All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 2, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
54:46
Edition 474 - Malcolm Robinson
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is still Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Summer of 2020, on the day that I'm recording this, it is going to be 35 degrees Celsius.
That is, I think, close on 90 Fahrenheit and very humid with it.
And you can imagine what it's like to be in an enclosed place without air conditioning recording.
It's a challenge.
As I speak these words, I have been filling in for a great British broadcaster on talk radio, a man called James Whale, and it's been a great privilege to do that.
But it just basically means that I have, I mean, I'm very grateful to it because mummy was getting to be a problem.
So at least it's made me a little bit of money and I'll eat for a bit.
But it was great to fill in for James for two weeks, thereabouts.
I'm just counting the days, just a little over two weeks, I think, and also do the podcasts and do the unexplained show.
And at one point, I was on the air filling in for James, and I was also the voice of an award ceremony for commercial radio in this country, the IRN Commercial Radio News Awards.
Life is a funny thing.
Sometimes, a lot of recent years have been really quiet.
And just for the last month or so, things hotted up a little, which makes it all interesting.
But what that means is that I'm a little behind on the emails.
Mostly, I will reply to your email immediately when I see it.
And I do get to see and read every day.
I make a point late at night of checking out every single new email.
So please know that I have seen your email.
But if you've sent me an email that required a reply and you haven't had one yet, please give me a nudge.
Just put in the subject line reminder or something like that, and I will get to you.
And thank you very much for telling me your stories of lockdown, which I am still in.
As things begin to ease here, you know, that situation may change.
But at the moment, I'm still in lockdown.
And also the stories that you share with me for my own interest and for the show.
I'm really grateful.
And thank you for the nice things that you say on my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Thank you very much for those.
Thank you to Haley for booking the guests.
Thank you very much to Adam for keeping the show online going.
Now the guest on this edition, Malcolm Robinson.
He's been on this show before.
Scottish paranormal researcher.
He covers it all.
Ghosts, poltergeists, you know, demons, UFOs.
And his latest book is to do with one of the most famous paranormal cases in Scotland, the Socky Poltergeist.
The year was 1960.
This is the 60th anniversary.
And Malcolm has gone back to this astonishing case that you may well not, I hadn't heard about it, and done some new and further research and actually tracked down some of the people who experienced this.
As you will hear, this is a poltergeist that did not stay in one location.
It sort of stayed with a person.
You'll hear how that happened and it's very chilling stuff in this edition of The Unexplained.
Like I say, thank you very much for being my friend through all of this and for seeing me through all of the trials and challenges that I have faced.
I'm very grateful to you for everything that you've done.
I hope that you're getting by too.
All right, let's cross to the Sussex coast.
Malcolm is a Scotsman living in Sussex at the moment and say, Malcolm Robinson, how are you?
I'm very well, Howard.
It's nice to be back on your show.
And how is on the day that we're actually recording this conversation, how is Hastings?
Well, I'm looking out the window just now and there's not a cloud in the sky.
It's allegedly the hottest day of the year and it certainly feels like it.
Certainly a lot, lot hotter in Scotland, that's for sure.
You see, it's going to sound absurd.
It means something while we're saying these words, but by the time it's heard on Sunday, probably it's going to have cooled down a great deal.
And of course, there are parts of the country, including your own dear Scotland, where it's not going to be quite as hot.
So we have to bear in mind those things.
Now, I think for people who are hearing you anew on this broadcast tonight, maybe we ought to be just explaining who you are and what you do, because you have a very, and I know this from previous conversations, a very, very long track record in paranormal investigation and research.
Absolutely.
I started off, as I've said before on your show, very, very skeptical.
I set out to mainly disprove the subjects such as ghosts, border geist, UFOs, etc.
I honestly felt that there were no validity to any of these claims.
But it's like everything else in life, Howard, once you go through life and you start your investigation, I've spent many, many, many nights in haunted houses.
It soon became apparent that there is no smoke without fire.
And what I mean by that is, yes, there's a lot of shenanigans out there.
Yes, there's a lot of people out to pull the wool over your eyes.
But within that residue, there is an incredible amount of paranormal effects and events, ghosts, and UFO sightings, etc.
And over the years, I slowly came off that sceptical fence.
I mean, I started off my own research society, Strange Phenomena Investigations, way back in 1979 to investigate all these claims.
And as the years progressed, I found myself in so many, many, many unusual and bizarre circumstances, which started to show to me that, as I said, you know, there is something real happening.
And throughout my life, I've been kindly asked to go on various television shows, radio, lectures, etc.
And it's been a wonderful, wonderful journey.
I've lectured in America, the first Scotsman to lecture over there, also the first Scotsman to lecture in Holland and Utrecht, France and Strasbourg and Ireland.
So it's been a wonderful journey, Howard, and it's a journey that thankfully I'm still participating in.
Now, we have to say that you started in 1979, and we both know that 1979 is another country.
The way that these things were regarded by newspapers, by people generally, very different from now.
And of course, people doing research and investigation as you were doing at that time.
And as I was starting as a kid to get involved in these things, it was very hard for you to connect with other like-minded people.
So it was a very different landscape back then, wasn't it?
It most certainly was.
However, do you know that's way before the internet?
And it was all done by letter and phone calls in those days.
And it was totally a different landscape.
