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Nov. 7, 2013 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
59:28
Edition 130 - Louisa Oakley Green

A new guest – US author Louisa Oakley Green is the psychic sceptic… Who became abeliever...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I hope life is being good to you as we slide into the northern hemisphere's winter.
The autumn ended with a bit of a bang here.
We had a huge great storm, 80 or 90 mile an hour winds, and then in the days that followed, torrential rain, and even now as we're into the second week of November, a lot of our roads are like lakes here, and the temperature is much milder than it's supposed to be for this time of year, and the winds are still quite high.
Very odd weather, and certainly very surprising for this time of year.
They're telling us in one of the newspapers this week, though, that we're in for a great big freeze.
Let's see if that happens.
You know my attitude about cold weather.
I don't do it.
I don't like it.
Now, lots of big stuff coming soon here.
Jesse Ventura, it is now looking like he's coming on.
I'll keep you posted about that, but that's good news.
Richard C. Hoagland, talking about Comet Eisen and many other things.
He's coming on.
In December, it's looking like we're getting Andrew Bassiago, so more about that soon, and many other big-name guests here.
This time around, we have somebody that you may not have heard of, but I'm sure that you'll find her story really interesting.
Louisa Oakley Green in the United States, somebody who got into everything paranormal and psychic quite by chance.
Hear her amazing story on this show.
Just a few things to deal with before we get into talking to Louisa Oakley Green.
Art Bell came back on radio in September on the Sirius Network and now appears to have left it.
Now, this is a fluid and flexible situation, so by the time you heard this, he's either A completely going away or he might have done a deal to come back.
But I believe that Art Bell being a pioneer in this kind of broadcasting, well, we need him.
So Art, I hope you work out some kind of deal.
So that's one thing to talk about here.
I want to get through some of your emails.
Thank you for them.
Had a lot of emails lately.
Thank you for the kind things that you've said.
I can't get to everybody, but let's have a go now before we get to our guest.
Danny.
Hello, Danny.
Wants to hear Andrew Bassiago.
Like I said, he is coming on, but not till December by the looks of it.
Richard wants to get my online radio recommendations.
What do I listen to in online radio?
Richard, there are way too many to tell you, but if you start with three stations, WABC New York, CFRB Toronto, great station, and another great station, try Cape Talk from Cape Town, South Africa.
Those are three, and they will get you started.
Matt Holland, thank you very much for your kind thoughts.
Sarah Hart Boyd, thank you for your views.
You're at Lake, is it Lake Chelan?
Lake Chelan in the US, thank you.
Tom, Peru UFOs, good subject, Tom.
We'll try and get into that.
Matthew in Tokyo, good to hear from you.
John Zimmerman wants to hear from Dr. Stan Monteith.
We'll try and get that on.
Andy in Liverpool, in Fazakali, to be exact.
Good to hear from you.
Fee talks about metahominids in her email.
That left me fascinated.
Thank you, Fee.
William Gebhard in the US, thank you.
Laura London Slifker.
Hope I pronounced that right in Chicago, USA.
Good to hear from you, Laura.
John Smart, heard me recently on the radio.
Nice to hear from you, John.
Harry Harris enjoyed, as many of you did, Linda Moulton Howe.
Mark at Shepperton in Australia asks a very good question.
He says, bearing in mind we've got all this technology these days, how come there is no smoking gun and firm proof about UFOs?
I don't know.
Good question.
Claire is very concerned as I am about the effects of radiation in this world.
Wes Germer, thank you for your email, had a Bigfoot experience.
Did Wes?
Wes, if you can get in touch with me and tell me more about that, maybe we can do something about that on the show.
Robert Quill wants me to talk to Roxy Lopez.
I'll do some research.
Cheryl Casey, thank you for your email as well.
Cheryl wants to know why I'm not still on TuneIn Radio.
Cheryl, I don't know.
I'll try and find out.
But we are available to you through our website, www.theunexplained.tv, or we're available via iTunes.
And my webmaster, Adam Cornwell, at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, makes sure that that happens.
So that is two guaranteed ways that you can get us.
Thank you for your emails.
If I didn't get to your email, please know that I do read them all.
They all come direct to me.
All right.
Let's get now to the guest this time.
Somebody you may not have heard of before, but you will by the end of this.
Her name is Louisa Oakley Green in New Jersey, USA.
And Louisa, thank you for coming on the show.
Well, thank you for having me.
Now, Louisa, listen, we've got a lot of ground to make up and get together here because I need to establish some facts about you first because you're a name that most of my listeners will know absolutely nothing about.
So if you can do it in a minute or two, tell me your life story to date.
No pressure.
I'm just going to try to tell you the interesting bits.
Okay.
I grew up in a household where anything paranormal was thought of as a superstition.
And you have to understand that when I was growing up in the 60s, science was doing some amazing things.
We had the polio vaccine, which was an absolute miracle.
Color TV was invented, which may sound like ho-hum to these days, but that was a big deal in the 60s.
And at the end of the 60s, men landed on the moon.
And because of that, we really felt, and it was naive, but we believed that science was going to solve everything.
And having come from that type of environment and that type of belief system, I really found it very difficult to believe in anything paranormal.
However, I believe the universe has a sense of humor.
And when I met my husband many years ago, more than 20 years ago, I had no idea that he was a gifted psychic.
And to make matters worse, his family was psychic as well.
It tends to be inherited.
That's an absolute fact, you know.
In my own family, my father was a bit that way inclined.
And his father, in the days of poverty back in the Great Depression here in the UK, his father used to read the tea leaves.
You know, in England, we have these people who read tea leaves, and the pattern of the tea leaves tells you what's in the future for you, apparently.
And it's kind of interesting to diverge off of me to something more interesting.
When I was doing research for my book, I read this wonderful scholarly book by Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell.
She wrote, she was a professor at Harvard Medical School, and she happens to be a neuropsychiatrist.
