What's that at the foot of my bed. It's spooky. Hey, jooky, I'm really sure it's dead. It's coming this way. Wait a minute, Hey, I ghosted I gos Nandaz Police. Hey boo, it's me Raz and welcome to Ghosted by Raz Hernandez, the podcast where I talk to people that I like about the paranormal. Oh my god. The guest on the show today, David. That's Mulchin. He is incredible. Okay. I was recommended him by multiple sources whose taste I trust, and I've known about him. I've never met him before,
but he's constantly in movies and TV shows. And then I saw his recent film Late Night with the Devil, which is so fun and different and it's just a cool movie and he's the star of it, and I just get so excited about people doing new, different kinds of things and it's very retro and it's just cool. So check it out if you haven't seen it and you're into horror movies.
Anyway.
Turns out, yes, amazing guest for this podcast, so you will see that in just a moment. Let me read your story first. This one's from Jennifer, who writes, I moved into my current apartment in October of twenty twenty. It's a former hotel from the nineteen twenties. I live toward the back of the building and moving in. I was going in and out moving and I noticed a black veil like wavy shape at the top of the stairwell. I'm on the top floor. I thought it was a
reflection or my hair in my eyes. I dismissed it. I love that you brought this up because as a owner of a set of bangs on my forehead, this happens to me constantly where I'm like, was that some kind of ghost or was it? Do I need a trim Okay, So the next day I see it again. I dismissed it. The third day, I stood and watched it moving, then it disappeared into the ceiling. I went to my friend's house and I was like, I know it was something because I had been telling him about it.
Later on, I had a friend come over to help me hook up my cable. We were leaving and walking down the hallway to the elevator like those old pull accordion door ones.
I hate those.
My friend says, hey, you have shadow people here, and I stop dead. My head had been down and I missed it. He said that it walked from the elevator to the stairwell. Now I hadn't told this guy anything about what I had seen earlier. Later on, I would see stuff out of the corner of my eye, always in the hallway. Though. One day, going in my door, I look back to the stairwell and it looks like something is walking through it, like the lower half of a leg I saw. Next month, I have a friend
over for Thanksgiving. I go down the back stairwell to let him in. A neighbor is coming in as well. I say Happy Thanksgiving and all of that, and I said, hey, do you notice anything weird in the building? And I don't mean the people who live here. Now, I had talked to this neighbor before and we always had a jokey interaction, so to ask him with familiarity wouldn't be weird. He says, oh, you mean that black thing at the
top of the hallway. I was floored. I built an altar in my apartment and I have the Eye of Hamsa hanging on the wall across it. I had gone into my doorway and I said, I get it. You're here, please do not come in here. Thank you. A little while later, like a week or so, I'm sitting in my chair reading and it just feels lighter, the room, the air, it felt lighter, and I said thank you
out loud. I hadn't really seen anything since. I think I see things in the back stairwell near my door out of the corner of my eye, but nothing as in your face as before. Okay, well, I'm glad that that works for you, because you know of at least two other people that have also seen this thing in your hallway, so we know it's not your bangs. Very validating. I love a shade ghost that also is respectful of boundaries. Okay, let's talk to you the iconic David DEAs Mulchin and
with the show Oh my God. I am enjoined today by David Dysmulchin.
Hello, Hello, it's so good to be here with you.
Oh my god. You Okay, the first time you were recommended to me as a guest on this show, of course, I've known who you are for a minute, but the first time was Paton Oswald. He's like, you gotta get David on the show. He had a haunted doll themed party or something like that. And then another person, mutual friend slash former guest of this show, Brian Fuller, was like like, have you not had David Dismalchin on the show, And I'm like, no, I want to. And then now it's finally happening.
It's happening.
Yeah, they're both such wonderful fellas and sweet baby Brian. His nickname to me is Naughty Brian because we're part of a gaming group and Naughty Brian has a really hard time following the rules sometimes when Brian wants to win a game and we have so much fun together. And yeah, it's interesting because I think it's the monsters and fear of the dark things, or maybe are the allure of the dark things that brought us together. And now yeah, he's like a brother to me. I love him so much.
I saw him probably like I don't know, a month ago or something and he was like, telling me about the advertisements you've done for a coffin company.
Yes, yes, I've I did it at first kind of as a bit my friend Ilan Gale, who's this mastermind of all things. He's just an incredible human being. Shout out elaw Elan makes unscripted television. He writes with Mike Flanagan for his shows. He is a producer of Rockntur. I mean, he's the most knowledgeable diner I've ever known of every restaurant.
In the world.
But Elan came to me and he said, I'm working with this He does branding work as well as I'm working with this company that is like kind of struggling
to get the word out there. They make and sell caskets on the open market, and they're trying to compete with kind of the monopoly that is being held over the kind of funeral industry where when you know you're in the crisis of trying to find all the necessary elements that go along with burying someone you love, if that's the way you choose to honor them, you're often only presented with a very limited number of options, and they go, well, there's the you know, if you kind
of liked your your person that died, here's a six thousand dollars option, and if you really liked him, there's ten thousand.
If you loved him, here's the fifteen. And it's just this.
