Edition 254 - Rob Gutro
Rob Gutro - American ghost investigator, medium... and meteorologist...
Rob Gutro - American ghost investigator, medium... and meteorologist...
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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 Return of the Unexplained. | |
Sorry this show is a little bit late, the final show of May being recorded May 30th, a public holiday in the UK, just in time for the end of the month. | |
Sorry that I've kept you waiting a little bit for this one. | |
Thank you very much for all of the emails. | |
I'm going to do some shout-outs on this edition. | |
Please get in touch. | |
If you want to make a guest suggestion, tell me what you think of the show. | |
Just touch base with me, shoot the breeze, whatever. | |
Go to the website theunexplained.tv and you can follow the link and send me an email. | |
And if you can possibly please make a donation for the continuation of this online show. | |
Like I say, life has been a little busy lately, but getting to grips with it all bit by bit. | |
The guest on this edition is a man called Rob Gutreaux, who you might have heard on some of the American shows, and I thought I would feature him here, partly because of his very interesting biography. | |
He describes himself as an author, a paranormal investigator, and a medium. | |
He considers himself an average guy, says his biography, who just happens to be able to communicate with those who've passed on. | |
He calls himself a medium rare because he's still learning how to meditate for more messages, but he passes messages on when he gets them. | |
He's also a member of the Inspired Ghost Tracking Team. | |
He's been able to sketch out what a ghost or spirits look like and have connected with many people and animals as well, which is the subject of his latest book, Pets and the Afterlife 2. | |
But we'll talk about all of his involvements. | |
This guy trained as a meteorologist, so sounds like a really interesting guy. | |
Rob Gutrow, the guest on this edition, thank you very much to Adam at Creative Hotspot for his continuing hard work getting the show out to you and maintaining the website. | |
Thank you very much indeed, Adam. | |
Now to my radio friends who are just as interested in the technology of radio as I am, I'm doing this edition with a little bit of Americana, a classic American microphone that I picked up for a song on eBay. | |
I've wanted to own one of these for a long time, a Sure Unidyne 545, as seen in studios like the one where Brian Wilson made pet sounds with the Beach Boys. | |
Of course, they had Big Neumann microphones, but they also had the SURE microphones, the Unidyne 545. | |
And I've loved this microphone for years. | |
It was the predecessor of the SM58, SM57, and now I've got a 545. | |
For most of you, it's not going to mean anything. | |
For me, it's a little bit of heaven, and it's made in America, and it's a beautiful thing. | |
So it's nice to be doing the show with one of these. | |
Tell me what you think of the sound of it anyway, if you can. | |
Let's do some shout-outs now. | |
Much more importantly, Matt gets in touch to talk to me about Dr. Louis Turi, who you might remember from the old radio show and the beginnings of this podcast 10 years ago. | |
Louis Turie, astropsychologist, astrologer, Frenchman born where Nostradamus was born in France, and a bit of an international man of mystery one way or another. | |
He made a couple of predictions on the radio show for an earthquake about the 27th of May. | |
And there were indeed two, one on the 27th and one on the 28th, not very big ones. | |
And Matt just emails to tell me that I should remember there are about 134 earthquakes of that kind of magnitude every year. | |
So Louis Turi has a one in three chance of being right. | |
Dr. Turi does not agree with that logic, I have to say. | |
A man who is very controversial, divides opinion, but was very good on the radio show. | |
Thank you for your email, Matt. | |
Gareth says that he's enjoying the back catalogue of podcasts and the radio show. | |
Recently, I put on the radio show my podcast of Uri Geller. | |
I went to his home in the Thames Valley. | |
You might remember this one. | |
And I broke it down into three parts and put it out at the end of the radio show over three weeks. | |
Uri always divides opinion as well. | |
And according to Gareth, he says, I find Uri Geller extremely tedious to listen to. | |
He hasn't said anything new in 15 years. | |
He's a shameless self-promoter, in my opinion, says Gareth. | |
Thank you, Gareth. | |
Uri always divides opinion. | |
I find him fascinating. | |
I've never quite been able to work out why. | |
Steve Spraggs, thank you for your email. | |
Fellow broadcaster Pete Bailey says loving the show. | |
Thank you, Pete. | |
Loving the show. | |
From Janet in Amherst, Massachusetts, thank you for your kind email. | |
Says, I love your show and your style. | |
You never take anything for granted. | |
Well, you can't in this world, Janet. | |
You've got to ask questions. | |
You can't take everything at face value, I find. | |
And Mark Hayhurst has been listening to my back catalogue show about the other Howard Hughes, the multi-millionaire, and liked it. | |
Thank you. | |
I enjoyed doing that show about five years ago. | |
Jay Palma sends me a case for David Paul Lidis, the missing persons, man. | |
Thank you for that, Jay. | |
Joe and Colchester said, recently discovered your podcast. | |
I've been working my way through your past episodes. | |
Not all of them float my boat, but the ones that do are incredibly interesting. | |
Thank you for that, Joe. | |
Hi there, just donated. | |
I do from time to time. | |
What a wonderful body of work The Unexplained is, says Annette McCann in Fife in Scotland. | |
Thank you, Annette, very much for your kind email. | |
Karen, Karen Smith in the US. | |
Nice to hear from you again, Karen. | |
I'm enjoying both the radio show and the podcast, listening from America. | |
I would like to hear something about hauntings soon. | |
Well, we're going to be talking about spirits on this edition and more hauntings on future editions too. | |
Ian in Dundee says, hi, Howard. | |
Great to see you back on the radio. | |
Any chance you can get James Randy, the man who wrote a book debunking Urigella and is possibly the greatest debunker of phenomena and people who purport to practice it on the planet. | |
James Randy, I've invited him to come on the show. | |
So you'll either hear him on the radio show or on the online show. | |
Lee, thank you for your email that I got today. | |
I understand, like me, you've just got tinnitus ringing in the ears. | |
Now, the only thing I can say to you, you've got to take the advice of the medics about this. | |
But all of them will tell you that you just have to adjust to it because there isn't a cure for it. | |
But you can adjust to it. | |
