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April 3, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:03:49
Edition 340 - Richard Estep Update

A return visit with Anglo-American paramedic and acclaimed ghosthunter Richard Estep...

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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.
Well, here we go.
We're just getting through Easter, out to the other side, and into spring here in the northern hemisphere.
I know it's the complete reverse in the southern hemisphere, so my thoughts are with you.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Keep them coming.
I personally reply to as many as I can, but I always see all of the email as it comes in.
And thank you very much for all of the guest suggestions and all of the other things.
If you can make a donation to this show, then please do.
It all allows it to continue here.
It is a completely independent production.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv, designed by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
You can connect with me through that.
You can also, if you want to, leave a donation to the show, which is very gratefully received.
If you've done it recently, thank you.
Guest on this edition, then, is a welcome return for somebody I was completely enthralled by last time I spoke with him.
His name is Richard Estep.
You can't call him a ghost hunter.
He is much, much more than that.
He is a researcher, author, investigator of phenomena of many kinds.
He is a very unusual man in that not only is he Anglo-American, so he was born here and lives there.
He works in the medical profession, as you will hear, in Denver, Colorado, but also is somebody who is involved in television productions and writing books about famous haunted locations and many other places, as you will hear.
He was a terrific guest last time we spoke, and it's great to be able to catch up with him now.
So, Richard Estep, welcome return for him coming very soon here on this show.
Like I say, thank you very much for all of your emails.
And I always welcome your comments about shows, and it's interesting those guests who stir up continuing comments that continue for weeks and weeks and weeks.
By and large, though, I think, although sometimes I wonder, but by and large, I think we're getting it right.
We're trying to balance the shows, and we're trying to bring you good guests, and we're trying to bring you people that maybe you haven't heard before.
I think that's the point of this.
Always the point of contact is the website, theunexplained.tv.
And thank you for putting a hit on that if you have, as you listen to this show.
It's very, very important that you do.
All right, let's cross to the United States then to Anglo-American researcher and author Richard Estep.
Richard, thank you very much for coming back on my show.
Okay.
So, Richard, tell me first of all then, for those who are new to you and the work that you do, how you would describe yourself?
I'm asking this for a reason because my thought about you when we first spoke was that when it comes to paranormality and hunting and tracking down ghosts or whatever you want to call them, you're a bit of an Indiana Jones character.
You know, I do like to travel.
That's my hobby and my passion.
So I tend to travel across the US and the UK to what are said to be some of the most haunted locations.
And I spend time there.
Whenever I get the opportunity, I'll move in for a few days and see what's what.
Which is a very brave thing to do.
I mean, look, we all watch these sanitized TV programs where people maybe move in for a short while.
And, you know, sometimes they, I almost get the impression that they feign terror when things happen.
You know, it's, oh my God, what was that?
But moving in with a thing and spending a bit of time with it and getting onto the skin of it, and I've spoken to you before, I know that's what you do.
That's a bit different, isn't it?
It can, yeah, it is a bit different.
And I think with a TV show, you do have to be concerned about ratings.
And I've never really understood how you can consistently get those kind of results and those kind of scares on a convenient schedule for a network TV show.
All right.
And just to give a quick 101 for people who haven't heard you before, who didn't hear your first appearance on the show, you are also unusual in that you are US-UK, so you spend a lot of your time over here and you live over there in the US.
But also your working life is unusual too.
You have a kind of double life, don't you?
Well, in that I have a full-time job, I think, though most paranormal investigators do.
But I make my living as a paramedic here in Colorado.
And how do those two things, and we might have asked this question before, but let's deal with it again now.
How do they connect?
Do they connect?
You might think they would, but generally speaking, the most useful aspect of being a medical professional when it comes to paranormal research is it lets you speak to people that have all these kind of claims and look at it from a medical perspective.
It's quite scary how many medications these days have a side effect of hallucinations if you read the small print and you start to dig into it a little bit.
So there are also various medical conditions that can make people perhaps believe they're having a paranormal experience when actually there's a fairly good medical explanation for it.
So it lets me cover those bases before I get anywhere near the possibility of a paranormal explanation.
And certainly in this field, and I've interviewed as you have interviewed many, many, many people over many, many years, there is always the tendency to think that sometimes people are deluding themselves.
They want to experience phenomena.
They want to be at the apex of some kind of paranormal activity.
And they would be very disturbed and disappointed if you told them, actually, it might just be something to do with the medication you're on or perhaps, you know, your mindset at the moment.
Well, I understand that because it's something that every paranormal investigator has to grapple with too.
The idea that you might sit there for 12 hours and get no result at all and have completely wasted a night when all of your friends are down the pub or doing something else.
You know, you start to really want that creaking floorboard to be something meaningful and often it isn't.
So I do understand why some people, I think, believe so intensely that they are unique and they are special and what's happening to them is this unique and special thing.
So it's kind of human nature in a way and I understand that we just have to guard against it.
And how do you guard against it?
What sorts of safeguards?
What sorts of questions do you ask?
What kind of preparations do you do to make sure that you're getting the good stuff?
Well, I'm a big believer in our job being to rule things out, first of all.
We rule out the commonplace and the everyday, which means starting simply with the environment that the alleged activity is taking place in.
We do look at EMF levels rather than waving around an EMF meter as a ghost detector, as some people will.
I'm interested in seeing high levels of electromagnetic energy because they can have an effect on the brain.
So we look at the natural environment.
We look at subsidence and the grade of a floor when somebody talks about, oh, this ball moved on its own.
You know, what is the camber of the floor?
What is the grade?
What is the airflow like coming through that building?
Do things happen when the conditioning is on or the heating is on?
Those sorts of things.
If stuff happens at night, houses tend to be noisier at night, especially after a warm day, because they contract when they start to get cool.
So there's a thousand and one things like that that are the paranormal investigators' stock in trade.
And sometimes because a lot of this stuff is done at night, there can be a tendency for your eyes to play tricks that you can perceive motion, slight motion, when perhaps there is none.
Particularly from the corner of the eye, absolutely.
And then we get into rods and cones and the actual anatomy of the eye and how we see things.
