The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 422 - Graham Phillips

Dec. 6, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:02:23

Edition 422 - Graham Phillips

Researcher Graham Phillips on his part in unravelling the mystery of a Green Stone with strange powers linked with a Secret...

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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 once again for being part of my show.
	Well and truly into winter time now and on this edition we have one of the most remarkable stories that I have ever been privileged to tell on The Unexplained.
	A man called Graham Phillips is my guest.
	More about him in a moment.
	Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell for another year of excellent work on the unexplained.
	Adam is at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool and he is the person who gets the show out to you.
	Make sure the website keeps cranking on and also just make sure that everything is ticking over, which it is.
	Thank you very much to you, by the way.
	If you've sent an email in recently, thank you for that.
	If that email requires a response, then I will do my very best to make sure that it gets one.
	And if it doesn't, please remind me.
	The website is theunexplained.tv and go to the website, follow the link there, and you can send me an email directly.
	If you have a problem with the shows technically or the website, then there's a link there for the webmaster.
	That'll reach Adam.
	And if you'd like to make a donation to the show as we come to the end of this year, that would be very, very gratefully received.
	And if you have recently made a donation, thank you very much indeed.
	Now, I said that the person that we're about to speak with is pretty remarkable, and so is the story.
	The story is just amazing.
	And thank you very much to the listener.
	You know who you are who suggested that we did this.
	I am very grateful to you.
	Graham Phillips is described as a modern-day adventurer, a real-life Indiana Jones.
	And when I read that, I thought, wow, this is just hype.
	But I have to tell you, the story you're about to hear from the English Midlands that dates back 40 years and brings us right up to the present day is, as I said, one of the most astonishing stories that I think I've ever had the privilege of being able to relay to you here on The Unexplained.
	It involves a stone, a green stone, a stone with a history, a stone that has a remarkable backstory is the only way I can put, without spoiling the story, put it to you.
	And a stone that appeared to have astonishing power.
	And when I say astonishing power, I mean it.
	Words do not really sufficiently sum up what this thing appeared to have, the Greenstone.
	Graham Phillips has written a book about it.
	This story, I think, should have been a movie before now.
	But you judge for yourself, because I'm not going to say any more words on this edition of The Unexplained.
	We're going to cross to Stafford in the English Midlands, a place I know well, and say Graham Phillips.
	Thank you very much for coming on my show.
	Absolutely my pleasure.
	And nice to be speaking to Stafford.
	I used to live in the Midlands, so I kind of still get a bit of a hankering for it.
	I hope everything is good there as we speak on this evening.
	We're recording this.
	Yes, it's, well, kind of cold, but it's nice.
	Yeah, no, I always like living there and nice people, too.
	Okay, tell me a little bit about yourself, because I understand that you have a bit of a broadcasting background, Graham.
	Yes, I originally started off working for a newspaper in London, weekly newspaper, and then I started to work for Radio Birmingham as it was then, Radio WM as it is now, from Pebble Mill.
	And I did a weekly show all about local myths and legends and traditions of Birmingham and the Black Country.
	And I started to get interested in the paranormal and the unexplained and mysteries because that was what we ended up covering most of all.
	I mean, you've only got so many strange, unusual festivals every week in the Midlands.
	And so sometimes we thought, well, what can we cover?
	And we started looking into people's claims of haunted houses and poltergeists and that sort of thing.
	So that's how I first got interested in the unexplained.
	Well, right.
	You know, I know the Midlands and I know that it is, as many other regions are, but it is replete with stories of that kind.
	But back in the days when you were doing that, there wouldn't have been, apart from the odd newspaper story, and even then the newspapers wouldn't take it too seriously, there were not that many outlets for that material.
	There weren't at all.
	There had been a magazine called The Unexplained, which came out about the same time, and it did quite well.
	And because of that, I was approached by a group of people who had raised money to start a magazine to investigate the paranormal primarily as a monthly magazine.
	And they called it Strange Phenomena.
	And they actually offered me the job as the editor.
	And that was based in Staffordshire, as it was then, Wolverhampton.
	Wolverhampton's now its own city.
	But then it was part of the county of Staffordshire.
	And the magazine was not just for the Midlands.
	It was sold all over the country.
	It was a newsstand magazine.
	And I got to edit this thing.
	And it was pretty amazing, really, that I should be doing something which was, well, virtually unheard of at that time.
	So what sorts of stories did you tell back then?
	And what sorts of stories did you hear?
	Well, I remember the first case that we investigated was a haunted house in Cannock in the Midlands.
	And there was a family living there that were having virtually identical things happening to them that was happening in perhaps the most famous poltergeist case in the world at that time, which was the Amateurville Horror.
	That was the name of the film that was made of it.
	And it was very similar to that.
	So because there was quite a lot of interest in the Amateurville horror, because I think the film had just come out, or at least the book had, and we went along and I thought, wow, these people are just trying to jump on the bandwagon there in a council house.
	They want to get out of it.
	They want to claim to the council that there's something wrong with the house.
	So they're making up this ghost story.
	But I was there and I witnessed some things.
	I stayed.
	They let us stay overnight, myself and a fellow reporter, stay overnight in the house on our own with nobody else there to throw things about.
	There was no cupboards to hide in or anything.
	We'd check the whole place out.
	And we heard strange noises.
	And on one occasion, one of the kids' toys from upstairs somehow got out of the bedroom and just rolled down the stairs and landed at our feet.
	And I couldn't explain this.
	So I remember that one very clearly.
	And was there in that particular instance, they sometimes say, they often say with poltergeist cases, there is a focus for the activity.
	There is perhaps a young person, maybe an adolescent, in the home, and that person is the focus for this activity.
	Was that the case, can you remember there?
	Yes, it was.
	There was a girl there at about 13 years of age and she seemed to have been the focus of it, although she was not in the building when we saw what we saw.
	So I think the general thinking at the time was that somehow young people going through an adolescence could somehow open a, I don't know, some kind of psychic rift or something whereby poltergeist phenomena would then happen in that place and wouldn't necessarily follow that person around.
	The person themselves wouldn't be haunted, but the house in which they lived was.