I mean, I live a near normal life now, even though I have ringing in the ears and I work with sound. | |
It's my love of life, really. | |
And, you know, it's been difficult. | |
And there have been times when it's really depressed me. | |
Sounds like you're going through that too, Lee, but you do come out the other side, okay? | |
And please get advice from the good people who give advice About this. | |
Gene Keys, thank you for that technical question. | |
I've passed that on to Adam, my webmaster. | |
Scott tells me that he's had many UFO experiences. | |
Would love you to come on the radio show, Scott, if you'd like to talk about those. | |
And thank you. | |
If you've emailed recently and I haven't got round to your email, please believe me that I see, unlike some of the big radio shows, I see each and every email that comes in here. | |
And I take on board what you say. | |
I've always done it that way because I think it's the only honest way to do it. | |
If you want to contact me, go to the website theunexplained.tv. | |
Follow the link and send me an email from there. | |
Let's get to the guest on this edition to the US to Rob Gutrow, author, paranormal investigator, and medium as well. | |
A man who calls himself a medium rare. | |
I guess, or a rare medium, I suppose, if you turn it round. | |
Rob, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained. | |
Thank you for having me, Howard. | |
I really appreciate it. | |
And Rob, listen, I know we shouldn't really talk about the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, but I think you and I deserve this, really. | |
We tried to connect on Skype, first of all. | |
Then we tried on your cell phone, and that didn't work. | |
So now you've gone next door to your wonderful neighbor in Maryland, Elvira, Elvina, who's allowed you to use the phone there. | |
Is that right? | |
That's correct. | |
It pays to have great friends. | |
Well, it does, absolutely. | |
You know, everybody needs good neighbors, as people say over here. | |
One of the reasons communications are a bit difficult at the moment is you've got a storm bearing down on you, haven't you, at the moment, Rob? | |
Well, we do. | |
There's a tropical depression Bonnie is actually affecting the mid-Atlantic coast today and will be for the next couple of days. | |
So dropping a lot of rain here. | |
Right. | |
But is Maryland a place that gets the worst of the storms? | |
I thought that was further down, you know, 1,000 miles south of you. | |
Yeah, it's further south. | |
It's northern South Carolina typically, and that's who's actually experiencing it today. | |
Right, okay. | |
So that explains why communications have not been the easiest, but I wanted to crack on and do this show because I know you've been waiting to connect with me for a while to do this. | |
So let's get on and do it. | |
Your experience, PA, if I can call it that, your biography is really interesting because you've done a bit of radio, you've done the stuff that I do, but you're also a paranormal investigator, a medium, and a meteorologist. | |
How on earth do you fit all of that in? | |
It's a lot, but actually being a meteorologist, it makes it easier to understand how energy works. | |
And basically, it's all about energy in the afterlife. | |
So it all comes together. | |
I suppose it does, really. | |
I don't think I've ever known, and I know a few meteorologists, any who are spiritually inclined, but I suppose you're right. | |
It's all about energy. | |
And the weather's about energy. | |
And you're about to feel some of that force. | |
And I suppose if that is energy, then why aren't we as human beings and spirits in the cosmos, in the universe, why aren't we energy too? | |
Yeah, I get the logic. | |
Yes, and actually what happens is after our physical body passes, we couple with our memories and our personalities, and we either stay here earthbound, this is a ghost, or we cross over as a spirit and join the energies of the cosmos or heaven or whatever you want to call it. | |
Now, you sound very convinced about all of that. | |
How are you so convinced? | |
There must be a reason. | |
Well, I'm on the paranormal investigation team, and we have investigated earthbound entities and have learned the reasons why they stay earthbound. | |
And I've learned the distinction between the two, that not only is it location, but it's also different kinds of energy. | |
They use physical energies, heat, light, water, electricity, but earthbound ghosts tend to draw on negative emotions like anxiety, fear, depression, while spirits who have crossed used love, faith, and hope, positive emotional energy. | |
And spirits also can come into your dreams where ghosts cannot. | |
That's interesting. | |
So there is, and again, I've never heard the distinction made in that way, the distinction between ghosts and spirits. | |
Spirits are our departed loved ones who leave us in love. | |
It's all very sad, but the feelings are love and warmth. | |
And ghosts are a little more disturbed, a little more angst-ridden. | |
They are. | |
And actually, their personalities, it doesn't affect their personalities, but the reasons they stay behind, I found, are varied. | |
Sometimes people can stay behind because they love the house that they lived in and they just want to stay there forever. | |
Other times they have unfinished business or they're trying to get a message to someone or they feel guilty about something they did in life and want forgiveness. | |
And some religious people feel that they're not worthy of crossing over. | |
Right. | |
So they actually, because of their belief system, they actually withhold themselves and they're almost punishing themselves. | |
That's right. | |
And we've encountered you several of those and we've had to cross them over. | |
This is all, I mean, listen, we're covering an awful lot of territory very, very quickly. | |
I had an email from my listener, Annette, in Scotland, who wanted to talk about hauntings. | |
And I guess those things you just talked about would come into the category of a haunting. | |
Yes, absolutely. | |
The Earthbound ghost would be the hauntings. | |
And there are two types for your listeners. | |
One is residual, which is, it's really, it's not an interactive thing. | |
It's nothing that can talk to you. | |
It's basically like an emotional thumbprint that was left behind in a place. | |
So you can feel the energy or you can actually see things repeat over and over like a film strip. | |
An intelligent haunt is one where you can ask questions and you can get responses, whether like movement of something or you can pick up a voice on an EVP or something like that. | |
And have you experienced in the investigations? | |
I know you're part of a ghost tracking team in Maryland. | |
Have you experienced both of those? | |
Yes, I have. | |
We've received a lot of messages from people on the other side. | |