You made a great point, Howard.
And the truth is that psychologically at night, people are way more predisposed, I believe, to start misinterpreting things as paranormal because, hey, that's when the ghosts come out, right?
Every Hollywood movie tells us this.
Yeah, but it's not always the case.
I mean, I have to say that when I had my one and only ghost sighting, and that was in Liverpool, Richard, at Radio City in their big tower there, I came down from going to the Louvre during a show and went back into the studio.
Actually, had my hand on the studio door.
The only other person in the building was my producer, Jonathan, and standing by the studio door, I wasn't at all frightened.
I was just surprised.
There appeared a man quite short in stature, wearing an overcoat and a flat cap.
He looked like an old-style night watchman or caretaker for a building.
And I looked at him, he looked at me, and then he disappeared before my eyes.
And I felt no fear.
But I registered every detail about him in the space of the blink of an eye, really.
And I walked into the control room where Jonathan was still outputting my show, and I was about to go back and go on the air.
And I said, Jonathan, you never guess.
I've just seen something really weird.
I saw a little man outside.
He said, you've seen him, haven't you?
And the ghost, the apparition was a common appearance, a common sight there.
But, you know, it is something these things don't always appear during the day.
And they, this one was at night, but they don't always appear during the day.
And they don't come with bells, whistles, woo-woos, drops in temperature or anything like that.
This was the most matter-of-fact sighting that I think anybody could have.
Yeah, and it sounds, I don't want to say unremarkable because every ghost sighting is remarkable by definition, but it doesn't have any of the, you know, the frills and the stuff that we're led to expect you would see thanks, again, to the media representations of this kind of stuff.
And there are so many reports of that sort of nature coming from around the world on a fairly regular basis.
So it sounds to me like you had a good, solid, and yet incredible experience.
I did.
And it wasn't something that frightened me in any way.
It was almost like if this person was somebody who is now dead and gone and had occupied that space, maybe as a night watchman, perhaps whatever, it just felt that I was registering something perfectly natural.
So even if we can't explain how these things generate themselves entirely, there are many theses and theories, that aspect of death is part of life.
It is, isn't it?
And whether you can argue that this is not necessarily evidence of survival of death at all, you can argue that what you saw was a type of natural recording, no more intelligent than the images on your TV or computer screen.
Yeah, and I've heard that theory too.
The only thing in this instance, and I've heard this before, is that whatever it was, but maybe it was in my mind, appeared to be aware of me, appeared to be satisfying himself that I was meant to be there.
And once he'd done that, it was a weird knowing look.
I can still see it.
Really odd.
And yet it was a two-second encounter.
Once he'd satisfied himself that I was supposed to be there, it was as if he was going on his way and he disappeared.
Well, and that adds a whole new dimension to it, no pun intended, because when you add in that degree of interactivity, then that implies that we're dealing with something else.
Okay, let's talk about your most recent investigation because you're a busy guy.
You've been doing television in Canada.
What happened?
Yeah, that was an investigation, actually.
But I'm happy to talk about my last case in a minute.
So in Canada, I was filming the second season of a TV show I do called Haunted Case Files.
In the UK, which is, I think, where most of your listeners are, that show is called Paranormal Investigators, and it airs on really TV.
Yes, I've seen it.
Yeah, it's definitely got a flair for the dramatic.
What they do is take some of my cases and they add in a big dollop of drama.
I'm played by a chap that looks like Steve Carell on that show for some reason.
And so they'll intersperse interview footage with me with their dramatic recreations of what they think went on.
It's a lot like a ghostly crime watch.
And can you tell me anything about the cases that will be in this next series then?
I guess it's going to be 18 months, maybe two years before we get it on TV over here.
It will probably be 10 to 12 months, and I don't know that they'll let me talk about the specific cases.
I will tell you that three of them are American, and one is a very famous British location.
And I'll go one further, and that should leave.
Yeah, I'll go one further and say that it's a very famous poltergeist case.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Well, you know, there are more than one of those, but the most famous one I think we know is the Enfield Poltergeist.
I don't expect you to say anything.
No, it didn't take place in London.
It's a little further north.
Okay, All right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Is there a difference then?
You say that in this new series, there are two cases, you know, two cases in one place, one case in another place.
Is there a difference between the nature of cases of hauntings, cases of this paranormality in the US and the UK?
Are they experienced in different ways?
So I think that there is a different mindset.
Certainly here in the States, thanks to the fact that America seems to be a more religious country and the UK seems to be more secular, or at least increasingly secular these days.
I think there's an unfortunate tendency here to throw the D word around, if you know the one that I mean.
People like to use the word demonic whenever there is a hint of scariness, I guess, or somebody happens to get scratched, things of that nature.
And I think more in the UK, we see less of that, you know.
But at the end of the day, I think people are people and they tend to experience the same sort of phenomena.
They may interpret it in different ways.
You talked about demons and demonology, if you can call it that.
There does seem to be, from what I read online, a huge uptick in interest in demons.
Particularly in the United States, there was this, and you might be aware of them.
There are three young women, and I think their father is also an exorcist.
He's a man of the cloth, I think.
There are three young women in their early 20s who are out there doing this.
And I did wonder when I read that.
But then, you know, I do do some work for the BBC, and it makes you see all sides of a situation that makes you cautious.
I wondered if that was necessarily good for them.
I don't think it's necessarily good for anybody.
I mean, not to address those specific young ladies because I don't know them, haven't met them, haven't seen their work.
But addressing the idea in general, I think that the term demon as it comes to paranormal research is one that we've really only seen become popular with the increased popularity of paranormal television.
And certain shows, naming no names, every bloody week, you know, they'll find something demonic because let's be honest, it's a ratings winner.
You know, people love horror movies.
There's a whole slew of Hollywood ghost stories now that are a subset of these dark and demonic cases.
And it's a term that's bandied around far too easily.
I do think there are those instances in which we seem to be dealing with some kind of force or entity that doesn't act as if it's entirely human.
So I'm not somebody that rules out the possibility of there being non-human or inhuman entities.