And I mean, we did hold meetings in the town of Sterling and Alawa.
and that's basically where we got all the like-minded individuals.
But thankfully, as the years have progressed and technology has progressed as well, we've had the internet, we've got emails, etc.
And the world's a far more bigger, bigger place now where my research can go, you know, many thousands of miles, etc.
But back in the day, yes, it was totally different, but it was exciting.
You know, it was good.
And we still had many wonderful times with various researchers doing case histories, etc.
Yeah.
Ghost hunting is what they call it today.
And of course, there are many programmes on TV.
And I've spoken to many of the people behind those programmes, both sides of the Atlantic, mainly America, it has to be said.
When you think back to your first, and I'm doing air quotes here, signs, you can't see me doing it.
When you think of your first ghost investigation, what was that like?
Well, it was quite exciting and quite frightening at the same time.
We were invited to attend a lady's house in Sterling, which had a lot of ghostly manifestations occurring, shadows, things falling off the walls, things disappearing, things reappearing.
And she was absolutely scared out of her wits.
She really was.
And she invited our society to come along and see if we could do anything, find out initially what it was behind the paranormal phenomena.
To cut a very long story short, we took our testimony.
We did some research in one of the bedrooms.
We turned off the light, but we had a small red ambient light there.
And our psychic, a lovely lady by the name of Helen Walters, said, Malcolm, don't you feel spirit in this room?
I said, sorry, Helen, I don't, you know.
Oh my goodness, Malcolm, come on now.
Stand over there, stand over there in the corner.
So I stood in the corner and she says, ask spirit to make its presence known to you.
So I extended out my arm, Howard, and I asked, okay, if there's anyone else in this room, please kindly touch my hand.
Now, with the ambient light, I could still see my friends and colleagues at the other side of the room.
There were nobody near me whatsoever.
Now, after one minute, nothing, two minutes, nothing, then about three minutes, woof, a tremendous force came down on my outstretched arm on the back of my hand.
And boy, I got a fright.
And I sometimes, you know, jokingly say to myself, perhaps the best piece of equipment that a ghostbuster should have is bicycle clips.
Think about it.
Oh, yes, I have thought about it.
Thank you.
So when you say tremendous force, because a lot of time we hear reports of ghosts and poltergeists, which we're going to talk about for a lot of this conversation, but we hear them maybe throwing something that misses somebody, but we don't hear them doing something that actually causes you to jump or even to be hurt.
Yeah, that's correct.
I mean, in the main, there is quite a number of differences when we speak about ghosts and border guys.
You get those ghosts that are transparent.
You can see through them.
You get solid-looking ghosts.
You get crisis ghosts who only appear maybe once every August the 13th.
Can you think?
I'm sorry to interrupt.
But, you know, Scotland is a great place for anniversaries.
Can you think of some good crisis or anniversary-type ghosts in Scotland?
Well, of course, a lot of people claim that at the Battle of Culloden near Inverness, I forget the actual date, sorry, but on that anniversary date, people can sometimes hear the clash of steel, the excited voices, the turmoil.
They can hear that.
Now, when I say people, not all people can hear that.
I'm probably talking more about those psychically gifted and aware that can connect with some form of psychic vibration, if you like.
You know, it's like turning on the old radio before we had the DAB radio.
You had to turn the dial to get radio one, radio two, et cetera, et cetera.
So the certain people, these psychics can tune in, if you like, to this frequency and hear the sounds, hear the turmoil.
But it makes me wonder why, oh, why, or why do we still have these anniversary ghosts, not just colloding, you have it in various battlefields on the anniversary date.
There must be some kind of mechanism which is operating to allow those people to hear that.
And that's still exciting.
And that's a question even today, I still haven't got a clear-cut answer for.
And isn't there some kind of anniversary phenomena, I may be wrong about this, linked with the Taybridge disaster?
I've heard that.
Whether there's any validity to that, I really don't know.
But some people claim that, again, they can hear the disaster that befell on that eventful day.
But I haven't personally spoken to anybody on that particular case.
And it's, see, my research comes down to speaking to people firsthand.
And whilst it's lovely to get these second-hand stories, every single story has to be evaluated for any validity and if it's true or not.
And as a researcher, I have to be very, very careful that the information that's provided to me and my colleagues at SBI is factual.
Because at the end of the day, what we're trying to do, Howard, is get as much substantial information to say to Joe Public, look, have a wee look, have a look at this evidence, because we believe that it consists of something fantastic.
Science does not have all the answers at the moment.
We're struggling, you know, and we're trying to understand what is the mechanism behind these things.
And what is it behind Scotland and the Scottish people that they are so interested in these things?
You know, we can all think of, I know it's a bit of a cliche, but it's a funny one, Corporal Fraser from, you know, Dad's Army, you know, I'll tell you the tale of the empty bar and, you know, that kind of thing.
I did some work in Scotland.
I love, love Scotland.
I actually quite like to live in Scotland these days.
But, you know, there is a huge interest in these things among the people of Scotland.
Very much so.
And I think it's probably ingrained in the very fabric and culture of Scottish people.
Tales of the bogeyman, the Kelpie.
The Kelpie is, of course, a water horse we could equate to Nessie and Morag and Lochmora.
So they've always been this historical aspect of haunted stately homes, Glams Castle, Urquhart Castle, etc.
