All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 4, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:05:30
Edition 571 - Ciaran O'Keefe
| 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 Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Hey, thank you very much for all of your emails.
Please know that if your email requires a response, then it will get one.
But even so, I will get to see each and every email as and when it comes in.
And if your email, like I say, requires a response, by hell or high water, I will make sure that it does.
I think I'm sounding a little chipper today because in amongst the grey, horrible cloud is just a little beam of sunshine.
even though it's September, there is a little bit of hope up there, I think.
You know, I just need a little bit of, I don't want to be in 100 degrees Fahrenheit, whatever that is, 40 degrees Celsius.
I just want a little bit of sunshine before we have to finally kiss goodbye to whatever little tatters of, you know, summer is left.
That's all I say.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work on the website.
Also, thank you to Haley for booking the guests.
Just a couple of people to mention before we get to the guest this time, Kieran O'Keefe, parapsychological investigator, famous for his work on such things as the Battersea Poltergeist case.
We'll talk a little bit about that.
We've talked about that before, but also a great new book that he's got coming out.
So, Kieran O'Keefe, the guest on this edition of the show.
But first, let's get to those listener emails.
Niall in Belfast says, listener for many, many years.
Thank you, Niall.
Having heard your recent podcast where you discussed your experience with the man who had hooves instead of feet, during my travels in India, I saw a man on the streets of Delhi, and he was like that.
Is it possible this could be some kind of genetic mutation?
I'm not sure.
You're not the only person to suggest that.
But it appears that this is much more common than I thought.
So we'll keep investigating.
Carolyn says, I loved your talk with Liz Cormel.
Wasn't she great?
Interesting stories.
Lovely person.
Absolutely, Carolyn.
I agree.
John says, I'm a merchant seaman at the moment writing from the Seaman's Mission in Keeling, Taiwan, and tells me the story of wherever in the world that he goes.
John's originally from Scotland.
He downloads these shows, and they're a bit of a beacon for him, which is a really nice thought.
I'm always amazed at the people that I'm reaching and where I'm reaching them, just like John, you know, who's on the ships, downloads the shows, and then takes them on the voyage.
Lee in Borehamwood, nice to hear from you, Lee.
Ian in Lancashire.
Kim and Paco.
Paco's at Chihuahua, near Austin, Texas.
Nice to hear from you, Kim and Paco.
Ed, who's also in Texas.
Ed, I can't reach the person that you suggested as a guest here.
Do you have any contact details for them, Ed?
You know who they are.
I know who they are.
If you do, let me know.
Claire and Jamie.
Titto, I'm still trying to contact the person that you suggested, but I'm going to keep on trying.
And finally, Michael in Sweden.
Thank you very much.
And thank you if you've been in touch.
If you've made a donation to the podcast to allow it all to continue, thank you very much indeed.
And if you haven't, please consider doing that.
Remember that, you know, a donation of £2 isn't even the cost of a cup of coffee these days.
And a cup of coffee, as I've said, I think before in the past on this show, cup of coffee may be great.
It may be indifferent, but it will definitely last you no more than about 10 or 15 minutes max.
And that's it.
The nice thing about these shows is the podcasts you can listen to and some people do over and over again.
So I'll leave that with you.
And if you have made a donation recently, you know who you are.
Thank you very, very much indeed.
Always looking for guest suggestions, by the way.
If you want to email me, email me?
Email me with one of those.
Then don't forget to put in the subject area guest suggestion, and then I will.
I'll leap on it like one of those pumas that people have been seeing in various parts of the UK, including Scotland recently.
We've been doing that on the radio show.
Got to talk about that on the podcast.
Okay, let's get across London now to Kieran O'Keefe, a man who has quite a background in parapsychological investigation and a very, very interesting guy, as we have discovered before when we've spoken with him.
Kieran O'Keefe, thank you very much for coming back on the show.
Lovely to hear from you, Howard.
Lovely to speak to you again.
Now, Kieran, for people who haven't heard you before, and you've been on my radio show, and I think you've been on my podcast as well for once, your background is somewhat unusual.
And actually, I think it probably nurtures the work that you do.
But you've done orthodox psychology, and you've done criminology.
How does all of that equip you for the work that you're doing in parapsychology?
I think that's a very good question.
Like you said, I've got a number of different hats.
So a forensic psychologist, or I would call myself more of an investigative psychologist, which is psychological assistance for criminal investigations, and also a little bit of music psychology thrown in there as well.
But yes, I did an undergraduate degree in mainstream psychology and then through various other routes became a parapsychologist.
And I guess all of that training was effectively preparing me in terms of the critical thinking side of parapsychology, which it so significantly needs, to be able to look at phenomena that's being reported by individuals and to look at it with a critical mind.
And I wouldn't say a dismissive or cynical mind, but certainly to look at the evidence in a very critical way.
And I guess that's the best training that you can have in terms of becoming a parapsychologist.
And what sorts of things do you apply that training to?
I mean, for example, one of the people that I'm looking at interviewing quite soon believes and says and has evidence that he talks about, that he worked for the secret space program and was assigned to Mars for a while.
I mean, do you deal with that sort of thing?
Well, that would come into the realm of what we call special claimants.
So as a parapsychologist, because of the phenomena that we study, which is all manner of paranormal abilities from telepathy to precognition, PK, and talking to the dead, we get contacted by individuals that claim to have Those abilities.
Now, I wouldn't be involved with somebody that claimed that they were part of some secret space program.
However, in a similar way, I have actually interacted with and been contacted by individuals that were part of the CIA Stargate program, which was a remote viewing program.
And so, as a similar sort of individual there, now, if an individual approaches me and said, look, I was involved in this program.
I'd love to chat to you about the evidence, about the outcome of that program, I'd be more than happy to sit down with them and chat with them.
I find the whole area just absolutely fascinating.
In terms of then, what is the next step?
Well, if that individual is looking for some sort of, I guess, support from me or giving, you know, a credibility tick in some way, it would be having to assess their ability in my lab.
