The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 414 - Father Nathan G. Castle

Oct. 12, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:10:26

Edition 414 - Father Nathan G. Castle

Father Nathan G. Castle says he helps "stuck souls" who died violent or accidental, sudden deaths get to "the Afterlife",,,

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	Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Thank you very much for being part of this.
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	I'm very, very grateful and thank you for helping me to continue this work here.
	Love to get your emails.
	When you get in touch with me through the website theunexplained.tv, please tell me who you are, where you are and how you use this show.
	And thank you very much for all of the nice things you've said about the show and for helping to keep me on the right path with this work.
	You know, I can't do it without you.
	This is an interactive thing.
	You know, I know everything's interactive these days, but I've always regarded this show as being something that's a dialogue between you and me.
	Now, this edition of the show is going to be different in that I have somebody coming to the podcast who's been on the radio show.
	And when I spoke to this person, I said, I want to do something longer and where we don't have news and commercial breaks and all the things that you have in radio, you know, involved in that.
	We can just have a conversation and that will be a continuous conversation.
	So we're doing that now.
	The man we're going to speak with is father, Nathan G. Castle.
	He is a priest.
	He entered the Dominican Order in 1979 and has served in campus ministries in California and Arizona for 22 years.
	In the first half of his new book, which is called Afterlife Interrupted, Helping Stuck Souls Cross Over, which is what he does, he talks about how over that time he's helped at least 250 stuck souls adjust to the afterlife after they died traumatically, suddenly, sometimes violently.
	It is pretty unique work, and he has a pretty unique way of communicating what he does and how he does it.
	And that's why, for reasons I can't really explain, I felt impelled and compelled, both of those things, to speak with Nathan G. Castle again.
	I think you're going to enjoy this conversation.
	Thank you very much to my webmaster, Adam at Creative Hotspot, for doing what he does so well.
	And thank you again, as I say, for all of the emails.
	Go to the website theunexplained.tv and you can send me some thoughts about the show, guest suggestions.
	Tell me how I'm doing it, whatever you want to say.
	It's nice to hear from you wherever you are.
	Keep them coming.
	All right, let's get to Tucson, Arizona now and speak with Father Nathan G. Castle.
	And Nathan, thank you very much for coming back on the show.
	Great to be with you again.
	Now, the last time we spoke, obviously when you're doing something for radio, you have all of the imperatives of radio, Nathan, to follow.
	You have commercial breaks to meet.
	You have to get to the news at the top of every hour.
	And I said to you at that time that I didn't think that we covered all of the territory.
	There was more to say, and we needed to have a more leisurely conversation on my podcast.
	So thank you very much for agreeing to do that now.
	Sure.
	Sure.
	First of all, for people who didn't hear you the first time round, and I have listeners all over the world to the radio show, but there are many people in other countries who won't have heard you the first time round.
	How do you describe yourself?
	Well, I'm a Catholic priest.
	I've been a priest for 34, going on 35 years.
	I'm a Dominican.
	Most of my life, I've been in campus ministry.
	I'm 63 years old and a happy guy.
	Well, that's the full resume.
	So what makes me curious about this?
	Look, I grew up in Liverpool, and there's no reason why you should know anything about Liverpool in the UK, but it's a city where the two major faiths are the Roman Catholic faith and the Protestants on the other side.
	And my family, I had the best of both worlds, really, because we were a little bit of both.
	My grandfather on my mother's side was a Roman Catholic.
	He did lapse for a while.
	And my grandfather on the other side was a Protestant.
	But I knew the priests in our area pretty well.
	I mean, they were very much, just as they are in communities generally.
	They tended to deal with mundane issues.
	And when I say mundane, I mean that literally, the issues that, you know, we all have to deal with the births, marriages and deaths and all of the traumas and all of the pleasures of life.
	But they didn't concern themselves very much with thoughts of the afterlife and those who may have problems when they enter into it.
	So you're different from them.
	Well, I suppose so.
	I was raised in a Catholic family and I was taught at a very young age to pray for the living and the dead.
	And so my mom taught me, even when I was first acquiring language as a very small child, how to pray blessings for people.
	And part of those people were people who died already.
	And it didn't seem to make much difference that God loves everybody, whether they're alive in this life or alive in some form afterwards.
	And so I started praying for the dead really pretty early, not with an exclusive attention.
	It was just a piece of my cosmology and my faith upbringing.
	And at that time, how did you regard the idea of death?
	Did you regard it as go to heaven or if you've sinned, you're going to go to the fiery pits of hell?
	Well, I was taught those three options, heaven, hell, and purgatory, and that purgatory was really a subset of heaven.
	It was more like an antechamber.
	Once you were in purgatory, there was no chance of going to hell.
	So that's what I was taught.
	But we were also taught that remember that this is all a mystery and God has not revealed to us the identity of anyone who is in a permanent hell.
	So I always held out hope that everybody could be prayed for.
	And that's been a feature of my life, really the whole of my life.
	And was it always the view then that those of no particular faith or no faith at all would be damned for it?
	Oh, well, I heard lots of things.
	I grew up in an area of southeast Texas where Catholics are rare, and most of the Christians are evangelical, perhaps Baptists or other evangelical churches.
	And there were, in the early 60s, when I was beginning to be old enough to know what these conversations were about.
	There were mutual antagonisms.
	Catholics saying they were the only ones that went to heaven, and Protestants saying essentially the same thing.
	But as a child, you just learn to tune some of that out, I think.
	I was also learning that God is love, and anytime that people were saying unloving things about God or in God's name, I just kind of tuned it out.
	And as a young person, how did you view people who didn't have any particular faith?
	You know, they didn't perhaps believe in God, and they thought that life was life, and by the time you get to the end of it, a switch is switched and then it's oblivion.
	Well, you know how it is.
	You're in charge of only your own life.
	Others are free to think and do as they please on the whole.
	And so I knew that there were people who didn't believe in God.
	I just knew that God believed in them.
	And maybe they'd one day come around or maybe they wouldn't.
	But I never doubted God's love for everybody God made.
	How and when did you decide to become a priest?
	I was, I think, 22 years old.
	I graduated with an undergraduate degree when I was 21, and I was part of what was then an ecumenical prayer group of Christians of all different kinds.
	Some of them were discerning going into the ministry in their own churches, and I began to think about it as well.
	I also began to think that, wonder whether I could really stay Catholic and be a priest.
	I thought it might be very lonely and isolating.
	And so I discerned, I ended up going into a seminary that included Protestant and Catholic faculties.
	Really?
	I've never heard of such a thing.
