Edition 136 - Ashley Hall
Direct from Adelaide - Australian paranormal researcher Ashley Hall...
Direct from Adelaide - Australian paranormal researcher Ashley Hall...
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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, we're heading headlong towards the end of 2013. | |
We have this show to do and probably one more and that'll be that for this year. | |
And we have great plans for 2014. | |
The exciting thing actually about the last show of the year is that I don't yet have a plan for who I'll be talking to. | |
So if you have any thoughts about who you'd like me to get on here, maybe we can do it. | |
Otherwise, I'm going to have to plan really quickly and I'm going to try and make it a really good one for the end of 2013. | |
And we do have a lot of plans in the pipeline for developing this show during 2014. | |
But more about that coming soon. | |
This edition, we're going to take a complete walk on the wild side. | |
And I'm doing this with almost no preparation at all, but it's just because of this feeling that I've had that we don't get nearly enough guests from the southern hemisphere on here. | |
So I want to get, in this new year, more fascinating people from places like New Zealand and Australia and South Africa on the show. | |
Anybody from the Philippines out there who's interested in coming on or wherever you are, if you're in Japan or China, let's see if we can spread this net further. | |
I know you're listening in those places, so there must be people doing research that perhaps the world would like to hear. | |
This time round, we're going to talk to a man who is a kind of Mr. Paranormal in Australia. | |
His name is Ashley Hall, and he's been interested in the paranormal for many years. | |
He's done research, direct research on UFOs and ghosts and various other topics. | |
And I just thought it would be quite good to get this guy in Adelaide on this show. | |
So it's going to be Ashley Hall this time round. | |
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work across this year for sorting out the website for us, for getting the show out to you and for helping in a thousand different ways. | |
Thank you, Adam. | |
Martin, who's working on a new version of the Unexplained Theme tune, thank you for your hard work. | |
And as I said, Martin, last time round, a lot of people, even now, even a couple of years after we started using this version of the tune, still commenting on it and saying how much they enjoy it. | |
So Martin, thank you. | |
And above all, thank you to you for your support. | |
Please keep telling your friends about this show, even if you have to go round to their front door, knock on it, tell them all about it. | |
If you want to put it on Facebook or Twitter or wherever, spread the word so we can grow this show. | |
And what's been happening in the world? | |
Well, of course, we've had the aftermath of the sad death, inevitable death of Nelson Mandela at the age of 95 and various stories around that. | |
Like, for example, the booing of Jacob Zuma, the current incumbent in South Africa. | |
And one interesting thing I heard somebody say there, a native South African, South African-born person, who said, the reason we booed Zuma in the stadium, the F ⁇ B stadium in Johannesburg, is that we never see him. | |
This was one of the few occasions where we could actually get to protest in the flesh, because that man has a lot of controversy around him. | |
So that's been happening. | |
The weather here in the UK has been utterly bizarre. | |
We've had very mild weather at times. | |
12 degrees Celsius, 54 Fahrenheit on a December day is pretty unheard of. | |
A lot of fog about too, which has been affecting flights into and out of Heathrow Airport in London, the main airport. | |
So really weird weather as we come to the end of this year, and some newspapers predicting a great big freeze so far have been proved to be wrong. | |
But next time round on the next show, I'll probably tell you something different, won't I? | |
All right, let's get to Ashley Hall now in Adelaide, Australia. | |
A fascinating man, I think, who's involved in an awful lot of research. | |
So Ashley, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained. | |
No worries. | |
Very, very glad to be chatting with you. | |
Hey, well, listen, I've got loads of friends in the southern hemisphere, loads of friends in New Zealand, South Africa, Australia. | |
But problem is I don't seem to get enough guests from the southern hemisphere on this show. | |
It just seems to me that there's a big dearth of people in all of those places I've just named who are researching the paranormal. | |
And if they're there, then they're certainly not putting themselves about. | |
What do you think the problem is, if there is one, Ashley? | |
I'm not sure. | |
I can name plenty of people that would be very entertaining and informative for your show. | |
I think there is a bit of a leaning in the paranormal world to what's happening over in the US and in the UK. | |
I guess Australia really hasn't put its mark on the map when it comes to the paranormal yet. | |
That's not to say it's nothing happening here. | |
It's just that I guess we don't have big shows here. | |
We don't have the television stations budgeting shows to happen. | |
We don't have a lot of paranormal documentaries being shot down here. | |
So really, I think it's just a matter of, I guess people don't really know what's happening down here. | |
And yet, do you know what? | |
If anywhere is worth that kind of input, it has to be Australia. | |
I've done a number of radio shows from and in Australia. | |
And I can remember doing one out of Perth. | |
And I spent a wonderful couple of hours with an Aboriginal guy. | |
And he was fascinating. | |
I just felt there was a wisdom about him and a knowing about him that certainly needed more investigation and more understanding by us guys up here. | |
Yeah, absolutely. | |
You know, the Indigenous Australians here, they're very, very wise. | |
They're very spiritual as well. | |
They've been in this land for 50,000 years kind of thing. | |
So, you know, when it comes to people that are really natural and really know the locations they're talking about and really know the land and really know what was happening here prior to European settlement 220 years ago, yeah, it's definitely, definitely the way it is. | |
So what show was that? | |
Oh, boy. | |
Well, this was a morning drive show in London. | |
It was a big, big show hosted by a guy called Chris Tarrant, who you might have seen in Australia, actually. | |
I think he's guest hosted Who Wants to Be a Millionaire down there. | |
So you might be aware of who Chris is, but I was on his radio show and used to travel around the world with him. | |
And that's how we found ourselves in Sydney and Perth and around the Great Barrier Reef once as well. | |
And we had a great old time and we met some wonderful people, but I have such happy memories of Australia and I met such wise and interesting people there. | |
I just feel that we need to, up here, we need to be more aware, I think, of down there. | |
That's just, you know, personal thought. | |
And when my Funds allow, which they don't right now, I want to come back down. | |
And I've never seen Adelaide, so you know, I've got to come and see where you are. | |
Well, that's cool. | |
It's good that you guys be aware of this country, being that you sent all the convicts down here. | |
I'm sorry about that, by the way. | |
That's great. | |
We wouldn't be here. | |
But South Australia is different because we were freely colonised. | |
We weren't set up as a penal colony or anything like that. | |
We're pretty much freely settled. | |
It was actually meant to be a utopia in the UK's eyes. | |
There'd be no crime. | |
There'd be no insanity. | |
There'd be no poor. | |
But, you know, within five years of having people here, we had a really large jail and mental asylums and everything. | |
So I didn't quite go to plan. | |
It certainly sounds it. | |
Always one thing about Adelaide that struck me, and I don't know whether you'd have an answer for this. | |
You have a really weird time zone. | |
So your time zone is, I'm trying to work it out right now. | |
It's something like, oh, is it nine and a half or ten and a half hours? | |
But there's that odd 30 minutes there. | |
So I'm talking to you now at midday, UK, and I think you're talking with me. | |
What is it? | |
Is it 10.30 p.m.? | |
Yep, just yep, pretty much 10.34. | |
Yeah. | |
Well, we're not really that odd. | |
So Australia's got, I think, three time zones. | |
So on the East Coast, when you're over in Sydney, they're actually half an hour ahead of me. | |
So it's actually 11 p.m. over there. | |
But it's easier with a set number of hours, with an even number of hours. | |
