6 Degrees of John Keel - Haunting Our Own Houses and Other Stories with Karly - Paranormal UK Radio Network

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to the Paranormal UK Radio Network and this
is six Degrees of John Keel. Hello and welcome to

(00:43):
the six Degrees of John Kiel podcast. I'm your host
Barbara Fisher. Tonight I'm talking with Carly Lapham Latham Latham.
See I told you i'm professional people, I really am Latham.
And she goes by the village to row which on Instagram.

(01:05):
She's a very interesting person. And we had just been
talking about what's haunted houses or people or both, and
so why don't you jump in with your haunted house.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Story, my haunted house story. I am really excited for
this because I just had a phone call with my realtor.
The house in question is for sale at the moment.
I'm not gonna say where, because if you buy that house, like,
that's on you, buddy, you know, So that's that's not
my problem anymore. But I would say that I am

(01:45):
someone that has always been sensitive, but I lacked the
information and the understanding of what was going on. So
like I can look back at my life and pinpoint
several several times when I felt like I wasn't alone,
Like I had experiences that I couldn't explain but I

(02:09):
was raised Mormon, so I was raised in a very
black and white this is what's real, this is what's
not religion, And as a result, when I had these experiences,
I almost always would chalk them up to anxiety like
that that it was the only way that I had

(02:30):
to interpret what was going on. Is I would be
alone in a room and be feeling watched and I
had no explanation for it other than I must have
watched too many horror movies. You know, Like I am
an anxious person that runs in my family. So like
that's that's logical, right, So fast forward to my adult years.

(02:54):
I left the Mormon religion, which is a whole thing.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Yeah a thing.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
It's a big thing. Yeah, it's a big thing. It
was hard on my family, It was hard on a
lot of the people that I was friends with. It's
the reason that I'm not active on Facebook is because
I have a Facebook account. But Facebook is where all
of my Mormon people live, and so I just I

(03:23):
know that strategically going on Facebook is good for me,
but I avoid it at all costs. So it is fair,
you know, Facebook is kind of an ick place anyways.
So I left the Mormon religion. And within a couple
of years, I moved to Florida. And I had lived

(03:47):
in Texas essentially my whole life. So like we're talking
born into this religion, left it, and then left my
home state behind in a very short amount of time. Okay,
So I got to Florida, and I am fully an
atheist at this point. I don't believe in anything. If

(04:08):
you know anything about Mormonism, it is that they teach
that that is the one true church, and they actually
will actively tell you if this isn't true, nothing is.
So like I worked through that conditioning. I had that
moment where I was like, this religion, this story that
I've been told my entire life, there's no basis in reality.

(04:32):
This isn't real. I don't have to stick with this,
right And it was huge for me because I had
always been very unhappy within Mormonism. I did not fit
in like I'm here on this podcast. Do you think
that I fit in with Mormonism? Like I didn't fit

(04:54):
in there. I didn't really fit in super well with
my family, like I've always been a little bit odd,
you know. And so I'm moving into this house and
almost immediately I started noticing strange things that like I
felt my whole life, but they were really amplified in

(05:15):
this house. Like one of the first nights that I
was alone, which was very few and far between. I
at the time, I was a military spouse. I my
ex was working for SpaceX, and so like my entire

(05:37):
existence was being a stay at home mom to my
kids to be there while he was out taking care
of business. Right, other military spouses and even SpaceX wives
will say the same thing. There's not a lot of
flexibility in our lives because we tend to just like

(05:58):
revolve around what's happening with our spouses at the time. Right,
So I didn't get a lot of time to myself.
I was alone very rarely, and so in the house
in Florida, I started having these moments where I was
alone for the first time and I was getting really

(06:19):
it wasn't even like jumpy. It was more like it
was almost like when you're watching a horror movie and
the main character knows that she's being watched and is
like looking around and there's like there's a bad guy
lurking around the corner. Right. It's that type of feeling,
except that I really was alone and so I'd be
looking around my house and being like, I don't understand

(06:39):
what the problem is. But it was intensified to a
degree that I had never felt before. So it even
got to the point where I was afraid to be
in the main house by myself. So if I was alone,
which again, I live to be alone. I love I
love my and I love I love when the house

(07:03):
is to myself, like I thrive in alone time. I
don't like. I don't like it when my house is
too loud or too crowded or too busy, which is
hilarious because I homeschool my kids, so it's always all
of the above, right, But I would go into my
bedroom and I was scared to the degree that I
was locking myself in my bedroom and just like kind

(07:26):
of hanging out there and watching TV in bed until
my kids would come home. Right, So this is happening.
And then meanwhile I meet these new friends in the
neighborhood I had joined. I homeschool my kids, so before
we moved to Florida, I did a lot of research
on homeschool groups, on trying to find ways for us

(07:48):
to get involved in the community so it wouldn't be
as hard of a transition as you know, it's a
pretty big move. So I met these women and they
started talking about birth charts and things that I was like, Okay,
I like, I'm a little bit familiar, but I also

(08:08):
don't know because keep in mind, I'm an ex Mormon.
Mormons don't talk about any of those things ever. Ever
X Mormon atheist at this point, Okay, So I am
forever fucking gout my feet, like it is just a
rite of passage. I will injure my feet in the

(08:28):
most bizarre and ridiculous manners ever. Ever, Like, I don't
have a single story that I like that's that makes sense. No,
it's the dumbest stories that lead me to injuring my feet.
So this particular day, I'm walking up the stairs and
I stubbed my big toe and that's ridiculous. But I

(08:49):
remember at the time being like, oh, you know, and
then just going about my day. I took the kids swimming,
we went for a walk around the neighborhood with our
new friends. We're doing this, We're doing that. I put
the kids to bed, I at my My ex at
the time was working night shifts, so he was gone,

(09:11):
so I like tucked the kids in and I am
laying in bed, and my foot starts to hurt so bad,
Like it's just getting worse and worse and worse. And
the longer that I sit there, the worse the pain
is becoming. And I'm like, I you know this is
this is ridiculous. I my fucking clumsy ass, right So
I'm like, okay, I'm gonna get up. I'm gonna get

(09:33):
some ibuprofen. My bedroom was on the second story, so
I opened the door to my bedroom and there was
like a little hallway and a landing area. So I
take a few steps down the hallway. I'm almost to
the landing area, and I just get hit by this
wall of fear. So I stood there and I was like,

(09:55):
I don't know how to process what I'm feeling right now,
because I was I was aware that I was more
afraid than the situation warranted, because I'm like looking around
and I'm like, I'm alone. I'm alone right now. I
put my children to bed, like they are in their bedrooms.
There is no reason for me to feel this afraid.

(10:18):
And so I tried to take another step, and the
fear just intensified to the level that I was like,
I don't know what to do here. So I went
back into my bedroom and I was like, I guess
I'm just gonna wait this out, like, you know, what
do you even do here? So, like that night was dramatic.

(10:39):
And then the next day I had mentioned this to
my new friends because it just was such a bewildering
experience for me that like I didn't have any way
to logically explain what had happened to me, Like, yes,
I am prone to anxiety. I've always been prone to anxiety,
but I've never had had that experience where I was

(11:02):
rooted to the spot petrified for seemingly no reason.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
Right, So you had none of the anxiety thought.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
Loops, none of the anxiety thought loops. Right, Oh, that
I'm so glad you about that doesn't feel right. It
didn't feel right, but there also wasn't a reason for
it to feel wrong. Like, you know, I do have
anxiety thought loops when I'm alone, but they always take
a very specific pattern, Like I could tell you exactly

(11:32):
what I worry about when I'm alone, and that night,
none of those things were happening. It just was my
foot hurt so bad, and I was like looking at
my empty house and being like I don't understand, like
what is happening to me because there is no reason

(11:54):
to feel this way, and like there were no traumad
other than the move, which you could count as traumatic,
but like it really wasn't that bad, you know what
I mean, Like, yeah, it was sad, it was really
hard to leave my home, it was hard to leave
my friends, but it wasn't like a traumatic move. So
I mentioned it to my friends and they started encouraging

(12:17):
me to have a psychic that they know come to
my house and clear it. And it was really resistant
to the idea for a little while because I was
like I don't believe in that. That's perfectly logical, you know, yeah,
yeah yeah. So I was like, I don't know, that
seems like a stretch, Like I've always been anxious, Like

(12:41):
I'm sure, I'm sure that there's some explanation. But one
one of like another night, I was laying in my
bed and I was like, what if what if my
kids experienced something like that? And I was like, you know,
I don't know what happened to me. I don't I
can't explain why I felt this level of fear, but

(13:04):
I am an adult. What if my kids had that
same experience? And then I was like, okay, that was
hard for me. I'm in my thirties. I'm thirty five now,
so I probably was like I don't know earlier thirties, right, Like,
if it made that level of an impact on me,

