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Feb. 14, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:07:45
Edition 144 - Annie Kagan

Annie Kagan – a Doctor famous across the US for her book that claims she is communicatingwith her dead brother...

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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 the flood of emails recently and flood is a word maybe I shouldn't be using at the moment because here in the UK and especially in the part of the UK that I live in we are gripped by a flood crisis.
I'm not a big one for lapsing into tabloid headlines but that is what it is.
I've spent a couple of days this week reporting from a little place called Raysbury which is in the country not very far from London's Heathrow Airport and very close to the Thames which has become very relevant to these people who've had to deal with floods before but now they're saying not on this scale for many many decades.
I have seen heart-rending stories this week of people who've been flooded out, lost a lot, washed out of their homes, people crying, people asking for help.
And as I record this, the army is now in Raisbury, 100 troops, and many dedicated volunteer rescuers and other people helping those people out.
But again as I record these words, the worst is not over and at this moment, while I record there is a storm pounding my window.
Now if you think about this, the storms that have gripped the UK, and you may not know about this if you're in the States, but if you're in Britain you will know about this, they've been a fact of our reality for about two months now.
It all started well before Christmas.
And yes, our weather's been mild, but it's been very, very wet and very, very stormy.
There have been all sorts of effects here.
If you're in America or another place, check it out online.
You'll see a washed away railroad in one place in the southwest of England.
You will see enormous transport disruption and you will see some people's lives that have been ruined.
And this, I have to reiterate, is not over.
So I will be following this on the radio as a news story.
But it is perhaps ongoing proof, perhaps not, of the reality of climate change or something happening to our weather.
In America, you will know about the big freeze.
Well, that's not entirely unusual, but it's been deep and it's been problematic, to say the very least.
So I just wanted to flag that up right at the top of this show.
Thank you very much to my webmaster, Adam Cornwell, for his very hard work on my behalf, for maintaining the website and keeping the shows coming to you.
Adam is at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Like I said, thank you for your emails.
Keep those coming.
I'm going to try and do some shout-outs on the next show or possibly the one after that.
But do know that I very, very much take on board everything that you say and all the great guest suggestions.
And with a bit of luck, thanks to your guest suggestions and your persistence and mine too, it looks like we will be getting in the next show, Dr. Stephen Greer.
Watch this space and keep your fingers crossed.
This time round, we have a guest who is very well known in America.
I don't think so well known, indeed, known at all, in the UK.
Annie Kagan is her name.
She's been on various shows in America and has been in print a great deal.
For her book, The Afterlife of Billy Fingers, Billy Fingers, her, in Inverted Commas, bad boy brother, a musician, who died and then communicated in a most extraordinary way with Annie, she says.
Now, she and the book are not without their critics.
But it's a very compelling story that I wanted to tell here, and she'll be online to us very soon from Long Island, New York.
If you want to get in touch with me here on the show, send me an email.
Maybe a donation to the show would be gratefully received.
You know, money is always a problem.
So if you can do either of those things or both, go to w deunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv.
That's where you can send me a message of any kind about the show, guest suggestion, whatever, or make a donation to it.
Okay, let's not hang about this time.
Let's cross to the United States and from storm-battered Britain to ice-pounded America by the looks of it.
Let's get on Annie Kagan.
Annie, nice to talk with you.
I'm very happy to be here with you, Howard.
I've just been telling our listeners about how storm-tossed we are here as I record these words.
A fearful storm is battering at my window.
At some point, you may well hear the hail, but carry on regardless.
We've had storms here, and I think you probably had ice where you are in Long Island, haven't you?
A lot of ice and more snow expected.
Wow, what a winter.
And in your living memory, is this unprecedented and unusual?
You do get cold there, and we get rain here, but I have never known anything like this over this side.
No, this is quite unusual.
The winters have been actually getting warmer.
And the good thing about it is that it's good for farming and also it will kill a lot of the insects that have been thriving in the summer.
So I'm glad for the chill for that reason.
Well, I'm not a big one for insects, but some of these people who are experts say not a great thing if too many of them die because they keep other pests at bay.
And actually, you know, the cycle of life, it's not the greatest thing if they all drop dead, you know?
That's true, but the warm winters have not been, there have been too many insects.
So maybe this will balance it off.
Well, let's see.
But that's something that is very much preoccupying all of us here.
The amazing weather and climatic changes that we've been facing.
I want to talk about the book, which has made you very famous in the United States.
And I think you have a fair amount of awareness in different parts of the world, but not as much as you do in the U.S. This is The Afterlife of Billy Fingers.
This is a book about your brother who died and you say communicated with you afterwards.
So that's the story of the book.
Before we get that story, let me hear yours.
What about you?
What are you?
Well, actually, I had been a songwriter when I was 16, into my 20s, and then I became a chiropractor.
And I had a very successful practice in New York City.
And after about eight years, Howard, I started to feel the effects of working on people who were in pain and ill.
And to remedy that situation, I decided I wanted to learn to meditate.
So just before we go any further, you were taking on board their pain, because a chiropractor is what they call a bone cracker, isn't it?
You realign people's bones to make them pain a little less.
But you're saying that you were taking on some of that?
Well, actually, I wasn't the typical kind of chiropractor.
I worked a lot with muscles and cerebrospinal fluid.
And it wasn't so much that I was exactly taking on their pain, but I started to become kind of depressed and grouchy and not feeling as good as I had always felt.
