Welcome to Destiny.
Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning.
Okay, I am going to go another week of promoting AI and I'll tell you why I told you about the prompts, which are these elaborate questions. I just discovered that chat GPT will automatically generate a very sophisticated prompt when you ask a basic question. So you put a question to tru to the prompt. What was what's the original look of the Eiffel Tower, how was the Eiffel Tower built? And hold on stuff like that, and it'll come back with very detailed the points of view from
various people that built of the engineering team. You might get if you ask for it. You might get schematics and things like that when the prompt comes up, and not always it doesn't always come up. It always it comes up as a kind of an aid. It's very strange, almost intuitive. When the prompt suggestion comes up, you have three to five times more detail added to your question.
And that's what they call the prompt. It's getting into what was the weight bearing size of the main pillars, what kind of steal was used, where was the still made and was it imported? I mean those kind of details are now readily available. They may have been available from the very beginning. But like I mentioned before in twenty twenty two, when I first became intrigued with AI, mostly as a writer, I was getting I was getting junk. It was more of a gimmick. And now and this
is exponential growth. Now it's really a tool, I think, and I I'm sure other people have thought about this. This, This makes each of us a genius because nothing is unlimited. You can ask a variety of questions, you can inquire.
In my case, as an amateur archaeologist, a mayanist, what I've been doing lately is taking broken statues, broken steely These are the Maya standing stones that have carvings of dates and things that are in pieces, putting them together, uploading them and saying make me or I should say, render the original features and position and look at this statue, steel, the building, twmple, whatever. And I am getting just miraculous results. It's just so much fun. And I gotta say this.
I think there is a community that is growing in the archaeological community that's beginning to look at it. But I don't know if they take it serious or not. And I'm getting some very very accurate reproductions. In fact, I have one of the rams of Ramsey, the second, this monstrosity, it's known as the Colossus. It's located in a place called the Ramseum, which is kind of a memorial building to him. And out in front is this toppled, huge colossus of a statue, and this monstrosity which has
never really been placed or attempted. No one's ever attempted to put it back together because it's too big. The thing when it was put together weighed over a thousand tons, one thousand tons. So on the upcoming cliff notes you'll be able to see exactly what I'm talking about. I take it from the broken pieces and I actually assemble it using AI and I gotta tell you it is a fun, fun, fun tool. So when I say everyone's going to be using it soon, I don't know some people.
I mean you might be where I was two years ago. It's like, oh, this is a gimmick. It's not working for me. But I'll tell you it is access to everything. You have literally access to anything. You can come up with, any ideas, any concepts, diagrams. All you need to do is type it in and I'll tell you, I'm reading a book right now on developing prompts. And that's the key.
The more sophisticated you can describe what you want, the better, the more accurate, and just the more brilliant this technology can reveal your thoughts. It's a little scary when you think what's happening in the next two, three, four or five years. What happens next, Well, this is where you begin putting AI into automatrons, robots. I don't know if they're putting in cars, because they have driverless cars, and now we have them here in San Francisco. I have
not gotten used to that. By the way, I see I go to visit people in the city, are going to meet somebody, and you see these cars driving with nobody in the driver's seat. I'm like, God, if you don't see them on the freeway quite as quite yet, but you are seeing people, you know, attempted without a driver. I don't know. I don't know where AI is going, but I'll tell you this guy's a little And that's why our government here in the United States is throwing
tens of billions of dollars. And it's not just chat GPT anymore. It's about I want to say fifty, maybe close to one hundred breakoffs who took the data and they spun their own AI. As an example, I'm using Claude, which is a writing tool where you can upload a sample of your writing and it'll reproduce it pretty close. Now, I'm not going to write a book like that because it gets pretty goofy, but it's great for chapter reviews
and consistency. As a writer, you want consistent You want the messages to come through consistently with accuracy and readability. And it looks like Claude is one of those tools that can really help you. So AI is here and I urge you to play with it, and you can get it. You can download pretty much any of the fifty to one hundred tools for free. But when it comes into really getting into some detail, they ask you to, you know, become a member. So really really really fun stuff.
Today's program is on monsters, creatures, and Poultergeist's all kinds of cryptoids as well, And I had fun with this. It turns out here in California there's a creeper in a place called Fresno that I didn't know about but everywhere in the world there are manifestations of monsters, which are when they say monsters, it's more like I don't know what this is, so I'm calling it a monster.
The classics like the Lockness monster, the bigfoot sasquatch. We even talk about the chupacabra, which is this doglike creature most notably found in Mexico. So we're gonna go in and out. You're gonna hear about some unusual topics. Let are a little chili but not too far. So today's program is Monsters, Myths, Legends and Real Encounters, and my guest is author research investigator Richard Estepp. We have a
paranormal investigator with us. Today's name is Richard Espp, and he has written quite a fascinating new book called Dark Spirits, Monsters, Demons and Devils, and this is a look at everything from kryptoids to hauntings and everything in between. It's kind of a an overview of some of the strangest events and cases ever recorded. And I'm happy to have him on because I have questions about some of these historic places.
Richard is originally from the UK, and you know, we don't get or have the history that Europe has on hauntings paranormal events, and so here's somebody who's really investing, geted a wide range of topics. So hey, Richard, welcome to Destiny. Great to have you on the program.
Good morning, it's a pleasure to be a good afternoon, I should say, now thanks to the invitation, Cliff.
Do you notice or suspect that there are different patterns, these paranormal patterns of these creatures and these hauntings that are cross cultural? Are they? Obviously America is a younger country. But what do you discover? What do you find when you're out searching? Is this something that's historic?