Wildly inflated, totally monopolized market and so I said, well, that sounds cool because the company that I that I started working with through along Titan caskets, they were selling them twenty five hundred three thousand dollars and they would also ship them anywhere you needed, and they're just these wonderful,
lovely people. Well, that evolved and grew and I just was like, it became from this like kind of silly fun way of spreading a good word about things to me, wanting to talk more openly and candidly and with both reverence, irreverence, humor, and you know, somber approaches the whole notion that we're all going. I mean, it's one of the only things that all of us have in common. Not everybody can claim that like everyone of us says, oh love, it
is same wepping. I don't think everybody necessarily needs to or falls in love in this lifetime, but one thing everybody does do is expire, and we just don't.
Talk about it.
And the people who do get out there and talk about it tend to be really problematic. And so Elan was like, what do you think about laying in a casket next to another casket with one of our mutual friends and just talking. And so we've been doing that and it's on Instagram. It's called Grave Conversations. And maybe you'll come be a guest with me at some point.
Oh my god, I would be honored.
Okay, great.
I love talking about death. We talk about it all the time here on this podcast.
It's an important conversation.
What's the the Haunted Doll? You had a party that was Haunted Doll themed or something?
I host a gathering around Sam Hayne every year.
Are you a witch?
I kind of don't take any label. I practice an openness to the magic of the universe, and I believe in higher power, and I believe that like things are conducted and exist through both manifest station of integration between the physical and the intellectual and the spiritual realms.
Although I'm just so.
Right now, only here's the only thing I believe in right now, at forty eight years old, after almost an entire lifetime dedicated to trying to dissect and understand this stuff, there's one thing I believe. There is a power that is greater than myself that can do for me what I cannot do for myself. That's where I've landed right now. Do I personally believe in ghosts most of the time, I really want to. I feel like I've had interactions
and experiences with things. Do I believe in the power of magic the way that certain people define magic absolutely, the way other people define it, I don't think. So it's really interesting. It's a really beautiful complex soup, and I think obviously we could get into this during our conversation today. But I'm just learning so much, and I'm surrounded by some really powerful witches and oh my god,
ritualists and even religious people. I'm kind of just observing everybody right now and seeing how their lives are existing and watching how incredible it is that the universe can find such specific ways to communicate with each of us, as opposed to like the blanket binary that I was raised with, which was there is one way, this is the way. If you don't do the way, then you go that way and you better watch the f out.
Oh what a horrible way to approach the mystery of this beautiful, incredible space that we all get to share. So I just like, oh man, I'm doing so much work on it. But the celebration around Halloween. As a little boy, I had a lot of fear. It was
really scared, really kind of combative household. A lot of love, which is confusing when there's a lot of love mixed with a lot of like conflict and you know, emotional psychic sometimes physical violence, but love and then really like heavy duty dogmatic religiosity and what kind I was raised in an intensely like evangelical community and belief system. That was, you know, this is the way you make this allegiance
and if you don't, you burn. And to me, that was I think the initial emotional attachment wound that I probably suffered at the youngest age when I came to the realization that there was this that was It wasn't a realization I was told. I was led to believe that there was this power that loved me so much it would do anything for me, but if I didn't do things the way it wanted to, or if I failed in some way, I would be then cast into
this eternal kind of void of suffering. And I thought, what, I don't think I was as conscious of it then as I grew to become it was that mixed just like a when you have parents, Like so many people, my parents loved me, but they also absolutely emotion and even physically abandoned me at times when I needed them the most. And so, as a little boy, because Halloween, horror, ghosts,
and monsters, witchcraft, et cetera. Were so maligned in my household, they were considered gateways into the path to hell, I
was always drawn to the monsters. I was always I had this special love in my heart for the artistry, the craftsmanship, the way that they were manifested in historical and contemporary art and film and comic books and masks that I would see at the woolworst of the Montgomery Wards around Halloween time, and I started to accumulate my own little boxes of Halloween stuff, and it was kind of much to my family chagrin that I would like decorate the front porch by myself and make content houses
in the basement and go on explorations. I'd read every book at my school in public library about ghosts and the lore of ghosts and mythology and even movie things like those books about monsters.
In the movies. I was so into that stuff.
And then as an adult, I wonder, I've been thinking about this a lot, like I've been writing a lot of letters to like seven eight nine year old David and just being like, hey, you know what's kind of cool. I'm forty eight and I still love Halloween, and there was nothing wrong with you loving that stuff. And by the way, I throw the most kick ass party ever, and you're with me there every year helping me decorate.
The word party.
I feel tricky, more of a celebration because I'm sober. I serve alcohol, and you know, I always try and set up a nice bar and like food and stuff. But it's not like it's definitely not a rager. It's not really a dance party. It's an experience where I incorporate magic and storytelling and kind of interactive, immersive hopefully for people.
That like that sort of thing magic.
And each year there's a different theme. We held a really powerful stance. One year we held a really amazing kind of interaction with ideas about uphology, and and one year, as Paton pointed out to you, I think he skipped it because they were a little scared.
I don't remember now. I have to look back.
My wife, Eve, who celebrates as intensely as I do. She at one point wanted to buy oh a cursed supposedly cursed weediboard off of like eBay, and I was like, I'm not comfortable with that. I think we shouldn't mess around just because if it has bad energy. I still whatever our belief is, I don't want to. I don't like bringing the idea of bad energy into the house.
But was in Germany and I found this doll that immediately had some kind of presence to it, and see it just felt like there was something off about the doll. And then of course she could be like, well, you're getting this cursed doll. I was like, well, I don't know. I brought it home back to the States. Immediately we started to have kind of odd energy around it, experiences around it, and so I brought in someone for one of the gatherings to do kind of a I guess
like a blessing or a cleansing of the doll. It didn't go great because then like the speakers fritzed out and like went into like high pitched like feedback. Everybody's ears kind of got hurt. The doll didn't seem to really want cleansing. The doll is no longer my home.
