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Nov. 16, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:17:59

Edition 370 - Stephen Lancaster

Documentary-maker, author and paranormal experiencer Stephen Lancaster with spine-chilling, thought-provoking stories...

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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.
	Thank you very much for all of your nice emails.
	Keep them coming, won't you?
	When you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
	It's always good to know.
	So those three bits of data, please try and include them if you email me.
	And if your query is an urgent one and requires a personal reply, then please know that it will get one.
	And if you've made a guest suggestion recently, please know that I'm working on that.
	And if you've made a donation to the show recently at the website theunexplained.tv, thank you very much from the bottom of my heart.
	And thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for all of his ongoing hard work as we march steadily towards 2019 here.
	The guest on this edition of the show, I think, is going to be one of our best.
	I have a gut feeling about this.
	He certainly has a big reputation both sides of the Atlantic.
	Very well known in the US and Canada.
	Not quite as well known, I think, in the UK, but I could be wrong about that.
	Stephen Lancaster is his name.
	I want to introduce him to you if you've never heard of him before, because I think you are going to enjoy pretty much every word this man says.
	He is a maker of video presentations for TV, a writer of books, and a man who's experienced paranormality, personally, up close.
	Very truly on the front line.
	So Stephen Lancaster, the guest on this edition of the show.
	Thank you so much for being part of all of this.
	You know, it means so much to me, and I can't believe that in 2019, we'll have been doing the unexplained online for 13 years.
	In the springtime of 2019, we'll hit that anniversary.
	And of course, I always have plans for the show.
	I always want to develop it, and I've fought over a very long time to keep the show a free show.
	You know, that there are lots of subscription shows out there, and as I've said before here, some of those people doing the subscription shows are making vast amounts of money that you wouldn't even be able to guess at from the subscription shows, because they do churn in cash if it's done on a big scale.
	I've tried to keep this as democratic as possible, but, you know, people keep telling me that I'm mad for doing that and that financially I'm suffering.
	Well, you know, I have to live a kind of hand-to-mouth existence.
	But I wanted to do it this way for as long as it can be done.
	So let's see where we're going to go in 2019.
	And, you know, your emails tell me on average that I'm on the right track.
	But I don't think that I am God's gift to broadcasting or podcasting or anything.
	So I'm always grateful to get pointers and guidance.
	And I do act upon those.
	All right.
	Let's get to the guest in the U.S. then on this edition of The Unexplained, Stephen Lancaster.
	Stephen, thank you very much for coming on my show.
	Thank you for having me.
	This is exciting.
	I always, you know, I always enjoy talking to my friends across the pond.
	I used to do a radio show called International Paranormal Radio.
	Did you?
	And it was between me and a girl who ran a paranormal investigation team over in the UK.
	And it was neat because you would hear both sides.
	You would hear what's happening in the UK and you would hear what was happening over here in the States.
	So I always enjoy.
	I've always admired the UK because y'all seem to embrace the paranormal and embrace the supernatural and actually go out of your way to make it a science, whereas over here, sadly, it's turned into a joke.
	Well, now, isn't that strange that you say that?
	Because I was going to ask you about the different approaches between those two things, especially as you did a show that involved doing exactly what we're doing now, linking transatlantically.
	And you say that despite all of those people with their spirit boxes and e-meters and all the other stuff they have in the U.S., you think that we're actually doing it more methodically over here?
	Absolutely.
	If I could live there, I'd move there tomorrow.
	Well, my God, you know, I was going to say that to you.
	If I could live where you are, I'd move there tomorrow.
	I think the other man's grass is always greener.
	That's what they say.
	No, you don't want to do that.
	You know, the problem with over here, most of it, it's become so commercial.
	It's a product now.
	And that's what the United States does is they create products.
	I have to say to you, Stephen, you know that my show is heard before you say anymore along those lines, my show's heard all around the world.
	Is that okay?
	Yeah, sure.
	Because I just, you know, I think, yes, there is a certain amount of commodifying all of this.
	But I think honestly, you know, that is happening because we tend to follow what America does.
	I think we're probably going to go that way anyway ourselves.
	I hope not.
	I really do.
	But over here, you know, I always get into these conversations with people about the entertainment side of paranormal.
	And that's exactly what it is, is it's entertainment.
	And you have shows like Ghost Adventurers, in my opinion, is completely ridiculous.
	Yeah.
	And sadly, you know, the target audience isn't people like you and me.
	The target audience, they're the influential, you know, influential, they're very influenced.
	They're younger people.
	They believe what they hear.
	They believe what they see.
	And they grew up watching Scooby-Doo, which has been running for decades.
	It's been running since 1969, and the plot was always the same.
	There's always some bad guy creating what appears to be paranormal phenomena, but turns out not to be in the end and needs to be investigated.
	I get the feeling that a lot of people who are interested in this stuff, all around the world, really, are kids who grew up watching Scooby-Doo, and they're too old for Scooby-Doo now, so they have to do something that's an equivalent in their later lives.
	Well, you can look at it that way.
	But, you know, and I'm a fan Of Scooby-Doo, but me too.
	Or rural, you know, you had the late 50s, you had the show One Step Beyond, and then shortly after The Twilight Zone.
	You know, it seems like every generation has had paranormal programming in some way, and it seems to me they have all missed the one most important part of it.
	Okay, we can walk in, and I do it.
	I have it, you know, the $30,000 thermal camera, the surveillance systems, you know, every little piece of equipment, all this stuff.
	But what people tend to forget is the reason you're there.
	You're there because somebody claimed to have experienced something spiritual, something paranormal.
	And guess what?
	They didn't see this with a $30,000 thermal imaging camera.
	They saw this with their own two eyes.
	And when you watch these shows and they're using this and they're using that, and I do, I use it as well, but you seem to forget that they didn't have that.