But if it's like 10 and a half hours, which you are ahead of me, doesn't it really confuse you when you're dealing with people around the world? | |
No, well, see, I don't have to worry about the time zones. | |
Pete, who we've talked to, my media manager, she took care of all that. | |
She said, you know, just be there at 10.30 p.m. | |
You'll be talking with Howard Hughes. | |
So I didn't have to worry about the time zone conversion. | |
So there was no confusion for me at all. | |
All right. | |
Now, your media person, Peter, who sounds to me to be very on the case, got in touch with me. | |
She is a regular listener to this show, which is nice. | |
And I understand you listen to it too, which is really good and gratifying. | |
And just suggested that you would be an interesting guy to talk to because you've had so much paranormal involvement yourself, started a thing called the Paranormal Guide. | |
So I want to work through the different topics and I want to get an Australian perspective on them all. | |
Let's start out with UFOs. | |
Now, I know there have been UFO sightings in Australia, but I don't know anything about any of them. | |
So maybe you can cherry-pick some cases for me, yeah? | |
Yeah, absolutely. | |
So UFO sightings be the same as anywhere else. | |
People do spot them at time. | |
They make it in the media. | |
But we do have some really large, really well-known cases. | |
I don't know whether they filtered across the world, but over down near Melbourne, there was a place called Westall. | |
There's a Westall primary school and secondary school there, so like high school. | |
And one day, and I can't remember the day off the top of my head, but it was in the 1960s, they were all coming in off of recess, which is mid-morning break, and when they noticed something flying through a sky, and 300 people, that students and teachers, all saw this object flying through the sky and it actually landed or disappeared behind the tree line in the paddock next to the school, which they called the Grange. | |
Now, a lot of the teachers and students were kind of freaked out by these events, but a lot of the more adventurous students, they jumped the fence and went into this Grange. | |
Now, the object was there for a little while. | |
A lot of people saw it take off. | |
A lot of people state that after it left, there were your stereotypical rings in the grass. | |
They weren't burnt. | |
They looked more like the grass had been boiled. | |
Now, students come back to the school. | |
The student that got closest to this craft actually had to be taken away by ambulance, was not seen at the school again after that. | |
Very soon after the object took off, five unmarked aircraft took off after it. | |
That was never talked about again, really. | |
Then the authorities and everybody descended on the school and basically took the principal aside and said, you know, tell the students and not allow to talk about this. | |
So there was a complete hush-up over this entire case. | |
All right, two questions about this then, just before we go any further with it, Ashley. | |
Number one, when was this? | |
And number two, how do you know this is all? | |
So, for example, you said that one of those pupils who was closest to it all was never seen at the school again. | |
How do you know all this? | |
Okay, so what happened? | |
So it happened in the 1960s. | |
I can't remember exactly off the top of my head the date, but it happened in the 1960s. | |
So what happened is a couple of newspapers got there quite early and started covering the event, started interviewing the students and the teachers. | |
But then after that, it was only in the newspaper for about a week and then that was all hushed up as well. | |
They were told not to print that anymore. | |
And then about three or four years ago, a UFO just down this way, he found it. | |
He came across it in some old records. | |
He found the old newspapers and he went out there and he started interviewing people. | |
And so this is 30, 40 years on. | |
And he actually held a school reunion for all the people that had witnessed this object. | |
So all the people were able to come together again and they were able to start talking about it because they were really told by their parents not to talk about. | |
This is nonsense, et cetera, et cetera. | |
But, you know, there were teachers there that witnessed this thing too. | |
And let's face it, this was not, whether we're talking about Australia, the UK, the US, wherever, this was not as enlightened an era as it is now. | |
So quite naturally, people back then, and we hear this all the time, would probably have been told to shut up and say nothing about it and just get on with your life. | |
Oh, absolutely. | |
But it was completely secret until this UFologist came along and he dug it all up again. | |
And he made a really famous documentary. | |
If you ever want to find it, you can purchase it online. | |
It's called 1966 when it's happened. | |
So it's called Westall 66, a suburban UFO documentary. | |
So if you ever want to watch something really fascinating about a widely witnessed UFO event that happened here in Australia in the middle of a city, mind you, just outside of Melbourne, yeah, definitely look that one up and it's absolutely fantastic watching. | |
So was this a contact case? | |
Was this a crashed craft and beings? | |
What was it? | |
No one's entirely sure what the deal with the craft is. | |
A lot of people described it as being blue, silvery. | |
Some of them described it as being a bit purplish in hue. | |
It glided silently. | |
It was about the size of A large family car, and basically, yeah, it just kind of went down behind the tree line in this area called the Grange. | |
And shortly thereafter, it took off again. | |
Now, there were some lead-ups to this. | |
So, a couple of nights before, an object was seen on roads around that area. | |
And yeah, it's just got all the classic stuff that you would see in a movie. | |
You've got like the object being witnessed, you've got the military coming in and cleansing the area, you've got people being told not to talk about it. | |
You've got essentially one of the schoolgirls disappeared for a while. | |
I believe they know where she is now, but she never returned back to the school. | |
She's alive and well. | |
But yeah, it's like a sci-fi movie, but it really happened and it's quite well documented now. | |
And you've looked at the documents. | |
Have you been able to talk to anybody who was involved yet? | |
I haven't talked to anyone personally that was involved with the sighting, but I've talked to the writer and the director of the documentary. | |
I had my own podcast a short while ago, and we got her on. | |
And yeah, and she basically filled us in with other events that have taken place since the sighting and newer things that they have found out. | |
Have you had a chance to look at any of those newspapers? | |
Because I'm fascinated by the way that newspapers of the past, you know, especially in places like the UK, like in the 50s, things were a bit stuffy up here, you know, compared with the way they are now. | |
Just interested in the way that that would have been reported back then. | |
Oh, yeah, absolutely. | |
We're really fortunate here in Australia. | |
I'm not sure if you've got an equivalent over in the UK, but we have something called Trove, which is an online database where they've basically got scanned-in pages of every issue of every newspaper in the country that they've been able to get their hands in. | |
So we're able to go and see direct scans of a lot of these headlines and a lot of these news reports as well. | |
So Trove is a fantastic thing. | |
So any for my research as well, if I'm looking for deaths or location, I can go directly to the source with the newspapers. | |
So yes, I've seen these headlines. | |
I've seen these articles directly as they looked at the time. | |
And what did they look like? | |
What was the tone of them? | |
Kind of sensational, kind of, you know, UFO scene and students told to be quiet and why weren't pilots interviewed, stuff like that. | |
So they were kind of like, they were bold statements. | |
They weren't really, they were really, yeah, just like, this is it. | |
This is a fact. | |
There was nothing really wishy-washy with them. | |
There was nothing. | |
It just seemed to be straight reporting to me. | |
Right. | |
But an amazing case. | |
And if that was up here, if that was in a British city, then I guess we'd have been talking about that one for decades and periodically, every 10 years or so, somebody would have the bright idea of making a documentary about it. | |
So very, very surprised. | |
Number one, I've never heard about it. | |
And number two, nobody up here seems to have done a documentary for UK-US consumption. | |
