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Feb. 28, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
49:37
Edition 523 - Lionel Fanthorpe

The welcome return of much loved and acclaimed paranormal investigator and story-master Lionel Fanthorpe in Cardiff...

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Hello, it's Howard in London at the Home of the Unexplained.
www.theunexplained.tv.
I have no idea whether people still say triple W, but there we are.
I do, because I'm retro.
A lot of you have been asking, which is why I'm putting this special edition out there without the usual intro and all the bells and whistles, we're going to get straight to the conversation.
A lot of you have asked me if I would put on here for posterity the conversation that I had very recently with the Reverend Lionel Van Thorpe, a man of paranormality, a man of philosophy and thought, and a very popular guest on this show and an old friend of mine.
I haven't spoken with him.
He's had some health issues, but we haven't spoken for about five years.
But as you will hear, he is an absolutely fantastic form at the moment at the age of 86.
I hooked up to his home in Cardiff, capital of Wales, land of my father's, very recently and had a conversation with him.
Let me know what you think, and we will try and speak again very soon too.
Because with Lionel, I think we could have done three or four hours together, not just one commercial hour.
So this is going to be slightly shorter than usual podcast.
But for the sake of posterity and having it there, it will always be here on my website for as long as I've got breath in my bones.
Let's put it on here now and you can hear it as one complete item.
So let's hear the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe.
Let's get to the man now.
He's been a guest on The Unexplained Online many times and used to be on the radio show with me in the days when I was on Talk Sport, our sister station.
The Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe.
Lionel, thank you very much for coming on tonight.
How are you?
I'm absolutely fine.
Well, technically, I have a problem called arrhythmia, which affects the heart and means I've got a rather interesting piece of mechanical gadgetry fitted inside my chest.
Arrhythmia is when it suddenly decides to do 200 beats a minute, and then just when you're getting used to that, it'll drop down to 45.
Mother used to say it's keeping you regular.
Definitely.
Yeah.
The gadget prevents it.
It's called an ICD unit, which is internal cardiac defibrillator.
I've also got type 2 diabetes, but for 86, I'm still feeling 50.
And sounding it too, if I may say so, and less than that, I would say.
Now, Michael, I know that you're in Cardiff, where I spent a very happy year training to be a journalist.
So how have you been managing over this last year of lockdowns and all the rest of it?
Well, very fortunate because of my illness, I took early retirement from school.
I used to be headmaster here over in Ely, which is part of Cardiff.
And I was ill and had to take early retirement.
And so I'm on a pension so that sympathetic as I am to all my friends who've got terrible problems with work not happening, I'm just ticking along slowly and carefully on my pension.
But of course, I mean, that's good news to know that you're safe and everything, but it means that you can't go out and do investigations and you can't do any of those lovely talks that you've been doing for all these years.
Oh, you're very kind.
I love doing it.
I'm looking forward to it getting right again so I can go out.
There's nothing I enjoy more than when an audience does me the honor of asking me to come to speak to them, mainly about unsolved mysteries.
Well, indeed.
And, you know, you could read the phone book, and I think we'd want to listen.
Talk to me.
We've got a very small delay on this thing, but the miracles of digital technology, Lina, I think we'll get through it.
We'll do our best.
Well, we definitely will, because we always do.
And for listeners who've never heard you before, and I can't believe there are any of those, but, you know, in case there are, how would you describe yourself?
Wow.
Now, that is the most difficult question.
I would say that I am an 86-year-old.
It was my birthday on February the 9th, and I clocked up 86.
And I would say that I still have the physical abilities that I had 30 years ago.
I'm mobile.
I'm able to do, you know, control the computer, use my keyboard.
We've got some new books I've been writing very, very busily.
I've got into a genre that I think experts like you would refer to as alternative history.
It was a genre I hadn't come across until my publishers, those wordcatcher publishers, asked me if I'd do one in which Joan of Arc had not died at the stake.
And I did a lot of research on the internet, and one of the fascinating things is a tombstone dated about 40 years after Joan's supposed death at 19, and it commemorates a certain Robert of Armoise and his wife, the Lady Joan.
