All Episodes

October 10, 2025 54 mins
Ruth was born in Paris, France, in the 1960's, to parents who were in the armed forces and were stationed there.

For most of her career, she has been a Civil Servant, working predominantly investigating theft and fraud and latterly harassment, bullying and discrimination. She is also an accredited and very experienced Workplace Mediator.

She has a fascination for the paranormal which has lasted a lifetime - and read extensively on the subject looking for answers after living in two seriously haunted houses with poltergeist activity in her formative years. Her investigative mind means she is fascinated by the endless possible answers to the questions posed by people experiencing phenomena, and dreamed for years of writing her own books on the subject.

When she partially retired in 2016, she found the time to start writing, and has so far produced three works on the subject - The Ghosts of Marston Vale January 2017, The Almanac of British Ghosts December 2017 and The Roadmap of British Ghosts January 2019. By interviewing witnesses herself, she hopes to add to the data available so that someone, somewhere, one day, will be able to answer the question - "Do ghosts exist? What exactly are they?


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-x-zone-radio-tv-show--1078348/support.

Please note that all XZBN radio and/or television shows are Copyright © REL-MAR McConnell Meda Company, Niagara, Ontario, Canada – www.rel-mar.com. For more Episodes of this show and all shows produced, broadcasted and syndicated from REL-MAR McConell Media Company and The 'X' Zone Broadcast Network and the 'X' Zone TV Channell, visit www.xzbn.net. For programming, distribution, and syndication inquiries, email programming@xzbn.net.

We are proud to announce the we have launched TWATNews.com, launched in August 2025.

TWATNews.com is an independent online news platform dedicated to uncovering the truth about Donald Trump and his ongoing influence in politics, business, and society. Unlike mainstream outlets that often sanitize, soften, or ignore stories that challenge Trump and his allies, TWATNews digs deeper to deliver hard-hitting articles, investigative features, and sharp commentary that mainstream media won’t touch
.
These are stories and articles that you will not read anywhere else.Our mission is simple: to expose corruption, lies, and authoritarian tendencies while giving voice to the perspectives and evidence that are often marginalized or buried by corporate-controlled media. 
Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
All hnry, Welcome to the xisde a place where fact
is fiction and fiction is reality.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Now here's your host, Rob Konno.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
You doing that thing YouTube breaking my heart into a
million pieces.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Like you always do. And you don't need to be.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
There either about the body thanco answer.

Speaker 4 (00:58):
Try try to get you the.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
Happy time.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
And good evening, one and all, and welcome back to
the X Zone. I am Rob McConnell and for the
next oh let me see you the next two hours.
I'm going to be your host and your guide as
together we cross the time space continuum to this place
that I call the X Zone. It's a place where
people dared to believe and dare to be heard. It's
a place where fact is fiction and fiction is reality.
And the X Zone comes to you Monday through Friday

(01:35):
from ten pm Eastern until midnight right here on the
Xzone Broadcast Network. And you're listening to us on your
hometown radio Classic twelve twenty and streamed around the world
on Classic twelve twenty dot ca X Nation. My first
guest tonight is all the way in the United Kingdom,
and she got up early or she's going to bed.

(01:55):
I get so mixed up with the times. But anyway,
her name is Ruth Roper a while and we're going
to be talking about the paranormal. She is a paranormal
researcher and author, and Ruth, welcome to the Excellent And
it's nighttime there, right.

Speaker 4 (02:09):
It's nighttime here. Yeah, it's just coming out for bedtime.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Oh jeez. Well, thank you so much for staying up
and joining us. I'm looking forward to sharing the next
hour with you. So tell us a little bit about
yourself here.

Speaker 4 (02:22):
So I first got interested in paranormal when I was
a kid because we moved into a house in a
small hamlet in England in the county of Hertfordshire, which
is just a few miles north of London, and our
house we very quickly found out, had quite an active
poltergeist in it. So it would literally chuck things about,

(02:47):
turn the lights on and off, make incredible loud noises
in the middle of the night, like glass smashing and
things falling. When you got up to check there was
nothing disturbed, it would wait til you were standing in
front of the cooker and then make the noise of
a pane of glass smashing on the ground immediately behind you,
make you jump, spun a knife across the kitchen, once

(03:14):
folded up a tea towel in front of my mother
and I once, So yeah, it was really quite active.
And my mother was a radio engineer in the RAF,
the British Air Force before she got married and had children,
so she had a really practical turn of mind about
these things. Was quite skeptical and wanted to always know

(03:37):
the scientific reason behind whatever was happening. So she never
reacted with fear or sort of hysteria or anything like that.
She would just calmly watch whatever was going on and
then try to find an explanation for it. And I
think that kind of instilled in me the desire to
find out what was happening, so I started sort of

(04:00):
trying to read up on it and without giving my
age away too much, but this was before the age
of computers. That yeah, I'm really that old. So you know,
your own recourse was to find books in the library
or bookshops or whatever, or maybe a magazine ask if
you were really lucky, And I quickly found that there

(04:23):
was particularly here in England, there were so many stories
that were really really old and they were set in
old castles or old you know, monasteries or whatever, and
the ghost was last seen in eighteen twenty four, and
I just really wasn't interested in that. I was living
in a modern house on a modern housing estate, you know,