Okay, well, listen, this is all about stories. | |
If you've got any stories to tell me that might make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and help me to Learn a little more. | |
Shoot, tell me the stories. | |
Okay, well, I'll tell you one that was very personal to me, and that was my dad. | |
When I was finishing my first book, Ghosts and Spirits, my dad passed away. | |
And the week that he passed away, my partner and I stayed with my mother. | |
And my dad gave us all kinds of signs. | |
He was playing with the electricity in the house. | |
He would move objects. | |
If we'd go into a room to go get a screwdriver to fix something, the screwdriver would be gone. | |
Then I would tell him, okay, put it back. | |
We'd go back in the room and it would reappear. | |
But he did help prove to my mother that he was at his own funeral. | |
And he did that because, and this will actually make the hair in the back of your neck stand up. | |
During the services, my mother was crying into her Kleenex course, and she was very distraught, as we all were. | |
And I heard my dad come over to me, and he said, tell your mother to use my handkerchief. | |
And he said it three times. | |
And what's unusual about that is in the 53 years they were married, my mother wouldn't even touch his handkerchief. | |
She thought they were disgusting. | |
So I heard my dad say three times to me, and he was very adamant about it in spirit. | |
So I turned to my mother and I said, Mom, Dad's here. | |
And he said, he wants you to use his handkerchief. | |
And her eyes just opened wide, her mouth opened, and she said, how did you know I have his handkerchief in my pocketbook? | |
And I said, because dad told me. | |
And then she realized that dad was right there. | |
Okay, well, that could have been the most remarkable coincidence, a great bit of guesswork. | |
But look, the probability is it's something more than that. | |
Yeah, absolutely. | |
And there are so many other things that, you know, when you ask somebody on the other side to help you, they will try their best to do that. | |
Or they'll guide you to something, to a different place. | |
Right. | |
So your father gave evidence during his own funeral service that he was there. | |
What effect did that have on you and your mother? | |
Well, as I mentioned, I think I mentioned my mom had the ability, but she was afraid to use it. | |
So she's always been fascinated by my gift. | |
And while I used mine, she never used hers. | |
So she was totally convinced and she totally understood. | |
It was a comfort to her. | |
And that's, to a lot of people, that's going to sound like a trivial example, but it isn't. | |
It means so much, isn't it? | |
It's a tiny, little, small thing. | |
It's just a handkerchief. | |
It's a piece of cotton. | |
But it means a massive amount. | |
You know, we all need that kind of verification. | |
You said that your dad told you. | |
Now, I've asked a lot of people who say that they're mediums over the years, how do they get this information? | |
Some of them just know it. | |
Some of them hear a voice. | |
Some of them see a being or a picture or an image of some kind. | |
How does it come to you? | |
It comes in a lot of different ways. | |
I usually hear things telepathically. | |
I hear them in my head, and they're like outside voices. | |
So I experience them by hearing them, seeing them, feeling them. | |
Some earthbound ghosts have shared their pain of death to prove who they are, which is a little unnerving. | |
So there are a number of different ways that I actually experience it. | |
Okay, earthbound ghosts who share the pain of death. | |
Tell me, you've obviously had that experience once at least. | |
Tell me how that happens. | |
How do they impart that information to you? | |
They actually make me feel physical pain in the areas of death. | |
And actually, experience will do the same thing. | |
It's all about proving their identity from the other side. | |
So I went on what turned out to be a double murder investigation because there was a home that was haunted, as it turned out, by two entities, two women who were murdered in the home. | |
And the woman conveyed what happened to them. | |
And I knew nothing about the home at all or the history. | |
We don't find out about things until we get to... | |
Anyway, these two ghosts made me feel like I was hit on the back of the head, pushed downstairs, stabbed, shot. | |
And it was an awful murder. | |
And everything that I felt was confirmed in the police report when the team manager revealed everything. | |
Okay. | |
Now, there are a couple of things to unpick about that. | |
Was this a murder that had been investigated by the police and had gone through the process of law already? | |
Or is this something that was fresh? | |
Was this a fresh case or an historic case? | |
This was an older case. | |
This had happened nine years before we were called in to investigate. | |
And you had never seen news reports. | |
You didn't have any information. | |
You weren't aware of that story? | |
No, it happened about 30 miles away. | |
And I don't even think I was living here at the time. | |
Right. | |
And so why, Rob, do you think that the victims of a brutal murder like that would want to communicate to an investigation team the nature of their death? | |
Why do they need to, if the police have investigated, it's an historic case, it's something that's already been dealt with by law, then justice has been done, presumably. | |
The facts are out there. | |
Why do they need to come back and tell people again? | |
We learned that they stayed behind because they wanted to protect anybody that lived in the home. | |
They were afraid that the man who did this to them would come back. | |
But he's safely in prison for the rest of his life. | |
He was caught. | |
Boy. | |
Yeah, so we conveyed that information to them and tried to get them to cross over, but they were adamant about staying to protect whatever family is in there. | |
And did they have any reason for doing that? | |
Were you able to impart to them that it's okay now, the person who did this terrible thing to you is serving time in jail, is not going to come out anytime soon, and it's going to be okay. | |
And they clearly had a reason from their side to think that something the reverse was the case. | |
Yeah, we actually couldn't convince them. | |
We went back twice to try and do that. | |
And, you know, we weren't able to secure hard evidence of the man's conviction. | |
You know, we could so. | |
What were they verifying to you? | |
This is interesting. | |
I'm just interested in the process of communication for you because you say that you're a medium, you're communicating with them. | |
How are you getting the information across to them and how are they verifying to you that they're getting it? | |
