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March 27, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
51:32
Edition 713 - Richard Estep Update
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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.
It's my big portentous voice there for a change.
I'm trying to make the most of the full frequency microphone that I'm using.
Weird weather here in London, since you asked.
The rain is hammering on my window at the moment.
It's supposed to be springtime, and I live in hope that it will eventually arrive.
All of nature, I've got to tell you, seems to be convinced that it has arrived, because all of the squirrels in the park and the deer and all the rest of it, they're all running round.
And they seem to have decided it's time to get a move on and do things.
I hope that everything is okay with you, and thank you very much for all of the messages that you've sent me, the messages of support and thoughts about the show, and the guest suggestions, and everything else that you sent me.
Remember, when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you make use of this show.
Always good to know for my own personal market research.
And no, I'm not keeping a dossier or a file on you.
It's just nice to know.
And it gives me that nice, warm feeling as I sit here in my anonymity.
You know, just nice to know who's there.
Nice to know that there are people there and that I'm constantly reaching new people.
Right, the guests on this show, two people, two people who were on my podcast, on my TV show recently.
And as you know, on the TV show, it all moves a little faster.
You have to make all of those commercial breaks and I've always got somebody counting me down.
So the format of the TV show is a little bit different.
You know, sometimes we have to keep people to 15 or 20 minutes.
And sometimes, to be honest with you, that's enough.
That's the right duration.
Mostly, we try to get the best out of the people.
And even if it's a longer conversation, if it's 30 minutes or more than that, I try and cover all of the main points.
And I think, famous last words, that I've pretty much done that here.
Guest number one, Richard Estep, paramedic, originally from Britain working in the United States, who's made a name for himself as an author and also a man who's on TV on ghost investigation programs.
His latest book is about Fort Mifflin in Philadelphia, which, as you're about to hear, and I had never heard about Fort Mifflin until a week or so ago when I read the book.
Fort Mifflin played a vital part in not only the history of America, but also the history of the United Kingdom, of Britain.
You'll hear why.
That in the 1700s and onwards, it was a very, very important place.
And I never knew it existed.
And I'm glad that I do now.
And I'm glad that I know the stories of those people who fought so bravely and, you know, suffered so much to defend that place.
You'll hear why.
And the history is explained very well in a way that I could never do it by Richard Estep.
So it's his new book.
And I think I was the first interview with him about the book.
The book has only been out for just over a week now about Fort Mifflin.
And it's various hauntings that appear to go through various eras and ages.
But you'll hear more about that in the conversation.
Well worth hearing if you didn't hear it the first time round.
Also worth hearing a second time.
After that, a short conversation with Fevzi Turkalp, bringing us right up to date with artificial intelligence and the idea that was posed by one newspaper that I read in the last week that suggested that we might be nearing the point or approaching the point of AI singularity.
In other words, where we become the technology and the technology becomes us.
Assimilation, as I think they called it on Star Trek with Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Interesting, eh?
So the gadget detective Fevzi Turkalp is here in the second conversation.
Both taken from the TV show and just to remind you, some of the conversations are different on TV.
And they are to do with the constraints that you have on television.
Television has advantages.
You can see the maps and diagrams.
But it has disadvantages in that it is more tightly constrained for time than anything else that I've ever known.
You know, we have a lot more flexibility to move things around on the radio than we would ever have on TV.
So just so you know that, and, you know, the conversations that we do here specifically for the podcast are recorded here, you know, at home, so I can make them any length I want to.
And I have to say, you know, some people, like I say, are at their best if you give them 15 or 20 minutes.
You know, it isn't, it wouldn't be beneficial to do any more.
And the time constraints focus a lot of people who come on the show.
Certainly focuses me, I hope.
Okay, thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work.
Let's get to item one on this edition of The Unexplained in the springtime, supposedly, of 2023.
First up, before Fevzi Turkhup, this is Richard Estep.
Richard Estep moved from the United Kingdom in the late 1990s, works in the States, as you may have heard on my podcast with him, as a paramedic.
He writes and he broadcasts about the paranormal.
He is a prolific author.
I think it's 32 books up to now.
The one that we're going to talk about was released a few days ago, maybe the 33rd.
He'll tell us.
He's covered topics that are astonishingly wide-ranging, from hospital hauntings, one on a haunted asylum, which we did a podcast about, Asylum 49, a book on serial killers, one on UFOs in Colorado,
and a lot of haunting material here, including The Fort That Saved America, or The Ghosts That Saved America, which is based on a well-known military fort that was under siege by the British in 1777.
Let's talk with the man.
Richard Estep is here.
Richard, thank you for doing this.
How are you?
I'm doing well, Howard, and thank you for inviting me on tonight.
My pleasure.
For people who are seeing you for the first time, certainly hearing you maybe for the first time on this show, talk to me briefly, would you, and bring them up to speed about you.
I said you're a Brit who moved to the UK in 1999.
You had an interest in all of these things we're about to talk about before then.
But just talk to me about the process of becoming the author that you are now.
I mean, 32 books.
Absolutely, Howard.
And for those of you that are seeing me for the first time, I apologize.