I feel like when it comes to cryptids amongst the stories, each culture has its own unique lens that it tends to view the kind of creatures or through. You know, So for example, if I say vampire, as we live here in the West, you know, we tend to think of depending upon our age, like you and I our generation, we might think of like Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee, you know, the classic kind of Dracula with the long cape and things of that nature. Some folks might think
more of the sparkling vampires from Twilight, you know. But if you go a little further around the world and I research vampires in India, vampires there come in the form of naked women riding tigers called cheapey. So oh, we've made the vampire like a very kind of pale skinned. We owe the Victorians, that I think, and a lot of our vampire mythos comes from that kind of New England Puritan Victorian world. We go around the world and
vampire stories are very different. You've got these big winged bloodsucking creatures, you know, and then I think you look at other countries and the supercabra, the bloodsucking the goat goat sucker, you know, is again roots kind of in the vampire myth But that's a whole other take on things. So every culture has its variance on these stories and they can change over time. They can change with geography and over the generations. It's something that makes them fascinating.
When when we hear the term per normal, what does that mean to you? I mean, also I want to ask, I want to double this question up for you, why are you so interested in these phenomenon? I mean, because I can see getting being interested in one or two, but you made a career out of it. It's quite fascinating. It's always like you're looking for this. You're, you're, you're, you're, you get a you have a huge interest in this.
Well, I feel that we live in the twenty first century. You know, we have these You and I are talking now across the country via the wonders of technology. I have a magic device right here where which contains more information at the touch of a few buttons than was in the entire library of Alexandria. And you know, we like to think we know everything, or we know how
the world works, the universe works. But increasingly there are these strange corners, these strange tales, whether it's haunted places, you know, UFOs, UAPs, things of that nature, whether it's cryptids and monsters, and they remind us that there are these areas that science has not yet explained, and they fascinate me. I like, I'm interested in the shadowy corners of our world and what may or may not lie there. I mean, at the end of the day, who.
Isn't Yeah, uh, do you have equipment that you carry when you're doing it, like checking out a haunting or a Poulter guys, do you carry special prayer? I think of the movie series where they had all this equipment with it, but some of it might be valid when you're checking frequencies and energy feels and stuff like that.
Yeah, different tools for different jobs. So usually that's that's the kind of stuff you would employ investigating a haunted location, you know, checking where well the baseline electromagnetic field levels are, identifying where there might be whether utilities might come into the house, sources of energy, things of that nature, temperatures,
So yeah, definitely there is a place for that. Less so when it's it's something about monsters, you know, so when I'm when I'm writing a book about cryptids, you are more kind of getting out there and putting boots on the ground and going out and looking for this kind of stuff and chronicling the story. So less equipment involved with this kind of project.
Mmm. Interesting. You open a book with Where Wolves, and I've been fascinated by Where We was said, how far back in history do they go? Do they go? Do they do they go back to the Romans? Or how far? How far back into the history do we look at Wherewolves?
I think Wherewell was born out of this idea that the human beings can change into animals with various forms, and you can find that in Greek myths too. Those kind of stories were mostly attributed to the gods though and demigods back then, you know, I mean, you look at Zeus in myth, and he turned into a whole bunch of animals, you know, usually to pick up women. He had, as Neil Degrass Tyson politely put it, a complicated social life. But you know, I write in the
book about the Viking berserkers. We still use that word today, berserk, And what it really used to refer to were these Viking raiders that were dom wolf pelts, so the skins of wolf that the you know, the heads and the apes, cloaks made of wolfa and then they would go rate these villages and they would just be absolutely savage in their attacks. And you know, it's believed that some of our werewolf stories, man wolf tales come from these berserkers
that would just shed blood everywhere. They would be immune to pain, the attacks would be incredibly savage and beasteel. And it's something that we still see today, you know, we still say so and so went berserk today and that's the origin of the word and as this wolf beast connotation to it. So those werewolf tales and under so much.
Talk a little bit if you can, about the effects of becoming awarewolf. What were the circumstances of somebody transforming into this. I don't know if it's not really a deity, it's more of a monster.
Yeah, yeah, I think so. Firstly, a clinical like anthropy is a real condition, and I like to start with that. I'm a medical professional. But to be clear about what that is. That is a psychological belief that one can turn into a wolf, you know it is It is not an actual literal transformation, but it is being so compulsively, you know, convinced that you can turn into a were wolf, that you believe it and act in that way and may go so far, as you know, attacking biting living people.
A lot of myths and old wives tale superstitions surround the werewolf stories. One is that if you were born on Christmas Day, you were more likely to be a werewolf. Cliff, So if that were true, then that would give us Annie Lennox from Eurythmics, you know, the singer would be a were wolf. If we Wigart, the actor would be a candidate, which I think would have made Casablanca a
very different movie. And going even further back, great Sir Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day and he sure spent a lot of the time look at moon and the night sky. So who knows, but you know, there are also claims that if your eyebrows met in the middle of the unibrow that made you was a possible indicator of being a werewolf, which if that were true, statistically four million people would be were wolves around the globe right now. So those were some of the kind
of you know, signs of being a were wolf? How did you become one? You could be cursed by someone who knew what they were doing, so the curse of the werewolf is a common concept, and there have been a few old monster movies along those lines, you know, the Wolf Man, where somebody gets cursed. You could also, of course, be bitten by a werewolf and have it transmitted that way as some kind of presumably bloodborne pathogen.
M The moon has a big effect on this condition, this being awarewolf have you documented or I mean, because lunacy is a big one, just general craziness is what they attribute to the moon rise. Yeah, is there any validity to that at all? Not necessarily the werewolf side, but.