And her book, The ESP Enigma, The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomenon, found a couple of interesting things about gifted psychics.
And one of those we just talked about is that psychic ability tends to be inherited.
And she feels that the reason for that is that the brain and the nervous system are like an energy antenna.
And in someone who's psychic, that antenna is actually more sensitive than the average person, someone who's a gifted psychic, because everyone has the potential.
But there's a second way that people can become very gifted psychics, and that's through trauma, trauma adjusting that antenna.
And there's some examples of that.
One is George Anderson, who is a very famous psychic in the U.S. I don't know if he's known in the U.K. I have to say, maybe this is just a deficiency in me, but I've never heard his name.
That's quite all right.
When he was six years old, he got the chicken pox.
His brain started to swell, and they didn't feel he'd survive.
And he did.
And he had no physical problems at all when he did survive, except that from that point on, he could see dead.
There's a famous Dutch psychic, Peter Hercos, and he ended up falling off a ladder and hitting his head.
And from that point on, he was a gifted psychic.
And another example, which is kind of interesting, is Joseph McMoneagle, who worked for the U.S. Army Intelligence Remote Viewing Program for more than 10 years.
And he became psychic after a near-death experience.
So those were things that adjusted that nervous system brain antenna.
So that would suggest that there is a kind of lever or lever, as you say in the U.S., that can be flipped.
You're either born with it already pre-programmed and turned on, or something can happen to you, and that psychic lever lever can be put in the on position by some experience that you have.
Either that, or a lot of this is delusional, and if you have a trauma to the head or something, you just have delusions.
You see things that you think are there and maybe aren't.
Well, I mean, certainly you can take either approach.
All right.
Now, you, as you said, a child of the 60s, brought up in an era of the white heat of technology, we landed on the moon, we did all sorts of things like color TV and stuff that we never thought we could achieve, but here we were doing it.
This was the most mechanistic generation of them all, because we were taught to realize that anything could be achieved and it could be achieved through our own hands and our own capabilities.
We didn't need anything outside ourselves.
So what was it that started to persuade you that there was maybe more to it all than we could see?
Well, I guess I could begin with the story of how my husband and I met and how different the experience was for the two of us.
To give you an example of the difference in life between someone like me who has no psychic ability and someone like my husband who does.
I met him more than 20 years ago.
I went to a class.
It was an ongoing class and I was the new student.
And the teacher introduced me to a number of people and I shook everyone's hands and it was a nice evening and that was it for me.
One of the people whose hands I shook was Stevens.
Well, Stephen went home very excited and announced to his family that he had met the woman he was going to marry.
Now, to understand how he would know something like that just from shaking my hand, because we had no conversations, we'd never dated, he just shook my hand.
If you read anything about quantum physics, they've observed that every living thing, whether it's a plant, an animal, or a person, has its own vibrational frequency or energy field.
And when somebody who is psychic, who can read energy, and Steve can, shakes a person's hand, for a moment there's a kind of jump in the energy while his frequency is adjusting to the frequency of the person whose hand he's shaking.
When he shook my hand, for the first time in his life, he didn't get any jump.
We were vibrating at the same frequency.
And so in his mind, that meant that we were soulmates and we were going to get married.
So what about all that stuff when you meet somebody and the earth is supposed to move?
That's not true then.
If a person is not compatible, then the earth might move.
But if you are completely compatible, you're on the same frequency.
I have no answers for that.
I have to say that I certainly had no idea that we were going to get married.
He was completely convinced.
And yet he was so very different from you because you didn't believe in all the stuff that was clearly at the core of everything that he was.
Yeah, and it actually took me quite a few years before I finally said, okay, there's something to this.
That's just one too many.
But this stuff in life happens.
It's a little tiny example, but I can remember years ago among the too many radio stations that I've worked at in my life, in my 20s, I did a little spell out in the Middle East on a ship that was a broadcasting station as well.
It was a radio station playing pop music that was based on a ship anchored off Tel Aviv.
And the idea was that we'd be a bunch of English or American guys playing hit records to both sides in the conflict in the Middle East, to the Israelis, the Arabs, and we'd bring everybody together by playing them pop music.
Now, I wasn't at all sure whether I wanted to go out there, and I spoke to the secretary of the radio.
I don't think I've told this story before on here, but whatever.
I spoke to the secretary of the radio station, a lady with a big voice called Chedve.
Now, I later learned that Chedwe is joy.
In Israel, if you're Chedwe, it's joy.
That's the name.
And I put the phone down from this lady, and I said to my mum at the time, this lady, and we're talking about a 1980s now, a long time ago, I said, she is incredibly psychic.
I got out there, and I've been trying to track this person down for years, and I have it.
She's just disappeared completely.
I discovered this person who worked at the radio station who could tell people what they were thinking and tell people what they were about to say.
In almost every case, she just knew.
I have never come across anything like that in my life.
It's amazing when you meet people like that because they make you think about the world in a different way.
They do.
And they also indicate to you as clearly your husband, you said Stephen, yeah?
Yes.
As he showed you there is more to this life than what you read about in Time magazine.
Oh, absolutely.
He and his family, who are very, very nice people.
And also over the years, I seem to be a psychic magnet.
A lot of my new friends over the years all ended up being extremely psychic as well.
So do you think that you're a facilitator in some ways?
Well, I listen to people, and I'm a listener.
I'm actually usually listening rather than speaking.
And I think that's not uncommon in writers.
And I think when you listen to people and you respect what they're saying, whether you believe in it or not, I think that that offers a service of sorts.
So you and Stephen get together, as he rightly predicted, and you later came to find out you were totally compatible and you got married.
Was there a light bulb moment for you when you realized this guy can do stuff that I can't explain?
There were many, many.
Very early in our marriage, my father passed away.
I was very close to my father, and it was a very sad time.
And the thing that was very unusual was that my husband saw my father at the funeral.
