Dark Disguises | Interview with John Kachuba | Podcast - Stories of the Supernatural

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Marlene with Miami Ghost Chronicles and I want
to welcome you to another episode of Stories of the Supernatural.
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(00:20):
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If you're into classic horror, ghost and adventure stories, I
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(00:40):
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(01:03):
Please subscribe to my newsletter on substack. Just go to
Mppelliser dot com for a link. I want to thank
you for being part of my audience and I think
you are all wonderful.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
So how's everybody doing good? Everything is good over here,
moving right along a lot of crazy stuff in the
sense of, you know, just as a matter of fact,
I'm getting I have some garden beds in my vegetable
garden beds. I'm going down that road again.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
Let's see.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
I don't know if I would have if if I
was supposed to be a farmer, I've died at start, Okay,
So I said, no, I'm not gonna give up. I'm
gonna go back. So yeah, that's my you know, even
though I had some stuff that I planted back in February,
and again remember this is uh in Florida, things are
a little bit different as far as the timing for planting.
But here we go again. I will keep you guys

(01:55):
updated as to how you know if I was left
on green acres, how well I do. I was like,
oh so, but I'm keeping it simple. I'm keeping it
like a potatoes And there's other stuff that I'm telling you.
We based on my little experience of micro farming. We

(02:15):
underappreciate our farmers, even though I know that, you know,
a lot of them have the machinery. Nobody understands really
how difficult it is not only to grow but to
grow nice stuff. All right. So I'll see. Now the
other day somebody had mentioned to me, because I had
made mention of that last time I did the five K,
how I didn't realize that the route was down that

(02:35):
parade ground for like it was like it was like
Thanksgiving and I did I did a route in front
of these gathering crowds because everybody was getting their lawnchairs ready.
It's a main street and you know how everybody sets
up to their chairs trying to get a good spot.
I didn't realize it. And here I am blagging behind
my five K and I'm getting cheered on, and it's like,

(02:56):
oh man, why did I do this? Like you never
think about those things. Well, here's another one of these
stories of things that happen and you're like, in hindsight,
You're like, okay, Marlene, here we go. So one of
these things I've learned is that I get out of
my pj's really quick in the morning, you know, like
once I get up, you know, how there's people that
sometimes no because there's always just in the possibility that

(03:17):
something will happen. Yeah, so what did they say about
Murphy's Low. So one day, this was like maybe two
weeks ago something like that, and my husband we were
going to go somewhere dressed up all nice and everything.
And by the way, where I'm at because this is
my taxes are lower, by the way, I'm very happy
with this. We drop off our trash. There's a very

(03:37):
small recycling kind of like right down the street from us,
so we drop off our trash and that's it. It's great,
by the way. So I'm telling him and it's only
it was you know, it's only open certain days of
the week. So I tell him. We were originally gonna
like dress up and go and I said, look, let's
just go and drop this trash off because I'm not

(03:59):
gonna do it. I'm dressed up and I'm like, oh,
my myself is put together, and he's like yeah, yeah yeah,
and I go, like I said, it's literally down the street.
So here I am. I'm in my U my pjs,
which happened to be boxer shorts and like a tank
top or something like that. It's like foipflops. So and
I'm thinking, okay, because he's the one he had, he'll

(04:20):
just usually get off and chuck the stuff off a
pickup truck, chuck it in there. So I'm saying, okay,
just down the street. Okay. Plus I take my little
dogs because this is their little right around the neighborhood.
They get all excited. So I'm saying, what could go wrong?
It's down the street. Sure enough, I go down the street,
throw the stuff away, and I come back and guess

(04:42):
who's outside my acreage? One of my guineas. Because among
among the dumb guineas, just the dumb and the dumber
and the dumbst well the dumbest. He's he or she
At this point, I think it's a heat is outside
and they will run back and forth and they could
easily fly over, but he'll be there the rest of
the day. Plus I don't want him get hit by

(05:03):
a car some but whatever, So I'm like, okay, and
this is very rural road. Some of my roads next
to my house are greater. But still my husband. My
husband's like, now I'm not getting done, and here I am.
I'm like, why did I know that? I had to
be in boxer shorts. Thank god, I have put like
a jacket, you know, one of these hoodies on me.
Here I am running around through the thicket because everything

(05:24):
outside my fence is like it's shrubs. And here I
am running after this stupid guinea, trying to like, I
opened up one of the gates, a big gate I have.
That's another thing. Man. They'll run this way and they'll
run the road and once again in there and I'm like,
and here's the pickup trump going down way. And of
course normally these roads are lonely, but now everybody decides
that they must come out. And I'm like, I'm in

(05:46):
my boxer shorts and flip flomps with a tank top
and a hoodie trying to corral well. We call it
the giddy rodeo, a guinea rodeo of the guinea. That's
that's what we call it. He was like, you know what,
this is one of those embarrassing things that you're thinking,
what could go wrong? Except you always leave something out
of the what could go wrong? So yeah, the moral

(06:06):
of that story is how sometimes despite our best intentions,
we do really highly We put ourselves in highly embarrassing
situations because the unexpected happens. So yeah, that's my embarrassing
animal story, hopefully for a long time. Anyway, let's get
to the good part. The good part is who's the
guest today on Stories of the Supernatural. His name is

(06:28):
John Kachuba. He's been here before. He is an award
winning author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. His
most recent novel is the historical fantasy The Bottle Conjurer,
which book two Lucinda, will be released in July of
this year. Others include Dark Entry, a paranormal novel, and
The Savage Apostle historical fiction. He's also published a two

(06:49):
volume collection of short stories titled There Comes a Season,
and has written numerous articles and poems for variety of magazines, journals,
and newspapers. His work of nonfiction, shape If There's a History,
was a finalist in the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker's
Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction. Several other works of
nonfiction about ghost and the paranormal. You're writing Native American

(07:12):
history and culture. John holds an m A degree in
Creative writing from Antioch University Midwest and Ohio University and
presently teaches creative writing at Ohio University and the Gotham
Writers Workshop. In addition to his present work, he's been
a journalist and freelance book editor. He is also a
member of the Historical Novel Society, the Horror Writers Association,

(07:33):
and the American Library Association's Authors for Library help Me.
Welcome him. How are you doing today, John.

Speaker 3 (07:41):
I'm doing great. Marlene. Thanks, it's good to be here.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yes, go ahead.

Speaker 3 (07:46):
I think how long? How long it's been.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
I want to say it's been in that three years,
three or four years maybe. And the reason why I
say this is I remember I was I didn't think
it was that long because as a matter of fact,
I think it was. The last book you have released,
was the Shape Shifter book.

Speaker 3 (08:06):
Okay, all right?

Speaker 2 (08:07):
And I was like, man, and time just speeds by.
Sometimes I look at things. Sometimes I was like, oh,
that was last year. I was like, no, it wasn't
last year.

Speaker 3 (08:15):
I know so.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
And as a matter of fact, we when we were
discussing that Shape Shifters that you were talking about all
these you know, like because basically it's a nonfiction book,
that that Shape Shifter one. It's it's not a it's
not a novel or or fictional account.

Speaker 3 (08:34):
Right, correct, Yeah, it's it's it's fact. I mean, it's
you know, a couple of years worth of research and yeah,
it's definitely nonfiction.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
Right exactly. And I don't know, did you see I
want to mention this real quick. This This came out
on the news maybe less than a year ago. This
was a real snippet, you know, of some lady that
she was sitting in some plane. The plane's about to depart,
and all a sudden, she gets up. She starts wigging
out in the middle aisle of the plane, saying that
the guy that's sitting back there, that he wasn't human

(09:06):
or something like that. I was like, oh, you know,
you had you need to you need to find that she,
you know, because we think of the shape shifter as
in maybe like the werewolf kind of scenario. But looking
up this lady she stands up. The plane hasn't departed.
I could tell those by the way. She wasn't drunk,
she was on drugs, She wasn't you know sometimes you know,

(09:26):
you have people on there with mental problem. No, she
she gets up, she comes down the middle aisle of
the plane, and it has any part. She's like, that's
that effort back there, he's not human. I don't care
his eyes they went like this and like this, you know,
and just see her. You can tell the people the
plane didn't know where to be scared of her. The

(09:47):
guy the back there were like what.

Speaker 3 (09:48):
Oh yeah, yeah, but she.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
Was saying it was if she was acting mad. It
was a pretty good acting job, I'll tell you that much.

Speaker 3 (09:55):
It's funny. I was on another podcast made but two
or three weeks ago, and the host said the same thing, Hey,
do you hear about this story? And I hadn't heard
it and now here seeing it again too. I did
look it up and I couldn't find much on it
other than like you said, she kind of freaked out
and said this guy was changing. But that's kind of

(10:15):
where it ended, you know, Like I want to know, well,
did anybody else see this guy change? And what did
he change? I mean, what happened? You know.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
I understand they kind of investigated her, like in the
sense of what she had YouTuber or not now a YouTuber
or TikTok or somebody that was doing it for the clicks,
and it wasn't She didn't have. I think afterwards she
did get one, but back then she was basically an
unknown person. Nobody knew who she was. And they looked
at the guy that she was pointing at, like, is
she having a fight with a guy that? Did she

(10:44):
know him? Apparently no, there was no relationship between them,
and it was one of those things. And what she talked,
she could tell she's a little bit hysterical kind of
but she doesn't look like she drugged up or drunk.
I mean, I wasn't there, but it was like, yeah,
you know, sometimes we think of shape shifters outside of
when she said that thing with you, I think I

(11:06):
was like, man, I'll tell you what, if I'm sitting
next to somebody in a planet and they do that,
I'd be like what.

Speaker 3 (11:13):
Right?

Speaker 2 (11:13):
But the historical your book, the shape Shifter one, it
delves more into like, uh, is it about like the
typical werewolf or was there? I know people sometimes think
also that they people are known to shape shift onto
other animal forms.

Speaker 3 (11:30):
Right right? Yeah? So I mean, you know when people
think of shape shifters, you know, the quintessential shape shifter
is the werewolf. Everybody goes, oh yeah, werewolf. They all
everybody knows that. Uh. Sometimes they'll say a vampire, you know,
turning into a bat or something like that. But what
I did in shape shifters was I was really interested

(11:50):
in the shape shifter character itself and whatever that means,
and how it appears in different cultures. And what I
found out, Marlene, as I did research, was that almost
every culture in the world has some kind of a
shape shifter character in it. Well, if not one, I
mean sometimes several. Uh. And they're not always monsters, you know,

(12:11):
sometimes they're they're they're good creatures whatever.

