Joshua P. Warren Daily - Why Joshua Is A Paranormal Investigator. Family Member Vanishes Into Thin Air.

WNC Paranormal Story Telling influenced Joshua, and so certainly did his Uncle who's head first vanished in a family photo and soon after his uncle physically vanished off a front porch never to be seen again while talking to indoor family members. This is what puts being a paranormal investigator deep into Joshua's heart and soul.

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Hello, I'm Joshua P. Warren, and this is Joshua P. Warren Daly. Here is a story you might enjoy, and if you have followed my work for a while, I bet you've heard this story at least once, but it's worth repeating, especially for those who never have. Of course, I was born and raised here in the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. These are the uh the oldest mountains in North America. And uh my family on both sides have been in this area for hundreds of years. So growing up in these mountains, it was common for me to hear all kinds of interesting old pioneer folklore and ghost stories and Native American tales, and uh storytelling is a big part of the culture around here. About an hour down the road in uh Jonesboro, Tennessee, they even have a storytelling festival. So I guess that's part of the reason that I grew to really enjoy some of these tales about mysterious things in the mountains, but they were more than just campfire stories to me, and it really starts with something that happened before I was even born. It happened on my mother's side of the family. See, back in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, my grandmother named Virginia Callaway at that time, um was about 12 or 13 years old, and her family had a big farmhouse out in a rural area, the countryside, place called Barnardsville, North Carolina, here in the western part of the state. Um, still a very beautiful place, and they were quite fortunate because they were better off than a lot of the people in the community during that time. Eventually, they too ended up losing their home uh as the depression sort of um became worse. But nonetheless, early on, uh they were doing okay, and my grandmother, Virginia, she received a pretty nice gift for her birthday. She was given a camera, which was kind of an expensive thing back in those days, and uh she was just relishing the idea of taking photographs of the family, and one day her father, an old mountain man named Jack, and her older brother, whose name was Claude, they came back out of the mountains from a small game hunting trip. And she asked them to pose for a photograph, and they obliged, and she took this great old-fashioned photo of these two old rugged mountain men standing there at the bottom of a hill holding their rabbits and squirrels. But the odd thing was when the photograph developed, and I saw this photograph when I was a kid, her older brother Claude, did not have a head in the photograph. His head was literally transparent. You could even see the brush behind him. Now they knew that was bizarre, but they didn't know enough about how photography really worked to realize just how weird it was. So, you know, they sort of blew it off. Well, fast forward one month later, this was in the middle of July, Jack, the father, was in the kitchen making lunch, and uh Claude was sitting outside on the porch reading a copy of his favorite publication, Western Magazine, Old Gunslinger tells. And the kitchen window was open, and so Claude and his father Jack were conversing back and forth between the window and then uh or through the window, and so finally, when Jack had finished the uh preparing the lunch, he walked out onto the porch, and Claude was nowhere to be seen. Here was Claude's magazine sitting there, pages rustling in the wind, but uh where's Claude? I mean, obviously he was looking forward to having this fresh lunch. Hours went by. Where's Claude? The day wound on, finally family members started coming home from various places. Jack's saying, has anybody seen Claude? Has anybody seen Claude? Claude didn't reappear. The next day they were out searching through the woods, they got the authorities involved, they searched for days and days, and my great uncle, Claude Callaway, was never seen or heard from again. It was as if he had vanished in the blink of an eye, practically in mid-sentence, as if he'd just been spirited away. And it was especially eerie that his fate seemed to have been foretold a month ahead of time in this phantasmal photograph. And let me tell you something, that was a major tragedy in my family. I mean, they never got over that. I mean, think if that were your relative, how puzzling and disturbing it would be. And when I became an adult, I contacted uh Vance Pollack, the best forensic historian I know, and uh and he got on the case. Vance found the whole paper trail of Claude's life, census records and employment records, and it all ends that very day. And I myself went there and talked to all the elderly people I could find in Barnardsville when I was in my early 20s, and they all gave me the exact same version of events that I have just given you. So that was um that was an incident that certainly opened my mind to the reality of the strange and the mysterious and the paranormal. That this wasn't some old legend. Uh, this was something real that happened to my family, and I wondered did did Claude slip into another dimension? Was he abducted by aliens? Um sometimes people just sort of just vanish right before the eyes of witnesses, and nobody knows what that's about. But uh I still don't know exactly how to explain what happened to my great uncle Claude. But growing up and knowing that story, seeing that photograph, it certainly made an impression on me, and it set the stage for my interest the rest of my life. So I'm gonna run for now, but uh I'll tell you soon in an upcoming podcast about some of the things that I've seen over the past 25 years as a paranormal investigator, especially as we head toward Halloween. Maybe next time I'll tell you about the first time I ever actually finally saw a ghost. Thanks for your interest and support. Thanks for staying curious. I'll talk to you again soon.