been working
hard getting stories and putting out books, and like you said,
my newest one, Stranger Utah, is actually booked eight so yeah,
I've been been going hard at it.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
So eighth books already, that's fantastic.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
Yeah, it's it's really fun. I mean, like you know,
you get to meet amazing people and hear extraordinary stories,
and there's nothing better.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
Let's go back to the man in the hat during
the farmhouse days and then get into what got you
collecting these kinds of stories.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah. So the home I grew up in, like you mentioned,
it was built in eighteen eighty, so it was already
one hundred years old when I was a kid, and
it wasn't long before, you know, by the time I
was eight, I realized that there was something different about
my house than other people's house. Yeah, and the man
in the hat is one entity, one ghost that we

(02:28):
were able to see like full body operation at times,
and everybody in the family had experiences with him. For example,
my mother would have an experience quite a bit where
she would be working in one of the rooms and
somebody would walk in and she would assume it was
one of us or my dad and start talking to them,
and when there was no answer, she would turn and

(02:50):
it would be him, and then he would disappear. So
it was it was just really fascinating, you know, that
he was the one that showed himself, even though I
do believe there was a lot more than just one
ghost in the house. But later on, when my grandparents
passed away, they didn't live very far away. I was

(03:13):
flipping through an old photo album when we were helping
clean out my grandma's house, and I flipped the page
and I bot fell out of my chair, George, because
there's a picture of my house, a black and white picture,
and a man standing in front, and it was the
man in the hat with overalls, white shirt, white brint hat.
And I did some research and found out it was

(03:36):
a great great uncle of mine that owned that house
in the nineteen twenty so I was able to him. Yeah,
that's him. He is one of the ghosts that is
in the house. So it's it's kind of fascinating to
be able to put a person to the ghost now as.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Well, there's a phenomenon going around now John called the
hat Man. Would you consider your man in the hat
the hat man?

Speaker 3 (04:02):
You know, I know, they're definitely two different things. The
hat man that people are seeing, it's more associated with
shadow people that they're also seeing, where it's a completely
black image with an obvious man wearing a hat. So
I don't believe there's any correlation between the two, but

(04:24):
I do find that fascinating that it's also a man
in the hat that's showing up as a shadow person.
So it's that's one that's really kind of strange and
scary for sure.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
What kind of stories do you collect, John, So.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
I collect pretty much any kind of story that you
can imagine when it comes to the paranormal ghost stories, cryptids,
glitches in the matrix, and I've even got some Fay stories,
which you know, I never thought I would actually get,
but I've actually collected some of those as well. And

(05:01):
you know, it just kind of runs the gamba, including
you know, people who've run into doppelgangers or just you know,
everything to do with the paranormal. I kind of keep
it open for for everything and ufo UFOs as well.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Truly remarkable. And you concise these into the eight books, yep.

Speaker 3 (05:24):
So yeah, I got them all in the eight books,
and I spread them out so that you know, it's
not just UFOs and one or whatever. It's it's kind
of a mixture of all. For those who kind of
like all different kinds of things, they can find it
in each one of the books.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
So do you have a couple favorite paranormal stories, John.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
I do you know? As I keep going, I keep
collecting more and more stories that that fall under my favorite.
But one that really comes to mind is actually my
newest book, Stranger Utah. I was contacted by gen who
said that his father had a story that would like

(06:04):
to share, and so I was able to get between
him and his son and interview both of them. The
father who's retired now. In the seventies, he was an
archaeologist for a university here in Utah, and in the
early seventies he was still working on going to school

(06:27):
and doing his doctor But they were working on a
Ana Sazi dig near the Four Corners area, and they
had first that started really strange, where in the evening
if they stayed too late, there were these huge balls
of light that would appear, these big orbs, and would

(06:47):
they would chase basically the archaeologists out of the area
if they stayed too late. And one evening, he was
the last one there and he was cleaning up and
he heard some heavy footsteps that were going around the
rim and he got really nervous because he was all alone,

(07:08):
and he got up and headed towards the vehicle and
had something he could hear following him, you know, through
the brush. He got to his car and drove off, scared,
scared to death. The next morning he talked to the
archaeologist that was in charge of the deg and the
professor that was in charge, and the two of them

(07:30):
went back to the dig to try and figure out
what was going on. And they found these enormous wolf
tracks that had followed him from the dig site back
to his car, and when he had left, the wolf
tracks turned and went out through the desert, and they
followed it for a little while and they both were

(07:53):
just amazed because, you know, before their very eyes they
watched the tracks turn from giant wolf tracks into human
barefoot tracks in the desert, and they laughed. He taught
to the professor, and the older professor refused to engage
with it. He did not want to talk about it.

(08:13):
He didn't want anything to do with it. But he
did make a rule from then on, nobody was allowed
there until an hour after sun up, and everybody had
to leave the dig site an hour before sundown. And
so they followed those rules for the rest of the
Simon didn't have as many problems. But I just thought

(08:33):
that was such a good story, and it was so
great to get it from the professor, because you're talking
about somebody that deals with science. They deal with you know,
hard proof and everything, and yet he had this paranormal
experience that has stuck with him all these years later.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
How many of these stories surprise you, John, Wow?