Wait wait, wait, what was happening with the doll to begin.
With, well, I don't know, you know how you know what it's like. It's so like people always roll their eyes and raise their eyebrows and sigh heavily when you say things like it was an energy. It felt weird, but like it felt like my kids on several occasions, who at that point were extra young. Now they're ten and seven. I think my kids were like four and
maybe four and seven at that point. We're like, the doll was, you know, saying stuff to me and I don't but I couldn't understand it, and I felt like at one point it was an implication that it almost sounded like a different language with them, which then freaked me out because I was like, oh, I did get this doll in Berlin, and then I was trying to research, like do like Google image searches to figure out like where this doll had actually come from, and because it
was like a thrift store that I found it, you know, it's just some crazy like side of the road in Berlin, you know, discovery. But they were and I trust my kids intuitions too, when they're like this this is I don't like this. It's like okay, all right, well we'll cleanse this thing. Well, we'll try.
I believe in that. I believe in the power of cleansing.
It's such a beautiful like you could you could you could say, you know, a shaman with the power of energy fields can cleanse or eck art Toole's like ideas behind just intentional cleansing, regardless of how you want to break it down scientifically. When I walk through a space and I put that intention and even maybe use some medicinal elements if it's burning herbs or if it's doing you know, anything ritualistic, it's just cleansing. So didn't seem
to work. Got rid of the doll, have had some fun.
Wait, so you just how did you get You just gave it to someone or threw it away or something.
This woman who came who I had found through somebody, I have to look back, but she had like an experience in like folklore and mythology, and you know she was was it was kind of tongue in cheek, you know, like I've got these like cleansing rituals and I will read this for you guys and give a little mini lecture on objects and the power of objects and belief systems and I mean, you tell anybody the power of objects and belief systems, especially when it comes to the
supernatural and things that are, you know, beyond the veil. You know, people maybe laugh at folks like you and me who really like think.
About this stuff a lot.
But I'm like, there's millions of people that will and I'm not mocking them at all. I think that there's a power in it that hold a rosary and feel an incredible amount of total spiritual power. There's people that keep the you know, the the the collar from the pet that was gone and that pet is still with them, and there's power and objects there is you know, what is Freud say?
What does Mary Shelley say? I don't know.
I think everybody has a cool opinion about this stuff.
What happened when you did the seance? You were talking about like, who were you contacting the seance?
It was we were contacting any one present. Because the house that we own only one family lived in it. I don't know who or if anyone passed in the house, but in just the surrounding area, the space we've always felt there there were presences and I feel a positive energy, energetic presence in the house.
That I live in.
It's it's in Los Angeles, and it's a strange house. It's kind of you feel like Aleister Crowley would have liked this house. The design, the layout of it's very It seems at some points like they were just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what's stuck, and other times like this seems wildly intentional, like this strange angle,
this strange archway, whatever. But I just love it because it's so unique and it always makes you feel like you're looking at a space that wasn't approached with any forms of cookie cutter, which is how I like to look at most things life.
Anything.
Damn.
So we had this, say as a friend of mine who had good experience, it was tricky because we didn't get to you can't follow all the rules when you've got seventy people up in the upper like balcony looking down and people gathered around and there was I want to say eight or a dozen of us at the table,
you know, participating in the in the sands. And it was done in a style that I'd never seen before experienced with a pendulum which went all the way up to the third floor and came down and it was perfectly still.
Oh wow.
And the questions that began as as simple things, you know, oh man, I can't, like, are you someone with us this evening? And Dad, and you know, the movement in this pendulum was so awesome and so exciting, and everything was going pretty well. And at one point, and I think it was just so crowded in the dining room
in the area around. We had like plastic fake candles for decoration that went like on each of the windows of each of the levels of the home, which were a pain in the ass to get into their places. And I wondered if it's because so many people were like leaned up against that wall or something. But so at one point and people had said to me, I don't I'd like to leave, or I.
Don't think you should do this.
So there's all there's already this tension in this space. So I was like, guys, relax, we're not inviting negativity in here. We're just we're communicating. But a candle fell from the third floor window and it caused such a ruckus people scattered. The energy was broken, the connection was broken, and that was that wow. And I was like, sorry, I don't you.
Know, well, like some people would be like, now you're opening up but poured, or like you know, you're opening the doors to the ghosts and the house coming through. Like did was that the case for you?
There was a couple of people who pulled me aside very seriously, and I didn't you know, I took them serious.
I listened to them. I said, thank you.
For your input. I appreciate it. I I feel comfortable with you know. That's like saying this might sound like a weird thing to say, but it's like, I don't just bring strangers in off the street into my home.
Yeah, but if I did, out.
Of a million strangers walking past my house, if I just were to open the door every time a stranger walk, I was like, hey, come in for five minutes. Out of a million of them, pray, nine hundred ninety nine thousand, nine and ninety nine of them, I would have like some kind of interesting conversation with their human beings that just are existing on this very difficult plane of existence
called trying to be a person. Now, maybe one in a million of them is a complete, utter, sociopathic psychopath that I would never want in my home. And like, I feel pretty good about my vibe check that I would sense that as they're walking up the driveway and be like, you know, what a wrong person.
