Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

March 2, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:12:40

Edition 243 - Richard Estep

Anglo-American paranormal investigator Richard Estep on ghosts and hauntings in the US andUK...

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
	My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Well, thank you very much indeed for a phenomenon that's been happening for the last month or six weeks or so.
	The numbers for this show keep leaping up and up and up and I think somebody somewhere is referring to or referencing this show.
	It may be Belgab or somewhere like that, but the numbers are just incredible now.
	So thank you very much indeed, wherever you are for being part of this.
	A lot of people have been in touch by email.
	Can I ask you if you get in touch?
	Can you give me a name?
	Tell me where you are and how you listen to this show.
	So, you know, your name, how you listen to the show and where you are.
	Great information for me to have.
	Don't worry, I'm not going to send the boys in blue or the men in black around.
	It's just nice to know who's listening and where they are.
	Try not to use pseudonyms either.
	Give me a name, just so I can get a handle on you, what you want and where you are.
	So lots of shout-outs coming up.
	Thank you very much to Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work on the show, maintaining the website and getting the shows out to you.
	It's all working so well at the moment and couldn't do any of it without you and your support over what has been nearly 10 years of doing this now.
	So thank you very much indeed.
	And if you have made a donation to the show at the website www.theunexplained.tv, thank you for that.
	Let's do those shout-outs ahead of the guest on this edition whose name is Richard Estep.
	Now he is a man who you may well not have heard of.
	He's a paranormal researcher from the US, originally from the UK, but he's also a paramedic.
	That's his full-time job.
	And we're going to talk about a number of things, including haunted hospitals.
	I think you're going to find this one interesting.
	Let's do those shout-outs before we get to Richard Estep in Colorado.
	Cody, thank you for your email.
	Chris in London listening to Mark Devlin.
	And although it's greatly entertaining, says Chris, he's incredibly vague about all aspects of these controllers and why we're being deceived.
	Well, we hope to have Mark Devlin back on at some point.
	And we'll talk more about the music when we do.
	Good comments from Lindell, who listens in Abu Dhabi, Kenya, or wherever he happens to be at the time.
	Nice to hear from you.
	P2O, or rather PTO, pull to open, made me laugh.
	Thank you very much indeed.
	Please try to use a name, not a pseudonym, though, if you get in touch next time.
	But I liked your email.
	Thank you.
	David in Doncaster runs a fish and chip shop there and has invited me to get fish and chips, great British delicacy there.
	So there's a big chance that I'm going to be going up there.
	I was brought up in Liverpool on battered cod, chips and mushy peas.
	Times two.
	Didn't do me any harm either.
	Ralph Harrison, thank you very much indeed for your email.
	Tom in Gloucester found something online that is said to support the idea that you may well have heard that Paul McCartney died in the mid-1960s and was replaced.
	One of these days, if we can find somebody good about this, we will do a show on it.
	But I've got to find somebody good.
	And that's always the difficulty.
	Jimmy says, hi, Howard.
	Love the show.
	You are the last radio regular voice that I've listened to since the Friday Rock Show with Tommy Vance in the 1980s.
	Tommy Vance, great British DJ, went over to the US in the 60s, worked on KHJ Los Angeles.
	I think the only Brit who did.
	And then came back here.
	Great voice.
	My radio hero, and I'm glad you liked him too.
	He's much missed, Jebby.
	Thank you.
	Jason Newman in Canada, thank you for your support.
	Damien in Swanage in Dorset, nice location and nice email.
	Thank you, Damien.
	Ian Shaw in a place I used to live and broadcast, Worcester.
	Used to be on Radio Wyvern back in the day.
	George Sellas says, keep on doing the shout-outs.
	We are, and thank you, George.
	Zachary in the US, thank you for your email.
	Andy in Wisconsin, thank you for yours.
	Josh sent me a whole bunch of phone numbers.
	Josh, can you let me have a clue what this is all about?
	Okay.
	Gaz in Brighton, UK says, I was saddened to hear Art Bell's decision to stop broadcasting.
	And sending out once again my good thoughts to Art Bell.
	But I will say you're definitely in the same league as Art.
	I think the baton has been handed to you.
	Well, Gaz, I'm not sure about that, but that's very kind of you.
	Kerry, a mum from Warrington, living in Dubai, listens on the way back home from the school run.
	Kerry, nice to hear from you.
	Rich in Trenton, New Jersey, who's off to Hawaii soon.
	You know I love Maui.
	You're a lucky man, Rich.
	I know you're going with the family, so have a good time.
	John rather in Portland, Oregon.
	A little bit delayed with getting Douglas Oswell on here, but trying to make that happen.
	John?
	Jim in Canada says, great show with Meryl Frankhauser, just to confirm the John Lennon channeling story that he told.
	Jim says, I wrote an historical fiction novel.
	Many parts of the book were not written by me.
	They came from somewhere else through me.
	And I sometimes felt like I was eavesdropping on a private conversation.
	Now, that is interesting, Jim, because sometimes I've done things on radio and I've thought, I don't know how, with my abilities, I was able to do that.
	Quite seriously, sometimes I would do stuff that has worked out perfectly to time or something has gone really right.
	I used to do the voiceover on a great big TV show here, live, and it should have been really scary, but never was.
	And it always worked.
	And I always used to think, I don't think I'm capable of that.
	So something somewhere helped me do that.
	I'm not crazy.
	I just have that feeling.
	And I'll talk about this more sometime because I think it may be a factor for some people.
	Tanna and Joe Brown in Utah says, Howard, you're awesome.
	Don't stop.
	Thank you, Tanna and Joe.
	Terry in the US heard the show on Morgellen's disease and thinks that we should do some more research about that.
	Terry, thank you.
	Kevin thinks that we should have a separate show for shout-outs.
	It's getting that way, Kevin.
	Thank you.
	Madeline in Seattle, thank you for your email.
	Jay in Atlanta heard about my show on Bell Gab.
	Bob Banks in Liverpool, nice to hear from you.
	Michael Green in Perth, Western Australia, listens as he drives his garbage truck and suggests Australian Colin McLaren on the killing of JFK.
	Would love to come back to Perth one of these days and just have one more coffee on the Cappuccino Strip, Michael.
	John John says he's got some information we all need to hear and he sent me a DVD.
	Where did you send it, John?
	Haven't seen it, so you've got to tell me where you sent it.
	Bill Furner, thank you for the links to your songs about Mars.
	And good luck says he's contacted Coast2Coast AM, but they didn't reply.
	Well, we do.
	There you go, Bill.
	Mark in Kingston, UK, had to turn off Meryl Fankhauser after 40 minutes, didn't like him.
	Well, horses for courses, Mark, I guess.
	Andrew Adriance in Toronto says, peace, Howard.
	Peace back to you, Andrew.
	Thank you for getting in touch.
	And Richard Pace enjoyed the show with astronomer and soon-to-be astronaut Nigel Henbest, who will be back.
	Those are your emails.
	If you want to get in touch, if you want to shout out, tell me anything about the show, get in touch through the website w.theunexplained.tv.
	www.theunexplained.tv.
	Right, let's get to paranormal researcher Richard Estep in the U.S. now, in Colorado.
	And Richard, thank you very much for coming on the show.
	Thank you for inviting me.
	It's a pleasure to be here.
	And Richard, you're in Colorado, right?
	I am.
	It's nine o'clock in the morning, and I've got the bright mountain sunlight streaming through my windows as we talk.
	That sounds great.
	You have not lost your British accent.
	No, I'll give that up.
	They can pry that from my cold, dead fingers, if the Americans like to say.
	How long have you been there?
	Your biography tells a story of a young guy who went to live in America.
	More than that, I do not know.
	1999 was when I came over here, May of 99, and I've been here ever since.
