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Aug. 12, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
52:55
Edition 655 - Dr Melvyn J. Willin

Leading paranormal researcher Dr Melvyn J. Willin - who is a featured speaker on the Cruise (see www.theunexplainedlive.com) - we talk about the Enfield Poltergeist and the role of music in paranormality...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
Thank you for the kind messages, hundreds of them, that I've had about my recent hearing incident.
It was a working situation where very, very loud sound was put down my ears, leaving me with tinnitus and a hearing problem that I'm hoping is going to resolve.
I'm going to be on medication for a couple of months now to do with this, and I'm just going to have to take things a little easier.
But your good wishes meant so much to me.
As you can imagine, when you do this kind of thing for a living and you have a problem with your ears, it's, to say the least, a bit of a worry.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his ongoing work on the show.
And thank you to you, like I say, for being part of it all, part of the Unexplained family around the world.
If you want to make contact with me, you can do that in various ways, but the best is to go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the contact link there, and you can send me an email.
And if your email requires a reply, please say so.
I'm getting a lot of email now.
I see and read every single email that comes in, so all your points are noted.
There's also the Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
The official one, it's the one with the logo, and no other similar or any other kind of Facebook page is the right one.
So it's the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Guest on this edition, a return to Dr. Melvin Willen.
He is one of the nation's leading paranormal researchers, very well known for his work on cases like the Enfield Poltergeist, where he recently reviewed the tapes and the evidence.
We spoke with him about that on the show.
We'll see if there's anything new about that.
We're going to talk about music in the paranormal on this edition of The Unexplained, and there is much more to that topic than you might imagine.
So Dr. Melvin Willen will be the guest on this edition of the show.
He's also one of the big guests who's going to be part of the cruise that's being organized with Tui Mirella, as you know, from October the 28th, visiting some of the greatest hotspots in the Mediterranean, some beautiful places like Cadiz and Malta, and then going across to the Canary Islands starting October 28th.
You can find out more about that and the guests who will be on it by going to the special website, theunexplainedlive.com.
That's theunexplainedlive.com.
And let me know what you think about the website and that.
If you want to make a donation to the show, then that's very gratefully received.
We'll be very, very grateful to receive that.
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and follow the donation link there to do that if you want to.
And if you have recently, thank you very, very much for doing that.
It means a great deal to me.
I know these are hard times, and for what we're being told, for all of us, they're going to get harder.
But we've got to stick together.
I think I've said all I have to say now.
So let's get to the guest in the United Kingdom, Dr. Melvin Willen.
We're going to talk about music and the paranormal and a lot more.
Melvin, thank you very much for coming on.
How are you?
I'm not too bad.
Thank you.
Are you getting by in the heat, though?
Because I think we're both in the southeast of England.
It's just unbearable at the moment, isn't it?
Yes.
I mean, it's not too bad here.
I'm fairly well insulated with thatch and what have you.
Oh, really?
Oh, lucky man.
You see, the old designs are often the best with these things.
If you've got a thatched roof, it's going to keep you warm in the winter and hopefully cool during boiling summers.
Unfortunately, I'm in a modern building here in an apartment.
But you understand this.
Now, listen, I don't often do this with guests, but I wanted to read your biography to you in case any of this is wrong, okay?
This is a biography I found online, which I think is probably going to make you groan, and I can understand why.
It says, Dr. Melvin J. Willen was closely associated with Bob Morris, Kirstler Professor Parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh, where, of course, Caroline Watt is working now for a number of years.
He's the Honorary Archive Officer for the Society for Psychical Research.
Published books include Music, Witchcraft, and the Paranormal, Ghost Court on Film, The Paranormal Court on Film, and of course, the work that you've done on the Enfield Poltergeist tapes that we've talked about before.
There's a lot of other stuff here in this biography.
It says you've contributed chapters to academic encyclopedias, helped to produce a CD collection of auditory anomalies in collaboration with the Freiburg Institute in Germany, very prestigious organization.
And there's a lot of other stuff in there.
Is there anything that I should be including?
No, I mean, the only thing is that some of the books you mentioned, with the exception of Enfield, are in the distant past, like sort of 10 years ago.
And the one that was published about three months ago is the Encyclopedia of Music and the Paranormal.
Right.
Which is what we're going to be talking about mostly on this edition.
So how would you describe yourself, Melvin?
Are you a seeker after truth, academic researcher?
When people ask you, what do you do and how do you do it?
What do you tell them?
I tell them usually that I'm a lion tamer and therefore it's got nothing to do with what they're talking about.
It's very complicated.
It's very complicated.
Basically, I suppose it's a cross between a researcher into alleged paranormal phenomena with a special emphasis, in my case, on music, poltergeist, apparitions, that sort of thing, ESP, along those sorts of broad psychical research, parapsychology terminology, but with for me a special emphasis on music.
So what you said alleged as part of your narrative there, that's interesting because, you know, people who do, I think, people who do proper research into the paranormal and parapsychology, things of this nature, don't accept it all on face value.
So the word alleged was very interesting to me.
Yes.
I mean, I'm not going to use it every time I say anything because it gets boring.
