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June 5, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:53
Edition 459 - Ruth Roper-Wylde

This time Ruth Roper-Wylde who has spent decades diligently investigating the UK's spooky - and sometimes little-known - ghost cases...

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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.
Well, we're into June 2020 now, and I hope that life in the midst of lockdown or whatever you're experiencing is treating you okay.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
You know, we've kind of been sharing each other's life stories, haven't we, through this two and a half months, whatever it is of lockdown here in the UK and however, you know, whatever the period is where you happen to be.
You know, I asked you if you would tell me your stories, you've been doing that, and I've been telling you on the air or on the podcast about how things are with me.
You know, I've been doing weeks and weeks and weeks of producing everything that I do and doing all the work that I do do from my home, from my flat.
And it's been a learning experience.
And literally, over these weeks, the only human being that I've seen in many of the weeks has just been the person, I say just they're marvelous people, but the checkout person on the counter at the local supermarket, and that's it.
And all the other connections that I've had, and I've spoken to many people, have been digital.
That is a kind of hallmark of the society that we're moving towards, I think, where a lot of communication will be done virtually.
Something that was going to happen anyway has been accelerated, it seems to me, by coronavirus, but we've talked about that before.
Anyway, the long and short of it is, thank you very much for sending me your stories and for keeping in touch with me.
It means a lot to me.
And you've been telling me that the show means something to you, which is fantastic for me because that's what I always hoped for when I started doing this podcast 14 years ago, more than 14 years ago now.
Now, two things from my radio show I'm going to bring to you on this edition of The Unexplained.
One of them is a conversation with Ruth Roper Wilde.
She is a UK-based ghost writer.
She writes remarkably about ghosts, not only of her own experience through her life, but also stories that she has spent decades and decades diligently compiling.
So Ruth Roper Wilde is first up, and then we'll speak with a couple of people who made some headlines in the UK and around the world about this to do with a strange story, a real ghost story.
This was in the Sun newspaper.
I'll tell you what the story is.
Paranormal investigators say that they ran out of a haunted Louisiana house after being confronted by an evil spirit.
The four-bedroom, three-bathroom house in Youngsville was built in the 1930s.
It is being given away for free after the seller struggled to offload it amid creepy claims from previous occupants and visitors.
Now, this is where a pair of ghost hunters come into the story.
They go and check the place out.
They're from New Orleans.
They're Cindy Parr and Greg Matlock.
And they've been to the home, but they did not stay very long because of the amazing events that transpired that essentially saw them flee that house in Louisiana.
So you'll hear their story.
We managed to track them down for the radio show.
You'll hear that conversation here too.
But first up on this edition of The Unexplained, it's going to be Ruth Roper Wilde.
We'll talk with her in just a second, but just to say thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot for his hard work on this show.
And please keep your emails coming.
Lovely to hear from you, especially during lockdown.
Okay, part number one of this edition of The Unexplained.
Let's get to Ruth Roper Wilde, author, ghost writer.
Ruth Roper Wilde, thank you for coming on The Unexplained.
Hi, Howard.
It's really good to be here.
I'm going to make a really silly comment at the beginning of this, but I have to.
Ruth Roper Wilde is a fantastic name for a person who investigates ghosts.
You know, it's much better.
I would say that it's much better investigating ghosts being called Ruth Roper Wilde than being called Sharon Smith.
Nothing wrong with being called Sharon Smith, but I think the name works, Ruth, if I may say so.
Well, it's a name that you won't forget in a hurry, isn't it?
Absolutely.
No, but it sounds also for the American listeners that we have.
It's quintessentially British, I think.
I took the Roper part as a middle name when I got married, because that's my husband's surname.
So I became Ruth Roper Wilde 20 years ago when I got married.
Okay.
That's how the name came about.
Well, it works.
Talk to me about you then.
How did the ghost investigation and the interest in all of this start?
Well, it really started when I was really young.
I can remember the first time ever having a paranormal experience.
I must only have been about five, something like that, five years old.
And we were staying with some friends of our parents over in Shropshire in a very, very old cottage.
And my sister and I were put to sleep in a truckle bed in the...
It's the old-fashioned kind of bed that they used to be able to pull out to put visitors up on.
So it was just an old-style camp bed type.
Okay.
And we'd been put to sleep in that in the dining room where they'd push the furniture to one side to pull the bed out and put us in top to toe as they often did children back in the day.
In other words, her feet to my head, my head to her feet.
I remember those days well.
Remember those days well.
Fight over who gets the covers.
And we were fighting to stay awake because the room had a real fire in it, which we found absolutely fascinating because we didn't have anything like that at home.
And then we got even more happy when two kittens came into the room and started playing and we weren't allowed pets at home.
So this was the biggest thrill ever for us.
My sister's a couple of years older than me.
So there we were, sort of roughly about five and seven years old, enthralled by these kittens who jumped onto our bed and were jumping over each other and purring and playing.
And we both recall the way that when they jumped, they kept slightly disappearing as if they were made of smoke.
And eventually, try as we might to stay awake and watch them, we couldn't.
We fell asleep.
The following morning, when we went down for breakfast, there was a fat old ginger tom sitting in the kitchen.
And I asked the lady of the house if we could play with the kittens.
And she said, well, we've only got the cat there, the ginger.
No, no, no, I want to play with the two grey kittens that we played with last night.
And she turned to my mum and said, we don't have any kittens.
They were run over a couple of years ago.
Oh, Lord.
So not only did you have what appeared to be like a ghost experience, but a ghost experience with another species.
With cats, yes.
And it's still very vivid in my mind how as they moved, they sort of trailed off into smoke as if they weren't quite real.
But children, we don't tend to question things like that quite so much as children.
The whole world is a wonder at that age, isn't it?
Probably the best age to be experiencing those things.
I mean, I'm guessing, but it's a big guess that you weren't really scared after that because you were a kid.
No, it wasn't at all scary.
It was a really nice experience, actually, because we just thought they were kittens who'd come to play with us.
