Witness! Talking to Those Who’ve Seen the Impossible

Simon and Chris discuss their experiences interviewing witnesses to paranormal events. What kinds of things cause witnesses to distort their recollections? Why do some people slide from one strange story into ten stranger ones? And what should we make of angels on bridges, voltergeists, bewitched dog bowls, demonic chip bags, vampire bats (in Ohio!), and shamanic puppies? Chris draws on decades of visiting haunted houses and chatting with occupants. Simon discusses collecting reports for the Fairy Census and how people ‘know’ the difference between UFOs, ghosts, and the fey. Expect to learn red flags in interviews, Chris’ double blind-ish technique, and Simon’s tell-me-thrice memory trick, with a sprinkling of narcissism, persecution mania, environmental toxins, and one brain tumour thrown in for good measure. 

Transcript

[Simon] Today, we're going to be talking about witnesses. This is usually a legal term, but here we're using it in respect to the supernatural, that is people who have experiences. And we're particularly interested with what it means to interview witnesses of the supernatural. Maybe, Chris, you're the best person to kick off on this, because you have many more years of experience than me in this field.

[Chris] That's true. I started in about 1990, writing books on Ohio ghosts and collecting stories there. And I started out just by writing libraries and historical societies to ask them for their local lore. And a lot of them were very helpful. And through them, some people started contacting me. I also had friends who'd had experiences, so I would talk to my friends about it. And many people wanted to be anonymous, which was fine. I always put an asterisk when I've got a fake name in my books. So people would just start coming out of the woodwork when they found out I was doing this. And when I first started this, what I found was people were generally very, very receptive. Everybody had a story. Or if they didn't, they'd think for a minute, and then they'd say, oh yeah, something weird did happen when my uncle died. And they were enthusiastic about it. They were happy to share their stories. And as the years have gone on, I've found that there's a lot more negativity about it. 

It's more people saying, oh, this is satanic. This is demonic. This is evil. You shouldn't be studying this stuff. And been denounced from the pulpit, as it were. So I find it very interesting how things have shifted, because there's a lot more paranormal stuff floating around out there, in terms of TV and movies and things.

[Simon] Thinking about your experiences, what do you do when you have a witness? Do you get a tape recorder or the modern equivalent? Do you just jot things down? Are there woodyard archives out there somewhere?

[Chris] Oh, there are woodyard archives. Oh, are there? Yes, file cabinets full of people's letters. Because what I would do is, if someone just wanted to speak on the phone, for example, they didn't live in the house anymore, or this was in a different place than they're living now, and I wasn't able to visit it, I would just ask them questions about what had happened, and they would tell me their story, and I would just take it down. I either would take it down by longhand or type into the computer directly, because I'm a pretty fast typist. Never tape recorded. I don't trust them, because my technology skills are very wonky. There would always be something that I call a Voltergeist, and something would go off or it wouldn't work. I just thought it was safer to do it by hand. Now, if somebody wanted me to visit, often people would call me up and say, I think I have a ghost, and I would stop them. I said, if you want me to come to your place, I don't want to know anything about it. I want absolutely no information until I've been there, walked through, done my whatever, and then you can tell me your story. If they didn't want to do that, that's fine, but I didn't want to have anything. They said, oh yes, there's a lady in white we see, and I would walk through and sense a lady in white or whatever. I didn't want to have it tainted as it were. That sounds perhaps silly, but I just wanted to have a blank slate where I could just walk through and notice what I noticed and then talk to them.

[Simon] For me, an interview is where you sit down and ask people about their experiences, but here we're almost talking about your experiences.

[Chris] That would be first, yes, and then I would sit down and interview them, and I wouldn't tell them what I had seen until after I'd heard what they had discussed. It's not really a double-blind study, but it was the best I could do. I was at a banquet for some Air Force wives at one point, and the commander's wife wanted to tell me all about her place, but she wanted me to visit. I said, well, then you can't tell me anything about it. She got really miffed and wouldn't let me come and visit after that because she was so eager to tell her story.

