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June 11, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:04:53
Edition 730 - Graham Phillips
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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.
Well, I'm hoping all's good with you.
Continuing very warm in the United Kingdom, a little bit of a heat haze out there, but at least there's a gentle breeze blowing temperatures here at the moment in the high 20s, and they're telling us it's going to get particularly sticky in the next few days.
So let's see what happens with the weather, hey.
Hope everything is okay wherever you are.
And thank you very much for all of the emails.
Please keep those coming.
And if your email requires a response, then please put in the subject line response required.
Like I've said recently, because of a lot of stuff that's been happening here, including clearing up from the fire, that's going to be a long and ongoing process.
I'm a little bit behind on emails, but keeping the podcasts and the TV shows going.
So, you know, that's one good thing.
My thanks to Adam for his hard work lately and especially for getting the Ralph Blumenthal exclusive out.
Adam was actually about to fly to Berlin and he actually published that item that ran as a special within 10 minutes or so of me sending it to him.
So literally within two hours or so of the debrief publishing that world-grabbing story, we had a conversation with the person behind the story on the website, theunexplained.tv.
So pretty great work from Adam.
Thank you.
Okay, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained is somebody who's been on this show before.
You've asked for him to return, and he is now.
Author Graham Phillips, a man who's a kind of Indiana Jones of mysteries.
This man has a journalistic background too.
He's written a lot of very, very good books on a variety of things, including a mystery to do with William Shakespeare, the book that we spoke with him about two years ago about was called The Green Stone, about this strange gemstone and the paranormal events around it.
Now we're going to talk about something similar, a deep mystery in his new book.
It's called Strange Fate.
And I'll read you a little bit of the publicity material about the book.
Investigating a mysterious 19th century secret society called the Order of Maonia, researchers Graham Phillips and Jody Russell are drawn into a remarkable story of the unexplained.
On visiting an ancient burial site on remote moorlands in central England, an inexplicable storm rages directly around them, while the surrounding countryside remains peaceful and calm.
Before long, their lives are staggeringly changed.
Although it defies belief, this extraordinary account is based entirely on actual events.
Fantastic stuff.
So Graham Phillips coming up in seconds from now.
Don't forget, if you get in touch with me through the website theunexplained.tv, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
And if you've made a donation to The Unexplained in recent weeks, thank you very, very much for doing that.
It's very, very kind.
You know who you are.
We are still trucking after 17 and a half years, which ain't bad.
All right.
Let's get to Graham Phillips now.
Graham, thank you very much for coming back on my show.
It's an absolute pleasure.
Thank you for having me on again.
And I have to tell you that for me, you were a gift that kept on giving because after the last conversation that we had, which I think was close on two years ago, certainly 18 months ago, we talked about your book, The Green Stone.
There was so much interest and that interest continued over months and months and months.
And even now I get emails from people saying, when are you having Graham Phillips back?
And the answer is usually, when he's got a new book out, which you have.
Yes, this new book is the first book that continues the saga of the Green Stone that's been out for 40 years.
So it's been a long time coming.
And all the people that were interested in the Greenstone are bound to be interested in this one.
I was amazed as you unfolded the story of the Greenstone.
And let's just quickly tell that one.
Because it was a story that dates back to 1979.
This was a relic, a gemstone, supposedly possessed by Mary Queen of Scots, that had powers connected with it that you actually found, I think, and I'm doing this out of memory.
I think it was tucked away, wasn't it, in a stone on a bridge?
That's basically it, yes.
And when you took possession of it and took it back to the office of the magazine that you were working at then, all hell broke loose in so many ways.
Yeah, we had like poltergeist phenomenon.
We had strange sounds, voices, apparitions, and it all seemed to be connected with this mysterious green stone.
And I think I asked you as the last question then, as, you know, I was probably bound to do, where is the stone now?
Well, we don't know.
I mean, after an original period of a few months where really weird things happened at the offices of the magazine that we were working for at the time when we were doing this, it stopped eventually.
The house was turned into apartments and we've been there recently and spoken to the person who lives in the apartment that was basically part of the main offices of the building back in 1979.
And they say nothing's happened there since.
So it kind of stopped and the stone didn't do anything.
But the lady who kept the stone over the years died a few years back.
And after she died, its whereabouts have become rather mysterious.
So we don't know where it is.
That's interesting for a whole bunch of reasons because if the things that happened to you, and those things included, I think the building spontaneously combusted at one point, but there were some horrendous happenings.
I mean, if those things are still happening around the stone, it's got to be somewhere, and whoever's got it or whoever knows about it is going to be aware of that.
I would imagine, I mean, the lady who had it, as far as I know, nothing actually happened to it.
It seemed to have lost its power after a couple of months, if it was the stone doing it.
But somebody wanted to...
From what I've heard, I can't say that this is definite, but the rumours are that when after she died, one of her family sold it to somebody who was interested in doing all sorts of weird research on it.
So I don't know what's happening to them.
Now, isn't that interesting?
I wonder where that person might be.
If you have any inkling or thought about that, I'm saying this to my listener.
I know other people have looked into it and they just can't find out.
I mean, we just don't know.
And as far as I'm concerned, I've thought, well, fate be as it is.
If those people want to try and do something with it, let them.
I mean, I never wanted to particularly hold on to the stone myself.
So I'm not really that bothered about what happened to it in the end.
But the story had an almost medieval tone to it because it was almost like discovering Excalibur in the lake the way that you found it.