	They were laying in bed one night and saw whoever, you know, at the bottom of their bed.
	So I get the science side of it.
	I'm more of a psychological guy.
	My degree is in psychology.
	You know, and that's the first thing I do is I do a psych evaluation on my clients before I even investigate their case.
	But really, now that's not, I won't say that's entirely unique because I know they do that before exorcisms and various other things.
	But for you to do a psych evaluation of the people who you check out, you investigate, that's fascinating to me.
	What sorts of questions then do you ask them to ascertain whether their problem is without them or within them?
	Well, one of the first things, actually the very first thing, is they sign a contract with me that allows me to basically give me the same permissions as if law enforcement had a warrant, if you know what that means, to where they can come in and search everything legally.
	So, you know, I ask them to sign these papers.
	I'm going to look in your fridge.
	I'm going to look in your medicine cabinets.
	And do any people say no?
	Because I have to say that I would be a little, even if I was traumatized by some spirit that was, you know, pursuing me, I'm not sure that I would want to give you carte blanche.
	Right.
	And that has happened before.
	But, you know, in most cases, they'll be, you know, if they're, to me, if they really believe what they're trying to tell me, they're okay with that.
	They have nothing to hide.
	So I can open that refrigerator and see if there's a 30-pack of beer.
	I can open that medicine cabinet and see if there's Xanax or Prozac or, you know, you know, just any kind of medication that could alter their state of mind.
	And have you ever called off an investigation, Stephen, on the basis of what you might have found when checking out the property?
	Yes.
	There was one case in particular.
	I was not happy to have to handle the situation.
	The woman had sent me a video of her young child, two years old, that she was claiming was possessed.
	And in the video, it shows her grab him, put him in the shower, throwing water on him.
	She was abusing him.
	And it turned out to be a child abuse case to which I had to turn over to social services.
	It's what we call it over here.
	Please tell me that woman was brought to justice.
	She was.
	Okay.
	Well, I mean, we don't have to go into the specifics of the case.
	But that's also, I mean, that's a risk that you run, isn't it?
	But there's somebody there trying to legitimize their own bad behavior by trying to pin a paranormal tag on it and trying to involve you in that.
	Right.
	And not only that, but you also have the people that, especially now, which, you know, back in my day when I started 22 years ago, it was taboo.
	You know, not a lot of people wanted to talk about it over here anyway.
	They, you know, it was all whispers.
	You know, okay, I'm going to have you come check out my house, but, you know, please don't tell anybody that you're doing this.
	You know, now everybody wants to tell their ghost story.
	You know, it's more commercial.
	It's just, and that's part of the problem too, especially when you're dealing with businesses, you know, bed and breakfast type places.
	You know, they want you to say the place is haunted because it's going to make them more money.
	So you're almost giving them a paranormal trip advisor review.
	Exactly.
	And it's hard.
	And, you know, luckily with my background in psychology, I can read people really, really well.
	And just like the case we talked about, there have been others very similar to where it was the people themselves.
	It wasn't actually anything paranormal.
	But that doesn't mean that there haven't been a hundred others where it was paranormal.
	I suppose the greatest question that you have to ask, apart from psychologically checking out the people that you deal with and also making sure that they're not asking for you to be some kind of unwitting accessory to their criminality, the most important question to be asked is why do you want me to investigate this?
	What are you hoping that I will do?
	You know, that's a loaded question because most of when it's a business, my red flag goes up instantly, which, you know, is a little presumptuous, but I understand how business works.
	And there have been Restaurants and hotels that I've researched.
	And when I say research, I don't mean like we see on TV where these guys are in a location for a couple hours, six, seven, eight hours, let's say, for a night, and then they think they got it all figured out.
	Okay, well, you can't do that.
	You can't be the client in one day.
	Excuse me.
	If they have been experiencing these things for 25 years, how am I going to figure that out in one day?
	So all of the cases that I take, I work for years.
	Years.
	You work for years on them.
	Years.
	One particular place is a location called the Brentwood Wine Bistro.
	How weird is that?
	You know, I do believe in synchronicity.
	Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing a show like this, even if I am a hard-bitten old newsman.
	I am looking at a piece of paper and I was about to say, what about the Brentwood Wine Bistro?
	That's bizarre.
	That location, now at this point, I have worked for 11 years.
	And things at, you know, early on that I deemed as paranormal, I was able to figure out later on actually wasn't.
	And, you know, other things still go unexplained.
	All right.
	Tell me about this place then, and we'll chart the history of your researches of it.
	It's a place called Brentwood.
	I don't know, Brentwood.
	Whereabouts is this?
	And what sort of an establishment is it?
	Presumably it is from the name a restaurant.
	It's actually an old house that was moved from one location to where it's at today.
	And it acted as a bed and breakfast for local fishermen way, way back, like 100 years ago.
	And long story short, we come to where I get into the picture.
	This family buys the house to turn it into a restaurant.
	And Master Chef Eric, Master Chef Eric Masson, he's actually from France.
	He moved here to South Carolina where this bistro's at and started his restaurant.
	And immediately, and he was the biggest skeptic I've ever met in my life, immediately started noticing these things that he couldn't explain.
	So him and his family contacted me and I went into this place and it was one of the few places.
	Now I've investigated thousands of places.
	It was one of the few places that the first night I walked out of there convinced.
	But I kept it going, you know, for 10, 11 years.
	And what was it that convinced you at the beginning?
	Because I saw him.
	I saw the figure that the owners told me that they saw staff, their waiters, their waitresses, their cooks.
	I saw the guy myself with my own two eyes.
	And it took a lot out of me after that.
	Wow, I have really seen the real deal.
	And I kept researching that location.