But I mean, it's always alleged.
In other words, I'm walking down that middle pathway.
When I find good evidence, then it tilts me one way.
And when I find fraud or bad evidence, it tilts me the other way.
I'm still not quite seeking after truth.
What is truth, said Pilot, I believe.
But it's more a case of just trying to find out what the earth is going on with all these things that we don't understand.
And there seem to be, unless I'm mistaken, and maybe it's just down to social media and greater ability to contact other people.
There seem to be more of these things happening, don't they?
I think they're advertised more.
There's a sort of a resurgence of interest into the occult and esoteric matters.
Perhaps our sort of materialistic society is dictating that some people are getting a bit fed up with everything geared towards sort of capitalistic ideas, shall we say.
So they're seeking into sort of more inner ideas in the mind and possibly outside of the mind as well.
Yeah.
And so in an era when people feel that governments and other institutions we thought were there to be working on our behalf, when they seem to be failing us, we start looking outside.
Is that what you're saying?
Possibly.
I wouldn't just blame any particular government anywhere.
I think it's the whole concept within us as a race, as human beings, if you like, that we've lost a great deal through technology and other things.
And perhaps some people are trying to regain that information, those capabilities.
Which plays into the whole idea that I very much am starting to buy into and never thought I would, that ancient civilizations perhaps knew a whole lot more than we give them credit for.
Oh, I couldn't agree more on that sort of statement.
I think that when you think of some of the achievements that people thousands of years ago managed without all the stuff that we've got now, you have to marvel at their capabilities.
And when you think of the things that have been talked about recently in that regard, is there anything that sticks out in your mind as being particularly shining?
I wouldn't name one specific thing, really.
I think it's ongoing at the moment.
The more that we discover about how ancient civilizations operate, the more marvels we tend to uncover, I think.
I mean, I'll give you one example, which I haven't been there for many years, but when I went there and my jaw hit the ground, and that was Abu Simbel in Egypt.
I mean, when you stand against those statues, which were hewn out of rock, et cetera, I mean, you don't even reach the big toe.
That's how massive they are.
I mean, they make the pyramids in Cairo look rather boring.
You know, I was a few weeks ago.
I don't get very many breaks, but I had a couple of days down in Devon, and I drove past at 7.30 in the morning as the sun was beginning to be bright.
I watched the beginning of the day over Stonehenge as I drove past slowly, just to take it in as best I could.
And you can't fail to be gripped by the idea that who could have gone to the trouble of doing that?
Why did they put it there and what was it for?
Those are the questions that unless you're a complete hard heart and you're only interested in what's on the front pages of the tabloid newspapers, you have to bear that in mind, don't you?
Well, yes, indeed.
And that's a wonderful bit of synchronicity that you've just chosen Stonehenge, because exactly this time last week, I was driving past Stonehenge on my way to Glastonbury to pick up a load of archive material.
It does make you wonder why and how they were able to do that, if they were not more advanced than sometimes people say they were.
Yes, well, I mean, perhaps they were using their brains for that sort of thing and survival, of course, rather than worrying about where the next car is coming from and when the next holiday is going to be and all those sorts of things.
People must tell you paranormal stories all the time.
I'm certainly getting more and more sent to me.
I'm getting videos of alleged UFOs.
I've used the word alleged there.
But I'm also getting stories sent to me.
I wonder if I might run past you just for a ballpark thought one story, and it's only a quick one that's been sent to me by a listener in the last week.
Is that okay?
Oh, yes, I'd welcome it.
Okay, this comes from a man called Frank, who's a regular listener, heard from him before.
Says, the house that we lived in has a lot of history to it in a small place called Skugen in the middle of Norway.
My dad still lives in that old house.
I'm now a grown man, but the memories from childhood still live within me, says Frank.
I have a bunch of these weird experiences where we'd hear sounds, footsteps, see things in the corner of our eyes.
But the one major thing that happened occurred when we'd been living in the house for about four years.
One night, I woke in the middle of the night.
Looking straight into my eyes was an old woman sitting over my feet with her back to the wall and her feet pointing out over the bedside.
She looked straight towards me for a couple of seconds before she raised her hand towards her face and made a hushing motion.
In other words, shh, with her finger towards her nose.
Then she smiled a warm smile before she disappeared before my big scared eyes.
I remember lying there for a few minutes in the total freeze before I managed to snap out of it and run the hell out of there.
Even to this day, I can picture her with her grey short hair, blue long dress with flowers on it.
If I had a picture, I'm sure I'd recognize her from others.
I've started to think that maybe it was a dream until yesterday.
I've now learned the story of the old woman who lived there a few years before.
As she was the mother of the house, and as she was ill, she could no longer live on her own.
The daughter accommodated her in the house, and my room was the living room back then.
She died there in that very same room as I saw this old woman as a child.
I've read that exactly as it was written by Frank.
So story, we've heard stories like this before, all of us, I think.
But this old woman, and it turned out that this was not a dream, that there may have been some history to it.
What do you think?
Well, I mean, as usual, that's a fascinating story.
And I receive, like you have already mentioned, many of these sorts of stories.