The pastor was somewhat long-winded, and my father, who was not known for patience, was standing next to the, or he whispered in my ear, your father is standing next to the minister.
His arms are crossed and he's tapping his foot and he looks very impatient.
And while that's not a big deal, you could say my husband was delusional.
A week later, my brother-in-law called and said, Louisa, I didn't want to say anything the day of the funeral, but I saw your father standing next to the minister.
His arms were crossed and he was tapping his foot and he looked very impatient.
Oh my God.
The two of them had not spoken to each other at the funeral because there was just not time.
And since.
And if these were people that you didn't know, then although the circumstances will be completely inappropriate, but you might assume that maybe they were having a joke on you or trying to reassure you or they'd colluded in some way.
But these were people that you know and are close to you and hadn't spoken to each other.
Yeah, and nobody would, that certainly would not be a funny joke when you lose someone you love that deeply.
Sure.
And they wouldn't even have been wanting to do that to reassure you in some way, I guess.
Yeah, and they don't really need to.
I mean, in my husband's family, when we have family gatherings, it's not uncommon for somebody to say, oh, you know, there is so-and-so.
And, you know, that just for a flash, they see that somebody who's departed is attending.
And it's a very strange thing.
I don't see these things, but I just find it interesting that other people may.
And this gift that Stephen introduced you to, when did you first, in your own life, discover that it could be useful in some way?
It's nice to be able to present people with little vignettes and little things that you see and little things that indicate that there is more to life than we can observe.
But practically, in your own life, when was the first time that he delivered something to you that you could use?
I don't know.
I mean, there's certainly, I guess just the only thing I can say that I've gotten out of it is a different worldview.
I mean, we certainly have never gotten anything monetary out of it.
He doesn't do anything for a living.
Like, you know, he doesn't do readings for a living.
I think it's just that it opened up my way of thinking to a whole new world.
And then, and this is the point of the book that you've written about this, which is fascinating stuff.
You got yourself introduced into a whole world of weird experiences.
It seems that with every passing year, life, from what I can deduce, got a bit weirder.
It did.
I mean, if you're looking for some sort of use from it, I could read you a story from my sister-in-law about how my late mother-in-law saved her life.
Okay, well, why don't you talk me around it?
All right.
Well, let's see.
Francine is a very driven person.
She's a sales manager.
She's, you know, when she drives, she drives like somebody you'd expect a sales manager to drive like.
She's heavy on the middle.
And she was going to work one day, and she was waiting next to another car.
And normally when the light turns green, she zooms right out.
But this particular day, she was waiting for the light, and she looked down at her hand, and she saw my late mother-in-law's wedding ring on her finger instead of her own wedding ring.
And she was startled.
And then she sensed somebody in the back seat.
She looked up into the rearview mirror, saw my mother-in-law sitting in the back seat in her classic flowered house dress, smiling at her.
And at that moment, apparently the light had turned green.
She missed it, and she heard a crash.
The car that had been next to her had zoomed out like a typical Jersey driver into the intersection and was broadsided by a very large vehicle.
And my sister-in-law, Francine, said that had she zoomed out the way she normally did, she would have been decapitated by this vehicle.
So she pulled over to the side of the road, extremely shaken, and called the police.
And then when she looked back up, her ring was back and my mother-in-law was gone.
But to this day, she credits my late mother-in-law with saving her life.
So the belief there is that somebody close to you, and we hear this so many times, don't we, wanted to intervene.
And that little intervention that saved those couple of seconds was enough to stop her getting absolutely mangled in a car wreck?
Yeah.
And I mean, we really do.
One thing that I'm convinced of, which I certainly wouldn't have believed 20 years ago, is that when our loved ones die, they don't lose interest in us.
They still have an avid interest in our lives.
They go to all of our parties and weddings and celebrations, And they're also there to try to comfort us when we're having a low time.
A lot of times.
It's easy for me to ask you this, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but how do you know that?
In your own life, how do you know that?
How do I know that?
I guess because there just seems to be a presence, you know, my father at his funeral and a number of other things throughout the years.
That's interesting because in my own experience and people in my circle, the experience that we've had, and I was very close to my mother and my father who I lost this year, it was, you know, terrible experience to lose dad, awful experience to lose mom, and we all have to go through it, of course we do.
And I felt in both cases, my mother, what, seven years ago now and my dad a few months ago, I felt that he was close for a while and I felt she was close for a while and then I felt they moved on.
They went somewhere else.
They had something else to do.
But you're saying that at times of crisis and times of interest, they reappear?
Well, basically, the soul is a lot bigger than we realize, a lot more pervasive than we realize.
They can be off somewhere else doing something and also be here all at the same time.
They may be more focused on that other thing, but they're everywhere.
Right.
That makes sense.
And Stephen, Stephen is, you say he's not making money out of this gift that he has, which he introduced you to.
I mean, is that what he's told you or is that what you've learned together?
Well, he tends to be somewhat shy.
He'll do a reading if somebody asks him to.
You know, when he was first learning, he went to a psychic development class for seven years.
He did a lot of readings to help develop his psychic ability because he was very fascinated by it.
But he's more interested in having a regular job.
Well, I can understand that.
Totally understand that.
But in your book, there are, what, is it a hundred different stories that have all impacted your life?
So I'd like to be able to get into some of those stories now.
And I know that you've got one story in the book that it's a very common experience for kids around the world to have a psychic playmate, a playmate in another realm.
Tell me that story.
Oh, yes.
This is, and one thing I should say, most of the stories in my book are just everyday people.
They're not like doing this for a living.
They're just everyday people who've had experiences.
And I think that's one of the things that makes it interesting.
Before you tell this story, did you go out and seek these stories, or did these people come to you?
What was the dynamic there?
Well, initially, I just decided to start writing down Stephen's stories from the last 40 years.
And then I thought, well, you know what?