	And in 2000, or last year, I talked to them and I said, look, you know, I'm going to come back and do another follow-up investigation, you know, for a whole weekend, see how things have changed.
	And it ended up being a documentary that went on Amazon Prime because it produced so much stuff.
	It was showing you 10 years of research at one location.
	Now, you don't normally get that.
	You normally get a TV crew who go in there.
	Maybe they do it for a couple of days.
	There'll be a researcher who goes out there first, probably.
	Then there'll be the crew.
	They might spend a night there.
	They'll deploy their equipment.
	Then they're gone.
	They have to create some conclusions.
	At the end of it, they have to find some things that were interesting.
	And maybe there were fabulously interesting things there and maybe they weren't.
	You're talking about 10 years of research, which started with a ghostly figure.
	Presumably, to be involved for 10 years, there must have been other things.
	I couldn't believe it.
	That very first night that me and my colleagues, when we were in there, and I turned my head and I saw this six foot tall, solid black silhouette of a man walk behind the bar of this place.
	And of course, I had a few choice words that instantly came out of my mouth.
	I just could not believe it.
	And I was destined.
	I was determined that I would get him on film.
	So that's kind of what once I saw it with my own two eyes, I'm going to come here every weekend.
	And I came there every weekend for two, three years.
	And then I moved away from that area.
	And so every couple months I'd go back and I would check.
	And finally, I got him in photographs.
	I got him on video.
	The audio was insane.
	Some of the footage, I did what's that channel?
	A ⁇ E Biography.
	I did They're My Ghost Story twice.
	And one of the episodes was on this restaurant.
	And, you know, that's their highest rated episode to date.
	Well, the way you describe it, I can well believe it.
	You know, if you have something there that, I mean, look, normally, and if you can use the word normally, your average ghost is pretty elusive, only appears to certain people, only appears at certain times, may not even appear at all.
	But for something to appear there in front of you on night one and to Be such an apparition.
	That's pretty exceptional there.
	And you were absolutely sure that what you were seeing was not something that the people who lived there had somehow generated, unwittingly, perhaps, or perhaps wittingly?
	Well, there's so much to that story.
	The woman who originally owned the house, her husband died at a very young age in the 30s, the 1930s.
	And he was tall, six foot, broad shoulders.
	You know, he just, that was him.
	That was him that I saw.
	And she was so adamant that she did not want this house destroyed.
	And I think it's because she knew he was there.
	And that's why the house got picked up piece by piece, including the foundation, which is very rare, and moved.
	But then he went with the structure.
	We often think that ghosts are associated with location.
	But here's a case where you're saying that it was actually located with the structure because the structure and the foundations were picked up and carted off somewhere else.
	Yes.
	And everything there is benign.
	One of the strangest things that ever happened, we were in one of the dining rooms because now it's a restaurant.
	You know, we were in one of the dining rooms and we were doing a communication session and we're talking, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And I'm hearing, I can actually hear with my own two ears voices.
	So we decide to play back the tape because I use magnetic tape.
	I don't like this digital stuff.
	I like using actual film.
	And all of a sudden we hit play on the tape and there's music that came from the time period of the original owners of that house.
	Now, that's one thing.
	But on top of that music, you could hear our voices during that communication session.
	And you were sure that was that a fresh tape?
	You know, in the old days of tape, we'd sometimes get tapes that didn't completely erase, and you would hear what was underneath.
	Right.
	It would bleed through.
	Yeah.
	I know what you remember.
	I remember what they used to print through, they called it.
	Yeah.
	And that was not the case.
	Wow.
	And I could not believe it because the song that was playing was a song about a girl named Valerie.
	And Valerie was one of the investigators that was there that night.
	It was, it gave me chills, man.
	It was.
	I can quite understand that, Stephen.
	But this means that whatever you were dealing with, and I can quite understand the fascination, had some sense on some level of you.
	This was not just a repeating movie or a soundtrack.
	This was something that was interactive.
	Very interactive.
	In fact, I've always told people, I've done a lot of, seems like every Halloween, the restaurant has the news cover their ghost story.
	And they always bring me in, you know, to where I can talk about it and stuff like that.
	And I always say the same thing, you know, I treat them like they're human beings because that's what they were.
	You know, I don't provoke.
	I talk to them like they're my friend.
	And I feel at that particular location that I build a relationship.
	And there was one night where I actually, I held a paranormal conference there.
	I brought in some people from Ghost Hunters International who are personal friends of mine and some authors and stuff like that.
	And that night, our walkie-talkies, the investigators who chose to use ghost boxes and stuff, I don't use them, but some of them did.
	All of a sudden, everything started to say Steven, which is my name.
	So I've built a relationship there.
	So it's a trust.
	It's like they know me when I walk in there and there's no threat.
	Everything's benign.
	Well, no, exactly.
	Again, that's the word that was in my head just now.
	If this presence was so benign, I don't understand why the people who lived there, the people who called you in, wanted you there.
	If it was benign, then so be it.
	And if they had a good handle on who it was, then shouldn't that have been the end of the story for them?
	I don't get why they wanted you to be there to investigate.
	I mean, amazing opportunity for you.
	Well, see, this is, you have to think like this.
	You are you, and I am me.
	We have become very desensitized to these things.
	To the average person who has never experienced something like that, it's scary.
	And in their case, their fryers, their washing machines, their dishwashers were going off, throwing water everywhere.
	It was very scary for them.
	You know, they didn't know what was happening.
	And when I came in with my associates and started investigating and started explaining these things, they found a comfort with it.
	And when we did the documentary last year, it's kind of funny because you watch the interviews with Chef Eric Masson and his wife.
	Now they're more comfortable, they're more accepting because they know that it isn't something that's going to hurt them.
	They refer to them as family now, you know.