	That was the general theory at that time.
	And in that case, it sounded like whatever it was was just sort of having fun with the people, or did it get more serious than that?
	No, it never really, that never really got serious.
	It never ended up with sort of all sorts of weird and wonderful things happening like happened in the Amateurville horror.
	But we didn't realize at that time that it was not going to be long before the headquarters that we had for the magazine in Wolverhampton, which was an old rambling Victorian building, that this was soon going to be the focus of what can only be described as bizarre paranormal phenomena.
	You're kidding.
	Well, it started with, I mean, it started quite, innocently nothing to do with the paranormal.
	We were investigating a local legend that there was once supposed to have been a green gemstone that belonged to the deposed monarch, Mary Queen of Scots.
	She'd had it on a ring.
	It was thought to be some kind of sacred item, some relic.
	And the story was that it fell into the hands of a group of people who had a secret society in the Midlands that met at a place called Cannons Ashby House, which is near in Northamptonshire.
	This group included the Elizabethan astrologer and occultist, Dr. John Dee, who wrote about this stone, calling it the Lapis Exilis.
	It was supposed to have had some kind of strange power to, I suppose we'd say today, bend reality.
	He was using it in various alchemical experiments he was supposedly conducting in the 16th century.
	Now, this stone eventually, according to legend, fell into the hands of the gunpowder plotters.
	And one of the gunpowder plotters, the one who led it, Robert Catesby, when he was fleeing from the authorities when the gunpowder plot went wrong and Guy Fawkes was arrested beneath the houses of parliament, he managed to flee.
	But before he was shot dead, he managed to make sure that this stone was hidden because it was important to this group.
	And apparently, according to the legend, Catesby and some of these other people in the gunpowder plot were involved with this same group, which was called the Order of Nehoniah.
	Now, we found out historical evidence that this group did exist, that it had been founded by John Dee.
	But what was fascinating is that the legend said that at the home of one of the gunpowder conspirators and member of this group, a man called Humphrey Packington, in his home at a place called Harvington Hall, an old Shudam Manor not far from Kiddeminster, that there had been left clues for some person in the future to find.
	They never discovered these clues.
	They deliberately left behind a trail.
	If there was any clues.
	They deliberately left behind a trail.
	They did left behind a trail because it looked like they were all going to be sort of rounded up by the authorities.
	Robert Catesby himself was shot dead just outside Wolverhampton at a place called Holbeach House with a number of other members of the gunpowder plot.
	Members of this group that had been founded by John Dee, they were rounded up as being undesirables and tried for various things like witchcraft and you name it.
	I was going to say that that would be the thing that they would get them for.
	Can we just explain to our American listeners who may not know?
	I'm sure they do, but if they don't, the gunpowder plotters were the people who were planning to blow up parliament essentially and as we say today, make a change.
	Yeah, it wasn't just that the people involved in this group that had been started by John Dee were people who wanted to see changes in society, generally speaking.
	They wanted more freedom for religious tolerance.
	They wanted more political freedom and freedom primarily to investigate the new discipline of science.
	And so some of them were Catholics because it was a Protestant regime in this country under Queen Elizabeth during the late 1500s.
	Some of these people were Catholics.
	Some were Protestants.
	Some, like Sir Walter Raleigh, who was part of the group, were atheists.
	He was actually locked up in prison for 16 years before eventually having his head chopped off for being an atheist.
	But that wasn't during Queen Elizabeth's time.
	That was during her successor, James I's time, who basically came crashing down on anyone who wasn't a strict Anglican Protestant.
	So that's the background to it.
	The group kind of somehow split up and Catesby and his followers were Catholic activists and they came up with this idea of blowing up the king and parliament.
	I think the others, certainly people like Walter Raleigh, didn't know anything about this, although James I thought he probably did.
	That's why he was locked up.
	So that's the background to it.
	So when these people, the reason they hid this stone, which had been one of their precious possessions, remember, not only were they political activists and so forth, they were also people who believed in the occult.
	They believed in alchemy.
	And at that point, alchemy and something like science were pretty much intertwined as one.
	The greatest scientist of all time, Isaac Newton, who lived in the mid-1600s, was himself a self-confessed alchemist before he suddenly started to look at things in a more scientific way and pretty much invent modern science and physics.
	So these people were believers in the occult.
	They had reason to believe that this stone, this green stone, had some kind of supernatural properties.
	They wanted to hide it so that maybe if some of them survived the persecutions that would follow the gunpowder plot, they would be able to go and dig it up.
	And that is why these clues were supposedly hidden at Harvington Hall, this old Elizabethan manor house.
	I had no idea that there was a confluence between those people who were involved in the gunpowder plot and these people who were, you know, looking into alchemy and the beginnings of science and things that the state at the time would not have liked because they didn't understand them.
	And that's, you know, that kind of thing happens today.
	I had no idea that that was an intersection that was happening.
	That's fascinating, Graham.
	Well, the proof of that is if you go to Cannon's Ashby House, which is near Daventry in the county of Northamptonshire, there's a room there where they all met.
	And on the wall, this room was only discovered in the last couple of decades.
	We didn't even know about this when all this was going on.
	But this room has got all the coat of arms of all the people involved in this group who used to meet.
	We know it was an occult society because there's occult symbolism there that has been found, that have been behind wall panelling.
	And all these coat of arms of people that are there, including Dr. John Dee, Robert Catesby, the leader of the gunpowder plotters, and Sir Walter Raleigh, all these people's shields were on the wall showing that without doubt they did all meet and were part of some sort of occult society.
	And at the heart of it, this green stone that had some kind of, they thought, some kind of power.
	Yeah, I mean, Mary Queen of Scots had once possessed it.
	She's supposed to have brought it back from France.
	But that part of it, we don't know for certain.
	We have got, there are paintings of her with it on her finger, a green stone on the ring on her finger.
	But we thought, well, okay, there's a legend to this.
	We can't prove that this stone really existed yet.
	But let's go and have a look at Harvington Hall and see if there are anything there that look like occult clues, if you like.
	And at the time, myself and another person who was working for the magazine, Andrew Collins, who has since become an author like me, he writes about all sorts of historical mysteries too.
