From Jailhouse to Lighthouse: Hauntings of Florida

AOTP EP:21 Tonight, I welcome Larry, a former law enforcement officer from Florida, who shares his spine-chilling experiences, from encountering a full-body apparition while on duty as a young corrections officer, to years later, hearing disembodied voices at the infamous St. Augustine Lighthouse.

https://www.indianriverhauntings.com/fbpi-home                                                        https://www.indianriverhauntings.com/irl-home                                                              https://www.facebook.com/indianriverhauntings/ https://www.youtube.com/@indianriverhauntings2341/videos https://www.amazon.com/Haunted-Indian-River-County-America/dp/1467155748    https://open.spotify.com/show/3PEUxe6OOkJl8Y57rOggBN

AOTP Episode Blog - https://accountsoftheparanormal.com/blog/f/from-jailhouse-to-lighthouse-hauntings-of-florida

If you have an account to share and would like to be a guest on the show, email me at show@accountsoftheparanormal.com and tell me what you saw!

Accounts of the Paranormal -

Creator/Producer/Host: Gino Barreto

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:43

If you have an account to share and would like to be on the show, email me at show at accounts of the paranormal.com and tell me what you saw. Welcome to the show. Tonight I welcome Larry, a former law enforcement officer from Florida, who shares his spine-chilling experiences from encountering a full body apparition while on duty as a young corrections officer to years later hearing disembodied voices at the infamous St. Augustine Lighthouse. Larry, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_03 1:22

Oh, thank you, Gino. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me on.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Oh, I'm happy to have you here, especially happy. You've got uh an incredible uh body of work. I'm I'm excited, and I'm gonna just get right to it because you just have so much to talk about here. Which really exciting for me, your first um full-body apparition where this kind of went back, and that's where we're gonna start uh the spring of 1980. I look forward to hearing about that when you were a corrections officer in Dade County in Miami. You uh started doing investigations. You have a Bachelor of Science in Management as well as a master's degree in public administration, uh, years of law enforcement. Much respect to you. Thank you for your service there.

SPEAKER_03 2:05

Thank you, sir.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Of course, you became a recognized authority in investigation on occult and occult-related crime investigation, teaching and lecturing on the subject, helping law enforcement professionals understand the complexities of investigating crimes involving the occult. So interesting. In 2011, you founded the Florida Bureau of Paranormal Investigation, and which is dedicated to uncovering evidence that will lead to an understanding of what paranormal phenomenon is and is not. In 2016, you created Indian River Hauntings LLC as the outreach for the uh FBPI, which provides events, tours, lectures to introduce its guests to the wonderful history of the area to explain, to help explain uh and sometimes experience the world of paranormal phenomenon and research. In 2024, you released your first book, Haunted Indian River County, and also host the Paranormal Stake Out Radio podcast. Okay, I can I can breathe now. You know, I try to summarize as best I can for time's sake. If I missed anything, you can just feel free to shout it out. But what I like to do, Larry, is I like to go back to when this began. And it appears with you. This started in the spring of 80, uh, when you were a young corrections officer at the Deed County Jail in Miami. I can't wait to hear about this and dig in um when you saw your first full body apparition. But before we get to that, prior to this sighting, what were your thoughts or your feelings on the paranormal?

SPEAKER_03 3:40

Well, I guess, Gino, I've always had this um desire to figure out things that nobody else could. I guess that's why I became a detective by trade uh in my law enforcement uh world. But I gotta give credit to my mother. She uh she always instilled upon me and my brother, in fact, he and I were just talking about this the other day, uh, the desire to uncover, find out the unknown, find out the answers to questions nobody else has. And she certainly had that mindset. She would watch uh uh oh, do you remember Cherries of Gods? It was a movie. In fact, she took my brother and I to see it back in the uh 70s. So it I always had an interest, I always had a desire to research and find out the answers to the unknown. So I think that's where I've always had that desire. And like I said, becoming uh in my in my professional life, uh spent many years as a detective, criminal investigator, uh, that's kind of the same thing. You're trying to find answers to questions. So that's really where it started. But the Day County Jail kind of happened unexpectedly. I was just a I was just 20 years old, and uh had gotten my start in law enforcement uh as a corrections officer, as as many law enforcement officers do. They they start off in the jail. And uh one night I hadn't been there but maybe six months, maybe a little less. And I was asked to go up to uh the fourth floor. On the fourth floor was the uh in the Dade County jail uh at that time, the main jail was ten stories tall. It was a huge building. And the ten the fourth floor were that they were short that night. They sent me up to to fill in because they were one officer short, and I was sitting at the uh the control booth. And I had gotten out uh a couple times to check the wings. Now, to kind of give you the layout, uh the control booth, I I'm sitting at it, it's got glass all around me, and the booth goes all the way back to a catwalk out the back of the control room, and that catwalk walked all the way around the perimeter of the floor. Now in front of me, I've got a lobby. There's an elevator where you know we would take uh the inmates up and or usually down or transfer to wherever we needed to court, for example. Um, and then there were three the three cell blocks were one on the left, one straight down, and one to the right. And uh I'm not sure why it was, but it was always A C B. I don't know why they said it that so C block was right in front of me. And at the end of each block was a big barred door to where you could see where the catwalk was. And the idea was you would go down the main cell blocks, sign out that you checked it, and then the other officers would go in the catwalk and look at through the outside of the cell cell blocks, and if that makes sense. So I'm sitting there just watching. I'm I'm just watching the floor. I'm of course I'm young, I'm new at this job, I am alert and ready, you know, ready to deal with any problem that comes up. And as I'm sitting there, I see a tall, lanky individual go from right to left down C Black. That's the one right in front of me on the on the catwalk. Tall, nothing, nothing spooky about it, just no, not see-through, not wispy, a solid individual in what appeared to be a uniform, go from right to left right in front of me. So I turned to the um guy, the other two guys on the floor with me, they were in the control room at the time, and I said, Hey guys, the lieutenant's on the catwalk. LT's on the catwalk. Now bear in mind the only way you could get up to the floor was the elevator that sat right in front of me, and nobody came up the elevator, or the stairwell that connected to the catwalk right behind the um control room. So these two guys jumped up, went out the back door, one went right in the uh catwalk, one went left on the catwalk, circled all the way around, and came back and said, Lawson, there's nobody out there. I said, I'm I'm telling you, I just saw them. There's nobody out there, Lawson, but this place is haunted. This stuff happens like that all the time.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Okay, you said tall. About how tall? I mean, like really, really super tall or like six foot, six foot?

