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Jan. 24, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:04:36
Edition 141 - Cal Cooper

Leading British parapsychologist Cal Cooper joins Howard on the work of Dr Alex Tanous...

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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.
Thank you very much for your fine emails that you've been sending me recently, some very thought-provoking guest suggestions, and some comments about shows and the guests that I've had on them that have really made me sit back and take a long, hard look at what I'm doing and where we're going to take this show in future.
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Now, this time around, I know we've had quite a few American guests on the show, but we have a true British guest here and somebody who's done some quite remarkable, quite detailed, and very, very good research in the fields of parapsychology, the paranormal, ghosts, and that kind of stuff.
His name is Cal Cooper, and I've been meaning to get him on this show for at least a year.
We're going to be talking this time about his new book that is the completion of an unfinished work by a man called Dr. Alex Tanaus and his collaborator, Carl Ossis.
I hope I've pronounced those names properly.
We'll find out.
They were, in the 1980s and around that kind of era, the real deal, real-life ghostbusters, people who did it properly, people who used equipment and did it in an academic kind of way.
Conversations with Ghosts is the unfinished book that Cal has been endeavoring to finish, and it's out now.
We'll also talk about his own book, which is to do with telephone calls from ghosts.
You may have heard stories, you may have read them in weekend magazines and that sort of stuff, where somebody has claimed to receive a phone call from somebody who's departed.
And in fact, if you listen to, I think it was two or three shows ago, one of my listeners emailed me to tell me a story about somebody who departed, who apparently called a care home.
This person didn't know that they had departed and was apparently lost.
This is more common than you may think, so we'll talk with Cal Cooper about that.
Like I say, thank you very much for your support for this show.
Please keep it coming.
I need to hear from you.
I need to know what you want to hear and what you think of the show, because it is a true interactive project, The Unexplained.
It always has been.
And thank you very much for all the support you've given me personally.
Okay, let's cross to the English Midlands now.
And by digital connection, we should have Cal Cooper.
Cal, thank you for coming on.
Thank you very much for having me.
I'm really pleased to get this together, Cal.
I've been reading about you.
I've looked at your website, which is enormously impressive.
And I have to say that you're definitely a guy on a roll.
You're doing a lot of media now, aren't you?
Yeah, since my undergraduate studies at the University of Northampton in 2009, I started contributing to a lot of newspaper articles and radio programs that wanted to hear more about the science of the paranormal and what's actually going on in various universities that actually allow students to engage in parapsychology and look at the science of the unexplained.
Because we have an awful lot of amateurs who do this stuff, and I've talked to a lot of them, and many of them are very, very good.
But we have to try and recall the fact that the study of all of these things began in institutions, began academically, and maybe we lost our way along the years and the decades, but it's still being done.
Yeah, it fluctuated.
I mean, the main sort of kickstart to the whole thing was in Trinity College, Cambridge with the early founders of the Society of Psychical Research, so Frederick Myers and Edmund Gurney and Henry Sidgwick.
And they set it up in 1882 and then followed by the American branch in 1884.
And they were really field investigators.
They were well-accomplished academics, but they wanted to go out and look at this rise of spiritualism and what's going on.
What's the science behind these people claiming they can talk to the dead?
And is there something going on in these places that are known to be haunted?
Can we actually learn something more about it?
It wasn't really until the late 1920s or 30s that this study started to become incorporated into the university.
But that started in the USA at Duke University with Joseph Banks Rhine.
So it took some time to progress and become accepted as a science.
And even now, we still have to fight parapsychologists' corner against all the other sciences.
So how would you describe yourself then?
You're clearly an academic.
Yeah, well, first and foremost, my profession is as a psychologist.
But out of all the things that I teach, I teach on the psychology of death, dying and bremen.
I teach things about the psychology of sex and gender.
But the main thing that I focus on that I mainly teach and get asked to teach is parapsychology.
So I explore areas of human experiences and abilities that appear to be outside the realms of current scientific understanding.
So therefore, that makes me a parapsychologist.
Have you met and do you know Uri Geller?
I know Uri Geller and I know of him, but I've never met him.
Okay, well, I think you should.
I have to, anecdotally, I have to drive past his home at Sonning near Reading every single morning, and I've actually interviewed him there, and I know him reasonably well.
I think you should actually talk with Uri because it's been some time, I think, since he's been scientifically studied.
Of course, you'll know having read all about him that he was intensively scientifically studied.
And if you believe a lot of the legend about him, he worked with the American Secret Services, didn't he?
Helping them out.
Yes, something like that.
There's one video of him that I always show to the students, and it's before he rose to any sort of media fame.
And D. Scott Rogo, the late D. Scott Rogo, used to show this to his students as well at John F. Kennedy University.
And it's early laboratory footage with several other parapsychologists under pretty well-controlled conditions with young Uri.
And he's going through different tests to guess which pot has the water in it.
They do some simple telepathy tests.
And then they do one where they have a small weight on an electronic weighing scale that's completely covered so no one can actually touch it.
And he's just asked to put his hands near to it.
And they've tested any deformations on the measuring scale by jumping on the floor, banging the table that the weighing scale's on.
And when Uri comes in, he manages to, what appears to be, he manages to increase and decrease the weight within a matter of 10 to 15 seconds.
And the deformations on the scale look nothing like if you were to kick the table or jump on the floor or anything like that.
It's actually saying that there's a weight increase and a weight decrease, which was fascinating to look at.
And this is something that people don't get about him.
And having met him and had the pleasure of interviewing him many times, this guy is much more than a spoon bender.
Yeah.
Yeah, he claims to be able to do all sorts of things.
I know a couple of times on TV that he's even gone along to haunted locations and acted as a psychic medium as well to try and communicate with the dead, see if he can actually pick up any thoughts and feelings.
His abilities are completely varied, but everyone always remembers him for the spoon bending.
And sometimes he's been set up on TV, which has led to some classic footage that goes out.
And again, people only really remember that.
And when you're on TV, there's always this need to perform.
There's always different things going on behind the scenes.
It's better if you kind of go and meet these people for yourselves and see what they're actually all about and what's going on rather than actually seeing what TV can produce at the end of the day when the final edit comes out.
And in any form of science, which is what you're involved in, repeatability is what we aim for.
So whatever you're researching, whether you're going to look somewhere that may be haunted or whether you're doing any form of this, to be able to reliably measure and then repeat your measurements is what it's all about, isn't it?
It's where it's at.
Yeah, not just that, but also control.
There's much control that we can have for the experimenter.
So we know that there's no outside influences that can actually affect our results, either by people cheating or some environmental effect that we're not aware of that seems to be playing with the results.