But the minute you say that particular word, it brings a lot of baggage in terms of religious belief and certain faith-based systems.
And it's not something that I subscribe to.
But we said this is very popular these days.
If you look at the Vatican, they have a course that is ongoing.
It was reported on recently in the newspapers over here to train young priests in the ways of exorcism.
Well, that's absolutely true.
But again, that entirely comes down to what you believe, doesn't it?
And I worked a very sad case when I first came to the U.S. I'll never forget this one.
It's sad for all the wrong reasons.
It was a young couple who were extremely Catholic.
And I'm not, as I said, not religious myself, but I have great respect for anybody's belief system.
The sad thing about this couple was that they'd scrimped and they'd scraped to get a deposit for their first ever home here in the U.S. They come from Mexico.
And so they'd managed to get a place and now they'd moved in and were experiencing, as they told us, this very high degree of paranormal activity.
Apparitions wandering around the place at night, creaking floorboards, knocking on the walls.
And I walked into this house.
I saw that they'd drawn crosses over every doorway.
And I went in the daytime with some fellow investigators and the place seemed very pleasant to me.
The wife actually wouldn't come in.
She was staying in a motel.
And these guys were paying for a mortgage and a hotel, two things that they really couldn't afford.
And the husband met me over there and he said, just wait until it gets dark.
This house changes.
So, you know, a very ominous thing.
So we sat there and turns out that when we used very sensitive microphones, we discovered that this house was on the main flight path to Denver International airport, that there was a very busy road a couple of blocks over and those vibrations were making the house just a little bit noisy.
It was also an older house that had a structure that was a little more flexible and prone to creaking.
There was no evidence of paranormal activity at all, not a shred of it.
But a psychic medium had gone in before us and had told them the most horrific things about demonic entities being there and even a dead baby in the bathtub haunting the bathroom, if you can believe that.
So we did our very best to reassure this poor couple.
But I have a terrible habit, whether I'm working as a medic or whether I'm working as a paranormal investigator, full disclosure, if you have a bookcase, I read everything on it because I'm a bibliophile and I love to see what people are reading.
And as I go along this couple's bookshelves, their novels are this kind of, you know, William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, those kind of things.
I look at their DVD rack and we're seeing, you know, movies like Stigmata and again, The Exorcist.
There's a definite taste on their part for these scary and kind of demonic themed movies.
And it's sad because even though we spent time there reassuring them that there was no hint of anything in the house, they ended up fleeing and losing their first ever home.
And that's terribly sad.
And I'm sure that is by no means unique as a story.
You know, we have to be able to separate somehow, and it sounds to me as if that is what you do, between phenomena and hysteria.
Absolutely true.
And we'd spent a night there.
These guys had been sleeping on watches, which I mean, one was staying awake while the other was asleep, you know, in order to keep an eye out.
And of course, every time something creaked or moved, their imagination was filling in the gaps and their belief system was filling in the gaps.
And I do know many people in this field that believe in the demonic.
And I absolutely don't rule that out.
That's not what I'm saying.
But a wise man I know, Dave Schrader, he used to host a show called Darkness Radio and now Beyond the Darkness.
Dave definitely is a believer in this kind of stuff.
And he said, you know, people will call me and say, I think I have a demon in my house.
And his answer is, if you genuinely do, you don't think you have one, you know, because it comes through like a freight train and it destroys your life pretty much.
I've never worked a case or been asked to work a case in which I've seen those kind of effects.
So it comes back to me respecting people's belief systems or at least their rights to those belief systems at the end of the day.
But yeah, I think it's a term that we grossly overuse.
And yet when we last spoke, and you tell me if I'm wrong about this, you did tell me that you had been on one particular stakeout investigation, whatever it might have been, and you'd taken something home with you.
I had, yeah, absolutely.
And I don't think really the two things are necessarily related.
And I had a good friend of mine who is a Catholic priest come and bless my house, which worked very well.
I talked to him about this.
I said, Stephen, you know, I'm an agnostic.
I realize there's a certain degree of hypocrisy in me asking you as a Catholic priest to come take care of my home.
Is this even going to work?
And he said, well, it just matters that you believe.
It doesn't necessarily matter what you believe in when it comes to a blessing and to spiritual work, which I thought was a very enlightened approach on his part.
And he performed a very Catholic ceremony, going from door to door in my house, you know, anointing with holy water the various window frames and door frames.
And what's fascinating to me is it worked.
The activity stopped immediately afterwards.
So you believe that in some cases, but you have to be very judicious when identifying those cases, that in some cases, places that you go to where there is extreme activity, if you're not careful and if you don't protect yourself, and I'm not entirely sure how you do that, then something might adhere to you.
But as long as you take steps, you can make sure that that is not going to be too deleterious.
Yeah, I used to, for a good 20 years, I used to scoff at such things.
Not actively, but I just simply wouldn't do them.
I saw people that would have their own little rituals before and after.
Following this, I've taken a little bit more of a, I think, balanced approach.
The technique that I was taught that seems to have worked is simply one of visualizing a white light that surrounds and protects you as you commence an investigation and as you finish.
And then before you leave the location, you basically lay down the law and state that any entities that are considering attaching themselves to you and following you home by no means are permitted to do so and won't like the consequences if they do.
That has worked for me pretty much 100% of the time ever since I had to have that blessing done at home.
And it raises a very important question.
Is this truly a genuine external effect?
Is there some kind of placebo element to what's going on?
You know, a psychic placebo element?
I truly don't know.
But there are many people who want to get involved in all of this, and their mental state is not of the best.
Maybe they have suffered something or they believe they've suffered something.
And it would strike me that it is the last state of mind to start investigating things.
If you feel that you're weak, if you feel that you're depleted, if you feel that maybe somebody or something has invaded your psyche, then it is better not to really get involved in these things.
Maybe the best way to deal with it, and you tell me whether this is right, is simply to have the attitude that you cannot be harmed.
Because from what you said, Richard, we seem to have primacy.
If we tell these things to go away, they will go.
Not in every case.
And I do think that you're absolutely correct in that regard.
