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Nov. 22, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:11:17
Edition 230 - Tricia Robertson

We talk with Scottish Psychical Researcher Tricia Robertson - her new book "More Things YouCan Do When You're Dead" is out Nov 30...

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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 for getting in touch recently.
I'm going to be doing some shout-outs, mentioning some of your emails in a moment.
Sadly, because of time constraints, I haven't had a chance to make notes on all of your emails, but do believe me that I've seen each and every one of them, and I will be doing a longer segment of shout-outs in a future show.
The weather.
I know some of you don't like me talking about the weather, so zone out for a minute just while I mention what's been happening here.
We had a thing called Storm Barney that hit the UK very badly, and the back end of it hit us yesterday, Saturday.
So when I drove home from Berkshire to my home in southwest London yesterday on the motorway, my car was pushed all over the road by the wind.
It was quite extraordinary, and we had a day of rain and storms and grey, gunmetal grey skies.
Horrible day.
This morning I wake up to two things.
It's ice cold.
I think it was something like minus four, minus five Celsius overnight.
Will Willow freezing point.
And I also woke up to find that my right ear...
This morning, my right ear is very, very dull.
And so I've lost a lot of high frequencies in the right ear.
I think it might be something to do with the change in atmospheric pressure.
So if I don't sound quite like myself today, that's the reason for that.
I'm doing this on one ear and we'll get through.
But any thoughts and suggestions about that, gratefully received.
If you want to connect with me, contact the show.
You can do that through the website, theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv.
And the website designed, created, maintained, and owned by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
The world is a very worrying place in the seven days after the terror attack in Paris claimed the lives of close on 130 people, left scores of others still in hospital as I say these words.
Nobody can quite compute the enormity of this.
And of course, it's put capitals around the world and here in Europe particularly on pretty high alert.
In Brussels, Belgium yesterday, which has been the crucible of some of this, it appears some of the people involved in the Paris thing had links with Brussels.
Brussels was in lockdown yesterday.
People were advised not to go to shopping malls and do their normal things, avoid stations if they could.
And that country was very quiet yesterday.
A lot of people asking, what have we come to when we are forced to do things like this?
But, you know, every capital city now, every city, I would say, is concerned.
London certainly very much a high security area at the moment, but life has to go on.
Which brings me to the subject of the last show that I did.
And that is mentioned by quite a few emailers.
I'm just going to pick a couple.
Somebody, I had a few emails that were under pseudonyms.
This is from somebody calling themselves Anna Graham, who says, as somebody interested in the alternative viewpoint, I was surprised to hear you taking the Paris events at face value.
The attack is part of a pattern of manipulation and war on terror.
Well, okay, Anna.
But I think at the moment, we just have to try and take in the events as they stand.
I think the conspiracy theories and all the rest of it, when they are properly formulated, can come later.
But for right now, I think, certainly at a distance of 24 hours from the events in Paris, the best thing I could have done was to find somebody that you hadn't heard talking about this, somebody who is an expert on Islamic politics around the world, to discuss it.
And I think he put some very succinct and very on-the-money arguments about it all.
But of course, the conspiracy viewpoints will come in at a later date, and we will cover those.
I do not think.
And I think a lot of people might agree with me that at the moment, that's just not appropriate, especially here in Europe, where we're in mourning for those people who died in that beautiful city.
Tilly Cat says, regarding the sickening events in France and the Muslim Intel guy, I guess you're talking about the professor who was on What a Crock and various views of that sort.
I understand what you're saying, Tilly Cat, but I hope you get where I'm coming from, all of this.
Karen, regular listener in Ontario, Canada, says, I have my own suspicions that there is something amiss with who and what the government tells us ISIS, ISIL, Daesh, whatever, actually is.
But the fact is that we're being herded like sheep into some language-controlled, behavior-controlled, totalitarian climate.
And as long as I can do so, I will resist this.
John Ziegler, nice email from you, John, on a completely different topic.
An expat, having recently relocated from New York City to southern Italy, says, once renovations on our villa are completed, you will be a welcome guest.
Sunny blue skies and wonderful, wonderful climate and food and just about everything.
John, thank you so much for that offer.
It's very, very kind of you.
Look, going back to France, though, I do understand that this is going to engender all kinds of feelings, but I don't think any of our feelings and thoughts and viewpoints about this can be fully formulated this close to the events themselves.
It's rather like passing judgment on 9-11, right after 9-11.
And from my memory, not a lot of people in the mainstream, I don't think anybody did that when those events were still raw.
So that's where I'm coming to this from.
And I hope you get that.
And I hope you understand what I mean.
Stuart in the UK says, I want to simply express my thanks and utter admiration.
Stuart, thank you for the program that you worked so hard to put out.
I've been an avid listener for three years, love the content.
Always current, balanced, and interesting, says Stuart.
That's very, very kind of you, Stuart.
And that gives me heart to carry on at those times when I just feel like I'm very depleted one way and another.
Thank you.
Susie, near Mount Shasta, I'm working on the suggestion that you made.
Ralph Ellis, if it's the same Ralph Ellis, I did talk to on a very early edition of the unexplained.
We met face to face.
Stephen in Edinburgh, great email, very thoughtful, good comments.
Thank you.
Dilly, new listener.
Hello, Dilly and Kev in County Durham, northeast of England.
Good to hear from you.
From Vince says, love your show, which I listen to on my daily 100-kilometer commute from the Sunshine Coast to Brisbane, Australia.
Wow.
Well, I know part of that area, and I think you're very, very lucky to live there.
Says, I love most of your guests, but I need to say this.
One, I thought that James K. Lambert was annoying.
I couldn't understand how he can dismiss so many concepts without real facts, especially 9-11.
I love Graham Hancock.
The read, he's just bought his new book.
The read is great so far, but his narration is below par.
I have been spoiled by your voice.
I think there was some criticism of Graham Hancock for being a little defensive by some listeners, but I've got to say, a great welter of support for Graham Hancock.
A lot of you thought that he was fantastic to hear, and he isn't a man who is prone to doing every podcast and broadcast out there.
He picks them very carefully.
So I was glad to have him on, and I'd like to have him on again.
A guest of great erudition, I thought, and somebody who will always provoke intense reactions one way or the other.
But often the best people do that.
James Lawrence, also in Australia, says, I want to let you know about something I thought was a bit strange on your intro to edition 228.
And I agree with you about this because the same fact dawned on me at the time that it dawned on you.
In the intro to that edition, I was talking about shout-outs.
And what I said was, I will go into a lot of your emails probably in the next edition unless something happens that means that I can't do that.
Well, look, when you broadcast in the style that I broadcast, a lot of it is ad-lib.
And, you know, it's good, bad, or indifferent.
You make the decision on that.
And sometimes words come out of my mouth, and I don't realize that sometimes they are prophetic in some ways.
Not that I'm a great prophet or sage or anything, which I am not.
But it did strike me as being very odd that I did say that.
And then, of course, the very next week we had these terrible events in France.
James says, probably just a coincidence, but it made me wonder about the power of intuition and our subconscience made me think too, James.
