What's that.
Spooky?
I'm really sure it's dead. It's coming this way. Wait a minute, I said by Ross jess p Hey boo, it's me Ross, who'd you think it was? I am back talking to John E. L. Tenny for the second half of our recent conversation and this episode today we get some stories. We get a story that is unlike any that we have had even remotely close to yet, and I'm thrilled to you'll know what I'm talking about. We'll get into that later. One thing that we didn't get to was evp's and so I thought I would
play them for you in this intro today. I I've been having a lot of fun with EVPs. I was. I made a video on my Patreon Patreon dot com slash raws dres Vales. The video is okay. So in my years of looking at EVPs posted on YouTube, I find some that crack me up. But they're just like vulgar and just not I never know with my guests, like I don't I don't wanna like offend any I don't want to offend my guests that are coming on.
I don't wanna Sometimes they're just like nasty. So anyway, I made a video that is me listening to some of the the nastier ones that I have found on YouTube. I just kind of I made like a note in my computer, a note app, little file whatever, and just like every time I find one that's it's just like bitch.
Like.
I don't know something like that, I just put it in this file and so I just made a video of it. Anyway, That's not what we're going to listen to right now. Right now, we are going to listen to two EVPs that we're posted by Peach twenty five Web on YouTube, and these were taken at the Trans
Allegheny Asylum, which is in Western Virginia. I have talked about this place a couple of times on the show, and I believe I've talked about it with Katrina Weidman, and I think I've delved into the history of it and some of the hauntings around there. And Peach twenty five Web found a couple of EVPs that I think are pretty good. So let's play. I'll give you some options and you can tell me what you hear, all right. This first one was recorded in the doctor's office of
the Trans Alleghany Asylum. What's it saying? Okay, Na, Na, gonna let me play it again?
No, Conda?
What do you think? Is it a Norman calm down? B normal condoms? I don't I don't know.
Is it C.
No thanks come again? Or D Norway? Jose? Here we go, we're gonna listen again. They believe it is saying Norman calm down. I don't know who Norman is. He needs to calm down. I hear it. It sounds lightly British. Okay, here's another one. This is also same place. I don't know what part of the asylum it is. But what's it saying? All right, a little bit louder? Here we go. I'm in a mom Renee? Is it a forget my mom? Okay? B. I can't afford to pay.
C.
Get one more Renee? Or D. I'm feeling real bored today. They believe it says C get one more Renee again. I don't know who Renee is. I don't know who Simon is, Simon or Norman. Norman needs to calm down, Renee needs to get one more, get one more Renee.
But we're gonna get one more, Tenna. We're gonna get one more from John E. L. Tenney another thing that I wanted to look into Before we get into that, we kind of start the second half of the conversation talking about urban legend type hauntings that it seems every town has. We talk a little bit about like the woman in White, that every town has the vanishing hitchhiker ghost. And I mean, of course not every town, but there's
a lot of them. There's a lot of a lot of ladies in the afterlife, hopping in cars and disappearing. Not always ladies, but a lot of them. Ladies in white. I've talked before about every theater seems to have some kind of lady lady grandam that she wears the white and she's an actress that died on stage or whatever. So I just I was curious about some examples of this. And there is a famous story that got some press
not that long ago. Last fall. I found a lot of articles about this, and her name's Lydia, and Lydia is based in North Carolina. There's an area called Lydia's Bridge, which is in Jamestown that seems to be one of
these places that people go to. I'm sure teenagers go to and they look for the Ghost of Lydia, and I think, I guess, I guess a lot of people don't know that the bridge, the real bridge, has been shut down, and it gets confused for this other bridge that's on the main street of the town, and this one is like off the beaten path and you can't drive over it. But the story of it is that she's a hitchhiking woman wearing a white gown, and it is said that she died on the bridge, and she's
seen beneath the bridge. And years ago there was a man that was driving in his car down the road and it's foggy out, and then through the fog he sees this gorgeous woman in white. I didn't say gorgeous, but she sounds gorgeous, this gorgeous woman in white with pale skin, and she's got a long, thin arm that she's waving. Oh, I need a ride. So she gets in the car and the two of them are sort
of talking. He's driving her home, and once he gets to the house that she tells him to go to, he goes to open the door, which is very gentlemanly. Goes to open the door, she's already out of the car, he's like, wait, where'd she go? He's like, oh, maybe she must have just ran up into that house without me, looking all quiet, which I see. I would feel like I was the creep at that point. If I was that guy, I'd be like, okay, like I was giving you a ride, like you don't, I'm not gonna like,
I'm not gonna try nothing. But she just she bolted out of there in his mind, so he goes up to the house to knock on the door and make sure she gets inside safely, I guess. And this woman answers the door and she's like He's like, oh, I just wanted to make sure Lydia got gotten inside. And it's like this old lady and she's like, Lydia has been dead for years. Woooo. So there actually seems to be.