If your state of mind isn't where it should be, if your emotional mood isn't where it should be, you probably shouldn't be doing this.
There are a number of cases on record where people have been vulnerable to some extent and have gone on to have sad, tragic, sometimes consequences.
So, yeah, I think that's absolutely a fair thing to say.
If I talk to those of my colleagues that come from a more spiritual belief-based side of things, they maintain that if you feel that you are energy depleted, if you feel that you are vulnerable, you know, if you're just having that bad week, you're having a bad time in your personal life, that is not the time to be doing this at all.
And it's certainly not the time.
You know, although Karen Dolman is a friend of mine, she is a practitioner of the Ouija board in California.
I have never done the Ouija board.
I don't think I ever will.
She is very balanced about that.
And, you know, I worry about people using that as a portal to stuff that we don't understand.
You know, my thoughts on the Ouija board, again, are twofold.
Number one, I agree.
I've heard some fairly horrific stories of people that have used the board and have had real problems afterwards.
I do wonder, though, how it's any different in terms of attracting this sort of thing to you.
How is that any different from the other techniques that paranormal investigators use?
How is it any different from sitting there with a digital voice recorder and requesting that any entities that might be present communicate with you?
I mean, it may be.
I just don't understand the actual mechanics of using a piece of wooden board marked in a certain way.
I don't understand what is so special about that versus the many other forms of purported spirit communication.
Well, I suppose, you know, some of us travel into town on a bike, some of us walk, some of us get the train, some of us drive.
It's different routes to the same thing.
But I do think you have to be grounded.
And, you know, in the case of Karen, who I must get back on this show sometime, she is a very, very grounded person.
So, you know, I would have no fear for her.
I would have fear for me trying to do that because I would be blundering into something, you know, which I did not really understand.
And I think that that can give you problems.
Talk to me about this latest investigation then.
You said you get there.
Oh, yeah, this was a fascinating one.
This was in Iowa.
It's a place called Malvern Manor, which if your viewers watch a TV show called Paranormal Lockdown, they might be familiar with Malvern Manor.
It was until only 10 years ago, a care home for the emotionally disturbed and also a kind of addiction outpatient center, I suppose, or residency as well.
So, what this place would do, it was the last stop for those that were struggling with alcoholism and with drug addiction, and also for those that really didn't have anywhere else to be taken care of.
So, Malvin Manor fell into, let's see, when the private owners moved out and sold the place, which I believe was 2005, it was standing vacant for the longest time and developed a reputation for being haunted.
And so investigators started to go in there.
One guy called Josh Hurd conducted a number of paranormal investigations at Malvern Manor and said the results he got were incredible.
So I'd wanted to move in there with a team of fellow investigators for four or five days, and that's what we did.
And we got some very, very interesting results.
And one of the things that fascinates me about this particular location is one of the patients, a lady that goes by the name of Gracie, suffered from multiple personality disorder.
She had her own room, which is still pretty much as it was when she lived there.
And the nurses documented at least 13 distinct separate personalities that she would exhibit.
Some male, some female.
And she was renowned for one of these male personalities that would repeat over and over in a very gruff tone of voice the phrase, the devil's coming to get me.
Oh, boy.
Which would frighten new nursing staff.
They would say, who's this guy in Gracie's room?
They'd go take a look.
And of course, it would just be, you know, this sweet old lady sitting there talking in a baritone male voice.
And a number of people have claimed that her room is extremely active.
And this fascinates me, Howard, like you wouldn't believe.
One of the theories is that several of her personalities seem to be among the ghosts that haunt Malvern Manor.
So if you truly have multiple personality disorder and echoes of those personalities are able to somehow survive your death, what does that say in terms of the soul, in terms of us being a single unified spirit?
I find that.
It poses all sorts of questions.
Were those things inhabiting her or was she somehow projecting them?
Or another possibility, too, this also is incredible.
There was a young girl called Inez who died of a hanging.
Now, for the longest time, it's a very, very sad story.
Inez was found hanging in a closet.
And if you watch the TV show Paranormal Lockdown, the initial claims were that she actually was found hanging in a closet at Malvern Manor.
But with a bit of research, the investigators have discovered that the hanging actually took place a couple of blocks away.
So very, very close to the location.
But this urban legend has grown up around the place that she actually died at Malvern Manor.
Either way, though, there is an entity which answers to that name that leaves EVPs in a little girl's voice that is very interactive with paranormal investigators at Malvern Manor.
So it is much more complicated than just the thought that there are ghosts about there.
They are the spirits of people who passed on.
It's much more than that.
Well, I mean, if we follow that process to its logical, well, to the next step anyway, first of all, while they were convinced that Inez had been hanged in a specific closet at Malvern Manor, this story was told to visitors on a fairly regular basis.
And then there are these, you know, EVPs and the sound of children running and laughing and giggling, the sound of a little girl called Inez answering to that name and asking people to play with her on EVPs.
So why would this young girl who died over 100 years ago have come two streets over and be haunting this big old place?
One thing I'm fascinated by is the possibility of thought forms.
And anyone that's familiar with the Philip experiment, which took place in Canada, will know that it is possible to create a ghost to all intents and purposes if you set out to do so.
So I'm curious as to whether what's manifesting as apparently the spirit of this young girl is actually something entirely different.
So we are very powerful within ourselves, but I guess in this particular investigation where you staked out the place you say for four days there was a group of you, do you think the group dynamic between you was somehow interacting with whatever was there?
Well, I think it acts as an energy source.
And I was fortunate enough to be able to pour through the guest book, you know, and go look at a couple of years' worth of experiences that visiting paranormal investigators have left.
And there's a very real commonality to the things that go on there.
We see the same sorts of phenomena repeating over and over again.
And I think as you add more people into the mix, you start adding more energy, you know, more potential energy.
There's also a very, very common happenstance of investigators' batteries draining.
And this happened to us.
We were plagued by this at Malvern Manor.
Yeah.
And that is something fairly common when you're at a haunted location or a location that's reputed to be active.
It's almost as if that energy is being drained by something we can't see and converted into a form that it can use in order to manifest.
Which makes it all very confusing, doesn't it?