	Does that mean that the level of weirdness, the level of things that happen by themselves and maybe bumps and bangs and all the rest of it, because they calmed down about it, did the activity calm down?
	No.
	It is still there.
	I receive emails probably once every two weeks.
	Hey, this just happened.
	Because he knows I keep my case files.
	He knows I keep the case logs.
	I type everything up.
	And, you know, he lets me know every little thing that happens.
	You know, it hasn't calmed down, but it's nothing violent.
	Thankfully, you know, because I've done violent cases.
	So is it a question then?
	And I'm sorry for interrupting here, but it's just, I think it's an important point.
	Is it a question of whatever it is, and we have a handle now on what it is or who it is, wants them to know that he is still around and living his life there?
	Or is it that his life is continuing on some kind of parallel existence?
	Which do we think it is?
	You know, I used to think when I first started investigating that particular location, I used to think it was residual.
	It was like a recording.
	You know, it just repeated over and over and over again.
	But then when it would communicate, then when it would say the owner's name on our tapes, when it would say my name, you know, when it would do things differently every time we were there, that shows intelligence.
	Boy.
	And 10 years of research or more on this place, and you're still in touch with the people there and they're giving you updates on it, which is nice.
	Has it left any impact on you?
	Whether it's like a spiritual impact?
	Has it made you think differently about all of this?
	That place, not really, because, you know, what got me into the field, you know, I was 10 years old and I had my first paranormal experience and I knew it was there already, you know.
	So at that point, I was desensitized, you know, this stuff doesn't scare me.
	But there have been other cases where it's been violent and it's been very scary.
	All right.
	Well, I think because I know that you're a fund of cases and there are so many that we could talk about, let me ask this question.
	And I would ask this question of others and I wouldn't be sure what I was going to get or whether they would have a story.
	I'm convinced that you have many.
	Talk to me about a case then that has scared the manure out of you.
	Well, we took this case in St. Paul's, an area called St. Paul's here in the States.
	It was an old plantation back when, unfortunately, African Americans were slaves and you had the slave quarters, you had the plantation house, you know, that kind of thing.
	And anyway, somebody bought this property.
	It was 88 acres of property.
	And they started to experiencing things to that, you know, that wasn't really good experiences.
	It was more like threatening experiences.
	And we spent about two and a half years at this place.
	And there's no power.
	There's no water.
	It was an old plantation.
	So we were camping.
	You know, we would have to bring our own power sources, that kind of thing.
	And this particular location put me down a flight of stairs.
	I was thrown down a flight of stairs.
	I watched another investigator get picked up and thrown against a wall.
	Whatever is there, we eventually pulled out.
	I wrote about this story in my book, Dark Spirits, because they're so few and far between.
	But this particular place was so violent.
	There was no talking like you and I are.
	It was always angry.
	Do you think it was one spirit, one entity, or do you think it was a number?
	You know, that's a good question.
	I'm not sure.
	Because this thing took many forms.
	We have pictures where it looks like some kind of dog, you know, some kind of canine, but with a bigger head.
	We have pictures where it looks like an old woman carrying a sack of potatoes, you know, like she was working in the fields.
	But this particular location destroyed us all.
	It changed all of our personalities.
	I was, the day I was knocked down three flights of steps, my colleagues told me, look at your face.
	And I looked at my face and there were three slash marks across my face.
	And did you recall getting those?
	No.
	What I felt was, and the way I've always explained it, is if you try to take two magnets of opposite polarity, you know, when you try to put them together, that force you feel, you know, they don't want to go together.
	That's what it felt like when I was hit.
	It just felt like this magnetic energy.
	So that's almost like a ripping sensation.
	Yes.
	And the interesting thing is that particular location we investigated, like I said, for two and a half years, but in 2012, I had a thermal camera.
	And it still to this day is the best piece of evidence in favor of the supernatural that I own.
	I set up a $30,000 thermal camera in the attic of this plantation house.
	And my wife and I were out, we were in the attic, but the attic had doors on the side walls where you could go out on the rafters.
	And we're sitting out on the rafters trying to do a communication session, you know, trying to talk in some way, trying to reach out in some way.
	And I look at her and I said, you know, is it just me or is it my eyes playing tricks on me?
	But I see this black mass at the end of these rafters and it looks like it's moving.
	Okay.
	And then you hear me say some choice words and it moves and it's gone.
	The next morning, I take that thermal camera and I plug it into our equipment, that monitor, and play it.
	You see this blue sphere about the size of a basketball come across one of the window panes in the attic.
	Then it disappears.
	Then it gets to the next window pane.
	And it's a full-bodied apparition.
	And the second it walks through that door where my wife and I were is when you hear me say my choice words.
	You know, when I physically thought that I saw something.
	Now, the part that makes that really, really interesting is the fact that that thermal camera picked it up in the first window pane as a small sphere.
	Then in the second window pane as a full body, you could tell it was, totally tell it was a human being, you know, the body of a human being.
	And then it goes out of frame to where we were sitting.
	And you hear me say what I said.
	Now, here's the thing.
	That thermal camera was running inside the attic, which means if that thing was inside the attic, we would have seen the blue sphere and we would have saw it go across the entire attic, but we didn't.
	We saw it in the window, then the next window, which means it was three stories up in the air outside.
	Good God.
	That it's giving me chills just telling you.
	It sounds to me as if, you know, in one case, in the case of the bistro, you were dealing with something that was, well, for a spirit, tangible.
	You know, you knew what it was.
	It seems to me that this location, perhaps, because of the exercise of man's inhumanity to man on that site, perhaps you had the essence of what we call today evil there.
	And you'd actually come to terms with, and you'd come face to face with, and you've been flung around by evil.
	Well, I'm glad you used that word, evil, and you didn't say demon.
	You know, demon is said way too much.