So I thought that meditation would strengthen me.
But the interesting thing was that my meditation, the particular kind of meditation that I did, made me very, very sensitive.
And that sensitivity, instead of making it easier for me to work with people, began to make it even more difficult.
And so I did what was kind of the unthinkable, which was I gave up my practice.
At the same time, the noise of New York City began to also became much too stimulating for me.
So I kind of just gave up my life, sold my practice, bought a very small house by the bay on Long Island.
And I had no idea what was going to happen with my life.
I thought I would go back to writing music.
And it turned out that really all of these changes, which seemed very difficult at the time, were setting the stage for something that I could never imagine.
So you think you were being prepared?
I absolutely believe I was being prepared.
Now, at that time when you were feeling this sensitivity and doing the meditation, your brother was still on this side of life, was he?
Yes.
And as a matter of fact, my brother had been missing for many years.
My brother was actually a heroin addict for much of his life, had many drug problems.
And at that point, he had been missing.
We knew he was in South America, but we hadn't heard from him for a very, very long time.
So he'd really gone off the rails.
He had really disappeared.
And that was the state of his life when I moved.
I really hadn't heard from him.
And in your state of sensitivity and receptivity, did you sense that something bad may become of him?
I already knew something bad was happening to him.
So, yes, I was afraid, but not surprised at all.
And really, I wasn't very focused on thinking about him because it was too upsetting and there was nothing that I could do about it anyway, since there was no way to get in touch with him.
And had he had problems, I suppose, is one way to describe them all his life?
Had he been troubled?
Ever since I remember, he had been troubled.
That's why the subtitle of the book is How My Bad Boy Brother Proved to Me There's Life After Death, because he was always seen as my bad boy brother, because he always had addiction problems and other problems.
And I was kind of the good girl sister.
But I also mean it a little bit tongue-in-cheek because I always looked up to him because even though he had problems, he was very charismatic, very charming, really lived life on his own terms and enjoyed life a lot.
So it wasn't just a negative term, but it was also somewhat glamorous.
Yeah.
Well, it does have those connotations.
But of course, if you're the person who has to pick up the pieces and live around the person who's going through all of that, then it's not so nice.
Absolutely correct.
So you'd made a decision by the sounds of it that you were going to detach yourself because there was nothing, I'm inferring from what you said, there was nothing much you could do.
There was absolutely at that point nothing I could do because there was no way to contact him.
So I think ever since I was little, very little, I kind of practiced detaching because it was just way too upsetting to always be thinking about how much difficulty he was in, how much danger he was in.
So I guess it was a spiritual lesson of detachment since I was quite young.
But it's easy to talk about and it's easy to imagine detaching, but very hard to do in practice, isn't it?
Not when he was away.
It was very hard and almost impossible to do when I was trying to help him when he showed up and we actually rescued him from South America.
And I was his main caretaker.
Then it was almost impossible to detach.
So he'd been in South America before, you got him back and you became a carer for him, but even that didn't work.
No, it didn't work.
And you always feel that you could have done more.
And I guess that was one of the things about his death was you always feel, or I felt that I could have done more.
Somehow I could have saved him.
And so my grief was very, very deep.
Very, very deep.
It's a very, very human thing to think, what could I have done?
I think in any circumstances, I had a, we were speaking, setting this up a day or so ago, and I told you how I came home last Friday and found my downstairs neighbor dead.
And I'd gone out to work very early in the morning that day, and he'd Been in his apartment lying dead then.
And although it makes no sense whatsoever, I felt maybe if I'd, I don't know, what could I have done?
Maybe if I'd done something and hadn't gone out to work like that at that time, leaving him there, perhaps he might have survived, perhaps.
But these are almost irrational thoughts that we all have when somebody dies.
Doesn't matter whether it's a relative.
It may just be a neighbor like my neighbor.
That's so true.
And I remember when my dad died, I was quite young, and I went to see a spiritual advisor, and I was so guilty about everything.
I had so many regrets.
And he took my hand and he said, Annie, everybody feels they could have done more when somebody dies.
It's a human condition that we all feel we didn't do enough.
When you got this news from South America, the ultimate confirmation that your brother had passed away, how did that happen?
How was it delivered to you?
No, well, actually, first he called from South America in terrible shape, and we organized a rescue party because there was no way that I could go to South America drug country to rescue my brother.
And we brought him back here.
And that's when we started the rehabs, the all the different ways to try to help him.
But actually, he was too far gone at that point.
And I got the news one morning.
It was nine o'clock in the morning.
And I had been out in the shower, actually.
And when I came back, there was a message light on and it was the police.
And they said, if you know William Cohen, please call us.
And I thought he had been arrested because he had been arrested before.
And when I called him, I found out that he had been hit by a car in the middle of the night.
Oh, Lord.
And that he was dead.
And what were your feelings then?
Basically, I just got into bed and couldn't eat, couldn't sleep.
And this storm moved in, this incredible snowstorm.
It was a record-breaking blizzard.
And I felt him in the blizzard because he always liked storms.
And it was almost as if I felt him screaming through my windows.
And I actually enjoyed the storm because it made me feel close to him.
And then three weeks later, all of a sudden, as the sun was coming up, I heard Billy's voice really, really clearly, as if it was coming through a hole in my ceiling.