We then moved to a house in Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, and that had a couple of ghosts attached to it that we'd just wander through every now and then.
So there was a little boy in perfectly modern dress, shorts and a t-shirt, who would just wander through.
You'd see him out of the corner of your eye.
And there was also a lady wearing a skirt and a dark coloured top, a red skirt and a dark coloured top that my mum saw on several occasions walk through the house.
And she actually went chasing after her the first couple of times, thinking it was a real flesh and blood person had walked into the house, only to chase her into a sort of dead end room, as it were, with no other exit and find there was no one there and realise that obviously we were getting visitors from elsewhere rather than just corporeal people wandering in.
No, I have a theory, and I think it's probably right, that most people experience these things maybe once or twice in their lives.
But this stuff seems to be on the basis of just your two stories from when you were very young there, and there are more, I know.
It seems to be following you around.
Well, I've sometimes wondered that, to be honest, whether it seems to be following me a bit on my back, and I don't feel very comfortable with the idea of the paranormal following me around, I have to say.
But it did.
And it did to the point where you made another move.
You seemed to make a lot of moves when you were younger.
And you ended up living in a house with a poltergeist, apparently.
That was the worst.
I have to say.
That was the part where my interest really, really sparked, if you like.
And what set me off on this lifelong journey of researching the paranormal and then eventually deciding to write the books.
So that was a property in Old Welling in Hertfordshire.
And it wasn't a particularly old property.
I think it was probably built in maybe the 1920s, something like that.
But we were there as teenagers, my sister and I and our younger brother, or from later childhood, it through into teenage until I left home.
And that had all sorts of things happening from crashing noises to smashing glass.
It would move things regularly right in front of you.
So for example, one evening, broad sunny evening, you know, sunlit evening, about six o'clock tea time, it was my turn to help clean up the tea time things.
So I'm in the kitchen with my mother.
We're chatting away.
The radio's on.
We're clearing up the things that have been left behind from tea.
And on the side is a tea towel that's just been sort of scrunched up and chucked onto the side there.
And as we're chatting and moving about the kitchen, we both suddenly caught movement out of the corner of our eye and turned to look.
And this tea towel was busy flattening itself out on the surface and then carefully folding itself three ways.
Hold on, with no kind of human intervention.
With no intervention whatsoever.
No.
And we actually stood there, mouths open, and watched it fold itself one way, fold itself the other way, and then fold itself the third way until it had made a neat little square.
So that indicates that somebody who'd been in that house before, and I don't know what the history of that place was, had been used to doing that.
Well, it could do.
And there were times when it would do things like that, when you would think it was quite benign and quite friendly.
I mean, one of the other things it used to regularly do was I used to make myself a drink of hot milk every night before I went to bed.
And I used to make it with a pan on the stove, the old-fashioned way, with an electric stove.
And I used to test the temperature by dipping my finger in it, which, yes, I know that's not entirely bright.
And listeners don't follow that idea.
But we have to say rather like the truckle beds, but those are the things that people, I remember, those are the things that people used to do.
Absolutely, back in the day.
So I know that the cooker was absolutely switched on because the milk would be getting hot and then it would seem to stop getting any hotter and you'd stand there waiting and waiting and then eventually realize the cooker had been switched off at the wall.
And sometimes, some nights, it would do it so often that I would actually stand there with my hand over the switch on the wall to stop it being switched off before I could heat the milk up.
So it would actually, you know, try and turn it on and off several times while I was trying to heat the milk up.
So quite often it seemed almost benign, almost friendly.
But then other times it would play tricks that were really terrifying.
And it used to pick on my sister a lot for that.
And its favorite trick with her was to wait till she went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and then bang loudly on the bathroom door.
It used to absolutely terrify her to the point where...
very likely.
And then if you think horror movies, then you get this great big bass drum rapping.
Is that what you got?
I mean, the one night that she persuaded me to come and sit with her while she went to have a bath because she was scared of being in the bathroom on her own by then.
I'd put the toilet lid down and was sat on the toilet while she was in the bath.
And somebody came and banged on that bathroom door like it was a serial killer trying to get in.
They were banging so hard that it was shaking the door in its frame and they were trying the handle.
So the handle was rattling backwards and forwards violently.
The door was banging violently.
I was absolutely convinced it was our baby brother trying to scare the living daylights out of my sister.
So I shushed her and crept to the door while it was still being banged on like this and flung it open, Intending, quite frankly, to give him a good punch, only to find there was nobody there.
Now, honestly, you told me before when you were younger, you didn't feel scared.
I presume at that point you were.
Yes, I definitely did by then.
Yes, I can imagine.
And especially, you know, it was as I opened the door, it was being banged on.
So there is absolutely no way if it had been somebody human the other side that they could even have moved more than a step away from the door in the time, you know, of me flinging the door open.
But there was nobody about.
The house was actually, my brother, it turned out, wasn't even actually home at the time when I actually went searching.
But the feeling of flinging that door open and there being nobody real stood there was quite terrifying.
And I have to say, I did then go with her to the bathroom after that because I understood why she was so scared of going on her own.
Gee, amazing that you could continue.
I suppose you had no choice at that age, but continue to live there after that.
Well, I think it was helped, to be honest, because our mum, before she got married and had children, she was a radio engineer in the RAF.
So she was a very practical, level-headed woman.
And she believed that there must be a scientific explanation for phenomena.
So whenever things like this would happen, she would just stay completely calm and try and work out what just caused whatever had happened.
So I think the fact that we had that kind of adult lead of staying calm and investigate it rather than get panicked and frightened about it, I think that did help.
But it didn't completely take the terror away.
I hesitate to ask this question, but did anything else happen?
I presume it did.
Well, I can remember one particular day I was alone in the house and I was revising for my A-levels and I'd taken a break from revision and had gone to sit in the lounge having made myself a sandwich and a drink.
And I was sat in one of the chairs in the lounge.
I'd got a radio playing softly in the background.
It was a Saturday, early afternoon.
And it was a slightly grey, drizzly day.
And I was just eating my sandwich, minding my own business, thinking about what I'd just been revising about.