Thank you very much indeed for your email.
I think that's pretty much all of the emails that I can fit in for now.
I'm sorry if you've emailed recently.
I'm going to try and do a mega shout out edition at some point where I have a lot of your thoughts.
But thank you very much.
And you do know that I see every single email as it comes in.
Wherever I happen to be, I'm checking into email for the unexplained constantly.
And let me tell you, and I know I've told you before, and maybe I'm a bore about this, mainstream media doesn't do that.
Mainstream media often just trashes the emails that you put in.
And I mean, literally puts them in the trash and doesn't really take account of them.
That's not all mainstream media, but that is a certain amount.
And how do I know?
Because I've worked in it and I've seen it done.
That's all I can say about that subject for right now.
The guest on this edition is somebody who's been on the show a couple of times before, Tricia Robertson, after-death researcher, I guess you would call her, at a very high level in Scotland.
She's a member of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research.
Her last book, Things You Can Do When You're Dead, was very popular, sold a lot of copies, and we talked a lot about that.
Some great stories in there, one or two of which you were captivated by and emailed me in great numbers about.
We're going to talk with her about her current research and her second edition of that same book, Things You Can Do When You're Dead.
We're going to cross to Glasgow to do that conversation in just a moment from now by Digital Connection all being well.
Just to say thank you very much for any donations that you made to the Unexplained.
It's coming up to the end of the year and it would be marvelous if it would be possible for you to make a donation to the show.
If you've been enjoying it, then, you know, if you can't afford to make a donation, I've always understood that.
It can be a free product for you.
But I have to survive too.
So if it's possible, please, especially at this time of year, make a donation to the unexplained.
I'm not booked for broadcasting shifts across Christmas, so I'm going to give more attention to the unexplained across that period and will announce to you my plans for the new year towards the end of this year.
That's all I can say about that for now.
If you want to make a donation to the show, please go to the website theunexplained.tv and thank you to Adam at Creative Hotspot again for his great work on this, as I've said.
So it's theunexained.tv there, follow the PayPal link and you can leave a donation or send me any thoughts, any suggestions about the show.
And please, when you do that, let me know who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
I love to know about you.
I'm not profiling you or anything.
I'm just getting an idea of the kind of people that when I open my mouth to record these shows, I'm speaking with.
Let's cross to Scotland now, which I'm guessing is possibly even colder than London this morning.
And let's talk with Tricia Robertson, a researcher of some renown.
Tricia, thank you very much for coming on the show.
You're very welcome.
Tricia, how's Glasgow?
It's freezing cold, very bright here in London.
It's exactly the same here, gorgeous sunshine.
I'm overlooking the Campsey Hills, and it's beautiful but cold.
Well, your air is better than our air down here, though.
I know that from having been there.
Look, lovely to have you on.
I came up with a description for you, and I don't know whether it's going to infuriate or delight you, but I'll tell you.
You are an afterlife and after-death researcher.
Does that work?
Partly, that's part of it.
I'm a psychical researcher, which investigates many things, including survival.
Okay, and you've been doing that.
Let's remind people who haven't heard you before, you've been doing that for decades.
32 years.
Why did you start?
I probably asked you this before, but you know, for those new listeners, what is it that compelled you to do this?
The answer is, I have no idea.
Not the answer you wanted, but I really don't know.
But listen, it's an answer I can completely understand because it's the same with me.
I started recording people years ago.
It was the best I can come up with was an intellectual interest as I have no real religious belief before that at all.
And it was just an intellectual interest.
I had no unhappiness.
There was nobody who had died, and it was just an intellectual interest.
And from that, it just grew and grew.
We all lose people as we get older.
It is the way of life.
Has your interest, you know, I know that you've lost people in your life.
I have lost my dear parents and others from my life.
Has your interest sharpened since then?
Or has it just continued as it was before?
Has it sharpened what?
What exactly are you asking me?
Has it sharpened what?
My interest in survival?
Yes, has it made your interest any more acute?
Not really.
No, not really.
Strangely enough, it makes the whole thing a bit better when you see the amount of evidence there is out there.
Excuse me, have a slight husky throat.
You're sounding fun.
The pair of them.
What are we both like this morning?
There's me deaf in one ear, you with a bad throat.
Welcome to the northern hemisphere in the winter, Trisha.
Exactly.
Exactly.
We're old troopers.
Well, you're a young trooper.
I'm an old trooper.
We're old troopers.
We'll carry on.
Okay.
Now, you say at the beginning of the latest edition of your book, Volume 2, which isn't out yet, we have to say that it's going to be out quite a bit.
I do.
Okay.
Update.
I have just heard this minute that my book will be available from the 30th of November.
Really?
That's very good.
And is that internationally?
International.
Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Kobo, all the usual suspects.
Yep.
You sold a lot of copies of the first one and got some great reviews on Amazon.
I've seen that.
Great reviews.
Yes, I did.
So I guess you have high hopes for volume two.
I have indeed.
Things you can do when you are dead, which is the greatest title.
More things, more things you can do.
More things.
It goes a little bit deeper than the first book in that we look at deeper issues like cross-correspondences, obsession, possession, more reincarnation, and the fascinating subject of automatic writing, which sounds completely boring, but it's fascinating.
Absolutely fascinating once you get into it.
I want to talk about that a little later in our conversation.
I know somebody who can do that.
So I'm almost pretty much convinced about automatic writing.
More about that anon.
Okay.
At the top of the book, you say this book is written for people who do not know what to believe.
Correct.
What does that mean?
Well, the man in the street sees these dreadful television programs, radio programs, awful films that are made.
They're made to make money.
They scare the wits out of people, and that's being polite.
And they have very little basis in reality.
The reality is much calmer than that and much more joyous, shall we say.
And I'm here to, do you remember I have a maths in science, a physics background, and I like to keep everything rational, calm, logical.
And that's the way I approach it.
But it's still not boring.
But I want to let people know that when they've lost their loved ones, well, that's one of the things I do.
There is enough evidence to show that they will see them again.
It's basically to give people in the street hope that there is evidence to show that their wishes are not in vain.
You talk to an extent in the book about the various ways that the departed make contact, we believe.
Aromas, I've known that one myself.
Sounds, well, there are particular tunes that I hear at particularly poignant times, and I believe there's something there, but that's just me.
Apparitions and messages on radio and TV.
Talk to me about the ways we think the departed may be trying to get through.
Well, one of the most common one is the movement of objects within your house.
It usually happens quite quickly after someone dies, or electrical interference.
That's what happens to me when someone dies that's been close to me.
It's all electrical disturbances, things that cannot happen that happen.
That's because I'm not at all mediumistic and I'm psychically as thick as a piece of wood.
So the only way they can get through to me is electrically or with sounds occasionally.
You can get a sound or a smell, like your grandfather, tobacco smoke, something like that.
But there are many, many ways that they can make themselves known.
But the most common one is movement of objects or the feeling that your hair is being touched or your cheeks being touched or just a feeling of chill around you at an unexpected moment that's relevant to the person that's died.