	He was working with the magazine.
	The two of us went along to Harvington Hall and quite astonishingly, we discovered that not long before we'd got there, during renovations to the old building so it could be open to the public, they had discovered behind the paneling, the wood paneling of an upstairs corridor, they discovered this big painting, this wall mural.
	And it depicted nine characters from history and legend, nine heroic characters.
	And the central image showed a youthful King Arthur wielding the magic sword of Excalibur.
	And behind him on the hill were gathered his knights.
	And this, we eventually decided, if there was going to be any clues in this place, must be what we were looking for.
	Right.
	So there was even a connection with that, which, of course, is previous history to the era you're talking about.
	Well, what I hadn't mentioned is one of the legends associated with this greenstone is that it had once been on the hilt of King Arthur's sword Excalibur.
	So that is why when we saw Excalibur on this wall mural that was like dated from the very time of the gunpowder plot, it had been painted in 1605, which was exactly the year of the gunpowder plot.
	And it showed King Arthur's Excalibur, we thought, this has got to be a clue of some kind, if anything is.
	And it had been deliberately hidden behind wood paneling for four centuries.
	So it had come, this item, from an era of mysticism and magic and belief in those things.
	Absolutely.
	So, okay, these people had believed this greenstone had some kind of power.
	They'd hidden it, made sure there was clues left for someone to find in the future who managed to perhaps survive the persecutions.
	Maybe they'd found this, but because it had been boarded up and no one had removed the paneling for all that time, or maybe it still remained hidden.
	Now, what were we supposed to be looking for?
	Well, to cut a very long story short, behind Arthur in the painting is depicted his knights on a hill.
	And very close by, there was a hill called Knights Hill.
	And directly below it was an old footbridge, which dated from the late 1500s, from the right time.
	And this footbridge, which crossed a little stream overlooking a lake that fed into a lake, was actually known locally as Arthur's Bridge.
	So you've got Arthur's Bridge and Knights Hill.
	And in the painting, you've got Arthur wielding Excalibur and his knights gathered on a hill behind him.
	And one would think, okay, that might not mean anything to anybody unless they were looking for something that had been associated with Excalibur.
	Yeah.
	Now, if this was a court of law, that would probably all be regarded as very good circumstantial evidence.
	But you say that there were more concrete clues, or it was thought that there was a series of more concrete clues that had been left as to the location of the Greenstone.
	Well, the first thing we did was as quickly as we could possibly do it, we went to this area called Knight's Pool, which is this lake below Knight's Hill, went to the bridge, we checked out locally and found it did date from the right time.
	We thought, if this was what someone was being led to, Arthur's bridge, by the painting, then if it could be hidden in the bridge somewhere, whereabouts?
	Now, in the painting, Arthur is looking down and to his left, and the hill is behind him, behind his left shoulder with the knights on it.
	Now, if you stood on the bridge overlooking the lake, so that the Knights Hill is behind you, behind your left shoulder, and you look down and to the left, you'd be looking at the side wall to the bridge overlooking the lake.
	Now, we thought, could it be behind one of the stones?
	And I think it was Andy Collins who eventually came up with the number nine, because nine was associated with the picture on the wall, the wall mule.
	It had been called the nine worthies.
	So eventually, we decided on nine stones along, nine stones down from the center stone of the bridge.
	You couldn't do nine stones from the edge of the bridge or any other.
	That's the only combination that worked that got you to a stone, basically.
	And we clambered down there, and the whole thing was overgrown with years of brambles and you name it, vegetation.
	I mean, I was going to say in the intervening years, even if it was there, and even if you cracked the code, then there must have been, I mean, think of how many hundred years there have been.
	There would have been changes, there would have been maintenance.
	You know, if you build a house, you've got to do pointing on the house to make sure the bricks stay in place.
	So the chances of anything being there, I would have thought, probably minimal.
	Astronomical, I'd have thought.
	But the fact was, and we discovered this later on, that the bridge had been unchanged.
	No one had done any maintenance on it or anything.
	It had been overgrown and forgotten for 400 years.
	And I suppose that's because of the way that it was built.
	If it's a stone bridge, then those things tended to, like dry stone walls, those things tended to hold.
	I think if I, I remember at the time thinking, you know, if I was going to hide something, I'd hide it somewhere that would last.
	Maybe a church or something.
	You know, that that's probably going to last.
	An old stone footbridge, you know, you think, well, that's going to last.
	But I don't think these people were intending it to last for 400 years.
	They probably thought somebody would come in within the next decade or something.
	You know, people wouldn't, they wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't send a letter.
	They couldn't send an email.
	They wouldn't tell all their friends, well, you know, by the way, just on the quiet, if ever anybody needs to locate this thing, this is where it is.
	The way that people did things, if they wanted them to be kept reasonably safe, then they would leave clues and those clues would be cryptic clues.
	Yes, I mean, the only reason why this legend came about is because of one of the, the grandson of one of the people that was involved in the gunpowder plot left reference to all this stuff in his diary.
	But he didn't actually say what the clues were.
	He was only told that somewhere in Harvington Hall was the clues to lead to where this stone was.
	So that's how we even knew about the legend in the first place, or how the legend began.
	So when eventually we, it was dark by the time we actually cut through the brambles and got to this bridge, and it clearly hadn't been disturbed for centuries.
	I mean, the old stone wall was there and everything.
	And we managed to, there was old cement or whatever holding this wall together.
	We managed to pick away at it and remove a stone that was, I don't know, about two feet, one foot and a half wide and about eight inches high or something.
	And we moved the stone away.
	And I didn't think we'd find anything behind it.
	But it was absolutely astonishing because there was this ledge, this small alcove behind the stone.
	And lying on it was clearly not what we were expecting to find, a stone, but there was something there.
	It was a long, thin, pointed object that was heavily encrusted with years of sediment.
	And we took it out.
	I think Andy was the first one to take it out.
	He pulled it out and it was a long dagger or short sword.
	So there was something there, although it wasn't a stone.
	How did you feel when that actually worked?
	When your suppositions actually delivered you, although it didn't deliver you the stone, it delivered you that.