And I think one has the two extremes.
First of all, that no, he's just made it all up, which I don't think is probably true.
The other is, of course, that it actually genuinely happened.
He wasn't suffering from a dream, which he mentioned himself, or hypnagogic, hypnopompic sleep, which is where you hallucinate just before going to sleep or waking up.
False memory syndrome comes into this as a possibility since it happened, I think you said, in his childhood.
Or there is something, and this is the one I kind of favor, there's something outside of ourselves that we don't understand.
Let's keep on researching it and try and understand it more and more.
Yeah, because that story I think will probably shine with a lot of people who are listening to this.
You know, a lot of people will understand that experience that Frank had.
I had one similar when I was a child, too.
But it was a relative of mine who was sitting in a chair next to me.
I think I was about eight years of age and she disappeared before my eyes.
And I just assumed that it was some kind of sleeping, waking anomaly and really wasn't important.
It was just interesting.
But that's much more detailed when this guy, Frank, is able to describe somebody who lived in the house who he didn't know of, wasn't a relative, wasn't somebody that he knew.
That's when it becomes interesting and worthy of perhaps further investigation.
Oh, yes.
I mean, I would thoroughly recommend Frank to investigate more.
If he was around, if he lived within a sort of 100 miles or so of me, I'd be visiting him, interviewing him, asking him all sorts of personal details about his life and about what was happening then and so on and so forth.
There's a whole list of possible questions and further explorations of this story and all the others that one receives, of course.
Which brings us back inevitably when I'm talking to you to the Enfield-Poltergeist case.
You knew the people who researched it.
I knew Guy Lion Playfair.
He was a guest on my show.
I had a lot of time for Guy Lion Playfair.
And you reviewed the tapes and came up with some different conclusions to the Enfield-Poltergeist case.
But that involved a couple of teenage girls, didn't it?
One in particular.
And it was thought that the phenomenon might have revolved around them.
Yes.
I mean, one wasn't quite a teenager at the time.
I mean, she was, I think, by the end of the events.
But at the time, I think she was 11, if my memory serves me right.
The other one was a teenager, just about.
And it would seem to have centered around them, although one of their brothers also claimed to have had some experiences, but that could have been a copycat syndrome because he was a lot younger and he may have just been emulating what his sisters were claiming they were going through.
But I mean, the whole of the Enfield poltergeist was fascinating.
And it brings me to something which I prefer personally to comments about apparitions.
And that is with poltergeist, you've got something to get your hands onto.
You've got something that's moving around.
You've got physical objects that are moving around.
Whereas with an apparition, it could be in somebody's mind.
It could be a hallucination.
Cameras don't tend to.
I know I've written two or three books about photographs caught on film, but anybody can say, well, that was Photoshop.
It's been faked or something.
I mean, in some of the cases, I don't think it was, but it could have been.
So therefore, with Poltergeist, with Enfield in particular, you've got some pretty tangible evidence that you can get your hands on.
The bits and pieces from Enfield that got hurled around.
I've actually got them here.
They're a few feet away from me as we speak in a box.
Yes, absolutely.
In a box labeled the Enfield-Poltergeist manifestations.
They weren't manifestations, obviously.
They were slippers and bits of Lego and burnt pound notes as they were then and so on and so forth.
And they are here because Morris on his death gave them to me as the custodian.
They belong to the SPR now, but I am the custodian of all of that material.
That's a big responsibility.
That's Maurice Gross.
Yes, indeed.
Yes, I knew Maurice and Guy, of course, but I knew Maurice extremely well.
And we got on well because he could be a bit crazy and so can I. So we have that in common.
Well, you know, to have the kind of dedication you need to pursue these things, we know you have to be a little crazy, depending on how you define that word.
Unusual or eccentric might work a little bit better.
But have you had any, since we had our last conversation about your review of the Enfield Poltergeist tapes, have you had any further thoughts about them?
Yes, I mean, I reread the book all the time and I listen to the tapes frequently.
There is a documentary that's going on at the moment, a three-part documentary that's coming out in the next few months about the tapes and about the whole case.
So I'm constantly reviewing what I think about it.
And I'm left in the same situation I was probably a year or two years ago.
And that is that I still think that some of it was absolute rubbish.
And I also think that some of it was completely genuine.
And it's that little bit that intrigues me still.
But was it something external or was it something that was to do with the people inhabiting the house?
Was it something around them?
Have you been able to conclude anything on that?
Well, I think it was both.
I think that some of it was centered on the actual people, notably Janet and Margaret.
But I also think some of it was completely external that was outside of themselves, outside of the situation, beyond what we currently understand in science, which is why parapsychologists, psychical researchers et al.
are trying to work out what's going on.
That's interesting, isn't it?
How would you, in this day and age when we have so much better equipment and maybe we're better placed to do these things, how would you be able to research that though scientifically?
Is there a way of doing that today?
Well, it's extremely difficult.
I'm reminded, I've also got here at my premises something called SPIDER, which is, don't ask me to remember what those letters stand for, S-P-I-D-E-R.
But this was what Tony Cornell and Alan Gould used to use on their ghost hunting events in the 1970s and 60s.