	How did that work?
	They're usually called a consortium, and they get together on the economic end, they get together so that they share all the administrative and overhead costs of running a private school, which are substantial.
	And then each, there were different institutions.
	I went to the one in Berkeley, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
	At that time, it had three Catholic schools and six Protestant ones.
	And so there was a Jesuit, a Franciscan, and a Dominican Catholic school, and then six different Protestant seminaries.
	And then in addition, there were other institutes and smaller organizations for Buddhists and Muslims.
	And so it was a wonderful education once I got to seminary.
	I decided to go for one more year at my parents' expense to get in the system and learn it from the inside and see whether I could really do it.
	And it did only take that one year to make up my mind and then figure out what to do next.
	And because the institution was different in that way, it was a combination of faiths in a lot of ways, did that mean that you had a more, I won't say broad-minded, that's the wrong phrase, but you had a more rounded perspective on other people's point of view?
	I think so.
	Yeah, that was really one of the whole reasons for coming together at all, was to be with one another, study together, and learn more about our individual polities, our own groups, but also to share what we knew we had in common.
	Boy, that sounds like a fantastic idea.
	And it would work for, you know, if they could include all the faiths together and do that, I think we'd avoid an awful lot of problems in this world, Nathan.
	Well, there are several like that in the United States.
	I think there are about four or five of them.
	Okay.
	And was it a fairly routine training?
	Was it a fairly routine grounding in all of it for you?
	Yes.
	Are you familiar with the Dominicans?
	Yes.
	After the Jesuits, I think we and the Jesuits are the two religious orders that put the highest priority on being well educated.
	And so our programs of studies are longer than they would otherwise be.
	So I really wanted to be well educated in my faith.
	And so that was one of the reasons that I joined the Dominicans.
	The Jesuits, most of their men get PhDs, and I just didn't want one.
	I didn't want to have such an exhaustive education in some small thesis topic.
	I always felt I was more of a generalist, and this has been a very good fit for me.
	Because at the end of the day, you're dealing with real people and their real concerns.
	So the more you can know about life, the world, and everything, I guess the better prepared you are.
	Yes, and I knew that I wanted to work in campus ministry, so I chose an order and a province within that order that had a heavy commitment of personnel to campuses.
	And that worked out great because I was 27 years on college campuses, and I still live on one, even though I'm not employed here.
	Right.
	And, you know, having a ministry that is a college campus, what sorts of things do you have to do?
	And that maybe sounds like a crazy question because it may be obvious, but tell me.
	It's not crazy if you don't know the answer to it.
	That's how you get answers.
	You ask questions.
	You referred to the mundane tasks of a priest, saying masses and hearing confessions and burying the dead and baptizing and so on, weddings, more weddings at a campus ministry just because people are largely at an age where they're meeting their spouses.
	But then in addition to all of those works, which are important, there would be an emphasis on the Catholic intellectual tradition and making sure that people understood that there was one, that it's not just a matter of believing in things that you're told to believe, but inquiring.
	Right.
	So it's more than blind faith.
	Yes, are you familiar with John Henry Newman?
	No.
	Well, he's a Brit.
	He was Anglican and quite respected in the Anglican clergy.
	And I think in 1845 or thereabouts, he became a Catholic.
	And he was really working hard on the idea of development of doctrine, that doctrines aren't just something that are handed to us as a finished item, but that our ideas continue to grow over Time and our policy as expressed through doctrine and dogma needs to change with it.
	So he's about to be canonized as saint next month.
	Really?
	This is Cardinal Newman.
	Yes.
	Yes, yes, yes, of course.
	I have heard of him.
	It was just the way that you put it as John Henry Newman.
	Now, I know exactly who you mean.
	Okay.
	So the path that you took, as you said, was fairly routine and you took up a ministry in campuses.
	That's what you wanted to do.
	But now you're involved in something very different.
	How did that begin?
	Well, the very different thing that you're talking about, I think, is intercessory prayer for people who have died.
	But in addition to doing that the way that I was taught as a child and reinforced down through the decades of my life, about 20 years ago, some people who had died violent, sudden deaths began coming to me in a dream and showing me the manner of their violent death and asking me for help.
	Why do you think, if that happened in that way, that they chose you and found you?
	Well, different ones, I've asked that question, and the answer I've heard most when I've asked it is, I'll ask, how did you find me?
	And they say, I don't know.
	Somebody brought me here, their guardian angel.
	They don't always call them a guardian angel.
	Some call them a guide, some fellow, someone.
	They don't always know it's a guardian angel, but that's what it is.
	Bring them to me.
	One guy said, your light was on, which I kind of like that.
	And another one said, somebody told me that when you're asleep, you're sort of like a satellite dish and that you can receive signals.
	Isn't that interesting?
	It is.
	And, you know, I've thought of that many times.
	You know, when I've had dreams myself that have in some ways been prophetic or they've helped me to solve something or they've brought me communication with maybe a departed family member.
	And I just wondered whether our brains created those things for reassurance.
	But you're talking about something of a completely different order here.
	Well, do you ever predispose yourself before sleep to be receptive to that kind of thing?
	I can't say I do, but there are times when I am more receptive than others.
	And those times always surprise me.
	But no, I don't think I, I think I find in my life that the more I would seed myself, seed my dreams to try and do that, the less it would happen.
	It tends to happen for me when it does happen in a happenstance way.
	Well, I was taught that as a little child too, that as much as we try to define things, and you know, the Roman Catholic Church has lots of definitions for just about everything.
	But at the same time, we're always talking about God who's a mystery and who's always larger than any attempt to describe in human language.
	So I learned that early on too, to, on the one hand, memorize your catechism and know the basics of your faith.
	But on the other hand, there's always going to be an unknowability about God at the same time.
	But if you're a man of faith and you're working within that sphere, then people are coming to you, people who've passed in violent ways, suddenly and shockingly in many cases.
	And we'll talk about some of the cases.
	Shouldn't you have believed really that they should have been making their way to God?
	If you believe in God, then isn't that their ultimate destination?
	And why were they coming to you?
	It depends on what you believe about God.
	I believe that God is in you and in me and in all things.
	So there's in approaching me, it's not as though you're not approaching at least an aspect of God because there are aspects of God that are built into me.
	So I don't think that God is a discrete lump opposite me or something, some object in the universe.
	God's imbued everywhere in it.
	And so, and I gave myself into God's service at about 22 years old, and I believe that I'm God's instrument.
	And if God wants me to be a peculiar instrument, well, that's okay.