And also we have to be aware of the people taking part in the study.
Are they skeptics or believers of the paranormal?
And the same goes for the experimenters.
Because on one side, we could have demand characteristics coming from the participants wanting to try and get the study right for the experimenter.
And at the same time, if the experimenter's quite cynical, then usually their results don't seem to find anything.
And if they're quite a believer in the paranormal, then they seem to get incredibly high statistical significance.
So it's really best to be on the fence, open-minded, but always questioning.
Absolutely.
And clearly that is what you are, and that's what you've done.
Now, the main reason why we're talking is a book, my attention was alerted to this by your publisher, and I'm very pleased that your publisher did, that resurrects a manuscript from somebody pretty famous in paranormal circles in the United States.
Now, I'm not sure if I'm going to pronounce this guy's name right.
Dr. Alex Tanos.
Is that right?
Spot on.
Okay.
Spot on.
I hoped so.
And he had a collaborator, as many of these people, right up to the present day.
And that was Dr. Carl Ossis.
Yeah, Carlos Ossis, yes.
Carlos Osis.
And they were both with the ASPR.
And the thing that really fascinated me about them is their heyday seemed to be in the 1980s.
We hear a lot of people who did research in the 30s and the 20s, the great era of mediumship.
Their stuff was right, smack, dab, bang in the middle of the 80s.
Well, it's claimed that some of their case files from having investigated haunting phenomena were used to actually construct some of the scripts for Ghostbusters soon as though that came out in the mid-80s.
And certainly Dan Aykroyd, when he was writing Ghostbusters, he used a lot of the American Society for Psychical Research files to help get the right terminology for the character.
So when you watch Ghostbusters, you find that the terminology they're using virtually most of the time is spot on, except for the stuff that's goofed up for the entertainment value.
So these flying balls of slime, which appear to be the ghosts and so forth.
Dan Alcroyd's grandfather, I believe, was a member of the ASPR and also a spiritualist.
So they took it very seriously.
But Alex Tannis loved the term Ghostbusters.
He wished he'd coined it himself.
I read that at the back.
It's right at the back end of your book.
And there's some fascinating stuff about the Ghostbuster connection.
And I thought that he would slough it off and say, no, that's not me.
We're serious investigators here.
But no, he loved it.
No, he absolutely did.
And that's why I really wanted to get this book out.
He'd published three before.
One was an autobiography of his life and focusing on these psychic abilities that he'd had since a child, even though he moved away from it slightly to pursue an academic career.
And then after that, he focused on children's psychic abilities.
Again, looking back to his own childhood and then comparing that to other children.
Do children seem to have this innate psychic response to everything that we tend to ignore in day-to-day lives, such as when children say they have imaginary friends.
Well, is it imaginary?
Or are they tuning in to something different?
Are they accurately describing relatives around them, relatives that are known to be dead?
And Alex Tammers seemed to be doing this.
And with a lot of children, this seems to be the same.
Children and young people seem to be magnets for this kind of thing.
I'm sure you know of Guy Lyon Playfair, who did all the research about the Enfield poltergeist.
And of course, that came down to a dysfunctional family living in a pretty ordinary house.
But the activity, as far as I recall, was centered around one young person.
Yeah, it was.
I think the guy has said that because of stuff like this, though, it's become stereotyped.
He was speaking at a conference at the University of Bath, which I attended as well, last September.
And he was saying that the notion that all poltergeist activity is focused around young children is nonsense.
It does happen quite a lot of the time, but this seems to be the main focus that the media has also taken on.
So, like with the film The Poltergeist and the little girl who stares at the telly and ends up going into this sort of limbo between life and death.
And it always seems to be this focus because of what the media has taken away.
But when you look at all the poltergeist cases that have been reported, sometimes you have an independent haunted property, say like Borley Rectory, that have their own poltergeist activity.
It's independent.
It doesn't seem to be centered around a person.
And Alex Tannis explored a variety of locations, some that had families, some that just had people watching over the place now and then, and some places that had just been abandoned for years.
And some with the most amazing backstories, which come out right from the start of the book that you have helped to bring to life now.
Tell me about Dr. Alex Tannos.
He's described at the beginning of this volume as what they would have called years ago a medium, not a term that he particularly liked.
Yeah, he wasn't a medium in the sense of he didn't hold seances.
He didn't turn up to people's houses to conduct parlor tricks, as he liked to call them.
He didn't consider himself this traditional spiritualist.
He was just someone that now and then had visions.
During his childhood, one particular case that was fascinating, he was out with one of his siblings and had this strange vision that something had happened to his father.
And they returned home and his father was outside gardening.
A bamboo cane had snapped in half and gone through his father's eye, which two weeks later led to his death.
Other things were they'd have family friends over and he would shake hands with them and predict when they were going to die.
So this led all the way through to his education where when he was in school, he was giving various readings to people in the class or he was saying things before the teacher managed to put it on the board.
So the answer to mathematical sums and so forth.
He was fascinated by it but didn't understand it and he absolutely admitted this all the way through the book which is why he went through a scientific education if you like.
He wanted to be a scientist to understand his own psychic abilities rather than just embrace what they were.
He wanted to explore the science behind the paranormal.
And if you look at the photographs of him in the book he looks like a very regular guy of the 1970s, 1980s.
I mean there he is.
I think he has a mustache and he looks very much like anybody you'd have seen walking through the streets of New York or Los Angeles, San Francisco back in that era.
So he's not a wacky hippie character.
No, everyone, I've never heard out of all the accounts of people that ever met him, I've never heard of bad words said against him.
Everyone said he was so friendly and embracing and loving.
He'd do anything for anyone.
But the thing they always picked up on on his characteristics, you picked up on the mustache, the main thing people admired were his eyes.
They were so dark and intense.
They said this added to his mystical appearance and the psychic appearance that it was having, the fact that his eyes were looking right into you.
But he came from a Lebanese background as well.
And all of his family now who run the Alex Tannis Foundation, it's shocking how much a lot of them you can see sort of characteristics of Alex still in them.
And this, again, is intense, beautiful eyes.
And you said his background very much scientific.
And the photographs in the book bear that out because quite often on the various pages, he's photographed there with masses of equipment, things that look like ancient computers that are virtually taking up an entire war.
It's shocking, isn't it?
I mean, stuff that took up an entire war now is just embraced in a little computer chip that's no bigger than your thumbnail.
And the stuff that they were using there that you see in the book, that was to test.
They tested two things.
Carlos Osis and Alex Tannis believed two things could verify in scientific terms life after death.
And that would be if you can prove that the mind can remain active outside of the body via out-of-body experiments.
Excuse me.
