DAIRYLAND FRIGHTS BEST OF 2023!

This is a best of, but just a sampling of some of the great stories in 2023 from my guest. You want to go back and listen to the full episodes because there's so much more. Again, thank you so much. I look forward to a successful 2024 at Dairyland Frights and always stay spooky.

For about seven or eight years, I've been working as a paranormal researcher, kind of digging into different urban legends and paranormal stories to kind of try to make sense of it all. If any of your listeners have heard of me, or as you and I have talked, I've had a lot of experiences just throughout the years that I've been trying to make sense of, and that kind of led me down this path of paranormal research and paranormal investigations. So, yeah, that's kind of my background in this field.

And so a lot of these beautiful movie houses that were great in the early part of the 20th century, they eventually fall into disrepair and they're just used for skin flicks. And then later on, they're renovated into music venues. First time I went to the majestic was to see the Rocky Horror picture show in the 1990s. And they used to have their awesome, right? They used to have the Rocky horror on every Saturday night at midnight and Love Rocky Horror. And so we went down and go watch it.

Have a great time. A few years later, I'm working on the Madison ghost tour. And by this time, the Oriental had shut down as a movie. Not the Oriental. Oriental is in Milwaukee. Different haunted theater. The majestic in Madison. Majestic. Majestic shut down for a while as a movie theater. It's reopened as like a vip club with bottle service and everything for a while. 2004, 2005. Then that shuts down again.

And by this point, when I'm working on that, I don't even believe it had reopened as a music venue yet. So now we just had the Majestic Theater sitting there derelict for several years. And I put out a call, probably on the Internet or in different places or maybe in the one ads or whatever, when I'm looking for ghost stories, working on the tour, and I'm looking for things specifically around the Capitol square, because I wanted to be a walking tour.

And so I needed a route that people could do in 90 minutes to 2 hours, like the length of a movie where you wouldn't be like, oh, I've been on ghost toys that go for 3 hours long. It's like, where's the bathroom, guys? I'm going to go on my pants, right? And so you need something. You try to create an experience for people that's fun, it's interesting, and it's comfortable. So it can't be a death march or whatever. It's got to be an easy walk.

It's got to be long enough so you don't have to worry about a bathroom break. And it's got to be enough places where you feel like you've seen enough of the city to get a good idea. Good idea of it, right? So I put up my ads looking for, hey, anybody had a ghost story in this area? And I get a call from a guy who used to be the stage manager of Rocky horror at the majestic in the 90s. I'm like, all right, let's talk to this guy. And he talks about the majestic theater. He's like, yeah.

He goes, man, that place super haunted. Their dressing room that they called it the green room, their dressing room where they would get ready, because in Rocky horror, people haven't seen it. They may have seen it on tv, but the movie theater experience was that there was a live cast in front of the screen who would act out the film while the film was going on. And so there's a part, they get married, you throw rice. There was a part with squirt guns. Depending on theater.

Some theaters allow the squirt guns. Some theaters that you would just toss these things or do these things in the middle of the film at these certain points, and everybody would sing along the songs with modified lyrics and the whole deal. But a live cast would act out the movie in front of you. So there would be a group of people who had the movie memorized, and they would be acting out and do all the things and turn around and the scenes. It was really fun.

He was the guy who kind of got everybody together and stage managed the cast for the Madison production of Rocky Horror. And he said that in the green room, there was a ghost there that wouldn't leave any of the girls know. He would hide their brushes, hide their makeup, kind of mess with their hair, like, pull on their hair a little fresh and things. Yeah. And so their theory was that it was a spirit who had killed himself inside the majestic theater.

He was an actor back when it was a vaudeville theater 100 years ago. Oh, sure. And so the actor had killed himself inside the theater over a broken heart. And that's why he was annoying the girls. And they called him Joe. Okay. I was not able to find any. I mean, usually suicides don't get in the newspaper anyway, right? But I wasn't able to actually verify anything about this actor that killed himself.

But it's an interesting story that they would tell, and they were definitely having paranormal experiences there. Okay. He says the last night of the Rocky Horror picture show right before the majestic closed down as a theater. And I think in 2000 or whatever is when it closed down for the first time. He is walking out of the green room before the show starts, and he hears a whisper in his ear, good luck with the show. And there's nobody there. And he's like, I didn't go back.

He's like, that's the last time I stepped foot in that groove. Fast forward. Okay, so I was designing the Madison ghostwalk in 2010 and 2013. I'm at a music conference in Chicago, and like I said before, I play in a band. Sunspot. Sunspotmusic.com dairyland frights fans. Thank you. And so I'm at this music conference, and I'm hanging out with one of the interns, the majestic, and everybody's just talking.

We're having beers, talking about music and music industry and all that kind of stuff, and our favorite bands. And she asked me, she goes, hey, you're in a ghost stories, right? And I'm like, yes, I am. And she says, okay, what can you tell me about the majestic? And I said, okay, why don't you tell me what you know first? Because you work there.