Because it is tempting to believe that there are spirits and they're nothing to do with us, but they interact with us.
Once it becomes a question of maybe they are a part of us or they feed on us or we influence them or even we created them, we start getting a little mind-boggling, don't we?
Well, yeah, and I think the spirit hypothesis is one that we kind of default to, don't we?
When we say haunted, we think ghost, we say ghost, we think dead person.
And that's a product of our upbringing.
It's every story we were ever told, every scary fireside story.
But there are other possibilities.
There's the possibility that we could be communicating with thought forms, as I said, the after echoes of consciousness, if there could be such a thing.
There are theories that we're communicating with people or entities in other dimensions, higher states of being, different times.
It's one big can of worms.
But what's undeniable is we are interacting with something.
When you stake out a place like this, for want of a better phrase, and you're a group of people, talk to me about the process step by step of what you do and how you do it across the days.
Well, it's a luxury to move in for more than a day.
I think a lot of locations, you're very fortunate to get eight to 12 hours.
And the truth of that is you're not able to learn the rhythms of the building.
You're not able to see the place on at least a 24-hour cycle and see how it reacts during the nighttime, during the afternoon and during the morning.
So you get to learn that.
You move in, you start looking at things that are not remotely paranormal in nature.
Where do the utilities come into the building?
Where's the power coming in?
Because you expect to see a power source there and you'll expect to see high levels of EMF.
You start to look at drafts.
You start to look at architecture.
How does air move through the building?
Things like that.
And then once you've taken baseline readings and have kind of gotten a good lay of the land, then you begin to conduct a number of experiments.
And that will depend on really the philosophy of the investigators in question.
Some teams are very tech heavy.
You know, I have good friends and colleagues that will wire a building up with 40 or 50 cameras, which is great in terms of trying to capture evidence.
The problem is somebody has to watch all of that footage.
And I've become, since I've started writing books, Howard, I've become as much of a storyteller as I have a paranormal investigator.
So I tend to use cameras and use microphones and use digital voice recorders and all of the tools, but I tend to do it a lot more sparingly than I used to.
So we target the hotspots, the places where it's claimed the most activity happens, which is why we staked out Gracie's room.
It's why we staked out Inez's room at Malvern Manor and why we went to the old nursing wing, which is supposedly the most active part of the building.
And was it?
Well, it was for us.
We caught a great piece of evidence, which I still have to isolate into a soundbite, but six of us were sitting there in the dark in a wing we know is abandoned.
And it has an interesting reputation.
At one end of the nursing wing is a room known as the Shadow Man's Hallway because a shadowy figure has been seen appearing from this room, rushing at visiting investigators.
And as you look back at the history of this room, it was one of the most memorable patients or residents was a man who was very tall, very aggressive, and very emotionally disturbed.
In fact, it was said he killed two people.
And the staff were so intimidated by this man during his lifetime.
He was the one resident that if he got up to go and take a constitutional walk, they never insisted that he put on his shoes.
And his party piece was that he liked to run up behind unsuspecting nurses and basically stop dead before he ran into them and put his face right up against theirs.
Yeah, which would be terrifying, really.
Talk about an intimidation tactic.
And then we have, of course, this reported behavior of the shadow man that likes to do the same thing.
He likes to come from this room and rush right at unsuspecting visitors to the manor.
So that's one end of the hallway.
At the other end in room seven, a very sad story is a lady that was in there for emotional and behavioral issues.
And this lady was so distraught by the fact that she felt abandoned by her family, she ended up literally pulling her own hair out.
And her room is very melancholy and sad, especially when you've heard that story.
And it's from the direction of that room, as all of us are sitting there in the dark, looking towards the end where the shadow man is supposed to appear, that we all heard what was very clearly a moan, a low-pitched moan of distress.
And we caught that on three voice recorders.
And how can you account for that?
You know what?
I can't.
And that's wonderful.
You look at things like the wind, you know.
Is it a particularly windy night?
Now, one of the things we were able to debunk, just to take a brief sideline, people talking about scratching in the walls, particularly in the attic.
Well, I went up into the attic, which is said to be haunted by the ghost of a male that really does not like company.
People bring this spirit offerings of whiskey, if you can believe that.
That seems to appease him.
And there was a whole bunch of liquor bottles up there when we went up there.
And I did indeed hear this scratching sound in the walls.
It was very sinister.
But when you look at the structure from the outside, and this comes back to your initial question of what do you begin with, we see that the branches of the leaves, which haven't been cut back this year, happen to scrape against the side of the structure up where the attic is.
So you get this very creepy fingernails on a chalkboard audio effect, which is nothing more than the branches of the trees.
So even a light breeze will do it.
So we look at, sorry, go ahead.
No, just interesting that the gift or the offering is whiskey.
And I'm guessing that isn't drunk by anybody or anything.
No, it's not.
In fact, they're all sealed.
We saw a number of these bottles up there that had been kind of clustered together and been left by previous investigators.
So you have to be able to cut the folklore from the actuality, don't you?
And it can be very difficult to do sometimes because so much of the history is hearsay.
Many of the stories about this place come from former employees.
And the truth is that exaggeration is human nature, you know, especially when it comes to this subject area.
Tales grow in the telling.
And I made a point of when I was in town getting lunch with my team, we would ask the locals in the cafe, somebody came up to us and said, hey, are you guys staying at the haunted house?
And we said, yeah, we are.
And this lady was a waitress in town for a good 20 years.
And she said, you know, I used to remember the special folks at the manor.
They would come in here quite often.
And she was very fond of them.
She said they were so nice.
They were so affectionate.
They were so friendly.
Now, if you look at certain sites online, they will tell you that this place was a hotbed of abuse and people were not taken care of.
When the research that we've done shows that people really were treated as, for the most part, anyway, as well as could be expected, and that there was a pretty happy, friendly, even family atmosphere at Malvern Manor, or at least as much as you can get amongst patients with those kind of issues.
So you go to your primary sources and you see what people really, really think.
And I kind of like the idea that these poor souls are remembered very fondly by some of the people in town.
And then, of course, there's your own experience.
