The West Grand Haunting author, Michael Oka - Part II

AOTP EP:4 Author, Michael Oka, picks up on our previous conversation, touching on paranormal investigations and a chance run-in he had with a more recent resident of his haunted, childhood home. 

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Accounts of the Paranormal -

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Welcome to the show. Tonight we welcome back author Michael Oka for part two of his interview, where he picks up on our previous conversation touching on paranormal investigations and a chance run-in he had with a more recent resident of his haunted childhood home. Michael, welcome back to the show. Good to be here. Happy to have you back for part two here of your interview. Last time we were talking, we left off and uh we were discussing uh some of the paranormal work you were getting into and touching on a running you had with the more recent resident of your um childhood home. Let's get into it. What did you find out?

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Well, absolutely. So uh my uh brother Mike and I are we're kind of driving around town and uh talking about where we grew up and kind of our roots, and uh, I was like, hey, you want it, you want to see a place I grew up in. It was it was horrible. And so we we go to the old neighborhood, uh back to West Grand, and I was showing them where you know where we used to park and go in, and we pulled into the uh driveway, and the uh current resident there was there. Um it was like a there was the uh main driveway, and then there was a dirt driveway that's where we were parked. Uh but she she saw us from inside her yard and she came out and said, Can I help you? And I said, Oh, I was just in the neighborhood, and I was showing a buddy of mine where I used to grow up. And uh, you know, I I grew up here for I lived here for two years as a kid and uh just wanted him to see. And it was actually she who approached us. She she she approached with the topic of, you know, well, when you lived here, you know, did anything weird happen? And at the time, even at the time, I was I was pretty young, early 20s, but I knew that I didn't want to lead in with something suggestive and have it, you know, reinforce something or create something in her mind that would make her go, oh yeah. You know, she asked me, you know, did anything weird ever happen? And my immediate response was well, weird, like how? And she's like, Well, did anything ever happen in the house like like scary? And I was like, you know, uh, what do you mean scary? And she's like, you know, and and everyone's afraid, right? You don't want to. It's fun to tell ghost stories at a campfire, you know. You sit around the campfire and you tell ghost stories, and it's it's a good night. You start talking about for ghosts for real, and and people might take you for crazy. So, you know, we we played that back and forth for a minute, and finally she's like, Well, did you ever feel like someone was watching you? And that's when, you know, I I opened up a little bit. I said, Yeah, we had some we had some creepy things happen, and she's all like, What? And I was like, Well, is it cool if we if we come talk about it? And uh she said yes, which was which was crazy because I I'd never met her before. Her uh she she lived there with her uh her dad uh and her two kids, and they're they were in their late teens. I think the daughter was oldest, but uh she she invites us to talk to her. She actually also just invites us into the house, which blew my mind because like I was already feeling a little bit nervous just sitting there in the uh the driveway the way we were. You know, that house uh was coming off kind of the way it was when uh my family and I first moved in there. It was just kind of quiet. But you know, the the moment that I put foot on the stairs and walked in the front door, you get this like overwhelming feeling of like, you know, oh I remember you. Like that obviously the house doesn't talk. It was just, you know, it could have been psychosomatic on my part, but there was just an immediately a bad feeling, and that feeling of being recognized by like an old adversary, you know, something you haven't seen in a while that hasn't seen you, but the moment you're in each other's company, you know who the other is, and that's that's what it felt like. And so she uh invites us into the living room, and it was it was uncanny because their living room, I mean, I guess there really was only a few ways you could set it up. You've seen the uh floorprints of the house, but um, it was set up like exactly how my family had had it set up. Their kitchen was the same way. It was it was weird. And uh she she started by saying, you know, she gets the feeling of being watched, and she really she's really trying to get uh get me to tell her my side of things first, and I don't want to lead in, I don't want to, you know, feed her some information and have her run with it like it was something that happened to her, you know, also the exact same thing. So I was like, well, why what do you mean you're being watched? Where's it worse? And she immediately, you know, the kitchen is the worst, it's like the windows in the kitchen are watching, you know, and we had discussed in the last one, like it was the one of the places in the house all of us just really didn't like being alone the most was in the kitchen. You had those windows right above, you know, the outside there, and it always felt like something was looking in, and that was what she was describing to me without me having to tell her what it was. And we get a talk, I said, Well, you ever see anything out there? She said, No, no. I said, You ever see anything in the house? She says, Not exactly. And there were a number of things that I really wanted to include in the book that I left out just out of concern that she might see it. You know, I didn't I changed her name in the story, but I didn't have necessarily permission from her to give an exact recount. Um, but she she said it was mostly just like catching a shadow out of the corner of the eye was her biggest, like her biggest complaint. And for me, that would have been like a cakewalk for what I went through. You know, uh her son was in the kitchen, and I I remember he had an ironing board out, and he's ironing this big black coat, and I asked him, You ever seen anything? And he's just like, nah, man, I don't want nothing to do with this. He just he wrote it off, and I was fine with that. Um, we get to back in the living room and we're talking, and uh, you know, her dad, he's he's laying on the couch, and uh, you know, I asked him, What about you? You know, you and he says, Oh, yeah, absolutely. Um, mostly I hear footsteps, and sometimes it sounds like there's children running back and forth through the living room, you know, and my mind's going a whirl, I never heard kids, you know. And I I start coming up in my head, like, is this kind of a residual thing? Is that something that an imprint that my sister and I left behind, you know? Um after we moved out, uh, I guess these people were the ones who moved in after us within a few months, and they had just been there this whole time. So he's telling us, yeah, I hear kids run between here and the uh the den over the other living room where we had kept our computer. And uh at night he'll hear, you know, he hears people walking through the hallway when everyone's you know in bed, and he'll get up and check and no one's there, and it'll be walking through the hallway or through the uh living room or even through the hallway, through the living room where he sleeps on the couch and into the kitchen, and he knows there's no one there. And you know, brave guy, does it doesn't scare you? He says it's a little spooky, but I don't know that I'm scared. Uh we get to the daughter though, and she she's the one who's having like the worst of it all. Um breathing, you know, when she's in the restroom getting ready in the morning, or if she's taking a shower, breathing over her shoulder while she's in the shower, the constant feeling of being watched. And of course, she was sleeping in the uh the bedroom where my sister uh slept when she saw the bloody Mary. And uh we uh and we had to switch, remember, but uh her her brother actually had my old room, and you know, her parents had had their room, and we started exchanging stories, and she was just telling me she always felt like she was being watched. There was audible, like that was the big thing with her was audible breathing. And that was something that I didn't experience, you know, thankfully. But uh, you know, they were telling me uh every now and then their their dog would go through the house. They'd have the dog come inside. They had a little uh kind of a little uh mini dog. I I couldn't tell you what the breed was, mutt. Um, but it it was uh sleep it would sleep on the porch where Stormy used to sleep. And uh they'd bring it in, and every now and then the dog would cower or