[Simon] I've sometimes had people get in contact with me who want to share a supernatural experience, but also want help. I wonder, and I would say immediately that I'm not the person to ask help for. I'm very interested in these experiences. Did you find that you were almost cast in the role of an exorcist sometimes?

[Chris] I made it clear that wasn't my job. I made it clear my only job is to be here and take notes and walk around and get the feel of place, but I am not here to get rid of anything. If you want to do it, you can do it like they say in the movies, go to the light or whatever, but that's not my job.

[Simon] Chris, you're someone who, you're very generous-spirited. You always want to help people. I imagine that if you met someone who really was a little bit disturbed and you had some useful advice, I imagine at the end you would have shared that.

[Chris] Well, you give me too much credit. Sometimes you have someone who is delusional and you can recommend perhaps you need to see a doctor, but they're not going to do it. I'm trying to remember if I've ever said anything like that. Someone called me and said that their daughter was demon-possessed. I think I've mentioned this before. She had been raped by a relative and she had to keep seeing the relative because they were denying that the rape had occurred. I said, well, she could be suicidal because of this. This is very traumatic. Perhaps you ought to have her see a doctor or a counselor. They were adamantly against it because they didn't need that. They had God. I don't know what to do with that. The young woman didn't contact me. The parents did.

[Simon] At that point, you just stepped back.

[Chris] I had to just step back. If anyone called me and said, do you want to come see my demon? As some people did, I would say that's not what I do. I have no interest in demons or demonology. Generally, when I found someone who claimed that they had a demon, then we had either someone who was trying to either sell their story or get publicity for their location, or they were mentally disturbed. Sometimes all three. I tried not to interfere with people's lives, but it was very obvious from some cases where you would find someone who had something hanging over them, some really dire personal history. They didn't know how to deal with it. It was easier to say that they had a demon or they had ghosts in their backyard.

[Simon] It sounds to me that when you began in the 90s, when I was back in my teens, you were actually doing quite a lot of interviews, but with the years of these become steadily less.

[Chris] I phased out visiting a number of years ago, probably 10 years ago, just because it's so draining. Either because the people are upset or there's really some weirdness going on in the house and I just don't want to be around it. It's just awfully draining. I've interviewed fewer and fewer people and now people sometimes get in touch by internet, but not that much. I think they've moved on. I'm kind of passe, because I started this a long time ago. I was one of the first to really do. Now you've got all these books, local books, and they parse ever finer. It's this county or it's this town or it's this house even. 

[Simon] If someone rings from three streets over and sounds quite balanced and says there's something strange, could you still be, I think of you as an ex-boxer, could you be tempted out of retirement?

[Chris] Probably not. Although I had a friend who asked me to come to his house and see what I could see because they'd had some tenants who were upset. The tenants had moved out and I just did my walkthrough and wrote up a little thing for him and he was very pleased. In Ohio, you don't have to declare a ghost as a disclosable defect. So, you don't have to tell the tenants that, yeah, you're living in a haunted house, which could lead to a lot of trouble because people would then imagine things perhaps.

[Simon] Well, look, in comparison with you, my experience of Witnesses is very, very different. My main experience has been through the Ferry Census and because of the Ferry Census, I also get a certain volume of emails where people very kindly get in touch and say, I just want to tell you about this fairy I saw. And I don't think, Chris, I've ever been invited to a house. And this might speak to my, perhaps my scary face, but it's probably more the difference between ghosts and fairies, that would be my guess. However, over the years, I have maybe on five or six occasions done what you've done on scores of occasion. And instead of having emails where perhaps some questions are exchanged, I've actually sat down with people and I've listened to their story and asked them questions as we're going through. But, and again, thinking of fairies, I've always been interested to listen to podcasts, Joe Hickey Holes, for example, where she's actually doing what I don't normally do and doing an in-depth interview and following the experience through. So, my knowledge of Witnesses is less than yours. It's younger than yours and it's really of a very different nature.

[Chris] I mean, fairies are pretty ephemeral, unless you've got somebody that says that they're, you know, summoning them up in their garden every night. So, it'd be difficult to actually go and have them say, hey, look here. Whereas with ghosts, if you've got a haunted house, it's there. It's not going anywhere, unless somebody, of course, exercises it.

