Edition 264 - Steve Parsons
This time Wales-based ghost investigator Steve Parsons...
This time Wales-based ghost investigator Steve Parsons...
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast. | |
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained. | |
Thank you very much for your recent emails and for your continued support for the show. | |
If you want to send me an email, please follow the rules, which are very simple and not totally binding, but it's nice if you do these things. | |
If you can tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show, it's always useful to know that information. | |
I'm going to be doing some shout-outs this time around, but thank you if you have emailed. | |
And if you'd like to email me with a guest suggestion or anything, comment about the show perhaps, just go to the website designed by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool. | |
It's theunexplained.tv, and you can send me an email from there. | |
Or if you want to make a donation to the show, which would be gratefully received, then you can follow the PayPal link there. | |
That's really easy, too. | |
Thank you. | |
The guest on this edition is a man who's written a book with a great and simple, totally intriguing title, Ghostology. | |
It's a sort of ghost guide. | |
His name is Steve Parsons, and as you will hear, he has a lot of experience in these things. | |
So I think you're going to like him. | |
Steve Parsons coming soon. | |
Before we do all of that, though, let's get your emails in now. | |
Sorry if I'm not going to mention yours, but I'm going to get in as many as I can. | |
And believe me, that I see and read every email and communication that comes in, both to this online show and to my weekly radio show. | |
Okay, here we go. | |
From Frederick, this email just in. | |
First of all, keep up the fantastic work. | |
Thank you, Frederick. | |
From what I know, you have not had David Hatcher Childress on your show. | |
I haven't. | |
I seem to remember trying to get him once, but I'll try again. | |
Thank you, Frederick. | |
Kelvin in Hong Kong says, not only do you have one of the most calming and smoothest voices I've ever heard, is this me? | |
But you're also smart in that you don't let your guests BS their way through the entire time. | |
Well, you know, you've got to ask them some questions, haven't you? | |
You've got to make them define themselves, I think. | |
If you don't do that, then you're just giving people an empty platform, is my thought about it. | |
But, you know, sometimes, Kelvin, I get criticized for it. | |
Thank you very much for your feedback. | |
Brenda in Illinois, US, says, wanted to say hello from Illinois. | |
I like mysteries about history. | |
History, mysteries. | |
Ancient ruins, strange occurrences, night shift creepy stories. | |
I like your show very much. | |
And thank you, Brenda, for your comments. | |
Robin Glasgow, great to hear The Unexplained on a national radio station these days. | |
Hopefully you'll open a few more eyes and minds up and down the country now that you're reaching a different audience. | |
He says that's what I'm going to be listening to on Sunday nights for the foreseeable future. | |
Thank you for that, Rob, and for your suggestion as well. | |
Howard, listener in Pennsylvania, says, I love your show. | |
I listen when I go to bed, been listening for several years now. | |
Thank you very much for your email. | |
You know who you are. | |
You asked me not to mention your name and you said no need to do a shout-out. | |
So I think you were ticking the anonymity box there. | |
So I won't mention your name, but thank you. | |
You know who you are. | |
Ollie says, just a couple of suggestions for some shows. | |
Something on big cats in the UK would be interesting. | |
Also, something about rods. | |
Thank you for that, Ollie. | |
Aide in Highton, Liverpool, says, I've been interested in these themes all of my life, and you help keep the obsession going for me. | |
You're simply unique, and you present the only show that is a must. | |
I listen to you while working out, and to my wife's satisfaction, while I tidy and clean the back kitchen with my earphones on. | |
You know, that's a Liverpool thing, isn't it? | |
We always used to say the back kitchen and not the kitchen. | |
I think that's very much a Liverpool thing. | |
My mum and dad and my granddad and grandmother used to say that, the back kitchen. | |
Thank you for that aid. | |
David in Liverpool also says, recently rediscovered the unexplained after a long hiatus. | |
I stopped listening, don't know why. | |
I remember the old talk sports show. | |
That's more than a decade ago now, David. | |
And then you took it online, which it did. | |
The reason I'm writing this is there's a documentary you should see called Adolf Hitler, The Greatest Story Never Told. | |
The creator is somebody called Dennis Wise. | |
This is interesting. | |
I'm going to check that out. | |
Stephen in Scotland, thanks very much for getting in touch with a UFO story, apparently, from near Falkirk. | |
Stephen, thank you for that. | |
Might tell that one on the radio show sometime. | |
Thank you. | |
From somebody calling themselves a Keen Ear. | |
Hello, Howard. | |
That's how it's written. | |
It's just a short email to say, thanks for the effort you put in and creating the shows you put out. | |
Always interesting guests. | |
Keep it going. | |
Thank you, Keen Ear. | |
And finally, Roy in Thailand. | |
Roy, good to hear from you says, thanks for another great show. | |
Having recently lost most of my sight, I'm still coming to terms with what I can and can't do. | |
But listening to podcasts is one of my primary pleasures. | |
Luckily, I'm still able to use my smartphone and computer with some difficulty provided I have a high contrast white on black screen with large print to read. | |
I know those things can help, can't they, Roy? | |
Finally, I want to say I love all of your shows, and although sometimes some of your guests may be less than credible, you still do a great job of interviewing them with intelligent, pertinent, and well-presented questions. | |
Well, we try. | |
And Roy, I wish you all the very best in Thailand. | |
I visited that fine country once, and it is like nowhere else, I think. | |
Fabulous place, and please take care. | |
Thank you very much. | |
If you want to email, just to say once again, go to the website theunexplained.tv and send me an email through the site. | |
You can tell me if you can, who you are, where you are, and how you use the show. | |
Because it's always good to know. | |
Thank you very much. | |
Okay, guest on this edition in the UK, Steve Parsons, Ghostology. | |
Let's get him on. | |
Hello, Steve. | |
Thank you for coming on The Unexplained. | |
My pleasure. | |
Now, tell me a few things about yourself. | |
I saw in a location guide for you on the internet that you're in West Wales. | |
Is that right? | |
Yeah, Wettest West Wales, as we call it. | |
I'm in Pembrokeshire, near the holiday resorts of Tenby, St. David's, that area. | |
Okay, well, I'm surprised that we're talking digitally because I stayed there for a couple of years, a couple of years, a couple of days last September and had a wonderful time there, reliving my childhood, going to Tenby and, you know, Cardigan, all the places that I absolutely love. | |
It is so rural and so gorgeous there. | |
But the one thing it doesn't really have, which we have in London and the big cities, is good broadband. | |
You know, the speeds are pretty low, aren't they? | |
30 meg. | |
Oh, really? | |
Oh, you're in a good bit. | |
Oh, well, we're in a good bit near Haverford West. | |
Oh, that's right. | |
I'm thinking of moving out there. | |
So that's this Very useful information for me. | |
So Haverford West is the place to be. | |
Yeah, we're actually quite well served now in the sort of around Haverford West, the big, Milford Haven. | |
We're up in the 30s now. | |
We're promised a 50-meg broadband by the end of the year. | |
Oh, my, but that's better than I'm getting here, and I'm in London. | |
There you go. | |
I'll have to complain. | |
Yeah, you complain about the weather, though. | |
I mean, they don't call it Wettest Wales for nothing. | |