	I think my first thought was that this maybe people put swords or short daggers or long daggers in bridges as some kind of mason symbol or something, or, you know, like the stonemasons put it there, that it was just a complete fluke coincidence that we'd found something.
	So you thought it was interesting, but not what you were looking for?
	Well, yeah, at first we thought, well, it's a sword, which it was not what we were looking for.
	We were looking for a stone.
	Now, what did you do once you'd got that?
	This was in the 70s, wasn't it, back end of the 70s?
	This was in 1979, almost exactly 40 years ago.
	Well, 40 years ago, frankly, it was on 13th or something of October, 40 years ago.
	Okay, so just a few weeks ago, really.
	Yeah.
	So, you know, you'd actually got it, and you got it by the method that you, you know, got to it, if you know what I'm saying.
	Now, were you able to show that to anybody?
	Because if you showed it to anybody and tried to have it dated and assessed and all the rest of it, you would have to admit how you got it.
	Well, we did.
	First of all, we took it to a museum that specializes in military items, you know, military artifacts, you know, swords and weapons and so forth.
	And you told them, you told those people that you'd had a go at the bridge.
	Is that right?
	Say again, sorry?
	You told those people that you'd had a go at the bridge.
	No, we didn't.
	We didn't tell anybody where we got it, first of all.
	It was all still covered in silt and sediment.
	It was clearly, it was about 18 inches long with a two-inch cross guard, clearly made out of one piece of iron or steel, covered in encrusted in sediment.
	So you couldn't really make out any markings on it or anything.
	We took it to the Grosvenor House Museum in the city of Chester, told them we'd found this.
	We didn't explain why.
	What is it?
	So they basically cleaned it up.
	They managed to get off all the encrusted sediment and so forth, cleaned it up and identified it as a dirk, which is a ornamental Scottish sword that they used to put down in their socks, basically.
	And if you see the Scottish military regiments these days, Scottish military regiments, they have the dirk.
	Yeah, they have it in their socks, don't they?
	Or what do you call it, down by the leg.
	And the first thing they said, and this is what suddenly got me, wow, you know, there is some connection with what we've been doing, Because they said, ah, it's inscribed with the personal monogram of no one other than Mary Queen of Scots.
	Oh my God.
	Now that meant you went from being lukewarm to being red hot.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, that went from that point, it was like really weird.
	We'd found this thing, but sure, it's just a coincidence of some kind.
	When it had Mary Queen of Scots' coat of arms on it, or at least her monogram, we thought, wow, this has got to mean something.
	But what really clinched it is when the sword was finally cleaned up, along its blade were written, were inscribed three words in Elizabethan spelling.
	Mehaniah for Mary.
	Mehaniah had been the name of this organization.
	So there was some kind of connection.
	Do we know who had left it there?
	Well, it seems to have been the person who owned Harvington Hall, a man called Humphrey Packington.
	He was a Catholic.
	He was also a member of this Order of Mehania.
	His coat of arms are on the wall of this room at Cannon's Ashby House.
	He kind of managed to get away with, he didn't get himself, he was put under house arrest for some years after the gunpowder plot because there was no direct evidence to involve him.
	He got away with it, but then he died.
	So he died in the house.
	So it seems to have been him that was the person who actually responsible for having this painting commissioned and then sealed up.
	So, but again, me and Arthur Mary, is this Mary, Queen of Scots?
	Me and Aya being the group, etc.
	Now, how the way that the sword led us to find the stone is the beginning of the paranormal part of all this.
	Well, I mean, that in itself, the bit that you've told me up to now, is an astonishing story.
	I can't imagine how, as a group of people, you must have felt then, but you must have been very excited.
	But I also guess that when you were doing this and wanting to make further investigations, then you probably needed to keep a certain amount of secrecy about it because you didn't want other people getting involved in this search because they might spoil it for you.
	Well, there was that, but we decided we must immediately go to the person whose land this sword had been found on and tell them.
	I mean, even though we'd pulled out a stone from the bridge, we'd put it back.
	We hadn't really damaged it.
	And the person who owned this land turned out to be the Earl of Coventry.
	Now, the Earl of Coventry was basically fascinated by this, but he could explain his family had got no history of being involved in this particular thing.
	He didn't know anything about the Order of Meaniah, the gunpowder plot or anything else.
	He was fascinated by it.
	Ultimately, we were able to keep it for a while.
	Ultimately, he kept it.
	And then this is the really weird thing.
	He decided to donate it to a nearby museum of which he was one of the trustees called the Upton-upon-Seven Tudor House Museum in this village called Upton-upon-Seven, which is not far from the city of Worcester.
	And he donated the sword to this museum, and it's still on public display there today.
	So anyone could go to the Tudor House Museum in Upton-upon-Seven and see the display with the sword there and all the little story about how it was found.
	But that's not the amazing part.
	The amazing thing is that we only found this out in recent years.
	And that is the house, the old Tudor building, which is the Tudor House Museum, was in fact in 18 and sorry, in 1553, the home of Dr. John Dee, the very man who had founded this organization and who once supposedly possessed this greenstone.
	That's an astonishing piece of detective work.
	That's an absolute fluke that it ended up in his house.
	Wow, that's an astonishing piece of detective work.
	I mean, you must have felt when you discovered that, even if it was some years later, that that was incredibly exciting.
	Well, in fact, the final part of all this only happened about a week ago.
	Andy Collins was taking a group of people round to see the sites involved in this story on the 40th anniversary of the finding of this orb.
	And I went along with him and we went to the Tudor House Museum where the staff there very kindly took it out of its case and let us hold it and so on.
	And when I was telling people about Dr. John Dee living in this house, the curator said, oh, hold on a minute.
	And he pulled out an old painting of Dr. John Dee that had been found in the house and it had written on the back of it.
	I mean, it's difficult to tell how old the writing on the back was, all about Dr. John Dee and his involvement in this group and everything about this stone he had once possessed.
	Power stone.
	Because it had been in the house all the time and no one had put the connection together.
	They knew that Dr. John Dee had lived there, but they never actually put two and two together and realised that this sword was actually connected with him.
	So have the museum, which has had it on display for some years, have they changed the story in the museum around this?