And I'd got the sandwich halfway between the plate and my mouth when all of a sudden the atmosphere in the house changed completely.
And it went from perfectly ordinary, benign Saturday afternoon to absolute heart-thumping terror for no reason that I could determine immediately.
I literally froze with the sandwich partway to my mouth and felt like some awful predator had just got me in its sights.
And that if I moved an inch, that was it.
It was going to see me and get me.
And I couldn't for the life of me figure out where that feeling was coming from.
Absolutely nothing had changed about the day.
There'd been no noise.
There'd been no movement, you know, all the things that normally happen in the house.
None of that had happened.
It was just a feeling.
And after a moment or two, I kind of gave myself a mental talking to.
I thought, don't be so stupid.
You know, nothing's happened.
There's been no noise.
Nothing's moved.
There's nothing here.
And I carried on and moved the sandwich and took the bite.
But the moment I did so, I thought, that's it.
It's seen me.
I'm in real danger.
I have got to get out.
And I literally threw the sandwich and plate down and ran out of the house.
And I went and sat on our front driveway.
Our old land driver was parked on the driveway.
I sat up on its bonnet and waited there for two hours until somebody else came home because I was too scared to go back into the house on my own.
But in the meantime, your mum is telling you all of this has to be rational and can be explained.
Absolutely.
Yes.
So, you know, and therein lies the issue, doesn't it?
That, you know, the fact that these things happen for me is indisputable because I've seen it and heard it.
But for me, the question is, well, what's causing it?
How do you explain the difference between something that can benignly fold a tea towel to something that can terrify you with banging on a door or, you know, just changing an atmosphere like that?
Completely different behavior.
And even our dog would react to it sometimes.
Really?
We had a mongrel dog, who was a rescue dog.
And my sister and I shared a bedroom.
And I remember one particular evening, I was laying on my bed, she was laying on her bed, reading magazines or whatever.
And the dog suddenly shot up off the floor and started growling and backing away and carefully skirting around something that it was looking at in the center of the room to get from where it was laying to the door out of the bedroom.
That frightened the life out of my sister because she's actually a bit nervous around dogs.
And because he was growling, she was sort of, Ruth, Ruth, what's he doing?
What's the matter?
Why is he growling?
And of course, I couldn't really answer her because whatever he could see, we couldn't see.
And he sort of backed around, whatever it was, keeping his eye on it, growling and snarling, and then fled out of the bedroom and would not be enticed back in that evening at all.
And yet the following evening, he was back in the bedroom as normal, perfectly happy.
So it was very strange because, like I say, sometimes it was a very benign, almost playful feeling to that house.
And other times it was a really petrifying feeling.
And obviously not just felt by us if the dog can feel it as well.
You must have thought about it a lot.
And not only at the time, but in the years that followed.
I mean, there are usually three ways to explain these things, aren't there?
Number one is, and it's easier to say, hyper-active imagination.
You know, maybe you just kind of thought these things happen and they didn't.
The other is that something happened in that house that imprinted itself there.
And the third one is that because you were young, you said there, you know, teenager, very young teenager, that somehow it was focusing on the young people in the house, which we know from the Enfield poltergeist.
Paranormal activity, they say, sometimes does.
They do, yes.
And poltergeists, they say, will often manifest where there are teenage, particularly girls, but it is known to do it around boys as well.
And what it sparked in me was such a fascination with it that I started reading extensively on the subject from sort of that age onwards, from the teenage onwards.
So, Ruth, you had a feeling then, after all of these things that happened to you when you were young, that you really couldn't leave it alone?
Definitely.
And I started reading extensively on it and very quickly became quite bothered by the fact that if you read a lot, and certainly back then, this was before the days of the internet, of course.
So I would be picking up books on ghosts, on haunted happenings, or magazine articles, etc.
And what really started to bother me was that authors were just repeating the same story over and over again.
And I didn't want them to repeat the same story.
I wanted them to tell me what they were, what was happening, how many people were seeing it.
Were people seeing it in this day and age?
I didn't want to read about some dusty old ghost that supposedly clanked around a castle in 1800 and something or other.
So you were thinking, I get what you're saying.
So you were thinking that the ghost writers that you were reading were leaving too many things unanswered?
Yes, they were just repeating old stories.
And you would often find the same story in different books.
And I've always wanted to be an investigator.
My entire career has been spent in investigative roles, one type or another.
So I couldn't leave it alone at that.
I couldn't just sit there and accept that people were only going to write the one story.
So I started a database.
And this would have been in my late teens.
And again, this was before computer.
So when I say database, back then, that was a card file.
My very first job was as a library assistant.
So of course I was familiar with the card file system.
So I started my own card file.
When computers came along, somebody very kindly showed me that you could get a card file electronically on a computer.
Amazing.
So I transferred all the data onto an electronic version of the card file.
And then a couple of years went by and somebody showed me that actually there's these amazing things called databases.
So I transferred all the data again and just kept adding to it over the years as I researched and talked to people and, you know, just gathered more and more and more information, looking for that elusive answer of what is it?
Do people experience this in this day and age?
And the more I researched, the more I got interested in, well, I'm actually only interested in knowing whether if an area has been haunted, is it always haunted?
You know, does it matter whether it's me that walks into that building or could somebody else walk into that building and experience something?
In other words, rather like that house in Welland that you lived in when you were younger, there was something that appeared to be reacting to you, if not reacting with you.
Yes.
And would it do the same if somebody else walked in there?
Or was it hanging in, you know, was it related to us?
Was it the theory?
Because some theories are that ghosts are projected from the mind, that they're not an external influence at all.
There's some theories along those lines, Tulpa theory and so on.
So it just fascinated me that was that something that we somehow generated ourselves?
Or was it something that we somehow woke up because it was there and we'd got the right atmospheric conditions at the time with who was present in the house?
Or is it that some people are sensitive to things that are naturally there anyway?
Or is it that there's something that's there that materializes in a different way depending on who's present?
And actually, the first 15 years or so of my career was spent as a fraud investigator.