And you're going to have to get used to being remote. | |
Why is it remote out here? | |
Well, no, that's true. | |
I mean, before we get, and this actually plays a part in what you do, because there are some eerie places there. | |
But the fact of the matter is, if you want things and you want to be in places quickly, don't live out there because, you know, the roads, a lot of them are really, some of those roads are so small. | |
How do you drive on roads that are that narrow? | |
It takes years of practice. | |
There's six weeks in the summer when the roads out here become really dangerous because we get all of the holidaymakers coming in. | |
And the locals, we have a certain etiquette about the narrow roads. | |
But when the holidaymakers come down, they haven't obviously had the practice that we've had. | |
So, yeah, it can get a bit fraught. | |
No, I think you get used to it in the end. | |
And I also did, and we will get talking about the ghosts in a moment, but I did a drive from where I was staying, which was near a Cardigan, really. | |
It's up in the north of the peninsula more. | |
And I wanted to go to Tenby. | |
And the sat-nav, the GPS, for our American listeners, took me round the most circuitous route of the smallest, narrowest lanes that were actually roads. | |
They were marked roads, but they looked like... | |
Yeah, they're A-roads. | |
They're major, supposedly major roads, but they were as... | |
You can tell the difference between an A road and a B road, a sort of country lane. | |
The country lanes got grass on them. | |
That's the only difference. | |
If they've got grass down the center of the road, then it's a B road. | |
Well, I'm going to remember that next time. | |
Okay, let's talk about you. | |
Now your name I should have known about, and that's my fault. | |
And reading up about you in the last couple of days, you've done so much stuff, consultancy on TV programs, appeared on TV programmes, written books. | |
You're always doing presentations. | |
You know, this is something that you've clearly been doing for quite some time. | |
Actively, yes, for at least 30 years. | |
But going right the way back into childhood, I'm assured by my parents. | |
I have no recollection of that, but they've reached that age now where they start to tell embarrassing stories about me as a child. | |
And I've learned that I always thought I'd started this interest in the paranormal as a teenager. | |
But apparently, according to Mart and Parr, for our American listeners, it started way, way, way earlier, three, four, five. | |
And around age eight, apparently I was caught making a Ouija board in the garage one day. | |
Now that's fascinating. | |
I have no recollection of that. | |
I don't know. | |
I had a little connection with it back at the same sort of age when an American friend of my sister, my sister had an American pen pal called Debbie in North Carolina. | |
And Debbie sent, it was all the rage in America at the time, sent a Ouija board as a present. | |
And my mum went ballistic. | |
She can't use that thing in this house. | |
Terrible stuff. | |
But interesting, because that happened to me when I was about eight, but we didn't use it. | |
I'm wondering what got into you and how you found out about it, you know, to make you want to create and make one of those things for yourself at eight years of age. | |
I honestly can't give you an answer because I have no recollection of it. | |
The thing that I do have subsequently learned and maybe some bearing on it is that my grandparents' generation, so my grandmother and her brothers and sisters and her, so my great-grandparents as well, were all spiritualist mediums in and around Liverpool and were active within the spiritualist church. | |
Now, again, I have no recollection of that as a child or even until my parents started talking about it. | |
And I'm only reliant then upon what they've said, not my own memories. | |
From my own perspective, I really remember as a teenager, starting sort of around age 12, we did a project at school on religion. | |
And I guess out of a sort of, it seemed to be a bit of a perversity, I chose spiritualism because nobody else had. | |
And I'd also had a Guinness Book of Records. | |
And I remember being captivated by a very small entry and a very small photograph that showed Borley Rectory at the most haunted house in England. | |
So around about 11 or 12, judging by the year of the Guinness Book of Records that was bought for Christmas that year for me, that's they're my earliest memories. | |
Interesting you should mention Borley Rectory because I was going to talk with you about that. | |
I know of at least one expedition that somebody's doing to Borley Rectory this year. | |
Funny also that you should mention Liverpool. | |
I have to say, I didn't know that you had a Liverpool connection. | |
I don't know if you know about me, but I'm from Liverpool. | |
I was born in Bootle and lived my formative years in Crosby. | |
Just opposite you until age 45, I was what you would call the woollyback because I'm originally from the world. | |
Are you? | |
Okay, which bit? | |
Which bit? | |
Just outside, well, Bebbington. | |
Oh, right, Bebbington. | |
Oh, it's very posh there. | |
Mind you, Crosby's quite posh. | |
But we know Bebbington was a We used to be taken out under the tunnel, under the Mersey. | |
Sorry, and we're Liverpooling now, and we shouldn't be. | |
But the reason I'm mentioning Liverpool anyway is that my interest in all of this began when I was a trainee broadcaster around about the time that I joined Radio City and maybe just a little bit before that, a long, long time ago. | |
And I went around interviewing people and I remember meeting a woman who I doubt she's still with us because she'd be over 100 now, I guess. | |
But she was a marvellous woman. | |
She'd been a deputy headmistress of a grammar school on Merseyside and her name was Lola, Lola McNaught. | |
And she gave me the lowdown on the grand history of mediumship in Liverpool. | |
And I'm talking about 30s and 40s, where there were seances going on all the time. | |
Absolutely. | |
Liverpool had a very famous Athenaeum, a spiritualist Athenaeum, and that's going back to the start of our conversation. | |
It was my grandparents, great-grandparents who were involved in that. | |
They ran the spiritualist church at Rock Ferry. | |
Again, she would have known and been aware of them. | |
Okay, well, then it was a grand era of this, but it sounded to me as if it was probably also an era where there were a lot of people like Lola, who was very well-spoken, highly educated, and a great seeker after truth, but also a lot of other people who might have been a bit more gullible. | |
And it seemed to me that some of them, back in the Liverpool of those days, fell foul of what a researcher I once interviewed, a man called Alan Gould, if you've ever come across him. | |
Oh, yes, yes. | |
Well, Alan Gould used to be, I think, the president of the Society for Psychical Research. | |
Wonderful voice, marvelous, lugubrious voice. | |
And he said, yes, but there were cases of the most egregious fraud. | |
And I can imagine back in the Liverpool of those days, there were people with sheets and curtains and all sorts of stuff. | |
But I'm sure that in the middle of that boiling melting pot of the 30s and 40s in Liverpool, and around wartime as well, there were probably some very genuine people practicing. | |
I have no doubt. | |
Of course, we've also maintained the SPR link with Liverpool with Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the sort of key members of the Society for Psychical Research, one of the world's leading physicists and instrumental in the development of radio, was very active. | |
He was at Liverpool University and maintained a lot of, did a lot of his psychical research experiments in and around Liverpool. | |
I think it was probably viewed as something that was okay to research. | |
Now, we have to remember, and something that I reminded myself of today, that in this country, in the UK, for our American listeners, the history of so-called ghost investigation goes back to about 1888 or so, and there was an investigation in Brighton. | |