There's one with me and I don't understand how this works, but I certainly know what it means because it is infallible.
It works every single time.
Whenever I'm about to leave a place, and I've had a lot of jobs in this broadcasting industry, most people who are still around in broadcasting, it just goes with the game, really.
You know, you're constantly moving.
Whether you are moving for your own reasons or you are moved, that's the way it is.
I always hear at the time when I'm about to move, a song being played by whichever radio station it happens to be, and that song is Randy Crawford's One Day I'll Fly Away.
And it happens invariably.
I now laugh.
I can be walking through the reception area, and this has happened many times.
I can be walking through the reception area of the radio station that I am leaving that day, and the monitor speaker will be playing Randy Crawford's One Day I'll Fly Away.
You know, it is beyond coincidence.
And you just smile and laugh and say, thank you.
Yep, I do.
In fact, the last time it happened, I did exactly that.
I finished my shift, sat down in my car, turned on the radio.
It was there the moment the radio came on.
And I looked up and I just said, I know exactly what you mean.
Thank you.
That's it.
Always say thank you.
Yep.
Great.
Super.
Yeah, no, I wish they'd come and talk to me.
But, you know, if we have to make do with a song on the radio, that's absolutely fine.
Perhaps you're as psychically sick as I am, yeah.
You know what, Tricia?
I would love to have a conversation with an apparition.
I would love somebody to appear to me.
But I do have belief, I think.
And, you know, one mustn't be partisan, too partisan about these things.
Otherwise, you can't do a balanced conversation.
But, you know, too many things have happened in my life to make it beyond coincidence.
I think there must be something.
It's only a question of what the something is.
And maybe we'll never quite have the wit to discern that.
And we won't know the answers until we ourselves have gone.
I'm going to ask you a question.
Do you actually think in reality If someone appeared in front of you as an apparition and had a conversation, do you not think you would freak out?
I don't know.
There is another way that this happens.
And, you know, look, some listeners have said, we love it when you talk about your own experiences.
More listeners have said that than have said the opposite.
So here's what's happened to me this week.
I've had a very busy week or so.
I've been filling in for somebody else, getting up at 3.30 in the morning.
It's been pretty full on.
So when I've gone to bed and slept, I've slept deeply and I've dreamt.
Now, I've lost my parents within the last decade, both of them, and I was very close to them.
Most nights I've dreamt about them.
And one morning, and I don't mind admitting this, one morning I woke straight out of the dream.
You know, the alarm clock hadn't gone for 3.30.
And I had been in their living room, and it was three-dimensional, full-color.
I was standing there, and there was a deathly silence there.
There was nothing, no noise, no sound, no nothing.
And two empty chairs.
They had identical armchairs at the end.
And all there were were photographs of my parents, very clear photographs, color photographs in life all around that room.
And the terrible, dulling sensation that they were not there.
I don't know whether that was some kind of communication.
Not necessarily.
It could just have been your dream wish fulfillment sort of thing.
I couldn't say is the answer to that.
I don't know.
I wasn't there.
I'm sure that dreams are used.
After my mother died, I certainly, she appeared to me that evening and asked me if I was okay in a dream.
Well, that's probably more correct than what you're telling me about the second one.
Yeah.
Because really, when they pass, the first thing that they do is try to make sure that you're okay.
Because when we grieve for people, we're actually grieving for ourselves.
It's the loss of that person.
They're absolutely fine.
They are fantastic.
I had the same with Professor Roy, as you know.
You worked with Archie Roy, probably the most famous researcher of this kind in Scotland.
Archie died on a Thursday at tea time.
And because of what I do, I keep a watchful eye on budding mediums, etc.
I go to places where I can see people demonstrating, not necessarily people that even know me.
And on the Sunday, I went to a, it wasn't a church, it was a sanctuary to see a medium demonstrating.
Now, Archie died at a, it was about tea time on a Thursday, and that was the Sunday morning.
He came through clear as a bell with very relevant personal details that could only have been him.
And the people in that sanctuary who knew me and had known Archie, everybody was in tears because it was just so fantastic.
Doesn't always work, though.
You know, my father was a Liverpool policeman.
He'd had experiences with ghosts when he'd been on duty that had terrified him, but he understood those things because he was always that way inclined.
And his father had been psychic and his father used to read the teacups, which people used to do in this country.
And, you know, his dad, who was a very level-headed man, used to do that.
And I would have expected if anybody could have come through to me, it would have been my dad, and he hasn't.
There seems to be no rules for regulations regarding that.
I've had people that have said to me, well, I know I've got to come back to you, and people who understood, and I've never been back, and yet I get people through that you wouldn't expect.
It's strange.
I don't know what the rules are.
I've no idea.
You talk about materialization in the book.
It's one of the subject headings.
And you have extensive quotes from somebody called Michael Rowe.
Yes.
Tell me about that.
Well, it's not just Michael Roll.
I have a whole chapter on materialization with a variety of people who explain in detail their experiences in materialization circles.
And the Michael Roll one, Archie Row himself, actually sat in that same circle, not at the same time as Michael, a woman called Rita Gould, who doesn't do it anymore down in the Midlands.
And Rita was a very honest lady.
People will go down, maybe just half a dozen at a time, and she would go into trance.
And in the room, figures would materialize from ostensibly the ectoplasm coming from her body.
They would stand up, formed into figures.
They would talk to people.
They would give information.
And certainly a lot of it was done in the dark, but they were allowed to shine a red light from time to time when they were told they could shine the red torch.
And Archie Roy, for example, will absolutely swear that he saw a little boy standing in front of him.
And the little boy said to him, see me wiggle my toes.
And then Archie's hand was taken with the torch down to the toes.
And sure enough, there were the tiny little toes of a little boy wiggling.
And Michael Roll, I would have to go back to read exactly what he told me again, but he had his father through.
He didn't particularly believe it.
The information given, everything that was given, and that changed his life around completely into the absolute knowledge that survival was a fact.
I don't think it did him the world of good because he's had to kick against the establishment ever since, as we all have.
But we have to look at what actually happens.
But there's so much material there about, if you pardon the pun, about materialization that you cannot doubt that at least some of it has to be true.
When one of the Sean Cis was in front of 200 people and they all saw the same thing.
I'm glad that you say that you cannot doubt that at least some of it.
We have to say there is a tremendous amount, and there has been back through history, of sheer fakery.
Oh, yeah.
But you get fake coins.
It doesn't mean all coins are fake.
You talk about Mary Armour, a medium.
Her account of the session with a man that I knew and you knew, Colin Frye, a TV medium, very well known in the UK, sadly left us, died very young.
I think he was 52 or 53, very recently.
I liked Colin a lot.
He used to come on my radio show.
Well, I knew Colin Frye 20 years ago, and so did Mary, obviously, long before he was the famous Colin Fry.
He was just a lad, you know, 25 years ago.
And Colin certainly developed his mediumship and made it very popular in the same sense that Patrick Moore made astronomy popular, although he wasn't actually a real astronomer, if you know what I mean.
But he certainly popularized and his heart was in the right place.