Speaker 3 (08:54):
You know my biggest surprise I think going through all
of this, George, is I never thought when I first
started that I would ever get a Fay story. You know,
something from these are what you know, people would consider,
you know, goblins or something of that nature or trolls,

(09:14):
and I always considered that folklore. But it was amazing
to me the number of people that I've interviewed who
have had experiences with these creatures. And what's really interesting
is that these stories are from all over the world,
and they explain very similar creatures but just have different

(09:37):
names from different places around the world. And and that's
really surprised me.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
Pretty dramatic. You've done some work about sasquatch too, don't you.

Speaker 3 (09:49):
Yeah, pardon me, that's other than ghosts. I think that's
some of the stories that I get the most of
is that well right after UFOs, so I would say
it would go ghosts to UFOs and sasquatch. But I'd
collected some very fascinating stories from people dealing with sasquatch.

(10:12):
I had one of my favorites of those a young well,
a woman that I interviewed When she was a young girl.
She lived near Jacksonville, Wyoming, and she would do babysitting
for different people in the area. And one night she
was babysitting at this home that was way out near
the forest, away from everything, and after she'd put the

(10:37):
kids to bed and fallen asleep, she was wakened to
something in the back of the house and she thought
perhaps it was the parents coming home, and so she
went back and couldn't see anything, and then she heard
something jump on the front porch, and so she slid
into the front room where she could see and turn

(11:00):
off the light. And this enormous sasquatch was on the
porch and it kept having to bend down to look
through the window. Pretty bold side, yeah, very and it
was prying, you know, trying to find a way into
the home when the lights from the parents coming up

(11:20):
the driveway finally scared it off. But it's really it's
really a fun subject.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
How many stories have you collected, do you think over
the years?

Speaker 3 (11:30):
Oh? Boy, you know, I still have so many stories
that that I collected that haven't gone in my books.
Each book has around twenty eight stories in it.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
And you interview the people responsible, right.

Speaker 3 (11:46):
Yeah, So one of the criteria is it has to
come from the person. I have to talk to the
person that happened to in order for me to put
it in the books. So, you know, I over the
thirty plus years, I've interviewed a lot of people and
just met some really fantastic people. And heard some amazing stories.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
What has been your favorite story ever?

Speaker 3 (12:12):
My favorite story ever? Well, I'm one of them, pardon me.
One that really comes to mind was in I think
it was not this this Stranger Utah, but the one
before is actually called a Stranger World, because I had
stories from all over the world, and I'd gotten contacted

(12:34):
by this woman and her mother had grown up in
a rural part of Mexico and she wanted to tell
a story. She didn't speak English, so she I did
the interview through her daughter. But when she was a
little girl, she had several brothers and sisters. She had
one brother that was close to her age. She was

(12:55):
a year older than her and the two of them
fought constantly, and one day when they were at school
they had to walk quite a ways to and from
school from their little farm. They had been caught fighting
at school her and her brother and had to stay
after school, and so the teacher made them do chores

(13:15):
at school and then they were left to go home.
So it was a little bit later and on the
way home they had another fight and her brother took
off running ahead, and as she was walking home, all
of a sudden, from the brush, she got hit in
the chest with a dirt clod and she thought, oh,
you know, my brother is in the brush, you know,

(13:38):
playing games on her playing games. Yeah, exactly, And so
she grabbed a rock and jumped into the brush to
confront her brother. And instead of her brother being there,
there was this little man maybe two feet tall, with
a brushy beard and a hat and like homemade clothes
and worn clothes and work a leprechaun, yeah, kind of

(14:02):
like the Leprecaun. What it ended up being is a duinde,
which is a little creature just like that in Mexico
Hispanic in Mexico lore, yes, And the little duinde told
her that not to fight with her brother. Her brother
is his person, is how he explained that that's my person.

(14:25):
And so she ran home crying and talked to her mother,
and her mother explained to her that it was a
duinde and these little creatures can become attached to people
or farms, and it was obvious he was attached to
her brother. And so they did this little ritual for
a couple months where she would write a note saying

(14:49):
I'm sorry, well, I'm not going to fight with my brother.
We're going to get along and lift it out by
their their little barn with cookies and trees to kind of,
you know, subdue them and let him know. And she
did that for a couple of months and never had
any more problems, never saw him again. But I just
thought that was such a scary and yet fascinating story

(15:13):
about you know, different cultures and again the Fay and
how they are throughout everybody's culture around the world.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Have you ever had people just come at you with
screaming stories they're so scared.

Speaker 3 (15:29):
Yeah, when I interview people, George, it's cool because a
lot of times when I'm interviewing people, they start telling
the story and they go right back there, you know,
almost like somebody who's had a car crash trying to
explain it. They get very emotional, and especially if it's

(15:49):
something that's very frightening, that was you know, very impressionable,
they're they're able to just go right back there. And
it definitely helps too when that happens, because you know,
it helps me realize, you know, they really believe in
what they've seen, They really you know, invested in this,
and those usually make for really great stories.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
What takes up most of the stories the ghost stories,
Bigfoot stories, UFOs which which.

Speaker 3 (16:20):
Ones, So most of them are ghost stories, I think
those are the most prevalent, and then UFO stories after that,
then cryptids like sasquatch, and then of course you have
glitches in the matrix stories which are pretty fascinating as well,
they're not quite as prevalent, and then of course you

(16:43):
know fay stories, which are a lot more rare but
amazing when I get so, there's definitely a pattern out
there when I interview.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
People, listen to more Coast to Coast a m. Every
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Speaker 3 (17:00):
I'm flare