What was the vibe like generally for you and the team?
Yeah, I would love to tell you that, you know, my blood ran cold and all of that kind of stuff.
We'd spent a good chunk of time sitting in the dark in this cold hallway waiting for something to happen.
And I wouldn't say the atmosphere felt charged.
I wouldn't say it felt, But once you push that psychological aspect of it out of the way for a moment and be objective, we were not expecting that to happen at all.
And we could not find a rational or at least non-paranormal explanation for it.
Try as we might.
It wasn't a draft.
There was nobody down there.
Nothing had moved.
You know, what can generate a moan inside an empty building?
And we can only speculate, can't we, that if this place is ever knocked down and they build something else there, will the phenomena, for want of a better word, that imprinted itself upon you and that you were aware of, will it recur in whatever else goes on that site?
Well, that is a great question.
One wonders, is it in the bricks and mortar of the building, the fabric of the construction, or is it in the ground itself?
And that's one of the great questions.
My next case is one that I've investigated before.
It's a place called Fox Hollow Farm in Indiana, which is the home, I should say, former home of a serial killer, a man who killed 17 men in the basement.
Oh, my lord.
And it's one of those rare locations that most scenes of serial murder are demolished so that they don't become a shrine to ghouls, you know, to people that want to come by and venerate.
Of course, here in the UK, we can think of the case of the awful serial killers Fred and Rose West.
Their house of horror, so-called by the media, was demolished and there's a garden there now for precisely that reason.
They didn't want people to be going to check it out as a kind of tourist destination.
Quite right.
Now, Fox Hollow Farm is a private residence.
It's owned by a family.
And the family began to experience paranormal phenomena almost as soon as they moved in.
They were very aware of what they were buying.
They got a good deal on this house and on its grounds.
They just had to be okay with the fact that it had this tragic history.
So it does beg the question, how much of the paranormal activity that's going on there at Fox Hollow Farm, how much is in the structure of the building?
How much of it is imprinted on the grounds?
And if you were to say, knock that place down and build, for argument's sake, a hotel on the site, would you get the same type of phenomena?
And I suspect that you would.
I suspect it's more the location itself than the structure.
And it makes you ask questions, doesn't it?
Why, when there are people who do terrible deeds or are notable for other reasons that are macabre, they don't always, there isn't always an imprint of those deeds there.
It's very random by the looks of it, from what I've heard.
Or there is an imprint, but it's not always picked up on.
I mean, we're still not entirely sure how and why people perceive certain paranormal phenomena.
A good example is we talk about seeing ghosts, and yet there are many instances of people taking these tours of Hampton Court Palace, some old historic building, and of 20 people in a group, five of them see the same apparent apparition, 15 of them don't.
And it may just be that those five were paying more attention, but it may also be that there's something about them as individuals that make them susceptible potential witnesses.
Is it something to do with their brain chemistry?
Is it something to do with an extra sixth sense for want of a better term?
You know, we're trying to figure out what factors go into experiencing the paranormal.
What stars have to align before we can experience this stuff?
Because it is not as common as some people like to think.
And I've been to some of the world's supposedly most haunted locations where very little, if anything, has happened to me.
But very strange that paranormality becomes the norm in some places.
You talked about Hampton Court Palace.
I live near there.
I could walk there if I wanted to.
And I very seldom do the palace tour because, of course, I did it when I first moved to this area 20 years ago.
And I only recently did it again with the medium June Lundgren, who's been a guest on this show.
She was visiting the UK.
And we got to talk, as I talk to everybody and anybody, to a lot of the staff there.
And the staff there very routinely report that ghosts or whatever you want to call them, images of what went before, are daily occurrences there.
There's one guy who's worked there for years and years and years as one of the guides in the chapel there, in Henry VIII's chapel, whatever the name of the thing is.
And he talks about seeing these famous historic figures in that building appear and disappear, sweeping down staircases.
It's just as if it happens all the time.
It's astonishing.
So for some people, in some locations, these occurrences that we would call weird are simply commonplace.
Yeah, and one wonders in this case, is it the witness himself, by which I mean, is he immersed?
You know, he's immersed in this particular environment on a regular basis.
Has he somehow become more attuned to this phenomena?
Is there something about his makeup?
You know, his, what was I going to say?
His the state of his brain, you know, the way in which he perceives things.
And I don't mean that in a negative way.
Well, this particular person's worked there for years.
He's very open to it.
That's what struck me.
And that might be it.
That might be a degree of being open as opposed to being closed off, you know.
But we're still trying to identify those factors which seem to be necessary for the paranormal to occur.
And it's been kind of an ongoing struggle, I think, for the field of paranormal research.
Why do people see ghosts and how do people see ghosts?
In Hampton Court, a very strange location in that whenever I make a request to go and record something there with someone about ghosts, it is usually denied.
Yet they have mulled wine and ghost tours at certain times of the year, winter time, and people go on those and it's great fun and they tell the stories.
But the actual going there and talking to members of staff about stuff that's happened, I don't think very much of that has been done and they certainly won't do it with me.
What's the magic phrase?
For entertainment purposes only?
Yeah, that's the one that we use on the, I don't know if you use it in the States, but whenever I do anything like this on radio, we have to make it clear that we offer you this for entertainment purposes only.
And please do not live your life by this is what I normally say as a caveat.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it is very similar here in the States, certainly for those that either put out the TV shows or claim to offer psychic readings and those sorts of things.
Right.
You've been to the Tower of London, talking about haunted locations here.
I'm always being told that I need to do a program from or around.
I don't know whether they would allow me.
I would love to.
From or around the Tower of London.
What did you do there?
I would give my right arm to spend a night at the Tower of London.
The most I got to do.
Yeah, that is the ultimate on my bucket list.
But the most I got to do actually was talk to some of the yeoman warders as we went around and hear some of their stories.
And I find them compelling witnesses, Howard, because if you look at what it takes to become a yeoman warder, you have to become a senior NCO in one of the branches of the British Armed Forces, and you have to have extremely good conduct.
So these are generally, and I mean this with no disrespect at all, these are generally not imaginative types of people.