So I can take what they're saying, I can look at some of the reports that were done, for example, in the program they were part of, but I would apply my critical thinking skills in terms of setting up an experiment in my lab to actually test their ability with, unfortunately, a slight caveat to that, which is you're only testing one individual at a predetermined time.
And even if you do it several times, there's always going to be the caveat, well, the circumstances might not have been the most ideal for that person to be able to perform their ability.
But certainly I'd approach it in a way where I try and assess their ability in the lab, but in a very scientific way.
Right.
And that is a difficult thing to do, isn't it?
Because presumably you have to devise testing that is tailor-made to each and every case and individual.
Yeah, it is.
It's very, very difficult.
In fact, for my PhD, I focused on special claimers generally, but the main bulk of my PhD was focused on mediums, individuals claiming to be able to talk to the dead.
And I kid you not when I say there was about six months of negotiation with the individuals.
I went to the Spiritualist Nationalist Union and various other organizations and asked them to put me in contact with the best of the best, which supposedly they did.
And it was about six months of negotiation where I was saying, this is the lab that I would like to set up.
This is the experiment I would like to be set up so that if you perform well, then we know that it's, you know, it's a potential mediumship going on.
But at the same time, I need to have that experiment so that you are comfortable in that environment.
It's stupid for me to set up an experiment that is so clinically cold that it means you cannot perform to the best of your ability.
Because afterwards, if you don't perform, you can always say, yeah, but it's not a natural environment.
So I spent six months sorting out the lighting, sorting out the most comfortable chair for each individual, how they wanted the room arranged, even down to the type of biscuits that they would like to eat with their cup of tea during the break.
You know, I had to really negotiate to such detail to make sure that at the end, if it came down to it, and that they would only be showing that they were able to talk to the dead in that environment.
So there would be no criticism, no kind of comeback on me afterwards because of setting up the experiment.
And that took six months.
And you're absolutely right.
It's a logistical nightmare to set up these experiments because every individual has their own tastes, their own way of doing things.
And did in those experiments, in that most, I'll use the word nebulous, maybe it isn't the right word, but in that most nebulous of fields, were you able to get something that looked like a positive result from anybody?
In other words, did anybody exhibit a talent or ability that definitely went beyond the range of, you know, explainable?
Within those particular series of studies, no.
And I say unfortunately, no, because I'm fascinated by the possibility.
You know, I had the client and the medium separated so that there was no interaction at all, but the mediums were still happy to provide the readings.
We had the clients look at the readings effectively blind.
We use the expression blind in psychology experiments so that they weren't aware, you know, of which medium was giving them a reading.
Lots and lots of different controls in place, but unfortunately not.
No, there was no single medium that was able to perform to the extent where I would have thought that they are communicating with the dead.
But the interesting kind of conclusion to that research, and you might kind of think, well, why did I even bother in the end?
But the interesting conclusion I came to is as I was developing the experiments, I suddenly thought, you know what?
Even though I'm a parapsychologist and even though I'm setting up these experiments so that they're in a really controlled way and I'm helping the mediums by saying, if you perform well and we get positive results, the only possible explanation is mediumship, that you're communicating with the dead.
If I do that, actually what I came to realize was there's no way I could actually say that.
In the paranormal world, there are so many possible explanations.
All I could actually say is if a medium was able to get information about a client who's in a completely separate part of the building and there's positive results and they've shown they can do it in a controlled way, then actually all they're showing is that there's some sort of paranormal communication.
It's not showing that they're talking to the dead because the information they got may have come from the client's mind, which could be telepathy.
They may have tapped into some akashic records or something similar, which again is, you know, ethereal or paranormal communication, but it's not necessarily talking to the dead.
Or it could be that they're talking to the dead.
You know, so you couldn't definitively say if they were successful, that it would be talking to the dead.
But isn't that?
But paranormal communication, that's amazing, if that was successful, but it wasn't Successful in the series of tests that I ran.
There was an era in this country, and that era was probably about 60, 70 or more years ago, of the physical medium.
It doesn't happen so much now, but it does still happen, where the medium purports to be able to conjure up out of thin air.
I say conjure up, that sounds like trickery.
I don't mean that, but deliver the appearance of somebody who's passed.
And there are people, I've spoken to one of them recently who was on a Netflix documentary series.
She works in Holland.
There are people who do this.
Have you ever investigated that so-called physical mediumship?
I have, yes.
And I was quite fortunate in that my PhD supervisor was Professor Richard Wiseman, who a lot of special claimants, mediums as well, kind of steer away from because he is very much described as a cynic.
But actually, even though Richard and I have slightly different perspectives, he gave me an amazing training for the three, four years that I was working with him because he's part of the inner magic circle.
And so when you're dealing with physical mediums who often will perform and produce physical phenomena in low light conditions or even darkness, you do need to be aware of possible trickery that's going on.
And so I was quite fortunate to have that training.
I have been involved in looking at some of these evidence that was put forward.
The Skull Report, for example, is a classic one that I helped analyze and was involved in speaking to some of the mediums involved in that and some amazing physical phenomena that was produced in that environment.
I'm not convinced.
I'm really not convinced.
And the issue is that it is rare.
You know, if I could only turn back the clock and go back to 60, 70 years ago, I would be attending all of these physical sciences on a regular basis.
But unfortunately, they're so rare that the two that I have attended have been in an observer capacity.
So therefore, I've had no control over the environment at all.
I've merely had to sit there as an observer, which I found absolutely fascinating, by the way.
Don't get me wrong, to be in a situation where you see floating lights, you know, where people report being touched around the seance table, where a lit object that was on the seance table, a ball started to float apparently by itself.
So I saw some phenomena that was fantastic, but it was in an uncontrolled environment.
I didn't have control of it.
And I'm aware of the possible alternative explanations.
Which could have included having a Confederate make those things happen for you.
Exactly.
It could have included that.
What I see more frequently are mediums that claim to be able to produce physical manifestation of spirit either on camera, so where they're producing wisps or orbs or kind of what they call a version of ectoplasm, which is not the ectoplasm that we associate with 60, 70 years ago or the Victorian spiritualist mediums like Helen Duncan, for example.