I have a great face for radio and the keyboard, not so much for the camera.
Two of us.
But yeah, I have been a paranormal enthusiast and investigator for about 25 years now.
Grew up in Leicestershire in England, small village called Syston.
And my grandparents had a haunted home in Kingston-upon-Hull.
And that's where my love of ghosts developed, hearing stories about this haunted house.
In the 90s, before there was any such thing really as paranormal reality TV, you really had to go to the library in the bookstore in order to get any information.
So I would haunt the bookshops and libraries, no pun intended, read as much as I could.
And I grew up just wanting to write the kind of books I'd enjoyed reading by gentlemen like Peter Underwood, authors of that nature.
And so that's kind of what I'm still doing today with, yeah, 30-something books, ghosts, hauntings, UFOs, true crime, and primarily military history.
And this book, The Ghost That Saved America, was born from my love of military history and the paranormal.
When I heard there was such a thing as a Revolutionary War fort or war of independence fort, depending on which side you're on, that was haunted, and they were going to offer an English guy the keys.
How do you say no to that?
Well, you don't.
And this place, as I discovered as I read through the book today, has got an astonishing history to it.
And it's a history that Americans are well versed in.
We're probably not here, and we are the poorer for not being.
And I love the fact that your first, is it two or three chapters in this book explain and outline the history because you can't know and you can't get a handle on why this place is important and why this place is so impactful until you know a bit of the history.
And I have to say to my shame, I didn't.
So I was very pleased that you filled me in on it.
So take us back, if you would, Richard, to 1777.
It's Philadelphia, this fort which is on a horrible muddy island.
I mean, the way you describe this place, it's not the greatest location in the world by the sounds of it.
You know, talk to me about why it became important.
Absolutely.
And, you know, not to your shame, Howard, because Brits, we really aren't taught much about the War of Independence or the Revolutionary War.
So it's something that I was never taught in school.
So essentially, 1775 sees the outbreak of the War of Independence with the so-called shot that was fired around the world on Lexington Battle Green.
And so by 1777, the November of 1777, the war has been going on for about two and a half years.
It was not the easy victory that the British expected over these upstart colonials.
In fact, the British have been given a bloody nose more than a few times.
Philadelphia on the Delaware River is this key strategic city.
It is a maritime hub.
It's a harbor.
What the British cannot forage from the land that has to come in by means of merchant shipping and the Royal Navy.
And the only way to supply Philadelphia and the British Army that is garrisoned there is by the Delaware River.
So we had, of course, the mightiest navy in the world.
We had the ability to move a lot of supplies by sea.
There was just one problem.
A choke point on the Delaware River, further downstream, two forts facing each other across the river.
One was called Fort Mercer, the other Fort Mifflin.
These two forts were loaded for there with cannon, mortars, musketmen, you name it.
And any shipping that was going to come up the Delaware to try and supply Philadelphia had to sail past the guns of Fort Mifflin and Fort Mercer.
And when you tried that, you were essentially sailing into the cannon's mouth.
So quite understandably, the British military strategy was in order to secure Philadelphia, we have to own the Delaware.
And the only way to do that is to remove these two forts.
British, excuse me, Hessian mercenaries, German mercenaries, were used to try and attack Fort Mercer unsuccessfully.
Fort Mifflin was besieged.
And for six weeks, the garrison of this fort, which is located on what's called Mud Island, hardly the most appetizing name for a location, is put under siege.
The British land artillery batteries.
They use the guns of the Royal Navy's men of war, their ships of the line.
And Fort Mifflin holds out and holds out and holds out for about six weeks with just 400 men.
And finally, the British have had enough.
As winter is coming in, the weather's getting foul.
Conditions inside the fort are appalling.
Men have no shoes.
They're freezing.
They're getting trench foot, but they are still holding out.
And while this is going on, George Washington and his Continental Army are rearming.
They're reorganizing.
They're getting ready to mount an effective opposition on land.
Fort Mifflin is buying them time every day that it halts out.
So the British force the issue.
And there is mid-November 1777, an attempt to pulverize the fort.
And at the highlight of this cannonade, Howard, more than a thousand cannonballs an hour are falling on the fort.
A thousand cannonballs.
It is raining iron on these poor men inside the fort.
And by the end of the day, there's almost nothing left.
The fort's been pretty much pulverized.
There are a few buildings still standing.
The commander of the fort, who'd only been in charge for two days, because the last commander had quit, the commander of the fort says, all right, enough's enough.
Half of my men are dead.
We're taking what we can.
We're cutting our losses.
We can't hold out any longer.
They leave Fort Mifflin.
They burn down any other structure still standing.
And when the Redcoats turn up the following morning, November the 16th, expecting to storm the fort, they find nothing but the dead.
And Fort Mifflin finally fell without a fight on the ground, but it held out long enough for Washington to put his strategy into effect.
And so you can make a very real argument that Fort Mifflin was the fort that saved people.
So this was the pivot.
And those people were heroes.
Hands down, they were.
No question.
And the British took losses doing it.