And he was saying, Annie, Annie, get up.
It's me.
It's Billy.
And Howard, actually, I was sure that I was dreaming.
And I said, Billy, you can't be here.
You're dead.
And he said, no, I'm here.
I want you to get up.
I want you to get a notebook.
And as I was up and walking across the floor, I realized that I wasn't dreaming.
And I started writing down the beautiful, comforting words that he was speaking to me from another beautiful divine dimension.
Now, you know that your book and your writings about this have been derided by some people.
There are critiques out there on the internet that I've seen.
And there are people who've said, with the best will in the world, that we all, a lot of us, have dreams about people who've passed.
My mother passed and I saw her in a dream.
My father passed, I saw him in a dream.
And they communicated through that dream.
And I'll never know whether that was them communicating or whether that was my mind creating something.
And the people who've criticized you have said, it was your mind and you visualized something that you wanted for whatever reason that might be.
Well, Howard, that was exactly what I thought.
And I was sure that somehow my mind was creating this imaginary conversation, although I don't know how, to make me feel better.
And I'm a very scientific person.
And so on Billy's second visit, he said, you know, I know you think that you're going crazy and this is your imagination.
So I'm going to prove to you that this is a real communication.
And he did.
And over a period of years, he gave me what's called evidentiary after-death communications.
Well, that's what everybody who researches this sort of thing looks for.
In the first instance, what was the proof?
What did he do?
Well, I think the very first proof came, he always spoke to me really at dawn, usually.
And one day I was in the kitchen and I had only told maybe four or five people about Billy.
And one of them was my friend Tex.
And I was in the kitchen preparing lunch.
And all of a sudden, I hear Billy coming through the ceiling saying, call Tex right now and tell her, show me the money.
So I'm very uncomfortable about doing this.
I don't know what he's talking about.
I don't really want to call my friend in the middle of the day and give her some message from the beyond.
But, you know, Tex has a good sense of humor.
So I called her and I said, God, Tex, I know this is going to sound crazy, but Billy just said to call you and say, show me the money.
What does that mean?
And she starts laughing.
And she tells me that that morning, that very morning, early in the morning, she had looked up at the sky when she was walking her dog.
And she said, Billy, if you're real, give me a sign.
And Texas is screenwriter.
So she came home and took a shower.
And when she got out of the shower, she was looking in the mirror and drying herself off and just saying over and over again, show me the money, show me the money, show me the money.
And she gets out of the shower and I call her and I say, show me the money.
So yeah, that was pretty amazing, I'd say, but it could also have been telepathy between you and tex.
I had never had that kind of thing happen to me before.
And there were other things.
Let's see.
What could not have been telepathy?
What could not have been telepathy was Billy describing music in his realm and then telling me about a piece of music in our dimension, in this world that I had never heard of before, that was precisely, exactly the same as what he had described.
That couldn't really be telepathy.
And what did he tell you about the way that he passed, what he knew about passing over, dying, and the transition that he made to wherever he is was?
Well, he said that when the car hit him, he felt no pain whatsoever, that he left his body immediately, and that he went into something that is called a healing chamber, which erased all the pain he has suffered in his lifetime, mental, physical, emotional.
And actually, he saw my father in that chamber.
And my father was joking around with him because they're both of that nature saying kind of, hey, what took you so long?
And then it turned out that the chamber was kind of a cosmic birthing canal that delivered him into a beautiful, luminous, divine universe where the presence of the divine was sensed in the light that was present there.
And the difference between that world and this world is that in that dimension, it's compassionate, intelligent, and you have no doubt about the existence of what I'll call the divine.
I don't like to say God because we have so many preconceived notions of God.
So I like to use the word the divine presence is absolutely certain in the other dimension.
Okay.
To some extent, it accords with descriptions of these things we've heard from other sources, but this idea of there being a healing chamber where you adapt by the sounds of what you're saying to where you are and what's happened to you, and then you're allowed to go forward to something else.
That's a different spin on what I've heard before.
Yes, there's a lot of things in this book that are different because it's a two year, two and a half year journey into different realms of the afterlife.
And many of the reports that we receive about what happens are from near-death experiences.
So those are people who haven't actually died.
They just go to kind of the entry levels of the next life.
And then they come back and they're remembering it through their senses.
This report or this account kind of takes off where those end.
And it goes through many realms.
And one of the really, one of the things that surprised me the most, Howard, was how much we change in the other dimension.
It's not going into just a static place of bliss, but it's a very evolutionary journey of the soul.
And what about his connection or anybody's connection, but his connection to you through that process?
How did that change?
Oh, it changed a lot.
At first, I heard him very, very clearly and I only heard him.
Then as he traveled deeper into the realms, I couldn't hear him.
What would happen would be I would see like a blue globe, a blue globe of light, and I would have to focus really intensely on that light in order to hear him.
Then I was able to hear him.
Then later on, I was able to catch just glimpses of him and his world.
And then he started to communicate with me kind of through my crown chakra instead of my right ear, which is how I always heard him.
So as he evolved, the communication also evolved.
So you're saying this started off as audio, as sound, because that was the easiest thing to give you.
And then as you got more attuned to that, then you were being communicated with straight into your head.
Exactly.
That was pretty deep into the journey.
But as he became higher, he was only able to communicate me through my crown chakra, which is a higher way to receive him rather than through my ears.
