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April 29, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:10:50
Edition 448 - Richard Estep

A return visit with Richard Estep - a Brit living near Denver, Colorado on his amazing ghost-hunts and superb new research into the bloodiest serial killers...

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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 of this is the unexplained.
Well, it's a strange thing.
I don't know whether it's a coincidence in the technical definition of that term or what it is, but I tend to record more and more of these podcasts with the spring sunshine pouring in through my window here and the trees once again are that beautiful, radiant color of green.
And it's marvelous to see that even though I'm not going out because of lockdown, the world and nature continues outside here.
Maybe you've drawn, as I've drawn, some comfort from that, but I certainly do find solace in those things, you know, in the isolation of all of this.
Now, more importantly, how are you getting by in this period?
I've had some emails from people all over the world about what they're doing.
Some people have developed new hobbies and pastimes.
Some people have been starting a book, which I should do sometime.
Some people have learned a language or they're doing more exercise or whatever.
And of course, some people are finding it enormously trying, which I'm sure that if it goes on for an extended period, more and more people will feel that way.
But it's essential and we're getting there, aren't we?
You know, as we watch the amazing efforts of our health services around the world, certainly here in the United Kingdom, I had cause to encounter the National Health Service only yesterday, and I told my radio listeners about this.
I woke up in the morning, and of course, you know, I have to be on form on the day that I do the radio show.
It's live, and it's all down to me.
So I have to get it right.
And I woke up with no hearing in my right ear, very, very little hearing.
Everything sounded like it was a thousand million miles away.
And I thought, okay, let's hope this goes away.
You know, these things sometimes happen.
The day went by and it didn't go away.
So by the time I got to half past three, I went to my local hospital and they, of course, are fully geared up for coronavirus.
And the staff were wonderful.
They triage you at the front desk.
They check you.
They check your temperature.
Then you have to go in through a special system.
This is Teddington Memorial Hospital who were wonderful.
And they've rebuilt the reception area to make it safe for the staff.
And of course, for the people who are visiting like me.
And the doctor, as you sit in the waiting room, phones you and asks you more about what you've come in with.
And I have to say the doctor there was marvelous.
And I was sent away initially with antibiotics.
So we're going to see how that goes.
But it was a bit of a shocker.
And it was quite difficult to do the radio show on my left ear only.
So it's one of those things.
And compared with some of the stuff that some people have to go through, it isn't anything in comparison with that.
Of course, it's not.
But it was interesting for me too, in this period where most people are staying away from hospitals and medical professionals to see the lengths that they are going to to make sure that we're all safe or as safe as we can be through all of this.
So that's that.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
I'm not going to do shout-outs on this edition, but just to say to John in Liverpool, nice to hear from you, John.
Thank you for the nice things that you said.
And you gave me a little bit of food for thought there.
Peter, good to hear from you.
And anonymous listener in Vancouver.
It's okay.
I'm not going to divulge your name here.
But thank you very much for your email.
You've sent me some great emails lately.
If you want to just shoot the breeze, whatever you want to do, suggest a guest, whatever it might be, get in touch with me through the website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me a message from there.
And if you'd like to make a donation to the online show here, that will be gratefully received as we face this uncertain future.
Of course, if you can't make a donation now, I totally understand now more than ever.
And please just enjoy the show.
But you can go to the website if you want to, theunexplained.tv, follow the link from there and you can do donations there.
If you have recently, by the way, thank you.
You know who you are very, very much indeed for helping me in all of this, to allow this to continue.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for all of his hard work.
And thank you to Haley for booking the guests for me.
It's something that Haley does brilliantly and I couldn't do any of this without Haley or Adam.
So thank you very much.
Right.
The guest on this edition, a return visit, I think it was two years ago since we last spoke with him, to Richard S. Step.
Richard S. Stepp started investigating the paranormal in the broadest sense, mainly ghosts and apparitions and hauntings and specters, here in the United Kingdom.
Then he moved to the United States in 1999 and carried on the work 20 years ago from there.
So he's now been doing all of this for about a quarter of a century or so.
You'll know him from television, series like Haunted Case Files, and he's got a whole series of books as well on paranormal themes, starting with In Search of the Paranormal, which is a kind of transatlantic look at all of these things.
But lots of stuff to talk with Richard Estep on this edition of The Unexplained.
If you get in touch with me, I know I always say this and I sound like a stuck record, but if you get in touch with me, can you tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show?
It's very interesting for me to know those things.
I'm not keeping statistics and data on you like big organizations, not at all, but it's just nice to know that you might be in, I don't know, Houston, or you might be in Houston in London with an E, not an H, or you might be in Bangkok, Thailand, or you might be in, like Kila, in Papua New Guinea.
It's just nice for me to know the spread of listeners that I've got.
And, oh, one other thing quickly before we get to the guest, Richard Estep.
Thank you for your posts on my Facebook postings, your posts on my posts.
If you haven't discovered the official Unexplained with Howard Hughes Facebook page, check it out right now and become part of it.
I'm hoping you'll like it.
I hope to be able to expand it, but it's something that I've been doing for less than a year now, and it seems to be going pretty well, so thank you.
All right, let's get to the U.S. now.
Let's get to Richard Estep.
Richard, nice to have you back on my show.
Always a pleasure to be here, Howard.
How are you doing this morning, or I guess this evening for you?
Well, it is evening time.
It's early evening.
It's beautifully sunny here.
We've had an unusually fabulous April here.
Lovely temperatures, beautiful, just a beautiful scene to look out at.
Most of the time, you know, the sky is unpolluted and blue.
But of course, all of us, as you are in America in many places, all of us are in lockdown.
So, you know, it makes a bit of a difference.
It's like Being in a prison looking out of the bars.
It is, isn't it?
It's almost taunting us.
But it's for the greater good, and I think most people recognize that.
That's true.
Now, I don't know whether you want to talk about this, but are you still doing your day job there?
I am still working as a paramedic.
Yeah, a lot of my time is spent in the office being a clinical chief.
It's administrative, but as needed, I do get out on an ambulance when there's a need for patient care to be covered.
So it's business as usual for us.
Right.
And this is a must be for you.
And I did talk about the NHS here.
I had a little dealing with the NHS yesterday when I had some hearing problems and went to my local hospital.
They were wonderful.
But, you know, this is a time of maximum focus for all of you guys, isn't it?
It is.
I'm telling people, we are living emergency medical history right now, which is something that we always knew there would be a pandemic of some kind.
But it's one of those things that, you know, we never expect it truly to happen to us.
And I must say, a lot of people, especially those in the NHS, are rising magnificently to the occasion.
They are.
I mean, in my little setting here, and I saw, I met five people from the NHS yesterday, and they were mostly people I'd seen before over the years at the little cottage hospital that I go to.
And I woke up yesterday, couldn't hear anything in my right ear, and I was due to do a radio show.
So I was pretty worried.
And I thought, well, even though there is coronavirus, I'm going to have to go.
