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Oct. 19, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:08
Edition 489 - Nathaniel Gillis
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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 Still Howard Hughes and this is still the Unexplained.
Hope you're doing all right.
London has just moved into Tier 2 of the coronavirus restrictions.
I know my friends in Liverpool, my home city, and other parts of the UK, some of them are in Tier 3.
It's going to be a difficult winter by the looks of it.
I really hope it isn't.
And I hope that some of the divisions between people that we've seen over this matter, you know, I hope that they can be solved.
And I just hope that we can come together and unite to deal with this.
Because the answer to the coronavirus thing will eventually be human ingenuity.
Like, it answers all problems and terrible situations that we face.
But, you know, we might have to wait a bit for that.
And that's what makes it really difficult.
And believe you me, I've been through it too because I thought I was sailing through the isolation at the beginning of lockdown when we had that.
But towards the end of it, I was climbing the walls, I think.
It was getting difficult.
And I'm a very self-sufficient guy, and I can manage with my own company, and I can do my own thing.
But I know what that's like.
So, you know, if you're going through any of that right now, my thoughts are with you.
And if your business or your job has suffered because of all of this, you also are in my thoughts right now.
Because this is the hardest time of my little life.
And that goes for millions of people around the world, hey?
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work ongoing on the website.
And thank you to Haley for booking the guests.
A couple of shout-outs before we get to the guests.
This is going to be one that I have to put a little bit of a caveat in front of.
Not necessarily a warning, but I have to say that listener discretion is advised for this edition.
Okay?
If you are easily scared, if talk of demons and demonology freaks you out, then maybe this one is not for you.
But if you're interested in this kind of thing, don't forget you can stop and start it when you hear it, then that's where we're going with Nathaniel Gillis.
Guy who's been on Coast Coast AM in America a couple of times, I know, and I wanted to speak with him about demons and demonology.
I think you'll find his take on it very different.
So Nathaniel Gillis in the United States coming next, but like I say, if you're easily scared, maybe this one is not for you.
A few shout-outs to do, people who've emailed the show before we get to Nathaniel.
Natalia in Manchester, good to hear from you, Natalia.
John in South Lyon, Michigan.
Thank you, John.
Tracy in Cheshire, nice to hear from you again.
Mick in Ohio.
All points noted, Mick.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much to a listener in America who sent me a story about a Ouija board that I will tell you before we get to our demonology guest, Nathaniel Gillis in the US.
I'm not going to give you your name to protect your anonymity here, but I'll read the story.
My own personal experience with a Ouija board back many years ago, now to high school, I was hanging out with some friends who were using one, and I was very skeptical when I saw one.
Later, however, the board predicted some events that were impossible to know, which came to be true.
I and a friend of mine bored one night and decided to make our own board, Ouija board, that is.
We found an old dry erased board buried beneath some junk and put all the letters and symbols of a Ouija board on it.
We used the large plastic cap of a bottle as a planchette to move around the board.
We didn't see how it could work, but we decided to give it a try.
To our amazement, when we placed our hands on the cap, our hands started moving around with an incredible speed and force, far more than anything we'd experienced before.
To make a long story short, we knew that whatever had come through was powerful, so we asked the board what it was, and what came back with incredible speed were the numbers 6, 6, 6.
Terrified, we asked it to leave, which it refused to do.
Finally, it agreed.
We immediately tried to wipe the numbers off the board, and they wouldn't come off.
We took the dry erase board with us and went out the door without telling my mum a word.
And apparently you dumped the board in a dumpster at a McDonald's after that.
I've since told students of mine to not mess with Ouija boards, but unfortunately, that just makes them want to go out and try them, so now I say nothing.
I can't expect anyone to believe this, as people have to experience things for themselves.
But I was confirmed not only of the existence of a spirit world, but of the dangers of that world as well.
Pretty chilling story.
I know people like Karen Dolman in the U.S. who use Ouija boards and write books about them.
But you know my view on them.
They are not for ordinary people to mess with, in my opinion.
I may be wrong, and please tell me if I am.
But that's just my thought.
Okay, let's get to the guest in the U.S. now.
Frightening listening, I think you're going to find Nathaniel Gillis.
We're going to talk about demons.
Nathaniel, thank you for coming on.
Thank you for having me on.
And whereabouts are you then?
Let's get that clear first.
I am in Ohio.
Okay, now I know that Ohio is a large and flat state.
It's got a lot of unexplained listeners in it, Nathaniel.
So how come, have you always lived there?
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
Ever since I was born.
Okay.
And is it a place?
Because I do have a slightly higher proportion of listeners in Ohio.
I noticed from the emails.
Is it a place where people are interested in paranormality necessarily?
Is there a big interest in ghosts and demons and spirits and that kind of thing?
Yeah, we do have a large movement of researchers.
And in addition to that, we have a lot of old places, old homes, actually entire old villages.
So yeah, there is a hot bit of paranormal research here.
Of which you are a part.
Now, look, everybody gets into all of this stuff.
And I call it stuff loosely for a reason.
Sometimes that reason, in fact, very often that reason, is the experiences that they had when they were kids.
And I'm guessing maybe this, because, well, I know from your biography that this goes back a long way with you.
So let's tell your story before we get into anybody else's stories.
Okay.
So when I was eight and a half, nine years old, my parents moved into a new house in Dayton, Ohio.
And it was actually at the open house Before we even purchased and moved into the house, it's at the open house that I experienced my very full, first full-bodied apparition.
I was in a room that was soon to be mine, and my dad said, You know what, take a look around, figure out where you're going to put your bed and your gaming system.
He said, your mom and I are going to be hanging out with the realtor in the living room.