And one of the things we were taught in the training there is how difficult witness testimony can be and how careful you have to be with it.
Because if you put five people in a room and something happens in front of them and then immediately remove them from that room and ask them each, right, what did you just see?
Everybody different to get five different answers.
I mean, that happens in the police.
Now, my dad was a copper.
It happens in journalism.
It happens everywhere.
So it makes investigating these things even harder.
Yes, because these are subjective.
You know, when you're investigating a fraud, you're investigating an objective event, aren't you?
Did somebody steal such and such or not?
When you're investigating something paranormal, there is a very subjective element to it because a lot of it is about how the person felt or something seen out of the corner of their eye or something that didn't quite manifest or whatever.
It's very few and far between that you get an experience as strong as mine as a child where things were physically moved.
And had that been in the day of like today, where we all carry phones with cameras around with us, if that had been today, I could easily have flicked my phone camera on and filmed the tea towel folding itself.
I mean, that's the problem, isn't it, with a lot of paranormal stuff.
People always quite rightly say, well, you said that this happened and it's in your book that this happened, but why can't we see this?
Seeing is believing.
And you always wonder why there aren't more videos of this weird stuff happening.
Okay, more and more of them appear all the time on YouTube.
We know that.
But not as many as there are stories, if you know what I'm saying.
No, not as many as there are stories.
And part of the problem with all the videos that appear is that alongside the videos appearing is people's ability with technology to make fake videos.
So then you get the added dimension of, well, how do I now tell?
Because I'm not techie.
Is this a real video?
Is this a fake video?
You have to get very good at spotting the obvious fakes.
But some, you know, you look at them and if that was a clever person making it, you can fake almost anything.
You only have to look at the big films, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, whatever.
And you see how amazing the effects in that look.
And you realise how easy it is to create an effect on film now.
It's all quite depressing, isn't it?
That technology is our friend in many ways.
But technology can cause a big fog when you're Trying to investigate these things.
So, there you are.
You're a young person with a database now.
You can't have, you know, presumably as stories came into you, you couldn't go and investigate them all, could you?
No, sadly.
So, what did you do?
Um, so I stayed with that, you know, just keeping the database for probably 30 years or more, I would think, until eventually I get into my early 50s and I get the chance to partially retire from work.
So, at the age of 51, I partially retired.
I had been a civil servant all my life.
I'd been the last 15 years, I'd been a bullying, harassment and discrimination investigator.
And I was able to go down to three days a week.
So, that gave me four days a week in which to do something with my passion to do with the paranormal.
So, at that point, I thought, right, it's time I wrote that book I've always wanted to write.
And it's time I actually get out there and do the ghost hunting myself as well.
So, it was about four or five years ago I finally got the chance to actually start writing the books and going out and hunting for ghosts myself.
Okay, now, if I've counted properly, there are four books.
Am I right?
There are.
Yeah.
And which was the first one?
Was it the roadmap of British ghosts?
No, the first one was Ghosts of Marston Vale.
Okay.
Which is a very small book.
It's only 50, 60 pages long.
Because I obviously had never been taught how to write a book.
I didn't know anything about how to do publishing.
So on.
So I had to learn.
So I thought, well, I've had this massive database, but I need to find a way of doing something quite small and succinct and neat that I can actually learn how to do the publishing part and writing a book part.
So I decided to write one on the ghosts that live just round where I live.
So I live in the Marston Vale, which essentially is a long, shallow valley that stretches roughly speaking from Bedford in Bedfordshire to nearly to Milton Keynes, on the edge of Buckinghamshire.
I tried reading up about, when I saw that you'd written a book about the ghosts of Marston Vale.
I tried today to read up about the area and I tried also to see if there were other reports of paranormality there.
And I have to say, there's not a lot that's been written.
So, you know, it was quite a unique thing that you were doing.
Absolutely.
Virgin Territory, really.
I don't think anybody else has ever written a book on ghosts around here.
So what has Marston Vale got then?
Well, interestingly, because what I actually did was I started with some of the legends around here and then went out to the local villagers and tried to talk to them about, you know, have you got any paranormal experiences?
I went out on social media and then when people responded, I went and had a coffee with them or spoke to them on the phone or whatever and got their stories.
So Ghost of Mars and Vale is a mixture of the local legends tried and tested out to see if anybody has actually had any experiences there, plus people's own experiences in their houses up and down the Vale.
And so if I give you an example, one of the legends locally is that Lady Snag, who was one of the local dignitaries in the 1700s, was murdered because she went out to visit her lover late one night, was galloping home on her horse to get back to her husband before he noticed she was missing, and some thieves strung a rope across the road.
She galloped through not noticing that the rope was there.
It hit her at neck height and decapitated her.
They robbed the fallen decapitated body and in the morning her body was found.
So obviously I researched that, discovered that A, I couldn't find any examples of any of the snag ladies over the centuries having been murdered.
But B, the lady snag that everybody pins the miss to because she's the one whose effigy is in our churchyard, actually died in her late 80s.
So she was galloping around on a horse late at night, having been to see her lover.
Good luck to her.
Not likely to be a true story.
But what I did was I went out on social media and said, this stretch of lane, which is the lane where her headless ghost is supposed to ride, has anybody ever experienced anything down there?
And didn't say why I was asking, because again, the investigator in me knows not to lead my witnesses.
And what I actually got back was two different people who'd had something that they thought was horse-like rush past them in that lane.
What they thought was horse-like.
Yeah.
So when I say horse-like, what they had was the sensation of some large animal or large object rushing past them that made them think horse, even though it was late at night, it was dark and there was nothing to be seen or heard.
But as it rushed past them and the sort of breeze of it passing went past them, it made them think galloping horse somehow.
And yet you were able to prove that the legend that had been attached to that and those happenings in that area was not what it appeared to be.
It wasn't that woman and the story did not stack up.
It cannot have been Lady Snow.
It has to be something else.
But that, you see, for me, that opens the whole fascinating discussion of, okay, so that's a modern sighting that happened within the last 20 years.