It's not that form of ectoplasm, but it's almost as though it's the wispy sort of ambiguous photographs that you get and presented to you as if they are ghost photographs.
I've encountered a lot of mediums that do that.
The issue is that you're having to take hundreds and hundreds of photographs before they're satisfied that you've captured something.
And again, it's an uncontrolled environment.
Forgive me for being a little bit cynical now, stepping away from my slightly more positive outlook, but forgive me if a medium sits down on a dusty chair in their front room and then says, you need to snap away and take photographs because I'm going to call for the spirits to come in orb form, I get very suspicious knowing that it's a dusty chair.
And of course, one of the possible explanations for orbs in photos is, of course, dust.
So it's only a couple of minutes before you get various orbs littering the sky in front of them.
Do you think we'll ever get to a situation then where you will find somebody, I suppose it's impossible to predict who can do this in a scientific and repeatable way?
I think the difficulty has always been with scientific analysis, and we'll move away from the medium ship in just a second for my listeners' benefit here.
You know, the difficulty has always been that level of scientific scrutiny.
Most mediums tend to fail that test when they are analyzed and scrutinized in that way, don't they?
They do, yes.
But I mean, there is a school of thought within parapsychology that, you know, some of us will continue to do the experimental research and effectively the conclusion will only be we've got some form of paranormal communication.
But if that were to happen, that would be amazing.
It wouldn't prove being able to talk to the dead at all, but it might show some sort of paranormal communication.
And I think with the increasing involvement of mediums in kind of ever more scientific approaches to investigating their ability, I think it will happen.
I think we're on a right path to be able to have mediums that will get more involved in the scientific aspect.
As to whether we'll find a medium that is actually able to communicate paranormally under those conditions, but even generally, I think the jury's still out.
You know, it's the old William James quote, isn't it?
You only need to find one white crow to disprove that all crows are black.
So it's only one medium.
And people say to me, you know, you've been involved in this now for 30 plus years and have interacted with so many mediums.
And I say, well, yeah, I find it fascinating.
And I will still endeavor to find that one white crow, that medium who is able to communicate paranormally, you know, or talk to the dead.
There's the other school of thought in parapsychology, which is now a lot more leaning more towards kind of the ethnographic or kind of anthropological approach, which is kind of saying, okay, let's forget, not even consider ourselves in a situation Of proving or disproving what they do, but let's just look at the impact, positive or negative, that it has on people who interact with mediums.
And that is not about scientific testing of whether or not they are accurate.
It's about research, academic research, but it's about kind of understanding the experience of getting a reading from a medium.
And I think that's kind of a healthy direction that parapsychology has taken within the last five or ten years.
In other words, there are two sides to the equation.
There is the recipient and the medium, literally, and you have to look at both.
Yes, absolutely.
You do have to look at both.
And also, you know, you have to look at both because it is a dynamic.
It is a dyadic interaction.
I think the success of a reading also relies on the belief and the motivation of the client.
It's not just about the medium.
And lots of mediums will tell you that.
And it's probably one of the reasons why, well, a lot of mediums say it's one of the reasons why I don't get readings.
It's because they claim that I'm a very logical, rational person who looks at the skeptical side of what's happening.
And because of that, that I'm the wrong person to receive messages.
I'm not open-minded enough.
And I can kind of see that.
You know, there's a lot of research looking at experimenter effect in parapsychology that the experimenter has to have a belief in the experiment being able to work because that can actually affect the results if they don't.
So that's rather like the medical phenomenon that whenever I go to the doctor, my blood pressure rises.
And my blood pressure is always higher in the doctor's surgery than it is when I try and take it at home.
Exactly.
Very similar.
But you've got a more open mind than most.
And that's why I like you doing this.
This is a good approach that you've got because you're not saying as many of the great parapsychological investigators through history, they've given a big portion of their lives to doing this.
Maybe they've had other gigs on the side.
They've been authors or celebrated musicians or whatever they've been.
And they've also done some of this.
And they've spent years on it.
And in the end, they've got very disillusioned.
It sounds to me like after decades of doing this, you are nowhere near that.
Oh, no.
I haven't reached the age of disillusionment yet at all.
And I think I will when I'm sitting in a retirement home, maybe in the final years.
But even then, I won't be disillusioned at all because I'll be a few years away from possibly finding out the truth, to be honest.
No, not at all.
I'm, you know, I was drawn to all of this as a teenage boy watching the movie Ghostbusters.
And I am just overjoyed that I'm in a career that effectively is being a Ghostbuster.
Okay, I don't have a Proton pack.
You know, I don't drive around in a fancy converted funeral car, but I am a Ghostbuster.
I investigate this stuff and I'm fascinated by it.
It would be pretty weird if I was carving out a career for myself, investigating this stuff in the lab, but also going ghost hunting at the weekend.
And there wasn't some part of me that thought, you know, I'd love to pick up the phone or love to be in that haunted house and go, we've got one.
You know, that would be the ultimate for me.
I'd love it.
Yeah, me too.
Me too.
You mentioned at the beginning of this, and I don't want to let it go.
If we can just skirt over this or around this, that would be great.
You mentioned remote viewing and you'd had contacts from people who've been involved in the Stargate project or said they'd been.
Were you able to do any experiments in remote viewing?
Were you able to try and get to the bottom of what that might or might not be?
Because if you think that mediumship is something that's hard to pin down, then remote viewing is equally so, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
It's very, very difficult.
Again, the way that some of these early studies were set up, you know, there are criticisms of how they were done in the Stargate program, but, you know, some of the remote viewing experiments done by Ed May and various physicists involved in parapsychology have some really good ways of doing things where you've got a remote viewer in a location.
They have no interaction or do not know who the other person is, but that person is told to literally drive anywhere.
And they might be given a remit, you know, make sure it's no less than 30 minutes away.
And they stop at a location and they just stand at that location looking, maybe taking photograph to prove where they are, drawing the image, that sort of thing.
And it's the task of the remote viewer to draw and to maybe meditate, kind of speak out loud about what they're seeing at that particular point.
And you can see the military application of it.