And then also via hauntings, if you can actually demonstrate that there are spirits of the dead there that can actually pass on information that's accurate.
So what they were doing with the out-of-body experiments, which you see from the photographs, are twofold.
They had two things they were testing.
Alex would go four rooms away and he would sit in this room.
It was an isolation booth and he would meditate.
We call them perception labs and we have a couple of those at the University of Northampton.
And he would lie down and he would try and meditate and enter an altered state of consciousness so he could project his consciousness, which he called Alex II.
When he was projecting his mind and traveling beyond that room, this Alex II, a second version of him, this spirit form of him, if you like, could move about, see what people were doing, in some cases interact with him, which is mentioned in the book where people saw this ghost of him and yet he was confirmed in two other places.
But anyway, he'd go four rooms away and they'd have a target machine.
And this machine would be producing optical illusions, which you could only see if you look through this one particular spyglass.
And then you'd have to get three things right.
There's a spinning disk that's moving via a random number generator and it has four quadrants.
So upper left and upper right and lower left and lower right.
And then each one of those four quadrants could change color and it would change symbol.
So for example, you could say upper right, red, bird.
So that would be one of the symbols that comes out.
And every time they did each trial, Alex had to guess or perceive what target was showing up.
At the same time in that room, they had a strain gauge to see if there were any environmental changes going on within this empty room.
This room only had the optical illusion device in it.
In periods where he was getting a string of hits, so he was getting these targets right, clustered together, the strain gauge was producing unusual activity, which they couldn't explain.
So for them, as a preliminary study, they thought this was suggesting not only that, yes, Alex could actually see information at distance in this outer body state, but they could actually detect some sort of presence, which could be consciousness, outside of the body.
It demonstrated the potential that consciousness doesn't have a fixed locality to the human body.
It can travel out.
And therefore, if it can do that, can it sustain itself beyond bodily death, which would verify the haunting phenomena.
And that was the thing that fascinated him.
And in that section of the book, there was a reference to him either becoming or being perceived as a sort of point of light at times, pure energy.
Yeah, he perceived it that way.
That's the only way he could describe it.
Some people, though, when he was having an out-of-body experience and he went to visit them, he looked just like you or I in The flesh, you would not be able to tell that this person isn't actually there unless you try to reach out and touch them and see whether your hand goes through them or not.
And there are at least three or four cases that are in various publications that have documented these experiences where Alex was confirmed to be in one place with one set of people, and yet at that very same instance, he was in another state or even another country with some other people.
And it's fascinating.
But yet, the actual hymn, the version that was verified as being in that place, Alex one, if you like, he said he was either having a daydream or he was meditating or he was asleep at the time that experience occurred.
So he was in and out of an altered state of consciousness again.
When and how did he die?
He passed away in 1990.
Ironically, the same year my other admirer in parapsychology, I admire Alex Tannis, but also Scott Rogo.
They both passed away in 1990.
And Alex Tannis, he was suffering from cancer towards the end and was receiving treatment for it.
And he got the old clear towards the end, but then subsequently passed away of a heart attack.
But it's still not 100% sure exactly what it was, but it was a combination of those things.
I have some highly astute and extremely skeptical listeners, and I know exactly what they're going to be screaming into whatever listening device they're using right now.
They will be saying that if this man was so connected and could project himself in OBEs like that, surely then he's going to have made an appearance in the, what is it, 24 years since 1990.
Absolutely.
Someone asked me that the other day, and has Alex ever got in contact with his family who kept this foundation going?
He wanted it to be set up.
When he knew that he was suffering with cancer, he wanted it to be set up.
And so they continued it.
And to my knowledge, no one's had some sort of visitation from him.
But people like Scott Rogo, who spent years researching the paranormal, he hasn't been reported to have come forward.
There's a few people that have.
Frederick Myers, even some people claimed they'd seen the ghost of the famous ghost hunter of the 1930s, Harry Price, after he passed away.
So there's a few ghost hunters and parapsychologists that seem to have come back, but not all of them.
And not something that you could do necessarily scientifically or repeatedly, which is a shame because, as you say, there are so many people like Alex Tannis and many others who you would expect to come back in some way.
I mean, look, my father was very connected.
He had some ghost experiences.
Good lord, in the 1930s, his father used to read the tea leaves for people.
He was very psychic too.
So I thought if anybody was going to come back and make their presence felt, it would be my dad.
But apparently, it doesn't work that way.
No, someone emailed me after I did a radio show about a month ago now, and it was a big one for the United States.
And I got loads of emails.
Then someone, this always happens, someone misinterprets what I am.
And I always say that I'm a psychologist at the start.
You brought that up and asked me to explain it.
So I'm a psychologist.
I look at the human mind and human behavior and how the brain works and so forth.
But they assumed I was a psychic.
So they'd emailed and said, you know, my friend passed away.
How come they haven't visited me?
Is my future going to be a good one?
I have a bad tooth.
Would it be possible for someone to make a 3D copy of it and replace it?
So I applied to all of these.
I said, number one, I'm a psychologist, not a psychic.
So, you know, sometimes people have a visitation from the dead.
Sometimes they don't.
It's the nature of the phenomena, which is why it's always been termed for over 100 years, spontaneous phenomena.
Number two, are you going to have a good future?
Well, if you keep your nose clean, if you keep on thinking positively about all your business plans and you always look both ways before you cross the road, I would have thought you've got a pretty good future ahead of you.
Yeah.
So I tried the best I could to answer all their questions, but I said, bottom line, I'm not a psychic.
All right.
Let's explain something that we haven't explained up to now and we need to.
What is your fascination with Tannis and Carlos Ossis?
How did you get involved in this?
Well, I was studying, I think I'd gone on to study my master's degree at the time I was at Sheffield Hallam University.
And I was also a student representative of the Paris Psychological Association for that year.
And a notice came up saying that the Alex Tannis Foundation were offering a scholarship award to students to help them with their research.
And I'd never heard of Alex Tannis to that point.
I must have read of him because several books that I do recall having read, I went back to them and found references to him.
So my eyes must have glanced over it.
And it was only brief mentions about Alex Tannis and his work.
So anyway, I applied for the scholarship and got it and found out that the family run the foundation and noticed that he'd been termed a psychic but also a parapsychologist.
So two contradicting things there.
One shouldn't normally be the other.
It's very rare to have a parapsychologist that says they have psychic abilities.
And they sent me his book, Beyond Coincidence.
And I read that and I just became fascinated by this guy.
But then I stood back and thought, hang on, how come this guy hasn't come up in the UK more often?
We never mention him in parapsychology lectures at the university, along with all the other great psychics like Eileen J. Garrett and Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Piper.
He doesn't seem to be there.