And from that, I wrote an alternative history in which Robert, who was a great warrior, rescued her from the stake and had taken with him and his rescuers the body of a poor little girl who had just died of malnutrition.
And he had with him an old alchemist friend who had a powder which, if thrown into flame, would create masses of thick black smoke.
So in goes the alchemical powder, huge smoke cloud round the stake, and his armorer blacksmith frees Joan, who then leaps onto Robert's horse with him, and they fasten the body of the poor dead girl to the stake.
So when the smoke cledguoman has been burnt to death.
But it was actually literally a case of mistaken identity.
So, if Joan of Arc gets away, what becomes of Joan of Arc?
And they live happily ever after.
Well, for a good 40 years together, Robert absolutely adores her, and she does everything that a good and loving wife does for the man who's rescued her from a terrible death.
And then one of the others that just come out, although I first wrote it over 30 years ago, it's come out under the title of Parables from the Pond.
And it's this, in fact, I will confess to you, because we're good and trusting friends, that this guy is my alter ego.
He's a giant bullfrog in the world of frogdom, which runs pretty well parallel to the earth in its history and its events.
And he runs a group of warrior bullfrogs who rescue helpless little animals from the predatory enemy who are the rats.
And so he also teaches and tells parables.
So that's the other one we're delighted to have out.
And there's a movie in this, you know, just going back to Joan of Arc, though, I feel so sorry for the girl who perished in her place.
You know, I think that's a piece of history that needs to be rectified.
We need to identify this poor person.
So you're keeping busy in this genre, which is kind of fiction, but more alternative history.
Yeah, at the moment, but we've also, and this is a sharp intake of breath job, back in 1952, when I was 17, I wrote the first of my science fiction stories.
And then on, as you know well, during the 50s and 60s, I managed to put together about 125 science fiction novels.
They were produced by a company called Badger Books.
And WordCatcher publishers have asked me, I took all the rights back when Badgers stopped publishing.
And WordCatcher have asked me if they can reprint them in a modern format and bring them all out again.
Well, when you did that work in the 50s and 60s and you think, well, the last sale of those took place 50 years ago and suddenly a marvelous new publisher comes up and says, I'd like to reissue your 10 odd science fiction stories.
And does that mean you're going to have to do rewrites on all of them?
That's 100 and what is it?
125, did you say?
Yeah, well, he's got the collection and he's just pretty well going through them.
And where we get the opportunity, we're doing not a rewrite, but, shall we say, a little bit of an update or a little bit of improvement, if we can.
And so they're all coming out more or less in their original format.
Boy, I thought you were taking it easy.
You're definitely not taking it easy.
Of those books, then, the science fiction books, which is your favorite?
What's your favorite story?
Well, the one that I like best, and again, I must confess it's a bit of my alter ego, is it's called the Durl Wothor trilogy.
And if you mess around with Durl Wothor, it becomes Other World.
And there are three in this little trilogy, the first of which is the Black Lion, the second is the Golden Tiger, and the third is Zotala the Priest.
Now, I've thought through, fascinated by psychology and have been since my student days, that there are really three aspects inside each of our personalities.
There is the desire to succeed, to get on, to make the most of things, to win.
There is also a desire for pleasure, you know, good old-fashioned hedonism of your favorite chocolate or your favorite, or whatever it may be, the things that give you pleasure, that you enjoy, the play you like seeing, the films you like seeing, the people you enjoy being with.
And the third thing is a spiritual element, which we might call the philosopher and theologian inside each of us.
And when you put those three things together, the desire to succeed and to win, the desire to have pleasure, and the desire to understand theological and philosophical things.
And I brought those three out as three separate characters, that the black lion is the man who is the warrior prince who wants to win.
The golden tiger is the easygoing hedonist.
And Zotalo the priest is the spiritual, philosophical man.
And I like to think, and again, it may be something to do with being a writer for so many years, that you can bring out parts of yourself in your stories so that the part of me which is a priest, the part of me which enjoys a really good cup of cream coffee, and the part of me which enjoys a good fight, they are the Black Lion, Golden Tiger, and Zotala the priest.