SPEAKER_03 8:10

Six's three, six foot two, right in that area. And tall and lanky.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

Okay, gotcha. And they were wearing a uniform, you said, so it looked like you you assumed it was lieutenant?

SPEAKER_03 8:19

Yeah, it it looked like a uniform, so that's what I that's what I uh immediately said. LT's on the catwalk. I mean, we figured he was attempting to come up, catch us sleeping, or not or not doing our jobs or whatever. Um, but there was nobody there.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Wow, that is so interesting. And then when this happened, or after they, the ones that informed you that this jail had reportings of hauntings, other people had seen things there. Is that what happened?

SPEAKER_03 8:45

Well, yeah, these um yeah, they said this place is haunted, stuff like that happens all the time. And they proceeded to tell me some stories, most of which I don't really recollect now, but I do remember coffee pots turning on by themselves and people seeing other apparitions. Uh, and they said it happened all the time. Um, that was my only experience in there, but it was pretty significant because to this day I can clearly see that individual walking right across right across my line of sight. And like I said, there was nothing wispy, see-through about it, anything that would make me believe it was anything other than a human being. But there was nobody out there, and the guys heading out into the catwalk would have had to have seen him because the only way they could have gotten out was the stairwell right behind the control booth, and they both went opposite ways and went around. So one of them would have seen it if it was the lieutenant.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

Wow, that is awesome. And what were your thoughts or feelings uh after this happened? How did you feel? I saw were you a little scared of being there after that?

SPEAKER_03 9:47

Or no, not at all. I was fascinated. I was absolutely fascinated with what I'd seen. I knew what I'd seen. I was not daydreaming, I knew exactly what I'd seen. Um, there's an another part of the story that I find kind of interesting, too. This particular floor I was on was where they put people that were on suicide watch as well as other uh mental health issues. So it was kind of a wild floor in that sense. C-Wing right befront of me, right down in front of me, was the um uh place where they put folks on suicide watch. Now, they took precautions in these cells and would not give, for example, they wouldn't give sheets because sheets were could be used to harm themselves, if you understand what I'm saying by hanging and things like that. And I had gone down the hallway and checked it, and then checked it again. I had signed off on it. And I walked down the hallway after this occurred, and I found a folded sheet in front of this one cell. And I came out and said, I figured these guys were playing a joke on me. What's what's going on? But nobody'd been down there because I had been watching it. And of course, the two guys working with me, we don't know anything about that. How could that have gotten there? It's not supposed to be down there. And I found out later that that was the cell where the last guy who had hung himself was in. Take that for whatever it's worth. But I found that folded sheet in front of that cell. I'm just telling you how it happened.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Yeah, for sure. About how old is the jail? Did you mention how old? How far back does this go?

SPEAKER_03 11:24

The the the Dade County jail, the the main one probably at that point was only in the 40-year, 30, 40 year range. It was a fairly modern building. I mean, it had old, old, uh, we had the old barred cells in it where you still had to use the keys in a lot of places, but it was not a it was not a jail from the 1800s or the early 1900s, even.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

It's interesting that they were in a uniform, though. Was there any reports ever of an employee of the jail losing their life there that you were aware of?

SPEAKER_03 11:55

No, not that not losing their life there. Certainly many officers had passed away. I believe there was a c you know, I take that back. I believe there was one discussion where somebody had a heart attack and passed in the jail. But there had never been any violence that took anybody's life.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

St. Augustine Lighthouse. I'm really eager to hear about this one. This is uh fascinating because you and I had chat about this. One of my favorite pieces of evidence regarding the paranormal came from there via ghost hunters. If you're into the paranormal at all, you know the ghost hunters, Jason, Grant, Steve, and the team. And they investigated the St. Augustine Lighthouse back in, I want to say it was season one or two. I want to say it's season two. Um they went there and the evidence they caught there uh just hands down, some of probably the best evidence of the paranormal, in my opinion. Period. It is absolutely incredible, and I know you're aware of it. Tell me about that experience.

SPEAKER_03 12:54

Well, for starters, that that particular episode you're talking about that's never been debunked, uh, that I'm aware of anyway, uh, is really what got me fully, fully cemented in following this in this journey. Fully cemented in following this journey. Um my son, who's now I believe he's 28 now, uh, was just turning 11, I think. And he had watched this episode on Ghost Hunters, and what it was was uh they had taken a camera and put it at the base of the St. Augustine Lighthouse and showed the camera straight up the spiral staircase. And they caught the most amazing video of a figure, you could see the shoulders and the head peering over the side of the banister, disappearing, and then reappearing a fraction of a second later on the next floor floor up, and I believe a fraction of a second a next floor up, always the head and shoulders. It was really amazing, never been debunked, as I said that I'm aware of. Well, my son had seen that, and Ryan said it was coming up on his 11th birthday, and he said, Dad, can you take me there? And I said, Sure, why not? I became aware of a um a tour that they did at the St. Augustine Lighthouse called Dark of the Moon. Highly recommend to anybody. And um, I found out about it, and we went up there, got a hotel room, we were gonna spend the night. And um a little history about the lighthouse. I think it was in the 1879, I want to say 1879, the exact date escapes me. But the lighthouse was being rebuilt, and that's where a lot of this story comes from. But let me back up just a little bit. Um, so at any rate, we went up there, we took this Dr. the Moon tour, and we went through it, and Ryan said, Dad, this is great. Can we do it again? Well, we weren't gonna drive back to Vero Beach. We were spending the night, so I said, sure, we'll do it again. So I bought two more tickets. The tours themselves were about two hours, so we were going to the last one of the night. Uh, it was a smaller group, and the tour guy said to me, Hey, fewer people, you guys have been through this once. Tell you what, I'm gonna take everybody from the smaller group. We're gonna go straight to the uh lightkeeper's house. And you and your son can have the lighthouse to yourself for about an hour. What do you think? Terrific. I mean, that's great. So we got led into the lighthouse, and Ryan and I went up to about the fourth level. Now, if you've ever been in a lighthouse, you'll know that these are huge, huge concrete cement blocks. Uh, and you can hear the wind whistling, but you can't hear people outside. You can't hear anything else other than the sounds from inside the lighthouse. And we're sitting on this fourth floor, and then suddenly we hear kids laughing, girls in particular. Now, at this point, I need to go back in the story a little bit, and this is where I was a minute ago. Uh, in the 1870s, I want to say 1879, they were rebuilding the lighthouse. It had been built before and it was being refurbished, redone in 1879. The construction foreman, if you will, we'll call him that, um, had three daughters. And they used to like to play on um the trestle that went down from the construction site down to the water. Now, understand something about Florida at this time. Very few roads. Railroads had just started showing up into the central part of Florida, but nothing was on the east coast. So the only way that they could get the materials to the construction site was by ship through the through the lagoon area, the river area. So they had this like train trusle that went down to the water and a cart that would bring the stuff up, the uh uh supplies up. Well, the girls liked to play on that uh little sled, and they had a little friend, little girl that they played with, and they would get on the cart and they would ride it down, like we would a roller coaster today. They'd hit the bottom and hit the brakes, and it was fun, they would take the cart back up. Well, one day, this uh cart, the brakes didn't work, something happened, the cart went into the water, and two of the construction foreman's daughters passed, as well as their little friend. Very sad. But since that time, it had been reported that they had been haunting the lighthouse. So that was the story from inside the lighthouse. We hear the kids laughing. Well, being a cop, the first thing I'm gonna do hearing these kids laughing, and it was unmistakable. Absolutely unmistakable, Gino. My son heard it, I heard it. I immediately start looking for wires and speakers, making the assumption they were trying to enhance the experience, if you will. There was nothing in that lighthouse that could have projected kids laughing. I I checked, the skeptical side of me checked. And it was that incident there that made me realize there's more to what is going on in this world. It had brought back the memories of what happened in the Dade County jail. And I was going to find out what this was, and that's really what set me on the journey. Now it was kind of an interesting side note about this. In 2022, 2023, I'm sorry, my old my sons, my older boy now in his upper 20s, and my other son in his mid-20s, and our a friend of theirs went back to the St. Augustine Lighthouse and just to re-experience it again. And we actually, through our equipment, was were able to make contact with these girls, and they were almost like playing hide and seek with us, not only in the lighthouse, but also in the lightkeepers' house. Just kind of a uh kind of an ending or uh exclamation point to that experience I had back in 2010 with my son in that lighthouse.

