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April 16, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
41:42
Edition 718 - Darcy Weir, Mike Bara, Richard Craig
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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.
Hoping that everything is good with you as we hit the middle of April.
And already, unbelievably, we're cruising towards May.
In the United Kingdom, we have a big event coming up at the beginning of May.
That's going to be the coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla.
So that's going to cause a couple of public holidays here.
And also, a lot of international media will be coming to the United Kingdom, a lot of international leaders.
So for a little while, London is going to be the center of all things.
So watch your local media for more information about that.
Hope everything is okay with you.
Thank you very much indeed for the emails.
Please keep those coming.
If you want to get in touch with me, you can always go to my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
That is the place where you will find out exactly what's going on with me and with the show.
And if you want to email me, you can do that directly through the website, theunexplained.tv.
And you can send me an email from there.
Both of those places, of course, and this podcast are places where I can communicate with you directly.
In a way, of course, I cannot do on the TV show because obviously that's controlled by somebody else.
It's my show.
It's my title.
It's my, what do they call it these days, intellectual property.
But, of course, the TV show is controlled and broadcast by somebody else.
My Facebook page, my website, and this podcast are directly controlled by me with help from Adam, of course, who keeps the wheels greased and keeps the website running and keeps the shows coming out to you.
Now, two things from my TV show you're going to hear on this edition.
First of all, you're going to hear from filmmaker and friend of this show, Darcy Weir, and Mike Barra, very famous UFO writer.
They both feature in Darcy's documentary, which is about weird things that happened.
They say, and they say they have the evidence in this production, weird things that happened on the Apollo missions 1 to 11.
I think we've all heard of the stories where it is claimed the astronauts may have seen alien craft or even aliens themselves or strange lights.
This is going to amplify on that.
So you'll hear Darcy Weir and Mike Barra, first of all, and then second of all, right back to the United Kingdom, and a conversation with Richard Craig from my television show, who is the resident ghost hunter and investigator and chronicler of the ghosts and presences at what is claimed to be Britain's most haunted ancient castle, Chillingham Castle in Northumberland.
Great talker, great item, wanted to include it here.
And the reason that I put these here on the podcast is, of course, it is a way of preserving these conversations for posterity, if nothing else.
Now remember, when you get in touch with me by email, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
It's always lovely to hear from you wherever you are.
These have not been the easiest couple of weeks.
I'm battling again with the tinnitus, which has raised in level.
There's a whole story behind that, which I can't tell you at the moment.
But it's just one of those things, but it massively gets me down.
And I think at some point I'm going to have to take a little bit of a break from things.
Maybe to plan some new shows and new guests and just to give my ears a bit of a break.
But if you've gone through this or you're going through it, you know what I'm talking about.
Okay, first item then on this edition of The Unexplained.
First of all, Darcy Weir, then Mike Barra, about this new documentary presentation, which is to do with happenings on the Apollo missions.
It's called Secret Space UFOs Apollo 1 to 11 is the title of it.
Check it out online.
You're bound to find it.
So, Darcy Weir and then Mike Barra.
News release from this week.
Director Darcy Weir announces the anticipated release of Secret Space UFOs, Apollo 1 to 11, the new documentary series that explores the hundreds of UFO phenomena sightings during the Apollo missions 1 to 11.
James Fox, Darcy Weir, Mike Barra and Richard Dolan, all people we've had on this show, discuss this hidden history of UFOs in space and structures on the moon, which is very topical right now.
The cast composed by director and producer James Fox, director and producer and writer Darcy Weir, New York Times best-selling author Mike Barra, renowned UFO researcher and writer Richard Dolan, American former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, movie director Lee Lustig, NASA researcher Kerry, I mean we're getting the impression that a lot of people are involved in this.
Before we talk to Darcy Weir, friend of this show, let's see a little bit of the trail for this documentary series.
We were that first crew that was going to get a chance to fly this vehicle and test this vehicle that was going to take human beings to the moon.
Let's say we know all of these implications and let's say it's 1960 and we know some of these things.
Well that's part of the trailer.
The news release goes on to say the documentary discusses all the anomalies, UFO sightings and structures supposedly seen in the photographs and film from these moon missions with Darcy Weir and of course Mike Barra, two people known throughout this field, and how former astronaut Buzz Aldrin almost released his UFO experiences in full before retracting and protecting the cover-up, according to this news release, we have to say.