And then you discovered as you took it back and you had it in your possession that it brought with it hope.
collection of downsides we would call them today yeah I mean we didn't understand what was going on I mean it started off simply as an historical investigation with a load of clues that had been left in this old Elizabethan house that led to where the stone was in the form of paintings that had been hidden behind plasterwork in the building and only been found because of renovations that were going on.
And these paintings that had been hidden had clues in them that led us to find this stone.
Up until that point, you're talking about just an historical investigation, an exciting one, but that's it.
But then when the stone was taken back to the magazine offices that we were working for at the time and doing this research with, that's when all these strange things started to happen, poltergeist paranormal phenomena.
The lady who eventually had the stone, the lady who died and after her time, we don't know where it's ended up, she was quite psychic.
She had the impression that if we took this stone to a certain old ecclesiastical building, an old ruined priory nearby, and at a certain time we, I think we had to say some certain words or something, I can't quite remember.
There's about 10 of us there, and we put the stone a bit of a distance away from where we were in this ruined walls of this priory in this woodland on an old burial mound that this lady, Marion her name was, thought that it should be placed.
And at 9.30 at night in the dark in the winter, we waited to see what happened.
And then this ball, these five balls of light rose from this copse of trees.
We all saw it.
It was like literally like floating balls of white light.
They merged together above the trees and then kind of exploded with this almighty, you know, bang.
And then the light was so brilliant, it lit up all the surrounding countryside.
She believed that that was the stone discharging its power.
Well, after that, nothing happened with it.
And that's when the phenomena in the offices of the magazine ceased.
She kept the stone.
She wanted to keep it.
After all, she'd managed to stop all this weird stuff going on around it.
We'd tried to investigate what, you know, try to control this stuff, but it was just getting out of hand.
So I was quite happy about what she'd done.
And I was happy for her to keep the stone.
So after all of the strange and terrifying happenings and almost portentous happenings that occurred around this thing, you know, some people would have been inclined to give all of these investigations up, but you didn't.
Well, I kind of did because I didn't investigate anything paranormal after this.
For many years, I've been writing books about historical mysteries.
Was there a real King Arthur?
If so, where did he come from?
Did he have something that was like Camelot?
Was there a real Robin Hood?
If so, who was he?
And the mysteries of William Shakespeare.
And I've searched the secret life of William Shakespeare, written a book about that.
I've searched for the Holy Grail or what was behind the story of the Grail.
And I've searched for the Ark of the Covenant.
And I've written books about all these historical mysteries, about lost relics, historical mysterious figures.
And so it's not really been about the paranormal until this latest book, which is called Strange Fate, for good reason, I'll have you know, that things started to happen again psychically, mystically, paranormally, a couple of years ago.
How did you discover this story?
Because this is the...
It says that you were investigating a mysterious 19th century secret society called, Is It the Order of Meania?
Mehaniah, they pronounce it, I believe.
Okay, the Order of Mehania.
You found yourselves, just as you were with the stone, almost sucked into something beyond your control.
Yes, the people who possessed this stone in the late 1500s, early 1600s, who hid it and left these clues to find this green stone, were called, as you say, the Order of Mehania.
Now, they ceased to exist around that time.
Their group disbanded.
But then what happened in the 1850s, a group of people who met at a place called Bidolph Grange, quite a long way away from where these people, the early order of me and I, had been doing their things, or so we thought.
Bidulph Grange is in northern Staffordshire, whereas the Greenstone was hidden in southern Worcestershire.
So you're talking about the north midlands of England as opposed to the southern midlands of England, 100 mile distance.
I mean, Bidolf is nearer Stoke-on-Trent, isn't it?
It's nearer Stoke-on-Trent, whereas where we found the stone Was nearer to Wolverhampton.
And what happened was that in around about in 1851, this group of people who, the people who owned Bidolf Grange, this Victorian manor mansion, really, they found an underground vault under an old ruined priory, not the one we'd gone to with the Greenstone.
This is another one, an old ruined church that was on the grounds of Bidulf Grange in the Bidulf Estate.
Underneath this ruin, they've discovered a slab, moved it out the way, and found a secret vault that had been sealed up for years, probably since the early 1600s, in which there were these lead boxes concealed containing manuscripts and all sorts of other, what would you call them, talismans or amulets that had been used by this group, the Order of Mehania, back in the early 1600s.
So they learned about the Order of Mehaniah and decided to re-found the group.
So you've got a second Order of Mehaniah being founded by a family called the Batemans, who lived at Bidolf Grange, and they seemed to be carrying on doing whatever the earlier group had done.
Now, I'd heard about this second group finding, well, I didn't know they'd found a vault at that point, but I knew that the group had been re-founded in the 1850s, way back in 1979 when this Greenstone story was going on.
But I couldn't really take it much further.
There wasn't much written about the people who were in the house.
There was no record survived that we could tell.
But a couple of years ago, what with the internet and information being much more widely available now and published, we were able to find out quite a bit more about this group.
So myself and my co-author of this latest book, Jodi Russell, she's from America.
She worked on other research with me in the past, like the Ark of the Covenant and the Mystery of Robin Hood.
She's fascinated by this sort of thing.
We decided a couple of years ago, with more information about this Miana group in Victorian times, that we'd start to investigate them.
And that's when it all began.
You say it all began.
Well, we started.
So you became aware of another artifact.
Is that so?
Yes.
I mean, they obviously had a number of these various talismans, artifacts, relics, call them what you will, that they had found.
But I have to take you back, actually, to just before they found this underground vault below this old ruined priory.