(04:44):
in a perfectly ordinary family, with something chucking things around
my kitchen, and I wanted to know if there was
somebody else having that same sort of experience. You know.
That's that's where I sort of got my interest. And
I started keeping a card file because again back to
four computers on the ones I found that were actually

(05:04):
modern rather than really old. And I just that just
sort of stayed as a hobby throughout my life. Then
as I grew up and had my career and you know,
went through life, and when I managed to take partial
early with time and to the age of fifty one,
a few years back, I thought, well more, I've got
the time to actually do something with all these databases

(05:27):
of information about the paranormal. So I decided I'd put
it in a book, rather foolishly thinking I'd put it
in one book at that point, And here I am
just getting ready to write book number nine.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yeah, I'm lucky. I'm lucky at the list one book
I'm looking at the book of the list here and
you've got let's hear The Ghost of Marston Vale, The
Almanac of British ghost The Roadmap of British ghost The
Roadmap of Bridge Ghost Volume two, The Hunted Times Volume one,
These Hunted Times Volume two, These Haunted Times Volume three,

(06:02):
and These Hunted Times Volume four. That's one heck of
a big one book.

Speaker 4 (06:07):
It sure is, and it really I really did learn
a lesson with that. The Roadmap of British Ghosts the
first one, because I genuinely, and this shows how dumb
I wasn't.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
No no, no no, don't no no no.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
No no, it really was.

Speaker 4 (06:23):
Because I thought this will be the definitive book on
all the ghosts that haunt the British roadways, you know,
because I spent years researching it and I thought I'd
found them all. So I called it the road Map
of British Ghosts. But the trouble was my ethos when
writing is having found a soft story, I then go

(06:44):
out to the public on all sorts of social media
and shop windows and in person however I can find
to do it, and I get their stories to see
if anybody's actually experienced it. In modern times to see
if I can find correlations. And what I found was, yes,
I found loads of correlations. But people would also answer

(07:04):
and say, well, I haven't seen anything on that road,
but I had a really weird experience on the road
around the corner or five miles away or so on
the database they went and before I knew it, I
had enough for another roadmap and pitches ghosts. And that's
when I learned to start using volume numbers.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
Now, now, would I be correct in understanding that the
the road maps, a British ghost is where ghosts have
been seen on the roads.

Speaker 4 (07:34):
Or some roads, tracks, highways, wood it pass that sort
of thing, anything that's not a building basically.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
And how come there's so many ghosts on the roads?

Speaker 4 (07:48):
Do you know? That's quite a fascinating question when you
really really stopped to think about it. And what I
find really interesting is I found so many correlations. So,
for example, if you have a piece of road that
has a legend on it that I don't know, say
a black monk is said to be seen crossing it,
we get a lot of black monks in England. And

(08:11):
you go out on social media, you go out to
the public, what you find is a lot of people
experience paranormal things along that same stretch, but they're not
the Black Monk. They're seeing other things that they can't explain,
but all in that same location. And that's when you
really get into the fascinating Well, what is it about

(08:31):
that location? Why is that little stretch of road sort
of somehow attracting all this paranormal activity? And it really
is fascinating that you get so many little areas of
road and even when the roads change. You know, here
in the UK, we're forever building new roads and whatever
because we're such a small geographical location compared to you

(08:55):
over that side of the pond, that we're forever having
to build roads over top of roads, and towns on
top of towns. And you know, so if you dig
down through our soil strata, you get thousands of years
below it of so lord knows what was there originally?
I understand, you know, that might be the cause. Or
is it just that the land itself somehow attracts that activity.

(09:20):
It's really hard to tell, but it is fascinating.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
Wow. So, just based on the books you've written so far,
how many ghosts have you chronicled or how many locations
have you chronicled?

Speaker 4 (09:36):
Oh, several thousand. Counted it up from there are literally
hundreds in every book, and I'm on, there's eight books published,
so yeah, there must be thousands.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
So people must be seeing ghosts all the time if
there are so many ghosts.

Speaker 4 (09:58):
The funny thing is that when I first started out
on this venture and I thought, you know, I want
to write about this. That means I'm going to have
to start talking to people about it rather than just
be interested in it myself. And I really thought I'm
going to get laughter, I'm going to get people, you know,
really taking the mick as we say here in England
about my interest. And what I found instead was that

(10:22):
most people, and honestly, I would say that nine out
of every ten people, the answer I get from them is, oh,
I don't believe in the parent normal. But there was
this one time, you know, when I saw something really weird,
and nine out of ten people I would say, at
least once in their life that I, you know that

(10:44):
contact me have had something or that I speak to
have had something happen at some point in their life
that they can't actually account for as it were. So
loads is the answer. Loads of people experienerience it.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
I do agree that that the United Kingdom is very old,
and it's had a marvelous history, a lot of wars
fought on the on the little island. And yeah, and
why why do the ghosts stick around? Why don't they
go to that light place that many paranormaline investigators tell

(11:24):
us about.