[Simon] When you were speaking, there were a few things that you said that I wanted to expand on. Something that you alluded to is the fact that some people seem to have experiences much more easily than other people. And I can certainly say, as far as the fairy census goes, that I'm always particularly interested in people who have never had supernatural experiences and then have actually quite a strong, unbidden experience that they're not expecting. Whereas you then get people, and often the first line in the fairy census or the email that they'll send me is they'll say, I have so many experiences I could tell you about, but I'm going to start with this one. And then there are four or five paragraphs that follow. And I just wonder if that's something you had as well in the world of ghosts.

Do you mentally split people up into those who are not perhaps particularly receptive or even interested in the supernatural and those that take great pleasure in the supernatural and their experiences?

[Chris] Absolutely. I divide into experiencers and one-offs, as it were. And I trust the one-offs much more. When someone comes to me and says that, yeah, we have a ghost in our house and every place we've lived has been haunted. It's like, well, that's interesting. And I usually attribute that to whatever it is is attached to you. It's something you are generating rather than an actual ghost. Although my late friend, Nick, who was a ghost hunter and developed his own ghost questionnaire for asking people about their supernatural experiences, said that he thought that some people were actually drawn to places that replicated their own traumas or their own experiences.

[Simon] Interesting.

[Chris] And it just brought out whatever was subliminally going on in their minds. And I know that's the basis for many, many horror movies. Most of the time, people would just call up and say, this really weird thing happened. I've never had this happen before. And what is it? And they were just genuinely puzzled. And a lot of them would say, I just want to know that I'm not crazy. And honestly, I've run into very few people that really were having mental issues. Most of the people just wanted to tell me what had happened and it was a one-off experience, or their grandmother had visited them, that sort of thing. There was one very poignant story where this woman had lost her parents both before her baby was born. And she woke up one night, the baby was in a crib in her room and saw her parents standing there looking at the baby. And they looked back at her and they're like, oh, we woke her up. And then they vanished. And they were just there to visit the baby. And that comforted her because she felt they got to finally meet their grandchild.

[Simon] The experience comforted her, but where did her compulsion to tell you about it come from?

[Chris] People want to know that they're not crazy. Am I hallucinating? Am I in such grief that I'm hallucinating? And it just seems to be that they want someone else to confirm that this isn't necessarily a hallucination, that other people have experienced this.

[Simon] So a slightly different question, but I hope you'll see the relation. On the fairy census, one of the questions I ask is, how do you know it was a fairy? And routinely people answer in this way. These are what you would call the experiences. They will say, I've seen UFOs and ghosts, and they have a different feeling from this. I just wondered if you had any view on that and connected to it. Do you think different kinds of people have different kinds of experiences in the way that you were drawn to ghosts and I'm drawn to fairies, though not necessarily at the level of experience, but in terms of interest?

[Chris] That's a really good question. I have never been terribly interested in UFOs. I was a little bit in high school because they were all over the newspapers and I cut out clippings on UFO things, but I've never been interested in the abduction or the aliens visiting, that kind of thing at all. And what I find with experiencers is that they tend to experience all kinds of things. And it just seems like it's too much. Now, maybe that's just the way their brains are wired. I shouldn't criticize. I only focus on ghosts. So it's kind of unfair to criticize them for seeing too much as it were. But I've found that people who are making things up or want attention just generally go too far. And that's what I'm looking for is this excess. I've seen everything. I've seen UFOs. I've seen fairies. I've seen ghosts. I've seen angels. I've had special visions. There's also that feeling of specialness that is kind of a tip off that perhaps this has no, well, reality is we can't even discuss that. So I'm trying not to be too critical, but I found them unreliable witnesses.

[Simon] Sure. One thing I've noticed over the years is that when you read, say, a book of anomalous experiences or open the pages of 14 times, you sometimes have people who have had really quite remarkable experiences, but it's so useful to know, well, hold on, this person has written to 14 times about this experience, but go back three years and they wrote about this other experience and go back another five years and they wrote about another experience. And of course, none of this means that the experiences didn't really happen, but it seems to me that this is vital context.