Let's get Darcy Weir on now.
We can't see him in pictures tonight, but we can hear him.
Darcy, thank you for doing this.
How are you keeping?
Hey, thank you for having me on again, Howard.
Good to talk with you.
No, I'm great.
A lot of people, if you go on YouTube, as you know, as we both know, you will see a million, maybe not a million, but certainly hundreds and probably thousands of videos of people claiming that the NASA astronauts who crewed Apollo and went to or around the moon or through space experienced things that were maybe extraterrestrial, were certainly bizarre, and these things are, quotes, covered up.
Is that the path that you're taking here?
Yeah, definitely.
We are looking at all the picture evidence and so photo and film evidence from Apollo 1 to 11.
Of course, we cover sort of the mysterious way that the astronauts passed away in Apollo 11 when they were burned alive.
You mean Apollo 11?
Yeah, Apollo 1.
And they actually, you know, Apollo 1 went down in history for being a catastrophe, but NASA, they told the public that the astronauts were asphyxiated by, you know, the oxygen-rich atmosphere that they pumped into the cabin accidentally.
That wasn't the case.
They actually burned alive.
And we have the original audio from Gus Grissom radioing back to the communications tower saying, you know, we got a fire in here and everything.
And not a lot of people have heard that before.
NASA, I don't think, ever formally released that because, well, because of the sensibilities and sensitivities involved in it.
And you have that, do you?
Yeah.
And so we just kind of are building a case that they censor so many different things to the public, especially back then.
And, you know, we go right through to Apollo 11 and finish off there where Mike Barra quite often is commenting on all of the anomalies from the photo evidence that he collected over the years with Richard C. Hoagland.
Right.
Okay.
Richard Hoagland, of course, friend of this show.
I just got to take you back to Apollo 1, and you say that you have that audio.
I mean, are you sure that that is the actual audio?
Because, you know, as far as I was aware, for all of those reasons that I mentioned, that was never released.
I'm just interested and intrigued as to how you might have sourced that and whether you believe that's the real deal.
Yeah, absolutely.
It is the original audio.
This was acquired through another research associate, Kerry Martinouk, who worked on the film.
He compiled a bunch of data from Bellcom.
Bellcom was a third-party contractor that worked with the Apollo mission straight through.
If it weren't for the scientists at Bellcom working with Houston Capcom, they wouldn't have been able to land on the moon.
And so some of the documents, some of the recordings and stuff came out through them, and that's how we got that.
Additionally, you know, one other thing I might say that's pretty intriguing in the documentary is the Apollo 11 mission when, you know, apparently the astronauts commented about seeing a UFO having an encounter when they were in cislunar space in between Earth and the moon, where there should be nothing out there, right?
And when they commented on that, that went down in history and Buzz Aldrin was quizzed quite often about that.
And, you know, James Fox helped us out with this documentary and added his testimony because he spent the greater part of 20 years trying to get Buzz Aldrin to go on camera and admit that what he saw was indeed a UFO and that it kind of creeped them out and followed them to the moon.
Buzz Aldrin, his sister, who he was really, really tight with, Faye Ann Potter, built a relationship with James Fox over the years.
She's now passed away, but James Fox agreed to go on camera and talk about, you know, how Buzz Aldrin kind of played a game with him and agreed to go on camera and then changed his mind because he didn't want to lose funding for a rocket program that he was trying to set up privately to take civilians to the moon.
So it all kind of points to the fact that astronauts know things are out there that are not man-made and they're curious about it, but they just can't speak about it publicly.
Have you run what James Fox said to you past Buzz Aldrin, Buzz Aldrin's connections?
Yes, we've actually tried to get a hold of him and we're trying to get an interview at least over the phone to clear this up once and for all.
But as you know, Buzz is quite a bit old now and he recently just got married.
So he's a busy guy and I'm sure he's got a lot on his plate.
And I would guess that over the years there will have been people who've asked him about that a million times and maybe, you know, maybe his views has run a little short on all of this stuff.
But it would have been nice for the documentary, wouldn't it, if you'd been able to get some comment on that?
Because all you've got is the one side of that story.
Fascinating story though it may be.
Well, we kind of have both sides because, you know, if you remember during the 90s, Buzz went on a press tour and talked about that incident quite a bit.
He was on the sci-fi channel.
He was on Entertainment Tonight.