Okay, well, definitely have a look for this one. | |
I can send you a link once we're done talking. | |
You can add it into your description for the podcast if you like. | |
Hey, that's a deal. | |
All right. | |
I always have this view of those great expanses that you have in the middle of Australia of red dust where a lot of native people and a lot of kangaroos live. | |
But as being a place where whatever is out in the universe and us down here kind of meet, you know, it's an area of mysticism for me. | |
I'm wondering if you can paint a picture of things that happen in that area because I'm fascinated by it. | |
I don't know if I'll ever see it. | |
I don't know if I'll ever go to that great lump of iron in the center of Australia that they call a mountain there. | |
I'd like to be able to go to Airs Rock and see and experience that. | |
But I just get that feeling that if you're going to have that kind of paranormality, that's the kind of place where you're going to get it. | |
Absolutely. | |
Airs Rock. | |
I'm glad you picked that up. | |
We actually refer to that more as Uluru now, which is the traditional name for it. | |
Uluru. | |
Uluru, yep. | |
Airs Rock. | |
Interchange, but we generally prefer Uluru here. | |
Yeah, it's a monolith. | |
So it's this giant rock out almost dead center of Australia. | |
It's pretty much the largest rock of its type in the world. | |
And I haven't seen it with my own eyes. | |
I've really got to travel out there. | |
But if you look at photos and look at videos out there, and I've talked to a lot of people, I say, you know, you're out in the middle of this flat desert plain. | |
There's this giant rock in the middle of it. | |
Now, what's interesting about that is when the European settlers, once again, they were looking for the overland routes across Australia to join the coast, because obviously we weren't flying planes back then. | |
It was easier to either go around the coast, but they were thinking it might be quicker to go, you know, horse and carts and things like that through the center. | |
So they stumbled across Ayers Rock and the Indigenous tribes around there said, you know, this is a sacred place to us. | |
Do not climb it. | |
Do not do anything with it. | |
This is very sacred to us. | |
And of course, we don't heed that stuff. | |
We don't believe in the spiritual mumbo-jumbo. | |
And, you know, there was a lot of fighting and stuff like that. | |
And eventually it became a tourist attraction. | |
A small hotel was set out next to it. | |
People were visiting out there and people were climbing this rock. | |
They were told not to. | |
Now, what's happened recently that's quite interesting is that we're also told when you go to nature, especially a place you don't understand, you can go there, you can take photos, but don't take anything with you. | |
Don't take souvenirs. | |
Now, what's been happening since probably about the 1970s is what's called the sorry rocks of Uluru, which is where people have not heeded these warnings on taking souvenirs and they've taken rocks home, they've taken branches home, they've taken all sorts of bits and pieces. | |
Bad things have started happening to them. | |
So they're now posting them back to the ranger station out of Uluru at their own expense to try and lift this first, they believe they have. | |
And we're talking places in Germany have sent back 26 kilogram rocks that they have taken from this place. | |
That is utterly amazing. | |
Yeah, just to fly that rock home in the first place would have cost a bucket, but to think a lot of bad stuff is happening, and it could be anything, it could be relationship trouble, it could be death, sickness, whatever. | |
But people, because they've been warned, they've taken this home, they start experiencing bad things, they attribute it to the rocks, and they're sending them back. | |
Now, I don't know whether this curse or this bad karma is real or not, but people believe in it enough that it's got its name, so it's the Sorry Rocks at Uluru, and they're sending them back at sometimes great expense. | |
I'm not sure what it would cost to send a 26-kilogram germ. | |
Hey, listen, our postal prices have just gone up here. | |
I shudder to think of how much that would be. | |
Of course, the other way of looking at that is it's a story that's put about by the people who are the custodians of that rock in order to stop silly tourists taking stuff away. | |
It could be. | |
We don't, with a lot of the Aboriginal stories, they are the custodians. | |
And us, well, the non-Aboriginal people, we don't know a lot of them. | |
We do know, we've heard of the dream stories and their stories of creation of the land, but we don't know it all because it's really kept really quite close in their circles. | |
And even to them, they've got to be a lot of the time, they've got to be kind of, I don't know how to word it, but kind of high up in the ranks of that tribe to even hear some of their stories. | |
So I don't know if we fully understand why Esrock is really, really spiritual and sacred above a lot of other locations. | |
But yeah, there's definitely something mystical. | |
A lot of people said out there, it just, the land feels ancient, as it would do. | |
And it's just, it's almost kind of eerie out there. | |
Now, recently they've made it, I'm pretty sure, illegal to climb it, which is good. | |
We're now finally starting to listen to the wishes of the traditional landowners. | |
But yeah, it's just very interesting. | |
When I stumbled across this story, I just saw, okay, one or two isolated cases of these sorry rocks. | |
Now they're getting them sent back to in packages almost weekly. | |
So it's happening a lot. | |
Well, there are two ways of looking at that. | |
Either people have been terrified by folklore or really things are happening to people. | |
It would be good to get somebody, wouldn't it, who'd had an experience of maybe something really bad going wrong, something falling apart in their life because they took a great chunk of rock from their home. | |
An amazing story, one way or the other. | |
And a truly wondrous location. | |
And as you said, it has this vision of being very spiritual, very peaceful, very disconnected from this world. | |
And I guess if you have such a physical distance between yourself and the rest of humanity, then it's got to give you peace. | |
The one thing that we have here in London is, of course, constant traffic, constant people. | |
Everything's expensive. | |
There isn't enough room for people. | |
If you go to the shops, there are tens of thousands of other people out there with you. | |
And all around you now is electromagnetic radiation. | |
I would just love to go to a place like that where those things don't exist. | |
Absolutely. | |
I think in my state, we're pretty lucky that we only have to travel about, I know, 20, 30 kilometres Adelaide to, and then you're pretty much isolated. | |
Yeah, my state's quite dry, so we don't have to drive very far to get into those kind of rural lands where there's just nothing around. | |
But yeah, Central Australia would be fantastic to check out. | |
You are an organiser, it says in your biography that I've got in front of me here because I'm organised, an organiser of the Australian Paranormal and Spiritual Expo. | |
Tell me about that, what it features, what it is. | |
Okay, so the Australian Paranormal and Spiritual Expo, we have a lot of psychic fairs here in Australia. | |
I'm sure you have them all over the world where you get a lot of psychics, palmers, things like that. | |
They'll sit in a room. | |
You go pay up, get red. | |
You can go buy crystals. | |
You can buy all your knickknacks to do with the spiritual and the psychic side of things. | |
But we saw that there was a bit of a hole. | |
At these places, there's no real paranormal teams. | |
There's no investigators. | |
There's nothing really outside of that psychic and spiritual. | |
There's nothing that core paranormal side. | |
So what we wanted to do was set up something similar, but put the focus on the paranormal. | |
We wanted local paranormal teams to be able to get out more, to be able to meet in person a lot of people that might be having issues in their homes. | |
We wanted people to be able to buy investigation equipment. | |
We wanted people to be able to just really do a lot of networking between teams as well. | |
So we thought of this idea. | |
We thought of a, I reckon it was November in 2012. | |
And then, yeah, we, what was it, eight, nine, ten months later, we held it. | |
We found a fantastic venue. | |
We got a whole bunch of people interested in being stall holders. | |
We did have the psychic room, the psychic element of that as well, because it kind of goes hand in hand. | |
And it was a fantastic day. | |