Scotland is awash with numerous tales of ghosts and etc.
And as a young lad growing up in Allawa and also Tillibuddy, I read as many books as I could on Scottish law that you've just mentioned there, Howard.
And that fueled my fire and the passion to extend my journey into this paranormal world.
But yeah, you're absolutely correct.
Scotland is historically known as one of the most haunted countries in the world.
And magic and strangeness, too.
I didn't realize until I interviewed the people who are the custodians of this place.
But Alastair Crowley, the famous practitioner of magic, and when I say magic, I don't mean the kind of magic that Paul Daniels superbly did.
I mean magic in the sense of spells and stuff that he was connected with and around.
Alastair Crowley had a house on the shores of Loch Ness.
He certainly did.
I think it was called Boldskin House, which was destroyed by fire a few years ago, but I believe that it's now been refurbished or they're trying to bring it back to where it once was.
But you're correct.
I mean, he allegedly held some very bad experiments and casting spells in that house.
And some people have said maybe it was due to those spells that we have sightings of Nessie.
That's wrong.
That's totally wrong because Nessie has been sighted way before Aleister Crowley bought that house, Bolskin House on the shores of Loch Ness.
In point of fact, Alastair Crowley actually died here in my hometown of Hastings, obviously a lot of years ago.
And the statements go that as he died, as he passed away, there was a beautiful clear sky like it is today, but there was a thundercloud.
I don't know how.
There was a thundercloud, a big thundercloud, and he passed away.
Now, this was written down by people who attended his last moments.
Again, is it true?
Is it just, you know, is it just made-up testimony?
But this is what I heard that when he passed away here in Hastings, a big thunderclap traversed the skies in clear blue skies.
But yeah, truely, he was certainly a very evil man, so they say.
Well, so they say.
I mean, he has his acolytes and researchers right up to this day.
Very, very quickly, and we will get into the story of the book, of course, we will, imminently.
The Loch Ness Monster.
More sightings recently, many of them via the video cam because of lockdown, but also because of technology.
Do you believe in Nessie?
Yes, well, needless to say, one of my books, I wrote a book called The Monsters of Loch Ness.
And for me, I've written eight books, and that for me is my favourite book.
As a young boy growing up, my father and mother took us up to Loch Ness, and I was absolutely captivated by the beauty and splendour and the tales of Nessie.
I've one of the few guys on the planet, Howard, that's actually went down in a submarine to a depths of over 600 feet and an off-sea submersible submarine which they moved to Loch Ness.
And that was a wonderful experience.
For me, yes, Nessie is real.
There is some type of creature in excess of 10 to 15 feet, more than one, obviously.
It's not a pleasure saw, it's not an old, you know, kind of monster for want of a better word.
But there's clearly something that is not an air-breathing animal.
It just comes to the surface on occasion when it's feeding for fish just below the surface.
It's an accidental breaking of the water surface.
So for me, yes, other people may say no, and that's fine.
But my research, I've spoken to many people along the loch side.
I've spoken to the former water bailiff, Alex Campbell.
I spoke to Father Gregory Bruce, who was the Benedictine monk at Fort Augustus.
And he saw Nessie in 1971.
He saw a long tapering neck extend from the depths of Loch Ness and thrash about for a few moments and plunged again back into the inky blackness.
So it's another phenomena for me that I'm very much entwined with.
Yeah.
The Unexplained talks with Malcolm Robinson, paranormal investigator in Scotland.
Well, actually, in Hastings, but Scotland's in his heart and he's always going back there doing research, including the research on his newest book, The Sorky Poltergeist.
This is a tale that goes back to 1960.
You may have heard, sure you have heard of the Enfield Poltergeist.
It was so famous, the work of Guy Lion Playfair, who I interviewed in his home a couple of years before his death, so famous that case, that they made a movie out of it.
Now, the Sorky case is a real to the core Scottish case, and you may not have heard about it.
In fact, I have to confess, I hadn't until I read about Malcolm's book.
So, Malcolm, let's set the scene here.
Talk to me about the location and the people.
Yes, absolutely.
Well, Sorkey is a small town in central Scotland.
It sits adjacent to the larger town called Alawa and also Tullabuddy.
And it was back in 1960, as you said, there, that Virginia Campbell, with her mother and father, left their small farmhold in Mobile in County Donegal and they moved over to Sokey.
Now, Virginia, like most young kids, didn't really want to go there.
She was settled.
She had friends, she had a lot of people there that she knew, but she was uprooted and they came over to Scotland in November 1960.
Now, all was well until November the 22nd, when strange things started to transpire.
And one of the strangest things that happened there was on that first night, the young girls, there was Virginia and their cousin Margaret, they claimed they were being touched by invisible fingers in all parts of their body.
So they jumped up out of their bed, ran downstairs.
And as they ran downstairs, it was like a heavy medicine ball, one of those big medicine balls you used to get back in the 60s.
Thump, thump, thump behind their steps as they were fleeing down the stairs.
They rushed into the living room and they spoke to their mother and said, you know, strange things were happening in the bedroom.
Of course, they weren't believed by their mother and some other family friends that was there at the time.
So they took the girls back upstairs, put them back in bed, and then the bed headstead started to vibrate.
And these knockings and bangings were creating.