And so I've made my internal psychological processes into three separate people to try to make them stand out more clearly.
And those are The three I like best out of everything I've written.
Including the easygoing hedonist.
Okay.
Including the easygoing hedonist.
Yes.
Now, Lionel, we've got to take some commercials.
You know how all of this stuff works.
So we'll do that in just a second here.
But when I come back, are you okay talking about ghosts and spirits and exorcisms?
Would that be okay?
I'd be delighted to.
Whatever you want me to do, I'll do.
Well, no, we've caught up.
We know what you're up to now.
And I'm delighted to hear that you're thriving.
The Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe is with us.
Lionel Fanthorpe is here.
Man, you may have seen on countless TV ghost-type programs.
Lionel, do you miss those programs?
Because people keep emailing me about you on 40 and TV in particular, which people, you know, I loved 40 and TV.
Let me lay my cards on the table immediately.
And also, you know, the most haunted genre of programmes.
Do you miss doing all of that stuff?
Yes, I do.
I'd be there again later tonight or tomorrow morning if anybody phoned me up and said, Lionel, can you make a program for us about notorious hauntings or whatever?
Yeah, I certainly miss it and I did enjoy it.
And do you think that those programs would need to change, though, for now?
Because I've noticed, as you might have noticed too, there seem to be, it seems to have gone two ways now.
In America, there are still great big, whoever it might be, goes to investigate a haunted hospital or, you know, some asylum that was abandoned in 1955.
So those big programs are still going on.
But here in the UK, we seem to have gone in a different direction where groups of people seem to be doing it themselves.
I don't know whether you were aware of the Mary King's Close streaming thing that happened just before Christmas where a bunch of ghost investigators in Scotland actually did a professional TV production that they streamed online from Edinburgh's haunted Mary King's Close.
So it seems to me there's a lot of DIY going on these days.
Yes, I think that there is.
And I think that as long as my own view, that as long as serious, honest investigations being objective, being, shall we say, investigative and scientific, I think that no matter how it's organized, as long as it has that underlying motive and that underlying intent, then that's all to the good.
And I was thinking when you were talking then of ghosts, of the less usual type of haunting and that famous car which had the 666 number plate.
And a ghost which is a person is a very different thing from a ghost which is a car or a building.
And I can remember I was called in to exorcise that 666.
And I actually drove it.
And me being the guy I am, you know, the judo fighter as well as the, shall we say, mental explorer, I borrowed the car and I deliberately drove it down to Beachy Head.
And I was driving it within a few feet of the cliff edge with the, you know, several hundred feet drop.
So this was a famous haunted car, the registration number of which was triple six, which we know is the mark of the beast, as they say.
Yes, that's.
You decided to take it for a joyride.
Yep, I did.
Well, its owner asked me if I would, and I said, yes, sure.
To Beachy Head.
And I took it to Beachy Head.
I thought, if this is going to be dangerous, let's have it somewhere really dangerous.
Let's show if there is some strange entity in this thing.
Let's show him that I am not afraid of him or it.
And had a perfectly uneventful drive and more or less said, okay, consider yourself exorcised.
Leave the car alone.
But lots of other people who've tried it have felt, especially people who I would suggest are much more sensitive than I am.
I hope I'm defining myself honestly and modestly as an investigator, but I'm also not a nervous investigator.
I'm the sort of guy.
You're really not.
If there's something strange and spooky, I want to get in there and challenge it.
And it's the same with my judo.
But look, in the case of this car, this haunted car that you took to Beachy Head, which is a risky thing to do because, well, for obvious reasons that we don't have to go into, I wouldn't be taking a car that had a mind of its own to a place where something bad might happen to me.
But you say that you basically showed whatever it was that was possessing this car, if indeed there was such a phenomenon at work.
You showed it who was boss.
You weren't afraid of it.
And you didn't have a problem, but other people still did.
Yes, they did.
They did.
And we had a wonderful friend years ago who was extremely sensitive, very, very psychically sensitive.