I mean, a major ship of the line, the HMS Augusta, has to be mentioned, exploded in a massive fireball so loud it shook the windows in Philadelphia miles away.
The Royal Navy, the Royal Marines, and the British Army tried their very, very best to take the fort and were unable to do so.
So I, of course, we all have bias, Howard.
You know, the story of Fort Mifflin is a uniquely American one, but for me, as a Brit and someone who was in the British Territorial Army, I always like to point out as well that those poor lads that were sent halfway around the world to fight for a king they maybe didn't necessarily believe in his cause were heroes too in their own way.
And you say in the book, you make the point very clearly that you got sympathy on both sides.
I do.
And my whole study of the Revolutionary War kind of reflects that, you know.
I think it, I was, just as a slight aside, I was in Concord and Lexington last year, the first battlefield of the Civil War.
British soldiers are buried in the streets of Concord.
In fact, there are graves there that say, here lies an unknown British soldier.
And they have flowers and they're well attended.
So the Americans are very respectful of the British war dead.
But I do think it's important to look at the poor lads that fought on both sides of this conflict.
And I think you do a great job of explaining the history.
And thank you very much because I'd never heard of Fort Mifflin.
I kind of know Philadelphia.
I'd no idea about this place and its important role.
And I think it was important that you explain the history.
And some people writing a ghosty book would have written, I don't know, five pages on, oh, it was very important and here's why, and would have left it at that.
And you didn't.
And I think that's a good thing about the book from my point of view.
So the siege of Fort Mifflin began in November 1777.
It's not just the people who died on both sides, though, that contribute to the ghostliness of the place, is it?
I mean, we'll get into some of the more modern factors.
But looking at that era, this fort was used for discipline as well, wasn't it?
I mean, there was one person hanged there who you think makes an appearance when you go and investigate it.
But it was also a place where, you know, people who were deserters or were not obeying the rules, it reminded me a little bit of the accounts of Gloucester Prison, the way that that was used in World War II by the Americans to house its prisoners.
There were prisoners housed there, too.
Are you thinking of Shepton Mallet by any chance?
Yes.
And Gloucester Jail, I think.
But Shepton Mallet.
Oh, I didn't know about Gloucester.
I did write a book about Shepton Mallet and spent some time there.
The Americans actually killed more of their own men, more people at Shepton Mallet than the prison did in its entire history as a British civil prison, which is just beyond belief.
So if you believe in the so-called stone tape theory, where events that are big and important impact themselves on locations, this very impressive and for America incredibly old structure is going to be one of those places, isn't it?
If anywhere's going to be, this place is.
Well, you have a confluence of reasons, I think, the fort could be haunted.
And, you know, checking my own expectations and biases at the door, I fully expected to go in and think, well, it's a battlefield and there were lots of deaths here, violent deaths.
You know, of course, there'll be ghosts.
But you also have to look at the fact that its neighbor on one side is Philadelphia International Airport.
And the tour guides have been asked on at least one occasion, why did they build the fort so close to the airport?
It's a very forward-thinking man, George Washington, is the answer.
Although the fort was actually sighted by the British.
But so it's also on a major waterway.
It is on the Delaware.
In fact, Fort Mifflin's cannons still work.
They let me fire one.
And so every time a U.S. Navy ship passes the fort, they will fire the cannon as a salute.
So you have this major waterway.
You have cargo ships and oil tankers and stuff going back and forth all hours of the night, planes coming in just 300 feet above your head, landing and taking off at Philly International.
You have a U.S. Army base right next door.
What was the U.S. Navy Yard, Philadelphia Navy Yard, is a little further upstream as well.
And then Philadelphia is right there, this major population center.
So you have this big massive humanity, this big massive energy, all of it creating, some people think anyway, a potential source to fuel paranormal activity.
A great place.
And, you know, it is, it's a heritage site.
They have guides.
It's tended and maintained.
The flag, as we saw in the photograph at the beginning of this, flies over it.
So it's a very relevant place today.
It is.
And they also do a terrific job of keeping the past alive.
They have reenactors so that you will see red coats and you will see continental soldiers walking around firing muskets at each other in order to keep this history alive for the public, which I think is a wonderful thing.
You know, historical reenactment allows us to connect with the past in a way that just reading a book or even visiting the location can't.
Seeing the men, smelling the gun smoke, you know, those kind of things allow, they really do keep history alive, Howard.
And there is this theory that you are stimulating paranormal activity when you reenact things that would have been familiar to the occupants of the fort hundreds of years ago.
And I think at one point, and we'll get into this in the next segment after commercials when we've, you know, when we start talking about the ghosts, but at one point you play to whatever might be there, I think in the nighttime when you're there, you play a familiar, what would have been a familiar song, aren't you, just to see if it gets any response?
Yeah, I'm a big fan of the song Over the Hills and Far Away, which anybody that thrilled to the adventures of Richard Sharp on TV will know that song.
Sean Bean, of course, is the Napoleonic era soldier.
But period music helps evoke the mood, you know.
We fired the cannon, we fired muskets, we brought the past alive during my investigation at Fort Mifflin.
And something as simple as me wearing a red coat.
I had a red coat and sash that I was wandering around in.
