Paranormal 101 with Nicky White

Today's podcast guest is Nicky White, a best-selling Amazon Author under the pen name of NV peacock. Nicky Peacock has released three books: Little Bones, The 13th Girl and The Brother, as well as multiple short stories. She is also the host of The Red Rabbit Hole podcast, where fiction meets true crime. We met in a Facebook group for podcasts and have a fascination with the paranormal. Nicky proclaims that “entertaining readers is the best feeling ever.” ... I am sure that you'll find that she's a great storyteller, as she shares stories and experiences in today's interview, our topic is the paranormal. So call in the paranormal.” Call IT in With Dar!”

Transcript

Speaker Dar

Welcome to Nicky… I'm so excited for today's interview, but before we dive into this topic of the

paranormal, will you tell everybody a little bit about yourself?

Speaker Nicky

Of course. Hello, lovely listeners. So I am best-selling thriller author NV Peacock, otherwise known as Nicky. I'm based here in the UK, and I write under both NV peacock and Nicky Peacock, so you can find my books on Amazon and in hopefully all good bookshops, and probably some not so good bookshops too. And I also cohost the podcast “the red rabbit hole” where fiction meets true crime. And myself and my cohost Lisa Shepherd, we interview authors, Thriller authors, horror authors, all sorts of authors, and discuss their books and the kind of true crime cases that inspired them. So we go down some pretty gritty rabbit holes of research.

When we do that,

Speaker Dar

Thank you. Will you define paranormal and what it means to you?

Speaker Nicky

Oh, big question. So I think for me, personally, I am a believer. I'm not a believer in everything. So I think that the paranormal is usually something that just can't be explained. And I think it's very arrogant of the human race as a whole, to kind of assume that we know everything and that we can tell everything. So I kind of hope there is some magic in the world and there are things that cannot be explained and that we can experience them from time to time, and they're a good thing rather than a bad thing.

Speaker Dar4

That's a beautiful outlook. Nicky, thank you. Will you discuss it? I've never been called a beautiful outlook before. You haven't, well, no, there's always a first. There's, there is that magic in the world, like you say, Speaker Nicky there is, I hope so anyway, I really do. I kind of think that, like I said, I think it's arrogant to think that we know everything. And I can get very frustrated with people that are like, Oh, well, you know, if it doesn't go against the laws of physics that we know about, then it's not real. Or, you know, it's not going to happen. Blah, blah, blah, and it's like, well, you don't know everything, mate. Nobody does so Speaker Dar well… we are definitely in harmony when it comes to that. Will you discuss the fear of the unknown a little bit and how you address that? Because with this topic, I bet that's huge.

Speaker Nicky

It's massive. It's absolutely massive. And I think the fear of the unknown is kind of the root of most people's anxieties as well. Just talking from us, I love psychology, so talking from a kind of psychological perspective, when you, your brain likes to know what's going on, and I think this can, I suppose, color certain experiences that we have in a negative light. Because if you don't understand what's going on, and you, your brain's going, Oh, no, I don't like this. Then it can concoct something that will make you feel fearful and will cause anxiety and make you run away from it, rather than looking at something that is unknown and being curious about it and wanting to explore it.

Speaker Dar

I'm going to repeat, repeat “that the brain likes to know what is going on”. Oh, sure, and that is probably the root cause, like you said, oh, let's get into the nitty gritty, where you tell us about some of your most unusual experiences. I'm going to turn this over to you.