Why not interview all his family?
Because half of them are psychic.
And then I started telling people about what I was doing.
And before I knew it, people were calling me up.
And the book kind of assembled itself.
These, I think, are the best kind of stories because they're stories that run around in families.
And if we're not very careful, most of them die when the people who know the stories die.
Like Dad, to mention him again, he had so many stories that have impacted him across his life of ghostly contacts and psychic feelings and weird stuff that has happened.
In my own life, I've had the most bizarre coincidences and strange things happen.
But if we don't document them, if we don't pass them on, they don't get recorded.
Yeah, and there are no accidents.
So they're not necessarily bizarre coincidences.
They probably were supposed to happen.
Tell me the psychic playmate story then.
Okay, this is Denise, and she's a middle school teacher.
And the name of the story is Playing Dead.
Children have an uncanny way of finding and making friends wherever they go.
But when Denise was a youngster, that natural ability went well beyond the norm.
Denise has been psychic as long as she can remember.
As a child, she used to hear choruses of whispers and feel people sitting on her bed at night.
They were so loud, it would wake me up, she said.
She could never understand their conversations because there were so many voices talking at once.
I was scared of it, but my grandmother told me it was a gift.
Even from the ages of 5 to 14, Denise lived across the street from a graveyard and often played there.
I would sit up in a tree and watch people get buried.
I could feel them there.
Sometimes she would talk to the deceased inhabitants.
I used to talk to a child there who had died in a fire.
I remember her saying that she missed her mother.
We'd play hide and seek in the graveyard.
I found out years later as an adult that there was a family buried there.
A father, six children, and a grandmother.
And everyone had died in a fire except the mother.
Wow.
That's very, very chilling.
And who did that come to you from?
That was from Denise.
She's a middle school teacher.
And I actually don't know Denise personally, but she came to me through a friend who said, oh, you must interview this woman.
She's amazing.
And in fact, Denise is a very interesting teacher in that she gets precognitive dreams.
And when a student is contemplating suicide, she'll get a dream and she will do an intervention.
And she has saved children that way.
When you say do an intervention, you mean actually contact people who can help or intervene herself or psychically intervene?
Yeah, she'll call the child into her classroom so she can have a quiet conversation with them.
And they almost always say, yes, I was contemplating suicide.
And she makes sure they get help.
Boy, they're hard conversations to have because I don't know what it's like there, but there are so many rules about dealing with students, dealing with people these days, that she must be very careful about how she introduces the subject.
I would have thought.
She couldn't have her last name in the book because she was afraid she would lose her job.
Well, I can understand that the same thing would be the case here.
But, you know, here's somebody who's clearly got a gift.
And she's using it to help people.
Yeah, she's using it to help people.
And if you were in that situation, if you were a teacher with a student who was contemplating doing something terrible, on every level, you'd have to intervene.
Oh, absolutely.
She's compelled to.
You've got stories of prediction in the book, too.
People are fascinated by being able to forecast the future.
I know a lot of people who say they can, but I don't know many who actually can.
So tell me a prediction story.
All right.
And I will say this.
I think one of the reasons why psychics often don't predict the future successfully is because there are 7 billion people in this world, and everything that each individual one of us thinks, says, and does creates the future, and we all have free will.
So the future is not something that is set in stone.
The future is actually a constant that we are, we're thinking up ourselves.
In other words, like a lot of these gurus say, we're creating our own reality.
Yeah, pretty much so.
So a psychic may genuinely see a future, but it may not be the one that comes to pass.
So they're not lying.
They're just not seeing the one that's actually going to happen.
And what about time scales?
I know a very good psychic and a guy who was incredibly accurate for me, but in a couple of crucial areas, he was not accurate in anything like the time scale that I could foresee.
In other words, I wanted the stuff that he was telling me to come true right now, and this was stuff that actually came true seven years or so later.
Time scales are a problem, aren't they?
That's a perfect lead-in to this story.
I must have moaned psychically.
Yes, you're amazing.
The story is called River of Molasses, and it's about a reading my husband did many years ago.
It's not always easy for psychics to understand the symbols they receive in readings.
Sometimes the true meaning isn't revealed until days, weeks, or years afterward.
A dark-haired woman in her mid-20s once asked Stephen to perform a reading for her.
She wanted to know what her future would hold.
She hoped to be a journalist.
She had a nice smile.
She was very playful, very full of life, he said.
I remember she had short hair and kind of a tough appearance.
Stephen held her hands and concentrated.
He saw mountains in upheaval, bursting up out of the ground wherever he turned.
He was a bit puzzled at the repeated visions of the mountains, but they eventually gave way to other images.
I saw a river, and it was made of molasses, he said.
On the other side of the river were three wood-paneled doors.
It was a struggle to wade across the river and reach the doors.
When I finally did, I found that each one of them I tried was locked.
He wasn't sure what to tell the woman.
I told her, maybe there's a different path for you.
Maybe journalism isn't what you're going to go into.
She replied that she had always thought that journalism was what she would pursue.
I said, well, things change.
A few weeks later, he learned that she had died in a mountain while ice climbing.
She had slipped and gotten trapped in a crevasse.
Rescuers couldn't get to her in time, and she froze to death.
That sad news affirmed in Stephen's mind the significance of the mountains and the reason why none of the doors would open.
She had no future.
So at least he was spared from the realization or the knowledge in advance that this person was going to die.
I think that would have been very painful for him.
Yeah, he...
I mean, you don't always know how to...
There's clairvoyants and mediums.
And clairvoyants know things about the past, the present, and the future that they should really have no way of knowing.
And that would be Stephen.
He really falls into that category when he does readings.
And then there's mediums, and they communicate with the dead.
And sometimes someone's a mix of the two.
Right.
Okay, the psychic medium, and my friend is a psychic medium.
But there are some who are less than responsible out there.
I know somebody, not in this country, who was given a date of her own death.