And I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that was the first, or one of the first documented cases of a ghost investigation. | |
No, we can go back way, way, way further back than that in the UK. | |
We can go back to the 17th century, the 16th century with Joseph Blanville, who was a very active researcher of psychical phenomena and studied many, many sort of cases in his era. | |
Also, around the same time, Daniel Defoe was himself very keenly interested in things psychical and spiritual and wrote extensively on the subject. | |
A lot of interest now. | |
I didn't know that, that the writer of Robinson Crusoe was into all of this. | |
I had no idea. | |
Yeah, Defoe wrote under the suit name of Andrew Morton, wrote one of the... | |
I've got the book up the shelf, but I think it's probably the longest titled book on psychical research ever, published in 1725. | |
He was writing under the pseudonym of Andrew Morton, but it was actually Daniel Defoe. | |
I'm getting the view of you, having told me the story of creating a Ouija board that you don't remember when you were eight, and all the detail that you've amassed about all of this, that when you went to school, you were seen maybe as quite an odd child, were you? | |
With your interest in this, did you divulge to people that you were into these things? | |
No, no, no, no. | |
You grew up on Merseyside. | |
You don't divulge anything for fear of... | |
I was pretty normal as a child, I hope. | |
I managed to dodge most of the things that were thrown at me and keep under the radar. | |
Oh, you were lucky then. | |
Yeah, so yeah, I learnt quickly. | |
Okay, but what sorts of, as you were trying to learn as a kid, what sorts of resources were available to you in the Liverpool of that era? | |
To be honest, it was the local library. | |
Of course, we didn't have the internet. | |
We didn't have the resources that we have today, which given the resources that we have today, maybe come on to this later, I think our generation were probably better educated in terms of our developing interest in the paranormal and psychical research because we had to dig that much deeper. | |
We had to go to the library. | |
We had to ask the librarian nicely for a book. | |
There weren't that many resources that were available. | |
And you had to work very, very hard indeed to find those limited resources. | |
And when you compare that to the present situation where basically you can switch on your mobile phone or your tablet or your computer and you have endless resources at your fingertips, what surprises me is the lack of knowledge. | |
I don't wish to sound disparaging, but there is a lack of knowledge within the ghost hunter amateur paranormal community when it comes to the history of the subject. | |
It seems to me, you know, and from some of the stuff that you've written online that I've read, I've got a feeling you might agree with me, but it seems to me that some of these people who are doing investigations now have perhaps watched a few too many Scooby-Doos. | |
Unfortunately, not only would I agree with you, I would say it's more than a few, it's the majority. | |
It's an unfortunate situation. | |
We've gone from a situation that existed for the greater part of psychical researchers' history from the 17th century to almost the 21st century to a situation now where instead of it's become more of an interactive scary movie experience. | |
You know, back in the 70s or 80s, you would, perhaps with a group of friends, you would go out on a Saturday night to the movies with a box of popcorn and scare the bejesus out of one another with a good film by the exorcist. | |
Now it seems to be that people are doing that en masse. | |
And we have a very strange situation That I had hoped would have sort of diminished by now, but started around 2002 here in the UK, 2004 in the USA, with obviously most haunted in the UK and ghost hunters in America. | |
Where people realized for the first time that they could indulge their fascination in the paranormal by doing it themselves, because what they seem to have picked up from the television is the fact that anybody can go off and be a ghost investigator. | |
And ghost investigation has always fascinated people. | |
It's always been a bestseller. | |
It's always been, you know, a top movie. | |
And the problem with the TV shows, a lot of which I have to say, I still watch when they come around again on the digital TV. | |
The problem with a lot of them is that they can edit the footage so they can make it look as if there's something happening, that there's phenomena happening constantly. | |
When you know and I know, it's not like that. | |
There are nights when nothing happens. | |
There are places you go, you might have been told it's a good steer, it's a good place to go, where it's not, or it's not working for you. | |
But the TV programs give people the impression that they can just take a bit of basic equipment and a flashlight and go somewhere and they are going to be scared witless. | |
Yes, but the television programs themselves are not to blame for that because people, a television program exists to sell advertising and so it must be it must attract viewers. | |
And they go to a location for 24 hours and if you know you've got to then condense that 24 hours into 47 minutes to allow for the ad breaks. | |
And you are going to only want to show in the good bits. | |
But then they have to, there is an increasing pressure upon the program makers, series upon series, to maintain that audience. | |
The white lady drifting silently down the corridor is so passe. | |
People want the you've got to be fighting demons, you've got to be battling ghosts, you've got to be wearing these combat fatigues now to attract the audiences and to sell the advertising. | |
But this is the message then that the amateur investigators are taking from the television programmes rather than the need for serious research or investigation into what is, in essentially, a fascinating aspect of the human experience of our own humanity. | |
Now, apart from giving the field a bad name, which some amateurs might arguably do, what are the risks of people who are not fully prepared to investigate this? | |
What are the risks for them? | |
What sorts of things might they encounter and what sorts of effects might those things have upon them? | |
Well, they certainly won't encounter anything within the paranormal realm that would do them any harm. | |
What they could risk is falling over things because they're blundering around in the dark. | |
But I think the biggest risk to anybody involved in the field who comes in unprepared is the risk of their own fear because they believe that what they're encountering is evil or demonic or could cause some harm. | |
And it becomes rather a self-fulfilling curse or a self-fulfilling prophecy because they believe that they can get possessed or attacked or affected by the things that they're investigating. | |
And I've seen people going into locations and coming out genuinely believing that they've that they, because they've been told whilst they were there, that because they didn't do a ritual or a clearance properly, that they're going to take something nasty and evil home with them. | |
Well, look, I have spoken to one ghost investigator, and he's a guy who's very seasoned. | |
He's a British guy in America, who said that he went to one particular place, and he's a very level-headed guy. | |
You know, he works, I think he works at a hospital in the emergency room. | |
You know, he works in that kind of field. | |
But he did take something home with him, and they did have to do something to get rid of this thing. | |
So there are, if you believe what that man said, and others might say, that there are those risks, that you might well acquire something along the way. | |
Well, I wouldn't disbelieve him because I've got no first-hand knowledge of his experience or his account. | |
What I would say is that I have been in hundreds of locations for tens of thousands of hours, and I've never been in a situation where I felt in any way threatened or before, during, or after the event. | |
Now, that might just be because perhaps my mindset doesn't allow that to take place, because I don't think that I'm going to be affected and I never have been affected adversely in any way. | |