And so I'm looking around the room.
I look in the closet and just kind of getting an idea of where everything is going to be.
And I was drawn, for some reason, drawn to the corner of the room where a bed was.
I got down on all fours.
I still don't know why I did this, but nevertheless, I looked underneath the bed.
And as soon as I pulled the bed flap up, I was met face to face with a little girl.
She had to have been about six years old.
She was pale in complexion.
She had long black flowing hair.
And she had a white linen dress that looked to have been made during the turn of the century.
So, of course, I was frightened.
When I looked at her, I pretty much was in shock.
I have to tell you that if I was a young kid and something like that happened to me, I'd be out the door.
But, you know, well done for persevering.
Right, right.
So, yeah, I mean, as soon as I saw her, she did something that has always stuck with me, though.
She scurried her little body across the floor all the way to the back of the wall to where she was the furthest away from me she could have possibly been.
So it was almost, was it, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but from that experience, did it look as if she was almost trying to hide or get away from something?
And that something in that case was you?
That's exactly right.
Yes, sir.
How did you know she wasn't real?
I didn't.
I didn't.
It wasn't until I went and just asked my dad.
We were in the car on the way home.
And I said, you know what, dad?
I said, while we were in the open house, I met this girl and I couldn't place her.
I said, did she belong to a family that actually either lived in the house and was selling it or was she a kid from the neighborhood?
I had no frame of reference for her and come to find out that the people that sold my parents the home, they were actually elderly and they had died and said they were just giving the estate up.
So, yeah, she shouldn't have been there.
She didn't belong there.
And it turns out that that was the actual entity that lived in the house.
And then once we actually moved in, it became more terrifying.
When you say it became more terrifying, I mean, presumably, I mean, look, if that became your bedroom, then whatever apparition or presence that was was living with you.
Yes, sir, 100%.
And it became more malevolent.
Where there were nights, many nights, in fact, where I would wake up to a full-blown conversation going on above my head.
And I could hear them talking.
There were two adults.
I could hear them talking just enough to know they were talking, but I was never able to understand what they were saying.
But that manifestation morphed into what became shadow figures.
There was at least one, if not more than one, entities that would walk on our wooden floors at nighttime, and I would hear them walking all the way up to my door.
Once they got to my door, they would stop.
And so that was my, people say it was my first encounter.
Truthfully, it was my first confrontation.
So you were hearing footsteps outside your bedroom door.
I mean, real kind of creaking footsteps.
Oh, yeah.
Surely your parents must have heard that.
No, they were asleep.
My dad always, to this day, he sleeps with a fan on.
So, you know, as a kid, I'm sitting there and I'm listening and I'm going, oh my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.
That's what I kept telling myself, you know, I mean, this entity, whatever it was, it would literally displace its own weight.
And so it was physical enough to creak our wooden floors.
I would sleep with my lights on.
There was one night, the craziest thing I ever saw was one night I was playing in my video game system and I saw movement out of the corner of my right eye.
And when I locked eyes on it, I moved my head, I locked eyes on it, it was a seven-foot tall shadow figure that was watching me from outside of my bedroom window.
Now, when you say seven-foot-tall shadow figure, when people talk to me about shadow figures, they tend to be incredibly dark.
They tend to have no great features.
Some of them wear a hat, but you're aware that there's something there when they're around.
Is that what it was like for you?
There was no hat.
When I saw it, it was just a regular, I won't say a regular, seven foot tall.
I mean, come on, it's a shadow figure.
It's just a regular shadow figure.
It's one of those, yeah.
No, I mean, it was your classic shadow figure.
But I just remember looking at it and locking eyes on it.
And I'm thinking in my mind, like, oh my God.
Because it's like you said, it's darker than dark.
I mean, it was nighttime out and it was darker than the darkness I was looking at.
And so, you know, it stuck with me.
It really influenced me.
And so that is more or less what I experienced growing up in that haunted house.
Most of us, if we had an experience like that and we were young, and if we were sufficiently close to our parents, we would probably tell our parents first.
What kind of reaction, response did you get from your mom and dad?
At first, they really didn't believe me.
They thought it was the curiosity of a kid Or me being suspicious or overzealous one way or another.
But the longer we stayed in that house, I think, honestly, I think that the more I became unglued, I should say, at nighttime, the more they realized, okay, this wasn't just Nathaniel being a kid.
It was something was really going on.
I mean, there were times when I would literally drag my mattress into their room at night because I just didn't want to be alone.
The way things work here, and certainly in the modern era, the one that we live in, a lot of parents would say, well, I think we need to get our son looked at, perhaps by a psychologist, just to make sure that nothing else is happening.
Did any of that happen with you?
No, it didn't.
Not at all.
Not at all.
So you were, obviously, it was creeping you out, but you were able to cope with it.
I was able to cope with it.
And I had created a coping mechanism that allowed me to be present with it, but also to understand it in a way that I wasn't as victimized as I once was.
And, you know, I mean, when these entities, especially as a child, when these entities enter your life, it's not just a haunting.
It's far worse than just trauma, right?
Because I had no idea how to even reconcile with the fact that I felt watched all day long.
I heard voices and all these things.
And so one way that I...
Were they trying to communicate with you?
No, sir.
I could hear them just enough to know they were talking, but I never could understand what they were saying.
But that leads me into my next point.
The main way I was allowed to cope with this entity was that I had to tell myself that I was afraid, yes, but why was I afraid, right?
I had to tell myself that the reason I was afraid was because I didn't understand what I was experiencing.
And so that was one way I kind of put up a guard against it.
How old were you then?
Nine.