Speaker 4 (11:26):
Well, my honest view on that is it depends on
what is actually causing any given phenomena. So I still
sit on the fence, even after all these thousands of
entries and that I've made, and you know, the research
I've done and the people I've spoken to, and my
own experiences, because obviously I do a lot of actual

(11:48):
ghost und I go to a lot of these places
if I can. My thought is that there is not
one explanation for what is happening, so no one answer
fits all the data. Wow, so some data, Yeah, it
absolutely looks like what you've got there is the spirit
of somebody who was once living who's hanging about. Other

(12:11):
data to me looks much more like it's pointing towards
some kind of other entity, some kind of trickster entity.
Here in England we might refer to them as boggots
or sprites or elementals. You know, there's something else that
wasn't necessarily ever human. Then I think there's some things

(12:33):
that are just kind of like a replay, right, or
something that happened, you know, it's just kind of like
almost like a recording coming back.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
All right, you and I have to take our first
breaks or please darn buy expor Nation. Fascinating lady with
fascinating stories, thousands of ghosts, and that's just on the roadways.
Our special guest is Ruth rop Roper Wild and if
you'd like to find out more about Ruth, visitor on Facebook, Facebook,
dot com, forward slash Ruth Roper Wild. I'm Rob McConnell.

(13:04):
This is the ex Zoe and we'll be back on
the other side of the short break as we continue
from our broadcast center in studios in Saint Catharine's, Ontario, Canada,
and on the let me see your hometown radio Classic
twelve twenty streaming at Classic twelve twenty dot.

Speaker 4 (13:25):
One.

Speaker 5 (13:25):
In with the stream and welcome back everyone.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
Our guest this hour from the United Kingdom where it's
nighttime over there, as our guest, Ruth Roper Wild, and
if you'd like contact Ruth and find out more about
her and chat with her about some experiences that you
may have had that she might be interested in. Her
Facebook page is Ruth Roper Wild and that's r U

(14:42):
t h r O p E r w y l
d E. Tell us about your most thrilling paranormal investigation
that you were done.

Speaker 4 (14:55):
I'll tell you about my most surprising one, if that's okay.
So I happened to really love the Scottish Highlands. They're
very remote, They're one of the most remote bits of Britain.
Left my husband, on the other hand, not that keen
on them. So one year I was sort of bemoaning

(15:17):
the fact that I'd quite like to do a holiday
up in the Scottish Higlands, and he said, well, maybe
be stopping you, but I don't want to go, and
I thought, good point. I could just go on my
own with the two dogs. So off I set and
I found the most remote cottage I could possibly find.
I mean it was literally fifty three miles down of

(15:37):
single track road, which for the UK is really remote.
And on my first day there, I decided to do
a little trek out just to because I've obviously done
a really long drive the day before, and I went
down this dead end road that was eight miles long
and went up one side of the mountain and down
the other side into a steep, steep down valley with

(16:00):
more Scottish lock at the bottom. Absolutely gorgeous and picturesque,
not been touched for centuries because there was a little
sign saying this has been left untouched. But you know,
since the Scottish clans were in the highlands, right But
all there was was this one road and this bridge
that spanned the end of the lock where it turned

(16:20):
into a little river, and I drove my car over
the bridge. As it went over. At this bridge made
this awful clanging noise because it was metal plates laid
on a metal girder structure, which made me jump. The
road came to a dead end, so I thought, well,
I'll go back to that bridge, park up and take
some photos up and down the lock, because it's really
pretty just there. So I go back to this bridge,

(16:43):
drive back across it, which all clang clang clang clang
with this metal park the car up, opened the boot
of the car and I'm just getting my dogs with
Belgian Malina out of the back of the car and
it is very highly trained and nose not to get
out of the car unless he's given permission. But for
some reason he actually jumped out the back of the car,

(17:04):
which never does so I'm bent down clipping his lead
on and scolding him for jumping out of the car
without permission when I hear the sound of an engine,
which made me think of a quad bike engines. It
was that high, reavy noise that quad bikes make, and
the bridge started clanging right next to me because I'm

(17:25):
parked right next to the bridge, so I'm bent over
if you imagine clipping the lead on a dog, and
I stand up to look to see what's come, thinking, oh,
I hope I'm not blocking wherever this quad bike wants
to go. And as I move from the bent over
position to the standing up right position, so what a
split second, the noise stops completely, absolutely nothing to be seen,

(17:50):
absolute silence, no engine anywhere near, and I am eight
miles away from the nearest even possible human habitation, and
I just they're staring at this bridge there's literally about
five feet away from me, with my jaw on the ground,
thinking what the heck just happened? There? Then, so then

(18:10):
I thought, now, maybe a boat went under it went
under the bridge. Perhaps that's what made the bridge cang.
So I walked out onto the bridge and looked over
where I discovered that actually the little river under it
is only about three inches deep, so there's no way
even a kayak would get under it, let alone a
boat with an engine. And at this point I realized

(18:32):
that my dog is acting really distressed. He's whining and
crying on the end of the lead, and I think
that's odd. So I walked him back off the bridge
and I walk him about a little bit. He wouldn't settle,
so I put him back in the car and I
drove about a mile up the road where there was
another little parking space and there was an information board,
and I thought, I'll get out and read that information board.

(18:54):
I got out the car. My dog is his normal,
happy self, wanting to play ball, not at all distress,
perfectly happy, And I thought I really should have listened
to him better, because he was picking something up at
that bridge, and that's why he jumped out of the
car in the first place, because obviously he's very protective
with being a Belgian nahah you know, and he was

(19:16):
obviously sensing that there was something just not right about there.
And I can't explain what that noise was that came
across the bridge, for that's fuit second, but it was
the high ripping sound of an engine and that bridge
started hanging.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
Do you think it might have been a rift in
time or a dimensional crossover.