And they used to joke about it and say, well, we're using normal equipment to try and measure the paranormal.
So we're pretty doomed to failure.
And I thought, well, you've got a good point there.
If one's investigating the paranormal, we're going along with our thermometers and we're going along with our tech recorders and all the rest of it.
But we're trying to investigate something that may not respond to our modern equipment, even though our modern equipment is very good.
So one has to sort of take on, I think, a different paradigm to try and understand what is paranormal.
Indeed, it's one of those things that you can't quantify.
I mean, how would you bottle and quantify genius or inspiration?
You can't.
Yes, exactly.
We give it as good a shot as we can.
But if anybody says that they've cracked it and they're an expert, then I start to think, oh, good for you.
And that's half the fun of what we're doing, really, isn't it?
I say we.
I'm a guy who looks in from outside, but those of us who look into these things, it kind of keeps it absorbing for us.
There's always something new.
It's absolutely fascinating.
I mean, I've spent the last 30 or so years in investigating these things.
And every day brings along something that makes you think, now, what's going on there?
You know, and sometimes you discover what it is.
It's somebody that's having a laugh at your expense.
And sometimes you're still baffled by what's going on.
Music and beyond the normal has been something that you've researched pretty extensively.
And that's what we're going to talk about now.
That involves, you say, music involving mediums and hauntings, near-death experiences, healing.
There are people who believe that music is part of the healing.
I mean, if you go to some dentists, they will play you relaxing music in the hope that it will put you into a better state and make you more amenable to the treatment.
And there was also something that I saw in my readings this morning about musical telepathy.
But talk to me about how you came to research the role of music in all of this.
Well, that's pretty straightforward, that question.
Thank you.
And that is the first half of my life was involved with music.
So I was trained in music.
I was a music teacher.
And that was my profession, my career.
And during that time, my all-abiding hobby was paranormal and ghosts and apparitions and all that sort of stuff.
And then as I reached possibly the halfway point in my life, I thought, why don't I try and put these two together?
Because there are so many anomalies in music that couldn't be explained by people.
You know, well, why does that happen with music?
Why is this happening?
And so on and so forth, in all the realms that you've just mentioned in your introductory spiel about it.
And so I trotted off to various universities and said, I want to do a PhD in music and the paranormal.
And finally, I found one in the shape of Sheffield University's music department and Bob Morris, who you've already mentioned in Edinburgh, who said, well, we'll do it between us.
The music chap did the music and Bob did the sort of the paranormal side of things, put the two together and we had music and the paranormal.
And that's where it really then started to explode, if you like, from there.
And ever since then, I've been doing that and related subjects.
And the impact that music has on people, we know that music can move us and sway us and make us think things and come to conclusions.
Even on the most basic level, if you're skeptical about this, just think about what it was like to sit in the cinema and hear the music of John Barry, great music composer, and the way that he used particular musical gambits to make us feel emotions.
You know, I've only got to hear the music from Born Free, which was his music, and that will stir me.
So music has impact.
Oh, indeed it has.
It has both positive and negative aspects.
And it can also take you into completely altered states of consciousness.
And it can have physical effects on your body.
So it's not just a case of the sort of therapeutic aspect, important though that is, and saying, well, I love that film music or I love this classical music, pop music, whatever it is, but it can have definite physical effects upon you.
So does it all begin, this research, from, for example, the ancient traditional drum beats that tribes would use in order to, I don't know, quell insurrections or keep people calm or move them to altered states so they could experience other things?
Is that where it all begins?
Well, I think possibly, yes, but even before that, because if you think about at birth, evidently, and I don't know if this is true because I'm not a physician, the first of our senses that's developed is the sense of hearing.
And allegedly, it's the dreaded word again, at the end of our lives, it's the last of our senses that goes.
So the hearing, our ears are open all the time.
We can shut our eyes and block out visuals, but our ears are nevertheless open.
And so therefore, it could be that sounds were important to us at the very beginning of our history as human beings and certainly in our own lives as we are born from inside the womb and onwards through to physical death.
Interesting point there and just a small diversion in this conversation.
More and more is being written.
I read an article only last week about at what point can we be considered to be dead and not experiencing anything?
It is now seeming that maybe, as you said, hearing is the last thing to go.
It might be that people we think are dead, and those of us maybe will all experience this, have been at the deathbed of a relative.
And you wonder when they have passed, and you are talking to them if they can hear any of this.
And increasingly, it appears that maybe the awareness of sound might be there for longer than we thought.
Oh, yes.
I agree with that completely.
I think that it needs, it's another one of those subjects that really needs to be explored.
And on my list of things to do in hopefully the next couple of years is some exploratory work on comas, where people are, and this is very topical at the moment, of course, but where people are seemingly out of action completely because their brain isn't functioning.
But perhaps in some sort of way, music can get through to them.
And it may, and there's been one or two cases in the past about this, where music has been played to people when they've been in a comatose state, and it has seemingly brought them out of the coma that they were physically in.
Sometimes through familiarity, if you were to play, I don't know, if you were to play to a Liverpool football fan in that state, you'll never walk alone, then that would have an emotional impact and might be more likely to get through than anything else.