(13:25):
what would it do to my kids? So that was
the motivating factor to call this woman to my house,
and that alone was an entire experience because she came
over and she's blessing my house with holy water, She's
calling archangel Michael, like she's saying these prayers, these rights
that I am not familiar with because I was raised Mormon,

(13:48):
and Mormons don't have the archangels, they don't have holy water,
they don't do they don't even really talk about ghosts.
So like all of this, and I'm just following her
through my house and my eyes are like wide as
fucking saucers. I'm like, okay, okay. But then she sat
down with me in my living room and she was like,

(14:11):
I would love to do a reading with you, and
she pulled out some oracle cards, and mind you, by
this point, it's been like maybe a month and a half.
It hasn't been a whole lot of time in Florida,
So the friends who referred this woman don't know all
that much about me. And I say that because like,

(14:34):
i am like open to a degree, but I'm also
very hard to get to know. I am very I'm
like a weird mixture of open and closed off. Like
you're gonna have a few good conversations with me and
then it's just gonna be like, what happened. That's weird.
And I'm like, I know, sorry, Like I don't know
what to tell you about that, but so and I

(14:56):
say that not as like a cautionary tale, but to
say that this woman sat down in front of me
and told me things about myself that like I hadn't
even told some of my very closest friends. There was
literally no way that she could have known these things
about me. She was telling me deeply personal details about

(15:20):
my thoughts and my feelings, and I was like, what
the fuck.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
Yeah, I'm sorry, I've had that happen with with psychics,
ye readers, And it's just like but I.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
Wait, wait, how did how how did you know that
about me?

Speaker 3 (15:38):
Though?

Speaker 1 (15:38):
You know, like like yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
I'm still stuck on. I barely admit this to myself.
How do you like what? You know? It was that
level of So she stopped mid reading and she reached
into her bag and she handed me a deck of
her own cards and was like, they're telling me that
you're going to need these. These are going to be
important for you, right. And it's like a movie moment

(16:03):
when I say it like that, but like if you
were there, in reality, it was like awkward as shit,
because if people get be presents, I don't know what
to do with them, and so I'm just like, thank you.

Speaker 1 (16:13):
It's awkward.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
It's awkward.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
You know, it's awkward, especially if it's a stranger. Then
it's like one hundred times off.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, a stranger who's just told you about very very detailed,
very personal details about your life. Right, And then she's
just like, here you go, you're gonna need these. I'm like,
what the fuck? Like what do I even do with these?
I don't know what these are. It was a deck
of angel cards by Dorian Virtue. I don't have them

(16:41):
anymore because I gave them to a friend. I don't
know if you can tell this about me, but I'm
not super religious. I use them for a really long time,
and then I passed them on to one of my
best friends because they seemed better suited for her. But
either way, it was a big It was a big
turning moment for me. So now I had these cards

(17:02):
and I was like, awesome, I don't know how to
use these, and so like it really wasn't like like
I wasn't getting like instruction or anything. I just was like, Okay, well,
I'm gonna shuffle these cards and I'm gonna pull one
and I'm gonna see what happens. And then every time
I was pulling them, I had a little journal and
I was writing on the card and what the guide

(17:23):
book said and how I thought it fit into my life.
And I kind of taught myself how to read like that,
which then opened the door for mediumship and more hauntings,
because yes, because they they all go together. But my

(17:45):
like looking back on it now, like from wearing sitting out,
I don't live in Florida anymore, but I can look
back at that time period of my life and be like, yeah,
all of these things needed to happen for me to
be in that exact moment ready to understand and to
receive the information that I was going to be given
because if that same experience had happened in my house

(18:08):
in Texas, even as an ex Mormon, I would have
been a fresh ex Mormon and been like, no, sorry,
I don't believe in that. That's just like a weird
it's a weird coincidence. And now I believe in all
sorts of crazy shits. It's like.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
Just like the rest of me.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
I know, I know. I like to say I'm a
skeptical believer. Now I'm like Molder and Scully combined because
I go to the logical side first, and if I
can't disprove it, then I move into the okay, what
could it be? Area? But yeah, that house was. It's

(18:47):
the ongoing debate is it the person or is it
the house? And in my case, I think it's both.
I think I've always been a little bit more aware,
a little bit more attuned. I think I think I
can't tell you for sure, but I think that when
I was little, I saw something that scared me enough

(19:08):
that I've like shut down that part of my senses
because I don't see. Occasionally I hear, but very rarely,
so like I have a very limited skill set with
which I can communicate with the other side, and that
works for me, you know, I'm not, so it makes
it a little bit more frustrating sometimes if I'm trying

(19:30):
to figure something out and it's like, you know, you're
talking to someone shouting at you while your eyes are
closed and ears are plugged. But it's still it's still
satisfying in a way. But like I can, I can
look back at my life and be like, was this
were you really afraid? Or was that potentially a ghost

(19:51):
interacting with you and you perceived it as fear because
there's no way to explain why, because if you can't
see and you can't here, and you only feel someone
in your space, it's like jarring, you know.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
Mm hmmm, and there's clearly no one and.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
There's clearly no one else, right, That's yeah, it's it's
a huge one. Yeah, yeah, it's it's uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
So yeah, it's.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
I think I've always been predisposed, But once I moved
into the house in Florida and I kind of had
that jolt of like waking up and being like, Okay,
so Mormonism is not real, but apparently ghosts are a thing,
and like working through all that and opening my mind
and kind of stepping into the person that I always was,

(20:41):
or I was always meant to be in like a
weird way, but like all kind of figuring it out
as I go. Right. So, the next thing that happened
is I broke my foot. So again too, we got
two foot stories in the same sitting. My origin story
involves a lot of feet, which is uncomfortable for all

(21:03):
of us. No, but I one of my kids dropped it. Seriously,
was like a nickel size amount of milk, and I
walked past it, and I was like, I should wipe
up that milk. And then I got busy doing mom things.

Speaker 1 (21:18):
And you skid it on it.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
That's exactly what happened. I skid on it. I I
fractured the bones on the top of my foot, and
I broke our arts. I didn't break, I tore the
muscles and the ligaments. Apparently. It was very close to
like being one of those foot injuries that like you're fucked,
you know.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
It was like you're just gonna be like that forever.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yeah, there was an actual name for it. I can't
remember what it was called anymore, but I my doctor
always gave me this pain scale question based on pennies,
and I just like every time I went there, I
forgot everything that he told me, because he was always like,
since the last time you were here, on a scale
from one two hundred penn how many pennies do you

(22:01):
have left? And I was like, I'm bad at answering.

Speaker 4 (22:04):
One to ten pages word problem, you know.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
What, Like yeah, like look at me. I'm not made
for math. I'm not a math person. And I would
try to describe what I was feeling, and he was like, no,
just to answer the questions.

Speaker 1 (22:19):
Like but I don't understand this.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
I don't know what you want from me. But so
I broke my foot. I spent several weeks in a cast.
I it was right before Halloween, and so I started
watching ghost hunting shows naturally, and that's what you do
when exactly that's what you do when you break your
foot right before Halloween, right like I couldn't. It was
also during COVID, so this is twenty twenty. I my

(22:45):
foots my foot's in a boot, my right foot, and
so you can't drive when your right foot's in a boost,
Like there just is nothing to do. So I start
watching these ghost hunting shows, and I was like, why
is this explaining my life to me? Like the more watching,
the more stories I'm hearing and people describing feeling entities

(23:06):
around them, I'm like, what the fuck?

Speaker 4 (23:09):
Like I was sorry what it was?

Speaker 2 (23:11):
I'm like, is that are you explaining my life to
me right now? Like what is even happening? So I
like it was the first moment where like I had
a psychic come to my house, Like I understand how this.
So I had a psychic come to my house to
clear it because it was haunted as shit. And then
I'm still like in this moment of like wait a second,

(23:32):
what And so've I've learned to read cards by now
I'm reading tarot and oracle like fairly confidently. And I
saw a paranormal investigator out in Florida post on Instagram
like I'm going to do this investigation. Here is this
taro spread if anybody wants to pull any cards ahead

(23:55):
of my investigation, like here it is, you know, here
it is. See what you get? And so I was like, well,
what else do I have to do right now? My
foot's broken, you know, and I have a I have
a deck that's one of my favorites to use for mediumship.
It's called art History Tarot for Past lives. It's a

(24:16):
deck specifically made to help you tune into your past lives,
but it works very well for mediumship. So I had
that deck and I was like, sure, I'm going to
give it a go. So I followed the prompts and
I wrote it up and later I heard back from

(24:36):
him and he was like, that actually was you know?
That was there was some accuracy there, and I was like, sweet,
this is something I didn't know that I could do,
but now I know this, and it ended up being
a really great relationship. I met that person. It's Eric
ghost Hunter. South ghost Hunter of South Florida. Was a

(24:59):
part of a or is a part of a paranormal
team or party paranormal, so I got to know a
lot of them. I pulled from them ahead of pulled
for them, ahead of some other investigations, and I went
out into the field with them a lot and I
would pull cards while they were using their devices. And
that's probably my favorite thing still to this day, because like,

(25:23):
I miss doing that a lot because it really is
cool to sit there and most of the time if
I am pulling cards for a haunting, I will, almost
to an obnoxious degree, say I'm not sure about this.
But and I do that not because I doubt myself,

(25:45):
but because the logical part of my brain will not
shut itself off until I have given myself permission to say,
to process, to verbally process this information that I have
no way of knowing. Right. So, like, if you're with
me on an investigation, I will say, I will tell
you what the cards mean, and then I will say,

(26:07):
I'm not sure about this, but this is what I think.
And you know, occasionally it rubs people the wrong way,
which is why I now give my disclaimer that I'm like.
It's not that I think I'm like making it up.
It's just I'm hardwired for that black and white thinking.
I'm not the gray area doesn't come easily to me.