Speaker Nicky

Oh okay, well, I've got a couple of very kind of, I suppose, unique experiences to myself. I am. I've seen a couple of ghosts, or I'm assuming they were ghosts. I couldn't explain them in any other way we have. I'm based in Northamptonshire in England, which is about, it's the Midlands. So if you were to look at the map of the UK and look at it like a person, I'd be living on its belt buckle. And we are one of the most haunted counties that there is. I mean, there's a lot of ghost stories around England generally, and we've got a road that sits between ourselves, and it's another town. It's kind of a rival town, to be honest. And the road that sits between us is a dual carriageway. It's not much to look at. It's certainly not got a lot of green or anything. But there is a bridge, and it's called Barford bridge. And there's a lot of stories along Barford bridge, everything from a hitch- hiking monk that can get in your car all the way through to Vikings enacting battles on the side of the road. People have seen lots of different things, and I've actually seen two things on that road, because I go to the neighboring town quite a lot. Both of these things were at night, and the first one was. I was driving along kind of minding my own business. And because I go down that road all the time, I'm never expecting much, or not expecting to see anything. And in the sort of what would be sort of two or three cars in the distance, I saw what looked to be a rolling ball of rags, which, considering it was quite a it was very much a summer night. It was very still. It was probably, it wasn't even late. It was probably about eight o'clock at night. But it was dark, and I thought, Oh, I'm gonna run into whatever it is. I'm gonna hit it. I'm gonna hit it. But I looked in my rear-view mirror and there was a car right behind me, so I thought, well, I can't break. I'm gonna have to just go through, you know, I'm just going to have to hit whatever this ball of rags is. And as I approached it, the car literally just went straight through. It was like there was nothing on the road. And when I looked back in my rear view mirror, there was nothing there either, but the car was obviously still behind me. And it just made me think, well, it was enough for me to have those thoughts of, I need to break, I need to do something. But when I went through it, I thought, well, that was really weird. And then I thought nothing else of it, until I spoke to a friend of mine who 's very spiritual, and I said, I saw this on the road. It was very, very odd. Didn't really know what I was looking at. It was like a

ball of rags just sort of rolling slowly across the road in front of me, and she said, Well, do you realize that's what it would appear if someone was actually hit by a car and was rolling across the road? And I just went really cold, and I just thought, oh my God, it was like a reenactment of an accident, and that's perhaps what I saw. So whether it was a ghost or a time slip of some description, I don't really know. So that was a weird one on that road. And the other thing that I saw was more recent. I was driving from that town back to my house, and again, didn't expect to see anything. Wasn't particularly, you know, I just wanted to get home. Wasn't paying attention to anything to the side of the road, but it was like a big white bird was literally diving towards my windscreen. And I thought it was again, I thought something was going to hit my car, and there was nothing behind me. So I tried to swerve a little bit to avoid it, but it just went through. And as it went through, I actually saw almost like a mist within the car itself, and then it was gone.

Speaker Dar

Wow. So that's both interesting stories!

Speaker Nicky

Not the kind of thing you'd normally see. And I mean, nowhere near as interesting as I've. I've spoken to people that have said they've looked in the rear-view mirror and there is that ghostly monk sitting in the back of their car. I don't know what I'd do if I kind of saw something like that, Speaker Dar yeah. That would be something, yeah. Speaker Nicky both of them were very odd, to say the least. And I just remember thinking at the time that it wasn't odd, if you know what I mean, that it was just like a bird was coming up my car, or I was going to hit something that was rolling across the road. It was almost like tumbleweed. And I thought, I don't know where this has come from, you know, like I had those kind of thought processes. So it wasn't like I sense something was weird or anything like that. I just kind of went through it and it felt weird after it happened, rather than as it was happening.

Speaker Dar

Yes, and I think we can bring back your quote that “the brain likes to know what's going on”.

Speaker Nicky

It definitely does. The brain is a funny thing. Another thing about the brain that fascinates me is that we only actually take in 70% of what's really happening around us, because the brain likes to know what's going on. But also, it's very lazy. It makes a lot of assumptions. So while you're sitting wherever you are, listeners, your brain is actually only taking in 70% of what's actually happening. So something could be happening in that 30% that you just have no idea what's going on, that the brain is making assumptions that, okay, it was like this the last time we were in here. So I'm just going to assume it's the same. So the setup to your room is the same, which is, I think, why? I don't know whether anyone gets this, but you can put your keys down for one second and think, oh, no, where's my keys gone? And you've not realized you've moved them, and your brain hasn't, you know, clicked that you've moved them, and it's just assuming they're back where they were meant to be. And that's how come you kind of lose your keys and then suddenly they're right in front of your nose.

Speaker Dar

Yes, and I have heard that before that we don't use our whole capability.

Speaker Nicky

Yeah, it does make you wonder what's going on in the other kind of percentage that we're not really paying attention to.

Yes, well, there are lots of theories, and that's the part of the brain we need for manifesting things to come into our life and tapping into that. But that's not our topic. Our topic is the paranormal.

Speaker Dar

So can you share some? One else's story that you just thought was just so fascinating and so fun.