	So I've kind of put down roots now, but I do get back to good old Blighty every year a couple of times, usually.
	And have they welcomed you over there?
	You welcome?
	Or are you still settling in?
	No, no, they're a very friendly bunch, the Americans, really nice people.
	And I think it's true.
	We do have that special relationship as two nations.
	We love each other's tele and each other's culture.
	And long may it remain so.
	I think that is so.
	I've spent a certain amount of my working time visiting America and broadcasting from America.
	And, you know, I've always loved American radio.
	And some of us, I think, are just pulled magnetically to the other side of the pond.
	I've known Americans who've been magnetically attracted to coming over here and people like me who are magnetically attracted to going over there.
	It's a strange thing that we have going, but you're right, absolutely.
	Well, I think every British kid of my generation was raised on American TV shows and American movies.
	And I think it's, yeah, again, it's a great thing, isn't it?
	It is.
	Now, your story, apart from the fact that you made that giant leap across the Atlantic and now live there, is pretty remarkable from what I see because your interest in things paranormal, we have to say that you work these days as a paramedic, which is going to be pretty crucial to what we'll be talking about for part of this discussion.
	But your story begins from what I read in your biography by you being a young kid and staying at your grandparents' home, which I think, unless you tell me otherwise, was haunted.
	Is that so?
	Not quite.
	So my grandparents' home was indeed a haunted house.
	So you're not, you know what?
	You're correct.
	It also, I found the body of my grandfather when he'd passed away in a different home.
	But most of my upbringing was I would go to my grandparents' place in Hull, Kingston-upon-Hull.
	And they regaled me with stories of when they were raising their children, my stepfather and his brothers and sisters.
	They were one of those big World War II era families, you know, where my grandfather came back from fighting in Burma, had a bunch of kids.
	They were going into the 50s and so forth, as so many families were.
	And they had the most incredible paranormal activity going on in that home.
	Perhaps my favorite instance of it, and the one that frightened me the most, I think, was that the children who all shared a bedroom, you know, as kids did in those days, and a ghostly old lady would come into that bedroom at night after they'd been put down to bed and would tuck them all in.
	And they didn't think anything of this.
	In fact, they had no idea that she wasn't actually a living, breathing, flesh and blood person for most of the time.
	And these days, people would panic about that kind of stuff.
	They'd be calling the police, the social services, just about everybody because they'd be scared and they would not be able to compute it.
	But we have to say that in that generation, and this goes for my grandparents' generation too, I think people were more accepting.
	It was part of this thing that was beyond life, was part of ordinary life, wasn't it?
	Well, that's true.
	And I think that the Americans have a great term for them.
	They call them the greatest generation.
	And I think that's a great way to put it.
	But it's also important to remember, especially in the UK, I mean, death became a part of life, didn't it?
	Many major British cities were bombed.
	Everybody knew people that had died during the war, often quite a few people.
	And so death was just something that you got on with and dealt with.
	And it isn't that way now.
	Death is something that we tend to hide away, something that happens to other people.
	It happens in hospitals, you know.
	I think most people here, most people in the UK and in modern day America haven't seen a dead body by the time they become an adult, for example.
	Well, we try and sanitize these things, don't we?
	And it's not until much later in life that you have to come literally face to face with this, as I did myself.
	My mother died 10 years ago, and I'd never seen anybody like that.
	And I had to see her.
	And, you know, my father, too.
	But it is something that more and more we try and protect younger people from, almost as if it isn't part of life, which of course it is.
	And I'm not sure we're doing them a great service either.
	Well, no, because we're trying to, I think, I mean, this is a whole other discussion that is worth having anyway.
	I think that we're just laying up trauma for people.
	We're laying up non-acceptance of something that has to be accepted.
	Unfortunately, this life, as much as you wouldn't want it to be, as much as I don't want it to be, is finite.
	It is.
	All good things come to an end.
	And sometimes you learn that at an earlier age than others.
	So there you are in Kingston-upon-Hull, your grandparents, a haunted house that you are aware of, and you're told stories about these things.
	What about direct experience?
	Because something must have helped you to reach a tipping point in your interest in these matters.
	You know, not within that house, and the house stands today.
	In fact, my grandmother only recently passed on herself.
	I never had a single direct experience in that house, but not for lack of trying.
	And I would lie there awake at night, every night, terrified out of my mind.
	Every creaking floorboard was acting on my imagination.
	You know, every time there would be a draft that moved the curtains, I would be waiting for this old lady to come in.
	And there were other ghosts in the house, too.
	My grandparents would regularly report that the pictures on the walls downstairs would be hung upside down when they come downstairs in the morning.
	They would also hear the sounds of what sounded like a party or a social gathering.
	But when my grandfather would go downstairs to check, the house would be absolutely silent and empty.
	Things like that.
	Did they ever do any research?
	Did you ever do any research on the house?
	No, well, one case only.
	There was, by all accounts, an old lady that had died in the house prior to my grandparents taking up residence.
	And my grandmother saw her standing in the doorway watching her putting out the washing on a number of occasions.
	And she would just stand in the doorway and watch.
	There was also a male spirit that appeared in a doorway once and scared one of my uncles halfway to death.
	And it turned out that there had been some faulty wiring in that room that was sparking and threatening to catch fire.
	And he had actually done him a great service by keeping him out of the room.
	Which suggests that those who passed on have awareness of what is going on here.
	Some.
	We use the term ghost, I think, a little too easily.
	It's an umbrella term.
	Or at least if we use it correctly, we get some of that activity, which seems to be almost a recording, if you will.
	And it's no more interactive than when you turn on your tele and you're watching any kind of show.
	You know, there aren't really people inside the box on your screen.
	It's some kind of recorded signal or broadcast signal.
	Well, I've only ever had one experience of this kind.
	And when I look back on it, it was absolutely classic.
	I was working in a big tower where there's a radio station.
	And one night I walked out of the studio.
	It had a corridor that goes all the way around the top of this tower.
	And you can look down on the city.
	And I saw a little man for a fleeting second in a flat cap.
	He looked like a laborer of some kind wearing a cap.
	Now, those were the kind of people who in the 60s had built that tower.
	But I saw this guy.
	I could describe him to you.
	He was quite a short and very squat guy with a cap.
	And I said to my producer, I said, Jonathan, did you ever see a little guy with a flat cap here?
	And he kind of confirmed that, yes, that was the resident ghost there.
	And the story goes that maybe this guy was somebody who'd worked on the building.
	You know, all building projects, especially in those sort of years, if they involved bridges or towers or anything like that and a certain amount of risk, inevitably people died.
	And it seemed that this was probably one of those people.
	But I didn't feel any sense of malevolence or harm, but I definitely saw him and was aware of him.
	And I'm told that he's around there a lot, doesn't mean anybody any harm, but just runs like a movie.
	So when you say radio tower, broadcast tower, we're talking about one of those, I'm picturing one of those big, well, broadcast towers, yes.
	Yeah, no, it's an actual tower that has a radio station on the top of it.
	That kind of gives it away, I think, for people listening in the UK.
	But it's a place that's a great location.
	The radio station's at the top of a big tower.
	And the reason I bring that up is, of course, we're always looking at the power source.
	And when you get either high voltage lines or a great deal of energy, that's when we start looking at possible sources for this thing to manifest.
	So it may be that this guy was no more intelligent than any image on a TV screen, that he was just a residual capture, if you will, going about his business as he had during his lifetime.
	The fascinating thing is that there are others, and I haven't met one of those, who do appear to react and appear to know that an electrical contact is sparking or, you know, have a message for you.
	Not that I necessarily believe what I see on some of these GeeWiz ghost hunting TV shows where they hear voices saying, please help me or don't go there.