That's a very sophisticated response.
I didn't think so at the time.
For a nine-year-old to be able to rationalize it to that degree is astonishing.
Well, thank you.
I just, you know, I was a kid and I didn't know how to rationalize it.
Honestly, I didn't know how to cope with it.
And so that was my only defense mechanism was to say, you know what?
It doesn't mean to be fearful.
It doesn't mean to be intimidating.
I'm misinterpreting this somehow.
And since then, it's allowed me to broaden my horizons in my own research.
But I'm thankful that I survived it.
But just before, I mean, look, you said that you came to understand it.
And it sounds to me like you weren't really sharing these experiences with anybody.
But you said also at the beginning that it was malevolent.
So was the malevolence in your lack of understanding of it, or was it really doing malevolent things?
It wasn't really doing malevolent things.
To this day, I'm still wondering if it was projecting the fear that I felt or if I was just terrified of it because I could not fit it in my worldview.
It did not scratch me.
These are all major classical manifestations of a haunting.
It didn't scratch me.
It didn't push me.
It didn't yell or growl or anything like that at me.
Did it move objects around you?
No.
No, it did not.
No, it didn't.
So did you ever think that maybe whatever it was was you?
No, not at all.
How come?
Just because I wasn't crazy.
Well, no, no, I mean, I'm not suggesting that, but sometimes people react to, I don't know, react to life circumstances, whatever they may be, in different ways.
And sometimes, you know, we have escaping and coping mechanisms.
If school is not so much fun, you know, I know this from my own personal experience.
You know, my school days at the beginning were not fun.
I didn't enjoy them until I got into my teens.
And, you know, a lot of kids find ways of compensating.
You're sure that that's not what was happening to Nate?
No, not at all.
I mean, I am sure, obviously, that that wasn't what was happening to me.
You know, I mean, once you have the first encounter with these entities and then you go on and you have a few more encounters, at some point you got to think, okay, what's going on here?
I mean, when you add up all the manifestations, I mean, I didn't even know what a shadow person was, right?
So when I experienced that as a kid, I realized, even as an adult, I realized, okay, that's not normal.
And that's not normal, not in the sense of, okay, that kid's overzealous or he's sensitive or he's going through something.
That's a classic haunting case.
Did you think at any time, why is this thing targeting me?
I did.
That was something that I dealt with tremendously.
Matter of fact, the night when everything came to a head, I prayed.
I just felt it.
I mean, I got so tired of waking up at nighttime, feeling that chilly air, feeling like something was staring at me, but I couldn't see it.
And I moved myself.
I just, I said, you know what?
I started praying and I went into the bathroom, shut the door, and I just sat down in the bathroom.
I just sat down.
I said, God, I can't do this anymore.
You know, I said, I've already failed a grade in school.
I'm not getting any sleep.
I cannot confide in anyone regarding what I'm dealing with.
And I could feel that entity move into the bathroom with me.
I could feel It so that to me sounds like almost a conflict.
You know, you were trying to exorcise it effectively.
Exactly right.
Yeah, me, you know, as a kid.
I'm over here, Constantine, or something, you know.
So you were praying, deliver me from this evil or whatever it is.
Yes, sir.
And it was wanting to be part of that, you know, that mechanism.
Yep.
You're right.
And I could feel it move into the room because, you know, I just thought, man, like I can't get away from this entity.
And so I asked God, I said, God, this is crazy, man.
I said, God, I don't know what this is.
I don't know why it's here, but I can't do this anymore.
And I said, I'm asking you to deliver me.
When I said those words, it's very interesting.
It wasn't as if another presence entered the room, like an angelic presence.
It was as if that darkness just completely dissolved in the air.
It was gone.
So you, I mean, that's almost like a scene from the exorcist.
So you say that at a very tender age, you learned a number of lessons that most people, thankfully, never have to learn.
You learned that these things are real and they can cause you disturbance in your life.
But you also learned that if you concentrate, maybe if you pray like they do in the movies, you can actually have a bit of a victory.
Yes, sir.
I was pushed in that direction.
You know, I mean, it was just, it was an impulsive move, to be honest.
I was fed up.
I didn't know what else to do.
Like I said before, I was losing sleep.
I had failed a grade in school.
When I would get to school, obviously I hadn't slept the entire night and I would just pass out on my desk.
What did they think was happening to you at school?
Or did they not care?
They cared.
They had no clue, though.
I grew up in a Christian tradition and I went to what's called a church school.
So I didn't go to a public school or anything like that.
It was a private school.
And I knew that I could not share what I was going through with my teacher because they would have never understood.
They must have known something was going on.
Did they think you were doing drugs or something?
I hope not.
No, I don't think that.
I think they were clueless, you know, and that's the way I wanted it.
I could not possibly tell them what was going on with me.
And I think that's one of the darkest natures of a haunting is that it's not just that these entities plague people.
It's that they want people to be exclusive to them.
You know what I mean?
They want people to be silenced into submission.
But most people don't have this experience.
So you must have had the thought, as any of us would have the thought, why is this thing looking at me?
Why has this thing come to me?
Am I susceptible?
You know, is there some veil of reality that's lifted in my case so that I can see these things that other people can't see?
And more crucially, what is it that they, I say they, want from me?
Yes, sir.
100%.
I had those thoughts.
I still sometimes have those thoughts, even where I'm at in my career.
I mean, as far as I can tell, I have and had empathic notions, and I think that they targeted me because they didn't want to have to deal with me in the future.
And so they wanted me to just completely die as a child.
Hang on.
That's fascinating.
They didn't want to deal with you in the future.
In other words, they knew that you were going to become involved in the study of demons.