Yeah. She goes, well, I don't know too much, but I tell you, every time I'm in the women's bathroom, I feel something weird, like somebody's grabbing at me or I'm feeling being watched, or it's a weird. The other ladies had that same kind of experience in the bathroom. So she goes, we don't like the women's bathroom at the majestic.

I'm like, that's interesting, because between the 1990s and the 2010s, when it reopened as a music venue, the area that used to be the dressing room, the green room, is under the stage. And so that's what they turned into, the bathrooms under the stage. So the very same room. The very same room that the people had the experience in Rocky horror, where Joe was annoying the girls. Fast forward 20 years, and now it's a girls bathroom. Now it's not the dressing room.

Now it's been remodeled and all those kind of things. People are having the exact same experiences in the exact same space, decades apart, without even knowing the story of Joe or the kind of legend that had kind of happened in the meantime. Love it. And so to me, that's like, okay, now that's interesting, because people from different times who have the same experiences in the same place. And so that one is one of my favorites in Madison, at least, of people having similar experience.

Here's one spooky story I can share with the audience.

I don't know my twenty s and I was living with my mom and my sister. Everything was cool and we lived. Our home was in front of a lake, but behind our. Well, behind us was a lake. In front of us was a landfill. So it wasn't like the best place to live, but it's what my mom could afford at that time and what we can do. But anyway, that's beyond the point. The point is manufactured home, not the best quality home sort of stuff.

So it was very easy to hear things all the time, especially outside and stuff. And my room was the first room. As soon as, when you walked into the door, my room was to the left. So I was the first room of the house, let's say. And my window looked toward the road. Well, a couple of nights, I start waking up hearing these very deep, guttural, sort of breathing, heavy breathing noises. And that I was like, what in hell? What is outside? I had never heard of that, anything like that before.

And, I mean, I'm like a nature person. I used to trek the everglades all the time. I know what a lot of these animals that we have around, like. And, right. So I was just like, okay, I don't know what that is. And I remember one night hearing it, and it sounded like it was almost like dragging itself across my window on the floor. And I was just like. I froze. I was like, I'm terrified. I don't even want to know what that is. So I never looked anyway, I just like, whatever.

Few days passed, maybe months, I really don't know. The timeline is all blurred at this point, right? I just know that another day I woke up to something again, making weird noises. But this time it threw a rock at my window. And I hear the rock break for the window and I was like, oh, no. And at that point, I'm like, I'm going to ignore it. I'm going to pretend like it's not even there. But as soon as I'm like, I'm going to try to shake this off. Nothing happened. Nothing broke. You understand?

As soon as I said that, I hear these clap, like, these taps. I will never forget how it sounded because it was very short and very quick. It was. And I'm like, what the heck is that?

It's still there, broken in pieces. Those are relatively nice. Shaped, like big size rock. So I was like, okay, well, that's weird. It couldn't have just been kicked up. Do you understand? Like, something had to throw it. But the freakiest thing, I will never know what it was, was it left a half moon shaped footmark, a mark on my fresh paint. And it just looked like a little new moon. Like a little, like, crescent moon, sort of, but I don't know.

But when I did investigate the cave a few months ago, and three different mediums from three different states who do not know each other as I was in there, and they had watched a video, they had said that they had seen like a skinwalker type that's in the cave. And I've actually caught a very dark black shadow manifesting from an inky blob to a vertical figure, I should say, because I say it's human, because I don't know. But a lot of experiences here have really opened my eyes.

They've been more of the negative evil kind of entity. What it said is that there was a shaman that thousands of years ago, like maybe 1000, 2000 years ago, had banished some of the Indians that lived here because they were delving into magic. That was not good, of course, for the tribe. And so they were banished as skinwalkers in the cave. And they are trying to get me to let them out. That's how it was said to me.

Again, this is why I started doing it, because I don't know about you, John, but aren't you tired of when you tell someone that you saw something or you took a picture of something and they say, well, that's not what it is, but then you ask, okay, well, then tell me what it is. And they can't.

And one of the things he told me, I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but he said when he was out, he was at this barn, and he was a kid, and he has one of those deserted barns in the middle of nowhere and cliche, scary barns in horror movies, and went in there, and there were all these chicken bones all over this barn, in the walls, on the floor, everywhere. And he was like, how is that? Is some kids do that for fun? Or is this. And this was in that area, too.

And people have found, like you said, chicken bones on this area, but no one has really get definitive proof of that. And it's hard to explain, right? It's hard to say, like, well, it's a werewolf. Okay, I get you.

I've talked with the best researchers. I've talked with Nick Valente, who is the founder of the international Dog man project.

They can travel through different portals from different corners of the world. And we just cannot be so closed minded, narrow minded to think that we're the only living kind of species, humanoid creatures, in this entire cosmos. There's just no way. And when you look at what we do to each other on a daily basis, no, this can't be all that there is, because then if there is, then someone did something awful, because you just don't treat people the way that we see the negativity being spread.

And it's so easy to divide us. So again, there has to be other things.