(26:27):
So if I'm stepping into the gray area willingly, I
have to give myself that caveat that I could be wrong, right,
But but it was and still is really rewarding. When
I am sitting there like sprawled in the fucking dirt sometimes,
or like I'm usually on the floor. I almost never

(26:48):
sat at the table. Why, I don't know, I'm just
on the floor. I have cards everywhere, and I'm spouting
what could be nonsense, like I could be pulling stories
out of my ass. I tell them what I think
that my cards are saying, and then they play back
the EVP recorders and there's some sort of confirmation for
the words that I've just said. And that's the moment

(27:10):
that I'm like this though this, Yeah, I love this.

Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah. I like the idea that you're sprawling on the
floor too. I still read sprawled, so you know, that's
that's how I've been doing my research for my book.
I'm sprawled sprawld me. So yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
Feel like if you are a neurodivergent person or just
like any kind of cool person, you're gonna sprawl yourself
on the floor because things make more sense on the floor.

Speaker 1 (27:47):
Yes. Plus it's easier for the cats and dogs.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
Hell, easier for the cats. For the dogs. You can
make little piles all around yourself like a fortress of information.

Speaker 1 (27:58):
Yep, yep, yes, yeah, this book, that book, the other book,
the notes, things, the notepads, Hey give me my pen backs.
That's usually a cat or a dog exactly, a dog
who likes to eat highlighters.

Speaker 3 (28:12):
You know.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
It's wild.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
Yeah yeah, so you so you went on these these
uh ghost investigations, and you were finding out information from
those areas, from the from the houses.

Speaker 2 (28:35):
Yep. So I was getting information from the houses. And
I feel like every investigation that I went on, or
every opportunity that I had to pull kind of just
helped me refine this skill set. And what ended up
happening is that when things would happen in my own house,

(28:57):
which did start to escalate, the more aware I was,
the more activity was going on around me. And that
does bring into question again It's another bit of a
gray area from is it the person, is it the house?
Is it the situation? Is it some combination of all
of the three. But along the lines, I ended up

(29:22):
doing research with some friends about my house, the property itself,
and it turns out that it was right along the
trail of a battle trail where soldiers or civilians. It
really was like it. I had other people describe the

(29:43):
energy of my house being like a railroad station, where
it was like it wasn't the same set of spirits,
it was people coming and going, which matched up with
what I was feeling because it was not the same
energy every night. It was like some days I would
wake up with a woman, some days this, some days
that it just was like an unsettling knowing that you

(30:05):
weren't alone. So I learned to ask what was happening,
because understanding what's happening, even if I can't see it,
removes an element of fear from the table for me.
So like having this experience, like most of my experiences
involve me sleeping, So like I do have ADHD, So

(30:28):
like during the day, I have ADHG and I have
three kids that a homeschool, So like you know, getting
getting you know, getting my attention during the day is
not like the easiest thing not to mention, like the
million and one projects that I'm constantly doing. So like
when I'm awake, I'm on the go, I'm distracted. I'm
not easy to like, hey, I'd like a word with you,

(30:51):
right But at night, all my guards drop and that
would be the opportunity that the ghosts would have to
like step up and be like, hey, I was just
wondering if maybe you wanted to hear this terribly sad
story about me. And what I started doing is I

(31:11):
would wake up in the moment. It was always scary
because you don't ever want to wake up feeling like
somebody's standing by your bed, right, And that's the way
it feels to me, is like an actual living person
is by my bed. It's the moment where Michael Meyer.
You open your eyes and Michael Myers is standing over you, right.
And I learned to calm myself down, like I would

(31:33):
have a mental checklist and be like, the doors are locked,
the alarms turned on, my dog's not barking, my kids
aren't awake, like there's nobody here, right, And then the
next morning I would ask my cards about it and
be like, well, who was this person? And I would
get information about who they were, and then I would say, okay,
well what did they want? Like what was so important?

(31:55):
Like what did they want to tell me? And I
learned to start getting bits and pieces of these spirits lives.
And at the time, what I was doing is I
would go onto my Instagram and I would do little
installments of this was my experience, this is the spirit.
Here's a follow up breeding because I'm still thinking about
the spirit. I haven't done anything like that in a while,

(32:18):
but I just I haven't really had the opportunity for
a hot minute here, But it was a moment of
like I had the awareness that ghosts are real. Whatever
you want to call a ghost, whatever you think that
a ghost is, the energetic imprint of another human is real.

(32:39):
And then I had the process of learning what works
for me to communicate because I have done some of
the traditional mediumship classes and they just my brain doesn't
process information the same way that most of it's being taught.
And it could be the way that my brain chemistry works,

(33:02):
It could be a lot of different factors, and it
could also just be that the way that I learned
was through feeling and imagery, and that is the way
that my medium ship works. So I need both of
them to give you, like a clear description of what
I think is happening. I'm not always entirely accurate, like,

(33:22):
but I am accurate to a point.

Speaker 1 (33:30):
That's you know, that's the best you can ask, really,
that is perfectly accurate. Yeah, Yeah, well you know that's
it's it's just how that works.

Speaker 2 (33:41):
It is, Yeah, it's how it works. So, yeah, I
had a lot, a lot of experiences in Florida. I
actually kind of miss it, especially now that we're we're
in October right now when we're recording, and like, you know,
there definitely is part of me that are like I
miss getting haunted, you know. But so now I am.

(34:05):
I am living with my parents now, I am in
the process. I'm separated now, so I you know, that
process is happening. So I'm in a very different space now,
and there just isn't a lot of opportunity for that
type of thing. There's not like I know there's haunted

(34:26):
stuff around where I live, but I'm just like it's
different now.

Speaker 1 (34:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So you've written a book I have
to write about.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
So right now I have two different books out. I
have a novel out. It is called a Collection of Eyes,
and my book is about a woman who is stalked
by a serial killer.

Speaker 1 (34:58):
Hey, that's uplifting.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
It's so fun. It's so fun. So this book started
as a birthday present for my best friend. Her name
is Joy. If you are on Instagram, you can find
her at the Wild Underscore. Her story in like historian
but her and she lives in England. So I wanted

(35:23):
to do something for her birthday. But I don't remember
what was happening. But I couldn't send her a box
at the time. So I was like, I'm gonna write
her something, and I wrote her this short story. And
if you have ever met Joy, she is fierce and
just so brave, and she has done so much to

(35:48):
help me before and after I got my PTSD diagnosis.
She was helping me sort through the mess that was
my life, right like she was. She was one of
the people that not the only person, but she was
one of the people there that saw everything that I

(36:10):
was up against and was like, I'm here and I'm
going to help you through this. And so I based
the character of my story on the on Joy as
this like tough final girl. She's been through it, She's
come out the other side stronger, right. So it started
as this short story and she was facing down the

(36:34):
man who kidnaps her basically you know that in the
first few paragraphs, if that's not a spoiler, she survives
their initial encounter. And what I did is I fell
in love with the character. I fell in love with
the storyline, and Joy was like, I love this so much,

(36:56):
it should be a full book. And I was like, oh, okay,
how do I Like, I'm already done, what do I
do from here? So what I did is. I took
that as an opportunity to explore explaining the way that
PTSD feels to me, So my descriptions in the book

(37:17):
will not be the way experiencing PTSD feels to everyone.
But at the time, I was having a really hard
time with nightmares. To a lot of people with PTSD experience,
and if you've never had a I usually refer to
them as trauma dreams. So if you've never had a

(37:37):
trauma dream, it's not like a regular nightmare. It feels
more real than that. It feels like the biggest reference
that people make are when you're a soldier and it
feels like you're back in battle, but there's not a
lot of references for the people who were not in battle. Right,

(37:57):
So my story thing nothing like what was in my
book happened to me, But it's it's not that at all.
It just was that I was looking for a way
to express the feelings that were drowning me at the time,
and I wanted to do it in a way that
I didn't have to talk about what happened to me

(38:18):
because I just still don't. I don't want to talk
about it like.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
You talked about it with your therapist.