And so they wanted to try and make sure that you were not around to be a problem for them.
Yes, sir.
I was a question that they did not want to answer.
And so they tried to snuff me out in a sense.
I know that to be true.
How do you know that?
Because it was suicide that was in that house.
Do you mean you think that somebody or in the history of the place you were living, that somebody had sadly taken their own lives?
I do believe that that occurred in that house, 100%.
But even more than that, the spirit of suicide was what I fought while I was in that house.
So I don't know if I can attribute that to someone who committed the act.
Or something was trying to push you towards that.
Exactly right.
Yes, sir.
And so according to my own research and according to even just my case studies, they did not want to deal with me later on in my career and my life.
And so they tried to just take me out when they could.
So the more I got into this research and the older I became, I knew just by the amount of people I was helping and the amount of people God allowed me to help that there was a reason they targeted me.
They did not want to deal with me because I've had many cases of suicide, like people that have tried to commit suicide and they were stopped just because of what God has allowed me to do and help them.
But I'm telling you, they wanted me out.
They did not want to deal with me in the future.
So they tried to take me out when they could.
That's a very heavy thing to be aware of when you're so young.
And that would freak a lot of kids out.
Yeah, it was a scary time.
You know what I mean?
It was a terrifying event in my life.
But thankfully, I grew out of it.
And so once I grew out of those manifestations, I grew into a dimension that allows me to understand them.
And it's no longer a coping mechanism.
It's no longer Nathaniel Saying, okay, the reason you're afraid is because they're projecting fear.
Now it's almost like I'm in their head.
And it's well, it also sounds like they're in your head.
In what way?
They're in your head as well as your.
You know, you say that they're in your head, but you know, your head's in theirs as well.
Yeah, exactly.
I guess so, you know.
Yeah, yeah, I got you.
Yeah.
So, yeah, so it has allowed me to understand them in a way that has weaponized my past experiences.
So now I can say, okay, if people come to me and say, you know what, I have an attachment or I think I have an attachment.
What I'm going to go down through is I'm going to list everything that I went through.
You know what I mean?
Articulately.
I'm going to say, okay, what are your nightmares like?
What are your emotions like?
Have you had any spirit of heaviness?
Have you had emotions that feel like they're not yours?
And so it really helped me out more than anything.
How did you get then?
I'm sorry to jump in here, but there's like a bit missing.
And the bit that's missing is how you got from that kid, who I think made a very mature judgment about what was happening to him.
I mean, I still think that you should have got, you should have sought some assistance from somebody.
I'm not entirely sure who.
You know, maybe a preacher that you trusted to confide in, or maybe a psychologist or somebody like that, or somebody who dealt with this kind of thing, but you didn't.
You did all of this by yourself.
How did you get from that kid who made that rational call about whatever this phenomenon was?
In other words, I know what it is, and knowing what it is means that I've learned how to deal with it.
How did you get towards studying it and you say assisting other people who were victims of it?
Well, when we moved out of the house, I was about two years out of the house.
I was 14 years old, man, and I started preaching.
And so it was literally 8 to 12.
You started preaching.
Yes, sir.
So from the years of 8 to 12, 8 to 13, that's when I was in the house.
And then at 14 years old, I preached my very first message.
And when you say you preached your very first message, do you mean that you actually did that in your church?
Yes, sir.
Okay.
So why didn't you become a clergyman?
Why didn't you become...
There are exorcists in many faiths.
You could have become that person, I guess.
Yes, and a lot of my heroes are in the Catholic faith, especially the exorcisms.
To be honest, they groomed me to be clergy.
You know, they wanted me to be an evangelist or a pastor.
But I preached all across the country for about 10 years.
And I just, I became disenchanted.
And I don't want to get into like the religious aspect of it, but I didn't understand their demonology.
I did not find it relevant, number one, number two, not accurate, because they told me that in possession cases, that we were dealing with fallen angels.
And when you say that, I mean, that's something that I've heard a lot.
Who told you that?
My pastor.
Yeah.
So your pastor believed in the things that you said that you'd experienced and your view of those things that you'd experienced.
And your pastor said, well, what these are are fallen angels.
They've been kicked out of heaven.
Correct.
Yes, sir.
And I couldn't rationalize that because I saw shadow figures.
Where's that in the Bible?
You know, I mean, and I couldn't possibly come to them and say, hey, listen, I saw a shadow figure.
They would think I'm cuckoo or crazy.
So what I began to do is I began to research on my own independently.
And the number one thing that I was interested in was possession and demonic possession, exorcisms, the entire lot.
But the more I researched, the more I realized that there was a reason that I didn't agree with them.
It's because, number one, the Bible never tells us that these are fallen angels.
It never mentions that at all.
But yeah, that's how I began.
Okay.
And how did you get into a situation where you started to mesh with people's stories?
In other words, how did you start to do, you said you have done case studies.
How did you get into that?
In terms of in home investigations, I got to a point in my research where I was comfortable with the material in terms of literature.
And so I kind of just opened myself up.
I got to know a couple other people in Dayton that were actually doing cases even before I was.
And so I began going on cases with them.
And then after that, I just started going out on my own.
But primarily what I was after is I wanted to know the historical aspect of this phenomenon.
I wanted to know what the ancients experienced.
I wanted to know how they interpreted what they experienced.
And so more or less, what I've been doing is I've been taking their case studies and any information I can glean from them and applying it to my own cases, if that makes sense.
It does.
And what sorts of cases came your way?
Mostly, it's honestly, mostly the paranormal field in terms of cases, they can get boring.
I mean, you know, most people are used to going on television and seeing these shows where everything is action-packed.