bark at nothing. You know, uh a lot of the typical experiences that uh my family and I went through, and she told me uh every now and then she'd hear the doorknob on the door, you know, or bedroom door, it would rattle, or the closet would would sound like it was shaking. I asked her, you know, did it ever open? And she said, No, it didn't open, but it it sounds like something shaking the closet. You know, and we go through the logical explanations, you know, hey, this how house is literally right by the 91 freeway ramp. Are you sure it's not a truck? And they're like, no, no, this is going on at one, two, three in the morning. There's there's no traffic outside, and door door handles are trying to turn, closets are shaking, uh, there's footsteps running through the house. And you that's that's one thing, you know, you can't really mistake for a truck passing by. There's a very deliberate sound with with a footstep, you know, uh, especially when it when it's intentional. How old is the daughter at this point? Oh, I had to play, she was close to my age. Um, she had to be around 18 or 19, I would imagine. And and the son would have to be somewhere between 17 or 18. Um, because they were they were uh he was still in school. I didn't know what she did. I didn't I didn't ask a lot about their personal lives because I didn't want to I didn't want them to get uncomfortable or push us out when we were in the middle of having what I felt to at the time to be kind of a profound exchange and a very validating exchange. You know, you spend this time as a kid growing up in these places, and you everybody's classmate and everybody and their mom has lived in or been in or knows of someone who's had a haunted house. And you you never just come out and say it because when you come out and say it again, you know, you don't want to be branded as crazy or that that weird kid who insists there's ghosts. Um, you know, as an adult, I I did some work in counterterrorism and that MMPI test, man, what like some of the biggest questions are do you believe in ghosts? Do ghosts haunt you? Do ghosts tell you what to do? You know, you don't want to be answering yes to those kind of questions if you want to work in a in a government entity. So, you know, even in my 20s, I know, you know, there's a certain level, a certain line you don't cross where you don't push too hard. But it was very validating because she she was a legal adult and she was old enough to know truth from fiction. And I had, you know, grandpa, their grandfather who sleeps on the couch. He's he's he's up there in years, he's got white hair, and uh he's talking about it. And he he doesn't hear the breathing, he's hearing the footsteps. The mom seeing shadows, she's gotta be in her her late 40s, maybe mid mid to late 40s, possibly early early 50s. And uh there's there's no dad in the house that I see anyway, except you know, grandpa. And you know, best three out of four of them were all having these separate experiences. So finally I'm like, well, hey, uh guys, you guys use the root cellar? Like, no, we locked that. I'm like, you locked it, like, yeah, we we don't go down there. So why? It's because it doesn't feel good down there. When we moved in, we we brought whatever you know we wanted in the house, and the rest of our stuff is in the uh root cellar, but we don't go down there, and all the stuff that's down there we don't really need, so we just locked it and we don't we don't go in there. I said, What about the garage? The garage is is mostly fine, it's a it's a little eerie sometimes. And um, you know, the the story is about being haunted, but also, you know, there was there were some things that some touchstones there for me that were were pretty deep. They uh let me see the garage, and it was weird. There was there were still some of my dad's stickers on the wall in there, you know. And we we uh if you read the story, he and I had been estranged for a while, and by the time we made up, he was around for a year or so and he passed. So seeing his blue, he worked for McDonnell Douglas, seeing the MD80 and the Blue Angel's stickers on the wall, you know, it was a it was a little bit of a choke up moment, and then they're like, Well, you want to see the root cellar? I said, Not really, but like, no, it's cool, you can. And I was like, Okay, if it's cool with you, and they they unlocked the root cellar, and I I really don't want to go down there, but I'm gonna go down there. And uh, my brother Mike, he's he's coming down there with me. And it was like swimming through tension walking down there. And if there was an oh, I remember you feeling that I got from the house, it was you know worse down there. It was it was like walking into like kind of a waking nightmare. And I know that sounds super dramatic, but it really was. It was like the last place on earth I wanted to be, and I had had you know over 10 years to process this. I'm in my 20s and I I just don't want to be down there. And nothing actually happened, but my brother's my brother made a comment and it was weird, you know, it was just out of the blue. He's kind of like, you know, there's just there's so many of them here. I said, What? And he's like, Yeah, there's there's just there's too many down here. We got we got to get out of here. And we we go back up, and my arms, right like right now, actually, just goose pimples up and down my arm. I'm super uncomfortable. And they're like, So is it is it spooky down there? Like, yeah, yeah, it's it's very uncomfortable, you know, lock that, close it, don't go down there. Um, and I and I told you in our first interview, you know, I always thought that that was where it kind of, for lack of a better word, where it lived. If there was anything horrible in that house, that that that place beneath that, that root cellar, which it wasn't paved, there was no concrete. There was it was it was like somebody just dug a hole and then built a house over it, you know, and here's where you're gonna store your stuff. And it was just it was the worst place in the house to be, besides maybe, you know, my bedroom or my sister's bedroom. But whatever, whatever was down there, you know, it it made its appearances up there. And they, they, you know, other than shadows and footsteps and uh that that thing about the the the the daughter though, her her breathing, her that that breathing she heard, even it was especially, you know, like when she's like, Yeah, when I'm showering, it's like breathing right in my ear. And I thought that was incredibly uncomfortable. Like I had never experienced that, and I'm probably very fortunate for it. You know, it seeing it, that that's very scary, you know. Uh the footsteps that that's very scary, but actually hearing something, you know, manifest a sound in your ear, you know, and and and I didn't I wish I had asked her, I didn't have the wherewithal in my head at the time to ask her, well, does it sound like human breathing? Like, what kind of breathing are we talking about? But uh unfortunately, you know, and and and to be uh not to not to disappoint you with how short the visit was, it was only about a half hour's visit. But uh, you know, we we talked a little bit more about the root cellar, and they said, you know, well, what happened what else happened when you live here? I said to be honest, you know, my folks divorced. You know, we moved in here with high hopes, we thought we had a new beginning, we were here for a couple years, my folks, you know, they they split up after that. And she said, Well, you know, do you ever get the feeling like you know, like it's just evil? And I I didn't want to lean into that. I said I I didn't want to be like, well, this house hated us, it probably hates you too. It's the last thing I want to do. But what I will do tell you is uh it was it was only 30, 45 minutes, and then we were gone. Um, I did return a couple years later though, and they no longer lived there. And the house me uh the house itself remained vacant, like no one lived there uh until it was taken over and turned into a uh a home business, as we discussed in the last one. You know, I I'm not allowed to say the address or what you know where exactly it is, but um I will say that they turned that uh root cellar, they uh did have it paved and turned into a single bedroom apartment and chose to uh live beneath the house, which I I thought was weird. I told my mom about that, and she's like, what are they frigging crazy? was the only thing she said about it. And uh yeah, that was that was my experience. You know, they were there, and then the next time I came to see them, see how they were doing, they weren't there anymore, and it stayed vacant like maybe a year before I left Corona.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Boy, what would I love to speak to the people who live down in that root cellar, whenever people whenever someone does live there, would I love to hear what they might have to say about that? That's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