	I don't mean this to be flippant in any way, but did you never stop and think, well, how come one of the more senior members of the church or the Pope himself was not approached to do this vital and godly work?
	First of all, I wouldn't know whether they had been or not, because if they had, they'd probably keep it secret.
	Now, why do you think if anybody else had been approached, why would they keep it secret?
	Is it something that goes against the faith in some ways?
	It doesn't just have to be about the faith.
	Lots of people who don't have any particular faith have experience of a spiritual nature that if they share them with other people, they find themselves ridiculed.
	Right.
	And so that really goes for any person, any flesh and blood human being.
	And I totally understand this, who has an experience beyond the norm.
	You have to make a decision.
	Am I going to talk about this or am I just going to come out on the doubting side and say, well, it probably wasn't what I thought it was, and I'm going to keep my mouth shut about this.
	Yeah, and you do have to discern these things.
	I mean, having a dream about your deceased loved one, maybe that was a visitation and maybe it wasn't.
	You'd have to discern that after the fact.
	I teach that now.
	Do you?
	Well, all right.
	I had after, I was very close.
	I was very close to both my parents.
	They were truly wonderful people.
	I was very close to my mother.
	She died first.
	And the day after she died, my mother came to me in vivid detail in a dream.
	And maybe it was just something to ease my extreme stress at the time.
	I don't know.
	But it was incredibly realistic, Nathan.
	All she did was she asked me, as she would have done in life, are you okay?
	Am I okay?
	She asked me, am I okay?
	And I said, yes.
	And I told her it was so marvelous to see her.
	And then I started asking her questions about where she was and what it was like.
	And at that point, she vanished, faded away.
	Now, she had had, and I've told listeners on this show before, so I hope they will forgive me for telling you this.
	When she was 10 years of age, like many children of her generation, she had an infection, lung infection.
	And in Liverpool in those days, and I'm sure in many American cities, something like that could easily take you away.
	And she came very close to Death.
	And she described, to her dying day, she described a place that she went as a 10-year-old girl that was a place of great beauty, of sunlight and pastures, and trees, and happiness, and smiling people.
	And they told her she didn't want to come back.
	And they told her she had to come back.
	Now, how common is that story?
	But that was my own mother's story.
	Well, what year was that happening?
	Well, we're talking about, you know, decades and decades and decades ago.
	I mean, we're talking about an era where, you know, there weren't the medical advances that there are now.
	So it's a long time ago.
	That's why I was asking.
	I just last week was at the International Convention of IANS.
	Are you familiar with IANS?
	No.
	It's IANDS, the International Association for Near-Death Studies.
	I met some people from the UK while I was there.
	It was in Philadelphia.
	And it started with Raymond Moody in his book in the mid-70s, Life After Life.
	Yes, I've spoken with Raymond Moody, yes.
	Okay, well, Raymond coined the phrase, the near-death experience.
	One of the most interesting things to me is that in the whole history of the human race, there are more people alive now who have had a near-death experience than at any other time in human history.
	Primarily because of the discovery of CPR, cardiac resuscitation.
	More people are nearly dying and coming back from it than ever in human history.
	And so a lot of these people, like your mother, have a story to tell of something that happened while they were in an extreme health crisis.
	Shouldn't that mean if that is the case, and I don't doubt it is because of those technical advances you talked about, that more people believe in the afterlife and the greater scheme of things?
	I was just with about 400 of them at this convention, and they're people of all kinds of religious traditions or no tradition, many of them more nativistic, not just Judeo-Christian or even Muslim, but more animist beliefs that I was taught to call pagan.
	When I use the word pagan, I don't mean it as a slur, just as an identifier.
	In my mother's case, when I had that dream, you said to me that it is down to the individual to decide whether what they're experiencing is what they think it might be or whether it's just an illusion.
	Did you think that your mother had really visited you instantly or did you have to reflect on it?
	Not for long because the experience was so different from a dream.
	Okay, I know what a dream is, and some of my dreams are very vivid.
	They're full color, three-dimensional.
	I see people who I've never met before in those dreams and go to places I haven't been to.
	This was different.
	So the probability in my head, and I will have listeners who will tell me how stupid and wrong I am, but I felt the probability was for that fleeting moment and on that night after she died that we'd been in communication and that she was sort of saying farewell.
	Yes.
	Well, you probably know that you're in good company.
	Many people have such visitations in the days immediately after the death of a loved one.
	Many don't and wish they would, but nevertheless, many people do have an experience like the one that you described.
	When you went through your experience, didn't you, you must have sensed that you were entering into a realm and a zone that that training had not prepared you for?
	Yes and no.
	It certainly didn't.
	There was no class in helping the dead cross over.
	I didn't study that.
	But it reminded me of getting a call to go to the hospital in the middle of the night.
	As a priest, you very often are in a rotation where at least one day out of the week, you have to have the pager on your nightstand in case there's an emergency call for usually a hospital.
	This just felt like that.
	This dream happened.
	The first one of this genre happened about 3 o'clock in the morning, but it felt like being phoned by the pager and waking up to somebody's need.
	And that need is, I have passed very quickly, violently, abruptly.
	I don't entirely know what's going on.
	Can you help me?
	Essentially, I wasn't sure the first time what it was.
	The dream was a picture of a man sitting on a radiator of a car from the late 1950s when they had fins and lots of chrome bursting into flames.
	And I could tell it wasn't a car crash.
	He didn't die in a collision, but he died in a fire sitting on the engine of a car.
	I didn't know who he was or what he needed, but I just knew right away that this was not my dreamscape.
	It was not my psycho babble.
	This was somebody else calling out to me in a dream.
	And you told that story when we did the radio interview, but can we visit that again?
	Because it was a very, very moving and in some ways shocking story, too.
	Yes.
	I recently listened to it on the audiobook version.
	I go for a walk in the morning.
	And right now I have a prayer partner named Laura Dunham who helped me in prayer a lot.
	And she recently died.
	And so I'm walking around listening to her in my head because she helped record the audio book.
	When this man was named Ray, he died when he was 20 years old in Georgia, in the southeastern part of the U.S. And he had been gone for about 40 years, but he was paying attention to Earth and to his wife, who now was in her early 60s.
	And he explained that she was dying of cancer.
	And he said, I can't be with her the way I am.
	And I want to be with her when she crosses.
	So that was that defined the task of what I and my prayer partner were invited to do, help this guy get ready to greet his wife when she died.
	Was he in some kind Of limbo, something like that.
	Although I don't use that word because it can confuse people.
	When I was a child, limbo was this other thing because there was this presumption that only Christians could go to heaven and you had to be baptized to be a Christian.