Absolutely.
You told me a story that I don't think has ever been written down, and I never broadcast it, but it made me laugh because he was a very funny man, Colin.
He told me a story after one show that I did with him on national radio in the UK about a traffic warden was about to give him a parking ticket.
And, you know, sometimes traffic wardens can be a little brutal if you're just going back to your car and they will nevertheless get you.
We both know how that works.
No chance.
And Colin was deluged with information about this traffic warden.
Some of it was not very complimentary towards him.
And he told the story very funnily about how he was very tempted to feed back all of this information at this man who was giving him the ticket.
But the story in the book about Colin Fry is about a materialization, the emergence of a personality called Dolly.
Well, Dolly, each materialization medium has a chief guide, as you want me to call it.
That all sounds like Red Indians, but it's not that.
Dolly appeared to be the chief person that was in charge of Colin when he was doing his materialization.
Now, Dolly was actually a transvestite and was a great personality and was really, you can imagine, hello, Dolly.
Well, that was what Dolly was like.
And Dolly would come through and give information and be sort of mistress of ceremonies, of all that would go on, to protect her own medium while he was in trance.
That's what the guides do in materialization.
They look after the welfare of the actual medium who's in trance.
They're completely out of the game.
They're not there.
You see, I was fascinated to read about Colin doing these things because I always thought of Colin doing television shows where he'd stand in front of the audience like James Van Praag does or any of these people do and call out a name and say, does this mean anything to you?
And then tell them some information.
And later they would be interviewed, the people that he was pointing out in the audience, and they would say they're so accurate.
I had no idea that he did all of this other stuff at appearances.
There was much more to him than I knew.
There's much more to most mediums than you know.
Gordon Smith will hate me for saying this, but Gordon in private circles does trance and materialization as well.
And he's completely taken over in trans circles.
A lot of mediums do that, but you have to be very protective of how and where you do that.
And Colin did it for years.
Colin, I think he sat in the Noah's Art Society as well.
I'm pretty sure in saying that, which they home in on materialization and they try to develop that.
Yes, in the Colin one that you're referring to, with Mary Armour, Mary Armour's daughter is a doctor.
And they were told that during the seance that the doctor would be allowed to go and hold the arm of the materialized figure and take its pulse.
So Mary's, at a given time, she went forward and she took the pulse of the medium and the pulse of the materialized figure and they were entirely different.
Entirely different.
And John Logie Baird had a session with another medium somewhere, I can't remember where, in which he took the fingerprints of the person.
For some reason, he had the fingerprints of the character that was supposed to be coming through.
And he took the fingerprints of the materialized figure.
And when he checked them, they were identical.
So here were the fingerprints of a deceased person coming through a materialized figure.
And this is John Logibeard, very serious Scotsman, the man who invented television.
Yeah, there'll be no mess in with John Logibeard, that's for sure.
He invented television, although his mechanical system ultimately wasn't the one that we use today, that we came to use, but he certainly pioneered it.
A man of science he was, but he was also fascinated by all of this.
He was.
He was, as were many eminent men of science.
But even nowadays, you have to sort of curb your enthusiasm for it, or people look scantily at you.
But that's changing, I think.
That's changing.
You've got people from the Max Planck Institute.
You've got the likes of Brian Josephson.
You've a lot of people, very, very clever people who are looking at these things with an open mind.
Thank the Lord.
You have a section on drop-in communicators, and you reference a man I met when I was 23 years old, maybe 24.
I went to Nottingham to interview Alan Gould.
Yes, I know Alan.
Alan's still with us.
Yep.
An amazing researcher into all of these things.
A man with the most wonderful, mellifluous voice as well.
You know, he could tell any story to anybody at any time about anything and make it totally compelling.
What are drop-in communicators?
Well, if people sit at a seance, in a private seance, looking for communication, some people do that week on week.
They have little seances in their own house.
And they're looking for their relatives and loved ones, but they're not looking for anyone they don't know.
But occasionally, on occasion, people come through and give such a lot of information about themselves that these people can subsequently be found.
They can be traced to have lived.
Now, Alan Gould, he became heir to a whole pile of transcripts from a circle that sat, oh, in the 1960s, 70s, I think it was.
Now, I don't think Alan particularly wanted this huge box of transcripts, but to his credit, he started to look through them.
And he realized that there were quite a large number of people coming through and giving vast amount of information about themselves that no one in the circle knew.
The medium didn't know that person.
And yet, it looked as if these people had existed.
So Alan Gould, in his wisdom, and great praise be to him, he took the time to actually go and research these characters.
And he found that the great majority of them had lived and the information given with such specifics were absolutely true.
Now, where did that information come from?
It couldn't have come from the medium.
They didn't know the person.
It couldn't have come from the sitters.
They didn't want them at all.
And to my mind, if it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck.
It's a duck.
I remember sitting in his office at Nottingham University, and I was very young and very trepidatious about this with one of those great big EU reel-to-reel tape recorders, which we all had to use in those days.
And they would record 15 or 20 minutes at a time.
Then you'd have to change reels.
But he impressed upon me something that I had no idea about at the time, that, as you say, this is the gold standard of communication.
If it is material that has not been known and could not be known by the medium, then you're onto something of a completely different order.
To me, it is one of the gold standards.
Yes, it is indeed.
Excuse me.
Croak his throat again.
Yes, you're doing brilliantly, by the way.
Well, thank you very much.
And is what I call a fastidious, steadfast researcher.
He would do the work slowly, carefully.
And in the second book, well, I'm not going to talk about it because in the book, the case of Harry Stockbridge, for example, is amazing, where the communication came through, gave such a lot of detail about himself, and he gave his date of death.
Now, when Alan checked up the War Memorial, the War Memorial had the day before, it was either the day before or the day after for Harry Stockbridge's death.
So Alan researched it at the War Office, he wrote to the government, he wrote to platoons, he wrote everywhere, and he found out eventually that the communicator was correct.
The date given in the circle was the actual date of the death.
For our listeners, who was Harry Stockbridge?
Oh, it doesn't matter.
He was just a soldier in a platoon during the Second World War.
That doesn't really matter.
The point is, the information this person gave was not easily checked up upon.
And yet, after months and months of searching and writing to War Office and the Home Office, all the rest of it, Alan found the communicator was absolutely correct.
Now, no one in that circle had an interest in Harry Stockbridge.
They couldn't have cared less about Harry Stockbridge.
They wanted Auntie Jeannie and Uncle Willie and the mother and the father.
So where does that, you've got to ask yourself the question, where does the information come from?
And a truly remarkable case in that it pointed up an anomaly in the retained information.
Correct.
Correct.
How do you begin to explain that?
You can't, apart from saying that it is what it appears to be.
Well, you'll hear people naming no names who will trot out the expression super ESP.
What the hell does that mean?
Nothing.
It means that you're tapping in somewhere to this information.
This information is not easily accessed.
It had to be found from various sources to check that that was absolutely correct.
And that is the case with a lot of other ones as well.
So as I said before, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck to me.