I've been looking at an interview with you, and you say to the interviewer, there are a few of these online, but there's quite a detailed one here.
It says, Billy took me out of my comfort zone, and then he made me understand through the people that I met that I really didn't have the right to keep the story to myself because it belongs to everybody.
It doesn't just belong to me.
How did he take you out of your comfort zone and what did he introduce you to?
Yes.
Well, first of all, when you talk about the skeptics, people who are skeptical of my story, I have to be honest and say that it doesn't bother me at all.
In maybe towards the middle of the story, Billy said to me that my only job in this adventure is to tell the truth as it happened to me and never try to convince Anybody of anything.
So that makes me very comfortable.
But what was uncomfortable for me was I really didn't want to be the person who wrote a book with her dead brother.
That was a really, really difficult role for me to play.
So Billy, you know, as he goes through his journey through the afterlife, one of the reasons the book is very popular is because he talks about how to gain wisdom on earth.
And one of the things he talks about is that, you know, the role you play is kind of a quantum leap.
So although I wasn't happy to play the role of somebody who talks to her dead brother, I really liked the role of being a cosmic detective.
So when I switched my viewpoint and thought of myself as someone really investigating whether there's life after death, whether there is a soul, I was kind of in the middle of the greatest spiritual thriller.
And that really shifted things for me.
And although I didn't speak about it very much, I went on adventures.
And every time I met somebody who I wanted to tell the story to, it turned out that they had somebody who had recently died.
And my story meant so much to them.
One time I was, Billy kind of took me on this journey upstate New York and I was getting a massage and I had never told the story to a stranger.
And I don't know why, but as I was getting the massage, I decided to share the story with the young man who was working on me.
And you said Billy took you there.
Did he tell you to go to this particular massage place?
Oh, yeah.
Well, there was a whole series of funny stories about where I was going to put his ashes.
And he had always wanted me to go upstate with him.
So I took his ashes upstate.
It turns out that I didn't sprinkle his ashes upstate, but I did meet this person.
And after my massage, when I looked at him, he had tears just streaming down his face.
And he told me that his young sister, who wasn't even 20, had just died.
And he felt that she sent him, sent me to him to let him know that she was all right.
So after a series of those kind of events, I just felt like this story does not belong to me alone.
And even though it's very uncomfortable for me to talk about this, which it was at the beginning, I really don't have the right to keep it to myself.
So you're the ambassador.
You've been chosen to relay this information by Billy.
A lot of people who've lost people, like that guy you knew, the guy doing the massage.
I wonder if he wondered, and I know other people will wonder, why they're not contacted in that way, why they don't have that connection that you've got with Billy.
Well, there are a few things I'd like to say about this.
Number one, many, many people do receive signs.
I think 25 to 30% of people receive signs from their loved ones.
And Joseph Campbell talks about how much in other cultures, people do communicate and do receive signs.
And in our culture, it's kind of frowned upon and you could be seen as crazy.
So I think if we could get rid of that taboo, more people will be open to it.
Well, I think more and more people are coming around to that.
I think a lot of people would say that they've had signs.
That's very, very common.
Look, I've had two very close deaths, my father and mother, and you know how scarring that is and always will be.
But I know I've had signs.
But as for systematic communication, as you've had with Billy, I haven't.
And I have to say, I remain disappointed because I'd kind of hoped that they would make connection with me.
And my dad in particular was very psychic, and there was a great love bond with both parents, but no communication like that.
And I've wanted it.
Right.
But usually after people read the book or when they read the book, they don't feel that way anymore because Billy is a stand-in.
My father, when I was a little girl, my father always told me that he had conversations with his parents.
His parents and his brothers had died when he was quite young.
And he, I always thought he meant that he made up these conversations in his mind.
And then it happened to me.
So I think, number one, it's an inherited trait.
And number two, someone who has been working in this field forever, she knew George Anderson, one of the first psychics, explained to me how my life had really set me up for this.
So number one, being a musician and working with music, which is also invisible, had trained me.
Being a chiropractor and working with energy, kind of cerebrospinal fluid, had trained me.
And then my meditation practice and the particular meditation practice where I went from a New Yorker who kind of did a lot of shopping and had lunch with the girls and had a practice to someone who was pretty ascetic and meditated no less than three hours a day.
Some of my more skeptical listeners may say that is the root of the issue here, that perhaps you become so tied into the meditation that you're off in some other realm of your brain where you've created a whole very realistic fantasy for yourself.
I'm not saying this on my part, but I know the kind of emails that I get.
And I know that there will be people who say absolutely right on the money.
Thank you very much, Annie Kagan.
You've said everything that I always felt.
And there will be the others who say this woman is absolutely, utterly deluded.
Yeah.
But it doesn't bother me.
And also, I think If somebody actually reads the book, there's a lot of proof in the book.
And people who've read the book and go along with the proofs and look up the things that people told me to look up on the computer.
Either I am a genius beyond any genius who's ever lived who could invent these things, or else they have to be true.
I have a friend who gave her husband the book.
Her husband was in his early 80s.
He was dying.
And he absolutely had no belief in God or that there's anything afterwards.
And after he read the book, he said, you know, maybe, just maybe.
And as Billy says, maybe is a lot better than no way.
So I just think that people really need to have an open mind and read some of the proofs.
And if they think I'm kind of deluded, that's really okay with me.
It doesn't really bother me.
Okay.