	But some people die without baptism, and God certainly wouldn't want to send all of them to hell just because they couldn't get baptized.
	So there must be a place in the afterlife, sort of an asterisk.
	There's this other place.
	Well, during his pontificate, Pope Benedict just one day said, everybody stop talking about limbo.
	It doesn't exist.
	Okay, so we have to find another term for it or another way of understanding.
	Yeah, just a space.
	He was in some afterlife space of his own choosing.
	If I were as a Catholic to have to pin it down, I would say it seems to me it's purgatorial.
	But the fact of the matter is that the word purgatory never comes up in any of the conversations that I've been involved in helping people cross.
	And so I try to just stick to the data.
	And purgatory is a word that people misuse anywhere.
	I mean, where I was brought up in Liverpool, people would say, oh, I've been stuck on this job for the last seven days.
	It's absolute purgatory.
	It's a word that people, they read many meanings into it.
	I don't mind using it when I'm among Catholics who share a common definition of it.
	But when I'm around other people, as I was last week at this conference, I don't necessarily use it when I'm describing the details that are in my book because it just never comes up.
	I would be adding that to the narrative instead of recording what was in the narrative.
	So Ray had passed suddenly, and we need to just explain the circumstances of that, and was aware of where he was, was he?
	Yes, he was 20 years old.
	He explained to me that he was 20 years old.
	He had gotten his girlfriend pregnant when they were 18.
	They graduated high school.
	They got married.
	They were raising their child.
	He had gone into a little business with a buddy repairing cars in a garage that was adjacent to his house.
	And one day they had had a little too much to drink.
	They were arguing.
	And he was sitting on the radiator of this car.
	And he doesn't even know how he caught fire, but he did.
	His clothing was greasy.
	And somehow he came into contact with something that set his clothes on fire and he died.
	Good Lord.
	Forgive me for saying that, but literally and metaphorically, I mean that.
	The very first words he said to me were, who the hell does he think he has taken me just when my life was getting good?
	Surely there was some anger there then, some resentment.
	He was angry at God because he had been taught that the reason that people die is because God takes them.
	But you would say that what was keeping him where he was was not God.
	It was his notion of God.
	Who would want to be with someone who burned you to death?
	He was taught that God is the reason that people die and that essentially that God had set him on fire.
	So he wanted no part of God.
	And did he talk with, was he able to communicate with you precisely what he'd believed and what he'd been taught when he was a kid would occur when he passed?
	In other words, did he believe that he was going to heaven?
	He was only 20, so he wasn't paying very much attention to death.
	But he had been taught by his pastor that God takes people, that's the reason they die.
	And he was just really, really angry about that and had just decided, I'm not going anywhere that God is.
	So he stayed in this middle land, seeing what happened to his partner, seeing what happened to the world, observing everything, but being unable to move on or do anything much himself.
	Yes, he understood that he chose this.
	He wasn't sentenced to anything or being punished for anything.
	He chose his circumstance, but he wanted it to change because he wanted to greet his wife when she came and he said, I can't the way I am.
	So I said, well, we're going to have to move fast because you've been gone for 40 years with very little show for it.
	Cancer has its own schedule and it's not going to wait on you.
	You're going to need to change quickly and I'll help you.
	And you can opt out of the process anytime you like if you decide to, if I'm too hard on you or if I'm pushing you too hard, it's not because I'm impatient.
	It's because I'm trying to help you.
	And how did you know what to do?
	Well, just common sense, I think.
	I pray to the Holy Spirit to be guided and led, but it was counseling, and I've done pastoral counseling my whole life.
	And the crux of a lot of counseling is people don't seek out a counselor very often until they feel optionless.
	Nothing that they're trying to do is working.
	That's when they're motivated to go seek the counsel of somebody else when they're stuck.
	And then you just listen for, I listen for logical inconsistencies when, or I challenge beliefs that seem to be in the way, like, who taught you that about God?
	How do you know God kills people and takes them into fire?
	I don't think that's true.
	So challenging some presumptions that had him in a mind.
	So you entered into a dialogue with him?
	Yes, I did.
	And how did you conduct that?
	Was that in your dreams?
	No, it was with the help of a prayer partner.
	She had a gift that I think belongs, in Christian vocabulary, belongs to the gift of prophecy.
	Other people would call it either mediumship or channeling, both of which in a Catholic context are very loaded, negative words.
	Well, I have to say that when I was a kid, I think I'm right in saying that there would have been priests and people connected with the Catholic Church where I was brought up who would have seen mediums and all that sort of stuff as being evil, as being, you know, the devil's work.
	Well, earlier you asked me, you know, why me?
	and I don't presume that I'm the only person who does this kind of work.
	I get it, that it's it that moving into these spiritual realms can be dangerous because I do believe in the dark side and the existence of fallen angels and malevolent spirits.
	And did you ever come into contact with any of those things?
	Well, you always are, but they're sneaky.
	Everybody is affected, at least at the level of temptation.
	But yes, I've done a little bit.
	I'm not an exorcist, which a lot of Catholics immediately start thinking along those lines.
	But yes, I've dealt with demonic spirits some in the course of my work.
	I might have asked you during the radio show, were you aware of the work of Father Malachi Martin?
	Yes, I read a lot of him many years ago.
	But the work that I do really doesn't involve the demonic hardly at all.
	It really is just a counseling ministry for people that seek me out and need some help.
	And it turns out that I believe that my prayer partners and I are able to help them.
	So in Ray's case, you reasoned with Ray, and Ray saw, literally saw the light, and was able to go to the place that he was meant to be so that he could then greet his wife when she passed.
	Yes, and he was trying to leap from isolation, self-imposed isolation, to communion with his wife without anything in between.
	And that just didn't seem wise to me.
	I thought, let's see if we can get you at least back into society a bit.
	Let's practice being with somebody else before your wife dies.
	And so we ended up asking him if there's somebody, he knew somebody that had died already who he knew loved him.
	And I asked him about his father.
	He told me that his mother taught him about God and made him kneel next to his bed when he was a child and she beat him while he prayed.
	So I didn't think she should be the first person that he meet because she sounds too odd.
	But I asked about his father and he said, well, he died when I was 10.
	I was a little afraid of him.
	I didn't really know him very well.
	He died in the war, which he meant Korean war.
	So I said, well, what if we asked him to come for you?
	Do you think you'd be comfortable going with him?
	Was there ever a time when the two of you had a great father-son moment?
	And he said, one time we went and looked at cars.
	I said, well, what if we ask him to come and be with you and help you kind of practice being with other people again?