And the way it was found, according to their writings and their documents that they left behind that we were able to trace down to their ancestors, was quite remarkable in its own right.
First of all, they didn't have any interest in the paranormal.
There was two families that were associated with Bidolf Grange.
There was the Batemans and another family lived nearby, a couple of miles away, called the Heath family.
And they were both involved in business ventures together.
They were industrialists, they owned coal mines, they were involved in iron smelting and they worked together.
And they both were interested in a stone circle that stood on the Bidulph estate, the northern part of the Bidulf estate.
It was an old stone circle dating from perhaps the time of Stonehenge, sort of like Stonehenge, but without the lintel stones, the arches around the top.
So it's a circle of large stones, about 12 of them.
Next to it was a burial mound, which has been dated to around 1500 years ago, so more recent.
Now, in 1851, in May, James Bateman, who owned Bidolf Grange, brought his cousin in, a man called Thomas Bateman, who was an archaeologist, to excavate this tomb.
It had been robbed out over the years, but it still survived as a mound, perhaps about 40 feet across, a small opening into a stone chamber inside it on one side, like a small, like a large rabbit hole, if you like, that went into it.
And while they were about to conduct this excavation, the children of a son of James Bateman, a boy called Robert, who was nine, and the daughter of the Heath family, Robert Heath, whose daughter was called Mary, who was seven, these children were playing around the mound.
The little girl, Mary, crawled into the mound and came out psychic.
That's all I can say.
All their writings, they've said that they were completely gobsmacked by what had happened to her.
She was a normal little girl when she went in.
When she came out, she was still a normal little girl, but she'd say really profound things.
She was able to tell them things about themselves that nobody else knew.
And ultimately, she was able to tell them because people said to her, well, how do we know that you're getting messages from the beyond or whatever?
And she was the one who led them to this old ruin that had been on the southern part of the estate for years, but nobody knew there was a big vault underneath it until little Mary, a seven-year-old girl, said, dig there, you'll find a stone, remove it, and you'll find something underneath.
That's what you've got to do.
And they found this vault.
So they were completely knocked over by the fact that this little girl had suddenly become mystical.
But what was fascinating as well is that when she came out of the tomb, she said that she'd felt impelled to dig down a little bit into the soil inside the tomb.
And she found something they thought was a pebble first, which is perhaps how it had survived there and not been robbed in the past.
And when they cleaned it up, discovered it was a stone, a small stone made of rose quartz, about two inches wide, two inches high, three quarters of an inch thick, carved into the shape of a stone heart.
And they called it, I assume maybe Mary told them it was called this.
I don't know.
They only ever referred to it as the heart of the rose.
And it was this stone that apparently, according to Little Mary and later all the other people involved in this group, believed had the power to influence fate.
And they, after finding all these artifacts in this underground vault, refounded the Order of Nehoniah, the new Order of Neoniah, if you like, the Victorian Order of Mehoniah, which involved not only the Batemans and the Heaths,
but other people who intended to start conducting mystical experiments with this artifact, the Heart of the Rose, and with other information, mystical knowledge that they discovered in this vault.
So that's how the whole thing started.
It's weird.
It is weird.
Do we think the stone found Mary or Mary found the stone?
If you know what I'm saying.
Yeah, it may be that the stone found Mary or maybe she was the right kind of person to pick up on it.
I mean, she was only a child.
In fact, she was a very remarkable child, certainly after she'd gone in the tomb, because just a few months later, she and her parents, Robert and Anne Heath, went to stay at another stately home a bit further north from where they were in Yorkshire that belonged to Lord Halifax, who was a member of the British government.
He was an extraordinarily rich man.
He owned lots of land.
And Robert Heath, Mary's father, wanted to be allowed mining rights, coal mining rights on his land.
And they were quite close.
And so for a couple of months, they actually stayed.
Mary and Robert and Anne, his wife, and their oldest daughter, Mary, stayed at the Halifax estate in Yorkshire while all this mining rights were sorted out.
And they did whatever they did in those days to decide where they were going to start digging.
And while they were there, and this is again another strange quirk of fate, Lord Halifax had a number of small children.
And those children were being, they were being tutored by none other than Lewis Carroll, who was later to write the story of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass.
But this was a good few years before he wrote those books.
And that story sounds to me, and I know sounds to you like it parallels almost Mary's story, because she went through a similar kind of experience.
Well, she claimed to have gone into this tomb.
She said that while she was in there, she saw all sorts of weird fairy beings and things.
People brought that down to her imagination.
It may be the way a child's mind was affected by whatever happened to her.
But she was full of this story.
Evidently, she told Lewis Carroll about it.
He was tutoring her for a short while while they were staying at the Halifax's estate.
And this was exactly the time that he came up with the idea for both the stories of Alice Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland, the basic kernel of an idea for the stories.
And he did a few drawings that he later asked the illustrator for the published book to copy as near as possible for the publication of the Alice stories.
And he always claimed that he based the story on a real little girl.
And the only little girl who was the same age as Alice in the books, which is seven, that Carol was anywhere near at the time the story was conceived was while he was tutoring the Halifax children at the same place that little Mary Heath was staying.
So maybe she told him about, oh, I've crawled into this hole and all these weird things happened.
Alice in Wonderland.
But it's not only that, she was fascinated by a mirror that hung in the Halifax's house.
And she claimed to be able to, in her mind, to go into the mirror into strange worlds.
So the idea of Alice in Wonderland and Alice with the looking glass seemed to have been based on Mary Heath.