I thought you were somebody else. Go ahead. Yeah, So that's kind of how I feel about it.
So many people are just so convinced that it's demons, you know, and I think it comes from religion where people think like there's basically God and angels and saints and stuff like that, but then anything else is just a demon.
Well, if you're a ghost, that means you're not in heaven, and if you're not in heaven, then you're and you're not in hell like humans according to you know, the principles of certain dogma would say you're either in purgatory, which means you're not allow you're not a wandering earth, then you're in hell or you're in heaven. So if you're not in one of those places, if you're wandering earth,
then you must be. And it's interesting to me that you know, exorcism, law and mythology and demonology, you know, it's it's all to me a really incredible, fantastic, mythological, beautiful, folkloric way of us trying to grapple with the pain, the baffling the insidious nature of how our bodies, minds, and even if you so believe spirits interact when in crises.
I think it's really sad to think about the number of people historically who wrestled with some form of you know, mental illness combined with physical ailment, combined with some kind of you know, spiritual crises, probably instigated by either early childhood trauma or brain you know, disorders that were you know, thrust into the designated role of possess. I've been thinking about that a lot lately, because I think so it's interesting.
We always see in stories and movies it's like, then you bring in the religious person who has the religious power to cast out the thing, but they never really do, do they. It always continues to like, you know, move on.
And that's not to say that if somebody was suffering that I wouldn't absolutely want to enlist the power of prayer from someone who believes in the power of asking a higher power, asking a loving God to like, you know, intervene in whatever way is possible, because it's all beyond our understanding. You know, our brains will never be able to rationalize or understand how all of this stuff really works, but I certainly wouldn't want to put that upon some
poor child, you know, wrestling with that. And I think it's been an easy way for thousands of years for us to look at the gross, embarrassing, darker, self centered, self pitying natures that exist within us because we're so scared and we're trying to keep ourselves safe, and we do behaviors sometimes that are utterly unreasonable and embarrassing, and we go, oh my god, I cannot believe I acted
like that. Well, part of you acted that way because you're trying to keep yourself safe, because there's a part of you that's still a little kid inside who's afraid of so many things. But it's so much easier to go the devil.
The devil.
Well, and so many times too, I think it's like, oh, people just had a different interest than everyone else, or they looked at things a different way or whatever, and it's like, well, then you're possessed your demon Burnham.
Oh well, sure, think about witches. Think about the history of witches. I am. I've been, you know, self promotion time. I've been writing a comic book I'm very proud of for many years called Count Crowley, and it's about a woman who wants to be a legitimate news broadcaster, but she In nineteen eighty three, she gets assaulted by like the lead anchor on a news program, and no one believes her because he's the like, the shining star of
the network and she is an alcoholic. So she goes back to her hometown in Missouri, which is near where I'm from, and she's just like so depressed, drinks herself nearly to death, and her brother runs this little small town station where their parents used to run it, and the only job he can get her employed on is as a late night horror host, which for me were kind of gateway into my love of horror. We had
one in Kansas City where I grew up. But anyway, my character Jerry, she does it reluctantly because she's going to get evicted, and she gets wasted, and she puts on this makeup and she shows up as Count Crowley. I know you're not probably showing this, but for you to see, that's what she looks like. And she ends up fighting out that the person she replaced who used to be the horror host was actually one of the world's last monster hunters, and I grew up reading and
loving these old monster hunter magazines and comic books. But I thought about it, and I was like women who take on the system, women you know, historically who would have been considered like the heroes of their time, fighting against the true, you know, evil, because we see it
in our time. We see people that to me are the bad monsters taking strong positions of power in our government and our in our society, and they're wielding that power to maintain authority and control over others that they would choose to marginalize and wound in some sick kind of feeding upon their own, you know, unrelenting quest to
control everything. And so a woman historically who would stand up and make that, you know, make that battle was it was so easy to go, oh my god, she's she's a witch, or if she was even unbridling her own sexuality. Let's say, at a time when and it's still dangerous for so many people to do that, whatever their gender they would be. You know, it's wild. They put them in a chair, strap them into the thing, and dip them in the river. Let's see if they can breathe underwater.
Wild.
Well, yeah, and I think about all of that all the time. I think about the mental illness, you know, side of it, where it's like the all these times where we, yeah, we didn't have the research and technology and and doctors didn't have the training and understanding of different any kind of differences where they just would blame
it on, blame it on the devil, the devil, the devil. Well, I also think with like mental health stuff ghosts, Like I wonder how many of them if they just like went to therapy, if they had it when they were alive, if they would like get over that lover that they wander the hallways searching for after all these years or whatever. But it's like people didn't do that.
You know what, that's a great idea for a show where there's a therapist for the afterlife. There's a therapist for those ghosts to really help them, you know. I mean, I guess medium she kind of tried to do that, you know.
I mean, I'm a sober person and I'm a therapy person. I'm not a trained none of that, but I've dealt with a lot of it in my own life, and when I do go ghost hunting sometimes I apply some of that to you know, trying to understand what's going on here. I don't know. I think it's a good way to look at it.
Have you ever considered I sometimes think about you know, there's lore that was discussed in a lot of some of the cinema that we got from like Japan, say, in the nineties, and it opened my eyes to thinking more about ways in which poltergeist activity isn't necessarily even just like the resurrected spirits, say of some angry First Nations person whose grave was you know, mishandled, which is kind of a trope at this point, but I think about, like, what about like the person who was hit by a
car and there's this echoing reverberation of that.