	But there are apparitions, presences, whatever you want to call them, that do interact.
	There are definitely those energies, for lack of a better term, because frankly we don't have a better term, that do interact and will directly answer questions when asked.
	So again, that's a different part of the spectrum, isn't it?
	So visual imagery, audio imagery, in fact, all five of the human senses can experience something paranormal, something that we would call ghostly, if you will.
	And we're still trying to fathom exactly how that works.
	When people see a ghost, for example, there are many recorded instances of a group of people going around some historic building, let's say.
	They're being taken by a tour guide.
	Three or four of them witness a figure in period clothing, which disappears.
	Eight or nine of them don't.
	What's unique about those three or four witnesses that did see the figure?
	Is it the chemistry of their brain?
	Is it the fact that they were in a different mental state?
	You know, they happened to be a little bit more either relaxed or not relaxed.
	Is it the fact that, well, there are so many factors we're trying to figure out how people see ghosts, what the mechanism is.
	And it may not be as simple as the light entering our eye that allows us to see in the everyday sense of the word.
	And all sorts of research being done on whether there is a parallel plane somewhere where all of us exist or have existed or will exist.
	And sometimes that parallel plane, which is maybe spinning at a slightly different rate, becomes visible.
	All of this stuff, I think we're getting more understanding of, but is really interesting.
	Okay, so there we have you, your story.
	Here you are in the UK.
	You're starting to be aware of these things.
	What did you do next?
	I pretty much, no pun intended, haunted the local library.
	And a big shout out to my home library in Seiston, Leicester, because the librarians there, whose job it basically is to feed inquiring young minds, let me have every book in the paranormal research section.
	And I read it over and over again.
	And I was blessed with parents and grandparents, too, that would go to W.H. Smith's every week without fail, you know, and publishers like Osborne used to bring out those great books on ghosts for kids and teenagers.
	You know those?
	Remember those?
	And I would get every one of those.
	So my shelves were just groaning with all these classic ghost stories.
	And you don't tend to see those for kids anymore as much either, I think.
	Well, you don't.
	I mean, I think the nearest we get to anything like that now is Harry Potter, but it's all rather sanitized.
	Well, and that's fiction, too.
	But there used to be a lot of those, You know, the bumper book of ghosts and stuff like that.
	And I would just read it over and over and be so fascinated with this subject.
	So it's one thing to read about it.
	And, you know, I read about all sorts of stuff when I was a kid, but it's quite another thing to start to do something proactive yourself.
	It is.
	And it was the mid-90s when I saw an advertisement in the Leicester Mercury, my local newspaper.
	A guy called Andrew Wright, who I love to describe as the Keith Richards of the paranormal research scene.
	If you saw Andrew, you'd know why.
	He looks very much like a rock star.
	Was taking a team to Lincolnshire to investigate a haunted church just outside Louth.
	And I was like, I'd love to get in on this.
	Maybe I can contact this guy.
	And pre-internet era, I went through the phone book.
	You know, there's a blast from the past.
	Found his number, gave him a call and said, look, I've always wanted to do this.
	Can you use an extra pair of hands?
	And he said, absolutely.
	And from there, I got to put boots on the ground deliberately in my first truly haunted location.
	Tell me about that.
	Well, if you, and I should add that I have some American friends that just went to this location.
	Now it's been beautifully restored and it's very peaceful.
	But at the time, the church was old, abandoned, and desecrated.
	It's out in the middle of nowhere.
	The closest town is Louth.
	It's called St. Botolph's Church near Skidbrook in Lincolnshire.
	And go there on a Saturday afternoon, as we did.
	It was in the middle of summer.
	It was birds singing, very calm, very tranquil.
	And yet when the sea mist kind of rolls in, when it gets dark, this place looks for all the world like the set of a hammer horror movie.
	I mean, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing would have been right at home in this place, you know?
	And when we got there, you got a very long driveway.
	We had to get permission from the caretaker in order to access the place and not trespass.
	And we would walk around and we saw that gravestones had been smashed.
	Some of them had been sunken into the ground.
	We saw that it had been desecrated.
	There were occult symbols daubed all over the walls of this beautiful old stone building.
	You know, we found, more concerningly, I think, we found a number of birds with their heads sliced off and laid out as though some kind of ritual sacrifice had taken place.
	So already you were predisposed mentally to, you know, into that supernatural mindset.
	So it wasn't just earnest paranormal investigators who had an interest in that place.
	There was something darker going on.
	Well, and it's possible on the one hand that these were thrill-seeking kids, you know.
	The reason the place had some notoriety was that it had appeared in a book which had gotten national exposure.
	The book was called Ghostbusters UK by a guy called Robin Furman, I believe.
	And Robin and his team had been chased out of there by some green mist that they say came up out of a grave and pursued them to their car.
	So, of course, people latched onto this.
	And it wasn't the ghost hunting era as we see it now, mainly because most haunted and ghost hunters and those kind of shows had not been born yet.
	So you didn't have paranormal tourism and tour companies.
	You didn't have people doing this every Friday and Saturday night.
	You just had a few small teams of investigators.
	But this place was kind of known on that circuit.
	It gained a certain notoriety after that book was published.
	What did you do there?
	Well, I was learning the ropes, learning the tricks of the trade.
	So I was learning the importance of bringing lots of caffeine in a flask.
	I was learning how to set up equipment.
	But I think most of all, I was coached to think critically.
	So many things, in fact, the vast majority of so-called unusual phenomena in this world have a very rational, perfectly normal explanation.
	It's a very tiny percentage, 5 to 10% tops, that we can truly say a paranormal.
	But if you put yourself in the middle of what looks absolutely like a haunted old church and churchyard, you know, every shadow has the tendency to take on this paranormal character, especially when it gets dark, you know, and your adrenaline is starting to flow.
	So I was learning how to think like a paranormal investigator.
	I was learning how to track the wind currents through the building.
	So what at first seems like it might be an icy cold draft turns out to be something coming in from one of the windows at a certain angle.
	We tracked all that kind of stuff.
	We tracked temperature variances.
	We set out tape recorders.
	Now we have the luxury of digital voice recorders where I can record 96 hours of high-definition sound.
	Back then, you'll remember the old 60 minutes on a side tapes, you know, tapes that you had to flip over.
	And quite often you get to the end of 30 minutes and be turning the tape over and the good thing would happen.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Murphy's Law.
	And I learned how to operate the video cameras.
	It was the old over-the-shoulder VHS cameras where you would load the tapes directly into the side.
	I'm getting all nostalgic as we talk about this.
	So learning the equipment and how to employ it.
	And there was significantly less technology available to the investigator than there is today.
	So what did you uncover?
	You know, you were able to screen out those things like drafts that appeared from particular places that you could track back and see that that's quite logical and maybe flashes of light or whatever.
	But there must have been something there to hold your interest that you couldn't explain.
	Oh, certainly.
	And I'll preface it by saying that part of it was and remains still the thrill of the hunt, of not knowing what's going to happen that night.
	And the answer most times is nothing, but the answer wasn't nothing at that church.
	One incident that stays with me to this day is that I was working with another investigator of being doing a mobile patrol around the outside of the church.
	And we all had walkie-talkies.
	And the radio keyed up.
	And one of the other observers said, hey, guys, who is that behind you?
	And we both turned around as quick as a flash.
	There was nobody there.
	And so got to this rather shaken investigator who insisted that there had been a tall hooded figure following the pair of us around the corner of the building.
	And it had disappeared as soon as she keyed her radio.
	Deary me.
	And What did you do about that?
	Change my trousers.
	No, in all seriousness, it's a completely subjective experience.
	And so we tend to have to discount something that only one observer sees.
	It's unfortunate, but you kind of have to do that.
	It makes for a great story, a great anecdote.