Speaker 2 (12:15):
Right, as far as it's not. It's not always like
we're out here trying to grab the human and eat
them or something like that.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
Right, right, I mean most of them are like that,
but not all. But yeah, the thing is, what I
found was that just the types of shape shifters in
the various cultures, I mean there's there's literally probably thousands.
I mean I I got I got finished. Just in
Central America alone, I counted, like, you know, one hundred
different kinds of shape shifters. Almost any kind of animal,

(12:46):
you know, people say, oh, yeah, well I saw you know,
aware gopher, you know, okay aware are Yeah, I mean
I mean, you know when.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
You look at it, because you're still thinking always of
the fierce creature.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
Right right, right right? I mean, how you know a
shape shifting mouse. I'm not sure I said terrorizing, you know.
But what I also found out too that was it's
not just animals. You know, shape shifters that you see
in folklore and mythology and religion and everything else in
the various cultures, that not only do they shape shift

(13:18):
into animals, but they're capable. There's different ones that will
shape shift into people or sometimes even inanimate objects. Japan,
Japan folklore and ghost lore and mythology has I don't know,
they have so many ghosts, so many shape shifters. But
the interesting thing with them is most of their shape shifters,

(13:41):
maybe even all I have to check, are not living
people like we think that then shift in something else,
but they're ghosts that shifts into something to come back
to the mortal world. So a typical Japanese story is,

(14:02):
you know, some guy murders his wife because he's having
an affair with somebody else and he wants the wife
out of the way. This kind of typical. You know,
a Japanese samurai or something all right, so the murdered
wife as a ghost. Now we'll say, well, you know what,
I'm going to come back and she'll like ship shape
shift maybe into the form of the samurai's lover and

(14:25):
come back so that oh yeah, hey honey, you know,
and then kill him. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:30):
Ultimately her thing is revenge.

Speaker 3 (14:32):
Right yeah, right, right right. That is so typical actually
of Asian cultures. There's so many ghosts that are really
vengeful and are looking for it.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
Right, yes, no, if you look at them, you know that.
They made a couple of movies, The Ring, The Ring too,
there was another thing which were originally based on Japanese movies,
and they're kind of very fatalistic. You never cannot run
that ghost man.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
There's no way, no way.

Speaker 2 (14:55):
But you know, you know, no, no hammer. You know
where Peter Christian runs in and you know, no, no, no, that's
you know, yeah, they're very fatalistic when it comes to
like like you said, the ghost star, like especially if
they die violently or you know, they're killed, they they
go after you, even if you have nothing to do
with it.

Speaker 3 (15:15):
Sometimes they do well, you know, I have I'm related
to a Vietnamese family through through marriage and My daughter
in law actually came from Vietnam. She came here when
she was in her thirties as an engineer. Is now
a citizen. But I'd been to Vietnam a few times
and visited family everything else. And there's a very interesting

(15:39):
ghost slred they have, which is they believe that if
you die outside the country, your body has to be
returned to Vietnam to be buried someplace in Vietnam with
all the cultural you know, artifacts that come with the
Vietnamese funeral. If that doesn't happen, then they call you

(16:00):
a hungry ghost. And your spirit, your ghost is out
wandering around. And what it'll do until it gets satisfaction
is it want to say, kill people, but it'll make
people sick, it will cause bad luck for them, you know,
they lose their money or something like that. So even
in Vietnam, there there are cemeteries in Vietnam that have

(16:23):
these tombs built and there's nobody in them yet. And
the people that are that built those tombs are living
in the US or other countries abroad. That is, when
they die, the body goes back to Vietnam from bury.
So you can imagine what the what the war did

(16:44):
because they had, you know, I mean, how many hundreds
of thousands of people killed, but of course many of
them were soldiers, Vietnamese soldiers right from both sides, north
and south. They all have the same belief and half
those bodies, you know, still haven't even been recovered yet.
So so you know, the these people believe that a
lot of these jungles and everything where things happened, that

(17:04):
there's these ghosts wandering around, these hungry ghosts, and nobody.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
Goes walking into jungle by themselves.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
Well, you shouldn't do that anyway.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
But I was like that that is you know, some
something's going to get you into going yeah, because this
is what people don't realize back then, Like you said,
people will killed them where they felt that's where they stayed.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
Right right there. There are people in Vietnam that make
a living. There's I guess you'd call them sort of
like mediums in a way. If you lost somebody in
the war, you would come to one of these people
and you'd say, you know, my brother and my son,
well you know whatever, and I want to I want
to find the remains, and this person will you know,

(17:47):
do some meditation or whatever. But they'll say I think,
I think, I know, and they'll go and try to
find the remains and everything else. And you pay big
money for this service. Of course, there's a lot of
fakes doing it too, you know, but that that tells
you how how intense that whole ghost thing is with them,
you know. And I know like in my my daughter

(18:09):
in law.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
But it's not like like, oh that the family, you know,
that's an archaic superstition, the right it still helps hold
true now.

Speaker 3 (18:17):
Yeah, yeah, And they have you know, Vietnamese like like Japanese.
I wouldn't I wouldn't call it an ancestor worship. That
might not be the right word. But every home has
an altar in the house and they have you know,
pictures of their departed, and every day there's candles lit,
there's offerings made, you know, some fruit or something else
every single day, fresh flowers, whatever, And that's to keep

(18:39):
their spirits appeased. Because the minute you stop doing that,
they're going to come and say, hey.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
You said, it's not like that you're going to die.
But they say misfortune And I know in some cases
some like you said, and we'll use ancestor worship for
the lack of a better. Yeah, but they also act
like guardians of the household. It's not just appease them.
They kind of like, look, you know, take make sure
that everything is good fortune for the family right, and

(19:06):
things of this nature.

Speaker 3 (19:07):
And so in uh in Thailand, I spent about two
months in Thailand. And in Thailand they have spirit houses,
which are like large birdhouses and they could be very
largely be size of a shed. But most every home
or not even just homes, but you know, main buildings
like hospitals, schools. Everybody's got a spirit house out front,

(19:31):
and it's it looks like a little like a little temple,
like a little house. It's usually on a pole or
sometimes four legs. And when this thing is set up,
you know, a Buddhist priest comes out and blesses it
and all this kind of sanctifies it. And what the
people believe is that there is a spirit that is
in this house and that spirit is the protector of

(19:53):
that property. So if there's a hospital there, this spirit
in this house is protecting that hospital from eagle. So
every home has one. And again they make daily offerings
to these, you know, spirit houses, even where they place it.
If you're doing it at your home. You have to
place it in the place, in a location where the

(20:14):
shadow of your real house won't fall on the spirit house.
That's that. So a priest will come and tell you
even where you have to put it in your yard.
It's incredible. I mean it's fascinating.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
Specsual practitioners where they before people will construct their homes,
you know, they kind of tell you. You know, you didn't.
Let's say a piece of land, they'll tell you build here. No, no, no, no,
don't build there. It's not a good place to build
a structure like no, forget that.

Speaker 3 (20:46):
No. So my daughter in law and my son and
their and their children, they live in Virginia, and when
they bought their house, every time well they're now in
their second house, but each time they bought a house,
my daughter in law the first thing was where is
that house oriented? In terms of the compass? Which direction
is it facing? And I don't know which one was

(21:08):
the fortuitous direction, but you know, if she saw the
house was facing I'm just I don't know. She's a
west Oh no, no, can't have any houses facing west.
It has to face whatever. The house could be gorgeous,
could be beautiful, it could be right in their range.
She won't buy it unless it's so she does that. Yeah,
she ranges her furniture, you know, kind of feng shuai

(21:30):
thing in a way like okay, you don't want to have,
you know, something where your back is facing to a door.
You know, it's incredible, Well, you know what?

Speaker 2 (21:39):
And one of these things that also that we're talking
about buildings, and I don't know if you came across
in your research, maybe not where a lot of times
and this is across cultures, by the way, different countries
where sometimes they'll bury people in the foundations of buildings, okay,
as guardians.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
Okay, okay, nice.

Speaker 2 (21:59):
Exactly and usually by the time any real anybody realizes, hey,
this person Hey. And unfortunately not all the times, but
sometimes they'll they'll take somebody like homeless people or somebody
or somebody like wann or drunk, somebody that's like and
this is a way that basically they force the person

(22:20):
to become like the guardian, partially like what you're describing
of that building. And once the concrete's port or a
building goes up or a bridge goes up, it's like,
who's going to to like find out really, but yes,
I've heard of that also that that in some cases
they will do that almost a safeguard that I guess

(22:41):
it won't topple or anything like that.

Speaker 3 (22:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
Yeah, and you know, I don't always always heard it.
But I'm gonna interrupt real quick, like, uh, I want
to say this, she put us less than five years old.
I want to say I can't remember if it was
Bolivia or Honduras, one of these countries. The news had
a little expose because there was this roomor running around
that they were using people homeless that you know, you know,

(23:07):
have problems with alcohol and they were basically kind of
like kidnapping and like one of they're drug and using
them for the purpose. And they were having a little
expos with the police. And I don't know how out
of depth they went with that, but it was enough
to get like a new story going about people being
used for that. And that was like less than five
years ago.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
Yeah, very people. Well, I'm uh, I'm half Sicilian and
we bury statues of Saint Joseph from the front yard
and I'm trying to sell a house. But that's different, yes.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
But but you know what, it's It's one of those
things where people don't realize that that people take And
I'll tell you what the this was about a year ago.
Oh my god, this I'm trying to remember that. His
name is Father Rapsberger. I think it's that's the way
I pronounced it. He was. I had heard him on
a It was on a podcast and they were talking

(23:57):
about evil and this and that, and you know how
the Calolic church sometimes they're very careful about and he's
talking about he says, well, you know what, you can
get one of those salt licks, you know the ones
that people buy for deer.

Speaker 3 (24:09):
Yeah, he says, take it to.

Speaker 2 (24:12):
Your church, get it blessed, and bury him in the
four corners of your property outside. And I was like,
I can't believe this is they're very cautious to you know,
because they were talking about, you know how an exorcism,
because he is an exorcist. You know, they used assault
plus salt and yeah, And that was the first time

(24:32):
I've ever heard something like that, Like, Okay, I showed
up with four salt licks my.