I so lunacy is also a word we use today. We all know what lunatic means. And the moon has had this powerful influence in human beings for as long as there have been human beings, and I think it goes back to the earliest days when we used to sit in groups around fires and you know, under the light of the full moon and tell one another's stories. Every culture has had its moon beliefs going as far back as we have recorded information. What kind of fascinates
me is that going forward to the modern days. I'm a nine to one one paramedic for a living cliff, and our medicine is evidence based, you know. We base our practice upon studies and research and data. That's how medicine should work. And yet so we are not superstitious people apart from we all have this belief that on full moon nights we are going to see more nine one one calls and that they're going to be weirder,
you know, And so this has been studied. They actually, as you shared with medicine, they actually did big studies and they looked at some major emergency departments during the period of full moon, several consecutive full moons, and they found that they were no busier. And they did the same with psychiatric emergency departments too. So do people seem to be acting, acting out, experiencing behavior of emergencies more
often during the light of a full moon. You talk to any nurse, doctor, paramedic, pop, firefighter, you know that works, and we're all the same. We're all like, full moon tonight, here we go. We believe it, but the data tells a different story. Pops are the only ones that really have a claim to this, because crime is generally more prevalent during the full moon, and that's simply because it's a burglar's moon. It gives people who are going to break into cars and houses some more light by which
to see. So that's purely a practical practicality. Yeah, there's no evidence at all in twenty first century, you know, North America or anyway that the moon in fact causes people to act out. I've got stories, and I'm willing to bet if you went into any emergency department they tell you stories too.
That's pretty funny. As a Paranormal Investigator. You've listed a few places like Amityville, and some of these horror houses are possessed locations. Are those blown out of proportion just because of the terrible murders or events, or are they truly areas that have negative energy or energy of spirits that have not crossed over what little we know about the spur world, you know we've made into movies, actually, But what's your feeling on that?
I have pretty strong feelings about it, and I should open by saying that Amiteville, which I have written about, I've never been inside that house. Very few people get to It's been a private residence for decades, and it's haunted primarily by public interest. What I mean by that is the owners took out those you know those iconic eyes, the windows, these two windows like eyes. Yeah, they took
those out. They had it obscured on Google street View, or because people feel like they have the right to trespass on that property. The real tragedy at Amadeville, we can say for sure, is that a whole family, the DeFeo family, was murdered there in cold blood by one of their own while they slept. That's tragic and it is horrific. The ghost stories have been debated and I think will be debated forever when you look at the
evidence that I have. Ronald de Feo, who committed those murders with a rifle in the house, wrote to a reporter who said and said to him there was only one demon at Amadeville, and that demon was me, meaning himself. Also, there's the fact that no subsequent owners of that house
have reported any disturbances of an aaronormal kind whatsoever. Defeo's lawyer outright came out and said that he cooked up the whole story over a couple of fotles of wine with George and Kathy Lutz, and then they went on to you know, get a book deal. The author, Jay Amson, wrote this multimillion dollar best seller, which became a massive movie franchise. There are over fifty Amiteville movies at this point,
which is just insane to me. Amadeville in Space, you name it, and it's so and some of them are really fun, but it's so easy to forget that this whole thing is borne on the back of tragedy and a family that was murdered in cold blood, and so that does not sit well with me, Cliff. Honestly, I think it's been exploited for generation after generation, and we need to remember what really matters in Amiteville, and that is the loss of those innocent victims.
Wow, fifty spinoffs, that's pretty amazing. I wouldn't have thought that as an investigator. Have you ever been to a location with a rumored either haunting or spirit interaction and felt something was going on? Or is it more made up by the people, as you say, who were perhaps once living in the residence, or a rumor to God started and it's just you know, grew from that type of idea.
Yeah. I've spent thirty years investigating claims of haunted houses, and if I didn't think there was something to some of it, I wouldn't be wasting my time, you know, I'd be spending my weekends like sitting on a beach
or something, or at a Denver Broncos game. So I do think that, yes, you get many cases which are exaggerated, that are made up for profit for attention, but there is still this core of genuinely inexplicable or apparently inexplicable phenomena which is taking place, and that is what keeps myself, and I think the majority of other investigators and enthusiasts
coming back. The trick is identifying those genuine cases. And you know, kind of you have to pan through a lot of silt before you get to the gold in the paranormal field.
And so are you saying that most of these claims are rumors and a small percentage or actual hauntings or paranormal events or what are you suggesting?
It's been my experience that about ninety percent of what is believed or claim to be paranormal has, if you look hard enough, an entirely mundane rational explanation, and that about ten percent of it defies or seems to defy easy explanation. So it's like ninety ten in my experience.
That's funny because you just give us the Amnyville suggestion. Is there one that you believe actually crosses over into the paranormal hardcorese We're looking at some perhaps testing, I don't know how you guys test to determine that this is coming from a different free can see a different reality, a different dimension. Talk about that.
I think that one of the problems we have is that we all set at our bar for what constitutes evidence in different places. So a good example, a case that I find fascinating is the case of Ronald Huncolor, which you probably know as the Exorcist case. It's the case the movie The Exorcist was based upon. Oh and this was.
A young boy.
Yeah, this was a young boy in Mount Rainier that ended up being exercised over an extended period of time in Saint Louis primarily, and there were multiple witnesses We're talking about double digits here, multiple witnesses who saw this boy behave in ways that they genuinely believed he was possessed by the devil or a demon, or some kind of external force, call it what you will. That he displayed abilities that you just couldn't attribute to a human being,
let alone a teenage boy. So these writings that would appear on his skin, these symbols, this prodigious strength. Well, what's interesting about that case to me, Cliff is number one, you have a lot of eyewitnesses that all say they
saw these things, and they all testified to it. But also every single one of them, every single one pretty much was a Catholic, And with the greatest of respect to Catholics, what I'm saying here is that they all viewed his behavior through the lens of their belief system, because we all do that, whether you're an agnostic, Christian and Muslim, you know, Jewish, whatever you may believe, we all view the world in that way. So you have, you know, twenty thirty people looking at his behavior and
they believe it's a demon because that's their mindset. And what fascinates me is clearly something was going on. You know, the debate rages today. Was this what they would call at the time, a disturbed kid, a troubled kid, or was this a kid that was genuinely possessed by some kind of dark force. The people that encountered him in person and spend time around him absolutely believed that he
was inhabited by diabolic powers. If we could get him today into a modern medical facility, would we think, would we conclude the same thing?