We show his interview with Larry King on, you know, Larry King Live.
All of this stuff, we build a very chronological case that he was changing his story a lot.
And then, you know, there's the case of what happened with him and James Fox.
So I think the evidence is there that he just got scared and didn't want to talk about it.
Possibly somebody got to him.
And Mike is actually here, by the way.
He's apparently in the waiting room.
Would love to talk with you too, Howard.
Reputed, well-known UFO investigator and writer, Mike, thank you very much for coming on.
We've got you in pictures.
Oh, you do.
Oh, there I am.
We're going to put you in pictures.
I'm sorry.
I was late getting here.
I've had some technical problems.
I got a brand new computer and I was like on the wrong computer.
I cannot even estimate the level of joy I have right at the moment actually seeing you, Mike.
And it's nice to talk.
Hey, listen, we've got a lot of ground to cover here.
We don't have a ton of time to do it because of the problems that we've had.
But I think we can make some useful inroads into this.
It's often been said, it's almost UFO folklore, it's almost space travel folklore, that the Apollo astronauts experienced a lot of things that were suppressed from the public and they were told not to talk about.
Is that your view?
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, again, I think the entire Apollo program was kind of a technology salvaging mission.
I think, you know, Apollo 11 was let's land on the moon, let's consecrate it as a Masonic temple and in the middle of nowhere and where we know it's safe.
And then the other missions, they went into where Richard Hoagland and I, myself, I agree, think there are these towering glass structures, which were some sort of meteor shield.
And they landed where they thought there would be technology.
And I think that was their job was to retrieve that technology, Apollo 12, 13, which didn't make it, 14, 15, 16, and especially 17.
So there was all that stuff they were trying to hide.
And then there were the experiences they had along the way.
You know, for instance, Buzz Aldrin talking about the UFO that they saw on the way to the moon and that they were kind of told not to talk about.
And then you hear the stories about them being buzzed by UFOs at the far end of the crater or whatever when they landed.
And the thing about that that's so interesting is I've had two people that were at NASA at that time, Ken Johnson Jr. and a guy named Marvin Zarnick, the late Marv Zarnik, who both told me that that rumor was swirling around NASA within 30 minutes of them landing on at Tranquility Base.
And if that's the case, to me, that gives me, it gives a really, really strong indication that that story is true.
You were saying, why would it be?
Well, why would that rumor be shooting through NASA 30 minutes after they landed if it wasn't true?
Because they did have private communication channels.
Well, of all the rumors in all the world, that's a real weird one.
A lot of people have tried to mock up that scene.
And the scene is, as you know, the gray, soulless dust of the moon.
And over a ridge appears these bright lights that are claimed to be craft of some kind or, you know, beacons of some kind that are there.
And that is the thing that it has been said for all of these years.
And loads of videos on YouTube about this.
It's been said for years.
That was what they encountered, and that was suppressed.
The feed was cut and we were never told about it.
Well, the feed wasn't cut, but they sent the worst camera they had, especially on Apollo 11.
It was a terrible black and white camera.
They had a color camera that was pretty good, but they were ordered to leave that one behind.
And I think it was because they weren't sure what you might be able to see in the background.
So I think that was the reason why they only took an inferior camera the first time around.
I know the second time they did take a color camera, but that camera was pointed into the sun, wasn't it?
That's exactly what I mean.
That blew it out.
So we only got lousy black and white pictures on the second mission.
Well, here's the important thing to remember about Apollo 12 is that we now have evidence uncovered by a guy named Kerry Lyondike who that they actually performed what they call a stand-up EVA on Apollo 12 that they never told anybody about.
They opened the top hatch and looked out and they said, holy, you know, because this was landed in the middle of all these towering structures.
And they said, holy crap, we can't show this to everybody.
And so once they pulled the camera off of the little tray that it was on, which gave you a very limited field of view, first thing Al Bean does is the thing he's trained not to do.
Points it directly into the sun.
Optics get burned out and we get no color TP pictures from Apollo 12.
But you don't think that was an accident?
Oh, I don't think it was an accident at all.
No.
Because they clearly, because they both had time and there's a whole circumstantial evidence thing you can show step by step by step that they did this secret EVA where they just looked out the top and said, well, we can't do this.
And for those of us who grew up with Apollo, I was a little boy, but EVA extravehicular activity.
Yeah, sorry.
I got into my technical terms.