Speaker 3 (24:40):
Church, right right, yeah, Father me a favor. Yeah, Well,
I'm sure that's I'm sure that's not Catholic dogma.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
But the Catholic priest, Yeah, it's like he wasn't like
he wasn't one of these like uh, it was like, no,
he's not a running and he's pretty well rec nice.
But I had never heard that as far as openly,
how's that talking about that? It was like okay, yeah,

(25:09):
and you know what, you might go to your local
church and they'll go what you want me to what?
Right now?

Speaker 3 (25:14):
Right? Right? Right?

Speaker 2 (25:16):
So yeah, that there's a lot of and I'm sure
you run across it maybe in your research a lot
of And this is, I think is the part, especially
when you get older stories, where is it totally superstition
versus where there's a reality or a truth as part.

Speaker 3 (25:31):
Of the story.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
All right, And when you come to those shape shifting things,
you can think, well, you know these people were like
thinking things up, and but how much of it was true?
Was it somebody that you know, maybe had some type
of skin disease or you know, some weed something weird,
and they after a while they just they just mistook

(25:54):
it like, hey, this is a whatever, a werewolf for
something else, whatever the case. There was one in South America. Again,
I want to say, it's like along the Peruvian coast,
and I had never heard of this. This was where
like the equivalent of a witchcraft, a black witchcraft, the

(26:16):
witch doctor, for lack of a better word. He's able
to leave his have his head leave his body, and
his head out of his ears. He sprouts two bat
wings and he goes around visiting people as it's called
the chung chong, which is ahead with bat ears and

(26:36):
stuff like that. And I was like, man, that's the
first I ever heard that.

Speaker 3 (26:40):
It's in my book. It is that.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
I didn't know all that. And when I read that,
I was.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
Like, what When you said the head flying around, I said,
wait a minute. And then when you said the name exactly.

Speaker 2 (26:51):
I came across the head go what in the world
I've never heard of that?

Speaker 3 (26:54):
Yeah, well, I mean right, And when you think about that,
like you want to say to your of, how could
anybody really believe that a guy's head can just leave
his body, brought wings and fly around and then apparently
come back and you know, wings go back in his
head or whatever. I mean. It defies all kinds of logic, right,

(27:15):
But then again, that's what superstition is about. It's not logical,
you know, and all these folk beliefs were. I mean,
so in my book, what I talk about is again,
you know, how the shape shifter shows up in folk tales, mythology,
and you hear all these unbelievable things. But I also
talk about reported incidents of supposed shape shifters or shape

(27:38):
shifting entities throughout the years, you know, and even to
modern times. We're like newspaper accounts, like from Africa and India.
I've got someone there, even in England, newspaper accounts about
people who have witnessed some kind of shape shifting, you know.
And we're talking about not newspaper accounts from fourteen twenty two.

(28:00):
It wasn't newspapers we're talking about, you know, nineteen hundreds,
nineteen nineties, two thousand. I mean, it's people are still
experiencing what they consider to be shape shifting experiences, and
I don't I never know what to do with that,
you know. It's like, I mean, I've done a lot
of work with ghosts. Most of my books were about ghosts,

(28:21):
and I've been in I don't know how many haunted
locations around the world, probably you know, a couple of
hundred doing investigations and everything. And I talked to people.
That's a big thing. I'd like to interview people that
have been there. I've had experiences, and some of them
will tell me these most amazing ghost stories, you know,
like oh, I saw this ghost came down the stairs.

(28:43):
And they'll be looking at me straight on and saying
it seriously. And I know they're not crazy people. I
mean sometimes they could be a nun, a police officer,
people that you think are you know, kind of with
it mentally, and they'll tell me these incredible stories and
all I can do is look at them and say,
you know, I cannot say that you're crazy. You didn't

(29:06):
have this. You had some kind of an experience. I
may not know the nature of it, and maybe you
don't when you say it's a ghost. Maybe we don't
know the nature of what happened. But you definitely had
some kind of experience that is well, like a better word,
it's paranormal. It's out of the normal. You know.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Did you ever have experiences while you were doing any
of these visits.

Speaker 3 (29:28):
I've had some. I mean I mostly like seeing objects
move and that kind of thing. But I remember like
actually in Florida, I was in Brooksville, Florida by I
don't know where you're located.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
But yeah, it's right a little bit south of me,
south west.

Speaker 3 (29:42):
Of me, well south US. Okay. Yeah, so at the county,
the Brooksville Historical Society Museum. It is a home that
used to belong to a doctor I forgot his name,
or the Stringer, I think, yeah, the May Stringer House
is doctor Stringer. And when you're talking about okay, so
if you've been inside it, you know it's got all

(30:03):
this old furniture and everything else. It's a historical house
and set up that way. They believe that they have
a ghost, well a couple, but they believe they have
a ghost there of a little girl three years old,
and I thought they called her Ruby. I'll have to
look up my own book and find it. But she
was the daughter of the doctor, and the doctor's wife

(30:23):
died in childbirth delivering Ruby. The child lived for she
was fine. She lived at the age of three, though
she contracted you know, scarlet fever, yellow fever or one
of those diseases that in the nineteenth century we couldn't
handle very well, and she died. But the people the
home say that she's there. They have some antique toys

(30:44):
and everything that are in glass cases kept sort of
you know, out of the way, and they lock up
for the night and set the alarms and everything else,
and they'll leave and then when they come back in
the morning, you know, they'll find the door, the case
is open, and the dolls are on the floor. They're
scattered around, like, okay, who's playing with the toys in
the middle of the night, so they think it's her.

(31:05):
But long story short is, one of the supervisors there
invited me to do a ghost hunt overnight. So it
was her myself and we had another ghost hunter come
out from Tampa, so there are three of us there,
and she kept saying how active this house is. There's
so much activity. Oh, you know, this is gonna be great.

(31:26):
So okay, so the three of us going there and
Marlene we sat there all night. We went through different
parts of the house. And the other thing I can
say is that we noticed right away is that once
we got inside and doors were closed and everything, it
was quiet, but not just quiet. It was like it
was like like a thickness almost quiet. Like we kept

(31:47):
looking at other like, man, it's really quiet. And then
right across the street was like this biker bar.

Speaker 1 (31:53):
Right.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
Yeah, well, when you open the door, you hear it,
all right, and you close the door you don't hear it.
But even then it's like that door is keep them out,
you know. So we're there all night long, and then
it's about maybe three o'clock in the morning and nothing
had really happened. So he said, well, you know, let's
just it's a bust. And the supervisor is so disappointed. Oh,
I'm so sorry that there's active activity all the time.

(32:18):
The minute I have somebody come in here, it stops,
you know. So we started going out through the kitchen
and the kitchen again has set up like nineteenth century style.
So there's this big pot belly stove by the door,
and you know, it's round, and it's got this big
flat metal round disc on it with kind of this hook.
And attached to that is this wrought iron handle maybe

(32:43):
you know, almost maybe two and a half feet long,
and it's got way to it. It's wrought iron, it's metal, right.
The idea was this thing was attached to that lid,
so when the stove got hot, you want to add
more wooden there. You couldn't touch with your hand, so
you grab this handle, you pull up the lid, then
you throw more wood in it down, so it's just
laying across things laying across the lid. So we have

(33:06):
lights are off, we're leaving. We're going to set the
alarm the back door and get out of there. And
we have one flashlight between the three of us. So
we're walking kind of kind of close to each other
in single file. And as we go past it, as
we go past the stove, I kind of noticed out
of the corner of my eyes some movement and what happened.
Actually I had not to on person myself. The other

(33:27):
two saw too, and we all looked, as you're walking
in this, this big handle lifted up totally up vertically
and slammed down it. And I can't slam here to
make the sound, but it did like a It did
a one eight hit, went bam on the lid, metal
on metal.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (33:44):
It was a big thing. And we all stood there
and looked at it, and of course we said, the
stupid thing. Did you see that? Yeah, we saw, were
right there and the three of us all saw, and
of course we had our cameras put away, our recorders,
put it whatever, head down to door, you know, so,
and we even tried, we even stayed a little bit

(34:04):
longer and we tried to see if we could recreate that.
Did we do it? Did we knock into it? And
some do anything.

Speaker 2 (34:12):
So that's not I think the most impressive one you
have really the items.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, I see a
little thing dance with something, but this was huge, and
like I said it loud. The supervisors said, see, you
know Ruby was here all the time. She just wanted
to let us know. And she's saying goodbye. And said, well,
somebody's saying goodbye.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Yeah exactly, that's the thing. Yeah. Sometimes for all you know,
it might not be Ruby, it might be you know,
some old lady who used to cook for them.

Speaker 3 (34:39):
Well yeah, well you know they I mean, they said
there's been other ghosts in the house too that they've
seen so or had experiences with. They they have frequently
seen somebody standing in the window at night. Now again,
place isn't open at night, it's locked up, and it's
got an alarm set. They've seen people at night and
they've called the cops. The cops come and they go

(34:59):
and and they checked it. There's nobody there.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
Yeah, so yes, and and you know that's because you
know you hear sometimes it's true, I have to say it.
Certain things can can move, especially if they're light, like well,
a breeze that you don't feel, or just anything movement
you pass by and you'll cause a breeze in your
wake and it'll move things. When you hear something of
metal that heavy that actually moves like that.