It's not always action-packed.
You know, you could be there for two hours and see one thing move.
You can be there for six hours and have nothing but one EVP.
So the biggest case, because everybody asks me that question, not that you're asking me that, but I did me.
I would eventually.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, man.
So I had a case that was a murder case.
And this is the most terrifying case study I've ever experienced in my own career because, again, it just completely destroyed my aspect of demonology.
But it was a murder case where when I got there, the wife had been murdered by a 15-year-old girl.
I'm surprised that the detectives involved in that case didn't say, who do you think you are?
Well, it was the family that called me out.
Was it?
Yes, sir.
And how did they hear about you?
Well, my dad's a pastor.
So I'm confident they thought they were contacting my father for prayer.
That's what it began as.
You know, can you come pray for us?
But they messaged me and I said, okay.
And I said, you know, what would, you know, of course I'll come out.
What would you, you know, what's going on?
I didn't know about the murder.
So they said, you know, well, we're having paranormal activity in the house.
And so I took it to my father and my dad was like, well, nurse, like, this is more of your line of work, not mine.
Does it make sense?
I was like, okay, you know, so.
But your dad was cool with you going there.
Yes, yes.
Yes, he was.
So when I got there, the family, I mean, obviously it was traumatic.
It was profoundly traumatic.
The mother had been killed.
The husband, he was also stabbed.
And the house was full of paranormal activity.
In fact, according to the family, they were witnessing paranormal activity prior and after the murder.
Prior to and after.
So when I got there, there was carpet that was plucked out, cut up, taken for evidence.
And you could feel evil when you walked in that house.
It felt like it was just completely draining.
How soon after this crime did you go there?
It was about a week after.
So it wasn't like on the crime scene, right?
Yeah.
Yes, sir.
Okay.
And you were going there to give the, ostensibly to give the family some comfort.
Exactly right.
And when you talk about the family, are you talking about the children who remained?
What was the story?
Oh, man.
The story was, and I'm not going to mention names, obviously, but the story was that the 13-year-old daughter in the family had conspired with a 15-year-old friend of hers to perform the murder.
And according to the father, he would be just watching TV at night and they didn't have any blinds at all in the house, especially the first floor.
And so he told me, he said, I would be watching television and I would look out the window and I would see the 15-year-old girl staring at me.
And he said, that's when I realized that there was a problem going on.
This is obviously prior to the murder.
And so he said that he told the 13-year-old daughter, his daughter, you know, I don't want you to have anything to do with this girl.
Nothing to do with her.
There's something wrong here.
And so he tells me, this gets very interesting.
But he said, Nathaniel, he said, one night, he said, I'm sitting there.
Okay, so he has, I think it was one leg.
And so he's on like a wheelchair thing.
He had a disability.
And he said that it was a school night for his daughter.
And while he's watching television, he looks over and sees his daughter coming down the stairs.
He thinks to himself, okay, this is strange.
His daughter looks at him and then she opens the door.
When she opens the door, the 15-year-old comes in, and this 15-year-old girl has a mask on.
And she begins to stab everyone she can see.
While she's stabbing them, there is a male, guttural voice coming out of her.
And he said, it was as if she was possessed.
It sounds like, sounds absolutely terrifying.
It was.
It had to have been.
I mean, even just for me going into the house, you could feel the terror.
It just, it got into you.
So this was a rampage, as the newspapers would describe it.
Yes, sir.
Absolutely.
It was a rampage.
So when I got there, what had happened was the husband, he was also stabbed and he was healing from surgery.
And he had his sister with him.
His sister was kind of helping him, not just grieve, but helping him get around the house and just heal.
But when I got there, there was such a heaviness in the house.
It was not just consciousness.
It was darker.
It was deeper.
And so we went through the house and I do what I always do.
I didn't want to know anything.
I didn't want to know any names.
I didn't want to know whose rooms I was going into.
And I told the sister, I said, would you go with me through the house?
I said, I don't want you to tell me anything.
I said, you know whose rooms we're going into.
You know whose closets we're going to be looking in.
But I said, I want you to see and hear what I'm going to say to you, just so that when I'm ready, we can go downstairs and you can give clarity and context to what I'm experiencing and what I'm saying.
I cornered the entity that performed the murder upstairs in a closet.
You cornered the entity that performed the murder.
You mean you cornered something that had possessed the 15-year-old?
Is that what you're saying?
Yes, sir.
Matter of fact, when they first contacted me, I could already see the closet.
And I told the sister, I said, I'm in a closet right now.
What does this mean?
She said, well, I was called to that closet the other night.
So once I got to the house, I pretty much knew what I was looking for and where to look for it at.
So I'm upstairs.
I'm in a room.
And I'm looking in a closet.
And when I look down at my feet, I look at a milk carton with green model trains in it.
And I told the sister there, I said, okay, I said, this entity is exactly where I had placed him when you guys first called me.
I said, he is either in this closet or he is attracted to this closet because this milk carton reminds him of something.
There's only two possibilities there.
So I turned around, looked at the other side of the room, went to another closet in the room, opened it up, looked at her and I said, okay, I said, again, this entity is either in this closet or he's attracted to something in this closet.
She keeps her mouth shut, you know, because I told her, I said, I don't want to hear anything, you know, I mean, not in that sense, but I didn't want to be interrupted.
I was in the flow of things and I didn't want to be defiled by suggestion.
So we go downstairs.
I go downstairs into the kitchen.
She follows me.
And I see a wooden table.
And the table was actually there in the kitchen.
But I also see the victim of the murder sitting on a wooden chair next to the table.
They weren't there.
I mean, to put it lightly, right?