And I thought, you know, I don't want to be perceived as being disrespectful, but it's probably been, you know, one of those things that would perhaps stimulate a response and seem to.
How did you get permission to go there for I think it was four days?
How did that happen?
Well, there's been at least one good history book on the fort.
For anyone who's looking for just a pure history, I do recommend it.
It's called Fort Mifflin, Valiant Defender of the Delaware.
But nobody had really looked at the haunting before.
And also, some of the stories of ghosts at Fort Mifflin, I think, do not have quite the basis In historical fact, that many people believe.
So I had been doing an event at Gettysburg, promoting some Civil War ghost books that I'd written, and met one of the key staff at Fort Mifflin, and we got to talking and had pretty much arranged for me to go in and research this and tried to tell the story as best I could.
No money changed hands.
They didn't ask me to tell it a certain way or push a certain narrative because I don't work that way.
They gave me the access to the fort for what would ultimately be five days and nights.
And they helped you.
That was something that you don't see in many places.
They actively helped you.
Well, I think that one of the, like so many haunted locations, we know times are tough right now.
And in order to keep the lights on, the ghosts are a very attractive thing.
In fact, many location owners will tell you, come for the ghosts and stay for the history, you know?
And I find that with my books, to be completely frank with you, Howard, I get to kind of full speed read this history they may not otherwise have learned about because they come in wanting the spooky story and the ghostly side of things.
Maybe they'll learn something about the War of Independence as well along the way.
And I really do love that.
I did.
Stay there.
Richard Estep in the United States, A Brit in America.
A great book.
It's only been out a few days.
This may be the first interview that he's done about it, but even if it isn't, it must be one of the first.
I went through it today.
It's about 275, I think, pages long and is a great read.
I hate history.
You know, I was lousy at history at school, and I was bored by history.
But I was interested in his account of this particular piece of history and the role of the men and the women who were on that fort, Fort Mifflin, Philadelphia.
An Englishman abroad, Richard Estep in America is here.
32 books on paranormality, the latest of which was released just a few days ago, The Ghost That Saved America, about the highly haunted Fort Mifflin, which until I looked at this book today, I'd never heard of before, Philadelphia, USA.
Back to Richard.
Lots to talk about, Richard.
So you arrive there for the four-day investigation.
And the first person you meet is the guide Greg.
And one of the first things you refer to is the fireplace there.
And you describe it as a very active spot.
Yeah.
So the fireplace is in the enlisted men's barracks.
None of the buildings at Fort Mifflin are really original to the siege because they were all flattened by the Royal Navy and the Royal Artillery.
But they have all been rebuilt.
And Fort Mifflin is one of the longest running, if not the longest running, continuous operated military establishments in the continental United States.
It saw service right up through the Korean War as an arms depot.
And during the Civil War, it served as a prison for not only Union prisoners, but Confederate war prisoners also, and civilians who in what was not his finest hour, President Abraham Lincoln had locked up because they essentially opposed his policies.
The enlisted men's barracks is where a lot of people sleep when they come to Fort Mifflin.
This is where, you know, junior men, privates, soldiers would have spent the night.
There are a series of bunk beds in there now, which I want to say the Boy Scouts built so that people can stay there overnight and experience it for themselves.
And that fireplace, we watched a fire guard essentially topple itself over, something that had been standing for weeks on its own, quite happily, toppled over in front of us.
And we had the sound of disembodied footsteps just pacing up and down, up and down in that room.
Well, in fact, you had that a few times, didn't you, over those days?
And that's very common at Fort Mifflin and also other military locations, Howard.
I mean, I have a couple of friends that work at the Tower of London.
And the flesh and blood sentries more than once have heard the sounds of footsteps, bootsteps, you know, walking in that special cadence that coppers and sentries have.
Not too fast, not too slow, nice measured tread.
So we got a lot of that in the enlisted men's barracks.
What about the ghost of the screaming woman?
I think you refer to this person as possibly having been somebody called Elizabeth Pratt.
Yeah, there have been a couple of different stories about the ghost of the screaming lady.
And let's talk about the fact first that it's very difficult to separate fact from fiction in a lot of cases of supposed hauntings.
A number of visitors to Fort Mifflin have reported hearing just this blood-curdling shriek, this scream that sounds like a woman in distress.
And on more than one occasion, I know police have been called because somebody thought a woman was being attacked.
And so one of the stories out there is that this lady, the screaming lady, was supposedly the wife of an officer whose daughter, shock horror, ran off with an enlisted man, a sergeant.
So, you know, kind of eloping with somebody beneath her social station.
Oh, no, how could we possibly do that?
And mom had hanged herself at Fort Mifflin in the shame of it had all been too much to bear, which it turns out when you dig into the history and you dig into the archives, there is no evidence to support that whatsoever.
But, you know, urban legends and these stories take on a life of their own.
And one of the key questions I had, because we heard this screaming ourselves a couple of times, was, is this even a human?
Are we, you're on the river, you're on the water, is this a seabird?
Is this a nocturnal animal, a critter?
Anyone that's ever heard, especially on your British audience, foxes at night.