Oh man, and well, you know, that same day I told you uh it's in the book, but the same day I did found our little Paranormal Research Society uh at the time. And um, when someone finally, you know, when the business finally did move in there, um, I did attempt to contact him, and I and I had mentioned in the book, you know, this this Margie May person um considered herself a white witch, happened to be real close friends with someone uh who lived in the house, or at least his wife. And from what she told me in our email correspondence, number one, she's like, stay away from them, you're gonna scare them. Uh, and she let slip that the wife was already uncomfortable moving in. She said that the house didn't feel right, you know. But now I'm getting third-hand information from somebody who is intentionally trying to withhold, you know, access to these people. And I and I want to help, I want to see what's going on. And and and I would think that was part of my hubris as a young man. You know, by this time that I'm telling, you know, this part of the story where we're involved with Margie Mae, I'm I'm 26 or 27, you know. I'm I'm getting ready to move out of uh Southern California, you know, within a year, and she won't let me close to them. And she's telling me what's going on, and we went through and we smudged the house, and yeah, a few coverts bang, but I drove it out, and whatever was in there, it's not in there anymore. And the house is clean, and you just they want to go on with their lives, and I don't want you coming near them. So I I respected that, you know, and and because they're running a business out of it, I can't I can't approach them or the media or anyone else around them because I don't want to damage a business or convince any of their clientele that they're walking into a weird place. But uh, when I talked to my mom about the fact that, you know, it was uh a psychiatric clinic, it was like a place you go to talk to a therapist, you know. When I told her, yeah, she says, Well, you know, do you think that like people who bring that negativity inside there, do you think that it's gone or do you think they're feeding whatever's there? And I didn't have an answer to that. Um, to close this part of the story out though, I I did end up moving. I ended up moving to Central California. And sometime in mid-late October, you know, around somewhere between like the 18th or 20th or something like that, I'm not sure. Mid mid-late October, I get an email from this Margie Mae lady, and I haven't heard from her in a while. And the email is in all caps, it's panic. Like it is panic stricken. And she's like, Did the things that happen in your house begin in October? Which they did, you know, the my whole story begins in October as a 10-year-old. And when I went to go and visit that second family that that divulged so much information that trusted me, you know, in their house, that was in October. And it was, you know, years later in October, did it happen in the house? What was going on? You know, I'm afraid that the husband is falling ill, and there's no good reason. And I wrote her back and I asked, I asked, Hey, will you tell me what's going on? I can't help you. I'm in Central California now. I don't know what to say, but I I would like to know what's gone, maybe reach out to them and see what's happening. I I don't know what I could do to help. And she never wrote me back. I uh wrote her a couple of times and then eventually I got a mailer demon and it bounced back. Her uh, she was an older woman though. She was uh um she was in her late 50s when she started uh communicating with me. And I uh she doesn't have any social media, I can't track her. Uh what used to be through strangeusa.com, we used to talk, but that website's now defunct. She doesn't have a presence on Facebook, Instagram, or anywhere else. And you know, good for her if she just decided I'm gonna cut off my social media, because you know that's that's a whole different topic of plague unto itself. But but when it when it came time to you know try and try and help, I I couldn't get through, I couldn't reach her, and that was the last message that I received, you know, was that someone was inexplicably getting sick living in that house, and I did I I haven't since then tried to reach out.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

It's really interesting something you mentioned um going back here about the grandfather that was there and when he said that he had heard children running up and down uh the halls. And your thought, it is funny because that was that was exactly my first thought. It's like how crazy if that was actually some kind of an imprint from Michael, young Michael and his sister all those years earlier. That's funny you mentioned that because that's a that's something I had thought of, like an impression that you guys had left there, because I don't believe you had said you had hurt children, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:16