There were nobody near it, and it wasn't the girls themselves.
This bedstead, you know, this bedhead was banging.
So they uplifted the girls to another bedroom.
And lo and behold, it happened again.
And that was the start of it.
That was the start of the events in the Soke case, yes.
And what we know from poltergeist cases, what we know from hauntings, is that quite often when people move to a house, they become embedded there.
They start to notice there are problems.
There is an escalation.
And sometimes that escalation is a slow escalation.
And sometimes things take a dramatic turn.
In this case, which was it?
Well, it did take a dramatic turn because the events of that particular night didn't stop.
As the days progressed, more and more bizarre things started to happen.
Knockings and bangings and rappings, etc., coming into the house.
It got so bad, Howard, that they asked a local priest, a local minister, to come and attend the Campbell home.
And that was the Reverend T.W. Lund, a man of the cloth.
He attended the family home and he saw the distress that young Virginia was in and he saw and heard things himself.
That was accompanied by Dr. Logan because the girl was so traumatized.
She was, you know, she was in a terrible state.
So they got the local physician and he came along, Dr. Logan, and he also saw this big, large linen chest.
Back in 1960, at the bottom of your bed, you had a big linen chest that contained lots of covers and bed covers and quilts, etc.
So the days before duvets, we all had blankets, galore, didn't we?
Very much so, absolutely.
Now that the lid of that linen chest started to rise up and then it fell, rised up and fell many times, flapping up.
Then it left its location and traversed several inches across the linoleum floor towards Virginia's bed.
And also, at this point, he saw that Virginia's top bed cover was rippling, just like as if you had a stonehoward and you threw it into a mill pond.
You get all these ripples.
And Virginia's hands were outside the bed covers.
So it wasn't, clearly wasn't her.
And these ripples are going up and down.
Now, he also saw next to Virginia was a pillow.
Margaret wasn't with Virginia on that particular occasion, was an empty pillow.
And then suddenly it was like an invisible head descended onto that pillow and depressed into the shape of a head.
Nobody was there.
Nobody was there whatsoever.
But this invisible head shape pushed down into the fabric of the pillow.
And then Virginia's pillow underneath her own head rotated 60 degrees underneath her head, all in view of Dr. Logan, the Reverend Lund.
And it got so bad that they had to bring in a number of ministers from Edinburgh to try and exorcise this ghost.
I was going to say that the scene that you described there with the rotating pillow is straight out of the exorcist.
Absolutely.
And people, you know, skeptical always say, oh, you know, they made that up.
That wasn't seen.
But again, you have to be in that position to see that.
I have every faith in Dr. Logan.
He's passed away now, but I interviewed his wife fairly recently for the book, actually.
And she says, yeah, yeah, all that's true.
We can take that.
That's absolutely true.
Now, as if things couldn't get any worse, Howard, they certainly did.
They even followed the poor little girl to your local school, to our local primary school.
Now, I'll just relate a few incidents of what transpired there for yourself.
We have to say before we get into those, that poltergeist activity, from what I've read, and again, I might be wrong, I might have missed the cases, but it tends to stay localized within the place that it is centered.
The idea that it would go along with somebody who was involved in this, that would go to school with somebody involved in this, is something that I've never come across.
Absolutely.
And this is why it's probably one of Scotland's, if not Great Britain's, biggest poltergeist case.
It's exceptional.
It's exceptional based on the fact that not only did it occur in the little girl's home, but it followed her to school.
And on one occasion, back in 1960, there was large classrooms, as you can remember.
There was a large big desk for the teacher, and you had the inkwells on the desks.
And all the school kids in Virginia's class were busily writing away, writing away in their daughters, except for Virginia, who had her forearms firmly, firmly pushing down on her desk lid.
And her teacher, Margaret Stewart, shouted, Virginia, what are you doing?
Stop that, stop that at once.
So Virginia lifted up her forearms and the desk lid was flapping up, up and up and down, down, up and down, up and down, up and down.
And all the school kids were absolutely screaming.
And they ran to the door.
It was like a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
They're all fixed trying, about six kids trying to get through a small narrow door.
And on another occasion, Virginia approached the teacher's desk with her essay.
And she says, there you go, miss.
There you go.
And she put her essay down on the teacher's table.
As she did so, Back in 1960, there was the long cane.
The teacher had a cane to point to the large blackboard.
It started to vibrate, Howard.
It started to vibrate, then it stood up on the desk and vibrated thumping down on the desk in a full view of the classmates and fell off the table.
Now, this is where it gets extremely bizarre because not only did that happen, but the teacher's desk lifted up a few centimeters off the floor and started to slowly turn round.
So whereas Margaret Stewart, the teacher's stomach, was in the large part of the table, it had rotated 90 degrees and her stomach was facing the shorter part, the narrow end of the table.
And at that point, there was a vase of bulbs, you know, flower bulbs, just screamed off the table and smashed into the wall.
And again, all the kids just screamed off of that classroom.
And when I interviewed Margaret Stewart, she says, Malcolm, I didn't even know what a poltergeist was.
I was a wary ghost, but I hadn't a clue.
But this happened, Malcolm.
I saw it with my own eyes.
And during the research for the book, The Socky Poltergeist, I've managed to track down a few former classmates of Virginia Campbell who put their hands up, said to me, Malcolm, I saw that.