	And demon, of course, is in relation to religion.
	Well, religion itself, or the Bible, let's say the Christian Bible, is the most paranormal thing you would ever read.
	Let's just face it, you know.
	But you said evil, and that's exactly how I word it.
	If you are a rapist, a murderer, a pedophile, if you're just a bad person in real life, what do you think you're going to be in the afterlife?
	So do you think that you came into contact with the distillation of that force in that place?
	we came in contact with something that did not want us there and did not want anybody there it was there But it was beyond being something that used to be a human being.
	This is, as I said, the distillation of madness.
	This was no human being.
	This was no human being.
	I could send you pictures of the night I was thrown down the stairs and I still held my camera in my hand as I was going down the steps.
	And when I stopped, you hear this low, guttural growl, like something that they would think come, you know, from a tiger.
	You know what I mean?
	Just I couldn't believe it.
	And that same night, we watched back and you would catch these little images of this thing that was like a dog, But more menacing.
	But the interesting thing, you know, the interesting, there's so much to say about that place.
	The interesting thing about that place is it changed every time you were there.
	When we first started, it was like a little boy that we got the name Jimmy.
	And we found out that this little boy named Jimmy had drowned.
	There's ponds on the property and he had drowned in the property.
	So we thought we were dealing with this little kid.
	And then all of a sudden it turns violent.
	And there was one night that I will never forget.
	Probably every week I think about it.
	A lot of the people on the team that works with me are former military, former law enforcement, including myself, are very good with firearms.
	So we're out in the middle of nowhere.
	We're out in the middle of this plantation, 88 acres.
	Of course, we had firearms for animals.
	You know what I mean?
	In case, you know, something would, you just had to protect yourself.
	And there was a night where we were going out to this pond where this little boy supposedly drowned.
	And we started to hear laughing.
	And it was almost like laughing like a hyena would do.
	It almost sounded cartoonish.
	Like you just didn't believe it.
	So we decided to pull out from that area.
	Well, as we're coming out of that area of the woods, we're all in blackout.
	We're all running night vision.
	I look over to my left and I see a pack of something.
	All I see are eyes walking alongside with us.
	Now, when we got out into the open fields where they used to plant soybean, stuff like that, I thought, okay, there's no way these coyotes or whatever they are that, you know, that was following us are going to come out into the open.
	You know, they're not going to do that.
	And we're walking through the field and we turn around and all these eyes pop up again.
	Now, the two guys I was with have been in Saudi Arabia.
	They have been in Iraq.
	Former military sharpshooters.
	I grew up under the gun.
	I always knew how to shoot a gun, respect firearms.
	And these things start popping up and they keep coming closer to us.
	So we unload everything.
	We fire and fire and fire three people who should never miss.
	The eyes disappeared.
	Why did you fire weapons if you knew you were dealing with something paranormal?
	Because surely on a human level, on an intellectual level, you would have known that those weapons wouldn't have touched whatever that might have been.
	Well, that's the thing.
	We didn't think paranormal.
	We thought...
	A pack of something.
	So whatever it is had such presence that it could make you feel that it was real.
	Correct.
	We thought it was coyotes in this area.
	It could have been wolves.
	It could have been wild boar.
	How'd you know it wasn't?
	We didn't.
	All we could see was the eyes.
	And so I gave the command fire shots to try to stop them from going away.
	Not hit them.
	Just fire some shots in the air.
	Didn't work.
	They kept coming through the field, through that soybean field towards us.
	So I finally gave the command, open fire.
	We all opened fire.
	We unloaded everything.
	Then the rest of the team shows back up on ATVs, four-wheelers, and picks us up.
	And we go back and we tell everybody, you know, what just happened.
	Something just stalked us out of the woods.
	The next morning, we go out there.
	There is nothing.
	There isn't any remnants of anything we hit.
	And we're talking about three people who were sharpshooters, okay?
	Hit nothing.
	None of our shells were even on the ground.
	Is that a ghostly dog bark I hear?
	Yeah, I have a hellhound here.
	I think your hellhound.
	What's his name?
	Tank.
	Tank.
	Oh, wow.
	I think Tank knows what you're talking about.
	But look, if we read fiction, and if you watch movies like the Omen movie, the devil deputes the hounds of hell or a hound from hell.
	I hate saying that while your dog's barking, but do you think that you encountered something like that?
	I do.
	Just not in the religious sense.
	I'm agnostic.
	You know, to be a paranormal researcher, to me personally, and I don't mean this as an insult to anybody who has faith or their own beliefs.
	But to me, as a paranormal researcher, if you go into it as a Catholic or believing in the Christian Bible, let's say, you are already prejudging the investigation.
	And I just can't do that.
	And yet, you know, there are people of the cloth who I think have a lot in common with you.
	There was a guy who was, I know that you've been on America's Coast to Coast AM.
	Back in the day, one of the regular guests there who was amazingly good and sadly no longer with us was Malachi Martin, Father Malachi Martin, who was the exorcist in New York.
	And in fact, he died after, I believe, falling down some stairs, and there was talk about whatever he encountered that may have caused that situation, but nobody will ever know.
	Even though you don't see it from the religious perspective, you do have a lot in common with these exorcists, I think.
	Well, because I believe in, like I complimented you on earlier for saying evil instead of demon, you know, when you say the word demon, that automatically puts you into religion.
	But evil is evil.
	You know, if you're evil in life, you're evil in death, you just have attributes that we don't have now, you know?
	And whatever was going on in that location, and I wrote about it extensively in my Dark Spirits book, it was just something that we had to pull away from.
	It just got too bad.
	People were getting hurt, you know, shooting at things that you would normally never miss.
	And then you find out your shells aren't even out there.
	Did you feel that you were in danger?