	He agreed to that, and that's what happened.
	Right.
	And so his father was a kind of ambassador?
	Someone to break the ice, just to get him back into circulation and out of the isolation that he had chosen.
	They had a good time together.
	He told me that they went and looked at the new cars.
	So somewhere on Earth, a spirit team of father and son went to a car lot to look at cars.
	I was going to say to you, it's just like real, it's just like this existence.
	You know, I used to go to car dealerships with my dad to look at the cars.
	Well, that's a very male thing, don't you think?
	It is.
	And it's a bonding sort of thing.
	And it's exactly, you know, it clearly fulfilled the purpose.
	And remember, his business was repairing cars.
	So he might have had a larger interest and love for automobiles than most of us would.
	And do you think there was some kind of healing in that for him, too, that he was able to go back and be around cars, which were the cause of his ultimate demise?
	Yeah, well, the car didn't really cause it.
	He doesn't really know what caused his demise.
	He still doesn't know why he caught fire.
	He just did.
	But yeah, come to think of it, it might be nice that that was part of his healing was looking at cars.
	Right.
	And we have a saying over here.
	I think you have it in the States too.
	When the penny dropped, at what point were you aware that the penny dropped for him and that it all fell into place and he was able to go where he was supposed to go?
	Well, I told him, I think I know what's wrong, Ray, and I don't think you're going to like it.
	I think you behave like a caveman whenever you talk about your wife.
	You act like she's your possession and that it seems to me if you had the opportunity when she passes, you just might grab her by her hair and pull her into your cave.
	I think you just need to be a gentleman and realize that you're not the only person that she loves and that you'll probably be in a small group of people who are also eager to greet her, people who loved her in different ways.
	So doesn't that make sense?
	He agreed that that did make sense and that he could make room.
	He could be in a small group.
	And that's what ultimately happened.
	When she passed, he said, well, he informed us.
	I asked him, so what's new?
	And he said, big news.
	My wife passed.
	And I said, well, how did that go?
	That is big news.
	And he said, I did just what you said and I humbled myself to be one person in a group.
	You'd have been proud of me.
	I was a perfect gentleman.
	And then if this was a movie, he would have faded away and you never saw him again.
	Did it happen that way?
	That was, well, before he was leaving, I said, I think our work here is finished, so I don't think I'll see you again until I die.
	But now that you know how to greet people when they pass, what would you think about waiting for me or keeping an eye on me and greeting me when I pass?
	And he said, sir, I'd be most honored.
	Just look for the perfect gentleman.
	And were you able to verify his real life story?
	No, I haven't.
	And I kind of wonder, you're helping me and my story and the book that tells the story reach a wider audience.
	I kind of wonder if there's going to be somebody within the sound of my voice that decides I'd like to take that up.
	I'd like to do the research and see if I could find Next of Kin and that sort of thing.
	Did he give you a full name?
	No, I would have to go back and ask.
	I only have a few details that wouldn't be very helpful in such a search.
	I guess it would be possible to work it back if he told you anything about his working environment.
	You know, how many Car shops are there?
	Yeah, I tried a little bit of doing that initially.
	When I first started doing this, the internet didn't quite yet exist, or at least I didn't know about it.
	And then when it did, and it became possible to do searches, I did a little bit of that, but I found that it's way more laborious than it would appear.
	Yeah, I mean, look, you could spend the rest of your life doing that.
	And, you know, there are those who would say, why would you want to?
	And there would be others who would say, in order for this to be validated, you have to do it.
	So like everything in this world, there are two ways of seeing it.
	On a practical level, people kept coming at the pace of about once a week.
	Did they?
	So I always had a next one to deal with.
	And it just felt like, remember, I'm a priest, and I believe that I'm led by the Holy Spirit, and I do what the Spirit asks me to do.
	And I discern that the Spirit keeps sending me new people.
	My work is plainly right in front of me.
	Just stay at your post and do your job.
	And it's not your job to verify.
	That might happen later, but right now there's other work to be done, other people to help.
	So they're still coming.
	Absolutely.
	Somebody came.
	Well, let's see.
	I had somebody not this past night, but the night before.
	And I think I have about five or six in the queue right now that I haven't.
	I've had the dream, but I haven't yet been with a prayer partner to help the person cross.
	Can you tell me anything about the most recent example or one of them?
	Yeah.
	There was one who died in the Rwandan genocide.
	Do you remember that?
	Yes, I do.
	I mean, absolutely.
	It was a horrific and bloody chapter.
	Yes.
	It was a family, a husband, wife, and a daughter that came, and they showed me only they kind of clustered as they might before a camera and waved at me.
	But they didn't show me anything violent, which is usually the way these things operate.
	I see the car crash or the shooting or whatever.
	And the man explained to me, he said, well, the way that we died was so horrible, I thought it a mercy not to show it to you.
	They were hacked to death with machetes by their neighbors.
	Appalling.
	Yeah, he just said, I was trying.
	He said, I hope that you would simply see us waving and smiling, and you did, and you came to help us.
	And what do they want from you?
	They wanted to cross over, and they just hadn't when that horror happened to them.
	They had fled to a Catholic church, hoping to have sanctuary, to be kept safe, and they hid.
	But when they were, he said, when one's in hiding, one hopes that should you be discovered, it's by someone who's there to save you, but that wasn't the case for us.
	It was a person who sought us out to kill us, and we die.
	What a sad, what a terrible story.
	You know, I've got listeners who will be listening to this saying, well, there is one case that you really should be working to verify, because if you could verify who those people were, and some of these things were well documented, the media were there reporting on this terrible situation.
	If you were able to verify it, then you have something that you probably think you don't need, absolute proof.
	Well, as I said earlier, maybe someone will emerge who would take that on.
	I don't have a staff.
	I'm just a guy sitting in his house in Tucson, Arizona.
	And I don't have a salary.
	I don't have a regular church job.
	I survive on speaking fees and work that I do around the edges.
	I don't have the means to employ somebody to do that.
	But I believe that if the Holy Spirit wants that to happen, that person will emerge.
	Here's a question you should never ask a priest, and you don't have to answer it.
	But have you ever doubted yourself in all of this?
	Have you ever thought, well, maybe this is something to do with me?
	You know, maybe I'm just having hallucinations or something like that, and maybe this mechanism that I'm working with and through is not what I thought it was.
	Do you ever have doubts?
	I have had doubts.
	And in my Dominican training, we learned to make distinctions and to separate things out.
	And when this first happened to me, I thought, well, it's possible.
	And then what would be the negative ramifications?
