Joshua P. Warren Daily - Joshua Shakes Hands With The First Ghost He Sees.

Joshua discusses his start as a Paranormal Investigator as a teenager, what it was like to see his first ghost, why all of this is nothing like the TV shows, and now the challenge was to make it go away. What happened? Totally a must listen podcast.

Transcript

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Hello, I am Joshua P. Warren, and this is Joshua P. Warren Daly. Yes, and I count down to Halloween. You know, I started investigating spooky places when I was just a teenager. I published a book of fictional, scary short stories and poems when I was about 14, going on 15, and because of that, uh I earned a job writing articles for the local newspaper, the Asheville Citizen Times. So before I was even old enough to drive, my parents would take me around to places like Helen's Bridge or some old haunted house in Madison County out in the sticks, and uh I would write articles about this stuff. But honestly, I never really got to see anything too ghostly myself. And uh this went on for years. I mean, I would see things that might be ghostly effects here and there, but I never saw a ghost until I was in my early twenties. As a matter of fact, I got to the point where I thought, you know what, maybe some people can see ghosts and some people can't, and I'm just one of those people who can't see them. I don't have the right rods and cones or something, and the firing of my brain synapses is a little off. I just couldn't figure out why that I would go to all these places and not see anything. But yes, it finally changed. And you know, to me, this is a great example of just how truly rare terminal phenomena can be. You get the wrong impression sometimes when you watch these television shows, and every single week they're cranking out a new bit of ghost footage. Well, it's hard to believe that you could uh you could have such fortune considering we call it paranormal because paranormal means beyond normal. It's not normal, it doesn't happen all the time. That's why it's so difficult to pin it down and to document it and to prove it. So, here is what led up to the first time I saw a ghost. Um I was contacted by a uh a college-age young lady who actually had uh seen me speak at one point, and um she moved into a little house in Asheville by herself. And when she was moving in, she actually called 911 because she saw a dark figure in her house and she thought an intruder had broken in. And of course the cops came, but they didn't find any evidence of that, so right off the bat she knew there was something fishy going on. Well, before too long, this form, this figure, began appearing more frequently, but it often looked sort of like a mist or a cloud. She was freaked out by it, but her friends thought it was pretty cool. They would come over and they'd have sleepovers and uh and they'd take pictures sometimes of this thing. And I'm telling you, some of the craziest looking pictures I've ever seen came from various people who photographed this big misty thing that would fly around this lady's house. As a matter of fact, if you've never seen those pictures, if you go to joshwarren.com, you can click the link there to the gallery of the strange in the top menu, and uh under the world's wildest ghost photos. I'm pretty sure I've got at least a couple from her house. So anyway, um this form started appearing, this misty thing, more regularly. And then when she really started getting afraid, however, was when this thing appeared in her bedroom. And then one night she woke up and it was in the bed with her. That was it. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. She got the heck out of there, slept in her car. She called me and she said, I am moving out of this house if something cannot be done to get rid of this. And I told her, I said, Well, you know, I'm not a Ghostbuster, I'm not an exorcist, I can't guarantee you that I can stop the activity, but I'll be more than happy to come over and study it, and you know, maybe I'll have some suggestions for you. So myself and a small group of fellows from the Lemur team, we went over to her house, and we did document some odd things, uh weird electromagnetic fluctuations and whatnot. I think we got a few orbs here and there, but nothing um nothing as extreme as what other people were experiencing. So knowing how rare this stuff is, I came back to her house a second time, less than a week later. On that occasion, I was up in the attic at one point with another researcher named Rob. And I just so happened to be in the attic because I was going around from room to room taking background field measurements. And again, if you want to know more about how to do that sort of thing, I have an online course on my website there as well. So I was in the attic with Rob, and Rob said, Josh, look! And I turned, and Rob was about maybe three feet away from me, and right there between us was this blue-gray, misty form just swirling in the air. And it was one of those moments where for me time just stood still, and I I've often told this story, and I think this is maybe the best way I can put it. I felt like I imagine a caveman felt looking at fire for the first time. I mean, it wasn't frightening, but I'm on one side of it, he's on the other, and we're just dumbfounded. I mean, you think you understand everything that you're going to see the moment your eyes hit it, and when you see something that is that foreign to your experience, your brain goes flipping through all the files in the cabinet, and you can't find the file that this goes into. And I reached out and touched it. That just seemed to me, I didn't even have to think about it. It was almost an instinct. I reached out and touched it. And I'll never forget when my hand sort of broke the surface of this misty form, because it did have a a bit of a structure, um, it almost looked like instead of curling around my hand like smoke would, that there was almost a um a faceted look to it, almost like a gemstone, and these kind of geometric angles sort of shifted around my hand. It was very, very strange. It was cold, icy cold in the middle, even though this was in uh a