	It's completely true.
	But if one person and one person alone sees it, you can't call that evidence.
	Did anything happen that all of you could agree on?
	Absolutely.
	We'd driven up there from Leicester, so about four in the morning, everybody was starting to flag.
	It was getting cold.
	So we burrowed down into sleeping bags inside the church itself, shivering on these cold flagstones.
	And it was one of those kind of nights where you got a couple of minutes of fitful rest here and there, no real sleep.
	So we were all starting to doze, and then the entire interior of the church was just split with this sound of screaming.
	And it sounded to me like a bird of prey screaming, not a human screaming, but an animal of some kind.
	And it was coming from the middle of the church.
	And of course, all of us were sat bolt upright, like, what on earth was that?
	We played back our tape recorders, and nothing had not been recorded, but we had all heard the same thing.
	We took notes, and we'd all been woken by this high-pitched screeching noise.
	Right.
	So you had some kind of record of something that sounded like a bird, maybe a bird of prey, but you're not quite sure because it's a screech that you haven't heard before.
	And you'd recorded this?
	Nope.
	Had not turned up on the one tape recorder we had running at the time.
	And if it were today, we would have four, five, six voice recorders running because recording time is now cheap, cheap as chips, as David Dickinson would say.
	But back then, remember, you had to take a box full of blank tapes with you.
	So you would kind of ration your tapes out and you would just have one running most of the time.
	So this one that had been running did not pick up anything.
	We had it hooked up to an external mic and didn't pick up anything.
	But when we talked about the sound of the screaming, we had all heard the same thing.
	And what's very interesting to me about it is that we were all in that place where we were mostly but not entirely asleep.
	You know, it's an altered state of consciousness.
	Everyone's familiar with it.
	It's the one you have when you're just starting to nod off and your head dips and you kind of catch yourself because you think you're falling, you know?
	And I tend to see pictures at that point.
	A lot of people do.
	And quite often it's just easily explicable.
	It's just the brain essentially in that transitional state between wakefulness and sleep.
	But it's one thing for one person to experience the noise, but if you all experience it, then something's happened that's been a communal phenomenon.
	Yeah, the nail on the head, Howard.
	So if it were just me or just one of the others, it would be easily explained away.
	Like the guy that it was his first and last investigation because he fell asleep, propped up against one of the tombstones and woke up insisting that somebody was breathing in his ear.
	And one of the other investigators tried to calm him down with no success.
	But the answer there is almost certainly, hey, you know, you were just having a semi-waking dream.
	But when you have five or six people experiencing exactly the same thing at the same moment, you have to reach for a different explanation.
	And that's the point where you have to correlate, I presume, what you've experienced with what other people have experienced in that place.
	That's correct.
	And there was a wide range of phenomena reported in that place.
	Now, I hadn't heard of anybody experiencing screeching noises in that church, however.
	And so when you look back on it, what do you think?
	What do you make of it?
	On that single experience itself?
	Yeah, on the totality of what happened there.
	On the totality of it all, it's what started me really actively investigating.
	So the experiences in my grandparents' house and with their reading every day started me out on this road, but I didn't really go into high gear until I started joining this team.
	And I stayed with them for a few cases as long as I was in the UK.
	And, you know, we visited some interesting places.
	We used to get calls for help from homeowners that didn't know where to turn.
	The police couldn't really help them out.
	I mean, calling the police when you have footsteps upstairs in an empty house isn't really that helpful.
	Well, you know, my dad was a copper.
	You can only deal with what is real and what you can see.
	Other stuff, although police officers, you know this because you work as a paramedic, you experience all sorts of things, but you can only document what is real.
	Well, and that's true.
	And the very definition of an emergency, I teach paramedics, and the very definition of an emergency is any circumstance beyond the individual's capacity to cope.
	So I've certainly heard of instances where the police have been called to a haunted house or a house where paranormal activity is going on, but there's very little they can do.
	And they can refer people to teams such as mine.
	So cherry pick a story or two from those experiences before you left the UK.
	Well, perhaps one of my favorite was a place in Loughborough, was a private help case.
	It was a single mom and her family, and they had just had a brother.
	Her brother had just moved in, and he seemed to have brought something with him, some odd activity came along with him when he came back to the house.
	So it was a nice, easily controllable environment.
	It was a council house, and I was in the TA in Loughborough at the time.
	It was not that far from my barracks.
	That's the, for American listeners, that's the Territorial Army, Volunteer Forces.
	Oh, yeah, the equivalent to the National Guard or the Army Reserve, something along those lines.
	So we investigated this location.
	A council house is a very, fairly small house, easy to control and investigate.
	And it turned out that this chap had been very much into the occult.
	When we were checking the house over and taking our baseline measurements in his room, we found a number of occult books.
	So it seemed that he'd been dabbling with certain things and may have gotten more than he bargained for.
	And what had led this lady to finally call for help was an experience where she had been in the bathroom and had tried to get out, and the door had been held, completely empty house.
	The door had been held closed, and she'd been trapped in her own bathroom for five or ten minutes, desperately trying to get through this door.
	Good God.
	I mean, most people would be apoplectic with fear.
	Well, absolutely.
	And of course, it doesn't really help that people have seen horror movies where this very kind of thing happens.
	And so she was hearing footsteps around the house and they were hearing voices.
	The activity seemed less than friendly.
	And in a lot of cases, although it's easy to misinterpret paranormal activity as being sinister, most of the time it can be either playful or an attempt to just draw attention to something, you know?
	And I always like to imagine if you were somehow rendered invisible and intangible, how would you try and make your presence known?
	It's an interesting mental exercise.
	And the chances are you would attempt to make noise, you know, you might attempt to generate light, but you would do something to try and draw attention to yourself.
	You'd rattle the coffee cups or, you know, make some stand full of shoes fall over.
	Yeah, move things, move objects, move what you can.
	And that's exactly what we see in the majority of these cases.
	It really is as though some entity is trying to say, hey, just so you know, I'm here.
	So this poor besieged woman who'd been kept in her bathroom by something that wasn't physically in the premises, what kind of reassurance or help could you have given her?
	Well, the first thing that we always like to do is prioritize cases where children are involved.
	Because, you know, nobody should be scared in their own home, but that goes doubly for children in my book.
	So we kind of dropped everything and went in to spend some time with her, did a number of visits there.
	We recommended, actually, that she get her brother out of the house, which is what finally solved the problem.
	So the focus, I mean, it's almost like a poltergeist case, isn't it?
	The focus was on an individual, and this particular person's hands were already tainted somewhat because he was dabbling, as you said, in stuff that maybe you shouldn't ought to.
	You're somewhat correct.
	Yeah, so generally speaking, there are three types of hauntings.
	There are haunted places, haunted objects, and haunted people.
	And we're all, of course, very familiar with haunted places, but objects and people, perhaps less so.
	So I wouldn't say that he was the focus, which absolutely poltergeist cases have a focus at their epicenter.
	I would say, though, that he was the catalyst, that he had caused this activity to spring up in the place where he was living.
	But it did happen to the mum when he was out of the house.
	So I think it was more that he tracked in some kind of parasite with him, if you will, when he started dabbling.
	But when he left, even though whatever it was was active when he wasn't there, even though he was resident there, if he went out to the shops or did whatever, it was still gripping that place.
	But when he finally left for good, whatever it was went with him.
	Yeah, or dissipated.
	Another analogy might be that he was no longer there to open the door for it.
	Again, we're not 100% sure of the mechanism.
	And despite there being plenty of people in this field willing to tell you that they are experts, there really aren't any.
	There are just people that have done it for a great deal of time.
	But whether he actually physically took that activity with him or whether it just dissipated because he wasn't there to catalyze it anymore, it stopped when he moved out.