Well, not sighting because I didn't see anything happening, I should say.
That happened within the last 20 years.
Lady Snag died in the 1700s.
So sometime between her death and now, this legend has grown up.
So we can assume that legend is at least a couple of hundred years old.
Does that mean 200 years ago, people walking down that lane were getting a much stronger apparition or happening or phenomenal occurrence?
And what they do is they pin that onto some local legendary figure.
So for example, if you look up and down the country, you get an awful lot of Dick Turpin ghosts.
You get an awful lot of Anne Boleyn ghosts or Oliver Cromwell ghosts.
Anybody that's famous in history, that's who people Attribute the ghostly happening to, even though I start to wonder, well, actually, are they just attributing to that because it's a local known name and it makes the story more interesting?
When it is the truth that actually there is something a paranormal happening there, but it's not necessarily anything to do with that person or that event.
It's just that they've given it that connotation.
Right.
And then over the centuries, it's gradually fading out.
It's grown and it's changed over the years.
And of course, look, it's human nature to try and explain something.
If something doesn't have an explanation 200 years ago, 300 years ago, or in 2020, you want to try and pin some sort of explanation to it.
Otherwise, you're left with the void.
So you can understand why people did this.
But of course, that leaves you with a great big question.
And the great big question is, if it isn't the lady, what is it?
What is it?
And who was it?
I mean, funnily enough, when I dragged my poor suffering husband out on yet another ghost hunt on Sunday afternoon, and we arrived at the place we were hunting and he said, right, come on, what are we looking for here?
And I said, oh, well, they're supposed to be the headless horseman and the sound of children laughing.
And he actually said to me at that point, how do we manage to get so many headless highwaymen ghosts around this country?
I said, well, that's actually a really interesting question, because if you look at historically about highwaymen, there were an awful lot of highwaymen.
I mean, obviously, we've got the famous ones, you know, but there were a lot, you know, almost every road had its highwaymen on it.
Very few of them were ever beheaded.
That simply wasn't used as a punishment in historical fact.
And almost none of them, in fact, I think only have found one possible reference, ever had their horses beheaded.
So why they would suddenly turn into headless ghosts and headless horsemen riding up and down the countryside, Lord only knows, except it makes a better story.
And curiously, this takes us back, doesn't it, then, to what happened to you when you were young?
Because what happened to you when you were young was something that was a force, a power, a revelation of something, but it didn't have a nice, neat explanation to it.
And I think what you're saying is there's an awful lot more of that going on in the UK and elsewhere than perhaps we're aware.
Well, that is pretty much the conclusion I come to with the research I do.
I mean, as you mentioned a moment ago, one of my other books is The Roadmap of British Ghosts.
And that literally is what it says on the tin.
It's a book about the ghosts that haunt our roads and byways.
And with that one, again, I started with a base story that I'd found, you know, written somewhere or on the internet somewhere or wherever.
And then I went out and tried to find people locally who'd seen it or heard it.
Or, as, you know, as my name got known and people knew to contact me about ghosts and so on, people would write in with their stories.
So there's some that are just stories that stand alone that don't have a backstory to them, if you see what I mean.
And the fascinating thing is, and here I am interrupting again, sorry for that.
But the fascinating thing about it is that the stories you've got in there are not just stories from 200 years ago.
There's stuff in there that happened in the 1970s and a lot more recently.
Absolutely.
They come right up to a few months before I wrote the book.
So Roadmap was published in 2019, I think.
Yes, it might have been late 2018 or just into 2019, can't remember.
But there would have been stories right up until a few months before in it because people were giving me things that they'd recently seen.
Because I literally belong to hundreds and hundreds of social media groups.
And I go out and ask people, have you ever had an experience here or here or here?
And take what they come back with.
And what you find is that some of these roads, people definitely have experiences along them.
The experiences aren't necessarily the same.
So for example, you might be supposed to be getting the ghost of a black monk, say, walking along a road.
What you actually find is that people are getting strange shadows or something that they heard walking up behind them.
It's not necessarily associated with a monk.
Okay, and as you said, you get five people who've seen the same thing.
They attribute different qualities to it and they put a backstory to it.
Okay, back to Ruth Roper Wilde, though.
We're going to be talking about, for most of this last segment, The Roadmap of British Ghosts, which is a fantastic title.
And I've looked at this.
In fact, I looked at all of your books today.
You kindly sent me copies.
There is an astonishing amount of detail in there.
How on earth did you put all of those stories?
And I don't know how many there are.
There must be 200 at least in the roadmap.
How did you get them all together?
Well, it all goes back to this database that I was talking about earlier.
You know, I've been building that database for 20 or 30 years at least.
And after a while, particularly the once upon a time librarian in me, realises you're going to have to split that data somehow because it is just spilling out at the seams, literally.
So what is a good way of separating out?
And it struck me that it would be quite interesting to get an actual physical map and map out on it where people were seeing ghosts that haunted roads.
And from that idea, once I started actually drawing on a map with some coloured pens, I thought, it'd actually be quite interesting to make this the theme of a book to only write about those ones that haunt roads and paths and byways and so on, rather than buildings.
So that was the idea and to separate out from the database.
So I actually split some of the data out and created a second database, Road Ghosts.
And that's literally how I then arranged the data for that book.
So the book is laid out county by county around the UK and it just includes every road that I could find a haunting with and then all the people that I could find had had some sort of experience or whatever along that road just by hours and hours of writing out on social media, speaking to people, interviewing people, corresponding with people by email or by instant messaging or whatever, even on Twitter.
However people wanted to get in touch with me to tell me their stories, I was happy to take the stories.
And it's just literally hours and hours and hours of donkey work, if you like.
And you can leave that.
You can learn all that information.
You know, the proof is in the books.
They are very detailed.
If you don't mind, and tell me if you do, I've picked out some of the stories from the book and I thought we might go through them if you're okay.
I was going to start with Klop Hill, the A6.
Klop Hill's very close to where I live, actually.
Well, if you like, I can read a little bit of the story and then we can fill in some details.
How about that?