You know, they're not fanciful.
They're very, very grounded.
They're people that are very pragmatic.
And they're taught to think logically.
They are.
And they also are aware that if you tell these kind of ghost stories in that environment, you run a very real risk of being made a mockery of.
So nonetheless, it seems that all of them have their own creepy stories.
And the one that I found most compelling was one of the gentlemen that was a former Royal Marines NCO and had been doing his duties one evening, going about making his rounds.
I'd say about seven o'clock in the evening, took his young son with him.
And his son, I believe, was three or four years old, something like that.
And so he's wandering around, you know, just doing his security checks and making sure everything is as it should be.
And they go into the bloody tower.
And he's about to move on and says to his son, come on, son, you know, we're going on to our next stop.
And he said, just a minute, dad.
I haven't finished playing with the two boys.
Oh, yes.
And that's when his dad's blood ran cold.
Because this is not a child that's going to be able to easily hear about the story of the princes in the tower and the fact that their apparitions are said to haunt the place.
That's astonishing.
That's verification that out of the mouths of babes, as they say.
Right.
And there is a wealth of eyewitness testimony at the Tower of London going back well over 100 years.
We had the officer that looked through the windows of the chapel there and saw a parade of phantoms led by Anne Boleyn walking down the aisle of the church, for example.
This is an officer in the British Army, and it's career suicide to report that kind of stuff.
And until that Henry VIII is a regular guest, a regged because it was his place.
Henry VIII is forever turning up at Hampton Court and walking down the corridors.
That's right.
So I think there's something about the great palaces, especially with the Tower, though, you have this bloody history.
You have the fact that executions were carried out on Tower Green on a fairly regular basis.
It was a good way for the monarchs to get rid of their detractors and people they found inconvenient to have around.
So you also had it as a place of incarceration and tragedy.
And one of the common factors I found with hauntings is that the more emotion and intense emotion you have at a location, whether it's positive or negative, the more paranormally active it seems to be, which is why there are so many haunted prisons, so many haunted hospitals, places in which the drama of everyday life plays out and seems to leave some kind of psychic scar.
There are occasions when doing investigations or asking questions, you have to bear in mind the matter of good taste.
And that is probably why there hasn't been a lot of investigating around the site of 9-11, Ground Zero.
I broadcast twice from there, once on the first anniversary and once on the second anniversary, actually live from the site.
But I can tell you, not only was the palpable emotion of people who'd suffered or who'd had family members who'd suffered part of that, but there was also a very distinct atmosphere about that site, a great sense of import and a great sense of sadness about it.
But, you know, I wonder what must be imprinted on that site now.
I mean, America's done a fantastic job of rebuilding something there and making the point that our freedom remains undimmed, whatever may have been done on that terrible day.
But I do wonder what is imprinted there.
It's a great question.
And as someone that has been a firefighter here in the U.S. for 15 years before I retired last Christmas, that place to us is basically sacrosanct.
Even if I were given the opportunity, I would not do anything of an investigative nature at that location.
But I do think, yes, you have this strong upswell of energy there.
It is fascinating to think what that might mean, the implications from a paranormal point of view.
But with that being such a raw and open wound, and I suspect it will be for many years to come, that's one that I would avoid for sure.
Yeah, and I can totally understand because there are issues of taste here.
All I can say is that I remember the first anniversary and I remember the ceremony of the day was completed and I was there on the spot and I was privileged to be there on the spot and recording this and trying to explain it to people listening in London.
You know, just what it is like to be here.
It's one thing to see it on TV, it's another thing to feel this emotion and be part of it and speak to people who were involved in the rescue bids and people who simply lost family members.
I did all of that.
But I do remember a very strange thing happening immediately at the end of the ceremonies.
Everybody was walking away in complete silence.
Most of us were dressed in black, quite rightly, as a mark of respect for those who died.
And I was walking away from the site and trying to gather my thoughts about what had happened, how it had happened, and how we were telling the world about marking this.
And the weather changed in the space of, and those who were there on that day will recall this, in the space of perhaps 60 seconds to two minutes.
There was a wind that blew up from nowhere that swept all the way down to the river from that site.
And you know that site is close to the river.
If events can make an impact on a place, then undoubtedly that was the case there.
I will never understand that particular dynamic, but I think we all felt something.
It was a tremendous peace and calmness there at the end of that.
But even to the point that the climatic conditions, the weather, whatever it was, changed in the space of 60 seconds to two minutes.
I've never seen that happen.
And that was astonishing, which just goes to show, I think, and I can only surmise, because that's all we have, you know, that there are more things in heaven and earth than we can be rationally aware of.
Well, as a species, we're very, very good at thinking that we're king of the hill and that we know everything.
We know all that there is to know, or at least we have a good handle on it.
And it seems to me, at least, if you're open-minded about such things, the more we learn about any given subject, the more we realize we still have to learn.
So as our knowledge advances, we gain a greater awareness of our broader ignorance.
And this is true in medicine, for example.
The more I learn about my chosen profession of medicine, the more I realize I'm ignorant about so much of it, you know?
And I think the same is true in any field of endeavor.
So every door that we open, every experience that we have and every answer we get in this field tends to raise five more questions.
It's like a hydra.
You cut off one head and you find a whole bunch more to be dealt with.
Are you ever frightened?
It does happen.
It does happen on certain occasions.
The last time that I was I would say kind of uneasy and disturbed took place in an old hospital I investigate in Utah called the Toella Valley Hospital, now Asylum 49, because it's a haunted house attraction.
But part of this was an old nursing facility and had a reputation for being haunted.
They put me in a room, which according to staff that had worked there, they tried to avoid putting residents in because more than one had woken up seeing a black shape with glowing red eyes standing over their bed.
So I thought, you know, that's the bed for me.
And I will say that that really preyed on my mind.
And in the early hours of the morning, I felt distinctly uneasy and I felt as though I was being watched in this location to the point where I'm not one of those people that can sleep with one eye open.
When I'm out, I'm out usually.
So I didn't feel comfortable going to sleep.
I actually felt strangely vulnerable.