And we took her to examine the car in the course of the exorcism that I was performing.
And before I did the exorcism, she said there is some dark power in this thing.
And she was actually shivering and she didn't want to approach it too closely.
So that I think maybe we could come up with a sort of general point that if you take these things head on, if you are convinced that the power of a good God is the greatest power in the universe,
and that strange, evil things that misbehave or that are Psychically dangerous.
If you go at them, then like a lot of bullies, whether they are psychic or physical, when confronted, they will back down.
When they think they've got an advantage over somebody, it is then they're at their most dangerous.
So you have to be your own Vincent Price.
You have to see them off.
You do.
Yep, you do.
And I'm thinking of some other cases where I've been called in to help and have gone in in that same way.
Well, just a quick one here.
When we talk about objects and vehicles and maybe buildings that appear to have a mind of their own, I've been fascinated by those things all my life because I've often believed, for example, cars that I've owned have had a bit of a personality.
I had an old VW Beetle that did.
But if you took that a little further, and maybe the spirit, if such a thing exists, of somebody who previously owned that car, or maybe something to do with the manufacture of that car, maybe somebody who was helping to produce the car somehow was able to have an impact on it.
Maybe there was an accident on the production line.
Who knows?
But you actually believe that objects, and we've seen many stories, in fact, your TV programs covered some of them, that objects can actually take on a life of their own.
Yes, there was some very, very interesting research recently, just in the last month or so, of a number of scientists who were working out whether or not inanimate objects could acquire what, for want of a better term, they called a soul or a spirit or a mind or a personality.
And these were quite serious and reputable scientists who'd come to the conclusion that just as you were saying, you have a particular car that you feel is very friendly and helpful and nice.
And even if he's running out of petrol, he'll do his best to get you to the next garage.
And you feel he's really trying, that there's a sort of personality in it.
And I could remember my old dad, who loved driving, was very much into the idea that a car had a certain kind of personality would have been a stronger word than he would have used,
but it had a sort of essence, something that transcended the metal and chrome and the glass and the leather, and that it was almost a personality.
And we can think of people who have worked, I'm thinking particularly of miners who have to rely on the machinery that they use and would actually go almost as far as to say, well, that's my favorite drill or that's my favorite, you know, trailer.
That you could almost put a personality into an inanimate object.
But the fascinating thing is, is part of that, the belief that people have, if people start to believe, like I believed that my old VW Beetle, I called her Taffy.
She used to get me out of all kinds of scrapes when I was a new young driver.
But is part of the process you believing, if you start to believe this power of belief, then maybe has a certain role to play itself?
Yes, I'm quite certain that it is what we think about an object, which can do things to the object.
I'm thinking, the car I've got now is an old Mercedes.
She's 2006, so she's 14 or 15 years old.
And I call her baby, and she's only a little 150, but she almost opens the door for me when she knows I'm coming.
It's almost as if she's saying, hey, Dad, are we going for a run?
Oh, goody, goody, goody.
It's almost as if you had a pet animal rather than a pet car.
But I really love that little car.
And I get the feeling that she's trying to return my affection.
Now, taking your point, which I felt was quite brilliantly put, is that the mind of the owner of the piece of mechanical, whatever it may be, somehow creates the personality of the machine.
If it's a machine that you need and you use every day, think even of the computer that we're talking to each other now over Skype.
The computer that you use and you're fond of and very familiar with, it's almost as if that had a personality which was coming back and saying, hey, boss, you just pressed the wrong key.
Can I put myself right, please?
So, you know, there are sometimes we can think ourselves into a situation.
And I know I've been in that situation where you think this is going to work and it does.
Let's take that a little further, though, Lionel, because I think we've opened an interesting scene here.
Do you think that the mindset of a person can determine whether that person opens, we might call them portals to paranormality?
I would say I'm, like you, very inclined to view that situation favorably and as a real probability that if I think I'd begin by saying that even with all the medical science that we have and with all the advances in experimental psychology,
we still do not understand how enormously powerful the mind can be.