Speaker Nicky

Sure, one of the big stories of my family is when my mum and dad first got married. They were quite young when they got married, and they didn't have a lot of money, so they had a house in, strangely, in the town that is one town away from where I live now. And they had, there was like a big Victorian building, and it had been cut into two apartments, and they'd taken the apartment above and there was this lovely lady called Queenie who was in her, I think, late 60s, early 70s, who had the apartment below them, and they were only there three months, even though it was such a nice building because of the ghostly activities that went on to the point where my mum said I cannot live here any longer. So it started quite innocuously. It was just footsteps on the stairs, and mum always thought it was either somebody coming to visit. She thought it was her dad, like checking in on them, or it was my dad coming back from work. And she's kind of flinging open the door to say hey, and nobody would be there. And the other thing that would happen on a semi regular basis was she would hear scratching, and she thought it was mice, so she'd put mice traps down, not very, you know, animal friendly, unfortunately, because we're talking, we're back in the kind of early 70s, and little bit of cheese, horrible kind of contraption. And they were all around the house, and she would hear them go off. But wouldn't want to see anything, you know, she wouldn't want to see any dead mice. So she'd wait until my dad came back to kind of clear them up. And then, literally, every time my dad would come back, she'd say, can you look at the mouse traps? He'd go over and he'd say, there's nothing there. The trap has been sprung. The cheese is still there, and there's no dead mouse. So it was a lot of like, little things that kind of started to add up. They were there over Christmas time, and they didn't again. Didn't have a lot of money. They were only just kind of starting out as a couple, and mum had spent a lot of what little they did have on a Christmas tree, and it was tiny.

It was probably only the size of her arm, and so they put it on a table to make it look bigger. And she's taken ages to decorate it. I tell you, I've heard nothing but this, this tree, most of my life, of how much effort she put into it. But every time that they'd leave the room, it would get knocked over. So dad thought, you know, it's an unsteady table. It's just falling down. She's put too much on it. They play with it. Take stuff off. He even taped it to the table every time they'd leave it as it was on the floor again. And it was getting to the point that mum was getting quite scared dad would work nights, and she wasn't very happy being left alone there. And so dad said that he'd buy her a little budgie budgerigar to keep her company, and she picked, of course, the runt of the litter, as my mom tends to do, called it smokey, and she'd sit and watch telly with Smokey when dad was out. And one day, the budgerigar, who the budgies don't speak, they sing, it, turned around to her and actually started speaking in a foreign language. And that's when she ran back, like she ran to Queenie, and was like, something is going on. I'm, you know, I can't go back up there. And when dad came back, he found smokey, unfortunately, dead, in his cage. So whatever had taken him over, it sucked. What little life that poor guy had left out of him. So it was, it was quite a traumatic three months in total. One of the other things that would really it would, I mean, mum kind of, I think, bore the brunt of it, but Dad would get annoyed because they buy a lot of stuff in bulk. So for example, like toilet rolls, they'd buy in bulk to save money. And when he'd come home, they'd be all out of their cupboard, and they'd be piled up the stairs. So in 1234, like counting up the stairs. And there was no way that Queenie could do anything like that. And obviously mum wasn't doing it. So it was like a real poltergeist kind of activity, and it took kind of smoky dying for mum to say, Look, I am and she was pregnant by this time with my brother, so she was like, I'm not staying here. I cannot do this. And so they got a loan from my grandparents, and they moved to somewhere else and found it much, much better. But the creepiest thing now, bearing in mind, I've heard these stories all literally throughout my life, all through my life, telling me about the ghosts and what they thought had happened and talking about, you know, all the kind of incidents and things like that. About five years ago, went to a hairdresser in that town and. And I was waiting for the hairdresser to turn up, and she was late. She was about 10 minutes late. And when she got in, she was like, all of a fluster. And she's like, I'm so sorry. I'm so late. And it was Christmas time. I was getting my hair done ready for a Christmas do. And I was like, you know, that's okay, don't worry about it, kind of thing. And she was like, I was trying to pick my tree up. And I was like, What do you mean? And she's like my Christmas tree. She says it gets knocked down every time I leave the room. And I'm thinking, this sounds familiar. I said, What else happens? Then I said, you know, obviously something's going on in your house. Is it like, you know, Do you have pets or whatever? And she's like, No, no pets. She said, I had a cat, but it ran away. Wouldn't stay in the house. And she said, the other thing is, I can never find my salon stuff when I need it, because I have a ghost, and the ghost likes to count my salon products up the stairs. And I was like, No way. And I said, Do you live X? And she went, how did you know that? And so she lives in the exact same house that my mum and dad were in. The only difference being now it's been turned back into one whole house rather than two apartments.