hot month, and uh the hair stood up on my knuckles, that typical electrostatic sensation like you you get if you hold your hand up to an old television screen. And Rob reached out and he touched it. So here we are, two guys looking at this thing from two different angles, were both touching it, and then it started to dim, and it got dimmer and dimmer, and then I realized, oh crap, I have a camera around my neck this whole time. So I snapped a photograph of this thing just before it completely vanished. So I did not get it in its fullest form, but I did get it, and it's there on my website. Now, I want you to think about for a second, before I continue this story, how frustrating this can be for a guy like me to see something like that. Another person there to be with me, we both see the same thing from two different angles. We both reached out and touched it. I took a photograph of it. There the electromagnetic field environment was going nuts. What more can you do to prove that a ghost is real? I don't have the Ghostbusters trap that I can stop to open up and suck the ghost down into it. So this was I mean, obviously, I I came walking down the stairs, my life was changed. Um and I looked at her and I said, We saw it. And she was so happy that we had come in with an objective mindset, and that we we validated uh her experiences, you know, and we said, Look, yeah, this is this is not normal, whatever this thing is, but it's it's something that's here and it's real. Um we heard that historically there was a mean man who lived in that house long ago, was very abusive to his family, may have even been buried on the property. So we've often wondered if that might be the historical connection to this thing. But anyway, so now she says, How do we get rid of it? And I said, Well, there are some physical things that we can change in the physical environment that might reduce it. And as a matter of fact, I think I'll do a whole other podcast for you in the future about different techniques to get rid of ghostly activity or unwanted paranormal activity. That's uh that's a bit of a podcast on its own, so I won't dig into it right now. But we went through all these suggestions, she tried all these things, and nothing was working. And then, just synchronistically, as fate would have it, I got a uh uh, I guess it was an email or something out of the blue from a man who told me that he was uh an ordained uh Lutheran minister, and that this is not something that is uh normally talked about within the church, but that he also has experience doing clearings and essentially exorcisms and things like that. And he said if I ever had a case where I needed any help, he would be happy to lend a hand. And I thought, whoa, what are the chances of this happening? So I met with this man at the Grove Park Inn, and I was impressed by his outlook. He also had degrees in science as well as his work in theology, and so uh he he prepared some things. Um we went to her house with him. Um he asked some questions about their their faith just to sort of see where they were coming from uh philosophically or whatever. He went around the house, he said some prayers, um he had some uh uh, I guess essentially holy water he used here and there. Uh and then he had these interesting little pendants that he had made that he gave them to wear. And he essentially blessed the whole place, and uh after that it seemed the activity had stopped. She was absolutely delighted for about six months. There was nothing. It looked like it had worked, we didn't know how, we didn't understand how or why, but after about six months, the activity started to come back again. And I just recently uh talked to her, and she still lives in that house, and she said the activity has never been as extreme as it was during that period of time, but the place still is haunted, it still has activity, but she really loves the place, it's a true home for her, and I don't see her moving anytime soon. But the point of that story is sometimes, no matter what you do, you just can't get rid of activity. And it may be just that you know we don't understand exactly what we're dealing with, that's part of the problem. Also, I think a lot of it has to do with the location, and then also you do have this weird phenomenon of you know, you you hear about haunted places, but they also are what appear to be haunted people, people who just sort of get attachments, or maybe they are for one reason or another especially desirable to some kind of a uh a spirit, and so you know, sometimes a person can go wherever he or she wants, and they just will continually pick up these little predatory spiritual things. So um the but you know, I that was for me a huge, huge moment. Um seeing a ghost, touching a ghost, photographing a ghost. And at that point I had no doubt that I was studying something that was real, something that was uh was valid, and I was more determined than ever about the the path that my future would take. So on the other hand, that time when I saw that ghost, I can't tell you for sure that was the spirit of a dead person. I can tell you it was a misty form swirling in an attic, and I think that would fit the bill for what most people would call a ghost. It was on another occasion, however, that I spent the night at a place where I had another life-altering experience where I came into contact with a spirit that was obviously a conscious entity. Conscious, interactive, aware, disembodied entity. That is freaky. As a matter of fact, I swear to you, I just I just got a cold chill thinking about it. It's like ice water down my back. So I'll be telling you also about that in an upcoming podcast as well. So uh hope you're enjoying these stories. I've got plenty to tell. I'll keep them coming as long as you keep listening. So uh again, please visit my website, joshuapewarren.com, check out the gallery of the strange, check out some of the stuff on my curiosity shop, and uh I still got some of those uh brand new sigil wands that uh I'm gonna only sell for a few more days. If you're interested, click the little icon of the wand on the top right hand corner of my homepage. Thanks for staying curious. Talk to you later.