So I looked into the literature of the USA and he rose to fame over there.
People loved him.
He did all kinds of TV events and radio.
He also took study groups from the USA over to Egypt and to do spiritual development classes over there.
But in terms of the UK, I don't think he hardly ever came here or did much over here with the British Society of Psychical Research.
So I think this is where he slipped the net.
And I think it's so unfortunate, seeing as though during the time he was around and, as you say, doing the most research in the 1980s, he could have come over here and done some really beneficial research, even if it was just the same out-of-body research.
It would have been great to have tried it across the pond, as it were.
But there's a manuscript which has formed the basis of this book that you've been involved in.
And it seems to me just by reading through the book that arose from this manuscript that this was his great work.
And it was so sad that it appears this great work until you finished it off was unfinished.
Yeah.
I think this is the other thing that kind of stopped him being recognized, the fact that he wrote so much.
And a lot of his unpublished stuff is available on the foundation website in the media library, but he didn't publish it.
And, you know, he visited the Bermuda Triangle with study groups and went to find out what that was all about, if they could, and went to various places to investigate hauntings.
It was written up, but it was never published or submitted anywhere.
What did he make of the Bermuda Triangle, by the way?
Oh, that's something that I need to get around to to actually look into it.
I keep on glancing at the title and think that's I've got to read his lecture on it.
I mean, I've got another manuscript up here in my office, which is an entire book of his.
It's another one that hasn't been published, which is on UFOs and his investigation of those and people that claim they've been abducted.
And that's another one.
It's a whole manuscript.
It's ready.
It just needs a look through by an editor and then it's ready to go off.
He just never got around to doing it.
So this guy was prolific and also very connected.
And you were the right guy in the right place at the right time.
I hope so.
That's very kind of you to say that.
I really do hope that I've actually done some good with this book and it's actually come out okay.
I mean, so far the reviews have been fantastic and everyone's been very kind with it.
And the foundation seemed very happy.
And that pleases me to know that it's his family that are saying that.
It was only three chapters long what he'd done and it just wasn't long enough for a book.
It was just an idea to get all the investigations that OSIS and Tannis had done, that they'd written up down into a book form.
And since though Osis and Tannis aren't about, I thought I'll try and fill in the gaps.
So I took all the interviews and all the extra notes that he'd done on survival of death and ghosts, tried to pad those out.
I wrote a lengthy introduction on who he was and why this book on ghosts.
And then I had to make an appendices section as well, again, just to pad the book out some more.
So I asked people that knew him and had done ghost investigations with him to contribute something.
And Lloyd Auerbach, he let me use one of his interviews with him on ghosts and hauntings as well.
So it's become this really neat little read.
And even I have read it back recently just to check through it because it's been a while since I've properly looked at the book and I'm actually quite enjoying it because even though I've edited it together, it's Alex's work more than it is mine.
So I've only written here there, here and there in the book.
It's mainly Alex's work throughout the main body.
I love the case studies in it and the way that they're unfolded.
It's done in a very credible way.
Before we talk about some of those, let's just ask about the man we haven't talked much about so far we need to, his collaborator, Dr. Carlos Osis.
A lot of people in this field have collaborators.
I recently interviewed Tricia Robertson up in Scotland, and she worked with a famous professor, Archie Roy, who's sadly no longer with us.
So this is very common, isn't it, to work in this way?
Tell me about Carlos Osis.
Carlos Osis was a psychologist and he worked at various universities.
I believe he was, I'm probably saying it completely wrong, but I'm sure his background was from Austria.
And in the later years of his life, he went over to the States and was working as one of the main research coordinators for the American Society for Psychical Research.
His normal collaborator, or certainly the one that he's recognized for, is working with Elenda Haroldson because they produced a book called At the Hour of Death, where they were looking at nurses and physician reports of people that were dying and strange experiences that were occurring around them.
But it's because of that book that Osis got to know Tannis.
Tannis wanted to know more about life after death.
So towards the end of his studies, once he gained his doctorate and finished off his third master's, he was working in a hospice for the terminally ill to see if it would teach him any more about what was going on at the end of life.
And it was there that he met up with Carlos OSIS.
The work at the hospital he did, he admitted, didn't really tell him much more that he needed to know.
But then he went off with OSIS and they decided to conduct these experiments in a controlled manner and explore the science behind these things.
So that's where they met up and that's why they found a friendship and also a partnership in working because they both come from two completely different backgrounds, but it worked well together.
You know, on an investigation, you've got this guy who's a scientist.
He's very well minded in theology and philosophy and claims these psychic abilities.
And on the other extreme, you have this psychologist who's used to using lab equipment, who sets up a few environmental monitoring pieces of equipment when you go to haunted locations, thermometers and so forth.
So they work well as a little ghost hunting team.
I've kept a few little quotes from the book.
I shared something with you before we started recording.
I made copious notes on the book so that I could talk around them with you.
And just before we went to record, somehow they all disappeared from my computer.
I'm sure it was human error, but it could have been something else.
But I've got a few left.
And a few little quotes here, I just want to read.
Here's one from early on in the book.
Houses with multiple layers of consciousness are perhaps the most difficult cases to solve.
Very old places or sites often have events attached to them that begin with one key parallel dramatic event that triggers the same type of recurring behavior in subsequent inhabitants of the site.
In other words, as we've seen so many times, haunted sites and perhaps multiply, some of these places are overlaid, multiply haunted, if you want to use that word, affect subsequent generations of people being there in similar sorts of ways.
Yeah, I mean, the way that Dr. Tannis wanted to look at it was if people have been living on that site for years and years, maybe even hundreds of years, then their spirit will remain in that location.
But all these spirits won't be aware of each other because they've died at different times.
So it creates different layers of consciousness where there are different spirits all inhabiting the same space, but they're layered up.
They can't interact with each other.
It was up to him to actually try and unite them, especially if it was two lovers or partners that formed together and then they died at different time periods and one promised to wait for the other.
I'm glad you said that because there is one great story and it is about, let me, if I've got this right, and I'm doing this for memory, as you know, it was about a woman.
It was a husband and wife team, wasn't it?
And it was a woman who, because of an accident, domestic accident, burned herself to death.
It was terribly sad.
And The guy was distraught and they had wanted to meet up.
Tell me about that story.
Yeah, he went into a house.
I've forgotten which one it was at.
I don't know if it was a specific one or if it was just.
I believe it was one house, yeah.
And he went into the kitchen and he got this vision of a woman at the stove, and then some of the fat from the pan had splattered onto her clothing.
And the next thing he saw, she was just engulfed in flames.
The husband was out at the time, but when he returned home, he found her there, picked her up and took her to bed and had her sort of nursed and looked over.