You talked about the specific proofs that he gave you and he directed you to places on the internet.
I don't want to lose that.
Tell me about some of those so that those skeptical people listening to this will understand where you're coming from more fully.
Okay, well, one of the more dramatic proofs in my mind was the fact that my husband was feeling quite ill.
And he went to the doctor and the doctor told him that he was fine.
He just had a stomach bug.
And as I was getting out of bed in the morning, as I was putting my feet on the floor, I heard Billy's voice, but it was different than it usually was.
It was kind of sounded evil and like Vincent Price in a horror movie.
And he said, Steve is going to be very, very ill.
And I was really upset because I didn't think he was ill.
And why was Billy using this horrible voice that was so scary?
And I was really upset and I didn't know what to think.
So I told my husband that I thought he should go back to the doctor.
I didn't tell him why because it would have really upset him.
And so he went back to the doctor.
He called me from the doctor and he says, you know, I'm fine.
He checked me out again, no problem.
And as he's telling me this, I again hear this evil laughter coming from the ceiling.
And I was very upset.
And I said, you know what?
I don't know why, but why don't you go?
Maybe the specialist is too specialized.
Why don't you go to just see a regular doctor, Florence?
He goes to the regular doctor.
Long story short, his EKG is off.
He's in the hospital soon, having an angiogram.
It turns out he was very close to having a heart attack and he had to have open heart surgery.
Now, how does one explain that?
And all this could be proved with medical records.
This is not something that I would be able to make up.
So when you got the message that he was very ill, did you know anything about his medical condition at that time?
What did you know about your husband's medical condition at that time?
Absolutely not.
He had been checked out by the finest GI person in New York City, a specialist.
He told him he just had an intestinal bug.
He was fine.
He was under a lot of stress.
So there was no, it's very important.
There was no indication that there was anything more serious than what you told me right at the head of this story.
That's very, very interesting.
In fact, two months before that, he had been cleared.
It was either two or three months before that.
He had been cleared by his cardiologist.
Did you think it was at all strange that Billy told you this, though, in terms of, you know, your husband is going to be very, very ill?
That's a very, if you have a love link with somebody, it's a very alarming way to put it.
I was furious, actually.
And I was furious that he used that scary voice.
But I understood afterwards that if he hadn't, I might not have taken it seriously.
And it was very upsetting and disturbing and horrible.
And he had never said anything like that before.
And I was thinking, well, maybe this is not Billy, you know.
But in the end, it turned out that he saved Steve's life.
And did Billy have any comeback on that after you knew that he'd saved Steve's life?
Did Billy communicate with you about that to say, there you are, job done?
I told you about that.
Well, actually, what happened after that was that I really asked Billy to give me some space because it was, it was, even though it was a great outcome, it was kind of a very traumatic experience for me.
Like being warned and I felt like I had a lot of thinking to do or meditating to do or research to do about it.
So I asked Billy for some space and he gave it to me.
And then he told me something about Tex and her dead brother that I didn't know.
And actually he continued to affect people's lives.
And I don't want to give away too much more because it's like kind of a spoiler alert.
But he saved somebody else.
And so therefore, those things convinced me that something was going on that was way beyond myself.
It is remarkable.
Very, very remarkable.
Anything that impacted you directly personally.
I mean, about you, yourself.
I would say that as I was taking the notes And going on this journey, I would go back and forth between feeling doubtful myself and feeling that this was really happening.
And that's because the human mind, our mind, is really, really almost impossible for me to accept that somebody was really talking to me from another level, even though it was happening to me.
So therefore, I can understand anybody being skeptical.
I don't blame them for being skeptical.
I was skeptical.
But there was one moment that convinced me that absolutely what was happening was true.
And that was when Billy was in a certain realm of the afterlife.
And he was talking about music that he was hearing.
And he told me the words that were being sung to him by this beautiful chorus of voices.
And then he says, just like Mahler 8.
Now, I didn't even know that Mahler had written an 8th symphony.
I was not really a classical fan.
And when I Googled it and I found an iTunes video of it, and when the music was a chorus, just like Billy had described, and the words were almost exactly the same words that were happening, that Billy was listening to, it was almost as if I had a chill through my entire being.
And I knew at that moment that this was real, that this was happening, because there was no way that this could be a coincidence.
So many questions I want to ask you.
Billy was a troubled individual, we know.
Did he have any reflections, has he had any reflections on his difficulties on this side of life?
Has he told you anything about that?
Has he said, gee, I'm sorry about all of that, or I had a lot of stuff to work out and here I am.
I've worked it out and I'm going through a much better process now.
What's he had to say, if anything, about that?
Well, he's had so much to say about that.
And I think that's one of the reasons the book is very popular, because he was a troubled soul and he did deal with difficult situations.
And many people deal with many difficult situations.
And there's a lot of wisdom.
And I think that partly his life was difficult so that he could come back and share what he had learned with others.
What's really beautiful is he led me on a treasure hunt that led me to many of the diaries, the journals that he had written while he was still alive.
Did you know they existed?
No.
Nobody.
But he took you to them.
He brought me to them.
Absolutely.
I explained how in the book.
He brought me to journals that he had written.
And what was in the journals?
A, he talked about God a lot.
That's all he talked about.
So while everybody was saying, oh, he didn't trust his higher power, the truth is he was totally, totally connected to God.
And second, what was his ambition?