I can, like I said, I can sometimes see them in my mind. | |
And it's all telepathic, basically. | |
It's all thought. | |
Okay. | |
A lot of people would say this is a great gift to have to use on current cases, you know, to actually be part of the crime investigation team going to a current murder or misdemeanor scene of some kind. | |
Have you thought of doing that? | |
Have you done that? | |
I've thought about it, but I'm still developing my ability. | |
So there are a lot more people who are much farther along that would be better at that. | |
I actually had a relative of my mother's, my mother's cousin, in Massachusetts, near the Boston area, that actually used to help police and solve crimes. | |
That's a whole fascinating area. | |
I used to have a woman on my radio show called Anna Vangelina, an American psychic clairvoyant medium who used to do an awful lot of that. | |
She worked on the Jimmy Hoffer case, she said. | |
That's a very specialized skill, isn't it? | |
It is, and I don't have that skill. | |
But you've done a lot of haunting investigations, and you were telling me about the two different kinds of presence. | |
The one that is like a movie that rolls around over and over again, and the one like at the murder scene you went to, that wants to communicate with you. | |
There's a two-way traffic. | |
Talk to me about the ones that are like a repeating image of something. | |
Okay, those are basically residual haunts. | |
So when you think about some traumatic or happy activity that happened in a place, it can leave a thumbprint, like an energy behind. | |
And sometimes when someone walks into that room and they have emotional energy, whether it be love or anxiety, depending on what had happened before, they can actually make things appear again. | |
They can't interact with them, but they make things happen again. | |
So for instance, I was on an investigation where people had seen a horse and carriage pull up to the front of a historic mansion. | |
And it wasn't really a horse and carriage. | |
It was actually just a vision. | |
And it was actually a wonderful, it was a vision from a wonderful time where things were really, people were wealthy and things were great. | |
And that was something that the energy left behind kept repeating. | |
Right. | |
Well, that's a nice thing to put there, I suppose. | |
You know, you get all sorts of stories like this. | |
There's a story from Liverpool that I keep trying to verify, and I'm originally from Liverpool, UK. | |
And there's a street there called Bold Street. | |
And there is a story of a time slip there. | |
Somebody standing on the corner of the street, and he flashes back to a previous era and sees old-style trucks and cobbled streets and all that sort of thing. | |
So what you're saying is that imprints of past things, they don't have to be disasters or murders or horrible things. | |
Imprints of just an era can be made. | |
Yes, absolutely. | |
All right. | |
And I think we need to talk a lot about the investigations you've been on and the things you've experienced. | |
So if you control your personal archive for stories that the audience is going to be interested in, I'd be very grateful. | |
Sure. | |
Well, again, there are two different aspects. | |
One is the spirits that pass and cross, and the other one are earthbound ghosts. | |
And here in the U.S., I've gone into a lot of historic mansions, and I've been able to confirm the people that still live there, basically, as a ghost. | |
For instance, there's a mansion called the Bel Air Mansion in Bowie, Maryland. | |
And I went in there the first time, and I sensed that there was a little girl, and she kept trying to get me to go upstairs. | |
And I didn't understand what was happening. | |
This is when I was first developing my abilities back in 2005, really. | |
So I followed her upstairs, and she showed me a room, and she said, this is my bedroom. | |
And I didn't know what to say. | |
So I went downstairs and I checked with the house historian, and I said, did a little girl ever pass away here? | |
And she said, yes. | |
As a matter of fact, her name was Anna, and she's buried in the backyard. | |
So that was proof right there to me that Anna is still playing in the house. | |
And when I went back again, I also sensed her back, and she kept drawing me up to the upstairs to her room. | |
It makes you wonder, doesn't it, why they want us to know their story in this way, why they want to communicate that fact with us, why they don't pass peacefully. | |
It is very interesting about why people choose to stay. | |
Sometimes kids, younger spirits, will stay behind because they're either afraid to go across or they like playing eternally in their House. | |
And I think that was the case with that particular spirit. | |
We've gone to other investigations that I wanted to bring something up, and that is we've gone into houses where people have used Ouija boards. | |
Now, that's interesting. | |
I have a regular guest on this show called Karen Doleman who's written books about Ouija boards. | |
The audience has always split about those. | |
A lot of people are very, very scared of them. | |
And, well, I agree with that. | |
So several of the investigations we've gone on included people who have used them. | |
And what it's done is it basically opened a portal so that anything can come in. | |
I mean, you may be able to channel the spirit of the loved one that you're looking for, but it's like opening a door to the other side. | |
And you can get anything. | |
It's like physically standing in the front of your house and opening your door and just waiting for people to come in all day long. | |
You never know who's going to come in. | |
So we have found that usually some kind of bad entity comes in. | |
And in one particular case, an entire family where a Reading board was used became physically sick and some very, very dramatically sick. | |
So that's when they called in our team to try and find out what was happening. | |
And once we learned what had happened, we were able to try and clear the house, like sage the house and so forth, and close that door that somebody had left open from that Ouija board. | |
And they volunteered the fact that they'd been using the Ouija board. | |
Well, we asked. | |
We had a feeling that it was used, and we were right. | |
And then we found a particular room that it was used in. | |
Because we could sense myself in another medium, we could actually sense what room had really bad feelings in it. | |
And that was the room. | |
So are we, I'm fascinated by this, and I've never really quite understood it. | |
The way that you see it with the Ouija board, is it that you have a bunch of people who think it's going to be fun to try this thing out, and they might communicate with something. | |
But in every environment, there are low-level entities, ghouls and goblins, and whatever you might want to call them, and they are there. | |