So I ended up staying up through the entire night on my last couple of evenings there and it really was exhausting.
And I couldn't explain to you other than the history of the room and the location, I couldn't really tell you why specifically I felt that way in that room.
And again, it could have been completely psychological, but I have the strong sense that there was something more to it than that.
And it had been an active investigation over that four-day span.
We'd captured doors closing themselves in this old building, slamming themselves shut.
We captured equipment switching itself on.
We captured voices that were unexplained and those kind of things.
So yeah, it does every so often happen to me that I do get creeped out, as the Americans like to say, and occasionally frightened.
Why are you doing this work?
Is it partly a desire to be famous?
Is it a questing mind?
You know, I'm sure there are other things that you could be doing, but you've chosen to do this along with your medical work.
Why do this?
And actually, as far as the very limited fame goes, that's not conducive to a good career in medicine.
It's something that I've actually not fallen afoul of to this point, but it should be a real concern.
Do you think you've lost opportunities because of it?
I don't know that I have, but certainly one or two people look askance at this.
Most of the people I work with are very supportive and they find these stories fascinating.
But my main motivation is when I was a kid growing up, I grew up in Leicester, a small town called Seiston, actually.
And I was fascinated with the paranormal.
I would go to the library and before there were any of these kinds of TV shows and the media frenzy we see today, I would get books by Peter Underwood, to my mind, the greatest ever ghost hunter.
I would get books by Harry Price, you know, the old gentleman ghost hunters.
The father of it all, yes.
Right.
And I would devour these stories, these accounts.
And I thought, I want to do this.
I love that they go to these places with the histories and they're looking for ghosts.
And I never lost that urge.
So when I began truly investigating it was 1995.
Again, this was an oddity back then.
In Leicester, there was one team that I knew of which did this.
And they would basically get their leads from newspapers.
People would call the newspapers, say their house was haunted.
They would contact our team and, you know, say, hey, these guys can help because we really don't know of anyone else that does this kind of thing.
Whereas now, you can't throw a rock without hitting a paranormal team in any town or city.
I developed a love for doing it.
I developed this passion for getting to the bottom of these mysteries.
And it's something that has never left me.
So, I mean, fame aside, I would be doing this anyway.
And I've spent far more money on pursuing this dream than I ever made from doing it.
People love to think that writers are rolling in money, which, you know, the only writer that's rolling is JK rolling, right?
Yes.
But as my wife will tell you, I spend far more on my passion for doing this than I ever make from it.
It costs me money to write these books at the end of the day.
But the stories are compelling to me.
You know, it's a great thing to be able to move into a historic location.
I was just at Gettysburg in November.
You know, I had the opportunity to investigate an old Confederate hospital at Gettysburg and then the battlefield itself.
And that's just, you know, I don't know what you do on your holidays, Howard, but to me, that was a very fulfilling use of time.
And just as, you know, here in the United Kingdom, the Battle of Clodden, you know, was part of the shaping of Scotland.
Yes.
There is still said to be the imprint of all of that there.
I presume Gettysburg is the same.
Gettysburg is kind of, yeah, the granddaddy of them all.
Coloden is a great example.
So is Edge Hill in Warwickshire, the Civil War battlefield there.
There's something about Gettysburg, though.
All of the American Civil War battlefields have their own ghost stories, as I suspect most battlefields do.
But Gettysburg seems to have a greater number of them than any of the others.
And it was a particularly bloody weekend.
More American casualties in one weekend than during the entire Vietnam conflict.
And how does that imprint itself on the site?
And how does that imprint itself on you?
Well, one of the additional factors when you have a civil war is the tragedy of it.
All wars are, of course, tragic by their very nature.
But when else do you have fathers and sons fighting one another across the divide?
Where else do you have brothers torn between family allegiances and loyalties and their loyalty to a flag and to a cause?
So you have brother killing brother, and I think that makes a civil war far more emotionally charged than, I don't want to say an average war, but hopefully you know what I mean.
You know, I'm not downplaying war at all.
It's always a horrible thing.
But there's something about a civil war which tears the fabric of society apart.
And I think that adds to the tragedy of it all and therefore to the emotion of it.
Last question.
Is there any location that you've been to?
And you've done a lot of investigations, you'll tell me how many, but is there any location that you've been to that has felt so bad and so negative that you wouldn't want to return there?
Not as of this time, no.
I've been to a few locations that you wanted to wipe your feet on the way out, and that's why I wouldn't go back.
You know, it was kind of a health hazard.
But in terms of the paranormal aspects of it, no, not really.
I do, as I go on, I do start to question the wisdom of living at a location for a week to the point where I almost think it might be wise to get a hotel room off-site and every 18 hours or so, get out of that environment, recharge, and sleep there so you can investigate fresh.
But that comes down to the fact that you don't want to be doing this stuff when you're exhausted.
And I presume, even if it isn't spirits taking you over, just the vibe of the thing, the atmosphere can take you over.
And sometimes, you know, you have to get yourself out of a place.
Yeah, it can be a little bit grim and it can definitely bring down your mood.
And it's a long period of time to put yourself through that.
You know, living in an abandoned hospital for four or five days definitely wears you down.
Just the nature of the place.
And you find yourself walking the hallways.
You find yourself walking through rooms and wondering, you know, whose room was this?
What are the stories?
What are the personalities that were residents here?
And not all of them were happy ones.
And I do think there is some residue of that with any old and abandoned building.
Any more books in the works?
My latest book is due out in two months.
It's called The Devil's Coming to Get Me, which is, of course, what the male personality of Gracie used to repeat.
That's my book about the haunting of Malvern Manor.
And that's available for pre-order now.
Boy, you're a busy guy.
And when are you back on shift then doing the medical work?
As soon as I'm done with you, I'm heading to the office.
Oh, you have a great life and lots to fit into it.
Richard, great to talk with you again.
Let's catch up in future.
Always a pleasure, Howard.
Let's do this again.
Thank you, Richard, very much.
Take care.
You too, sir.
Goodbye.
And as I always say, but it is equally true now, more great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained.
So until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you're doing, wherever you are, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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