Never once. But but you know, and we recount that. And the last one I mentioned that, you know, I I don't remember what I called it the story. I want to say it's Darlene or something, but she had mentioned, you know, that she had seen a woman sitting on my my father's bed, but the woman she described wasn't my mom. And having, you know, I told you that day, I ended up going to my buddy's dad owned a foster freeze. We all I come zooming like a bat out of the hell with my brother into the parking lot, just as he and his girlfriend at the time are coming in like a bat of the hell. And they had just discovered some or experienced something really weird too. We didn't even, I don't know what it was because we never discussed it, but we like formed right then and there, like, we gotta know what's going on, guys. You know, like kind of a Scooby-Doo gang. We were kids, we have no clue what's going on in the world, we don't know how the paranormal worked, but we did discover, you know, one thing is that nobody, we don't think that anybody actually knows. You talk about experts on the paranormal, you see it back in the old days when it was more prevalent on TV, you know, you see expert on the afterlife, Sylvia Brown, expert on the paranormal, experts on the afterlife, and you ask yourself, well, at least in my experience, you know, when you're an expert on something, there's so many hours involved. But also there's a field of study where you have to do a hands-on experience. And if you if you didn't die to die and go to afterlife university and come back, I don't know that you're an expert. You know, we we can't we can't see these things, you know. I don't know what these things really look like, and I don't know that I want to. I saw a decrepit, rotting woman behind my door, and I know for sure that that's not what they look like. That's what they want to look like when they're trying to scare you out of your pants, you know, or or whatever my poor sister saw that came out of her closet that she described as not Bloody Mary, the bloody Mary, like ah, the bloody Mary. Mary. That's not what they look like. And I can't, you know, and in recounting on what my brother said, you know, there's too many of them. Like the idea that it was crowded down there, you know, it was it one that just wore different faces, or was there many? You know, and and then you get to the more disturbing part, you know, is this idea that there was an imprint, which is often, I believe it's called like re uh what the what the old protocol called uh recurrent spontaneous psychokinetic activity, which is just a fancy way of saying, you know, you're watching a holographic video of of something that's passed before. You know, in the story, I mentioned it in the very beginning that when I was very little, I saw a green, like, ghost-like we were down the street from the railroad tracks, and I saw a green, like, ghost-like, homeless man, you know, sitting there talking to someone that I couldn't see. And I, as a kid, I remember I could still feel the cold glass pain against my cheek, staring down the street when I'm supposed to be in bed. And I've got to be four or five, man. I'm not, I'm not that old when this is happening. But even then, I knew that it wasn't really there. And it wasn't there in the way that something intelligent is. And it disturbs me, you know, because like that leads to the same thing, you know, the thing about me and me and my sister, and was he listening to an imprint we left behind? Is that the fact that a place like that can absorb that kind of memory? Because she and I, you know, we were brother and sister. We fought a lot, sure. But like, you know, we were also each other's only real friends besides the kids in the neighborhood. And um, we had these uh kids that lived down the street and around the corner from us, and they uh kind of they spoke passable English, but communication was often difficult. Um, we didn't have a lot of a lot of friends in the neighborhood, so we were each other's friends, and we did run back and forth throughout the house and we laughed. And that's that's the thing is he heard that, you know. When he said, I hear children and they're running back and forth. You know, these these kids that he hear hears are playing in it, and it kind of mortified me when he told me that because just like you know, that was your first impression, is could that be an imprint? It was the same as things did the house keep a piece of us there and not not necessarily spiritually, but just a memory of us kept locked in those walls, you know, being activated by other people in the house. And that was part of you know, some of the things when you when you talk about like paranormal research and development, I think that you probably have better, like maybe maybe better street cred saying that you're an expert, because how do you research something you can't see and how can you develop proof, you know, and and and instead of attacking it head on, you know, instead of saying, Yeah, we're ghost hunters, we can verify your place is haunted, we can't. What we can do is we could come in like your local cable guy and provide you a service, we're gonna come in and we're gonna we're gonna handle things, you know, unfortunately from a logical perspective, because if the paranormal were something you could prove it wouldn't be paranormal, it would just be normal. But what we what we can do is we'll look up the history of the house, you know, is this property sitting on, you know, um salt deposit, bedrock, uh, magnetite, anything that could possibly provide strange energy signatures, things like that, you know, and and there was unfortunately, especially for that house, like I told you in the last one, there's no real history that I could find prior to the person who lived there before my my family and I moved in. Everything before that, I couldn't turn up anything. You know, I mean I'm talking about like a paid subscription finding like you know, the history of a house. Nothing. It was like the worst$25 I've ever wasted. And uh just kind of creeps through my skin when I think about like grandpa's laying there and he might be listening to the last tenant that were were in that house, you know, and and that what what my dad's girlfriend saw, you know, who had that been, you know, because it it wasn't it didn't present, it didn't move, it didn't react to her, it didn't think, it wasn't what what old protocol researchers would call an intelligent haunting. And I think that that's the only thing that that my uh paranormal research and development society is what we call ourselves now. That's the only thing that we do agree on, is that there's there's maybe two kinds. There's the intelligent haunting and the the non-intelligent hauntings, and where we diverge is we don't we don't use occult tools. There's gonna be no Ouija board, no pendulum, uh, no divining rods, because I mean, you know, there there is a proven science behind the pendulum, uh, micro muscle movements in your fingers, and you can sit there and just stare at it and think forward, and the pendulum moves forward. So, how can you discern your own, you know, your own answers or or even subconscious answers that you want from something that is affecting it from an outside force? You know, they say, Oh, if it swings clockwise, the answer is yes, or if it swings counterclockwise, the answer is no. And and and I had an uncle, God rest his soul, uh, who had come to the house when I was a kid before the problem started, and he had taught me how to do it with a magnet, you know, and he told me, he says, This isn't magic, this isn't, you know, a spiritual thing, this is the power of your mind. He was he was very big on, so is my dad, on mind over matter, and he was just showing me that if you hang an object, and it doesn't really have to be a magnet, it could be literally anything. If you hang an object that's heavy enough to make a piece of string taut, and you hold your elbows together and you hold your hands together and stare at it, and you start thinking about the direction you want it to move, it is going to move in that direction. And so, you know, as we did the paranormal RD, we started trying to say, okay, well, if we can't rely on these things, what can we rely on? Well, we need to start thinking backwards. And we don't want to take the fun factor out of hauntings, but I also don't personally believe that a haunting is fun. You know, it was always the first question we asked clientele who would contact us. Number one, you know, we tell them your information, confidential. We're never gonna really we'll release our findings. We won't release your name, your address, who you are. We will release that we did an uh, you know, an investigation and here were the results. But um, the first question you ask, you know, do you want your house to be haunted? Because there's people out there who think, yeah, I'd love to be haunted. You tell a story like the West Brand haunting, and people are like, oh, that sounds like it was fun. No, it was horrifying. I was a child but lost sleep, you know, and and when people say they want to be haunted, those are the people that actually get mad when you come in and you're like, okay, so um here's what we've got. We've got an extremely high amount of electromagnetic radiation coming out of these particular areas. How old is your house? Oh, our house was built in 1922. Okay. And then we explain things like, well, electromagnetic radiation can cause things like feelings of dread. It can also cause auditory and visit visual hallucinations. You know, I noticed you guys have a fish tank in the other room and you've got a pump running. That can cause auditory paridolia, where the sound, the babbling sound, the human mind, it's so complex and yet so entirely easy to lie to that the sound you're hearing, your mind can't make sense of something. It forces it to make sense. It's staring at the succo on the wall until you see a dog or a shape or a cloud, you know, oh, that looks like a chicken uh or that looks like a cow. Your mind rejects these