And if you are not careful, you're going to connect with them rather than connect with what you might want to connect with, and that's a higher realm of spirit. | |
Yes, absolutely. | |
When you connect with one with that particular instrument, the Ouija board, you can connect with many of the others that you don't want to. | |
And is that because the board is doing something, or is it coming through the people? | |
Is it about them and their psyche, their consciousness, whatever is hanging around them personally? | |
Their energy certainly lends to opening that door and drawing in whatever negative energy may be out there. | |
So for instance, if people are depressed or anxious or angry, they have a tendency to draw more earthbound ghosts who are negative. | |
It's all about energy and personality, too. | |
So people who are one end of the spectrum will draw negative entities. | |
People who are happy and positive and optimistic will draw more positive entities. | |
Okay, and once those things are out, once they've invaded your space, once they've scared people, is there any putting them back? | |
Yes, we've gone on several cases where we've actually been able to do that. | |
It takes a while. | |
What it takes is not only doing the sage thing, but it also takes trying to get everybody to change things, like bring in a lot of outside light, try to remain optimistic, play more music, make it much more of a pleasant experience in the home. | |
Right. | |
And the worrying thing, I think, for me, I think for everybody really, is that these entities are there for the drawing. | |
You know, they're there around you. | |
You've just got to be careful that you don't open any kind of gate or any kind of portal to them. | |
How do we know that by things we're doing in everyday life, or the way that we think, the way we behave, that we're not actually inviting these things in all the time? | |
Well, typically, ghosts stay in a fixed place on Earth. | |
They stay in a place that they're familiar with. | |
So unless you have one, a resident ghost in your home, it won't come to you. | |
So they'll typically stay where they are. | |
Right. | |
Okay. | |
So how would we know that we had something there, something that we hadn't tapped into without using a Ouija board or without doing rituals or whatever? | |
How will you know whether your space is infected, inhabited? | |
Basically, you can sense the energy in the room. | |
Like, for instance, if you walk into a room full of people, you can always tell that there's one person that annoys you or you don't want to be around. | |
You're actually sensing the energy of that person. | |
So it's the same thing. | |
If you feel off-kilter, if you feel like you don't feel right or you're more nervous or anxious for some reason, you know that something's happened to the energy maybe around you. | |
When you do cases like this, Rob, I know you've got a background of it and your family has a bit of a background of this. | |
Are you ever scared? | |
Well, you know, from time to time. | |
And the reason is because when people pass, they all maintain their memories and their personalities. | |
So if someone was a bad person in life, they're likely going to be a very bad person as a ghost. | |
And I ran into one such entity when I actually visited Scotland in the cemetery where Grey Friars Bobby is. | |
In the back, I could just sense it, that there was a ghost there. | |
And he was very nasty. | |
So I stayed away. | |
Right, but you knew there was something there. | |
I did. | |
I could sense it. | |
And you can just feel the energy. | |
Do you get messages about the future? | |
Or do you only deal with whatever spirit is telling you about their passing, whatever? | |
Yeah, no, I don't get any messages from the future. | |
I only talk to dead people and dead pets. | |
So they don't tell me anything about the future. | |
They just try to keep proving who they are by giving me puzzle pieces or something. | |
So I would say that would be more of a psychic than a medium. | |
And how has it left you feeling about your own mortality? | |
I know you're a young guy, Rob, so it's going to be a long while before you have to meet this, but it must give you some feeling of, I don't know, reassurance maybe that there is something beyond what you see. | |
Well, I'm not that young, but it does. | |
I'm actually pretty peaceful about the whole thing because I know we go on, and I know everybody that passed before me will be there waiting when I'm there, including my pets. | |
Right. | |
I want to talk about the pets because I know you've written not one but two books about pets and the afterlife. | |
Most of us feel that pets exist in a different universe to us. | |
You know, that they're here, they're here for a short time, we love them a lot of the time, they love us, then they go, and that is the end of the story. | |
You're saying in these books that you've written, that is not the end of the story. | |
That's correct. | |
Yes. | |
And basically, I've run into this a lot. | |
People of some religions will say that animals don't have souls. | |
Well, what is a soul? | |
A soul is basically energy with memories, personality, and intelligence. | |
And as you mentioned, you had dogs before. | |
And as you know, they all have their own personalities. | |
They're certainly intelligent. | |
I mean, they understand our words. | |
They're instinctual intelligence. | |
There's routine. | |
If you break their routine, they let you know it. | |
They can sense when you're feeling bad, when you're happy, when you're angry. | |
I think that's true. | |
I had a yellow Labrador, golden Labrador called Nishka. | |
This is years ago when I was a teenager. | |
And she was incredibly perceptive. | |
And I remember once, I was going to take her out for a walk, and she got very excited whenever I was going to take her for a walk along the beach. | |
And because we walked to the front door, and it was very cold, I had to go upstairs to get my coat. | |
And she started getting upset, you know, as much as to say, but he's brought me to the front door. | |
We're going to go for a walk on the beach. | |
What's gone wrong? | |
And I said to her, without gesturing at all, I've got to go upstairs and get my coat, but we're going for the walk. | |
And she sat down quietly. | |
She realized that it wasn't the end of her walk. | |
I was just going to get a coat so I could be warm. | |
And I came back down, of course, and we opened the front door and off we went for the walk along the beach in Liverpool. | |
Remarkably perceptive dog. | |
And we were very, very close. | |
She understood so much. | |
Ever since, and right up to today, if I walk in the park in London where I live, I can always guarantee that if there's a golden yellow Labrador, whatever you want to call it, in the park being walked by somebody, the dog will make a beeline for me. | |