	Really?
	Did you give him any advice?
	Did you give them any advice about the way perhaps they should conduct themselves in future?
	Well, I mean, it's always challenging because in this particular case, we don't have any business.
	Well, we never really have any business telling people how to run their lives.
	But we said, you know, it's obvious you're having some pretty deleterious effects after playing around with forces that you don't understand.
	And whether you believe in the occult or not, which is a whole separate issue, I think, no matter what your belief system, if something you're doing leads to a bad outcome, stop doing it.
	That's pretty common sense, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	It really is.
	And you don't really have to drag theological debates into the mix or anything like that.
	Now, you were in the territorial army at that time.
	How did they react to the stuff you were getting up to?
	We didn't really talk about it that much, but one guy that I was in the TA with was a full-on psychic medium, and that was how he made his living.
	Really?
	So, yeah, I mean, the territorial army is made up of a very diverse bunch of men and women who we all would wear very different hats during our working week.
	I was an IT engineer, for example, you know, and then we would get together at the weekend and all do the same thing.
	What a fascinating life you've had.
	So what was the catalyst for you to, when you're involved in all of this fascinating research and you've got a life here, how come you decided to uproot and go to America?
	You know, it was one of those decisions that I, and I love America.
	America has been very good to me.
	It was one of those situations in which I had the chance to come out and do something new.
	And I've learned that good things tend to happen in life when you say yes to opportunities.
	And this was a lot of upheaval for me.
	It really was.
	And it's something that I did in my early 20s.
	I would not have done it in my 30s, certainly wouldn't do it now in my 40s, you know.
	But I was young enough and maybe foolhardy enough to grasp the opportunity with both hands and take it.
	So you were a part-time soldier here and an IT engineer.
	What did you go over there to do?
	To be an IT engineer.
	I worked for a large IT company that I can't name, I don't think, but it has three letters in its name.
	It's fairly well known.
	And they had a big plant in Boulder, Colorado, and I had a skill set that they said they could use.
	And I ended up marrying an American woman and settling down.
	So look, Richard, I mean, you were living the dream.
	At what point did your paranormal researches, there you are with your nice life working for a big tech company in the U.S., living, as I say, the dream.
	What made you want to carry on with the paranormal stuff?
	Well, I think part of living the dream is doing what you're passionate about and fascinated with.
	And for some people at the weekends, you know, they like to a big shout out to my friends in Leicester who are, you know, they spend their Saturdays at Philbert Street watching Leicester City play.
	Which is sometimes a salutary experience, yeah.
	Yeah.
	You know, so some folks are all about that and they live that.
	Other folks are all about fishing or caravanning or whatever your passion is, whatever you love to do.
	We work in order to further what we're truly passionate about.
	So if you handed me, let's say, 10 million quid tomorrow with a lottery win, not that I play the lottery, but if you did, I would still continue to paranormal investigate, you know, whereas I would not have continued to work on people's computer systems.
	What did your new wife in America say about all of this stuff?
	Was she into it?
	No, but she was pretty supportive about it.
	And that's the way pretty much that any of my girlfriends have been and that my wife has been.
	It's a case of if this is your thing, knock yourself out.
	Try not to bring anything home with you.
	Which works.
	Yeah.
	Literally the spirit of America then.
	You know, you've got to be free to do what you want to do.
	That worked well until last year, and we ended up having some problems at home.
	And I did have to call a friend of mine who is a Catholic priest to come bless the house and try and cleanse things.
	What did you do?
	Amyuka, you can't just leave that hanging in the air.
	What happened at home?
	Well, it's kind of interesting.
	And as I said, for all those years, that's the one kind of cautionary piece of warning I've had.
	Whether I've lived with a girlfriend or lived with my wife, I've always been told, you know, just don't bring any of that stuff home with you, okay?
	You can go out and investigate as many haunted places as you want, but leave work at work.
	And so that's always kind of been the case.
	And then it was last Christmas things started getting pretty odd.
	And by that, I mean not the Christmas that's just gone, but the Christmas before that.
	And we found that our Christmas lights would start switching themselves on just after midnight every night.
	Which was a little bit odd, but I was putting it down to the wiring, you know, and coming up with all kinds of reasons.
	Probably it was freezing and the circuits were contracting and these things would turn on.
	But it was happening, then started happening throughout the day.
	So I changed components.
	I changed the power strips.
	No dice, this was still starting to happen.
	So I have a friend who is an ordained Catholic priest, but is also a paranormal investigator on the side.
	Again, it takes all sorts.
	So he came over and said, look, you need to give, you've probably picked up some psychic bottom feeder, for want of a better term.
	Give it a good talking to, a good stiff talking to, and everything should be fine.
	Okay, so the theory from him was that you had been on an investigation maybe and something had adhered to you.
	Yeah, in the same way that when I'm working as a medical provider every so often, you know, I'll come home, I'll get a sore throat myself.
	Despite my caution, I've tracked something home with me.
	So I delegated that out to the fierce one in the household, my wife Laura.
	And she said, leave it with me, I'll give it a talking to.
	And so everything stopped, and we had a completely silent year.
	And 2015 was a year where I visited some of the world's truly most haunted locations.
	I went to Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky.
	I went to Bobby Mackey's Music World in Wilder.
	Those are both two extremely haunted locations.
	I've been to a number of places over a pretty short period of time, the Cripple Creek Jail up in the mountains, you know.
	You have done the Cook's Tour.
	Well, I've been writing a number of books, and in order to write books, you should try and get on the ground in the locations that you're going to write about if you can.
	And as you say on your biography, in your biography, you're trying to hold down a career as a paramedic, so you cannot go everywhere.
	But it seems to me that you've cherry-picked the best locations.
	And that's kind of my MO at the moment.
	So I'd done that, and we started noticing at home, and I should preface this by saying that one of the cases I'll be working on later this year is in the UK.
	I'm writing a book about a very famous British case called The Black Monk of Pontefract, which was nationally famous during the 70s and is still very active today.
	That location, in fact, nobody will live in that house.
	So you're going to take time out and check that out, literally.
	I'm moving in for a while.
	Are you?
	We must stay in touch.
	I'd love to come and see you when you're doing that.
	Absolutely.
	So I'm asleep one night in bed and my wife elbows me in the ribs and I had just Skyped the day before with the owner of this house and producer of the movie about the haunting, a movie called When the Lights Went Out.
	And she said, whoever this black figure is by the bed needs to stop.
	I just woke up and there was a short black figure standing there next to the bed.
	I said, Laura, you almost certainly imagined it.
	She's like, I did not imagine it.
	I was fully awake.
	I'm fully awake now, but whatever.
	So we both went back to sleep.
	The next day, Laura is on the phone, answers a phone call, says hello.
	There's nobody on the other end.
	Her phone line is dead.
	And then hears a female voice elsewhere in the house say, hello.
	Good lord.
	Our dog, Greta, who just passed sadly, she liked to lie on the bed upstairs and watch the world go by.
	You know, she was kind of like the neighborhood watch, went berserk.
	As soon as this voice, which seemed to come from downstairs, was spoken, Greta went hackles up, running down the stairs, full-on attack dog mode.
	Nobody is in the house.
	So I write that off to dogs being dogs.
	And, you know, I said, Laura, you probably imagine the voice because we're all great deniers, you know?
	There's a reason, by the way, just as a quick digression.
	Medical professionals are the worst patients.
	We are the people that will deny that we could possibly have a heart attack or a stroke happening to us.
	It's part of our psychology.
	So given the same principle, then paranormal investigators are the first.
	You said that you learned in Leicester how to allow for rational possibilities first.
	So you were saying, oh, it can't be anything.
	It's just you've imagined it.
	It was a bad dream.
	It might have been this.