Speaker 2 (38:26):
Exactly if you if you were exactly if you're talking
about it in therapy, if you're talking about it and
you're safe with your safe people and you are still struggling.
I turned to writing, and so I had this initial idea,
and then I was like, what would it be like
to watch a like we already know she survived, she

(38:49):
is a final girl from the beginning pages, But what's
it like after that? And that's what I went in
with the rest of the book to explore was was
the after effect. And of course there's twin and turns,
and there's ghosts, and there's spice, because that's just who
I am as a person. But the intent there was

(39:09):
to showcase the resiliency of human being a human and
experiencing something that shatters your idea and your expectation of
the world, and then learning how to put yourself back together,
because that's the part that there's not a lot of
people who are like, guess what, your world just got rocked?

(39:33):
Like you know, it's like it's either the before or
the well after that we get. It's not the people
who are sitting in the middle of the mess and
being like I just I don't know how to feel better.
I don't want to feel like this. I miss who
I was before, but I don't know how to feel better.
And yeah, I like I am better now. I'm like,

(39:57):
am I am? I healed? No, but like I'm in
a better place than I was now when I wrote it.
But the act of writing it really was therapeutic for
me because I got to give all of my symptoms
to a fictional character. But the act of doing that
really allowed me to look at it and see, like,

(40:20):
because you know, there are days when you wake up
and you're like, I should I shouldn't still be struggling
with this, or like, you know, it's the thoughts that
once you have a mental illness, they don't they get better,
but they don't necessarily go away. That's like you should
be over this by now, you're being over dramatic. You're
imagining how bad this was. It's those thoughts like that

(40:43):
that when they weren't mine anymore, and when they belonged
to a fictional character, I was able to look at
it and be like, God, damn, look at me. Go
you know, im Peter what. I didn't face a serial killer,
but I'm doing a pretty fucking good. Yeah, yeah, so

(41:06):
that is my That is my first novel. I don't
write a lot of happy things, but why, but why
there's always an element of happiness to it. But I
whether it's ghosts or whether it's my writing, I appreciate

(41:29):
the happy moments. And I think it's hard for some
people who aren't curious about humanity or like human nature
in the way that I am, because it's like, I
think that all emotions are meant to be felt. I
think that the good emotions and the bad emotions, and
I think that sometimes the delicate weaving of the two

(41:51):
are what it means to be human. It can't all
be good and it can't all be bad, because then
what's left if everything good, than what makes anything special?
You know? It's like, do I want to have PTSD
and feel the lowest of the lows as often as
I do? No, not at all, you know. But also

(42:14):
I can recognize that when I'm having a bad day,
it makes me appreciate the good days that much more
because I do know, I do know what it's like
to feel those depths, and I try to write from
that perspective too, and that I don't use a ton

(42:35):
of descriptive language. I'm trying to get a little bit
better at that, but I write in a way that
lets you imagine how it feels to be in that situation.
So if you read my book, it's scary because you
feel like you are having the emotions that she is feeling.
It's not that my wording is super scary. It's just

(42:56):
it's you're putting yourself in somebody else's shoes for a while.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
I love monks. Yeah, Yeah, it's a safe way to
learn things. It's a safe way to experience things that
are outside of your experience. And if you have actual
empathy when you read, you can't help but get into
the shoes of whichever character is being written about, you know,

(43:25):
and you experience with them their life and the way
that they cope with awful shit, you know, just just terrible.
I mean, you know, one of the things about being
an author is you come up with these characters and
you love them, but then you put them through awful,

(43:47):
terrible things. Yeah, because because if you don't, who's going
to read it. The point is to is to see
what people endure and then come back from right or
yes or they they surpass yes, what they beat are

(44:11):
faced with, yet they beat the.

Speaker 2 (44:13):
Odds and it makes you feel like you can beat
the odds too. And that's like that That's what literature,
That's what stories do for us, is that it gives us,
even if it's like a fucked up kind of role model,
it's still someone to be like, you know what, if
they can survive this, I can fucking get through this.

(44:34):
You know it even't like it doesn't matter that it's
not real. And that that is something that my friend
Joy that my book is based off of. She would
tell me a lot when I was still in Florida,
was like, pick a fictional character. It doesn't have to
be a perfect character. It just needs to be someone
that you look up to, someone that you can find

(44:56):
some hope in. Right, And this was before I started writing.
But for me it was Sherlock Holmes, Robert Jowney Junior,
Sherlock Holmes and.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
P. T.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
Barnum from the Greatest Showman in the movie, not in
real life, because he was the piece of shit in
real life. Let me just say, oh, he's terrible.

Speaker 1 (45:15):
It was terrible to me.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
He was kind of terrible in the movie too, but
like in the Moon, not as terrible. But the aspect
of the movie that got me was that he thinks
of the impossible things and he doesn't let logic tell
him why it won't work. And so by the time
I was already practicing this exercise, I already had PTSD.

(45:37):
I didn't have the diagnosis yet, but I was unwell.
I was not a healthy person, right, And so I
was being told to look to fictional characters. And that
is something that I've done my whole life. I've always read,
read stories, and I've immersed myself in these fictional worlds.

(45:57):
And now I've just learned to adapt what's in my
mind onto pages. So like odds are you won't read
the happiest stories from me, Like they're they're they're gonna
end well and I build in happiness, but they're that's
it's not the point of my writing, because it's not
the point of my existence. Like I don't like I

(46:21):
love I love rom comms, I love Happily Ever afters.
It's just I am more interested in the people who
have been through the trenches, so to speak, and have
come out and be like, you know what, you're a
little bit weird and you're a little bit fucked, But
you're my kind of people, So come on, let's go.
You know. It's the Yeah, it's it's that. And recently

(46:47):
it's been allowing me to explore hauntings and the pair
normal in a new way as well, because I had
a lot of freedom to explore that when I was
in Flora. I had people around me that I could
go out and explore with. But I also, like, I

(47:09):
have a hard time going new places by myself, and
it's not a PTSD thing. That's the way that I've
always been. I find new places really really intimidating and
really scary, and I love experiencing new things and I
love going new places, but I have a really hard

(47:30):
time getting there myself. So like if I was like,
I've never been to this place before and I want
to go, it will take me a long time to
work up to doing it right. But in the aftermath
of having PTSD, sometimes that's a lot worse. And sometimes

(47:50):
it's hard for me to go to the grocery store,
you know, or to do things that are easy for
other people to do. Because I am from Texas. I'm
a Texan. Texans love our grocery store called AGB okay, Like, yeah, yeah, Texans,

(48:10):
all Texans love chibhib is my favorite place. I go
to AGB sometimes, not even to buy stuff, just because
I like AGB. Right, It's like I don't have a
lot of places here and HB is my place. But
there have been times when going to the grocery store
was more than I could handle. I have had recently,
I had a panic attack in Target and I was

(48:32):
feeling fine when I got there, but everything was loud
and there was just too much happening at once, and
I like, I left the store. I paid for my stuff,
but I didn't get half of it. And it's it's
those moments where I'm like, I want to explore more.
I want to explore the paranormal more, but how do

(48:53):
you do that when you're afraid to leave your house?
Enter fiction? Yeah, so it's you know, writing has done
a lot for me. On an alternate side of that,
I have been exploring more about the paranormal through writing because,

(49:16):
as I mentioned before, I live with my parents, who
are lovely, very supportive in taking me and my kids
and my pets into their house. But it's not like
what I do isn't necessarily like like we don't talk
about it, you know. So it's just like, and in

(49:39):
my current situation, it's easier for me to put those
things into a world of fiction than it is to
be like, this is what I do, because I could
be like, look, i've written a book. Yeah, so ye,
writing has given me the keys to freedom in a
way that I didn't expect and I wasn't anticipating, Like

(50:03):
it wasn't necessarily on my bingo card for my life
to like end up where I am. I would have
liked to avoid the severe mental damage. But I also
can look at the trajectory that my life has taken
and the lessons that I've learned talking to ghosts and
investigating and all the different things that I've learned how

(50:25):
to do, and from where I'm at now, I can
also see that, like is it unfortunate? Yes, I can.
I can give myself that sympathy that, yeah, it sucks
to be where I am. But also I didn't lose
any of those things. I'm just translating them in a
different way than I used to, so like it's different, yeah,

(50:50):
but I'm proud of it, you know. I like where
I'm at.

Speaker 1 (50:54):
Yeah, Now do you do readings from a distance still,
I mean, do you so pull cards, you know, for
other people or other investigators?