Now, if he genuinely believes that he's had that experience, I'm not in a position to deny or criticize him for having that experience, because for him, that is an entirely genuine experience. | |
So you don't believe, we've got to get this clear, because I have had some serious investigators, some academic investigators say that you have to be very careful about low-level entities and stuff that you might attract and things. | |
You're saying that there is no risk? | |
I'm saying that in my experience, which I believe is extensive, I don't consider there to be any risk from the paranormal side of things. | |
The physical side, yes, you can fall over, you can hurt yourself, you could be in a building with asbestos, you could affect yourselves physically, you could frighten yourself. | |
But the paranormal demons, entities, whatever people want to call them, I think you have to believe that you're going to be affected by them in order for that to take effect. | |
I think that's more of a psychological issue than a paranormal issue. | |
I agree with you completely. | |
I think that's a very level-headed way of looking at things. | |
You know, my Liverpool grandmother used to say, you don't have to be afraid of the dead. | |
It's the living you've got to worry about. | |
Yeah. | |
You know, I've been in some of the places where people have said that others, you know, nobody can spend the night in this building. | |
Everybody that goes in here, nobody's survived more than an hour. | |
Well, after an hour, I've been bored to death, but not scared to death. | |
And I'm not bigging myself up in any way. | |
It's just that I just genuinely don't get frightened because, well, why would I? | |
It would be like a fisherman being frightened to fish. | |
And yet I'm there to explore and to understand. | |
There is, I don't know how well you know the Liverpool ghost scene. | |
I don't know it that well. | |
All right, well, let me talk to you about Bold Street in Liverpool, which a street with there is some play, a building there that used to be a music hall, right? | |
And it was a Comet electrical discount warehouse store for a while, and I think it's Waterstone's Books Now, or it might actually be a club. | |
Download it. | |
Okay, well, you might well know about this place. | |
I've wanted to ask somebody about this for years because my dad, I'll cut this story very short, but it's one of the scariest and most worrying things that I've ever encountered. | |
My dad, when he retired from the police in Liverpool, became the security manager for the region, for the North Region for Comet. | |
And one of his jobs on a Saturday night was to go and, for a while, they had a bit of a crime problem there at this particular branch in Bold Street. | |
So he had to go down and relieve the guard that they'd hired and his big Alsatian dog that was guarding the place so he could take the dog for a walk around the corner and it could stretch its legs and do what it had to do. | |
This building, though, was noted to be haunted. | |
Now, haunted where to the extent that the big, toothy Alsatian guard dog refused point blank, and I saw this, to go up the stairs to what was the balcony of the theater that that building had been. | |
My father told me stories about huge, you remember how big colour televisions used to be and the boxes they were in? | |
Colour TVs were stored up there. | |
They would throw themselves against the doors. | |
The doors would float. | |
There were two swing doors at the top of the stairs. | |
And in the theater days, that would have taken you to the balcony, the circle. | |
Those doors would fling themselves open. | |
Everybody was terrified of that place. | |
And I didn't see anything. | |
I didn't catch any glimpses of anything. | |
But I tell you what, I felt a presence there without a doubt. | |
Do you know about that place? | |
I know Bold Street very well. | |
Not specifically. | |
I am aware of the comic case, the theatre case. | |
I'm just trying to rat in my brains to remember the name of the original music hall building. | |
Well, the story was that there was a, well, the story my dad told me, and this might just be. | |
visited the location on two occasions but bold street is is it it's it well Well, maybe you can tell me about the time slip, because I've been trying to investigate this for years as well. | |
Listeners alerted me to this years ago, and I heard the story, and I think it appeared in the Liverpool Echo, the local newspaper there, too. | |
Wasn't it supposed to be a retired policeman standing on the corner of Bold Street, suddenly found himself transported for a very short time back to the 1950s, maybe, and the street was as it was with all the shops that were there and the vans of the 1950s that were going up and down. | |
And then suddenly, in the snap of a finger, he was back up to date. | |
Oh, we can do far better than that. | |
There is over 150 documented accounts of time slips in Bold Street, including one that you just mentioned. | |
What's interesting about the Bold Street time slip cases, and I say we have over 150 documented and we don't have them all. | |
We know of at least another dozen or so that are undocumented. | |
And the most recent that we have just learned about was from March 2016. | |
Good Lord. | |
This is amazing. | |
They range over a period of dates in terms of the time slip itself from the one that you just discussed where people go back to the 30s, 40s or 50s, and they do seem to interact with the time slip. | |
They talk to people or the people within the time slip we spot react to the strangeness of the appearance of the 20th century person, witness. | |
Okay. | |
And of the people who've experienced this, the case I know about is supposed to be a retired policeman. | |
Are they all similar sorts of people or is it a spread? | |
No, we have a widespread male, female, young, old. | |
We've tried to seek patterns within this huge swathe of experiences that we've had reported and documented. | |
But the problem that we've got is they are just so diverse. | |
I mean, we've got perhaps the most bizarre is a gentleman who walks into Waterstone's bookstore and actually passes himself coming out. | |
Good God. | |
So that was the shortest time slip. | |
So you're probably talking a time slip of moments. | |
We know about the police one that you referred to, but the only common thread that we've ever found whilst trying to find a focus or a reason for all these time slips, and they're so tightly clustered in this lower part of Bold Street, there are other sort of focus around Liverpool City Centre, but the Bold Street one is notorious, absolutely notorious for the sheer number of people that have reported time slips there. | |
It does seem to be predominantly in the winter months and predominantly on the foggier days or evenings. | |
That is the only common thread that we can suggest. | |
But we've got them where there are multiple witnesses undergoing the same time slip. | |
For example, a man sitting opposite Waterstones on the steps of the Lyceum or the Lyce Ridden, as you would. | |
I have to say the Lyceum is it looks like it's a sort of Romanesque style building, very, very grand tea room. | |
That's right. | |
The Lyce Ridden, as it was always known by scouters. | |
A gentleman there went into a time slip that appeared to drop him back into the 1960s. | |
At the same time, somebody, a young female, walked into the time slip at the same time as he did. | |
They both reacted to each other and became aware of something unusual taking place. | |
And he Walked in, she walked. | |
Sorry, she walked. | |
The girl walked into Waterstones, which was at the time a clothes shop back in the 60s. | |
And as she walked in, the whole thing flipped around. | |
It became Waterstones Books. | |
So you have two people, two independent witnesses to the same time slip phenomena. | |
And you're sure these people are not either deluded or haven't spent too much time in Yeats's wine lodge? | |
Fairly sure. | |
We've done a lot of interviews with people. | |
It started off in the same, probably the same way as you. | |