	I know exactly where you're talking about, by the way.
	I worked in Worcester and Upton on 7 is just sort of on the way down the backway out of Worcester towards Tewkesbury, isn't it?
	Yes, absolutely.
	They are on the wall, I think, next to where the sword is now, they're going to hang this painting of John Dee, this picture of John Dee, and with a photocopy of what's on the back of it.
	So that's added to it.
	And that only happened about a week or so ago.
	Well, that's an astonishing story that has to be told.
	I'm glad we're telling it now.
	What about the Green Stone, though?
	Okay, well, the Green Stone bit is, it's quite complicated, so I can't explain it all now.
	But the bottom line is that Meaniah, after which the organization was called, is the name of a place in ancient part of the ancient Greek world, which is basically, it's an ancient word meaning the swan.
	Now, at the time, just before the, the reason the Order of Mehania Was founded originally was that a new star, actually what we'd now call a supernova, had appeared in the constellation of Cygnus the Swan.
	They thought that heralded a new age of enlightenment, or at least Dr. John Deere as an astrologer, thought that it did, and founded this group basically was the Order of the Swan.
	Now, another star, this time the rare brightening of a normal star, had appeared in the year 1600, which is one of the reasons why some of these Catholics decided that they were going to lead a rebellion against the king.
	And other people like Walter Raleigh decided to start speaking out against James I a couple of years later, because another star had appeared in Cygnus the Swan.
	They took this to be a good omen that a new age of enlightenment was at hand.
	Now, this new star that appeared, or at least a rare brightening of an existing star, appeared in the Swan's Neck.
	Now, within a couple of miles of the bridge where the sword was found, there was a meander, a bend in the River Avon called the Swan's Neck.
	And it was there we decided to search.
	And again, cutting a long story short, in a mound near the river at the end of an avenue of trees, which came into the story, but I can't explain all that now, there was a mound and we dug down into that mound and about three feet down, the spade hit something and it was a heavy metal object.
	When it was removed, something again covered in years of silt and sediment.
	It turned out to be a quite a heavy brass casket, about 10 inches long, six inches wide, four or five inches deep.
	Again, this was taken before, you know, to the Tudor House Museum, who identified it as dating from the late 1500s.
	And inside, there was a small green stone.
	How did they open it?
	Basically, they sort of cut around all the kind of the muck in it, and it just opened.
	It wasn't locked.
	There clearly had been some kind of lock on it at one point, but I think that had rusted away.
	Right.
	Your heart must have been in your mouth during all of this.
	Well, when we found there's a stone in it, I mean, that was it.
	I mean, we'd actually got to the end of a trail of clues that had been left 400 years ago and managed to solve it.
	And what was absolutely astonishing is that, I mean, the stone itself, it was about, I don't know, three quarters of an inch long, half an inch wide, flat on the one side.
	So it's obviously something that had been put in a ring at one point, maybe, or in some part of the jewelry.
	It was rounded on the other side.
	But when compared with the paintings of Mary Queen of Scots, which had this ring on her finger, it was exactly the same.
	This didn't prove it was the same stone, but with all the evidence and all the kind of clues we'd followed, there was no doubt that we had found the stone that these people 400 years ago had believed had some kind of supernatural power.
	And little could they have known the people behind all of this that you would follow those clues so diligently and actually find that item?
	Well, we're hoping that somebody would find it nearer to their time.
	But the thing next was we suddenly thought, okay, we've found this stone.
	Does it really have some sort of supernatural power?
	And it was then that strange things started to happen.
	Firstly, I'll have to mention that while we were looking for this stone, other people involved in the group, either directly involved as reporters for the magazine or people we knew, started having dreams that seemed to fit in with it.
	Before we found a sword, a guy that we knew, but who didn't tell us afterwards, had had a dream that we would find a sword.
	Another lady had had a dream that we were looking for a sword that would lead us to the stone.
	And when we found it, it would be on a stone slab.
	And there was this strange smell of rotting vegetation.
	And of course, when we were actually at the bridge and found the sword, there was this horrible smell of rotting vegetation all around us.
	So people had already started having like psychic visions, if you like, associated with this search.
	So we began to think maybe there is something weird about it.
	And how was it affecting you?
	I don't know.
	At the time, it was so, I mean, I was only 25 at the time.
	I was pretty excited.
	Nothing like this had ever happened to me before.
	I mean, I had seen paranormal things happen, but this was totally different.
	This was investigating an historical mystery.
	And I think it was that part of it rather than the paranormal bit that really got me interested in investigating historical mysteries, like, was there a real Ark of the Covenant?
	Did the Holy Grail really exist?
	If so, what happened to it?
	And so it did profoundly affect me as to my course of life thereafter, becoming an author, writing about historical mysteries.
	But at the time, I was just kind of, it was like, like being in a dream, I suppose.
	And what else did it do?
	You said that there were paranormal stories connected with it.
	It seemed to have some kind of power.
	Was it doing anything else?
	Well, at first, the first things that started to happen at the headquarters, the big old Victorian house in Wolverhampton that was being used as the office for the magazine, the first things that started to happen, and we didn't associate this with the stone to start off with.
	First of all, we started getting electric shocks from various appliances in the house.
	The lights kept dimming.
	There was all these weird electrical anomalies.
	So we called in the electric company or the electricity board, as it was known then.
	They checked the wiring and said there was nothing wrong.
	Then we started, then what happened one day is that just as it was getting dark, the whole place just filled with this kind of weird grey smoke.
	And it didn't just appear in one room.
	It appeared in various rooms behind closed doors and even in cupboards and closets.
	I mean, the whole place just filled with this smoke.
	And what was it like?
	Was it like an incense or something more earthy?
	Like a sort of incensey type of smell, and it was like a grey smoke.
	And it kind of stung the eyes.
	And it came over about five or ten minutes.
	And there was about 12 people in the place at the first time it appeared.
	And everyone checked the whole place to see if something was on fire.
	We couldn't find anything.
	We called in the electric company again.
	They couldn't find anything wrong with the wiring.
	And, but that wasn't the end of it.
	The next night, just as it got dark, this smoke appeared again.
	And it kept happening.