You know, originally the Stargate program was designed to look at remote viewing stars, those that claimed they had this amazing ability, because they wanted to kind of use that ability to be able to search for missing people or search for hostages or kind of find out if there were any missile bases, you know, in countries where they weren't able to access that sort of thing.
So as an applied paranormal ability, I think it's absolutely fascinating.
And Joe McMonagall, for example, who's one of the remote viewers who was on the Stargate program, who I met, and we did some couple of experiments at the Institute of Parapsychology in Durham, in North Carolina.
You know, he had some great successes in his program.
When I witnessed him doing his remote viewing, I didn't see those successes.
So I didn't see what I thought was, you know, an accurate representation of what the other person was looking at.
Not to take anything away from what Joe had done in that program and some of the others that I spoke to as well.
You know, there are some amazing kind of matching up between their imagery that they drew and then the person and what that person was looking at.
You look at the photograph versus their sketches and there's some amazing, amazing matching going on there.
But certainly my experience testing them, I didn't see that.
And the problem is, just as we leave this small topic aside, the problem is that sometimes there is a lack, In fact, almost all the time, there is a lack of subsidiary supporting evidence.
I once interviewed a remote viewer who gave me a very detailed account of how 9-11 was masterminded by some evil genius and his hench people, her hench people, wherever they were.
And it was a very compelling story.
Unfortunately, there was no subsidiary evidence like where might this have been done?
Where is this person now?
You know, who were the people who worked with this person?
How was that executed?
There were details that were missing, which meant you could never really depend on that information.
And that, to me, seems to be one of the difficulties with remote viewing.
Not all of it, but with a lot of it.
Absolutely.
It's that.
It's also some of the mediums I've spoken to, but a lot of special claimants, it's the gaps.
They present gaps.
And if anything, the gaps are beguiling.
They're enthralling.
There's little bits of information where you go, you know, yeah, I'd love to prove that in some way, but it's those little bits of information that you need to get evidence of to be able to show that their ability or the story of their ability or the story of their experience is absolutely true.
But you're right.
It's a lot of vagueness and ambiguity built into some of their narratives.
You and I first spoke more than a year ago now about the Battersea-Poltergeist case.
Yes.
Very, very famous.
In fact, after the conversation with you, it transpired that really there was more to this and potentially more chilling than the famous Enfield Poltergeist case, but it had never really got the same level of media coverage and stirred the same amount of excitement.
This is a place called 63 Wycliffe Road in Battersea.
And the happenings at that place, and you were recently part of a BBC documentary about this, but there were flying pans and noises, there were exorcisms, there were ghostly interactions, so-called.
There was even apparently an attempt to contact the poltergeist at this address by the BBC, which is astonishing because I'm sure they wouldn't do that today.
They'd probably point to some rule that would say you couldn't do it.
But that was then and this is now on prime time television.
And the focus of all of this was a person we talked about a year or so ago, Shirley Hutchings, who is now 80 years of age, but at the time was 15.
That's correct.
Yes.
And it's just one of those cases that when you start to get involved in it and start to investigate it, it's back in 1956.
You just think, you know, why on earth do we know so much more about Enfield when you've got this amazing case that carried on for 12 years?
Enfield was about a year, maybe 13, 14 months.
Battersea-Poltergeist was 12 years.
And there are many, many witnesses involved in this.
And, you know, whereas with Enfield, there's a couple of, you know, there's some objects moving around, you get some independent witnesses that happen.
Within the first week or so of the Battersea-Poltergeist, the family are reporting loud knocks.
And these are not just knocks that the family are reported.
You've actually got witness accounts from neighbors who come and knock on the door and say, please, can you keep the noise down?
It's not auditory hallucination.
It's not people making it up and misinterpreting it.
It's not as you've got the neighbours saying, can you stop doing that?
Exactly.
So you've got that.
You've got a whole gamut of phenomena that exists over all of those years.
So it is a phenomenal case.
Really is a phenomenal case.
And I'm incredibly grateful to Danny Robbins and to Bafflegab Productions for putting it on the map.
You know, now more people know about it than it is just one.
And we're taking it on the stage as well in October as well.
Are you going to dramatize it?
And you found an actress to play Shirley.
Well, we're going to dramatize it.
There's going to be part of it that's dramatized, but it's also going to have a Q ⁇ A element to it, some science demos and various other things that are happening as part of the show.
And fingers crossed, I don't know, we can't confirm yet, but fingers crossed, at least for one of those theatre shows, I'm hoping Shirley will be able to join us.
Like you said, she is 80.
I spoke to her only a couple of weeks ago.
We had a fantastic conversation about her experience and about all of the media interest, the current media interest now.
And yeah, I'm sure she'd love to be involved.
But yes, we've got dramatization, science and Q ⁇ A coming up late October, early November in Battersea Poltergeist Live.
Battersea Poltergeist Live.
That's an excellent idea.
Actually, one of the reasons I asked you about this was I had an email only a few days ago from a listener who didn't know that you were coming on the show anyway and just asked me to ask you if there was anything new.
I think in our previous conversation, you'd sort of hinted that there were new details.
There were bits and pieces coming out about this all the time.
But she asked me to ask you if there was anything new on the case.
From my perspective, yes, I think there is quite a few things that are new that have come out of the case.
And there's still a lot of archives that we're trawling through.
It all goes back to, for me, one of the key bits of phenomena is the slippers.
A lot of people have commented on so many other things and they tend to ignore what happened with the slippers.
For me, it's quite amazing that you have a pair of slippers that the family report walking out of the room into another room.
By themselves.
By themselves.
This is not a pair of slippers that fall off a chair and people misinterpret it as flying across the room.
Did they have mice?
Very clever, coordinated mice, yes.
But yeah, still for me, I find that fascinating.
And a little bit of information that's come out since in terms of the investigation was the brother John, he supposedly witnessed that, but he wasn't convinced by it.
And for me, that's a lovely piece of phenomena that then raises questions about the authenticity of it.
Because if I saw a pair of slippers walking out of the room, I would be convinced.
I just, you know, I wouldn't know what to say.
But for the brother to go, I'm not really convinced, it kind of makes you think, okay, there's something about the retelling of that particular phenomenon that makes you think maybe, maybe we're not hearing the full story.