And they were just marvelous.
They were totally focused, totally in charge of what they were doing.
So I think all around the world, all of the medical people are doing their job just incredibly for the rest of us who look on in awe.
Exactly so.
I find it remarkable how hard the people in the hospitals especially are working these days.
And it's a thankless job at the best of times.
And these are far from the best of times.
So tangentially to that then, if that's the right word, do you find that talking about paranormality and the books that you write and the research that you've done and been doing, is that an escape for you at this time?
It's a passion.
It's something that I've always done.
I mean, when I'm truly seeking escapism, I go to books.
I go to comic books even.
Right now, I'm on a huge Doctor Who kick.
I have my favorite fantasy worlds.
I'm a big science fiction fan and things of that nature.
Paranormal matters have always been my passion, but I don't really consider them escapism as such.
I consider it to be a real world interest.
Right.
And the real world interest, do you believe that you are exploring a real world, just not a real world that we completely understand?
Well, I think that's always going to be the case, isn't it?
Anybody that thinks they truly understand the real world is really delusional.
Our physics, our level of physics and scientific understanding is still in its infancy, no matter what we might like to think.
I mean, we see the sheer scope of human knowledge is increasing at an exponential rate.
And it's the beginning of wisdom, isn't it, Howard, to realize the more you understand, you realize the less you actually understand.
Yeah.
And I think that goes for any profession as well.
You know, if you think you've learned it all, you've got a, but what did they say in Liverpool?
You've got another thing coming.
Absolutely.
I'm not a big fan of practitioners in any field that think they know it all.
We should always be students in whatever our chosen fields are.
What's the difference?
And you will know, and we did touch on this last time, but I'm just interested to get your current thoughts on this.
What is the difference between the way people investigate and regard paranormality in the US versus the way that we do it in the UK?
You've seen both.
Yeah, I think the biggest difference is that there is the UK seems to be much more of a secular nation.
So, you know, you don't hear what I call the dreaded D-word demonic thrown out and about every other minute in the UK.
Whereas in the USA, there is a lot of that perception.
And not to trample on anybody's beliefs at all.
I'm very open to the possibility that there is such a thing as inhuman entities, but I think you have to be very careful in regarding every single case as having that kind of negative affect, you know?
And I really blame TV for that.
And yet, only a week or so ago, maybe a little longer, I interviewed a man called Ron File Enright, Archbishop Ron File Enright, who is, as you might be aware, an exorcist in the US, runs the Order of Exorcists.
I think that's the correct title of the organization.
Catholic priest, trained, rose through the ranks of the Catholic Church, and this is what he does.
Even though he's retired now, he's still involved in these things.
And there are many people, and I don't know whether there are more of them in the US than the UK, I'm not sure, but they believe that there is, on some level, a battle constantly going on between good and evil.
I mean, you only need to look at the news to see that that's the truth.
That's also all of human history.
The question is, do you believe in good and evil as greater, you know, universal forces?
And maybe they are.
I'm not wise enough to say.
But one thing I keep coming back to is we all have our own inherent bias.
Personally speaking, I'm an agnostic, but I work with investigators that are Christians, investigators that are Buddhists, at one point, an investigator who was a Muslim.
And so we all bring our own personal belief system to the table.
And as any scientist will tell you, it's almost impossible to rule out bias beyond the field of pure mathematics.
So once in a, let's see, it was 2010, Howard, I had a back injury.
I had a herniated disc in my lower back.
And so it was interesting.
My doctor said, you probably are going to need to get back surgery for this.
He said, however, we should look at some alternatives.
And here's why.
If you go to a surgeon, you know what they're going to recommend?
Surgery.
You go to a chiropractor, you know what they're going to recommend?
A chiropractic adjustment.
So, you know, experts, quote unquote, experts or specialists or whatever you want to call them in any given field tend to view the field through their own personal filter of belief, bias, and expertise.
You know, so if you are someone that is a demonologist and believes in that kind of stuff, more power to you.
But you are going to tend to see your cases in that light.
And, you know, And I need to be open to the possibility that because I am not such an advocate of those kind of things, I tend not to see cases in that light.
And it may well be that, as it so often is in life, the answer lies somewhere in between, in the middle.
I talked about good and evil.
Have you encountered anything that's frightened you, chilled you, something that you felt was negative?
A number of cases.
I've encountered some violent physical phenomena.
I've seen scratches, physical touches, striking, you know, physical trauma of a very low level, those kind of things.
But I do wonder how much of that is an intent to harm versus an attempt to communicate in the only way these forces, whatever they are, know how.
The most recent book I'm working on, which won't be out till next year, is a non-paranormal book.
And it's a fairly large 150,000 word manuscript about serial killers.
And, you know, reading the history and the behavior of these individuals, I mean, there's no doubt that there's such a thing as evil in the world, but you can find evil in so many places.
You know, you could find evil in the Nazi regime, for example.
You don't need to go, though, to a spiritual explanation necessarily in each case.
Sometimes people are just bad, and sometimes people are so good, they're borderline angelic.
It's a fascinating topic, though, that you're getting involved in.
I've done a number of programs about serial killers, and we're always left.
Even the experts that I talk to, you're left baffled at the end of the day when you close the fader, turn off the microphone, go make a coffee.
All these thoughts buzz around your head.
What is it in the psyche of some people that permits them, they think, to commit the most heinous deeds?
That must have struck you time and time again.
It did.
And one thing that I could never answer to my own satisfaction was the whole nature versus nurture debate, you know?
And I'd done a number of paranormal cases which involved serial killing.
So, for example, I investigated the Foxholler Farm haunting the home of the I-70 Strangler.
I investigated a case that pertained to John Wayne Gacy.
Oh, did you?
Talk to me about that one.
What was that one like?
I mean, just remind people who John Wayne Gacy was.
I know he was a notorious serial killer.
Yeah, well, as you say, Howard, John Wayne Gacy was one of the United States' most, I think, awful serial killers, which I know a strange choice of terms, but they're all pretty bad.
But Gacy was particularly heinous.
He was very much into torture and murdered.
They're unclear exactly, but 29, 30 young men, something like that, burying most of them in the crawl space beneath his house in Chicago.
He was caught ultimately and executed by lethal injection.
But I don't know if you know the Kling brothers, Brad and Barry, who appear in the TV show Ghost Lab.
Brad and Barry, friends of mine, and they put me onto this case because Gacy is supposed to haunt an old movie theater of all things in small town, Illinois.
And the reason is that Gacy's lawyer used to keep some of the paintings he did on Death Row in an armoire, a wooden cabinet, which ended up at that movie theater.
And it wasn't long before the owner started to have strange things happening, brought in some paranormal investigators, brought in some psychic mediums.
And the medium said, you know, we're picking up very strongly on this man whose name, he says, is John Wayne.
And the owner was pretty happy with this.
He's like, the Duke, you know.
Well, in a movie theater, you know, what a great association to have in a movie theater.
Right, absolutely.