We had a show on Radio Merseyside, and we became aware of people reporting or phoning up the show, the radio show about time slips. | |
And so we started to study it. | |
This was 15, 16 years ago now. | |
And people came forward. | |
And what was interesting is that people didn't know each other. | |
And with reverse time slips, it is possible. | |
One of the problems we had to recognize is that, yes, people could just be pulling our chain because there is a lot of information about Liverpool, about Liverpool city center, about Bold Street, as it looked in the 50s, 60s, etc. | |
But let's be honest about it. | |
One of the most atmospheric places in this world that I know is Bold Street. | |
When I think of Christmases, foggy days, and amazing times, this street with a history with cobbles and all the rest of it, you know, Bold Street is absolutely, you could set a movie in Bold Street. | |
It is absolutely the sort of place that you would expect it to happen. | |
The only other sorts of places where it might are places like Bath. | |
And I think Bold Street has got, in many ways, the edge over Bath. | |
People are going to kill me for that. | |
Well, it's not just, I mean, yes, Bold Street is the focus. | |
I mean, with this, you know, 100 plus, easily 100 plus cases. | |
But Castle Street, up by the town hall, down by the Albert Dock, there are others. | |
What's interesting is there is also a small cluster of forward time slips. | |
Now, we can at least verify a reverse time slip because if somebody says that they were looking at the name on a vehicle or a storefront, we can go back and we can look at the documents for that. | |
But what's interesting is our inability to test this idea of forward time slips. | |
But there are people who have come forward who have described a future scenario. | |
We have no way of verifying whether they're accurate because it hasn't happened yet. | |
Are they similar accounts? | |
Broadly similar, yes. | |
But we lack any ability to put that claim to the test. | |
What we can do with a reverse time slip is to at least go back and look at the records to see, did such a building exist? | |
Did such a shop exist? | |
The problem you've got is, and the skeptics would point out gleefully, is that, of course, if we could find the fact that there was this particular store in 1950s, Liverpool, then anybody else could also, and they could entirely fabricate the experience. | |
But what we did find interesting and what we do find with many of the witnesses is we are the only people that they've ever told. | |
When they've come forward, they have almost never, in many cases, told their family and certainly don't want any publicity because they're embarrassed by having the experience. | |
It's an experience that one of the things that we found interesting about people who have had time slips is it does seem to have an unusual effect on them. | |
It affects, it becomes a very profound effect and a very profound experience. | |
But in a way that disorientates and a way that when we're trying to say to them, well, what day was it? | |
Because obviously we're trying to pin it down. | |
We're trying to find a focus. | |
Can we go there at the same time? | |
And, you know, does it happen at five o'clock on a Saturday afternoon? | |
If, you know, in which case we'll go there at five o'clock and hope that we'll interact with it. | |
But they have an inability to remember the modern scenario. | |
So they can remember the names of the stores and what the people were wearing in the time slip. | |
you say well what day well i think it was a saturday um and it was around about They're not specific about when the event took place. | |
It's like it's affected their memory in some way. | |
So that makes it very hard to investigate. | |
If you can't pinpoint the specific point in modern time, then, you know, where'd you go from there? | |
We can get it down roughly to the day of the week. | |
Right. | |
Or, you know, morning or afternoon, but it does seem to have this unusual, unsettling effect on the contemporary memory. | |
But look, let's bring it down to earth a little bit. | |
Now, look, there are so many people reporting this that I don't think it can be this. | |
But Liverpool, I remember my first boss when I was a kid at Radio City, a guy called David Maker, and he said, Howard, you've got to understand that Liverpool is a place with a sense of nostalgia. | |
And there is no doubt about it. | |
There is nowhere like Liverpool for the sense of nostalgia. | |
We all, look, one of my great dream is, and I doubt it'll be able to happen for me. | |
I would love to go back and spend a day in 1950s Liverpool. | |
I would absolutely give anything to have that experience. | |
And it's not going to happen. | |
And that's because of our great nostalgia. | |
And what I'm saying really is, Liverpool is infused with this. | |
Maybe it's wishful thinking. | |
Well, I can certainly understand your comments about Liverpool and its sense of nostalgia. | |
Now, I'd cite your rival radio station, Radio Mercyside, and Billy and Wally, Billy Butler and Wally. | |
Oh, I know Billy and Wally. | |
Who basically made a living out of Liverpool in the 1960s? | |
It was almost like Liverpool had never evolved out of the 1960s. | |
And growing up in Liverpool in the 70s and 80s, you could understand why, because Liverpool was a very dead city and it had closed down. | |
There was a lot of industrial action. | |
There was a lot of people out of work. | |
And we didn't even acknowledge, the weird thing to me as a kid, in the 70s and 80s, we didn't really acknowledge the Beatles. | |
You go to Liverpool now and the Beatles hotels and Beatles Museum, Beatles everything, but not in the 70s and early 80s. | |
No, I don't. | |
No, we didn't. | |
You know, you can go to Liverpool now and you will see pictures of the Beatles on the side of buses. | |
It's everywhere, isn't it? | |
It's absolutely everywhere. | |
But there was always this every, you know, every time you put on the radio station, it was always in my Liverpool home and you could leave the doors open and you could walk up our jiggered at the end of the road and nobody do anything to you. | |
Yeah, it was safe in those days, you know, you could go out at night and everybody would look out for you. | |
That's the one, yeah. | |
It was like Liverpool was stuck in a time warp. | |
Exactly. | |
And that's why I think, just as I have this desire to go back to Liverpool in the 50s, because before I was born, to see what it was like, a lot of people feel that way about Liverpool. | |
But that can't explain all of it. | |
No, it doesn't. | |
I mean, I've had the advantage of talking to the people that have had these experiences. | |
And you have to make a judgment call when you speak to somebody. | |
People don't tell you lies. | |
You get the occasional storyteller. | |
You'll get the occasional leg pull. | |
But in the main, people don't tend to just make up stories. | |
Why would they? | |
What's in it for them? | |
There's usually some advantage to be gained by making up a story, some pecuniary advantage or ego advantage, some boost. | |
But these are people who don't want anything. | |
They don't even want their names recorded. | |
Quite recently, I was asked by an American researcher if we could locate some people relating to the Times that some of the original first-hand witnesses for a book that's being written. | |
And we really, really struggled. | |
We contacted around a dozen of the original witnesses, not one of whom would want to come forward to go on record publicly with their name, address, and photograph attached to their account. | |
They stand by their account, totally stand by their account. | |
But they said, well, we've told you what we experienced, and that's it. | |
That's the end of it. | |
You know, we helped you out. | |
You helped you guys out. | |
We don't want to make a song and dance about it. | |
So that isn't like your normal witness who's just wanting their five minutes of fame on the television. | |
So I presume what you're looking for, and I had no idea that these cases were ongoing right up until March of this year. | |
You're looking for somebody who's had a recent experience who's willing to go the whole nine yards. | |