And I felt even if the person that she consulted knew that, to pass that on is the ultimate in irresponsibility.
one should never do that.
One should actually, when you're, They're there to counsel someone.
You never give someone negative information.
You may tell them that there are certain things they need to work on, but you would never tell them anything negative or devastating because it may not come to pass.
You could be wrong.
And what about in these experiences that you've had, in the lives that you've touched and the stories that you've gleaned, are there any stories of malevolence?
Because a lot of the people that I've interviewed on this show have told me that, of course, there are good entities out there if we're talking about the ghostly realm and the spirit realm, but there are also malevolent entities out there.
I wonder if you've come across any of those.
Well, I obviously haven't because I'm not psychic.
My husband has occasionally sensed things that may make him uncomfortable.
For instance, and this happens a lot in malls.
We'll enter a mall to go shopping.
I think we're going to have a nice evening shopping.
And my husband will turn to me and say, we're going to have to leave.
The energy in the mall tonight is extremely negative.
I have to get out of here.
And we'll leave or he'll get physically ill.
That's not necessarily a malevolent presence, but there is a lot of negative energy out there.
And there may well be entities that are negative.
I haven't really run into them.
And most of the people that I interviewed had really not run into that.
They had felt negative energy in certain places.
So looking at the categories of stories that you've quantified, you put together here, what do they break down into?
We've had stories of ghosts and precognition.
What else?
Well, there's a lot of different things in the book.
Out-of-body experiences, shamanism, psychometry, just basically a lot of different areas of psychic ability.
Now, the out-of-body experience thing is very interesting because there's a guy over here who's done quite a bit of academic research into OBEs.
His name is Sam Parnia.
And when I used to do a radio show about all of this stuff on broadcast radio, old-fashioned style, he was a guest.
He's very, very well known.
And he's not the only one who's looked into the scientific basis of OBEs.
But tell me an OBE story.
You got one.
Ah, an OBE.
Well, let me see if I can find one here.
I don't normally, a lot of the OBE stories are Actually, from my husband, because when he was a child, he went out of body a lot and didn't realize what was going on.
I can tell you a story here, okay, called Invisible Mole Rat.
We have an expression in this country: children who are left in malls by their parents are called mole rats.
Nice.
Well, they're a nuisance, and their parents really ought to be not leaving them at the mall for babysitting, I guess is basically what the sentiment is.
Well, yeah, it's not only is it risky, it's a bit inattentive, too.
Precisely.
So this is called invisible mole rat.
Window shopping can be an enjoyable activity, but most people browse with their feet firmly planted on the pavement.
It was not always so with Stephen.
One September evening in 1977, when Stephen was 16, he dozed off in his room and stepped out of his body.
He found himself floating from above urban Belleville, that's where he lived, with its tangle of highways and wall-to-wall buildings, to an area of New Jersey where rooftops spread out like islands amid a sea of lush trees.
By now, out-of-body travel was a familiar concept to him, so he didn't give this mystical mode of transport any more thought than getting into his parents' car for a short trip.
He arrived 20 miles away at the Rockaway Town Square Mall in Rockaway, New Jersey, just before its grand opening.
Stephen walked around inside, taking his own personal astral tour.
The lights were off and the gates were down in all the stores, he recalled, but the shelves were stocked and ready to go.
I went into the Walden bookstore and saw three new Avengers paperbacks that I wanted to read.
He continued to check out all the news stores.
After an evening of browsing, he returned to his body still resting back at home.
The following week, his father announced that he was taking the family to a new shopping center.
Stephen had never heard of Rockaway before, but when his father pulled into the parking lot, he immediately recognized them all as the place he had visited during his out-of-body adventure the week before.
As they walked through the main entrance, he spotted the Walden bookstore and went inside with his mother.
He knew which shelf the books he sought were on, but he couldn't immediately find them because someone had piled other books in front of them.
He pulled the obstructing books aside to reveal the new Avengers series he had seen during his astral tour, and then he bought them.
Afterward, Stephen told his mother that he wanted to look at the other bookstores and would meet her later in the center court of the mall in an area that could not be seen from where they were standing.
She agreed to look for the center court and meet him there, but first asked, how do you know where everything is?
We've never been here before.
Yes, I've been here before, he replied.
You're just not going to believe how.
Stephen then described his out-of-body experience to his mother.
While many mothers would have been skeptical, she'd grown up with a mother who had psychic ability, and she quickly understood his experience.
Wow.
I think that's the only word I can say.
You mentioned a place name there, and it's a place name that impacted very deeply on me around the time of 9-11.
As a journalist, I covered 9-11, and I won't bore my listeners with the story because they know, but I went there twice after 9-11 for the first and second anniversaries and covered them live on radio in London.
There was an event, and I think it was that big concert for the victims, families of 9-11 and remembrance, what have you.
And I just remember this firefighter, and you know what I'm going to say, standing up and saying, my name is so-and-so, and I'm from Rockaway.
And, you know, we're not going to forget you.
In other words, the people who did this were coming to get you.
Which brings me kind of in a clunky way to 9-11, which didn't happen too far away from where you are.
It's just across some water for you.
New York City, of course, is just there.
Isn't it handy for you in New Jersey?
And it has a great impact on all of you there, doesn't it?
I wonder if you had any experiences or you and Stephen had any experiences around the World Trade Center site and 9-11?
My husband does not like walking around there.
He feels really bad energy in the area of the World Trade Center.
We don't live very far from New York, so we occasionally go in to walk around.
It's an interesting city to walk.
But he doesn't like being in the area.
We were in that area, and he said, we've got to get out of this area.
This is really bad energy.
Wow.
And what, that was after, presumably, the incident or before?
Oh, that was after.
Yeah.
It's strange how these things impact.
Again, I don't think I've told this story here, but I made my first trip to New York in 1986.
I was a young guy then, and I was meeting a relative there.