And I've always kind of thought, even though it's not rational, that actually there's more to that, that maybe Nishka's having some kind of effect from some dimension upon that dog, and that dog is coming to check and see if I'm okay. | |
That's exactly what's happening. | |
Yes, she is. | |
Our spirits are always connected. | |
The spirits of our pets are always connected to us. | |
And so every living thing has a soul, and we're all part of the same energy when we pass over. | |
There are some religions of the world that do understand that. | |
Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance, and Native American religions here in the U.S., they totally understand that every living thing transitions. | |
I don't know where the concept that animals don't have souls comes from, but I will tell you that I think it's crazy because they have intelligence and personalities. | |
I mean, animals lived on Earth long before man appeared. | |
They had to be intelligent in order to survive, right? | |
But is there a hierarchy? | |
In other words, if you're here now as a dog and you die as a dog, do you continue as a dog or do you come back as a person or a frog? | |
You know, that's something that's been disputed a lot. | |
And my feeling is that the animal kingdom comes back as the animal kingdom. | |
They can come back as anything in the animal kingdom, and people come back as people. | |
But some others have said that they were once, looking into past lives, they think that they were once a dog or a wolf or whatever and have come back as a human. | |
I don't honestly have any idea about that. | |
All right. | |
So what's in this book, too, that you've just written that you're promoting now? | |
What are you talking about in that? | |
In Test in the Afterlife 2, it's broken down into three sections. | |
One is the basics about how they, all the different ways that they communicate, and explains their intelligence, all the different levels of intelligence, and science behind determining that they have the same emotions that people do. | |
It was a study done by Gregory Burns in Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who used an MRI to look at dogs' brains, and he found out that they have the same emotional response in the caudate of their brain that humans do when they're feeling pleasure. | |
So he and Dr. Stanley Coren have proven that dogs have the intelligence and the emotions of at least a three to four year old child. | |
So that's the first part. | |
The second part are messages that I got from dogs or cats when people would email me and I would connect to them and give them specific details. | |
And the third part is stories from others, people that I met that had had encounters with their pet. | |
Okay, well, I'm fascinated by the messages that you've had and how, for example, a dog or a cat would communicate with, to, and through you. | |
Okay, well, and they usually communicate for a reason. | |
For instance, there was this dog, a Spaniel named Clancy, that a woman named Elizabeth emailed me about. | |
She said her dog was very young, and one day she came home, and her dog was feeling lethargic and sickly, and she didn't know what was wrong. | |
She called the vet, and the vet said that they thought the dog pulled something. | |
Well, she said she put the dog in the crate and comforted it, and at 10.30 at night she went back to check on the dog. | |
It was about two years old, and the dog passed away. | |
And she was beside herself. | |
She did not know what happened, and she wanted answers. | |
So she wrote me. | |
I was able to connect with the dog, Clancy, and the dog said that the dog actually showed me plants in the backyard and showed me that he liked to eat them. | |
And it made him sick, and he was in pain in the inside. | |
So the plants that he ate were poisonous. | |
And there was nothing that the parents could have done because that dog had ingested so much of it. | |
Right, so he ate the plants on this side of life and got sick, very sick, terminally sick, but understood what had gone wrong on the other side. | |
Is that correct? | |
That's absolutely correct. | |
How does that happen? | |
How does the dog come to understanding on the other side? | |
We have an awareness when we transition on the other side. | |
And it was actually the last thing that the dog really did. | |
So he was actually able to realize what had happened. | |
They're really intelligent animals, so they can convey these things. | |
So I shared that with Elizabeth, and I gave her a link to a list of a website with all the plants poisonous to dogs and cats. | |
And she wrote me back, and she said, I have several of these plants in the backyard, and my dog loved eating plants. | |
So it totally explained how her dog passed. | |
And she received comfort from that. | |
But the reason that Clancy kept coming back to me was to give all pet parents a warning that there are a lot of poisonous plants that people don't know that they may have in their yard. | |
If this dog, if we assume there is such a thing as doggy reincarnation, would the dog that comes back have a knowledge about poisonous plants, or would that dog have to start again? | |
The dog would have to start again. | |
We all start with a fresh slate. | |
That's always been, whether it's people or pets, that's always something that's bugged me a little. | |
You know, the fact that you learn so much when you're here. | |
And if you do pass, and if you do come back, and these are big assumptions to make, it always seems to be a bit of a waste that you've got all that wisdom. | |
You've amassed all of that stuff sometimes by hard and bitter and painful experience. | |
But you can't bring the benefit of it back, whether you're a dog or a person. | |
It doesn't seem fair, but I will say that some of the things that we experience in the past influence our current incarnation. | |
So, for instance, if you find yourself drawn to bird watching, for instance, you likely did it in a previous incarnation. | |
Interesting. | |
Do only dogs and cats communicate, or do other creatures communicate? | |
Can frogs and toads and crocodiles and tigers do the same? | |
Well, everyone has the ability to communicate, but it's only the ones that are domesticated that can communicate with people from the other side. | |
The ones that have lived around people, so they hear our language, they understand our emotions and so forth. | |
they can relate but you know you wouldn't i wouldn't get a message from like a a lion for instance because i wouldn't understand it so when they're living around us they actually learn You know, you're covered in fur. | |
It's okay for you. | |
She actually understood the words that I was saying. | |
She did. | |
She absolutely understood. | |
And she probably also read the tone of your voice because you were probably like very, very calm about it. | |