No, no, no. | |
We don't want the whole nine yards. | |
We just want the account because what we're trying to do, and like with any sort of research, is we're trying to look for a pattern, something that will give us a window into the phenomena to try and understand the nature of the phenomena, the experiences. | |
And so what you're saying is that there is no commonality between these accounts. | |
Apart from there's a hint of an idea that it might be seasonal and that the winter months are more likely for it to take place and the weather conditions favour those mists off the Mersey damp evenings that we talked about before. | |
And then the mist rolls up from, I mean, look, we all talk about, if we don't live in Liverpool anymore, we yearn for it. | |
But the mist rolls up from the Mersey and at Christmas time. | |
I'm pretty sure you'll get those mists. | |
I guess you probably get them all the time there. | |
All right, listen, your publisher are going to be very upset with me if I don't talk about Ghostology, which is your new book. | |
So I'm talking to you because I loved that name, Ghostology. | |
I thought a guy who's written a book called Ghostology has got to be really interesting. | |
So what is ghostology? | |
Well, it's quite simply the study of ghosts. | |
It's theology, the study of ghosts. | |
I didn't create the word. | |
The word has been around since the 1920s when another author coined the term ghostology for his book. | |
But I thought it was a cool word and describes pretty much the contents of the book, which is the study of ghosts as a human experience and as a phenomena that we interact with, that we live with, that we exist with, and is topical. | |
It's actually a book I didn't want to write because there are hundreds and hundreds. | |
I mean, my bookshelves here are groaning under books about how to hunt ghosts and how to catch ghosts and what equipment you need and ghost investigators' handbooks. | |
And in the write-up and reviews for this book that you've written, you're very, very keen to stress that this is not a handbook. | |
No, it's not a handbook. | |
It's a discussion on the techniques. | |
It's a discussion about the equipment that people use, the ethics, the morals. | |
People can use it as a handbook, but that's not how it's written. | |
It's actually a discussion about the contemporary methods that are being employed by investigators. | |
Right. | |
And so the sincere investigators, the ones who are really into it and they're not, you know, they haven't been schooled by Scooby-Doo, as much as I love Scooby-Doo and Shaggy and everybody in Scooby-Doo, Casey Casem, who did the voiceover. | |
It's not like that. | |
Today, if you go and stake a place out, say you went to Bold Street to that old branch of Cobbett, the old music hall, what would you, as a serious investigator, take with you? | |
My notebook and pen. | |
That's probably... | |
You're not there looking for ghosts. | |
What ghost hunting essentially is, is trying to understand a human experience. | |
Somebody has had an experience that they believe to be a ghost. | |
They may have heard something or sensed something or smelt something or had some of the sensory experience. | |
Now, they have given it a label. | |
They have called it ghosts. | |
And for that reason, I have no doubt that ghosts exist. | |
But it's what actually is a ghost. | |
What causes that experience? | |
Is it, for example, something within the environment that's causing them to have these weird effects? | |
And we know That there are some environmental stimuli that can do that. | |
Is it something within their psychology, or is it indeed something external to the human, something that is extra-dimensional, paranormal, that is interacting with those people? | |
Is it the dead coming back, or is it something that we're generating internally? | |
We don't know. | |
And we can't begin to measure and throw equipment or even hypothesize because we lack that basic understanding. | |
The question, what is a ghost, remains a question that we cannot yet answer. | |
There are lots of people, mediums and those who believe will tell you that it's the returning dead or it's demonic or it's something else. | |
The parapsychologists, the skeptics will tell you it's all a figment of the imagination, a creation of the mind. | |
But neither can be absolutely certain because we just lack that information. | |
We just do not understand this human experience. | |
And for no other reason other than it is a fascinating human experience that goes back thousands of years and encompasses all cultures and beliefs, we have to understand it. | |
We have to study it. | |
We have to try to get some angle on it. | |
Right. | |
I can tell you my ghost experience, I never thought I would see a ghost in my life. | |
I just am not that kind of person, I thought. | |
You know, too rational, too much of a journalist. | |
That's my training. | |
Didn't think it would happen to me. | |
Then one night I was working at a very well-known tower in Liverpool where there is a radio station. | |
You will know it, of course, at Radio City. | |
You've been there a few times? | |
Well, you know, I hope they don't mind me telling the story, but I was filling in for somebody called Pete Price there, who does a big phone-in show there. | |
And he's a bit of an icon. | |
And I'd come up from London and I'm thinking, oh, they're going to give me stick because I left Liverpool and that's not the thing to do. | |
And I love the place, but, you know, I've been down in the south for years and my accent changed and I'm not quite as Liverpool as I used to be. | |
But anyway, it's a lovely experience. | |
It always was. | |
And I love Liverpool. | |
But anyway, what was it? | |
One o'clock in the morning. | |
I have to go to the Loo during the news. | |
And I run up to the Loo and then run back down. | |
And as you know, there's a walkway around the outside of the tower. | |
And you can look down across North Wales and the North West and down into Liverpool city centre. | |
And then within that walkway are the doors into the studios and offices. | |
So I'm going back or just about to open the door to the studio to go back on air. | |
And I just look and there standing in front of me is a man quite short, quite thin, wearing an old-style overcoat and a workman's cap. | |
And as I looked at him, he disappeared in front of my eyes. | |
I swear that happened. | |
And I didn't know anything about this. | |
I went in and said to my producer, I've just seen. | |
I wasn't scared because I just took me by surprise. | |
I was blindsided by it. | |
And I said, I've just seen this guy. | |
He said, you've seen him. | |
And he didn't like to talk about it, I don't think. | |
And he didn't prime me for it. | |
I'd no idea. | |
And apparently, they think it is somebody there who worked on the construction and is just keeping an eye on the place. | |
Pete Price, actually, when I've done Pete's show, he actually told me the same story. | |
Well, a story about the same figure. | |
But the old Radio City building itself was well known to be haunted. | |
Was it? | |
I worked there. | |
trained there yeah the old radio the old radio city in oh come on well 6.7 in the square box size. | |
Well, Radio City is an iconic radio station for Liverpool, commercial radio station. | |
They gave me my start. | |
I was a local boy from a local comprehensive school, and they gave me a training. | |
I won a competition there when I was 16, and they had me back there to train as a journalist. | |
So I owe them everything. | |
Now, their original building, before they got the big posh tower, was just an ordinary sort of commercial premises on Stanley Street in Liverpool. | |
Stanley Street. | |
I was racking my brains trying to remember. | |
A big, stocky red brick building. | |
Yep. | |
And when you went in, you went up the short flight of steps and into the studio complex. | |
It was that area there around the foyer. | |
It was always cold. | |
That area was always cold. | |
And it was night security guard. | |
We interviewed two of them going way, way back, maybe 20 years ago. | |
Yeah, well, there was a very, there was one particularly older guy there. | |