chaotic images and turns it into something you recognize. So when we come in and someone's like, you know, yeah, I want my house to be haunted, I think it'd be cool. When you tell them, okay, well, here's what we think it is, they get they get mad. And then you get the the flip side of it. The clientele, like, well, we we don't want our house to be haunted. Who who in the right mind would want that? You know, we come through and our goal now is, you know, just kind of putting your mind at ease. Let's let's look at everything that it that it could be and prove that it isn't before we jump to conclusions. You know, they say, okay, well, we have a uh camera in our bedroom. Uh we we set it up because we are hearing movement, and we saw some dust particles, man. Uh not, I'm sorry, no, I call they we saw some orbs, is what they call it. We saw orbs. And uh we had long ago discounted orbs. Um, we we determined, you know, there's there's a few things that can cause it. Uh silica particles, which is just dust, um, will refract light, especially under a uh night vision lens and moisture particles, you know. And out here in northern Nevada, with our last clientele, they're like, Well, we we don't have a we just dust it, we cleaned, you know. I said, Yeah, but you guys, you guys live in the middle of this desert and you've got some arboreal stuff, but every time the wind picks up, it's going in your air vents. And what I'm looking at on this video, I'm I'm telling you, I'm seeing a dust particle. You know, it's it's it's floating along a specific current. I, you know, I point out the vent in the room, and the direction the air's blowing is is consistent with the direction these particles are moving. They're well, what about our our closet door just opening? I said, Well, that's an easy one, you know. Let's get in there and take a look at this. And you know, we close it and it's shut. And I, you know, I just one inch at a time, you know, until the door just slides open. And then we go down and we we measure, you know, the tracks. So the tracks are they're slightly off and it's causing the closet door to slide open. I said, Well, you could be comfortable in that. Well, what about our bathroom? Same thing. They had a sliding bathroom door, it was a real pretty bathroom. Um, and it was the top track was just slightly higher when I put a level on it, and it and it showed that the door was sliding open. And I said, Okay, well, we're not, I'm not seeing these things, you know. Um, let's go into the living room. You told uh the wife in this this investigation tells us, well, I got this enormous migraine while I was in the kitchen. It was just a sudden migraine, and this phone charger that I had wrapped up just suddenly jumped off the counter. I said, That must have been very scary for you. Let's go and take some readings. And their their electromagnetic frequency coming out of that particular part of the wall was like at unhealthy levels. It's like, you know, they say, you know, living next to uh power lines can give you cancer kind of unhealthy levels of that. And they just they had this power strip set up with other power strips set up to it. The wiring in the wall was over 70 years old, you know. Um, and so I let's reenact this. So we get the, you know, the actual phone charger she said jumped off the counter. I said, Well, how'd you how did you have it wrapped up? And she wraps it up for me. I said, Oh, it's pretty tightly wound. And we set it down, and you know, and I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna do what you were doing, and I'm putting pots down on the counter. And it didn't jump off the counter, but it did unwind like a spring. And she's like, Oh, and I'm like, okay, so there is a rational explanation, you know, and and she's like, oh my god, you know, and and and she they had us come and investigate three times in total. They tipped us each time. They were really good tippers, they were able to fund a lot of the things, the equipment we needed to perform our investigations. And and the end result is, you know, like, I don't know if I mentioned it in the book, but the Paranormal Research and Development Society, from its foundation, through our phase of amateurs, we're still amateurs. There's we we like to say that we we practice ignorance of the afterlife because we just don't know what they are. Um, my faith, you know, I told you in the last one, my faith says they're demons. And I don't want to talk to them if that's the case anyway. But um, you know, we we try to approach with this idea that if there are hauntings, which we believe they are, they are a lot less common than people think they are. You know, I everybody wants to say my house is haunted, you know, and and and the ones who are who are willing to be rational about it, they'll they'll say, uh, you know, I don't want my house to be haunted, and I I would, I would, I want to find any rational conclusion. I want to know that I'm not crazy, you know, which is that something I brought up earlier. You know, there's a stigma that comes with this. And uh we we fulfilled our our our deal with the client. We did a few investigations. Uh, we also tested for this. This one's a big one too, and it's actually a proven, it's a proven fact. Uh, there was this scientist uh working in a lab. There's a whole article on it. I wish I had brought my notes with me, but it is a quick Google. You just look up infrasound, and I think it's 19 hertz or 18.9 hertz, but it's basically a sound that you can't hear that vibrates at the exact same frequency as your eyeball. And so this scientist is working in a lab and he keeps seeing movement. You know, there's no one else there, he's moving by himself, and he's working in there, and he keeps seeing movement, and he's getting this feeling of absolute abject terror. So much to the point where he just leaves and he comes back the next day, and everyone else is like, yeah, we're seeing like a white lady or something. So he he he notices though that there's these air vents and they're they're blowing, but this blow, this blowing is producing a sound at a specific frequency, and he starts experimenting with the frequency, and it is known as the fear frequency. They even made a movie called The Fear Frequency. And a fun fact about this frequency is it can occur naturally and artificially in any home on any property. It could be the wind blowing through the trees, but a long enough exposure to this frequency can cause feelings of dread, feelings of being watched, and it can cause you to think you're seeing ghosts. It'll cause visible hallucinations because your eye is literally vibrating at this frequency. And so we we check for infrasound too, because you know, you've got all of these external factors that could could be a haunting. And if you can rule them all out, then you start going, okay, I think you've got a problem here. But here's the thing is also, you know, we get the question do you guys do exorcisms? Absolutely not. We are we're not rated for it. You know, contact your local parishioner. Uh, we could recommend one, but we we don't do them because we don't know how. And we're not willing to, we're not willing to have something follow us home or or anything like that. But uh when it when it comes to things that that scare us, you know, um, we're not about wanting people to experience anything like the West Grand haunting or any of the other hauntings that other people in our group, and most of our members are with us because they want to know why. They experienced something visible or something that was so horrific that it that it left a mark on them as indelible as the one that was left on me by my experiences, that they they join up with us because they want they don't want to go out legend tripping, and legend trippers are people who go to scary places for the thrill. We're not doing this for the thrill. We're trying to find peace of mind while trying to find the answer why. You know, there doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason, but we don't we also don't think that you know that there's an entire neighborhood block where everyone's house is haunted. You might have one place, you know, on a city block that's genuinely haunted, and that might even bleed over to a few places in the neighborhood if it's intelligent and wants to. But everywhere, but it probably not, you know, and I don't want to ruin the idea of you know spooky things for people, especially with October right around the corner. But there is some degree of responsibility when we do this kind of thing, when we engage with people, when we discuss these ghost stories, they're fun to tell if you've never actually experienced it yourself, you know, and and it's like you know, people saying, Oh man, I I think a gunfight would be exciting. You have no idea what it's like to be shot at. You can't wish for something that you haven't experienced because there's there's a dozen cops and there's a dozen, you know, uh veterans out there who will tell you it is not a good time. And it's the same thing. These people who have actually experienced legitimate hauntings, it's it's not fun. It's it's not thrilling. It's it's almost, you know, like kind of makes us want to warn people away from it. Don't don't mess with things that you don't understand because you can't see them. And just because, you know, if you're out there with your your friends up in the attic playing with a Ouija board, whatever you're talking to has the ability to lie. It's not necessarily, or in my case, with my beliefs, you know, it it's definitely not telling you the truth. But we we practice uh on the clock, as we like to say. We're non-sectarian, so we try to come in specifically following scientific principles, scientific steps of you know, from hypothesis to conclusion, and and we we want we have the goal of putting someone at ease, you know. Let's let's disprove everything we can, and if there's still something there, then we'll try and work with you to find help, you know, to get rid of it, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