SPEAKER_00 18:56

That's fascinating. So you were able to catch uh the voices. Do you have any uh voice recorders, uh, recordings of that?

SPEAKER_03 19:04

No, I do not. Unfortunately, this was uh early, this is actually before we started uh FPPI, and we didn't have any equipment like we do now that would have recorded it. The last one, it was kind of the same thing. We we didn't we didn't we didn't get any voices the last time, but we got um basically through K2 meters and I think a millimeter we were using, and we would ask questions and it would respond, but we didn't get any voices of it now.

SPEAKER_00 19:30

Yeah, and and I would just uh to the listeners, anyone that may not be familiar with that episode of Ghost Hunters, um, if you have any interest in the paranormal and you want to see some just incredible evidence, uh look that one up. I think I revisited about a year ago. I watched it again. It's just so incredible to see that shadow do what it did. It's just fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 19:54

And like I said, to this day, to my knowledge, has never been debunked. It's just a tremendous piece of evidence, no doubt.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

Yeah, no, you can't, how can you? You remember when they were walking up the steps? Um, Jason was trying to get Steve to go because of his fear of heights. And then when they reached the top, remember and those lights, the lights came, that just the light came on. Yes. It cemented it right there because this shadow was up on that level. Did it trigger the light? No. The only thing that triggered it, they didn't even know that there was a trigger until they got up there. They reached that level.

SPEAKER_03 20:29

And that was at the top floor, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

Yes, and it came on and it just it blew their mind. It blew my mind, blew everybody, I'm sure their mind and watched. So if you have never seen that episode, look it up. I want to say season two of Ghost Hunters. It's just fantastic.

SPEAKER_03 20:43

Well, I had even taken my family there one time. This is before we went up the last story I told you. And uh every I've not been in the lighthouse where I haven't had something happen. And the last time we were there, and this is about 20, not the this is not the last time, but um uh an event we went uh I think it was around 2019, 2021, right in that area. We went up there with some friends and went through the lighthouse. My wife had been sitting outside the um uh lighthouse waiting for us to come in, and uh she saw something flash before her eyes, and not a minute after that, I'm coming down the stairs, and the door to get out of the lighthouse locked. And there were a group of us in there, you know, different people. It was it was a it was a regular tour, and people were panicking because the door wouldn't lock. And if we finally got help from the staff that were there, and they had to use a special key to get in. They said the door doesn't lock from the inside. I said, Well, we couldn't get out, but somehow this door locked and wouldn't would not let us out. So there are many experiences at the lighthouse that cannot be explained.

SPEAKER_00 21:50

Oh, yeah, that's just further evidence of that place. It's just live. I would love to someday visit that place. Incredible.