And then they said, yeah, but why is he dressed as a clown?
And that's when the owner made this connection that he had this armoire which had contained Gacy's artwork.
So, you know, I was allowed to go and investigate that location with a team over several days, and they ended up writing a book about it called, Imaginatively Enough, Gacy's Ghost.
And there is this belief that, you know, a number of people have seen his apparition at this location and claim to have encountered him.
So, you know, it's kind of fascinating.
And when you talked about the proprietor of that place experiencing phenomena, what sorts of phenomena?
Well, first of all, footsteps in an empty building.
The owner moved into that movie theater with his wife and renovated the living quarters.
So now it's his home and place of business.
He runs an insurance business out of the offices there.
And the rest of it is essentially an old movie theater.
It's an incredible place.
If you want to look it up, it's the R, as in the letter R, theater in Auburn, Illinois.
And they were starting to experience things moving on their own, strange voices in the building, all that kind of stuff.
So the owner brought in some investigators, like I said, and they all started to say, yeah, there is this clown-like character.
And of course, Gacy dressed as a clown.
He played a clown at children's parties and actually said to the police, you know, I like being a clown because clowns can get away with murder.
Oh, Lord.
Well, I've never heard that quote about that case before, but that's astonishing.
So it kind of draws this question out, though, doesn't it?
Is it the pent-up power, if that's the right word, the pent-up energy, that's a better word, of this person within those works of art that the proprietor kept?
Or is it something live and malevolent that is being visited on that place now?
If you see what I mean, is it like those artworks were like a battery of stored-up badness?
Or that guy is somehow still connected with the things that he created, and the things that he created happen to live in that movie theater?
Yeah, and I tend to think it's more interactive because the nature of the haunting, Gacy is known to interact.
He's got a very childish personality in death as he does in life.
So he's been successfully provoked into speaking with people.
I'm not an investigator that believes in provocation for the most part, but I'll certainly make exceptions for somebody as awful as him.
I have no issues at all calling out somebody like John Wayne Gacy.
So when you get provocative, some investigators have had verbal interactions, they've gotten EVPs that claim to be John Wayne Gacy, and they do sound again pretty negative, pretty belligerent, if you will.
So, that implies to me at least that it is more of a interactive haunt than a residual one.
But I can see how having objects like Gacy's art, which he did on death row and ended up selling and trying to make money on, you know, which was pretty awful.
Turns out that the families of some of his victims purchased his art and burned it, which I thought was a very classy way to handle it.
But I can see why he might have some kind of emotional attachment to the art that he once did.
Yes, I can.
And I presume this happens.
In fact, I know that this happens in other cases.
It's fairly common.
But it's also pretty scary.
What ultimately did the person who owned that venue do about it?
Did he get rid of the artworks?
Did he bring in an exorcist?
What happened?
So the artwork is no longer in the armoire.
The artwork is gone, but the armoire is still there.
And so it appears that Gacy is attached to that piece of furniture, if indeed he really is there.
I'm not a big believer in just buying into a story 100%.
My own investigation of the R theater, which took place over several days and nights, we had some very unusual things happen, but I cannot definitively say that that was John Wayne Gacy or not.
So I'm always reluctant to go out on a limb unless I have some evidence to back it up with.
The theater is haunted, in my opinion, 100%.
As to whether it really is Gacy, that I cannot tell you for sure.
And how, if anybody wanted or dared to do it, how would you investigate that further, do you think?
Oh, I will.
The owner is now a good friend of mine, so I'll be back to do more once the travel restrictions are lifted and it's possible to actually get out there again.
But as with all paranormal research, it's simply a question of time spent.
You have to invest a lot of hours in order to get even the smallest result for the most part.
So time served, boots on the ground.
Yeah, that's the only way to do it.
I think that goes, that's a motto for life.
And you talked about another killer further back in history.
This is Herb Baumeister.
This was The Horrors of Fox Hollow Farm.
How did that compare with some of the other people that you've investigated for the serial killer book?
Baumeister, I actually also put in the serial killer book because he's one of the lesser known serial killers.
If you mention John Wayne Gatty to almost anybody, even in the UK, you know, he's fairly well known.
The I-70 Strangler is not, and it mystifies me as to why.
He killed up to 19 men.
They're not sure because the number of bones that were found and bone fragments that were found on his estate, they were only uniquely able to identify a specific number of bones from the left hand that would say, you know, this is male A, B, C, D, E. So the exact count is unknown.
But here's the story.
During the 1980s, a number of young men's bodies turned up on the interstate outside Indianapolis.
And they would be found in a state of undress, dumped by the side of the road.
Nobody to this day has been caught and charged with those murders.
But a man called Herb Baumeister, who owned thrift stores, as we'd say in Britain, pound shops, you know, a chain of thrift stores, was doing pretty well for himself and bought a large 18-acre ranch called Fox Hollow Farm in the countryside, about 30 minutes out of Indianapolis.
And when his wife would take the children to their lake house at weekends, he led a secret life.
He would go to the gay bars of Indiana and he would pick up men, bring them back to his house, and he would murder them in the swimming pool.
And then he would drag the bodies out into the woods behind Fox Hollow Farm.
And rather than bury them, he just allowed them to decompose.
Sometimes he would set them on fire to try and burn them, but they were never buried.
And so they were left to the elements.
And of course, the various animals that you find in any woods got a hold of them, scattered them up, chewed them up.
And so Fox Hollow Farm essentially became a huge boneyard.
So he would have thought that he was committing the perfect crime.
He bought that venue with extensive ground acreage.
And he would have thought that the animals would have done what animals do, and the evidence of what he'd done would never be found.
Well, and here's the thing, too.
The reason he's known as the I-70 Strangler, despite nobody being collared for those murders, was that they stopped the day that the Baumeisters bought Fox Hollow Farm and moved in.
So once it came to light that Herb Baumeister was the prime suspect, the police checked his travel itinerary and he was on business trips out of town, out of state, along the interstate highway when the I-70 murders occurred.
So what it looks like is that he was killing initially, you know, hitchhikers that he would pick up.
And then when he had his own place, his own playground, if you will, that was isolated from the public, he didn't need to risk doing it on the roadsides anymore.
He could bring them home and take care of that at his leisure.
Boy, and of course, he wouldn't be suspected because he'd be a pillar of the American dream, you know, self-made man.
It's interesting when you start looking back, and I found this with many serial killers, you know, you look at their childhoods and there are usually, not always, but most often, there are some red flags.
You know, Herb's nickname in the neighborhood was Weird Herb.
And it was said he'd give you the shirt off his back.
He's so nice.
And he was very, very non-confrontational, but he was also strange.
He had some odd predilections and had been committed to a mental care facility as a teenager for reasons that were sealed because he was not an adult.
So there were a few red flags there.
But what I encourage you to do, Howard, once we're finished with the interview and your listeners too, if you go onto the internet and type in something like Herb Baumeister interview, you can see a news segment.
And this is one of the creepiest things you'll ever see.