Unfortunately for me, I was incredibly crooked. | |
So this great event that I helped hold, I missed. | |
So I'm very much hoping to make it next year. | |
But yes, it was a great success. | |
Hey, listen, we've all seen Crocodile Dundee, and I've been to Australia, but there might be some of our American listeners who don't know the word crook means sick. | |
Okay, you were not well. | |
Okay, yes, sorry. | |
Yep. | |
Yeah, I was unwell. | |
Sorry, I was ill. | |
Well, I'm glad you're better now. | |
But look, this may sound talking about these things on a show like this to some people might say, they might say, Howard, why are you talking about paranormal fairs and shows? | |
But I've got to say, having had experiences of places like South Africa, there aren't very many of them. | |
And quite often they do attract the most interesting people. | |
I think to an extent, possibly even more interesting people than things like that attract in London. | |
Yeah, you know, there is. | |
The thing is, it's really a group of people with a similar passion coming together. | |
And we're providing a venue that they could all come together. | |
Because you do a lot of times see groups joining together to go tackle a larger location where there's reports of activity, but they might not ever meet a group that's in the next suburb or the next town over, but just because it's never popped up by having this central venue where people can come to and all meet each other, it really did help build a community. | |
There's a lot more people now that hadn't met before. | |
They're now in contact. | |
They're able to share knowledge. | |
They're able to share different strategies. | |
They're able to share different techniques. | |
And yeah, it really saw a lot of things come out of it along those lines. | |
A lot of education and a lot of just helping one another. | |
All right, listen, in our time, we've got about half an hour left here. | |
I want to grab from you as many Australian stories as I possibly can. | |
I don't mind if they're UFO stories. | |
I don't care if they're ghost and haunting stories, stories of magic, whatever. | |
So, I want you to try and, like I said before, cherry-pick some of the best of these stories. | |
And I know that you've done a lot of ghost research. | |
So, start me off with a good ghost story. | |
I'll start off with an older one. | |
So, we had in the 1920s, there's a little town in New South Wales called Gyra. | |
Now, just outside of there, we had what was known, it was a farmhouse, and it became known in the media as the Gyra Mystery. | |
And it turned out to be what many people believe now to be a poltergeist case. | |
Now, where this started was, there was a mother and father living in the house. | |
There was young Minnie Bowen, that was her name, Minnie, and she also had a younger sister. | |
Now, Minnie was walking home back to the house one day when she turned around and she saw a man following her, and he just started throwing rocks at her, which was very unusual. | |
She was only young. | |
And so she basically ran home. | |
The man gave up after a while. | |
She told the parents what happened and they said, you know, it's okay. | |
Don't worry about it. | |
It's just a random happenstance. | |
Now, starting from that night on, they could hear stones being thrown at the house. | |
They could hear them crashing into the roof, into the windows. | |
Some of the windows got smashed. | |
They obviously called out to the police. | |
The police came. | |
They didn't find anyone. | |
Now, this happened again and again over consecutive nights, and the town found out. | |
So they basically camped out overnight, forming a human cordon around the house to see if they could catch or deter whoever was doing this. | |
Now, the stone throwings was still taking place, and no one was ever able to find out who took, you know, who was causing this. | |
Then it got a bit weirder. | |
The stone started getting thrown inside. | |
Now, spiritualists started to descend upon this small townhouse, and they ended up making communication with the Bowens had lost the youngest daughter kind of recently within a year. | |
And they made communication through Minnie, who was channeling this sister, that it was indeed the sister, and she just wanted to let the parents and the family know that everything was okay. | |
Now, this activity kept taking place. | |
Now, as you said, in the 160s, with that UFO case, the kids were told not to talk about it. | |
They're not going to suffer that nonsense. | |
In the 1920s, it was even worse. | |
Now, the community were terrified of young Minnie Bond, and they did not want to live in the same community as her. | |
So she had to move. | |
She had to go somewhere else. | |
She ended up moving in with her grandmother. | |
Now, the activity started happening at the grandmother's house. | |
People started to suspect it was young Minnie that was doing it herself. | |
And she was, in fact, caught out once, but she did state that she was only doing it to get people to believe her. | |
She had only done it two or three times. | |
Now, in the new community where she was living, a whole bunch of weird stuff was happening. | |
An old lady happened to go missing at the same time. | |
The community started to get really paranoid. | |
Some women were sleeping with guns underneath their pillows. | |
And in one case, one of these women's sons grabbed the pillow and accidentally shot his sister. | |
So there was all sorts of mayhem. | |
And of course, everyone's blaming this little girl for it. | |
So she ends up going home. | |
And basically, after a while, it kind of disappears out of the media. | |
Now, subsequent stories on her later on, as she grew up, she did, people believe that she had learned a telepathic power that is kind of, I don't know if you're kind of classic. | |
So we're not sure whether it was a poltergeist event, whether it was complete hoax on the little girl's part, or whether perhaps as she was going through that pubescent stage of life and that you read a lot of cases of, that maybe she had developed a power that she wasn't aware of, some maybe a telekinesis or something that she was unable to control. | |
And did she, as very often happens, certainly up here, did she grow out of all of this? | |
As she got older, as she went through puberty and then became a woman, did things change? | |
Well, we don't really know a lot what happened with her after her younger years, though there are murmurings, if you read around the internet, that she did develop a telekinetic ability that she was able to control. | |
Nothing major, but that it was something that she could control. | |
So there is more of a leaning that she was just going through those early manifestation phases that she wasn't fully aware of or controlling. | |
So that was quite an interesting story that I came across a couple of years ago. | |
And what about more contemporary stories? | |
Maybe one of the ones that you yourself have been involved in investigating? | |
Yeah, okay. | |
What's a good, okay. | |
We went to a location. | |
I used to be part of it. | |
The paranormal guide used to be an investigation team. | |
I still investigate, but I do it solo now. | |
So my old teammates are still in their own team, somewhere, but I'm going separately. | |
But while we were together, we went to a place called Truebridge Island, which is not far from where I live. | |
We went there just as a weekend getaway. | |
We thought it'd be a spooky location. | |
It's a very small island. | |
It's only a couple of hundred meters long, a couple of hundred meters across. | |
Whereabouts is it? | |
This is off Adelaide, yeah? | |
Yeah, it's off of the next peninsula, the York Peninsula. | |
It's kind of between the two. | |
So just like I once went to Perth, they have this little island off Perth called Rottnest Island. | |
A little tiny island. | |
It's like a strip of land. | |
Same sort of deal? | |
Same sort of deal. | |
It's a bird sanctuary as well. | |
But this one's got a lighthouse on it, which was built because a lot of ships are obviously crashing in the area trying to go to Adelaide and trying to service the insides of the peninsula. | |
So they built this lighthouse and they had the lighthouse keepers cottage. | |
They've actually got two lighthousekeepers' cottages there. | |
And you can hire the whole island to have for yourselves for the weekend. | |
So we thought, fantastic, we'll build that. | |
Creepy lighthouse, stuck on there for, you know, two, three days, two nights. | |
Let's see if there's any paranormal activity there. | |
We went there not knowing anything, really. | |
There was a couple of murmurings around that. | |
Yeah, it's a bit weird, but we didn't know a lot. | |
So we get to this island. | |
The very first thing I discovered was the visitors books. | |