And that's the thing with a lot of these stories is that in the conversation that John and I have today, is is sort of about aggregors and could these stories that become legends, can they create actual ghosts or are they rooted in something? You know, a lot of times these stories are passed down for generations and they turn into another thing. You know. Okay, A great example la Yourona, Okay, Lorona.
There are so many different versions of that story she to my knowledge, and I've looked into this slightly, but to my knowledge, there's not like and I might be wrong. Sorry if I am wrong, please be nice about correcting me on this. Of course, never take facts from someone named Rales josepha As. But to my knowledge, there's not like historical evidence of a woman that killed her children and then killed herself, and that's what Liarona is like,
based on to my knowledge, maybe there is. I believe it is just the story that has been told for generation to generation, and now she comes back and she's crying for her kids. And so that's one of those things where it's like whether it actually happened and it can be traced to a historical event or not. People do claim that they have seen this woman that fits
the Laona description. There are people that if there was a lineup, a police lineup of all of these women in white ghosts, there are people that would go, that was her, that's Lorna. I saw her. She was by the river, she was crying. That was her. So I don't know anyway, So this this woman Lydia, apparently she there actually was a woman in nineteen twenty that died and her name was Annie L. Jackson, and so paranormal investigators, it was actually two of them named Michael Renegar and
Amy Greer. They wrote a book called Looking for Lydia, and they did find this woman, Amy or Annie L. Jackson. And so they don't know that the L. They don't know what L stands for, but they're thinking maybe that's where Lydia came from. But she did die in a car accident, and so yeah, I mean, that's very well could be her. She was about thirty five years old at the time. She was working in a cigar factory,
and she did have parents that lived locally. So maybe maybe there really was an older woman that answered the door that was her mom. I don't know. Now I'm making things up. I don't know. But it was after her death that people started saying that they see this woman in white hitchhiker lady. So the bridge was originally built in nineteen sixteen, she died in nineteen twenty, and now it's just like abandoned and overgrown and it's not Yeah, you can't access it with a car now. In the
articles that I've read from last fall. It says that they're supposed to be working on a walkway for people to walk to the bridge and be able to see it easier, and they're gonna, you know, do events around the bridge and honor the history, which I think is a beautiful thing. But I can't. I haven't been able to find any info if that has happened yet or
what maybe you might know. It also kind of makes me think, like these Hitchiker ghost stories makes me think of the idea, like how many times have you encountered someone that was a ghost and you didn't even know it? I have. I might have told this story before this. One time I was at a place. I don't really want to say what it was, but I was at
a place. It was a gathering of people, and there was this woman that came in or the person I don't know, but this person looked so incredibly unique and like was kind of glowing and in a way not visually but just like whoa like, who is that person? And definitely had a look to them. I mean, this person had a look, that's all I'm going to say,
just a look on purpose, it seemed. And I was looking around the room I was like, nobody's looking at this person, and I'm like, I see this person, and this person was staring at me walking through the room, and I was like, I was kind of getting the shivers. I was like, this person seems not of this world. And the person sat down and stayed there the whole time. But I was like, I don't I wonder if that's
a ghost. Like I was looking around at the other people in the room and I was like, no one's looking at them, and we're all sitting and it's the only person that's standing walking around the room. And this person definitely want like they stand out. And I'm not counting it as a ghost story, but like that's an example whatever. It's just something to say. Okay, you know what, Let's get into my conversation part two with John E. L. Tenney. There is a full length episode of my new podcast
Commercial Free on Patreon. Me looking up spooky things and learning about patroon dot com. Slash rosdres Flees also send me listener stories ghosted by Roz at gmail dot com. Subject line listener episode with some bullet points. Just give me enough so I know what the stories are about, and let's do a listener episode. Okay, here we go part two with John E. L. Tenny on with the show have you ever heard of the Ada Witch?
Yes?