And one of the things he thought would be fun to do was to take me to the World Trade Center.
And we did.
We went up to the cafe at the top.
Yeah, just an incredible place.
And I had what I call my, I love America, my American experience, where I stood at the very top there, and the sunlight appeared from behind the Statue of Liberty and illuminated my face.
I just, that for me was one of those heart-stopping moments which I will never forget.
And of course, that place will never exist again.
But after we'd had our little tour of the World Trade Center, we went down to the ground level before we descended to the PATH train.
And I looked up at the towers, and they were so tall that the one I was looking up looked as if it was leaning forward towards me.
And I had this terrible feeling of those towers collapsing.
I've never forgotten it because that's what happened.
And then around the time of the World Trade Center situation, 9-11, that terrible story that the world would never forget, of course not, I had a dream, probably three nights before I was working on breakfast radio news, morning drive radio news in London, and I had a dream about a silver American Airlines jet.
I think it was American Airlines.
No, United Airlines jet.
Sliding into a field.
I actually saw it slide out of the sky into a field and just explode and make this huge deep trench.
And of course, in Pennsylvania, that's what happened a few days later.
I've never been able, and this is an absolutely true story.
That was a precognitive dream that I had a couple of days before 9-11.
And I still don't, because I don't class myself as being a super psychic.
I'm not.
I don't understand what happened there.
But I'm just guessing it's one of those mental capacities that some of us have.
Some of us can lose.
Absolutely.
All right.
Where do you want to go from here then?
You have a story from the UK.
They're not all American stories that you have.
Well, I have a friend who I Met on the Queen Mary.
Her name is Daphne, and she lives in Surrey, although I'm not exactly sure where that is.
Well, if I look to my left out of the window here, and if I could see far enough, then I could see Surrey because I'm on the Surrey border.
I'm on London's border with Surrey.
So you're kind of southeast England, and Surrey is a county that is 30 miles from the coast.
That's about it, really, outside London.
Very nice, very, very upmarket area.
Ah, okay.
Well, the name of this story is called Room Service.
It's often said that service isn't what it used to be, but examples can still be found of hospitality employees who go above and beyond in their attention to customers.
This story is one of them.
Daphne and Les were staying at a Victorian hotel in Bath, England.
Bath is best known for its natural hot springs that have attracted visitors for centuries, as far back as the ancient Romans around 50 AD.
We only stayed there one night, she said.
It was an old hotel.
I went to bed, fell asleep, and woke up in the early morning.
What she saw when she opened her eyes startled her.
A figure was standing next to the bed, dressed in a maid uniform, holding a towel over her arm and looking down at me.
She was 40-ish in age.
Daphne switched the lights on and the woman vanished.
I left that light on, she said.
I remember thinking it was a kind way she was looking at me, like a mother looking at a child.
But I didn't like seeing anybody in my room that shouldn't be there.
I swear I wasn't dreaming.
I know what I saw, and I definitely saw that woman.
Certainly, no one could fault the maid for her dedication to duty.
Absolutely.
And that all happened in Bath, which if you've never been there, if you've never heard of the place, it is a city that the Romans occupied, and we're talking obviously a very, very long time ago, but it's a city that's steeped in history, has the most beautiful buildings, and is also said to be one of the most haunted places in these islands.
So if something like that is going to happen, it's going to happen here.
Amazing.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm going to be guided by you.
I think we've fallen into a pattern here of you telling me stories.
You know, my listeners keep asking me to get more stories of the paranormal on the show.
So this is a show dedicated to those, I'm guessing.
So tell me another.
Oh, all right.
Well, let's see.
I'm not usually asked to tell that many.
So let me see if I can find one that you will find.
We know if you have the inclination, I have the time.
All right.
Let's see.
I can read you another story about a different teacher who was trying to help a child at risk.
And her name is Claudia.
And in addition to being a substitute teacher, she's also a counselor for children at risk.
And aptly, the story is called Children at Risk.
Children are particularly vulnerable souls, so any support they can get along the way to adulthood can make a meaningful difference in their lives.
Claudia is a licensed counselor and has spent considerable time outside her teaching job, volunteering to assist children of divorce or those trying to cope with an alcoholic or drug-addicted parent.
While she doesn't counsel at school, sometimes students seek her out for advice, and she will help them in any way she can.
A young girl from the middle school often came to my room to talk, she said.
Her parents were divorced.
She had to travel on weekends to see her father and was often reluctant to go.
Her mother would insist on these visits nevertheless.
On one occasion, this girl seemed more upset than usual about her weekend journey.
I sensed something really dark as she spoke.
I had a strong urge to prevent her from making this particular trip.
It was as if I needed to pull her back from an impending avalanche.
Claudia told the girl that it might be best to follow her instincts and not see her father.
After a long conversation, she realized that nothing she said was going to prevent the visit from taking place.
So she persuaded the girl to take a friend with her.
Claudia didn't know what would happen that weekend, but she knew it would be traumatic.
While the event couldn't be averted, having a friend along might serve as a buffer.
When the girl and her friend arrived at her father's apartment, they found that he had hanged himself.
She said, thank God, she was not completely alone.
Oh, my lord, what a story.
That absolutely sends chills down your spine, that one, doesn't it?
Yeah, and it's, again, another teacher who's trying to help and another teacher who couldn't have her last name in the book because she knew that she could be fired.
Okay, I'm going to spring this one on you because it's an extract from your book that I've got here.
Okay.
And it's, you'll know the story, obviously, because you wrote it.
One night, Kelly blacked out in the shower, and Chelsea ran in to help her.
It was an unusual occurrence for Kelly.
She was young and in perfectly good health.
She had no idea what had brought it on.
A few weeks later, however, Chelsea received an unwelcome glimpse of what might have been behind her roommate's fainting episode.
Chelsea was alone in the apartment and decided to take a shower to unwind from a long day.