You know, it sounds as if murder is being done if you hear two foxes going at it with one another.
Is this even human at all?
So that's one of the first things that I wanted to try and answer.
But the legend of the screaming woman goes back decades, and I interviewed several people, very experienced investigators, that swear they heard the sound of a woman, not an animal, screaming in very close proximity to the officers' quarters when they were at Fort Mifflin and were completely unable to explain it away.
And the footsteps omnipresent.
On the first night, just after you've had some pizzas delivered, I note, you heard strange footsteps and they were the kind of footsteps that appear to go back and forth.
And you believe this was the sentry literally marking out his posting.
Yes, you have five casemates, they're called.
Actually, there are more than that, but five of them are conjoined.
And really, a casemate is just a brick enclosure.
You walk inside, and it's absolutely pitch black.
And these were used as places of internment, imprisonment.
And according to newspaper reports from the Civil War era, so we're moving on a little bit past the Revolutionary War side of things now, you had around 100 political prisoners crammed into one very narrow space, one bucket to act as a toilet for everybody.
The water lapping around their ankles, you know, bodily waste, all that kind of stuff, the most terrible conditions.
And sentries would walk back and forth, back and forth in the hallway that is outside the casemates that connects them all, just making sure that nobody was trying to escape.
And so the sounds of those footsteps are very, very common at Fort Mifflin.
And we experienced it twice ourselves and were unable to satisfactorily explain it away.
Casemate 11, I think it is, used to house problematic prisoners, deserters, one of them, a man called William Howe.
Now, William Howe, apparently the only man to be hanged for his desertion there, even though there was an appeal to President Abraham Lincoln directly, he wasn't given clemency.
So he was hanged at Fort Nifflin, and he was a very, very popular man.
He's also a very popular man with ghost hunters because apparently he puts in appearances on a fairly regular basis.
Yeah, now, William Howe was not the only execution at Fort Mifflin.
He was the only one, though, that they sold tickets to his execution.
Lord, really?
It was like the big event that you could go buy a ticket to watch William Howe, this deserter, be executed, be hanged.
And they sold tickets for that, even though he was popular, apparently, with his colleagues, his fellow servants.
Yeah, and his story is kind of sad and understandable.
He had served honorably by all accounts, had fought in battle.
And the reason that he and several of his comrades had deserted and gone back to their homes was that their unit had been struck with terrible dysentery.
I mean, the kind of debilitating illness that will kill you if it's not treated.
And the army at the time just was not capable of taking care of that.
And so these men went home.
And that's where they found William Howe at his home.
They sent the local sheriff to arrest him on charges of desertion.
A gunfight ensued in which one of the law enforcement officers was shot dead.
And so for this, William Howe was brought to Fort Mifflin, thrown into Casemate 11, which is essentially a single cell underground.
It's dank, it's moldy, there are insects, it's solitary confinement, Howard.
And I spent some time in Casemate 11.
It would be an absolutely miserable place to spend your time.
It really, really would.
And he was kept in there.
And then on the last day of his life, with his appeal for clemency, not accepted by the president, which was odd because Lincoln did love to commute death sentences.
His generals were really not fond of that about him.
I kind of like it, though.
Howe was brought out and before a packed crowd was hanged.
So it's been said by mediums such as Chris Fleming that he's around still and he's pretty angry about the fact that they turned his execution into a spectacle, a public spectacle, which was unique in Fort Mifflin's history.
You know, the firing squads and other executions were not done in the public eye, but this one was.
And I think that that left a stain.
It was not the fort's finest hour.
It was not the authorities' finest hour.
And I think that if William Howe is still there, he's justifiably angry about what they turned his death into, a circus sideshow.
And not even an appeal to President Abraham Lincoln saved him.
No.
And they turned it into a spectacle, which is horrific, you know, by today, well, by the standards of that time, too, I think.
You have numerous attempts, successful in many cases, according to the book, to communicate with whatever may be there by the use of technology.
You use a thing called the Phasma box.
What's the Phasma box?
It's a very controversial device, and I'm still on the fence where it is concerned.
Let me be very upfront about that.
There are some paranormal investigators that will tell you it is meaningless and worthless, and others will tell you it's the best thing since sliced bread.
In my experience, and I've used this device for many hours, it will absolutely waste 95% of your time and then deliver a knockout result instead of getting ready to throw it away.
Absolutely.
I mean, you came across with this thing, I think.
I'm sorry, here I am jumping in again, but you came across a foul-mouthed spirit using a variety of words, most of which we can't use on the air here, but one of which was a famous word often used by Clint Eastwood when he played Harry Callahan to describe some of the people that he had to deal with in his life.
I'm sure my audience will know what that word is, but you got that word from this, which is interesting because that word, are we allowed to use that?
I'm just looking at Mark here.
Asshole.
Okay, I love it.
Go ahead and make my day.
That word came through on the Phasma box, and that word you researched wasn't in use until the 1930s.
So here we get the first appearance of there being multiple things happening there, seemingly.
Yeah, because again, talking about bias, I had walked in there.