Speaker 3 (35:25):
Yeah that's impressive. Yeah no, And like I said, it
just had such great force to it as it flipped
up doing a one eighty and slammed down with you know,
actually it hit so hard that it popped off and
fell on the floor. I mean, it's just.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
It'd be like, oh, now we're definitely leaving. Okay, now
I've had enough investigations that that's exactly what happens when
everybody's ready to leave put Away right, Oh, I'm gonna
all right, Yeah here, the joke is on you this.
But yeah, yes, I've I've heard of that happening. So
freakd lead to other groups. Oh yeah, it's so boring. Yeah,

(36:04):
and then something unmistakable happens.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
How's that right? Well, then of course you have you know,
electronic voice phenomena. You know EVPs where you have a record.
I picked up something and we did a place. I
live in Cincinnati, Ohio, and for several years I was
teaching at Ohio University, which is in the eastern part
of the state. It doesn't matter, but at Ohio University
up on the Ridge, it's this beautiful old Victorian building

(36:29):
and it's huge, and it started off in eighteen seventy
six as the Athens Athens is the County Athens Lunatic Asylum.
That's what it says right in the door. Well, yeah,
the university owns it now, but it's in bad shape.
They have the ground floor has been renovated. There's an
art museum in there, but the next three or four
floors of this huge I mean, it's an enormous building

(36:52):
are locked and secured because there's bad floors, there's asbestos,
there's leaky pipes, all that stuff. But as a teacher,
so there's all these haunted stories about the place, and
as a teacher there I was invited by not okay
and back up. Not only they're an art museum, but
on that same floor the art instructors at Ohio University

(37:16):
have their private studios there. So they're teaching during the
day on the campus and they go into the building
here and they can paint all night or sculpt or whatever.
And their studios are literally old patients rooms, you know.
So they were experiencing some stuff and I knew one
of the art instructors, and he said to me, you
have to come in here and do an investigation. So

(37:37):
I got a team out of Columbus, Ohio. They came
down and we went through the building, spent all night
that we set up cameras and recorders everywhere, and we
just walked through the whole place. So again, nothing really
happened while we were there, but as we gathered all
our recorders and cameras and stuff and took another couple

(37:57):
of days or a week to listen to this and
watch all the video and listen to everything. We had
a recorder place in the basement room, which was a
secure room. It was where in the old days they
put patients who were violent, you know, in danger of
hurting themselves or others because they did in the house
they handle them. So it's the old padded cell. You

(38:18):
just sew them in there and lock them up, you know.
So we had a record them in there, and as
we're listening to it in the playback, all we're hearing
is white noise, you know, and all of a sudden,
in the middle of that white nose that pops that
we hear.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Would you help us?

Speaker 3 (38:34):
Just like that? Would you help us? Oh my god,
as we said, oh my god. And it makes what
I liked about that is, you know, there's so many
things that you can record dps. You think you get
DP and then somebody will say, well I heard it
and it said something like you know, yeah, I died here,
and somebody else will say, no, it didn't say that

(38:55):
at all. It said the cake is in the oven
and said, you know so, but this one is so clear.
And everybody, as we listened to it individually, heard the
same thing and came back and said that's what they heard.
And it makes it makes sense if you can imagine
that there was a spirit in that cell the time,
and and he's you know, sentient in some ways you

(39:17):
can see people out there. He's trying to tell you
get me out of here, help me. Would you help us?
In the fact that he said help us, like.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
Right, like there's more than one of us in.

Speaker 3 (39:26):
Here, Yeah, how many are you in there? So that
kind of those kinds of experiences I think.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Don't realize interesting, especially those old asylums that are built
post Civil war. They were like a self sustaining farm
kind of deal.

Speaker 3 (39:39):
Exactly.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
Oh, this one was not all you know, some of
the patients that weren't really violent, they were basically the work.
They became the farmers that ran this thing. But like
you said, there was always some floor or some wing
where the ultra violent ones, the ones that you couldn't
let out, had to be kept somewhere they could. In
other words, they couldn't be used for anything.

Speaker 3 (40:00):
This place was was gorgeous. I mean, the building, like
I said, is still beautiful. But to your point, they
had a farm, they had a dairy, They made bricks.
They had a facility to make bricks for the city.
So a lot of the city bricks in Athens, the
town of Athens, the streets are paid to the brick
and a lot of them made would have thered the
asilum itself has oh yeah, yeah, very much. It'specially one

(40:26):
of those haunted places in the state, maybe the United States.
The idea is that the theory is that it's sort
of at a vortex of different lay lines, so there's
a lot of energy there. There was one of the
first spiritualist churches in America was in Athens. Yeah, it
was called it was the Coon's family Kons, and the

(40:51):
newspapers carried all kinds of stories, national stories because if
he went to a seance at the Coons, they called
it a tabernacle. It was a building called it a tabernaco.
If you went there, you would see trumpets floating in
the air and musical industries floating around and they'd been
playing and all this stuff. So they were set up
for many years. Then the building was struck by lightning

(41:13):
and burned to the ground, and the people in the
town said that was God getting the right.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
And you know what, it's really funny. I've gone a
visit well, you know the here Floia we have Cassadaga.
It's just still an active spiritual.

Speaker 3 (41:25):
I've been to yeah, oh yeah, which.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
Is like if you go real quick, that's it. You
just left Cassadaga back. And I've been to lily Dale also,
which you know has a lot of history as a
spiritualist camp. And it's you remember that there was a
time like at the turn of the twentieth, which is
like you said, like manifestations were the ectoplasm and the
floating whatever, and they got the spirit cabinets like it

(41:50):
was like that was the way you know, mediums basically worked, right,
And but I know the spiritualist this is part of
their religious beliefs as far as well.

Speaker 3 (42:02):
Yeah, well, for sure, communication with the dead is their
whole thing. I mean, that's what they try to do.
And I don't you know, I don't, I don't. I
don't knock that at all. I just think the spiritual story.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
Is more than just being a mediums. They this was
part of the religious belief Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:16):
I went to a good friend of mine as a
spiritual minister here in Ohio, and I've gone to some
of her services. But I did go to Cassadega. My
wife and I went down there in January and it
snowed in Florida in Cassadaga when we were there. Wow,
that doesn't happen that much, right, it doesn't. But we
stayed in the hotel and we checked in you probably know,

(42:39):
we checked in at the you know, the actually the
clerk desk clerk is in the gift shop there at
the hotel. We checked in and she gave us the key,
and she said, now, if you go out to dinner
or something, that's fine, but make sure you locked the door.
I said, the lobby door. Well, we said, well, yeah,
locked that doors Okay, I mean, I'm not sure why
I'm locking the door to the lobby right. But it

(43:00):
turns out that my wife and I were the only
guests in that hotel that night, in the whole hotel,
and they don't have a staff at night or anything.
Everybody's gone, everybody, there's no security, so you're buy yourself
in this haunted hotel. And it was interesting because there's
a picture that my wife took of me in the

(43:20):
room and I was I was meditating and I was
actually going there. I was I had an appointment with
one of the readers that I forgot who he was,
and I was doing some meditation. I was trying to
pike some contact. Anyway, as I'm doing the meditation, she
took a picture of me, and when we looked at
it in the camera, there was this, you know, a
little glowing white orb like right behind my head.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
You know what was really scary. It's just I don't
know if it had changed, but when we were there,
there's no televisions in any of the rooms.

Speaker 3 (43:50):
Right.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
My husband he's like, you know, you walk in, you
put it. He's like, you see him looking around, where's
the TV?

Speaker 3 (43:58):
Nothing?

Speaker 2 (43:58):
And I'm like and I go, oh, I guess TV's
Like what TV? He was like, I come back coming up?
They come back. Yeah, he was like, yeah, that was
like I forget the ghost he was It was the
no TV part was what got to him. Let me guess.
When they were there, they had you know how this
hotel is like it's older. And one time I had

(44:21):
seen you know where they have the the far extinguishers
in the hallway and I saw some little match box
like those hot wheel things, and they're saying, oh, we
leave them out because we have reports of kids running
up and down the hallways.

Speaker 3 (44:34):
Oh I heard that.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
You know what they make like the like an opening
into the into the like into the hallway where they
stick the the extinguisher in. Yeah, And I noticed some
little match box. I was like, that's weirder than another.
And I asked, hey, what's He goes, Oh, no, we
leave those for the ghost kids so that they can
play with them. You know, the they've heard they heard
running up and down the hall.

Speaker 3 (44:56):
Was like, okay, yeah, I heard his story. My wife
is my wife has a PhD in toxicology, and she's
not not necessarily a believer. She's more science. But she
went with me on this. But she always goes, John,
this is this is your stuff. You know. So what
I did, We know people like I said in there,

(45:19):
So I at night, I just I got out of
the room. I just I walked around. I walked the
halls and I just sat like in the lobby for
a while in the dark. I was really trying to
see if anything would happen, if I can communicate with anything.
And it didn't. But I'm also you know, I don't
claim to be a psychic or anything like that either

(45:39):
or sensitive like that. So but it was a great experience.
It was a great I.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
Went over, there's a right you know, right, there's like
like like Helen cemetery. It's right, you know, Casidic is
right there, it's right there. And we said, well, I'm
gonna go. This was the middle of the end of
the weekdays, so we went to cemetery. It's empty, like empty,
and I'm walking around and hear enough, you know, they
have some family plots where they've erected like little walls.

Speaker 3 (46:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:05):
Here you find the glasses of clear water of just
water there, and that's because the clear water is supposed
to elevate the spirit, like it's like a vibrations. As
we're walking around, I was like, what is that? And
I was like, yeah, somebody they have placed it on
the wall of a family. I can't remember what the
name of the family was. And they also have I

(46:30):
think there's a devil's chair story connected to that, to that,
to that cemetery. And also I want to say, was
it the nineteen seventies or nineteen eighties they did have
where one of the psychics, one of the readers there
was killed, was murdered really in Cassadega, Yes, yes, no idea.

(46:54):
And it's very you know, because they're very you know,
they're very low key and everything. You know, they've got
that gift store and everything, and yeah, but and it's
like I'm not surprised sometimes because you get sometimes you'll
get get crazy people or just people looking for money,
and sure, yeah, but that's a very unusual place. But
it's it's it's basically a really I remember, well Lily

(47:16):
they'll had more historical homes, but over here they they
still like very active with that. As a matter of fact,
I want to say, the last time I was there,
I did get a reading. I'll say how far back
this was the lady she gave it to me, the.

Speaker 3 (47:29):
Cassette cassette.

Speaker 2 (47:33):
Okay, she was an older lady. I mean there was
other ways of setting to me, but she recorded it
on a set and it was like sure, okay, by
not right. The as far as the beliefs and things
like this, I want to say, and and and going
back real quick to that thing about the ship shape shifters,

(47:56):
and you know, I'm sure you've heard of the skin walkers,
which is one of like popular thing among Native Americans
where they don't even want to talk about it. You
want to bring up the subject and they're like, no,
we're not talking about that, and they'll just walk away
because they're always afraid that by actually mentioning that, you're
going to call it.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
To you call to you, yeah, right, right exactly.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
And you and it's always that same theme of that's
not only death, but like a portent of bad things
will happen, that kind of deal. So and it's incredible
because even modern day they they're like, no, we're not
talking about that. Yeah, they believe it, just like what
you were talking about. As far as the Vietnamese, they

(48:38):
still even modern day believe this.