No, and what would it take to convince him?
And what else haven't we heard, as you rightly say?
But if you think about a pair of slippers or shoes or whatever they are, walking by themselves, There are only a number of ways that you can do that.
You can have them on strings.
You can maybe use some kind of magnetism, but then that gets complicated because you have to pre-plan all of that.
The thought of that happening in a way that people see in a standard suburban house is astonishing.
It's mind-blowing, isn't it?
It is.
Yeah, it's one thing to talk about pots and pans flying around, but not everybody saw that.
You could argue that some of it fell off a surface and then people are misinterpreting.
But that is something totally different when people are talking about a pair of slippers actually walking out of the room and you've got Shirley, you've got her parents and her grandmother all saying the same thing.
That for me, that's almost like gold dust in terms of poltergeist phenomena.
And did this activity remind me, did it subside when Shirley got older?
It did subside.
And the bizarre thing, we talk about it being 12 years, but I produced a quite detailed timeline for a popular magazine recently showing all the phenomena that happened.
And I would say the first year, you've got more phenomena happening that first year than everything that happened in Enfield and most poltergeist cases all thrown together.
And it quickly kind of petered off after that first year or so.
So that the phenomena that you got was more focused on communication.
So knocking, but writing as well.
So there are kind of a series of letters that were sent supposedly from Donald the poltergeist.
But also you've got some writing happening on the wall.
And that's about it.
Every now and again, maybe every four or five months, an object moving or something weird happening.
But certainly after the first year, which is typical of poltergeist, you get that real quick decay and kind of reduction of phenomena happening.
But it still did continue for about 12 years.
And of course, you're talking about Shirley, who was 15, which means when it finished, she was 27.
So quite a poignant conversation I had with her and Danny had with her and kind of saying, you know, it literally stole her teenage years.
Just have to explain, we talked about theatricality a moment ago.
If my listener is hearing some noises off, I think that's another member of the household, isn't it, that we can hear?
Yes, it is.
It's not a poltergeist screening in the background.
I sometimes get emails from listeners saying, you do know, Howard, that at 17 minutes, 45 seconds, there's a very strange shuffling noise.
And it's usually where I reach for my coffee.
But I just wanted my listener to know that there's nothing ghostly going on at the moment, as far as we know.
Let's talk about the new book.
It's called Ghosted.
And this book involves a team of people that is almost like the Ghostbusters.
It's a sort of dream team.
Yes, it's a dream team.
We're calling ourselves the Global Ghost Gang.
And it was originally set up by James Haran, who's a researcher I've known for a number of different years.
And the gang came together because of a mutual interest in understanding haunting experiences.
That's how we came together.
So it was Brian Lathe, James Haran, Neil, Daniel, and Kenneth Drinkwater and myself, an international team with very different perspectives on haunting experiences, some of which are dismissive, some of which are skeptical, some of which are very strong believer in haunting experiences.
And we kind of recognize very quickly, here's an interesting team of academics that want to do research on this stuff, but have very different perspectives, but equally respectful about working together in the pursuit of understanding these experiences.
And initially, the aim was to do lots of research that were connected around haunting experiences, which we did for about three or just over three years.
And then towards the end of that three years, got the idea of going, well, you know, we're doing all of this stuff.
And it's almost as though these articles that we're writing, these research articles, are speaking to our field, which is parapsychology or psychology.
And actually what we want is to speak wider than that.
We would like ghost investigators.
We would like members of the public.
We would like people to know about this research because we think it's interesting and we can make it accessible.
And so it was James that said, right, well, let's take all of the stuff that we've done over these last three or four years, plus anything else that we've done, put it all together in a book about understanding paranormal encounters and kind of specifically haunting experiences.
And you say, and I quote, our series of studies has revealed many new, quote, learnings about ghosts and haunted houses.
What have you discovered?
Well, there's a number of different things.
So one of the main ones, one of the chapters is something called a haunted people syndrome, which I don't think is necessarily new.
This idea that there are interesting aspects of haunting experiences that you find happening in other similar entity encounters.
And I use that as a very broad, purposeful term, entity encounters.
So, for example, imaginary children, you know, when you have an imaginary child or where you have something called gang stalking, which is this idea that it's almost as though you are being pursued by individuals like the men in black, like the government, kind of that paranoid aspect to it.
But there are lots of accounts in other domains.
Alien abduction is another one, where the features of them all feel very, very similar.
So we kind of propose this idea of haunted people syndrome.
Now, that's in the book, and that's the theory about it.
It's trying to understand kind of the subjective and objective experiences or facets of the experience that people have.
And that's one part, which I think is fascinating.
I think the stuff that ghost investigators and that the public will be perhaps more interested in is kind of the environmental stuff.
That when they're watching any of these paranormal shows, you'll always see people walking around with machines that beep and make funny noises.
And they talk about EMF or infrasound or humidity or temperature and these things that help explain Why people have these experiences.
And actually, one of the papers that we published was looking at the research that had been done over the last 20 years to explain away haunting experiences using environmental factors.
And actually, what we found is that's not the case at all.
You just, you can't really explain this stuff away yet.
The research into the environmental aspects of hauntings has not really been done to the extent that people think.
And too often, skeptics are wheeled on to shows, myself, I'm equally guilty, wheeled onto paranormal shows to go, oh, well, that experience could be explained because of electromagnetic fields or because of the presence of infrasound.
Well, the honest answer is we don't actually know yet.
And yet spooky things quite often happen in spooky locations.
People report things that they think they've seen or have seen at castles that have got long and perhaps bloody or checkered histories.
I had a guest on my show recently, Liz Cormel, in Starbridge in the Midlands, and she'd been on an investigation about five years ago to the Drakelow tunnels in Kidderminster.
I don't know, yes, you've heard of those.
They're famous, aren't they?
They were sort of storage or production tunnels that I think were used in World War II.
They're extensive, they're big, and they are claimed to be staggeringly haunted.
Now, the story that Liz tells, and I have no reason to discount it or disbelieve it, is that there was something that was definitely making its presence felt in a very serious and very forcible way down there.