What became of Mary and what became of the Rose Stone, the heart of the rose?
Well, Mary went at first, the people who started the group, there was a lady called Maria Bateman, the wife of Robert Bateman, who owned the Bidolf Estate.
He was traveling the world a lot.
He owned a lot of money.
He owned a lot of wealth.
He was a very rich man, but he wasn't that interested in personally running the business of coal mining and other industrial stuff that the company were doing.
He was more interested in botany, and he went around the world leading expeditions to get all sorts of plants from all different continents and have them shipped back to England in the form of seeds, saplings, cuttings, and so forth, and have an army of gardeners plant this magnificent gardens around his home of Bidolf Grange.
While he was absent, and he was absent for about 10 years on and off, his wife, Maria, kind of looked after the side of things where telling the gardeners, okay, my husband wants this put there and this put there.
At the same time, she decided to build a series of temples or Shrines in the grounds of Bidolf Grange where the Order of Mehonia could hedge their bets by practicing different occult traditions from different countries.
Underneath the house, they built a Roman temple sacred to the goddess Fortuna, the goddess of fate.
They built a reconstructed Egyptian tomb dedicated to an Egyptian demigod called Ami, who is the Egyptian god of fate.
She did a Chinese sanctuary, which is like a Chinese pagoda building with all sorts of other Chinese structures around it.
And that was sacred to Chang'e, who is the Chinese goddess of fate.
And then they built a Celtic sanctuary, which was basically a sacred well or a sacred spring surrounded by standing stones, which was sacred to a goddess called Bride or Brigid, who is the Celtic goddess of fate.
And it seems that they were doing mysticism from various parts of the world in these sanctuaries or shrines that still survive today and are in these beautiful gardens and people can go around them.
I'm sure I've been there, but I've certainly read about this.
If they were around today, you know that they would find themselves in the Daily Mail for these people researching these strange things.
Did they get a bit of a reputation back then or was it all done clandestinely?
Well, they kind of, they managed to kind of cover it up.
Some of the, first of all, Maria Bateman led this thing.
When anybody came to the house, they would sometimes see them dressed up in robes and wandering around.
They would say, and there's articles were written at the time about them conducting what they called rustic fates.
I think they kind of got people to believe they were holding like what in America they call Renaissance fairs or something like that, or medieval fairs.
They were just doing it for, I don't know, just for ceremonial purposes.
But they understood the purpose.
But they understood the purpose.
But it was the time, when they were doing this, it was what was known as the occult revival or the Gothic revival.
People suddenly became fascinated by spiritualism.
The spiritualist group started all over the world.
Mysticism started up in the form of things like the Theosophical Society.
The Rosicrucians and other groups began.
Everyone suddenly became fascinated by ancient mysticism.
So the fact that they were doing this was nothing out of the ordinary.
And what about Mary?
Not as far as anybody else was concerned.
You know, my thoughts go back to Mary and the stone.
You know, how did Mary fare through her life?
Well, when she got to her 20s, she took over the group.
The Batemans eventually sold the house, moved down to London.
We don't quite know why they left.
Apparently, they ran out of money after James Bateman had been traveling the world, getting all these amazing shrubs and plants to go in his garden, building all these temples and things.
But it doesn't really explain why they kind of left.
Their son, Robert, now he was one of the little boy playing around with little Mary when the tomb was opened.
He stayed living on the estate of Bidolf Grange, but the Grange was bought by Mary's father, Robert.
But because he lived nearby at a far grander house called Clough Hall, he let Mary run the estate herself.
And she was like head of this group, the Meehaniah group.
And she lived at Bidolf Grange and ran the estate during her mid to late 20s.
Eventually, she died fairly young at the age of 28.
We don't know anything about her.
We haven't been able to find any photographs of her, any pictures or anything.
One thing that was really strange is when we went to where the mirror that she was fascinated by as a child now hangs in a place called Hall Cross Hall, which is now a hotel and spa resort in not far from Burton-on-Trent,
north of Birmingham, we discovered that this mirror that now hangs in what's basically a lounge area is said to be haunted by a little girl who everybody describes as looking like Alice in Wonderland.
And it wasn't until we did our research that we ever connected this mirror with Alice in Wonderland.
Had this little girl Mary, I mean, she didn't die as a child, so it can't be her ghost.
Had she somehow, maybe by using this stone or some powers she gained after going into this tomb, duplicated herself in a mirror as some kind of bizarre thought form?
I mean, it really was quite interesting because when I went there, I tried to concentrate on little Mary.
You know, where did you, you know, what did you do when you, you know, what happened in your life?
And I did have like visions, or not visions as such, but very strong impressions in my mind about where she'd actually found this underground vault.
And we were able to discover exactly what it was.
And the remains of the chapel are still there.
And I wouldn't have done that unless I communicated with this bizarre double of little Mary that seems to exist in this mirror.
Did she continue to be connected with paranormality, the psychic world?
Well, we don't know.
We know the group did.
The group continued.
Everybody became involved in it.
Quite a lot of them were pre-Raphaelite painters, probably because Robert Bateman was himself a pre-Raphaelite painter, and he knew other people in that movement.
There was a lot of women painters in the pre-Raphaelite movement, which made it different to most other painting schools, if you like.
And they were all early feminists.
They were working towards the rights of women.
Back in the Victorian time, they weren't even allowed to own property in most Western countries.
They couldn't inherit directly.
Everything they owned belonged to their brother, husband, or father or guardian.
They worked towards changing this.
They were the early suffragists or suffragettes that were working towards women's right to vote.