They just the trauma of that, Because trauma.
Is at the root of all of our If anybody's been in therapy, anybody who struggled with addiction, anybody who struggled as a human being, we all, all of us carry trauma, and we just get into the game of like justding ourselves because well, oh, my tea is little tea. It's not as big as their tea. Their tea is so much bigger. So how am I suffering so much? Like, who gives a crap? You guys, we all carry it with us. So imagine wham, just hit by a car
out of nowhere and you're gone. That trauma of that moment, like reverberating echoing in a space. There's elements of physics, particles, you know, the atomic relativity, things that we just can't even begin to think about or understand. There's there's how many thousands of conic colors that our eyes don't even see, So like what if that is the reverberation of that
and it would know? How powerful could it be someone like yourself who can find some way of connecting with that, that person's echo that's still there, like experiencing that trauma and being able to help like ease that.
That's to me, that's really beautiful.
Well yeah, I mean there's a lot of things we can't see. Doesn't mean they're not there at all times. Like I can't see the internet, like working, Like I can see the results of it, but like I don't know, like I can't see you can't see certain I can't see germs, right, but they're there.
I love that argument when people try to say to me, like there's never you can't you can't explain the unexplained or whatever, And I go, Okay, I'm going to give you five minutes. I want you to explain to me how television works. Seriously, I don't explain that to me because I've heard things. I've seen things that I can't explain. So if you're telling me that they can't be rolled, and just please please, with our very capable brains, explain
to me how the internet freaking works? How is my cell phone work?
But you know what, I love not knowing like I love just I love especially the unknown. The all of this kind of stuff is so fun for me to just if I had the answers. First of all, I wouldn't have a podcast. It would be so boring. We would know everything, you know, it's keeping me in business not knowing everything. Yes, wait, I have to talk to you about Late Night with the Devil.
Ooh.
I love this movie. Thank you, And if anyone listening has not seen it, oh my god. First of all, your performance is.
Incredible, thank you.
And it's just such a different kind of movie. It's fun, it looks cool, it's scary. It's just like everything I love. I love aesthetics and colors and then also spooky and just ugh, it's such a me movie. I love it.
To me the movie. Thank you for saying that.
By the way, I really appreciate this, and I appreciate the shout out and the plug too. So I do hope anyone who is a fan of yours will now take your lead and go and give this movie a chance. It's called Late Night with the Devils, written and directed by two brothers who are Australian named Colin and Cameron Karen's and the Karens brothers grew up just like me, obsessed with late night horror hosts and late night talk show.
Well I wasn't as obsessed with late night talk shows as I was with just like classic horror cinema, eighties cinema that was, you know, from the likes of John Carpenter or David Cronenberg or any of these you know,
awesome filmmakers we had at that time, Toby Hooper. So they write this film about a guy who's, you know, the host of late night talk show and he's in second place to Carson and he's going to get canceled because he's just getting clobbered by you know, a ratings loss, and he's recently widowed in the last year, and he's this guy just has never processed any of the going back to the trauma, Like he's never processed the trauma of losing the love of his life, of his fumbling career,
of the fact that he has to be mister happy and charming guy in front of the national audience every night while behind the scenes he's drinking himself and stressing and overworking himself to an early grave. So to me, when I've read the script, I was like, Oh, I can latch on all that stuff because I know psychologically, emotionally how all of that stuff can feel. Now it's Halloween Night, nineteen seventy seven. The show is going to
be canceled any second. So in order to try and resurrect his show, he brings on this young woman and the doctor who's been caring for her, who he has started to develop feelings for. And this young girl was recently rescued from a ritualistic cult and it is believed she believes that she's possessed by a demon. And so his hope is that things will go bananas. Maybe he can even have an exorcism on live TV and it
will goose his ratings. And I love that notion of the script too, because I've definitely done things in my life, whether it was career wise or even just relationship wise, where I've bent the little calibration on my ethical compass just a smidge because I thought that the ultimate goal was worth it, right, Like, well, if I can make
this good thing happen, then maybe it's okay. If I just just in my compass a little bit, Wow, it never goes well, and it certainly doesn't in the movie, and I think it it's just like what we were talking about, that meeting point between fractured psychees, untreated trauma, emotional dysregulation, and the way in which psychic energy and manifestations can just erupt. And I really loved getting to make the film. I'm so glad you liked it.
Ah, Yes, And I'm I'm also such a huge fan of well sixties and seventies, like paranormal studies and like it's definitely the era of like parapsychology and ESP and all of this, the warrens Adam Lorraine Warren and anyway, now when you're doing this kind of movie, of course you hear these stories, weird things are happening on set or did any of that that happen.
I had two incidents that were tricky for me, and it was really fun. I didn't ever feel in danger, one of which I just want to attribute to good acting, because I would never want to put it out there into the interspheres that she would be that she was possessed, because she's a wonderfully sound minded young actor out of Australia named Ingridterrelli, who plays Lily, the girl who is supposedly possessed in the film.
We shot.
This is a This is like a Friends and Family Productions, very small production. We were on a little stage in Australia in Melbourne called Docklins, and there was little we didn't have, like trailers or these little dressing room areas that were kind of off the stage. It was like doing a play, to be honest, which is something I loved about it as an actor.
But I was walking past.