And the most parsimonious explanation, as in Occam's razor, is the personality has survived and is passing that information back down to people here.
Now, Stockbridge wouldn't know anyone in that circle, but it was obviously his only means of communication to get the information through.
This is a good point to bring in something that comes towards the end of your new book, and that is the whole topic of resistance to the acceptance of survival after death.
In other words, we know much more about this, and there is much more evidence coming out.
But it seems also that counter to that, the opposition, the refusal to accept it, the putting your fingers in your ears and going da da da da da is increasing.
Yep.
Well, I think it's getting better.
And this is one of the reasons, actually, that I have written these books.
I didn't really set out to write books, but as you know, Professor Roy and I gave lectures at Glasgow University Adult Education for many years.
And when Archie died, I thought, you know, the best way to memorialize this is to put a lot of our work and some new work, of course, into books, because everybody that came to the university absolutely loved the 40 hours of lectures, loved them.
And so I've incorporated some of the essence of those within the two books.
But as Stanley Kribner said, you know, you'll either love the book or hate the book, but you certainly won't be bored by it.
And that's absolutely true.
But I mean, there's so many other ways of looking at information.
For example, I don't know if you know about the Bank sisters who were psychic artists.
I read something a while back, yes.
Well, I mean, once again, I'll tell you about this because it once again looks like a duck.
The Bank sisters were actually physical mediums more than psychic artists, although they did use artistic material.
And the first recorded demonstration of their what they call precipitated art, because what would happen was a canvas would be put on somewhere and underneath the canvas there would be little oil paints at the bottom.
The whole canvas would then be covered by a cloth.
You as a sitter would come in and sit beside the mediums, the bang sisters.
You would sit for an unspecified time and when the canvas was lifted there would be a picture of your loved one there.
And if you didn't like it and if you said, oh, I didn't really want them to have those pearls on, they would cover the canvas again after an unspecified time, lift a cloth and the pearls would be gone.
Now they'd never touched anything.
But even more interesting to me and much more evidential from my point of view and your point of view, Vice Admiral William Osborne Moore was Queen Victoria's cartographer and he diligently investigated the Bank Sisters.
Now as a cartographer he was a keen observer, as you can imagine, and kept immaculate records.
Now he saw the works of the Bank Sisters.
I think they came to England actually.
And he saw them and he devised a test for them.
So after seeing the works of the sisters he contacted Sir William Crookes, whom as you know was a chemist, and he asked him to prepare an ink which incorporated ingredients not normally associated with ink.
Because one of the other things the Bank Sisters did was you could go to the Bank Sisters, Howard's going to the Bank Sisters, with an envelope with a blank Sheet of paper in it.
You sit with a sealed envelope in front of the bank sisters.
You don't move, they don't move.
And as you're sitting there, now in those days, they had the little bottles of ink.
You might remember from your school days, a little bottle of ink, and you had to put a pen in it.
Yes, remember those quink bottles of ink.
That's the very chap, right?
So you can sit there.
Howard Hughes is there, the bank sisters is there.
There's an envelope with nothing on it and a bottle of your quink ink at the side with a pen in it.
No, it doesn't really matter.
As you sit there for an unspecified time, everyone in the room can hear scratching noises coming from the inside of the envelope, as if a nib was writing on paper.
Good lord.
And after that time, you, Howard Hughes, you open the envelope and there is written in the handwriting of your loved one is a message for you signed by them.
So Osborne Moore thought, I'm going to test this.
So he'd William Crookes make up an ink that was a one-off ink with ingredients in it that were not normally in ink.
So he subsequently presented himself to the Bank sisters along with the sealed envelope and his own bottle of Crookes' special ink.
And the Bank Sisters said, yes, that should not be a problem.
Now, what happened then was exactly the same as before.
Osborne Moore sat there.
And the other interesting thing was the little bottle of ink that you could see, as you heard the scratching on the paper, the level of the ink would diminish.
If it was two inches high, you would see it slowly going down to one inch.
So this happened again.
Just as if the same thing would happen if there was a leak in the bottle.
Yep.
It was going down like that.
Wow.
In front of your eyes while the scratching was going on.
So the usual routine took place.
A handwritten letter was given to Osborne Moore.
Osborne Moore then sent the letter to William Crookes for analysis, and Crookes confirmed that the ink in the letter was the ink that he had prepared.
I don't know what to say about that.
But look, if this is possible, why is nobody doing this now?
Well, we don't know.
Why are these things not worldwide known from the time it happened in the time of the early 20th century?
Why do we all not know this?
Same reason as why do we all not know the likes of the work of Chico Xavier with the automatic writing?
I'm glad you got to Chico Chavier and the automatic writing because that is fascinating, isn't it?
There are people who are doing that now.
In fact, it seems there's not as much of this stuff on television now, but back in the days of great talk show hosts like David Frost, this kind of thing used to be on mainstream television, which it is not now.
Automatic writing, though, I've actually experienced this with a guy called Christian Dion, a British medium who now lives in Los Angeles.
And he can do it, two hands, and he can, without looking at the paper particularly, and he can write coherent sentences that come out.
And I still have no idea how that is done or quite what it is.
Well, the theory, if we take one theory, obviously, in his case, two people are working through them at the same time.
One's writing with the right hand and one's writing with the left hand.
And this is quite common.
Chico used to do that too.
And diversing slightly, one of the healers, I think it was Arigo, used to write prescriptions for people with two hands, two different prescriptions at the same time, and quite often in a different handwriting.
Now, back to Chico Chavier.
Yes, some people still can do it, but Chico was amazing.
I mean, this man was only educated to six, primary six, we would call it.
And yet, in 2010, he was voted Brazilian's Personality of the Year, and his photograph went on a stamp.
Why?
Because he did so much work with automatic writing.
I'm just getting facts and figures.
He wrote 259 poems by 56 different poets, including almost every leading figure from Brazilian Portuguese poetry.
And he was tested in the laboratory for his brain waves.
So he was interested in what was going on because he didn't understand it either.
And incognito and double-blind testing, they sent Chico's brainwaves and the brain waves of Chico while he was doing automatic writing to a laboratory, obviously disguised it, double-blind testing.
And the scientists said there is no way that these two brain waves could come from the same person, which makes you think someone else's brain waves, personality, energy, whatever you want to call it, is the one doing the writing.
And this also happens with music, doesn't it?
It does indeed.
That's another, I've got a bit about that as well, but that's too long to go into it.
Now, there was another man, another Brazilian man, a scientist called Hermani Andradi.
Now, he takes an altogether more cerebral approach to survival.
It's very upmarket, very clever, very scientific, quite difficult at times.
But Andrade is a wonderful afterlife researcher as well.
So just after one of Chico's books was published, an admirer of Chico brought him a copy of Andradi's book.
And he said, Chico to Chico, what did you think of Andradi's book?
And Chico looked at him and said, how would I know?
He said, I don't even understand my own.
And that's absolutely true.
Now, Chico's output were millions, millions of pounds worth or currency worth of stuff.
And he never took a penny for himself.