This is from near where I'm from. Uh. It's in Ada, Michigan, which is by Grand Rapids, and there's a what they say is a haunted cemetery where there's another woman in white that you know, you can be seen right on the dark streets and she's one of those like hitchhiker ghosts or whatever that gets in the car and then you turn around and she's gone. And have you ever been there?
I haven't, but I always think it's interesting that there are ghost archetypes like women in y and the hitch hiker ghosts or the ghosts of the children who push you off the train tracks so that you don't get, you know, hit by the train. That there seem to be when we're talking about thought forms, there seem to be ideas generated because every state has it, Like every state has a woman in white, every state has a hitchhiker ghost, everybody has like the witch grave where you
can go and see the witch. Everybody has these stories and that makes me wonder, like is that something deeper in us that's manifesting like in these locations because kids experience in them, you know, they have experiences, and then do their kids' experiences form the basis. I don't talk about this often because this goes into the terrible beginnings of John, but this is I will admit to it. But there's a very old house in Royal Oak, which is the city that I live in. It's the oldest
house there. It's called the Orson Star House. And when it was just an abandoned building, I used to investigate it.
I was probably sixteen at the.
Time, and at some point nothing ever happened in this house, Like it wasn't scary, it wasn't spooky, there were no ghosts, And at some point, talking to friends and talking to people in the area about investigating this really old house from Royal Loke, I made up the story that there was a ghost dog in the house. I said, there's a ghost dog in the basement and it growled at you and it has red eyes, and I really just sold this story. I was probably again sixteen or seventeen.
If you investigate yours in Star House now you'll see a ghost dog exactly how I described it. People have pictures of it. I created a ghost in that house that everybody knows about.
Now, oh my god, that's crazy.
I mean the first time I saw a picture of it, I was like, what what? Like someone took a picture I think it was in like two thousand and seven. They were like, I saw this ghost dog and you can see like a dark shape with two eyes at a dog's level.
And I was like, they're taking pictures of this thing that I made up.
That's crazy. So that's so cool.
The short of that story is, don't pretend and make stuff, because you might make you might make something real, and then it always hurts my heart because then like you've created something that lacks purpose, and that kind of breaks my heart. Like now this thing is going to persist or be somewhere and it doesn't know what it is, and it doesn't know who it is or what it's supposed to do. Like that kind of makes me really sad.
Yeah, yeah, because I mean when we go back to this idea of all of these types, these ghost types in everybody's hometown, they a lot of times when you look into it more, there's no proof of it ever really happening. There's no record that that person existed, that there was that train accident there. It just never happened, but yet it still exists.
When I bought my house, the house I live in right now, about eleven years ago, everybody in the neighborhood when I was looking at this house, was like, you know, old man Ferns died in that house and his ghost is in that house. And I was like cool. Like for me, I was like, great, that's awesome. And all of the kids in the neighborhood, you know, they remembered when they took his body out of the house. No one knew how long it had sat in the house. And I mean, I'm investigator. This is what I do
is I find out the facts about stuff. So after I bought the house, I was like, let's find out what happened here. And the thing was is he had gotten sick one day and then went to a hospice unit up like sixty miles away from here, and like four months later died. He never died in this house. There was no body wheeled out of this house.
Like it was.
All urban legend, neighborhood gossip, and everybody in the neighborhood was convinced the house was haunted. Now there's a ghost hunter living in their house.
It's kind of similar to like the Mandela effect, you know that that whole theory of oh, people remember this happening, and everybody on the internet things that it was, Like what's an example, like.
The like the Benstein bear.
Yeah, but like, isn't it really called something else? But everyone just kept saying it that way, and now we think that that's what it was, and so people go crazy. Yeah, it's like kind of that huh yeah.
And I think that, you know, long before, so even before the Mandela Effect. One of the issues that was talked about a lot by paranormal researchers and investigators of the supernatural was something that was called transient environment phenomena, which is experienced by tons of people all the time. So most people drive the same route to work back and forth every day for years, or live in the
same neighborhood for years. But this thing happened with tap with transient environment phenomena where one day you just notice a building that you've never seen in your entire life. You're like, You're like, I've lived in this neighborhood for ten years, how did I never see this?
House that's right there.
Or you're driving and you see a barn every day and then one day you drive by a field and there's no barn there anymore. And it seems like reality is kind of not as concrete as we would have it believe it is, but it's more plastic and kind of changes.
Wait, okay, now I'm thinking of the story, the story with the diner. Can you tell that one?