Speaker Dar

Wow. Thank you for sharing that. That was really a fun one, not for the people involved….

Speaker Nicky

no, I mean, she seemed to be dealing with it, I guess in a way, she wasn't, you know, it was, it was so bizarre to kind of, because part of me was always like, my mom and dad are just embellishing, you know, because it's their story, and, you know, it's, it always get popped out at Halloween and things, and especially if someone new came into the house, they would be like, All over them, telling them their ghost stories, and to actually hear it all from somebody else was just remarkable, and to know that it's still doing it, and I had very, very recently decided to walk up that street and see the house for myself. And it is creepy, though it's got a very not to look at, to look at it was beautiful. It's like, it's a Victorian terrace house, and it's, it's gorgeous. It's got lovely fixtures, but you can feel something's not quite right there.

Speaker Dar

Yes. So the energy of the house is what you're talking about, Speaker Nicky

definitely the kind of aura, the energy something isn't right. But to have someone else cooperate, you know, a complete stranger, I'd never been to this hairdresser before, you know, just kind of corroborates the story. Was just shocking to me, and it was like, wow, you know, Sorry mum and dad for not believing you all those years.

Speaker Dar

Yes, it really, really does back up their story. Yeah, let's talk about you as an author in the books that you've written.

Speaker Nicky

Sure, so I've written, I've done three thrillers, adult thrillers, so far, under the name of NVP Cook, if you were to look online or in your bookshops. And the first one that I put out was “little bones”. And that was actually about a podcast that tells the identity of a serial killer's daughter living in the town. And it was a bit of a bizarre story attached to it, because I'd really enjoy true crime podcasts, as you could probably tell, you know, with what I do with the “red rabbit hole” and with the genre that I write in. But I'd been listening to a lot of them and thinking, well, this is great, but there's no real meaning. I don't know whether it's the same in the US, but in the UK, there's no real laws governing these podcasts and what they can say online. I mean, you can't really slander people, but it's then kind of choosing whether or not to say, well, if it's true, it's not slander. You know that they can't, then get in, they can't get in trouble for it. So it just made me think, well, what Could one say that would incite the inciting incident, so to speak, within a book. And I kind of landed on this, I guess that the daughter of a serial killer who has been literally hiding her whole life to avoid the stigma of what her dad had done, and how that then affects her going forward, and how the podcast decides, for its own amusement, to link her to a case that's going on at the moment, so she looks a little bit on the guilty side. So the reader kind of is following her journey as to what she has to go through. And I'd written the book, and it was the first kind of big novel that I'd ever written. In the past, I'd done some youth adult novellas, so that was no more than about 40,000 words, but this was 95,000 words when I'd finished it, and I was like, Okay, now, you know, I'm going to approach some publishers. And I saw that a big publisher, HarperCollins, had an open submission, which is very, very rare. Normally, you can't get to HarperCollins unless you have an agent. And I. Thought, Well, what the hell I'm just going to send it in? And I did that, and COVID happened. And of course, everything went to hell in a handbasket, and we started having lockdowns in this country, and everyone was working from home. And suddenly, you know, people are really worried. They're worried about their health, they're worried about their jobs, they're worried about their finances. And finances, you know. And I'd kind of forgotten about it, and I was getting phone calls on my mobile from a London number, and I'm thinking, I don't know anyone from London. It's clearly some kind of, you know, accident claim, kind of con or something that someone's trying to pull on me. So I wasn't answering it, and I got an email that then said, Hi, this is Beth from HarperCollins. We've been trying to call you. We'd like to publish your book. And I was like, No, I missed the call, because every author wants that call. They want that story of, you know, oh, and I had the call from the publisher, and I was like, yay. And I didn't get it. Darla, I didn't get the call because I wouldn't answer the phone.