And this was before modern day, where it's easy to Photoshop and print something out. Somebody actually captured this, and I was very intrigued by that. And I wish I had known what happened to that photo, because shortly after I moved out of that apartment, it was renovated and turned into the Wonder bar. And it's unfortunate that I think it was a casualty of COVID And if you're a Madisonian, you know, there are a lot of people looking to move to the Madison area.

They want to live in the downtown. They want to live by Lake Menona, Lake Mendota. And they are tearing things down as fast as they're building it. And this is one of the sites. Yes. It's a shame because we need to keep Madison weird and we need to protect some of this historical heritage and not just make everything high raise apartments. That's kind of my screed for the evening, but it's one of the places that has been on the list of places to tear down and redevelop.

And it'd really be a shame because I have a personal connection to it because it was the first bar that I went to when I came to Madison. Right, yeah, me too. And it just has such a rich history of gangster lore to haunting. So it checks all of the boxes for me. And if it went away, which I assume it probably will be moved and reconstructed somewhere, if we're lucky, if not raised.

But if it is knocked down, I'm going to have to go grab a brick or something like that for a memento because it was a great place and it's great. Yeah. Unfortunately, I don't have the best news about that one, but definitely an awesome place with lots of history and legends. So what do you think of the list. Is there anything you would add? Is there anything, John, you missed this one. The one that I would add is we were talking about the poor farm, the Wood county asylum.

Let's talk about the in. It's just outside of Sheboygan. The Fox Valley ghost hunters, the same group that I went to Summerwind with, they run tours there, and I got a chance to about a year ago to visit, and it has a similar history to the Wood county asylum. But it sounds like the treatments weren't as horrific. It sounds like they treated the patients a little bit better. So at least that's what they tell you on the ghost hunt. So I hope that's true. But there is a lot of activity there.

There is one little room they call the chapel, where the tour guides, kind of the way that the fox Valley ghost hunters tours work is, a lot of times you'll go on these ghost hunts, and they'll just be like a tour guide that will walk you through and tell you a scary story with the fox Valley ghost hunters. They're ghost hunters at heart. So they will bring all of their gadgets and gizmos, and they will try to involve the group in a group ghost hunt.

And we had the EVP rope, the EMF rope laid out with the little lights on it. And whenever something gets near and changes the EMF, it changes the colors. We got so much activity in that room and lots of spirit box activity. We got to visit that chapel. We got to visit. There was, like a cold storage for the bodies. We got to go into that room and conduct a seance. We got to go into some steam tunnels and had just an incredible experience with the spirit box session there.

So anybody who wants a little thrill, I would definitely recommend the Sheboykin county asylum. And the great Lakes paracon is coming up next month in the paranormal.

And so that was, like, my first experience was a full bodied apparition. And then she just disappeared. Even talking about it, I get, like, chills thinking about disappeared. I do paranormal road trips. I go around the state of Ohio, but I just became the brand ambassador for get haunted. So I do my road trips with them, but I mainly do my paranormal road trips. And so my hashtags are like, be like Brie and paranormal road trips. You'll see me all over socials.

And I try to bring the history into the haunting because there's no haunting without history.

But you're a little more informative, a little more fun, and that's what I love about you. So that is awesome. So can I ask you a question about your experience really quick?

So I don't know if I accidentally brought a hijacker home or one can sense that I'm sensitive to stuff. Like, I can hear and talk, so I don't like, hey, let me come hang out with you because you know I'm here.

Just for the. So fact, talking to people like you and everything. One thing, though, I have to ask you a question, is when Covid was happening and you were at home, did you notice any more, like, paranormal or less, would you say?

I haven't seen him, but I believe, like, I would say that there was a lot more activity because my one son, John, when they closed the schools, a couple of his friends didn't have anywhere to go. There wasn't much to do with kids. And so I was an essential worker, and I was working in an office for a company that made parts for air tanks. And, like, the stands that you see the purel pumps in, they made those stands?

But ironically, whenever he was in the house, the spirits would. They started antagonizing him back.

I made sure they did the walk through of the living quarters upstairs, and they went down afterwards to the. The empty shop below us, and they were supposed to lock up when they were done. So I go downstairs, and the door is, like, wide open. And I'm like, okay. So, like, I'm calling out, anybody in here? Nobody's responding. So I'm calling the landlord, and I'm like, can you verify that everybody's done? They left the door open, and I know you told them to shut everything up.

And he was like, oh, yeah, I just got the text. All the realtors are done. You can go ahead and close it up. And I'm like, okay, well, where I was at was, we always use the back entrance to the building. You got the back door, and then there's the door that goes down to the basement, the door that goes upstairs, and then the door that's straight ahead, that would go into the shop. But that door, if you slammed it, like, you had to slam it hard because it was like a door that would pop back.

And so I put every ounce of weight behind it, slammed it, and the door bounced back. And I'm like, well, that shouldn't have happened. So I go to close it, and an arm reaches out. Like, I can see another. I can see the body. I can see the arm reaches out, and it's got, like, the victorian lace. Like, I even got goosebumps talking about it right now.