I should have kicked myself and thought about this before I went in, fully expecting it to be all muskets and red coats.
And, you know, you have to understand, though, a place like Fort Mifflin, generation after generation, has lived there.
And the haunting, I think, is kind of like a lair.
There are different strata.
And you never quite know who's going to turn up to try and communicate with you during some of those sessions.
So going into case mate 11, you fully expect to talk with someone like William Howe from the Civil War era or some of the other casemates.
There is a foul mouth individual known as the judge who shows a great distaste for female visitors and has been known to touch them inappropriately and call them some pretty offensive slurs.
But then, you know, you could also be getting more contemporary things.
Getting a name, A word like that, the A word that you mentioned, I won't mention it again, tells me a couple of things.
One is it helps date it to a time period.
You know, researching when a term first became common is, I think, an underused tool when you are doing investigation.
And secondly, it tells you that whatever you are getting is not generally, generally commercial radio, because in the U.S., if you are broadcasting over the airwaves and you use profanity, the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, will levy a huge, huge fine on you for each infraction.
Oh, indeed, I know.
And they used to have, I mean, this is not a subject of conversation in this particular time because I want to make the most of every minute, but they have, I think, still have the seven dirty words that you're not allowed to say.
So let's not say any of them here, even though we may slightly more liberal.
I don't want to test it.
But the value of that, how it is, when you're a researcher, many people have said, these devices are just picking up radio waves.
That's all they're doing.
You know, you're listening to Howard Show and you're thinking it's dead people.
Well, if you're using words like that, it ain't Howard Show, right?
The source of that word is something entirely different.
So something or somebody else was there.
And that was quite a spicy exchange.
It was.
It was indeed.
Have you any idea with whom that might have been?
It's very tempting to think it would be this character to judge because it fits with what we've heard about him.
We were warned about this individual, primarily in Casemate 5 is his favorite hangout, you know.
And he's generally not a happy character, doesn't like people, doesn't like company, and again, particularly dislikes that company if it's female, showing some of those good old-fashioned stereotypes of sexism that one would have seen 100, 150, 200 years ago.
Now, coming even further up to date, there was a brutal serial murder by the looks of it.
Four women, I think, all shot in the head, dumped by a biker gang called the Warlocks, I think.
And you think that at least one of them may have put in an appearance on the sessions that you did?
So the more contemporary we get with our history, the more gently I stare power because I don't want to upset relatives of anybody that might be involved.
That's understandable.
But what we do know for sure is that the bodies of at least four murder victims, which were attributed to this gang of motorcyclists, the Warlocks, were dumped either in the marshes right outside Fort Mifflin and Philadelphia International Airport, or were found washed up in the river, the Delaware, right there.
So it does make me wonder if there is any kind of connection between that and some of the activity that take place at the fort.
Couldn't prove it, couldn't say for sure, but certainly couldn't rule it out either.
I mean, there were all, I mean, there was, you know, fun for all the family there.
There was all kinds of activity that happened.
On page 94, you talk about a wire brush that seemingly appeared out of nowhere, almost like an apport, as they call it.
Also, a piece of equipment, a spirit box that we've discussed on this show many times before, a brand new battery in the thing that gets drained immediately.
So, I mean, this place was a gift that keeps on giving if you're doing investigations.
It is.
And so the only real downside to it, really, was there's so much ground to cover.
You really are spoiled for choice.
You could live there for a year and I think only begin to start tapping into its secrets and doing your research.
But yeah, absolutely.
The power drains are not uncommon.
It's why we always use factory fresh batteries straight out of the packaging into our devices.
And for one of them to go dead in 30 minutes is very, very atypical.
That energy went somewhere.
The big question is, where did it go?
And of course, one of the hypotheses regarding that is that it's being used somehow to generate, to fuel paranormal phenomena.
But we had investigators that were touched at Fort Mifflin.
Almost always, that was my female colleagues, not my male colleagues.
I had one of them practically faint and I had to catch her.
And this is a seasoned nurse who doesn't blink at the sight of blood or anything like that that almost went down like a sack of a ton of bricks up in the officers' quarters when things were getting a bit.
There were points at which the intensity of it was enormous.
There was a second floor.
Is that the officers' quarters?
Second floor you talk about, you know, that place seems to be absolutely replete with it.
It does.
And again, there are several theories as to why this might be.
But then other parts of it that you would expect to be more active weren't for me.
A good example is the Western Sally Port.
A Sallyport, for those that don't know, is most fortresses have them, and it's essentially a small controllable gate where if you're besieged, you can have a few of your soldiers nip out of the Sallyport, sally forth, do a quick raid, a bit of a hit and run, maybe snatch a prisoner, and then come back in, lock the gate.
The Sally Port was one of the high mortality areas during the bombardment.
It's said that I think the majority of men died in that part of the fort.
Very, very quiet for us.
So that defied my expectations.
There's much about the fort did.
So it wasn't always the areas you would think would be the most paranormally active that turned out to be that way.
Isn't that interesting?
One of the, I have to say, one of the, there are many atmospheric segments in this book.
One of them is where you describe the smell of cigarette smoke.