So by even the tone of voice, they understand. | |
I mean, this has nothing to do with passing over, but it's a fascinating thing about pets. | |
That particular dog, but other dogs I've known do this as well. | |
I was in the sixth form, as we call it here. | |
I was taking my exams at school to allow me to go to university, which I ultimately did. | |
And the dog, I would come home at lunchtime. | |
I was lucky enough to be able to come home and have my lunch and then go back for the afternoon session at school. | |
That dog would know exactly when I was coming home and be waiting in the porch for me. | |
That always struck me as being something that was remarkable. | |
How the hell did she know exactly? | |
Because the time would vary. | |
You know, sometimes I'd be half an hour later and sometimes, you know, I wouldn't come back until later in the afternoon, but she would always know when it would be. | |
You know, people have studied that in science for a long time and they can't figure it out. | |
And I don't know. | |
All I can say is that because dogs are very sensitive to energy and emotion, maybe they read energy from one place to another. | |
Now, you know, we're going to get the cynics certainly emailing me about this and the skeptics. | |
Let's say skeptics, not cynics, the skeptics. | |
And they will say, this man is completely deluded and he's, you know, taking commissions from people who want to communicate with their pets because they're distraught about Fido has died or whatever feline I've got has died. | |
And, you know, they just want a little bit of comfort. | |
And you're delivering them comfort, but there's no basis, in fact, in any of it. | |
What would you say to them? | |
I would say that when people write me to get messages, I don't charge a thing. | |
I charge nothing. | |
I make my life as a meteorologist. | |
And I give messages to people free of charge on my own personal time. | |
All I want to do is offer comfort and understanding about what happens. | |
So there's no profit. | |
I wrote four books, and each book is under $10 because I wanted to keep the cost as low as I could, and that was as far down as I could, just so I could be able to get people to get comfort and understanding. | |
I'm not out to make a profit. | |
I'm just out to help people. | |
And Rob, as you do more of this media stuff, and I know you've done Coast Coast AM in the U.S. and that kind of stuff, you will be under pressure, won't you, to give up your day job and stop being a meteorologist? | |
No, that would never happen. | |
I need to eat. | |
I think we're all in that situation, Rob. | |
Do you get psychic messages about the weather? | |
No, no, I don't. | |
But I can forecast, though. | |
Because you told me before we started recording that that storm that you've got hitting you at the moment that's causing the phone lines to be disrupted like they are is coming this way. | |
And that's what the weather forecasters are telling us. | |
We're in for a bit of a rain battering after a slightly sunny weekend. | |
You're doing well on the forecasting front. | |
Eventually, everything makes its way across the Atlantic. | |
That's true. | |
I keep trying to tell people that. | |
If you hear about what's happening, East Coast USA, it's coming over here eventually. | |
If it's powerful enough, it will cross the Atlantic. | |
That's what happens. | |
Or anything else you want to talk to me about pets and the afterlife? | |
I just want to let people know that the energy that connects us with our dog or cat or whatever is always going to be there. | |
It never dies. | |
And the easiest way for a spirit to come to us would be in our dreams. | |
So before people go to bed at night, ask your loved one, whether person or pet, to come into your dreams. | |
And eventually they will. | |
And you'll see that they're usually in a peaceful setting. | |
So they're trying to convey that they're okay on the other side and that they still have that connection to you. | |
You told me about the third part of this second book that you've written is about stories that you've been told, not ones that you'd experience personally. | |
What are the most eye-opening stories in that section? | |
Oh, gosh, there are quite a number of them. | |
Well, cherry-pick. | |
One of them was that I called Cody's Coins and Colors. | |
And it was an email that I received from a woman who said that she was obsessive about cleaning. | |
So she wound up finding a coin under a dresser when she was cleaning one day. | |
That happened to be the exact same day, the anniversary of the passing of her dog Cody. | |
She looked at the coin, because I always tell people, look at the date on the coin, and that will clue you in as to who is giving you a message. | |
She looked at the date, and it was the year that Cody was born. | |
So she knew that it was a message from Cody. | |
Well, I'm going to use that word again, coincidence. | |
Yes, yes, coincidence. | |
She also told me that she loved painting things bright colors. | |
But for some reason, she said she wanted to paint her bedroom gray. | |
And she did not understand really why she wanted to paint her bedroom gray, and neither did her husband. | |
So she wrote me and she said, does this have anything to do with Cody? | |
And I told her, yes, it does, because dogs usually see everything in shades of gray with the exception of blue and yellow. | |
So Cody saw a lot of his world in gray, and that was like a favorite color. | |
So by painting her room gray, she would know that Cody was still around. | |
Right. | |
Okay, well, that's simple but powerful. | |
It's just, you have to have an open mind when it comes to the messages from spirit. | |
Another aspect, too, that I didn't mention was that dogs and cats have the ability to see and hear spirits. | |
They have a different physiology than we do. | |
They have different cones and rods in their eyes, and it lets them see things at a higher vibration, a faster rate of speed. | |
So that explains all of those cases where we hear that a dog will run away from the haunted house, or if there's a poltergeist in somebody's house, the dog will be the first to cower under the sofa. | |
Absolutely. | |
And if you think of a dog whistle, it's at a higher frequency. | |
We can't hear it, but dogs can. | |
And that's the frequency that ghosts and spirits talk at. | |
And that's why we use electronic voice recorders to pick up their voices. | |
I'll tell you a story. | |
My father, when he retired from the police, went to work as head of security in the region for a big electronics company, a company that sold televisions and cookers and all sorts of stuff. | |
And they had a branch in the center of Liverpool. | |
And for a while, my father used to have to go on a Saturday night, very late, to allow the security man with his Alsatian dog to take the dog out for a walk in the center of Liverpool. | |