Yeah, victorian lace going down her arm, and it came to the v, and it was like a gray arm that you could see straight through, grabbed the handle of the door and slammed the door shut. And I was like, with that, I'm going back to work. I was like, you have a good night. I'll see you in a couple of hours. That was probably one of my favorites, because to see full bodied apparitions, especially to see them grab a physical object and manipulate that physical object, how often do you really

see that? One of my favorites.

Mysteriously, the camera that I would set up kept getting turned off, and I had a pretty new son in the house at the time. Okay. So we decided it was an attachment. And when it really showed itself to me, and I'm empathic, so I'm not sensitive, I'm not psychic, but I'm empathic. And sometimes little things get thrown into the back of my head from spirits, a name or a phrase or something or a feeling.

And I was standing outside, and I was talking to my good friend Tom, and he was from massachusetts, and he ran a team out there. And I was telling know, tom, there's something in my house. And I was standing in my backyard, and my kids had a swing set, and there was two swings. All of a sudden, john, one of them started moving and picking up. Oh. And then it stopped abruptly.

And I'm telling tom what's going on, and all of a sudden, in my head, I can hear, I'm going to do what I want around your daughter, and there's not a **** thing you can do to stop. Oh, no. Oh, wow. So what I'm getting at is, it's hard enough to fight something, and it's really hard when you can't see. So larry and I enlisted a friend of ours who's a psychic, and enlisted another friend of ours, who.

I'm not going to mention their names, because the one psychic who actually helped us do this does not want to have to do this. She has to remain nameless in the whole thing. But Larry and I performed a cleansing in the house. Good. And it was the most wild thing I've ever seen. Yeah. Prior to know, our interactions with people with juju powers are extremely limited. We're just a bunch of fat dudes that like to county. Part of the big issue up here is we have a lot of limestone. We are.

It's part of the Niagara escarpment, but that limestone continues out of the bluffs, down underwater. And so there's a lot of hazards and a lot of reefs and shoals that you need to avoid. And if you don't know how to navigate the area, you can get in a lot of trouble. And death's door happened to know that was, like, the doorway into Green Bay. And it was actually named by the French after they had found the evidence of a native american battle that occurred up there.

And they had found so many skeletons that had been washed up on the beaches of that area, and they heard stories for the few witnesses that were still alive when they came through. That's when they named it La Porte Mort. And the british translation of that was Death Store. And that was actually the suggestion to actually name our county Death store. County at one point. Luckily, we were a long, thin county, and that didn't all fit on the map.

Death Doors is exciting, and there's a shipwreck story I do tell that's very apropos to that situation. Yes. And we'll get into a lot of the different stories here. So I have to ask you this, Ed. Before you started doing the tours, were you interested in the paranormal? Did you believe in ghosts, or did your mind change once you started doing the tours? Well, I wasn't all in on the whole ghosting.

I was very skeptical about all of it, and just not a non believer, but somebody who was very intrigued by it and kind of hoping that, boy, it'd be neat to have this experience to really confirm my beliefs, but never really always skeptical thing. So it wasn't until that date, basically. Well, it was right after August 21 of 2017, when that solar eclipse occurred, that we had just an explosion of facial images that people were taking.

We had prior to that, I mean, there might have been four or five in a week's time. And we do these tours. We start on Memorial Day weekend. We go every night of the week, seven nights a week, all the way through Halloween. And some years after, depending on what the demand is, we have a minimum of two trolleys per night, and we're going at it heavy duty. And all of a sudden, we're getting four to five per week of these images, not the explosion that occurred after that solar eclipse.

All of a sudden, we're getting 14 to 18 per tour. Everybody taking pictures, was getting a facial images, different windows. And so I'm thinking, what's going on here? Is it the fact iPhones are just getting better? They're getting their quality, more of the imperfections in the windows? What's going on here? So I snapped a picture of every single window in that house about three days after the 21st. That put me about August 24.

Okay. And when I got home that night, I opened up all the pictures I did and the very first one I took was the very best facial image I have ever seen coming out of that of magic and so forth. So many magic workers avoid the terms entirely. So, Cynthia, do you not even bring that up when people ask you?

And that's the keyword in the satanic witchcraft and the satanic church and the Bible. Freedom. And I love that kind of the Satanism.

The legend here is that Mary, when she came to the end of her life and was quite ill, she said she wanted to be buried in Hillside cemetery. And the local managers there, the board said that, no, you can't be buried in hallowed ground. So we won't allow a witch be buried in our hallowed cemetery. And she said, if you don't bury me there, I'll curse this whole city. So the legend says that they put her in an above ground crypt. She wasn't buried in hallowed ground. She was above ground.

So a loophole. So she may be there. We don't know. There are two crypts. Actually, more than that. There's three crypts, but there's two crypts that are fairly well known now in hillside. One is called the public crypt, which was the temporary holding vault for bodies during the winter. It was too difficult to dig graves in the wintertime. They didn't have the big machinery they have now. So they would put them in cold storage, basically in above ground crypt called the public crypt.