Even she was scared by it and decided it was time to call the investigation off.
But when they got to the gates of this place, and, you know, the old-fashioned armature of the door, rusted and heavy and steel, whatever it was, seemingly it had worked before.
It didn't work when they wanted to get out.
It seemed that whatever it was was wanting to keep them in.
Now, such accounts are incredibly powerful.
And there's an account of a spooky thing in a spooky place.
Yeah, incredibly, incredibly powerful.
I do know the location.
And also hearing an account like that, it gives me the impetus to carry on.
Those sorts of accounts are the accounts that led this global ghost gang on a journey to try and understand more.
Even though we'd all done our independent research, and like I said, I've been involved in this for 30 plus years, to bring us all together and go, okay, people are giving us these accounts of their experiences.
It would be arrogant of us to ignore them.
It would be arrogant of us to be dismissive of them, like some psychologists are, and say, it's merely down to suggestion or it's merely down to hallucination or they're just making it up.
And that's at the root of our book is effectively saying, you know what?
Yes, some of us are skeptics and yes, we're taking a scientific approach, but you know what?
At the end of the day, people are having these experiences across a whole range of socioeconomic levels, backgrounds, education, doesn't matter what it is, people are having these experiences and they're impactful enough that they're having an effect on people.
And you can see some of the encounters I've had with some of these witnesses where they're visibly shaken.
So it's almost we should have a responsibility as scientists to try and understand these more.
And the lovely thing about the Draclo tunnels is that one theory put forward is the impact of infrasound because you have these long, long tunnels which equate to huge gigantic organ pipes that you find in cathedrals where there's kind of infrasonic pipes.
And there's some early research that was done showing that the presence of infrasound in some of these spooky locations could be causing people's experiences.
Sorry, you were saying?
I was going to say, well, you know, we know that infrasound can affect you and can affect you physically and physiologically, and you can misinterpret that and misinterpret that as the presence of whatever you think is in the location.
But what we do know now from our research and what we report in the book is actually the jury's still out in terms of whether infrasound can cause the experience.
If anything, it exacerbates already existing experiences.
So it intensifies them in a way, but it's not telling you that the infrasound has actually caused the experience.
But also, it would be pretty difficult unless you've got a particular air movement that's happening down in the tunnels for infrasound to cause that door to lock.
Yes.
I mean, how would that happen?
This ties in, doesn't it, to some research that suggests and is increasingly suggesting that ancient civilizations like the Egyptians, maybe the Mayans and others used sound to make things happen, to move things, to cut things.
You know, we're only beginning to understand this.
Down in South Africa, there is some research that suggests that sound may have been a very important thing.
And even at Stonehenge, you know, here in the UK, there are indications that, you know, that confluence of stones there, there were sonic properties there that were important in ways that we don't yet understand.
Oh, absolutely.
And you're tapping into kind of my boyhood fascination with some of this stuff as well.
When I used to read some of the early, you know, Von Daniken stuff, but also I was a big follower of Paul Devereux as well, who's involved in the Leigh Hunter magazine and kind of this sort of stuff.
And actually, it's interesting you say about kind of the ancient stones.
When I was doing my PhD, so over 20, 25 years ago, Paul Devereux himself set up something called the Dragon Project, which was looking for exactly that.
It's kind of looking at the sound elements of stones.
He was also looking at other things as well, ionizing radiation, magnetism.
He did some IR photography as well.
But effectively, what he was doing was he recruited a whole team of dream volunteers.
And that is individuals who were happy to pair up, visit Some of these ancient sites.
I was based down in Cornwall for the project.
Visit some of these ancient stone sites, and for one of you to sleep in the site, the other one to sit and stay awake and at predetermined times to wake the person when you knew that they were dreaming based on their rapid eye movement and then ask them to report their imagery.
And he was going from the point of view that maybe the developers of these original stone circles or stone monuments were tapping into some elements of sound and maybe other environmental variables that could stimulate something in your brain to give you access either.
I mean, he was talking about it in terms of imagery kind of and tying it in with ley lines.
I was quite interested in the fact that if you then looked at the results, would people have similar sort of dream imagery across all of the teams?
You know, that they were tapping into something because of the way these stones were designed or the way they were laid.
It's just fascinating.
So there was a program there to be read.
Were they reading the program?
Exactly.
Yes, yes, yes.
Almost like an ancient television in a way.
If you sat in that, sat or lay down and fell asleep in that particular place, would you be watching the same program as the previous person that had slept in that same location?
Absolutely.
Yeah, an ancient form of television.
How lovely is that idea?
What about the ghosts that appear to people and they don't necessarily scare the bejabers out of them?
But they're just, I mean, when I had my one and only experience in my life, it may be the only one that I ever have, of an actual ghost that appears to me as something in color standing in front of me that disappears before my eyes.
Now, I've told you this story before, and my listeners are going to be shaking their heads because I've told them.
So I have to tell it in about 15 seconds.
It was the ghost of a watchman dressed in 1960s watchman uniform, shiny boots, cap, coat, not a very tall guy at the Radio City Tower in Liverpool, the big tower in Liverpool where the radio station is.
And, you know, I saw him at one o'clock in the morning.
I'd been to the loo.
I was doing a talk show filling in in Liverpool.
And I walked into the control room.
There was only the producer, Jonathan, and I, and Jonathan said, and I said, I've just seen something really strange, Jonathan.
And Jonathan said, you've seen him, haven't you?
And it turns out, although people didn't really talk about it, I don't think at the time the owners of the building were that keen on having it talked about too widely.
But, you know, a lot of people who'd been there at night had seen this guy.
And that, to me, the kinds of ghosts that seem to be on a reel of film.
You know, back in the days when commercials for television were made on film and the voiceover had to get it absolutely right, they'd have it on a continuing, like a toilet roll that went round and round and round.
So this 30 seconds of film would just keep playing.
There's a famous story about the guy who did the commercial for the fragrance denim, and he had to say the word denim exactly right in the right place.
So they had this roll of film and they had to poke him literally when they wanted him to say denim in exactly the right place in the right way.