He gave all of the money from automatic writing to the local community, for hospitals, schools, and to the local community.
And that is why the populace voted for him to be personality of the century against the government's wishes, actually.
They didn't want that.
They wanted Pele or one of the presidents to be on the stamp.
But no, the people insisted it was Chico Xavier.
What a fantastic man.
Sometimes an embarrassment, isn't it, for the powers that be when the people speak?
Well, yeah, we'll not go any further than that one, yeah.
Here's a story about Christian Dion, that I've never told on this show or indeed anywhere else.
In fact, I'd forgotten until right now, until this moment.
This is absolutely true.
Christian Dion, a British medium now in Los Angeles, likes to do a lot of celebrity showbiz psychic gossip.
That's his thing.
A very flamboyant character, trained as an actor, very interesting person.
You know, he would do readings.
I'd listen to him on radio doing readings, and he'd say, you know, you've been through a bloody, terrible time.
It's been like you've been through a long, dark tunnel, but I'm telling you now, it's going to be okay.
So he's a psychic medium.
And I've always believed he had something for reasons that I'll go into on another show, but he certainly did some work with me that I can't explain and came out to be right.
Automatic writing, he said he did it.
So he demonstrated in my parents' home in Freshfield near Southport in the, I think about 1984, this was, maybe 83.
I was very, very young, very new to researching all of this stuff.
So Christian is there and he starts to write.
And next door is a man called Brian Hurdle, who still lives in the same house next to my late parents' house.
And Brian, I didn't know much about it, to tell you the truth, and I knew nothing about it until this moment, had a background in the RAF.
Now, Christian automatically wrote down a lot of stuff about the RAF, about Spitfires.
Those were the famous World War II British planes for listeners in America.
I'm sure you know what they are.
And about certain events that happened.
And sealed the letter, which I later passed to Brian.
And Brian confirmed the stuff in it was correct.
And we didn't know where it had come.
I think there was also mention of somebody who perhaps had died and had been a colleague of Brian.
It's a long time ago.
I would need to talk to Brian, who's still alive.
God bless him, up in Freshfield.
And I will talk to Brian about that.
But he was quite staggered by it, absolutely staggered by it.
And from that day to this, I've never talked about that and I still don't understand what was going on.
Well, once again, you have to ask yourself, where did that information come from?
I have not the faintest idea.
I mean, Christian hadn't even met Brian next door.
Well, I'm still asking you the question, where possibly could that information have come from?
Yeah, I mean, where could it have come from?
Well, it could have come from colleagues of people who worked with Brian in the RAF during World War II.
It could have been some kind of telepathy between, you know, between the walls of the two houses with a person that Christian had never met, whatever it was.
It was pretty damn remarkable.
I think that's very unlikely, the telepathy answer.
Very unlikely.
The most parsimonious answer is that whoever was writing it was trying to get information through to Brian.
Surely that's the most parsimonious answer.
That's what I've always thought about this.
But listen, I haven't even thought about that for easily 10 years, probably more.
And just the mention of automatic writing brought that true event.
And I swear, that happened in my dear parents' home on a Sunday afternoon, very near Easter.
Fantastic.
Fantastic.
That's a tremendous experience for you to have.
30 years ago.
But, you know, that's something that maybe if I ever write a book, I'm going to put in it.
Amazing.
The guy's amazing.
I'm going to have him back on this show.
He's still doing his work.
You were talking about, sorry.
Sorry, yes, you were saying.
You were talking about materialization.
And people have said to me, well, where do you go from here?
You know, I have three published papers on mental mediumship, et cetera, et cetera.
And I feel I've been drawn towards physical mediumship.
And I did sit in a materialization circle fairly recently.
And I have to say, amongst all the other things, there were definitely things there that I could not explain.
I've tried to rationalize it out.
I could not explain the things that happened in that circle.
And that, I think, is the way I'd like to go is to sit in more physical circles and just see what's what.
As long as I can put in my own protocols, then I'll be happier than with the last one I was in.
But even at that, there were things I could not explain because I have no imagination.
I'm not artistic.
I'm not a medium.
I don't have a fanciful type of mind, but there were things there that I saw and felt that I could not explain.
Quite fantastic.
Well, you've teased my listener.
Just can you give me one example?
Well, it sounds crazy unless you were there.
I was invited to this circle and I was sitting beside people I didn't know at that time at all.
There's a woman on my left called Pauline and a girl called Alice on my other side.
And you have to sit in a physical circle, you all have to hold hands the whole time.
My downside is it was all done in the dark, which I really don't like.
But there was a point a red light was put on, but not long enough for me, but that's a different matter.
And the reason you have to hold hands and put your knees together is to make sure the person next to you is not moving.
There's no one moving around.
Now it's quite a small space.
Well, relatively, not a big space, maybe nine by nine or something like that.
Not a big space at all.
And there was a usual wrappings and tappings and things allegedly flying about, which didn't particularly impress me.
And then I heard someone, I did know someone who was sitting further down and I heard her going, oh my God.
And at that, a light appeared like a ball.
It was like, it wasn't solid.
So it wasn't a solid thing.
This ball of light came past Helen and I heard her saying, oh my God, look at the fingers.
And as the light came round, and it wasn't just on the one level, it was going up and down.
And as it passed me, I was determined to watch what was in this ball.
And as the ball passed me, I could see it was as if it was being held in a little tiny hand.
And you could see through the ball.
And it wasn't solid.
There was little filaments inside it.
It was so delicate.
And as it passed me, I mentally said, oh, don't go so quickly.
Come back, come back.
And it stopped and it came back to let me, I'd only thought it and it came back to let me see inside it.
And then the woman next to me saw it as well.
And of course, I said to her, what did you see?
And we all saw the same thing at a different time, at a different level.
That was one thing I could not explain.
So the next day I was on the computer looking at holograms, etc.
And there's nothing fits that parameter, whatever.
But there was lots of other things happened to other people as well.
And there was another thing to do with light that I saw another figure coming around, and I could see the skeleton through the actual figure.
I could see it was like an x-ray just as it passed me.
I was sitting in a corner.
There's lots of interesting things.
I would love to do it again.
I'd love to be more awake, alert to possibilities.
But I would love to do it again.
I think it's fascinating.
It seems that the golden age of all of this was from perhaps the turn of the century and up and to and through World War II.
I say this for a reason.
One of those interviews that I did age 23, and I've mentioned her before, was with a grammar school, I believe she was a deputy headmistress.
She'd been my sister's deputy headmistress.
A very, well, as people were of that time.
I interviewed her, as I say, early to mid-80s.
Lola McNaught is her name.
And we played a little audio clip of her a couple of years back on the show from that original interview from when I was 23.
She talked about the great era in Liverpool of the physical mediums, the people who made, in one case, a little girl appear, or was it a little boy who came round and touched people in the circle.
And Lola, I looked into her eye as I did this interview, and I was, what, it'll be 23 sitting there in her front room in Waterloo in Liverpool.
And, you know, she was completely convincing and totally believable.
She said this little person who appeared came round and touched people on the hand.
What could that have been?