But two days later, she passed away.
Before she died, she said how much that she loved her husband and that she would wait for him.
On the other side, she would wait in the house more or less until he passed over.
And I think many years went by.
He didn't remarry.
It was at least 20 years or so.
He stayed living in that house.
And he'd reported various things that suggested to him that she was about.
So maybe sensing her presence, hearing the odd footstep up the stairs, something moving about on its own, something across the table.
And then when he passed away, Alex said that they were both there, but they were both walking about completely confused because they couldn't find each other.
And Alex said that's because the time period was so long.
There was a multiple layer of consciousness on that site, but they were never going to find each other.
It was down to him to reunite them.
And he said that he successfully did that.
And then I won't give away the end, but he said, you know, it all came out good in the end.
But that was the story of that.
It was about continued bond.
It's a really lovely story, actually.
It's very heart-rending and heart-warming in a lot of ways.
But that suggests if they couldn't, after death, connect because they were in different planes and their consciousness had survived in a different place, but parallel, then how can spirits, as we call them, how can they connect with us?
Or do they connect with us?
Are they connecting?
This is the thing.
This is where I have to start thinking like a psychic and just say, this is what I guess is going on, but I can't be sure.
If we're assuming that there is such a thing as life after death, then to experience a ghost or something like that, we're assuming it's stuck in a state where it is in limbo.
It's not quite alive and it's not quite dead, but it's still consciously aware of everything that's going on.
So like that out-of-body experience or like that dream where we go to sleep and we believe we've gone to our old school and we're seeing it in a different way or we're visiting a friend.
Is our mind actually traveling and interacting with those people?
Especially if you come out, you wake up with information that's correct.
Is that what this limbo state is like?
You're in this dream world.
And I guess that's what it is.
And sometimes just two consciousness forms of consciousness can't meet.
And I guess that's what's going on.
I really don't want to elaborate too much on that because it's assuming something that I can't do.
I'm not psychic.
Alex was the one with the answers and all the answers he provides are in the book and they're probably not even complete.
Alex probably could have added so much more to that.
But, you know, just off the top of my head, thinking like a psychic, I guess that's what's going on.
And what about the theory that what we here have here, what we see and what we experience, this is the fantasy.
This is the, well, let's not say fantasy, but this is the non-reality.
It is our creation.
Yeah, a lot of researchers and philosophers have thought that.
There was a guy called David Storm who produced a book called The Atheist Afterlife, and he believed that this reality that we're experiencing is quite fake.
When we die, this thing suddenly takes over called the Inside-Out Theory, as he calls it.
And the dream world becomes the reality, and the reality becomes the dream world.
So when we dream, that is what the ultimate reality of death is like.
Other people, such as Attila Vonzele, who was similar to Alex Tannis in a way, he was an astral projector and a psychic.
He reported what his own astral projections were like.
And he said it was like traveling about the world at great speed.
So very much like a dream state where you picture yourself flying.
But he viewed everything and everyone as though you were looking through a goldfish bowl.
And, you know, you weren't quite perceiving everything in the normal way because you weren't perceiving it through the normal senses.
You hadn't got eyes and a nose and a mouth and ears anymore, arms to touch with.
You're this free-floating consciousness, this essence.
And again, that's very much what like a ghost is when we say just that white lady or that grey mist, the figure that floated down the stairs.
And the $64,000 question, the one that is so hard to answer, and I suppose we're all going to get the answer to it one of these days, but we can't at the moment necessarily communicate it back to people in this realm.
But the idea of that consciousness which we all have, can it survive?
And if it does survive, how does it survive?
Well, going back to you mentioned Tricia and Archie Roy, I love them both a bit.
They're very nice people.
And I'd met Archie a few times.
And wasn't it Archie's final quote that he said that once he dies and if he finds out there's nothing there, he'll be very disappointed.
Yes, I've heard that.
He'd done so much research on it.
We don't know.
There's some people that say, and I think it's very ignorant when they do say it, that there's no evidence for it.
There is loads of literature.
The University of Northampton has loads.
The SPR office has loads.
There are loads of foundations, you know, the Alex Tannis Wand, the Parapsychological Association, the Parapsychology Foundation.
There's loads of libraries with all the literature, with all the books, with all the journals, with all the research.
There is a wealth of evidence.
And I said this the other day to someone.
Each case alone, you could probably find a rational explanation.
Doesn't necessarily mean it's the right one, but you could probably apply one and then say this case is flawed.
But when you put them all together and you adopt this gestalt entity, you know, the whole, this mass of evidence is greater than the sum of its parts.
And there is loads of evidence to suggest this stuff's going on.
And even in the 1930s, they had enough statistical evidence to suggest that psychic abilities are possible.
So as a parapsychologist, I know that these experiences occur.
That's accepted.
How they're occurring and why they occur, we don't know.
We just have some people in other areas of science that adopt this ignorant view and say, it's not possible, this isn't going on.
Well, they're generally people that haven't read the books and haven't read the literature.
And, you know, being on this show right now, if you asked me a question about astrophysics or something like that, I'd honestly say, Howard, I don't really want to answer that because it's not my area to answer.
I've never read a book on astrophysics.
I've never really read a paper on astrophysics.
You know, everyone that has their own discipline should really stick To their own discipline and do it well.
And what we have to bear in mind, of course, is that our knowledge today is not going to be our knowledge 30 years from now.
We will inevitably know more.
So that is why it's never really a good idea to rubbish many, many things, because actually they may end up being right.
We may end up meeting with aliens.
We may end up discovering, as the papers have suggested recently, that there are things on the moon that we didn't put there.
Yeah, absolutely.
And at the end of the day, all this literature that we've gathered will help either way, whether there is something or whether there isn't something.
We'll learn from having bothered to take the time and collect it, research it, understand it, understand it in terms of human behavior from psychology and try and understand the physics of it and then all the other aspects, the sociology, the anthropology, the history and philosophy and theology, why we've adopted different things, why we approach different things, why one mechanism acts on another.
We've taken the time to actually learn what's going on in this, just a little bit of a weird side of science.
And some people have approached criticism and everything and fought against it just to try and make sure that we've learned just that little bit more about the world that we live in.
And it's all important.
And as you say, 30 years down the line, maybe we'll have made a groundbreaking discovery in at least one area of parapsychology.
And then we can move on.
There are several things that have become adopted into normal sites now, like hypnotism.
That was something in early psychical research that was one of the paranormal elements that was looked at.
Nowadays, it's not really looked at in parapsychology.
We understand what's going on there.
Also, dreams.
We don't actually know, even in general psychology, what dreams are, what they're for.
You know, you could say that it's parapsychological, but we just leave it as this nice mystical thing of human psychology.