I would go say hi to everybody in the morning, and you know, after you've done hair and makeup and you're just getting ready to start, and I'm walking down the hall and I walked past the Lily's room, her doors open, and I went to say hi to her, and she was staring at herself in the mirror, and I got this like perspective as she's like staring at herself, getting herself into character for this this possessed young woman,
and it sent chills down my spec. She had no she didn't hear me, and she didn't have any awareness of my presence, and it scared me so bad. I really like, it gave me the chills. And then we're shooting a sequence where there's a lot of cool, very old school, rudimentary special effects tools at play. We did this film again with not a lot of money, very little money in fact, and so most of the things
we did we did practically. And there's a moment where like a table starts shaking and some glasses explode, and this is all done with little motors and little remote controls, and it's very fun, you know, it's like old school filmmaking. So while that's happening, my character is really supposed to be taking in his environment and being like this this wasn't are these are like did we do this? Did we plan this little thing? Or is this like or
is this actually really happening, So it starts happening. But in addition to the loud noise of the table rattling and the theorem and player making noise the walls of the stage in the are areas where there's no hallways. So there's areas around this stage where there are no hallways. This is literally just the edge of the wall of the stage, which are all soundproofed. It sounded like I don't know how I can recreate it where I am right now, but like like things were shaking out in
the outer realm. It happened once, and I will always wonder if they found some way to mess with me, to like go bang on things, because I asked, and they genuinely seemed to be that. People were like, I don't think did anybody hear anything? I was like, did you guys hear that?
That was really scary?
So I don't know, I don't know, I don't need to know. All I know is that I had a blast. I felt completely safe making that movie, and I mean safe not in a supernatural way, but in an emotional, like psychological wake. The character he had to go to some really dark places, and when you're with people making films, who approach it with so much love and consideration and create a real safety net you can just jump into it. It was such a great experience. I'm so happy. I'm
so proud that people seem to really dig it. It means so much that you liked it.
Thank you.
Yeah, you should be proud anytime people are just like doing things different. Oh my favorite. You know, it's like a completely original It's it's just a beautiful, a beautiful thing to see and I want everyone to see that movie.
Thank you.
It's funny because like I feel like it's the devil whenever the Devil is mentioned in these movies. That's why I ask if anything happened on set, because it seems like I feel like the people I've talked to that have done movies that are about a haunted house, like it's not really that, but it's like it's anytime it's a possession movie or whatever, there's like a couple of
weird little things that will happen. So I'm taking your stories and saying, yes, there was some weirdness, but nothing too bad.
Thank you. I choose to believe.
Have you ever seen a ghost or you know, had an experience where you're like, I'm that's a ghost.
When I was eleven going twelve, coming out of like a really tumultuous divorce that my parents had, and it was really really dark.
I was.
I was deep in the throes of my first very long battle with depression, suicidal, ideation, isolation. I was, like I said, raised very religiously, and I was struggling with that relationship with concepts of spirituality. My sexuality was beginning to you know, really grow. I was on the verge of puberty, and I was definitely told by like a religious counselor that my thoughts of suicide were probably tough.
I do the fact that I was having, you know, sexual fantasies or masturbating and just all kinds of real problematic stuff was being plumped into my brain while at the same time I was doing my own dabbling with the occult and trying to learn about stuff that I found really fascinating, and it all kind of cal It was really interesting with this little house in South Kansas City where there was like six people living there, including siblings and parents, and then within a very short time
amount of time, it's just like me and my mom and there's me and my mom and my sister, because my sister got really sick and needed to be home. So you have a very sick sibling, very dark house, windows are all closed up. You know, I'm in deep depression, and I was really wrestling with insomnia, deep insomnia. I really had like one friend, and my mother was you know, very religious, but also a bit unavailable in ways that I would have been helpful at that time. And I
had no relationship with my father at that point. So all this to say, I give you this lead up because I think any psychiatric psychologist, counselor listening would be able to go, well, this is why these things happen. I wonder often if it's a marriage between of course, the psychological and the hormonal and the things that were going on with me meeting something else and I don't know what it is, and I will never know what it is, and maybe even when I die, I'll never
get to know what it was. But I started hearing conversational, very whispery voices late at night. I was having auditory experiences where I was hearing things. I for a long time believed that my radio turned to certain dials would help me tune into extraterrestrial life based on something that I'd read at one point, so I would turn on radio late late at night and then turned way to the far right dial and just like lay there and hope for listening for something. And maybe I was just
hoping and my imagination was hearing these voices. But what would happen is these soft, soft voices. I would lean in and lean in and lean in, and then all of a sudden the screen would would ring out, Oh God, but it would scare the crap out of me, and
I couldn't sleep. And then I started hearing footsteps coming up and I was sleeping in an attic at that point, coming up and down the stairs to my attic, and then I would go and check, and the next day ask my mom, you know what was going on last night, and then she would say nothing, it's sleep. And at one point I came home and my mom was mad and frustrated. I was like, what, and she thought I had done it. I know I had not done it.
I don't know who else could have done it, but someone had pulled all the drawers out of the bathroom that was like at the bottom of those stairs that then led to where my mom's room, and my mom and my sister were sleeping in the same room because my mom was taking care of my sister. At that point, the running up and down the stairs got more and more intense, the sounds got more intense. Was it my little self grappling with my first severe anxiety and panic attacks?