Well, yes, the emotional impact is absolutely spot on because in the so-called Gansfeldt experiments involving telepathy, it was more emotional music that had effect In getting people to seemingly be telepathic than just sort of dundy-dundy-dumb boring music, but I would take a little bit of issue and with a bit of fun, really, that playing the Liverpool fan, You'll Never Walk Alone, may have an emotional effect on them and get them out of the state that they're in.
And playing a well-known theme of a different football club might also do it because they might be so damned angry that it brings them out of themselves.
Indeed.
And, you know, we don't entirely understand this, but we're learning more about it.
Should we unpick then, little by little, bit by bit, the various fields that music might have an impact in and apply to?
Let's start with musical mediums.
What's a musical medium?
Okay, well, a musical medium is somebody who is living, who believes that they are in touch with dead composers or performers, but from my angle, musicians of some sort or the other.
The very, very, very big name in this field was a lady called Rosemary Brown, who was around in the middle 20th century.
She died about 10 years ago or so.
And she channeled the spirits of numerous fairly well-known composers.
She was dictated to.
She wrote down their music.
She attempted to play on the piano.
She wasn't a very good pianist.
And the musicological world was split down the middle.
I was in touch with her at the time when she was doing some of this.
And half the musicians of the world were saying, this is amazing stuff.
Remarkable.
How is she tapping into this?
And the other people were saying, well, it's pastiches and it's not really very good.
And anybody with a degree or A-level or something in music could do it.
The thing was, she didn't have a degree in music and she didn't have an A-level in music.
She was a housewife from Wimbledon and a school dinner lady.
But it makes me wonder why it doesn't happen more often.
Think of the people who've passed before their time.
Let's think about, I don't know, George Michael in the modern era or Amy Winehouse.
You know, people who made great music in the way that they did it, went before their time, were tremendously powerful personalities.
But as far as I'm aware, they haven't been channeling their music, their gift.
Yes.
It is.
It's remarkable that there isn't a great deal more of this sort of thing going on.
And the people you've named are a prime example, because I don't know of anybody that they are being channeled with.
But perhaps it's not that easy to do this.
Perhaps it's like looking at something through a frosted glass, that it all becomes distorted.
And we're trying to think about this in normal terms.
Once again, this is something that's genuinely paranormal, perhaps.
And therefore, we can't quite get a hold of it as to understand how it works.
Which makes it all the more fascinating.
I mean, in terms of the people who claim to be channeling the dead composers and creating music, whether some critics say it's derivative or not, maybe everything a great artist does is derivative of everything else they've done.
But that's another point for another time and maybe not the subject of debate on a show like this.
But it's interesting.
You know, it's a fascinating, it is a fascinating thing that does have value, but it makes you wonder how it happens, I guess.
Yes, and you would be amazed.
I've done a great deal of work on the musical mediums, and I've had every case from my jaw dropping open once again, to being horrified with them actually thinking that this bore any resemblance to the people concerned.
And quite often I would go along with an open mind and I would come out sort of thinking, well, that was one of the best experiences of paranormality I've come across.
Or I'd come out thinking, what a waste of time that was.
Does the person involved, if a musical medium is claiming to channel some famous dead composer who made great music, does it matter whether, as so many of these people, that person lived what we might think of as a tortured life or a difficult life?
In my experience, no, not particularly.
The range of people that have come through that I have certainly studied have varied from the tortured soul composers like Robert Schuman, for instance, through to people who seem to have perfectly reasonable, happy lives and, you know, passed away at the appropriate time.
Do they ever say to the medium, do they ever communicate with the medium why they're doing this, why they didn't allow their canon body of work to speak for them?
Yes, sometimes they do, not in every case.
And they quite often say that they'd still got so much more to give and this was an opportunity for them to actually be able to do it because they had somebody that could pick up on their vibes or their energy or whatever it happens to be that they could then dictate their new music to.
The desire for continuation, the desire to carry on, I can understand that.
And so there are people who do that.
Is it something that is a worldwide phenomenon or is it only something that is in places like Europe where we had the great composers?
Yeah.
Well, my research into this had to be limited to countries I could get hold of.
And so therefore, my starting point, of course, was the UK and America and Europe.
And I didn't really go beyond that.
That would be a fascinating study if anybody's listening and wants to give me some sponsorship to actually have a look at what's going on in the Far East and in sort of, you know, Scandinavia, northern climb, southern climes, Africa, etc., etc.
Okay, musical hauntings.
Now, we've seen movies where at a climactic part of the movie, sound of some kind, maybe droning or maybe actual music itself is heard.
Are there musical hauntings where people report music playing?
An exaggeration would be millions, but thousands would not be an exaggeration.
There are thousands of places scattered around the world, even, but specifically for me in the countries I mentioned before, where there is very well documented evidence of exactly that happening.
How interesting.
Can you think of one?
Oh, I can think of dozens.
A very famous one, of Course is good old Borley Rectory, where Borley Rectory on the Suffolk-Essex border was famously called by Harry Price the most haunted house in England.