I thought, oh, maybe someone's put some stories in there. | |
We'll go through them. | |
If something weird's happened, we should be able to find it there. | |
We found loads. | |
It was like one in every eight entry into this visitor book was, this happened, or I witnessed this, or this spooky thing happened to me. | |
So we were like, wow, this is awesome. | |
We're going to have a great time here. | |
Now, so we decided all of the activities seemed to be happening in the older lighthouse keeper's cottage to run down one. | |
So we set up base in the good one. | |
That's where we would sleep, and we would investigate the old one. | |
One of the old team happened to bring a Ouija board. | |
Now, a lot of people are against this thing. | |
I'm not against it, really. | |
Nothing really bad happened to me yet, so I'm still pretty okay. | |
They tell me, and we've had Karen Dallman in the US on this show in California, and Karen's coming back on here, and we're going to do some Ouija, I won't say experiments, but we're going to try and use the thing. | |
And apparently, it's all about intention. | |
If your intention is absolutely pure, then you're going to be all right. | |
That's what they tell me. | |
Yeah, that's what I've been told as well. | |
So we decided, oh, when we're going to use this thing, and they thought, this is going to sound really crazy to some of you listeners, but we decide we'll do it on the first night. | |
If anything bad happens, we're still stuck on the island for another night. | |
We can't go anywhere. | |
So we thought, you know, we'll do that. | |
Now, the first night, yeah, it was interesting. | |
We were getting words through this thing. | |
So we had four of us on the board, a fifth person just kind of recording and note-taking. | |
We had our fingers on the planchette, the puck, and we were getting movement now with these things. | |
You never know whether it's someone pushing it or not, but it seemed to be complete mumbo-jumbo. | |
We made no sense out of what was coming through, whatever. | |
It was after we closed the session that we were just saying back the words again, seeing if we could find a pattern, when someone noticed that the last four letters were K C A B. And they realized K C A B is back backwards. | |
So we started reading it through backwards and there was a message there. | |
And I'm thinking, well, someone's moving it. | |
They'd have to be kind of sick in the head to have thought well in advance how to do a message backwards. | |
And it was quite interesting. | |
It said back, what was it? | |
It was something about Luke's not here. | |
I am host. | |
I told some friends about this. | |
They reckon it sounds demonic. | |
Like I said, I'm pretty open or whatever. | |
But so we were there. | |
We thought, okay, that was interesting. | |
We stopped for the night. | |
We did some other investigations things. | |
Not a whole lot happened. | |
The next day, we just enjoyed ourselves. | |
Following up, we went back in there, continued the session. | |
Now, it started spelling out some darker stuff. | |
One of our more spiritual investigators got a little bit freaked out by it. | |
She said, what we're doing is not right. | |
I want to leave. | |
So we just said, okay, you can leave if you want. | |
We're going to continue. | |
This is what we're here for. | |
If we actually make some form of contact, that's what we're about. | |
So she left, and another one of the female investigators left with her. | |
Now, we continued doing the session, and it continued saying some pretty rough stuff. | |
I won't repeat it on the air. | |
It's a little bit blue, some of it. | |
But needless to say, it was quite negative. | |
After a short while, I noticed torches in the window. | |
I looked there, and at first we thought it was the girls waving at us. | |
So we kind of waved back. | |
We're enjoying ourselves. | |
We're pretty paranoid inside, but we want them to see that we're okay. | |
And that's when one of my male investigators, my tech guy, and they said, we've got to leave this room now. | |
And I'm wondering why. | |
So we walked outside, and that's when I found out why. | |
He had seen that the look on the girls' faces through the window was quite frantic, that they were panicking. | |
When we went out there, one of them was in a complete mess. | |
Now, what worried her was the fact that we were still in this house, but she was not able to get our attention. | |
She had been yelling in through the door at us to leave. | |
She doesn't feel comfortable us being in there. | |
She went to the kitchen window where we were, and she was bashing on that glass, and we didn't hear any of this. | |
It was almost like whatever was with us, if there was something with us, was preventing us or had somehow caused us not to hear what was happening on the outside of the house, them trying to get our attention. | |
And you're sure this was absolutely genuine, and what she was telling you was absolutely so that she was bashing on the windows and doors, screaming like hell, and you were not hearing it? | |
We were not hearing it at all. | |
We got the correspondent, the other female investigator was out there with her as well. | |
So she can verify that she was really worried for the first one that was panicking. | |
Later on, we went back into the house to grab our equipment and we said, well, do exactly what you did before. | |
We could hear her yell through the door very clearly, and we could definitely hear her bashing on that window. | |
She only had to knock lightly for us to hear it. | |
We have got no idea why we were unable to hear her frantic bashings and yelling at us. | |
So whatever it was was not something physically to do with the house. | |
it had clearly gotten hold of you. | |
Yeah. | |
I'm usually a bit... | |
I need more data to make a complete termination. | |
But yeah, it was very weird. | |
There is nothing physical. | |
There was no physical reason, no structural reason in that house, nothing wrong with us personally, our ears or anything like that, that can account for why we couldn't hear her trying to get our attention. | |
And the messages that you were getting through, I know you said some of them, and this is not uncommon if they come through from the dark side, if you believe in that kind of thing. | |
You said that some of those messages were X-rated quite blue and you couldn't repeat them. | |
Were there any that you could tell me about? | |
Yeah, it was basically, so I got the story a bit wrong. | |
The first night we made contact with, we were going through it, it seemed like it was a young man named Luke. | |
He gave us an age and everything. | |
That seemed okay. | |
The second night was when we got the messages, Luke not here, I am host, and then some other stuff, some swear words, things like that. | |
Now, when I went and taught, I have a friend who's quite into demonology and the stuff. | |
And I figure, well, look, I might as well shoot him the message that we got and see what he makes of it. | |
Always open to other opinions. | |
And he thinks it was quite dark indeed. | |
He says, in a lot of biblical senses, host does mean, you know, the dark one or at least a higher ranking demonic figure, so to speak. | |
He also said we have to worry about the name Luke. | |
Now, it might have all been backwards, but Luke backwards is Eccle, which is also Another name of another demon. | |
Now he said a demon will never tell you its name. | |
If you watched all the movies, once you know a demon's name, they don't have a lot of power over you. | |
I don't know whether that's just in the movies or what, but that's what they say. | |
And he said, the way a demon could get more power is by giving its name, but you not realizing it has done so. | |
So he thinks maybe that's what had happened with that first message. | |
I don't know. | |
That was his opinion. | |
I'm still trying to figure it all out myself. | |
Right. | |
And you were there for more than that one night. | |
You were there for a few nights, a couple of nights. | |
How were you in yourselves as you were going through this? | |
And you sound to me like a very happy-go-lucky guy with your feet well and truly on the ground. | |
So I guess you came through it okay. | |
But what about everybody else? | |
Well, yeah, I think once we all got out of that house, our friend that was panicking did calm down. | |
She was much happier that we weren't in there. | |
When we went back into the house just to grab the equipment, because although we wanted to, or at least I really wanted to keep investigating, you know, I've got to also think of other people's feelings. | |
And it's not great being stuck on an island if you're going to be worried about the friends that are in the haunted demon house next door. | |