You know?
So these are the kind of cases where I think there's enough of a question mark, enough of a gray area that they can be endlessly studied and debated.
We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guest today Richard Estep discussing his latest book, Monsters Will be right back. My guest today is Richard Estapp. He is a paranormal researcher who has studied unusual phenomenon around the world for over twenty years. His new book
is Monsters, Mths, Legends and Real Encounters. I don't want to get it into the movie The Extracist because it's kind of dramatic, but can you give us a point in fact of some of the what this kid was able to do or what made him seem possessed? I mean, how old was he at the time of the.
Yeah, so initially you're looking at like a fourteen year old boy. And the you know, critics of the case, and indeed of most cases of demonic possession, they talk about the fact, well, how do you know this isn't a mental health disorder of behavioral issue, which is a very valid point point, you know. And as we you and I talked to earlier about were wolves, the same
case has been made about people with clinical hycanthropy. They're they're running around snarling and biting and snapping their teeth at people. You know, we don't actually believe there were wolves and that they're going to turn into some kind of hairy creature under a full moon. But what thing about Ronald Hunkoler is that the beginning of that case holtergeist activity, objects flying across shelves or flying across the room, and apple flying out of the fruit bowl when the
kids nowhere near it. He's sent to go spend the night with the family's priest. And the bedshakes, I mean, the kids not doing this. Furniture moves around him when he's not touching it. That's not mental illness. There's you know this, We're talking then about physical effects which manifest in our material world. So to me, these cases get much more fascinating and credible when the effects take place beyond the human body, beyond the human brain and in
the surrounding environment. It's possible that he had psychokinetic powers. We've all seen the movie carry right Cliff, you know, which is yeah, Stephen King's book ow being a teenager and the hormonal Maelstrom. That teenager's experience can manifest telekineticut It will obviously carrious fiction, but it just kind of makes me wonder if if you take in a situation like the one that Stephen King made up his story about could you just as easily have believed that Carrie
was possessed by a demon? Very similar symptoms, very similar behaviors.
And yet you know, here we have the Catholic Church with this exorcism division. I don't know if it's called a division or whatever. What do we know about this young fourteen year old in the face of a priest who is trained to perform exorcisms? Did they report on success? I think you said very early in our discussion that there were multiple exorcision exorcisms. Is that true?
Yeah? Or rather one long, protracted one cliff that went on over several weeks. So when you look at the Exorcist, and by the way, the movie The Exorcist and the novel, they both contained a great Although they're dramatic, especially the movie, there is more than a grain of truth in both of them. You know, they exaggerated, of course for Hollywood effect.
But the Exorcist that worked on this father Bowden. If you dig into his background, this guy, prior to his his fairly quiet life in the civilian world, was a military airborne paratrooper. He parachuted into these hell holes during World War two and gave the last right to his American soldiers to comrades, you know, while under fire. I mean, this is not a man that spooks easily. This is not someone that is given to flights of fancy or the imagination. And he was shaken by the behavior of
this young boy. So it's important to kind of factor that in. He was considered to be a very reliable pair of hands, someone that could make a sober, valid assessment of this teenage boy. And had it just been a kid that was acting up to borrow a phrase from the Times, he would have spotted that. Absolutely. He believed there was a genuine possession at work, and he secured permission from the diocese to perform an exorcism, which wasn't just handed out easily. It had to be recommended
and assessed carefully before an exorcism was permitted. So today the church requires quite riotly that before permission is granted for an exorcism, a rigorous mental health screening is performed in order to rule out the fact that this person should in fact be receiving clinical care, you know, not an exorcism, but Richard, but you do hear that Catholic exorcists, Cliff. They say they're busier than ever, that the demand for exorcisms has never been higher right now, right now?
Wow? What does that say to you? When the church is opening the door to exorcisms, is it? I mean it's a belief system, you know, I mean, here we go again. The church is validating possessions, abnormal behavior attributed to demons. How valid is that?
We have to talk about bias because I mentioned earlier, you know, we all view the world throughout the lens of our own beliefs. I'm an agnostic, so I look at this and I think we live now in the twenty first century when belief. It's interesting. The church is struggling for membership. You know, church membership is on the decline, meaning its influences waning. So as an organization, it's not doing as well as it was. And you have, on the other hand, you know, belief in demons has never
been higher either. Why is that We've got a multi billion dollar movie franchise, The Conjuring. Yeah, we've got all these TV shows which you know, a certain ghost enthusiasts on TV. We'll find a demon in every basement. And you put those two things together, and I think it's been an opportunity for the Church to say, hey, we're the demon people. You know, we got this. Were the experts when it came out, the Exorcist. This was one
of my favorite descriptions. Cliff I wrote a book called In Search of Demons where I looked at this whole phenomenon, and they described the Exorcist as top gun for the Catholic Church. When the movie Top Gun came out. I don't know if you remember that, but US Navy recruiting just went sky high. It was like a ninety minute you know, recruiting ad for the US name. Everyone wanted
to go that. Yeah, yeah, So the Exasis came out, and then you know, you see these shows on the Catholic come interested in the Catholic Church just just skyrocketed as well, because the idea is, hey, the devil is real. He's out there. We're not talking about some creepy old horror movie, you know, said in a Puritan village in the eighteen hundreds. We're talking about you know, Georgetown, and we're talking about an apartment or you know, an ordinary house like the one you live in, the devil can
get you there. You're not safe, but don't worry. We're the Catholic Church and we've got you. We've got our superheroes on standby. We'll come exercise that devil for you. You've just got to believe and get on our train, as it were, you know. And I don't know that it's necessarily that cynical, but that is the effect of it, the idea that the forces of light and darkness are clashing and that you can get on board with one side or the other. So I think that's a very
attractive worldview for a lot of people. You know, we all see the news, right we look at the world essentially going to hell in a handbasket with every passing day. It's very easy to blame the devil as opposed to you know, human stupidity and greed. And if you blame the devil, well, guess what. There are these people in black with colors that can come and engage in spiritual warfare on your behalf. And if you want, you can even be one of them.