It's a a John Tenny hits.
I know your greatest hits and I love them.
I went to a paranormal convention in the mid two thousands, and while I was there, in a car accident. So after the convention was over, I had to stay in this It was Decatur, Illinois, so I'm one person in a two hundred room hotel. Like it was the Shining It was crazy. The pool was closed down for winter. There was three feet of snow. I was like Sunday night and I realized I had to stay until Thursday when my car was fixed. But on I think it was Monday, I asked the dust clerk where can I eat?
And so he said, oh, you know, if you go out the back of the hotel, there's a little cemetery you have to walk through that, and then there's a road and a golf course and you turn here, and turn here and turn here. So I waited, probably a little later than I should have, and I started walking there that night and a huge snowstorm, but found the diner, went in eight went back to the hotel.
The next day.
I stayed in the hotel the day after that. The third night, I went back through the cemetery, through the snowstorm, found the diner again, went back to the hotel the next day, picked my truck up, and then I was like, well, I should eat at that diner one more time. So I get in my car and I start driving around and I can't find the diner, and I'm like, well, I've been walking to it, so I'm not used to the roads in this area. I go back to the hotel. I ask where it's at. He tells me the directions
to drive. I drive in his directions and I find a diner. But it's not the one I've been eating at. It's the one that he has been giving me directions to. So I start following as much as I can on the road where I've been walking these past few days, and there's no diner there. It's up like State Park. There's no driveway, there's no diner. There's never been a diner there. I ate twice at a restaurant that doesn't exist.
But did you eat ghost food?
I the first night I was there, I had hash browns, scrambled eggs, and coffee. The next time I was there, I had pancakes, hash browns and an omelet.
So what is your leading theory of what that is? Is it an alternate dimension? Is it?
I think so it's probably an alternate reality that I somehow stumbled into at some point. I like to think that somewhere there's an alternate reality where the diner does exist, but I don't, and the people at the diner still talk about that time that weird guy came in.
Yeah. I always love the stories of when like a living person is like the ghost to the ghosts.
Mm hmm.
Those trip me out.
That's why I think if if people who did paranormal research really loved collecting data as much as they say they do and really wanted answers like we would collect data and compile data a lot better than we do. Like people are at Waverley Hills every single day. We should have huge maps as to like what time of day, what day, what lunar cycle is most active. We should have all that data already, but people don't collect that data.
I think if we looked back at historically allegedly haunted locations where the haunting is dark shadows moving around in the night, whispering to each other, with weird lights floating around, I think that they in the past might be experiencing ghost hunters presently. Because ghost hunters presently are walking around in the dark whispering to each other saying things like talk to me, and they have little blinking lights and
they're floating through the air in the darkness. I think that we, in some instances might be investigating ourselves.
Whoa Yeah, all of a sudden, you just hear like show your fucking face doom, And then you're like, what.
Yeah, maybe like there's an next there's something really violent in here, and it's really just like some ghost brows like kicking the walls and.
Yeah, and I'm just like going like this to them. They're like, oh, I think something just hit me, and I'm like, what is that? Okay, do you think that trolls are real? I mean, not internet trolls, but like like duen days, like goblins, like I guess those are two different things, but.
Like, no, I think they're all kind of probably the same thing, like little supernatural creatures for sure, yeah, yeah, I think they are for sure.
And fairies.
Yeah, I don't talk about it that much anymore. But there was a gentleman who asked me, I think there's almost six years ago now, there was a gentleman who asked me, after one of my lectures, if I wanted to see an elf, And so I said yes, and put together a time to go and see an elf. And so it was at that point, like I said, six years ago, January, I went out to his location. He gave me a list of things I had to
do to prepare myself to see the elf. So, you know, some of them were easy because I'm vegan, So it was like, don't eat meat. That was already something it was easy for me to do. But then like I could only smoke natural tobacco. If I was going to smoke, I could only like drink I think, whiskey three times a day. I had to spin around in a circle for three days before I saw the elf three times a day. I had to touch a plant for three days,
three times a day. Three days leading up, I had to have a conversation with a non human animal, just like all this stuff I had to do for three
days before I met the elf. So then I went out to his property late at night, fully expecting someone to, like in a keyboard elf cost doom to jump up and stab me in the chest like like like this is how I go out right like Paradorm rasearcher killed by man in elf costume and went out there and he started singing, which he said, he said how he met the elf and.
Rose. I think I saw a fucking elf.