Like they weren't there.
And so I said, okay, I see the wooden table, but I also see the wooden chair and the victim sitting in it smoking a cigarette.
Again, she didn't say anything.
So we move into the living room.
I sit down and I'm going through just some of what I felt and everything.
And I asked the husband, I said, okay, I said, can you tell me about your father-in-law?
He goes, sure.
He said, my father-in-law hated my wife, which is the victim.
He said, my wife's father would get drunk and high and would beat my wife unconscious.
And he told her, I will kill you.
This is controversial.
I know, but we have to understand how these entities think.
He said that his father-in-law, the victim's father, would beat her and her mother unconscious.
He said, and during these escapades and during his fits of rage, the only way that the mother could get him out of that fit of rage was to put him in a car like a child, drive him to a toy store, and buy him green model trains.
And he said, matter of fact, when he died, we took all of his stuff and placed it in a room upstairs.
When he said that, his sister's mouth dropped.
And you could feel the atmosphere change.
And he said, it's funny you mentioned the wooden chair that you saw in the kitchen.
He said, because that wooden table that's in there was made by my father-in-law.
And you're right, Nathaniel.
There is a wooden chair, but we keep it in the garage outside.
Now, in the meantime, there is a murder investigation going on.
The police are involved.
What happened to the perpetrator?
Oh, man.
So, according to my knowledge right now, both of them are in prison.
They were charged as adults, I believe.
The night, interestingly enough, the night of the cleansing, right, once I got there, like I said before, it was a week after.
The night of the cleansing is the same night that the 12-year-old, the daughter, came to her social worker and said, the demon that has been coming into my cell at night told me that it's never coming back again.
Right.
That happened.
I heard that.
What happened to them?
Did they, I mean, are they, presumably they're still in prison now?
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
Yep.
And what about that family?
What about the father?
They're doing better.
They've not had any kind of paranormal activity since I've been there.
What is it that you did?
You clearly thought that there was this spirit of the guy who passed and then tried to continue his wickedness with the current generation.
What was it that you did?
According to my knowledge, I crossed him over.
Now, that was my very first crossing over of any entity.
Usually it's just a cleansing.
This was different.
When I had the family in the living room, I prayed and I work with one angel.
I don't work with a bunch of angels.
And it's not like me and him are, you know, he and I are cool or anything, you know, but he does help me.
And so during the cleansing, I just asked my angel, I said, Can you take this entity wherever it belongs?
I have it on audio.
I recorded it.
You could hear, I mean, the husband, it was an incredible moment.
The entire room felt like fire.
The husband began to slap his shoulders and say, get it off me, get it off me.
Oh my God, get it off me.
And when we were done, you could literally see the darkness leave.
You could watch it.
It was like someone slowly turned a light on in the room and we watched shadows leave that house.
So much so that in the audio recording, you could hear the sister say, oh my God, oh my God, I'm going to check upstairs to make sure I'm not just imagining this.
It left.
Now, what's fascinating about this is about two months after that, I was sitting at a restaurant and I was reading.
While I'm reading, there is a couple that sits down next to me.
And the wife, it's fascinating.
She sits down and she looks at me and she says, okay, you know, what are you reading?
And I tell her what I'm reading.
And she asks me what I do.
And I say, okay, you know, I'm a researcher.
I do cases and all that stuff, whatever.
And she goes, okay, well, what was your last case?
And I gave her a little bit of detail, nowhere near as in-depth as what we were talking about today.
And she goes, I know that case.
I said, no, you don't.
She goes, yeah, I do.
And she said, I've heard of you.
And I can tell you that what you're telling me is the truth, but I cannot tell you how I know it.
And so about 30 minutes later, finally, I drug it out of her.
This is crazy, man.
This is how this stuff works.
She said, the reason I know you're telling the truth is because I'm a social worker that has been working with the 13 and 15 year old.
And she said, the night you did your cleansing, this is how I know.
She said, the night you did your cleansing is the same night the 13-year-old came to me in tears saying that entity told me it can no longer come into my cell.
So, look, do you, I mean, that is a very, very chilling story.
It's the kind of story you need a cup of coffee and five minutes to digest, I think.
So you believe that you delivered those people who'd been through that terrible experience of murder in their home from an entity that actually caused that, which brings me to the question, do you believe that many of the awful, you know, sometimes I will read crimes in newspapers.
I don't understand how these things happen.
I don't understand what would motivate somebody to commit such harm or evil, and yet those things happen.
Are you saying that a lot of that stuff is caused by entities that occupy people and make them do it?
I do believe that.
In a great many cases, that happens.
It's not just possession.
It's not even transient possession.
What that entity did is absolutely chilling because it could not open its own door.
It had to have the 13-year-old to do it.
Right?
And he knew that the 13-year-old was not willing to kill.
The 15-year-old was.
And so what he did, and this is a fascinating case study regarding possession, it projected its consciousness into two individuals, either at the same time or individually.
And so what my point, I guess, is this, that it could not open its own door.
It had to have the 13-year-old.
It could not hold its own scissors and knife.
It had to have the 15-year-old.
And so it manipulated the 13-year-old in ways that it could not manipulate the 15-year-old, right?
So it was operating on both ends.
And then once it got into that house and was embodied again, then it began to speak.
It began to laugh.
Literally, that's what they said.
It was laughing at them.
And did the police not get concerned that you were getting involved in the investigation?
Because you said you went to that house where those events happened one week after they'd happened.
No, they didn't.
I don't even know if they know about it, to be honest.
The family called me out, and it wasn't like I'm doing a crime investigation.
It was just, you know, they're dealing with shadow figures.