It's some of the only footage of Herb Baumeister.
It may be the only footage out there.
And he is talking to the camera.
He made a complaint to a local news station.
So at the height of the murders, Herb comes home one day and sees outside his house in the road that there is a dead animal.
It's a squirrel or a raccoon or something of that nature.
Okay.
And a spray painting team, the ones that put the lines on the road, has been working that day.
And rather than move this small flattened animal, they drove over it and spray painted over it.
Now, not huge in the grand scheme of things, right?
They should, but Herbert is, I mean, he's up in arms about this.
He looks like your bank manager, you know, or an insurance salesman.
He looks so ordinary.
I'm looking at a still from this interview, by the way.
This is WISH-TV, isn't it?
Herb Baumeister interview.
Yeah, I can see it now.
And this guy, he looks like a school head teacher.
He does.
And he's complaining.
He says, how dare they?
This poor animal was shown no dignity in death.
They just treated it like a piece of trash.
We should have their jobs.
They should be fired.
And all the while he's talking, behind him, about 300 feet in the trees, there are the bodies of 10 to 15 young men decomposing that he put there.
That suggests to me that he was able to do something that I've read serial killers can do.
Not only serial killers, but people who deceive.
He must have compartmentalized those parts of his life.
Dissociation.
But also, I mean, I was fortunate to talk to the one victim that escaped from Fox Hollow.
And he told me that, you know, it was his opinion, having known her Baumeister from the gay scene in Indianapolis.
He said he thought that he was actually getting off on the idea that he was getting one over on the world, on the cruise.
You know, I'm making this big deal, but if you knew what I'd really gotten away with.
So this was the little guy who feels badly done by one way and another and wants to get one over, like you said, on everybody else.
And succeeded for a while until he was finally caught.
And when the law enforcement got onto his property, he fled to Canada and shot himself in the head on a beach in Canada in a national park.
So to this day, he was never convicted of anything.
It would have been a difficult trial.
Again, because he failed to bury the bodies, whether this was intelligent or not, in other words, whether he knew this was intelligent or not, I couldn't tell you.
But when you bury a body, you help preserve DNA evidence, you know, so you could exhume them and find some DNA.
Thanks to them being outdoors for years, exposed to all of the elements, it's likely that they may not have been able to pin the murders on her.
He could have brazened it out and said, I've no idea how all these corpses ended up in my garden.
And he may actually have gotten away with it.
And maybe that was part of his evil plan, and we will never know.
No, we'll never know.
Like I said, he took his own life and his family sold Fox Hollow and moved on.
What's unique about that location is that most places in which serial killers do what they do, quite rightly, are demolished.
In England, Cromwell Street.
Well, then the so-called House of Horror in Gloucester.
That's now a garden.
Right.
It's a walk, isn't it?
It's a walk that they didn't even put any memorial plaques up, as I recall.
Ten Rillington Place was pulled down.
Places like that, quite rightly, are taken down.
So they don't become a shrine, you know, for the ghoulish to visit.
Fox Hollow, though, is a private residence.
It's owned and lived in by a family.
So it was a unique opportunity for me when the family experienced a lot of paranormal phenomena themselves for me to go in and investigate on my own terms.
Why did they want to live there?
Sorry to jump in.
Why did they want to live there?
So the house was well known for its history, and it's a gorgeous house, Howard.
I mean, I put some pictures of it in my book about Fox Hollow Farm, but you can see them on the internet also.
It's a lovely house, and it was going not for a song, but it was significantly discounted because of the history there.
And the owner, Rob, his name truly is Rob Graves, and his wife are both in the business of...
And they were very okay with living in a house that had that kind of history and were able to get it at a very affordable price.
So another day at the office for them.
And presumably because they were scientific people, they wouldn't have believed in paranormality.
Well, and that's the interesting thing.
Neither of them were particularly, you know, they're not quote-unquote ghost people.
Rob and I co-authored the book about Fox Hollow.
And he said, you know, you do the ghosts, Richard, that's your thing.
And I'll write about Herb and the murders.
Because he's, you know, undoubtedly the expert.
He lives in Herb Baumeister's house, sleeps in his bedroom, you know, showers in his shower.
A lot of Herb's stuff is still at Fox Hollow, including parts of his library.
So, you know, Rob is kind of the expert on these murders.
And he's not particularly convinced about the haunting, but his family and friends all experienced phenomena that they couldn't explain.
His wife, Vicki, who is a scientist by nature, experienced phenomena she can't explain.
She saw the apparition of a young man in the woods disappear in front of her eyes.
And it kind of changes your worldview when things like that happen, you know?
So I found them to be very credible witnesses.
And I felt very privileged.
But also I wanted to handle it a little bit delicately, purely because the families of those poor men, Hurt Baumeister chose his victims carefully.
He always chose young-ish gay men.
So all of them were younger than 35.
And he went for those that wouldn't be missed.
So when the murders occurred, late 80s, early 90s, these men started disappearing from gay bars and from the gay community in general.
And the police, when it was reported to them, they would ultimately take this seriously and started putting plainclothes detectives out in the gay bars.
But prior to that, they would say things like, oh, well, maybe they just moved on to San Francisco, you know, or even horrifically, you know, oh, maybe they died of AIDS because it was in the middle of that, you know, very bigoted, homophobic era.
And the truth is, they weren't paying a lot of attention to the disappearances of these people that were marginalized and on the fringes of those people to end.
And what bothers me the most about it is that, and I think this plays into the Fox Hollow haunting, but what bothers me the most, I think, is that these poor men, not only did they never receive a burial, you know, a proper fitting burial, whether it's Christian or any denomination at all, but some of them to this day are unidentified.
And that is a recurring theme, isn't it?
That sometimes police simply don't know how many, in this case, Baumeister might have been responsible for, and they can only, in the absence of any compelling evidence or something new, they can only surmise.
Yeah, whenever a serial killer is identified, police in the surrounding vicinity will always go over their missing person's records.
And, you know, they'll start to, this is how really Baumeister was tied to the I-70 murders.
And they were able to prove that he was out of town and very, very probably was responsible for those nine deaths.
And it makes you wonder.
And it was only the fact, stroke of luck and the fact that he ultimately picked on a victim whose mom, whose mother missed him and hired a private detective, a very diligent man called Virgil Vandegriff, who put in a lot of time driving the back streets of rural Indiana, trying to find this place that the one surviving victim had said was called Something Something Farm.
There are so many jaw-dropping aspects to all of this, aren't there?
What about the paranormality that happened there to the people who lived at Fox Hollow Farm to this day?
You know, what sorts of things were they experiencing and was it disturbing them?
Well, one was the fact that both Rob's wife, Vicki, and their lodger, Joe, were experiencing apparitions.
So they both saw a young man in the woods, the same young man wearing a colored t-shirt.
And in each instance, he had no legs from the waist down.
Well, that's common with ghosts, isn't it?
But this is the one you told me about before who disappeared.