Well, we were certainly touched.
We were certainly touched in that circle as well.
And the chairs were all jammed in close together.
And at one point, it was impossible for the chairs to move because we were jammed from wall to wall.
And at one point, we all felt as if, pardon me, the chairs were being pushed along the line and we were touched by a hand as well.
But equally, a phrase that I've never forgotten from Alan Gould in his wonderful, lugubrious British voice, the way he said, I personally have seen cases of the most egregious fakery.
There has been in physical mediumship egregious fakery.
Oh, absolutely.
I'm sure there's fakery in everything.
And also in modern mediumship, there's a lot of delusion as well.
And all mediumship is not equal, unfortunately.
And this is a whole problem.
There are gold standard people, you know, people that are fantastic.
And they're few and far between, I have to tell you.
And there's some people that are just downright awful, to be honest with you.
And some of the awful ones are making a lot of money.
Although we'll not go into that.
True enough.
You have a tantalizing little section about help from beyond.
In my case, whenever I'm going to do something big in London, I don't do quite as much of that kind in London anymore.
But whenever I do, I try and go to the Church of All Souls, which is next to Broadcasting House.
It's the broadcasting chapel.
It's part of the BBC.
And I sit there in the pews and I try, please don't laugh, and I hope my listeners will understand, and connect with a man called Ray Moore.
He was a broadcaster on BBC Radio 2.
He's from the same town, went to the same school that I went to, had a marvelous voice.
I was a big fan of Ray, incredibly funny man.
His funeral, his service was there at All Souls Broadcasting House.
So even right up to today, if I'm going to do, for example, I had some sessions to do for Britain's Radio Academy, where I have to stand and present to broadcasters about whatever topic it might be.
I would go and sit in the chapel at All Souls there, the BBC's chapel, the broadcasting chapel, and ask Ray for help.
I know it sounds ridiculous, but I always believe that he did.
It's not ridiculous at all.
I believe that Ray helped me.
It's not at all ridiculous.
Maybe it's just the ramblings of an old fool, but I think there's something in it.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
You know yourself, if you're standing up, I know if I'm lecturing, I don't speak the same way I'm speaking to you just now.
You stand up and you, I don't know, you adopt a different persona.
It's as if there's someone there helping you.
Even if it's just to make the best of yourself.
No, it's not foolish at all.
Not in the slightest.
And I do believe to an extent, and I am a level-headed person and I am a journalist and will ask the hard questions of whoever has to be interviewed.
But there have been occasions when I really haven't known how it's been possible to do a thing.
Two occasions in my own life, I used to do the live voiceover and commentary on a huge television show called the British Comedy Awards.
I did it for eight years.
And thinking about it now scares me because it was all live and it had to be perfect and it always was.
And I would come out of it and say, I didn't do that.
Another occasion where I'm sure I was helped was I had to do, to cover the Queen Mother's, the Queen's mother, the Queen Mother's funeral service, which was a massive national event because, as you remember, she was such a loved and respected person.
I had to cover that for all of the stations that were then owned by London's Capital Radio, and that was a lot of stations up and down the country.
I had to do it all by myself and mix it, mix the audio from it, do it all in a timely and appropriate way, and above all, do it to time and not make any mistakes.
I know thinking of that makes me feel sick.
But I did it, and I finished it on time for all of the stations, and everybody said, wow.
And I looked around and I said, well, I am convinced I did not do that.
You know, I don't think I have that ability, but it somehow came through me.
I'll never understand it.
Well, you did it, and that was great.
It's like even writing a book.
You go back and you read it, you know, months later, or you read, and you think, I don't remember writing that, but obviously you did write it.
But it's just, it's as if someone else is doing it for you.
But of course, it's my own material.
You cover reincarnation in the book.
The first book has got more reincarnation than the second one.
The second, there's actually quite a good program from America Don't Laugh on just now in one of the other channels in which they're covering a lot of the cases that Jim Tucker deals with in his book, Return to Life.
Now, Jim Tucker is from the University of Virginia, worked with Professor Ian Stevenson, etc., as you know, and they have logically and systematically investigated about over 3,000 cases of a sensible reincarnation of children who remember a previous life.
Now, some people are not going to like what I'm going to say.
The cases of reincarnation which appear after regression, I don't give the same amount of weight to.
I like the cases where children can speak of a previous life from the minute they can actually speak.
And this, it's called The Ghost Within My Child, and it's a series on Lifetime just out on television.
And they're actually doing it very, very well.
And they show you the children, and it's cases, verified cases of children who, from when they could speak, could give their name, how they died, etc., etc., from a previous life.
And often these children are not happy children.
And often, as in my case in my first book, the Cameron case, they'll say to their mum, I've got another mum.
You're not my mum.
Someone else is my mum.
And they'll give details.
Now, on this program, they've done it really well.
And they've taken the children back to the place where they think they died.
And they do a little service, a goodbye service to the first personality.
And you know, it's amazing how that seems to work.
But the amount of detail that these children can provide is unbelievable.
Some of them are very unhappy memories and some are quite happy memories and some are somewhere in between.
But along with the 3,000 cases in America, the case that I did with Cambern is very similar in the way the child speaks to the mother.
And there's this coherence all over the world with any child that remembers a previous life.
It is quite fascinating.
And every so often, something happens in both our lives, I'm sure, Tricia, that will shake you.
And I know that some of my listeners will say he's telling another story again.
And I'm sorry for that.
It's just because I've lived a few years and you and I have both got stories to tell.
But, you know, I may be a deluded fool, but I remember working.
You think you are?
Well, you know, I might be.
It's still open to debate.
Who knows?
And, you know, frankly, we've just got to press on with life.
I don't know.
But look, I was filling in for Pete Price on Radio City, who's a big talk show host in Liverpool.
And I went back to my home city and I stayed in my dear late dad's house with him.
And we had a lovely time together.
It was probably 2009 or so.
And my mother had died in 2006.
One day I was going into work on the Mersey Rail train from Freshfield or Formby station into Liverpool.
And there is the most delightful little girl sitting opposite me.
And just as I would have imagined my mother to have been when she was little, she told me so many stories about her Liverpool childhood.
It was a magical and very innocent time.
She was the most delightful little girl with her big brother, who must have been a teenager, and this girl was maybe four.
And she looked up at me and she just said with an innocent smile, where are you going then?
And I said, I'm going into work.
She looked at my jeans and she said, you can't go into work wearing those.
And I thought, that's exactly the kind of thing my mum would have said.
And I just thought, you are captivating.
And then the clincher for me was, and I said, what's your name?
And she told me her first name.
She said, mine, and her second name.
She said, my name is Hughes.
That's my name, you know.
And I tell you what, I was smiling, but I was nearly crying then because I thought, look, probably nothing.
But if my mum had come back, that's what she'd have been.
There you go.
You can't go like that.
I used to laugh.
This is off topic a bit, but you know, I've done a few television documentaries for BBC and Channel 4, etc.
And my mother was someone who couldn't quite get to grips with this because she couldn't understand how all these people could be up there.
There was no room for them.