So we agreed, okay, we'll stop investigating there. | |
So when we went in there and grabbed the equipment, she was still very worried for us. | |
But it all seemed to be fine. | |
Yeah, but besides that, it's been okay. | |
We investigated a couple of times after that. | |
And yes, we did use the board again, but we didn't really get anything through any other times, really. | |
So as far as I'm aware, they're all happy, healthy, still going about their work. | |
So, yeah, there hasn't been any lasting damage that I know of. | |
From what I've read about you, it's the ghost investigations, that side of things that interest you most. | |
Australia is full of locations that have potential. | |
There's one that I went to and stood in. | |
Again, on that trip to Perth, which is, what, it's 12 years ago now, thereabouts, I stood in the execution chamber, the place where they used to hang people at Fremantle Jail. | |
I don't know whether that's gotten me past to it, but it certainly felt like it when I stood there. | |
Absolutely. | |
That place is quite well known to be haunted in Western Australia. | |
So Fremantle Prison was actually known as the Limestone Lodge. | |
It's another one of these prisons where, you know, you get sent over here as a convict to Australia and then you've got to build your own prison. | |
You know, too bad for you kind of thing. | |
What's really interesting about that place is, I'm not sure where they told you, is that there are a series of tunnels underground, quite far. | |
We're talking 15 meters underground and they're filled with fresh water. | |
What happened originally is they had to provide water to the prisoners, so they dug these wells, and the water in the prison was so good and so fresh that they ended up enlarging the series of chambers underground so they could start providing that fresh water to the free people of the town that rose around. | |
Now, that place is haunted. | |
We have executed some of our most notorious criminals there. | |
And yeah, there's some quite interesting stories. | |
One of my favorite stories there is an investigator was there. | |
They were alone in one of the blocks. | |
They were taking some photos. | |
When all of a sudden, they saw a shadow figure, which is just a dark three-dimensional humanoid form, charging along one of the walkways in one of the upper levels. | |
And it came down the stairs. | |
And as it did, they let out a tremendous moan, which absolutely rattled this investigator all the while there taking photo after photo after photo of this thing. | |
And then it took off. | |
As is always seems to be the case, those photos never turned out. | |
He doesn't have any proof of what he saw. | |
And he knows he took photos. | |
Photos before and after incidents seem to be fine. | |
All those just didn't turn out for some reason. | |
I mean, it just struck me that this is one hell of an atmospheric place. | |
The only memory I have of it is when you walk in from the outside, there's no real hint that it was a prison. | |
It looks like some kind of fort. | |
You know, it's got quite tall walls. | |
And I can remember it all being whitewashed because I think they had something like, you know, the temperatures in Perth are pretty high a lot of the time. | |
And the day that we went there, it was about 38 degrees minimum. | |
So it was really hot. | |
And the place looked like a fort. | |
But when you get inside and when they took me to the execution chamber and I stood by the drop where people dropped through the doors to be hanged or dropped, you know, past the boards to be hanged, there's a definite sense of not good about it. | |
Definitely. | |
Yeah, a lot of our jails are like that. | |
So from the outside, all you've got are the walls. | |
They'll have buttresses to reinforce them. | |
They'll have the, I can't believe I forget the name of it. | |
You know, they look like the teeth on top of the towers that you see in old castles. | |
They've got all of that happening. | |
So yeah, they do. | |
A lot of them, the stonework's beautiful for a place that's meant to be holding prisoners. | |
They do make it so that you're on the outside, the good side, you don't have a complete eyesore to look like. | |
No, I mean, exactly that. | |
It just looked like it could be some kind of old fort, something that you would find in France or somewhere that maybe they turned into a hotel these days. | |
And I'm sure that most of the tourists who go around there in the sunshine have no understanding of some of the stuff that may have gone on there. | |
You know, it's just another stop on the tourist route, but I found it fascinating. | |
And like I say, there were parts of that building that had a definite vibe to them. | |
Yeah, that's true of all of our jails. | |
So we've got Old Adelaide Jail here. | |
That was 141 years in continual operation, only closed down in 1988. | |
I worked with a tour company that did some of the tours through there for a while, and there are definitely certain locations in that jail that have a definite creepy vibe. | |
Some places that I really didn't like spending time alone in. | |
I'm quite used to an experience to this kind of thing. | |
Australia has, I mean, it's partly our fault up here, but there are certain things that happen there, like a lot of kids from this country who perhaps were from, you know, they were born illegitimately. | |
They were shipped out to Australia. | |
It is much to our shame that those things happened and they were maybe stuck in some kind of, you know, semi-religious establishment. | |
You know, this is not a good part of our history and it's not a great part of your history either. | |
I wonder if you've had any investigations done in places like that. | |
Yeah, I only just learnt of that a couple of years ago. | |
A movie came out here. | |
I think it was called Oranges and Sunshine or something. | |
And it was about that, I'm not sure exactly. | |
I think it was illegal on both countries' part, but yeah, a lot of children that were in orphanages and homes over in the UK, I think it was something like 30,000 or some ridiculous number were being transported over here and they'd be basically put in work camps for religious orders. | |
And this was happening, I think, all the way through the 60s and 70s. | |
And, you know, it was like being in prison for a lot of these kids, and sometimes they were abused, but they were far from home. | |
And their only crime in this world was perhaps to have been born to an unmarried mother or whatever, or just to have a not great start in life. | |
But that's what we did. | |
And we're not talking about two or 300 years ago. | |
This stuff happened in living memory. | |
Yeah, only 40, 50 years ago in some cases. | |
No, I haven't been to any of those locations, but I do know of some of them. | |
Once again, there's where you were in Western Australia, the main thing in that movie was set in Western Australia where they were part of a religious order and basically they built this, I'm not sure whether it was a monastery, if that's what you call it, but this grand, beautiful building. | |
And these were young kids, young as five, you know, up to about 12, 13 years of age, moving rocks, laying rocks. | |
I'd hate to think how many accidents took place. | |
When you've got kids in charge of what is essentially building on an industrial scale, I'd hate to think how many accidents took place in these locations. | |
It's unbelievable. | |
And also the sorts of places that end up either the subject of poltergeists because of the angst of some of the people there, of many of the people there, or indeed haunted because people died. | |
Yeah, yeah, but yeah, unfortunately, I haven't been able to visit any of those places myself. | |
I only really know of the one location that kids went to, but I know they would have gone to dozens, if not hundreds of locations around the country. | |
But you're definitely a place that would be intriguing to check out. | |
But unfortunately, most of these places, I was saying, this is only 40, 50 years ago. | |
A lot of these places are still working as what they were built to be. | |
So it's not like there are ruins somewhere that you can just go check out. | |
And I don't think priests and monks and people like that, when you're poking around in the darkest side of there are... | |
But let's talk some more about the ghosts then. | |
We had your own personal experience. | |
We had one other story that you knew. | |
Maybe something a little more contemporary, something that has maybe made headlines in Australia, may not have made headlines up here. | |
Okay, something contemporary, something haunted. | |
Ghosts really haven't been making much of a headline here in Australia. | |
I think the most recent one that I can think of, and it went all over the world, was there is an IGA Independent Grocers Association. | |