Yeah, disappeared into the woods.
And so what's more interesting than that, I think, is that Rob and Vicky had seen all of the, they had news videotaped about the Baumeister murders and were going through the videotapes one night.
And both Joe the Lodger and Vicky recognized one of the victims as being the young man that they had seen in the woods.
So they made a positive spike.
With a positive ID like that, that is pretty compelling evidence, isn't it, of something that we just don't understand.
So are we assuming that the young man was coming back to try to pinpoint what became of him?
It may well be.
I mean, the earliest ghost story that we have on record, to my knowledge, takes us all the way back to antiquity.
And it was about a, I want to make absolutely sure I'm right in this, but I believe it was a haunted house in Athens.
And an apparition would appear every night standing inside the house until one night the owner of the house followed it out into the yard and the apparition was pointing at the ground.
And when he dug there, uncovered the set of remains and turned out that he was a murder victim.
So it's the classic story, isn't it, of ghosts with unfinished business.
And what about Baumeister himself, though?
You know, we can understand the victims wanting to try and get some justice for themselves.
You know, who wouldn't want to do that if he were on the other side?
If the other side exists, then you want to come back and do that.
But what about Baumeister himself?
Was he appearing?
He doesn't so much appear, but there have been a number of, again, violent episodes at Fox Hollow.
To give you an example, a young man of about the same age as Baumeister's victims was swimming in the pool and felt hands around his throat and was dragged under the water.
Obviously not done by a living human being.
So that was one of the more disturbing phenomena that occurred.
I recorded the sound of a male voice out in the woods very belligerently, an EVP, that said, get away from there when we were at one of the body disposal sites.
So there are suggestions that Herb Baumeister is still there and is still active.
I brought in a couple of different sensitives, did not have them talk to one another to get their opinion.
And what interested me is that I was told by a couple of them that there is something negative at Fox Hollow that likes to imitate Herb Baumeister, likes to pretend to be him for its own purposes.
And one of the sensitives told me, he said, this thing is, again, not human and was drawn here because of all the negative energy and the terrible events that took place.
I don't know if, I mean, I certainly can't say one way or the other if that's true, but I don't find it beyond the realm of possibility.
So that would suggest that there is a sort of, we don't like the word demons, you said that, but a kind of demonic realm that is all-seeing, all-knowing, and would instantly latch on to something so bad.
You know, here's an analogy I like to use.
And again, I don't want to disrespect anybody's belief system.
So, you know, if you are of a particular faith and you believe in the demonic and want to call it that, that's absolutely fine.
But I also like the analogy of the shark in the ocean, Howard.
You know, sharks can sense blood from a great distance away.
Now, would you say a shark is evil?
Well, a shark is...
No, but if you're seeing one in an aquarium, would you think so?
Or would you just think it's an apex predator doing what it does by nature in its environment?
I think if you'd asked people 40 years ago, they'd have said that's a nasty piece of work.
And if you ask people today, because we're all a lot more enlightened, they would say it's an apex predator doing what an apex predator has to do.
So I've often wondered if what we like to call the demonic entity or whatever labor you want to put on it, if there isn't an equivalent of the shark or the tiger or the lion, you know, in the paranormal realm, something that feeds on negative energies, I'm sorry, that can be drawn to them and, you know, is entirely willing to call some mayhem along the way.
I get what you're saying, and I'm sorry to jump in again, but if the backwash of Bad things that happen can appear today, like, for example, the movie theater that was inhabited by John Wayne Casey.
Doesn't that mean that when you start investigating and raking over some of these cases, that some of that might, if you believe in these things, append itself to you?
It's possible.
And I was told by a medium when I left Fox Hollow that a young man had come back with me to Colorado.
And I used to be someone that would scoff.
By the way, I'm not very proud of this at all.
So here is a lesson in humility and why it's needed.
I used to scoff at people that did so-called spiritual protection, you know.
And for 23 years as an investigator, I never had any need of it.
And then that all changed when something unpleasant came home with me from a case.
And we started seeing a shadow figure in the house.
My dog started barking when we would hear a woman's voice in the house.
And there was nobody there.
Plainly, there was nobody in the house.
And finally, things started jumping off the shelves of all things.
So I brought in a friend of mine who's a Catholic priest, in addition to being a paranormal investigator.
And he said, I can cleanse your house for you.
He came over and he did it.
And he knows that I'm an agnostic, you know, and he said, it's about belief, Richard.
It doesn't matter that you don't believe in a specific framework of, you know, a specific religion or faith.
It's about having belief, though.
Belief is powerful.
And what I can tell you for sure is that after he spent about 90 minutes walking around my house, putting holy water on the doorways and doing his ritual, we were never bothered again.
And I took psychic protection very, very seriously.
And I tell people that they should do that themselves whenever they investigate a case, whether it seems good or bad.
So let my foolishness be a lesson.
Yeah.
Well, interesting, isn't it?
Because you do it very methodically, almost scientifically in the way that you go about these things.
So for something like that to visit itself upon you must have been pretty, you know, that must have given you a wake-up call.
Yeah, absolutely, because it's almost like when a doctor gets sick, you know, you spend so much of your life, of your time, dealing with something, but it's always somebody else's problem.
And when it becomes very personally your problem, again, it kind of shakes the way you view the world.
My home is a safe space.
It's my home.
So I go to all of these haunted locations.
I've been to the Billiska axe murder house and places that are just awful in terms of what happened there.
But when I come home, there's this mental change that takes place, which says, I'm in my safe space.
This is my home.
It's comfortable.
And when something invades that, definitely can hit you.
Did you ever look when you were investigating serial killers into the Zodiac murders in California, San Francisco?
I did.
In fact, the Zodiac murders are a part of the book that I've been writing.
And I think the most disturbing thing that I found most disturbing was the fact that the Zodiac was never caught, was never identified.
So serial killers, it's a truism, isn't it, that they rarely just stop.
Serial murders may have gaps in between them, but generally when serial murders stop, it's because the killer was either imprisoned for something else or had some kind of major life change, like an illness, a stroke, or became too old or debilitated.
We don't know what stopped the Zodiac murders.
They ceased as abruptly as they began, and they're one of the great true crime enigmas, aren't they?
Well, they are.
I mean, I remember, I've seen the movie a couple of times.
First time I was on a plane watching it, and I thought it was a brilliantly executed movie that I totally recommend.
But the way this perpetrator led the police a merry dance with letters taunting them effectively.
And there were times when the police thought they were absolutely onto him, assuming it was a him.
And, you know, that's the outcome is as you described.
So in terms of paranormality, then, if there isn't a named killer, if you don't know who it is, you can only have suspects, can there be any aspects of paranormality connected with a case like that?
Connected in what way, howard?
Well, kind of connected with victims or supposed victims coming to, for example, help the police with their inquiries.
So my understanding, and correct me if you know differently, and I'm sure your listeners will be willing to correct me.
I'm certainly open to being wrong on this.