	It's one thing to be terrified, but it's another thing to be in danger.
	Absolutely.
	The night that I was thrown down the stairs was very interesting.
	The house, the plantation house itself was empty.
	And of course, like I said, we were in a camping situation because there was no power, no water.
	And one of the investigators said that she left her water bottle in the house and she was going to go get it.
	So she goes in the house.
	She comes back out and she said, is somebody in the house?
	And I'm looking around.
	Everybody's accounted for.
	And I said, no, why?
	And she said, because somebody from upstairs just said your name, my name, Stephen.
	And I was like, okay, maybe this is a sign.
	You know, maybe this is a way to communicate.
	You know what I mean?
	So I said, I'll go in.
	I'll go in there.
	What do you think that to some degree they might have been offering you a truce or something?
	No, I think I was being set up to get my ass kicked.
	So I go into the house.
	I go up those stairs, three floors of stairs.
	And before I hit that third floor was when I felt that magnetic force hit me in the face and put me all the way down the stairs.
	And this enticed you to come forward and basically accept what you ultimately received.
	What my assessment was it wanted to take care of the alphas.
	It never attacked any of the women at all.
	It brought me in there to put me down those stairs and try to get me to leave.
	And by putting you down the stairs, you show everybody else, here's what I can do and this is what you're dealing with.
	Right.
	So, but it didn't stop there.
	I brought in a former Marine who was on my team and I bring him in.
	And that's when we start getting these dog-like, weird faces on our video.
	And he gets, he's the guy that gets picked up and thrown against a wall.
	So the other guy, who's also a former Marine, sitting outside, all of a sudden goes into a seizure.
	He went into a seizure so bad, he destroyed the chair he was sitting in.
	So to me, it was destroy the alphas and they'll go away.
	Do you think it was feeding off you, whatever it was?
	I think it was because there were many times where the voices we would hear would be our own.
	I can remember being in the attic and hearing the voice of one of my investigators who was way outside, way far from the plantation house.
	And it was his voice.
	And something that I've documented, and you'd probably be very interested in seeing this.
	When we went back up into that attic the next day, the ceiling had burnt.
	And I'm talking burning, burnt, footprints.
	Like somebody walked upside down on that ceiling.
	But the footprints were burnt.
	Yes.
	It was a wild case, a wild place, the most extreme that I have ever been in.
	And it got to the point where the colleagues I was working with, I said, look, we have got to pull out of this for a while because It was just getting too bad.
	And of course, you start thinking about practical things, like, I guess, you know, how am I insured for all of this?
	Because if somebody dies here, there's going to be all kinds of trouble.
	Well, yeah, that too.
	But, you know, it was more or less: there's nothing we can do, there's no such thing as Ghostbusters, you know.
	We can't make this go away.
	Do you think an exorcist going in there could have made this go away?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I've never worked with an exorcist.
	I've worked with a few psychics, and those were not pleasant experiences.
	And I think it's because of Google.
	But I don't know.
	But the place has remained abandoned ever since.
	You know, the owner wanted to turn this place into a BNB, you know, a bed and breakfast.
	And when this stuff started happening, what got us on this case was the fact that his son left his cell phone in one of the rooms of the old plantation house.
	Well, this cell phone picked itself up and recorded video filming around the room.
	And that's what caught my attention.
	And it just snowballed and snowballed.
	And it was just too bad.
	It's too unsafe.
	There are places that exist like that.
	I don't know why, but they do.
	And we did two and a half years there.
	And it is, like I alluded to earlier, the best damn footage I have ever had in favor of the supernatural.
	Of course, there is a school of thought that says people who investigate these things, if they're not very careful, can end up taking some of that stuff back home.
	And some people I've talked with who do this for a living or do this as a very serious pastime, they, I don't know how they do it, but they protect themselves.
	You don't have any truck with any of that stuff.
	I mean, do you feel okay after having had that experience?
	Were there deleterious effects that you took away from there?
	Well, you know, I think it's like anything.
	You know, in 2014, I was in a horrific car accident.
	I flipped a car seven times down the highway, 90 miles an hour.
	Gee, you're lucky to be alive by the sounds of that.
	And I crawled out of that car with nothing wrong with me.
	Boy.
	And, you know, as far as the case we were just talking about, yeah, it haunts all of us.
	It does.
	We occasionally all kind of bring it up to each other.
	And, you know, because that was the real deal.
	That wasn't something you see on TV that's over, you know, exaggerated.
	And it's something that I don't think any of us will ever forget about.
	Understandably, because it was tangible and malevolent.
	Now, look, you have a degree in psychology and you use psychology in your work, Stephen.
	We all know that one of the worst things that you can have in life, because it gives people all sorts of hang-ups and problems as they go forward, is unfinished business.
	That case for you is unfinished business.
	It is, and we've discussed it, a few of us.
	There are some of my associates that refuse to go back there.
	And you know what?
	I don't blame them.
	But we've discussed it and talked about it because, you know, that's a place that, you know, if could be documented a little bit better, could prove it.
	You know, exactly.
	All you've got to do is have the kahunas to go back there.
	And that's a big ask.
	Well, it's, I mean, for me, my motto has always been run right at it.
	You know.
	By the size of this, you're going back there.
	I would like to.
	I really would.
	It deserves it, you know, and it goes back to what we talked about earlier that what you see on TV, you know, this one night you're spending in somebody's house and you got it all figured out.
	No, it don't work that way.
	Not in real, not in the field of paranormal research.
	It doesn't work that way.
	Well, it sounds to me like if you want to do it properly and if you want to investigate the real stuff, then you've got to be in it.
	You've got to give of yourself to it, which you do.
	But you've also got to be in it for the long haul, I guess.
	You do, because, you know, there are so many factors.
	You know, one of the cases, my quickest case, was 15 minutes.