And they, it seemed from what their writings tell us, is they hoped to supplement what they were doing in the form of writing magazines and working politically to actually influence fake itself so that men in positions of power in governments throughout the world would start to look upon women more favorably.
And this did happen.
And it all seems to have started in May the 4th, specifically, 1851, when little Mary went into this tomb.
But we don't know how far she was involved in it because they seem to keep her right out of the headlines.
Other people that were involved in the group included Florence Farr, a famous actress who also started her own occult society called the Sphere Group, which is known about.
She joined another group called the Golden Dawn, another group that was known about.
There was another pre-Raphaelite painter involved in it and a women's rights activist by the name of Everen de Morgan.
She was quite famous.
She was quite outspoken about her interest in the paranormal and the mystical.
But Mary herself, we don't know.
All we know is that she died somehow mysteriously in 1872, I believe, and was succeeded by her sister-in-law, Laura Heath, who kept the group going until there was a mysterious fire that burnt down Bidolf Grange, or much of it, in 1897.
And then the group dissipated.
We don't know what happened to all these items and amulets and documents that they possessed, but the heart of the rose, this stone, which seemed to have been their prized possession, according to their writings, was hidden and they'd left clues that somebody one day might find and discover where it was.
Just like the green stone, but much later.
What happened this time is when we found that going back to the green stone years ago, nothing psychic or weird, not much anyway, started to happen until we'd found the stone.
This time it was the opposite.
The first time Jody and I went to the burial mound, or it's now the mound has gone, it's been dug away and there's just big stones surviving.
But the first time we went there, it's called the Bride Stones and it's in the peat district just to the north of Bidolf, hilly moorlands.
The first time we went there, the most bizarre thing happened.
Suddenly, a storm broke out around us, even though it had been a clear, sunny day.
The rain was torrential.
There was lightning, thunder.
And during while this was going on, this kind of ball of light, we were filming it all the time.
We captured this on film, kind of zipped out of the tomb or where the tomb had been and shot into some bushes opposite.
Now, that could have been ball lightning.
We don't really know what it was.
Part of the storm in some way.
But whatever it was was very localized.
Sorry, you're saying you looked around you.
Yeah, we looked all around us.
And as you just said, it was totally localized.
All around, the countryside was dry and sunny.
There was just this huge cloud over us.
That was just weird.
It lasted about five minutes.
What happened then?
Well, it was after that.
I mean, if things could be described as strange back in the days of the Green Stone with apparitions and poltergeist phenomena, what started to happen now was beyond strange because we went back to Bidulf Grange, which is a couple of miles away from where these bride stones, what was the burial mound once was and stone circle, back two miles away, back to Bidulf Grange.
And I won't go into the whole story because it'll take too long.
But we knew and we had researched over the years.
I had been doing it for 40 years on and off, researching the Me and I group, although not looking for a stone until a couple of years ago, and knew full well that the fire had taken place in 1897.
Jodie had done her research.
All her notes, all her research said 1897.
We went to the Grange and suddenly found out from the, it's open to the public now, it belongs to the National Trust.
You can go round, see it all.
Not inside the house, that's kind of privately owned, but the grounds.
We went back and found that all the references now said that the fire had occurred in 1896, a year before.
And we just thought, well, we couldn't have been wrong.
We couldn't have been that wrong.
Hang on.
We found a number of other people that also were convinced that it had taken place in 1897 and the date had changed.
How is that?
I'm asking you this.
How is that possible?
It isn't possible.
I mean, at first, we just thought, well, there is something called the Mandela effect.
It's a strange phenomenon, I suppose you'd call it, where of lots of people sharing a false memory.
It's named after the South African president, Nelson Mandela.
And when he became President, many people throughout the world were convinced that they remembered reading about or hearing about him having died when he was in prison as an activist.
And so, therefore, when loads of people swear that something has changed in history, it's known as the Mandela effect.
And sometimes it's just down to wrong people sharing wrong information.
It just catches on.
So that's what we thought had happened at first, no matter how strange it seemed.
But then we went to see some guy.
I won't give the whole circumstances away because it's irrelevant, but we went to see an old house that we'd seen before.
We'd been taken around by the manager of the property, on an estate, and he'd taken us around this old deserted building that we wanted to see.
I'd even filmed inside it.
We went back to see him.
He didn't remember who we were.
He'd never seen us before in his life, as far as he was concerned.
Good Lord.
We asked if we could look at this house again.
He kind of said, yeah, all right.
And he didn't, he just thought, we kind of let it go a bit and sort of said, oh, could we have a look at the house for the first time, please?
Although we'd been there before.
He took us there.
He said, you can't go inside because it's all boarded up, has been for years.
We'd been inside, but now it was all boarded up with metal shutters and the screws in it were clearly rusted away.
It had been like that for years.
And he said, no, nobody's been inside for years.
When I started showing him the film of us walking around inside with him, he got very worried and didn't really want to speak to us again.
So do you believe that he's gone to a different world?
A parallel universe or something.
You know, it seems to me like you had rather like in the old days of LPs, as if the arm had skipped to another track and you found yourself in a different version of reality.
Well, this is what we kind of thought at first.
I mean, that is a weird enough way of thinking about things, but scientists do believe that parallel universes could be possible.
It's one answer to many mysteries in quantum physics, the many worlds theory.
It's not that unscientific to suspect it could be possible.
But what made things kind of weirder was that other things happened that had changed completely.