Those of us who went through any of the space missions will know that we'll be hearing that stuff again when Artemis comes around.
Albine, interesting character because he came back to Earth and it appeared to have changed his life, changed his outlook on life.
He became an artist.
And there is some thought that that might be connected.
Well, it is connected because logically, if you have this glass or crystalline structure that was built by extraterrestrial civilizations or some advanced humanist civilization that fell, and then we crawl back up from the soup, the primordial soup, you would get prismatic effects.
You would get pink and purple and orange and green and yellow.
And when you enhance the color on Apollo photographs, you do see that.
And it's fascinating because when Bean first started painting, the first thing he painted was a self-portrait of himself.
And it was the standard National Geographic gray and brown and boring.
But he just said it felt like it didn't feel right to him.
So he kept changing it and changing it and changing it until he had, guess what?
Lavender, pink, purple, all these colors around him as he's standing on the surface of the moon because that's what he remembered.
But the interesting thing about that is that that implies that he was like hypnotized or something to forget because it took him four or five attempts to get the picture right.
So what was it about it that he didn't, I mean, it seems like he didn't remember.
Look, in this documentary, Mike, and I'm glad that you and I are talking about this.
In this documentary, is there any further evidence to back up the claims that many people have made that the Apollo astronauts were not only debriefed at the back end of the missions, but perhaps they may have been hypnotized or some other mechanism used to stop them remembering stuff that they went through?
I mean, have you been able to take that any further forward?
Well, there's two examples.
One is Buzz Aldrin was on a NBC television interview, I think in the early 1970s when we were still going to the moon.
And the reporter asked him, well, Buzz, what did it feel like to be on the moon?
And on national television, live TV, he had a panic attack, ran out of the studio, went into the alleyway behind, and threw up.
And that just smacks of MK Altra conditioning.
I hear what you're saying.
I've never seen that or heard that story, but I hear what you're saying, Mike.
So that's interesting.
That's interesting.
And then there's circumstantial, though.
No, it's not.
And I can't say it's proof, but it's interesting evidence.
There was a scene, a thing that Richard C. Hoagland did in Pasadena, near JPL in the late 1990s.
And I was there with him because we were working together at the time.
And there was like a cocktail party.
And this lady comes up to us and she had these photographs that had NASA stamps on them.
And they were of the Pathfinder landing site.
And they showed in incredible detail objects that were obviously mechanical.
And she was saying things like, well, you know, we were wondering when you were going to see this one and so forth.
And then she says, you know, I was part of the team that debriefed the Apollo guys when they came back from the moon.
And he said, really?
And she said, yeah, you know, I'm a medical doctor and a psychiatrist with experience in hypnosis.
And she said, did you know that all of the astronauts, when they were debriefed, were hypnotized to help them remember more clearly what they saw?
Right.
To help them remember.
Yeah.
Now, this is just one person's testimony.
And then it was funny because there was this back and forth.
And she said, we said, but they don't seem to be able to remember anything.
It's like the only thing they can remember is their script of do this, do that, do the other thing.
They can't seem to remember anything else.
And she said, well, you know, that's, that could be some of us.
And then she stopped and she said, and I literally heard her say this.
She goes, come to think of it, I can't remember anything about those sessions either.
But those are both anecdotal stories.
But, you know, great story nonetheless.
Now, you and I both know Dick Hoagland.
I've known him for 25 years.
I'm sure you've known him for just as long.
He's controversial.
He never fails to be interesting.
You know, he is a man who can give a two-hour presentation without a stumble, without wavering one centimeter.
He's brilliant.
He's incredibly excited by the upcoming Artemis missions because he believes that those missions will provide us undeniable proof that there are structures on the far side of the moon.
And because of the technology involved, this time they can't hide it.
What do you think?
Well, I think it's a possibility.
Richard gets very enthusiastic about things.
And I hope, you know, at this stage of his life, I hope that happens because I certainly think he deserves to be vindicated while he's still here with us, which I believe he would be if they were honest about the information.
I do think we're in a phase where there is a certain amount of disclosure going on.
And certainly if you look at the political arena, there's a lot of things being exposed that would have been absolutely shocking 10 years ago.
It's kind of one thing after another after another.
And now why not have that in terms of alien and scientific disclosure also?
I think that we're headed into a period where, you know, the walls are going to come tumbling down and they're not going to be able to hide this stuff anymore.