Speaker 2 (51:08):
I will if you I do for investigators, and I
will for people. I don't charge, which is like counterproductive.
But I have had a really big problem with scam
accounts on my page, So it just is not something that, like,

(51:30):
with what was happening in my personal life, it wasn't
sustainable for me to try to be like, no, that's
not me, that's not me, that's not me. You should
buy this from me, but this isn't me, you know.
It's like I removed that from the table for my
own mental health, where like the the scam accounts that

(51:54):
I was facing, like it got real bad for a while,
but the scam accounts that I was dealing with the
worst of it coincided at a time when my personal
life was also at very rocky points. So for me,
it's not that the scam accounts themselves are this bad.
It's just that it puts my mind into a place

(52:16):
where things were that bad. So I don't do personal readings.
I will, Like if you messaged me and you're like, hey,
can you help me with this, I will. I don't
charge for them, and that way I could keep up going.
It's just not me. Just don't worry about it because
it's not me. And if you are investigating and you

(52:38):
would like help, I do investigate from a distance. I
love to do that. I'm happy to do that literally anytime.
I work with a couple of friends Scottie the Medium
he's on TikTok and Melissa the ghost doctor, who's on
Instagram and on TikTok, and we do most of our

(52:58):
work from a distance to so hopefully more in the future.
But yeah, that's you really just have to like, if
you message me, I'm pretty good at responding to my messages.
I don't catch all of them, but I'm pretty good
at responding in my messages. And that is something that
I love to do and I really missed doing, especially

(53:19):
where I'm at right now. It's just like it's that
like I can't advertise it too much because yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:30):
Oh mom, that's just my friend the witch. You're gonna
go talk to the ghost.

Speaker 2 (53:36):
Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
You know that graveyard down the road, there's ghosts waiting.
I told him i'd be there by midnight. Yeah, that's
not gonna say.

Speaker 2 (53:51):
Yeah, So you know, but that that is how to
do it. If you, I will add the the extra
warning that I normally get people in the way that
I read taro is more for what's going on with
you mentally emotionally. I don't do fortune telling. So if

(54:11):
you come to me and ask if you will ever
find love or are you going to get this job?
Can I ask that question in my card? Yes? Will
the answer be what you want? Probably not? So, yeah,
I understand, you know, Yeah, it's I'll do my best
to give you the correct answer. But if you come

(54:34):
to me asking about your love life, I'm probably gonna
tell you why you think you're not worthy of being
loved if I'm being if I'm being perfectly honest, like,
that's what it's gonna come down to. It's not that
you haven't met the right person. It's that you feel
like you don't deserve the right person.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
So well, but that's true, and ye's actually a useful answer.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
It is a useful answer.

Speaker 1 (54:55):
But people don't always want the useful way.

Speaker 2 (54:57):
People don't want the useful answer. People want the the
live TikTok readings that or the videos that say he
left you and he's going to come back and I
don't do that kind of reading.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
Yeah, I know. Yeah yeah. So when you when you
think about to row cards, how much of it did
you learn from traditional to row sources like books? Not

(55:35):
necessarily the little tiny booklet that they give you, which
is whatever it is, It is what it is.

Speaker 2 (55:41):
Let's just I love those well to an extent, to
an extent.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
Yeah yeah, but but how did did you learn it
from books? Or how did what is your method?

Speaker 2 (55:52):
So I did learn it from books, I I think. Actually,
I'm pretty sure that this is my first hair right here.
It's just like a basic yeah, right orway. So I
had the Oracle cards first. So I the Angel Deck
by Dreene Virtue, and I started by shuffling and asking

(56:12):
what do I need to know today? And I would
just pull one card, and then once I was feeling
like I was understanding the one card, I moved on.
So now my daily pulls are wild. I never know
how many cards are gonna come out. Like, I still
do the same thing. I'm like, what do I need
to know today? And I, you know, I pull and

(56:33):
however many cards comes out comes out. But I used
bitty taro is. It's a big account, but I got
her guide book and I actually have it on my
little trunk over here. The pages are literally falling out
of the book. So I use a blend of intuition

(56:55):
and the basic card meaning in that I enjoy diferencing
what the card actually means. I like, I like getting
decks made by artists, and I like reading their guide
books because sometimes what they mean for the card is
different than the traditional card. Yes, two of my favorite

(57:16):
examples of this are the I think it's called the
hurt taro. It's really beautiful. I'll send you a picture
after this, and then the Horror Taro, which I've been
using a lot recently, and the meetings are different, the
wording is different, and it changes the traditional meetings. So
I will When I was first learning how like, I

(57:39):
would pull cards and I would look up the cards meetings,
and I would get my journal and I would write
the card. I would write the keywords or whatever I
was taking away from the meaning, and then I would
write how it applied to me so or how I
saw it applying to me in my life in that moment.
So those are all packed, but those exist somewhere. There's

(58:02):
just journals of me being like I pulled the three
of swords today, you know whatever. And so now I
read Taro in a combination of the two because I
don't need the guide book. I like the guidebook because
sometimes little phrases will pop out at me, so like
I enjoy I enjoy it when that happens because I'm like, oh,

(58:26):
I didn't think about that way to go, you know.
But it's it's a blend of both for me, and
I know people that will look more at the imagery
or will that stick to the core energy of the
card or this or that. But I think that that's
what makes reading Taro so fun is that it is subjective.

(58:47):
There's no right or wrong way, and my method isn't
necessarily right. It isn't necessarily wrong either. It's a little
it's a hodgepodge of all sorts of different things, and
it looks different from day to day. Sometimes I'll pull
my cards out and be like, oh my god, okay,
I get it, and I'll put them away, and then

(59:09):
the next day I'll do the exact same thing, and
I'll be like, oh, I should look that card up,
and I'll look it up, and I'll have a whole detailed,
you know, journal like I used to do it. Just
it just kind of depends. But that is one thing
that when I was learning to read Taro, I also
was in a lot of Facebook groups, which I'm I said, already,

(59:30):
I'm not on Facebook a ton, like I have a
Facebook page, I'm just not super active on there. But
in the Facebook groups, they would always be like, if
you're not reading on intuition, then you're not a real
reader and so and I'd be like, okay, I guess
I'm not a real reader then you know, okay, but
I'm over here with my guide books and being like fuck, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(59:51):
look look at that ten of cubs. I didn't see
that one coming, you know. It's like it's it's I
just I just think that it's such a personal tool.
And it's like I love how mainstream and how popular
Taro has gone, because like I can go to Barnes
and Noble and buy a new Tarot deck if I

(01:00:11):
really want to, Like, they're there even in my like
small Texas town, there are there's a spirituality section. I
love how accessible it is, but I also don't love
that there are so many people out there that are
like this is the way to read taro or like
and this is the only way. And again you can

(01:00:35):
follow my life trail back and be like, she just
doesn't like to be told what to do because the
way she grew up, And that's absolutely true. I don't
like it if you tell me what to believe, I
will immediately say no, thank you. I don't like that.
And it applies to my spiritual practice too, and that

(01:00:56):
I have. I used to share a lot more of
my practice on my page. If you go back far enough,
it was only taro. It was spelled candles, it was
bind rooms, it was things like that. And I really
pulled a lot away from that, partially because what was
happening in my personal life mixed with the scam accounts

(01:01:17):
just made it to where I was like, this is
important to me. This is important enough to me that
I'm not gonna share this all of the time. And
it's been hard finding like my footing on, Like I
have this public platform, the fuck am I going to
do with it? If I'm no longer the village Taro witch,
you know, like that name is still there, but I

(01:01:39):
go by Carly dot Latham now on Instagram and it's
I missed the days when I could just be like
my full, witchy self. But also I appreciate that now
it is more private to me, that those moments aren't.