They had pops of light that would manifest.
But, you know, it was a very interesting case.
So I don't know that they knew anything about me, to be honest with you.
Do you call yourself an exorcist, then?
No.
What do you call yourself?
I described you in the introduction to this as a demonologist.
That's how I described it.
That's more fitting.
Yes, sir.
That's more fitting.
You know, I think that every exorcist should be a demonologist, but not every demonologist is an exorcist.
And how was it that you were able to, you know, if we understand that those events happened in that house, I mean, it's horrific.
Those things happen in that house.
How was it that you were able to make them stop and make the cause of it, as you say, go away?
I don't know.
I'm telling you, I have no idea.
So you did what you did when you were a kid then.
You prayed.
Is that what you did?
Yes, sir.
You know, I can't tell you it's my research because sometimes it doesn't work like that, right?
It's not just the intellectual aspect of it.
Whatever happened in that house, I was given permission to act upon it.
It wasn't Nathaniel, you know, it wasn't because I'm some gifted guy because, like I said, it doesn't always happen like that for me.
But whatever occurred in that house, it wasn't just a murder.
It wasn't just possession.
When I first got there, I had was already getting a name coming to me.
It was Gary, the name Gary.
And I kept feeling a hug.
And I just began to weep.
I began to cry.
And I asked the husband, I said, okay, I said, I'm getting hugged by a guy named Gary.
And he and his sister, they kind of looked at each other and they said, that's our deceased brother.
He died of cancer.
And they said for the last year of his life, every time he would hug us, he would just bawl like a baby.
That happened in that house.
And so, you know, it was a powerful moment.
There was an atheist there.
Can I go in this direction for a second?
I'm not like, you know, I'm not going to go against atheism or anything, but I want to explain something that happened.
You mean there was somebody who didn't believe in religion there?
Yes, sir.
During the cleansing, it was like the entire house shook.
And there was an atheist in the corner of the room.
When I first got there, he literally just straight up told me before I even said who my name was or anything like that.
He says, listen, I know what you do.
I heard about you and I know why you're here.
And I basically don't believe in any of this.
100%.
So during the cleansing, he had his arms crossed and he had a scowl on his face.
But when that entity moved into the room, there was a confrontation.
Man, I cannot express this enough.
There was an absolute confrontation in that living room during the cleansing.
And I'm watching these people in the room just move in and out.
Like I could see them being affected.
First thing I saw was that atheist begin to bawl like a baby.
And it still, man, all right, it still affects me because, you know, you don't expect that to happen.
So do you believe that there is, as we've seen in movies and as we've read, a daily battle that's gone on for millennia against good and evil?
It's being played out all the time.
Yes, sir, and it's transcendent.
In fact, that night, once we got done with the cleansing, he hugged me, the atheist, hugged me, cried on my shoulder and said, he said, you know, he said, my entire family are atheists.
My dad taught me that there's no God, there's no afterlife, there's nothing.
And he said, this moment changed my life.
Three months after that, okay, this is crazy, man.
But this is, this is, you know, it's a good story in terms of how people can be helped in this case.
But I get a phone call from the sister and the sister says, okay, you remember the atheist that you met that night?
I said, yes, I do.
She said, well, he's next to me.
He's afraid to talk to you because of for whatever reason, but he wants to tell you a story.
I said, okay.
So I get on the phone with him.
He goes, hey, Nathaniel, you know, how you doing?
We get to talking.
And he said, that night I went home and he said, I cried.
He said, I could not stop crying.
He said, and I called every pastor in Dayton, Ohio.
He said, I went through the phone book and I pulled out every church I could find.
He said, some of them I talked to.
Some of them I had to leave voicemails.
But I told them my experience in that house.
Then he starts crying again and says, Nathaniel, I want to do what you do.
And that's when I realized that indeed we are experiencing a war.
It's an absolute war.
So in your view, are the only people who get saved from those evil entities, those who have faith?
There are many people in this world who are perfectly good people, as you will know, but they don't have faith.
They don't have a faith.
They don't have a faith.
Indeed, and it's a very curious aspect of this phenomenon.
I mean, faith plays a large part.
And that's what grieves me about a lot of people who say, you know what, I'm a skeptic.
I don't believe in this stuff.
It doesn't matter if you believe in it or not.
You know, I mean, I've never had a case where somebody says, you know what?
These entities looked at me and said, I won't haunt you because you don't believe in me.
They don't care.
Does that make sense?
But they're free.
But the only way, if a person considers themselves to have a haunted house or they have some kind of entity that's bugging them, the only way for them to fix it is to effectively get religion.
Not just religion.
I think I understand what you're saying.
It depends.
I mean, that's a very deep question.
I have people that first began with nothing, like they had no religion, and they deal with a haunting.
And that goes back to my point.
You don't have to believe in religion for these entities to haunt you, right?
Now, religion does play a role in terms of a defense mechanism and how you deal with these entities once they get in your house.
And it's not just Christianity.
There are many religious amulets.
There are many different prayers that you can perform.
So in other words, to deal, it's almost like being a firefighter.
You're firefighting equipment.
You Have to call on, effectively, you would say, you have to, in order to be able, whether you have a faith or not, if you want to deal with these things, you need to be calling on God because God is, you know, in your view, God is the force that will purge or has the power to purge these things.
Indeed, yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
Why doesn't God then do that all the time?
Why does God allow them to exist?
In terms of like the hauntings or how is that allowed to happen?
Okay, well, what we're dealing with is afterlife phenomenon.
And so we're dealing with a form of a continued existence.
And I don't know why God allows it to happen.
I don't know that.
That's a very, that's a huge theological question.