Now, that's something that, I mean, for me, when I was a kid and when I started my career, you know, a lot of people smoked.
I never did.
But it was something that, you know, was something that everybody did back in previous eras.
My father did until his health, you know, was suffered for it and he gave it up overnight.
But you smelt cigarette smoke and there was nobody among your group who smoked.
So that was unusual.
And then you heard even more footsteps.
Now, that was a very atmospheric description.
You know, it wasn't all hell breaking loose, but it was packed with atmosphere.
Thank you.
I'm not somebody that believes in spicing up a book like this.
The truth is, and I think you and I have talked about this before, Howard, 90% of what we do as paranormal investigators is very humdrum.
It's very, very boring.
And so I can at least try and evoke a sense of atmosphere and bring the reader into Fort Mifflin with me.
I want to try and let them have that experience, especially if they're unable to ever visit.
I want them to know what it feels like to walk those casemates and to walk the battlements and look out onto the Delaware and to fire the cannon.
I refuse to put a paranormal interpretation onto things I can explain away by non-paranormal means.
And so if I'm going to make a book like this worth your while, I'm hopefully going to make it feel as if you were right there with me and my team, tagging along.
And you do, absolutely.
I think you should be doing an audio.
If you haven't done it already, do the audiobook version of this and just read it.
It's in production.
Great.
Well, you know, read it like you've written it.
And you've got a guaranteed audience.
Now, listen, I've got a couple of questions from listeners I promised I would ask.
David in Ulster, Warwickshire, says I enjoy all of your books.
What is your opinion on paranormal tourism?
Some alleged haunted locations are being investigated on a weekly basis.
And I think in itself, this perpetuates the activity.
In other words, the more people go there, the more you're going to get stuff appearing.
What do you think about paranormal tourism?
Well, first of all, David, thanks for the kind words.
I appreciate them.
And Warwickshire, Warwick Castle, love it.
I think paranormal tourism is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, the revenue generated in some of these cases is helping keep historic locations open, and I am all for that.
On the other hand, you have to be careful because whenever money is involved, there is a tendency, there is a temptation to perhaps over-exaggerate and play things up that may not in fact be paranormal.
So a lot comes down to the integrity of the investigators and the integrity of the location owners.
And I think when you have integrity in both cases, it can be a wonderful thing.
And a constant stream of visitors does indeed, I think, perpetuate a haunting because it brings in a regular energy source.
And as you say, it depends on integrity on both sides.
Regular listener, Steve, this is an interesting one.
It says, have you ever had a ghost sighting when you had an unbeliever with you?
And did they believe it or were they still unconvinced?
I don't know.
Did you put yourself ever in that situation?
Great question, Steve.
The only time I've seen what I would consider a ghost, I was alone, but I used to give tours at a historic haunted hotel called The Stanley, which was the inspiration for The Shining by Stephen King.
And on more than one occasion, I had individuals come onto the tour who were avowed skeptics.
They would sit there at the beginning with the body language, like, you know, I don't want to be here.
I'm only here to keep him or her happy.
And then I want to go to the bar.
And by the end of it, they would be a sweat-soaked, terrified mess.
And something had happened to them that their entire worldview had changed.
I'll give you one example real quick, Howard.
A guy that was about 400 pounds of muscle was from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, big guy.
And I watched him become terrified.
He told me that a small childlike hand had touched him on the ankle.
He could feel the fingers as we were in a part of the hotel on that ghost tour.
And so, yeah, it does happen surprisingly often.
And when it happens, as in that case, it can be life-changing because there was somebody who wouldn't have believed it and had his view of things changed markedly.
Exactly.
The whole paradigm changes.
It's one thing to read the books and watch the shows and all that stuff.
Only when it happens to you and only when you are unable to explain it and you have that visceral reaction to it, I think, do you truly believe this kind of thing is possible.
And when you do, it's kind of a knockout punch to the way you look at the world and you re-evaluate everything.
The Fort Mifflin book, The Ghost That Saved America, has only been out for a few days, I think.
Is it available in the UK?
It is available on Kindle in the UK right now, and the hard copy, the paperback of it, will be out this coming Friday.
And I would love to hear what your listeners think of it.
Excellent.
Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I don't like history, and I enjoyed this.
It was very easily written.
So, you know, well done on that.
And I hope we talk again, Richard.
Thank you very much indeed.
I'd be delighted.
Thanks very much.
Wishing you a very good night.
Anglo-American Richard Estep.
I wish him all the greatest of success with all of his books, and particularly this new one about Fort Mifflin, that I thought was incredibly well put together and definitely worth reading.
Richard Estep.
Now Fevzi Turkhalp and the whole idea of AI singularity.
Are we becoming it and will it eventually become us?
With all of these things happening in artificial intelligence, deep fakes and all the rest of it, the pace of it seems to be exponential.
It's getting faster and faster and faster.
And this piece that I read this week suggested that we may be coming close to the singularity, technological singularity, where you and me become, I don't know, sounds a bit like Jean-Luc Picard, assimilated with the technology.
Now, we might have thought, if we were asking this question a year ago, that that was decades away.