It's Exciting, but it was a bit of a lap dog, because I know I got the email, I didn't get the call, I got an email, but it was, it was really exciting to kind of get everything going. And the book actually still came out during lockdown. And we have supermarkets over here. We've got a supermarket called Tesco. Is a big one. I don't know whether you guys have them in the States, and it became a bestseller in Tescos. And I started getting what was really nice was I started getting readers contacting me saying, you know, it's a horrible time that we're living in right now, but your book took me away for a couple of days, and it was the break I needed. So I kind of felt like I was giving people, you know, holidays for their brains. They couldn't go on holiday physically, but they could go on holiday mentally. And my book was giving them the chance to kind of to feel, well, I guess, in the nicest possible sense that there was someone worse off than them, because my character, Shuri, is very much worse off than someone in COVID. So that was the first book, and I did everything round the wrong way. So I got the publishing deal, and then I got an agent. So I'm with David Hyman associates in the UK. They're a top London agency, and my agent then got me my second deal, which was a two book deal, and quite quickly I had out a book called “ The brother” that is all about forensic genealogy. And this was based on the Golden State killer case, very, very loosely in terms of how working back through DNA, you could find relatives of serial killers and figure something out. And my protagonist Fallon discovers that not only if she doesn't, she doesn't belong to the family she thinks she does, but also she has four brothers, biological brothers, and one of them is a serial killer. So she has to try and figure out which brother is the serial killer before he gets to her, and that's the brother. And then very quickly after that one, I had my third one come out, which was February this year, and that was called “ the 13th girl”. And the 13th girl was very close to my heart, because it covers, I guess, on mental health issues, as well as the normal kind of thriller tropes, because my character has come straight from a mental health facility. So when she starts looking into a serial killer in the area and starts discovering things, nobody's really inclined to believe her, and she does feel very much on her own.

Speaker Dar

Wow, I think our audience is going to want to read all three for sure.

Speaker Nicky

Well, they can get, they should be able to get all three in the US and Canada and Australia, anywhere where English is the main language. I think my books will be there so you can get them from Amazon. Or alternatively, I think “ the 13th girl” was in the Walmart’s as well.

Speaker Dar

Interesting. So also, for our audience who like to listen to podcasts, tell us a little bit about your podcast.

Speaker Nicky

Well, the “ Red Rabbit Hole” is mainly for fans of thriller fiction, but also we have a bit of weirdness with it too. So my co host is Lisa Shepherd. Lisa is a therapist and a lover of true crime, so she's very interesting to play off. She's also a comedian as well. Which therapist comedian? Not really the kind of two things you'd expect to have together, but we make it work, and we quite often will have other authors that I know, that I've met through publishers, through Facebook groups, that will come on the show, and we'll talk about their books, and we'll talk about the cases that inspired them. So we've gone. Through Blimey. So many cases by now. So the Madeleine McCann case, we've gone through Harold Shipman. We've gone through Jack the Ripper. We've gone through all sorts of times. The chocolate poisoner of Victorian England was hilarious in all the wrong ways to be fair, but still funny. So we've covered a lot of ground so far, and the other side of it is we go down the red rabbit hole for research, but we also find ourselves in weird Warrens. So these are bonus episodes that are more along the supernatural, paranormal lines. So on those episodes, it's usually just me and Lisa talking about all sorts of things, really. So we've covered like changelings and fairies. We've covered demon possession, which I, I covered for “the 13th girl” with my research. And we also recently did the clown panic of 2016 which happened in England.

Speaker Dar

Very interesting. I just want to assure our audience that all of your contact information will be in the show notes, and they'll be able to get the link for the podcast and also information about the books. Is there anything else along this topic that you would like to share with the audience before we leave.

Speaker Nicky

Sure I've got one more story that I think you guys might find interesting. It's not ghostly, but it was a bit strange, and my kind of experience is very different to others that I've heard. So I have a friend who went through a hypnosis course for her work, and she decided that she would hypnotize me and take me back through some past lives. Now I am a strong believer in past lives. A part of me is just the hopeful kind of we know we're not all just doing this once kind of thing we are actually working towards, something, you know, for the greater good. And she decided she was going to take me back. And I must admit, Darla, it was the most relaxed I think I have ever been in my life. Once I was hypnotized, I was just so relaxed I couldn't even feel my limbs. It was like I was floating. And she took me back through some lives, and quite frankly, it was just not what I was expecting. So you kind of hope that you were, you know, kind of the princess of the Nile you, you know, I was a Tudor lady and waiting or something, but I wasn't any of those things. The first one she took me back to, I was a little boy, a little French boy, and I didn't, I couldn't. The problem was I could understand vaguely what she was saying to me, but I