[Chris] It is. It is. I don't want to say it's an obsession. With some people, it is that everything in their life is seen through this lens of the supernatural and everything that happens to them somehow has significance. I had some young man that called me and he was telling me about something he had seen on a bridge, like an angelic vision. He kept calling with different stories about this, that, and the other thing. Then he was very, very agitated one day when he called. He's like, I opened my back door, there was something on the back porch and I opened my back door and what do you think I saw? It was a puppy. And somehow he saw mystical significance in a stray puppy on his back porch. And it was like everything had some sort of supernatural element to it.

[Simon] You do have some people who consider themselves on a shamanic journey through life. And so every little thing can, like you say, take on a special significance. And then a magpie feather dropped from the sky just at that moment. Now this isn't to disagree, it's a very beautiful thing and it probably gives your life an enormous sense of direction, agency. I can well imagine that. But again, this is useful context if you're responsible for jotting down experiences. Because the danger is 40 years later, there will be our descendants who are looking at these and they say, oh my God, this guy saw an angel on a bridge. And we have no context about the person or the experience.

[Chris] Right, exactly.

[Simon] You alluded earlier to people who might have psychological issues. This of course is a very, very delicate area. And for me, there are some emails that I particularly dread where people get in touch and ask me advice. But not advice of the where can I find fairy type, though? I also get those. But more advice of the, this is happening to me, should I be worried? And part of me wants to say, look, I am not a psychologist. I'm certainly not a psychiatrist and I have no authority to comment on this. Though I must also add that I'm not quite sure that psychologists or psychiatrists have much authority necessarily to comment on these things. You do have people who have these experiences. And one unusual version I've had of that, that you can imagine with fairies makes sense, is I've had parents contact me about their children's experiences. So in other words, the parent is relatively well balanced about all this, but is becoming anxious because their child is having these experiences. And in this situation, again, I do what we've talked about before. I remind myself that my job here is really to do interviews, take down information. It's not to actually enter the arena in any sense. But maybe a couple of times, one thing I've asked is what's the frequency and does your child find the experiences disturbing? Because I think if you have a situation in which the child doesn't has occasional experiences, or maybe they have more experiences, but the experiences are not disturbing. I personally, if I were a parent in that situation would be a lot less worried.

[Chris] Absolutely. I had a young man went to school with my daughter and his father was quite worried because he was hearing voices. And I knew the young man, he seemed eccentric, but stable. He did not strike me as having an actual mental illness, but he was definitely an unusually, extremely brilliant, just a genius. And I tried to reassure him. And of course, they had seen a doctor about it, but he just wanted my view. And of course, there's even an organization now about people who hear voices in a non-pathological sense. They're trying to sort of de- Stigmatize. Stigmatize, exactly. This sort of thing, because it doesn't always mean a mental illness.

[Simon] But thinking now more about your experiences with ghost interviews, you said before that actually it was relatively rare for you to turn up in a place and find someone where you doubted, let's say, their mental stability. Is that fair?

[Chris] Yeah. I would say the majority of the people were just ordinary folks that had had some one thing happen, or it was just so anomalous they needed information about it. Now there were occasions, there was one poor woman who was seeing demonic faces in bags of chips, and I couldn't do anything for her. There was another case where this man was smelling what he thought were sulfurous fumes, and he was seeing things run up and down the wall. And I said, really, that is very, very bad medical. Those are bad medical symptoms. 

Please see your doctor. He had a brain tumor of which he died, actually. Apparently the odd smells are a symptom of that. He was not mentally ill, but he was certainly physically ill.

[Simon] So he responded actually well to your suggestion.

[Chris] Yeah, he did go to the doctor and found that he had a brain tumor. So dreadful stuff. But yeah, I really, what I find more in terms of mental illness was not so much your classic schizophrenia where you're hearing voices or seeing hallucinations. It was more very narcissistic people who wanted to be the center of attention. And so they would make up stories and really exaggerate what was going on because they wanted to have their name in the paper or their name in the book.