But my current understanding is that there are zero cases on record of either a psychic medium or a paranormal investigator solving an unsolved murder case.
Okay, well, I've interviewed some people who may somewhat disagree with that, but that's interesting.
Well, again, and I'm open to being corrected.
You know, it could just be a gap in my knowledge.
So if there are, I would like to learn more about it.
But I would also like to see that acknowledgement come from the police themselves.
Of course, police often bring in psychics, and sometimes the psychics aid them by confirming something that they already suspected.
I certainly know of those cases.
Okay.
In terms of that being an objective thing, again, I'm a little ignorant on there being any cases like that.
So I'm not saying it.
And of course, the people who will tell you these things are not necessarily the detectives, but they are the mediums who would say that.
So it's mired in...
It's not...
Exactly.
And I would just like to hear that from someone that doesn't have a vested interest.
You know what I mean?
Okay, getting back to, and I'm sorry to jump in again, just to bring it back, because we could talk all day, and this became apparent last time we had a conversation, Richard.
You book The Dead Below.
This is an investigation into a cemetery, the Denver Botanic Gardens.
It was a botanic gardens, which became a cemetery, obviously replete with remains of those who'd passed.
What sort of an investigation was that?
That was an interesting case because Denver is my adopted home.
Well, I should say Colorado is my adopted Home State.
I live outside of Denver.
But so I love the movie Poltergeist.
It's one of my favorite films of all time.
And the whole idea of, you know, this corporation built a housing estate on top of a cemetery.
And rather than go to the trouble of exhuming and moving the bodies, instead, they would just remove the headstones and flatten, you know, they would build on top of it.
It seemed like a great idea.
And I thought, there's no way that would ever happen in real life.
And of course, I learned that that very thing happened in Denver.
The old city cemetery was where the Botanic Gardens now stands.
And what happened was that as Denver started to grow, and it sprawled fairly quickly at the end of the 18th century, excuse me, at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century.
So as we started to see this urban sprawl in Denver, it was decided that they wanted to move the cemetery a little further out of town.
They didn't want it right in the middle of Denver.
So they gave people a very short span of time, a few weeks to come and have their loved ones moved.
And a contractor came in that was paid a specific amount of money per body to move it.
And this, we use the term cowboy, you know, builders in the UK.
This guy was definitely a cowboy.
I think maybe quite literally.
And would, there were horror stories and scandalous tales in the newspapers of him and his workmen cramming multiple sets of bones into one coffin for cheapness to save money, you know, and leaving bones out there bleaching in the sun, doing a halfway job, if you will.
It became quite a scandal.
And so he was removed from being allowed to do that.
Right, because it's the ultimate disrespect.
It really is, isn't it?
And so what happened was then that they relocated some of them to Denver's new cemetery.
And anybody that did not claim their loved one, they were basically told, right, your time is up.
We are going to plant grass all over the old cemetery.
The gravestones are going.
And there are several thousand, up to 4,000 sets of human remains still under what is now the Denver Botanic Gardens and Cheeseman Park, which is a big public park that abuts the Botanic Gardens.
So human remains are found to this day.
When they built a new parking structure, a car park for the Botanic Gardens, they regularly had to call in law enforcement because they would find skulls and so forth.
And of course, obviously it's part of the cemetery, but you find human remains, you know, there's a process you have to go through.
It's surprising, isn't it, that the people who made that development and did the building didn't actually know that if you uncover human remains, you're going to have to get the cops in because they have to make sure that foul play is not involved.
Well, and I think ultimately it's just become like a very jaded thing.
Whenever the utility workers are laying new cable or fixing pipes, they warn their employees, hey, you may come up with a FEMA here or, you know, a humorist there.
Just be aware that this is a thing when you dig on Cheeseman Park and then the Botanic Gardens.
Well, it's gruesome and tragic at the same time.
It is, but also the Botanic Gardens itself, which the kind of epicenter is this grand old manor house where my investigation centered.
It's a historic old building that they built the botanic gardens around, has a small issue with subsidence because there are all of these pockets in the ground, these old wooden graves, you know, and every time the ground gets wet, you know, you water a botanic gardens quite a lot.
And every time the ground gets wet, you start to see the soil become soft.
It's slowly corroding.
Corroding is not the right word, that's metal.
It is degrading the wood of the coffins.
And every so often, one will just snap and collapse.
And if that happens often enough, you know, you start to see subsidence.
So you are literally walking on the dead when you walk around the Denver Botanic Gardens.
And I was, I felt very privileged to be allowed to investigate.
For several nights, we were locked in there and security would lock us in, make sure we couldn't get out.
And we were, I feel privileged to be allowed to tell that story.
What was it that made you want to investigate?
What had you been hearing?
So they had had a staff member, a security guard, a night watchman, if you will, quit unexpectedly, could never find out why, but quit in the middle of the night and would not come back.
So most of the employees at the Botanic Gardens, they take it in their stride.
You know, it's not that they're living in a state of fear or anything, but a number of them, including the cleaning staff that are there later at night, have heard voices in that building.
And people that walk around the outskirts have also seen strange lights and figures that have disappeared, those kind of things.
So it had all the elements of a classic haunting, and you don't have to look very far to see why a place like that would be haunted.
Well, Yvonne, for the people who've gone to live there, you know, located themselves there, it's like living in your own personal horror movie, isn't it?
Well, I mean, not really, because it's one of those out-of-sight, out-of-mind things.
This isn't like Fox Hollow, where you had people that were murdered at that location.
These are people that were buried there, and then, you know, we're just built on top of them.
I mean, half of London's built on plague pits, isn't it?
Yeah, well, I mean, that's a fact.
And I suppose people who plan building, and I've often thought about this because we've seen cases where former cemeteries, of course, the remains have been removed in most cases, I think.
You know, former cemeteries have been built over simply to make space.
And a decent amount of time is allowed to elapse, they say, before those things happen.
But nevertheless, it's still an alarming thing.
If you believe in paranormality, it opens the door for all of it.
Because here you may have, and you said in the case of this Boston Cemetery, thousands of perhaps unidentified or little identified remains.
So if anything is screaming out between this side and the other side, if there is another side, for justice, identification, retribution, whatever, here's a case in point.
Yes, one of the, I think, the more chilling moments of the investigation came with an EVP that we got.
And We'd asked the question, a very simple question, you know, where are we right now?
And received a male voice in return, which clearly said, in a mass grave.
Yeah.
So that indicates that whatever it was, I just took me a second to take that on board.
Whatever it was, was aware of the circumstances now.
Again, you have that intelligent response as opposed to something residual.
You know, so but the staff of the garden, it's funny.
There is a sign on the door downstairs in the basement which says, please close the door.
It keeps the ghosts in.
It's a joke, of course.
But the staff really aren't bothered by it.
You know, they like working at the gardens and it's a beautiful place.
But every once in a while, there's a reminder of what it is that you're walking on and standing on.