And from your experience, your investigations, from my investigations and experience, we come across case after case where when the mind stands up to a problem, whether that's a problem of health or a problem of being desperately overworked and thinking, I've got to give up and leave this.
I can't do it.
Will you stand up and say instead, I'm going to cure this illness.
I am not going to be flattened by it.
I will not care.
Well, that's what we call mind over matter.
But I've known cases, and I'm sure you have much more than I have, where you might put two people in the same situation, and one of them will encounter what you and I might call a ghost, and the other one won't see anything.
I'm wondering if this is what we're talking about here.
I think it comes very close to that general line of discussion that we're on, that you can go to an allegedly haunted house and take two or three investigators, and one of them will see and hear things, and others won't know.
I've worked over many years with people I would refer to as psychically highly sensitive, and I've been with them into situations where ghosts or psychic phenomena have been reported, and my psychic friend or colleague will say to me, there's something in the far corner line or just under the windowsill.
I can't describe it, but it's very potent and it doesn't want us in this room.
And I experience nothing.
But a friend whom I trust has a gift, a talent that exceeds my perception, has actually seen something.
Now, I would tend to believe, depending upon how well I know the investigator, friend who's come with me, that he or she really has seen or experienced something that I have not.
I don't think he or she is imagining it or making it up.
If we just use as an allegory the idea of, well, let's take something that we're all familiar with in the world of mathematics and go back to being a school student and taking a maths exam, a GCSE or an A-level exam in maths.
There are among your friends and acquaintances people who can rip through mathematical problems in a way that you, well, it fills you with admiration and it also fills you with amazement that they can take this strange problem and solve it in a matter of minutes, whereas half an hour later, you or I might still be struggling with it.
Now, if we took that as an allegory, as a parallel, and looked into psychic phenomena, I prefer to think that when in a situation which where a building is allegedly haunted,
and I have got a psychic friend with me, and we're examining it together, then he or she will see something that I can't see or feel in the same way that a good mathematician will race through a number of problems while I'm still struggling with the first one or two.
And I think psychic ability can be paralleled with mathematical ability.
And you either have it or you don't.
I think it's something we're born with.
How does that?
You don't necessarily have to go and, and I'm sorry that digital delay is getting in here, but we're coping with it, Lionel, because, you know, we're us.
On the occasion, the one occasion in my life, where I saw something that was definitely anomalous, and I believe was a ghost, and I won't go into the story again because I've told it on the air before, but it was at a radio station based in a tower, and I saw, in the middle of the night when I was virtually on my own in this place, a man who was dressed in a workman's coat and a cap and a pair of shiny boots.
And he looked at me, and I didn't, I was about to speak, but I had no time to speak.
He looked at me, and I could describe him now, and disappeared before my eyes.
Now, I was not, my mind was not attuned to, oh, I'm going to see, I wasn't thinking ghosts.
I was thinking, I'm doing a radio show here.
I've just been up to the loo, and I've got to get back on air quickly.
And I had my hand on the studio door, and I saw this thing, but my mind was not attuned to it.
I wasn't expecting it.
It was just like something that, a picture that projected itself.
So I suppose the question is, was that a ghost or a spirit or was that some kind of artifact of my mind?
Yeah, that, of course, is the major question.
That's the $64,000 question.
That when you've had an experience like that, you say to yourself afterwards, especially if it's you or me who investigate in a serious way and are so keen to be accurate And to get to the real truth.
Now, if I could use an example like yours on this same question, when I was a boy living at home with my parents and my grandmother, who was separated from granddad and had come to live with us,
that when you went to the street gate of our house, and we had a small front garden, if you're sitting indoors, you would hear that old-fashioned iron gate go clang, clang as a potential visitor opens it.
And if you were sitting in the dining room, looking through the window, again out into that front garden, you would see somebody passing the window, especially if you had actually got food in front of you and you'd dive down for a spoonful of soup or you'd slice through some salad and you just get a kind of half a view of whoever is passing the window.
There was then another gate that separated the back garden from the front garden and sitting in the dining room looking out of the window, this half-shadowy figure has just passed and you hear the click of this little wooden gate that connects with the back garden and you would then expect there to be a knock on the back door as this visitor that you thought you'd see comes round,
but there wasn't a knock.