There are racks inside the crypt which are still there, and you do get.

But right next door to it is another crypt, and it's kind of a mysterious one, and we aren't quite sure what happened there, but when I was in school here in the 70s, in about 1971, there was a break in of that crypt, and vandals had destroyed some of the coffins and scattered bones of those that were in those coffins in that crypt. And they also took one of the. There was a baby coffin there that they removed from there and took it over to campus and put it in the fountain.

I was going to class, and I saw this gathering of people around the fountain, and there was this baby coffin in the fountain. So the police came then and took it back and replaced it back into the proper crypt. And then the gates to that crypt, the doorways were welded shut. They didn't want anybody breaking into it again. A terrible thing to happen to desecrate the graves or desecrate the resting place of those people. And there's a few coffins still in there.

But anyway, so the legend was that Mary Worth was buried in that crypt. We don't know that for a fact, but it's kind of mysterious that there aren't too many records about Mary Worth. The census of what, 1890? Yeah, 1890. The census was burned in a fire, so the records were lost. So that whole census was lost in the fire.

That was 35 years ago, and it might have been after partaking a little bit that evening, but, yes, a few spirits myself, but, yes. Did the Ouija board near the cemetery on campus and doing the Ouija board there and in a couple of apartments when I was in college, it really freaked me out because the answers that you get were way too accurate. And, yeah, I haven't done this since. So I wouldn't say the cornfield was necessarily connected to Mary worth.

I just remember as a freshman, that was one of the things they'd try to scare you with, because the campus butts up right at that point, right up to farm fields. And that was always the legend, was that the cornfield just on the north end of campus, that you couldn't go across it. You couldn't make it all the way through from one end to the other. On Halloween, the spirits would get you. That might have been before children in a corner.

Don't want to talk anymore about it. So very mysterious. We ventured up to the water tower, and we decided that we were going to jump the fence and go in. At that point, it was just more like a chain link fence. And at the top, you had barbed wire, but it was pointed in. So most places have barbed wire that's pointed out to try to keep you from getting in. Well, this was tipped inward, so it was almost like it was trying to keep something from getting out from inside.

And had it not been one of my shoelaces catching on the barbed wire, I might have wound up inside the gate that night. A friend of mine did. And again, this could have been maybe alcohol induced, but he was trying to climb out. A couple of times we were trying to help him out, and he kept saying, dude, something's pulling me back. Something's pulling me back. Dude, something's got me. And when he came out, he had. Where barbed wire had gotten him on the palm of his hand.

And I don't know, I look at mine and I don't see marks, but anyways, it formed crosses on both of his palms with the blood. But, yeah, he was the one that got into the water. Well, he didn't get in the water tower, but he got inside the fence. And then the cops might have done a patrol around there. And I learned how to climb a tree really fast even then. That was, again, one of the legends that you start hearing as soon as you're a freshman thing to go.

Underground passageways built beneath the hotel during the bootlegging days contain the lost treasures of Al Capone and John Dillinger. So if you know anything about John Dillinger, he was a bad guy. He was a nasty dude. And those two guys together supposedly took all their ill gotten gain and all their money and put it underneath this way. So people claim there is treasure, right? You think somebody would have found it by now, but who knows?

I don't know, I just thought that was interesting that Al Capone and John Dillinger.

And the hotel, not the hotel, but the garage is all cursed. So like people, when they were renovating this garage where this massacre happened on St. Valentine's Day, some people took the bricks, excuse me, for novelty, right? Well, these bricks are so cursed that people who have them, people die in the family. They get in a car accident, they lose their job, they get divorced, like every terrible thing. And people don't know where the bricks are anymore. They just don't know.

Like some guy just said, oh, get them out of my house. And nobody knows where those bricks are. Bricks are.

And the rope appears to be around her neck. So I go into full panic mode. I think I was maybe like 1314 when this happened. And my sister was four years younger than me, so 910. So I run around, run through the house really quickly so I can tell my parents. Carly says, outside, this is happening, blah, blah, blah, we got to go. And then within less than a minute, we're all across the street in front of my sister to help her. My neighbor Chris is nowhere to be found.

I think he ran off and freaked. Course, of course, Carlisa said he ran inside to get some scissors or something to try to cut. He's nowhere to be found. But what's really interesting about this story, right? It's terrifying. We want to make sure she's okay. Like I said, we were there within less than a minute. When we get there, this woman had appeared from what seemed to be out of nowhere and was holding my sister on her shoulders. And what I saw was a shorter hispanic woman. She was quiet.

I don't remember her saying anything to us. And she was just kind of struggling to hold my sister up on her shoulders because she was such a small statured woman.

And the other really weird thing about all of it is, like I said, she didn't say a word to us. And then later, when my sister was fine and we untangled the rope and all that kind of stuff, and we're just kind of reflecting on it, me and my parents and my sister were all like, wow, thank God for that woman, blah, blah, blah. And for some reason, we started describing her. I guess maybe we found subconsciously something odd about her. So I was like, yeah.