And when you say reminder, I know that a security guard quit and there's various things that have happened, but are there any that would particularly interest or maybe even I shudder to say, but scare my audience?
I don't think your audience are that easily scared, Howard, from what I've seen.
They're my kind of people, let me tell you, if they're listening to this sort of subject, they're my kind of people.
But generally, yeah, the classic get out is something that, you know, thanks to the Amateurville horror, we've seen that crops up in a lot of cases.
And one of the cleaners was told quite forcefully by a dissonbuddy voice, get out.
And it was advice that she took.
She was very quick to get out of there.
We also had one of the staff members there that had a door rattled very forcefully, a locked door, as if someone was trying desperately to get out.
Now, this door led onto a big enclosed part of the gardens, which is informally referred to as Jurassic Park, because, you know, it kind of looks like that, but it's completely enclosed.
There's one door in, one door out.
And the security guard on duty that night and this member of staff both saw this door being shaken violently as if someone was trying to either gain access or escape, which was quite chilling.
So do we think there's any common motivation with those spirits or entities that appear?
Are they wanting to go back to where they came from?
Are they wanting to, like I said, pinpoint what happened to them, what became of them?
Do they feel a sense of injustice about the fact that they've ended so tragically and anonymously?
I guess we can only speculate, yeah?
We can only speculate.
I would not be at all surprised, though, trying to put myself in that situation, which of course is a very difficult thing to do.
But I would not be at all surprised if they didn't feel like they were slighted by the fact that they'd received a burial, you know, that their life was over, and all of a sudden their place of burial is turned into this clamoring place of tourism.
And do you think the fact that some people, a lot of people know what this site was used for and maybe have heard the stories, not that I'm saying people fantasize because you were there and you got the story firsthand one way or another, but do you think that by allowing for the possibility that there might be the return of the poor people whose remains are there, if you allow for that possibility, maybe you open the door to it?
I mean, that may be the case.
There's the old saying that, you know, once you become interested in the paranormal, it becomes interested in you right back.
You know, and I do firmly believe that.
So yeah, it may be that you're empowering something or triggering something or something of that nature.
It's entirely possible.
Boy, are you going back to this location?
You know, my investigation there is complete.
I do go back to do book signings every once in a while, and I would be real happy to go back and spend a night or two there.
At no point did I feel I was in jeopardy or we were in jeopardy or anything like that.
It was my kind of feeling that whatever was there was making its presence known.
But we were being extremely respectful.
And I think most of the time, that's the approach investigators should take and just visitors should take, you know.
They're people, just like us.
And I think they just wanted to be acknowledged somewhat.
And I let them know that I was going to tell their story in the form of a book.
And I would do it as respectfully and courteously and accurately as I could manage.
Have you ever thought, as many of us who investigate these things and think about these things have thought, that some of the most likely people to want to return, perhaps people who've been involved in psychic research or others who were notorious in many ways, some people you would expect to return and they don't.
And others who were not that well remarked or they were infamous for various reasons, like being a serial killer, they do return.
Have you ever thought about that?
Yeah, I mean, Houdini's the obvious one, isn't he?
Houdini was the one that had arranged the secret code, which your fellow investigator and I are doing, by the way.
I'm sorry, I've done it again.
I've jumped in.
Are you doing that for yourself?
Yeah, absolutely.
So Houdini had a secret code by which if any medium or Ouija board user or anybody really could use this keyword or phrase, could recite it, then they would know that they were communicating with Houdini himself.
And this really came about because Houdini had gone to a psychic who claimed to communicate with the spirit of his mother, and there was just the small manner of she got wrong of the name that Houdini's mother had called him by as a young man.
And that's how he knew that he was dealing with a fraud.
And that launched Houdini's crusade.
There's no other word for it against fake mediumship.
So the Houdini code has never been cracked.
Nobody has come forward with it yet.
So Harry Houdini would be one you would think would be well motivated to come through and say, hey, guys, it turns out we do survive after all.
I was wrong about that.
And it's pretty awesome over here.
And that is one of the biggest flaws in it all, isn't it?
That such things do not happen.
So have you get me, I've got to get this right.
Have you told me that you've arranged a secret code for your own passing?
It's actually one that I'm Working with a fellow investigator at I called Tim Woolworth, who is my EVP consultant.
We are coming up with a code together for both of us.
So if something should happen to either of us, we'll make every effort to come on through and annoy people in death as we did in life.
That's our goal.
All right, okay.
Well, forewarned is forearmed, as they say.
If you have a secret code, it's got to be known to the two of you, but nobody else, really.
Otherwise, it's not a secret code.
It's not a secret if it's known to more than one person anyway, but two is the next optimal number, isn't it?
Hmm.
Well, you know, I hope that you're able.
Well, I hope that you live a long and healthy life.
But I hope you're able to prove this point as well when that long and healthy life reaches its inevitable end as it does for all of us.
Why, just very quickly, we don't have a lot of time right now, but I noticed that you investigated UFOs, and they were one thing that I wouldn't have thought would fit into your quiver of arrows.
But you've done an investigation into UFOs in your own state.
Why was that?
Well, I like to think of myself as a working writer.
And what I mean by that, I mean, all writing is work, don't get me wrong.
But what I mean is that if something intriguing I don't know a lot about comes up and I'm motivated to write about it, I'm happy to.
So the publisher in question had asked if I would like to write a book about UFOs.
And I told them the very thing you just said.
I said, I'm not a UFO guy.
There are plenty that are, but it's not my wheelhouse.
And they said, well, that's what we're looking for.
We're looking for someone that can tackle the issue of UFOs, give us a kind of state of the union from their home state, if you will, and give us their take on it.
So it was one of the, it's one of the shortest books I've ever written.
At 30,000 words, it runs to about two-thirds or half of what I would usually write.
And it took me two years purely because the research, I spent nights in secluded clearings out in the woods with people who tried to communicate with alien spacecraft, for example.
I visited abductees, contactees.
I interviewed people that claim that they'd had the most incredible experiences.
And it was a wonderful journey and a wonderful adventure.
So wouldn't have missed it for the world.
But as a researcher in these things, and I've been interested in UFOs all my life, you really want to be, you know, it's always the bridesmaid, never the bride.
You want to be the one who has contact.
You don't want to be speaking to somebody else, ideally, who's had contact.
You want to know for yourself.
You know, you want to see the proof for yourself.
And I guess I haven't, and I guess you haven't.
I did not.
And that was my conclusion at the end of the book.
You know, I'm not somebody that will sex up an ending for a book.
Sometimes, you know, I investigate a case and a number of interesting things happen, but there's no big Hollywood ending because that's not the way life works.
You know, so, and I know there is a big market for books out there that talk about, you know, you end with a huge exorcism or something of that nature.
I like to put out there as I see it the unvarnished truth.
And in the case of UFOs, I truly believe the people I interviewed believe what's happening to them 100%.
But you didn't.
Well, I'm not saying that either.
I'm saying that I did not have any physical evidence to corroborate the claims they made.