M hm. Real quickly, then, I think that's as we as we. I want to just ask another thing on this possession with your background, do you see this young boy perhaps unusually open. Two the energies. I don't know how you would explain it. I want to see. I want to say, uh, being easily influenced as a young person. Uh. And in this case possessed documented being possessed by a spirit, a topic that we don't really know about. We don't
have any interaction. We may hear about it, and and and then exorcist having to come in and say, you must leave this body of this child. You're this evil spirit must leave. And here's the sacraments and the holy water and whatever hell what else they use to rid the child of this of this evil. But as a parapsychologist, where do you find this in history? Or where do you define it as a possession? And what is the possession?
The consciousness of the child leaves and this evil spirit comes in like a like a you know, I mean, how do you define that? I'm just curious.
And I just want a slight correction. So I'm not a parapsychologist. A parapsychologist holds me a doctorate, and so there are there are some out there. I just oh, no, that's okay. I just want to make sure that I don't still investigate as it actually, you know, did the work I am. I'm an investigator and an enthusiastic amateurs. So just to be clear when we talk about possession, this is also a belief that is as old as humanity. I mean, it predates biblical times I know that we
tend to think of. In the Bible, there is the story where Jesus expels the spirit you know, which is possessing a human and drives it into a herd of swine, and then the swine goes stampede away and they all die, you know, and the demon, the demon has been exercised by Jesus Christ himself. But the notion that humans can be possessed goes all the way back to antiquity. Ancient
Babylonia and Sumeria they had these beliefs. The Jewish tradition slightly different, but they they've also had that belief since time immemorial. The idea that there is this kind of dark passenger that can come in from outside and can influence at first attack, influence, and then ultimately possess you and take over you. It's as old as people cliff, you know, and the idea of exorcism, the ritual behind it.
This framework I think makes it more formalized. You know, it was the church's way of saying, we need to have some kind of a standard approach to deal with this. But most cultures have some variation of exorcism. It may not be called that, but a ritual for driving out dark spirits from individuals. Well, no matter which continent you go to, you know, Africa, those cultures have their own
way of addressing it. We have our own way of doing it here in the West as well, different faiths, but all with this same goal of taking this unclean, negative dog energy and driving it out of a living human.
Yeah.
I just find it fascinating that this one boy is probably the best example of a possession. And I guess I don't know if you have documents. I don't know if the church releases documents. How many exorcisms are the real thing and how many are just mental health issues? That's huge.
No, you make a very valid point, which is and that's something that I wrote about in In Search of Demons. It's a very valid question. It also begs the flip side, though, how many of what are written off as mental health issues may in fact be possessions. If you believe possession is possible, you know, and you believe that mental health behavioral emerginggencies can be mistaken for possessions, doesn't the door swing both ways? Could someone in fact be possessed instead
of having a mental health issue. But I do think now that you know, demonic possession is a recognized clinical condition as well. But just like clinical lycanthropy, the medical profession is not saying that spirits are real and can possess people. They're saying that a clinical syndrome exists whereby someone is so convinced that they are possessed, they act as if they are to all intents and purposes. What we cannot objectively prove one way or the other, though,
is is this an external exterior thing? Is this really something else coming in from outside? Or is this such a strong pathological conviction that you've been possessed that you essentially are I interviewed a guy from my book in Such a Demons. He is a world class illusionist. You know. His job is to make you believe things that aren't real are real. His job is to make people believe in magic. And I was interested because I wanted to
know you know you mentioned the movie The Exorcist. I asked him, could you convincingly stage in exorcism where you know, you make somebody levitate floating above the bed like Linda Blair does in the movie. Could you fake this so that we couldn't be convinced? And he said, well, you know, once you got within about six feet you would know what I was doing. Like, there's no way to truly
convincingly make some of this stuff happen. And then he told me, Cliff that he went to a real exorcism as an observer, that the church had asked him to go observe in exorcism and see if if he thought that this was a genuine case of possession or if it was fake. And I asked him what happened and he said, well, the lady was It was a female in Wyoming. And he said that the lady was in entirely pleasant and nice until nightfall, and then she began to behave in such a way, this animalistic way, that
she had to be held down. It took several fully grown males to hold her down and prevent her attacking others, attacking herself. And so he said, I took a Saint Michael, you know, a prayer card, and he slipped it into her pillow so under the pillowcase on which her head was resting. And he said, she could never have seen me do this. This is a guy that makes cards appear out of thin air, and you know, he doesn't pull rabbits out of hats, but that's his wheelhouse. And
he slipped this prayer card into her pillow case. And he said, the minute she laid her head back down, she came up like this, as if she'd been burned when her head came into contact with that prayer card through the pillowcase. She shut up, as if he just burned her in the back of the head. And he said, there's no way she could possibly have known he had done that. He didn't have a good explanation for it. And his entire career was built uncomming people, you know,
he said, I can't explain it to this day. Does it mean she was possessed? Not necessarily, but something, something very strange was going on there.