Speaker 3 (48:41):
Right. Oh yeah, the belief is still there. But you
say you're not going to get much information on it,
but it's still there.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Yes, yes, yes, And I want to say part of
it if you think about it. You know, remember how
you hear about the vampire story, well, the that they
have to rest in their native soil kind of deal. Yeah,
always that right, that the spirit for the spirit to rest.
You know, they and I know in Asia they do
have like like you said, in the different Asian countries,

(49:12):
they have that very strong belief of anybody dying violently.
They and I was reading the other day, you know
when they had the tsunami and the thing in Japan
and was it twenty eleven, Oh yeah, that they had
like a loss of life that was sudden that they
had to bring in like zen priests like help because
they had sightings they said of like taxi drivers, uh

(49:36):
saying people were hailing them saying take me to this address,
and they'd look like that address is like it's leveled.
There's nothing there now.

Speaker 3 (49:42):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
You know where they were saying that all these people
that had perished tsunami were still trying to get home
or trying to do what they were or you know,
or that typical hitchhiker thing where all of a sudden
you look and the person that was there right no
longer there, and the same thing there was. There was
another around that they were taking Chile, there was you know,

(50:05):
it's an earthquake that causes a tsunami, and same thing
where they had an area of town that was coastal,
big loss of life, and then engineers and people that
were sent out there to work and assess and things
like that, they all have sightings of different people and
things going on even you know after the that happened. Yeah,

(50:28):
things like that. So that's uh uh, that goes along
with that, that belief sometimes that which we still have it.
You know, sudden, unexpected or violent death is going to
produce a ghost, right.

Speaker 3 (50:42):
You know, it's interesting, isn't. I Mean, you're you're right
about the tsunami and all that. In fact, I'm trying
to think when it was it was, what was after obviously,
but after that tsunami. We were in different parts of Asia.
We were like in Sri Lanka and India and places
like that. And like in Sri Lanka that's where an
higher passenger train was just swept off, just just an

(51:05):
entire train. And that is this memorial, a bigger memorial,
and it's it's a carving, and it's it's I mean,
takes takes your breath away because it's so sad and
so tragic. The carving is of you know, the train
and waves and people and it's just terrible. But all along,
for miles and miles and miles are these markers and
these little little Buddhist shrines to mark the high water

(51:31):
mark of the tsunami, how far it came up. And
also these Buddhist shrines are to protect or I should say,
let's keep the ghosts at rest.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
I guess I want to say as far as yes
that we like, it's like you feel sorry for them,
but more than anything, there's also that fear of that
they're going to be running around, right, you know, appearing
to people. And what time was this is an older story. This,
I want to say, it's before four nineteen hundred, eighteen
hundred been in Deadwood in North Dakota, and there's you know,

(52:05):
this is a course of camping, you know, mining town
kind of deal. And I want to say it was
even before the state was part of the United States,
and they had you know, you know a lot of
these camp the Chinese would have their own section. There's
this lady, she lives there. And this is by the
way it made them the newspapers. She gets killed. Somebody

(52:25):
comes into her house or her little apartment or whatever
she was living in, kills her violently, like beats her
to death something like that. So noting in the thing
that somebody moves in right away, another Chinese family, and
they start hearing like the reenactment of this lady getting killed.
They move out right away. And after that they say

(52:47):
nobody they said nobody would ever the the author of
the article says that that will be up for very cheap,
real quick. He says, because now there is no way
you could induce anybody, no matter how inexpensive, to move
into that location or this that happened to that lady. Yeah,
they take their seriously.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
I guess well, I'll tell you another quick Vietnam story.
When we went and went to Vietnam. I heard about
a house that was supposed to be haunted in Vietnam.
So I was with my son and my wife and
my daughter in law and we had a driver. We
hired a driver to take us up. It was in
the city is called De Lot, and it's in the
central Highlands and it's a beautiful town noted for growing flowers.

(53:28):
It looks like Holland. You get up on a hill
and the ice series beautiful flower fields. Anyway, there's this
house that you see from the outside. It was probably
built like, I don't know, maybe nineteen eighties or something,
but it's beautiful but almost just like a southern mansion,
big white pillars and that kind of thing, right, And
it sits up on this long driveway that winds up
on a hill and just like that's a gorgeous house.

(53:48):
That's the haunted house. Except what So we shit to
the driver we want to go there, and he stops
at the end of the driveway and the driveways, you know,
quite a distance to the house. Yet he says he's
not going to further. Okay, Yeah, So we get out
my you know, my wife and myself and my daughter
in law, my son and uh, my daughter and says, Dad,

(54:12):
I'm not going up there. And I said, well, not said,
it's the house is haunted. I said, I know, No,
I'm not going. Okay, so she's stay in the car.
We walk up there. Anyway. His house is his gorgeous,
totally empty, and it's because it's Vietnam. It's it's open
a lot doesn't have I mean, it's got walls, but
like big open areas and all this stuff. No furniture

(54:33):
in there. But there is one room that has a
Buddhist shrine. There's like three buddhas and flowers and stuff like,
who's doing that right? It turns out that the story
behind the house is that during the war in Vietnam,
the house is owned by an officer in the South
Vietnamese Army, Arvind n and he was called to war

(54:55):
and apparently he was killed and his wife was very
distraught and she killed herself in the house. She killed
herself by jumping off the third floor or something and
killing herself. So they say her ghost is there. But
in addition to that, years later after the war, like
probably nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties something like that, there was

(55:17):
a young girl who was kidnapped by some guys and
I want to go all details, but anyway, they killed
her and threw her into a well. What was left
off him for the well, and so her ghost is
that you see it all the time. So people say
this place is haunted. And what they did is they
the well is outside. They covered the well, they cemented

(55:38):
it over and covered it and they have a shrine
on that too, and they shrine in the house. So
shrine for the wife of the officer and a shrine
for her. You know. But you talk about just the
kind of house. I mean, it's it's like a gorgeous house,
and you go, how can you believe it?

Speaker 2 (55:55):
Oh yeah, oh sure that place is haunted out Okay,
but they really believe it. Like I said, it's not
that the guy got killed in war. It's the suicide
wife and then that other girl. These are the ones
that you have to worry about, right because they I
want to say that these ghosts, they become the worst
person they be. They're like vengeful and they want to

(56:17):
like either curse or bring take you, you know, take
you to your death. There's the worst things are associated
with that. And you could probably go back there in
twenty five years and the haunted house will still be
there and nobody goes there.

Speaker 3 (56:30):
I'm sure. That's kind of the point I was making,
is that very few people actually go into the it's
sitting here by itself, this big gorgeous house. Yeah, I mean,
you can move into it, you know, but nobody you know,
especially well these people right and there weren't. There weren't
too many tourists that knew about it because he's kind
of off the beaten pass, and you'd have to really
be somebody interested in haunted houses.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
Let's say, if anybody, let's say another Vietnamese family, let's
say whatever, or anybody, forget any family would move in
there if any little bad thing happened, you know who.

Speaker 3 (57:03):
It was going to be because of Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
Places curse is bad. It's you know, all these bad things. Yeah,
that that's it's always you're gonna have to lead a
charmed life because of that. You're gonna be under the
curse of whatever happened there. And the the uh they
also have in Japan, especially even now. I don't know

(57:28):
whether you want to call them, I don't know some
of the things that I know they're based on older stories,
but about these women you know that are seen down
the alleyways and part of it has transformed into anime
type of novel novels like short stories right that that
they are they're coming after you. Everything is like if

(57:50):
you see a woman and she's coming down the alleyway
and I've been wanting was it was it? I want
to say it was on Facebook or they have this one.
They have a couple of creators and it's usually in
these he's filming. He's from one of these Asiatic countries
and he'll just dress up some It might be a
man or a woman, but it will be someone with

(58:11):
long wig and a white dress. You want to see
grown men like they have one which is it shows
us a laundromat and whoever's gonna play the prank has
gone into one of the dryers or washing machines. So
you see some guys that are like they're just hanging
out the launch and this door opens and this thing

(58:33):
crawled the ring. I've never You've never seen grown men
like how many can fit through the one entryway of
the door. Nobody even thinks about confronting whatever it is,
right or but yes, that's when you see, like nobody's like,
oh man, it's a joke. Come here, No no, no,
no no. It's like we're running and one of the guys,

(58:54):
you remember, he's like walking with a girl, like there's
one where the stage it like that. It looks like
some type of parking garage, you know, there's an area
this thing comes out and he leaves it. The girlfriends
like this and he runs back, throws her over his shoulder,
and speeds away because it's like, we're not going to
find out what it is together. It's a very big belief,

(59:17):
like in that Angry Woman ghost kind a deal that
is going to get you no matter who you are.

Speaker 3 (59:25):
And it's funny that they're mostly female, which is kind
of interesting.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
You know, yes, yeah, yeah, you know, like for example,
in Japan, you know you have the samurai and you know,
and I'm thinking myself, well, they have the suicide forrest also,
but you know, you would think of untimely deaths or
even the the samurai that had that is it harakiri,
the you know, the that they commit suicide because of

(59:53):
this honor. I think, man, you would think that you
have a ton of those men running around like hey,
I wasn't right, but you know, I had to.

Speaker 3 (01:00:02):
You know, it's funny you mentioned the suicide forest too,
and I don't know that I've heard of ghost stories
from there, have you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
Not? Really?

Speaker 3 (01:00:10):
No. I mean a lot of people, you know, kill
themselves there, that's the idea, but I don't know that
I've heard. You would think that would be loaded with ghosts,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
And what's really funny is that sometimes some people they
find them right away, like within, and sometimes they because
they have like I'm thinking, this must be a highly
paid job where the equivalent of a park ranger. But
this is for the suicide forest that they've come across
people like years. Like in other words, they've gone to

(01:00:45):
some place that's for some reason just overlooked and they'll
find body hanging they've been their years and things like that.
And there was in the nineteen thirties or forties they
had a volcano that was active, well it wasn't active,
but it was, and two schoolgirls they go up there

(01:01:08):
and one of them be planning to kill herself and
I was like, I don't understand the romance of this,
you know, different mindset, and she throws herself into the volcano,
somehow or other, the story gets out that she did this,
and then you've got swarms of these young Japanese people,
boys and girls, men and women, you know, going in
there and jumping in and it was like what wow,

(01:01:31):
it was like talk about a horrible death because really
it wasn't bubbling up, but it was that if in it.
You know, it was always smoking. And they got to
the point where they had to post guards, you know,
along the perimeters, not to allow up and down because
of that. That's my point being that you would think
this place would be replete, but unhappy goes. But yes,

(01:01:57):
it's the I want to say, the wuther. It's murder
usually is the common denominator and the revenge thing. Yeah,
I'm going to get revenge for whatever. Like you said,
the husband that kills a wife to make wait for
the new one. That kind of deal is usually what
spurs it along. And let me ask you the book

(01:02:22):
that you're because I imagine you must do you weave
a lot of your research into the fictional.

Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
Oh yeah, oh yeah for sure. Yeah, yeah, I mean
that's that's kind of what I enjoy so much about,
you know, writing the nonfiction, going to all these places
and doing research and being on the ground and seeing
what it's like and talking to people. You know, it's
it's a double whammy for me because I can put
it in nonfiction, but then I use a lot of
it in my fiction. Sure, I'm working on a book.

(01:02:52):
I'm finishing up a book now that my agent would
like to get out, and it's called The Amulet, and
it has to do a lot with Tay culture and
amulets that everybody wears the word off spirits and all. So,
I mean there's a lot of Thai culture and ghost
stuff and everything is it is a paranormal novel to
begin with, so that's in there, and then just the

(01:03:12):
whole idea kind of theories about what ghosts are, why they're here, whatever,
and then also even talking a little bit about mediums
and people that can contact ghosts and how they do that.
That's all in that novel, just because it's kind of
what I know. You know, so finds its way in
my fiction, which is.

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
Great, exactly. And this is and again, this is something
that you find all around the world, different cultures, different countries,
different religious beliefs. You know, how they have certain you know,
whether it's Buddhism or you know, Christianity or whatever you
always have a version of the other day, I was

(01:03:57):
reading about this is in Afghanistan, you know, there was
I don't know if you've heard of it. There was
an outpost out there known as op Rock. And apparently
this location it was like a raised hilltop which is
why they used it was like sixty feet like a hill.
It was elevated, so that's why it was being used.

(01:04:17):
Come to find out, it had been used by the Russians.
The Afghans were there, and the last ones there, you know,
were the Americans, and the English had also been there,
you know, and they all had especially the English, I
think it was Welsh soldiers and the Americans that were there,

(01:04:37):
but even the villagers that were in this village would
all tell them that that place was cursed, and they
would all have all these stories about there was one
soldier that was doing guard duty and he heard somebody
speaking Russian in his ear, and later on they find
out that forty Russians have been executed. This was when

(01:04:59):
the you know, the Russians in afghan right like, and
it was like this place got like a really really
bad reputation and they said. Everybody, Like I said, when
the Americans came into English for living and they were
telling them be careful. But that's my thing. Even the
Afghan people that live there already knew that this place
was like not a good place, right all right, And

(01:05:23):
then everybody that came in, you know, stood out there,
they would see things out like because that areas where
really like this desert kind of like that, they would
see things out in the like with their night vision lights.
They had seen figures a lot of weird stuff and
that cross the board. People would see it. And I

(01:05:45):
think that's so interesting when it's not like, oh well,
because that culture believes and of course they're going to
see it like everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:05:51):
Everybody, Yeah, everything has the experience. You have to wonder
about that when you have when you have experiences that
that everybody, everybody feels and like you said, regardless of
what your culture was, what's your own background was, your
religion or whatever. If you go to a certain location
and you experience something and you find out that over
time or history a lot of people have gone there

(01:06:14):
and had that exact same experience, and you really have
to ask yourself, Okay, what is going on? Here, there
is definitely something going on, right, Whatever that's something is,
we may not know.

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
But exactly what is it that that common denominator that
doesn't care about what the cultural beliefs are. Whatever it happened,
you have that phenomena happening there. And I wanted to
ask you this book that it's going to be releasing
the which I know is fictional, The Bottle Conjuror. What
is that book about with the title of it?

Speaker 3 (01:06:49):
Right? So The Bottle Conjuror is based on a true incident,
which was that in seventeen forty nine. It's based in London.
In seventeen forty nine, in London, posters went up all
around town and the poster said that at a particular theater,
an anonymous conjure, no name, anonymous conjure was going to

(01:07:09):
come to this theater and he was going to put
himself into a wine bottle, an ordinary wine bottle, put
his tired body into a wine bottle. And he said,
once he's inside, you know, people can examine the bottle,
they can pass it around. You'll hear him singing from
inside the bottle. That's what all these posters said. So

(01:07:31):
tickets were sold to this thing. People were saying, Oh,
come on, I can't there's no way this can be true,
can't happen. So of course they wanted to buy tickets
to see that it couldn't happen, right, And tickets were
very expensive, so only like the elite and the rich
people were able to fill this theater. But fill it
they did. They bought tickets, they filled it up. And

(01:07:51):
so they're there sitting around and they're waiting for a while,
and nobody shows up, and there's nobody on stage, so
they continue to wait. There's a little band that's playing
the kind of keep them amused. But an hour goes
by and they're still waiting and no one shows up.
They give up more time. Two hours go by and
still nothing is there. So now the audience is getting

(01:08:12):
really ticked off, right, so they start ripping up the chairs.
Somehow one of the candles or lamps or something used
on this stage is knocked over. The knights are curtain,
the theater burns down. People run out into the streets.
So people survived. They run out in the streets, and
they also find out that these are the rich people

(01:08:34):
that they lost their their bracelets and their necklaces and
their watches because during those two hours there are pickpockets
working the crowd. So this was the truth. This is
a true story. And what's interesting is that today, to
date this was seventeen forty nine, they still don't know

(01:08:54):
exactly who is behind it. There is one guy called
the Duke of Monte You who was like the prime suspect,
but there was no evidence bro against them anyway. So
what we did, I say we because this is the
first time I've co written fiction, and I'm co writing
it with my cousin, and we took that as the

(01:09:15):
starting point. So it's historical, but it's historical fantasy. We said,
what if there really was a conjuror who could do that?
What would I mean if that was possible? That kind
of throws everything we know about science and reality out
the window, doesn't it. And he happens to be a romani,
a gypsy, and it takes off from there, and the

(01:09:39):
second book, what we're doing now is a lot more fantasy,
a lot more fantastical than the second one. And the
third one, which we'll do probably next year, takes place
in America. It's the Saint You're following the family. You're
following the main characters through there, you know, from England
through twenty years or whatever, and then into America during

(01:09:59):
time the Revolution. So a lot of history, a lot
of really fascinating history were uncovering it there. But yeah,
you too, So that's on.

Speaker 2 (01:10:08):
That you have real history woven in through the Yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:10:13):
So like in like the one we're doing now, the
second volume that's going to be coming out in July. Uh,
there's historical characters. Is a guy named Jack Broughton who
was the bare knuckle champion of England during the time,
and in the ring is again true story, he kills
the guy he wants. He wants to stop the fight,

(01:10:35):
but the guys that are and say no, no, no,
you got to keep it up. They gotta hip and
he ends up killing a guy. And Broughton was a
very religious person, so he ends up basically kind of
not hanging up his gloves, but he's he invents the
rules from modern boxing you wear gloves and all that stuff.
So he's in there. We have two highwaymen, you know, robbers,

(01:10:56):
Plunket and McLean, and they were real people and they
robbed a bunch of people and McLean ends up getting
caught and hanged plunk It, escapes to America and fights
in the American Revolution. This is all true. So it's
fascinating to find sort of these these little people in
the history that are real, you know, George, that.

Speaker 2 (01:11:18):
They insert in there, like you know, yeah, this is there.
That's true. During history, there's so many unknown, unnamed people
living their lives right that. Yeah, around these characters that
for some reasons show up, you know, written about historically.

Speaker 3 (01:11:32):
Yeah, so mey say, like, well, what if our character,
like the romani in book one who goes to his
name is Stefan. He's a totally invented character. Well, we say,
so what if Stefan met Jack Broughton? You know what
would that be like? Because you can do that you
lived at the same time. How do I know? I mean,
who knows whether Jack Broughton met a gypsy somewhere. Maybe

(01:11:52):
he did, maybe he didn't. That that's the fiction part.

Speaker 2 (01:11:55):
Right, Nobody following that like not like now everybody follows
you around with a camera you.

Speaker 3 (01:12:00):
Yourself, like, I know, I know, And you know what.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
It's really funny when it says, okay, a few years back,
you remember when people started getting more like they would
take pictures of what they were eating. And then back
when I was like, man, you got to be crazy
what I'm eating? What cargo? I was like okay, And
now it's like okay enough, no more, no more of this.
You know, everybody's like a you know, it's like everybody's

(01:12:24):
pulling out their inner narcissist. And but it's like, I know, hey,
what would happen? Okay, how bad? How bad do you
think the withdrawal would be? John? For some reason, the internet.

Speaker 3 (01:12:36):
Would down worldwide.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
You see people riding around on the ground.

Speaker 3 (01:12:43):
What's wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:12:46):
Myself?

Speaker 3 (01:12:47):
Completely? I know, they say, what, there's a real world
out here. I don't like what it looks like.

Speaker 2 (01:12:51):
You don't know what do you want to talk face
to face? No, I don't have my makeup. It's incredible
people who have a live certain amount of years that
I've seen it. You look now and you're like, what, like,
what is this?

Speaker 3 (01:13:05):
I know, well, I mean, you know, I was born
in nineteen fifty and you know, there was no internet,
there was no cell phones, you know, and all of
a sudden, I mean it's such a short period of
time the world has changed point incredible point yeah, what's
it going to be. Yeah, I mean another ten years,
twenty years, it's going to be totally different again, you know,

(01:13:27):
because technology just advances exponentially. It just was crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:13:31):
Yes, yes, let me tell you something. The other day.
My son was looking something up and he says, mom,
I looked something up on chat GPT, which is AI.

Speaker 3 (01:13:39):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:13:39):
The answer it gave him was and it asked me
to do with law was excellent. And I said, well,
I lawyers out.

Speaker 3 (01:13:45):
Of the job.

Speaker 2 (01:13:46):
Yeah, yeah, right, it was legally on something in a scenario.
And I said, and he's like, I said, mana, you know,
sometimes look it up. But he went to an AI source.
I was like, oh boy, some of these attorneys.

Speaker 3 (01:14:02):
But you can find anything you want, yes, on the internet, right,
anything absolutely in playing my books on Facebook, I'm on
Amazon and whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:14:13):
So it's going to say, wait a minute, because I
did look at this, hold on it, because you know what,
I did look these up, and I wanted to show
them these I.

Speaker 3 (01:14:27):
Want to oh wow, oh there you go, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:14:30):
And and and you know as far as the I
ordered it by publication date, which is that bottle conjurer.
And then you've got boy, you've got So you've got
so many great books, all right, you know, especially like
that you've done. I guess the haunting of these different
like I guess capital cities or things like that. Let

(01:14:51):
me ask you real quick, what is that Dark Entity?