As the warm water relaxed her muscles, she began to feel a little lightheaded, closed her eyes and thought that she could see a shadowy outline of a person standing in the stall with her.
In a sudden motion, it reached out and grabbed her upper arms.
Reflectively, she looked down and saw bruises there.
Oh my lord, that's something that can actually, that's a presence that can actually physically impact you.
Yes, actually, that was my daughter, Chelsea.
Really?
Good lord.
So did you see the bruises?
You must have seen the bruises.
You're her mum.
I did not because she was not living in this area.
But she, in fact, she never even mentioned it to me until I was interviewing for the book, and she said, oh, you know what?
Something happened several years ago when I was in college.
Would you like to hear about it?
And I went, oh, my God.
So people often don't share their stories unless they're kind of given permission by a situation.
I do have another story I can read you that if you would like to hear another.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
You have a facility.
I'm sure you've been told this for doing this.
I have a psychic prediction to make for you, and I wonder if this is going to happen.
Maybe it's happened already, but I just kind of saw the letters NPR.
I see you on national public radio telling your stories.
So let's see if that happens.
That would be wonderful.
It hasn't happened yet.
Well, if it happens, you've got to tell me.
I absolutely will, and I'll thank you for it.
What about the next story then?
Okay.
Okay.
So one of the people at the end of my book, I interviewed four psychic professionals.
I actually never meant to include psychic professionals in my book because I was thinking, oh, let's just have everyday people.
But these four psychics came to me and said, I want to be in your book.
And so one of them is Conchetta Britoldi, who's very well known.
She's done psychic readings for the royal family.
And she also wrote the forward to my book.
Hang on.
She's done psychic readings for the British royal family.
So I've heard.
Who says that?
She says so.
So press releases say.
Okay.
All right.
Well, I don't know whether the royal family would admit to that, but that's an interesting claim to fame if that is absolutely true.
I would be a little skeptical about that, but I'm sure she was telling you the truth.
Wow.
Well, again, I don't know, and I read it not from her, but from something online, so she may not have said that.
No, no, I'm sure they're quietly interested in those things.
I don't think they talk about it that much, but that's interesting.
Okay.
All right.
Well, this story is called Home for the Holidays.
And I think it's a wonderful example of the other side and how they are involved with us.
By the way, I don't know if people in England know what Thanksgiving is here.
Probably, I'm sure many people do.
Well, it's a wonderful thing.
We hear about it talked about, but I'm guessing a lot of my UK listeners will not know what it is.
But I experienced it once in Florida.
It's a celebration, isn't it, of the harvest time, and it happens in November, and you all get together and spend family.
It's almost like Christmas.
You spend family time together and you eat a beautiful meal.
It's about sharing time with family and eating food.
I like the sound of that.
I'm going to say that because this story centers around Thanksgiving.
Okay.
Okay, and it's called Home for the Holidays.
Thanksgiving has a special significance for Conchetta Bertoldi's family.
It has been a time of both separation and reunion.
My mother, Eleanor, was raised in an orphanage in Irvington, New Jersey back in the 1930s, Conchetta said.
It was a terrible place where she was beaten and starved.
When she was six years old, they put her to work in the kitchen, cooking with pots that were bigger than she was.
She often got burned and there was no medical attention.
Eleanor's mother, Helen, was still alive, but she was an alcoholic.
So her daughter and three sons were placed in an orphanage.
One day when my mother was seven, my grandmother Helen went to visit my mom and promised her that she would take her home for Thanksgiving and give her a traditional holiday meal.
My mom was so excited that she waited at the end of the driveway at the orphanage all day.
About four o'clock in the afternoon, an adult came out and told her, your mother is dead, come inside.
And that's how she found out her mother had died.
Helen passed away at the age of 27 from cirrhosis of the liver.
Conchetta observes that when people are abused as children, they can react in one of two ways.
Either they can pass on the abuse or become very compassionate and loving.
Her mother, fortunately, took the second route.
Eleanor grew into a beautiful woman with reddish blonde hair, blue eyes, and a delicate porcelain complexion befitting her Irish heritage.
She was married happily for 50 years and had three children, her daughter Conchetta and two sons, Robert and Harold.
Sadly, her son Harold and husband Manuel pre-deceased her.
On Thanksgiving Day in 2008, we invited mom to join us at a friend's house for Thanksgiving, Conchetta said.
We talked to her about it the night before to finalize times, and she was very excited about it.
During the night, however, Eleanor became ill and called the paramedics who rushed her to the hospital.
My brother was at her side when she passed.
Shortly after, for the first and only time in my life, I heard a homecoming on the other side, Conchetta said.
My mother was greeted like the guest of honor at a birthday party by everyone she had known and loved in life.
I heard her embracing other souls and laughing.
As a professional psychic medium, Conchetta communicates with spirits on the other side every day.
But this was a deeply emotional and personal experience for her.
She reflected on the irony of her mother's death that day.
Can you imagine?
70 years after she had promised, my grandmother Helen finally kept her word and took my mother home for Thanksgiving.
Oh, that's a lovely story.
It really is.
And we all like to think, don't we, that when we pass and when people close to us pass, that they will be reunited with those who've gone before.
That's the hope anyway.
I feel pretty sure after all the people I've known and talked to over the last 20 years that that's the case.
Well, I just, I didn't experience anything like that with my dad, but with my grandfather, he was very ill in the 70s on my father's side, my father's father.
And he, of course, was psychic, as was my dad.
And my grandfather, on what was his deathbed, and it took him sadly a long time to die, and he was in, they brought the bed downstairs and he was in the living room.
It was a kind of Liverpool thing.
But he, at the very end, was describing relatives, was describing deceased relatives.
And also, if I get this story aright, he had contact with a child who died, you know, in the 30s and way back decades ago.
There were lots of diseases around that would claim children's lives, which of course wouldn't today because we can deal with them.