When we go to sleep, we create this fantasy land and we go after it.
But what's it for?
What does it do?
What's its purpose?
And some of it seems to present a psychic element when we dream of something before it happens and so forth.
So we still have so much to learn.
We do about dreams.
I mean, that's a whole other show in itself.
But I have dreams that are three-dimensional, full color, and I meet and have conversations with people that I've never seen before.
That I do not understand.
I'm told that not everybody dreams in color or has those experiences.
But how can I have conversations with very clear people who I can remember, who I simply have never met?
I don't know.
I mean, again, I think the person to ask there was Alex Tannis with his third book when he wrote Dreams, Symbols and Psychic Power.
It's still today considered to be one of the best books on dream interpretation and why we have dreams about certain interactions with people that we don't know or why we dream about our teeth falling out or flying or going upstairs or walking downstairs and all these different symbolic things.
He found that they all have a general meaning and he tried to break it down in terms of psychology and his own psychic experiences.
Each dream for each person can mean something completely different.
So I dream about my teeth falling out and it might be because I've got worries in my waking life about relationships or something like that.
And you might be dreaming about your teeth falling out because you've got a worry about money trouble or something like that.
It just depends.
You have to try and relate it to your waking life and does it make sense?
A lot of it is symbolism.
Now look, in the time that we have remaining, and as you know, my copious notes for this conversation have disappeared into the innermost recesses of my hard drive or into cyberspace or something.
So we're going to do this off the top of our heads.
Talk me through a couple, if you can, of your favorite Tanos investigations.
I know there's the Frolic House and the Dandy House.
And the Dandy House has, I only more or less transcribed what he'd put and found out recently that even now people are still fascinated by the Dandyhoust investigation.
So I wouldn't really like to go into that off the top of my head without getting it wrong.
So the most notable one, which I'm sure a lot of the listeners will be familiar with, is the Amityville case.
And Amityville became popularized due to the book by Jay Anson that was brought out and then also the film that came out after that.
See, a lot of people would think the Amityville horror was fiction.
But the Amityville horror, there was more to it than that.
There was a real case around that.
Well, it created a big debate.
I mean, some people were saying that there was a murder involved and a body was hidden in the house and so many other things.
Believe me, if you trawl through the literature, there's a lot more than what the surface of Wikipedia might tell people.
And if you look around the books and what various investigators did, again, it will vary.
The bottom line is, when the case came up and the movie got popularized, the family that were living there, the Lutz family, they moved out and the place became abandoned, but they still had the rights to the property and the keys at the time.
I think they were trying to sell it on.
But anyway, the parapsychological community wanted to find out what was going on, why it's suddenly been popularized by the media in this film, and was there something to this haunting.
Now, two places were called at the same time.
One was the American Society for Psychical Research in New York, and the other one was the Psychical Research Foundation in North Carolina.
And Dr. Jerry Solvin was sent over from there, and Drs Osis and Tannis were sent from the ASPR at the same time.
Ironically, they had no idea, they'd not been communicating, but they were sent on the same day.
So they met up, that made a brilliant team of three.
And I believe Jerry went to speak to the family, and Osis and Tannis got the keys to the place.
So they went to the house, they had a good look through, they did their usual investigation where Osis would have a cassette recorder, record their conversation throughout the house.
Tannis went through the whole place and came back to OSIS and said, I'm not feeling anything.
I don't get anything.
I'm not sensing any current activity.
I'm not picking up with spirits.
It literally seems, for want of a better term, it seems dead in here.
And then they went back to Jerry.
They spoke to the family, had a chance to interview them.
And as Alex was walking about the house, he caught more than a glimpse in the Lutz family's home of a contract which said that they were under contract because of the book and the film to keep the story of the haunting alive as though it had been completely made up.
And this family was asked by the people promoting the book and the film to keep the story going within the local press and media and so forth.
For parapsychology though, this was potentially incredibly damaging if parapsychologists had got involved investigating a haunted location that wasn't genuinely haunted, it was just created through media hype.
So immediately, OSIS and Tannis went away, they went back to the ASPR, and Jerry Solvin went back to North Carolina.
But just as they were leaving, they noticed camera crews turning up, local newspaper reporters turning up, and there turning up was the famous demonologist of the USA, Edin Lorraine Warren.
And they went in and they got a load of publication, well not publications, but publicity out of investigating Amityville and claiming that they experienced all kinds of things in there.
Also, the ghost hunter Hans Holzer joined them for a few investigations inside the house.
They later went on radio and TV and claimed loads of things.
One particular thing that's mentioned in this new book, Conversations with Ghosts, is that the Warrens had claimed that they'd been with Tannis, or at least Tannis had said that while he was in Amseyville, he'd levitated inside the house due to the activity there and had seen the devil.
And a listener to the show wrote to Alex and told them what they'd heard, and he was furious.
He wrote back to the companies, the radio companies and so forth and told them to reject the statement or clarify on radio what had actually happened in Tannis' own words.
But that was all he was willing to do.
I don't think any parapsychologist in their right mind want an association with the place, even to go live on radio and say, look, I went in there and there was nothing there.
They just didn't want anyone to know that they'd been there.
But finally, this stuff has been published later down the line.
And so that's in the appendices section discussing Amityville.
And it's also large thanks to Lloyd Auerbach as well, because in his book, ESP Hauntings and Poltergeist, he discussed his initial interviews in the 1980s with Alex and OSIS when they came back from Amityville.
And he said, you know, what was it like?
What did you experience?
So a lot of the first-hand information came from Lloyd.
And in what kind of state did they come back?
I think frustrated, annoyed, you know, because that's their time and they were doing it voluntarily.
And I think they realized what was going on straight away.
And I think Lloyd also said, did you, before you went, did you think something was going on?
And I think they had doubts, but they were still willing, as you should be, you know, that open-mindedness, but questioning everything.
I think that's the attitude they went with.
But when they saw that contract, that was the last straw.
You know, they'd taken the time and Dr. Jerry Solvin had taken the time as well.
And so it was a valuable lesson to be learned.
But it was good that they got out of the time that they did.
It seems to me that reading about Tannis and Carlos Osis, they were people very much, of course, of a scientific bent who wanted to rationalize things.
Did Tannis ever come across anything that he really could not rationalize, really could not find an explanation for?
I think he was open to all kinds of things.
I think that something of his that should have been investigated more, that should have produced some more publications, was his ability to project light from his eyes, which was known as light projection ability.
And he'd mentioned it at a conference once.
There was a conference paper on it that he presented.
A few people, when he'd gone around to their house for dinner, he was sat in their dining room and said that he could do this.