Speaker 4 (19:38):
I think that's the most probable explanation that I heard something,
you know, like say like an echo in time or something.
Couldn't have been very far back given the sound of
the engine. But you know, I wasn't out ghost hunting.
I've searched that area and there's no known stories about
it being haunted, So I wasn't in any way thinking

(20:02):
about the paranormal or I was just having a nice
day out sight seeing, right, And yeah, well it decided
to jump on me anyway, follows me around now, wants
to get in the book. That's what it is.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
Why do you think, Ruth, that some people are more
attuned to paranormal activity than other people?

Speaker 4 (20:23):
I actually, honestly, I believe it's a matter of paying attention.
And I know that sounds daft, but rather than I
do quite a bit of shooting and I have often
sat out in the fields watching somebody walk across the field,
perhaps walking their dog or whatever, and they never noticed

(20:44):
my husband and I sitting there in a hide with guns,
and I look at them and I think, you're just
unaware of your surroundings. So how much else are we
unaware of every day right as we go through normal life?
You know, I've got several accounts of ghosts that haunt
city streets in the middle of the day. And these

(21:04):
are busy city streets, and the only way people see
them is because they suddenly do something odd like disappear
right in front of them. But other than that, they
thought that they were a normal person. So how many
times do the rest of us drive past the walk
past somebody in a street, whatever, And because we didn't

(21:25):
happen to turn round at the moment it disappeared, we
just carried on walking and didn't pay much attention. How
many times do we actually not see it when it's
actually happening. And another way of thinking about, we have
a look a bird here in the good shows called
the robin redbreast. Very very common they are. They're all
over the place, and almost every back garden has one

(21:48):
because they're very territorial, and they tend to make one
back garden their territory, and you hear them quite often,
but you rarely see them. And I think the paranoral
will like that it's there all the time. It's just
we don't always get attuned to it or pay attention
to it. And I think the people who see an
experience more have just become more attuned to it. Perhaps

(22:10):
they had something happen so they're more afraid of it,
you know, or perhaps you know, like me, they've got
an interest in it, so they're kind of looking out
for it more. But I think it's all about how
much attention you pay. I think it's there all the time.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
The reports that you get of these anomalies or these
ghosts on the highways, do more than one person see them?
Does more than one person have any interaction with these ghosts?
Or are these just sporadic?

Speaker 4 (22:43):
In many cases it's more than one person. So I
think my record for one particular road I think I'm
up about nine now has spread over three decade period,
and that's only the people that have seen that I'm
asking we've got back in touch with me, so you
can that there must be more that have never heard

(23:03):
of me. Don't know I'm asking, don't know to get
in touch. Mustn't there, I must, you know, just by logistics,
I must only be getting hold of a certain percentage
of the population that'sy' ever driven along that road. But
I've now got about nine and all of them they're
not all seeing quite the same thing. They're not seeing
it at the same time of day or night. Sometimes
they see it at night, sometimes it's during broad daylight.

(23:25):
But all of it is to do with a horse,
a horse, a horse. So the original sauce story that
I found was a farmer working on the ditch on
the side of the road, and he heard the sound
of a horse galloping, stood up and looked around him,
just in time to hear the horse crashed through the
hedge next to him and gallop on down the road,

(23:46):
but there was nothing to be seen. That's the original
sauce story. And when I went out and asked for
other people's version. For example, I've got one lady coming
home from a night out on the town back to
this small village with our friends in the car, got
car headbeams on and all of a sudden, the headbeams.
Jumping out of the hedgerow, galloped across the little lane
in front of her, and through the hedgerow on the

(24:07):
other side was a horse, but it was only the
outline of the horse, not filled in, so her headlines
headlights just picked up the outline of a horse galloping
across the road. Freaked them all out completely the village there.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
Sorry, I said, I imagine this would freak people out.
But how do we explain that this ghost of a horse,
Let's just use the horse, for example, has mass enough
mass to move bushes aside, to actually make the sound
of a horse when it's really not there.

Speaker 4 (24:49):
Who knows. That's a really good question, because yeah, how
is it making the sound? And it does make sound?
This one because I've got another chap who has a
little cottage on the street there at the village that
this lane goes into. And his front door opened straight
out onto the street. It's a little, tiny, old cottage,

(25:09):
and he stepped out one evening to put his milk
bottles out and stood for a minute just enjoying the
night air. Its about midnight, and he heard the sound
of a horse clopping down the street, and he thought,
who the heck is out riding a horse at midnight.
And then he thought, oh my god, is somebody's stealing
a horse? So he looked down the high street, couldn't
see anything, but the sound of the clopping hoos came

(25:31):
past him, past his cottage and on down the lane
and faded away with him, never seeing anything, just hearing it.
And he said, I can't I don't believe in the paranormal,
but I can't explain what I heard that night, he said.
And people have tried to tell me maybe it was
just the sound of a coke can rolling in the wind,
he said, but ah, there was no wind. And b
I do know the difference between the sound of a

(25:52):
rolling coke can and a horse's hoofs, you know, because
sometimes I do think the explanations that people tried to
up with it weirder than the actual thing that happens.

