Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norrie with your Graham Phillips back with us. I'll tell you a little bit about Graham. Also this book, Strange Fate and Extraordinary True Story of paranormal Discovery. He wrote with Jody Russell, who lives in the Los Angeles area. Graham lives in the United Kingdom. He's been one of Britain's best selling nonfiction authors for forty years. Has published twenty books concerning
historical mysteries. They include investigations in the Death of Alexander the Great, The Secret Life of William Shakespeare, The Mystery of King Arthur. His book also covers his search for historical relics as the Holy Grail. He's considered a real life Indiana Jones. Graham, Welcome back. It's been a couple of years.
Hi, George, Yes it has, but I'm still alive and still going.
Good for you. And how's Jody doing? What do we hear about her?
She's fine, but I'm not sure if she's listening to this, might be asleep, but she's in Los Angeles, so hopefully she's awakened listening.
Yeah, it's not too late. It's only a little after midnight, so she might be up. Hi, Jody, wherever you might be. Hey, Graham, tell us a little bit about strange fate. Tell us about this investigation.
Well, it's a little bit different to my other historical investigations. It started off as an historical investigation into a secret society that existed in the mid nineteenth century based in central England. They claimed to have found in an old burial mound in central England. They claim to have found this small stone that was shaped in the shape of
a heart. They called it the Heart of the Rose, and they believed that it had extraordinary supernatural powers, specifically the power to alter fate time even to cross into different universes. Now, they wrote about this in the mid Victorian period, before things like the multiverse became popular, so I thought it was fascinating that they even claimed to
have done this sort of stuff. But in the end, Jody and I decided to go in search of this stone that this strange group called the Me and Aia group had claimed to have hidden.
This group what is the name mean? Me and Aya?
Well, it's an anagram for I am one. They believed that different cultures throughout the world had different ways of different forms of mysticism, like in China, India, the ancient United Kingdom and elsewhere, and they believed that they were all different ways of looking at the same thing. So it was firstly an anagram for I am one, but it was also the name of an ancient land in what is now Turkey that they believed these stone was originally made over three thousand years ago.
Now you were looking for, as you mentioned, the Heart of the Rose, what is that loss relic?
Well, it hadn't been I hadn't found any reference to it before, as you mentioned in your introduction. I researched things like the Holy Grail and gone in search of that, investigating all sorts of different references in history to it. But there wasn't really any other references to this Heart of the Rose other than what this ME and I
group wrote about it. But they claimed, for example that in eighteen fifty one, on May the fourth, specifically that one of the daughters of one of the people involved in this, a girl called Mary Heath, went into an old burial mound in central England at a place called the Bridestones. It was around about fifteen hundred years old, which historically speaking, dates from the kind of period that
King Arthur is said to have lived. She entered this too while an archaeological dig was going on there, and somehow managed to find this small stone at the heart of the rose. When she came out, she said that she had felt impelled to dig in a certain place and there she found it, and afterwards she became psychic, as the only way to describe it. She had all sorts of strange abilities. She started telling her parents and others in this group that all sorts of things about
themselves that they couldn't have known. And she eventually proved herself by taking them to an old ruined church on the not far from where this burial mound was, and she said that if you dig down here this part of the ruins, you'll find a stone slab, and underneath it is an old crypt containing old documents belonging to the knights templars from the Middle Ages, all sealed in
lead containers. And she was right. I mean, five or six of these people all wrote separate accounts of how this happened, so they've been led to find some ancient, hundreds of year old manuscripts and a lost crypt by a seven year old girl, which is absolutely.
Astonishing, incredible research. Is this stuff similar to like Stonehenge?
The burial mound is like similar to Stonehenge. Yes, right next to it, it's about fifteen hundred years old. It is thought to have contained one of the last druids of Britain, the old priesthood of the Celts before the Anglo Saxons invaded, and it was thought to have been a woman who was the inspiration behind the Arthurian legend of Morgan le Fee, the wizardess if you like, of the Arthurian legend, or more Gana if she's sometimes called so.