I saw it with my own eyes.
And that is why possibly, you know, this is one of the biggest cases because it followed the little girl to school.
But it must have left an impact on those kids as they were, people in their 50s and 60s, I guess, now.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, they still remember it to this day.
And this is why my tickets for my talk in November at Sokey Hall is selling so well, because it's such a major part of Sokey, such a major part of Scotland, that a lot of people want to come to this talk and find out more.
And I'll be presenting it with PowerPoint slides.
But one of the beautiful things about this case, Howard, is that because it was so, so big in 1960, and it didn't just go over the Scottish newspapers, went down to England and all over the world, that BBC Scott Radio Scotland had a programme called Scope.
And they sent a researcher over to the house and we recorded, or Dr. Logan, I should say, recorded the actual sounds of the poltergeist in that house, knocking on the walls, knocking and rapping, etc.
And you can hear young Virginia screaming out, Mummy, as this lid of the linen chest started flapping up again in front of those witnesses.
There were cine footage allegedly taken of these events, and how I wish, how I wish I could find that.
I've tried for over about 15, 20 years or more, and nobody seems to know where that cine footage is.
But we thankfully have the recordings, and I'll be playing those recordings at my lecture in November.
Okay, well, let's appeal to you wanted the video, the film.
Let's make that appeal now, because we've got a lot of listeners in Scotland and around the world.
If you know potentially the location of that, if you've ever seen it, get in touch with me at the Unexplained through my website, theunexplained.tv, and I will pass your details on to Malcolm.
Let's see what that brings, Malcolm.
You said obviously the clergy were involved in this.
How were they treating what was going on?
Were they regarding it as something demonic?
Well, they initially thought that maybe there's no substance to these stories.
Back in 1960, I dare say that they didn't have a lot of dealings with episodes as strong as this.
But through my research, I found out that quite a number of them changed their opinions simply because it's your own eyes.
It's proof of your own eyes.
Now, having said that, we're living in a Steven Spielberg age, a fantastic world where we can manipulate anything on video to look like a whimsical ghost.
We can create sounds.
We have Darren Brown doing tricks.
We have these wonderful magicians.
And even though I believe firmly in life after death, I am still very, very, very sceptical that people could still be out to pull a wool over your eyes, make a name from themselves, etc.
So I dot the I's and cross the T's.
But to answer your question, those ministers were sceptical initially.
They left the house not sceptical anymore, based on what they saw and what they heard.
And they could clearly see that clearly there was something happening here.
The medical profession would say, well, you know, maybe it's some externalisation from young Virginia herself.
She was troubled.
She was coming over from Ireland.
She didn't want to go to Scotland.
And somehow, an externalisation, this psychic force somehow manipulated the movement of objects.
What I should also say to yourself, Howard, and your listeners, is that they moved Virginia Campbell out of that house to a house in the town of Dollar, which is again in Clackmannonshire.
And it happened again in that house in Dollar.
So no matter where they took the poor unfortunate child, the Poulter guys followed her.
So that would indicate, as has been indicated before in the Enfield case, that it maybe was centered upon her or certainly spurred in some way from her.
What sort of help did she get?
I mean, I'm not just talking about the clergy maybe doing ceremonies and exorcisms and that kind of thing.
Apart from that, today, of course, we would regard this as being something that requires psychological assistance.
Absolutely.
I mean, you have to look at that because when people have claimed these horrible events, well, certainly as a researcher, I have to ask questions that I don't like to ask.
And what I mean by that is, are you taking any drugs?
Are you on any medication?
Maybe you could falsify maybe something normal to look like a ghost.
We as researchers have to ask all these questions and find out what's going on.
Back in 1960, though, she really only had the help of the doctor, Dr. Nisbitt and Dr. Logan.
Dr. Nisbet was another doctor who came on the scene and also saw that.
And they could only offer her, you know, Medication to calm her down, etc.
There were nothing physically that they could do.
There was some form of exorcism conducted by the Church of Scotland ministers, but basically that didn't quell things down.
It did for a few days, but it all came back.
And eventually the family moved to, and I just found out this recently doing research, the family moved down to the town of Bedford in England, and then latterly to the adjacent town of Kempston near Bedford, where I believe Virginia now is located, although I can't find out which house, yes.
Okay.
So the church gave it its best shot and failed by the sounds of it.
And it seems to me that people were wringing their hands.
So the family did the only thing that they could do, and that was to do what I would do, get out of there.
Yeah, they did, Howard.
And the thing is, when they moved down to Bedford, and again, I only found this out in the last two or three months with my research for my book.
I spoke to a lady who knew the family, and she knew that they fled from Scotland, and then she knew that they embassed themselves in Bedford.
And then she went on to say, oh, and it followed her there.
Pardon?
It followed her to Bedford.
Yes.
And then I found out in my research, not only did they flee Mouville and County Donegal in Ireland, there is a possibility that the poltergeist was occurring initially there.
And I'll speak more about that in my lecture.
So even when they came to Scotland, events happened.
They moved down to Bedford and England, events happened.
So it stands head and shoulders as, you know, above any case of its kind in Scotland, simply because of the veracity of the evidence.
And like I say, we've got church ministers, local doctors, all who testified to the bizarre events in the Campbell home.
Dr. Nisbitt, quoted in your book, says, Virginia is not responsible for what happened.