He wanted to write a book to help people.
That's what he talked about in these journals.
Please, God, help me write a book to help people.
Help people.
Isn't that strange that now he did it after he was dead?
And they found the diaries late in the story, not when he first started speaking.
So the truth is, if the greatest skeptic looked at this book and at the proofs and spoke to, interviewed the people who were involved that were not me, it would have to be one of the biggest shams ever perpetrated on humanity.
I don't even know who could make it up.
When Billy was here, did he have friends?
I know he was troubled, but he must have had some.
Yes, he had friends, but not towards the end of his life.
Towards the end of his life, he was very much alone.
And I would say that God was his closest friend.
I'm wondering what those people, I wonder if you have communicated with them, but I wonder what they would make of it.
Well, actually, I don't want to say who because I want to protect their privacy, but one of his people he was very close with, when I gave her the writings in the book when it was finished, she said, oh my God, it really is.
It's Billy because he had a very particular personality and way of speaking and way of being with people.
And anyone who knew him and reads this book, they know it's him.
It's just who he was as a human being shines through.
He was very different than I am.
I'm the serious one.
He's kind of the funny one.
So, yes, people who knew him feel very much that it is Billy.
You said the nature of this communication has changed, and not only the way that it happens, you heard it first of all, then it went directly to you.
Is Billy still in contact with you?
And if he is, what's he saying?
Billy is very much in contact with me.
But right now, I feel that I don't want to write another book right now.
I'm just still very involved in this book.
And I would say that when he talks to me, he tells me more personal things.
And he talks a lot about how to really have a better life on earth.
So tell me about the place that he's in, because here he is in a better place.
It's got music.
It's got creativity by the sounds of it.
There's a lot of goodness there, which we could do with down here, but it's nice to know that it's there if it is.
Is he moving towards something?
Is he moving towards perhaps coming back or ascending to being something greater, something closer to what some people might call God?
Yes, he is not coming back, number one, which i think accounts for some of the differences in near-death experiences some of the differences in the life reviews they're very different than people who have near-death experiences what he's saying is that really when you go through the door of death you evolve and you're always getting closer to the light and you yourself are becoming a higher
so he's definitely a higher being than he was when he first got into the afterlife and one of the interesting things that he says is wow even even the soul changes the soul evolves just like we evolve so he he doesn't speak much about where he is right now um and if he ever will i don't know i actually don't
want him to right now i i don't feel open to it because when i'm in communication with him i have to have my life set up in a very particular way not to just say hi or little things but if i was really going to start uh taking dictation and writing again i would have to become much more isolated than i am now and i feel like i'm not really ready to do that it sounds to me like it's a tremendously draining experience at
times it is that's why when people are envious you know i feel like if they knew the whole story they wouldn't be so envious because number one it's a lot of hard work you have to be very isolated it's very focused and the most difficult part of it is that it's almost like having a near-death experience over and over and over again a lot of people who have had near-death experiences talk about how hard it is to come back to this realm where
there's so much gravity and difficulty and so it it can be quite disorienting so i feel like i'm not ready to go on that journey again right now but billy felt and feels that there is a mission that he's on to communicate this stuff and to let us know that there is something else out there again my more skeptical listeners and there's an element of this in myself too would say well it's marvelous that he's communicating with you and you're getting a good deal of solace from this and
passing on this information but if billy really really wanted this to be out there he would just the once make contact with me or uh president obama or uh you know somebody i don't know a hollywood movie star you know pick a name why doesn't he do that actually i get letters every day from people who read the book and if you go to my facebook page where i think we have something like 65 000
people on the page in less than a year people are having experiences of him and they write to me every day about it and so people are having their own experiences and sometimes they're having experiences of their own relatives through reading the book so i feel like i have nothing to do with with that billy has written the book in a certain way that it's almost like
there's light encoded in the book and i just feel like he's doing his own thing with people and i don't blame you for being skeptical if i heard this story i would be plenty skeptical myself so it's okay there are so many people who are so grateful and having really
life-changing experiences from reading the book that i just feel like very detached and it's all okay with me it's all okay with me that's a good position to be in and look i am skeptical because i'm trained to do it but if i wasn't in that position i would be suffering a lot i'm sure i am skeptical but i want to believe and i want to give you the best possible opportunity in this
small forum to let people who will send me those emails saying what's this woman talking about to let them know actually there is something in this look for what it's worth for my two cents worth i'm pretty sure there is something in this and i'm pretty sure there is something out there i just wish we could all connect in the way that you've connected well but that's like saying you know we should all be able to be a prima ballerina in in the in the russian ballet you know people people have different
talents in life very very good point you know i wish i was a ballerina i mean then there then you could talk about the long island medium who speaks to everybody's relatives i'm really really grateful that i don't have that job you know so if people really understood everything they might not really want the job it may be scary to them some people are scared and people just have different talents and really billy is a standard this is
this is his job so i don't know why this happened to me exactly but i know i was prepared for it and i feel like billy was prepared for it and there's there's so much comfort and it opens really the mind to many questions it opens the mind to thinking about are there other realms is there a soul is there a world beyond this one and if
there is what does that mean for us all like if you think about what does it mean if i really am any divine eternal being that just changes your world and there are many books out these days it seems like there's a like a little revolution going on right now where there are many books proving or suggesting that there really is a world beyond this one it's not something i would have ever chosen for myself but
here i am can i tell you something that happened as you said this part of what you've been saying just in the last 60 90 seconds or so there has been the most phenomenal storm here i told you about that with the rain hammering down at my window the tree shaking
and it literally is a very was a very stark scene with these spindly trees which which are completely bereft of leaves now because they've all been blown off them and a grey sky well um behind this black and white scene suddenly has come the most amazing shaft of silver sunlight.