Speaker 2 (26:02):
All Right, you and I have to take our bottom
of the hour break, so please stand by fascinating stories,
and thank you very much for joining us at this
late hour at your end. We appreciate you being with us.
Ex O Nation. Ruth roper Wild is our special guest,
and if you'd like to contact her, or check her
out visit her on her Facebook page. Ruth roper Wild.
This is the Xcell and I'm Rob McConnell. We're coming

(26:22):
to you from our broadcast center and studios in Saint Catherine's, Ontario, Canada,
on the X Zone Broadcast Network and on your hometown
radio Classic twelve twenty. Ruth and I will be back
on the other side of this break. Please don't go away.

Speaker 6 (27:13):
Slow down, you move too fast. You got to make
the morning last. Just kicking down the cobblestones, looking for
fun and feeling gruey, good by, a lot lot lot
of feeling groop. You being beat me yellow lamp post.

(27:40):
What you know when I come to watch your flowers grow?

Speaker 1 (27:44):
When h you got no rise for me? Do it? Dodo?

Speaker 6 (27:50):
Feeling grooeby and goody.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
If a lot of I'd walk back every one. Ruth
roper Wild does our special guest. We're talking to Ruth
about her books and dex oonation. She has written eight
of them that we have here on our list. I
understand you've gotten ninth book that you just completed, or
you're finishing out your ninth book.

Speaker 4 (28:11):
I'm just right in the middle of writing it and
researching my ninth one, and I'm hoping it's going to
be about American ghost for change.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
Yeah, all right, and exhonation. The books that Ruth has
written so far are The Ghost of Marston Vale, The
Almanac of British Ghosts, The road Map of British ghost
The road Map of British Ghosts of Volume two, These
Haunted Times Volume one, These Haunted Times Volume two, These
Haunted Times Volume three, and These Haunted Haunted Times of

(28:41):
volume four. And where can people get copies of your books?

Speaker 4 (28:46):
So most good bookstores will order them in for you,
but generally they're just available on AMIMSM and you can
have them as ebook or paperbacks. And if you hadn't
had Kindlan limited, you can even read me.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
Ill bad Now. The Ghost of Marston Vale is this
one of the road maps where the ghosts are?

Speaker 4 (29:09):
This is actually my village. So yeah, so I live
in a tiny little village called Marston Martine and the
valley that it sits, well, it's a very shallow valley,
but it gets called a valley, Okay, it is called
Marston Vale. And when I decided i'd wanted to write
a book for those databases, I've been keeping. I had

(29:30):
absolutely no idea how you go about writing a book
or publishing it or anything else, so I thought I'd
better start with something quite small. So The Ghost of
Marten Vale is just a very small book, say about
sixty pages. I think it's very small, and it is
just about the ghosts around here in this valley that
I live in, and some of the old legends and

(29:52):
so on. And I just used it as a way
of testing out the water to see how you write
a book and how you get it published. But I
did actually meet with the people whose stories are in
there and interviews more in person, because of course, you
know you'll live in the same location, right, So I
had lots of nice meetings over coffee up at the

(30:12):
local cafe up at the forest Center and had people
tell me their actual stories. You know, they're haunted houses,
space to play because there were some really interesting because
even in just such a small area of this, you know,
it's quite a number of hauntings. So so yeah, so
that's what that one is about. It's all the whole
things around where I.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
Live now, the ones that you do for the roadmap
for the ghosts and where the ghosts are located. Have
any of these stories been validated by your local constabularies.

Speaker 4 (30:46):
In some cases they have. So in some cases, you know,
the source story has got police involvement in it. That
there's one particular one. I forget exactly where the road is,
but it's sort of Hampshire away around there, and it
was it was actually reports to the police of people

(31:08):
kept on a particular night, loads of people rang into
the police to say they weren't able to stop because
it's dual carriageway, but they saw a car karene across
the carriageway and plunge off the bank of the embankment,
and so the police were obviously dispatched to go and
see it, and after quite a bit of searching, what

(31:28):
they found was much further down the embankment and all
the undergrowth was an old car that had been there
for about three years with a dead person in it
who'd been missing for three years, who they then subsequently identified.
And so you can you can read all the actual
newspaper reports at the time of when they found this,

(31:51):
you know, this wreck and the body and this had
never been it had been reported missing, but nobody he
was in London and nobody thought there was any reason
to look out where he was actually found. Nobody knows
why he went out that way that night, nobody knows
where he was going. So at the time he went missing,
the search was all within London and they never did

(32:13):
find it. It stayed out with a cold case until this
night when suddenly loads of people rang in to the
place saying that you've just seen this car crash, and
there was no current car crash. The only thing they
found was this old car crash. So some kind of
replay actually led the police to closing that cold.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
Case, just like the ghost of saying, hey, I'm down here.
I want to be found down here. Yeah, you know what,
I want to bring closer to my family because they're
worried about where I am and so on, and that
kind of makes it, yeah, like an intelligent hunting, all right,
an intelligent apparition.

Speaker 4 (32:55):
It's either intelligent or there was a momentary timeslip, and
that what they saw was a time sip of these
actual headlights going off the road. It's one or the other,
isn't it. It's gone one or the other, you know, But
either way, that's what happened, and that's a matter of records.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
So fascinating. It truly is. It truly is because of
the age of the United Kingdom as well as the history.
It's very rich in history. Do people report seeing nights
as ghosts.