	15 minutes.
	This guy contacted me and he said every time he opened his store, he would walk in and he would hear somebody walk across the attic.
	So he finally got me down there and I said, okay, I'll meet you there when you open your store.
	And I want to hear this.
	I want to see what's happening.
	So we open the door and we walk in, and sure enough, you hear somebody walk across the attic, or what you would think would be somebody walk across the attic.
	What it was was the air conditioning unit.
	He walked in, which changes the temperature of the room.
	And the ducks for AC have flaps in them.
	And they make a noise.
	So when the wind or wind or air, whatever you want to call it, when it stops, they stop in order.
	So do, do, do, do, do.
	I'm like, dude, it's just your air conditioning.
	So it's not always malevolent paranormality.
	Sometimes it's very practical and you just have to point it out to the person.
	Now, listen, you have Tank, your dog, who sounds to me like he wants to go out by the sounds of that, by the howling that I can hear.
	Do we have time, or do you have to give your time now to Tank, for me to just talk to you very quickly about one thing?
	Let's start.
	All right.
	And we can do this in greater length either on my radio show or here online on the podcast where we can talk in a more relaxed way.
	This is your book that I thought when I first of all saw it online was a work of fiction.
	I thought, oh, what a great topic.
	You know, it's a bit like Chucky Revisited.
	This is Norman the Haunted Doll.
	Now, the story goes that you apparently bought a doll, which was the mascot, I think, of the Mattel Toy Company.
	And you bought this doll and you gave it a name called Norman.
	But Norman started wreaking havoc in your home.
	And I thought that was fiction.
	You're going to tell me I think this was fact.
	It is fact.
	And he is still here.
	And that's the beauty of me and my wife both being paranormal investigators.
	We have surveillance all through the house, outside, inside.
	Everything is covered because we are constantly, constantly bringing in things from investigations where the client believes it's a certain object.
	They're like, here, you take it, you know, and they give it to us and we bring it here.
	But Norman, Maddie Mattel, we actually found at an old antique shop and he was sitting up in this box.
	And I just wanted the box.
	I really liked the wooden box he was in.
	And pulled it down, asked the ladies at the counter, and they're like, oh, we didn't even know that was there.
	We didn't even know that doll was in there, you know.
	And she sold it to me for five bucks.
	And we brought him to the house.
	And within a day, the house became haunted.
	And it was stuff that started subtle.
	Like you're just sitting here, let's just say on your chair.
	And all of a sudden, Christmas music starts coming across your computer.
	You know, which I have no Christmas music on my computer.
	It just, but it started playing anyway.
	You know, to then objects being thrown, to then us watching the surveillance and seeing these anomalies.
	And I'm not going to say orbs, but just these transparent things on the surveillance.
	And it progressed and it progressed and it progressed to where we were infested with spiders, rats, snakes.
	Yes.
	And you've never had any of this stuff before.
	No.
	And I'm thinking, what is going on with this doll?
	And I joked with my wife.
	I said, you know what?
	I'm going to rename him.
	He's not normal.
	So I'll just call him Norman.
	You know?
	So that's how he got his name.
	Okay.
	I mean, this reminds me of a story that they made a drama out of.
	And this was somebody who bought this box.
	Is it called the Dybbuk?
	You may have heard that story.
	Yeah.
	And this haunted box that had all kinds of malevolent energy around it.
	It sounds to me like you bought Chucky.
	You know, you did.
	Although the doll itself, I presume, didn't stand up and walk and terrorize you.
	It was doing things, you think?
	Well, he did move.
	Like I said, we have surveillance all through the house.
	And he turned his head.
	He would look at me.
	He would turn his head the other way and look at whoever else was in the room and then turn his head back to normal like he should be.
	Now, this doll is not mechanical in any way.
	He's from 1962.
	So there's no batteries.
	He's not mechanical.
	But he's got issues by the sounds of it.
	Do you know anything about his backstory?
	I do.
	The doll, this particular doll, sadly, the girl who owned the doll originally in the 60s was eight-year-old girl, something like that.
	And her entire family burned in a house fire.
	And the police found her outside in the snow holding this doll.
	So she got out of the house, but her mom and her dad died in the house.
	Oh, what a sad story.
	Well, years later, this girl kept the doll her whole life.
	Years later, she donated it to this particular antique shop, but they didn't know that backstory.
	And like I said, they didn't even know they had it because it was in this box.
	Right, so Norman wasn't doing anything in the shop.
	It was only when you got him home.
	When we got him here, it was like, see, the mother, to my understanding, was to have twins.
	And the girl lived, the daughter lived, but the brother was stillborn.
	He died.
	And Norman, or Maddie, Maddie Mattel, was brought to them as a gift, you know, because she was having babies and a family member brought this doll to her at the hospital.
	And it's like the soul of the brother that didn't make it went into this doll.
	Oh, boy, what a sad and disturbing story, Stephen.
	Oh, it's awful.
	It's awful.
	And the stuff that has happened here, the last book I published was this past April.
	And it's about Norman.
	And it's sad because if you want to believe that the soul of that brother that didn't make it went into this doll,
	at the time I wrote the book, he would be 54 years old, you know, which means he would know everything that we know, you know, just from watching, you know.
	And there has been some really chaotic things happen.
	It sounds to me like, I mean, you've decided to hang on to him.
	I could ask you why you're doing that, but we'll ask that in a second.
	You're hanging on to him.
	Have you got an uneasy truce with him, or is he still doing horrendous antics?
	For the past few months, there hasn't been too much.
	The most recent thing we had happen, where he is stationed, he is locked in a room that we built specifically for him that looks like a children's room.
	And we're thinking maybe that would bring him peace that he never got to be a kid.
	You know, here's a bit of childhood for you.