SPEAKER_03 21:59

Um We had created uh the Florida Bureau of Paranormal Investigation and w we ended up in 2016 creating uh Indian River Hauntings to kind of show people really what this was all about from our angle, what it was and what it wasn't. But about the year or so before that, we had um had the opportunity to investigate uh a prison that had closed down, a state prison, not not too far from where I live. And we had the opportunity to go in there. And uh we had we went in during the day to kind of get a lay of the land. And this was a youthful offender facility, so it wasn't like a typical prison. It had more barracks type of uh ambiance to it. Um so we're we're just doing a lay of the land that the day before, I think two days before the investigation, but they did happen to have one heavy-duty lockdown there, which is typical of any major state prison. That's where they put the, I guess, the problem folks in. And we'd gone through the um the uh the building and we're just looking around and taking pictures, and of course, we're recording everything. At this point, we're re-recording everything. And we end up uh finishing our evaluation to set up for the upcoming investigation. And once we left, we listened to the in fact it was Dan Clarkson, one of our teammates was actually listening to the uh recording, and he calls me up and says, Larry, you've got to hear this. And we are walking out, it's about three o'clock in the afternoon, which is important because people make the assumption this only happens at night. Nope, it happens 24-7. So it's about three o'clock in the afternoon. We're walking out, and you can hear the recording, and you hear my son, Evan, make the comment of, it's a shame that they were locked up here in life and they're still locked up in the afterlife. Didn't think too much about it, but when we listen to the tape later, you hear a voice. It's on my website, in fact. Hell we ain't dead. Right after Evan, right after Evan says it, you get, you know, and of course it's it's wispy, but you know, you can hear it. Hell we ain't dead. Now we went back and actually investigated that prison uh uh you know a few days later, as I mentioned, and we we had a wild night. We had things thrown at us, we had other voices in the main lockdown. So it was really quite quite an event. That was about 2015 that happened, and really cemented to us in our minds, hearing that tape, proof, this happens 24-7. And really there's no concept of time or day or night on the other side. So we've been we were pretty well established as a group. Uh we uh fortunately, because of my background and I and I'm pretty well known in the community. Folks were folks were uh not reluctant to call me if they ran into a problem. But in this particular instance, uh, this was in a little town called Sebastian, Florida. And my daughter, who was a law enforcement officer also, was an police officer for the city of Sebastian at the time. And she answered a call, middle of the night, of a burglary in a small, it was a residence, but it had been uh changed over into a uh retail shop. One that you know dealt with uh interesting things like crystals and whatnot. The alarm went off, and my daughter answers the call, and uh they're in there and they find an item in the middle of the floor that is uh shouldn't be there. I mean, how could it get in the middle of the floor where they don't know? Well, apparently one of the two owners had gone into the office and was watching the feed but headed on live and saw some sort of shadow whisked by my daughter and came out and told her. And she said, and they had mentioned that they had had a number of unexplained experiences in there. So my daughter says, You need to get a hold of my dad, which they did. And I brought the team out there and uh we set up a full investigation. Now it's important to tell you at this point, and this was a tough thing for me as a cop working with mediums. Uh, I'd had so many experiences where I'd be working case, particularly a homicide, where people who claimed to be mediums, and I'm not saying they weren't, but they would give me information that just never panned out. Therefore, being a cynical old cop, you know, I had a probably a not a positive view of mediums at that point, but that had changed due to some personal experiences. And I had come to get to know a guy named Chris Huff. He lives in England, and Chris does join us via the internet on our investigations many times, and he has proven to be incredibly valuable, and his evidence has been proven so many times through historical research and not and and whatnot. So, to make a long story short, I believe that some people in this world have this gift, and Chris Huff is one of them. So, Chris was with us this night, and what he would do is I would uh we'd set up all of our equipment and we use a lot of equipment now. We videotape everything, we have uh uh spirit, we use spirit boxes, we use electronic equipment, we record, as I said, we'd use audio and video recorders, we'd have everything set up. And then Chris would come to us via the internet, and I would talk to him with headphones on. Nobody was allowed to hear what he said because we did not want to contaminate the venue. We did not want to contaminate the area that we were doing our experiments in with him saying anything. So he's on my earphones. First part of the investigation, not a whole lot's going on. And then suddenly Chris says, There's a young lady, a young girl here. She's young, she's five, six years old. Her name's Lindy or Belinda, I'm not sure which. About this time, some of our other equipment goes off. Now we overlay a bunch of things. I like to triangulate for lack of a better term. I like having uh dowsing rods, a K2 meter, or a REM pod, uh Spirit Box, and some other pieces of equipment going at the same time. So when we get things, we can cooperate it. And that's exactly what started happening. We suddenly started getting information from this little girl. Of course, nobody can hear Chris but me, but it did select me to ask some questions. And next thing I knew, my team members are actually saying or confirming what Chris is telling me over the earphones. We've got a young girl here and there. She likes to be called Lindy, but her name is Belinda. She's five years old. Uh, she died there. Uh she died because something happened to her, but she went on to say that her mother had a bunch of uncles that would come over and visit, if you get my meaning. But one uncle, in particular, Uncle Oscar, actually didn't mean to hurt her, but hurt her. And one thing you don't know about me yet, you know, is that my background is in is in crimes against children. So I'm hearing what this little girl is saying, and my mind automatically goes into cop mode, and I begin to ask questions that I would ask a five-year-old to ring an uh an investigation, an actual investigation. And we're talking and she's telling me things, and she's saying Uncle Oscar didn't hurt her. Uh and and I I'm giving you in full sentences, but we're getting this in bits and pieces between what Chris is saying and what our spirit box is saying, confirmed with the dowsing rods and the REM positive type of thing. So we're getting all this information, and finally, I'm pretty well convinced that I'm dealing with a child that may have been hurt. We don't know when, but I asked her, Do you like television? And the answer was no. Uh, do you like radio? Yes. Well, do you like um? I started naming modern songs, and it the answers kept coming back, no, no, no. To make a long story short, I did get to the point I started asking about some older shows, and I finally said, Do you do you like Amos and Andy? And the immediate response was yes. So now I'm thinking 30s and 40s. Now this house was built, I believe, in the 20s. Okay. So she finally says, yes. So now I've got a period of time, and that's what we do in this business when kids are hurt, and we'll just use that term, uh, they don't always know dates and times. So we have to try and narrow down when the dates or times are. So now I'm I'm getting a period of 30s and 40s. During this time, uh, and you know, I'm I'm just telling you what happened. Chris says the child's mother came, but the child did not want to go with mom, refused to go. She said she liked it there. Take that for whatever it's worth. Um, but then suddenly everything went dead, everything went very, very quiet. Um we concluded the investigation very excited because we had some very tangible information. We had a name, we had several names. We now had an area era to look into. And I asked my daughter, hey, check this files at the police department, see if there's any indication of a young lady being harmed or hurt back in the 30s, 40s, or 50s. And of course, she came back and found nothing. Um, we also found during this time, uh, during our research, we found out that there was a gentleman named Oscar who lived less than a mile from this dwelling. Uh, and he died in 2017 at I think the age of 100 or something close to 100, which now gives us a name of somebody in close proximity by the name of Oscar. My daughter, in continuing to do some inquiries with us, uh, went to the local cemetery and spoke to the superintendent there. And uh he said, Ah, it's amazing you came here. And he told her a story, and she says, Well, you know, I'll I uh call my dad. So he gives me a call, and I start talking to him, and he said, Yeah, I was talking to your daughter, and she was telling me about what you're looking at. And just to let you know, about a week or so ago, we had a family show up here. They were visiting another grave site, uh, and it was the gravesite of Harold Fear. I I easy name to remember. And we just got talking as they're visiting the gravesite of this relative. They were from New York. He did not get their names, I might add. Um, and we got talking about children that were buried in the cemetery. And this gentleman, the head of this family, says, you know, we have another shirt tail relative here. She she was about five years old when she died tragically. We don't know how she died, but she died tragically in 1939. And we don't know how, but her name was Belinda. And they went and took her to her grave site on the on the um in the cemetery. And it's a you could tell it was a very poor gravesite. It was about maybe four feet in length, maybe two and a half, three feet, not even three feet in width, surrounded by old rotting wood, and there was a tiny tombstone on it that was so old I couldn't get a rubbing off of it. But the superintendent said that young girl's name was Belinda, 1939, died in tragic circumstances. I ask you, Gino, how does that happen? How does that happen? So I now believe that we have information of an unsolved homicide. And I am still working it, and it's difficult because I don't know. I have no information who it is that came down to visit. The superintendent is, of course, hopefully he'll remain there for a while, will let me know when they come back. But these are the types of cases that keep me going. This is tangible. There's no way we could have had all this information from this tiny little house. And now we've got an actual grave site of which I have pictures of, I might add. So that's the the uh story of the uh little girl in the cemetery, and I will send you that picture. So I'm going to 2017 now. Uh, this is about two weeks before we had, I think it was Hurricane Ida came storming through here. Didn't beat us up too bad, but it did knock a few things around. And I was doing a tour of folks in the city of Felsmere. Uh Felsmere, when I retired the first time from as director of the police academy, I don't know if I don't know if I mentioned it, but I was director of the police academy for a number of years. But I retired from the state, hung up my state badge, went to work for this little town of Felsmere as their detective, and had found out all the interesting things that were going on out there, and it was really a very haunted spot. So that's really what was the impetus behind also creating Indian River hauntings, because next thing after all this, people are wanting, hey, can you speak to our rotary club? Can you do a tour for our Cub Scouts, that type of thing? So, at any rate, I'm doing a tour in Fellsmere. This is uh in 2017, in the late summer, early fall. I can't remember when Hurricane Ida came through now. And I had a tour coming through, and we would go through the old school that was built in 1916. My team had come along also, and we were going to do an investigation, our kit one of our continuing investigations of the school after the tour. So they had come in and they were upstairs prepping as I took the tour group through, and it was a very brief tour, but we would go down into the cellar area, which also housed at that point in time the Boys and Girls Club for the area. And we went down there and we've always had interesting things happen there. But on this particular night, I've got my guests downstairs, and I suddenly hear step footsteps coming down the stairs. And I hear the door rattle. My first thought it was one of my guys upstairs. Maybe they're looking for me. All the guests heard it. We all turned and looked. We could hear the door, the door handle rattled after hearing the footsteps. I get up and I go look, and nobody was there. And I said, Oh, I guess folks are gonna things are gonna be happening tonight. So I then walk upstairs and I find my group. They had come down from the top floor, the auditorium, in fact, where they were at. And uh they said, Larry, you got you gotta hear this. And they were up there and they had done a uh what we call an EVP electronic voice phenomenon. They had to use a uh a digital recorder, and they recorded one of my team members asking, Billy, is this the room you like to be in? Now, Billy was a young boy that we had identified a year or so before. We don't know if that's his real name, but that's what we call him. That's what he responds to, uh, that just plays havoc. He throws little pebbles at the cleaning lady and puts fingerprints on on the on the uh glass doors and stuff when there's no kids in the building. And what they heard was this uh my teammate Mark Holt was his name, ask, Billy, is this the room you like to be in? Clear as a bell. You hear a little boy, and there were no kids in the building at this time, but you hear little boy say, Yes, sir. Clear as a bell, also on my website, I might add. Um, and that's one of the many, one of the many instances we've had of Billy in that house. And another time when I was the detective there, it was the day after, in fact, it was um the day after uh Memorial Day in 2017, I think it was. I'm sitting at my detective, my desk in the detective's office in the police department, and Letty, the lady that comes over, uh, cleans our building in the old school, comes over all excited. She calls me to come over, she pulls me across the street to the old school, and she shows me fingerprints that I did try to lift on my head on the the uh glass going into the water department. And nobody had been there. It had been a long weekend, nobody, especially kids, had been in there. And clear as a bell, you could see little kids' fingerprints on the glass. Now, the folks down in in the uh basement uh where the boys and girls club was at the time were constantly telling me that. They would come in the next morning and see kids' fingerprints on the walls. The kids, the younger kids in the Boys and Girls Club would constantly be talking to somebody. And this the the uh counselors would say, Who are you talking to? Our friends. They would talk about playing with these kids. The most significant thing that happened there though was they kept saying the elevator would go up and down on its own. Didn't matter who was there, go up. They had an engineer come out, nothing was wrong with the elevator that would make it do that, but it would come up and down. We were in there one night, and sure enough, the elevator started going on its own, and it was preceded with a unbelievably loud bang on the inside of the door. Not the elevator, but the elevator door, as if somebody's taking their fist and banging it on it. We also got that on tape, which was quite interesting, and that's happened many times. So the old school is filled with stories that I I could go on with for hours, but what a fascinating place. But getting Billy's voice was tangible evidence because there were no kids in that building. We got it on tape, uh, and it was pretty significant.