The child is innocent.
What has taken place was not conjured by the child herself.
An outside agent is responsible.
Believe me, something unfortunate has been going on in that house.
The girl was hysterical all the time the phenomenon was appearing.
So, you know, Dr. Nisbet believed that there was something gripping possessing that place.
Absolutely.
And as do the former classmates of Virginia themselves, some of which are still alive.
Some have passed on, sadly.
Some have moved, you know, abroad, etc.
But I think what makes us head and shoulders as well is the audio tape, because this is a wonderful time capsule of paranormal events recorded by men of integrity, pillars of the community, solid, reliable witnesses.
And let's be honest, Howard, the simple truth needs no assistance to make it more impressive.
It's a wonderful case, wonderful case.
There's also a quote from Dr. A.R.G.
Owen, mathematician and psychical researcher.
There's a combination for you, Malcolm.
In my opinion, the Sochi case must be regarded as establishing beyond all reasonable doubt the, quote, objective reality of some poltergeist phenomena.
Yes, he was the main researcher who was sent up from England to investigate the claims of the Campbell family.
And over the course of a few days that he was there interviewing and witnessing the events himself, he came back clearly of the opinion, yes, that there was something very real happening in the Campbell household.
And again, he's another man of integrity.
And he was the only researcher at that time who really was boots on the ground, so to speak.
You know, how I wish I was around at that time, but I was only three years of age when the Sochi case was happening.
You'd have been the youngest psychical researcher in Scotland.
Absolutely, yes, absolutely.
Was Professor Archie Roy, the very famous Scottish member of the Society for Psychical Research, a friend of our friend Tricia Robertson?
Tricia, of course, was his assistant.
Was he around and investigating these things?
He was.
Surprisingly, he wasn't involved in the Sochi case.
But he, I mean, Archeroy, what a wonderful man he is, sadly no longer with us.
What a great researcher he was, but he wasn't, you know, participating in the Socky Poltergeist case.
It was mainly A. R. G. Owen, who was the principal researcher, yeah.
And what we know from previous poltergeist cases that seem to be focused around one person or a couple of people is that in later life, they're mostly, you know, they're mostly 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, maybe, 17, perhaps.
But in later life, most of them go on to lead normal lives.
It would be fascinating to know, and we can't know, we don't know, the kind of life that the family had beyond this.
Yeah, that's one of the questions, unanswered questions in my book.
You know, it would have been great to find out, track down where Kempstead, Virginia Campbell, is, and find out how her life is today, you know, and find out generally if things eventually stopped occurring to the poor girl.
She'll probably be about the same age as myself now.
Well, I'm 63, so she'll be what?
She'll be 65, 66 or thereabouts.
But yeah, it'd be interesting to find out how her life was after that.
Well, maybe we can help with that.
If you know anything about her location, maybe you are her.
Please get in touch with me.
So, do poltergeist phenomena still manifest themselves in Scotland?
Are you still getting reports from Scotland and other places?
Yes, indeed.
We have the main society of strange phenomena investigations is based in Glasgow, run by the wonderful Alison Dunlop.
And we do get poltergeist cases and ghostly cases from time to time.
But we're due to have our big Scottish paranormal conference in Glasgow University in June, but due to COVID-19, that's been postponed.
And what we do, Howard, is we, as researchers, myself, Alison, other people, Ron Halliday, we impress upon the people of Scotland and any visiting people from England and overseas at these conferences.
Have a look at all the Evidence.
We put it as best as we can.
We take questions.
What I must stress to your listeners is: I am not an expert.
I don't hold all the answers.
How I wish I did.
I don't hold all the answers.
But because I've been boots on the ground myself since 1979, I can at least offer some possible interpretations.
And you can ask the question.
The Unexplained with How Hughes, Malcolm Robinson, research the Socky-Poltergeist case.
And before we get on to other business up to the end of this show, there are a couple of points that remain outstanding about the Socky case.
Yes, there is indeed.
I mean, obviously, I mentioned a moment ago, we do need to track down Virginia Campbell.
Where in Kempstead is she?
If there's any other people who I haven't spoken to in regards to former classmates of Virginia, do please get in touch with the show.
I'd love to hear from you.
It's added testimony to what transpired way back in November 1960.
And anything that we haven't said that we should have?
I may come back to that in a moment.
Okay.
All right.
Well, that's intriguing.
Because I wanted to get on to the UFOs.
You've done extensive research on UFOs.
And a few years ago, we had a very strange conversation about you going to a location where I think you said to me, and it is more than a decade ago, Malcolm, that it was possible to summon, to call up UFOs and they would appear.
I vaguely remember that.
Yeah, that wasn't coming from me personally.
There was a gentleman who took on Skywatches in the Bonnybridge area who claimed that he could summon up UFOs at will.
And so like anything else, we have to test the water and find out, you know, if these people are genuine because there's a number of people worldwide who claim this.
But there was a man, you know, who made international headlines.
I first heard him on Art Bell's show in America.
Early 2000s, maybe late 90s, called himself a prophet, and he got international coverage.
I interviewed him on The Unexplained, who claimed that he was summoning down UFOs and he was going to invite the world's media.
I don't actually think it happened.
Doesn't surprise me.
No, it doesn't surprise me because extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence and this is why we try and provide that evidence.