But there was another family member, would have been a sister, I guess, of my dad's, who died very young, and he actually saw her.
Not only did he see her, he saw, as I said, other family members.
So it's nice to think that there will be this kind of reunion.
I think there is.
Of course, everyone has to believe what makes sense to them, and I would never, having been skeptical most of my life, try to impose anything on someone else.
You have to really...
And Louisa, we all Have to contemplate our own mortality.
The time of reckoning is coming to all of us, if you want to put it like a preacher, but we're all going to pass.
All things must pass.
Oh, absolutely.
When you think about your own, do your experiences and the stories that you've gathered, does it make you feel any easier?
Yeah, it does.
I mean, I think that, and even psychics I've talked to, they're not afraid of death.
It's the process of getting from life to death that people have anxiety about.
You know, no one wants to suffer.
And that's the great imponderable, isn't it?
That's the great fear for all of us.
None of us wants to suffer, and yet we know that people do suffer.
And I wonder if any of these stories or any of the things you've experienced with your husband, Stephen, if any of this has indicated to you that the process of suffering towards the end is made any easier?
In other words, if you're anesthetized as your passing gets near?
I honestly can't answer that.
Most people I have talked to who are very spiritual have a preference for being fully awake.
They want to experience the passing.
But I'm just wondering whether, as you get to that point, and if it's difficult, if something out there takes you away from yourself, I didn't express it very well, but if you're taken away from yourself in order that you don't feel it as much as you might.
Yeah, what I have read and been told by people is that dying is like walking from one room to the next.
It's actually a lot easier than being born.
And a lot of people, as a result of that, sometimes don't realize they're dead.
It may take them a while.
And how long does that situation for those people last?
Is that something that could be a long-term thing?
Is that why we get hauntings?
They don't realize they're dead?
Well, I mean, you can only speculate, really.
I mean, I honestly don't know the answer to that.
I've heard a lot of people speculate that people eventually go to the white light if they don't have any unfinished business.
If people do have unfinished business, sometimes they'll remain for a while to see it through.
And what about experiences of not our own deceased selves, of humans?
Have you and Stephen over your psychic quest over these years, have you come into contact with anything that hasn't originated here on this planet?
In other words, I'm talking what is popularly called extraterrestrials.
I don't actually have any stories of that in the book, although certainly over the years I've talked to people who feel that they've seen things.
One woman I knew many years ago, and at the time I thought, oh, she's nuts.
But she said that her community was having a little league baseball game, and this craft that was the size of the baseball field hovered over the field, and everyone freaked out and left.
As you would.
Yeah, I think I would.
And to this day, she swears, you know, that that happened.
And I remember thinking, oh, that's nice.
But, you know, that many people, if somebody had tried to actually gather them all up, it would be very hard to disbelieve that if there were that many witnesses.
Listen, you've experienced all of this stuff through Stephen almost vicariously.
He's been doing the experiences and you've been chronicling and documenting them.
And you've talked to other people as well.
Do you wish that you had this ability yourself?
I don't really miss it.
I think, first of all, I'm a first-class coward.
So if I were to see someone dead, it would probably scare me.
I think for people who've seen dead people all their lives, it's no big deal.
But for people who haven't, like me, I think it would definitely be an unpleasant experience.
So I'm perfectly okay with seeing people in dreams or, you know, things that are a little bit more benign.
This is a question I should have asked you at the beginning.
But why did you think that it was a good idea and a useful thing to put together a chronicle and a journal of these stories?
Well, I actually didn't have any particular purpose.
I didn't know it was going to be a book when I started writing.
I ended up after I was finished writing it thinking about, well, you know, what can someone get from this book?
And I think the conclusion I came to is that I understand if you're a skeptic, and I understand if you're a believer.
Either way is fine.
But I think the important thing is that we remain open-minded and respectful of other people's viewpoints.
I don't think I was terribly respectful of people who believed in the paranormal when I was younger because I just assumed that they were hopeful or delusional.
And that was disrespectful.
And I think that I would like to encourage people to at least respect other viewpoints, even if they haven't personally experienced something.
And it might be interesting to have a dialogue on it because it really gives you an entirely different way of looking at the world and prioritizing what's truly important and what isn't.
So you've come out of it to paraphrase the monkeys and their song title, A Believer.
Yeah, I would have to say that's the case.
A lot of authors I've talked to, especially in this field, they write one book like you've done, and then they find themselves wanting to write another.
It's rather like going for a Chinese meal.
They say you have one and you want to eat another one afterwards.
Do you want to write another book?
Well, after this book came out, a number of people came up to me and said, why didn't you interview me?
I had a story.
And people who I had no idea had any psychic experiences.
I mean, most of the people who came forward for this book really surprised me, the people I knew.
I had no idea.
So I may well write another book next year, if for no other purpose than so they won't be angry at me for leaving them out of the first book.
Well, I wish you well with it.
And please keep me posted on all of this.
I think you tell the stories beautifully.
I think you're a great chronicler of these things.
Thank you very much.
And a lot of people who write books can't read them.
You can.
So I wish you all the very best with it, Louisa.
And I'm very, very pleased that you got in touch.
This has been a bit of a walk on the wild side for me.
You're not somebody who I come into contact with, and, you know, I didn't know anything about you.
So you suggested yourself, and I thought, hell, why not?
And I'm glad I did.
Thank you so much for taking a chance on me.
Well, a new guest to the Unexplained family, Louisa Oakley Green.
Let me know what you thought about her.
Send me an email, www.theunexplained.tv, and you can send me an email through the website or indeed make a donation to the show from there, www.theunexplained.tv.
And the website designed by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Don't forget, coming soon we have Jesse Ventura, Richard C. Hoagland, Andrew Bassiago and more.
More big-name guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
And if you have any suggestions for people that you want me to talk to, go to the website you know how to do it.
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My name is Howard Hughes.
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