I can't remember his name, but he'd been there from 1974 when it started. | |
So he'd been there for years. | |
He will have seen everything. | |
He was, well, we interviewed one of the security staff. | |
By the sound of your description of it, I think it was the same guy. | |
The other one was one of the early morning staff who would come in at six to, because I think overnight it was done with the recording. | |
Back in the day when I started, and when I started doing news there, they had overnight shifts. | |
So I was in that building. | |
I used to prowl that building at night, you know. | |
There'd be a disc jockey in the studio on the air. | |
And I would just, if I wanted a bit of exercise, I would go all around that building. | |
And there were... | |
You were the ghost. | |
I think I'd probably still haunt the place. | |
But there were parts of that building that were eerily cold. | |
And that's a fact. | |
It's something that's not unique to that particular building in terms of radio stations, because the old Radio Merseyside building itself had a well-documented ghost that was on the premises. | |
And we have somewhere in our archive a very interesting photograph that was taken of a group of Radio Merseyside DJs, including I'm not going to name him now, but one of the DJs had died a year earlier, a very well-known Liverpool DJ of Radio Merseyside, and he appears in the photograph. | |
Really? | |
Now, at the time, we had a weekly show on Radio Merseyside that dealt with the paranormal, and they sent us this picture, and we knew the presenter staff and the producer staff at Radio Merseyside, and they were as shocked by this appearance as we were. | |
And we looked at the picture and we examined it. | |
Fortunately, it was a print picture, not one of these modern digital pictures. | |
And we were able to at least look at the negative for this picture, and we could demonstrate that it hadn't been tampered with, and whatever was on the negative had certainly been in the room with these people. | |
And this person, look, you don't have to say the name, but I'll certainly know everybody there from that era because I grew up listening to it. | |
You would know him. | |
Yeah. | |
How did he look? | |
Well, we'd met him on a couple of occasions and he was instantly recognizable. | |
In terms of how he appeared on the photograph, he was obviously different than the presenters, than the main group of the photograph. | |
He was grey, almost monochrome in appearance and not quite right, if that makes sense. | |
Obviously, it looked like a modern photo app, you know, all these apps that sticks a spooky ghost onto a mobile phone page. | |
And you're sure that that negative hasn't been adulterated? | |
As sure as we can be. | |
We subjected it to, you know, it's beyond us to ascertain whether a negative had been tampered with. | |
So what we routinely did with photographic negatives is we used to send them all to Ilford down in Cheshire, where we had a friendly guy there who would look over the negatives for us and say whether it had been doctored in. | |
Okay, now just for our American listeners, Ilford was a famous British film company rather like Kodak. | |
Yeah, and they were based in Cheshire, not very far away. | |
So we were able to develop a good rapport with Ilford when it came to, you know, the occasional picture. | |
And they were occasional pictures. | |
You know, nowadays people are shelling ghost pictures into the media at a rate of three or four a day onto Facebook. | |
And some of them look really questionable. | |
You know, man says a medieval knight spotted in corner. | |
And you're thinking, where is that? | |
Well, you have. | |
There's a sort of the modern-day paranormal ghost photograph now, to make it truly paranormal, you have to usually draw a red ring around it. | |
Yes. | |
I'm not sure actually whether it's the ghost itself or whether the red hoop is a new sort of paranormal phenomenon that we've come across recently. | |
Listen, that Radio Merseyside experience is interesting for this reason. | |
Radio stations are places where there's a lot of emotion and a lot of people spend a lot of hours there and there is a certain amount of times of angst and there is happiness. | |
There's every human emotion but amplified on a radio station. | |
So if we believe the theory that people imprint themselves on a place, then the one place that's going to happen is a radio station. | |
I can't disagree with that. | |
I can't dispute the theory either because we don't have the information as to why people have these experiences. | |
But there are areas and it's been suggested by others that there is this ability to imprint within the environment some aspect of our emotion, our thoughts in some way. | |
That might also hold true for hospitals and nursing homes. | |
Again, these sort of locations have a higher proportion of it. | |
In fact, I don't know of a single hospital that doesn't have a ghost. | |
And many of the nursing homes where I worked at previously, again, every single one of them had its resident ghost. | |
Well, it's strange. | |
There's a hospital in Liverpool that's now closed. | |
You know what I'm going to say now. | |
My mother had a bad accident many years ago. | |
My late mum, she had an electrical accident with a badly wired washing machine. | |
And one of these days I'll name the company because they sent a man round and my poor young mum gave them, let them take the washing machine away. | |
They'd wired the washing machine with cloth-covered flecks, not rubber-covered flecks. | |
So she got a bad electric shock. | |
She nearly died. | |
And her hands were burned. | |
And she went to a place, the reason I'm saying this, called Newgam Hospital. | |
And Newgam Hospital looks a bit like an old asylum. | |
It's a big, stern, red-brick building. | |
And she had to go there every week to have her hands dressed. | |
Now, that place has been closed for years, and ghost investigators have been checking it out, haven't they? | |
It's become one of the go-to locations because there is a large industry that's grown up on both sides of the Atlantic supplying the or meeting the need of people who want to go and explore these phenomena for themselves on these paranormal investigation experiences. | |
And Newsham has, because they're always seeking new locations. | |
And Newsham, I think, popped up two or three years ago and is now, you know, it's one of the ones that you see regularly, almost weekly, monthly, with increasingly active phenomena being reported. | |
Because of course, every group that goes there adds another layer of their experiences to the location. | |
Take an example down here in Pembrokeshire. | |
When I moved down here, Pembroke Castle and Kerrou Castle both had ghosts. | |
They had ghosts each. | |
I think there was two at Kerr Castle and one at Pembroke Castle. | |
And neither were on the circuit for the ghost tours, for the ghost events, for the ghost investigation experiences. | |
Both of them have now got onto the circuits. | |
And I think at the last count a few weeks ago, Kerw was up to, it was well into double figures. | |
And Pembroke Castle had, again, well into double figures for the number of ghosts and spirits that are said to haunt the locations. | |
And that's the same for any location, particularly ones that have perhaps made it onto media. | |
You know, a visit from a television crew is a sh I mean, first of all, it puts the price up, but it also puts the number of spirits up as well, because every group will go along there with their own agenda. | |
They will have their own mediums, they will have their own experiments, they will have their own ideas and hypotheses. | |
Doesn't that muddy the waters for the investigator like you who goes along there with a shorthand notebook and a pencil? | |
Well, we also have it. | |
We do have some equipment, obviously. | |
But yes, it does incredibly muddy the water. | |
In fact, What we spend most of our life doing nowadays is untangling and trying to get back through this layer of modern reports to the original experiences, those that were had by people who weren't looking for the paranormal. | |
The members of staff, the day visitors, the people who worked in locations, the casual visitors who knew nothing about the history. | |