(01:02:02):
I'm I never I'm not one to manufacture the moment.
So if I've posted about it, or if I'm talking
about it, it's because it happened, or it's because it's
on my mind. It's not just like I have to
do something today, you know. But I do feel like
my relationship with spirituality and with the tools that I

(01:02:22):
prefer were damaged along the way. I mean, there's not
a lot that PTSD doesn't affect once you've been diagnosed
with that, and not even just that, but I could
say mental health in general. It's it's not like I
wanted that to be like the pocket that wasn't touched
and it could just be like this happy, safe space,

(01:02:45):
but that I don't want to use the word tainted,
but that's the way it feels to me, like that
my spiritual practice was tainted by the events that went
on in my life. And so like now again I'm
leaning into the writing, but behind the scenes, I'm also
working on rebuilding my personal relationship and my personal practice

(01:03:10):
because it got derailed so much in the process that like,
it's it's a weird one. It's a weird one to
talk to people about because that was the essence of
my page for so long, and I've kind of been
like drifting in the wind for a for a long time.
For like the past year or so, I've been trying
to find like where what do I do? What do

(01:03:34):
I do with this platform that I've built, with these
things that I'm so passionate about, And the answer for
me has been writing. It doesn't mean that it's going away,
it doesn't mean that I'm not going to share these
things about my life. It's just I've learned new tools
to channel that information so much in the way that, like,

(01:03:54):
if you had been following me for any amount of
time and you read my captions, they are usually fairly
deep on whatever is on my mind at the time.
You know, I kind of I go all in for it.
And you'll find that in my writing too, is that
I don't write happy things. And it's not that I'm

(01:04:18):
not a happy person. It's just that there's so much
to explore if you give your self permission to see
what's hidden just beyond the veil, or if you turn
the lights off and you get comfortable with the monsters
that are in the dark. You know, there's a whole
world out there, and not all of it is scary.
It's just that we're trained to believe that these things

(01:04:40):
are bad. So I am retraining myself to have hope
and to believe in magic and to see the unknown possibilities.
It's just the things that I love were tangled up
in my mental illness. Yeah, yeah, that's that's yeah, I

(01:05:07):
understand that a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:05:08):
Yeah, I was. I was involved in a court case
and you know, I got pointed at by a lawyer
who said she's a witch. She's a witch. Even her
own mother doesn't talk to her. You know, that'll that'll
harden you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:05:25):
But then you know, after that was over, I still,
you know, had PTSD and bad dreams about it. But
you know, I was like, well, I was outed, Yeah,
so I might as well do something with.

Speaker 2 (01:05:39):
It, might as well.

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
Yeah, So I do understand, though, it does feel like
what you were doing to help people is then held
against you. Yeah, And that's just that's just not a
good feeling at and it it does make it feel tainted.

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
It does. Yeah, I was having that conversation with a
friend of mine because it's not like it's not like
I'm not proud of what I've accomplished, and it's not
like I don't recognize that like I love what I do.
I show up every day almost every day because I
love what I do. It's just like there is an

(01:06:24):
element of I like I there's no going backwards. I
think that's what it is, is that, like I desperately
I want to go back in time. I want to
be in the space that I was in before all
of these things happened, where it just was like this

(01:06:47):
is you know, this is what I'm sharing, this is
what I'm good at. I'm going ghost hunting, I'm doing
all those things like that is where I want to be.
But that's not where I am. And the things that
have happened in between have just made like it does.
It feels tainted. It feels like it feels like I
am reaching for a person's dreams who doesn't exist anymore.

(01:07:11):
And you know what I mean, like it is a
past version of me. So we were talking about me
haunting my own house. I forgot we were going to
talk about this, but this is the perfect transition.

Speaker 4 (01:07:23):
It's it's yeah, this is going in a circle.

Speaker 2 (01:07:25):
It is going in a circle. This is the perfect
transition because my when I lived in Florida, it was
the first time that I had the space and the
freedom to really explore who I am without outside eyes
looking in on me, without my family being like, you know,
you're pretty fucking weird or like, you know, they would

(01:07:47):
never say that to my face, but they say it
with their eyes, so message received, you know, like h
it's things like that, where Like, it was really hard
for me to move there because I've I lived in
Texas my whole life. I'd never lived more than a
car rides away from my family. But once I was
removed from that situation, I had this enormous experience and

(01:08:11):
I was able to grow so much. Right so a
core part of my identity was built in my haunted
house in Florida. Right. So I made the decision to
move back in with my parents, And it was not

(01:08:31):
an easy decision. It was a decision that I made
knowing that I would be breaking my own heart in
some ways, and I did. I cried, and I mourned
my life in Florida for months. I'm actually like rite
about my one year anniversary of moving here, and I

(01:08:53):
still feel like I am going through the grief process
like I had. I had a really good life in Florida.
I had really good friends, but it wasn't healthy and
I needed help to regain my health, and there was
a bunch of other big factors at play. But I
made the choice to move back in with my parents,

(01:09:15):
and recently my house in Florida is on the market now.
I signed the paperwork to put it up and I
was going through those emotions because while I had a
lot of time to discover myself and who I am,

(01:09:38):
I also had some of the worst experiences of my
life in that house. So it was it was both
all at once. And so when my house went on
the market, it's something that I had been waiting for
for a very long time. I've known that this was coming.
It's you know, there were there was some logistics that

(01:09:58):
needed to be worked out before or it could get
put on the market, and so once once it went on,
it was like I had a few days where I
felt like I felt the depths of being like this
is my home, though like this is my home I
live with my parents. I can't even like I can't

(01:10:22):
read cards outside of my room. Like I felt, I
felt trapped, and I felt limited in a way that
I don't like feeling. Because anybody who reads taro I
will say that it's more of like an aid of
sores energy where you're feeling like you're trapped and like
there's no way out. There is a way out, it's
just it doesn't feel that way. And so I was

(01:10:44):
stuck in that moment where I was like, I really
don't want to live here. I'm grateful that I have
this safe space to come to and that I was
able to recuperate here, but I don't want to live here.
I missed my life, I missed my friend. And I
cried so much that day. And it wasn't that exact day,

(01:11:07):
but it was. It was around then and I had
this dream and in my dream, my house was empty
like it is right now. It wasn't like when I
lived there, and it had furniture, it had my decorations
and it had I used to paint the walls of
that house. I would just like sometimes I was dressed,
sometimes I was bored, but I painted like a flower

(01:11:29):
mural on a wall, and I had a chalkboard wall,
and I had a wall that was covered in yellow
polka dots, and it had my personality. It had so
much of my love poured into that house. And so
in my dream, I was walking through my house and
it was empty, and I could see that they had

(01:11:50):
painted the walls, and I remember touching the walls and
feeling the texture of you know, the whatever wall texture
they put on. And the dining room was one of
my favorite rooms in that house. It's where I filmed
a lot of content for my Instagram page. It was

(01:12:11):
like there was these shelves built and I had all
my oddities on there, and it just was a room
that I loved. The kids didn't really use that room.
I loved the dining room. We didn't eat there. It
just was a spot for me to like sit and
do whatever, excuse me, do whatever. But there was a

(01:12:32):
spot on the ceiling where when I painted that wall,
I got dark blue on the ceiling and I never
fixed it because it's my toxic trait. I don't know
what buck. If you live with me, I am a
paint of the ass. I will paint stuff and then
I will leave it half finished for months until I
finish it, or I will have these like it's not
really manic, but for lack of a better word, I

(01:12:54):
call it like manic when I'm painting flower murals on
the walls, you know, and I do things like get
paint on the seat and I just never go back
and fix it. And I noticed in my dream that
that spot had been painted over, and it made me
so sad because it was I was like, I was like,
it looks really nice. They painted that room was dark

(01:13:17):
gray now, so they repainted it, but the house is
still empty. But it was this moment where I do
a lot of dream traveling, which we haven't gotten into,
so that sounds like kind of out of left field.
I'm sure your listeners will be through it anyways, though.
But I do a lot of dream traveling, and those
dreams feel different. It's not like your normal dream because
you don't have that level of awareness. Like I was

(01:13:39):
actively processing my emotions while I was standing in my
house in Florida, and it was my house, no one
else was living in there. It wasn't like a weird
in between space. That was my house as it is
right now, empty and freshly painted. You know, And so
the next morning I woke up and what I usually

(01:14:03):
do when I have these experiences is I will talk
to a couple, I will talk it over with a
couple of my friends, and then I'll usually grab my
cards and be like, what was this? You know, Like,
what did I just experience? So from what I've been
able to tell, that was me astral traveling, like whatever language,

(01:14:23):
whatever terminology you want to use. I missed my life
and I missed my house, and I traveled back to it.
I went there in my sleep, and I feel like
I interacted with someone. I can't remember that one right now,
but like that was the core of the moment that
I didn't want to be here. I didn't want to

(01:14:46):
be in this house. I wanted my space, I wanted
my freedom. So I went back to the last place
that I had it, which was my house in Florida,
and I started talking about it and Jordan. Jordan Keith
and I had been talking a lot recently about different
ghost theories and what a haunting even is, and that

(01:15:08):
led me to the most fascinating question to me, which is,
if another person had been there, would they have been
able to feel me there? Because you know how they
say that, like when you move things around in a
house or when there's renovations, it stirs the spirits up.
My walls got painted, and I was sad about it.

(01:15:30):
Me a living human, which just makes me wonder about
so much about hauntings in general. I have a million
and one different haunting theories. But in this particular instance,
I am dying to know if somebody else had been there,
would they been able to sense me? Would they have
been able to feel the grief that I felt in

(01:15:54):
knowing that I have to give up my home that
like this. I know why I don't live there, I
know why I can't move back there, but this is
still my home, and I'm still sad about it, you.