I don't know what was it. I don't know visually, I never saw anything, but I do know that I came down I finally fell asleep one night, I got a very good night's sleep for the first time in a very long time. And by the way, this is while I was preparing for my first like serious contemplative attempt on my life, and I was really thinking I
was going to do it like that week. And I came downstairs and my mom, my sister and I hadn't my sister hadn't really left her bed in a while, but they were sitting in the living room with someone a friend of my mom's was very religious from church, and they were very upset, And I said, what's going on. I thought maybe they'd found my note, but they said, do you remember last night? And I said no, And
apparently in like a complete glazed over fog. I had walked throughout the house not responded to anybody, like sleepwalked.
I guess you would say, if you're a scientist, in a.
Way that really creeped everybody out. And then I went back to bed and fell asleep, and whatever it was that they saw, it freaked them out. So then of course they go go in my room and they find all this stuff that I've been like looking at, and so then they did like a whole like blessing over my room, and dah dah da da da. I looking back at that kid, I wish a that he'd been listened to a lot more, and I wish that he had been taken to like a really good therapist. I
feel like that could have had a huge impact. And I think that anybody who's listening to this, whether you're forty eight like me, or you're twelve, or maybe there's a twelve year old or a nine year old in your life that is struggling and you just don't know how to reach out to them, but you know their behavior is changing and it seems like they're in darkness.
Whatever your belief system, whatever your faith, whatever your family of origins, traditions are there's great powers spiritually as well as medically in getting them to talk to a professional. And I really wish that that had happened for me at that point, but it didn't, and I survive, and here I am today to live to tell.
Have you sleepwalked?
Since then, I have never sleepwalked. I've had some interesting verbal moments where my wife dreads this story.
Scares are so bad.
But one time I sat up, I guess, and I said, she's there.
She's in the corner. There she is.
I woke up and my wife, who's very tiny, teeny tiny, she was like crouched like a little chinchilla on the pillow next to my head. I was like, what are you doing there? She was like, no, no, no.
That is very scary. What about sleep paralysis? Is that a thing?
I've not wrestled with sleep paralysis? But as a little boy I had this. I've always been obsessed with the concept of infinity, and I was always really scared of infinity since I was very small, and I used to have this reoccurring vision late at night when I was
very little. I would lay on my back and I would see what looked like this giant meat ball spinning above my bed, and it was like to me, it felt like it was eternity, the concept of eternity, which has always been so overwhelming for me that I can't even think about it now at forty eight without getting a bit of a headache or like feeling a little sick to my stomach, because it's just so overwhelming. It's
so hard for my tiny brain to comprehend it. But I've known a few people who have struggled with sleep paralysis and shadow people because I was I spent I'm twenty two years dry. I've kind of stopped saying twenty two years sober. I stopped shooting up and drinking twenty two years ago. I have had numerous emotional relapses, so I don't think I've behaved necessarily like a sober person these past twenty two years. But I certainly haven't used
you know, heroin or alcohol, which is thank goodness. But when I was using heroine at one point, I was experimenting with speed and doing speedballs and kind of going into you know, darker corners of the Midwest where meth was starting to really rise in the early two thousands, and I interacted with a number of people who had lots of stories about the shadow people, and I felt like there was times when I'd been sleepless for a day or two and I could see them, you know,
out in the woods around whatever creepy house I was using at. I think that that's I don't know what it is.
I don't know. Is it alien research? Is it you know?
Is it ourselves that is we're so out of touch with our own souls in those moments of you know, self abuse, drugs, just destruction, that like our souls trying to reach out to us. Is it our higher self that's so disconnected from us? Is it our ego? Is it our shadow like a Freudian shadow, it's come to life now and is out to like just wreck destruction. I don't know, but it scares the crap out of me.
I think it could be any of those things, because I think about that too. I'm I'm nine years yeah, and I guess. I mean, I always just say sober because it's easiest. But yeah, I totally get what you're saying about all that.
Oh boy, I mean I have been on some benders and I didn't pick up a drug to save my life, but boy, oh yeah, there's people who've been in who love me, who are like, oh, that guy was a monster because I wasn't working the prob I wasn't doing what I needed to be doing.
Totally no me and the the Krispy Kreme, those people are like, uh, oh, she needs to talk to someone. Anyway. When I think about that darkness and the people place the things that I was surrounded by in those dark times, like, yeah, I feel like I was kind of like an empty shell of a person or whatever, and like not connected to the spiritual side of me. And I can see how darkness is attracted to darkness, and yeah, could it be my shadow has left my body or my soul
is leaving my body or floating around? I mean, it doesn't feel very closely tethered when you're in those moments, and who knows what kind of weird other worldly things can happen. Yeah, and you could. It's very easy to go, oh, well, it's just you're on drugs, so it's not like real.
I think. I think that, like, especially when people are doing drugs or drinking or whatever, your your inhibitions are lowered obviously, and you're you're not focused on all the things in life that we're always thinking about, much like how animals and children, they say, are a lot of times closer to the other side, are more open to the other side. They're not focusing on all these other things that we're focused on, And I think we're in a more state of openness or something like that.
I agree.
I think there are countless ways to lift the veil. Two of the most prolific throughout human history have been either one inebriation or be kind of like a monastic
real intentionality and anyone who's curious. I found a lot of magic and inspiration in a book called The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Costeneda, about a researcher who goes to work with the First Nation's medicine man shaman, who teaches him the way of the payote and the way of all of these incredible, you know resources the Earth has given us to try and you know, tap into the other And at a certain point, this very you know, academic, scholarly guy who's gone down this credible
rabbit hole of astral projection and telekinesis and all kinds of magical, wonderful stuff realizes that his guru isn't taking anything. It is a discipline, you know, and it's it's kind of it's kind of fascinating.