SPEAKER_00 39:37

Are people able to reach out to you if someone like has something going on?

SPEAKER_03 39:42

Oh, that happens all the time. Yeah, we do that all the time. We uh we if uh we prefer doing public buildings or uh historical sites for lots of reasons, but we will do homes if the need is is uh apparent enough, but we'll do a very strict vetting uh session prior to going into somebody's home because there's lots of reasons why people may have things have be going on in their home. Uh and sometimes it's because something unexplained is happening. And sometimes there's also other reasons, and we try to we try to figure that out before we we in uh invade somebody's home, if you will.

SPEAKER_00 40:21

Of course, of course. What is your idea or your thoughts on all of this and what it might be?

SPEAKER_03 40:28

Wow, that is a question I love to ask my guests, because the answer, Gino, quite frankly, is we don't know. Anybody that tells you they know what this is are fooling themselves, maybe fooling you, maybe a little bit of both, because we really truly don't know the answer. And if you talk with folks that have been in the field for any length of time, they'll tell you the same thing. Until, this is how I describe it, until Abraham Lincoln comes into the room, pulls up a chair, sits down in front of me, and says, Larry, this is what the other side's all about. We're not gonna know for sure. The only ones that do know are the ones that have passed over. Now, since the, and I mentioned this before, since the beginning of time, since the beginning of mankind, people from every socioeconomic class, educational class, culture, religion, uh country, they've all been experiencing, not everybody, but people from all of those areas have been experiencing things. You can't say that it doesn't happen. So the question then is what is it? Um I have my personal belief, but being a cop, until I have tangible evidence that I can present to a jury of my peers, I've got to say I don't know for sure yet. But I will say something is happening that we cannot explain.

SPEAKER_00 41:45

I'm interested in hearing about your uh grandmother, uh the connection you made uh with her uh back in Vero Beach. Tell me about that.