Totally. And and I can appreciate your angle and your method and your idea. I I think most of what people attribute to the the paranormal you know, ghosts or hauntings can be explained away, maybe not easily, but it can be when someone is there uh searching you know for the for the answers like like you would when you go into a place and you you know what what you're looking for by what they tell you that they might be experiencing. I really believe most of it can be.

SPEAKER_00 37:29

Did you know? Um, because I didn't mention this, but this is actually an important factor. And I think that a lot of people out there who quote unquote ghost hunt or perform paranormal investigations, I believe genuinely that they mean well. I know that they have their own beliefs about ghosts, and I know they have their own beliefs about hauntings. Um I think that they come into it with as much desire to believe something as everyone else. And the way that we perform our uh function, we we perform silent and blind investigations, meaning the person who takes the call, right? Our client comes in, they they tell our uh our screener, hey, this is what we think is happening. Our screener turned around, does not tell us what they think is happening, and the clientele are advised not to tell our investigators either, so that we don't have any preconceived notion. We don't know what we're looking for. And, you know, as far as what what the symptoms of their alleged haunting is. And we tell them we we like to not classify things, we don't refer to them as ghosts or demons, we call them afterlife entities because on the clock we're practicing a non-sectarian scientific approach. So if there is an afterlife entity here, you know, I don't want to know what the what the issue is. The things that you can tell me we that we can attempt to replicate, that's fine. But if there's something that, you know, that's going on, we want to find it on our own so that you we can say, you know, afterward, after the investigation's over, I'm gonna, if I'm hearing whispering in the attic and I come down and my partner goes up and he's hearing whispering in the attic, I don't know he's heard it yet, you know? And then afterward, when we compare notes and we see that we're both hearing the same thing, and then we bring them back to our screener and says, Oh, yeah, they were hearing whispering in the attic. We we have something legitimate to follow, you know. We have we have something that wasn't a suggestion because the human mind, man, it's that's the thing, is it's so complex and yet it's constantly lied to. Like we stare at a picture, you know, a swirly looking picture that's that's static and stationary, and you move it around and to the human eye, it looks like you're looking into a spiral or you know, all of these different uh things. There's a uh an experiment that I often show to our clients. I bring along a piece of paper that has a uh a black grid printed out on it, and I tell and I let them look at it and say, How many white dots are on the grid right now? And that you see these white dots look like they're sparkling all over the place because as your mind's trying to take this picture in, it's creating blank spaces. Which in some cases, that's how I how I consider that. You know, sometimes we think we see shadows in a hallway, or when you're sitting in a doorway and you see an um a slightly askew plane, it creates the impression that something's moving. You know, we we walk into these on the on a blind investigation. We don't want to know. We we're fine if you come in and say, Thank you for coming, you know, we're really scared, we don't want to be crazy, we're here to put your mind at ease. We're gonna go ahead and do this. Please don't tell us anything until we're done with this investigation, then we'll compare notes. And that's how we go about it. Um, you you ever watch tapped like ghost hunters, right? You know, everything's oh, oh, did you see that? Did you hear that? And as soon as you say that, your case is contaminated because you've put something in someone else's head that something moved or something made a sound, and even if they didn't hear it before, they're going to now. Because they've become hypervigilant and they're expecting to see andor hear some. You know, it's why we it's why we do it blind is because we recognize, you know, our own weaknesses psychologically, uh, the way that our mind works. We understand that we're going to be our brain is going to lie to us. We know it. And we can't trust feeling because feeling doesn't prove anything. You know, feelings, like I said, things like EMF and and infrasound can create false positives inside of us. It causes us to see, feel, and even hear things that aren't really there on top of things like audio and visible visual paradolia, you know, and that and and we don't want to just dismiss anything per se. We take everything seriously. We just we we're not coming in to automatically confirm something you want to be, nor are we going to come in and automatically say, nah, you're fine. You know, and and the thing is, you know, like we we we can get into pseudosciences all day long because it's just such a such an incredible and and fantastic reaffirming Gnosticism to it. You know, it fills in the blanks that we can't answer, but that's they that's oh that's why, you know, we're not a favorite among other uh paranormal groups out there. They don't like us much because they think that we're taking the fun out of this. And what we're actually trying to do is just we want to prove it. We want to prove the why, or we want to prove the how. And and we can't do that if we're just willing to say, okay, you know, well, this was, you know, Lawrence Thomas and he fought in the Civil War based off of something we picked up from a Ouija board, right? You might see a, and this is an actual phenomenon, you might see the name Lawrence Thomas and as you know, fought in the Civil War, just walking through a graveyard, having seen the headstone once and never looked at it again, walk into a place and be like, boom, this proves that it's headstones at the cemetery. You know, our our minds don't uh they have a fantastic way. I mean, I'm a writer, I love, I like, I like writing stories, fiction and non-fiction. But when I'm writing fiction stories, man, my brain is making things up a mile a minute. You know, every single thing. It's like every time someone buys a fiction story from me, I've been paid to lie to them and to get them to lie to themselves. While you exist in that moment in a fiction story, you're you're you're writing the lie and you're writing the high. And the same thing comes when you're dealing in reality. If you apply these pseudosciences, it's it's refreshing and reaffirming. It's like reading an op-ed article that happens to agree with your point of view. Um, so we're we're not favorited by people, but we also we also know that there is a responsibility when we're working in the public trust, not on a governmental level, but when we're when we're going into someone's house, someone has invited us into their home. We're not gonna sit there and and feed them this incredible story or be, oh, it's just the ghost of a child in your home, especially if something is there. We're not gonna be like, oh, it's a harmless child. You're fine. You know, just just talk to it. In fact, we we go by like you know, the exorcist rules. Yeah, don't talk to it, don't name it, don't acknowledge it, don't invite it to talk to you, don't invite it to exist in you. Don't don't do anything to provoke it. Just if if there is something here, we'll we'll we'll try and help you find a way to handle it. And you know, with Halloween right around the corner, it's especially this time of the year, you know, you you you get these things where everybody wants to be spooky for spooky season and and play with their crystals and play with their their uh copper divining rods and their pendulums and their Ouija boards. And there is like it's pretty down the middle, there's like a 50 50 argument going on on whether or not these things are dangerous. And I would say, right, you know, when we're growing up, we're little kids, especially for those of us who lived in the 80s Stranger Danger Don't Get Kidnapped era. You know, the first thing that mama tells us, that teachers tell us, don't talk to strangers, right? And those are the strangers we can see. You know, if you think you've got something in your house, the last thing you're gonna do is just start talking to it. Or you can't see it, you don't know who it is, if it's telling you the truth or it's lying or what it is. And I I can promise you though, you know, it's not little Abigail Annie from 1755 who misses her parents and wants her teddy bear. It ain't that. You know, uh you don't bother going in a graveyard, they didn't die there, and they're not haunting it, you know. If if you want to go by the old school rules, that they they stick where they where they died. And if you want to go by the more scientific method, you don't know what it is. And I wouldn't go swimming in murky shark-infested waters myself, you know, and I wouldn't recommend anyone do the same. And and that's analogous to, you know, attempting to speak to forces or mess with forces or trying to reason with forces that are so alien based off the sheer fact that we don't know how they think or if they are human, and if they're what you know, what I believe in my faith off the clock, then you definitely cannot possibly understand an inkling of the way their thought process works, you know, and and it it would be a fool's errand to try.

SPEAKER_01 45:13

For sure, 100%. And a few minutes ago, you had mentioned something about you know the paranormal investigating. And then you were you touched on like shows and TV shows and how they they they can can be dramatic. And I kind of think they just they need to be, you know, at to a certain point. It is a TV show and and and they're there to entertain. I'm pretty sure they're pressured by producers to make things happen, you know, or just uh uh oh no, absolutely, right? That's just how it has to be, because if they were really there and just kind of being real, so to speak, uh it would probably be a very boring show most of the time.

SPEAKER_00 45:49

Oh, oh no, like a hundred percent of the time. It would be, you know, because because now they're not talking to it, there's no EMF, there's you know, there's no EVP. You know, they're just walking around, they're like, Well, it's a nice house you got here, copper pipes, huh? Might want to change those for something more modern. Okay, bye.

SPEAKER_01 46:04

You know, exactly, exactly. Yeah, that they they they need to entertain, so there just has to be some. I'm though I think some of them go a little overboard with the drama.

