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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you. Paranormal investigator, ghost hunter and author Ross Allison with us lectures to thousands of students and people throughout the US on the ghost hunting adventures and as Todd is such far away locases as London, Canada, Scotland. His latest book is called Haunted Historical Hotel. Ross, welcome back to the show. How have you been?
I've been pretty good.
How you been good?
All is good? You still checking into haunted things?
I am?
Why did you? How did you get interested in all this?
Well? I always tell the story that my mother got me involved in ghost hunting because as a kid, I just grew up listening to her ghost stories and I was always fascinated with these stories, wanting to know do people really experience this phenomena? And so for me it was just like curiosity, wanting to see if there was any truth behind and all of that.
Where did mom get the ghost stories?
Oh, she'd find them in like local newspapers and in a lot a lot of the books and stuff like that.
I remember one story she told me as a kid, was about a couple that wanted to leave for a party, and as soon as they were getting ready to leave for a party, they couldn't find their keys, and they searched and searched because they thought something that happened, some weird happened with their keys, and it come to find out the ghosts had hid them in a box in their closet, and if they had left when they were supposed to leave, that they actually would have been killed
in a horrible car accident that just happened down their street.
You know, it's interesting how impressionable we are as kids. Row So my mother did the same as yours, except she went into the UFO route, in the extraterrestrial route when I was little, and it obsessed me with that.
Yeah, it was one of those things. I was one of those kids that was constant checking out all the ghost books of the library and failing to return them. So I got in trouble for that.
Now, when you decided to become a paranormal investigator, how did that all come about?
Well, I was actually living in the Bay Area out of San Francisco, and I had always, again, like I said, been fascinating with the paranormal. But luckily down there I was able to pursue it. It wasn't a thing in the Northwest, or in the Seattle area, i should say. And so while I was down there, I got to work with a lot of the names down there. Lloyd Auerbach actually took a few of his lectures and classes.
And when I moved back to Washington, and this is before ghost hunting became a huge thing, the ghost hunting shows did not exist. And it was two thousand and I had moved back to Washington, and I wanted to continue learning about the paranormal, but there wasn't anything out there, you know, in the state of Washington. So I actually h one night, it was around Halloween. I said, you know, I'm going to get a few of my friends together that there's a local cemetery down the street. We're going
to check it out. But of course my friends they're like, yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun, but we want to hit the bars first. Yeah, a bunch of drunks in the cemetery is not a good idea. No, So a friend of mine just said, why didn't you start your own group? So I did, and it really took off from there.
This paranormal experience. How do you explain it?
Well, a paranormal experience for me is a little bit different than a lot of people. You know, when you get into the fact. You know, people believe in ghosts already. It doesn't take much to convince them. You know, a knock on the on the wall could convince anybody that it could be a ghost. But for me, it's a lot more challenging. I want more out of it rather than just that knock. I want to see if we could have three points of data. Is there you know,
some sort of reading happening at that exact moment? Is there, you know, a temperature variance? Can we get something you know with video as well? Is there you know anything else that can add to that experience to help validate something more to it than just the knock on the wall. So I tend to be a little more throle or I guess I challenged myself as a paranormal investigator to try and validate paranormal experiences.
Russ, How did you come across haunted toys?
Well, that was a funny thing. David Weatherly actually approached me and wanted to do some work on writing some books together, and so our first project was Haunted Toys because we both had a collection of haunted objects and toys was a great thing to actually because our main goal was to get the book out before Christmas, we thought this would be a great way to get some ghost stories stirred up around the Christmas season. And it
was a huge success. People loved it, and so we kind of continued on with the series and still doing more work today.
You're still working with David is a great guy.
Oh, he's a wonderful guy. I love working with a guy.
I love his Black Eyed Kids' stories.
Oh. Yes, he's been doing a lot of cryptid stuff as well. So he's doing lots of books on all of the encrypted stuff to state by state. So then doing a lot of amazing work.
Now, how does the toy get haunted?
Well, there are three different beliefs. There's basically, an object can absorb the essence of its owner, especially when it comes to children. I don't know if you know a child, but a children can become very obsessed with a toy and so sometimes that energy can carry on into the toy. Then you also have just an object being you know, possessed by a spirit. So you've got situations like maybe a wedding ring where a bride is attached to that ring, and so when she dies, she continues to hold on
to that. And then of course you have a situation where people believe that they could, through rituals, have some sort of energy attached to an object as well, such as like voodoo or any other spiritual beliefs.
Rush is it the toy itself that creates the issue or is it the fact that somebody is possessing it.
Well, again, it's like I said, with a child putting so much energy into a toy, I think sometimes these toys can become its own entity, you know, whether it's like the same phenomena as an imaginary friend, whereas somehow they can actually filter that energy into that object. And then there's like I said, there's that situation whereas something wants to be attached to it, whether it is a ghost haunting the location and it is attached to a toy. So you know, it just varies on the situation.
John Zapfis has shown us that other objects can be haunted as well.
Oh yeah, yeah, definitely not just toys. This is the reason why we may have haunted houses. You know, you think about it as a wealthy person puts so much time and energy to build their mansion, something that you know,
identifies their success in life. And sometimes you know, there's lots of stories where these wealthy people die before their mansion is completed, or they want to hold on to that mansion because this is again some sort of status as who they were, and so a lot of times they can be attached to just the house alone.