	And eventually, we got so many people coming to try and explain this and witness it that the story broke in the local newspaper, the Express and Star, which is the local daily newspaper.
	Overhampton, yeah.
	And then when that happened, the BBC, it wasn't the Midland, it was the other ATV, I think it was called at the time, of the Independent channel in the Midlands.
	They sent a reporter and a film crew to film this smoke, which they did.
	And the person who was the reporter who came and witnessed all this was somebody who was to become very famous later in her life, Anne Diamond.
	I worked with Anne.
	Yes, very famous.
	Well, if you ever get to see her again, tell her about her time in the haunted house.
	I mean, Anne is a very down-to-earth broadcaster and very famous in this country, as my English listeners will know, my British listeners will know.
	What did she make of it?
	Well, I don't think I don't.
	I saw her many years later on her show for something else many years later.
	And I said, do you remember the haunted house?
	She said, you're the editor of that magazine.
	I said, that's right.
	I said, so you remember it then?
	She said, yeah, I don't get to go in a haunted house every day.
	So it stuck in her mind.
	Wow.
	I mean, she didn't herself get to actually see the smoke, but she spoke to a lot of the people who'd actually swore to have seen it.
	The camera crew stayed there.
	They did get all sorts of weird things happening to the camera when it was being filmed.
	So the story really broke.
	And so once that happened, more and more people were coming to the house to witness the strange things that happened thereafter.
	So we had dozens of witnesses to the even more disturbing things that happened next.
	Which were?
	Well, it went from electrical anomalies.
	Eventually what happened was that electricity, we had the electricity bill come through.
	And where it should have been, I don't know.
	I can't think of how much money it would have been at that time.
	But let's just say now for a quarter, you'd expect an electricity bill for the place of about £400.
	It would be like £2,000.
	It was way, way, way above.
	So something was seemingly sapping electricity, energy.
	That's exactly what the electric company said when we called them in and said there's something wrong here.
	And they put all their equipment to work and said, it seems to us that something's drawing power off your electricity supply.
	It's almost as if you're feeding all the street lights in the area.
	Well, isn't that strange?
	I mean, look, I used to be a customer of the MEV, as it used to be called, the Midlands Electricity Board.
	Had they ever seen anything like this before?
	No, they said they hadn't.
	I mean, we actually, because the landlord, I got in touch with, we were leasing this place, and I got in touch with the landlords and said, look, you've got to fix this wiring.
	Because at this point, I didn't definitely associate this with anything paranormal.
	But one way or the other, I wasn't going to pay, or we weren't going to pay this money when there might be something wrong with the wiring that the landlord was responsible for.
	So I got in touch with them and I got the Midland Electricity Board, as you mentioned, the MEB, to prepare these documents to say, look, we can't explain this.
	We had it all in black and white to send to the managers of the property.
	So they couldn't explain it.
	And they did a report to say they couldn't explain what was happening.
	Did you have to pay?
	Well, in the end, we said, right, we'll pay it.
	But they said, well, no, we're going to cut you off anyway.
	You pay it, yeah, but we're going to cut you off anyway because there's clearly something dangerous about this wiring.
	So we were left with a place that was pitch black at night.
	It was in the wintertime, so it was dark early.
	We couldn't work from there anymore.
	We had no electric to operate anything.
	So we had to start doing the magazine from somewhere else.
	But we still had a year remaining on the lease.
	So we kind of thought at the time, okay, let's keep hold of the place and let's keep going back.
	It looks as though there's something weird going on here.
	And you're absolutely certain just before we, I'm sorry to interrupt, but you're absolutely sure that the smoke was not smoldering wiring.
	I know this is a silly question.
	Every bit of the wiring that they possibly could do with whatever equipment they had, and there was nothing to account for this smoke whatsoever.
	And after about a week, it stopped and it never happened again.
	Even when the electric was still on, it never happened after about a week.
	But then once the electricity was off, I mean, I remember that the first things that were happening is that people going into the building to the workmen who were helping to move out, the removal people to move all the office equipment to move somewhere else, they started saying that they saw objects moving around.
	Somebody said he saw an office chair on wheels kind of like move across the room on its own.
	One of the students who was working with the magazine said that he was actually in one of the rooms looking at a radio on the side, an old transistor radio, that in full view of him looking at it, rose into the air, lifted up and then crashed to the floor.
	And I was thinking, are they getting this story?
	They know there's something weird going on in the headquarters because it's been in the newspapers.
	Are they just making this up?
	Are they imagining it?
	Until one time when I was walking down a corridor, a great big heavy box of magazines that had been in the corner behind me flew past my ear and crashed into the door.
	And there was nobody else in the place.
	Were you never scared?
	Well, scared, yes, but excited because remember, we're a magazine investigating the paranormal.
	And I thought, wow, this is amazing.
	We can actually investigate something on our own doorstep.
	Absolutely.
	Literally.
	Absolutely, because, you know, it's usual that you have to go out and investigate things and get people's stories.
	But for the story to come to you is pretty unusual.
	Well, a lot of people will say, oh, well, you're just making all this up in order to sort of sell your magazines.
	Well, the fact is, we never included any of this story in the magazine.
	I mean, it was a good few years later that I actually wrote about it in the book, The Green Stone.
	Before that, we didn't publish it because we thought no one's going to believe this.
	They're going to say, oh, you're just doing it to try and get publicity.
	Well, we had dozens of witnesses.
	And on the plus side, because we had so many, we had got publicity about this, people were coming along.
	Anyone could just come along, as long as it went crazy, and try and disprove this stuff or see if they could witness it for themselves.
	And we've got dozens of accounts of people hearing strange noises, distant singing sounds, all sorts of weird stuff.
	Did you ever get any people who were mediums or purported to be mediums coming down to check it out?
	Oh, yeah, loads of them.
	And in fact, that is kind of at the point originally what we thought was causing this seemingly poltergeist type phenomena.
	We thought that it's maybe, we didn't, I wasn't associating any of this with the Greenstone.
	I don't think anyone was at this point.
	Because firstly, well, the Greenstone had been in that place for a while, but then it had been moved out and this stuff was still going on.