And in Borley Rectory, there was no musical phenomena as far as we're aware, but in the church opposite, there was a great deal.
And many people witnessed the organ there playing by itself when the place was locked up and other sort of musical phenomena, even sort of not recently, because now the church is kept locked because so many sightseers turned up and so on and so forth.
But in the fairly recent past, there were people making recordings saying, well, we've recorded this, we've heard this, and so on and so forth.
So Borley Church is a good example.
And then back probably about 100 years before that was the famous Versailles haunting where two ladies went to Versailles, the schoolmistresses, and they heard music, which they couldn't understand where it was coming from.
And finally, they managed to work out what it was.
And it was checked out and it was appropriate to the time slip that they had seemingly entered at the time.
So there's just two examples of, as I say, hundreds, if not thousands.
And if a place is famous for music, is it more likely that the structure will retain some of that musical input?
I'm thinking of places that I've been.
Not that I've heard ghostly music there, but if anywhere was going to have that, then places like Hereford Cathedral, for example.
You stand in Hereford Cathedral, and if the choristers are singing, if there's music being rehearsed there on a frosty November afternoon, you always think that maybe that's making some kind of impact on the building.
Yes.
I mean, we're into the sort of stone-take principle there, which is quite a nice way of explaining these things, perhaps.
But I don't think it's necessary for the place to have a musical connection because, I mean, for instance, there are battlegrounds where music has been heard.
And okay, in distant years, it may have been the drums and the trumpets playing.
But a battleground outdoors wouldn't necessarily be associated with music apart from on a specific event.
And then there's other places where music has not been the actual focus of the building, sort of, you know, pubs, for instance, seascapes, castles, blah, blah, blah.
The list is endless, where music has been either recorded or has been said to have haunted the place.
Interesting.
So do you think that music is, now, how do I put this?
Do you think that music is provided by the other side in some instances, if the other side exists, for those who don't believe in those things, as a kind of cipher or indicator of something, a kind of metaphor for something else, or the music just simply exists there on its own account?
I don't know whether I phrased that clearly, but do you think that it's used as an indicator by if there is a ghostly presence there?
It's kind of a way of saying, it's like, you know, hooting your car horn.
It's showing you I was here.
Well, hooting your car horn could be a musical phenomenon.
I think that I don't think it has a purpose.
So it's a bit like most of my reading about apparitions.
It doesn't necessarily have a purpose.
It could be some sort of playback, like the Stone Tape principle would indicate that under certain conditions, which we don't know at the moment, something plays back that was occurring there in the past.
And traditionally, of course, it would be a ghost wandering around.
And from my angle, it will be the playback of music, which for some unaccountable reason plays back under certain conditions and can be heard by people at certain times.
Some people say that if we're to communicate with extraterrestrials, we need to be sending them musical notes.
I think some of the probes that have been sent up there to see if anybody's out there contain bits of music that represent us.
But if we look at fiction, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you had the five tones.
Not that I can sing or anything, but that was a key part of that.
And people do say that musical notes and music could be a way that we might communicate with ET.
Well, yes.
I mean, you know, it's possible.
One gets into the heavyweight discussion then about what is sound and what is music.
Because, I mean, somebody like John Cage, the American composer of the early 20th century, would say, well, sound can be music and music can be sound.
Whereas we tend to say, well, you've got to put certain combinations together of music, of sorry, of harmony, melody, rhythm, tonality, timbre, that sort of thing to constitute music.
So whether it's the actual sounds or whether it's musical sounds that would make contact with so-called extraterrestrials, I couldn't say.
So, you know, having talked about that and the musical mediums, is there anything else we need to add to that part of the discussion, do you think?
No, the only thing I would say is that both of those subjects are very prevalent.
There's a great deal of activity there, both past and present.
And it's certainly worthy of investigation because most people studying paranormality, parapsychology, etc., do not do it from a musical angle.
And I think that's a big hole in the research, which music is intangible and so is the paranormal.
So perhaps there's some sort of connection there.
I can tell you a story that I've never told you before.
And, you know, if you work in media, sometimes strange things happen to you.
Early in my career, I worked at a radio station in Worcester, serving Herefordshire and Worcestershire called Radio Wyvern.
And I loved that place.
It was based in an old house that was one of the many houses that the composer Elgar lived in.
It had a beautiful gazebo that he put there, and that the people who converted it into a radio station, I think it's now gone back to residential use, this house.
It's called The Holly's in Barbourne.
Basically, Elgar's Enigma Variations was playing on air, but was also being played to dignitaries at the launch of the station on a record player in the reception area.
And when they came to turn the monitor speaker down for the radio station, they found that the music playing in reception was in perfect sync with the music Playing on the radio, something that is probably impossible to happen.
If I was going to be completely skeptical, I would say that it was a coincidence, but I would then add it's a very meaningful coincidence because it wasn't just, well, one of those things, a jot, as Mary Rose Barrington used to call them.
It sounds a very sort of strange synchronicity, if you like, that, as you say, once in a million times could happen, but why did it happen?
Is there any significance there?
The specific event you're talking about, I wasn't there, and so I'm not sure what to make of it, to be honest.