Not golden sunlight, silver sunlight on a day like this.
Now, if you were one for signs, you might think that was one.
I don't know.
Yes, especially because he describes the light in the healing chamber as a silver light, not a golden light.
So this is not made up.
There is a division in the sky between these very frightening looking clouds and this circle of just pure silver light.
And, you know, I don't go in for these things, but that's what's happening right now.
So that's interesting.
So if you want for signs, that's one of them.
And also, what was I saying at that moment?
I was saying that we are, in fact, divine, eternal beings for real.
And, you know, the things that we hear that, you know, we will die and we will meet our loved ones and they're fine.
What if that's not just a fairy tale made up to make us feel better?
What if that's real?
How would that change our lives now?
And Allie, I want you to live forever, but none of us is, right?
And I don't know whether that will be a good thing if we could.
That's for sure.
Well, we don't know whether it would be a good thing even if you could live forever.
But when you get to the stage of your end, have you any idea what Billy might be doing for you then?
Presumably, you'll still be in contact.
Will he help you?
Will he help you through that process?
Perhaps, although I have a feeling that it might be my mother.
I don't know why.
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, you know, I don't really think about that much, but I know that I'm not afraid of death like I used to be.
And more than anything, it's changed the way I feel about life.
And when you lose your fear of death, it really changes the way you live your life.
And I think that that's one of the most important things about the book.
A lot of people take so much so seriously.
Has it made you less serious about stuff?
Oh, yeah.
That's the main message that Billy gives me because, you know, he's the bad boy and I'm the good girl, is that death isn't as serious.
The dramas of our life, some of them are serious, but most of the things that we take really seriously are not really all that serious.
And I think I'm a much happier person now.
And you say you won't write another book because that is quite a taxing process.
So you're not actually making notes for it or doing anything preparatory to it.
Do you think you'll ever reach the stage where you might want to go for volume two?
I might, but, you know, I get a lot of requests for another book.
And I kind of had an argument with Billy about this, you know, and he told me that I really don't have to do it unless I'm ready and unless I want to.
Because you have to remember, he's not some high spirit to me.
He's my bad boy brother.
So sometimes we argue.
But mostly he just tells me to lighten up.
Like, you know, when I'm being very serious, he'll just kind of say, hey, Annie, you know, lighten up.
He's still challenging to you in a lot of ways.
You said that.
But you must feel, do you, differently about him?
You were very worried about him and then you gave up on him because there was nothing you could do about it.
But it seems that your attitude to him through this process must have changed.
It's changed very much, but he's not at all.
I think one of the reasons I also believe it is whatever he tells me is very unexpected.
It's not what you expect, this high-loving being.
He's very challenging.
And, you know, he challenges my beliefs.
And he's funny.
Most of all, he's very funny.
And I've learned to have a sense of humor about life and things.
And I've learned to laugh a lot more.
So I wouldn't give up this experience.
I wouldn't give up having had this experience.
As we record these words, it's the middle of February.
When was the last time he communicated with you?
Yesterday morning.
Can you tell me what he said or is it private?
Yeah, I can tell you what he said.
I had a wonderful dream.
That's private.
And when I woke up, he said, I'd like to say it very, it was about five o'clock in the morning.
And he said, take what happens in life and make something good out of it.
Don't take what happens in life and make something bad out of it.
Make something good out of it.
And at that moment, just like you're talking about your silver light, don't forget it's five o'clock in the morning and I live on a pretty lonely road.
I guess a car passed and lit up my entire room at that moment.
So that was pretty good.
And what do you, this is, if this is a rude question, tell me.
Yeah.
But you gave up the chiropractic practice.
How are you living?
Oh, yeah.
Not on what I make on the book.
Well, that's what I was, I was trying to, in a roundabout way, I was trying to ask that.
No, I mean, that's the funniest part of all.
Anyone who thinks that you make a lot of money if you're not a celebrity and you're an unknown author with a small independent publisher should do their homework.
Because I promise you, you do not get wealthy writing a book like this.
I promise you.
But you've done the rounds of media and some media can be pretty skeptical and pretty rough.
How's that been for you?
Actually, I haven't had a lot of skepticism.
The most skepticism I had was on one show.
And it turned out that the interviewer was kind of irate because his mother had passed and he was sure that if anybody could communicate from the other side, she loved him so very much that she would do it.
So therefore, I must be a fraud.
If he couldn't do it, I must be a fraud.
And I think a lot of times skepticism comes from people who are disappointed.
But it's a very, I really can't say why some people receive and some people don't.
And again, I just think it has something to do with the extensive meditation that I did for such a long period of time.
And if somebody wants to meditate three hours a day for like 10 years, then maybe they could, you know, see what that's like.
But really, I just don't know.
And I just, as I say, I'm very, very detached from people's reactions.
I could totally understand somebody being skeptical.
It doesn't bother me because if it wasn't my book, maybe I would be skeptical too.
If I asked you to ask Billy to send me a message, do you think he might do that?