	Am I being deceived by a devil?
	If I speak of it, will I be ridiculed?
	Could I lose my priesthood?
	All that.
	But the simple answer is no, I don't doubt myself.
	One of our Dominican motto is Veritas, which is Latin for truth.
	And even writing the book was risky, but I believe I'm just telling the truth.
	I know I'm telling the truth.
	When you say it's risky beyond ridicule, what are the risks for you as a priest?
	Could you have been, you know, could they have drummed you out of the church?
	That's a possibility.
	Really?
	Well, it would depend.
	I'm not looking to be drummed out of the church.
	No, I'm listening to you.
	Absolutely, you're not.
	But, you know, if somebody decided that what you were doing was not good, not good for the church, then I presume they could take steps.
	And up to now they haven't, I presume.
	That's correct.
	And I took a vow of obedience, and that vow is lived out in obedience to my provincial.
	And the Dominican order has something about maybe 45 provinces in the world.
	In the United States, there are four of them.
	So if you think of the size of the United States divided into four quadrants, I live in the western one, and my provincial is the person who my obedience is to, and he's supportive.
	Well, that's good.
	If you were ever instructed, maybe if there's a change of management or something, if you're ever instructed to cease and desist, would you?
	Well, I would cross that bridge when I come to it.
	Is that an expression in the UK?
	Yep, very much so.
	All right.
	That dropping the penny thing is nothing I'd ever heard of before.
	I think it's something to do with slot machines in a fun fair.
	Somebody will tell me, but you know, when the penny drops, the thing works.
	I think that's supposed to be how it is.
	It's just something that we've always said over here, certainly in Liverpool.
	It's just kind of folk wisdom to cross that bridge when you come to it.
	Stay at your post, stay in the present moment, let the future will take care of itself.
	So, yeah, I sometimes have those concerns, but I try to dismiss them.
	In your book, Afterlife Interrupted, Nathan, you talk about 13 different stories.
	We heard Ray's story, who was the, you know, I'll say person, the presence who started it all off for you.
	Were there any other stories that made a particular impact that you could tell me about here?
	Let me turn the question back on you.
	Are there any that you found particularly interesting?
	Well, I would rather as to how it impacted upon you.
	All right.
	Well, I'm going to tell one that I've done a lot of interviews, and rather than bore myself by making this interview like all the others, I think I'll pick a different one this time.
	Please do.
	There was a young man whose name is Paul who somewhere in the early 1950s borrowed his grandmother's car right after graduation from high school and went on a double date.
	He was with a gal pal, but the other two were interested in romance.
	And they had brought beer that they were drinking, but Paul was driving and did not have anything to drink.
	They wanted a dark place to park.
	So he pulled off a road that he was unfamiliar with in a forest.
	It was badly, not at all lit.
	And the car drove over some wood that he thought must be a wooden bridge.
	In fact, it turned out it was a pier.
	And he drove off the end of it into a lake, and they all died.
	He was very responsible.
	And at the moment of his death, he felt like he needed to stay with the car and he needed to take pictures for the insurance and he needed to be there when the police came.
	So he didn't leave the scene because he was trying to be responsible for what he had just caused.
	And he really didn't realize that he'd been part of it and that he'd passed as well.
	He was confused about that initially.
	So when people first came for him, which is the way it works, when you die, there will be people who come for you to help you and to guide you along.
	But you don't have to go with them if you are unprepared to or just don't want to.
	Nobody's going to drag you into the afterlife.
	I wonder what that dialogue is like.
	If those people come along, say, if it's me or anybody, you know, they're people presumably who've been close to you and they say, time for you to come with us.
	And you say, I'm not going anywhere.
	I'm staying right here.
	You know, what's that?
	Do they just say, well, okay, you know, it's your loss.
	See you later.
	How does that work?
	They're loving people and so they're patient.
	They're not offended that you didn't go with them.
	They just say, well, then our services aren't needed here, so we'll be on our way.
	Anyway, he did stay behind.
	But when he was ready to pass, he did come in a dream.
	The prayer partner that I was with that day had never done this before.
	It was his first time.
	But he was very compassionate and he listened carefully.
	And Paul decided that he was minus four man.
	Most American high school students have to read The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
	Do you know that story?
	No, I don't.
	Well, it's an American story, and so it's part of American education in literature.
	It involves a Puritan woman who had sex and got pregnant out of marriage in, I don't know, the 1600s or something like that, maybe 1700s.
	And she wore a scarlet letter.
	They made her wear a scarlet A so that for the rest of her life, everybody knew she was an adulteress.
	So he knew that story because all of us had to read it when we were in high school.
	And he decided he must be like that, but he had subtracted four young lives from the earth.
	And so he was minus four man.
	And so he was punishing himself.
	Correct.
	And he felt like he needed to wear this minus four on his chest.
	And the other victims, the other people who died, they had a smooth passage?
	Presumably, because my prayer partner, I was helping him speak, and my prayer partner is the one responding to him.
	And he said, you know, the longer you talk, the more I'm sure that you're not minus four, man.
	You're minus one, man, because you haven't seen the other three.
	They crossed.
	You're the one that stayed behind.
	You're not really minus four.
	You're minus one.
	He turned it into an algebra problem.
	Do you remember studying algebra?
	Sadly, yes, I do.
	I hate it.
	I saw a t-shirt recently that someone was wearing that said, another day I didn't need algebra.
	Yes, yeah, I did.
	You know, we used to have logarithmic tables and algebra lessons.
	And I think a lot of these things, we digress here, but a lot of these things depend on the person who's doing the teaching.
	And I have to say, for part of my mathematical education, I had an absolute tyrant of a maths teacher.
	And consequently, I couldn't learn.
	When I got a better maths teacher, I improved enormously.
	But sadly, too late to rectify things as far as algebra is concerned.
	Yeah, bad teachers can really change the course of a young person's academic life.
	Yeah, that's the problem.
	Well, anyway, the opposite is true.
	Yes, sorry, you were saying.
	Precisely, precisely.
	And I can think of professors that loved me that made me love their topic.
	Yep, me too.
	Me too.
	Sorry, I interrupted you.
	That's all right.
	Once he accepted that he was minus one man, my partner, whose name is John, in that one, said, let's turn this into algebra.
	There's an equal sign in the middle, and there's two sides.
	Your companions cross over to the other side, and so it's x, what did he do?
	x minus 1, because Paul wanted to be minus 1, equals y plus 3.
	So, what we need to do is get you onto the other side of the equal sign.
	And he thought, that's brilliant.
	I was really good at math.