We have to try and get through all that to try and find out, well, why are they even at this place in the first place? | |
What was the very first experience that was ever reported? | |
Have anybody reported things from these locations who were just, you know, disinterested, right? | |
So you're saying that the best reports are almost rather like the one that I had, the one and only ghost I've ever seen in my life, where I wasn't expecting it. | |
I knew nothing about the fact that people talked about a ghost and that I had no idea, never heard it, didn't know anything, certainly wasn't looking for it, was getting on with my life and my job. | |
And this thing just appeared before me. | |
So it didn't scare me, wasn't expecting it, but I experienced it. | |
Well, I think that's a more genuine or a more realistic human experience. | |
Because if you're paying £40 or £50 for a night, then an experience, any experience that you have, there is a high level of expectation of pre-priming the pump. | |
And so it's not surprising when so many people will have an experience. | |
What you actually find is if you try to go back into the recent history to find the original source material, there isn't one. | |
What you actually come across is the reason people are there is because it looks scary. | |
It conforms to a pre-formed expectation of what a haunted building looks like based upon Hollywood, the movies, television programmes. | |
So big Victorian institutions. | |
In terms of experiences that you've had, what is the most eye-opening, inexplicable, maybe scary thing that's ever happened to you? | |
Okay, not scary, but certainly perhaps the most unexplicable. | |
If we'll stick to Merseyside, we spent many, many thousands of hours in Camelard on the ship, in the shipyard. | |
Oh, Camel Reds, yeah. | |
After the shipyard had closed, it was retained and the staff who were there were reporting things and we got involved and we spent lots and lots of time there. | |
And on one particular occasion, we were there with the BBC film crew who were doing one of the featurettes. | |
I think it ran Halloween on ghosts. | |
And we'd been there from eight o'clock at night till about five, six in the morning and nothing. | |
Absolutely. | |
It had been as quiet as a grave. | |
Which was pretty much what we were expecting. | |
And just as we came to leave, obviously we had our own set of keys to the office block at Cat, which is something we took great care of. | |
We had our own set of keys, we were trusted. | |
And so we took great care locking up. | |
And as we were locking up, we noticed that one of the lights on the first floor offices was on. | |
So we immediately, oh, we've left the lights on. | |
So we went to open up. | |
But as we looked up, that light went out and another light further along the building came on. | |
And we thought, clearly somebody has got in. | |
So I unlocked the door and two of us went in. | |
And we could hear people move, we could hear footsteps, we could hear movement, we could hear doors opening and closing. | |
Now, at that point in time, we must have been there for, I'd lost count, hundreds of not hundreds of hours individually over a course of a few months. | |
And we knew the doors. | |
We could tell you which door was being opened and closed. | |
So we rushed in. | |
We weren't sure whether somebody broken in or whether somebody was trying to prank us because the security, of course, they had a key, they knew we were on site. | |
Nonetheless, we went upstairs and we were confronted by the old drawing office where all the drafting tables used to be. | |
It's a big, big, big empty building, big empty room, perhaps 150 feet long, 60 feet wide with windows down each side. | |
And it was lit from above by light panels and each light panel had an individual string pull, cord pull, to activate it. | |
And these light pulls, the panels themselves, were going on and off. | |
There was no sequence to them. | |
A couple would go on, a couple would go off. | |
And we watched and we could hear the click of the pull cord at the same time. | |
And we could hear the doors beyond opening. | |
We could hear movement. | |
And we were completely, absolutely confounded by what we were seeing and experiencing. | |
The layout of the building meant that we could sort of come around on two sides so that we entered this room from both ends simultaneously. | |
So there was nobody there. | |
There was us on this floor with lights going on and off and doors moving. | |
I'd have been out that door so quickly. | |
At that point, the BBC reporter finally got themselves together with the cameraman and had come rushing in behind us. | |
And as I turned round, we were still sort of like, what's going on? | |
To have a camera light come on and microphone. | |
And the reporter goes, so is this a ghost? | |
I can't remember what the exact answer was. | |
I think one of the answers you could have given was, you tell me. | |
I don't think they broadcast the initial response. | |
And we never did understand that one. | |
We were absolutely 100% sure that we weren't dealing with an electrical malfunction because we had the original electrical drawings for the building pulled. | |
We went to the person who designed the electrics for that particular building block, which was built in the 1960s for the Polaris submarine program. | |
And he confirmed to us that the lights had no master switch, that the only way of turning those light panels on and off was via The pull cords. | |
There was no master switch that allowed them to be operated individually. | |
Oh my god, what a great story. | |
So there was no way, apart from pulling the cord or pulling the master switch and turning the entire floor, you know, the entire system off, that those lights could have been doing what they're doing. | |
Steve, we've got to do this again. | |
Thank you very much. | |
Plug the book. | |
Tell me how people can get hold of it and tell me what your website is so people can find you. | |
Okay, the book is called Ghostology, The Art of the Ghost Hunter. | |
It's available on Amazon. | |
All Amazons have got it. | |
It's got a lurid green cover with a rubber comedy ghost on the cover. | |
So that's easy to find. | |
The website for me is obviously the triple W, The Ghost Hunter, all one word.webs, WEBS.com. | |
Steve Parsons, thank you very much. | |
We're recording this at night time, so stay safe. | |
Well, thank you very much, man. | |
We'll do the next one with the scout accent. | |
Oh, definitely, you know. | |
Well, if you want to, we can do that anytime you like, you know. | |
I know you sound like Billy Butler there. | |
No, great deal. | |
Billy Butler, by the way, for our American listeners, the most famous disc jockey probably in Liverpool and for Liverpool. | |
Wally. | |
Billy and Wally, they were a pair who did, I mean, we shouldn't be doing this, but they did a quiz on Radio City called Hold Your Plums, which they transferred to Radio Merseyside. | |
And there is a clip, if you're listening in America, and I hope you get the humor, but certainly in England you'll get the humor. | |
If you've never heard, there is a woman trying to guess a word, and the word is potato, right? | |
And she's got the component parts of the word, which will make her a winner. | |
Pot, eight, and toe, right? | |
And I heard this. | |
I was on the motorway and heard this, Steve. | |
And I nearly crashed the car because I heard it live. | |
The woman could not get the fact that running the words pot, which she guessed, and ate, and toe for your toes, run them together, you get another word, that's potato. | |
That would win her the competition. | |
She couldn't work it out. | |
And Billy's going nuts trying to say, it's, yeah, so run it together, say it quickly. | |
Potato, Bill. | |
Potato, what's that? | |
Steve, we've got to go, but thank you very much indeed. | |
Take care. | |
Thank you. | |
Bye-bye. | |
Bye-bye. | |
You've been hearing Steve Parsons and the topic of ghostology. | |
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My name is Howard Hughes. | |
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Thank you very much. | |
Take care. |