So Lieutenant Ryan Graves is a man who was featured in the Telegraph newspaper in the UK this weekend.
He is a man who says that the U.S., effectively, he was a former Navy fighter pilot, the U.S. military has been encountering UFOs, UAPs, on a very regular basis.
So that's another brick in the wall, isn't it?
Right.
The thing about this is these reports from these military guys bother me for the same reason that the stories I just told you bother you.
They're not really proof of anything.
They're stories, right?
But there's no videos to go with them.
Now, I know that these aircraft are all equipped with gun cameras and they can record what's going on and they do record the heads-up displays and all this stuff.
And I hear about, oh, well, you know, the Tic Tac video from the TTSA people, which by the way, as far as I'm concerned, is just some sort of blob military heat.
And a lot of that stuff, we're running out of time, but a lot of that stuff was taken away and has never been seen since.
But the problem is, is that they, oh, well, there were 80 Tic Tacs and they all shot up and down, but there's no video of that.
So my problem with it is I hear these stories, but where's the video that supports those specific stories?
Mike, I always love talking with you.
We've been talking for, you know, off and on for two decades now.
So, you know, I love to have you on here.
I'm so sorry to limit you to a minute or so.
But if you can give me, in a minute, if that's possible, a takeaway point from this documentary, what would it be?
I think the most important thing about the documentary, Apollos 1 through 11, is that the moon that they gave you, what they told you it was, is not true.
It is not real.
There is something very different about the moon that they, and I mean NASA and the government, are discouraging you from believing in.
And you should keep pushing and asking questions because the moon they gave us is not the real moon.
Do you think, just a yes or no, that we will get further information that may boast of this case from Artemis?
Yes, it's unavoidable.
Hey, Mike Barra, thank you so much.
I'm sorry we had such a lot of technical glitches and we could have spoken for longer and I always love speaking with you, but I'm really grateful we were able to do that.
And my thanks to a man who's been a good friend of this show over the years, Mike Barra, UFO researcher and writer, very well known and regular guest, of course, on the old Art Bell shows.
And before that, the man who created the documentary Filmmaker Darcy Weir.
And that documentary presentation is called Secret Space UFOs Apollos 1 to 11.
Definitely worth catching.
Check it out online, as they say.
And now back to the United Kingdom.
Richard Craig is Chillingham Castle's resident ghost expert and ghost hunter.
This is said to be the most haunted ancient castle in the United Kingdom.
It's in Northumberland, way up in the northeast of England in the UK.
And this is Richard Craig.
Chillingham Castle, which is reputed to be the most haunted castle in the United Kingdom, in all of these isles.
If you look at lists and tabulations and documentations about Chillingham Castle in Northumberland, often claimed to be the UK's most haunted, little paragraph about it, Chillingham's reputation for terrifying hauntings has been going strong for centuries.
A poet in the 1800s, Henry Wadsworth, Longfellow, once wrote a verse, about the phantoms in the castle with feet that make no sounds upon the floors.
Let's get on.
A man who knows about Chillingham Castle, inside and outside, because he's the man who documents these things.
Chillingham Castle's resident ghost hunter, Richard Craig, is online to us now.
Richard, how are you?
I'm very well, Howard.
How's yourself?
Oh, we're having more luck with you than we have with the guys talking about the UFOs.
Thank God for you, Richard Craig.
Thank you very much.
Richard, thank you very much for doing this.
Your description here that I've got in front of me is Chillingham Castle's resident ghost hunter.
Is that you?
That's correct.
I've done that for quite some time now, and it's a fascinating place.
Well, no, it is.
I don't know whether you know Elaine Kelly, who's often on this show, but she's a ghost hunter in the Northeast from Spectre Detectors.
She and I have talked about Chillingham Castle.
It has this reputation as being the United Kingdom's most haunted structure of its kind, Castle.
Is it really?
I would have said so, yes.
As I say, I've investigated a lot of places over the years, and Chillingham, by a country mile, tops the lot.
You know, I'm going to ask this then.
Why do you think that is the case?
Day and night, 24-7.
It doesn't matter what it's like.
It could be bright sunshine.
It could be a stormy night.
There's always something that's going on.
We get all manner of things.
We see a lot of apparitions, a lot of shadows moving around.
And Chillingham is quite good in the respect that we have a lot of tactile phantoms as well.
So being touched, scratched, clothes, hair-pulled, all manner of things.