And there was, of course, if it was something normal like the postman or somebody delivering the groceries or whatever.
But where it was one of these half-seen semi-shadow figures passing the dining room window, it clicked on the gate, but it never knocked on the back door.
And the view of it that we'd had, my father, my mother, myself, would be almost recognizable, but not totally so.
And the thing that we came to expect, and this again raises the question of how much of this is in my mind and how much is a real phenomenon, we came to expect that the figure we thought we had seen and thought we had recognized as a friend or a neighbor or a colleague who called at the house would have
passed away.
It was as if we were getting a farewell visit from the ghost of somebody, not a close friend or family member, but a neighbor with whom we'd been friendly or a visiting delivery man whom we'd known for several years who was bringing the groceries or who was bringing some other stock that we'd ordered, perhaps.
It was a familiar postman because this was the small town of Deerham in Norfolk where I lived and grew up.
And that was where this happened.
And again, we had more or less persuaded ourselves after seeing these figures over a number of years that it was somebody coming to say goodbye, somebody who'd been there during their lives.
And we found that it happened on a remarkable number of occasions.
And now, we're back to the big question that you and I were dealing with and balancing and weighing up.
Did we convince ourselves that this was a goodbye visit from the spirit of a friend or neighbor or regular visitor, tradesman?
Or was it really such a visit?
Otherwise, I'm going to be in big trouble.
Let's leave that question with our listener.
Maybe you've got a story like that in your family, that there's a sort of portent.
You know, I knew somebody once whose eye, left eye, used to Twitter beat.
And if it was the left eye, then somebody would die invariably.
And I saw this thing demonstrated.
And if the right eye was beating, something joyous, maybe a birth would happen.
You know, maybe there just are.
And that's why we do this show.
Stranger things in heaven and earth than we'll ever be aware.
You obviously, for a good portion of your life, you've been a man of the cloth.
And as we indicated earlier, you were involved in a number of exorcisms.
There is one story that I would like you to tell, which we've never told on a podcast or on the radio.
And you tell me if you want to go into this one.
I heard you on an interview that I checked out today telling this story about a cinema usher in Bristol who was apparently possessed, seemingly, by something very, very bad.
I don't know.
Do you mind telling that story?
No, very glad to.
What came about was when I was doing a number of my TV and radio shows, so that a number of friends who listened into me and knew that I was into exorcism or helping people who were apparently going through great difficulties with normal, abnormal forces.
This man, because he'd heard of me and as an exorcist, got in touch with me.
And he had been extremely happy as he worked in this big cinema in Bristol and very happy in his job, loved his job.
And then, week by week, word by word, work by Work day by day, evil things began to appear in one part of the cinema where he, as one of the working team who were seeing people in and looking after them and keeping them safe, he felt he couldn't go on.
And the contact came to me, he explained to his manager that he loved his job, he didn't want to leave the cinema, but he could not stand these strange, dark, evil forces which were plaguing him.
What was happening to him?
And it was as if they were, when he appeared in this particular passage, passageway between seats, there were things, ghosts, perhaps of the kind that Dickens wrote, which came to see the Christmas ghosts that would come and see the poor miser.
And they looked humanoid, but very ugly, very dangerous, very threatening.
And it was the cinema manager who persuaded him to come to see me.
And in other words, his boss liked his work so much that he wanted him to escape from, to get away from that evil paranormal force that was driving him away from the job that he'd loved and that he'd done so well.
And I went along to the cinema with all the blessing from their cinema manager and I went with him down this strange part.
And of course, I said, I saw nothing, I heard nothing, nothing got in my way.
And I walked up and down this passageway with him five or six times.
And I performed with Bible reading.
And, you know, there are some well tried and practiced formulas for traditional exorcisms.
And that you sprinkle a little holy water and you do a scriptural reading in which the power of God destroys the power of evil.
These are the most frequently used biblical passages that goes with the prayers of exorcism and the sprinkling of holy water.