SPEAKER_00 46:12

Oh, for sure. Well, and and and and I want to clarify, like, I get that those shows are mostly entertaining. I think that they have a passion about it, and I think that they actually do enjoy real investigations, and I think they also know they want to make sponsors and board of directors happy, and everyone wants to collect a paycheck. And that, see, and that's the thing that I can excuse, but you know, I um as our paranormal research and investigation uh I'm sorry, research and development group, you know, we were in a number of paranormal groups on Facebook for quite a while, and everyone and their mom has one, and that's fine. But when you watch their investigations, they also add the music and they add the spooky sounds and they and they they emulate what they see. And what that that does is it also kind of, I guess in a way, it kind of uh what's the word I'm looking for? It it kind of steals from our credibility. It discredits us from the people who are actually trying to figure it out because now the public at large genuinely believes that this is how it's run. It's it's a sideshow, you know, because all these groups are emulating an entertainment factor, and and they come in and they do these things, and it's you know, we brought a psychic with us. Okay, maybe psychics exist and maybe they can't. I can't disprove it personally. Um, so I won't speak for it either way because I don't I don't want to I don't want to go the Houdini route where I'm standing in front of that. By the way, Harry Houdini, huge, huge discreditor of the paranormal. Did not like them, took it to Congress, almost had a law passed. It is why modern psychics have to actually register. And it's why all psychic networks have to stay for entertainment purposes only. Uh, you could thank Houdini for that, but I don't I don't want to discredit them personally. Um, but you you get them and they come in and you get this person you've never met before, and they're like, there is something evil in your house, and we need to get a blessing right away. And now you've terrified your client. You've made a definitive statement that you can't withdraw, and that you know, if you withdraw it, your credibility's gone. So now you either have to stand by it or double down. And you have put these people in a situation where either they're gonna bring in a church or or a rabbi or or whatever it is they believe, and then aside from that, they might want to move out. And I see it so often in the forums. Your house hasn't they someone posts a picture online and an online psychic looks at it and says, There's an evil demon in your house, you need to move out now. And I think that like when I talk about the responsibility, that's what I'm talking about. Why would you do that to someone? How can you make such a definitive statement? And you're right about the entertainment factor, you know, for shows. I have nothing against it. I I watched them, I I enjoyed the spook factor, but the the reality of the side, like I moonlit as a fugitive recovery agent for a couple years, and I'll tell you right now, everyone wants I probably can't say they watch certain bounty hunter shows, right? And they're like, man, this is exciting. It is not like eight-tenths of the job is research, and there is a you know, the other two-tenths of that job might be exciting for a minute, and it's also incredibly dangerous. And I and I and I approach uh paranormal investigation in the same light, you know, a majority of it is incredibly boring, but if you've got time, I do have one uh particular incidence that we actually just declared the property haunted. Yeah, sure. So, you know, you're you're familiar with Corona. And in the last one, I had told you about uh the old Ganol estate that's been torn down now, and they were gonna put up housing tracks or a mall, but unfortunately the property is on this fault line. So building uh building um you know commerce businesses, uh, the the investors dropped it. I don't know what they're what's there now, but back in the day, you know, I told you my buddy said you want to see a real haunted house. We investigated that as our group for years, you know, they it and it was it was one of those things where it like it never let us down, you know, just just walking onto that property, which by the way, for anyone listening, if you're doing paranormal investigation, uh get permission. Uh trespassing is a real thing, and uh you can get in real, real deep trouble for it. Having you know admonished in that advance, uh, we did enter that property a lot. And every single time it was, I mean, and when I say like terrifying, like you set foot there and you're having heart palpitations. I uh brought my mom up there once. She was like, My heart hurts. I'm like, yeah, it's weird, right? And uh we would go up there and we we did some late night excursions to go and check this place out. And uh the the real impact, the first time that we had a real impact, we pulled up there, we came out, and we're walking around the property just being like, Yeah, this is this is weird. And we're we're about ready to just pack up and go home. And and we you get this what sounded like almost like a music box. You know, we're all talking, and my my brother Alan, he goes, Hey, shut up, everyone shut up. You know, no professional decorum, I guess. But we all we all you know dummy up and you do, you hear this music, and it it sounds like a music box. And there's by this time, you know, I told you in the last uh podcast episode, this this property was gone. You know, uh the first time there was an accidental fire, second time an arsonist tried to take it, third time uh city of Corona came down and burned it down because it was a fire hazard. So we're just walking an empty property and there's this music box, and there is no explanation for it whatsoever. You know, we we looked around because we're like, maybe we tripped over something and activated a music box, you know. First logical conclusion. But following the music box, you know, then we got what sounded like church bells and the acoustics, you could say, you know, maybe you're hearing a church across town, it's possible, but extremely unlikely because it sounded like it was like right next door to us. And it didn't play any the familiar uh the uh you know, every hour on the hour sound that we would hear when bells would go off. And when the bells did finally chime a number, it chimed like 16. We counted 16 chimes, and that didn't make sense. And uh we were we were a bit, you know, shaken by that. It was the first time I had heard something that didn't have an explanation. I'd seen plenty of things, but we we uh got some brass, got our gumption up, and decided we try and go in the direction of the ball uh the bells, and we're walking up this this gravel pathways, and uh there there's a fair amount of us, and we're walking in this direction in the dark. We have a flashlight for the entirety of us, and we all stopped dead in our track because we heard someone walking toward us, and we're like, oh god, it's gonna be security or the cops are here. I don't know. But we're we're you know, we're in our 20s and we're we stop, and there's someone walking toward us, and it's making like an audible sound. The gravel is crunching, they're footsteps, and it's not like you know, oh, it's a coyote, a fox, or a deer, which are all common out in that area. There is nothing there, man. And you know, we're looking and and and audibly I'm thinking, okay, this has got to be 30 feet away from us. And instinctively, like all of us, we're we didn't even know it. We were all backing away slowly, facing that direction, but backing away because we didn't want to turn our back to it. We didn't know it was coming. And if it was an animal, you don't run. And its pace picked up. You know, footsteps became kind of like speed walking, and then speed walking became running, and that's when we ran. You know, this thing like it hit about probably what we would have estimated was maybe 15 feet from us when we turned around and hauled tail out. And I was the last one in the group taking up the tail, and I could hear it behind me, and it was running fast. And the thing that got me is like we get back to the entrance, you know, and we're we're out on the other side of the property, and I turn around and look, and there's nothing there, but you could hear footsteps in the gravel, but it wasn't disturbing the gravel, and I thought that was probably the scariest thing we ever encountered. And so naturally, a week later, we went back at the same time, and uh fortunately, you know, we didn't get the footsteps, but we brought a newcomer with us, um, somebody who wanted to cut his teeth on an investigation. And I remember like the music started almost on cue, the the the uh jewelry box music, that music box sound, uh started like maybe 10 minutes earlier than it had the time before. And it was also a different tune, which struck me as strange. And uh that night there were 12 of us there. It was about two in the morning, and I keep thinking, you know, we're out of our mind doing this. And you know, new blood's out there, and he's like, I'm so nervous, and he starts smoking a cigarette. And I remember one of our guys actually almost started crying. He wanted to go home, and I felt a little bit annoyed about that, but also incredibly empathetic because like the annoyance was was because we were in the middle of what I considered to be like a potential discovery, but the empathy was I know exactly how he was feeling when he said, I want to go home. I want to be as far away from this as possible because whatever's going on feels like a very real threat. You know, unfortunately, we didn't get, fortunately, we did not get you know the footsteps in the gravel this time, but I said it was about you know two in the morning, um, had just turned, and uh, as we were leaving, the bell started and it played a different uh melody, and then it chimed 12 times at two in the morning, and there was 12 of us, and we got a little apophenic, I won't, I won't lie, you know, where we just kind of decided that that meant there was 12 of us and 12 bells, so we're leaving now. And that was that really was the last trip we went up there. We said, okay, you know what? We can't prove it. We're we're gonna say it's haunted, it's dangerous, and let's not ever go there again, and let's talk everybody else out of going there again, too. And also, you know, private property, let's encourage people not to not to trespass. And that that was this probably the second scariest experience as far as paranormal goes that I've ever had.

SPEAKER_01 55:11

Did you guys have any recorders that picked up any of these sounds, the bells or the or the music or anything?

SPEAKER_00 55:18

You know, and that was one of those things where you're like, I wish I did. Uh we were still in our infancy. Um, so you know, uh much like every believable ghost story that I've ever heard, unfortunately, this is anecdotal. And and in a weird twist of irony, you know, uh anytime that I have brought recorders with us, we never, like I said, we never talk to them, but we'll record audio and video while we're walking through an investigation. And if something comes up, we listen. But I've never actually picked anything up uh as far as EVP, either in video or audio. I know that's anticlimactic, it really is, but it's just the reality of what I do.

SPEAKER_01 55:50

No, it is what it is, exactly, exactly. And I know it's been uh uh probably a while since you had any uh investigations or done. I know you're slammed with your your writing recently, right? I'm sure that's what you're focusing on at the moment.

SPEAKER_00 56:04

Oh my gosh, it won't the the story won't shut up. I haven't had a break. You know, I I piled through two books and I'm I'm already 10,000 words into the new one, 12,000 now.