That's so funny that you're mentioning that. It's like the vibe, the vibration of good and evil, the energy behind good and evil. That's just amazing. So something's happening there. This jump into kryptoids and other strange creatures that you feature in your book. I want to talk first about something that's in my own state. Fresnel, California Nightcrawlers. What are Nightcrawlers? I saw that, I was like, what the heck, what's that all about?
Damn define on Cliff, That's that's my favorite. As I don't know, they all crazy. If you look at the have you seen the video footage of the Fresno Nightcurlers?
No?
No, In fact, when I read that is to talk about it, I'm just really amazed at this.
It's one of the weirdest things. And I realized that in a book about cryptids, you know, the whole thing is weird, but this is one of the stranger things. So these stories and we have there is video footage of it, but these accounts of what looks like a pair of kind of disembodied legs running through the night have turned up on on security cameras, and you really, anybody that's watching or listening to the show, I encourage you to hop onto YouTube or any video site and
search for the Fresno night Crawlers. They are. Yeah, imagine a pair of very big, tall, skinny legs that are running of their own. There's no torso, abdomen, chest, head, arms, like, just these kind of legs that are running through the night in Presno, California. And there are a couple of instances of these, not just one. There are a couple of instances where they turned upon film and then gone like it's one of the great what ifs. You know. We have no idea what these were. There's no real
legend associated with it. There's nothing like it in the histories that I could find, and it seemed like it would be extraordinarily difficult to fake as well, if you were going to post this, if it was a prank, it would be very difficult to do. Once you see the footage. So I encourage you all to take a look and form your own opinion. But I'll hand on my heart, I don't know what this was.
We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guest today, Richard Estep discussing his latest book Monsters. Will be right back. My guest today is Richard step He is a paranormal researcher, and he has written a new book called Monsters, Myths, Legends and Real Encounters. What are the reports of people who have seen them, you know, after the being captured by the film or captured on video like the local authority.
And these are video anomalies. Yeah, these are video anomalies, Cliff like that. There's no it's not like they're running people down and you know, attacking them or anything like that. It's simply a very very strange looking, apparently creature that that was captured a couple of times on video cameras. And it's so strange because it appears as if the film itself, I mean one of the one of the
videos was on it was an official camera. This wasn't you know, something that somebody recorded on their sony handicam. This was on I believe it was Park Service Land of Memory Serves. And we have no idea. We just have no idea what they are and the way the way that they move. It has this really odd, really strange motion to it. I don't know if you paid me a lot of money to fake one, I don't
know how I would go about doing it. So the freendno nightcrawlers are interesting and they're a little skill.
Yeah, describe them obviously if they're they're just a pair of legs, which could be some kind of a creature, but they don't. They're not like like somebody's been cut in half where they have pants and shoes on.
No, no, no, no, it's not like we're looking at a human being where you digitally remove their upper body or anything like that. We see down in the movies all the time. H In the motion they move, it's almost a fluid motion. It's almost a twisting motion. So this isn't the way that human beings walk, you know. This isn't like normal locomotion. So they almost seem to flow a twist as they move. It's the weirdest thing.
Weird. I gotta check out the video. Thank you for that, trip uh. I have been curious about the chupercra bra for for a very long time, probably over ten years, because it's they've seen them mostly in Mexico and Latin American countries. Describe the trooper cabra and if you can give us an update on any most recent sadines.
Yeah, troop of Cabra or the goat sucker It's a fantastic, fascinating phenomenon as monster stories go, because, as we mentioned earlier, there's an element to the vampiric about it, you know, the idea that this was initially sucking the blood of
goats and livestock. And one of the things that fascinated me about it, Cliff, is I think that there may be some crossover with those UFO related animal mutilation stories, you know that were so prevalent, that the castle mutilations and things like that, The idea that there's this creature out there that is feeding on the blood of living animals and livestock, and as fierce as the accounts of the Tupo Cabra are, the most common skeptical explanation is
that this is a coyote with mange. Mange is like a wasting and disease process that you can see in some animals. So some academics out of Texas are of the opinion that the Supercarbo stories really relate to mangy coyotes, rabid animals, things of that nature. But the stories they cross cultural and geographic boundaries. You know, you see them in Latin America, you get stories in North America, especially
prevalent in Texas and some more desert states. And they still continue to turn up, like you still do hear of them. The jury is still out on what's going on with the SUPERCARBRA. But the most the most compelling non cryptid explanation is a coyote with mange. Does that account for all of the cases? Not necessarily? And you get to some Latin American country and you see these variant creatures which are flying, like imagine a flying shupercar Bra.
There's no way that's a coyote with mange, you know. So the story continues to evolve and twist and change depending upon culture and time.
I was wondering if you had heard the rumor that they were laboratory experiments that had gotten loose someplace in like New Mexico or something. Did you ever hear that as kind of a lead to their original location.
I'd heard that rumor. And what's kind of interesting is that that that Rima has been advanced for a whole bunch of cryptid stories, everything from the Jersey Devil through sheeperc. You know, it's it's very much a horror movie trope, right, It's I hate to say it, but it sounds like lazy writing on the part of a Hollywood screenwriter to me. You know, suddenly the creatures got in there they are
I mean, is it possible? I guess as sure. You know it's it's no stranger than one of any other, you know, amount of cryptid origin stories, but there's no compelling evidence for it.