[Simon] Or perhaps they just want to be heroes in their own story.

[Chris] Ah, there's that too, yeah.

[Simon] You could enable that by giving them space, allowing them to tell their story. I would absolutely go along with that, that I have met far more people who are, let's say, narcissists than people who suffer from persecution mania, for instance. 

[Chris] Right, right.

[Simon] It tends to be much more in that direction. That's interesting. Hmm.

[Chris] Yeah, I had one woman, she ran a bread and breakfast in a very beautiful historic home, and she wanted me to come in to confirm her sightings so she could have her name in the book and get some publicity. And I'm walking through the place and there's nothing there. It's a very pretty place, but there doesn't seem to be any ghostly activity. And she's telling me about all the, she's sort of looking at me sideways, like, how much can I get by with here? And there was the ghost of a man in a soldier's uniform looking at this certificate on the wall, and she'd had the certificate carbon dated to whatever date it was. And I'm like, oh, that's very, very interesting. Carbon dating paper. Hmm. And then she started telling me about a vampire bat that they had in the house. And this is Ohio, we do not have vampire bats. And then she started talking about UFOs and things like that. So I just took it all, wrote it all down and said, thank you very much and left. And I actually got a note from somebody who said, I stayed at the B&B and it was just a horrible experience, which I could tell it must have been. The place was rather shabby, the way it was done up, even though the house was beautiful. She says, I stayed there and the woman told me you were going to put her ghosts in your book. And I just wanted to tell you that I think she's a really big fraud and you should beware. And it's like, thank you. I'd already figured that out. Thanks. And as it turns out, the woman eventually, they basically stripped the house of all the valuable woodwork and just left it a shambles and skipped town.

[Simon] Chris here, imperceptibly, we've moved from the possibility of mental illness to simple dishonesty. And this for me is actually much more mystifying than people who perhaps have slight mental issues. Why do people lie? Now, in this case, I think we both have the answer that this was someone who wanted to get a star in a book. So she had 10% more people a year or whatever it might be. But often there are stories that I just don't understand where I just think, why, why are you wasting your time doing this? Many years ago, when I started the Fairy Investigation Society newsletter, in my very first interview, I talked to Janet Board and Janet was talking about her experiences. And at a certain point, she said, I asked her what she had changed her mind about over the years. I hope I'm remembering this correctly. And Janet basically said that it's amazing how many people just lie. That actually a lot of these anomalous experiences can be explained by people just making things up. And I think Janet Board's a very wise person. And it struck me, it has struck me over the years, that I've become more sceptical, let's say, about a certain number of experiences. And I just wondered if you'd moved in a similar direction?

[Chris] Yeah, I think so. I've run across way too many people with what they call paranormal venues, where they buy a property and then they make up this backstory for it. There's one place where they claim that the janitor murdered 28 children and buried them in the basement. Well, actually, there's no primary source evidence for that, but knock yourself out. There's another one where it's a demonic house and it's built on Indian burial grounds. They've gotten the whole genealogy wrong. They've just made up all this stuff sort of cobbled together out of some local truths, but mostly just local nonsense. So, yeah, I find that particularly when somebody's deliberately making money off of their haunted place.

[Simon] But again, there I think we can both agree, we can see the logic.

[Chris] Sure, yeah, the logic though, yeah.

[Simon] But sometimes, I mean, particularly with fairies, we're back to haunted houses as against your ephemeral fae flitting you through a glade. Why is it that people make stuff up like that?

[Chris] Well, they want to feel special.

[Simon] So, we're back to narcissism?

[Chris] Well, is it narcissism though? I mean, if you've got somebody who never had any good parents that told them they were worthless, and all of a sudden you're seeing visions and there's things coming to you and telling you messages, you're special. Or perhaps you've been abducted by aliens, it makes you special. And researchers are interested in you and they want to listen to you instead of ignoring you. It's a very powerful motive just to feel listened to, just to feel heard.

[Simon] So, let me approach this from another direction. For future researchers, how do you know? What are the warning signs? Let's forget the people who are trying to get their property on the internet, but what about people who are just making stuff up?