Speaker 3 (01:14:53):
Book about Dark Entry? So that's that's a sorry, it's
a paranormal novel, okay. And it's based I grew up
in Connecticut, and it's based on a location in Connecticut
that is nicknamed Dark Entry. And there's a whole haunted
history to that place, going back to the colonial days
where basically people, over a period of about fifty years

(01:15:14):
or so, a lot of them committed suicide, they went
insane and all that. So I took that sort of
basic story, uh, and I invented a Native American spirit
that is causing a ruckus in Dark Entry. Now, I'll
tell you a quick story about that. So it's a
real place, and I want to check it out. And

(01:15:35):
it's up on a hill. It's it's upon a kind
of a I don't want to say mountain, but in
Connecticut it would count as a mountain. Well, you're in Florida,
so you you don't have any mountains, yeah, right, But
you know the only thing. I slept through these old
like cellar holes and abandoned wells or something else. But
the forest has just overgrown it. And it's called Dark

(01:15:58):
Entry because the forest has grown over so thickly that
when you go up there, it's like the lake goes out.
It could be a sunny day. You go up there.
It's dark. I mean it's really dark, which is great
for the story, but it's a real place. And Ed
and Lorraine Warren you probably not this. Yeah, I knew
them because I grew up in Connecticut and got to

(01:16:19):
know them. They had gone up there many times and
had all these amazing photos of orbs and anomalies and things,
and I went up there and got those kinds of
photos too. But so that was the place that I
wrote about. And the whole area now is private. There
are some homes up there, and they created something called

(01:16:39):
the Dark Entry Forest Association, and they bought that property
and kept it private, mainly because they had a lot
of people going up there doing stupid stuff like you know,
rituals and all this, because it's haunted location. Right. So
but here's the weird thing. Lean I don't know how
this happened. The book. I forgot even when the book
came out. It's been several years now, but even before

(01:17:01):
it came out, Even before it came out, I got
a letter here in Ohio from the letter heads a
Dark Forest Dark Entry Forest Association. I said what they
said in a letter, we understand that you've written a
novel about Dark Entry and we want you to cease

(01:17:23):
and desist.

Speaker 2 (01:17:24):
I was gonna say.

Speaker 3 (01:17:26):
What yep, because it you know, the property damage and
all this kind of stuff, and you know if you don't,
you know, you'll face legal consequences and this kind of stuff. Right.
But it wasn't even signed. It was signed Dark Entry
Fords Association. Nobody's knowing. No no address, no you know,
nothing like that, no phone number. And of course I

(01:17:47):
immediately ignored it because my First Amendment rights say you
you can't tell me I can't publish a book. And
the book came out, but it was It's amazing this
story is so well known that somehow they even knew
I was going to write a novel about it. I
don't know how they even knew that and tracked it
down to me in Ohio.

Speaker 2 (01:18:06):
Haven't even published it yet.

Speaker 3 (01:18:08):
No, No, nope, that was the weird thing, Like, who
I mean, It's not like, you know, it's not like
I'm some major public figure where everybody's watching every move
I make, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:18:21):
His next book will be and everybody's like, yeah, yeah, no,
exactly what you mean. How did they get a hold
of that information?

Speaker 3 (01:18:29):
I don't know. And they found my address they mailed
to me here in Ohio. Wow. Anyway, interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:18:35):
Yeah, but so a lot of these places. But yeah,
and I don't get me wrong, I understand that sometimes,
like you said, people they get carried away when they
do legend and they do stupid stuff and they' vandalized.
I understand that, But still.

Speaker 3 (01:18:50):
Right, and I don't condone that, and I know you
don't either. There's no place for that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:18:53):
I know, But still is like, you know, people are
going to do stupid stuff no matter what you know.
Do you really think do you really think that just
because they have an association that bought it.

Speaker 3 (01:19:03):
No, people are still going People are still going out there.
And I even I even said somewhere like in a
little author's note or something in the book, that you
should always, you know, when you're doing anything, be respectful
of private property. I even said that.

Speaker 2 (01:19:20):
Some people it's like, as a matter of fact, there's
more of an enticement. Oh you know, I'm not supposed
to go there. Oh that's where I'm.

Speaker 3 (01:19:27):
Going, right, Yeah right, I know. But that's what that
book is about. That was some one to write too.

Speaker 2 (01:19:32):
So all right, John, thank you so much. It has
been absolutely wonderful to talk to you same here than
you pay in touch with you because I wanted you
to come back and we'll talk about your other books.

Speaker 3 (01:19:43):
Well, I'll have the Bottle Conjure out in July. Bottle
Conjure too, we could talk about that.

Speaker 2 (01:19:47):
No, and you've got three and I mean you've got them.

Speaker 3 (01:19:49):
All like that. Yeah. Yeah. Well. The one thing I
just want to mention though, is there was one book
show which is called hatecorn Smith and the Castle Ghosts.
And the reason why I will mention that is that
is my first book for like middle grade readers, like
ten to thirteen. So I had I was invited to
a couple of schools here in the Cincinnati area to
come in and talk about the book and everything to

(01:20:10):
fourth graders. Ghostory Yeah yeah, yeah, I love ghos story.

Speaker 2 (01:20:13):
Anyway, myself included when I was growing up at the end.
When I was growing up, the only one that was
doing those stories was like hands Halter. Oh yeah, he
was the only one that was reading you know, that
type of books back then. But yeah, of course it's
I love it. You know, how can I tell you your
imagination runs wild?

Speaker 3 (01:20:30):
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (01:20:33):
Again, Thank you, John, It's been absolutely wonderful.

Speaker 3 (01:20:35):
Thanks take care Marley.

Speaker 2 (01:20:40):
Yeah see, I love it. You know, you take the
you take the research, use your research and your fictional work.
But then he did. You could tell when I showed
his list of books. He's got a lot of other
nonfiction books like U goes hunting in Illinois goes hunting,
Ohio Goes hunting, or High on the Road again, this

(01:21:01):
is like a hunted road trip, you know, is like
I guess, like a pit stop at all these different
places where which have some type of what do you
call it, some type of story or reputation behind it
as the word taunting it. And this is the thing,

(01:21:22):
you know, everybody likes you. Well, that depends, you know,
the the some explanation or conclusion or the ghost were
across it. Sometimes the story is just that. It's all
it is, is the story. You know, you think that
this is who the ghost is because supposedly or this
is the family that lived there, and this is the manifestations,
and then that's it. But sometimes the story is that's

(01:21:45):
all it is. It's a story. It has no resolution
in the sense of that for all you know, the
ghost is still there. You think you might know who
the ghost is. But sometimes, like I say, sometimes if
if you go with a theory that let's say it's
a certain family that lived in a certain location, you
could have somebody. Well we were talking about when he
said that he weaves these true historical figures into his

(01:22:10):
fictional work. All right, same thing, there's I want to say,
the majority of people that have lived are unknowns. They might,
if they're lucky, if something ever happened, they might have
made their local paper. But otherwise they kind of lived
their lives in anonymity. They didn't hear their name or

(01:22:34):
maybe maybe maybe an open would be published when they died,
but their daily lives. And my point being that in
a lot of these houses, let's say we're going with
a haunted house thing, a lot of drama played out, okay,
and nobody never made the papers. Nobody, you know, back
then there was no it wasn't documented. How that sometimes

(01:22:58):
by the way, that drama ended up bating nasty, all right,
people getting killed. Like he said, love triangles. Same remember
also contrary to now where everything is published, good, bad,
and the ugly, especially the ugly. Back in these we're
talking here, like a while back, you didn't want scandal

(01:23:21):
visit in your house, either because of the if you were,
the family that lived there, or even the people let's
say that worked for you. So people would take great
pains to like not let bad stories go out. Sometimes
it was unavoidable. Forgot it, there's no way around it.

(01:23:43):
But a lot of times people the scandal was to
be avoided, like the plague. Why because people back then
had long memories, had long memories, all right. Point and
I tell everybody, even to the point where if you
had led a scandalous life or a moral life, or

(01:24:04):
you weren't even buried in the regular people, you were
put in the corner. If you if you knew who
you were, you know, sometimes even your family would ostracize
you and not even bur you, let's say in the
family plot or family you know, whether it's in cemetery,
because even after death they didn't want that association. My

(01:24:26):
point being that scandal was to be avoided, but that
doesn't mean it didn't happen. So in other words, there's
always an effort like, hey, you know that happened, Okay,
should be quiet, get that person out and we'll do it.
You know, nobody wanted to be that family where. And
then let's say if you lived in a house not

(01:24:47):
that reputable where people were killed or things happened or
beat up or crimes took place, which were basically like
more of a rundown part of the town, nobody was
nobody was worried about that. No, it didn't make the papers.
Things happened, people disappeared, all right, and it was like, oh,

(01:25:11):
you know, well, well they they're that from the all
that area where the saloons are or where the brothels are,
or what they call the tender loins of the town.
You know, crazy stuff. Unless it was something really big
and scandals, like a shootout, people came and went what
was it. One time I was doing research on one
of my books, and which is the first book I

(01:25:33):
wrote about. It's an old it's it's it's it's nonfiction,
all right, Old West wicked ladies and the bad ombrees
they loved and in was this a barbary coast. The
Barbary coast was, you know, a long San Francisco's coast,
and it got the reputation. This was like the place

(01:25:53):
where all the sailors went to do. It was like saloons, brothels,
you name it, Opium, dens, blah blah blah blah. It
was one time. Was it San Francisco or is San Diego?
Can't remember? No bottom line the was it the world
not the World's Fair, the PanAm Exposition something. It's a
big deals coming to the city, right, So the city fathers,

(01:26:16):
all the movies and shakers, they're like, we gotta make
this city look wonderful. It's gotta beautiful. We're gonna have
an influx of visitors. YadA, YadA, YadA. Right, so they
decide that they're going to clean up the tenderloin. Like
when I say the tenderloin, the tenderland was usually an
area like I said, with the brothels, saloons, all this stuff,

(01:26:37):
like nobody talked about when it took place there. All Right, Now,
some other people in the town, especially the law enforcement,
they were like, no, no, no, don't do that. Because,
by the way, sometimes in these areas of town, you
you could even leave the area if you have let's
say a brothel or anything. After a certain time, you