Similarly, although it's a bit of a tortured explanation, but I think it's a reasonable example, it seems that there are things that we call ghosts that have imprinted themselves on particular locations and play themselves back to unsuspecting individuals like myself.
Yes, and I find that part of hauntings as fascinating as the ones where there is interaction, because absolutely right, you're talking about, you know, apparitional experiences where it appears as though there is no interaction.
It's just these individuals are either standing still or they're going about their business or, which is equally fascinating, they are following a path that no longer you can follow.
But if you look back through the records of the building or the area, they are following that original path.
So I think very much about the Roman soldiers in York, for example, who are seen and you can only see from the knee up in terms of these Roman soldiers.
But actually, when you look at the records of where they're walking, the road would have been a lot lower at the point where they existed.
So you're kind of seeing that.
But yes, it's almost like a recording.
And it's theoretical in terms of what's going on there.
You know, a lot of people point back to the 1970s and Nigel Neal's play, The Stone Tape, because, of course, we're talking about the stone tape theory, this idea that something that the memory of something is stored in the fabric of a building and then it's played back either at a predetermined time or because there are some triggers in the environment or there are triggers from an individual.
You know, there might be some aspect of you and others in Radio City, something about your sight or your particular state of mind at that particular point that means you were able to see that individual.
And it's a theory that goes back not just to the 1970s, but it goes back even before then.
You know, there are various scientists over the last hundred years plus who talk about the idea of things leaving an impression in a way.
Even Charles Babbage, for example, talked about kind of spoken words leaving a permanent impression in the air.
And I always tell colleagues who laugh at me at the idea of this imprint or people having ghostly experiences and how can people sense that the ghost is there.
And I always say, well, have you ever been in a situation where you walk into a room and even though you didn't hear anything or see anything prior to that, you walk into the room, there's a few people in there and you get an immediate sense that they've just had an argument.
Are you picking up on their body language or is there something in the air?
And it's that same sort of thing.
Is there an imprint of either an emotional event or a person that's left on the fabric of a building?
The frustrating thing, which is also the most fascinating thing for me, because it means you've got a lifetime career set out in front of you if you wanted to try and solve this, it's a theory and it'll only ever remain a theory.
I cannot think of any way that you could Test and prove that particular theory at all.
And all of that speaks to the idea that you have in the book that some of this is about us as related to our environment, which is fine.
You know, maybe what I saw at Radio City and what my father saw in Bootle Cemetery when he was a police officer and cycling home, he saw an old man standing by a grave, again, wearing a flat cap and quite short.
And he looked at the guy and said, what are you doing here at one o'clock in the morning?
And the guy disappeared in front of him.
And my father said, you could not see my bottom.
That's not the word that my father used for steam as I cycled away from there.
So, you know, right place, right time, right circumstances, right moods.
Unfortunately, none of those things afford us an explanation as to whether people can actually communicate in inverted commas with the dead.
You know, there are a lot of things that suggest that experiences imprint themselves on locations, that maybe the actual conditions of the location affect things or facilitate things to happen.
And then there's your brain that may be in a state where it's able to pick up things.
But none of that says, I'm going to speak with Uncle Fred who passed on 20 years ago.
Yeah, absolutely.
It doesn't at all.
If anything, I think what we're trying to emphasize in the book as well is really say, yes, this sort of thing happens to people.
And, you know, it doesn't have to happen to a medium.
Mediums claim to be able to talk to the dead, which give that communicative aspect.
And it almost creates a sense that these are special individuals.
But we know you just recounted some amazing experiences.
I've heard thousands of them in the course of my research and people hear them all the time, that these are experiences that happen to normal people.
And whether it's down to their own hypersensitivity, it's something about the person or their psychological profile, or whether it's down to, you know, the environmental fluctuations or something that suddenly triggers an event to cause, we just don't know at this situation, at this stage.
But I think the important thing about the book is that we're saying that.
We're showing you, here's the research up to now that is trying to answer these questions.
Some of these questions may be answered, but actually we're saying, here's the next step.
This is now what we're going to do to try and understand a little bit more about haunting experiences.
And you know what?
It's not just us doing it.
There are thousands upon thousands of ghost hunters out there who are regularly doing, visiting haunted locations every weekend.
And it's almost a cry out to them as well to go, stop stumbling around in the dark.
Listen to what we're saying.
And maybe if we can all do this in a constructive, shared way, we can start to gather data, more data on what's happening and maybe get a better understanding of people's experiences.
Does that mean you want to hear people's spooky stories?
I would love to hear people's spooky stories.
I never asked for it.
Even if you repeat yours ad infinitum, I would still never get bored of it.
Rather like that reel of film.
Okay, well, you asked for that.
And part of this is about empowering people.
I'm forever getting people contacting me and saying, I've never told this story before, but that thing you talked about, it happened to me too.
So part of it is about enabling people to tell their stories because this stuff I sense and you know is more common than perhaps we used to think.
Absolutely.
And you do get people that have kept their stories and their experiences very close to their heart and not shared them.
And I think, you know, your show, The Battersea Poltergeist is a prime example.
You know, the popularity of that opened the floodgates for people sharing, but also sharing secretly.
You know, they were contacting myself or Danny, one of the researchers on an individual basis, just saying, I've never talked to anybody about this, but, you know, the discussion of what Shirley was saying or the way you were talking about this, I would like to share my experience with you.
And I don't want anything, they were saying, I don't want anything from it.
I don't want you to explain it away.
I don't want to do it.
I'm just going to tell you my experience.
And that for me has been the case now for over 30 years of hearing people's experiences and hearing genuine people tell their experiences, not fakes, not frauds, not people that are deluded, but ordinary people sharing their experiences.
And it's what keeps me involved in the research.
Do you think that we are getting close to a one-size-fits-all theory of everything weird that would connect Bigfoot and Sasquatch and Yeti and UFOs and ghosts and afterlife experiences?
It seems to me that the more I read, the more it seems that some researchers are getting close to something akin to that.
Yes, I think so.
Whether or not we take a respective nod to some of these early researchers in kind of UFO ufology and people like John Keel with the Mothman prophecies and the Eighth Tower or individuals looking at group stalking at this gang stalking idea or looking at people with imaginary friends or haunting experiences.