SPEAKER_01 56:14

Whenever you do get back uh into the investigating or the research, if you ever do, if you ever decide to be sure to reach out to me and uh when you have some findings, you can come back on and let me know what you found. But yeah, the Colt County Diaries, right? That's what you're currently working on. If you want to just talk about that for a minute before we wrap it up.

SPEAKER_00 56:31

Oh, I would, I would, I would love for the opportunity. So, yeah, so you know, I'm uh a dad, and uh my eldest was uh, you know, Twilight is considered young adult, which is I I don't know. There was the there was a whole mu news media hubbub about how unhealthy the main character's obsession for, you know, the main the main vampire character. She sits by a window watching the seasons go by because her life can't continue because he's not there. And I I started paying attention to these young adult novels because I I had a daughter, uh, you know, she was 12 or 13, 12 or 13 at the time. I want to say 12. And then I had a newborn daughter, and I'm like, I don't want my girls growing up, you know, with these different things. Like they're they're great, you know. I I didn't like Twilight, but you know, divergent, that's a great story. And there's some really awesome young adult novels out there, but um also teenagers read these things, and there's an awful lot of sex and violence, and and there's there's foul language. I I don't want my kids growing up thinking this is what real life's like or what real life should be like. And I don't want them to want what this life represents in these stories, you know, even if it's fiction, there is some degree of uh of it that rubs off on us or makes us long for it. So I decided I was gonna write a story for my kids. And actually, it was you know, it was 2012 when I started the first book in Colt County Diaries, and uh I ended up hitting a writer's block. I shelved it, and then just start of 2025, I picked it up again, and suddenly the story was back. I finished it, you know, by July. Uh I started in May, finished by July, picked up on the second story in July, got through it, and I'm currently on the third one. And this one's this was great because you know the stakes in the story. It's funny. You your main character in this is uh character named Quincy Cobblebottom. There's a lot of weird names in there because I'm I'm shooting for a factor that feels you know mundane with the fantastic. There's no foul language whatsoever, but the but the danger feels real. Um, there's really high stakes, uh no, no uh actual human on human violence, you know. Um I have what I believe successfully blended, you know, an adventure comedy with a with a little bit of genre bending in there, some uh existential dread, some some scary stuff. But the main the main overall story, uh without being preachy, without being like, you know, like a Saturday morning wholesome family show, it it's it feels like something that we all did, you know, as we remember what would be our last summer, right? You know, that last summer you had where you told your friends, hey, I'll see you tomorrow and you never saw them again. It it captures that feeling, you know. It's that that final real big adventure that we had. And so, you know, this story, I've got a beta reading audience, and I'm I'm letting uh a few different ages. I've got a 70-year-old woman, one of my favorite people on earth. She's uh I can't I can't name her because I didn't get her permission, but um, I let her read the first story, and she came, she came to me later on, probably the most excited I've ever seen anyone, and she's like, I dreamt about it. I saw everyone. Quincy Cobblebottom, you know, Melody Bell, Danielle, or I'm sorry, not Danielle, Melody Danielle Bell and Carly Fry and the twins. She's like, I dreamt about everything. Oh my god, can I read another? I'm like, absolutely. And I've let some, you know, some of my my kids read it and some some other younger folks read it. Um, so right now I'm looking at an audience that's uh with some other beta readers in between that spans between about 15 to 70, apparently, you know, that are enjoying the story. And if you're if you're an 80s kid or a 90s kid, you know, the nostalgia's there. The story actually takes place in 1996. And I did this on purpose because guess what? You know, Quincy can't get in trouble and pick up his cell phone and call the cops or call his folks and ask them to come pick him up. You know, he talks about dial-up modems in there and AOL. He does, you know, and and and the whole you've got mail thing. You know, that's still going on in his world. You know, we're not all tethered to our phones and on the internet in 1996. So this story gives, you know, a good adventure without it being unrealistic for say 2025. And my hope, you know, is that when my kids read this, they see that, you know, there's there's better things in the world that's you can have a lot of fun and you can have a lot of adventure without really getting into any real trouble. And and it could be a good time. And this story tells it in a fashion that is honest, it's realistic, it's awkward. My main character, Quincy, uh, he he's got ADHD. And instead of, you know, giving him the stereotypes, you know, oh, a squirrel, and he's constantly distracted, you know, it shows his ADHD in the way that he hyperfocuses. He's he's the perfect lead character specifically for the tasks that are set for him because he would notice things that other people won't notice. And his his asides and his jokes and everything very, very funny, you know, off the wall hilarious, because he he could be things worrying about, you know, girls one moment and the next moment walking into a situation where he know he shouldn't be that he knows he shouldn't be there. And he's goes, you know, you know, just to quote one line, he's like, you know, it was the it was the most terrifying thing I've ever seen. So obviously I walked right in, you know, and he he makes these comparatives to movies and and and music of the time that give you this feeling, kind of like, you know, when I read the you know the story It Made Me Long to Be in 1955. I think it'll resonate with uh younger audiences and older audiences who remember what it was like that last real summer, or for people who want to experience that last real summer without you know any and having to embrace the concept that there has to be violence, sex, bad words, or any of those other things while still seeing that the adventure, the stakes, and the danger is real and there's other ways out of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:01

That's awesome. And that that's exciting. I'm excited for you. When you're about to publish, be sure to let me know when you're gonna release, and um, I'll definitely want to make a mention that uh for you.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:11

Oh, I'm going through like a soul crusting process. I've like, you know, I I love Madhouse books. Uh I know they're on a break right now as far as publishing uh new authors go for new talent. I'm not trying to go indie with this one. Uh I am trying to get an agent because I would love, if not someone from the big five, uh a larger publisher, because this this story should be something that people see. If I could get an agent, hopefully it's a good enough story, but if I can get an agent and go big five, that the that kind of marketing will take care of itself and the story will get the attention that it earns.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:43

I'm hoping so for you, for sure. And um again, be sure to let me know when that when it's coming out. Absolutely. Uh we'll we'll give you a mention there. But uh Mike, I appreciate you coming back and and buttoning up your your your story and uh sharing the West Grand Haunting. Um, I really do uh appreciate your time. Thanks so much for being here. And be sure to come back and let me know if you have any uh future uh investigations and things you want to talk about.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:09

Oh, absolutely. I'd love that you had me on. You know, I I I I'm honored to be on your show, man. You're an awesome host. I have a lot of fun with you, and uh, you know, unfortunately we're like 7-Eleven, we're always open, but we're all not always doing business. So if we do get anything new, I'll let you know about it. I'm sorry some of it happened to be kind of anticlimactic. I I hope that doesn't put anybody out for your listeners.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:28

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:30

Absolutely, man. It's been an honor.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:34

Thank you for listening. I appreciate you being here. You can catch this show wherever you listen to podcasts, as well as our website, accountswithparanormal.com, where you can access full episodes, as well as links to all our socials and our YouTube channel, where you can listen and watch along with visual images. And if you're a fan of what you heard here, please like, share, follow, subscribe. I appreciate the support. And if you have an account to share and you'd like to be on the show, email me at show at accountswithparanormal.com and tell me what you saw. I'll see you next time.