For example, when we were investigating this Alice in Wonderland story, we wanted to know if there was anything anywhere in the country, like an Alice in Wonderland kind of museum or something.
And we found there was something in North Wales.
And we basically knew what everything was to do with Alice in Wonderland.
Suddenly, while we're driving around the town of Telford, which is also in the Midlands of England, we're driving around the town of Telford and we keep getting lost.
Jody and I, we're in the car.
Jodie's like looking at a map that the sat now's on.
And for some reason, we keep being brought back to the same place, this same traffic island, roundabout.
And after about the six return to this same place, we see a great big sign saying Wonderland.
And like pointing in a, what?
So we said, well, that wasn't there before.
We follow it and we find an entire theme park devoted to the Alice in Wonderland story.
It's like a sort of a kind of mini Disneyland, but with all themes and rides and things connected with the story of Alice and Wonderland and the Looking Glass world.
Had you heard about it before?
And you've never heard about it.
It wasn't just us going into another universe.
Half the people I know had been, lived in Talford.
A lot of people I've known have lived in Talford, never knew about this place.
Half the people I know had never heard of it.
The other half, yeah, it's been there for everybody knows about it.
So, I mean, that's not just like going to another universe.
It's like bits of patchwork universes are being tagged onto our own.
And if it was just Jody and me, I'd just think we were going nuts.
But there's loads and loads of people who were witnesses to this.
And apparently, as you unfolded this story, and let's just be clear about this.
This was before you found the Heart of the Rose.
This stuff was happening before.
Before we found it.
In your aid, all kinds of people apparently turned up to assist you in finding it.
And then you were not able afterwards to trace them.
They vanished.
They disappeared.
Yeah, a few people.
I mean, I'll just give you one example of this funny little old man.
I say little old man, I'm an old man, but I mean, he kind of really looked like wizened and old, like a kind of wizard almost.
But he was obviously a flesh and blood human being.
He wore a strange, ill-fitting black suit, a bit eccentric, perhaps.
While we were examining an artifact that was connected with the Order of Me and I, I won't bother going into all the details, it'll go on forever, but we were examining an artifact that had been put on display in a museum at a place called Upton-upon-7 near Worcester.
We were examining this artifact and Jody and I were there.
There was people around us.
People who worked for the museum were giving us a background to it.
We were asking questions.
Suddenly, this little old man appeared from one of the other galleries somewhere and started explaining things about it that we hadn't known and that the people who ran the gallery, ran the museum hadn't known.
So we were all looking at each other.
That's interesting.
But he just suddenly sort of, you know, wandered off into the next gallery without explaining who he was or what he was doing or how he knew all this.
I followed him straight through into the next gallery.
He'd gone.
And there didn't seem to be any way he could get out.
Everyone was mystified.
We'd all seen him.
Eight, nine of us had seen him.
It was a physical person.
It wasn't some kind of transparent, ghostly figure.
And he'd vanished.
But if there may be some explanation for it, he may have been playing a trick on us or something.
But he appeared again.
When we were in a place called Wittick Manor, which is in Wolverhampton, so back in that area again, where there were paintings on the wall that we eventually discovered held clues as to where the Order of Mehaniad had hidden this heart of the rose stone, we were looking at this and the people who worked in the place, Wittick Manor, it's open to the public, it's owned by the National Trust.
The guides didn't know much about this painting, at least that there might be any clues to anything in it.
And while we were there, this same little old man appears behind us.
He's come out of a crowd of people who are being shown around and tells us a number of things about this painting.
And I'm trying to question him.
He answers a couple of questions.
I say, look, we saw you before.
And off he goes, wanders into this crowd of people who are being guided round the house.
I try and follow him.
I have to push my way through a bit of a crowd.
Go outside.
He's gone.
No one out there has seen him.
Upton on 7 to Wolverhampton.
It's about 50, 60 miles, isn't it?
It is.
So how could the same person, you're sure he was the same person, be in both of those places and disappear in both?
Well, I wouldn't swear to it in a court of law, but he was dressed the same.
I mean, you don't tend to stare at people's faces when you first see them.
He was a little old man.
He seemed to have the same kind of croaky voice.
He was dressed the same and he vanished in the same kind of way.
And he has information for you.
We were in another museum and a lady who looked just like, we were looking at, we were examining an old pre-Raphaelite painting, looking for clues as to where the order of Mianai may have hidden the heart of the rose.
And we kind of reached a bit of a dead end.
And one of the pictures we were looking at showed a pre-Raphaelite model.
They always had, whatever their real colour of hair, they always had these models with these long red flowing hair to make them look kind of Arthurian, Celtic, if you like.
So there was this image of this woman we would be looking at on a computer screen with long red hair and a green gown.
And suddenly behind us, there's a woman with in modern clothes, but a green gown, not down to the ground, but certainly, you know, quite a long dress and red hair who didn't look dissimilar to the character that we've been seeing in this painting, who suddenly tells us a whole host of things we didn't know about.
And then we followed her, raced after her into the next gallery.
The people in the next gallery hadn't seen her at all.
And she didn't appear on film when we asked to see if there was any pictures that were taken by security cameras.
Good Lord.
So do you think that there was some kind of concerted effort to assist you in finding that which you sought, the heart of the rose?
Well, it must be.
And I can't explain what it was.
I mean, on one occasion, we were in this Egyptian tomb, this recreated Egyptian tomb in Bidolf Grange.
And Jodi had had this dream, this vision, if you like, that she'd seen me in this tomb.