And I did it and delighted to say that whatever it was that had been frightening him out of the job that he'd loved vanished.
So do you think that you'd seen something off, or do you think you'd relieved him of some tension in his own mind?
Which do you think it is?
I think that he was so convinced and he seemed to me to be one of those gifted people who had the ability to see and hear far more of the paranormal than a sort of rough, tough guy like me can.
I think there really was something which he was aware of.
You go back to my analogy about using mathematical ability to solve difficult mathematical problems.
I felt that if we were both mathematicians, I would scrape my way through GCSE, whereas he would run through A-level and then a university course with great ease.
That was the difference between our ability to observe and experience the paranormal.
Right, so did he live happily ever after after that?
Yes, to the very best of my knowledge.
A long time ago, but he might still be there.
If the cinema is still there, I think he loved that work, and that was how we did it.
But was it those prayers of exorcism that got rid of whatever evil force might have been in that cinema?
Or was it that having watched carefully as an exorcist who cared about him and was throwing the force that he had into getting rid of these negative psychic forces, did the man who feared the evil psychic forces, did he feel that I had done it?
Was there anything there for me to do?
Or was it just that he had felt that somebody had come and rescued him?
He believed very strongly that there was a series of presences.
And then if you call in an exorcist and you believe in the power of exorcism as strongly as you believe in the evil force, then he may simply have felt, I've been rescued, I'm safe, it's gone.
I truly believe that.
But the outcome was a good one, and that's the most important thing.
But the outcome was helpful.
I was able to help somebody, you know, if you and I have very similar views on life, if you can stretch out a helping hand and do some good, then that is what life's all about.
Do it.
Now, we've only got minutes.
This is, I mean, this hour has just gone like that.
A listener called Roger emailed me before the show, and he knew that you were coming on.
And he asked me, he told Me a story about a cat, okay, a cat from spirit.
In other words, a cat that was no longer on this plane of existence, brushing up against the legs of, I think it was his mother in the story.
I haven't got the email here, but he'd experienced it.
Do you believe that just as we can experience, some people think, the ghosts and presences of people who've lived, that we can also experience animals?
I'm sorry, this is going to have to be a short answer.
Yep, I'll be short.
Yet, I believe they can.
I think that if an animal is very dearly and deeply loved, that pet, the spirit of that pet, after it has passed away in the physical sense, that the animal can come back.
And I have come across a great many people over the 40 or 50 years in which I've investigated, come across cases of spiritual animals which some owners and loving owners are certain that they've seen it again,
that it's come back, almost waiting for it to join them in the new world when the loved animal, dog or cat, had passed away before the owner.
So animals have souls.
I believe they do.
And I believe that the soul is strengthened, developed, and freed by the love that we give to the animals who've meant as much to us as people.
And we can soon find a loving pet owner to whom the much-loved cat or dog is loved by a person as much as by a person.
And they seem to convey a form of immortality to it, as we do as human souls.
So we're actually part of that process.
How fascinating.
Well, I would believe that they are.
And I think that it can also be among people as well as among animals that when we give love, unselfish love, to other human beings, we strengthen them as well as they, who love us, strengthen the immortal part of us.
Well, that's a good point to park it, Lionel.
I promise not to trouble you too much, but I'd love to speak with you again because there are at least 10 topics that I didn't have time to get to tonight.
And by the sounds of it, you're going to be a busy man with these 125 books to rework and get published again.
And anything I can do at all, anytime you want me, you just let me know.
And I love talking to a good friend, especially when we're talking together about the paranormal and unsolved mysteries.
Of which there are many more to discuss.
Lionel Fanthorpe, thank you so much.
The Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe.
Talking to us tonight from Cardiff.
The wonderful Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe in Cardiff, the capital of Wales.
Hope you enjoyed that.
Feedback, always welcome.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
You can follow the link and you can leave it for me there.
And if your email requires a response, then it will get one.
But please know that I see each and every email as it comes in and I read them all, which is more than you can say for a lot of the mainstream media.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been a special edition of The Unexplained.
Until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you.
Take care.
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