Russ. If somebody were given a haunted toy, would it stay haunted or does it dissipate?
I think it could depend on the situation. One of the things that we always question is why is an object haunted. We don't always have that direct communication with the other side to understand why something chooses to attach itself and how long right exactly or even how long. I've always felt that there's not always an easy, you
know process for you know, ghostbusting. I think a lot of times, if you are dealing with something that's intelligent, it may be some sort of counseling session, you know, to help them to understand, you know, what's going on. There's no reason for you to be here anymore, you
can move on. And I think due to our limited communication with the other side, we don't always are able to, you know, pass on that information, just as much as they can't always pass on the information to us as to why they're there.
Can this toy sometimes be the haunted version of the kid that was the owner and maybe the kid died.
Oh yeah. In fact, I've got a great story. One of my favorite stories to tell is called the Haunted Lamb, And this was a little stuffed lamb that this little girl, her name was cindysho is about six years old, and she's obsessed with this toy. He kept it with her
at all times. She even bathed with this toy. And one day she was crossing the streets and she was struck by a taxicab and it actually during the impact, her and the lamb went separate ways, and of course, you know, she unfortunately died, and her mother went back to the scene of the crime, and she actually was trying to, you know, find this lamb because she wanted her daughter to be buried with her treasured toy, and
she could not find this lamb anywhere. Well, the funeral ended up happening and the next day when she came home, she found that stuffed lamb sitting on her porch. Now, she was grateful to have this toy. Yeah, it was returned, but no one left the notes. No one ever reached out to her to you know, just to address the fact, you know, making sure she got the lamb. So she has no idea how this, you know, lamb came about
back into her life. But she brought the lamb into the house and she put it on her daughter's bed. She went to bed that night. When she woke up, the lamb was actually sitting in front of the TV in the exact same spot where her daughter would always sit to watch her favorite show. And this happened almost on a daily basis. This lamb would show up in different locations. I would sit at the table, she'd find it at the table where her daughter always sat, you know,
in her favorite play area. Now realizing that this was most likely her daughter communicating with her, and she was at the time was not a believer in ghost so she really didn't know what to do with this experience that she was having. So she ended up reaching out to a local ghost hunter and they decided to try EVP electronic voice phenomena, and so they sat the lamb on a table, set a recorder right next to it, and of course tried to reach out to the little girl.
And one night when they were doing this EVP session, when they played back the recording, they actually heard a little girl crying. And this was the first time that her mother had actually heard her daughter. And so that night she just could not sleep. She was tossed and turned,
and so she got up. She went into her daughter's room and she laid on her daughter's bed and she had the lamb sitting right next to her, and she finally was able to fall asleep, but she was awoken by a strange noise in the room and she opens her eyes and she looks over and she sees the silhouette of her daughter standing in the doorway. Now she couldn't say anything, she couldn't move, She wasn't terrified, but she was just in somewhat shock but be calm at
the same time. And she just locked, you know, onto this image of her daughter, and then it just faded away.
Did she think she had a dream, No, she didn't think.
She had a dream. She just felt that this was her daughter and The thing is is after that experience that Lamb never moved again, and she never had that experience ever again. She never saw her daughter or heard her daughter. And she thinks that the reason why her daughter was crying on that recording is because she was saying goodbye.
I was just going to say, she hadn't had a chance to say goodbye exactly, and she moved on finally, and she did. Do you think most spirits eventually move on?
I think, and in time. I think there are a lot of situations. Well, you know, if you think about some of the oldest ghost stories, you know, tied to castles, there are some hauntings that still happen to this day, you know, stories that date back to you know, early you know, seventeen hundreds, eighteen hundreds, and so I think that activity can carry on. But in some cases, I think some of that activity is more residual rather than
an intelligent haunting. I think in some cases, intelligent hauntings may have the opportunity to move on. Residual is just that trapped memory that just plays itself out over and over and over again. So I think, in fact, here's another great story. We were doing a case where a young man had died in an apartment. He had committed suicide the drug overdose or in a party. And since then, this young this young lady was living in the room where this had happened, and she would wake up in
the middle of the night the strange noises. She would actually see him standing in the corner of her room. Her closet door would open and close by itself, and you know, she was terrified. She didn't know what to do. She had heard the story of the young man that died in the apartment, you know, previous to them moving in, and so they called on us to do an investigation. And I brought in a psychic. And the interesting thing was is I don't tell anybody that claims to be
psychic any information. I don't even let them know where they're investigating exactly. I really try to focus on building credibility. And so you know, she was brought in and she immediately did pick up on this young man. But the surprising thing was is she said that it wasn't a suicide. She's telling us that, you know, he just was he was upset because the story was that him and his girlfriend had just broken up, and so he you know, that's why they felt that he had committed suicide because
he was depressed over this. Well, through her interpretation, she believes that it wasn't a suicide. He was just partying a little too hard and didn't know when to stop. And as soon as she passed that information onto us and we were able to pass it on to friends and family of that young man, the activity completely stopped. And I think that's exactly what he was trying to tell people, is that it wasn't suicide. He just didn't know when to stop.
Do you think ross that most hauntings are ghosts and spirits trying to pass on information and like you say, once they do it stops.
I do. I do. But then I think sometimes they don't know how to let go again. If you are dealing with, you know, that intelligent factor, they don't know how to let go, or they don't want to let go. But I do think there's a lot of situations where they they just want to hang on for a little bit.
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