Speaker 1 (01:16:08):
Know, Yeah, Yeah, it's really interesting I have. I have
dreams all the time about my last childhood home and
my ex mother in law's home which I lived in

(01:16:31):
for a period of time. And I don't know if anybody,
I mean, I know somebody's living in my old childhood home,
but I know that my mother in law still lives
in her home, and she has some of my letters

(01:16:56):
and poems and writings away in her attic. She never
gave them back.

Speaker 2 (01:17:05):
So that's a piece of you in her attic, uh
huh huh, and her heart felt piece of you yeaheah.

Speaker 1 (01:17:12):
Yeah, her house was already haunted. So I can't help
but think, is there a part of me, you know,
my twenty something year old self floating around up in
that attic, around that box?

Speaker 3 (01:17:27):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:17:27):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:17:28):
It's like, yeah, if anybody could see me, it.

Speaker 2 (01:17:31):
Could could somebody see if if I walked into my house,
if I wasn't me and I walked into my house,
would I be able to feel that that piece of me,
that part of me that still exists there. That's that's
the question, and that that's what makes everything that what
that we do so interesting, whether it's like you know,

(01:17:54):
I write about it in a fictional sense now, but
like it. It's that kind of curiosity for the way
that the world works, and to say, what if, what
if you're still in your mother in law's attic, What
if twenty year old you is still really upset that
you didn't get your poems back? What if the me
that went through everything that I did in Florida is

(01:18:17):
still there and still being like I'm here, what do
you mean? I live here? This is my house.

Speaker 1 (01:18:25):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like it. It's like
the living version of the movie the.

Speaker 4 (01:18:31):
Others exactly, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:18:35):
And and if that's the case, WHOA I know that
has a lot of implications.

Speaker 2 (01:18:41):
It's it's wild to me. Well, I started noticing when
when I got to my parents' house and I didn't
have the constant influx that I had when I was
in Florida. I started to notice that the spirits that
seek me out more often than not are women who
have seen some shit or children sometimes, right, I don't.

(01:19:03):
Every once in a while I get a man, but
most of the time I get women who want to
tell me what happened to them. And I started thinking
about it because sometimes they're able to tell me all
about their life, and they'll tell me what their childhood
was like, and they'll tell me beyond the moment of pain.
But I also have spoken to several spirits who seems

(01:19:27):
to only exist in their pain. Like when I had
asked about their childhood, it.

Speaker 3 (01:19:32):
Was like like like a fuzzy radio where it's like
the coming in and out and then they loop around
and they repeat the same message of this is what
happened to me, This is what I'm feeling.

Speaker 2 (01:19:48):
I'm upset about this, and in the past I didn't
necessarily disregard, but I didn't have a lot of experience
with spirits who were like splintered. Like really, the the
idea of the concept, the theory that a piece of
your soul is stuck in that moment of pain, and
it's not that you're unable to move on, it's just

(01:20:11):
that you don't know that you're not in that moment anymore.
So like mm hmm, you in your former in laws attic,
it reasonably could be a piece of you. And maybe
the reason why these spirits can't give more than that
moment is because that's all that matters. That's all that's

(01:20:32):
real to them, is that the rest of them is
moved on, and for whatever reason, it's just this piece,
this sliver of their life that impacted them so much
that a piece of them is still reliving it, which
sounds terrible and kind of sad, but that's why people
like us exist to saying, Okay, what about that, then.

Speaker 1 (01:20:56):
Let's let's see if we can release that. That's not
good good. Well, that's the thing that I learned in
shamanic training was soul retrieval is that when traumas happen,
sometimes a bit of the soul just just like I
can't deal breaks up, I'm out of here.

Speaker 2 (01:21:15):
Yep, yeap, Like it depends.

Speaker 1 (01:21:17):
But what happens is that it gets stuck and then people,
you know, wander around with pieces of themselves. Yes, exactly,
and that's that can't be good.

Speaker 2 (01:21:31):
It can't be good. It can't be good. I like
to reference Foldemort from Harry Potter with that with the horcruxes,
because he did that on purpose, So that is that
is a distinction. He did that to himself, and these
cases are not like nobody is.

Speaker 1 (01:21:44):
Like, cool, I'm gonna do this.

Speaker 2 (01:21:48):
Sounds fun, you know what sounds great? Haunting my house
in Florida forever? Oh yeah, yeah it is. It's just
it's interesting to me, like what what does make a ghost?
And there I'm sure that there's times in the past
that I've been like, I'm pretty sure that this is
what a ghost is, and now I'm like, I don't know.

(01:22:08):
It could be so many different things. It could be
so many different things, and it could be different things
all at once just to make it more confusing.

Speaker 1 (01:22:15):
Yeah, I completely agree. We should we should do another
episode just about ghosts and what we think they are?

Speaker 2 (01:22:22):
It would be fun.

Speaker 1 (01:22:24):
That's just it's such a can of worms and it.

Speaker 2 (01:22:28):
Is yeah, it's a uh yeah, yeah, it's a can
of worms. And there's just there's so many theories. And
I will say I am a skeptical believer, so I
tend to believe things that I've experienced. And so, like,
I had already been like noticing this pattern of like,

(01:22:49):
you know what I'm I don't get people's loved ones
who have passed on and been like, hey, can you
tell so and so that I really love them and
I missed them. No, I don't get ghosts like that.
And I had already been like in the process of
being like why is that? What is it about me
that I'm like, like, what frequency do I shine on?
That's like, hey, ghosts, tell me your most fucked up stories,

(01:23:11):
because I want to hear them. I do to be fair,
But you know, it's like, I don't know if I
hadn't already been thinking about those things when I had
that dream of my house in Florida, would I have
entertained the idea that I had actually been in my
house in Florida, Or would I just have logically assumed

(01:23:35):
that I was homesick and I didn't like my situation,
so I'm dreaming about it, you know what I mean.
It's like it's those small differations in thought that like,
it doesn't mean that both are not true because I
was unhappy, I didn't want to be here, But that
doesn't mean that I wasn't actually there either. Yeah, and

(01:23:55):
that's the wild part to me.

Speaker 1 (01:23:58):
Yeah, and I will get of corroborating testimony that I
certainly don't want to be in my ex mother in
law's attic at all. No, that's the place I always
dream about, Yep. I mean I dream about the rest
of the house too, but the attic is but.

Speaker 2 (01:24:16):
The attic, specifically the attic is where you have the
tie to your belonging still in the attic. So that, Yeah,
it makes perfect sense to me.

Speaker 1 (01:24:28):
Exactly it does. But you know, I didn't want to
go there, so it may be that, you know, sometimes
we just go where we want or go where we
were left. Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:24:42):
Yeah, I think it can be both. Like I will
say that I have I do not know how to
travel places on purpose. I've been trying to experiment with
it because like I'm like, well, I'm doing this more
and more, I might as well figure out how it works.
I have no clue. I have no clue, but it

(01:25:03):
has been interesting once you were if you're willing to
open your mind to the possibility that some of these
things could be real and to just kind of track
like it doesn't even have to be like, well, tonight,
I'm going to go to sleep and I'm going to
go to Bermuda or whatever like that sounds fantastic. First
of all, I love a beach, but it for me,

(01:25:24):
it's almost more like, huh, this thinking is happening. I
should make note of it and see if there's a
pattern here and see see where it leads me.

Speaker 1 (01:25:38):
And my case, I would never go to Bermuda because
I'd get stuck there because you know the triangle that
you know. I just watched the like my compass has spinning,
I can't get home.

Speaker 2 (01:25:49):
I watch I watched The Adams Family yesterday, so it
was on my mind where Wednesday was like, nobody gets
out of the Bermuda triangle. But yeah, that's that is
that That is me and hauntings in a nutshell, that's

(01:26:10):
I believe a lot of different things are possible. I
think that more things about hauntings are true than I
am aware of, than I know, than I probably will
ever know. And I think that that's true for most things.
And I'm okay with that. I like I like the unknown.
I like exploring. I like I like theorizing and trying

(01:26:35):
to figure out what could be real, even if I'm
a skeptical asshole for half of it.

Speaker 1 (01:26:41):
Oh, you know, when I'm experiencing something, I am skeptical.
It's all that out. I sit there, you know, there's
a light in the sky and it's doing weird crap,
and I'm looking at it, going, uh, is it a plane?

Speaker 4 (01:26:57):
Is it not?

Speaker 1 (01:27:00):
They a light's okay? Is it No? There's no strobe. Oh,
it's changing colors and it's doing a right angle turn.
It's definitely not a plane. Okay. You know, is it
a drone? Because now we have to worry about drone right?

Speaker 2 (01:27:13):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:27:13):
Yes, but they have to have a specific light as well.
So I'm like, what is it? There's no noise, you know.
So I sit there and I run through all of
these different things, and but when people tell me stories,
I don't.

Speaker 4 (01:27:28):
Do that because I'm like, I'm in the same way.