I don't know.
What I do know is that the exorcistic right was to cleanse people from corpse pollution.
It's found in the book of Numbers, chapter 19.
Corpse pollution.
Yes, sir.
Not fallen angels, right?
Corpse pollution.
Which is?
Corpse pollution was a purity law in the book of Numbers, like I said, 19 and verse 11.
The law was essentially anyone who touches a corpse becomes polluted by it.
Okay, well, I mean, I suppose that makes practical sense that if a lot of people died of disease in ancient times, and it isn't dying of disease now, but the rule would be if you touch somebody who's died in that way, you might get whatever remnants of it remain.
So you have to be cleansed.
Exactly right.
Yes, sir.
Now, in addition to that, the scripture goes further.
It's fascinating.
It says that not only are you unclean if you touch the corpse, but then it goes on to describe what the Cantonese in China would call killing air.
It's fascinating.
They describe what's called the open vessel law.
The open vessel law is the law that says that anything that is vulnerable in the house, especially food, any vessel that does not have a lid on it is equally as defiled as someone who touches a corpse.
So it's not just the touching of the deceased, but the idea was, according to biblical antiquity, that when someone dies, there is released out of the body a like it's almost like a cloud of air.
This gets very deep.
Is this okay to talk about?
It is.
I mean, we're running out of time, but I think it's important that we get a handle on what you believe these entities, you know, have at their core.
What's creating them?
Right.
So it came out of the body like a gas, like a smoky apparition.
And in the Bible, they call it an unclean spirit, just like they call corpse defilement uncleanness.
And so that ghost or that gas, that apparition would possess things.
It would actually enter in to open vessels.
And so they first called that the open vessel law.
Later on in the Bible, they called that possession.
Here's how we know that.
Because in the book of Numbers, chapter 19, which is what we're talking about, we're writing the text right now, that is the origin of the exorcistic right using holy water.
Okay, so to cut to the chase here, when you're talking about demons and evil spirits, if we can call them that, you think that they are effectively this escaped spirit, this material that has emanated from the corpse, from the body?
100%.
How come more of this doesn't happen then?
How come more spirits of that kind don't return?
I don't know.
I really don't.
I think that, especially regarding possessing entities, we're dealing with an apocalyptic species of evil.
In academia, they have a word for it.
They're liminal beings.
Liminal is just a fancy word for being in between two worlds.
A lot of these creatures are people who have been killed, people who've died outside of their time, and they're looking for re-embodiment.
And so the ancients, they understood this, but they tried to use different words for it.
But that phenomenon of possession did not originate with the idea of saying, okay, they're fallen angels.
That's never been the case.
And the real question is, why are our exorcistic rights working, right?
If they're accurate and they're actually successful in their exorcisms, then we have to ask ourselves, why is it that these entities are more knowledgeable about their own curse than we are about their own cure?
That's why this research is so profound.
Okay, I think since we have to wrap this up, you are saying that what we would call demons are spirits and they feel that they have unfinished business.
They want to continue.
And the only way that they continue or think that they can continue is to come back and try and possess somebody in order that whatever it was they wanted to do, you know, maybe it was something incredibly evil like that case you were involved in, can continue.
They have to come back and they have to consume a living person in order for their essence to continue.
100%.
That's incredibly scary.
Does that mean we have to deal with every case as it appears?
There is no universal fix for this.
There is no universal fix, and it's far more complicated than we've even covered in this interview.
I mean, it's not just what they believe in in terms of these entities.
okay, we have possession cases where these entities don't even believe in God.
Okay.
You know, it's a huge thing.
I know it's covered in your books.
So by all means, tell me what those books are.
I know that you've got one out and one about to come out.
Is that right?
Yes, sir.
The first one is called A Moment Called Man.
The second one is going to be called The Skin That Crawls.
And I'm not going to give an anthology to possession, but it's going to discuss it.
The skin that crawls.
Yeah.
How did you get that title?
It just came to me.
Truthfully, it's the research.
Once you get into this research and understand the literature, it's impossible not to realize that that's what they're doing.
You know, we're used to men looking like monsters.
We're not used to monsters looking like men.
Dealing with the last question, dealing with all of this stuff like you have all your life, do you not feel at any risk yourself?
No, sir.
And I don't know why.
I don't feel that.
Maybe it's, again, maybe it's my immunity.
Do you think you have immunity?
I don't know, honestly.
I don't.
I go into houses.
I don't have attachments.
They don't follow me home.
More than anything else, I have what I call forerunners, which are apparitions that come to me before cases.
Like I've had, like that murder case.
I had the victim that came to me in the form of an apparition.
She was holding the hand of a little girl.
And I didn't know where to place her until I went to that house.
And then it all made sense.
God, this is really, really chilling stuff.
This is really, really chilling stuff, Nate.
I don't know what to make of it.
Like I say, I'm going to have to make that big cup of coffee, have a big sit down and take a great, big, deep breath after this.
Very, very heavy stuff.
Do you ever get a break from all of this?
Because it's pretty intense.
It is.
Well, I have my things and I have my indulgences and where I can recenter myself.
I like to watch Fraser.
Me too.
Right?
Oh, my God.
Who does it, right, brother?
Oh, my God.
I like to smoke my cigars and I love reading my heroes and my favorite authors.
And that's how I recenter myself.
Well, I think you need to do a lot of that when you're involved in all of this.
Nathaniel Gillis, thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
It's been an honor.
Your thoughts about Nathaniel Gillis?
Welcome.
My name is Howard Hughes.
Theunexplained.tv is where you can find me.
Send me an email through the link on the website and make that happen.
We're right out of 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 Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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