	So I kind of, no one kind of associated with that the Greenstone was anything to do with it.
	I think we thought because we'd had mediums in the place very often to test them, to do like Xenocard tests and so forth, that we'd had seances and all sorts of stuff, that because we'd done all this, this might have in some way been responsible for these strange activities that were happening.
	But eventually apparitions began to appear.
	People started to see like a strange Victorian figure with a top hat and a long frock coat.
	But it wasn't just figures from the past that people were seeing.
	They were also claiming to see contemporary figures, people in clothing of like 1979.
	Just somebody would say, well, who's that guy standing in the front room?
	And, you know, is he waiting to, are you waiting to speak to him or something?
	And then we'd go in there and there'd be nobody there, that sort of thing.
	Sounds to me like, you know, in modern parlance, people might say this stone was some kind of focus or portal.
	Well, eventually there was a lady called Marion who had been involved in the research.
	She actually, she became involved with helping out do research for the magazine when her daughter had had a UFO experience.
	So she wasn't like a medium or anything.
	But she suddenly had a really vivid dream one night that the stone was responsible for all this.
	And she said, she was the first person to come up with the idea that the stone might have been doing this.
	She said, in some way, she couldn't understand how it had opened some kind of preternatural rift in the house.
	And even though it was no longer there, this rift was, you know, had been opened and it was allowing all these weird things to happen.
	Now, I kind of, we said, oh yeah, fine, great stuff.
	But we didn't really take too much notice of that until we began to realize that, oh, she told us, she said, what's going to happen?
	Because we said, well, how do we know the stone's responsible?
	She said, well, it's drawing not only power from the house, it's like accelerating time.
	And we said, accelerating time.
	She said, it's just drawing all the time and energy from the house.
	And we thought, that doesn't even make any sense.
	But over the next few weeks, the place began to fall apart.
	Remember, it's abandoned now.
	There's nobody living there.
	The plaster began to fall from the walls.
	The ceilings began to collapse.
	Pipes rusted and burst.
	And the place began to look like it had been abandoned for years, but only over a period of weeks.
	And then she said to us, she said, I told you, time's like accelerating in the place.
	It's to do with the stone.
	And if you don't discharge the power of the stone somehow, it's going to spread.
	So basically thinking, well, okay, let's try out whatever she wants us to do.
	And she'd had this dream that we should take the stone to where it was originally made, fashioned, which is a place called White Ladies' Priory, about seven or eight miles north of Wolverhampton.
	That's where she said she thought it was made.
	I was going to ask, how did you know that?
	Okay.
	Yeah, she said she thought that's that.
	I mean, whether it was or not, who knows?
	But White Ladies Priory is an old ruined monastic building, a priory.
	Its walls still survive, but it's got no roof or anything.
	And it's just in a field.
	Anyone could go there day or night.
	And she said that we had to be there at a particular time at 9.30 at night.
	It was something to do with where the moon was or something.
	I can't remember now.
	It's all in the book, but I can't remember it off the top of my head.
	So there was nine of us actually went there in the end.
	And she said that she needed to put this stone on top of a old, what turned out to be an old burial mound, which is surrounded by trees in this small wood about 50 yards from the priory.
	And she said she thought it'd be much the best thing if we just went back to the safety of the priory and watched to see what would happen at 9.30.
	And that, she said, was when the power of the stone would be discharged.
	You put a lot of trust in her.
	Well, I didn't, no, I didn't think anything would happen.
	I thought, okay, let's just see what's going to happen.
	I think she said nine of us had to be present.
	That's why nine of us are there.
	Two of the people there had never ever seen anything weird before.
	They were just friends of people.
	One of them was a police officer.
	The other one was a local councillor.
	So they're the kind of people you would believe in a court of law.
	And all of us stood witness to the fact that when it got to 9.30, we heard this really weird screeching sound coming from the woodland where this stone had been left, about 50 yards away.
	Remember, it's pitch black.
	And this screeching sound seemed to rise into the air.
	And I thought, is that a bird?
	Is it an animal?
	And then just as I was thinking all That these like five flashes of light came from within, white light came from within the woods, which turned eventually into these five balls of light.
	I know this sounds totally ludicrous and incredible.
	Well, I mean, it's going to sound to some people like you were kind of living at that time, you were living a mixture of Harry Potter and the exorcist.
	Well, precisely.
	I mean, of course, there hadn't been a Harry Potter at that time, but there had been an exorcist.
	I thought, I'm just, I thought, firstly, this is psychological.
	Only I'm seeing this.
	And when I looked at others, I realized that I could see all their faces lit up by these five balls of light that were rising above the trees.
	And they were all looking around.
	They could all see it.
	And I thought, wow.
	And then they kind of merge, these five balls of light merged into one wall of light, which was about, I don't know, six feet across.
	It's difficult to tell.
	But it seemed to move towards us.
	And then it just exploded with like an ear-shattering bang and this almighty flash that lit up the whole area around.
	And then it was just dead quiet.
	And I think the word Marion used after that was a word that actually appears quite a few times in the book, flee.
	So we just got out of that place as quickly as we could.
	We didn't go back to the stone for the stone until the next day.
	And as we ran back towards where the cars were, away from the wood, I remember we kept looking back and to try and see if there was anything in the woods or that could account for this or there was a fire or, but it was just all blackness as if like nothing had happened.
	Did you leave the stone behind?
	We did for that night.
	I think we went back to get it the next day.
	I think Andy, Collins, went and got it.
	Somebody did.
	I didn't.
	And what was the vibe, the feeling about the stone after that?
	The weird thing is that after that, there was nothing ever reported, as far as I know, in that house again, strange or out of the ordinary.
	I remember going to see somebody who lived there some years later and they said the place isn't haunted or anything like that.
	It all stopped.
	And that was the end of the whole story, as far as the haunting was concerned, or whatever you want to call it, the poltergeist, the weird reality distortions or whatever was going on.
	And the place remained, we let, you know, our lease went out.
	Nothing else happened.
	The place remained empty for a good few years because it had virtually fallen apart from within.
	Eventually it was modernized and turned into apartments.
	And as far as I know, nothing strange has happened there to this day.
	And what of the people who were involved in this story?