And next to me, there was this Victorian woman, woman dressed in Victorian clothes, who she thought may have been Mary or Laura Heath or somebody, looking at me.
We went there.
Jody was filming me for, I was just giving a little presentation to camera and walking through this tomb for something I was doing for YouTube.
And when we looked at the film, there's me walking through.
It's quite dark in there, but you can clearly see a kind of grey outline shape of a woman in Victorian clothes standing right next to me and looking at me.
So you're not talking about ghosts, you're talking about Jodi seeing something in the future, seeing a woman maybe from the past, me in the future.
I mean, is this time travel as well?
I mean, it's nothing like your normal ghost poltergeist type phenomenon.
This is something totally different.
And it just kept happening.
And all I can say is we never felt threatened.
It wasn't malevolent.
It's completely benign.
And we seemed to be helped along in what we were doing.
I mean, we used to call it the whatever because we didn't really know what was behind all this.
Lots of different things.
But if this overall whatever wanted us to find the stone, why didn't it just give it to us straight away?
Well, maybe Jodi thought this one, and it's the only thing that makes any sense.
It wanted us to learn something about the way the world works by the quest during the quest itself, kind of like an Arthurian setting.
How did you actually locate it?
Well, eventually, the clues in these paintings led us to a cave in the Peak District of northern Staffordshire.
It's a wonderful area with rolling hills and limestone rock formations.
And in this cave, it is the setting for an Arthurian story called Gawain and the Green Knight.
It's been made into a film.
And at the end of the story, Gawain meets a character called the Green Knight who takes him to this cave called the Green Chapel, although it is a cave.
And there he sees ultimately Morgana or Morgan Le Fay.
Originally in the Garthurian story, Morgan LeFay was a kindly enchantress rather than the wicked witch she later became.
So this mystical lady, Morgan Le Fay, wants to give him her powers because he's followed this quest and she's about to do it.
But for some reason, he turns this down and he goes off to live a humble life in Arthur's court.
Now that's a medieval story.
There was a painting of the encounter between Gawain and Morgan Le Fay in the form of a winged woman, like an angel, but that's the form she took, in this cave, her hand offering him the power.
And it's actually the cave that they used, that the artist in the 19th century, as part of the Me and I group, the place he'd use as a setting for this was a place called Wetton Mill Cave, Which is where we went.
So, this painting of this cave with this angel figure, Morgan the Fay and Gawain, led us to this cave.
And we ended up in the spot where the angel and Gawain are in the painting.
And when we got there, I mean, just to describe it, it's like a huge cavern.
And above, directly above us, about 20 feet higher than we were, is this great hole in the roof where the cavern had obviously collapsed at some point in the past.
So you can see outside and there's all bushes, trees and so forth above us and brambles and whatnot.
And the moment, not long after we got there, there was suddenly, like what had happened at the beginning of our search, there was this sudden downpour.
I mean, rain like you don't normally get in England, the sort of thing that you see in central states of America where the rain suddenly pours down and there's instant thunder and lightning.
It was like this.
And again, what we discovered later, it was pretty localized to where we were.
It started, but what was even weirder, there was like a whirlwind, like almost like a tornado that you don't get in Britain very often, blowing directly above where we were.
And you could see all these branches and leaves and things being thrown round and round in a whirlwind directly above us.
The rain was so torrential that after a few moments, there was like gushing waterfalls coming down all around the walls of the cave.
And directly in front of us was this kind of niche, this kind of alcove in the side, the walls of the cave, which is where the figure of the angelic Morgan Le Fay is in this painting.
And the water is pouring down as a cascade, like a little waterfall.
And in the lightning, it seemed that it was created by shadows caused by the lightning, the shadows of rocks and trees above us.
It appeared for a second as a flickering image of like an angel or this Morgan the Faith figure appeared behind this waterfall.
That's what it seemed like to both of us.
And then with an almighty crash of thunder, the whole thing seemed to come to an end.
The rain stopped very quickly, the wind dropped.
And then, as the rain, the water sort of gradually seeped away or rushed away from where we were, we saw on the floor in this niche where we'd seen this shadowy figure was this stone heart.
It was basically, as I say, about two inches high, two inches wide, about three quarters of an inch thick, not smooth, but shaped into the shape of a heart.
And it was made from pink rose quartz, and it was just there on the floor.
Now, we worked out that it must have been washed down from a crevice higher up in the rocks.
But the fact that it should have been washed, that may be where it was hidden.
Some people have said, well, it could have been something that was left there by some New Age group or pagans.
They often leave things at sacred sites.
But for something, we're looking for a heart called the heart of the rose, and a rose-colored heart stone is washed down from the walls of the cave exactly when we're there.
It's too much of a coincidence.
So as far as we were concerned, we found the heart of the rose.
And is that the end of the story?
Do you have it in your possession now?
Well, Jodi took it back.
It's in LA at the moment.
There's a university there that she knows people who work there.
And there's some geologists examining it.
I mean, we kept it with us for some time and nothing happened with it.
It hasn't done anything yet.
So they're looking at it to determine how old it is, where it came from.
I mean, if it is the one that little Mary found, then it's got to be at least 1500 years old.
The Meaniah group themselves believed it had been made by a mythological Greek queen called Omphale, who ruled a land called Mehania, after which the group was evidently named, which was in modern-day Turkey, part of the old Greek world.
And she was supposed to have made various magical stones that had various properties.
And the heartstone, or at least a number of heartstones she'd made, was supposed to have had the power to influence fate itself, to change reality.
Well, we'd had reality changing before we found it, but nothing since.