Like eleven inches tall, with hoofs, little hands, a little flat cat faced but real kind of long, droopy elephant ears, deep inset eyes, and a real big fat furry belly clothes.
Nope, and it looked like it was a living, tangible human or you know, you know, living Okay, yes, okay, So out do you know requestioned any of this stuff beforehand? I mean, did this guy? This guy seem credible. I mean, he gave you this list of things and you're just like, sure, why not?
So his story was he was an automotive worker in Detroit. When he retired, his wife and he had moved into the Thumb area of Michigan, she passed away. He started walking around out in the woods kind of humming and singing to himself when he encountered these creatures that he called elves, and he developed a relationship with them and seemed like a very normal human individual. And so you know, when he asked me if I wanted to do this,
I said sure. And then after I saw the elf, it seemed like it probably I mean, I say probably, but it did like it came home with me. I think that he gifted it to me, like in the seeing of it, all of these immensely strange things started to happen around my house, so I had to put a new roof on my house. I would wake up in the morning and shingles would be torn off of my house and they'd be laying in the front and backyard like something was on my roof trying to rip
into my house. And then I realized I have this force field over my house and it probably couldn't get in, and it was frustrated. So I gave it a space and made it an offering and then things calmed down for a while. But then whenever I would travel, these really bizarre synchronicities, you know, would happen, and like the first time that I crazy to me. So the first time my parents ever sought me lecture was the year after I saw the elf, so my parents didn't see
me speak the majority of my career. They came to this lecture event, which was the weekend of my birthday. I told the elf story in public for the first time to this crowd of people, like two thousand people, including my parents. And then when I went and asked my parents, I was like, what did you think of? You know, what you saw me do? And my dad was laughing and he was like, you're gonna love your
birthday present. And we walked out to the car and they had brought me my birthday president was this like three foot gnome statue, and I was like, why did you buy me this? And they're like, we don't know, Like we thought it was really funny. We thought you should have like a little gnome or an elf at your house. And I was like, like it was just it floored me.
It was crazy.
By this point, had the elf gone away or was it still in your life.
Oh, it was still in my life, and it was wreaking a lot of havoc, like it was not a great thing. And so eventually I at a certain point, so I did caregiving for my mom the last few years of her life, and I had this kind of spiritual talk with the elf and saying like I can't deal with you right now, like whatever you have to go away.
I can't.
Like I'm taking care of her, I can't take care of you. I can't handle your nonsense. And it calmed down and went away. And three days after I did that, I got a phone call from the gentleman who introduced me to the alf and he said he called me up and he's like hey John, and I was like hello, and he goes, so you sent the elf back to me And I was like, oh did I? Like that's crazy? You knew that, Like it went back to you, Like it's crazy. He's like, yeah, I didn't want it anymore.
He's like, I gave it to you, and now it's back at and I was like, yeah, I'm taking care of my mom. I can't handle it.
So, oh my god, that poor ow. It probably like came back to the guy's house like he dumped me. But so when it was wreaking all this havoc and your life, were you seeing it like you were physically seeing it? Yes, okay. Interesting.
The night after I I think it was two days actually two days after I saw the elf out in the woods with that gentleman, I was at home and the first people that I told about the elf were Greg and Dana Newkirk, and they were on Skype with me at the time. I was sitting in my kitchen and I started telling them the story and all of the windows in my house started rattling and the doors started shaking, and Dana was freaking out, and I was like,
it's this fucking thing. It's this creature, it's this entity trying to get in the house. And they're on Skype so they could hear it all happening. And I heard this big, huge slam on my front door. So I picked up the laptop that I had them on Skype with and I was like, come look outside with me. So I brought the laptop with me so I didn't have to go outside by myself, and in the snow on my front porch were tiny little hoofprints all over the front porch.
It sounds adorable. There's a part of me that wants one.
It was troublesome, it was chaotic.
How do you think that this man figured out the whole be vegan and you know, talk to an animal like that whole routine.
So he was in After he met them, he became more in tuned to them telepathically, so he spoke with them, and they so interesting. Like you know, there's a lot of this story that I'm kind of not getting into just because it gets weirder and deeper. But so like the entities, the elves whatever you want to call them, could only telepathically when they were talking to him. They
could only use the words that he knew. So he started like reading dictionaries and thesauruses to get more words into his head so they could speak more properly to him, so that he would have more words in his head.
And every time he asked them.