SPEAKER_03 41:55

This story has many interesting facets to it. Um we I I as I told you in through Indian River Hauntings, I do historical tours of the area. And my son Evan, who's now an adult, um would accompany me with and Evan, even though he does not like talking about it and kind of shies away from it, has the gift. He can see and hear things other folks cannot. Um, and we were doing a tour one night in this area where all this happened, and he looks up into this very narrow building uh that has a a um beauty salon on the top, Justin's beauty salon. It's actually in uh in my book that salon is. And we, for lots of reasons, realize that place has uh been occupied with um entities we're not sure of why they're there. I'll put it to you that way. That's a whole different story. But in this particular case, Evan would be seeing he saw a woman, long dark hair, long white dress, very sad, staring at us from a window. And I would say, Evan, well, why? She said, Dad, she's trying to tell you, but you can't hear her. And it's because I'm as sensitive as a rock, as I like to say. Um, I said, okay, we'll find out what's going on there. Well, um, just before COVID hit, we were doing a tour and we had a couple of young ladies. I never told anybody what Evan saw. Not that I didn't believe him, but I had no cooperating evidence. So you can't be talking about stuff unless you've got some meat to go with those bones, if you will. So we're doing this tour, and a couple of young ladies at the end of this tour comes up to me. They're 14 years old, and uh what one young lady says, Mr. Lawson, somebody, my friend here wants to tell you something. I said, Sure, what is it? And the young lady other young lady starts by saying, Well, there's a woman in that window. Well, Evan was with me that night, and I stopped her. I said, Evan, come over here, I want you to hear this. And I said, Okay, tell me what you saw. Well, there's this woman, she's got long dark hair, wearing a long white dress, and she's very, very sad in that window up there. Of course, we couldn't see it, but she did. Same exact story to the T that my son. Had seen over the last year. Wow. COVID comes and goes, and we of course shut down like everybody was at that time. But in uh 2022, in March of 2022, we're doing a new investigation of Justin's hair salon. And this time I've got my whole crew there. We're going to do some work outside. And my friend Chris is with me. Got him on the video. Once again, speakers on. He does a walkthrough. That's what he normally does. He does a walkthrough with us of the venue, tells us what he sees. He says, Larry, there's three women there. Now Justin's had had a lot of activity of doors being opened, things being moved. They thought it was a woman. Chris didn't know any of this history. But he says, there's a woman, there's three women here. The first one, her name is B. And B is a rather gregarious woman who likes to open doors and shut doors and move things around and just play jokes. I said, okay, that makes sense. He said, there's a second woman here. Her name is Jenny. And Jenny's got long dark hair. She's wearing a long white dress and she's very, very sad because of the loss of a child. He did not know any of this, but once again, he gave, with a little more detail, the same exact story my other two witnesses had. But then he says, Larry, there's a third woman here. Her name is Florence. Florence is an old woman. She's craggly, she's bent over. And she's a religious zealot. And she's very, very she's mean. And then he stops and he says to me, And Larry, she hates you. And she's looking at you, and excuse this description, but she said, She's looking at you like you're poop on her shoe. That's a quote. And I said, Okay, fine. And he goes on and he talks about, you know, how she is and everything. And I let it go. The investigation comes to an end. It's after midnight now. Chris is in England, so it's almost 5, 6 a.m. for him, and he's stuck with us. And he says to me, Hey, Larry, Florence came back. And she's asking you to forgive her. She's asking you to light a candle for her, and I don't know what that means, is I'm not religious. And I said, Well, my wife happens to be Catholic. Um, her father is a deacon at St. Helen's Church here in Viro, and I'm very aware of some of the trappings. I'm not Catholic myself, but I'm aware of it. But my my father's side of the family was also very, very Catholic. In fact, my grandmother was angry because he didn't, my father did not become a priest. And he was doubly angry when he married my mom, who was like his, sorry, dad, but third or fourth marriage. And um she uh she uh didn't like my mom because my mother was Protestant. In fact, I found out in later years, I didn't meet her until I was like in the sixth grade, and she was very, very cross with us kids all the time, very not very nice. In fact, I found out that she didn't even tell her people that she lived with in the in the Catholic nursing home she was in that we were her grandkids. We were friends of the family only because we weren't Catholic. And I said, as I said, she treated us the kids very poorly, treated my mom even worse. And I told Chris all this, and I finally said, Oh, and by the way, Chris, my grandmother's name is Florence. I knew exactly who he was talking about. I knew exactly what he described. I didn't tell him, I just let it go. But he described my grandmother physically, personality-wise, religious-wise, to an absolute T. Interesting to know some people say, oh, she could have looked up your name. He could have looked up your name. First of all, he's a he's my friend and I trust him. But more importantly, my grandmother spelled her last name differently than we did. So there would have been and then she and she ran a uh dry cleaning store in Detroit back in the 30s and 40s and hadn't done anything past that.

SPEAKER_00 48:10

That's incredible. Yeah. Um that must have blown your mind.

SPEAKER_03 48:15

Um it did, it did. I uh what I've I've known this would happen. The most important thing is why did she come back saying she's sorry? And as it's been explained to me by other other uh folks with the gift who are mediums, that a lot of times the other side will come back to you initially as you exactly remember them. If Chris had said, Oh, your grandmother's here and she wants to give you a big hug right up front, I would have found it fishy. But no, he talked, he described her perfectly. And then when she came back, in fact, even Chris even said, I think she wants to say she's sorry. And lighting a candle is a significant, you know, pray for me, say a prayer for me. In the Catholic, she was a very staunch Catholic. So I took, I took that as hers coming back to say, I'm sorry for everything that occurred. So that's that's that story.

SPEAKER_00 49:09

Have you had any other types of experiences personally in homes you've had, places you've lived, any kind of experiences at any level?