I do know that there's quite a bit of information about Elgar's sort of mystical side, if you like, that he was involved with, in fact, he collaborated with Algernon Blackwood, the occultist and author, and he produced some music for one of his plays.
And of course, Elgar's Dream of Garantius was all about a near-death experience, if you like, the music itself itself.
His ghost has actually been seen at a place called Fiddleworth.
And to be honest, I don't know where Fiddleworth is, but I should have looked it up to find out exactly where it is.
So there is certainly a sort of a mystical side to Elgar, which quite a few people don't know about.
And this could be a manifestation.
Well, we always thought there was something about it.
If ever I was in that building on my own, and the newsroom was the front living room of that building.
So it was right in the front of the building overlooking the front garden.
And just outside the newsroom was a stairway, one of a couple of stairways that were in that building to go to upper floors.
And at the base of that stairway, which was just before the studios, and then you would go up the stairs to go to the boss's office, and then up some more stairs to go to the administrative offices there, which were all part of this converted house.
Very often it would go, even on boiling summer's days, deathly, deathly cold, quite literally.
And you just got that sense that there was something there, along with the odd creeks and stuff like that.
And if you were on your own there, it was sometimes a deeply creepy experience.
Maybe it still is for people who live there now.
It's been converted back into residential.
Yes, I mean, people's senses about these things vary quite a lot.
My cottage is a 15th century cottage and it's very low and beamed and thatched and so on and so forth.
And some people say, well, it must be very spooky here.
And I don't get a thing out of it being spooky.
When I've been to so-called haunted locations, I haven't felt phased about it at all.
But that could be a problem with me, that somebody else can feel these things.
They've got better senses than me in that sort of respect.
And so they can feel the things that pass me by.
Do you find in your research, and this is nothing to do with music particularly, but do you find in your research that the people who have experiences of a paranormal nature, maybe they experience ghosts as I once in my life did, and my father a couple of times, he was a police officer and had experiences at work.
And before that in the army, he had experiences.
But do you think that the people who have those experiences have to be predispositioned towards them?
In other words, they have to have an interest in these things?
I'm not sure that they have to have an interest in them, but I think that there must be something as part of their makeup.
Whether that makeup is a sort of an issue from gender, like we talk about female intuition, or whether it's something to do with their hereditary side of things, or whether it's a behavioral thing, maybe it's their upbringing, whether it's a combination of those things or something completely different that we don't understand.
I think there has to be something there, but it doesn't have to necessarily be they are predisposed towards it.
What about music and near-death experiences?
Again, something the newspapers are very much preoccupied with the moment.
You know, they are constantly running stories.
Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror in the UK have a lot of these stories, as you know, Melvin.
What part does music have in near-death experiences?
Is it merely, I say merely, is it merely being used to bring people back from the brink of death, or is there much more to it?
I think there's much more to it.
I think that in some cases it seems to bring people back.
I have a well-researched example of that.
And also, I think it's when they don't actually survive that they hear music, which is probably the majority of the times, just before they then literally physically die.
But they either recount hearing the music or other people with them at the time also hear the music.
And then they pass on, quite often they're happier for it, the people that are dying, because they've heard some music welcoming them, not just angelic music, you know, the angels fluttering around saying, welcome to heaven or anything like that, but nevertheless, it gives them some sort of pleasure.
The weirdest dream that I had in my life was a dream about dying.
And I dreamt that I was ascending through clouds.
And I've never had this dream since.
It only happened once.
It was in the 1980s, and as a lot of things were.
But I can remember having this dream, and I hadn't been drinking or anything like that before.
It was a perfectly normal night.
And I hadn't been watching anything on TV that might have suggested this or brought it to me.
But I was ascending up through tiers and tiers of clouds that were becoming ever more silver and bright to the music getting ever louder of Ravel's Bolero, which you can remember, Torville and Dean skated to it.
It became very famous.
You know, dumb, da-da-da-dum, very famous piece of classical music.
And I always felt that if I was going to confront the process of dying, which we all must, it might be a little bit like that.
Well, what do you think about that dream and that strange cathartic experience that night?
Yes, I mean, I can't possibly explain your dream.
There are so many books about dreams and they quite often contradict each other that no doubt there would be for every book about dreams there are, there could be an explanation as to what you experienced.
As far as the sounds are concerned, Ravel's Bolero obviously has that very distinct continuous rhythm.
And I think that a sceptical scientist such as Susan Blackmore would say, well, it's just part of things firing off in your brain that's creating that sort of pulsating sound inside of your head.
I mean, not quite tinnitus, which is a different sensation altogether, but nevertheless, some sort of throbbing sensation that indicated to you it was Ravel's Bolero.
Other people have heard sort of the heavenly choirs, that's quite popular in the culture, as well as quite specific pieces of music and even being told, if you like, to write a piece of music themselves, which is a very strange one.
What people who've been through a near-death experience and been instructed to write something or people who've had that in a dream?
No, not a dream at all.
Somebody who I interviewed at length a few years ago was a chap who almost died in a train accident.
He got dragged along the line for a while because his coat got caught in the door as it had been shut.