God bless her.
But I would do a documentary and I would go into her maybe the next day and sit down.
Now, no word was mentioned of the documentary, nothing.
And then eventually she would say, I watched your program last night.
And I would just go, oh.
And then she would say, why did you wear that blouse?
That was the amount of applause I would get.
Why did you do this?
Why did you do that?
But God bless her after she was getting there, you know, before she died.
She was beginning to think, yeah, there's maybe something in this.
So that was really quite good.
Yeah.
There is so much that we could talk about and so much we could say.
And I hope my listeners will forgive me for telling my stories and for just for having a conversation with you, which is what we've done.
So, you know, it hasn't been a forensic examination, but you and I just talked about it.
Can I very quickly just put in two lines of Patience Worth from the automatic writing?
Patience Worth was a personality who worked through an American lady called Mrs. Curran.
Now, Mrs. Curran was only educated up to the age of 14, not a great education, but she did sit in circle every week and she developed this personality coming through her called Patience Worth.
Now, people might think it was a figment of her imagination, except for the fact that Patience Worth wrote in Old English.
And Patience Worth, the study of Patience Worth is absolutely fantastic, the amount of output that's come from that.
Through Mrs. Curran, a fairly uneducated lady, there were four novels produced, The Sorry Tale, Tecla, Hope True Blood and The Pot Upon the Wheel.
The output of that was tremendous.
Now, Dr. Walter Franklin Pierce came to see Mrs. Curran do the work with patients in trance.
And Dr. Franklin Pierce thought that it was a lot of nonsense.
And after questioning Patience's personality through Mrs. Curran, he said to her, you're a conscious, subconscious dream of Mrs. Curran's.
And patience would say in Old English, and what be he, sir?
Nee ga, they're a sorry dream over too much current.
And patience, his quick-witted repos were just that, came back in a fraction of a second.
Everything he said, she would have an answer to in old English, in the correct syntax.
Mrs. Carne was American from Boston, didn't have it.
And Prince said to Patience, part of the odd words you use, she unconsciously remembers or she has invented.
And Patience says, well, it be a trick.
Can they do it?
And then the very, very final one I want to share with you because I think it's fantastic is after five years of examining Mrs. Carn and patients coming through, Prince, with no warning, asked patients to write lines beginning with every letter of the alphabet, A, B, C, D, except X, and to write something about them in the correct order.
The reply came fully in alphabetical order, minus the X, at a speed which was even difficult to take down the shorthand person who was there.
But as Prince himself dryly remarked, her opinion of the task to which she was set was evident from the last two lines.
She looked, well, through Mrs. Curran, she looked at Prince and the last two lines were with the letters Y and Z. And the lines were, yea, this thy servant upon the path of folly, zealously endeavouring to follow, that she follow a fool.
And he said, that's what she thought of him.
And Prince eventually had to reluctantly give in that the works coming through Patience Worth were definitely not coming from the subconscious mind of Mrs. Curran.
He didn't want to do that, but he had to, because, as I say, it's all about the evidence.
The evidence is there.
In all of the things we've been talking about, there is a huge amount of evidence.
And this short time, of course, gives us no time to go into all of it.
But believe me, the evidence is there.
Don't be disheartened.
Look in the right places and you'll find evidence for survival amongst other paranormal phenomena.
Tricia, I'm really pleased you have a publication date finally for the new book.
It's called More Things You Can Do When You're Dead.
It's effectively, if I could even say the word, a volume two.
Published on November the 30th.
What's the publisher?
White Crow Books.
It's White Crow.
We know them well.
If people want to know about you and your work, is there a place online they can go?
Yes, they can go to my website.
It's www.tricia, spelt T-R-I-C-I-A.
Tricia Robertson.weebley.com.
W-E-E-B-L-Y dot com.
So the Trisha is spelt with T-R-I-C-I-A Robertson.weebley.com.
And there's a whole bit about my research into healing, etc.
A whole lot of stuff with references.
Now, I should say that in both books, I give you my side of the story, I give you the evidence, but I also provide you with masses of references where you can go and find out more about what I'm saying.
My book is written for the man in the street, the woman in the street who does not know where to go for credible information.
But surprising to me, Howard, is the big Whigs, you know, the Bernard Carr's, John Poyntons, all the people who know about psychical research, they all love it as well.
They love it because it's simple.
It's straightforward.
I don't mince my words, as you know, and they just love it.
And it gives people the opportunity to take any subject further if they want to, because everyone's not at the same stage to accept things at the same time.
I got a lot of response to you and your appearance on the last time that you came on here.
The one story that captivated people more than anything else, and we don't have time to go in detail into that, but it's in our previous show about the first book, was the story of the airline pilot.
I know Glasgow Airport well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The airline pilot who turns up for work at Glasgow Airport and has a conversation with a colleague who he later discovers had died.
Three days earlier, yeah, in Edinburgh.
Yep, and I've got a lot of response to that.
But he didn't know the guy had died.
He hadn't seen him for a year.
And it turned out at Glasgow Airport that the coffin was coming from Edinburgh through Glasgow Airport to the plane to Stornoway, in which the chap lived, had just died.
And I mean, it didn't do my Captain Bob any good at all because he was an agnostic and he really didn't like the idea because he said, I bloody well know who I spoke to because they had a relevant conversation.
And there was other corroborating evidence as well, like the weight loss.
We'll not go into just now.
But that was fascinating.
And what fascinated me more was I went up to the Chief of Security with Bob to Glasgow Airport.
And the Chief of Security took us seriously.
He absolutely took us seriously, which I thought was fantastic.
But hadn't they mysteriously lost the video camera footage from that day?
Because that was pre the time that the people drove their car into Glasgow Airport.
They only kept the video footage for a week.
And by the time Bob got to me, it was over that time.
And the video footage had been wiped and it was reused again.
What a shame.
What a great story.
Well, nowadays with digital, probably that wouldn't happen.
It would always be there, you know.
But that was 1996.
Tricia, great success with the book.
I love talking with you.
We'll talk again.
And thank you very much.
Thank you.
Take care.
Hope the throat gets better.
We've been a pair of right pair of sufferers today, haven't we?
All crocs.
Lovely to talk to you.
You with your throat and me with my ear.
Thank you very much, Tricia.
Please take care.
Bye.
The great Tricia Robertson in Scotland, and the book that she talked about will be out very soon.
Please watch this space, but search her name and details will appear, I am sure.
And I'll put a link to her and her work on my website, theunexplained.tv, which is designed, created, owned and maintained by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
You know, in 2016, The Unexplained will be online at least a decade old.
It's already more than that.
If you take into account the radio show that came before the online version, big plans for 2016.
Thank you very much for being with me as you have been every step of the way.
If you've got anything to say about the show, any suggestions for it, I see all of your emails.
Please get in touch via the website theunexplained.tv and if you can possibly make a donation, especially at this time of year, please do.
You can do that through the website theunexplained.tv and follow the simple and safe PayPal link.
Until next we meet here, please stay safe, please stay calm and please stay in touch.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London and this has been The Unexplained.
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