But certainly, as far as that gentleman goes, on that occasion we took him to Bonnybridge, I don't think your listeners will be surprised that nothing happened.
And so that was nothing big there.
But what about the history of ufology and UFOs in Scotland?
Are they concentrated in less populous areas up in the highlands?
Do they hang around submarine bases, military jet bases?
What's the general flavour?
Well, basically, UFOs, as we probably know, is a worldwide phenomenon.
It's touched every continent, every country on planet Earth.
The vast majority of UFOs can easily be identified as having natural explanations.
We're only dealing with a small percent.
Now, that small percent fascinates myself, my colleagues, and my colleagues the world over.
What is going on?
Now, some of these bizarre events that's transpiring over the skies of the world could be our own black budget technology.
The stealth aircraft was flying in America for up to near enough 10 years before the military and the air force decided, yeah, it's ours, it belongs to us.
But that gave rise to many, many false UFO reports.
And it begs the question, you know, what is seen in the skies today?
Could again that still be some new prototype aircraft.
Now, that said, you know, that said, there's still sufficient cases worldwide to interest me sufficiently to say that it's not our own technology.
It's not a rare atmospheric phenomena akin to ball lightning.
Some of these stories worldwide are absolutely fascinating.
And Scotland, as a nation, has had its fair share, fair share of these wonderful cases as well.
Okay, can you think of any that may tease my listener?
Well, there's so many.
I mean, I'll quickly tease your listeners by a number of cases, which some of your listeners may be aware of.
But probably the big one would be the Bob Taylor case, a forestry worker who in 1979, the year of SBI, funnily enough, he had no interest in UFOs.
His job was to ensure that no cattle or sheep strayed into Deckman Woods near Livingston Newtown in the central Scotland.
Deckman Woods, famous case, yeah.
Famous case.
So very, very briefly, he alighted from his pickup truck.
He walked along the forestry path accompanied by his Irish red setter dog Lara and he approached a clearing in the woods.
He's seen it before, many, many times before, but on this morning of November the 9th, 1979, about 30, 40 feet hovering above this piece of grass, this clearing, was this large dome-shaped object with a flange going around its perimeter with cross-like projections sticking up.
And he's standing there.
You can't believe what he's looking at.
And his dog is bark, bark, barking.
Then suddenly the machine, whatever it might be, dematerialized and you could see the young trees in the woods behind it.
Then it would solidify again.
Then it would dematerialize again.
And then suddenly, what resembled two Second World War sea mines, those spherical balls with the prods sticking out that bobbed in the North Atlantic, very similar to them, how it dropped down from beneath this object, impacted on the grass and started rolling across the grass.
And he's standing, oh my God.
And then they stopped in front of him.
Then they projected these rods towards his hips and pulled him, pulled him very, very forcibly towards this larger object.
And just before he lost consciousness, which he did, he remembers a horrible burning smell pervading the whole area.
And the noise is like a cane, a swishing sound.
When he regained consciousness, and we don't know truly how long that was, he found that his trousers were torn, his jersey was torn, there were over 40 marks in the grass, triangular and circular marks.
It's a long story, but very briefly, the police became involved, They fenced off the area and a police investigation was put underway.
And to this day, it stands the test of time as one of the most unsolved Scottish cases that the police were involved with.
You know, it's a crazy case.
And what about the man himself?
Well, sadly, Bob passed, I think it was 2007, but to his dying day, and he was a good friend of mine, he always says, Malcolm, no matter what the sceptics might say, I definitely saw what I saw that day.
In my book, The Deathman Woods UFO Incident, we look at almost 11 theories to account for what transpired that day.
You know, many sceptics have put forward their own interpretation.
He was eating wild berries, hallucinogenic berries called a tropa belladonna, which either ingested or rubbed between the skin can cause hallucinations.
There's no evidence of a tropa belladonna being in those woods.
And, you know, there was a lot of other theories as well, which we knocked on the head.
I firmly believe, Howard, that he saw what he saw that day, and we can take out of it, you know, basically what we will.
Yeah.
Is Scotland a place where, and these reports never go away, different parts of the country all the time.
You get these reports of animal mutilations, you know, bloodless, almost surgical in the way that they're done.
Does Scotland have those?
Not to my knowledge.
Other Scottish ufologists may say that they are aware of some cases, but I'm certainly not.
I mean, another case famous in Scotland is the A70 case, which is Scotland's only recorded alleged UFO abduction, which occurred to two Edinburgh men.
Recorded?
Yes, what I mean by that is that, to our knowledge, if there is any other UFO abductions in Scotland, they've not been made aware to SBI.
And they were leaving the built-up city of Edinburgh on an August evening back in 1992, travelling down the A70 road.
And as they left the built-up city of Edinburgh, the A70 is bordered on fields, you know, fields on either side, lovely countryside, an old cottage dotted about the landscape.
And as they're coming towards a blind bend in the road, they saw this two-tiered disc-shaped object hovering above the surface of the road.
And immediately, both men knew that this was not a conventional helicopter or aircraft of any description whatsoever.
So what did they do?
They decided to floor it and go underneath this object and go to their destination of Turbrax.
However, as the car was directly underneath this object, this black shiny object, it emitted a heavy silver shimmering curtain of light, which descended from beneath the underside of this object and hit the car.