She was supposed to have been buried seemingly with this stone that gave her remarkable powers that this little girl found. But right next to it there was a stone circle that was even older about the age of Stonehenge, and something similar to Stonehenge.
There's an area called Bidolph Grange where this group met back in the eighteen hundreds. You write, what's so strange about this place?
Well, once they found this stone and this little girl that led them to all these ancient manuscripts and me talismans that had belonged to the Knights Templar group in the Middle Ages. They started this me Andia group based at Bidoff Grange, an old Victorian mansion then it was just built then, and it was on the grounds or in the estate of this Bidoph Grange that this burial man had been, and also this old ecclesiastical building where they discovered this crypt. What they'd started to do then
was practice various ancient forms of mysticism. They built a mock reconstructed Egyptian tomb on the estate. They built a Chinese sanctuary like a pagoda and pool and other ancient Chinese mystical sites. They built a Celtic glen, as they called it, which was basically what the rich ancient Britons used to worship at, which was like a sacred spring coming out of the rocks, a pool, and also standing stones, some of which they actually moved from right next to
the bridestones this tomb nearby. So they built these, and they also built an underground Roman temple right under the house, and it was here that they met and performed whatever strange ceremonies or whatever other mystical practices they did in the belief that they could alter fate, or even in some cases, believe that they could travel through time or to other worlds.
While your investigation was under Waygraham, didn't weird things start happening to you two?
Well? Yeah, at first, I was just regarding this as an historical investigation into a bunch of people with rather weird beliefs. I did think that there must have been something pretty weird going on, just beyond historical, if you like, and more mystical, especially so because so many witnesses claimed that this young girl was able to perform amazing feats
of prophecy or whatever you'd want to call it. But when Jody and I visited the where the two was, it's just a load of old stones that remain now where this little girl, Mary Heather name was had found this stone. We went there and suddenly, whether there's a nice sunny day, suddenly the rain started pouring down. There was thunder lightning, far more violent weather than you'd normally get in England. But there was a massive cloud directly over us that seemed to have come from nowhere were
all around us. It was completely clear that the thunderstorm could be directly overhead, and while we were there, we filmed what was going on while we were there on a phone camera, and what seemed to be a kind of ball of light seemed to shoot from these stones and into the nearby bushes. Now people said it could be lens flare or something, but experts had examined it so they couldn't really explain it, but it might have been something to do with it electrical storm one way
or the other. The storm lasted for about five minutes and was only present when we were there at the stones, and nowhere else in the area around.
That's pretty dramatic, isn't it. Do you think you stumbled into some kind of like parallel universe.
Well, at the time, we just thought we'd distumbled into some rather strange weather phenomenon. But shortly after this we began to find out that things were rather different to how we remembered them. For us, start bit Off Grange, the Victorian house nearby. What all these people had met was there was a fire there that we as far as we know, the research that we'd carried out Jody and I a fire that had taken place in eighteen ninety seven. We'd written all about this, and we'd done
all the research about it. It was still in the books that I'd written referring to it. But suddenly we went back to the grange house itself, which is now open to the public, and one of the we were just discussing the history of the place if one of the guides, who suddenly told us that this fire had taken place in eighteen ninety six, And we said, no, no, no, no, no, it's eighteen ninety seven, because you'll see it there on one of the pictures that you've got showing the grange
as it used to be. But no, it had changed. And that was just the first of a whole series of small, little incidents that could be down to faulty memory. But as these strange changes in dates and reality carried on, we had to think we were in some other kind of world. For example, there was one person we'd been talking to a few days before who didn't even remember.
Um, that's weird. Now are there any members of this group two offspring still alive today?
Well, this is what we're still trying to find out. I mean, we've been investigating this or a good cup years, I mean, on and off I've been looking into this group for about forty years. It's only now I've gotten to write the book about it, but that the last of these people were called the Heath family that lived at Bidolf Grange and ran the whole thing. Mary Heath, a little girl, ran it for a while when she was an adult. Her sister in law, a person called
Laura He's, took over. She died in eighteen ninety seven, and after that the group seems to have broken up. There were offspring, but these people didn't seem to know very much about it. We found one family who had old documents written by the me and I a group that were kind of hidden away up in their attic. They really didn't understand the significance of them and had
no idea of what their ancestors had been doing. So we're still looking for people today who may still today be carrying on whatever this group were doing.