SPEAKER_03 49:21

Oh yeah. I mean, what it my wife and I were um oh gosh, my my daughter was still a uh a girl in school little girl in school, my daughter for my my first marriage, and she would come and would visit us, and we had a room all set up. And whenever I went anywhere, I would um uh I would buy her a trinket, uh whether it be a spoon, because when I was an investigator for the state, I would travel quite a bit uh working on cases. I would always bring her back something. Um so she had the she she had a lot of the stuff in her room. And I remember one night I woke up and I heard a bell ringing. And uh looking around and where did that bell come from? Middle of the night. And I go looking around. I had there were no bells in the house that I was aware of. I finally find my way to Ashley's room, and on her bedstand was a little bell that I'd bought her. And I picked it up and I rang it. Same exact tone. I said, Okay, well, this is interesting, and I sat it down. It's about two or three nights later, I hear the bell again. Of course, the first thing that you're thinking, am I dreaming? You know, is this just something that's happened in my dream? Go into the bedroom, look at the bell, it's still sitting there. I walk back into the bedroom, my wife had woken up and said, Oh, you heard it too. So that was one of the then there's been other stories where um uh she's heard that I would be working late, uh, you know, coming in late from uh from the working on the job, and she would thought I would come in and the door would be. She had locked it, but she heard me come in, heard me messing around, and then didn't see me, got up, looked around. I would get home and she'd say, Where do you, where did you go? I'm just getting home. What are you talking about? Well, you were just in the house. Now it wasn't a burglar because nothing was disturbed, and the door was still locked from the inside. But yeah, I've had I've had many things like that. My my uh son, the uh Evan, the uh the gifted one, uh came flying into the room one night and said, Did you just come into my room? This is once again two or three o'clock in the morning. No, no, no, what are you waking us up for? Well, I heard footsteps and somebody came up and sat down next to the bed, and I was still awake because I was on my phone, because that's what teenagers do. And I looked and there was nobody there. I thought it was you. And then he came back later and said, Because of his abilities, and he said, Ah, it was your dad that was in here. Once again, take that for whatever it was worth. But the he was awake when it happened. So, yeah, there's and there's been lots of little things like that. You know, you hear you hear when when our our beloved uh dog Kramer died, we could hear stuff, we oftentimes would still hear her her claws on the linole on the uh not linoleum, but the uh the stuff on the floor. Sorry, you'll have to edit that out. Oh, the tiles. The tiles, thank you. That you'd hear her, you you we we would hear the the clitter clatter of her so yeah, we've heard things. Can you pass that off to emotions and dreams sometimes? Sure. But how often does it have to happen before you gotta wonder, is there more to this?

SPEAKER_00 52:29

Yeah, for sure. Time flies and we're having fun. We're already getting close to an hour here. I do want to uh touch on that the teaching lecturings you had did on the occult and the cult-related crime investigations. That's very interesting. Just talk about that a little bit and what that was like.

SPEAKER_03 52:47

Well, this once again, my background was in crimes against children. And back in the late 80s or early 90s, there was a um a real upsurge in people that were joining Satanist groups. Um, they'll remember it. It got kind of overboard uh with people thinking Dungeons and Dragons was a satanic uh uh game that was influencing kids. And and there were certain things. McMartin had happened. Now, this is where it got interesting. The McMartin case had happened, I'm sure you remember that. Uh, or do you remember that? Was that the in the Manhattan Beach, it was a huge daycare case where parents had accused the um owners of uh the uh daycare, McMartin daycare, or of abusing their children and using satanic trappings to do that. Well, that whole mess did start a whole bunch of things that actually did occur. Now, my feeling on that is it wasn't so much they were Satanists that were trying to turn the children's souls over to Satan, as much as it were individuals that wanted to harm children and used those trappings to scare them and influence them, if that makes sense. But there certainly was a whole lot of that going around. And we had kids all over the country that were getting involved in cults. There were us uh there were there were kids that were committing, there was a couple cases where kids committed murder because they were reading the satanic Bible, all kinds of stuff like that. Well, uh, what happened there was there, I I ended up working at a very, very large case uh at a Montessori school in Stewart, Florida. Um, and there were trappings of ritualistic abuse with that, and that's the term we used at the time. And when you start looking into it, there were many things that were happening that people would use satanic trappings. But also at the time, being here in South Florida, we had a big influence with what we call the Afro-Caribbean cults: Santa Ria, Palamayombe, Brujariya, uh, voodoo, that types of things. So I began to become familiar with these tr these different religions because I was seeing it in child abuse cases I was working, particularly the Montessori case school. Um, and from those studies and the work, and we ended up convicting our guy. The McMartin case ended up in a complete acquittal, but we ended up uh convicting our guy. Um, and because of the background in studying, people wanted to know more about it. And of course, at this time also, we started having old people breaking into houses and drawing inverted pentagrams, painting inverted pentagrams on the floor, and there was evidence of candles, and and even some cases, and I know uh one case in particular, uh animal sacrifice was being done. Well, because of my study in this, and really nobody else was looking into it, um, I began to help officers understand what it was. A classic example of the other side of this, people like to look at Wiccans. I don't know if you're familiar with that term, but the term Wicca and Wiccan is a pagan religion, and most of the practitioners of Wicca call themselves witches. Many people, especially my profession, looked at somebody that that called themselves that as a Satanist. Well, that there couldn't be farther from the truth. And my studies and my teaching and my teaching of cops started telling the guys and girls out there that a Wiccan is not a Satanist, and you need to treat them differently than when you've got an altar with a sacrificed animal on it, for example. But that's what happened, and next thing you know, I continued to study, and uh I still I still am very, very familiar with it. I still get calls once in a while about, hey, I've got this symbol, what does that mean? And I ended up uh for many years teaching a uh two, fourty-hour course uh in cults and deviant groups investigation, then an advanced version of that. I did quite a bit of speaking on it in different parts of the country, including people that used satanic ritual to help cover or influence or scare their child victims. So that's how that all happened. And I spent, oh gosh, from uh the late 80s up until I retired teaching that course, uh, just making people aware of what to look for, how to handle folks involved in it, what evidence to collect, what does the evidence mean, what does the symbols mean, things like that.

SPEAKER_00 57:16

That's very interesting, and especially back at that time. I imagine probably many in law enforcement maybe didn't take that stuff too seriously, as far as you know, anything uh maybe demonic related. How would they approach cases if if they were just not even believing in it? What was their attitude towards that?

SPEAKER_03 57:40

A great story. A gentleman who I have the utmost amount of respect for, I won't use his name. Apparently uh an agency in the area had found out that there was a greeting of folks that um uh a meeting of folks that were practicing some sort of ritual, and we'll call it, it may have been a black magic ritual. I was not there, but this is what happened. And this particular uh who's a real legend in law enforcement here apparently walked into the middle of this event that they found out about out in the middle of the woods and walked in there and says, you know, what are y'all doing here? Who's the head spook here? Come on, get I mean, just stuff like that. And spook bad uh I don't know if you want to he didn't mean it in that sense. He meant who's the head, uh who's the head ghoul here, let's say, is what it meant. Of course. Who's the head? Yes, pretty and and my my meaning for that description of that is they they thought it was just a bunch of nutty people. And that's what a lot, but then we started getting some animals that were cut up. We started getting uh kids that um were doing things to vandalize and using these trappings, and you have what you end up finding, most of these kids are what we call um the term we used, um were um oh, name's escaping me right now, but basically youngsters that were reading a couple chapters of Anton LeVay's satanic Bible and calling themselves Satanists and just destroying stuff because they could. You know what I'm saying? That's what most of it turned out being was people that found an interest in it. Because you have to understand those teachings say you can do whatever you want. And people that aren't sometimes wrapped real tight or looking for an excuse will use that as an excuse. So that's what a lot of it was. But there were times, especially in child abuse cases, where they were using it to scare the kids into quiet, being quiet.