	And has that worked?
	And it's been quiet.
	But recently, maybe three weeks ago, there was a can, a soda can on our dresser.
	And my wife and I were laying in bed, and I think we were watching the show fringe.
	I don't know if you ever watch it.
	It's kind of like the X-Files.
	And we're watching that.
	And all of a sudden, we hear this ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting.
	And then we have seven dogs, and the dogs go crazy.
	They're going nuts.
	And I'm like, what in the world?
	So I like jump up, I look at the surveillance we got running, and I rewind it.
	I say rewind it.
	It's digital, but you know what I mean.
	I rewind it, and the can just flew off of the dresser across the living room.
	So that's like the most recent thing.
	But you still want to keep him?
	Yes, because this is a paranormal researcher's dream.
	Well, yes, it is.
	You have something like that.
	You know, it's like the equivalent of a takeaway meal.
	You didn't have to go out for this.
	This came to you.
	And it's in your home.
	And that's the thing.
	You know, I keep watching him.
	I consider him a Trojan horse.
	If anybody gets the book, it came out in April.
	It's called Norman, the doll that had to be locked away because we did have to lock him away.
	And we made him, like I said, like a children's room and put him in there.
	And, you know, when you read the book, you know, that's behind at this point because there's things that have happened.
	The biggest thing was a few months ago, I'd say midsummer, I'm laying in bed.
	Our monitor for the surveillance, we can, it's in our bedroom, so we can see what's going on everywhere.
	Well, Norman catches fire in the middle of the night.
	Fire?
	In a case.
	Because I have him locked in a case.
	And I jump up, I run over there, I put him out, and now he looks even more demented.
	I mean, it's like his left eye caught fire, and the whole left, kind of that section's just burned.
	Okay, are you saying this was like spontaneous combustion, or was there something else going on?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I don't know how you managed to live with that.
	What I think, if you read the book, when we first got Norman, we got Norman right before Hurricane Matthew Hit us, which is irony in itself.
	You know, you got Maddie, the doll, Hurricane Matthew, you know, but Hurricane Matthew hit us, and we had lost power for four days.
	So we were running IR, infrared, to get to the house at night and stuff like that because we had no power.
	And I had captured an image of a stereotypical guy in a cloak, like a Jedi, just to picture it that way, with self-illuminating eyes.
	Because I was running infrared, his eyes should not have been like that, but these were self-illuminating.
	So to me, there is something inside of Norman that at that moment when that hurricane hit our house, maybe it was the ionic energy from the storm.
	I don't know.
	But this thing appeared and I got a crystal clear picture of him.
	And it's in the book.
	It's this hooded figure with self-illuminating eyes.
	And that same night, we were talking about my dog Tank.
	Tank goes on investigations with us, and he's equipped with his own little headcam.
	So whatever Tank sees, we see.
	Because dogs, you know, they can tell you a lot.
	If they turn around, if there's some reason.
	There must be something there.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Right.
	So Tank is wearing his head cam and Norman somehow.
	He went into the kitchen and jumped off of the kitchen table and tanks camera caught that.
	And when you say jump, did this look like you or I jumping off something?
	Or was it a fall?
	I don't know because the camera here was using it.
	If you had the book, you would see the pictures.
	And if you send me an email later, I can send you a PDF of the book and you can see the pictures I'm talking about.
	All right.
	Well, if you also want to give me a selected picture to use as the picture that I put with this edition of the show, I mean, it's up to you whether you do that.
	I would be very happy to do that.
	Stephen, I think that we've only scratched the surface of the world of Stephen Lancaster.
	I don't know how you do all of this stuff.
	And you promised me because I'm going to get emails from people telling me this guy's making this all up.
	If you are, then you have an amazingly creative mind.
	But, you know, this stuff all happened, yeah?
	Yes, sir.
	Wow.
	And, you know, that's something you've got to deal with, you know, in any industry.
	The music industry, the film industry, you know.
	And I'm the same way.
	I see things on social media, you know, where somebody posts something and they say it's this and I look at it.
	And I'll even go as far as download the picture or download the video and I'll analyze it and I'll say it's BS, you know.
	So I expect no less, you know.
	Sure, people are going to read my stuff or see the stuff I have on TV and say, you know, it's crap.
	You know, it's made up.
	But then why would you spend 10 years?
	I mean, somebody wanted to pull off a hoax, a fake.
	They'd spend 10 weeks doing it.
	They wouldn't spend 10 years researching something.
	It's just not worth it.
	Well, you know, this is what I've always said.
	I've always said to the people it matters to.
	The stuff you see on Facebook, Twitter, it's a small fraction.
	The audience that watches Zach Bagans on Ghost Adventures and watches these silly ghost shows, they're an audience for entertainment.
	They're not the people that matter when it comes to the field of paranormal research.
	of course those shows I mean to be fair might introduce people to to work that is perhaps a little deeper I don't know but but you know that's another debate for another time Stephen I've really enjoyed this conversation and if you did I would be very keen to speak with you again I'd love it I'd love it okay and if people want to visit your work and I recommend they do what's that website you you can go to facebook.com slash author Stephen
	Lancaster and that's Stephen with a PH or you can just go to monstervision TV.org I love that website monstervisiontv.org Stephen Lancaster I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and you know you are a guest that I've had on this show where I haven't really looked at the clock while I've been doing it and I haven't noticed the time go.
	I've just been enthralled so thank you very much for giving me that.
	Oh, it's been a blast.
	I enjoy it, man.
	Thanks, Stephen.
	Stephen Lancaster, I will put a link to him and his various efforts on my website, theunexplained.tv.
	We have more great guests in the pipeline for you here at The Unexplained Online.
	So until next, we meet.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	I am in London.
	This has been The Unexplained, and please stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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