	The people who went to see that building?
	The people who worked at that building?
	The people who were involved on that night when the power of this stone was seemingly dissipated?
	How has this affected their lives?
	Well, a lot of them were affected by it.
	Like, as I say, I went on to write books about historical mysteries.
	Andy Connors did the same.
	And he also wrote books about the paranormal.
	Marion, the lady who'd had this experience, who had never been psychic before, became very interested in the supernatural.
	And she went around investigating things.
	She went to America and joined up with a psychic group over there.
	She even went searching with some woman from Canada in search of a crystal skull in the Andes, I seem to remember at one point.
	So a lot of these people were affected.
	Some people just carried on with their ordinary everyday lives.
	And I remember I said that one of these people was a counselor.
	Well, the thing is that this man who was a member of the local council was so down to earth that he'd seen this happen to him.
	You know, he'd had this happen to him.
	He knew some of the people involved in it, but he'd never witnessed anything himself.
	He actually had to go on tranquilizers for a few weeks after that.
	He went to the doctors because he was so shook up.
	But after that, he never really had anything to do with the supernatural, the paranormal, or anything.
	He just thought that the whole thing was just too weird.
	So it affected everybody in different ways.
	But because a lot of the people involved in this were a lot older than myself and Andrew Collins, a lot have since died from natural causes.
	I mean, they would have been in their 80s or 90s now.
	But luckily in 1981, we managed to make a documentary about this, interviewing the people that had actually had these things happen to them.
	And I bent just recently to mark the 40th anniversary of the whole event, I put together a half-hour video that I've made, including all the footage we've got from that period and also the interviews with these people.
	You can just see how normal they are.
	And if anyone wants to see it on my YouTube channel, which is Graham Phillips author, and you just look at the Greenstone video, you'll be able to see for yourself all these sites I've been talking about and interviews with some of these really sensible down-to-earth people who are involved.
	Guess what I'm doing when I finish this conversation?
	That's what I'm going to be doing.
	An astonishing story.
	Where is the Green Stone now, remind me?
	Well, the Greenstone was kept by this lady, Marion, who was one who had this dream about what we should do with it.
	When she died, her estate was sold off.
	And unfortunately, we don't know now who's got the stone.
	We're actually trying to find out the casket and stone.
	We don't know where it is.
	That's a bit of a mystery.
	Well, that is one that definitely, I mean, you know, within our lifetimes, we could do with solving that, couldn't we?
	Well, indeed, there are some people now trying to start the whole search all over again to find this Greenstone a second time.
	I mean, it sounds to me almost like a work of, I thought when I first, one of my listeners got in touch and I looked at the description of the book that you'd written about the Greenstone and I thought, well, this is a work of fiction.
	This is by no means a real thing.
	And then I read into it and there it was there saying that this was a genuine series of events.
	You know, I think maybe the story needs to be resurrected now.
	Somebody needs to make a TV program or a movie about this.
	Well, it would be nice.
	The gathering that Andrew Collins organized a few weeks, a couple of weeks ago, this Greenstone event.
	There was about, I think we had about eight people that were still alive that gave their accounts of what had happened at the time.
	And I think what you find is so amazing about the people who were involved, they all came from different backgrounds.
	There are middle-aged men in suits, young, hippie-looking people, normal housewives, police officers.
	You know, it's not like we're all a bunch of weirdos or anything.
	What an astonishing story.
	Well, I don't think, you know, even though a lot of years have elapsed, you can let this one go now.
	You have to see it all the way through, I think.
	Well, I am writing a book at the moment about some of the things that have happened since and the things we've discovered since.
	And I'm going to be going back to the house in Wolverhampton and investigating to see if anything ever has happened to people since.
	Well, that would be fascinating.
	If anybody listening to this knows anything about this, then they can certainly contact me through my website and I will pass on their communications.
	What an astonishing story, though, and to have that as part of your life.
	It is life-changing.
	Well, it certainly changed my life.
	I decided I was just going to write books about mysteries.
	Now, you can't come across a paranormal mystery every day of your life, but you can decide to investigate historical mysteries.
	And that's what I spent the rest of my life doing.
	And I think I've written about 18 books now that have been published about historical mysteries that don't have anything to do with the paranormal.
	And when you think back to the time when this stone, you say, was active, when it was doing things, did you get a sense that it, because it didn't sound it to me.
	It just sounded like it was a very powerful, for whatever reason, thing.
	It didn't sound malevolent in any way to me.
	Well, no, it didn't.
	The only one person that almost had a very bad accident with it was Andy Collins.
	He slept over one night at the headquarters when it was abandoned, and he woke up in the middle of the night to find flames leaping from his sleeping bag.
	Oh, Lord.
	He just managed to get out.
	He wasn't injured, but his sleeping bag was virtually completely destroyed.
	And if you go to my website, grahamphillips.net, and look at the Greenstone, you can see a photograph of Andy Collins, which was on the front page of one of the local newspapers, the Wolverhampton Chronicle, showing him holding up this burnt sleeping bag.
	There's hardly anything left of it, yet he got out of it.
	I mean, it seemed to have spontaneously combusted, yet he wasn't hurt.
	Well, the whole world has heard about the Enfield poltergeist.
	There was a film made about it, I think even a TV series, but certainly a movie made about it.
	Strange that more people haven't heard this story.
	They need to, Graham.
	And just give me that website address again so people can go and see.
	GrahamPhillips.net.
	I hope we get the chance to speak again.
	Well, I hope we get the chance to speak again, not only about the Greenstone, but about other things that you've done.
	You hold together a fabulous narrative.
	You put the story across so well, Graham.
	And I wish you well in everything that you're going to do.
	Thank you very much indeed.
	Well, the book is called The Greenstone.
	The man you've been hearing is Graham Phillips.
	One of the most remarkable guests, I think, in all the years that I've been doing this, we've ever had.
	Your view, of course, is paramount.
	So if you'd like to let me know what you thought about this guest or any guest we've had on The Unexplained, please email me through the website theunexplained.tv.
	We have more incredible guests as we come to the end of 2019 to bring to you here on The Unexplained.
	So until next we meet, 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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