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Man, welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Nori with you. We're going to have a fascinating moment with John Olson. Born and raised in Cash Valley, at the age of eight, he began to realize that the home he lived in was very strange. His parents still owned the old farmhouse
built in the mid eighteen eighties. Strange experiences such as phantom Knox, loud boots running across the stairs, missing objects becoming commonplace for him as he grew up with each run in with what he called the Man in the Hat.
John's interest in the paranormal grew bigger and bigger. Fueled by his own experiences with the unknown, John has spent the last thirty plus years interviewing and documenting first hand accounts of those who have witnessed all kinds of strange and unusual phenomena in the Western part of the United States. The Stranger Bridgeland series contains first hand accounts posts monsters, hauntings, glitches,
and the Matress, sasquatch and even UFOs. John Olson back on Coast to Coast, Hey, John, it's been almost three years. Good to have you back.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me George. It's always such a pleasure to talk to you. I'm just a huge fan of all your work and the opportunity to come on here is amazing, So I appreciate it.
We are fans of your You do a great job out there on the Western Side.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. I've been working hard getting stories and putting out books, and like you said, my newest one, Stranger Utah, is actually booked eight so yeah, I've been been going hard at it.
So eighth books already, that's fantastic.
Yeah, it's it's really fun. I mean, like you know, you get to meet amazing people and hear extraordinary stories, and there's nothing better.
Let's go back to the man in the hat during the farmhouse days and then get into what got you collecting these kinds of stories.
Yeah. So the home I grew up in, like you mentioned, it was built in eighteen eighty, so it was already one hundred years old when I was a kid, and it wasn't long before, you know, by the time I was eight, I realized that there was something different about my house than other people's house. Yeah, and the man in the hat is one entity, one ghost that we were able to see like full body operation at times,
and everybody in the family had experiences with him. For example, my mother would have an experience quite a bit where she would be working in one of the rooms and somebody would walk in and she would assume it was one of us or my dad and start talking to them, and when there was no answer, she would turn and
it would be him, and then he would disappear. So it was it was just really fascinating, you know, that he was the one that showed himself, even though I do believe there was a lot more than just one ghost in the house. But later on, when my grandparents
passed away, they didn't live very far away. I was flipping through an old photo album when we were helping clean out my grandma's house, and I flipped the page and I bot fell out of my chair, George, because there's a picture of my house, a black and white picture, and a man standing in front, and it was the man in the hat with overalls, white shirt, white brint hat. And I did some research and found out it was a great great uncle of mine that owned that house
in the nineteen twenty so I was able to him. Yeah, that's him. He is one of the ghosts that is in the house. So it's it's kind of fascinating to be able to put a person to the ghost now as.
Well, there's a phenomenon going around now John called the hat Man. Would you consider your man in the hat the hat man?
You know, I know, they're definitely two different things. The hat man that people are seeing, it's more associated with shadow people that they're also seeing, where it's a completely black image with an obvious man wearing a hat. So I don't believe there's any correlation between the two, but I do find that fascinating that it's also a man in the hat that's showing up as a shadow person. So it's that's one that's really kind of strange and scary for sure.
What kind of stories do you collect, John, So.
I collect pretty much any kind of story that you can imagine when it comes to the paranormal ghost stories, cryptids, glitches in the matrix, and I've even got some Fay stories, which you know, I never thought I would actually get, but I've actually collected some of those as well. And you know, it just kind of runs the gamba, including you know, people who've run into doppelgangers or just you know,
everything to do with the paranormal. I kind of keep it open for for everything and ufo UFOs as well.
Truly remarkable. And you concise these into the eight books, yep.
So yeah, I got them all in the eight books, and I spread them out so that you know, it's not just UFOs and one or whatever. It's it's kind of a mixture of all. For those who kind of like all different kinds of things, they can find it in each one of the books.
So do you have a couple favorite paranormal stories, John.
I do you know? As I keep going, I keep collecting more and more stories that that fall under my favorite. But one that really comes to mind is actually my newest book, Stranger Utah. I was contacted by gen who said that his father had a story that would like to share, and so I was able to get between him and his son and interview both of them. The
father who's retired now. In the seventies, he was an archaeologist for a university here in Utah, and in the early seventies he was still working on going to school and doing his doctor But they were working on a Ana Sazi dig near the Four Corners area, and they had first that started really strange, where in the evening if they stayed too late, there were these huge balls of light that would appear, these big orbs, and would they would chase basically the archaeologists out of the area
if they stayed too late. And one evening, he was the last one there and he was cleaning up and he heard some heavy footsteps that were going around the rim and he got really nervous because he was all alone, and he got up and headed towards the vehicle and had something he could hear following him, you know, through the brush. He got to his car and drove off, scared,
scared to death. The next morning he talked to the archaeologist that was in charge of the deg and the professor that was in charge, and the two of them went back to the dig to try and figure out
what was going on. And they found these enormous wolf tracks that had followed him from the dig site back to his car, and when he had left, the wolf tracks turned and went out through the desert, and they followed it for a little while and they both were just amazed because, you know, before their very eyes they watched the tracks turn from giant wolf tracks into human barefoot tracks in the desert, and they laughed. He taught to the professor, and the older professor refused to engage
with it. He did not want to talk about it. He didn't want anything to do with it. But he did make a rule from then on, nobody was allowed there until an hour after sun up, and everybody had to leave the dig site an hour before sundown. And so they followed those rules for the rest of the Simon didn't have as many problems. But I just thought that was such a good story, and it was so great to get it from the professor, because you're talking
about somebody that deals with science. They deal with you know, hard proof and everything, and yet he had this paranormal experience that has stuck with him all these years later.