I don't know what to say.
I said this last time when we talked about the Greenstone.
What an astonishing confluence of events.
It seems that something wanted you to find that, and you found it.
It's now being analyzed.
I suppose the last question, or perhaps penultimate question for you, is then, all of these things happened to you.
How did that change or how has that changed your view of the world and the way that it works?
Well, not much really, because I already thought before this, and this may be why it happened to us, and Jody was similar.
I mean, I've spent a number of years, I mean, I write about historical mysteries, but I also read an awful lot about quantum physics and about how reality may not be anything like the way we think it is at very small subatomic levels.
Time and space cease to exist.
If you were to travel at the speed of light, no time would pass.
So you might see a photon from an ancient galaxy that left that galaxy 13 billion years ago, and it's now just reached your eyes or the telescope it's been looked at through.
And although it's taken 13 billion years for that photon to get here, if you were riding that photon and actually going at the speed of light, scientists know for a fact, they've even proved it.
I won't bother to explain how.
People can look that up, that no Time would pass.
So, for that photon, no time has passed whatsoever between when it left a galaxy 30 billion years ago and now.
So, there are strange things within science itself that no one can really understand.
Quantum physicists, many of them, believe in what's called the many worlds theory, where there could, logically, there must be an almost infinite amount of parallel worlds for our world to exist at all.
I mean, it's something to look into, but I'd already got my head around these kind of thoughts.
So all this kind of dud did to me was made me think two things.
Is it because myself and also Jodie think like this in the first place that this happened to us?
Or did we create the phenomenon because that's what was already in our minds?
Or in other words, reality is what you think it is?
Well, kind of.
But I mean, seriously, it could have sent us mad.
But because we've investigated so many weird things in the past, where coincidences, I mean, I'm so, as I said before, I've researched the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail and other things like this.
And very often I was able to find out things that other people had never been able to find out before because some information just so happened to be somewhere I happened to be looking.
When I was looking for the staff of Moses, for example, the staff with which Moses is said to have parted the Red Sea, I found a historical character that fitted the profile of Moses, and he was supposed to have been buried with his staff.
And this staff was discovered by archaeologists in the mid-1900s, and then it had been lost.
Now, I lived in Birmingham.
I did most of my research.
I still live in Birmingham.
I do most of my research, or did then before the internet, at Birmingham Museum and Library, which are right next to each other.
So I start to do research, find out that these guys had found this staff in a place called Petra in Jordan.
I go there.
I find the place where they had done the research.
Then apparently the staff ended up being sent back to Britain via Germany.
So I go to Germany, then Heidelberg, and then to Britain.
Then I find out that it's sold to an American collector and he ends up on the Titanic.
So the Titanic should be at the bottom of the Atlantic.
But no, the Titanic stopped off in Ireland before going across to America, to New York.
It set off from Southampton, went to Ireland, picked up a few more passengers.
A few people got off before it went to New York.
The man who'd bought the staff just so happened at the last minute to decide to go on a sightseeing tour of Ireland for a few days and take the next ship.
So ultimately, I kept tracing what had happened to this staff until eventually I found out it was in the Birmingham Museum in the Egyptian gallery, literally a stone's throw from where I started my research.
Things like this have been happening to me all my life, just not so kind of intense, if you see what I mean.
No, well, I've always believed all of my life that there is no such thing as coincidence.
Things happen for a reason, and sometimes you are definitely in the right place at the right time.
An astonishing story.
You tell it so beautifully, Graham, and thank you so much.
I mean, you've amazed me again.
And I wish you every success with the book.
I know it hasn't been out for too long.
Do you want to tell my listener, A, the title of the book so that we have that firmly noted and B, where they might get it?
Yes, it's called Strange Fate, and it's by Graham Phillips, myself, and Jodi Russell.
You can find out all about it on my website, which is grahamphillips.net.
All your links that you need to know are there on the first page, plus a bit about the book.
You can look at some of my YouTube videos about it on Graham Phillips Author.
And where you can get the book, it's available on Amazon.co.
Sorry, on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.
strange fate.
And as a man who's worked in the Midlands for a part of his broadcasting career as a great Midlands phrase, gobsmacked, I think that's probably how...
I think it's originally, I mean, somebody's going to correct me, originally a Birmingham word.
You know, I'm originally from Liverpool.
We have our own words that have gone national, but I think gobsmacked is a Midlands word that went national.
And I'm gobsmacked at the back end of this.
I've been explaining that.
Well, I mean, I might be wrong, and somebody will definitely tell me.
Graeme, it's been a privilege to speak with you again.
I hope we speak again.
Are you working on anything else at the moment you can?
In a couple of months, I've got another book coming out by the American publisher Inner Traditions.
That's a more, I don't know what to say, a tamer book, but it's about, it's a historical investigation into an island that once existed off the coast of Britain called Doggerland that sank beneath the sea at the end of the last ice age that may have had a civilization on it that gave rise to the builders of Stonehenge.
Right.
That has been in the news, I think, over this last six months or so because of some academic research.
Graham, pleasure, as I say, to speak with you.
And I want to speak with you again.
Please take care.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Howard.
I'm not even going to try and say anything after that because anything I do say will be along the lines of wow or gee and won't add anything to the conversation.
The remarkable Graham Phillips, Strange Fate is the book, and he's involved, as you heard, in some new research.
We'll talk with him again.
Thank you very much if you've recently suggested Graham.
I'm delighted to have got him back on here.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained in the sunshine.
So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
Above all else, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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