(01:26:59):
couldn't leave. As a matter of fact, they even had
like a mini business where they would have these boys
runner boys on bicycles and let's say the madam would say, hey,
go to the store and bring me back some bottles
of liquor or lunch or whatever whatever was going on,
you know, because they weren't allowed to leave that area,

(01:27:21):
and they were fine with it, or after a certain
time they couldn't leave, and so they had this side
hustle going on back then even then where they would
run out get it, and then they would even come
and sometimes put in a basket and they would haul
it up to you know, especially these big houses, because
in some cases, a lot of the times you would
have the saloon on the first floor and the brothels

(01:27:41):
would be on the second floor. Not all the time,
but sometimes that's how they ran it. So anyway, somebody
gets the bright idea, hey, we need to clean up.
We cannot have this. We were going to have an
influx of visitors from around the world, other people that
I think were a little bit more street savvy. They said, look,
it's going to be a prom because if here we
have them under control, when somebody does something, they're not

(01:28:03):
supposed to know where to come and look for. All right,
it was like a vice bottom line. Anyway, they end
up under the pretext of like the health, like healthy.
They go in there and start demolishing some of these houses.
It's surprising. So when they're demolishing some of these houses
and bars and opium duns and a bunch of stuff,
they find skeletons of people underneath these houses. These said

(01:28:27):
people that had been killed or died or whatever. Who
knows under their bottom line that my point being the
original point, which is that sometimes things take place, people
get killed or die or od or a bunch of things.
Nobody ever noted it, nobody ever wrote something in the
paper or you know, no newspapers or out here. We

(01:28:50):
haven't seen John Smith for about two weeks. And that
sometimes the hauntings that you will see at some of
these locations are not the usual suspects. All right. I
don't care if that family that lived there had maybe
some tragedy where three kids died from scarlet fever, or

(01:29:11):
the wife died in childbirth, or the husband committed suicide.
Sometimes the one that's having all this commotion going on
is maybe a gardener who was obsessed with maybe the
young lady of the house and she she's totally unaware
of what's going on, and he does away with himself.
Or you know, somebody that lived or worked there has

(01:29:35):
an unhappy love affair, same thing. They just you know,
commit suicide or they're just unhappy or what I call
the unfulfilled life. All right, they live in the shadow
of this family. Nobody really knows what their aspirations were,
if they were happy, unhappy, if they were fulfilled, that

(01:29:57):
they were get married, if they wanted to or have children,
whatever words from outward appearances were. They spent maybe all
these years working there, this is just and maybe deep
down inside nobody I asked them, Hey, are you okay?
Are you happy? Maybe this person was very unhappy. They
didn't get what they aspired to in life, but they

(01:30:19):
stay there because what else am I going to do?
All right? And if you don't think that sometimes that
unhappiness or that lack of fulfillment or sometimes that you
get like I was cheated out of I should have
had this, or I should have had that, or you
know what, my sister, my fiance or the guy I

(01:30:40):
loved when I married my sister instead of me, or
my cousin, and you know, and some people get over
stuff like that and they move on and they marry,
and then others don't and they get stuck on that.
And sometimes they'll live their life and they'll die when
they're seventy, but that event colors the rest of their
life and they end up becoming unhappy spirits. So sometimes
in these haunted houses, it's a cast of thousands of

(01:31:04):
who it could be, all right, that could be causing
a disturbance if if they're really if if it is active. Okay,
just like when he was saying at the beginning that
story about the String of May house, where you you know,
the supposedly the hunting is a three year old child,
but then they have uh, a heavy iron thing in

(01:31:28):
the kitchen plunk. I'll tell you I would not I
would not attribute that to a child spirit. Sorry, mm hmmm, Nope,
it just doesn't. That doesn't no to me. It's more
like something more forceful, whether it's the personality or even

(01:31:52):
the anger or whatever. Again, and this is another thing.
You know, when you have these places where people endeavor
to have spirit communication, you will bring in spirits that
have nothing whatsoever to do with that location. Nothing. So
here you are trying to talk to the little girl,
Hey baby, how are you doing? You want a little dog?

(01:32:13):
And you know who's standing hanging out as this big
guy who uh has tracked around him over in the
field or whatever. Why because you're attempting spirit communication. And
then in some cases what will happen is they stay there,
they'll leave. It's like, okay, hey man, everyone said, while
there's a bunch of people running around here trying to communicate,

(01:32:34):
maybe somebody will tell me what happened, or hey, I
can tell them that I didn't run away, I fell
in the well and I drowned in the well. So
that's what I'm saying. Some people think that that they're
these haunted houses or locations are like, that's it. They're
sealed off from other spiritual intrusions, and sometimes those original

(01:32:54):
spirits if they were there, those ghosts, they they move on.
You know, something happens some psychic goes in there and
releases them somehow or other. The light bulb goes off,
they leave, they realize they're dead. Somebody comes from them.
They're like, oh, thank god, I'm out of here. And

(01:33:15):
then there's other spirits that come in and just hang out.
Like I said, they're attracted because there's people that are
trying to do spiritual communication, even if it's not Wiji Bord.
Why I'm talking about EVPs anything else, you know, everybody.
You could tell everybody's attention in that group. Let's say
we're talking here ghost hunters. They're fixated on capturing some

(01:33:36):
type of evidence, all right, which is a form of
spirit coun me. So you used to get these spirits
that going in. Then after a while they hang out,
they just stay, they don't go. It's like, now why
not got all these interesting people? And again there's always
whatever it is that that binds a soul a spirit
not to move on. Is like, this is no place
for them. It's like, but that's a whole nother show.

(01:33:57):
But again I think that his his stories. And again
the I'll say the common denominator that you have from
all around the world, and I've said this before, where
the dead. Okay, because even when they talk about let's
say in the Asian countries, where you appease your family

(01:34:18):
members and you know, you build the shrines and all
of this, really it's also a form of appeasement because
there's always a cross, Like I said, across culture times countries,
there's always, for lack of a better word, a fear
of the dead coming back, even if it's a family member.
And by this I don't mean the vampire thing like

(01:34:39):
reason from the dead. Now, I'm talking about the spirit
of a dead person coming because everybody knows that it's
a bad thing. It's not good, it's antithetical. Any soul
which is at this level is not going to be
happy and it's going to be a problem for the living.
So that's why I think that what he was describing
in the Asian countries where they have these ghost house

(01:35:00):
basically is to keep everybody happy. And I've even heard
that in some cases when you have a spirit, let's
say that doesn't have a family member or anybody, uh
tho's what they call the hungry ghost. That that that
could be trouble, that could be a problem. So I
can imagine that that's basically why going into Vietnamese jungle
is like no, it's like the real perilous stuff and

(01:35:23):
the spiritual danger as well. It's very interesting how much
we all kind of believe, kind of or fear the
same things independent of one another. I remember one time
when they make this real. This is my grandmother moves
into this very old houses in Cuba and as you know,

(01:35:45):
the Spanish were there since the fifteen sixteen hundreds. They
move into this. It was a I think it was
a rent. I don't think they have bought it or
they were going to buy something like that old Spanish
style house. My mom told me that walls were like
thea thick you know, to this is to keep it
cool inside. I don't know how long after they move

(01:36:09):
in my grandmother And let me tell you, my grandmother
was a very no nonsense person by the way. She
wasn't she wasn't really She did that scary easy and
she somewhere along the way, I don't know how soon
after they move in, she finds out that at one
point it had been used as a funeral home. Guess what,

(01:36:29):
my grandmother and the family moved my grandfather everybody. I
don't I don't know exactly how that went, because I
always got the condensed version of that story. But it
was like it was a It was a beautiful house,
the thick walls, old Spanish building, very big, the tall
you know, ceilings, everything. It was nice, beautiful, beautiful, right,

(01:36:51):
and it was like, we're out of here. They had
There was no manifestations or nothing, but just the information
that at one point it had been a funeral home.
I was like, and by the way, I'm not talking
a more I'm talking like a funeral home kind of deal.
It was like. But then Mike's same grandmother, who I'm

(01:37:15):
gonna guestimate at this she must have this must have
been in the nineteen late nineteen twenties, early nineteen thirties.
When she tells me the story. She tells me how
she has a neighbor who is a young woman, but
she's got TB tuberculosis, and she tells me, by then

(01:37:38):
she already had my mom and my aunt, there were
little little girls, and this neighbor tells her, look, I'm
gonna die. I've already chosen like what I want to
be buried, and would you please do me the favor
of coming over here. When I die, if you could
like clean me up and put this dress that I
have here for on me. My grandma says, sure, I'll

(01:37:58):
do that. By the way, my grandmother was a very
young woman. Then I want to say, my mom. My
grandmother must have been in her early twenties when she
did this, and the lady was comparable to her in age,
because remember this is the time when people would die
at home and do wakes at home and things of
this nature. My grandmother that didn't we were out. She
did it. Sure enough, the lady died and she went

(01:38:21):
over there, cleaned her up and put on the dress
she wanted. And I guess this was in preparation. I
don't know if the lady didn't have immediate family, or
maybe they weren't in that part of town.

Speaker 1 (01:38:30):
I have no one.

Speaker 2 (01:38:32):
I don't know how she came about to ask my
grandmother to do that for her, and she did it.
She didn't know what got But fast forward a few years,
it's like, no, I'm not living in what used to
be the funeral home. So again there's always that underlying
fear of that. You know that anything that is not
supposed to be on the earthplane that's here is eventually
going to cause a problem one way or the other.

(01:38:53):
That stuck here. How's that so? Anyway, guys, I have
a lot of great guests coming on, like John, people
that are returning new ones. I have my newsletter. Go
on Substack, go to mppelister dot com, go to Miamigro's
chronicles dot com, any of those they I have links there.
Not only for the podcast version, which is an MP

(01:39:14):
three file. I've got links to the video version. Not
only for Stories of the Supernatural, but for Nightshadeediary dot com,
Supernatural story Time, got articles on Eerie Time, Erenews, Eerie
dot news. Also articles on Stranger Than Fiction Stories, which
you can find me in Stranger Than Fiction Stories dot com.

(01:39:34):
All of the above. Like I said, I'm on all
the major podcast platforms, videos, all the major video platforms
besides YouTube, I'm on Rumble, I'm on Steamen, I'm on
Bitch You, anywhere I could find myself, cloud Hub. I'm
in all of those so and again for free, free,

(01:39:55):
for free, for free, And I tell everybody, if you
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(01:40:17):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Dark Disguises | Interview with John Kachuba | Podcast