Because then we'd have some proof because I'm an honest broker in all of this.
I really am.
And if he gave me a message that was relevant to me and my life, then I would tell the world about it.
And there we would have proof utterly positive.
Yeah, but actually that happens to people without my doing that.
And I just feel like if I do it one time, then it's like, you know, they'll put me in a laboratory.
I don't, and test me.
I really, I really kind of don't feel open to doing that.
And yet I can hear people screaming at their iPods or whatever device they're using to listen to this right now saying, that's a cop-out.
Well, they could think that if they want.
That's just fine.
But if they were in my situation, they might understand, you know, getting so many letters a day from people that want me to communicate.
You know, I'm not a medium.
I don't talk to other people's relatives, nor do I want to.
And what do you tell those people?
There are a lot of desperate people out there and they do write letters and they do make requests and you can't fulfill them.
But what do you tell them if you tell them anything?
Well, I tell them to find a good medium because I don't really do that.
And I believe that there are really good mediums.
There are people that do that, that could give messages and tell them things that they didn't know before and definitely prove that, you know, they're being spoken to by another dimension.
But I don't do that.
I don't want to do that.
It's enough just dealing with Billy.
And again, I have absolutely no intent to convince anybody of anything.
Everybody's free.
I'm free.
They're free.
Everybody's free to enjoy their life and pick their own belief system.
You know what?
You can't argue with that at all.
When you're no longer here and when you're on the other side, if there is another side to go to, have you got any plans to communicate?
Are you going to send us a postcard from there?
That's a really interesting question.
I don't know because who knows who I'll be then?
You know, after I evolve, who knows what I'll want to do or be?
But if there's anything I would do, it would be, boy, I would love to create some music on the other side.
I would really enjoy that.
Anything that we haven't said in this conversation that we should have?
I think that one of the most beautiful things that I've learned from Billy is a scientific fact, which I didn't really know before, which is that every single cell in your body was forged on a star.
Every bit of calcium, iron, carbon, everything came from outer space.
It came literally from a supernova.
And if you sit and you ponder that and you look at pictures of the universe, you realize that the same force that created the universe is within you.
And when you connect with that force, you connect with your infinite self.
I like that.
Why did they call him Billy Fingers?
Yeah, well, that was a name that he kind of adopted when he was very young.
He was working in a factory and he cut off the tip of one of his fingers.
And later on, when he was kind of in the darker realms of this life, he adopted that name.
It was kind of a...
Everybody's got to be something.
I never liked the name.
You know, I didn't want to call the book.
I didn't want the name Billy Fingers in the title of the book.
He had to really argue with me to get that because I didn't like that name.
It sounds like a criminal.
You know, it sounds like somebody who gets killed in a back alley.
Scarface Malone, absolutely.
Well, listen, I've really enjoyed this conversation.
This is not what I normally do, and it's not the style of Unexplained Show that I normally do.
But, you know, if you don't experiment, you're never going to learn.
So that's why you're on here now.
And I know some people will want to email me and say, I don't buy that at all.
And I know a lot of people will email me and say, I want to know more.
And if they do want to know more, how do they find out more about you and the book and your communication with Billy?
Yes.
Well, the book is available on Amazon and Amazon UK.
You could please go to Facebook, Afterlife of Billy Fingers, where a lot of the sayings are padded with pictures.
It's a very active community that talks about their own experiences as well.
You could go to the website, Afterlife of Billy Fingers, and also on the website, you could download the first chapter of the book and see what you think, skeptical, non-skeptical.
It's all okay with me.
You're very near New York City where you are.
That's a very hard place.
I just wonder what people there make of it and you.
Oh, they love it.
It's, you know, New York and also California.
And also, believe it or not, London.
Like on Facebook, my busiest city is actually London because the UK has been involved in these kind of studies for a very long time.
So people are really open.
And, you know, you're hearing me in an interview, but it's very different when you actually read Billy's words.
And you could do that even just by downloading the sample and decide for yourself if you think it's something worth looking into.
Well, a few people have asked me to speak with you, Annie Kagan, and I'm glad I did.
And I wish you well, and I'd ask you to stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Howard.
Well, a thought-provoking conversation there with Annie Kagan and the afterlife of Billy Fingers.
I wonder what you thought about that.
Do let me know.
You can drop me an email.
Go to the website wwwtheunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, and there you can leave me your feedback and thoughts about this show or a guest suggestion or anything you like.
You know that if you send me an email, I'm the one who gets to see it.
It's two-way communication, and how many media outlets can say that these days?
Not many, I think.
Also, if you want to make a donation to the show, you can do that at the same place, www.theunexplained.tv.
My website, designed and imagineered by Adam Cornwell, a creative hotspot in Liverpool, couldn't do any of this without him.
Great work.
And I couldn't do any of it without you and your suggestions that have kept me going and your support.
Thank you very much for it.
If you happen to be in one of the flood-battered parts of the UK, or if you're experiencing storms right now, my thoughts are definitely with you and more so since I've actually been and experienced the plight of the people at Raysbury, where this week the mighty River Thames has overflowed and disrupted so many people's lives.
Thankfully, the politicians are now starting a little bit late, but starting to listen and getting them some of the help that they need.
But like I say, my thoughts with you.
Until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
Stay calm, stay safe, and stay in touch.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained, and I'll see you again here soon.
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