Speaker 4 (33:32):
I've got a couple of nights. I've got a Bronze
Age horsemen. I've got a couple of Roman soldiers in
my books that people have told me about what they've seen.
So one of them was particularly I think it's in
one of these Haunted Times volumes, because what happened is
these Haunted Times is when I was researching for the
roadmap ones, people of course would write into me and

(33:54):
so well, I'm not see anything on the road, but
my house is haunted, or my place of work is haunted,
or the pub I go to is haunted. So I
sort of had to start a new series to put
all of those in. And this particular one was there
was a chap who had to keep the actual location
secret because he was the archaeologist dealing with it. And

(34:15):
they were dealing with this particular site in the south
of England where they had some you know, a Roman
temporary way thought right, they thought that they were looking
at and a lady came up to them, who was
often outwalking her dogs, and said, all she said, are
you are you going to be building over this up?

(34:35):
I hope you're not going to disturb the soldier. They said,
what a soldier? She said, well, there's a ghost of
a soldier up here, a Roman soldier, and he always
stands on this hillside looking out that way and carrying
a spear and a shield, and he's dressed in green.
And the archaeologist said to me, he said, I didn't

(34:56):
say much to her, you know, it was very interested,
thank you very much, and were be respectful of that
sort of thing. So, but the really interesting thing was
most people would picture because of you know, Hollywood, and
that Roman centurions wore red with those shortly kalamous skirt things.
They add, yeah, they're called you know, in the breastplates
and what have you. But here in the UK, there

(35:19):
was one division of the Roman army that came across
as part of the invasion of Britain who wore green.
So unless she was a real buff of history, then
she was actually seeing the ghost of one of the
soldiers that would have been in that way station that
they were busy surveying and he was there when she

(35:41):
knocked on the little cut door, so that that was
a Roman soldier stilong guard all these juries later.

Speaker 2 (35:48):
Tommyth how has been an author of these ghost stories
in it and the content that you have been able
to accumulate, How has it changed your life?

Speaker 4 (35:59):
It's made me very, very wary when I go out
on the ghost hunt. Nobody is allowed to turn on
a evp resorder in my car, and nobody is allowed
to turn on an EV recorder anywhere near my house
because I don't want any of them following me home.
Thank you very much. And I have to say I

(36:22):
hunted the whole year. It so happened that this particular
haunted road it's not fast from me. Every fortnight I
would drive down it's about half packen at night on
my way through. You know, the particular thing I did
every fortnight. And so for a whole year I kept
my eye open for this particular ghost. And when I
finally saw it, it scared me so badly, which is

(36:43):
unusual for me, because I'm it takes a lot to
scare me normally. I've been unable to drive down that
road on my own after dark. Goodness, I can go
down it with my husband's in the car with me, right,
But I just can't bring myself to drive down it
on my own, and it drives me nut because it's
so unlikely. I quite happily go ghos hunting on my own,

(37:03):
you know, and I quite happily sit in a haunted
room on my own in the dark and wait something
to happen. But something about that apparition scared for the
Jesus out of me.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
What did the apperation look like?

Speaker 4 (37:17):
He was? It was almost identical to what everybody else
says they see on that road, except everybody else he's
facing them. And when I saw him, he was facing
away from me, so I never actually saw his face.
But he's a heavy set, older chap wearing some kind
of big like we would call him donkey jackets near
in the UK, but like a big duffel coated work jacket,

(37:42):
heavy workhousers, heavy work boots. When I saw him, he
was stood at the side of the road, facing away
from me, with his shoulders hunched and his head down.
But the really freaky thing about him was instead of
being in just normal muted colors that your headlights would
pick up, he was made up of a pas. It
was one of those nights where it was both foggy

(38:03):
and there was a mist rising as well as fog falling,
and there was frost, and there was a full bright moon.
So you kind of drove in and out of patches
of fog and then missed just rising up off the
road and then glittery frosty patches, and his whole outline
and filled in was made up a patchwork of those colors,

(38:27):
so gray and black and sparky frosty color.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Huh. I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 (38:33):
I can't even tell you why he was scary, because
he wasn't he was looking away from me, but there
was just something about him that just put the hairs
up on the back of my neck. And I just
did not dare turn the car around and go and
look for them again. And he appeared at a moment
when I had full view ahead of me on the road,
to the full length of my main beams on the car,

(38:56):
and yet he suddenly appeared right in front of one
of my car.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (39:01):
So and yeah, just absolutely terrified me. So it has
changed me in a way, and I'm a bit more
wary about driving at night in certain locations I'm a
lot more wary about driving my motorbike at night because
we don't like to feel if something thought to something
getting on the back of the motor.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
Oh look, honey, I've brought on the hitchhaker.

Speaker 4 (39:22):
God, yeah, don't. I've got quite a few hitchhiker stories,
which is actually first hand.

Speaker 2 (39:27):
Well why don't why don't we hear a couple of them?
Why don't we hear about a couple of them when
we come back from this break? How's that sure? All right? Xcellonation.
I guess this hour is Ruth roper Wild and we're
talking about ghost. Ruth is paranormal researcher and author. If
you'd like to contact her, visit her Facebook page at
Ruth roper Wild. I'm Rob McConnell. This is the xceon

(39:49):
and we'll both be back on the other side of
this break as we wrap up this hour here in
the X one with Here Australia, Rob McConnell from our
broadcast center and studios in St. Catherine's, Ontario, Canada, on
your hometown radio, Classic twelve twenty, streaming around the world
on Classic twelve twenty dot c A.