It's a supermarket, a smaller independent supermarket here in Adelaide. | |
And the security alarm went off and the cameras started recording. | |
They were on like a motion detector. | |
So if there's something happening in the store, they'll turn on and start recording. | |
And what happened is a packet of roll-ups, which I don't know if you know what roll-ups are, they're kind of like processed fruit in strips. | |
They basically moved off of a shelf. | |
Now, that was such a minor event. | |
And we're talking, this is a busy road next to it. | |
Trucks could have gone through, have knocked this rattled dirt, slippery packets knocked on floor. | |
But for some reason, it went all over the world. | |
It was just one of these viral things that took place. | |
That's probably the most recent thing that I can think of. | |
And it's just silly that, you know, we've got these, we've got old haunted asylums. | |
We've got some of the biggest asylums in the world here. | |
And, you know, these things are absolutely filled with crazy things going on and a supermarket and something falls off of a shelf makes world headlines. | |
I don't understand it. | |
Okay. | |
Of the investigations that you yourself have done, you've got a list of those. | |
You presumably want to be wanting to add to that list fairly soon. | |
Where is the place that you really would like to go to and like to do an investigation of for whatever reason? | |
Okay, here in Australia would definitely be down in Tasmania, Port Arthur. | |
We've had, there's a lot of history there to do with the original convicts there. | |
There's a lot of old buildings there. | |
It was basically a prison, but a very large one. | |
They also have in the harbour there a small island, a very small island, which where if you were a convict and you died in a prison, you'd be buried there. | |
And there's hundreds, if not thousands, of bodies very tightly packed on this very small island. | |
It's known as the Island of the Dead. | |
And then we've also had some more recent history there, which is probably still pretty raw for a lot of people. | |
But we did have a mass shooting there a couple of decades back. | |
So there's definitely a lot of sadness and a lot of bad energies that would be there. | |
So that would be one of those places I'd like to visit. | |
But asides from that, I think I'd love to get to some of the ancient stuff here in Australia. | |
I'd love to make it out to Uluru and check that out for myself, definitely. | |
I want to end up this conversation by talking about ancient knowledge there and the Indigenous people. | |
Just to ask you one question. | |
I wonder if you've ever been or would you like to go to Sydney Harbour Bridge? | |
I'll tell you for why, because of course I did the tourist thing when I was there for a radio show and myself and Chris Tarrant, this host on the show, we walked across the bridge and they clip you to a special harness and it's all very safe because it's all very high. | |
But they did tell us in the course of that that quite a few people died building that bridge. | |
It's such an impressive structure. | |
I'm sure that that must be haunted. | |
Yeah, I go to Sydney quite often. | |
I go there probably every three months. | |
Pete, my media manager, lives there, so I go over there and visit her quite often, do a lot of investigating there. | |
Now, I have been to the Sydney Harbour Bridge, I haven't climbed it yet, but I have heard the stories that there's apparently someone in one of the pylons still fell in there and is kind of entombed in there, if you will. | |
Did you happen to check out Lunar Park, or did you see Lunar Park from the bridge? | |
Yes, I did. | |
I saw it. | |
We didn't have time because we were on a ridiculous schedule, so we didn't have a chance to do that, but we saw it. | |
Yes. | |
Yeah, that's a haunted location. | |
In the 70s, they had a ghost train. | |
Ghost train, you sit on the carriages, go through, people scare you. | |
They had a fire on there, and quite a number of people died. | |
Now, they never replaced that ghost train. | |
They kind of demolished it after no one wants those bad memories still around. | |
But what they've got built on top of the place now is the big top, and that's a big arena. | |
So you can have live band performances there. | |
You can hire it out, use of functions, all sorts of things. | |
People have been reporting some pretty strange stuff there, whisperings in their ear by people that aren't there. | |
They've seen people that shouldn't be there, shadows moving around. | |
So, yeah, you were quite close to quite a few haunted locations. | |
There's also a whole area known as the Rocks there, which is where the original Sydney settlements were. | |
That's the other end of the river, isn't it? | |
Isn't that the bit you can get a boat there from by the Opera House? | |
And that Rocks area, there are some great fish restaurants, stuff like that. | |
Is that what we're talking about? | |
I'm not sure. | |
I really don't know the geography of Sydney as well as I should, but it's really old. | |
They've got some of the oldest buildings in Sydney still there. | |
What they have that's really interesting. | |
I went on the Rocks Ghost Tour. | |
They do two sides of the Rocks, and there's quite a bit of walking up and down hills, but it's amazing that you can have these really modern structures, so modern-day Sydney built there, and then you just go one block behind, and they've got ruins from houses that are 200 years old. | |
They've got these stories of tragedy. | |
But the thing that really highlights the new and the old of Sydney together is the end of that tour, where you're kind of, this guy, the guy says, oh, you're going to really enjoy this. | |
He's telling all these dark stories. | |
And then you're kind of standing in front of this really modern high-rise apartment. | |
And he opens this glass door and you go in and he closes that door behind you. | |
It's complete darkness. | |
Then you turn your torches on. | |
There's this rampway that goes down several floors. | |
And there's the original houses still under there in ruins. | |
You can still see where the ovens would have been, where the chimneys would be. | |
And they still know a lot of the history and the people that died there. | |
And it's really quite eerie knowing that just 10, 15 meters above your heads, this car parked and then everybody's living there. | |
But you wouldn't know these ruins were there. | |
You kind of got to have the key and the knowledge to know it's there. | |
And it's something that they've been preserved and they haven't just knocked it down. | |
They've just built right on top of it. | |
It's really quite amazing. | |
If you ever come back to Sydney, definitely do the rocks tour. | |
It is fantastic. | |
But yeah, it's just one of those things that really highlights the two different worlds that are Sydney. | |
Yeah, and we have to say that people may think that Sydney brand new city, but Sydney has a history. | |
Australia has a history. | |
And there are many parts of it that have been knocked down because just like up here, developers and authorities don't make proper, or didn't in the past make proper plans and preserve heritage. | |
But Australia is getting more of a sense of its heritage, which is a really great thing. | |
I want to bring you back at the very end. | |
And I don't know how much you know about the Indigenous people of Australia, but they do fascinate me. | |
And, you know, they have been, well, they've been through some very, very hard times. | |
And of course, they were oppressed and discriminated against as, you know, quite often happens in situations like that. | |
It's again another embarrassing part of your history and ours as well. | |
But they did and do know a great deal, don't they? | |
Absolutely. | |
And you're dead bang on there with them being oppressed. | |
It was only within the last 50 years that they'll take off of the fauna register of Australia and they'll actually classified as human beings. | |
Dear Lord. | |
Yeah, it's outrageous. | |
It really is. | |
And a lot of terrible things are happening. | |
We're taking their children. | |
We're basically trying to breed them out. | |
We'll try and just get rid of a whole race. | |
It was pretty much genocide, but without a whole bunch of murder, though, a lot of that did take place in early Australian years. | |
But if you go back into their history, their settlements, their cave paintings, their knowledge of the skies. | |
Yep, absolutely. | |
You find that with a lot of ancient cultures that they do have a better, you know, we were discovering things 100 years ago or maybe 150 years ago that a lot of ancient cultures have probably known for thousands of years. | |