What are you the only word that they ever really used in describing themselves was whimsy is how they described themselves.
That's adorable.
But they gave him this list of things to do if anybody else ever wanted to see what's really strange? Too is over the years telling the story, and I stopped just because I think, like when I talk about it too much, that entity knows and wants to get
involved again. But I would tell people all the time, Like if when I told people the story, people started coming up to me and saying, like, you know, when I was little, I used to sing and I would see these little creatures, or you know, I used to go out in the woods and I would when I was saying, I would see these creatures, I used to hum, I used to whistle, and I would see these creatures.
And so there did.
Seem to be again kind of archetypes showing up with other people having these experiences that this gentleman introduced me to.
We talked the last time about one of my favorite things that you've said about. Maybe Lockness is a dinosaur in Bigfoot, is what neanderth cave man, And so could that be it's a ghost of something I don't know what, but sure type of human or I don't know. Sure.
I also think too, you know, for as much as it could be, you know, the ghost of something that doesn't exist anymore. I mean, I do like to imagine that it's kind of whether we call them fay or faery or folks or trolls or gnomes or elves, whatever we call them. I like to think that nature takes on personalities and like has little component parts of itself as much as I like to. You know, I went to a monster truck rally a couple of weeks ago
and dressed up as like civilian Tenny. I wore a baseball hat and you know, a puffy jacket and stuff. But that was just an aspect of me coming out, And so I feel like these creatures might just be aspects of nature coming out.
Yeah, drag n Nature's drag. Mother Nature is a drag queen. Did you see that article recently about a mermaid. No, they think that they found a three hundred year old mermaid. And this was not just like in world news or what was that?
What was that news?
Yes, it wasn't like that. I just I still have such a vision of being at Meyer grocery store and seeing one of those with like a man finds a mermaid in his tuna and he's like holding.
It right.
Bat boy, Yes, of course, but no, it wasn't that. It's they claim that they found a mom of five Mermaid and they're doing tests on it at a university right now. I was thinking it might be an old side show, like I know that they used to do those, you know, But I.
Think it's going to be harder and harder for us and people in the future to figure out what was going on. We have such great ways to fake things right now that people twenty years from now are screwed like trying to figure stuff out. We know how to
age stuff. You can go on YouTube right now. I mean, I used to do furniture refinishing, and so I used to have to make new wood look like one hundred year old wood to match a part of a table or of chair, and I could do it perfectly, like you wouldn't be able to tell, and like you can just learn how to do that on YouTube now. But people learning how to age things and construct mummies, like, I'm sure that it's going to make it very difficult.
Yeah, it's like the Cosplayer thing too. Yeah, do you think demons are real? What do you think about that? I mean, I mean it's obviously a religious thing a lot of time, but.
They're popular, right, They make a lot of clicks and they get a lot of television shows.
I think movie tickets.
Yeah, I think that.
When it comes to demons, I wrote an article a long time ago called the like the demon of judgment, And I think that people jump too quickly to demons when they don't understand something, literally demonizing it, turning it into something that they think is evil.
Right, And you know, I don't know.
Some concepts I hit on at my lectures and they sound pretty good to me, so I use them, and I don't know. For the past twenty twenty five years, I've told people, you know, if you were invisible in a house, if you were a ghost in a house, and you were there and couldn't leave for some reason, and you were there for a year by yourself, five years, ten years, fifty years, one hundred years, like you might become bitter over that time, Like you might change into
a nastiest person. And even if you didn't, if you finally manifested up enough energy to form your fingers to reach out and touch someone and you accidentally scratched them or pulled their hair, like the person's reactions like something attacked me, right, and you were like, no, I was trying to say hello, sorry, Right, I think personally, Like on my journey and thinking about all of this stuff, I think that the most demonic things that we encounter
every day are human beings, like someone that's making money off of your fear. Someone who's making money off of keeping you in fear. That is demonic to me, not someone who is reaching out from the other side I have. As a human being dealing with other human beings, I have difficulties understanding people's personal motivations. And that's with someone
I can see and hear sitting across. For me, when I'm dealing with invisible denizens of some nether realm, I have very little to go on what their means and motivation are, and so for me to just demonize them, I feel as a disservice to them.
It was just looking into demonic possession and all of that stuff. And I still don't know where I'm at on that.
I saw an exorcism. Have we ever talked about that?
I can't remember if you told me those or if I heard you say this someplace.