	It might have been that.
	At what stage did you decide something else was going on?
	That was a couple of days later.
	So I go to a lot of science fiction conventions because I'm a huge geek.
	And we have a bunch of autographed 8x10 photos in frames that we're waiting to hang on the walls.
	So there were 10 or 11 of them sitting on my shelf, stacked, and they'd been there for about four or five months, I'm ashamed to say, sitting on my mantelpiece, in a very neat stack, haven't moved in months.
	Then all of a sudden, they are tipped and come flying to the ground and nearly cut one of our cats in half.
	So 10 or 11 pictures are pushed, there's no other way to put it, off the mantelpiece onto the ground where they smash and crack.
	One of my cats had been sleeping directly underneath the fireplace.
	Fortunately, he didn't use one of his nine lives.
	He was able to bolt away before they actually hit him.
	Now, the answer to all of this in Loughborough, if we go back to England, is the source of it all, which is presumably you, to stop doing all of that stuff.
	But you couldn't.
	I mean, that's your great interest in life.
	It's your passion.
	It's your love.
	So how do you square that circle or circle that square?
	Yeah, you're right.
	It's safer to say I could stop, but I won't because this is my passion.
	Well, and there was one more incident.
	And so I was still clinging on to looking for a rational explanation.
	So I said, look, it's a mantelpiece above the fire.
	You know, maybe it got warm.
	There was some temperature change in the mantelpiece and maybe that caused stuff to slip.
	And Laura just looked at me and said, they've been there for five months.
	Seriously?
	So the next night, I am sitting in my hallway in a chair.
	My boss, Jen, had called me.
	I'm sitting in a chair talking to my boss, looking at my front door, just idly, you know, looking around as we're talking about the working day.
	And I see this black, shadowy figure walk across my hallway and it's silhouetted against my white front door.
	And at that point, it's done.
	It's game over.
	It's like, you know, it's not like I've been drinking.
	It's not like I'm hallucinating.
	What's going on here?
	I clearly saw, and I said to my boss, I said, Jen, I'm going to call you back.
	A shadowy figure has just walked across my doorway.
	And Jen, knowing me full well, said, all right, see you tomorrow.
	Bye.
	Click.
	And what do you do at that point?
	Something has obviously followed me home.
	So I got in touch with my friend, the Catholic priest, right?
	Yeah.
	And said, Steve, can you come over?
	And I'm an agnostic.
	I'm a big believer in respecting people's belief systems, but mine is kind of show me the evidence.
	I'm undecided.
	So I'm an agnostic.
	And it's kind of nice to be an agnostic with an on-call priest on my speed dial.
	So we made arrangements for him to come over that weekend, and he did the full routine, you know, the full ceremony, and he blessed the house and was daubing crosses in holy water all about the place.
	He has a very specific ritual that he uses in cases such as this.
	And I laugh because I told you I'm a big collector of memorabilia, movies, TV, and science fiction.
	I actually have an autographed 8x10 of the kid from the Omen hanging on my wall.
	And I said, Steve, is this the first time you've blessed a house with a picture of the Antichrist hanging in it?
	There would be people, you know, I mean, joking apart, Richard, who would say you're living very dangerously.
	You know, there would be people that say that, and I don't mean to mock their belief systems.
	I can only talk with 20 years of experience and say that being part of the paranormal community, I've really not seen any ill side effects.
	And I wonder if you haven't been adversely, deleteriously affected by this because you're pretty grounded and you refuse to allow whatever there might be attached to you, haunting you, coming round your front door.
	You refuse to allow it to get too much of a grip of you.
	Perhaps somebody with less of a will, an iron will, which you seem to have, would be worse affected by this.
	Well, I'll tell you, Howard, there are protective techniques that most investigators use that involve envisioning energy shields and those kind of things.
	And I always, as a young man, with, you know, so forgive me because it sounds less than respectful and it wasn't at the time.
	I used to laugh at that kind of stuff.
	I used to think it looked stupid.
	But as I've done this for more and more years, I've begun to get involved in those small rituals myself.
	So because I became a proponent of the theory that if it looks stupid and it works, it isn't stupid.
	I mean, just don't knock it.
	Don't question it.
	I would be using it.
	So where are you at now then?
	So there is a small follow-on to that story.
	Everything was quiet in the house for several weeks after Stephen had visited.
	And my dog, Greta, so I flew to Britain in January to go spend some time in a haunted witch's prison in St. Oseth in Essex called The Cage.
	And while I was gone, Greta, my dog, who is the love of my life and my wife's also, she became very ill and we had to have her put down.
	And my wife had to do that when I was out of the country, which was heartbreaking for her.
	And we always would put the blinds in the office at, we'd call it Greta level.
	It was about two feet up.
	So she could watch the world go by and watch her turf, her patch, you know.
	The night that Greta had been put down, Laura cleaned off the glass in the office, the window, because Greta's snoot marks, her nose marks were all over it.
	She cleaned them off for the last time.
	She put the blind down because she knew she would not need to leave the blinds up for Greta to look out anymore.
	You're not going to tell me those marks reappeared, are you?
	No, no, no, I'm not.
	But the following morning, Laura came downstairs, was sitting at the computer talking to me, writing me an email, and then looked down and saw that the blinds had been raised to Greta level.
	And she was sure she hadn't adjusted them.
	She'd put them down, and it was one of those things that sticks in the memory because it was so painful.
	She quite distinctly remembered saying to herself, this is the last time, until we get another adoption dog, which hasn't happened yet, this is the last time I will need to put these up for Greta to see out of.
	And she put them down.
	And it's the kind of thing that sticks in your memory because it was an immensely painful thing for her to do.
	It was part of her acceptance That the apple of our eye was gone.
	Except the next morning, as if trying to be helpful, something or someone, somehow, those blinds had gone up two feet high again.
	All right.
	Well, you're the one who likes to find a rational explanation.
	Doesn't sound like there's one for that.
	Nope.
	Good luck with that.
	And if you can offer one, or if one of your listeners can offer one, I'm all ears.
	Oh, what a life you lead, Richard Esther.
	Listen, your publisher is going to be really annoyed with me if we don't talk about the book that they sent me an email about, The Haunted Hospitals.
	You did allude to one of those locations that you went to, but if we can just spend the last, say, 15 minutes or so of our conversation talking about that research, because that's pretty, you know, other people have done this sort of thing, but it's fairly unique.
	It is an interesting subject.
	And of course, as a paramedic, it wasn't a great leap for me to want to write about haunted hospitals.
	But also, if you're going to categorize certain types of haunted buildings, you know, in 20 years, I've seen haunted everything, pretty much.
	I've seen a haunted bakery.
	I've seen haunted restaurants.
	No surprise that I've seen many haunted pubs and bars.
	But hospitals, pretty much every hospital has its ghost stories.
	And they're not as publicized as you might think.
	And it's a very good reason why.
	People that manage hospitals, they understand that these are places of healing and that ghost stories and things that go bump in the night aren't perhaps the most conducive to a restful environment.
	Well, they're not too good, I don't think, for blood pressure.
	I wouldn't have thought.
	Precisely.
	They're great for mine because that's my passion.
	But most people don't want to hear that.
	Excuse me.
	But if you know healthcare providers, doctors, nurses, just folks that work in hospitals, you know, if you get them talking off the record, it's amazing how many of them have their own experiences.
	And I won't name the hospital, but there is one relatively local to me, which is now abandoned, in fact.
	But I talked to one of the nurses and she said very matter of factly to me that every night doors would start opening by themselves on one of the floors.
	And they would have the charged nurse, because she was the sternest, say to thin air, hey, knock it off tonight.
	We don't want to deal with any of your shenanigans.
	And it would stop.
