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And welcome back, George, nor with you. Richard A step with Us has been a paranormal investigator for thirty plus years. He has researched claims of ghosts, hauntings and UFO since the mid nineteen nineties. Richard is a series contributor on the TV show Haunted Hospitals, Paranormal, Nine to one one, Paranormal Night Shift, in Haunted Case Files. He lives in Colorado, where he works as a nine to one one parademic and also a clinical educator. Richard, thank you for your first response to job.
Thank you, Sara very much appreciate that, and a big shout out to all the other responders out there and also to the good people who are listening in across the country and the world.
How did you get involved in your paranormal investigating?
I grew up in a halted house, George. My grandparents owned a haunted place back in Native England. I have an accident in case you couldn't tell, and I used to hear stories about this old lady that would wake my dad and my aunts and uncles up in the middle of the night during the war, and this happened until my grandfather came home from having fought in Burma, and it was only then the kids realized that this was the ghost of the old lady who had lived
in the house before they had. She died in a chair downstairs, and she was keeping a motherly eye on the family, helping my grandmother out until my grandfather returned home.
Well, your book, Doc Spirits, why don't you get into it? You can't put it down, Richard.
Hey, that's kind of you.
Thanks so much.
You know, I grew up as a boy in Britain reading those old school kind of ghost books written by guys like you know, all hands Hoolder, Peter Underwood, and they just told these these stories of you know, some of the haunted places in this world. And I to write those same kind of books. And I'm lucky enough that I get to give.
Us a little overview of dark spirits.
Absolutely well. I've written something like thirty books on the paranormal Georgian. This one looked at the darker side of things. So I wanted to look at perhaps some of those cases and places that were not necessarily so nice. But I also wanted to dispel a few myths and legends along the way. So we cover everything in this book, from malevolent ghosts and hauntings to skim walkers to UFOs, abduction, vampires, and demonic possession.
Let's talk about some of the spots that are in the book, and you can tell us what's going on. Tell us about the history of hotels a seal.
Oh.
The Hotel Cecil in Los Angeles used to be one of LA's biggest, most glittering hot spots, at least right up until the Great Depression. When that happened, plus the fact that Americans stopped using trains and started using carves to see the country, the hotel fell into a state of disrepair, and it's now located in a place that we all know the name skid rub. Unfortunately, the Secil had seen better days than By the sixties and seventies, it became the cut of place.
Where you would rent a room by the hour, if.
You catch my drift, very cheap accommodation, not the cleanest, not the nicest, and it soon gained a reputation for being cursed. It had an unusually high suicide rate, people jumping out of windows and from the roof, There were several murders, at least one of them unexplained, and a reputation for violence, probably not helped by the fact that not one but two serial killers lodged their George, one of them being the notorious Richard Ramirez, the so called Nightstalker.
So it has gotten a.
Reputation for being a dark place that is supposedly, according to some cycling mediums, at least haunted by negative forces.
Has there been a lot of tragedies at the hotel.
You know, all hotels see death, don't they, But and the Cecil has an unusual amount of tragedy. There was a military man who cut his own throat open there. There was tragically a lady who gave birth and threw her baby out of one of the upper story windows.
But I think the Cecil became most commonly known. I think when a poor young lady named Alisa Lamb went missing while staying there, and her body turned up in a water tank on the roof of the hotel seesaw sometime after her disappearance, and was only discovered because some of the residents complained that the water takes is a little strange in the hotel.
How did you get up there?
Well, that's the question, isn't it. There's some rather unusual footage of Lisa Lamb.
She seems to be.
Based on what the hotel CCTV camera system found, either talking to somebody who was there, talking to somebody off camera, or unfortunately, perhaps having a mental health episode. It's impossible to say exactly what did cause that poor young lady's death.
But you're saying physically the hotel structure is still there.
The hotel structure is actually still there.
Yeah.
Absolutely, it was originally being turned into a boutique hotel. Now it's kind of in a state of flux, in the state of limbo. I really do hope. Though they've changed out the plummet.
Why don't they level it?
What a great question. Well, it's baked in downtown Los Angeles with seven hundred rooms. You could house a great many people there and perhaps make it dent in LA's homeless situation if you repurpose the SECOL properly. And they're wearing deep plans of foot to do exactly that. But one wonders whether it's dark reputation will follow it no matter what.
I go to Denver monthly the taper Beyond Belief TV shows, Richard, But I've not been to the Denver Botanic Gardens. What's going on there?
That's right, You and I filmed a show for Guy.
I think Colorado is great. You know.
I love the movie Polter Guyst.
George.
I think it's an absolute classic, one of my favorites growing up and probably contributes to me being a paranormal investigator and a ghost And for you, he asked, I love that line. If you remember where the coffins are coming out of the ground and Steve Frielan's boss turns up. You know, the guy that is kind of shady, that has decided he's going to build this housing estate on top of an old cemetery and he's going to be
so cheap. He moves the headstones, but not the bodies, you know, and Craig T. Nelson grabs him by the shirt and he says, you fob, you move the headstones, you didn't move the bodies. Well, that actually happened in Denver, Denver's old cemetery, which was in the heart of the city until, you know, the city.
Started to expand.
They decided to move the cemetery and gave people an ultimatum, you know, essentially you have a few weeks to move your loved ones. When that didn't happen, they hired a contractor to do it. Now, the contractor used to get paid by the number of bodies that he moved. Orthough he's personnel moved, but he was kind of cheap as well. So we had cases of that guy breaking up bodies and stuff in three four skeletons into one coffin in order to save one coffins. Became a scandal quite rightly.
There was a public outcry, George, and so what they did was they said, all right, no more of this. We are moving the headstones. We're going to put grass over and we're going to turn it into a park, which is now Denver's Cheeseman Park, and that directly abuts
the Botanic Gardens. Now, the Botanic Gardens is slowly but surely thinking because there are several thousand sets of unclaimed remains underneath that building, and quite regularly when the utilities technicians come in to check the water mains or to lay new cables or whatever, they find skulls and females
and bones and things of that nature. It is one big graveyard in the heart of this major city, and the staff of the botanic gardens have heard laughter and disembodied voices at night, phantom footsteps they hear themselves being called out. I was able to go spend a few nights in there because the night security guard quit. He actually ran out of the building, locked it up and never looked back.
The living daylights out of them, didn't it?
Should it? Security guards are great for intruders, not so great for ghosts.
Sometimes, have you been to most of the places that are in the book.
I've been to about half of them, George. The ones that I could investigate in first, and I absolutely did. There are some that I would love to get to someday, and they're on my bucket list, But I'd say I got the majority of them.
Yeah.
Are there's some places, Richard, you would not want to go back to again.
Oh, that's a really great question. One of the more disturbing places is Fox Farm in Carmel, Indiana. And if that name strikes a bell with your listeners, it's because it's currently featured on the Hulu TV series The Fox follow Murders playground of a serial killer. It is the home of the iced seventy Strangler, a man that murdered probably a minimum of twenty to twenty five men during the eighties and nineties before taking his own life before
he could face justice. Unsurprisingly, at home like that where many of these poor unfortunates were killed, has a reputation for being haunted, and I spent quite a bit of time there researching the haunting and experiencing some parts of.
That for myself, well, with Richard A Steps book is called Dark Spirits, Monsters, Demons and Devils. His website is his name linked up at coast tocoasdam dot com. What's the story behind the London Underground, Well, you know, it's.
The world's oldest mass transit system. It's absolutely honeycom the ground beneath the city of London, and it has had a reputation for being haunted for as long as I think most people can remember. Certainly, it's had its share of tragedies. You know, during the Second World War, for example, the Underground was used as a shelter of the civilians from German bombing and there were a number of casualties when some of those stations sustained direct hits from bombs.
And those stations are said to have ghosts to this day. There was also the tragic King's crossfire which took place, took a great many lives, and it's believed that one female apparition who is seen in King's Cross Station is perhaps somehow connected to that incident, as are phantom smells of smoke and sometimes account the same screens which can be heard when the station is otherwise relatively quiet.
I spent a lot of time at Saint Louis Richard where they had the hospital of the Extracis that William Bladdie wrote about that was turned into the movie The Exorcist. What do you think is the true story behind that one?
I want to give a shout out to researcher Troy Taylor who's looked extensively into that case and consulted with me on this book. But it is a true story. It was a boy, not a girl, as we saw in the novel. In the movie, a young man named Ronald Hunkler who at the age of thirteen began to behave as if he was possessed by some demonic entity. He would act out of character, he would curse, his growl, spit poltergeist activity would take place around this poor young man.
The furniture would shake, objects would fly from the shelves, and apple flew across the room. Finally, members of the Capitol Church Jesuits were called in to assess his suitability for an exorcism. That position permission was granted. Now, the exorcism took place in three locations, much of it being in the Alexian Brothers Hospital in Saint Louis.
Which is now gone.
The only building still standing is a relatively normal looking, modest home in the Saint Louis suburb of Belnor, and multiple owners of that place have said that that house remained haunted to this day.
There's an incredible story. Bladdy did a great job with that book, did he not?
He absolutely did, And I think the exerssif I always described it as the top gun of the Catholic world because it recruited so many people to the Catholic faith during the nineteen seventies. It's also responsible for making us terrified of Wiji boards. But yeah, Bladdy did a fantastic job. It's a wonderful novel, terrific movie, and contains a great deal more accuracy than many of us realize at the first.
Class, since you brought up weedy boards, what do you think of those things?
You know, I respect everybody's belief when it comes to wigi boards, and I think they have this fearsome reputation for being some kind of portance to hell, to the underworld. I've never found them to be that way. And my friend Robert Merch, who is the chairman of the Talking Board Historical Society an owner of probably the world's biggest
talking board collection, agrees with me on that. But there are undeniably some cases in which the board can be a little bit frightening, and there have been a number of murders which took place because the Wija board told somebody to do it. Do we believe that it's just the subconscious of the sitters. Well, sometimes it is, But I've personally experienced cases in which the board has said things that nobody that was touching it or even in
the room could possibly have known. There are times it seems that some kind of intelligence that we cannot see can communicate through that board, and on occasion the consequences can be violent and tragic.
Do you know, Karen Dolman, I.
Do Karen is a very good friend of mine. She was kind enough to consult with me on my book In Search of Demons, and also an acknowledge that's on the talking Board. She loves Luigi boards, she does and she is a ranking member of the Talking Board Historical Society and a wealth of knowledge on that particular subject.
What's going on with London's Highgate Cemetery.
Well, you can't talk about Highgate and not talk about vampires, George. Highgate is one of those old Gothic cemeteries that is, you know, so historic. If you walk through that place, it just streams haunted. You know, it is so atmospheric if you go to Highgate, especially when there is mist, when there's fag, it looks like horror movies ought to
be shot there. But there were claims, and these reached the national newspapers, and there was some kind of hysteria that a vampire was rising from a tomb in Highgate Cemetery and was preying on stray animals and ultimately human beings in the vicinity of Highgate. And this caused such a few sorry that British people were Londoners were coming out at night and doing vampire watch, getting ready to confront and possibly stake this thing if they ever found it.
There were many stories. I don't know that despite some of the claims, that anybody ever actually came face to face with the Highgate vampire, but there were many stories of this red eyed, pale skinned, grulish figure prowling the lanes around Highgate after dark.
What does youve got to tell you, Richard about vampires?
You know, historically speaking, things like vampires have been used to explain stuff that we don't understand, so they've made a fantastic black box for human beings who did not understand things like tuberculosis.
If you look at the New England vampirism.
Cases of the late eighteen hundreds, you see cases in which, you know, tuberculosis and coughing up blood accounted for the blood stained teeth that were found on some people when they were dug up. This idea that the fingernails and
the teeth and hair grow after death is inaccurate. But what does happen is that the scalp shrinks, the cuticles around the fingertips shrink as well, so it does appear as if there's been growth, and of course dead bodies will sometimes grown as gas moves throughout them from decomposition, they will sit up, you know, they will behave as
if they are alive. So it's very easy to understand why some of our ancestors, who did not perhaps have the medical knowledge that we have to day, believe that the dead would get up and walk and seek the blood of the living.
Do you believe in the story that the silver bullet theory will take down a vampire.
I don't know that silver would take down a vampire, and that I'm not convinced that vampires as we think of them are actually real. But you know there is not that. But law goes back generation. So it does seem to be based on something, doesn't it, George, It truly does.
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