There are more and more, the more and more you read into it, you can see the commonalities.
You can see that commonalities happening.
But by the same token, there's also a spectrum of intensity and extremeness with some of these experiences as well.
Even though there are commonalities between all of these encounters, and we keep on using the word entity encounters because that's what they are.
They're all entity encounters.
You can see the extreme sense of some of the experiences, but also you can see the cultural and belief influence as well.
That in some cultures, some of these experiences will be very, very accepted.
And it'll almost be as, you know, this is not a weird thing.
This is not entity encounter.
This is just standard.
This is part of our culture.
With other cultures or belief systems, there'll be a leaning more towards aliens or fairies or fae rather than hauntings.
And actually, the more and more you look at it, I think you're absolutely right.
I think there are individuals out there, and I'd like to include us as a team, kind of, you know, somewhere on that path as well, to coming up with a model or an understanding of all of these experiences.
And it would be lovely if we're able to achieve that in my lifetime.
I would be in that retirement home of a very happy young man.
Old man, I should say.
But we'll see.
I mean, it just takes a lot more coordination, a lot more constructive work, a lot more scientific work.
But I think we're almost there.
I think we're getting there.
The issue is the testing of it.
I think the theoretical side and the model side is really interesting.
And I think we're not far off.
I think the testing of it is going to be slightly more difficult.
Okay, which brings me to what will probably be my last question here.
So God how it better be a good one.
If I was able to provide you with the research funding that you've always dreamt of, perhaps unlimited, if I was able to give you the resources and time that you need to do one experiment or investigate one thing, what would that thing or experiment be?
It's a small question.
It's just a small question.
Yeah.
Wow, that's a really tough question.
What would that one experiment be?
There must be something that you've dreamt of doing.
You've wanted to investigate the media.
You know what it would be?
You know what would be?
It would be a haunted house.
It would be going back to Harry Price and the Borley Rectory.
It would be give me a haunted house that I can use for years, basically, and I can do the research in that.
I can send people in.
I can send them on the same path in that haunted location.
I could be measuring their physiology remotely as they work through.
I could be giving them scales and questionnaires prior to their entry to know about their belief as well.
All of that sort of thing.
But effectively, give me a lab that is a huge haunted house.
That would be my idea.
In the same way that there's a researcher from Birmingham that did the same sort of thing with Muncaster Castle, where he was just looking at electromagnetic fields.
And he managed to get access to the castle for about 18 months, two years.
And he was measuring electromagnetic fields and then looking at people's reaction or their physiological reaction as they were walking through that particular area of the castle.
It would be that sort of thing.
Buy me a haunted house, Howard, and I would be a happy man.
Well, do you know, this has been a very difficult time for a lot of organizations, places like the Royal Palaces and the English Heritage Properties.
You know, because of COVID, they haven't had the level of visitors and they certainly haven't had overseas visitors.
This would be an opportunity, I think, for somewhere like Hampton Court, which I'm speaking to you from a location not very far away from it.
If I could, you know, see through the trees, I could actually see Hampton Court from where I'm sitting at this moment.
It needs an operation like Hampton Court to say, okay, come and affiliate with us.
You know, we have our mulled wine and ghost tours there, but let's do it seriously.
Let's get a team of researchers in.
Let's embed them and let's do proper research.
Because, you know, I've spoken to the people who work there as wardens, as guides, and they, as they may have told you, they will tell you stories of apparitions appearing on a regular basis right in front of their faces.
Henry VIII in one case, I kid you not, Henry VIII regularly walking down a corridor at Hampton Court Palace.
Ghosts of one of Henry VIII's wives appearing in the chapel there.
And I've got people who I've spoken with who worked there for 30 years looking me in the eye and telling me this stuff.
That's what needs to be done, isn't it?
It is what needs to be done.
And I'm going to steal a little bit of your thunder and say back in 2000 for two weeks, I lived at Hampton Court Palace and we did that.
But we did it and it was led by Richard Wiseman and the focus was very much on suggestion, kind of looking at could we show that people's experiences were down to the fact that the haunted gallery is suggestible.
You know, you're saying it's haunted, so therefore people are going to have those experiences.
If you tell people another part of Hampton Court Palace is haunted, are they going to have the experiences there merely down to suggestion?
And whilst that was the focus, the experience was amazing.
And I 100% agree with you.
At the time, I talked to the wardens as well.
We had a couple of physicists that came along, you know, on a few nights and were measuring magnetic fields, but also we had a thermal imager, you know, there as well.
But also the wardens telling us about the experiences, but also one of the wardens specifically who had accumulated all of this archived material of writings about people's experiences going back hundreds of years.
You know, it's not just like a 30, 40 year of historical experiences.
It's hundreds of years.
So, yeah, I'm stealing your thunder a little bit by saying I lived at Hampton Palace, but if I could live there for a year, that would make my world.
Well, I'm always wanting to go there and do a show from there, and they're always telling me no.
So maybe if they're hearing this, maybe they'll think again about this.
Let's work together and make it happen.
Well, and I think it will definitely drive visitors there because all of these historic royal palaces at the moment are having trouble with their funding.
So I think that will be something.
And people are not, I don't think people would be deterred.
I think people would be encouraged to go there even more in case they see something.
So failing us making that project happen, the only other thing that can happen is that I win the national lottery and buy you a haunted house, some of which periodically appear on the market.
Kieran O'Keefe, thank you very much indeed.
This book is called Ghosted.
Is it out around the world at the moment?
It's available for pre-order on McFarland Press.
So it's available for pre-order.
McFarland are now saying it's going to be out in the new year.
Okay.
So January outing.
We were hoping for an October release, but now they're saying the new year, unfortunately.
Okay, well, if you need somebody to narrate your audiobook, here I am: reasonable rates.
Kieran O'Keeffe, thank you very much indeed.
Thank you, Howard.
It'd been lovely chatting with you.
You too.
Thank you.
Kieran O'Keefe, more great guests in the pipeline here on 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.
▲
Export Selection