In ninety nine, I got the Archdiocese of Detroit let me sit in on a Vatican sponsor third exorcism.
Oh my God? And did that inform your opinion of the existence of demons or how did that contribute to that.
It showed me that I don't understand what's going on. It's just another reinforcing segment of like, no one has a clue of what's going on. Because the things that I was told through that religious belief system was, you know, I can sit here for days and say, like I wish a demon would come into me, Like a demon's not going to come into me. I don't have any want or need of it. I'm not putting it into action.
I'm not working to become possessed. You can't just say I want a demon in me and a demon jumps inside you like that's they told me. That's not how it works. The person who was possessed that they were doing the exorcism one had worked lived a life to become possessed by a demon, and once they were possessed, obviously it wasn't what they wanted, you know, and their
life had gone in a different direction. Excuse me, but watching the experience, really, you know, there was nothing that I saw that I couldn't find a valid reason why it happened. Like the client started speaking Mandarin, right but I can somehow in some part of my brain say maybe one time. You know, everything that we see, everything that we hear, is recorded in our brain. We just
don't have access to it. So maybe at some point they had watched a movie in Mandarin, and so that Mandarin language was somewhere hidden in their brain and they brought it up at this time, and that's why they started speaking Mandarin. Those type of things like, I can talk it away. But I think what informed me the
most was when he did start speaking Mandarin. The assisting priest went to the door of the room and there were people outside that would get you anything you wanted during the exorcism, and he requested someone who spoke Mandarin. So they brought in a Buddhist monk into the room who spoke Mandarin. I don't know where they got him from. This was in rural northern Michigan. You'd be hard pressed to find a Buddhist monk in rural northern Michigan, but
they found him. It's the Vatican, so I assume they can do anything. But the Buddhist monk assisted with the Catholic exorcism until the end of the exorcism, and then in this breakdown session at the end where we were all kind of sitting around, not the client. The client was in this kind of recovery, but I'm sitting there with the two priests and the Buddhist monk and a couple of church officials and myself, and I asked, don't you think it's weird that you had a Buddhist monk
helping with a Catholic exorcism? And they all kind of did weird smiles and snickers, and the main priest who was in charge of the exorcism, looked at me and very casually said, if you don't think the major religions of the world understand that there's only one force in the universe, then you're wrong. And I was really taken aback by that, and I said, well, why don't you
tell that to people? And they were like, no one would believe us, Like there's too much money, there's too much power, and there's too much separation built in, generational separation built and no one would believe us if we started saying that. That informed me more than are their demons. It informed me into how human beings are so separate and in their own bubbles and how and why we can't get along.
It's like one big high school and there's all the different clicks or something. You know. Did you see other activity during this exorcism that I mean, so you did kind of say this, But.
I saw the client, you know, their body when in I'm not a physiologist.
I don't know that much about the human body.
But did things that I thought would probably be harmful to the human body.
The way that the arms.
And legs bent and moved, and seeing you know, rashes appear and disappear, you know, not over the course of hours, but in the course of minutes, eye color changes, things like that. Things that I mean, there are probably physiological triggers for that. You could say happened because of this reason or that reason, or stressors or whatever. But it was when I saw it was just mind blowing.
But after this was performed, did that person did all that stuff stop?
Yes?
Yes, I mean that's pretty that's something.
Yeah, and then the client, I this is probably now. I don't know when Hurricane Katrina was. I can't remember what hear that was. Was that like two thousand five or six maybe something like that. No way, I had reached out to the archdiocese to find out what had happened to the client. They told me I was never going to know, but I you know, I'm a researcher and I like to dig around. And I just made a phone call and they actually informed me that the
client had died. But the client had died helping people during Hurricane Katrina was caught in a was carrying someone's stuff across this little like river and they got grabbed by the undertow and pulled over. And I was like oh. And then I said to the archdy. I was like, well, what do you think that means?
Whatever?
And they were like no, you don't understand. Like that person died in service to other people, Like that was such a radical change from what that person had been previous in their life.
Like that wasn't a demon. That was just you know, the world taking effect, and.
This person was like calling on dark forces to get inside.
Yes.
Wow.
For years.