And what about, I find these people some of the most fascinating because I haven't come across very many of them, but those who claim that they, and you did an investigation, that was part of your research for the book, people who claim that they can summon them.
That always fascinates me when there are people who say that they can literally call them down.
I'm a big fan of the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
I'm sure you're familiar with him.
Yes, I am.
And he can seem a little snarky sometimes, but he makes a great point.
He talks to people that claim they can do this and says, you know, next time, if you're abducted or if you are in contact with aliens, reach out, grab something, put it in your pocket.
Grab a knob from a console or something and bring us back a piece of physical evidence.
And it doesn't appear to have happened yet, or at least we don't appear to have indisputable evidence.
It's always fascinated me how if you look at the history of ufology, the aliens come from further and further away as human knowledge expands.
So the first kind of UFO flap with Kenneth Arnold and so forth, back in those days, the earlier part of the mid-20th century, UFOs came from Mars and they came from Venus.
You know, and then there were these stories about there being civilizations on those planets and stuff.
Flying sources came from, you know, Venus.
Then we started sending out space probes and lo and behold, the aliens came from further away.
You know, so they came from the fringes of our solar system then.
And as we started sending probes out to the fringes of the solar system, then they come from the nearest stars in our neighborhood.
Right, so you're saying that the less elusive these things become, the more elusive we have to make them.
I do wonder how much of the UFO phenomenon isn't a kind of black box for other things, if that makes sense.
You know, it's a fascinating phenomenon, and I'm not casting aspersions on it in its entirety.
I mean, there are well-documented cases of missing time, of people showing up with unexplained burns, radiation issues.
It's also one heck of a story.
I mean, if you like conspiracy theories, looking at things like Roswell, you know, the debate still rages over Roswell to this day.
I mean, I have to put my cards on the table, but I have no reason, as in scientific reason, to know this.
But I have a feeling that we are not alone in this universe, and we may well have been visited for a good long period.
But that's just a belief that I have.
You know, I have yet, you know, I'm hoping tonight might be the night, the nearest thing I have to it at the moment is in front of my console here that I'm doing my radio shows at the moment from at home and also recording my podcasts.
I've got a little ET model that I've had since 1982.
That's the nearest I've ever got.
The most fascinating case, just to close here, I wonder if you ever heard of this person.
I used to have him on my radio show.
When I started doing The Unexplained on radio, it was 2004, 2005, and the original radio show ended in 2006, and then I made it into a podcast.
There was a man who called himself the Prophet Yahweh.
And this was Las Vegas, I believe, which is a perfect location for these things.
And he always promised to summon a UFO on command in front of TV news cameras.
And I'm not quite sure.
Maybe one of my listeners will know what happened to the Prophet Yahweh.
Because I believe, but I may be wrong and my listener can correct me, that the Prophet Yahweh, who was a great entertaining character to talk to, I think his real name was something like Ramon.
I'm actually trying to look it up now.
Ramon Watkins, according to one source that I see here, was this person.
I don't think it ever happened, but it was a fascinating case and maybe worth some research on its own, Richard.
Who knows?
Yeah, I think it would be immensely arrogant of us to assume that in all of this immensity, we are the only intelligent species, the only inhabited planet.
So my belief tracks with yours.
I definitely believe that we are not alone.
Now, as to whether this phenomenon is a reflection of that, I'm not sure, but I find it fascinating.
It does make me wonder.
I mean, I talked to people that have been supposedly contacted, at least one of them, it pretty much ruined his life and was deeply traumatic for him, deeply disturbing.
And this was a well-respected member of the medical community who I kept anonymous by his request.
And I talked to others that found it very positive.
And the end of the book, I delved a little into the philosophy because it had caused a number of philosophical changes in some of these contactees.
It had given them what they like to call a galactic rather than a global perspective, you know.
And they took the view from this that the reason we're not being more explicitly visited is that we as a species are too immature, that we are essentially still in our crib throwing tantrums.
We are devastating our environment, our habitat.
We aren't mature enough yet to go out and play with the big kids.
Well, two ways to look at that then.
Number one, I agree.
Or number two, if we're so misguided, come and guide us.
Yeah, or alternatively, they're seeing if we are able to walk ourselves, you know, I mean, when I first learned to ride a bike without stabilizers, they used to call them training wheels in the States.
We call them stabilizers, but there's always that moment at which you kind of, your dad takes the stabilizers off, right?
And then you have to go ride for the first time.
And sometimes it's painful.
You fall over, you skin your knees, you don't want to do it, but you've got to get back on and you've got to do it for yourself.
Oh, well, that begs the question that, you know, if we are about to wreck the planet, are they going to step in?
And at what stage will they step in?
Fascinating discussion, Richard Estep.
I always love talking with you.
Please stay safe in your day job.
You know, you're doing great.
And it's a very dangerous and worrying time for all of us.
You told me about the serial killer book.
Are you able to tell me anything about research beyond that, if you're doing any?
I have several other projects I'm working on.
In terms of England, I'm finishing up my next book, which is called The Hanging Pit, about my investigation of Bodmin Jail in Cornwall.
And that should be out late in May, all being well.
That was a fascinating case.
After that, I'm writing a book about the Villisca Axe murder house here in the U.S., Iowa, the haunting and investigation of that and a few other haunted locations, including one that covers ghosts of the Revolutionary War.
Right.
And those things, battlefields, a rich vein of research for many people, you know, both sides of the Atlantic.
Bodmin Castle, don't leave me in suspense, though.
What sorts of things happened there?
Bodmin Jail.
Bodmin Jail.
Yeah, Bodmin Jail is kind of interesting.
It's where they would execute people throughout the county of Cornwall for many years.
They would start executing people outside the gates and ultimately bought a, constructed rather, a purpose-built execution pit inside the walls of the jail.
And I was given free rein, along with some fellow investigators, to spend several nights at the jail delving into the mysteries of that particular location.
And it's now being turned into a hotel, of all things.
It's being renovated, and they're turning half of the jail into a hotel and a paranormal kind of experience and research center.
So I'm really interested to see because I was one of the last investigators to go in there when it was purely Bodmin jail.
I'm interested to see how the big construction changes alter the paranormal activity that takes place there.
Boy.
Well, you've got a lot on your plate in so many different ways, Richard.
Thank you very much for speaking with me.
It's only fair for me to give you a chance to plug your website.
So what is your website?
Sure.
I'm over at richardestep.net, and you can catch my books pretty much anywhere.
Amazon, of course, is probably the easiest way.
But I'd just love to say to all of your listeners, if I may, thanks for tuning in today.
And those of you that are staying home, social distancing, doing your very best to flatten the curve, those of us in healthcare really appreciate you.
Thank you so much.
We know it's difficult, but we will get through this together.
We will.
Please stay safe, Richard.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure, Howard.
Richard Airstep, my thanks to him.
We have more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained as we continue in lockdown around the world.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe.
Stay home now.
Stay calm.
And above all, for all of our sakes, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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