	And so it's interesting because you look at physicians, you look at nurses.
	Nursing school and medical school, of course, are two of the hardest academic achievements on the planet.
	You have to be very scientifically versed.
	You have to have a pretty strong academic background in order to become a nurse or a doctor.
	And you have to be fairly hard-headed, too.
	You have to accept that in the midst of life, there is death, and we just have to get on.
	You know, hospitals could not exist if there wasn't a throughput of people who go there.
	Some of them go home treated and some of them will not go home.
	And the people who have to administer the care need to be very level-headed and quite balanced about it.
	That's right.
	You've kind of hit the nail on the head with what you said there.
	Part of why I think hospitals have so many ghost stories is that they are the stage for the entirety of drama in human life.
	I mean, on one floor of the building, you have people coming into the world.
	You have labor and delivery, you know, O-B-G-Y-N.
	And on another floor, you have people that are leaving it.
	You have people that are taking their last breath, surrounded by their families.
	You go to the emergency room or A ⁇ E for our British listeners, you know, and you have people that are coming in and dying of motor vehicle accident trauma, gunshot wounds, stabbings, heart attacks, those kind of things.
	It's almost as if it's a microcosm, isn't it?
	It's life being played out before you.
	Listen, I did exactly what you're talking about when my dad died a couple of years ago, the hospital in Southport, up in the north of England.
	And I walked around the hospital when I went to collect his possessions.
	Very emotional thing.
	And I just, I didn't feel like driving home, didn't feel like doing anything.
	So I just walked in a daze around the hospital.
	And there all around me was the drama of little babies taking their first breaths.
	A guy in a quiet side room surrounded by his family.
	That picture told its own story.
	So you're absolutely right.
	Hospital is a kaleidoscope of all things.
	It is.
	And you only have to look at the fact that TV shows, such as Casualty in the UK and ER in the States or whatever you choose to look at, you know, those shows run for years and years and years because they never run out of human drama.
	There are so many stories told on the stage of a hospital.
	And I think that that leaves a trace.
	It leaves a residue.
	So some of the hospitals that I looked at in the book are either no longer there or they're no longer functional.
	They're abandoned.
	Others are, I looked at some of London's bigger hospitals, for example, talked to doctors that still work in some of them.
	They're still big, they're bustling, they're in the heart of the modern 21st century metropolis, and they also have their active ghosts.
	So you have this constant bustle of human emotion, and I think that feeds the activity.
	My listeners will absolutely round on me if you don't tell me any stories from hospitals.
	So I'm going to let you tell them.
	Well, I'll tell you one of my favorites.
	I'm a little biased on this story because it involves a hospital in Salt Lake City, just outside Salt Lake City in a town called Tuela.
	And this is the subject of my next book, and this is a shameless plug, which comes out in August.
	I think you're entitled.
	You're entitled.
	Thank you.
	I went to visit this hospital with a couple of fellow investigators.
	We made the drive from Colorado to Salt Lake to move into this hospital.
	And the reason it is such an incredible location is they closed the hospital down in, oh, 2003, 2004, something like that, abandoned it and sold it into private hands.
	And it is now a Halloween haunted house.
	So it's kind of like the London Dungeon or, you know, Madame Two Swords Waxworks, but it's a full-on full of vampires and zombies and all that kind of stuff, haunted house experience.
	It comes to life every Halloween season for a couple of months.
	And it is just full of all these actors, you know, playing horrific roles.
	But it was an old community hospital.
	And when they abandoned the place, they left everything there.
	They left the beds, they left the charts, they left x-rays, they left all the equipment, half of which still works.
	You know, the hospital beds are the same hospital beds that people slept and died in for decades.
	And it is all just there.
	It truly is a hospital.
	And so I talked to the owners of this place, which is called Asylum 49 now, and said, guys, you know, this sounds like a really fascinating case.
	Could you tell me a little more about it?
	And they said, why don't you come see for yourself?
	And so I went down there last spring and had an interesting time, but you know, I wouldn't say it was that spectacular.
	And I was a little disappointed.
	And the owner said, the problem is you're here off-season.
	If you come later in the year, if you come during the Halloween season, this place has over 30,000 people coming through it in the Halloween season.
	And that's when we have ghost sightings crawling out of the walls.
	It's just so the ghosts put on a show for the people or maybe in some way the people attract the ghosts.
	Yeah, I think the latter is more accurate.
	And I'll give you a good example.
	The old emergency room, the owners of Asylum 49 were getting a consistent feedback from customers.
	They're saying, we love the ER.
	It's now splattered with blood and it has zombies, babies in it, and all kinds of stuff.
	They said, but the guy that was playing the ER doctor, man, he seemed really angry.
	He's a terrific actor, isn't he?
	And they didn't have the heart to tell these customers that we don't have a guy playing the ER doctor.
	So a little bit of research yielded the fact that the man who used to oversee the ER in the hospital was known as being a real myway or the highway disciplinarian.
	You know, the kind of guy that didn't tolerate tomfoolery and that kind of stuff in his emergency room.
	And the hospital is full of stories like that.
	So I said, guys, do you mind if I move in for a week?
	And so last Halloween, I took a convoy of investigators and paramedics and nurses who had wanted to volunteer to do this.
	We drove out and we spent Halloween week in that hospital.
	We moved in.
	So during the nighttime, you had customers coming through getting the fright of their life.
	And then we would take over.
	We would investigate all through the night and into the following day.
	And then we would do it again and again and again.
	We had some extraordinary results there.
	Yes.
	Okay, so one example is I wanted to do an experiment.
	As somebody who not only is a paramedic, but trains paramedics, I'm fortunate in that I have access to a lot of state-of-the-art training equipment.
	So I took out a full-body human mannequin that we use to teach people how to put in breathing tubes, you know, how to run cardiac arrests.
	And having nurses and medics with me, I said, guys, here's what we're going to do.
	We're going to go to the ER and we're going to run a simulated cardiac arrest with this guy.
	And we're going to put tubes in him and give him drugs and all that stuff that we can do with this high-fidelity mannequin.
	Right.
	And see if that attracts whatever might be there.
	Right.
	And knowing what we did about the personality of the doctor that had overseen the ER, I said, here's what I recommend.
	I'll run the first one myself, but I will be the most obnoxious, angry, irritated, disrespectful.
	And they said, so basically, just be yourself then, Rich.
	But, you know, I said, I'll run it like the Keystone cops.
	I want you guys to screw up the drug doses.
	I want us to get everything wrong.
	I want us to be as inept and incompetent and mean as we possibly can to each other.
	You know, we're running this on the worst day of our lives.
	We're all crabby and irritable and incompetent.
	And then the second time, we'll have somebody else run it and we'll do it perfectly and professionally.
	And we'll wire the whole ER up with cameras and EMF meters and voice recorders and see what happens.
	So the first time we did it, I did exactly what I'd said I was going to do.
	I was overbearing.
	I was basically a tyrant.
	In fact, it's kind of painful to watch the video footage, which I really should get to posting online.
	You know, and I'm overbearing.
	I'm snapping at my people.
	My people are snapping back at me.
	The tubes won't go in the patient.
	The drugs are given in the wrong doses.
	Somebody brilliantly trips and pulls an IV out.
	You know, all that kind of stuff.
	But the key thing to know about is I was being very disrespectful, intentionally so to my nurses and medics.
	In the hope that you would bring forth the man who the people had seen.
	Precisely.
	So this was in the actual emergency room where this had happened for real thousands of times.
	And then I would step, I went out of the room.
	You know, we were all taking a break and I was getting ready to apologize to my guys, even though we'd arranged it that way.
	I just felt horrible for behaving like this.
	And I had to go, I realized, oh no, I forgot my radio.
	I left it in the security room.