So I've literally...
Let's hope this works.
Let's give it a go, Howie.
Okay, Klop Hill, the A6.
One witness recounted a tale told to him by his late father, a man not known for flights of fancy.
The father worked as a lorry driver, specifically driving recovery tow trucks.
The very nature of that work meant that he was often working shifts late at night or into the wee hours of the morning and driving up and down all sorts of roads.
Despite this, he only ever told the one tale of something supernatural, which had left a deep impression on him.
When he was driving a Buck Dale's recovery truck, sometime in the late 1970s, he had occasion to be driving up the A6 in Bedfordshire.
It was about 2 a.m. in the morning, and he'd just passed the small village of Clop Hill, perhaps best known for its abandoned and ruined church, which hit the headlines in the 1960s and subsequent years for apparently being the haunt of some devil worshippers.
As he drove along the quiet rural road, which at this point passes some deep woods, he suddenly saw a very elderly lady walking along the side of the road.
It immediately struck him as extremely odd that she should be walking alone in the dead of the night in such a rural location.
He assumed she must be in some sort of difficulty, perhaps with a broken-down car.
He immediately pulled up to the side of the road and put his hazard lights on, intending to offer the poor lady his assistance.
Jumping out of his cab and clutching his coat around him against the chill night air, he walked back along the road he'd just traversed.
To his everlasting puzzlement, he could find no trace of the lady and nowhere she could sensibly have gone.
What a great story.
Absolutely.
And interesting that you should pick that one because that one was actually supplied by a chap that corresponded with me right from the early days of the first book.
And, you know, and that's actually a story that his father told.
And he got in touch with me after Ghost of Marston Bell because he was fascinated about having a book written about that area.
And he supplied that story that his father had told him.
His father's now deceased.
He's passed away since then.
And like I say that, you know, that's a story that he gave me and absolutely fascinating.
And interestingly, if you look up anything about the A6 past Clop Hill, the only story you'll get, there's a very famous murder happened along there.
And that's the only thing you'll pick up along there.
But that murder was of a young lady.
So this ghost is certainly not related to that.
So who knows who she was?
We literally couldn't find anything on who that might have been that the truck driver saw.
And we've got a scene of truck driver.
He's not a man who's had a night out.
His attention has to be with his work and with the truck.
So he's a good observer.
Absolutely.
You know, he was on duty at the time.
He was a recovery driver.
So this is a big recovery truck.
You know, and he's on duty.
He's in the middle of his working day.
It might be 2 a.m. in the morning, but it's in the middle of his working day.
So he's fully, you know, compass mentis wide awake and at work when he sees this.
So, and, you know, he did the right thing, particularly given his line of work.
You know, it's his job to stop and help people.
He sees a lady walking along.
That was his first thought.
Oh, my goodness, she must be in trouble to be out here on her own.
There must be a car nearby.
She must be in trouble.
I should stop and help her.
And that's what he stopped for, not because he thought of anything ghostly or supernatural or anything.
His mind was on work.
I mean, that's true, isn't it?
When people see, I've seen one ghost in my life.
I will not bore my listener with the story again because I've told it a million times here.
But I wasn't expecting to see a ghost.
And even when I saw the thing and I saw this man vanish in front of me, I still wasn't scared and I wasn't thinking ghost.
It was a minute or two later that I thought ghost.
Quite often when people have these encounters, like my father when he was in the police, saw a man standing by a gravestone at one o'clock in the morning.
My father was on his own.
And the guy was wearing a cloth cap, standing by the gravestone and disappeared in front of my father's eyes.
My father wasn't expecting to see a ghost.
It took him about a minute or so to rationalize it.
And then he said, I was back on my bike, and Howard, you couldn't see my backside for steam.
But that happens to a lot of people.
There's a story here from a place called, I think I'm pronouncing it properly, called Nunny in Somerset.
And if you don't mind, I'll read this one.
Sure.
Okay.
Nunny Somerset.
Froome Road.
This road boasts an often cited report of a hitchhiker wearing a flannel shirt, or in some versions, a sports jacket, trying to catch a lift and seen several times in the 1970s.
In some reports, he's said to suddenly materialize in the backseat of passing cars.
And that isn't something that I would particularly want to experience.
The sightings of him tend to range along this older road, but also some out onto the newer A361 at Nunny Catch.
When I asked for local experiences, I got some very interesting results.
One witness told me experiences that about 40 years ago they were driving from the pub in Nunny towards Froom on a particularly foggy night, and an unpleasant one too.
They suddenly saw a young man walking in the fog and thinking, how dangerous that could be.
They stopped to offer assistance.
He said he was looking for somewhere to stay, so they offered to drop him off at Froome police station.
When they arrived, they pulled up in the car and he stepped out.
They turned to watch him go into the police station, but he'd completely vanished.
So various kinds of weirdness in this place called Nunny in Somerset.
Well, it's really interesting that one, that particular one you've chosen, because if you do as much research as I do, or even if you read roadmap, you'll notice that there's an awful lot of hitchhiker ghosts around the country.
There are an awful lot of sightings of ghosts that try to hitchhike a lift with cars.
And there are a lot of older stories that it's very hard to pin the actual source story to of hitchhiker ghosts getting into cars and then subsequently disappearing.
And I had, quite honestly, come to the conclusion that they were mostly urban myth, that the story had started somewhere and it had been repeated around the country and attributed to different roads.
And then I had this witness right into me with exactly that experience.
And that's when you start to think, okay, I might have been a bit hasty here in assuming that this is just an urban myth then, because here I have somebody who's actually had that experience of an actual hitchhiker ghost getting in their car and disappearing.
And that now makes me wonder whether I shouldn't be quite so quick to dismiss the fact that you get it elsewhere with these vague stories and backlines.
Because of course, years from now, when somebody reads one of my books and I haven't put the name of that witness in very deliberately, because I don't really want them to have to have internet trolls or anybody horrible chasing after them, are they going to think that that's just a story that I plucked out of somewhere and made as an urban myth?