[Chris] I would like to say I've never been fooled, but once or twice, there was one fellow that told me a story and his relatives got in touch and said, this is complete falsehood. And I had known he was a little bit unstable, but I'd known him for some time and it was not an implausible story. Usually, if somebody goes too far, that's when the red flags go up.

[Simon] Goes too far, the story becomes outlandish.

[Chris] Yeah. There was a guy who called me with a plausible story about a haunted library where he'd worked. It didn't sound outlandish at all. And then he started on a tale of a haunted school that could have been written by Stephen King, complete with evil entities and disembodied red eyes and rasping demonic voices. And I thanked him for calling, but I emphasized I would need to talk to the other witnesses that he claimed he had. I'm still waiting. So, usually they go too far. And as I said, there's the experiencers who've seen everything. And first they start with ghosts and then they say, well, you know, I've also had UFO experiences and I've also had communications from our space brothers and that. It just goes too far for my taste. It goes outside of my brief for ghosts.

[Simon] It might be worth saying here that for a casual listener, it's strange to think of this being outlandish or going too far, given the very fact of seeing a ghost or a fairy or anything supernatural is already pretty outlandish. But I know exactly what you mean. And it is that there is a kind of a natural limit in the experiences. And you know, 10,000 ghost stories, and I know a couple of thousand of fairy experiences. And you get a sense of what the non-outlandish is. What are the limits, the likely limits of experience? And sometimes…

[Chris] And the patterns.

[Simon] Thank you. This is the word I should have used. You know the patterns. And so when someone goes outside those patterns, for me, this can start to be a red flag.

[Chris] Exactly. Exactly. Now, you know, somebody who sees her parents standing by the baby's crib, that to me is one of a million stories of parents coming back to look at children or parents just coming back to be in touch with their families. There's nothing unusual about that. But if they turned and suddenly they turned into terrible demons with distorted faces, that would be a red flag for me.

[Simon] I love this thing about patterns. Chris, another question related again, is what are good signs with witnesses? I'll give you a couple examples just to warm this up. In Victorian times, if you could say the vicar had seen the ghost, or almost as good, the vicar's daughter had seen the ghost, that would get you instant respect. It's a little bit like in modern times with UFO sightings, when you can say it was a policeman, it was an airline pilot. In other words, these are people who are seen rightly or wrongly, as being more responsible and more reliable. I just wonder, in your world of ghosts, is there a certain kind of person that would immediately, because of where they are or what they do, suggest reliability?

[Chris] Not necessarily. I've known way too many nefarious clergy. I can't give them an automatic pass. I'm more interested in how people are as observers, or if this is a one-off experience for them, if it falls into the patterns. When I'm talking about observing, I can think of back to our mermaid stories. These people were sailors. They knew the local wildlife. It's somebody that knows the area, knows what the stories are, or what the lore is. I find that much more compelling than just an automatic, well, this was a soldier, or this was a clergyman, or this was a police officer. Now, I have interviewed police officers, and generally, I've found them to be pretty credible. But again, maybe I've been fooled.

[Simon] I suppose another area where I bet you've had experience, because you indirectly referred to it before, is the hope of multiple witnesses.

[Chris] Yeah, and that doesn't happen very often, unfortunately. Well, when I think of multiple witnesses, I think of a crowd of people seeing the Virgin Mary somewhere, when what I normally get is successive witnesses. Okay, I was here, and I saw this thing. This person was in the same venue, and they saw the same thing. That's what is interesting, when multiple people will say they've had the same experiences. So, that's kind of what I look for. One interesting case at a Masonic temple that I visited, and the ghost seemed to be an older man who'd been a member there, and just enjoyed being there, was hanging out. At one point, he pointed out his picture, because they have pictures of the different Masonic years and groups, classes, I guess. I showed that picture to one of the security guards there, and he said, that's the guy I see around here all the time. So, I thought that was interesting. Other people had experienced exactly the same person.

[Simon] So, you actually did sometimes go out of your way to talk to more than one person about a single case.