	So I went down there to get my radio, came back and got the fright of my life because a pretty heavy wooden door.
	And it's important to tell you that all of the doors inside the building are wedged.
	They use wooden chocks to keep them open so that they don't accidentally slam in the faces of customers, you know?
	So this big, heavy wooden door, just as I walk through it on my way back to the emergency room, slams full force behind me, maybe two inches behind my back as I pass through it.
	And the wedge had been kicked or moved, kicked is an assumption, but it had been moved 10 feet away.
	Are you scared at this point?
	I'll tell you, it's rare that I get scared doing this kind of stuff.
	But if you listen to the audio feedback of me immediately and the slam of the door and my immediate reaction is on the audio feedback, my boss, Jen, who was with me, she's also a paramedic and she was working for me on this investigation, still laughs about it to this day and said, I've known you for years.
	I have never, I've seen you on real 911 calls.
	I have never seen you frightened like this.
	You were ghostly white, more so than your British complexion usually is.
	You were pale.
	You were almost trembling.
	So even you, and you are, I mean, you strike me as being very level-headed and almost gung-ho guy.
	Even you were affected by that.
	Completely.
	And I know why, too.
	Most of the time when I deal with this, I'm dealing with it from a clinical professional perspective.
	I'm coming into your place and I'm helping you with your problem, which is what we do as 911 providers, you know?
	I mean, your house can be on fire.
	There can be all kinds of drama and trauma, but it's still not my problem.
	It's not going home with me at the end of the day.
	But when it feels targeted personally to you, it is entirely more unsettling.
	And that's where that moment of fear Came from it felt targeted.
	I almost hesitate to ask: did anything else happen?
	Well, you know, my boss, Jen, was scheduled to run the next cardiac arrest perfectly, and she took me aside and said, Look, you know, this is your team, Richard, but here's my suggestion.
	I think you angered something.
	And she put it in a slightly more graphic American way.
	I'm sure you can guess what she said.
	You peeve him off.
	So did she suggest you make amends?
	Yeah, she said, I think you need to run the second one, and I think you need to do it very respectfully and politely to prove that you can, to prove that you aren't this overbearing, incompetent that you just portrayed.
	And she was right.
	So we did exactly that.
	And we ran it as we would run a real cardiac arrest this second time.
	We didn't raise our voices because despite what you might see on TV, those kind of events, everybody knows their job.
	Everybody knows what their role is and what the drug doses are and so forth.
	So we did it much more calmly, much more professionally.
	And at the end, when I pronounced this patient dead, the first time I did that, I threw down my stethoscope like a prima donna and I flounced out of the ER slamming the doors behind me.
	This time we did what we would actually do.
	We were very respectful, very polite, you know.
	And then I took the team outside and I, if you've never apologized to thin air before, it's an interesting experience.
	But I apologized to any healthcare providers that might be present that we couldn't see and said, just so you know, we were conducting an experiment and we would never treat one another or patients with anything less than the greatest reverence and respect.
	Wow.
	And after that, everything calmed down, quieted down.
	Oh, Richard, you are rapidly becoming my new favorite person.
	So you've got a book that's full of stories like that.
	The World's Most Haunted Hospitals has just been released by Career Press New Page Books.
	And the full story of Asylum 49 will be out in August from the same publisher.
	Staggering stuff, Richard.
	So you're coming back to the UK, you're going to Pontefract?
	Yeah, in July of this year to try and get to the bottom of the Black Monk case, which is a house, everyday house on an everyday block or street that just happens to have experienced some of the most incredible poltergeist activity for the past few decades.
	Do you feel differently about life and death?
	Now that you've done all of these decades of this research, and it's so much a part of your life, do you feel reassured that you're going to be going to something else when you cease to be here?
	I like to look at how I see the evidence is that something of us survives.
	It's almost undeniable.
	Now, the exact form in which that happens, I'm not entirely sure.
	But I am convinced that when we take our last breath and we go somewhere, it is not the end of us.
	Now, we must change into some other kind of state.
	And I couldn't give you the specifics of that.
	Some people say that they can.
	Some people claim that they have those gifts.
	I personally am very skeptical.
	You know, I think the jury is still out, but I have come to the firm conclusion that part of us does survive.
	And I find that immensely encouraging.
	Have you ever been to a psychic medium?
	I have once.
	And this is an interesting story, which I'll tell quickly.
	It was in Salt Lake City again at this hospital.
	They have an on-site resident psychic medium.
	And I've had very much a mixed bag when it comes down to psychic opinions over the years.
	I don't have a practicing psychic on my research team because too often the information given is very vague.
	It's very generic.
	It's, you know, very hit or miss.
	But we had nothing else on.
	And I said, you know, would you be interested in giving me a reading, seeing what we get?
	And so we went through a reading.
	There were a number of questions and answers.
	A lot of the information was generic, as you would expect.
	And then she said, oh, here's what I'm getting.
	I know that you're writing a bunch of books right now.
	You're actually going to see either Hollywood or the TV people come calling.
	And I tried to keep a straight face and failed.
	As my wife Laura likes to say, the Americans don't put ugly people on tele.
	You know, she's a big fan of British TV, but she said the British are a lot more forgiving of who they'll put on tele.
	The Americans are.
	And she said, you're definitely not.
	That's probably true.
	I mean, if anybody in this country, in the UK, has ever seen a thing called Days of Our Lives.
	You know, you cannot be anything less than model and statuesquely perfect to be on Days of Our Lives.
	I know, right?
	So I kind of laughed and I said, you know, I appreciate you saying that, but I can't see that happening.
	Anyway, not two weeks later, I get a phone call from a TV production company saying, can you be on a plane next week to fly to Canada to record a new paranormal research TV show?
	Which I ended up doing in December.
	So I did that meeting with the psychic in November.
	And within a month, pretty much, I was flying out to Toronto to record the first season of a TV show.
	Are you going to give up being a paramedic then and go to Hollywood?
	I'll give up being a paramedic when they bury me.
	I love what I do for a living.
	I love helping people.
	But I also have the passion of paranormal research.
	So I've got a foot in each world right now, and I quite like it that way.
	You know, I like being a paramedic.
	I like teaching new paramedics.
	So I can't see myself ever giving that up.
	But I do like the idea of if there's some small degree of fame, the only thing I'm interested in is will it open a few more doors to locations that I can get into?
	Well, I'm damn sure it will.
	And you explain things brilliantly, Richard.
	And thanks for giving me an hour of your time.
	You can probably predict.
	I don't know how psychic you are, but I'd like to do this again.
	So if you can make some time to do that, that'll be fantastic.
	But I've been absolutely enthralled.
	You know, even if there's so much information, though, That you have within you, I feel that we could have done three or four more of these.
	So I do think we need to make another appointment to do another one.
	And thank you very much.
	Whenever you are, Howard.
	All right.
	Well, listen, thanks very much.
	And when you come to the UK, let's see if we can try and do something together.
	And I can be a fly on the wall with it.
	And let's see where we go from there.
	If people want to know about you and your work, you have a website, and it's only fair that I let you say that.
	Yeah, it's www.richardestep.
	That's E-S-T-E-P is my last name.net.
	RichardSstep.net.
	And I love to connect with readers and hear their ghost stories and hear what they think of my books.
	And I'm very jealous that you'll live in my American dream, but I wish you well for the future and your wife too, her family.
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you.
	Richard Estep in the US, and I will put a link to him and his work on my website as usual, www.theunexplained.tv, the website designed and created by Adam at Creative Hotspot.
	Thank you very much for all of your support.
	Big news about me and the work that I do coming soon here.
	And thank you very much for all that you've done for me.
	Until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
	Please stay safe.
	Please stay calm and please stay in touch.
	Thanks very much.
	Take care.

▲