And the reality is a few years from now, it'll only be me that knows that I actually spoke to somebody who'd actually experienced that.
Which makes me think, well, the other stories that I've read, those authors are in the same boat now, aren't they?
There's only they that know who they spoke to and who they got the story from.
So I'm actually, I've turned my mind around a little bit because of this particular one, that I think there is more to the hitchhiker ghost phenomena than I was originally pegging to it, because I think it does happen a bit more than we sort of suspect.
And not just in the UK.
People have been flagged by ghosts.
Not just in the UK.
No, not just in the UK.
It's quite a unilateral phenomena, that I think.
And it's a very curious one when you think about it.
What is the explanation for that?
What entity is it that has the need to flag us down in our cars as we pass by?
Okay.
And whatever entity you are, please, please don't flag me down in my car when I'm passing by.
Okay.
And can I add myself into that particular equation as well, please?
Okay, of all the, this is really putting you on the spot, and it's okay if you don't want to go here.
But of all of the stories in the roadmap, which is your favourite?
You know, anybody that listens to me talk often will probably sigh and say, oh, we know which she's going to say, but it's always going to be Risely in Bedfordshire.
I absolutely love that one.
This is a story where there is one published, or there was one published story of a farmer who was working on the side of the road on the hedge that bordered his land, doing some work in the hedge in the ditch, middle of the day, and he heard the sound of a horse crashing, sort of galloping towards him, looked up to see what was coming, and the sound of the galloping horse crashed through the hedge in front of him and on down the lane, but there was nothing to be seen.
That's the original posted ghost story.
A little bit vague as to how long ago it was, but it looks like it probably dates back to maybe 70s, 80s, 1970s, 1980s, something like that.
So I wrote out on social media and I actually got five more accounts at the time that I wrote Roadmap.
I've since got another one, so there are now six, of people who have seen some kind of equine entity or heard it around the lanes around that village of Risely in Bedfordshire.
And none of them know each other.
None of them had known that the other was writing in or what story they were given.
Their stories are all slightly different, but all of them have an equine type entity at the base of the story.
So to give you an example, one gentleman lives in one of the cottages on the high street.
It's very old, pretty villages, wisely.
Lives in one of the cottages on the high street, stepped out of his cottage one evening, about midnight, to put the milk bottles out, stood for a moment on his doorstep, just taking in the air, like you do, when he realised he could hear the sound of a horse clip-clopping down the lane, down the high street.
That caught his attention, because obviously he thought, who on earth is out riding a horse at midnight?
And this was literally only a few years ago.
And so he stood and waited to see who it was.
And he listened to the sound, clopped down the high street, past him and his cottage and on down and out of sound at the end of the high street.
Nothing to be seen, just the sound of his horse.
And he said to me when he corresponded with me about it, people have said to me, are you sure it wasn't like a coke tin rolling in the wind or, you know, just something knocking on something that you were mistaking?
And he said, it absolutely wasn't.
It was unmistakably the sound of a horse walking down a street.
In the same village, a husband and wife out walking their dog one sunny afternoon.
They'd intended to do a circular route of the village through the fields and, you know, up one lane, through some fields, back down another lane, back into the village.
As they were walking up the first lane, they were actually walking besides a hedge.
I don't think it was the same hedge that the farmer had originally been at in the original story.
I think it was a different lane.
And they had intended to turn right at the end of this hedge row into the field.
But the whole time they were walking along there, they could hear a horse in the field, the other side of the hedge, snorting and stamping and apparently getting quite cross at the presence of their dog.
So they were walking along talking, not entirely sure it was a good idea to turn into the field in case this horse could get at them, you know, or was going to get really upset at the presence of their dogs.
So the husband had sensibly said, well, we'll poke our heads around the end of the hedge and see whether or not there's a fence between where the horse is and where we're going to be walking, in which case we'll be safe to walk.
So they did this, poked their heads around the end of the hedge, there in front of them is a completely empty field, not a single animal to be seen, let alone a horse.
Oh my God.
And broad daylight, broad sunny daylight.
So, and you'd have to read the book to get all of them, and you'll have to wait for another book to get the last one that I've got.
You're going to leave us tantalized.
Hey, listen, we're out of time, and we've only just scratched the surface here.
And I'm really pleased that I discovered you with Ruth Roper Wilde.
So, Ruth, thank you very much for talking with me.
What are you working on at the moment?
I'm actually working on These Haunted Times Volume 2, because These Haunted Times Volume 1 was the most recent one I've published, and that was literally a spill-off of all the stories people had given me that didn't fit into either Almanacabish Ghosts or Roadmap of Bishop Ghosts.
So I put them in a book, and then I realized I'd still got loads more.
So there had to be a These Haunted Times Volume 2.
I can't wait for that one.
And I want to have time to read properly the four books that you sent me.
And I'm certainly keen to see that.
So let's talk again.
And I have to say, I absolutely love whatever the subject is, talking to somebody who adores their work.
And that's you.
Absolutely, Ruth.
Absolutely do.
So if people want to read about you, have you got a website they can check out?
No, but if you Google Ruth Roper Wilde and my surname is spelt Whiskey Yankee Lima Delta Echoes, it's a slightly unusual way of spelling Wild.
You'll find that I've got a Facebook page, I've got a Twitter page, I've got a Pinterest page.
You can connect me through any of those or my email address is wa-1400 at outlook.com.
Are you happy for that to go on the radio?
Absolutely.
Okay.
What was it again?
WA-1400 at outlook.com.
Well, if you've got a ghost story, send it to me and also send it to Ruth.
Ruth, thank you very much.
This is, as they say, to be continued.
Please take care.
You too.
Ruth Roper Wilde, four great books out and another one on the way.
We'll speak with her again.
Please let me know what you thought about her by going to my website, theunexplained.tv and sending me a message from there.
Next up, as promised, is the team of ghost hunters, Cindy Parr and Greg Matlock, who visited this home in Louisiana that the owner could not sell because it is reputed to be so terrifyingly haunted.
They went to check the place out.
I spoke with them about the terrifying events that happened there.