Yeah. There was a nighttime host named Art Bell whose the legend. Yeah, for some reason, he not necessarily started the rumor, but he seemed to have a fascination about it. And I remember listening to him, and he would have people that said I saw it, I saw the troop of Cabra. So it was almost like a phenomenon for a period of time.
Art Bell and I love Art Coast to Coast being on many times. It's it's to my eternal regret that I'll die before I could be on his show. And I would love to have met him, you know, I mean, he was a true legend Coast to Coast under Art Bell. They still have their own archive now of art shows. I think it's important to note that Art's heyday, though,
was before the technology I mentioned earlier. We all have cell phones now, you know, we all have the ability to capture evidence of some of this kind of stuff and arts kind of crowd. His audience were people that didn't have access to this kind of thing. The technology hadn't been invented then, so he relied a lot on hearsay and anecdotes and eyewitness stories, and some of them held water better than others.
Yeah, he was great, fantastic. Let's head to Australia. This is something I've never heard of before, the bun yip, which is some kind of a creature. So I've never heard her talk about the bun yep. I think that's how you pronounce it.
Yeah, yeah, no, it is the bun yep. I wanted to I wanted to look at Australia because I thought number one the the Books Forward is written by doctor Karen Stozno, who is Australian and co host of the Monster Talk podcast. And so I'm like, nobody seems to write about Australian monsters and cryptis and they must have some right and I started digging insurance they do. They have their own lake monsters. They have the bunyepe, which think about this is like some kind of crocodile like
monster that will ambush the unwary and eat them. You also have the yowie, which is Australian bigfoot. And what made me laugh the most about this cliff was I'm thinking, you know, here's Australia, a country where ninety percent of the wildlife wants to kill you anyway. You know, like you've got snake biders and all these kind of things, and now they have stuff that sounds like it might be even more danger I kind of feel sorry for I kind of feel sorry for like researches in Australia.
I'm like, how dangerous is it out there? You know, when I went squatching here in Colorado, you worry about mountain lions and bears a little bit in the woods. But that's a picnic for Australian researchers, right. They have spiders and snakes and you name it, all kinds of nasty stuff out there. So yeah, bun yips and yowie's and things of that nature. And I do also think that when it comes down to cryptids, we have to quite rightly ask ourselves, you know, why don't we see
more reliable reports of them here in the US. We still have our wildernesses, but Australia is once you get outside the cities in Australia, the country is still one big wilderness and you have these vast areas of land which just nobody is there at all. So if one of the big kind of talking points for cryptid enthusiastics, where are the carcasses, where are the bodies? You know, where are the bigfoot remains, where are the ya remains?
Those kind of things, if they are out there undiscovered, anywhere I would find Australia might well be a prime location for them to be discovered.
Can you describe one of these one of these creatures? Are they like a hairy bigfoot or a sasquatch? You know, the big dimension so yep, yep.
But also the ability to move fairly quietly when they
choose to. That fascinated me about the Yowie stories, about how much of them, how much crossover there is with North American bigfoot sasquatch stories, the idea, you know, you've got these big, lumbering, heavy things that are eight nine feet tall supposedly, and at times researchers or experiences they talk about hearing this heavy tread, you know, and sticks breaking and hearing something big moving, and then at other times they're almost being stalked or shadowed, and they seem
to be able to move, if not silently, with great quietness, stealthfully. It's as if they either don't obey the same laws of physics that our material world does, or they are so at home in the woods that they have the ability to move, you know, with all the stealth of like a ninja or something.
Mm hm. You know it's funny because I have friends over there, and you would think you would hear more about these creatures, like we have our bigfoot here, but they must come and go. It must be brief sightings or something, and then they vanish.
Yeah, and again, you know, you have these great wildernesses out there. But when it comes to bigfoot like creatures. I know that in Nepal and the Himalayas, you know, we have the Yetsi stories, but a lot of the bigfoot sasquatch kind of like stories. They require wooded areas, and they require you know, like hilly country, if not mountainous.
We still have a bunch of that. I mean, there are quite a few sidings here in the US near Sturgis, North Dakota, where the big motorcycle rally is you know, you have it's kind of wilderness but not And a lot of the sightings occur near populated areas, human populated areas, but they are very close to these heavily wooded environments where these kind of creatures could just disappear fairly quickly.
Is there at least footprints that we see in Australia like we have out here, there's tons of footprints, which is kind of weird because we don't have a body yet, we don't even have scat. We have some hair hair follic calls, I think is about most we ever we do.
And and also you know, there are there are the signs like, for example, the bending of tree trunks and branches. Some believe that is sign of a bigfoot sasquatch, of their presence, either marking their territory or a form of art things of that nature. And then other physical phenomena,
the tearing and notting of things. You know, I've seen a couple of American flags which were flown outside cabins and residences that were torn into strips and then knotted, which seems to be a characteristic of North American bigfoot sasquatch encounters. You know, they like to braid things, so several accounts of horses having their manes braided have been attributed to bigfoots too.
Oh that's hilarious.
You know.