For some reason, I started talking about how she had dark hair and blah, blah, blah. And my dad was like, no, what are you talking about? She was, like, a tall woman with light hair, and my mom said she was a redheaded woman. We all had vastly different descriptions of her.

So I decided that I wanted to tell a story, something probably a little different from what we've probably heard about the pakwaji and even maybe some native american lore, because as you'll see, this mythology is native american. So I'll be reading, and I hope you like it. So, the word pakwaji stems from the native american tongue. The lore is associated with the Algonquin, the Ojibwe, and the Wampanag tribes, among others. The root bagwage, or bhagwaji, actually means wilderness or wild.

And so the native word is actually bhagwajinini, which then translates to a little person or a person of the woods or the wilderness or of the wild. So if you really think about it, the word bhagwajinini kind of sounds like pakwaji, which is actually where it stems from. So the native american word is bhagwajinini. Puckwaji is like the way that us Native Americans came, and we just modernized it or made it ours.

Now, Mashap is a giant, very benevolent creation or creator deity, and he is the person who was responsible for creating the Cape Cod area of Massachusetts. Okay, so it seems that Mashop was beloved by the humans, and the pakwajis kind of got a little jealous, so they became a little know, trying to get attention from the people. But this actually bothered the people and aggravated them. So they complained to mashup, and they said, hey, these puckwajis, they're bothering us.

So Masha was like, cool, okay, I'm going to take care of it. And he went and he scattered the Puckwoodgies all through New England. Well, as you can think, and probably determine that the Puckwoodjees weren't very happy with that. So Mashup and his wife, who's known as granny Sponenet, left for a little bit, and in their absence, the Puckwajis returned. But this time, they returned with a vengeance, because they were Pete owed.

And so instead of being mischievous and kind of just bothering people, they really took it up a notch. They started kidnapping children, burning villages, and then apparently, they even just outright killed people.

Apparently, from what I was gathering, it was pretty serious. Like, these puckwoodies mean business. Translate that to today. Puckwoodgies are actually still known to be tricksters. They're also known as killers. They lure you to the cliffs and push you off.

And so throughout the years, I've always talked about the paranormal activities that go on in people's homes and the experiences that people have. And so that kind of prompted me, you know what? I need to start a podcast. So I went ahead and started this podcast, strange darkness radio. Nice. So I have to ask Bobby, tell me a little bit.

I know you probably have already said it to your audience, but I have a whole new audience here would love to hear your little paranormal experience, age eleven. Well, let me make this brief because it's kind of a little detailed, but go ahead. Yeah, exactly. Okay. A little teaser. Well, we were at the drive in. We came back home. I really had to go to the restroom. Didn't want to find my way back to the car and all that jazz. So I waited until we got home.

Me and my dad came to the door of our home. We entered the home. There was a light that was coming from the right side of the living room area. And as we entered, I tried to dart off and go to the restroom. And then as my dad saw whatever was happening in the kitchen in the living room area, he told me to freeze. Get out of the house. Somebody's in the house. And I was like, I need to go to the restroom.

So being a kid, my first thought is, because my dad was in the military, and my first thought is, I got to go to the bathroom. So for whatever reason, I bypass the hall bathroom to go to my parents bathroom. I go down to the end of the hall. And as I look over to the right in my parents bed, there is a long figure laying in the bed. And I froze. And then, so as I look at this figure, it was like a movie plane.

I can hear my dad calling me, but I couldn't make out what he was saying as he was running down the hall. And as he puts his hand on my shoulder to grab me, whatever figure was laying in the bed just totally went into the bed. The blankets were still disheveled. It just slowly just melted into the bed. And he's like, I told you to get out of the house. Everything and what had happened was in the kitchen area, all the dishes were out of the cabinets. All of the food was out of the refrigerator.

Somebody ransacked the house. And then as the police came, there was nobody that entered the home. They said someone must have entered the home and locked the door on the way out because there was no sign of any entries or anything. And so that was my first paranormal experience. Wow. Did you in the paranormal and. Well, especially the warrant. What interested you in that?

I wanted to be a parapsychologist when I was that age. I thought for sure that's what I would grow. I'd grow up and be.

He's retired now, but he wanted to share a story that he'd never shared before, and it was about a woman. The chapter is called the woman possessed. And it was a woman who had lived most of her life in that hospital. She had no family, and she would get into bouts of violence where they'd take three or four people to hold her down because she had this superhuman strength that she could throw them off. She would scratch, she would bite, she'd be calm and fine, and then just go right into this.

Other things would happen with her room, where she'd be complaining that her room was like a meat locker. It was so cold and freezing. They go in and there was nothing wrong with the heater, everything was fine. So they move her into another vacant room. And when the minute they move her into the other room, the other room suddenly becomes a meat locker. And the room she was in, it goes back to normal temperature. So weird stuff like that happened. They even had meetings.