	And he said, you know, when you use a word and you look it up in the dictionary, the same word can mean a dozen different things.
	He said, that's just not true about numbers.
	Nine is always one less than 10 and one more than eight.
	Numbers are just a much more precise way to describe things.
	So he really liked numbers.
	So he said, okay, well, now you're minus one, man.
	How do we get you?
	Wouldn't you have to add one to both sides of the equation to get the minus one to go away?
	Do you remember that?
	Dimly.
	Dimly.
	It's slightly traumatic to think back to it, but yes.
	One more time.
	X minus one plus one equals Y plus three plus one.
	All right.
	So if he accepts the truth and relevance of that equation, then he's done.
	Yeah, well, he accepted it, and then we said, now we need to figure out how to get you to go from being minus one to plus one.
	And right at that moment, he said, wait a minute, something's happening.
	And we got still.
	And he said, oh my God, it's my high school principal, Mr. Wambacher.
	And he's holding a football jersey that's purple and gold, which were our school colors.
	And it's a plus one.
	And he's saying to me, put this on.
	So Paul put on the plus one and became plus one man, and he went to the other side.
	And thereby was assimilated.
	And I guess you heard no more from him?
	Other than to get his permission, because when it was time to tell these stories, they do resemble a counseling appointment.
	And I wouldn't presume if you were my counsellee, if you gave me a fascinating story, I'm not going to write a book about it.
	At least not.
	Just like if I do an interview with somebody, you know, for broadcast, obviously you have to get their permission for its use.
	And once they're given their permission, then you can use it how you wish, how you discuss.
	You had to do that with the people who are subjects of the book.
	I didn't have to, but in order to satisfy my own ethics, I had to.
	How did you do that?
	Well, my prayer partner, Laura, was helping me design the book.
	And I just kept saying, you know, I just feel ill at ease about whether I have permission to use these.
	And she said, you've mentioned that several times, and it's upsetting you.
	Why don't we go back into prayer?
	They talk to you once.
	You're certainly not trying to just chat them up for no reason.
	You have an important question to ask.
	Maybe the spirit would honor that and maybe they would come and give you an answer.
	So I thought, okay, well, that makes sense.
	Let's try it.
	And then when we did, instead of just getting a yes or no answer, we also got little updates on what people had been doing since we last saw them.
	That's nice.
	And had most or all of them progressed?
	Were they happier?
	Were they more resigned?
	Not resigned.
	Were they more at peace and one with themselves?
	Yes, they were.
	And you know a lot of people, and you know how different people can be.
	And there are different ways to live a life.
	So each of them had their own stories to tell.
	Remember that they're a small subset.
	They're people that died sudden, violent deaths that didn't cross.
	And they were still in whatever the first phase of their afterlife, active afterlife anyway, was progressing.
	So they all had stories to tell about what they did when they got crossed over.
	And in his case, I think it's been a while since I've read that one.
	He wanted to know more about school and what he could learn.
	I remember he wanted to try to apologize to the three friends whose lives he had accidentally taken, but was told not yet.
	It's not time for that yet.
	And he also said that he wanted me to let my friend John know that he's trying to stay around him a little bit to cheer him up.
	Okay.
	And were you able to make that happen?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	John is aware that, well, John is just a sweet soul of a man, but sometimes he deals with depression.
	And if you know anyone who suffers from depression, they often can be tempted to isolation.
	And then when they're isolated with their own depressing thoughts can get themselves into an emotional sad state.
	And so he said, I know this of John.
	And so I tried to hang around him a bit to try to lighten things.
	There's one thing on your website.
	You say that you assisted the deceased sister of Patrick Swayze.
	I presume you got permission to tell that story.
	You wouldn't have mentioned it on your website if you hadn't, but what's that story about?
	That one is a lovely one.
	In fact, I was on the internet last night and watched a documentary about Patrick.
	I was working at Stanford University and I had the credentials to be in Stanford Hospital and visit the sick.
	And my sister was living in Oregon and she was raising alpacas, which are from Peru.
	My sister felt like if she was going to love Peruvian exotic animals, that she ought to love Peruvian people.
	So she would go to the Andes Mountains in the summers and learn to be a dental assistant in these remote places where people had bad teeth.
	And she was praying to St. Rose of Lima, who's also a Dominican, as I am.
	And she was at prayer in her house in Oregon and said, St. Rose just wouldn't leave me alone this morning.
	She kept telling me to find my brother Johnny Castle, help my brother Johnny Castle.
	She said, I don't have a brother named Johnny.
	I have a brother named Nathan and David and Mike, but I don't have a Johnny.
	But St. Rose was insistent about help your brother Johnny Castle.
	So she went to the internet and typed in Johnny Castle and up came Patrick Swayze.
	That was the title of his character in Dirty Dancing, which was the film that launched his career.
	Why would she use the name Johnny Castle?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	Why do they have to be so cryptic?
	I don't know.
	But in a way, it was a guide.
	And one thing I haven't done, by the way, you've been getting emails or notifications from time to time during this, simply because what you're saying is so compelling.
	I haven't stopped you.
	I didn't want to stop the flow in the middle of it.
	Yeah, and I don't know how to turn that noise off.
	I need to, you know, remember, I'm a 63-year-old priest who's kind of a, you know, being dragged into the 21st century.
	Oh, as indeed we all are.
	You know, sometimes I get texts and emails and messages when I'm on the radio, and they look at me through the glass in the radio studio as much as to say, do you know that you've got to mute that phone?
	But it isn't today.
	That's for another day.
	Okay.
	Anyway, my sister said, I knew that he was dying in the hospital, and now I'm supposed to help Johnny Castle.
	So I went to the head of chaplains, explained the whole thing, because I didn't think he would laugh at me.
	Or if he did, I could endure it.
	And he said, you may not visit a celebrity who has not asked you, not inquired after you.
	And so I sat in the hospital's lobby hoping that someone would walk up to me and say, thank God you're here.
	And that didn't happen.
	So eventually we went back into prayer.
	And I just said, I'm trying to do all I can to help Johnny Castle.
	I just don't know what to do.
	And with a prayer partner, my partner said, well, there's somebody here that's come in reply to this question.
	And it turned out to be his sister, Vicki.
	So Vicki had grown up in North Houston, about an hour's drive from where I grew up.
	They're about my age.
	I'm a little bit younger.
	But she had died.
	She had become an alcoholic early in her 20s.
	She was in a garage band and played at small clubs and stuff in Houston and got involved in the late night alcohol and drug scene and became an addict.
	And she died in addiction.