How many of these stories surprise you, John, Wow?
You know my biggest surprise I think going through all of this, George, is I never thought when I first started that I would ever get a Fay story. You know, something from these are what you know, people would consider, you know, goblins or something of that nature or trolls, and I always considered that folklore. But it was amazing to me the number of people that I've interviewed who
have had experiences with these creatures. And what's really interesting is that these stories are from all over the world, and they explain very similar creatures but just have different names from different places around the world. And and that's really surprised me.
Pretty dramatic. You've done some work about sasquatch too, don't you.
Yeah, pardon me, that's other than ghosts. I think that's some of the stories that I get the most of is that well right after UFOs, so I would say it would go ghosts to UFOs and sasquatch. But I'd collected some very fascinating stories from people dealing with sasquatch. I had one of my favorites of those a young well, a woman that I interviewed When she was a young girl. She lived near Jacksonville, Wyoming, and she would do babysitting
for different people in the area. And one night she was babysitting at this home that was way out near the forest, away from everything, and after she'd put the kids to bed and fallen asleep, she was wakened to something in the back of the house and she thought perhaps it was the parents coming home, and so she went back and couldn't see anything, and then she heard something jump on the front porch, and so she slid into the front room where she could see and turn
off the light. And this enormous sasquatch was on the porch and it kept having to bend down to look through the window. Pretty bold side, yeah, very and it was prying, you know, trying to find a way into the home when the lights from the parents coming up the driveway finally scared it off. But it's really it's really a fun subject.
How many stories have you collected, do you think over the years?
Oh? Boy, you know, I still have so many stories that that I collected that haven't gone in my books. Each book has around twenty eight stories in it.
And you interview the people responsible, right.
Yeah, So one of the criteria is it has to come from the person. I have to talk to the person that happened to in order for me to put it in the books. So, you know, I over the thirty plus years, I've interviewed a lot of people and just met some really fantastic people. And heard some amazing stories.
What has been your favorite story ever?
My favorite story ever? Well, I'm one of them, pardon me. One that really comes to mind was in I think it was not this this Stranger Utah, but the one before is actually called a Stranger World, because I had stories from all over the world, and I'd gotten contacted by this woman and her mother had grown up in a rural part of Mexico and she wanted to tell a story. She didn't speak English, so she I did the interview through her daughter. But when she was a
little girl, she had several brothers and sisters. She had one brother that was close to her age. She was a year older than her and the two of them fought constantly, and one day when they were at school they had to walk quite a ways to and from school from their little farm. They had been caught fighting at school her and her brother and had to stay after school, and so the teacher made them do chores at school and then they were left to go home.
So it was a little bit later and on the way home they had another fight and her brother took off running ahead, and as she was walking home, all of a sudden, from the brush, she got hit in the chest with a dirt clod and she thought, oh, you know, my brother is in the brush, you know, playing games on her playing games. Yeah, exactly, And so she grabbed a rock and jumped into the brush to
confront her brother. And instead of her brother being there, there was this little man maybe two feet tall, with a brushy beard and a hat and like homemade clothes and worn clothes and work a leprechaun, yeah, kind of like the Leprecaun. What it ended up being is a duinde, which is a little creature just like that in Mexico Hispanic in Mexico lore, yes, And the little duinde told her that not to fight with her brother. Her brother is his person, is how he explained that that's my person.
And so she ran home crying and talked to her mother, and her mother explained to her that it was a duinde and these little creatures can become attached to people or farms, and it was obvious he was attached to her brother. And so they did this little ritual for a couple months where she would write a note saying I'm sorry, well, I'm not going to fight with my brother. We're going to get along and lift it out by their their little barn with cookies and trees to kind of,
you know, subdue them and let him know. And she did that for a couple of months and never had any more problems, never saw him again. But I just thought that was such a scary and yet fascinating story about you know, different cultures and again the Fay and how they are throughout everybody's culture around the world.
Have you ever had people just come at you with screaming stories they're so scared.
Yeah, when I interview people, George, it's cool because a lot of times when I'm interviewing people, they start telling the story and they go right back there, you know, almost like somebody who's had a car crash trying to explain it. They get very emotional, and especially if it's something that's very frightening, that was you know, very impressionable,
they're they're able to just go right back there. And it definitely helps too when that happens, because you know, it helps me realize, you know, they really believe in what they've seen, They really you know, invested in this, and those usually make for really great stories.
What takes up most of the stories the ghost stories, Bigfoot stories, UFOs which which.
Ones, So most of them are ghost stories, I think those are the most prevalent, and then UFO stories after that, then cryptids like sasquatch, and then of course you have glitches in the matrix stories which are pretty fascinating as well, they're not quite as prevalent, and then of course you know fay stories, which are a lot more rare but amazing when I get so, there's definitely a pattern out there when I interview.
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