Talk to me, either Greg or Cindy or both, about this house then.
What is so spooky about this house?
It's just the house just has a reputation of being haunted.
The house was being given away.
It was claimed, but they have not removed it as of yet.
And we were asked by the owners to go in, approve or disprove.
And we did.
And the house is definitely haunted.
Definitely.
It's one of the places I've been in.
Now, all of those things that I've just quoted from the newspaper report, Cindy, what was it like to experience those terrifying things?
What did you experience in there?
There was a lot of energy in the house.
It was real spooky, but it was kind of...
I really don't know how to explain it.
You have to be there to feel it.
I'm reading reports here of doors closing by themselves and bangs and crashes.
And then there was Greg, a mysterious black figure, a dark shadow.
Well, we went like, I mean, you hear growling in there.
I mean, it was a lot going on.
Like you said, the doors opening, the door closed.
It's just a type of place, you know, most places you go to, you really have to hunt to catch something.
This place here, you're just, you're not welcome and it's constant.
We heard growls.
We had a table that slid four inches by itself.
It was just amazing.
Then we went upstairs and went to go into this room and it had this mass painting.
It was not a figure.
It was solid.
And this thing was huge.
It was amazing.
I won't go back.
I don't think I'll ever go back in there.
It was just, it was bad.
A door opened up by itself.
And what they did catch in a clip, after the door opened, there's a loud growl with their smells of urine.
I mean, it's really bad.
It's not something friendly, that's for sure.
Needless to say.
And is it true, as the newspaper puts it, that you literally, quotes, fled the place?
Most definitely.
When I've seen that figure, and I've seen a lot, you know, it wasn't, like Cindy stated, it wasn't just the seeing of it.
You can feel the power of it.
You can just, it was, it's unbelievable.
It was definitely scary.
I mean, we don't just run out of places we hunt.
We've hunt a lot of places.
We just left West Virginia State Prison, and I mean, many people have died there.
But this place here is of its own.
It's evil.
There's nothing nice about it.
Not at all.
And you're not welcome.
Most ghost investigators are pretty, most of the ones I've spoken with are pretty experienced.
And not a whole lot scares them, but you were clearly absolutely shaken to the core, both of you, by this.
Yes.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
We said prayers after we went outside.
I've been doing this for 20 years, and this is the first time I've actually run into something of this magnitude.
I mean, it was, you know, like dealing with the devil himself, I would say.
It was that bad.
It was a debate to go back in or not.
Yeah, we were supposed to sleep there.
We didn't sleep there.
We did go back in.
We sat down in the living room, and the whole time you hear scratching on the walls, growls, a window slammed by itself, a blonde fell down.
It was just continuous activity.
Do you think it was deliberately targeting you, or are those things happening there all the time?
Definitely because we went through the EVPs, and the first EVP we came across was they're coming in.
Class A EVP.
And that's hard to catch.
It's just, you don't get that kind of quality.
This place has that amount of power to do that.
It could do whatever it wants.
And I knew at that point, it could definitely harm as we had to leave.
We didn't sleep there.
So you've got a recording of a disembodied voice actually saying they're coming in.
Yes, that's correct.
God.
And what do you think?
I mean, I don't know what kind of history this place has got, But what do you think is causing this?
Well, I asked the owners if they had anything, you know, evil or anything like that in the house, and they said, as far as they know, it was just this little old lady.
And definitely, this is not a little old lady.
I think maybe people got in the house and did some rituals or something like that because the house set for a long time.
I mean, it's bad, you know.
We met a person that walked up after the hunt.
Well, I'm sorry, at the beginning of the hunt, they took a plant from the house.
The gentleman that was with us was clawed all up his arms.
I didn't believe it because I'm the type I have to see it to believe it.
Well, we seen it to believe it.
It's not that.
You're saying that somebody went in there, got, you know, like you see these people with stigmata marks, scratches.
They got scratched.
Oh, definitely.
Yes.
Yes.
I mean, it drained all our batteries, and within 45 minutes, we lost every lighting battery pack, three cameras.
That's unheard of.
We've never had that before.
I mean, this is straight out of the exorcist, isn't it?
My opinion?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Well, you would have heard stories about this place before you went there.
I'm surprised you even went there in the first place.
I don't think I could have gone even, you know, I couldn't have gone even four blocks away.
I don't think so.
Congratulations for doing it.
What is going to happen to the Gregan City?
What is going to happen to this house now?
Well, they're going to give the house away.
I fear for the people that's going to get it because I know something bad's going to happen.
That's my feeling.
I mean, this place is unreal.
You know, you have to be there to experience it.
But if you've hunted, you know, the paranormal before, you could feel the energy.
To have a smell of urine that wasn't there five minutes prior, because that was the second trip we made upstairs.
And nothing, no sense, no problems at all.
And just, I could put it like as is, hell broke loose.
The smell of yarn was just horrific, and it wasn't there five minutes prior.
Well, I have to say, if they put me there, there would be a smell of urine, but it will probably be from you if all those things were all those things were going on.
Now, look, I've got some skeptical listeners to this show, and you'll have heard from skeptical listeners and people before.
You've had a lot of worldwide publicity about this.
Do you swear these things happened?
Oh, God, yes.
Definitely.
God, yes.
We went because we didn't believe it.
We are skeptical ourselves.
We prove or we disprove, and that's why we went there for the onus.
Actually, I went there to disprove.
That's the attitude we take when we go into a location.
You know, definitely made a fool out of me.
It's real.
Very real.
Boy.
Well, Greg and Cindy, listen, thank you very much for sharing all of that with me.
I think you're incredibly brave, both of you, for doing that.
Boy, well, I like a challenge, but I don't think I'll be going to that house in a hurry.
From New Orleans, Cindy Parr and Greg Matlock talking about that house in Louisiana.
And who knows what's going to happen to that house next?
They've been trying to give it away.
And thank you very much to Ruth Roper Wilde.
Hope you enjoyed her with her ghost stories.
We will speak with her again because I think we only scratched the surface this time.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained, so until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
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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