My dad would go down just to be there while this happened. | |
And he used to take me there by 10 o'clock Saturday night. | |
And the guy with the dog told me that that building was haunted. | |
A lot of people reported the building, which had been a theater, was haunted by the spirit of a girl who'd thrown herself off the balcony of that theater. | |
And terrible things happened there. | |
My father had seen them. | |
A lot of people were frightened to go upstairs there because doors would throw themselves open and boxes containing big old-fashioned television sets, not like the lightweight ones we have now, but big TV sets, would throw themselves across the floor. | |
And that dog that was a big, tough dog with huge teeth and a foul temper, that dog was like a puppy. | |
It would not go up the stairs towards that place. | |
That dog knew, in my view, and everybody else's view it was there, that there was something malevolent or something not good at the top of the stairs where the balcony of that theater used to be. | |
What do you make of that? | |
I totally understand it, and I agree with it. | |
They can totally sense, they can see and hear ghosts and spirits, and as we talked about, they can sense energy too. | |
So they know when you walk into a room and something's bad, just like people do. | |
All right, Rob, anything else to tell me? | |
What's your next project? | |
Actually, it's one that hits closer to home to you because it's called Ghosts of the British Isles. | |
Really? | |
Where have you been? | |
Where will you be talking about that, Emma? | |
Well, I'm putting it together now. | |
Over the past couple of years, I've traveled to the UK and I've gone all over all to the Tudor castle sites and so forth and various other places. | |
And I've run into a lot of, as you imagine, a lot of ghosts. | |
So these are my experiences throughout England, Scotland, and even Ireland. | |
I'm in Ireland too, because I went to Ireland last year and had a lot of encounters. | |
And I did run into a very famous ghost that I wasn't even aware of when I went to Hever Castle. | |
That's in Kent, isn't it, southeast of England? | |
I believe so, yes. | |
It was the home of the Boleyn family, as in Anne Boleyn. | |
Yeah, yeah. | |
So when I walked in the door, the first thing I heard was, my name is George and I am here. | |
And it was unjust, and it wasn't true. | |
And I didn't know if there was a George Boleyn. | |
As it turned out, I found out later that that was actually Anne Boleyn's brother who was beheaded. | |
Right, so you've got how many stories from the British Isles in there? | |
About 200 pages worth. | |
Did you go, and I have a feeling you're going to say no, but I think you should have, to Hampton Court? | |
We did. | |
Actually, we went there two years in a row. | |
Okay, now Hampton Court is not very far from where I'm based. | |
And that is said to be, if it isn't the most haunted place in the UK, it's one of the most haunted locations in the UK. | |
Yes, I ran into quite a few different people there, including a young screaming Catherine Howard down a particular corridor. | |
Now, that apparently is supposed to be quite a regular occurrence. | |
Other people have experienced that one. | |
I can tell you that. | |
Yeah, I actually did some research and I found out that, yeah, that does happen quite a bit. | |
And it was in that particular corridor that everybody continued to experience Captain Howard. | |
So, yeah, it's quite a haunted place, and it's pretty cool. | |
I really enjoy going through there. | |
So of all the experiences you had, and you told me you had some quite remarkable ones in Ireland, which for you, which was the most scary is not a word to use with you because you tell me you don't really get scared by these things, but which made the most impact on you? | |
Oh, gosh, it's really hard to pick from that. | |
I will say that one of the most startling ones is when I was actually walking through Hampton Court, and I actually felt, I felt a sword cut right through my shoulder and down my chest. | |
So I knew that somebody had died that way there. | |
Well, that's the kind of thing they used to do back in the days of Henry VIII, who lived there, you know. | |
Yeah, that was pretty frightening to me. | |
I was actually walking around touring, and then suddenly I felt that impact. | |
And then I had to say to the ghost, I said, okay, I know how you died. | |
I know you're here, and you need to cross over, and you need to stop making me feel your pain. | |
So that was pretty startling. | |
I wonder if it made any difference. | |
Because, you know, those ghosts have been, the ones that are claimed to be at Hampton Court have been entrenched there for hundreds of years. | |
Yes, they have. | |
And I really, I don't think that it's going to be an easy task to get them to cross over. | |
Rob, listen, thank you very much for talking with me here. | |
I'm sorry that the weather conditions there affected the phone lines, but at least we were able to have this conversation. | |
You tell me that you did a bit of radio. | |
I hope you don't mind me saying this, but all the way through this conversation, I've had this thought, he sounds like somebody, and I've worked out who it is. | |
And for me, this is high praise because I love the guy, okay? | |
Casey Kasim. | |
Have you been told that before? | |
You sound like Casey Kasim. | |
No, I have not been told that. | |
That is a really high compliment. | |
Just try saying these words. | |
Now we're up to our long-distance dedication. | |
Now we're up to our long-distance dedication. | |
Oh, my God, it's Casey. | |
He's back. | |
You could be connecting with the great Casey Kasim. | |
It was a great sadness to me when we lost him. | |
Rob Gutrow, thank you very much indeed. | |
Please keep in touch. | |
And if you're back in the UK, you know, we'll have to have a cup of tea at Hampton Court. | |
That would be spectacular. | |
Thank you, Howard. | |
Thanks, Rob, very much. | |
Take care. | |
Bye-bye. | |
Bye-bye. | |
Well, some very interesting stories from the guest on this edition. | |
Rob Gutrow in the US. | |
Please let me know what you thought about him. | |
Go to the website theunexplained.tv. | |
You can send me a message telling me what you thought about this or any of the shows. | |
Guest suggestions, pointers, tips, whatever. | |
And also at the website theunexplained.tv, you can leave me a donation for the show if you can. | |
That would be very gratefully received. | |
Thank you very much for your kind messages, all of your guidance and support. | |
This show continues online and will develop. | |
So until next we meet here on The Unexplained, my name is Howard Hughes. | |
I am in London. | |
And until that time, please stay safe. | |
Please stay calm. | |
And above all, please stay in touch. | |
Thank you. | |
Take care. |