As soon as that effect hit the car, both men were catapulted into inky and total blackness.
They couldn't see their hands in front of their face.
They couldn't see the dashboard of the car.
They thought they were dead.
To quickly finish the story, because it's a massive, massive story, they regained their sight, they drove to their destination of Turbrax.
They knocked on the occupant's door and the occupant went, where have you been?
You're an hour and a half late.
The journey, Howard, should only have taken about 30, 35 minutes.
They were an hour and a half over time.
That night and subsequent night, they had strange dreams of these small grey creatures coming into their dream world.
They found scammers on their body that they previously hadn't seen.
And there was a massive case in Scotland, yeah.
Wow.
And sounds to me a lot like Alan Godfrey's case at Todmoden, you know, the one that he wrote a book about.
Indeed, yes.
Near Manchester, near the Pennines, to be more.
Yes, sir.
To be more precise about that.
I'm not reading about them in the papers.
Are UFO sightings and cases still happening in Scotland this year?
Yes, they are.
And the beauty of that is because we have the wonder of the internet and emails and etc., more and more reports are being generated to societies like ourselves.
Admittedly, a lot of these reports fall down by the wayside once you whittle, you know, you do the investigation.
You find out there's either an aircraft viewed at an unusual angle or it was a hang glider or something along those lines.
But to answer your question, absolutely.
It would appear that UFO sightings are on the increase.
And the beauty of it is that under the Freedom of Information Act passed many years initially by America, many pre-classified government documents by the FBI, the CIA and the NSA, the National Security Agency clearly showed that the American agencies were involved in UFO study.
And then of course latterly we've had release, DRIP Fed release by Whitehall on UFO cases as well, which again show how much the British government were aware.
We could say that maybe it's just a case of maybe they're looking towards Russia.
Maybe they think it's a Russian threat.
So we have to be aware that we've got to check every intrusion in our airspace.
So maybe that was partly why they still did that.
But as we know, the UFO desk was closed a few years ago.
But I still think the Ministry of Defence are still closely monitoring what's going on in the skies above the United Kingdom.
It'll be interesting to see if we get hearings, as some people say we might in the United States next year.
And all of that, of course, tied in with the research that's being done on Mars that might suggest that there's life or has been there.
So this is an interesting time, Malcolm.
Is there anything in all of the great panoply of paranormal stuff, if it's UFOs, poltergeist, whatever, anything that you would like to investigate?
A very good question.
I mean, if it was only one and it had to either be in the paranormal world or the UFO world, oh, it's a tricky one.
Probably the paranormal world, because my heart really belongs to that field of research, you know.
And if, for instance, there was another major, major poltergeist case occurring in Scotland, oh, how I would love to be boots on the ground for that one and video record it.
But I need to take a guy like your good self, Howard, along.
The reason being, because I'd love for you to see what we see.
And then, you know, you're a man of the media.
You could say to your listeners, et cetera, well, I didn't really believe it.
But By golly, I saw it.
The thing is, Howard, what constitutes evidence?
Is it witness testimony?
It can be flawed.
Is it a good video?
It can be manipulated.
We're dealing in the main with people and sometimes, thankfully, video footage.
But what do we accept as good footage and witness testimony?
That's what we have to ask ourselves.
You said to me at the beginning of this when we were tying up the conversation about Socky that there was one other thing that you would come back to.
What was that?
Yeah, I mean, basically, there was the people who on Facebook, there have been a number of people who said that they would love to tell me what they saw, i.e.
they were former classmates of Virginia, or they attended her house, or they know more.
They never told me any more on Facebook, and it would be fantastic to get their testimony.
I mean, we can use pseudonyms, we can give false names, we will not, you know, portray the real names on radio or whatever.
But I would really like to know more about the soccer case, more from the classmates that we didn't manage to get because they were frightened, frightened to come forward.
And that's the thing, Howard.
You know, so many people have seen UFOs and ghosts, but they'll only tell their immediate family they're frightened to say more, you know.
And of course, you know, looked at through the prism of today, we would be asking today what psychological effect, what future effect, what impact did it have on those people who were in the classroom?
I mean, I'm interested in what the school did about this subsequently.
I mean, I wonder if the school's response was to suspend the pupil, to ignore the thing.
I never asked you that, just very quickly, because we're coming up to the end.
What did the school do?
They did actually send Virginia home for a few days.
And because the place was awash with press reporters from Scotland and England, they had a young girl who looked very similar to Virginia put on Virginia's coat and run away out of a different area, followed hot on the heels by the press that wasn't Virginia's.
It's just like the Beatles, isn't it?
It is, yeah.
They're using decoys.
What an incredible case, Malcolm.
You know, I hope you're able to get up.
Well, I know you've got to get up to Scotland to do your talk, haven't you?
When is that talk at Sokey Hall?
It's Saturday, November the 21st at Sokey Hall.
And Sokey's very near Allawa.
And it's 7.30 p.m. to 10pm.
We'll be playing the recordings of the Society.
And we'll be playing witness testimony and showing a lot of photographs, etc.
Well, thank you for sharing your various stories, in particular that one with us, Malcolm.
If people want to check out your website, we might as well cover all the ground here.
What's the website?
Well, it's basically just a Facebook page, to be honest with you.
▲
Export Selection