It happens day and night.
And being the resident ghost hunter of those things happen to you?
Yes.
The last time was, well, yesterday afternoon, in actual fact.
Really?
No, no.
Yeah, yeah, about 20 past four in the afternoon.
And again, it was a nice day.
It was quite busy, in actual fact.
And I thought, oh, that's it.
They're out again.
So, yes, as I say, it just does not stop.
We're looking at pictures of Chillingham Castle.
I mean, the two words that would come to my mind, and I don't know whether you'd agree with this, it's imposing and austere.
That's correct.
It is an imposing sight.
I mean, back in the day, it would have been a top-secret sort of military establishment.
It was a very, very strong castle, very close to the Scottish border in Northumberland.
It was there for a purpose, and that was to keep invaders from the north out of England.
And it gradually evolved into being a very sort of palatial country house or stately home, as it were.
But it still resembles a major league fortress.
Right, and it became a stately home.
Who lived there?
It was the Earls of Tankerville.
And of course, after the union of the crowns in 1603, changes were made to the castle to make it fit for a king.
And King James I of England and VI of Scotland, he made his royal visit there in 1617.
There'd been various other monarchs in between times as well, but the main state visit for him was in 1617.
So there went great guns to make it fit for an arriving monarch.
And even to this day, I mean, it's had a lot of restoration work, but it is, as you say, it's very imposing, but at the same time, it's very luxurious in some areas.
It's got a hell of a history, as you just indicated, and that's not the half of it, as they say.
Now, with haunted locations, some of it's about the building and some of it's about the site.
And this particular site is particularly interesting.
Indeed it is.
This particular site, it was very well chosen.
It's out of the way.
It's tucked in against some high ground, but communication-wise, was very good.
It's very close to what was known as the Devil's Causeway, which was the Roman road between York and Berwick.
So militarily moving troops around, indeed.
Scottish raiders used the same ones as well.
It was quite easy for them.
It manifested itself.
It was a manor house on the site, which also housed a monastery.
So it evolved from there.
And of course, it was raided.
And the original manor house was burnt in 1296, thanks to William Wallace and company.
And of course, it was rebuilt with fortifications.
And they continued until 1344, when it turned into, it got a license to become a major fortress.
It was built up by Sir Thomas de Heaton, if I remember rightly, from those times.
And the works continued for three or four years.
And that was on the current plan that we see at the moment.
It was motored as well.
They've since been filled in.
But the hauntings are attached to the castle.
And also the fact that there's been 800 years of sometimes very turbulent history layered upon that.
Well, going all the way back to a monastery on the site, but I also see from some information that you very kindly provided that Edward I's torturer-in-chief was based there.
That's correct.
John Sage himself, a lieutenant in Edward I's army.
He was also known as John Dragfoot.
He'd taken a severe injury to a leg, which meant he could not perform the duties of a frontline soldier anymore.
He basically pleaded with Edward I to give him some kind of role, and his sadistic nature fitted the role of torturer very well, and he held tenure there for three years.
Right.
And do we know how many people he dispensed with?
It is estimated between seven and seven and a half thousand.
Thousand?
Dear Lord.
Surely not all of them on that site.
It is said yes.
Gee.
I mean, he had almost a cottage industry of disposing of people.
How awful.
So, you know, there's another reason to have presences of the poor tortured souls who would have gone through there.
And for what reason would people be tortured and dispatched there?
What would you have to do to earn yourself a place there?
It was plain and simple.
Edward I wanted to find William Wallace.
This all occurred after 1298.
William Wallace had lost the Battle of Falkirk and had given up his guardianship of Scotland, essentially gone on the run.
He'd caused an awful lot of problems, which necessitated Edward I to move the seat of government from London to York.
So he wanted William Wallace found by Hook or by Crook.
So anybody that seemed a bit on the likely side, this is Scots and English, both sides of the border.
If they were near-do-wells or they had various connections, they were brought in and tortured to try and find out if they knew the whereabouts of said person.
So a real bloody history in every sense of those words.
All right, talk me through then, would you, Richard?
Some of the ghosts that have been seen there.
There's a ghost of Lady Mary Barclay and a radiant or blue boy.
Yes.
Two to be going on with.
Okay, Lady Mary Barclay.
Let's scroll back to 1682.
She was married to Ford Gray, who was the first Earl of Tankerville.