I want to bring up a European phenomenon creature that you describe, and that's the Crampis, which is the during the holidays and I love it because they've made it an art in Germany and people wear these very elaborate masks and they bang drums, but they seem to be kind of a negative creature in a way. And I was curious, why is Saint Nicholas always hanging around with them, because you would think that Saint Nicholas is the Yeah, actually Crampis is Saint Nick's brother. So and Crampus is
getting very popular here in North America too. There are Crampis events now every December in a lot of US cities. But he is essentially Saint Nick's brother the way the legend goes. But Crampis comes on December fifth, and he is this big, monstrous ogre like creature and he comes for the naughty kids. So of course you know there's the list, right, he's making a list. He's checking it twice. He knows who the naughty kids are and those are the ones that cramp Has comes from. But the Crampist
stories are terrifying. The idea that he will break into a kid's bedroom, snatch them out of bed, stuff them into a basket that he carries on his back like a backpack, and then he will take the kids to his lair, and depending which version of the Crampers story you're hearing, he either eats them or more commonly uses birch wood, you know, sticks and beats the kids with sticks and then returns them the next day. He's trying
to beat them into being good kids. And if you don't get taken by Cramppus, it means you were on the nice list and you're going to get presents from Saint Nick, Santa Claus Father Christmas instead. So he's the or else to Father Christmas if you will, you know, and he comes first too. So crampis nached or Crampus Knight is December the fifth, and so if if kids make it through to December the sixth, they were on
the good list for the year. That what a lovely story. Yeah, but was it somebody's idea to manifest the crampis because there were quite a few bad kids who didn't deserve presents, or what's the history of that idea.
It's just a means of keeping kids under control. I mean, history is full of these kind of examples. Myself, I'm a child of the seventies. I grew up in England in the seventies and we had a thing that we all believed in called the seven o'clock horses, and it was a tail in my part of the Midlands where if you were not in bed with the lights out by seven o'clock at night, the seven o'clock horses might would come and they would carry you away and you
would never be seen again, absolutely terrifying. A tale made up by parents to get kids to go to sleep so they could finally unwind after a day. What seven o'clock. You know, it's seven o'clock and he's still not sleeping. Let's put the fear of God into him. So I think a lot of tales just like this. They evolved as a means of social control, you know. I mean a lot can be said about Santa Claus stories just there as a means to motivate kids to be good.
Crampus is just the flip side of that same point.
I mean, the images I've seen of this Crampis for decades. He's not a friendly looking guy at all. He's pretty devil looking, true.
And if you look at the Crampus events, you know there's a lot of fire and flame and that kind of stuff going on. But look at the Christmas festival and you look at its place, you know, I mean throughout history Christmas. Of course we call it Christmas now, but that whole period long pre dates Christianity, and it was a time of darkness. You know, people, you are halfway through the winter, the old year was dying and
the New year was yet to be born. Christmas time was a very dark time and place throughout most of human history, and so people used to celebrate com memory it in their own ways, some of which we might see today is being slightly warped and macabb But it's interesting now that they're making a resurgence again.
I love them fantastic. The books called Monsters, Myths, Legends and the Real Encounters. And my guest today has been Richard step The books coming out tomorrow so people can get it on Amazon, but they can probably get it where they get most of their books, right.
Yeah, your your local independently owned bookstore. I'm sure would love to order it in for you, and I bet they could use your custom So whatever suits you.
And do you have a YouTube channel where you're talking about your encounter?
I have a website. Yeah, I have a website, Cliff Richard Estep dot net. You can catch up with me there. You can find me on social media Richard step author. You can see me on the TV shows Haunted Hospitals, Paranormal nine one, things of that nature. Hop on out there and connect and let me know your monster stories. I'd love to hear from you.
Yeah, fantastic. As we close, our ancestors had traditions warning against contacting spirits. What do you think of modern ghost hunting kind of ignoring those ancient cautions and kind of delving into these territories that could be a problem.
While I'm fifty three, I've been doing it for most of my life and I'm fine. Is my first reaction. I think any subject that you approach with respect is that's the way to do it right. Where people get into trouble, I think is when they are a provocation and aggression and belligerence and doing this for entertainment and for egotistical reasons. Those that are genuinely interested in the unknown, in researching it, in adding to our knowledge and understanding,
I think I'll welcome and we'll do fine. Those that get into this for the wrong reasons and in a cavalier way might want to keep an eye out.
So are you suggesting when you go to a location or doing research, that you say a prayer or you have a special intention that you are here to.
If that's your belief Yeah, Cliff, if that's your belief system, by all means, I suggest I go to haunted prisons, hospitals, asylums, you name it. I make I approach them as I would approach any strangers that I'd never met before. So if I've never met you before and I'm invited to your home or workplace, I'm going to extend you a certain amount of respect, you know, which should be entirely normal.
I won't come in and demand that you show yourself start performing for me on demand and do this, and you know, flip this, flip this chair over, and throw something off the shelf, making demands go in with a respectful attitude and you will, almost in my experience at least, be absolutely fine, fantastic. You know, respect the dead as you would respect the living.
Richard fascinating much success on this new book, and I appreciate you coming on the program.
Thanks sir, I have a wonderful day and thanks for having me on. Take care.
Richard mentioned that the book's not out yet, but you can order it. I just checked. It is available on Amazon, but if you're not an Amazon fan, you're gonna have to wait a few weeks. It just was. It was just released, so it's fresh baked. Hey, if you're enjoying Earth Ancients, Destiny and Earth Ancients Special Edition and the Archives, please consider becoming aces scriber for as little as five dollars a month. You can support the work we do here on the podcast and we have less of bills,
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It's the Patreon subscription program and for more information go to Patreon dot com, Forward slash Earth Ancients. I want to remind you we have a new program. It's called Cliff Notes and it comes out twice a week. You can hear it on the Facebook page, on Instagram, and
on YouTube. I'll talk more about it later. These are short twenty thirty minute brain dumps, including graphics, and a lot of this is having to do with some of this new technology, not just AI, but this SAR technology as well as lightar and other programs that are beginning to really open the door much more fully to the archaeological past, which are ruins and what we're studying. So check it out. It's cliff Notes, with yours truly, Cliff Dunning. Well,
what a nice guy. All right, that's it for this program. I want to think my guest today, Richard Estepp, coming to us from Colorado, and as always, the team of Gail tour Mark Foster, Infia Pavar. You guys rock all right, take care of you well and we will talk to you next time.
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