And so he started to project images onto the wall of people and the outlines of them.
And apparently it was luminous as well.
And people could see this outline of a head and shoulders and so forth.
He was even taken to the Maimonides Medical Centre.
And he was tested by Chuck Honiton, who came over to the University of Edinburgh to study his PhD in primary psychology.
He unfortunately passed away halfway through doing that.
But he's still a very famous name in primary psychology.
So it was Chuck Honiton and Dr. Alan Vorgan.
Alan Vorgman had done loads of studies on telepathy and also claimed some psychic abilities.
So anyway, these two people were testing Alex in the Maimonides Medical Center for having this ability to project light from his eyes.
And they placed him in a room with very low lighting and gave him different things to look at and then project them on the walls.
They could see what he was projecting, but it was one of those situations where you're faced with something so remarkable, they couldn't say, well, yes, it seems he's genuinely doing this.
Let's get an orthoptist in to find out what's going on in his eyes to actually be able to do this.
They said, surely it's down to us as experimenters.
This must be some form of suggestion here that we're susceptible to.
Maybe it's telepathic and he's just passing this image on to us.
So actually, as people of science, they were debunkers.
Yeah, they were debunking it, but I think they were doubting their own experiences more than debunking because it's there on the wall.
And, you know, with it being a big institution, I was asked recently, well, where's the paper from it?
And that was a good point.
I spoke to Professor Stanley Krippner, who's over in San Francisco, again, another big name in parapsychology.
And I said, what happened to all the papers from the My Monitors Medical Center, excuse me?
Because they did so much testing there.
And he said that Chuck Honerton got rid of a load of the papers before he left there, simply because he said that all the raw data was taking up too much space in his office.
So he shredded a load.
You're like, what a waste.
That could have gone to a library or other places.
But, you know, some data in some instances goes missing.
And you've heard of cases of sometimes there's a tragic fire in a library and stuff like that.
But imagine all the rare documents in there that just go missing.
That's it.
They're never going to come back.
So, you know, all we have is just this anecdote of what people saw and they mentioned it in a book.
And it's just not enough.
It's certainly not enough to convince a wider audience.
It's not going to convince science.
And it's not quite enough to convince me.
But I certainly don't doubt that they had some form of experience.
That's all I can say.
I wonder if there's anybody today who claims to be able to do that.
Well, I was speaking to Steve Parsons about this and if we could actually find anyone else within the psychical research literature that claimed that they could do this.
And there are some relations to some early mediums in the 1920s or so that claimed that they could pick up hot coals or produce luminous lights within a seance room.
And also the Skull Report, when that was produced in the Society of Psychical Research, the sitters were claiming that while they were sat in the circle, they were seeing these luminous balls of light passing through them.
They could also grab them in their hand and hold them, and then they would leak through their fingers.
And there's even some video footage of this, but it's all in very, very, very poor lighting.
It's completely different to what Tannis was reporting.
He was sat, picture yourself in a dining room with some friends having a meal of an evening, and then one of them says, oh, did I tell you I can project something out of my eyes onto the wall?
Watch this.
You know, they've not stood up and switched the lights off.
They're just doing it there and then.
So there's no deception or magic or conjure or trickery going on.
At least not obvious trickery anyway.
Alex seemed to be doing this so spontaneously.
But there we go.
I'm glad that you're doing a lot to put out this man's work, not only in the UK, but around the world, because it seems to me that he needs to be given a little bit of a kickstart.
If you think of the reputation of people like Nikolai Tesla, people like that.
Now, we're not saying that he was on a par with him, but his legacy is there to behold.
And from what I knew nothing about Tannis before we talked, and now I know a great deal more.
He did a lot of work about apparitions, didn't he?
Yeah, again, that's the bulk of the book, really, looking into the definitions between what is a ghost and what is an apparition.
And he was describing one that has this current conscious awareness and it can interact, and the other one is nothing more than going to the cinema and seeing this recording being played back.
So one is just like a Xerox copy and the other one has some depth to it.
Yeah, a lot of psychics have reported that though, and sort of defined a ghost and an apparition as being these two different things.
And even some psychical researchers like Tyrrell in his book Apparitions describe different categories of ghosts.
The main thing that kind of sent me on a sidetrack with Tannis was when I looked into these study groups that he took out to Egypt and he didn't, again, a shame, he didn't write this stuff up and what he was doing out there.
I just gathered from people that had gone and from these pamphlets that he issued that they were doing these psychic developments out there.
And allegedly, Alex had discovered a hidden chamber below the Sphinx that no one knew about while he was out there.
He worked a lot for the police in finding missing people.
So he was very good at doing these things that interlinked with his ability to project his consciousness beyond the body and find hidden things, hidden rooms, hidden people.
And I went out to Egypt not last year, but the year before.
And I went to Cairo and other places that Alex had been to and had my photo taken in more or less the same places that he had, just for comparison.
But I spoke to people out there about their beliefs in ghosts and apparitions and compared them to reports from ancient Egypt and the ancient beliefs in ghosts, all the way back to when we see this classic path of the afterlife and being judged.
And that is this spiritual heart going on to be judged.
But the ancient Egyptians still believed that there were two things that were left behind besides that.
You split up into three things spiritually, this bar that goes off into the afterlife, the car, which is an absolute double of you.
It walks and talks like you.
It looks like you.
It's what we define nowadays as a typical ghost.
And then the coup.
The coup is this spiritual form.
It's a white or grey mist.
And it haunts the locality of the tomb.
And these things can come and go as they please, but they guard the body, the actual physical body that's left behind.
In modern Egypt, though, with it mainly being Muslim and Christian mix, the main two ghosts that they seem to have are jinns or genies and Afri.
Now the jinns and genies they believe can possess a man.
It enters a man through the mouth and takes over his body.
They seem to haunt near water and also haunt places typically where people are told not to go to.
So it's like a deterrent in policing people through religion to stop them going there because they're afraid of the ghost.
But the jinns can move at incredible speed.
They have incredible power.
And when you read the Quran, it said that these things predate humans.
Even though they're meant to be an image of a human, they predate them.
They were created by Allah through hot winds and smokeless fire and have warped the earth before man even came about.
Which suggests that we were created in the image of someone or something else.
Yes, that's a very good point.
Certainly.
You know, there's so many different theological takes you could actually put on ghosts.
And certainly reading the Quran, it's got a very interesting take on it compared to the Bible.
And then they have another one which isn't really mentioned as much as jinns.
Jinns seem to have priority in terms of ghosts in this religious perspective.
The Yifri, so when a violent death occurs and the blood is spilt on the ground, the body is taken away and buried.