With the Aboriginal people, I think one of the things that have always interested me the most, which is up in the Kimberleys, once again, very far northwestern Australia, they have what was called the Wangina paintings. | |
Now, I don't know whether you've ever discussed ancient aliens on your show, but these paintings are quite often cited in people when they're talking about ancient aliens, as they show beings, they're humanoid beings, but they do look like they've got bubble-domed helmets on their heads. | |
And, you know, there's a lot of discussion as to whether these people had been visited by aliens or time travels, whatever, back in the past, and that they have obviously maybe looked at them as if to be gods or at least higher beings, and that they have painted them and these records in their rock art. | |
And although their paintings are, you know, when you look at them, they do look quite simple. | |
They're almost stick figure-like. | |
A lot of people might say they look childlike. | |
But what you also have to realize is in a lot of their paintings, every dot, every stroke tells a part of a story. | |
And that's how a lot of their culture is handed down is in the knowledge and just the strokes, the dots and what they do in their paintings. | |
So yeah, definitely a very, very wise, very knowledgeable people, just not expressed in the way we do. | |
They don't have written records. | |
They don't have books. | |
They don't have printing presses to store their knowledge. | |
It's all very verbal and in some cases through the painting. | |
And yeah, it's you know, it's special. | |
And I think a lot more attention needs to be taken in preserving that knowledge rather than just, you know, what we tried to do up until only, you know, 50, 60 years ago, sweep it under the rug and try to see them off the off our act. | |
Well, it would be interesting, wouldn't it, to see if there were links and connections between, as we're coming to discover now, for example, there are people who connect the Inca and the Egyptians or whatever preceded the Egyptians, maybe even some of the Asiatic people, because don't forget, I think a lot of us up here, again, are not aware of the fact that you go north in Australia and the influence is Asia. | |
It's not Europe, it's not Japan, but it's up towards China. | |
That's your influence, isn't it? | |
Indonesia. | |
Yeah, it is. | |
Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, places that are really close. | |
And that's where they believe the Aboriginal people got here by 50,000 years ago, hopping from those small islands and then hitting up northern territory and maybe northern Queensland and even northern Western Australia. | |
I guess, yeah, there would be. | |
I think you could probably follow the cultural art from those regions and you could probably see and probably track back the evolution on how it changed, much like you would a spoken language. | |
I think it would, as you have dialects, even in your country, UK, I've heard, you know, you can go up north heading up towards up towards the northern places and the dialects change. | |
And, you know, someone speaking up far north in the UK is not going to answer someone down south unless they both commonly know English. | |
I think the same would be here when you're talking about the ancient cultural art. | |
I think you could see the way it's changed as you come down from north to south. | |
But when you look at the two extreme ends of those, they might not show a common link. | |
But as you come through, yeah, there's definitely an evolutionary pattern. | |
And one thing that we have to see, and I don't know whether I'm going to be able to afford to, whether I'll get the opportunity to come back to Australia, but it had a big impact on me in those years that I was working for Capitol Radio in London and able to travel with them, because that was the only way that I could do it. | |
I couldn't have afforded to do it myself. | |
But I saw places like the Great Barrier Reef, and you come to understand when you go to places like, I know it's for tourists, but Heyman Island, you know, they're very aware of the conservation and the nature and the ocean there and the reef. | |
That if you want to feel the force of nature, I can't really think of many better places. | |
Perhaps southern Africa would be on a par, but I can't really think of anywhere better than Australia because you are connected. | |
You go there and you're connected in a way that I think we're ceasing to be up here. | |
And that's just my personal prejudice and personal thought. | |
So there. | |
What's the plan for 2014, Ashley? | |
What's the first thing you're going to do? | |
Well, okay, well, first thing I'm not entirely sure. | |
I'm going to Sydney again at the end of January. | |
We're going to go visit some of the sites up there, some of the local urban legends. | |
I'm going to go down with people from API Australian Paranormal Phenomenon and Investigators. | |
I'm going to go to some of their locations. | |
You know, I love their powerhouse that they run the tools at there. | |
So I'm going to visit there. | |
And I think, you know, we're in the very early stages of a very special project here. | |
So, you know, we have the Paranormal Expo here that we're running, but we've started on something very, very interesting. | |
I can't say anything about it, but it's a type of product that could be accessed all over the world and will allow you to learn a bit more about one of Australia's more interesting hauntings here. | |
Really? | |
All right. | |
Well, keep me posted about that. | |
And if you come across any interesting people that I could do with talking to on the unexplained, I'd love for that to happen. | |
Let's keep up the connection. | |
And I'm glad we've bridged the gap. | |
I think, Adelaide, I'm trying to work out how many miles away you are from here. | |
I think you're probably something like 11 or 12,000. | |
So we're covering a hell of a long distance. | |
And it's just a miracle that digitally these days we can do this. | |
Yeah, it's fantastic. | |
There's not even a lag when we're talking. | |
No time delay. | |
No time lag. | |
Nothing like that. | |
Ashley Hall, listen, thank you very, very much. | |
If people want to learn more about you, how do they do that? | |
Where would they go? | |
The best place would be through Facebook if you just look up the paranormal guide. | |
So if you go to facebook.com slash the paranormal guide, that's where you'll find the page. | |
We put up pretty much daily new articles on haunts and dark crime, dark history, UFOs, cryptos of the world, anything you can think of. | |
Just about daily, there's a new article put up there. | |
We ask interesting questions for people to give feedback on. | |
So we have that. | |
And we've also got the paranormalguide.com, which is pretty much a brand new website. | |
But there's a couple of interesting features that I'm not sure whether they're unique, but my favorite part is the Paranormal Atlas, which is basically a world map like you would see on Google Maps. | |
And there's pins on all interesting paranormal and crime locations around the world. | |
You can click on those and go directly to our articles from there. | |
So you can kind of search for articles via geographic location. | |
Okay, that sounds good. | |
Cryptozoology, just very, very quickly, do you have a Bigfoot equivalent in Australia? | |
Have you got a Sasquatch? | |
We do. | |
It's called the Yowie, and a lot of that is in the Blue Mountain area of Sydney. | |
So you possibly flew over one when you came here. | |
My God, well, you don't have to go very far out of Sydney then to find it. | |
Well, I don't think that would be too close to civilization, but, yeah, there's a lot of... | |
And what's the Yahweh like? | |
Big, hairy, hairy, humanoid style, but bigger creature? | |
Yeah, pretty much the same as, from what I understand, pretty much the same as Bigfoot, Sasquatch, things like that. | |
You know, they're very shy. | |
They don't want to be known by you, but they can be, listening to some of the stories of some of the friends that have told me, they can be quite, if you do go into their areas, they're quite defensive. | |
They will throw rocks And boulders and stuff at you. | |
So you've got to watch out for the boy. | |
Well, I'd love to discover one of those. | |
Okay, that can be the starting point for our next conversation, Ashley Hall in Adelaide. | |
Thank you very much for talking with me on The Unexplained. | |
Thank you for having me. | |
And the man you've just been hearing is Ashley Hall. | |
He's based at Adelaide in Australia. | |
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Probably one more show to do before the year's out. | |
Not bad, eh? | |
That'll be coming soon. | |
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