Were they like strange people in those days? I mean, were they violent and older?
Though no, not in the slightest. The interesting thing is most of them were women. They came from rich families that lived in stately homes throughout Britain. They who then traveled to bid Off Grange for these meetings. They included a number of female pre Raphaelite artists. They were mainly women, as I say, female pre Raphaelite artists, writers, and also people who were pacifists and specifically a lot of women who were into the early sort of years of feminism.
They were some of the people that were involved in campaigning for votes for women women's rights, generally at a time when they was extremely unpopular, and from the few writings we have got from this group, it seems that they wanted to try and add mysticism to their intentions of changing the world to some degree so that women
got a far better lot. They were known as the first wave feminists, and a lot of the ones who started the votes for Women's campaigns both in America and this country and other women's rights groups were also members of this mystical me and I group who seemed to be trying to use the paranormal if you like, or the supernatural to change the world in favor of more equality for women. So opposite of being violent Graham.
When Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland, was he somehow stumbling into this tool?
Yes, he did. It was quite interesting because just a few months after this little girl Mary Heath discovered this stone pretty much started the whole thing off. Once she had found this old crypt, that's when the group started. A few months later, in the summer of eighteen fifty one, her father and mother went to stay at a nearby other stately home belonging to a man called Lord Halifax, who was a member of the British government. He was
an extraordinary wealthy man. Mary's father, Robert, was into mining, coal mining and iron production. He was staying with Lord Halifax as ongoing meetings and discussions about mining rights on the Halifax estate. So Robert and Ann, his wife, went with them, and so did little Mary, the oldest child and who was just seven at the time, went and
stayed with them at this house. Interestingly, at exactly that time, Lewis Carroll was the tutor to the children of Lord Halifax, and it was at that point that he first came up with the ideas in tandem for both of the Alice books, Alice in Wonder vand Analyze through the Looking Glass. And it wasn't until many years later that the story was published, but he always claimed he had based his story in eighteen fifty one on a real little girl who, according to the books, is exactly seven and a half
years old. Now, some people have suggested that he based it on one of the children the girls of Lord Halifax, but none of them were that age. But Mary Heath, who was staying there, who was probably also for a short while shooted by Lewis Carroll, was that exact age. She was staying there. She'd just recently remember crawled into a hole in the ground, into a tomb. She'd come out saying she'd been to a fantastic land where all sorts of strange things had happened. They put that down
to imagination. And this may be whereas he was in spe to write the story of Alice in Wonderland.
That's fascinating. Might they've been this group stumbling into time travel?
Well, the time travel bit is quite weird. That they claimed that they could see through time. They didn't that. Unfortunately, the evidence we've got is rather fragmentary in documentation. But what happened on one occasion Jody and I went into the mock Egyptian tomb that I was telling you about, into a central, dank, cold chamber that's there and in there there's the figure of a statue they put of an ancient Egyptian god called Arne, also known as the
Ape of Thoth. It's like a human sized baboon creature who was supposed to be the lord of time. And in that particular chamber, Jody was filming me, just talking about it for a YouTube thing I was doing, and when the film came out on it you can see quite clearly. It's dark, but you can see that there's a figure seemingly of a Victorian lady standing there looking at me as I walk past. And the couple of
weeks before that, Jody had had this vision. She does meditation quite often and sometimes she does get experiences of things that are you know, that proved to be accurate that she couldn't have known about, And she had dreamt of this actual event taking place, and she'd seen me in the future to her standing next to this woman exactly that I had appeared on this film, a woman in Victorian clothes who was seemingly was able to see me because she turned and looked at me as she
went past. So it appears that there was both past, present and future nighting in one place and that's just one example.
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at oneam Eastern, and go to Coast tocoastam dot com for more