If someone goes back to that place of the violent death and they disturb where the blood was spilled, it unleashes the spirit of the Ifri, again, who looks like the person that died there.
But these are ghosts that have the ability to inflict physical harm upon a person.
And as we have Casper the ghost and the stereotype of a ghost being this mist, in their children's cartoons, they depict quite often the Ifri, this ghost that can grow in size.
It can grow to the size of a house and makes this strange noise as it grows.
And the noise is more or less.
It's a T-O-T-O-T-O-T-O repeated strange noise as it grows.
And there are various stories of people allegedly encountering this ghost and also saying what the ghost can do, in which it will grow in immense size.
And if you get too close to it, it will lean over you and squeeze you to death.
So ghosts and the way they behave and what they do are dependent, and I wasn't really that aware of this, on the construction that we as a society or a religion or a group of people put upon them.
Oh, absolutely.
If you just generally look at your own paranormal beliefs, you know, whatever you experience within a haunted location normally is only going to happen depending on your beliefs.
If you're quite skeptical, then you'll rationalize everything that's happening.
That cold draft down the corridor is just because the doors aren't sure.
There's a window open at the end for the skeptic.
But for the paranormal believer, they allegedly felt maybe someone hurriedly run past them in a spiritual manner or felt the dress of a woman that's known to haunt that corridor flutter past them in a very cold breeze.
So it's interpreted in two different ways.
But if you have a religious interpretation, again, it's going to be completely different because certain religions will tell you what these different things are.
And if you follow a religion and you have high religiosity, then you will take your interpretation from that and therefore what your experience will be incorporated and mixed up with that.
Catchy, I've spoken over the years, and we're coming to the end of this now, but I want to have a rematch with you at some point very soon because you are a fascinating man to talk to.
I've spoken to a lot of researchers and I've often asked them, have you ever had a ghost experience yourself?
And most of them say, sadly, but I'd love to.
What about you?
I've never experienced ghosts.
I've never spoken to one, but, and here's the but, I have been at least to two or three locations and most scientists would probably not want to ever mention it live on now, which is a shame because I know there are a lot that claim that they haven't and they actually have.
And I'm not going to mention names, but they're certainly popular in the media and other parapsychologists.
Really?
Yes.
But so I've seen poltergeist activity.
I've been with police officers and other researchers when in a few haunted locations, alleged haunted locations around Nottinghamshire.
And this has involved throwing objects off down a room and then a completely different object will come back on command.
Or we've drawn around an object and left it and come back and I was the last one to leave the room with the keys and the first one to return and the object has moved out of a circle that we've drawn it in.
And, you know, it just defies, more so when you're seeing the stuff coming back, when you're throwing stuff and asking something to be thrown back, you wait for the first object to stop and then you ask and something completely different comes back at great force.
Your heart sinks, but at the same time you think, well, this just relates to the literature on this.
It just confirms that what other people are experiencing might indeed be this strange movement of objects, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's spirits of the dead.
It could be psychokinetic.
We willed something to move because we wanted it to move.
So there could be no chance of survival of death whatsoever because it's not suggesting it in that instance.
It's just a movement of objects.
But nevertheless, it was an independent movement of objects.
No one was touching it, no one was throwing it, and no one was in the area of the room where it came from.
And in some instances, that's on camera showing an object coming from an area of the room where no one was stood.
It's fascinating stuff.
Tell me very briefly about your own work to do with telephone calls from the dead.
I recently had an email from a listener who told me a story where a person who was no longer alive apparently phoned a care home claiming to be lost.
And this was a very credible listener, and it was a very credible story.
And you do hear these things a lot, don't you?
That's a good one.
I've certainly heard that a few times.
Briefly going over telephone calls is quite a hard one, but I'll just summarize what it is.
It's literally the phenomena of people claiming that they've had a telephone conversation with the dead.
And this can happen in a few ways.
One is very similar to what you've described.
Someone might be very aware that someone has died.
They might be in a state of bereavement and they hear the ringing of the telephone, pick it up, and lo and behold, it's that person's voice on the other end.
And they might say just a few words or maybe a name and their voice is mixed in with static on the line and then their voice fades out and you never hear a click of the receiver.
In other instances though, someone might call you, a good friend of yours, you have a long conversation, maybe about half an hour, and then you put the phone down, someone turns up or someone else rings you and then says, oh, did you hear about so-and-so, the person you were just talking to?
They died last week in a car accident.
And you're in absolute shock.
You're like, well, I've just been speaking to them for half an hour.
Absolute shock.
You come to the realization of what's going on and you think back to the conversation and you realize that a lot of the things that they were saying were very final.
You ring the telephone company and there's no record of that call taking place.
Do you believe this happens?
In some cases, there are other witnesses in the room to verify that that call took place.
In some cases, the phone was passed around like you do.
If it's a member of the family and you say, oh, so-and-so's on the line, do you want a word as well?
And you pass the phone over so you all get a chance to speak.
There's multiple witnesses building up, which adds more credit to it.
Just like with cases of ghosts, if it's just one-on-one, it's very hard to actually fully believe that that person has encountered something that we can't explain.
If it's a group of people that all saw the ghost, it becomes harder to rationalize.
The same as if it's a group of people that speak to this dead person on the telephone and there's no evidence with the call company of it taking place, then what was it?
It seems to have independently been created through the telephone itself, not through the telephone line.
So it's a bizarre phenomenon.
Cal, thank you very much for being one of the most interesting people that I've had on The Unexplained, which I've been doing for a good few years.
I'm so pleased we finally did this.
I want to do this again.
And if you ever fancy doing an investigation of somewhere claiming to be haunted, then, you know, I'm there.
There's a place called Cambridge Airport.
I don't know if you've heard that set of stories.
That's supposed to be one of the most haunted places in the UK.
It's not an airport anymore.
But I interviewed a guy who wrote a book about that.
And apparently, cups and bolts and that sort of thing would throw themselves at the backs of people there.
Sounds like a very active place, if it is to be believed, but that is perhaps something we could do in the future.
Thank you, Cal.
If people want to know about you, which they will, how do they find out about you?
They can go to CalCooper.com or swing by the University of Northampton sometime.
Either of those.
I would love to do that, I'll tell you.
Thank you, Cal Cooper, very, very much.
Thank you for having me.
The work of Cal Cooper.
And if you want to know more about Cal and his writing and his appearances and broadcasts and podcasts, you can do that.
Click on the link that I will put on my website, which is www.theunexplained.tv.
Thank you so much for your support.
Please keep your emails and donations coming.
Go to www.theunexplained.tv and that's how you can achieve that.
Until the next edition of The Unexplained, some really good guests coming soon.
Please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I'm in London.
This has been The Unexplained, and I will see you soon.
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