[Chris] Yeah. And often, when I was asked to come to some public venue, like a theater, or a museum, or a library, there would be multiple people waiting to talk to me about what they'd experienced. That was always really interesting. Now, you could also say that they had colluded and gotten their story straight. I didn't get that sense.

[Simon] Another problem that we have with witnesses is, of course, some very sincere people have experiences that can be explained scientifically. A classic example I've come across several times with ghost accounts is where there is something like a form of carbon monoxide poisoning on a property, and this can cause basic hallucinations, and it can actually be quite deadly. So, these ghosts, in a way, can be a useful warning to sort the property out. But I wonder if you'd had other experiences. You already gave us that very striking one of the poor chap with the brain tumor and the unusual smells.

[Chris] Yeah, there was actually a couple that asked me to come to their home, and they were worried that the ghost was harming their dogs. They'd had actually several dogs become very ill. I was in the house, and there was something wrong with the end of the house. It just didn't look right for the era of the house. I said, something went on that you remodeled or something? They said, oh, we had a fire, and that part of the house burned off, and we replaced it. They put new carpeting in, and they put new paneling in. I said, you might want to look into formaldehyde poisoning, something that may be leaching from the carpet or the paneling, because it was brand new. So, I don't know whether they ever figured that out, but they were convinced that they had ghosts, and I suspect it was actually more of an environmental toxin. A woman sent me a video and said nobody was in the house, but I had the video recorder running, so I could tell what the ghost was up to. She heard chains rattling and played this for me. I'm like, that's really interesting, very interesting. I was in the house when she was playing me this video, and I could hear the same noise. It was the dog. He was rattling his metal water dish. Yeah, there wasn't a human in the house, but there was a dog.

[Simon] How do people react when you solve an issue like that?

[Chris] Sometimes they're very disappointed. They really want to have a ghost. I'm not sure why. I don't want to live in a haunted house myself. Yeah, sometimes they're disappointed. She took it in good part with the dog, and kind of rolled her eyes like, oh, what a silly person I am. But yeah, sometimes they really want to have a ghost.

[Simon] Another question that comes up, of course, in Witness Accounts is memory. I've been very interested in this, perhaps because I'm a historian, and so much history depends on memories, often from 40, 60, 80 years before. One thing I've done with an Italian I know, who had a supernatural experience when they were a I've periodically asked that person to tell me again what happened to them, and then written it down to see if there were differences in the account. I also had that experience with the Fairy Census, that sometimes people, bless them, in their enthusiasm, would send the same account two or three times to the Fairy Census, and maybe part of it was frustration that, well, I sent this, and it wasn't in the first Fairy Census, them not realizing that there were a couple of Fairy Censuses, and it was an ongoing project. What I did in those instances was I would take the second account and put it in a footnote, and in this way, people could see the differences in memory. It is quite striking how some memories and perspectives change with time.

[Chris] Did you find a lot of distortion?

[Simon] Not a lot of distortion, but I found it a useful reminder that ideas are very fluid in our heads. One of the problems is that when you are speaking to someone like yourself, or to me, or you're writing this down, for many people, it's actually the first time that you're really putting together the experience in a systematic way. The Freudian term here is secondary elaboration, and it's used in reference to dreams. The idea being that you have a dream, and we all know how chaotic dreams are, but when you write the dream down, you will immediately start to systematize it, because that's what we do. We're human, we have narratives, they follow a certain order. I think sometimes with supernatural experiences, something else goes on, and that's one of the reasons why it would be so exciting to catch someone relatively soon after the experience. Let's say when the experience is still raw.

[Chris] Right. I was fortunate in a lot of cases to be able to go to places where the thing had just happened. It wasn't years ago, it just happened. Certainly, there were stories where people would just phone me and say, hey, this happened 20 years ago, but for the most part, when I actually went out to a house, it was something that was either recent or ongoing. Now, speaking of distorting memories, one thing we do know, long-term stress damages the part of the brain that deals with memory. If you've got somebody who's had trauma all their life, they're not necessarily going to be remembering things correctly. That's another issue when you're dealing with this. Neurology in general, when you get older, perhaps your memory isn't as clear, although they say that sometimes the things that you remember are further back. You remember those more correctly than you remember what you had for breakfast yesterday.