And he had visions, but as he was recovering, he was very close to death on several occasions, music started coming into his head.
And it was completely different to music to what he was used to.
He was a youngish chap and quite interested in sort of popular music, if you like.
And this was sort of like Vaughan Williamsy classical inverted commas type music, which he then decided, well, he'd got to write this down.
And he subsequently managed to write it down with help from people because he had no idea how to write music down and had it performed in Cambridge, which I went to the first performance of it.
Now, isn't that interesting?
I think, did this man write a book about that?
Because I think I've interviewed him.
Yes, he did.
Again, fairly recently, his name was David.
David Ditchfield.
Yep, David Ditchfield.
I had him on here.
What a fascinating experience.
Not everybody believed it, but it was nevertheless an amazing experience.
This guy said goodbye to his girlfriend, didn't he?
She got on the train, but he found his coat was closed in the door of the train, dragged him along the platform.
He was dragged onto the track and suffered some horrendous injuries.
Well, that was a wonderful experience there because not for him, but I was attending a rehearsal and one of my students at the time was playing the Rodrigo Guitar Concerto.
And there was this chap stood at the back of the church.
And I got chatting to him.
This was David Ditchfield.
And I said to him, well, blow me down.
I'm doing research into exactly this subject.
And on the night of the first performance of his work was the performance of the Rodrigo Guitar Concerto.
And so we met up again and arranged to do the interview and so on and so forth.
And the piece of music is actually quite impressive.
I mean, I have a recording of it and obviously attended the first performance as well.
And how was the message delivered to him?
Well, I think it was via sort of sounds that he heard in his head, as far as I recall, which he then attempted to orchestrate and write down again with help.
I think he did a lot of it on a sort of a keyboard that allows you to produce these effects, the traditional electronic keyboard.
And that's how he got it down.
But it was certainly outside of his musical, his normal musical experience.
And it was alien music to him because that wasn't his sort of music scene, if you like.
And it's going to be very difficult to prove whether that came from the other side, whether it was something that was in his subconscious, although I know that he says absolutely, you know, he wasn't particularly connected to any of these things before all of this.
This was all new to him.
So who knows?
Well, indeed, I mean, there's a word that I don't use, and that is proof, because it's just far too final.
As soon as you find proof, somebody comes along and disproves it.
Now, our internet connection between us is getting slightly ropey.
It's still possible to hear you, but there are some breakups.
So let's deal with this just at the end quickly if we can, Melvin.
Music and healing.
Those who say that music has a healing benefit to it.
We know that the dentist will sometimes play you soothing music to make you more perhaps amenable to the treatment, but does it go beyond that?
Yes, I think it does, because I think this is where the world of music therapy and genuine music healing have to start sort of sliding apart a little bit.
And when music has a definite physical effect on people, allows them to do things they can't normally do, other than just being terribly relaxing.
And isn't that nice while the dentist drills away?
I think that that's where it comes into a different world.
There's something called the Mozart effect, which is meant to be to allow people to be able to be intellectually more stimulated, if you like, more capable by listening to music like Mozart's music, not specifically Mozart's.
There are examples of people being taken out of comas from hearing music that's jolted them out of a coma situation.
There's the effect of Baroque rhythm on people.
I mean, again, there's a great big list.
There's people actually having operations, physical operations along the lines of amputation without anesthetic that have been able to have been taken out of their body through the sound of music.
So maybe more science than paranormality, but certainly unusual and not totally explained.
The fact that the brain may be influenced, and we know this, we've seen that trance music so-called is supposed to get people in various states, perhaps in some cases assisted by hallucinogenics that they might imbibe.
But we know that these things happen.
Yes.
And I mean, this does cross different cultures because I've witnessed myself dervishes doing their dancing, their so-called whirling dervishes.
And the music takes them into a different state.
And how they manage to do this, I do not know, because I mean, you've got a circle of men in these long robes, et cetera, twirling around and around and around, or whirling, I should say.
And they're not crashing into each other at all.
They're going quite fast.
And it's governed by this music.
Without the music, they can't do it.
How bizarre.
Well, music and paranormality, it's a subject that is covered in that book.
If people want to read that book, where would they go?
Can they find out about it on your website?
Yes.
Yes, it's on my website, or they can get it in the usual shops, water stands, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's available.
Right.
And it's called?
It's called an Encyclopedic Dictionary of Music and the Paranormal.
Melvin, thank you very much for doing this on this boiling hot day.
And we've had a couple of technical interruptions here while we've been doing this, which my listener will not be aware of.
But thank you very much indeed.
I look forward to seeing you soon.
It's a pleasure.
Thanks for having me on again.
Melvin Willen, who will be one of the guests on the Unexplained Live cruise that is being put on by Tue Morella.
And I will be hosting the events with five top speakers from October the 28th.
If you want to know more about that, the special website for it is theunexplainedlive.com.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained online.
Until next we meet, here in the boiling heat at the moment, it is hot and sticky in here, let me tell you.
Hopefully things will improve as we get a little more advanced in the year.
But 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 and stay cool.
Take care.
Thank you.
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