couldn't get my point across, because I was thinking in French, which is bizarre, because I don't particularly know a lot of French, and all I knew I could still, I can still close my eyes and feel what he felt. Then he'd it was kind of, I think it was around the 1700s and he'd stumbled upon, like a battlefield, his dad, he was only very small. He was probably only seven years old. And his dad, I remember, his dad had said, like, don't go over there, you know, because the soldiers, and he'd wanted to see the soldiers, and he was just so scared. And so just everything was kind of Misty, because there were cannonballs and everything was so loud, and there were men shouting, and that there was mud on the ground. And I just remember him just being incredibly, incredibly frightened. And I just had this horrible feeling that that is where he kind of died. He'd, he'd kind of stumbled upon this place. And my friend was asking me questions, you know, like, How old do you know? What can you tell us about where you are? And I just remember thinking there was part of me that knew exactly what she was saying, but the part of me that was in control just couldn't answer because I just couldn't get the words to her. It was a very, very weird experience. And then she kind of moved me forward. And I was in Victorian England, which I've always had a massive affinity with, with the time period, and I was this kind of middle-class lady, and I just remember I was obsessed with the piano, like playing the piano was my obsession. And I'd married quite a wealthy man. I'd given him two children. So that, to me, was like I was done with that side, and all I ever wanted to do was play my piano. And she kept asking me questions like, you know, do you love your husband? And I was like, does anyone love their husband? Because at the time, it was, you know, it wasn't really done, you know, people didn't. Everyone kind of forgets now, because it's all romanticized. But people back then, they married more for convenience, and they married to have children in a family unit. They didn't marry for love. And it kind of was a bit of a cold shot, kind of when I woke up thinking, Yeah, I had this kind of family, but I really wasn't that bothered about them. I was more bothered about playing the piano. Interesting. I. The whole past life working towards the greater good is what I would like to see, too. And my past lives sessions didn't reveal anything like in the area of a princess or a queen …

I always kind of roll my eyes at things like that. Darla, I always roll my eyes because I just think, you know, not the odds of everyone being Cleopatra or Queen Elizabeth the First it's just, it's ridiculous. So it was just to me, the whole kind of scenario was, you know, I I've never imagined myself as a little French boy dying on a battlefield. And I'd never imagined myself as a woman that was really just not bothered about her children or her husband, and was only bothered about the piano forte. I just had never kind of had that, that feeling. So to me, it was kind of more real and but what is really bizarre is that what little French I did know from doing my GCSE French in England in the high school there all came back so I could actually reasonably competently speak a bit of French during hypnosis.

Now, it stayed with me. Oh, now, now, yeah, it did. It was like accessing, I think, a little part of his brain, maybe in terms of, you know what he knew. And it was almost like, I can marry, it's very weird. I can marry the two together. I can marry my kind of lessons and marry his kind of knowledge as well into that. I'm not sure I can play the piano. Maybe I can try.

Speaker Dar

That was my next question. Nicky

Speaker Nicky

I didn'...t haven't tried since I had, again, I've had piano lessons like in the past, but since then, I haven't tried. But I don't know that would be really bizarre if I could just kind of do to do Speaker Dar

that's pretty interesting, though, that you have had both French and piano lessons,

Speaker Nicky

yeah, yeah, it's, I guess you're kind of drawn, aren't you? To what you know. You're the kind of familiar again, that the brain likes the known, doesn't it? It doesn't like the unknown. So maybe it knows too, yeah, to know what is going on, it does. It doesn't.

Speaker Dar

Thank you so much for being with us today, Nikki, and I definitely am going to check out your books, and I already checked out the podcast, but I'll listen to more episodes, and I hope our audience will too

Speaker Nicky

Excellent. Well, we'd love to have you all “down the red rabbit hole” and explore some weird Warrens with us, because I think you'll probably have a good time, whether you get out or not. I don't know. We can never guarantee escape from any of these things.

Speaker Dar

Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai