What's that at my bed? It's spooky and joy I'm really sure it's dead. It's coming this way.
Wait a minute, Hey, I ghosted.
Tyros Dress. Hey boo, it's me Roz.
You know, next month or next week is Pride month, and of course it's always Pride month.
Here A ghosted.
But I thought it'd be fun just to just to get a little head start by talking to a queer historian, paranormal researcher, paranormal investigator, an author named Ken Summers. Ken Summers wrote a book called Queer Hauntings True Tale of Gay and Lesbian Ghosts, And I asked Ken about the whole the whole spectrum of you know, LGBTQ ghosts and and the relationship to queerness and the paranormals. So we have a cool conversation about that that you will hear today.
I also it was a it was a quite quite the conversation. We got into a lot of stuff, so I did have to cut out a chunk through it. On Patreon, Patreon dot com slash Ross Dress vilas link in the description, where you could also find a weekly podcast episode that I am putting up this week as well. And I'm so excited for next week. You guys, there's gonna be some changes. People on my Patreon I have already heard about these changes, but uh, for everyone else, this it's gonna be.
It's to be.
It's gonna be a different week next week. Here I'm ghosted and I'm really excited about it.
And so don't you worry.
I will still be talking about the paranormal every week, and I am going to change a few things about the podcast, just like some different kinds of episodes will be popping up more next week.
I can't even.
Believe this, but I am going to be joined by truly one of my favorite comedians. I just recorded the episode and we had so much fun. I'm going to be joined by two people, Patton Oswalt and his wife, actress Meredith Salenger. I can't wait for you to hear it. Oh my god, Oh my god, my god, my god. So we'll get into that next week. I'll tell you more about some of the changes I have planned going on with the pod cast. It's all fun, exciting stuff,
don't you worry. And anyway, I say, we just get into this conversation about queer hauntings with Ken Summers on with the show, you guys, I am joined by a queer historian, a paranormal researcher, an investigator who specializes in LGBTQ ghosts. Ladies, gentlemen, everybody, please welcome Ken Summers.
Hello, Hello, and thank you for having me.
Thank you for doing this.
I'm so excited to talk about gay ghos. I mean, it's Pride Month, It's it's something that I always want to talk about on the show. I just don't know of that many LGBTQ ghosts, so it sounds like you're the person to talk to.
Yeah, there are surprisingly quite a few. They're very difficult to find, as you can probably imagine. But actually that's what started me on this quest many many years ago, just doing local investigations in Ohio where I am and sort of living two lives in a way, being like being a gay man in one respect and then being a paranormal investigator in like the straight world and the other. And just one day I just bubbled up in me It's like, why don't you ever hear about any gay
ghost stories? And that sort of set me on this mission of there have to be some out there, so
I have to find these stories. And fifteen years later, I have a treasure trove of stories and past investigators, current investigators that I've communicated with all sorts of I've even gone beyond ghosts lately with a book that I have written and I'm shopping around with a publisher right now that delves into everything in the paranormal spectrum from astrology, UFOs pretty much, and how queer people have basically been proliferent throughout the entire paranormal spectrum all for the entire
time that paranormal has existed.
Really yeah, well, it's like so much of I would imagine finding out about the sexuality or gender identity of a ghost would be from researching and finding like the real story of who this person was at one point. But have you ever encountered, like, have you ever been ghost hunting and you're like, Okay, my gatar is going off, I feel like this ghost again.
Times when you go through historical records and you've run across these confirmed bachelors and people who adopted an adult individual. That was one of the keys for historically how different days in lesbians would allow their partner to inherit their wealth after they passed was to adopt them so that that way they could legally be in the will and
all that and gain things. But you run across all these interesting stories of and they like people who dress especially fancy and parade themselves in very strange ways, and it's like this person could not have been straight, because that's just impossible.
Oh my god, that is.
It's really an interesting thing because I imagine like something that's so tough with ghost hunting, especially like over the years, these stories get the game of telephone that gets passed around, and then people a lot of times get the history of people wrong, and I feel like they make their own assumptions about who these people were, and like I think sometimes like you always hear the story of like, oh, the man that lives here loves women, so if you're
a woman, like the man that haunts this place loves women, so if a woman comes in, he just might smack Yeah, so watch out, ladies, he loves you. And I'm like, he could be a gay guy that wants to get the ladies out of there. He wants to spook them off so he can get to your husband exactly.
There was actually one story I remember from my last book when I was researching it and I came across there was a haunted pub in England somewhere where it was there were women being pinched, and it turned out that the ghost was a female and it was pinches on the rear end. So it's like, that's definitely not straight behavior. But there's a lot of times when there is like this questionable thing. I know. There was a
story of another bar in England. It's like England must be like the central ground for gay ghos, I guess, but there's there was another bar where in the kitchen area men's zippers on their pants kept getting pulled down. What Yeah, And they brought in a psych gick who they found this old photograph of the bakery from a century ago, and she was she was asked to pick out who on that was the one that was haunting and it turned out to be a man who is
pulling down living men's pants zippers. Oh my god.
See I could see people be like he was a tailor and that's why he's doing it. It's like, yeah, that's not why he's pulling it down. We know what he's looking for. Oh, these ghosts. I'm obsessed with this whole idea of gay ghosts tell me some gay ghos, well, a lot.
Of them that I find are. The way that I find them is you take people who were known to be gay and look for the hauntings. Like Truman Capoti Tennessee Williams. They both haunt the same bar, even though they pretty much disliked each other in life, but.
They both haunted together, Like do you think that they are aware of each other?
I don't think so, because this is it's a bar called Cafe Lafitte in exile in New Orleans, and Tennessee Williams sits in his favorite spot at the bar, and Truman Capote haunts the stairwell leading to the upstairs and tries to strike up conversations with people, So they're in
two different areas of the building. Tennessee is not interacting with anyone who's just looking distraught all the time, but Truman is being himself and being the life of the party and trying to chat people up the whole time.
So, but do you like he appears like full body like people think it's actually Truman Capote and then he disappears or what.
What I've heard? They just hear his voice, they don't actually see him in the stairway. They just they can hear him talking to them, and it's just a little bit unnerving.
Yeah, I can imagine. Oh my god, tell me, mor tell me more, tell me.
May Well, gosh, I'm trying to think of. Oh, there's a lot of celebrities from the past who have haunted different places. The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel is haunted. It's a well known haunted location.
Classic.
Yeah, and I cannot I don't know why, but for some reason, I cannot remember the actor's name.
Montgomery Cliff.
Yes, he haunts the building because he rehearsed there for a movie and people still hear him playing the trumpet and complain thinking it's an actual living person. But that's Montgomery Cliff still rehearsing the trumpet in his old hotel room in there, and he was very very much closeted person. So many people in that time period of Hollywood and everything else like that. But then, yeah, there's James Whale. He actually he's apparently I don't I he haunted his look.
He's the director of Frankenstein for those people who don't know, but the original Frankenstein and Brida Frankenstein. He committed suicide in his Pacific Palisades house in the pool, and the one of the later owners had it filled in, but actually the former the later owner, had an exorcism performed to get rid of his ghost because she didn't like having him around. Walt Whitman, the poet, He haunts one
of his favorite hiking spots in New York. Actually the trail is called the Walt Women Trail, so it's pretty easy to find him. And he actually spent a year of his life trying to learn how to become a psychic medium. He failed miserably, but he always found mediumship fascinating.
He actually had his head measured for phrenology by Fowler, who pretty much invented phrenology, where you different parts of your head mean different things, And he actually coined a new term dealing with Walt Whitman called a massiveness, which was basically, I'm trying to think of exactly how he phrased it back in eighteen fifty, but it's a lack of conjugal love and an avoidance of marriage, something along those lines, but basically trying to say gay, right, but it's.
A long way to say, yeah, there's no pride called lack of contumicult love and avoidance of marriage.
But yeah, and Harvey Milk was still a very well known activist from the past. He actually was at his camera shop when they were filming the movie Milk And actually gust Vincente had said somewhere during an interview that while they were recording one of the scenes, there was someone walking around the background and it was getting annoying
because it was closed set. There wasn't supposed to be anyone extra back there, and when someone finally bothered to look closer to see who it was, it was Harvey Milk standing in the background watching them film seen about him a little bit of a narcissist, but I guess that's okay.
Oh my god, Harvey.
Mike was probably like, I didn't wear that.
That's not how it went down.
Yes, definitely.
What about Liberaci's Ghost.
Yes, he well, unfortunately his restaurant is closed. It is. Last I heard it was a Russian restaurant, but yeah, it was originally called Liberacis Tivoli Gardens, then it became Carluccio's for a long time. But yeah, he he has hearted that bar. He liked to h the restaurant. I mean, and they had the used to have a lot of his costumes and instruments and everything all over the place, a lot of memorabilia. He liked to lock women in the women's restroom all the time.
Because he liked women. It's because he liked women, That's why he did it.
Yeah, that was his big claim too. So but yeah, and people have seen glimpses of his sequent kate in the building because he had secret entrances that he could pop in and go to his piano and start playing for people randomly whenever he felt like it. But then he also is extremely easily upset by jokes, because there was one incident where a bartender at the bar was making a wise crack about Liberati being gay, and a bottle of wine flew off the rack above her and
smashed right at her feet. So he was letting her know that he really did not appreciate the humor of the joke.
The insinuation. Whatever do you mean?
Actually, Debbie Gibson and one time told a story on the best TV show in history, Celebrity Ghost Stories, and she somehow got her hands I can't remember the exact story, but she like got Liberachi's piano and like has it in her home and it's haunted.
Oh nice, Yeah, the one from the old restaurant. I think so goes closed down too, And I know we had more than one piano, and so it must have come from one of those two places.
Have you ever seen that movie about him?
Yes?
I have.
I didn't know any of that stuff. That is wild.
Yeah, it's his life was very interesting. He was a very interesting person, and the people who came part of his life were very interesting. But the one thing they did kind of miss that I always liked was the final days of his life were actually spent in his bed with his dogs all piled on top of himself and watching reruns of Golden Girls. Oh not a terrible way to go out.
Livarachi, rest in peace. That's amazing.
I I'm wondering now, also about our lesbian ghosts. What kind of lesbian ghosts do you know about?
There are well, not so much in the famous, is that okay? Yeah? But yeah, of course I have to give equal treatment, and I try my best to cover as many people as possible. There's uh, there's a kind of famous but not so much famous over here. Story of the Ladies of Langollen in Wales. It was these two women in the late eighteen century, Susan and Sarah, who one of whom was older and dressed as a
man all the time. But they originally they lived in Ireland and they eloped together and fled Ireland and settled in a little town in Wales called Langollen, and they bought a house called plas naw It. It still exists to this day as a historical museum. They lived there their entire lives. They they were like celebrities, celebrities, local celebrities really and they met They had different famous poets as guests. They were very very popular among the locals.
But it was pretty much well known that they were a lesbian couple, even though there have been some historical accounts that have been trying to backpedal that a bit that oh, it's a romantic friendship. That's no, they were lovers, let's just get it flat. But they still haunt their old house, especially around Christmas time. They're very friendly ghosts,
but they're still there. And there's also one story that it's it's very controversial in a lot of ways, but Lizzie Borden I will add her to the list because there's there's a decent amount of evidence suggesting that she wasn't straight.
Well, there was that movie I saw, was that Kristen Stewart. Yeah, wasn't it like kind of lesbian heavy movie?
Yes, it was, And I know a lot of people get upset by that. There's no there was. She was just she was just a spinster basically kind of thing. But no, she had a romantic relationship with an actress named Nance O'Neill and that went horribly wrong along the way.
But there's good reason to believe that that is what basically led to the split of her and her sister, because Lizzie Borden and her sister had a huge blow up fight around the time that Nance came over and brought her actor and entourage with her, and the two of them never spoke again for the rest of their lives. So it must have been something very very very serious, like coming out or something like that that led to this whole split. And they actually died within a week
of each other. I think it was just a few days after Lizzie died that her sister fell down the steps and broke her neck. Wow. Yeah, but no, everyone always focuses on the Ben and Breakfast, the Lizzieboard and Ben Breakfast, where the murders happened, and all that. She doesn't haunt there. She haunts the house that she had after that, called Maplecroft, which she She was a very rebellious woman in a lot of respects, and she did one thing that victorians thought was well allegedly it.
Was never prettyellous, maybe the most rebellious thing a person can.
Do, but but no, she didn't care what other people thought of her. And when she bought Maplecroft, she had the name of the house chiseled into the front steps, which you can still see today, and that was considered by victorians to be extremely distasteful. But no, she was
a lover of poets and animals and music. And actually I think it was thirty thousand dollars of the money in her will went to the Fall River Animal Shelter, and they still have information on their website about that because basically that huge donation back in the nineteen thirties has helped them still exist this very day. She believed that animals were better than people, which in a lot of times that's very much true.
Wait a minute, I'm realizing now that I actually don't know a lot about Lizzie Borden.
Didn't a lot of people.
So she didn't kill her parents, or she did kill her parents, We don't know. Somebody actually kill her parents.
A question of debate. There are so many It's well, there's always the Lizzie board and took an axe, give her mother her father forty wax thing, But that was that was actually a newspaper selling slogan. It never happened that way exactly. But she was acquitted of the crime, so she was never formally charged and convicted of murder. And there's arguments to be made on both sides of the story as to whether she actually did it or
someone else actually did it. So it's one of those never to be solved mysteries pretty much at this point.
But her parents haunt that bed and breakfast, right.
Yes, And her step her father was not the most wonderful person in the first place, not justifying murder or anything like that, but he was. He was a rather stingy, rotten person who just wasn't a pleasant person to live with. And her stepmother wasn't the best person either, So I can understand if she did commit it, commit the murders. I can understand why in that type of environment something that bad could happen.
But maybe it was somebody else.
There were other suspects. There was a someone believed to be a serial killer in the area at the time who could have committed it. There was stories that possibly the maid doing it, who supposed that she was having an affair with There were a lot of different rumors going around that still still go around today that nobody knows for sure. It's it's trying to solve one hundred and fifty year old murder is a little bit challenging these days because you don't have any physical evidence left,
you don't need. All you have is stories and everybody makes up gossip about everybody else, So it's it's never probably going to be solved one.
Oh, Lisey Borden. Now I feel bad for Lizzie Bording kinda. I like that she has animals.
She was She was a very intelligent person, very unique person, and she was a good soul in a lot of ways. But nobody is ever one good and one or one per evil. There's always some combination of the two. Everything is somewhere in between.
Yeah, I feel like, you know, I always talk about theaters being haunted, and I love I love the I love theaters, and I love the idea of haunted theaters, and they're also uh safe haven for queer people. And there's always there's You can't have a theater without some queer people up in there. So I imagine there's probably a lot of haunted theaters by queer people, right.
Actually, yes, there are, there's. It's it's always tricky to be sure because there's a lot of stories. Unless you know for sure someone's personal history, it can be a little bit difficult to find out for sure if it's just really a case of gay ghost And that's that's always my tricky point is I need to find some kind of definitive evidence to back up what I find in different ways. But I know that there is one
theater in England, the Queen's Theater. I don't even mean that in the sense of irony or anything like that, but the Queen's Theater is actually one of the one of the many many hatted theaters in England, and it does have some queer connections with it, with the hauntings and everything like that as well.
It does.
They do believe that John Gielgul could be the one of the ghosts at that particular place, even though he had a theater directly next door to it. They believe that he, uh the actor and director, maybe the man in the gray suit that's seen wandering in that building there.
Hmmm.
Curious what about you know, gender nonconforming, transgender goes.
Do you encounter those? Ever?
That's always been the tricky one because I tend to deal with stories from the distant past more often than more recent. But and that's where it gets you have to sort of understand the vernacular of the times. There are some situations of cross stressing ghosts.
Yeah, I mean it is interesting when you look into trans history because you know, it wasn't it wasn't something that people could just you know, do you can just transition and just live your life. I mean, there are some cases, but they're few and far between. Of course, if you look at like different cultures, you know there's and.
For a long a long period of time and history, just dressing in the opposite gender was literally a crime that could bland you in jail, which is what There's a lot of stories of people that I have uncovered from spiritualism and all realms of the paranormal who were gender non conforming in a lot of ways, and many, many times were arrested for dressing in the wrong gender, usually women dressing as men, which was especially frowned upon
because you're you're trying to imitate that the correct gender and a lot of people's ideas. But but yeah, there was a lot of cross stressing going on, and it's it's it's always been a very difficult thing. And that's what makes it difficult when you're dealing with the paranormal and researching these people is you don't always know why they're doing it. Is were they were they were they transgender, or were they just did they just enjoy thing of
the other gender. There's a there's a lot of a lot of questions involved in a lot of that, and I don't like to get to to bog down in
uh trying to translate it all. But but no, like you were saying, with the cultures, there's there's always been in every culture you can pretty much find, there's been a history of people who dressed in opposite gendered clothing, everything from Native American two spirits to over in India, there were I don't want to pronounce it wrong, but I think it's hero which is sort of a cultural group of men who dress as women and take on female gender roles. But there they were very highly regarded
for a very long time. They've become a little bit less liked in recent years, but they still exist as a culture of phenomena, and it's something that's always permeated everything. And it used to have a lot more to do with people who had these conflicting genders, for lack of a better term, were usually thought of as important people. They were the healers, they were the wise people of the tribe. They were the sorcerers, they were the ones that were more in touch with the spirits because they
could be both genders at the same time. So there was a very spiritual significance to someone who walked the line between genders like that.
My personal opinion that still holds up.
Oh yeah, definitely what And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that people in the entire queer spectrum, you live on the edge of the society you're in in a lot of respects, so you're more observant of everything than the average person walking down the street with a single gender and straight heterosexual
orientation who just goes about average everyday life. You realize your own differences and so you have your own internal struggles, But then you also are more observant of the people around you and how they interact with things, because you're trying to both see where you fit into society as well as how to navigate that society as best as possible.
So, I mean, I also think that it probably has to do with the time you live in and the
location that you live in. But I also think that there's a lot of survival technique, that survival instincts that you develop both for your own safety and for finding your own community or finding lovers or whatever you have to have, Like when people say gay dar or whatever, like, I do think that there actually is something to that that that could be also going along with being intuitive, being psychic, whatever.
Exactly that's and that that's why there's a lot of gays, lesbians, bisexual, transgenders in psychic world and involved in any kind of spiritual beliefs that involve the afterlife and all that. There are a lot of gay psychics out there. There are always.
Have been place the Cyrus Rex House I was reading about on your website.
I didn't know about this. Can you tell us about that?
Oh, yes, Cyrus Rex. The town was named after him, rex Mont, Pennsylvania. He basically ran this little company town. And yeah, he lived in old brick house in what's left of Rexmont, which is not there's not even a stop sign in the side in the town. It's basically non existent anymore. But there was a female spirit observed by later owners of the house, and for one reason or another, they thought that maybe it was his niece
who had lived with him for a while. But there's there was a growing belief among at least one of the owners that it was actually Cyrus himself, dressing in women's clothing who was haunting the building dressed as a woman, which actually is not that uncommon because the Rosencrown Guest House in Provincetown is also haunted by a man dressed as a woman who was the former owner of that building. He was the gay rights activist. He was an AIDS activist.
He passed away of AIDS, but he always dressed in a white bride's costume for Carnival every year there and they still see him in the hallways, specifically in the library, dressed in a white dress. So there's quite a few cross guessing dressing ghosts. I actually found another old story from the nineteen fifties of a couple in California who bought antique furniture from England and there was a ghost
that came with it. Of I think he might have been a page or someone's assistant or servant or something like that, but repeatedly at night he would try on the woman's clothing that she had sitting out for the next day, so he even was attempting to cross dress in the after life. Wow.
See.
And that kind of goes along with some people theorize that in some circumstances, when you're a ghost, you can choose to be your best self or your happiest self, or however you want to be. You know, when people say stuff like that, or it's like you can go back to being younger, even though you died when you were ninety, but you haunt as a twenty year old or whatever. You know, it's kind of that thing.
I think a lot of that has to do with mentally, to go with what makes you happiest which is what I think a lot of us should be living our normal lives as doing and living the way that makes us happy, not the way that everyone else thinks we should be happy.
Right, And I imagine at a time when you can openly be trans or just you know, explore your gender publicly, those moments in quiet at home at night or whatever, we're probably some of your happiest moments, your most authentic moments. Yes, what about haunted queer spaces like gay bars and stuff like that. I feel like every once in a while I'll hear about like a haunted gay bar.
There are surprisingly a lot of them. What is difficult now, though, is so many queer spaces are closing, not just because of the pandemic and.
COVID, but because there's sort of a cultural shift in society away from these institutions that some of us.
Say grind.
Grinder has taken away the gay bar.
Blame it all on social media and apps. Yes, yeah, but no, but there are a lot of I actually worked at a haunted gay bar some twenty years ago. Everyone knows, everyone in the area knows that I'm a paranormal investigator. So anytime I go anywhere at some point, I'm going to ask if the place is haunted. And yeah, there was a bar in Akron, Ohio called Cocktails. The building has been torn down since and relocated, but yeah,
I happened to ask if it was haunted. And turns out that there was a female patron who was a regular even before it was a gay bar, and she was a well known heavy drinker. And one night, the front door used to face directly out into the main street. She was especially drunk. She lived across the street, down a few streets. She walked out the front door and right into oncoming traffic and was hitting killed. And her ghosts still lingered around that building. You would catch glimpses
of her. You would strange things would happen, and I remember I was talking. I told all the other bartenders about it, and the owner was a strong disbeliever and ghost so he never wanted to hear anything about it. But one of the other bartenders who I worked with one day when I came in for the afternoon shift, he said, I have to tell you about this because I know you're the only person who will believe me.
And I don't know what happened, he said. I was closing up last night, and there was an upstairs bar and then a lower bar, and a staircase that led down facing away from the main bar, and he was counting out the money on the like two thirty three o'clock in the morning, and a crumpled up napkin flew down the stairs, and he thought, that's strange, but maybe
the wind caught something. Just brush it off, pretend like it didn't happen, goes back to counting the money, and ten minutes later, another crumpled up napkin comes flying down the stairs, rolled up in a ball. He freaked out immediately, he left the money where it was, didn't even set the alarm, just locked the door behind him and ran out of the building and left. So the owner was very upset with him the next day for not setting
the alarm and leaving money out like that. But he was just terrified of whatever it was that was there, that was trying to let him know that something, something was there and needed some attention from him.
Well, you know, another theory that some people have is like just the energy, the collective energy of a lot of people, people being happy, people being sad, people being drunk, chaos fighting, whatever, all of that can linger around and can not manifest into move and shit around a bar.
Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of well, there's even cases of very very very very old gay bars, Like in England, there's the Molly houses that they used to have back in the eighteenth century. Usually it was a woman who ran the establishment for those like us, and she was referred to as mother, very very drag
appropriate name. But no, there was a famous raid that took place on one of these molly houses, and there is still a ghost story attached to that that people could still hear the crowd fleeing for their lives from the police from that location, running down the same street that had happened on some two hundred and fifty three hundred years ago. One of my favorite stories that I have come across is it was documented in a book
by a former famous researcher named Nanderfodor. He was a psychologist, psychiatrist and a paranormal investigator back in the nineteen thirties and forties, and he had a friend who was a lesbian and he wrote about her in his book and basically for the nineteen forties when the book came out for someone to basically say that there's absolutely nothing wrong
with anyone's sexuality is quite remarkable and it's so. But he said that this woman that was his good friend had a lover who passed away and took her a long time to get over her grief, but she finally did, and she met another woman and set up an appointment in a New York hotel room for an evening together in private, and just when they were getting intimate in bed, the phone started ringing and it kept ringing, and it rang non stop, and it was so constant that the
girl she was with got very uncomfortable and left in a hurry. The next morning, she went downstairs and berated the clerk, talking about how I will have your job. That was horrible of you to do, and just going on about and he said, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to disturb you or anything. But the person on the phone said it was an emergent. Didn't see and so
she got she got the phone number. It was a California number, and that's when she remembered that she knew a psychic out in California that she had spoken to when she was trying to get in contact with her dead lover. So she called up the psychic said, what was so important that you had to call me in the middle of the night in New York about And she said, I'm sorry about this, but your lover came to me and demanded that I call you immediately because she had a message for you. And she said, what
was the message? And she said, your lover said, I'm extremely disappointed in you. So her dead lover did not like the fact that she was moving on with another woman and wanted to let her know that she was disapproving of the new girl.
Damn that is that's like psychic Jerry Springer.
Yes, oh my god.
Well you also had mentioned to me in an email about lesbian lesbians that were abducted by aliens.
Yes, what is the book?
The book was actually also written by a gay man and a straight woman. The book is called The Tahunga Canyon Contact.
Wait, I actually I have looked into this before, but remind me, remind me.
Yeah, between I want to say nineteen fifty and nineteen eighty or so, there was. It started out with a lesbian couple that experienced something akin to an alien abduction, and the Tohunga came in California, and it wasn't until they went through regression that they started understanding what had
happened to them. And then friends of theirs started experiencing similar phenomena, and there ended up being about six women total, some of whom were gay, some straight, some questioning or bisexual, who were all connected together who were having strange experiences with abductee reports and strange phenomena and missing time and all of these very very bizarre experiences with it. And yeah, it was chronicled in a book by d. Scott Rogo
and and Ruffel. D Scott Rogo was actually a paranormal investigator, very prolific paranormal investigator in the nineteen eighties. He was very, very famous in his time. He wrote like thirty books in his short life because he was murdered in a possible hate crime in nineteen ninety in his home in California. So it's a lot of weird stuff out there. Yeah.
Well, another thing I was reading on your website is a part about abductions, and it says that they interviewed some people and they found a pretty high number of LGBTQ people have been abducted.
Yes, and that's given the fact that the UFO community is on the conservative side, there's a lot of pushback against that. But there was a dettailed book written by
three authors I believe it's called The Abduction Enigma. They delved into sexuality when it comes to abduction reports, even though they said that it's very difficult to know for sure because so often sexuality is completely overlooked in documenting any form of abduction reports or phenomena and all of that, but they said through their own research that there have been they have discovered that there is a higher than expected degree of people who are either hyper sexual or
LGBTQ who experience abduction phenomena compared to the normal, straight, heterosexual average people.
Now, are these reports of people that are also having some kind of sexual activity when they get abducted, like with.
Shin, why are we not no.
Why are they trying to get people that are hyper sexual and LGBTQ, And well, it's a good question.
It depends entirely on what exactly is happening with with why abduction cases are happening in the first place, which is still a big, a big question mark right there. But yeah, it's it's interesting in a lot of ways. But if you're if you're looking to learn about a species in general, you would want to sample all the outliers, not just the most common ones. You would want to
see the entire range of diversity. So if if it is like a a if it ends up being something where it is like beings from a different dimension or planet or something like that, investigating human species, it would make sense that they would want to find out all the possibilities of humans and all the different types of humans and all the the different variations of the species in a lot of ways.
Well, if there's still I mean, this book was written in nineteen eety nine, but if they're still looking for queer people, I am here. I am so down to get taken up. Can you imagine what that would do for my podcast? Yeah, to come back down and tell some stories.
Yeah, you would. There's probably be a few book deals in it.
Too, just like a nice vacation for a while.
Yeah, it's all as just not a metal counter that you have to lay on.
Right, Honestly, I'm fine with it at this point, just to get out of here for a little bit.
I'm down.
Yeah.
Wait, so I guess we should also I should ask you if there's bisexual ghosts that you encounter.
Yes, That's where it gets a little bit complicated because there's always the question of, well, there's always been controversy with our bisexual people, just people who can't make up their minds and they're just in denial.
Well especially I'm sure you'll you'll find historical, uh, you know, evidence of a straight couple and the husband has affairs with men, and then people might say, oh, well that he's gay, but he could have been bisexual, like who know, who really knows exactly?
Yeah, And that's that's where it becomes a bit difficult, because who's to say that someone is gay when they could have been bisexual? Even I mean, Vincent Price's daughter said that she believed that he was bisexual, and that's still a controversial thing, even though his daughter said that. But but yeah, there's but there's a lot of things where it's it's difficult to say for sure if someone is technically bisexual or if they were full fledged k.
Does Vincent Price haunt someplace? Because I'm obsessed with Vincent Price.
I wish he did. I know that he had a very prone, profound paranormal experience when a friend of his passed away. But no, he was on a plane at the time of this actor's death and there was sort of a strange light in the sky out his window and he looked out and in the clouds he could see the words that so and so is dead, and he thought, that's just weird. And he landed, and not not an hour after landing, he got the news that while he was on that flight, his friend had passed away.
He also recorded an album. Do you know the album that he recorded about witchcraft and Satanism.
He recorded a couple of different things he I know, I don't know if it was from that album or not, but he recorded a a reading of I don't know what he was reading, but it was about how to see ghosts or sure they bring them to you.
Yeah.
So, but yeah, he's he was very much into very creepy things. He had a lot of gay friends too. There was a very famous gay Hollywood couple that lived directly across the street from them. So he was extremely open with sexuality. And his daughter is a lesbian and she said he was fully accepting of her when when she came out to him. Wow, And supposedly that's when he admitted that he had experienced relationships with men in his life as well.
Okay, Wall, we should probably wrap it up soon.
But one of my favorite I think, I mean, I never like to say my favorite, but one of my favorite haunted places is this place in San Diego called Villa Montezuma. Yes, that place is so cool, and it is haunted by this man who was very queer.
Jesse Shephard, also known as Francis Grierson. Yes, when he was a writer, he was a psychic pianist, so he but he didn't like living as a psychic, even though the spiritualist community out there built this amazing Queen Anne Victoria House for him, that the ice. I would love to go inside it. I've only been on the outside myself, but I would love to go inside it just to see the stained glass window of Sappho that he has there.
Yeah, apparently up sometime, I've never gotten to go inside either.
But yeah, but no, he was. He was a psychic. He could channel different spirits, he could channel composers.
He was.
He made a good living doing that, but he decided he didn't want to be known as a psychic, so he wanted to be known as a musician. So he went off to Europe, failed miserably as trying to just be a regular musician and an author, and came back to San Diego dirt poor. And it was actually during his performance for he was doing a fundraiser just to get enough money to try and keep alive in basic life.
He held a concert as a fundraiser and he played the final song and stopped and bowed his head at the keyboard, and everyone applauded, and then they stopped and he didn't move, and that's when they realized that he had died right after playing the final notes of that song. But he had a male secretary who well, yeah, I've had a few people complained to me and say, no, they were not lovers. They were just business partners.
I've had a female secretary as myself.
He traveled with him everywhere. They were an inseparable couple. There was it was not just just the boss, that's all. But no, and he he haunts he's supposed to haunt that building. There was a cat that there was a fire at the building at one time. There was a cat, I want to say that was found in the that they named Psyche and they believed that that cat actually was the reincarnation of Shepherd himself if I remember correctly.
Too cool, But there has to be a movie about its.
Been shut down for so long. Even when I went there back in two thousand and nine, I could only see the outside of the building, but it was so frustrating.
Ken, this has been great.
You are a lovely storyteller and I love hearing these stories. Can you tell people where to get your book and find it and all that stuff?
Absolutely? Yes. My book from two thousand and nine, so it's been a while, Queer Hauntings True Tales of Gay Lesbian Ghosts was published by Leafy Press and it's still available through Leafy Press, but also anywhere books are sold, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, you name it. I hopefully fingers crossed and my agent, Sanity at Sake, will be having a new book coming out, tentatively titled Weirdly Queer, which is going to tackle the history of all paranormal phenomena
related to LGBTQ perspectives. You can visit my website Moonspenders dot com or do a search for queer paranormal and that will come up first. I have some information on there, not a whole lot, because I'm holding back on a lot of it and I haven't had much time to digest everything into a smaller form to post on the
website recently. But as time goes on, I'm going to be adding a lot more to do with everything from updated ghost stories to voodoo and Santa Ria and witchcraft, the history of witchcraft, and sexuality and you name it, really, because there's so much fascinating stuff out there with weirdness and queerness combining into one. Yeah, and I have a few possible other projects coming on the horizon, but I don't know anything for sure, so I can't really say
much about that. But yeah, and you can also since you interviewed Greg and Dana Nwkirk, you can find some of my past writings on their Week and Weird website. I used to write a bit of more humorous perspective in a lot of ways, but I have some old queer stories on there as well about ghosts and strange news stories and all sorts of weirdness on there too.
Cool.
Well, thank you so much, and I hope we can talk again sometime. Thank you so much. To Ken, I hope you have a lovely Pride month. As we go on into Pride Month, I think it is so important that we honor the people that came before us.
So often their.
Stories get erased or revised, and I'm very happy to be LGBTQ, very proud, be proud of who you are. You know something else I forgot to tell you about last week's episode with Sapphire Sandalo. We ended up getting on video and you can watch the full video version of that episode on YouTube, which is something else that will be happening more and more and more, So look out for that.
Guys.
Please be subscribed to the show and tell your friends, tweet about it, post about it. Rate at five stars wherever you can. I definitely want to be reading more ghost stories on the pod, so please send me some relatively short ghost stories in a five star review, or just email me at ghosted by Roz at gmail dot com. I'm on Instagram at Roz Hernandez TikTok and Twitter at It's Roz Hernandez. And next week you will hear me and Patton Oswalt and Meredith Salander.
Oh my god, it's crazy. I love you all, both living and dead. But if I didn't ask you to haunt me. Don't haunt me.
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