If ever, it seems to be getting closer and closer.
So let's just quickly, in the minutes that remain tonight, and it's a good time in the midnight hour to ask this, Fevzi Turkop, the Gadget Detective, is on with us now.
Fevzi, here's looking at you, kid.
Hi.
How are you?
I'm very well, thanks.
How are you doing?
Hey, I like the microphone, Fevzi, for those who are viewing.
That's very, very appreciative.
That is the microphone that was used by Frasier, among many other people.
Amongst others, yeah.
And sadly, amongst other microphones, I've got one of those as well, which makes me deeply, deeply sad.
But you're looking inside a great.
Now, listen, singularity, it's on the way.
You've been telling me, and we've been talking about these things for years, and I don't think I've really been listening.
If it's coming, how close are we to it?
Okay, so it's probably worth a definition.
singularity is variously defined.
I would say it is the point at which general machine intelligence supersedes our own and it basically pulls away from our level of intelligence exponentially.
So, it's potentially the point at which we may lose control.
I think most people might suggest that it is coming.
There may be a difference of opinion of how many years or decades it will take.
Depends on how you define it.
But one of the interesting things in the article that you mentioned was that Elon Musk and others, and I hate to mention his name these days, but actually he's quite right about a lot of things still, just not Twitter.
Elon Musk and others have said that arguably the only way in which we will survive the rise of AI is to join with it, to integrate with it so that we have what they call the brain-consumper interface.
And he's got a company called Neuralink.
You may have heard of it.
It's the one where they're inserting probes into the brains of pigs, and trying to communicate between the machine and the pig's brain.
But also there's a company called Synchron, which a lot of people haven't heard of.
It's a very interesting company.
What's particularly interesting, they're doing similar work.
Their probe into the brain is much less invasive, and it's already succeeded in allowing people who would otherwise be cut off from actually sending emails by thought.
So what you have is when you have this brain-computer interface, you have the ability to augment the capabilities of the human brain by attaching it to the internet and faster processing.
You have the ability to have telepathy.
So we no longer have to do this.
I can just think a thought and it will just beam directly into your brain.
Not sure, or broadcasting would be directly into everyone's brain all at once, which is kind of scary.
So there's lots of options here.
And Synchrom is its seed funding, its startup funding came from DARPA.
DARPA is the R ⁇ D arm of the U.S. military.
The U.S. Department of Defense.
And DARPA wouldn't be putting money into it if it didn't see military applications for this.
So I think we are one of the last generations of pure humans because if we start implanting things, how many things can you implant before we cease to be purely human?
You know, how many?
Because in the beginning, we do it to make up for people who have got locked-in syndrome or people who are blind or people who have some other form of disability.
But it's a short step from there to augmentation.
So we augment our capabilities.
We enhance our brain capacity and ability to think.
We have telepathy.
We have the ability to move things at a distance.
All sorts of things become possible.
But because you're saying, at what point do we cease to be human?
And that, I think, is a huge worry.
And it's something that needs, like a lot of these things we talk about all the time, Febzi, it needs regulation.
And unfortunately, here's something else.
You know, our politicians who have, in my opinion, shamefully failed us in recent years on multiple levels, they're certainly not addressing this particular topic as far as I am aware.
This is something that we need to be looking at, don't we?
There won't be meaningful regulation of this because what we have is an AI arms race, both in the commercial world or as we've alluded to in the military.
So because America will be fearful of Russia or China taking huge leaps forward and having these sort of super soldiers and super smart weapons, they will develop them.
Just with the new, as we did with the nuclear arms race, we now have an AI arms race.
And unlike the nuclear arms race, it's much harder to control, much harder to monitor, verify.
So even though, Febzi, it won't be a week next Tuesday when we get this singularity.
We can now contemplate it.
We wouldn't have contemplated it five or ten years ago, but now it's a possibility.
Well, yeah, I mean, we already have the beginnings of it.
We already have implants into and onto the heads and brains of human beings.
Elon Musk is asking for permission to take his technology into humans, from pigs into humans.
So it is already with us.
It's just a little bit primitive.
The interface is a bit limited, let's say.
As that interface becomes smarter and the AIs become smarter, the ability for our brains to communicate with theirs will be amazing.
And I think in the long term, my personal view is that's our best chance for survival, because otherwise, if we continue not to develop other than over billions of years by Darwinian evolution, we're going to be completely superseded within decades.
Wow.
Look after yourself, Fevzi.
Thank you very much for talking with me about that, because I think it is something people need to think about.
And I wonder if in the midst of all of the rest of it that's happening at the moment, the rising prices, the political term war, I wonder who's got headspace for it, but we need to.
Fevzi Turkup, the official gadget detective, talking about AI singularity.
We will discuss that and other AI issues an awful lot more, I think.
Certainly looking at the news this last week.
And before that, you heard Richard Estep, Anglo-American author of books on ghosts and hauntings and, you know, a great deal of other weird and strange topics.
Very well-written material and a good guest and a good guy.
I definitely recommend him and all of his books, to be honest with you.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained Online.
So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been the Unexplained.
Until next we meet, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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