Speaker 3 (40:48):
Lady, we're all long just a music radio. No one's coming,
no one's gone. Telephone me the lad still dancing, say.

Speaker 1 (41:17):
Dancing.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
Welcome back everyone, This is the excellent I'm Rob McConnell
and my very special guest this hour, all the way
from the beautiful United Kingdom is our guest Ruth Roker Wilde,
and she is an author and a paranormal investigator. First
of all, Ruth, I want to thank you so much
for joining us. Great pleasure talking to you. And before
we went to the break, Yeah, we were talking about

(41:41):
hitchhiking ghosts that you yourself have had first hand experience with.

Speaker 4 (41:46):
Well, I've had witnesses talk to me yet about the
experiences they've had, because when I resperse researching, and there's
quite a lot of stories of hitch like a ghost
around the UK, and I genuinely thought they would just
urban myth, most urban legend. But I've actually talked to
a couple of people and there's one that springs to mind,

(42:06):
particularly where a ghosts got in their car. And this
particular one was a chap who was driving home, not
particularly old chap, you know, quite young, driving home on
his own after dark, and something caught his eye in
the footwell of the passenger seat next to him. So

(42:27):
she imagine, you're driving, it's dark, but you sort of
see something glint in the passenger footwell, and you sort
of glance side with his rise and think, well, I
left on the passenger floor. And every time he glanced,
and this happened over a period of maybe thirty or
forty seconds, so quite a short period of time, but

(42:48):
terrifying when you're driving. When he first glanced, it was
just a little glint of metal. When he glanced again,
there was a sort of buckle and a shoe. When
he glanced again, he'd got the lower part of the leg,
and then a knee, and then a person sitting in

(43:08):
the seat next to him for a second who was
grinning at him, wearing old fashioned what we call breeches
with stockings and those sort of buckled shoes that they
used to wear back in the eighteen seventy eighteen hundreds.
And he actually became very close to crashing the car

(43:29):
because his instinct course was to jerk away from what
was sitting next to him, and in doing so, he
kind of jerked the wheel and that made him look
forward and hurriedly get the car you know, hit the
brakes and try and get the car under control before
he crashed. And he sort of looked back in terror
and it had gone, whatever it was had gone. And

(43:50):
he drove home in a quiet state, said he's never
been so grateful to get to the outskirts of the
place where he lives, where there were street lights, you know,
to get off the dark road sort of thing. And
funny enough, as he walked through the door, although it
was quite late the evening, his mum was still up
and you've just seen a ghosts So funny you should

(44:12):
say that mum actually just have in the damn car.
But yeah, that's that's why I have quite strict all
about no e vps in my cars, thank you very much.
I don't want them materialize in my caub Doing.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
The research, doing the research for your books, how do
you differentiate between fact and fiction?

Speaker 4 (44:36):
Well, I actually think that's the hardest thing, isn't it,
Because I have absolutely no way of checking the veracity
of what somebody chooses to tell me. I only you know,
all I can go on is I've gone out asking
and they've responded to requests. And most of these people

(44:59):
I respond, you know, by email back towards or I
actually speak to them over the phone, or where possible,
I'm meet them in person if it's close enough. And
all I can say is that it's very very rare
that somebody tells me something that makes me think you're
just putting my leg. Most people are just so leaved

(45:19):
to have somebody listen to their story. And when I
get more times than not is I've never told anybody
else this, but because you were asking, I just wanted
to get it off my chest. You know, I don't
use their real names in the book. In the book,
My books are all pseudonyms of wits. Say. So, they're
not getting anything out of this. They're you know, there's

(45:41):
no payment for it, there's no fame for it. You know,
there's nothing in it for them other than getting this
off their chest and finally having somebody to talk to
about it.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
And I would imagine that that's worth its weight in gold,
because here we are, here, we are in the twenty
first century, and still we have people who are afraid
to come forward and say, you're not going to believe this.
But and this is what our show is all about,
is giving the people who have had the experiences that
they can come and share with our listening audience and

(46:15):
not have to worry about being laughed at, being persecuted,
because fact is stranger than fiction, it.

Speaker 4 (46:22):
Really, truthfully is. And I always think of the old
man who spoke to me once. He spoke your email
and blessed him. You know, he tould it your email
because he was really eighty. But he said to me,
I really really want to get this down so you
can understand what I'm saying because it happened when I
was in my twenties and I've never told a soul before.

(46:42):
I'm so old now I don't care what people think. Well,
and he gave me his stories six you know, sort
of sixteen year old story, and to go all those
years not telling his family because he was afraid people
would laugh at him. And I always say to people,
I'm never going to laugh at you, because you cannot
possibly top some of the weird things I've been told
over the years that people have experienced and seen and

(47:06):
I have, you know, in ninety nine point nine percent
of cases, I have no reason to believe they're not
telling me the truth as it happened to them. Yeah,
there's just the other one where I think, really but
that most of them, that the vast majority. It's clear
that this person is telling me because they need to
get it off their fat.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
What has been the most comical account that you were
ever given?