They did bring in priests. They thought they were wondering if she needed some sort of exorcism. But one of the nights where he was working by himself, there's a bunch of them doing an overnight shift, and they've got the break room with the tv and stuff like that, where they're hanging out when they're not doing their rounds. So it was his turn to go do some rounds.

And as he's walking down the hall, he walks by a room and he hears voices, because sometimes you'd hear her talking to someone else and you could actually hear another voice in the room. So he's like, oh, my God, is there another patient in there? So he opens the room. It's pitch black. She's sleeping. There's no one else in the room with her, but she's sleeping while standing on the wall about 4ft above the floor, over top of her bed. She's completely horizontal.

Her face is down, her hair is hanging down over her face. Her body's like she's moving, like she's breathing, like in her sleep. There's no one else in the room. And that's what he sees. He doesn't know what to do. He's kind of like, I know what to do. So he slowly backs up, closes the door, goes back to the tv room and never says anything because he doesn't know. Did he see something? Whatever.

One of his colleagues who worked there, who's also worked at the same hospital, recognized his voice, knew who he was and asked to meet him. Tim Hortons is like a Dunkin donuts. It's a coffee shop chain here in Canada. They met at the local Timmy's. They met at the local Timmy's, eh? And the colleague told the story about one other night within that same year or two that happened to them.

And they had walked by and heard her having a discussion with some other voice that was coming from the room that didn't sound like her. When they walked in, they saw her sleep standing vertically with her feet about a foot off the floor, facing. She had her eyes closed and everything. And she was just kind of sleep standing, not looking at, but looking straight. And again, that colleague didn't tell anyone because they didn't know what to do. It was so unbelievable.

They backed out of the story. And the only reason they confessed was because they heard the story and they said, oh, my God. Well, I didn't see the exact same thing, but I saw something very similar. And so that was like, that stuck with me. And I remember telling the story at a late night author event.

Yeah. And has there been a place just really quickly? I don't know if you guys investigated all. Have you been to where you've been to a place that shook you a little bit? Know, maybe you've been somewhere where, again, you heard about and wanted to check it out. I walked past the Cecil Hotel once in downtown. Oh, yeah. And I didn't go inside, but just walking past it, man, it was like the eye of just. It felt like someone was like rubbing your third eye with sandpaper.

It was a very intense feeling just walking past it. I can't imagine actually going inside. Yeah, I hear you. So, Paul, same question. Bucket list, where you would like to go? Paranormal hoya forest in. Oh, yes. Yeah. Explain that to people who are not familiar with it. Can you give us, like, a brief idea? Because that is awesome place. Yeah. So it's this beautiful. I mean, Romania itself is a beautiful and much unloved country by the rest of Europe.

It's often looked down upon as a former soviet republic. But for anybody who loves the spooky, we're all entrenched in a bit of a love affair with Romania because of Dracula. And so the hoya forest is this incredibly atmospheric portion of land that is, some would say it is a thin veil between both sides. And it's supposed to be inhabited by numerous nefarious spirits from the other side, who will often lead travelers to a disappearing or a sticky end.

So I'd like to go with plenty of people, make sure I've done some cardio beforehand so I can make sure I'm not the slowest person there and keep an eye out for the bears that wander around there. But, yeah, that would definitely be mine. Especially in Europe, there's a lot of poltergeist to lack. Right. This had none of that. It was so subtle, it was unbelievable.

Anyway, he was basically nominated by his bishop for his diocese to take over, each catholic diocese needs to have at least one exorcist, and their exorcist in their diocese was retiring. So his bishop nominated him to take the place of the exorcist. So he had to go to Rome, he had to do some formal training. And he come back and he said it was quite know, there was no cause for kind of. He viewed it as just a box ticking exercise.

Sure. Anyway, he then got in touch with a woman who said, can you come and bless the house? Which she often gets. He, as a priest, said he'd often get requests for house blessings. Things are going on. When he turned up, this woman was acting really strange and he wasn't like, sure. And he thought she was being abused by the partner, and he left anyway. And as he's walking down the street, the partner runs after him and the partner's been attacked by her.

And the partner says there's something in her, she needs help. So he goes back and pays her a visit, and he's convinced then he can tell in her eyes she's oppressed. I think she mentions something. I can't even recall what it was because I'm getting to the point. I'm getting to. As opposed to regaling this story, long story short, he goes to the bishop to ask for permission to do an exorcism. The bishop denies it and says a confession is as good as an exorcism. And he argues the toss.

Why have you put me through the exorcism training?

She's got a youngster with her, about maybe four months old, whatever, and she comes in, she sits down, all nice as pie. He goes, you want a cup of tea? Yeah, all good. Goes in, makes a cup of tea, comes in with the tray with some biscuits on and stuff like that. And as he looks up, she's holding the baby above her head, above his glass coffee table, and smiling at the priest and saying, what would you do? Sort of thing, what are you going to do? Can you stop me? Blah, blah, blah.