[Simon] Also, it's worth just saying how we confabulate with the past without actually realising. There's a celebrated example that has been given a lot of publicity over the last years that the journalist, I think it's Brian Williams, had a memory of being in a helicopter attack during, I think it was Iraq 2. It was subsequently pointed out that this just didn't happen. There were a number of witnesses that were able to speak against it who had been there, but it was also suggested that Brian Williams was absolutely sincere and that what had happened was a helicopter near his had been hit. Then with a decade and telling people the story, re-remembering the story, in this way, the memory had distorted. Let's say I spoke to a 30-year-old who, when she was 20, had seen a fairy in the garden. I can well believe that when she was 20, she, quote unquote, saw a fairy in the garden, but I think it falls to us to be a little bit suspicious of some of the details. Here, you have something like the opposite of what we were saying before, that it's actually not the lack of patterning, it's that sometimes patterns take over and sometimes memories start to conform to a general idea of how this experience should be.

[Chris] That's very possible, yes. You also have people who will just tell you what they think you want to hear. They're maybe not deliberate liars, but they're eager to please and agree with you that, oh yeah, that must have been a ghost or it must have been a fairy because this is what I've heard a fairy is like.

[Simon] Surely that's also another point and part of the scale of the interviewer, that you have to be very careful that you don't give cues like that. I'm sure you're excellent at this, Chris, but you can imagine that someone who desperately wants UFOs to be in a certain way and says, but was there a green light? Yeah, very intensely. Then, of course, it's more likely that the witness will, well, now you mention it.

[Chris] Yeah, I tried really hard not to lead people on. The other thing I did was I would write out my story and I would send it to them. Say, is this correct? Are there any corrections you'd like to make? They would sometimes say, oh, well, no, it was really like this or no, that's fine. I found that really helpful and it also sort of covered me in, I don't know whether in a legal sense, but here's the story. You approved it. It's in the book.

[Simon] It reminds me a little bit of those 19th century affidavits where the four or five people get together and count a sign.

[Chris] Right. Only this was just one person. We didn't have the sworn before the justice of the peace affidavit. I don't think I've ever had anybody say, oh, I'll take an oath on this. That would make me suspicious actually.

[Simon] Yes. Talk about red flags. Chris, this has all been incredibly interesting and I feel I've learned a lot about your modus operandi. I just wonder if we could finish, we're not going to have a reading today, but maybe we could just throw in a few books that make good use of interviewing. I thought if you didn't mind, I would give you the, well, two very good fairy books with lots of interviews. One is Walter Evans Wentz's The Fairy Faith that basically the first 180 pages, just a series of many interviews in the different Western nations, in Britain, in Ireland, in Brittany, in France. And the other, a book that I'm a huge fan of is Barbara Rieta's Strange Terrain about fairy lore in Newfoundland. I love that book. It's a great book, but she's also, she's clearly a very special person. And there's a series of interviews that are in themselves works of art. And I remember there being a particularly excruciating interview where there's a story about a woman who was taken by the fairies and got lost in the woods. And Barbara goes to interview this woman and it turns out the woman has no legs because she suffered from hyperthermia when she was lost and the legs had to be removed. And so instead of the delightful, sweet conversation about the fairies, it becomes this very awkward circumstance. So those are two books I would recommend. What about from your side, Chris?

[Chris] Well, I keep thinking about the hallucinations census. I don't know why, because people were interviewed and they gave their own experiences. This was the Society for Psychical Research, let's see, 1882 to 1895. It was edited by, I think, Henry Sidgwick. I've also got a book called Noted Witnesses for Psychic Occurrences by Walter Franklin Prince. Again, you've got people's anecdotal reports, mostly from famous people, because again, they were trying to put some credibility into the witnesses. These weren't just ordinary folks, they were doctors and lawyers and distinguished politicians, that sort of thing. Of course, I wouldn't trust a politician. You've been listening to Boggart & Banshee, a Supernatural podcast. If you've enjoyed it, please leave a review, as it helps other people find us, those cursed algorithms.