Speaker 4 (47:33):
Oh, that's got to be the disappearing sausage, the white up,
the disappearing sausage. I love the disappearing sausage. So this
was a chap who lived in a flat with his girlfriend.
They knew their flat was fairly haunted. There was various
things happened over time. But they have a Sunday routine
where every Sunday they make a good old English fry up,

(47:54):
which is bacon, sausage, egg toast, tea, mushrooms and tintamatos.
That's the standard English fire. And because they've been living
together a while, I mean his girlfriend, have a sort
of routine for who cooks which bit of the meal,
and they kind of dance around each other in their
little kitchen in a sort of cho choreographed move as

(48:16):
to who cooks what bitten plates are up until they
sit down for their meal and it's like a little
Sunday morning rich of for them, and they always cook
as part of that meal they always cook five sausages.
He has three, she has two on her plate. And
this particular morning they're chatting away the raiders on. They're
doing their usual thing, and they plate up. He plates

(48:36):
up the sausages because he's cooking sausages. And they turn
around to put the last bits on the plate, and
there's four sausages sitting on the plate instead of five.
And they both look at it, and they look at
each other and they look at the plate, and she goes,
didn't you cook five as usual? He went, yeah, I
definitely cooked five. Well where is it? Then? I don't know? Him?

(49:00):
Does it fall a lots of plate? So they search
under the table. No, no side of this sausage. They
haven't got any pets, so this isn't a case of
a cat or a dog has sleep past and whipped
it away. There's just the two of them in the house,
in the flat. So they argue a bit over the
four sausages. Then there should be five. Turn back to
get the tea off the side and then the teapot.

(49:23):
What have you? Turn back and there are five sausages
in the plate. And he says, to this day, I
cannot explain to you Ruth, how that happened? Except when
I try and picture it in my mind, those four
sausages sitting on that patterned plate. I can see in
my mind's eye a bit on the plate where the

(49:43):
pattern was blurry, as if something was hiding the sausage.
When I look back and think about it, he said,
But all I can tell you is we both looked
at that plate. We argued about it. Why was there
only four sausages? We turned away, He turned the back
and there was five sausages, he said, I was trying
them in the pan. I know there was five sausages.
So that sausage was hidden for a while while it

(50:05):
was sitting on the plate. And that's my favorite story,
the disappearing sausage.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
So it looks like there was a spirit who had
a good sense of humor.

Speaker 4 (50:13):
Definitely. He thinks it might have been his grandmother. Yeah,
he thought that might have been his grandmother having a
bit of a laugh with it.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
I've got about I've got about two and a half
minute laft, and I'd like to ask you are all
pubs in England haunted?

Speaker 4 (50:27):
Most of them? Yes, not every single one, but the
vast majority. Yes. When you actually asked them, they'll say, yeah, yeah,
we've got one, and quite a lot of them actually
advertise it. Come on in, we have a ghost. But yeah,
the majority of them have something because they're such old buildings.
Most of the pubs in the UK are such old buildings.

(50:48):
But I do have quite a few haunted pubs that
are in modern purpose built building, so they get haunted
as well.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
So why would a modern building be handed by her by.

Speaker 4 (51:01):
In the UK?

Speaker 2 (51:03):
Pardon?

Speaker 4 (51:04):
It could be built over anything, going back over history,
you know, And you know, I just get the sense
that we're such a small geographical space and you have
so many thousand years of history. At some point in
time that's been a piece of land that meant something
to somebody, you know, and whether that's a human somebody

(51:25):
or whether it's some kind of elemental spirit work, at
some point in time it had an attachment for something.
So it doesn't matter what you build on it or
in what period of time you might punting.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
So let me see, I've got about a minute left.
What's next for you? You've got this new book that's
coming out, you're halfway through it. Do you still continue
doing your paranormal investigations?

Speaker 4 (51:46):
Yeah, So I've got one coming up in August where
I'm going into a haunted stately home in Leicestershire, and
then I've got one in October and I'm going into
an old haunted commercial build thing down in Bristol. So yeah,
I've got a few coming up. Plus I always do
a few road trips where I look for, you know,

(52:07):
alongside my hanted roads to see if I can see
everything except that one. I'm scared of not going to
that one again.

Speaker 2 (52:13):
Now, if people want to contact you, I've been giving
out your Facebook page. Could you give it out to
our listeners please?

Speaker 4 (52:19):
Yeah. So it's just Ruth Roper Wilde at Facebook, but
also my email. You can contact me that way, and
this is also just Ruth roperwild at gmail dot com. No,
space is.

Speaker 2 (52:32):
Just the way it is. Ruth. I want to thank
you ever so much for joining us. It's been a
great pleasure talking to you. Continued success and I look
forward to the next time that you and I meet
back here in the X Zone. So until then, take
care of yourself and continued success. Did we lose Ruth,

(52:53):
Oh my goodness, look at that. We last Ruth talked
about timing exonation, and you know what, I'll bet as
a ghost. I'll bet you, I'll bet you it's the
ghost that did that. I'll be back on the other
side of this break as we start our number two
up tonight's show. More from the world of the power
Noormal and the science of parapsychology. Because here in the

(53:16):
X Zone we're Monday through Friday from ten pm ETRON
until midnight the X Zone broadcast network around the world,
your hometown radio around the world, especially on Classic twelve.
I'm Rob McConnell. Don't go away, one's gone, the telephone.

Speaker 3 (53:38):
Meal, the Lids, doll Dancing, Sway Dancing, Dancing,
Advertise With Us

Popular Podcasts

My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.

24/7 News: The Latest

24/7 News: The Latest

The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.

Dateline NBC

Dateline NBC

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.