They had a baby and they needed some help to look after the little baby.
And they thought, who better than Lady Mary's sister, Henrietta?
Ford Grey's roving eye sort of came to the fore and he ran off with Henrietta, who was 17 years old.
And of course, he eventually was arrested for doing this.
And it didn't do him any harm because he eventually became Lord Privy Seal.
But the ghost of Lady Mary, she died in the early 1700s, and she forever wanders all the corridors of the castle looking for her erstwhile husband.
She manifests herself with the smell of roses, sometimes if it's really quiet, the rustling as if it's a silk dress.
And when this occurs, you often get a lovely little wafting chill in the air as she goes past.
And have you experienced this, Richard?
Absolutely.
The last time I got the roses smell was a week past Saturday, and that occurred in the King Edward Room at the top of the South West Tower.
And do you get the, in the case of Lady Mary Barkley for one, but these other apparitions that you've been aware of and that you've experienced personally, do you get the feeling that they are just merely playing out a scene that they've played out a thousand times?
Or do you get the impression that they're aware of you?
No, we use various bits of gadgetry these days and I demonstrate this with great regularity and they now, with the inclusion of this, show signs of obvious intelligence.
Going back to the blue boy, this poor chap was found walled up in 1920 in the castle walls when some workmen were breaking through to a tower.
And they found him with some scraps of blue cloth.
He's since been interred in the churchyard over the road from the castle.
And sometimes you see, and this is through the day, you'd see a bluish humanoid form about four and a half feet tall.
Humanoid form.
Yes, yes, the shape of a boy.
I've seen him twice in the Great Hall.
Interestingly enough, Howard, both times between about 2.15 and 2.30 in the afternoon.
And that seems to be a bit of a haunting hotspot in the afternoon, time-wise.
It is interesting.
And other times, he manifests himself.
He looks like a dull blue sparkler like you would get on bonfire night.
That always occurs in doorways.
I believe his name to be Cecil with all of the gadgetry that we've employed in tracking down these fandoms.
And he would be 10 years old.
And look, a sceptic might say, oh, well, you know, Blue Flash, it's static electricity or something.
I doubt it.
I have a very sound sort of electronics background.
And these always start around doorways, lower down, and they lift up slowly but surely.
Occasionally, they change into a sapphire blue sort of orb of light.
So it gives you the impression that it's something that's trying to form in front of you.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
That's how it appears to me.
We've been left with less time than I'd hoped for, Richard.
Hopefully we can talk about this maybe on one of my podcasts where we can have a nice leisurely conversation.
Can you talk to me about the involvement of somebody who's perennially interesting, the occultist and magician Alistair Crowley.
Oh, yes, Alistair Crowley, or Edward Alexander Crowley, given his real name.
The seventh Earl of Tankerville, a man called George Montague Bennett, had a little bit of paranoia and he wanted to be protected from witchcraft.
So he employed Alastair Crowley to actually come up to the castle, I believe this was in 1922, and perform rituals to do such a thing.
And in doing so, it is said that Alistair Crowley more or less opened up the upside-down world within and unleashed all sorts of beams of the place.
Phenomena in inverted commas, if you read about Alastair Crowley, appeared to, and he wanted them, I think, appeared to follow him around.
That's absolutely correct.
And the funny thing was, on a ghost hunt a week and a bit ago, on one of the spirit boxes, he came through.
And what did he say?
He said his name.
Really?
Did he spell it out for you because he has a very unusual way of spelling Alistair?
It's Alistair with an E. It came through sounding quite guttural.
I don't know whether you're aware of these spirit boxes, but these, you know, pretty much allow a virtual sort of two-way.
They do come across with a lot of intelligence.
But when asked who was with us, it came.
It was reversed, actually.
He says, Crowley Alistair.
I thought, oh, that's very interesting.
Yeah.
That's a good point to park this.
Richard, I'm sorry we didn't have as much time as I'd hoped.
We will talk again.
Thank you so much.
Richard Craig, Chillingham Castle's resident ghost hunter.
That was Richard Craig, the resident ghost expert at the highly haunted Chillingham Castle in Northumberland in the far northeast of England.
One of these days, I want to get to that place.
It's going to be on my ever-expanding list of places that I want to visit.
Before that, of course, Mike Bearer and Darcy Weir about Secret Space, the documentary to do with the weird happenings on Apollo's 1 to 11.
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, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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