Yeah, I was just reading this book. Maybe you've heard of it. It's by the psychiatrist at Wait psychiatrist or psychologists. His name is like doctor Richard Gallagher, and he's like very credible, like Yale Harvard teaches like all these things, and he specializes in demonic possession. You know, he studies this stuff and you know he can say what is mental illness and what is not. And he was talking in the book about that same thing that he encounters
pretty much people that are looking for it. Yes, that just seems to be it's not just you know, some teenage girl just one day. It just happens like it's like it's typically somebody calling on darkness or what they believe to be demons.
Or yeah, even you know, doing this. As long as I've done this, I've run into so many people who have been like, oh, I think you know I was possessed by a demon because I played with Ohisia board or I went on a ghost hon or like and I always try and tell them like, but your intention wasn't to be possessed by a demon like it would be. You know, everything that I've read, everything that I've talked about, Like, you know, first of all, there are different types of possession.
You can have things like repression, which is where you know a demon is trying to keep you down, it's not actually in you or doing anything, and aggression, where it's tearing stuff up in your house and you know it's still not in you. Possession is you know, obviously
it's possessed you as a person. But again, I think it's interesting that we've created all of these terms because like what one person might be like, oh, this is you know, aggression, demonic aggression, like it's throwing things around your house. Another person might be like, oh, that's a poltergeist, like just throwing things.
It's just a noisy ghost.
Like.
The thing that changes in all the scenarios are the persons the perceptions of the world. You know, I live just outside of you know, twelve or thirteen hours away from Dearborn, which has one of the highest populations of Middle Eastern people outside of the Middle East, and for the past thirty years, when I go to that neighborhood to do any kind of investigation, I'm not dealing with ghosts. I'm dealing with jin But if that person in that
house was somewhere else, it would be a ghost. Like we're just calling things terms based upon our own perceptions of reality.
Right, That's when I just get to a point where I'm like, what if it's all true, It's just different for different people.
Yeah, I think that it's very personal. I think these experiences are individualized to us. I think that's why they're so hard to collect information and data for. I don't think that they're always reproducible. I think that they're meant to aid us in our journeys, and so they're individualized to us. And yes, they might share some aspects, which
is what we talk about. But at the end of the day, and I've said this at many lectures and on many at the end of the day, if there's no such thing as ghosts, if there's no such thing as UFO's psychic powers, bigfoot monsters, elves, whatever you want to say, if it's all just a means and motivation for us to talk to each other about the things that we think about, then it's still vastly important.
Yeah, that's a great closing statement. I feel like we should probably end because it's been a while that we've been talking here, and you've given us the goods.
I hope that there's something in there you can use.
Oh it's so good. Thank you so much. Do you want to tell people you know where to find you and what you got going on and all that stuff.
Sure, all of my social media is John E. L. Tenny, that's Twitter, Instagram to talk all that stuff, and then I do a podcast once a week with my friend Jessica called What's Up Weirdo, And it is literally just a telephone call that I tape between her and I. Sometimes sometimes we talk about ghosts. Sometimes we talk about Love is Blind two. Sometimes we talk about nine O two one oh. Sometimes we talk about UFOs. You never know what you're gonna get.
Yeah, no, I love it. It's it's it's fun to listen to two friends having a good time and being their authentic selves with each other. And it's just like, I mean, I kind of do feel like I'm like I tap somebody's phone. But it's fun, you guys, a funny Yeah, people should check it out. Well, I guess that's it.
Thanks for having me. It's always a joy. I'm sorry. I feel like I talk too much.
I ask for it. I want you to talk and it's you. It's not like you're talking about a bunch of stupid stuff. It's great. It's really it's really interesting. And this is our first time having a troll story of some or whatever that was elf Elf story. Elvis impersonator goes, I mean you gave us, he gave us some good stuff.
Here may see the haunted head.
This is the first time I have seen a haunted wighead during one of these So thank you so much, thanks for having me. Thank you so much to John E. L. Tenny. What a gem. I hope to have many many conversations with him. He is so great. And go listen to his podcast. Go check out a lecture of his if ever you get the chance, because we can all learn a lot from John E. L. Tenny. And follow him
on Twitter. He's a great follow okay patreon dot com, slash Role's dressful as place for lots of amazing content for me. If I do say so myself, please subscribe to this podcast, Tell your friends about it. Rate it five stars, leave a nice five star review everywhere you can. If you like me but you don't want to see me do spooky things, that's my social media Twitter and TikTok At. It's raz Hernandez Instagram raz Hernandez. I will be talking to you guys next week. I love you all,
both living and dead. But if I didn't ask you to haunt me, don't haunt Mekay back star means on here a podcast network