SPEAKER_00 59:32

Oh, for sure, for control, 100%.

SPEAKER_03 59:35

Control. And that was the main reason for it. Obviously, that has died, it died down by the mid-90s, but every once in a while some things crop up here and there. And uh, like I said, in South Florida, we've had a lot of interesting things like uh Centrea has been approved by the uh um, I believe it was the Supreme Court that said it was okay for them to kill animals in the process of their ceremony because Dade County wouldn't let them let them do it. There were lawsuits going back and forth, but they're they're not allowed to to sacrifice animals in the name of their religion. So, you know, interesting stuff like that went on.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:11

Cases like um uh the Manson murders and the Night Stalker. Oh, I know those are out here in California. Would those have been would those have fallen under that umbrella of the of occult-related crimes?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:25

Night stalker in particular would have been. Now, once again, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you he um who is the other guy, the um Berkowitz in in New York, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:34

Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:35

You know, claimed that's the same. That's the Zodiac one or is that Zodiac, yeah. The dog told him to kill these people. Um there is no question that there was a belief system in play there. I believe that it was just people that were, and this is just my opinion only. I am not a doctor, but these were people with severe mental health issues that were able to find a justification for their answers, and that's why they used it. That doesn't mean that they didn't use the trappings of it, and that doesn't mean, and it would it helps a law enforcement officer if they understand at least what it means when they're talking to a suspect or a witness that they can talk that language, so hopefully they can get more information out of them. Um, but yes, Night Stalker definitely uh Manson's an interesting story because uh he was your atypical cult leader, and that's another part of the cults class that I talked about. Your Jim Jones, your Manson, uh your folks at um the uh what was that one group out in California, also the Hail Bob comet folks, uh just went right out of my head.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:44

Oh, yeah, I know, I know what it's escaping me too, but I know what you're talking about, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:49

Uh, you know, those those are all folks, and I also taught would talk about biker gangs. Anyone that would use was it wasn't the Heaven's Gate, was it? Heaven's Gate, that's it. That's exactly what it is. Um, and once again, that's a whole topic I could go on to for hours. Now, was it were they really getting messages from uh uh the mothership? Personally, I doubt it. Um but let's say that you were, let's say that you had found one of them alive and you were trying to, as an investigator, find out why they did it. If you go in there with no information, no knowledge, a background of why and how cults work, you're gonna be beating your head against the wall. If you go in there understanding why cult leaders have developed into what they are, how they run their groups, why they run their groups, who are the types of people that they seek out to be part of their groups, you go in with that kind of knowledge, then you can decipher the case a whole lot better and come to uh an answer as to why this happened. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:51

Oh, totally. Having uh an understanding, uh psychological understanding of the people and the roots of this, uh the the origins of it. Yeah, it totally makes sense. It's I think it's important, and I think it's great that you were teaching on that and helping, because I get that a lot of these people in law enforcement were just like this is just nonsense, banana not taking it seriously at all. And it should be taken seriously at a level, and uh it should be researched, like you said, to get an understanding of why these people are acting out like they are.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:26

Because you want to stop the problem. And and God forbid, it's actually something more supernatural than we think. It's good to know that too. But most of the time it's folks with other issues, but you're just not gonna walk into uh an interrogation room with somebody like that, slamming your fist and you know, being Mr. Tuff guy or having good cop, bad cop, if you can't speak that language, if you can't somehow connect with them.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:54

Absolutely. God, we're running long here. I could talk to you for hours and hours.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:58

I hope I'm not boring you. I hope I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:00

No, no, this is the opposite. So let's talk at your uh Indian River Hauntings, uh Florida Bureau of Paranormal Investigation. Talk about that for uh for those things for and for the people, let them know. Um, and how people can reach you if they'd like to.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:15

Oh, sure. You know, you can find us uh our Facebook uh under Indian River Hauntings or Florida Bureau of Paranormal Investigation. Our website is Indian RiverHauntings.com. If you want to see a little bit about what we do, how we conduct investigations, we do have a YouTube channel which is at the at sign, Indian River Hauntings 2341, if folks want to go there. Um, FBPI is the result of the St. Augustine investigation. When I decided that it was time to start looking into it, um, my wife and I at that time uh were uh watching a lot of X-Files or had been watching X-Files the years before my son knew it. So he's the one that actually came up with the answer because both she and I were in the law enforcement field, and that's how the name came to play. And then uh we we just began to do investigations, and then of course, Indian River Hauntings really is the result of everything we discovered or uncovered out in Fellsmere when people wanted us to wanted to find out more what we were doing. And the shows were really, really big at that time, and I really wanted to give folks not even history is such a huge part of this, and I wanted to share the incredible history of this part of Florida with folks, along with the legends. Um and the best way, and and also to talk about what the TV shows were and what they weren't. For example, cop shows will think you can solve a crime you know in a half an hour, and that really isn't the case. And paranormal shows, as good as they were and enjoyable, and people loved them, uh, tended to make people not really understand how these things work. So our tours were geared towards teaching people history and giving people what what we saw as the true view of paranormal research. We've been doing it ever since.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:57

Yeah, I'd love to get out there and uh and and meet up with you. chat and maybe maybe get in on investigation. That would be that would be just outstanding.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:05

If you're coming, we'll make sure we have one.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:07

Thank you so much. And also your book, Haunted Indian River County, uh, that's available everywhere for people that are interested in that.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:15

Yeah, it's on you can get it on Amazon. It's put out by um uh the Arcadia Press and particularly the history Arcadia Publishing, the History Press as part of their haunted America series. I don't know if you've ever gone into um I don't know if you have loggings or CVS out there, but they always have uh books little book uh carousels there where you usually find things all on there or you can get it on Amazon a few other places but uh Amazon's probably the easiest way for your folks to find it.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:41

Cool and I will uh provide links for the episode and also on the on the blog so people can uh find you easily but uh Larry again uh I have really enjoyed this conversation uh I look forward to speaking with you again stay in touch um if you if anything else uh comes up any really cool investigations uh you want to talk about come back on the show I know we can we can talk for for hours more again so stay in touch I appreciate it you bet thank you for the