	And she died sad that she was such a drain on her family and that she couldn't be relied upon to be helpful because she couldn't stay sober long enough to do that.
	And now in the afterlife, her brother was about to die.
	And she said, I want to show them all that I can really step up my game and I can be a force for the good.
	She wanted to stay behind and help cross with her brother.
	Right.
	So, I mean, this is all very verifiable because you're talking about public figures.
	This one is, yes.
	And maybe one of these days I'll hear from somebody in his family if this book ever finds its way to them.
	And then we would.
	Do you know People Magazine?
	Yes.
	I was in the grocery store line.
	They often have that, at least I don't know if they do that in the UK, but in the States, while you're having to wait your turn to get your groceries paid for.
	They hope you buy a magazine.
	Yeah, and so there was Patrick Swayze.
	So I bought the magazine, brought it home, and I learned that they had grown up in North Houston, and they were Catholic, and they had gone to St. Rose of Lima Catholic School and Church.
	Well, that's astonishing.
	If I was studying the paranormal, for want of another word, then I would say that's what you experienced in that case was evidential.
	I think so.
	You know, then about people and what they believe, you know, you can't run around every last person on the earth and get them to believe what you said just because you want to, to leave people free to believe as they please.
	But that's the way that played out.
	She just needed to have some assurance that she was ready to help.
	And she did get to cross with him.
	And then when we spoke with her to get her permission to use the story, she talked a little bit about the process.
	And he was standing right next to her, but he spoke to her and said, he's telling me, I had plenty of time in front of microphones.
	This is your turn.
	So he didn't feel the need to speak other than to say, she told me as she was leaving, I wouldn't say this on my own, but he's telling me that he's proud of me.
	Oh, that's a lovely story.
	That's a lovely story.
	It's a lovely story.
	To the degree that I've been able to get to know him a little bit just through watching things about him and reading about him a bit, he sounds like a person I'd very much like to know.
	How has all of this affected your view of your own mortality?
	Well, in combination with the fact that as I've grown older, a lot of my loved ones have died, it gives me a sense of eagerness about looking forward.
	The liturgy uses the phrase, looking forward in joyful hope to the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ.
	And I look forward in joyful hope to my passing and the reunions that will come with it.
	In the meanwhile, I've got work to do, and I try to be joyful about my work.
	Now, as we record this, we're sliding into early evening in the UK.
	I know it's still morning time where you are.
	Are you anticipating that a presence, a spirit, will come to you tonight?
	Well, if you just do the math of it, they come about once a week.
	So there's about a one in seven chance.
	So this could be the night for the next one.
	It might be.
	And they don't come at regular intervals.
	Sometimes there's two in the same night.
	And then the spirit can be very gentle with me in that if I'm in a particularly busy moment in my life with a lot of things going on, very often I'll have a night without a visitor for a stretch of Time.
	But you presumably always keep a notepad by the bed.
	I do.
	I keep a notepad there so that I can immediately write down what I receive.
	It's an amazing story.
	The book is called Afterlife Interrupted: Helping Stock Souls Cross Over.
	And how's it doing internationally, Nathan?
	It's hard for me to say.
	It's only available on Amazon.
	It's not in any bookstores.
	It's what's called hybrid published.
	My sister is a publisher, and so she helped me get the book and my previous book into the marketplace, but it's only available on Amazon.
	We don't have a distributor or a publishing house that's bought the rights to it.
	But it's doing very well.
	And I have recorded the audiobook version, and it also is a Kindle.
	It has the e-book option.
	And then in addition to that, I've created an online course that will accompany it.
	The online course is in post-production right now.
	It's a series of six hours of video.
	And I've seen some of it and have signed off on it.
	But I hope that in about a month, that will be available on my website.
	Now, when I started doing this podcast, because I'm journalistically trained, I used to ask questions that I tend not to ask anymore because I just don't enjoy asking them.
	But I will on this occasion just ask this, and I hope you accept it in the spirit in which I say it.
	Are you making money out of this?
	Right now, I have a lot of upfront costs.
	The money that I had to put out to get having to be coached and everything because I'm always doing things I don't know how to do.
	So you have to pay for the coaching and pay for the production crews and all of that.
	Right, but I hope that the receipts are covering those costs.
	They haven't yet, but I believe it's an upfront cost.
	It takes money to make money, spend money to make money.
	In the end, I have a dollar poverty, so I won't be, my standard of living won't change.
	I need to send $40,000 U.S. to my headquarters to educate seminarians.
	We have about 30 young men that are in seminary, and they're expensive.
	So any money that this makes will go to those works?
	Either to those works or kind of cycled back into whatever the next expenses I have are.
	The way that a company would, some of your profits are going to go back into producing a next thing.
	But I'm pleased with it.
	I'd kind of like it if I got the right offer for a publishing contract, but that hasn't come along yet.
	I've had a couple of interested parties that I just declined.
	What about television?
	This story I think would be fabulous for Eden, as long as you had some control over it.
	It would be wonderful on television.
	I was recently asked to be a consultant on a show in the United States about ghosts, but they wouldn't give me any say about how it was edited, and they wouldn't let me meet any of the principal characters involved ahead of time.
	So it was going to be reality television that to me just felt exploitative.
	So I just had to decline it.
	I suppose the first one I kind of understand.
	The second one I don't get at all.
	Why they wouldn't want you to meet the other people involved.
	Perhaps they thought that might put you off.
	And inevitably, it probably would.
	Well, I wouldn't want to attach my name to something where I had no say at all about what the finished product looked like.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Well, being slightly prophetic myself, maybe you'll end up doing this yourself as well.
	Possibly.
	I think it would make I would like for people to wait in joyful hope.
	And if I were ever going to have a show, I think what I'd like it to be would be having someone who had done all the investigative work and helped me connect with loved ones and next of kin and meet those people.
	Nathan, thank you very much.
	I'm glad that we had this second conversation and we weren't interrupted by commercial breaks and all those things that you have on radio.
	I told you the first time around, even though it was kind of truncated time-wise, because these things always are, that I was fascinated by the story and it made me think, and I'm still thinking.
	So thank you.
	Well, good.
	You're delightful to talk to.
	And if you'd like to talk again, you know how to reach me.
	Nathan G. Castle, and to remind you, the book, which, as he said, is available through Amazon, is called Afterlife Interrupted, Helping Stuck Souls Cross Over.
	And I don't know about you.
	I found that absolutely fascinating.
	And at times, as I did the first time around when we spoke, moving and compelling too.
	More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
	So until next we meet here, my name is Howard Hughes.
	I am in London.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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