He panics that much. He drops the tray. And then when he's picking the stuff up, she's back to herself and she's putting the baby back in the pram. And she's like, are you okay, father? What's wrong? What's happened? And she's completely lost it. He goes, like, as in, she's back to normal. She's lost the oppression, if you will. So he then returns to the bishop and says, we are not getting her in a confessional booth. And the bishop says, my hands are tied. You can't do it without.

So he says, I can't do it. Then you give me a job I can't do, and I want to give him a notice, sort of thing. So only the pope can approve you being lasized? Apparently so I'm learning all this through reading the letter or reading the email. Even the bishop writes a full explanation as to what's going on. The bishop immediately grants him being lasized, which is suspicious in itself. It's kind of know, no questions asked anyway.

But the weird thing is, apparently, once a priest, always a priest. It's not like if he wanted to become a priest again, he has to go through the training again. He could literally just make a phone call and say, put me back on, and he's on. And he can also perform certain, like, last writing and emergency and stuff. Anyway, as I'm halfway through this story, as I say, as you've heard, like I do, in a different sort of accent, a little bit more serious, a little bit more well spoken.

I'm really concentrating on what I'm doing. I become convinced that someone stood behind that curtain that separates my recording room to the door. So much so to the point that I stop recording. I take my earphones off, and I say hello, like, three times. Sure. Then I put my headphones back on. I start recording again. Then I hear my name. Then I take me headphones off, and I'm like, someone's definitely behind my curtain.

So, like, on a cartoon, I've got me umbrella, and I'm poking the curtain from me seating position. Yeah, I got you. But honest to God, something was in that room. It's not left me now, even now. And I've spoke about this numerous times on numerous versions of me, numerous shows, that this was something, that there was something in that experiences. But while we've been talking, has anything entered your mind that you recall that has, again, anything really spooky that you can remember?

The one is called things still go bump in the night, and the other one is a few favorite haunts. In fact, I'm sharing both of those. One tomorrow with one group and one Tuesday with another group, and about every fourth time that I share those. When I'm done, somebody in the audience will come up to me and go, can I tell you about this experience I had with this ghost? Sure, go ahead.

And they'll proceed to tell me about their mother's in law's haunted house that they inherited or staying in a hotel where they were in. But my point, John, is that almost always their response to having to encounter a ghost is one of fear. It's a western response. You mentioned ghost somebody. The most typical response will be retreat and fear. For buddhists, they have exactly the opposite response. So they believe that ghosts are what? I've never been able to get a translation.

That's very good. But they call them suffering spirits, and they believe that they should be pitied and we should have compassion for ghosts instead of running away and being scared by them. I think that's a very interesting contrast. And now I blame Stephen King for a lot of that. There were plenty of scary ghost stories before Stephen King came along, but he kind of made it Hollywood version. But I thought that's an interesting aspect.

I've learned from our research that most people don't, and I can't imagine that in China or India, where they practice Buddhism. I can't imagine that ghosts are much different than what they are here, but they have a very different reaction to. Absolutely. And so that leads me to my next point. Have you ever had a skeptic come up and say, oh, ghosts aren't real? Randy, what is know? Come on. Your presentation was a bunch, but often, yes, often. In fact, here's how I counter that, John.

About halfway into the presentation, I have a set of slides that, you know, every time I do this preaching, I have somebody giving me this. Now, you can't see me, but I give them the crossed arms and the doubting face. That, of course, draws a bunch of laughs. And I go for them and for everybody else, I'm going to share with you the scores of famous, intelligent, educated, sophisticated people, all who believe in ghosts.

And I just blow them away with examples of scientists and politicians and musicians and athletes that they all know and they all recognize, but they didn't know they believed in ghosts, really, everything from Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan to Dale Earnhardt, Jr. And you name it. And that kind of quells a lot of the, it's just a bunch of poppycock.

I will still have some come up and do that, but after I give that little piece and show them the examples, I'm going, well, these people, my answer is, all these people crazy? Is Abraham Lincoln, because he believed to go Ronald Reagan. Is he crazy? And Winston Churchill. So that kind of stifles it before it gets very far. But yes, of course, I've shared this with thousands of people, so I get every kind of reaction you can think.

So I'm not a medium, but sometimes I can hear. Sometimes I can be clear audience. And I could immediately hear the spirit in her house. I said, does the name George mean anything to you? And she said, yeah, that was the man who lived here before me. And I said, oh, guess what? He's still. Yeah. So George was still there. And George was a total creeper. And he was watching her sleep and bathe and go to the bathroom. And she said she felt like people didn't really want to come to her home.

Her pet was uncomfortable. There was every sign of an entity who really was just not the best. So I was able to interact with George. We did clear the space physically. There are several ways to do that. You can use bells, you can use sage or other herbs to burn. Like I said, there's lots of ways to go about it. And I helped her figure out how she would maintain her boundaries in this space clearing situation. And George agreed to leave.

But I asked him if he would actually leave the whole building, because it was a building of all women.

He was sapping the energy of that woman very specifically, but probably also the building in general. And because he had lived there, he felt entitled to the space. He felt like, I have every right to be here. I lived here, too. And in fact, the curtains in her living room were hung by him during his physical life.