But yeah, and I and I agree with you.
I think that the children element too is really it's really fascinating.
I remember my my sister.
My nephew miraculously beat cancer when he's two years old. But he used to have to go to the hospital and he would get treatments and you know, da, da da, And he woke up one night and said that he had seen this girl who came to check on him, and he wondered how she was doing, a girl that he had been at the hospital with and she had passed. It really moved my sister and my sister, by the way, after my mother, my mother passed and I got lots
of little signs. And again psychologists and scientists listening to me right now will go, well, that's because you're looking. When you're looking for signs, you're going to see the science. And I say, okay, that doesn't dissuade them from my truth. My mom loved yellow butterflies, and right after she passed away,
I was inundated with yellow butterflies everywhere I went. I felt like one almost saved my life, and my sister started to really have connections to the other side because both of us, in fact, I think most of the people in my family reached a point where we had to be liberated from the chains of spiritual belief systems that we were indoctrinated to believe that had really held us back. And she literally heard a voice saying like, let go, you can let go of all that crap.
And she's one of the most spiritual people I know.
You know, I'm looking at the time, this just flew by. I had some real silly, dumb stuff that we could have done, but we didn't have to get to any of it because this has been so amazing.
Well, thank you.
I'm honored.
I'm honored because you care about this subject in a way that means a lot to me. I know there's a lot of approaches to this stuff, and I mostly work with people in the entertainment side of things, which
I love. I love talking about ghosts and the supernatural and monsters from the realm of how do we entertain people and how can we I even have my own company, Good Feeing Films, where we're trying to like utilize spooky stories and ghost stories and supernatural stories and mythology just as a form of entertaining people through which we can.
Tell meaningful stories.
But when someone wants to really get down and talk about, like the real.
Stuff, I get very excited.
So I was very honored that you wanted me to come and shoot the breeze with you, and I hope I didn't bore your listeners, and I hope I didn't bore you. I know I can be a gab fest sometimes, but this is a subject that I just think is so cool.
Now. You make my job real easy. I could listen to you talk about this stuff for hours, and I hope one of these days you'll come back and we can get into more of those because we have a lot to talk about. We didn't even get to aliens, we didn't get to know Bigfoot, we didn't talk about psychics.
I love it.
I mean, there's a lot I have a.
Lot of friends in this in the community as well. It would be fun if you ever want to do a round table or we should do it get together at some point. I mean, I think my friend Zach and Alex twin Temple, they they really are the people that know the most about magic of anybody I know, and I think they're fascinating.
The musicians, yes, yes, Twin Temple, I know them, aren't they amazing? Or I don't know them personally, but they're really cool.
They're so cool.
Yeah, I have a I call it my our coven, but really we just get together and play like board games and it's like the Boulets and.
You know, Twin Temple and.
Some of our spooky goffe friends Ed Brian and more, people that are so cool. But I like, I love it because I think if any of my neighbors see, like, who's coming into my house, they're probably like, what crazy Satanic orgy or the Desmulchions up to tonight And we're in there, you know, playing like some very sophisticated, weird version of battleship with like.
No you did not think mine. It's like quite a bunch of nerds. I love it.
I love that. I love spooky weirdos, especially when you find out that they're like not that spooky. That's like my favorite thing. Hey, where do you want people to find you? And you know, what do you want them to see? Tell them? Oh?
Thanks?
I try to share information about things I'm working on at my Instagram page, which is at desk Mulchin, so it's just my last name. I have Count Crowley currently in publication from dark Horse. If you like monsters and all Manner of the Supernatural. That's a really beautiful comic that I'm very proud of. This summer, we launch a new comic that I've created called Nights Versus Samurai from Image. Super excited about that. I'm making a couple of other
announcements at San Diego Comic Con. I have Late Night with the Devil, which is currently streaming. And yeah, I just I hope that I can come back and talk to you again and that our paths cross somewhere out on some investigation somewhere. It'd be really fun.
Yes, all right, Well, thank you so nice meeting you. Thank you, Thank you so much. To David Desmalchin. I definitely want to have him back on this podcast at some point. Oh my god, he's so cool. Anyway, Hey, thanks for listening. Make sure you you know Greatest five Stars, Tell your friends about the show, follow us on social media, all that kind of stuff. I love you all, both living and dead. But if I didn't ask you to haunt me, don't haunt me came back. This has been
an exactly right production. Want to share your paranormal experience on the podcast. I read stories out loud and sometimes I'll even call you, So email me at ghosted by Roz at gmail dot com. You can send a DM or voice message to the show's Instagram at ghosted by Roz. Give us a follow while you're there, and follow me Roz on Instagram at Roz Hernandez and on TikTok and Twitter at It's Roz Hernandez. My senior producer is the
Startling Jiha Lee. Associate producer is the alarming Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed and sound designed by the Eerie Edson Choi. My guest booker is the Petrifying Patrick Kuttner. Additional production support from the hair Raising Hannah Kyle Crichton. My theme music is by the spine Chilling Brendan Lynch Salomon. Artwork by the Spooky Vanessa Lilac, Photography by the Terrifying
Elizabeth Karen. Executive produced by the Chilling Karen Kilgareth, the Spookky, Georgia, Hard Start, and the Frightening Danielle Kramer,