Speaker 1 (01:27:31):
No, these these people have experienced something, and you know,
I believe if they're going to talk about it yep,
in front of people, that they've experienced it.

Speaker 2 (01:27:42):
In the same way, Because what what benefit do you
have from talking about these things? Like, like I have
stories that make me I literally just told you that
I dream traveled to my house in Florida, right, But
like I have wilder stories than that, And like, if
I'm willing to say that, it's because I I understand
that it happened to me, and I feel like other

(01:28:03):
people deserve that same respect, where like I might not
understand what happened to you, but I will always try
my best to be open minded and to listen to
your experience, because was it actual, paranormal? Was it not?
I don't know, but it happened to you, and that
makes it real. And that's the thing. If you experienced

(01:28:29):
it and it's real to you, then it is real.
It's not fake. It's not you know, like is there
a muggle interpretation? Maybe sometimes there is, Yeah, but that
doesn't mean that it wasn't a real event that you
experienced exactly exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:28:46):
I am so the same way, because I truly see
no benefit in people just making up stories right like.

Speaker 2 (01:28:58):
That, well, especially in the hair, nor if you're.

Speaker 1 (01:29:00):
Gonna write it down and get money for it.

Speaker 2 (01:29:02):
I'm right, yeah, Like I have yet to be able
to transform any of my like actual encounters onto paper
because I'm so obsessed with getting all the details right.
And I'm like, who who would subject themselves to this?
This is terrible? This is absolutely terrible. But yeah, and

(01:29:25):
especially if you look at alien abductions or or hauntings
or possessions, which I'm a little bit on the fence
about if I'm being perfectly honest, there are so many
cases that involve the strange and unusual that automatically get
cast with such suspicion and doubt that like, why would

(01:29:45):
anyone get up here and be like, this thing happened
to me? Let me tell you all about it, because
you sound a crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:29:56):
And do you really want to sound crazy right public?

Speaker 2 (01:30:00):
You know, like the yeah, it's if it's like a
clear money grab, then I'm a little bit wary. But
most people aren't trying to do that, and most people
are terrified when they're telling you about what they've experienced.
Some like they'll they'll be telling you stories and they'll
start shaking or really reliving it.

Speaker 1 (01:30:23):
And choke up. Ye can't speak exactly. Yeah, every everyone
I've talked about who's had those intense experiences, there is
the truth right there in their voice and on their faces.

Speaker 2 (01:30:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:30:37):
And even though I don't post the video, I'm still
looking at them exactly while we're talking. Yep, and they're
not they're not. They're not bullshitting. You're telling the truth
as they understand it, as they experience.

Speaker 2 (01:30:53):
As they understand it, as they experienced it, which makes
it real. And that's another thing that I like to explore,
but maybe not everybody does that. Technically, that is the
fabric of reality. It's because you experienced it that means
it is real. It's your reality. Yeah it's not, is
it everyone? Maybe not? But it's yours. It's yours. That

(01:31:14):
is your experience. And we are honored to be the
people that get to hear those experiences and whatever we
do with them. I again, I haven't done any of
these readings for quite some time, but if I have
had someone ask me for a paranormal reading, I will.
I will share the reading without sharing any details and

(01:31:36):
so basically I will say I was asked to do this,
this is what I've learned, but without giving any details
about the person or too much about the case itself,
because to me, that moment is private. And I even
have people be like, no, no, you can share all
the details. You can give all of this, And sometimes
I share more on those ones if I'm like really sure,

(01:31:58):
but it's like, you know, it's it. It's an honor
to hear any of these stories. Like I miss being
in the position where I heard more of them and
I got to interact more with them. But the ones
that I've been able to hear and the ones that
I've been able to share have done so much for

(01:32:20):
me in opening my mind up. So like, even if
you want to look at the paranormal in that sense
that like, okay, you don't believe in ghosts, but what
did you learn from the situation or if this isn't paranormal,
Like what did you think when you were feeling those feelings?
You know? I just I think that there's so much

(01:32:40):
to be learned by studying people's experiences period, whether it's supernatural,
whether it's not supernatural, and being one of those people
that gets to hear this crazy thing happened to me,
What do you think about it? Is one of my
favorite things that I don't get to do as often anymore,

(01:33:02):
but I really appreciate it when I do.

Speaker 1 (01:33:05):
Yeah. Yeah, it fascinates me in a lot of ways.
It makes me feel hopeful in a way about reality
that you know, the reality I've been living in since
I was a kid is not so crazy. After all,
there are other people moving through that reality, right you know.

(01:33:28):
They may not be moving through right at the exact
place I was at and am at, but they're in there, yep.
And every person I hear from who you know, then
stabilizes there, you know, after telling their story, I feel
like just listening yep was helpful to them and was

(01:33:52):
healing to them. And that means a lot to me
to be able to say, you know what, you're not crazy? Yeah, yeah,
at all? It is.

Speaker 2 (01:34:01):
It's an important moment to be like, yeah, thank you,
because when you see the relief that they have, it's
just it's really nice. And I'm not always able to
provide answers. I'm always honest about it if I don't know,
but you know, I'm not always able to provide the answers.

(01:34:23):
But what I am able to do is to sit
and listen and at least just hold space for the
thing that you experienced. And you know, there's definitely times
when I haven't really had much to say or like besides, like, whoa,
I can't believe that just happened, you know, but it

(01:34:45):
still is. It's a really cool part of being in
this community is knowing that people trust you enough to
come to you with these bizarre stories and say this
happened to me, and know that you're not going to
turn away and you're not going to tell them that

(01:35:06):
they're imagining it or that they're crazy, because they've probably
been hearing that their whole lives anyways, and the fact
that they've approached you means that they've already thought. Maybe
not every time, but a lot of the time, people
have already thought about like what are they going to
think about me if I bring ghosts up right now?

(01:35:27):
What are they going to think about me if I
say I'm pretty sure my house is haunted, or you know,
things like that. So just being someone that people feel
comfortable coming to and saying I experience something heavy, whether
it's real life trauma or it's something supernatural and just

(01:35:49):
listening is It's big for me, and a lot of
that translates into my writing now. But at my core,
what I love doing is exactly this. It's talking ghosts,
it's theorizing. It's helping people understand their experiences in a

(01:36:10):
new light if I can, and if I can't, then
that's okay too. But I like exploring people's memories with
them and saying, you know, well, how did that feel.
I mean, that's like a normal therapist question, but like
you know, exploring it with cards or with the metaphysical,

(01:36:30):
or taking those moments and turning them into a story
like I did with my life, where it's like this
isn't me anymore, but it's it's all, as Jordan likes
to say fingers. On the same hand, it's it's exploration
into the unknown. I'm just using different tools than I
used to, and it's it's an adjustment, but I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:36:56):
I agree. I agree, that's the best part of having
a podcast asked and I love being able to say
to people no, no, this this is real and it's
okay yep, and you will be okay.

Speaker 2 (01:37:10):
You will be okay. It's gonna be hard, but you're
gonna be okay.

Speaker 1 (01:37:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and yeah, I just I just feel
like it's it's an important thing to do.

Speaker 4 (01:37:22):
So yeah, here we are here, we are doing it.

Speaker 1 (01:37:26):
Yes, doing the thing, as we say in our family,
doing the thing, doing it right, not fucking up, and
it works. It just works.

Speaker 2 (01:37:36):
That's amazing. I love that doing the thing, doing it
right and it just works. I'm gonna use that now.
My favorite thing to say is, well, I say, feel
the fear and do it anyways. That's what I and
that's what braves exactly. You know what, you could be
as scared as you want and you still do the
fucking thing and way to go. Even if it didn't work.

Speaker 1 (01:37:59):
You did so yeah win, but did it even though
you were skar did it exactly it yep. Yeah, And
that's that's the way to be.

Speaker 2 (01:38:08):
That's the way to be. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:38:11):
Well, well, thank you so much. I was looking forward
to this.

Speaker 2 (01:38:19):
This is great, This was wonderful. Thank you so much
for talking to me. This has been a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (01:38:25):
It has been fun, and you're welcome back anytime. I'd
really love to talk ghost theory with you. Oh yeah,
I love that and yeah, yeah, yeah, that'll be fun.

Speaker 2 (01:38:35):
That would be super cool. I would love that. So yeah,
thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:38:40):
Thank you. Well that's all for this week's episode of
the Six Degrees of John Keel podcast. If you have
any questions or thoughts about the podcast, or would like
to come and talk about your experiences of the paranormal,
you can contact us at six d JK six seven
at gmail dot dot com. We promised even answer you,

(01:39:03):
and we are always happy to hear from you. Thank you,

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6 Degrees of John Keel - Haunting Our Own Houses and Other Stories with Karly

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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;}6 Degrees of John Keel - Haunting Our Own Houses and Other Stories with Karly