You're listening to the final episode of Unexplained, Season six, episode thirty one, Every Story is a Ghost Story. It had been almost a month since TV producer and director turned paranormal investigator Barry Comrad first arrived at Jackie Hernandez's bungalow with the sole intention of capturing genuine supernatural activity on film. At first, caught up in the excitement of all that seemed to be going on, it was easy to lose sight of the suffering of those in the
middle of it. However, by September of nineteen eighty nine, Barry was now heavily invested in their welfare, he couldn't offer much. The least he felt he could do was to offer them a place to stay while she figured out what to do next. Over the next few weeks, Jackie and her kids divided their time between Barry's apartment and staying with Jackie's friend Susan in Sampedro, before finally
securing a new place to live. In October, the family moved to a trailer in Weldon, a small village on the outskirts of Isabella Lake in California's Kern County, roughly a hundred miles north of Los Angeles. By the following spring, the peculiar events of the previous year looked to be well and truly behind them. For Barry, though he missed the excitement of the investigation, he was nonetheless grateful that
everyone had escaped relatively unscathed. Claiming also to have been left a little traumatized by the whole adventure, he was more than happy to console himself with all the footage they'd captured. Over the next few months. With a busy work schedule ahead, Barry used whatever spare time he could to put the film together. Working late one evening, the quiet of his apartment was punctured by the sudden blare
of the telephone. Barry was surprised to hear Jackie on the other end of the line, her voice fast and loud as the words tumbled out in a blind panic. The thing, it seemed, had followed them to Weldon. Barry was transported right back to that samp. He drove apartment, watching aghast as his friend Jeff stumbled down from the attic with the wire around his neck and gasping for breath. He also knew there was no question he had to get to Weldon. Immediately to see what was happening for himself.
On April thirteenth, nineteen ninety, under a bright full moon, Barry and Jeff headed out toward the desert sands of Kern County and arrived at Jackie's trailer just after eleven PM. Shortly before the family had moved out there, Jackie claimed to have undertaken a Weeger session in which an entity identified itself to her with the initials S. Barry regretted that they didn't catch the session on tape, so when Jackie suggested they try it again that night, he was
more than happy to oblige. After taking some establishing shots of the trailer, the three of them took a seat in her kitchen to begin the session, along with Jackie's friend and neighbor, Tina. Jackie pulled the board out from a side cupboard and placed the planchette on top, as Tina lit three candles and placed them carefully on the table.
A nervous Jeff took his position around the board as Barry prepared the camera, but again, as had happened so often in sam Pedro, it seemed suddenly unable to function. Cursing his luck, he set up a portable voice recorder instead, before finally taking his seat alongside Jackie at the table.
An anxious Tina stood to one side taking photos. After agreeing that Tony, Barry, and Jeff would touch the planchette so as to eradicate any possibility of Jackie manufacturing the results, the main lights were turned off, With only the soft flickering glow of the canned with which to read the board, the pair were finally ready to begin. They started by
asking anything present to identify itself. After a short pause, the planchette began to move first to the letter S, then M, and finally E. This, they believed confirmed the specter was indeed the same that had haunted Jackie in Sampedro. Most of the following dialogue is taken from Barry Comrade's own account of the Weieger sayance, as detailed in his book An Unknown Encounter. How many entities are present here? Asked Barry, his eyes widening, as the planchette came to
rest next to the number four. Where are you from? Cut in Jeff. For a moment there was nothing. Then the planchette shifted across the board to the letter H. Then e followed by an L. An audible sigh of relief was heard as the planchette moved back away from the L, only to swiftly move back to the L again. Tina took a photo, puncturing the anguished silence that ensued. As if in response, The table then began suddenly to vibrate, rattling the board and knocking over a candle. Oh god, look,
shouted Jackie, pointing at the table. Are you evil? Said Barry, trying his best to keep focused on the matter at hand. The planchette, now whizzing across the board, stopped at Yes. Do you feel that? Whispered Jeff in amazement. The others nodded in agreement, having also felt the air in the room suddenly drop in temperature. Barry turned his attention back to the board. Are you a ghost? He asked? Yes, Yes, yes, read the planchet Are you okay, Jeff asked Jackie, noticing
he was becoming suddenly pale. A second later, he slumped forward in his chair as a gust of air apparently blew through the trailer and snuffed out the candles. Jeff shouted, Barry, tending to his friend Jeff roused and picked his head up from the table. I must have fainted, he said, blinking wearily. Satisfied that Jeff was okay, Barry contin ued as Tina ReLit the candles. What year were you born, they asked? Nineteen twelve? Came the prompt reply. Did you
die in the house in sam Pedro? No? It said where? The planchette then spelled out Pedro Bay, and with that the table apparently vibrated violently again. How did you die? Continued Barry as he held the table steady. All eyes concentrated hard on the planchette once again as it shuffled across the board and spelled out the word they'd all
been fearing, murder. The seance carried on for some time, as the apparent spirit continued to answer questions, including the year of their supposed murder nineteen thirty, and that they'd been held under water until they died. Barry would later claim that Jeff was at one point thrown against a back wall during the proceedings. It was also reported that Jackie had been so disturbed by the seance the following morning she took the board outside and set fire to it.
A few days later, Barry was looking through the archives of sam Pedro's Newspilot newspaper to see what he could find about a possible murder in nineteen thirty when he came across some intriguing information. The body was pulled from under a wharf in sam Pedro Bay shortly after seven am in late March nineteen thirty. The subsequent autopsy revealed severe bruising to the head likely to have occurred post mortem, as well as a much larger wound that had been
inflicted prior to the man's death. However, since this wound was deemed insufficient to have caused the death on its own, it was the coroner's initial conclusion that the man had ultimately drowned soon after, with the prevailing suspicion being that it was murder. Barry eventually identified the victim as Hermann Hendrickson born in eighteen ninety, a seafarer who'd been working illegally on a lumbers steamer at the time of his apparent murder. The name had little relation to the possible
initials of SME, and neither was he born in nineteen twelve. However, the manner of death certainly fit the profile. In a final twist, Barry showed the video of Jeff's apparent strangulation to a former fisher of sam Pedro, who instantly recognized the knot that had been used to tie the cord around his neck. It was a bowline knot, the knot
most commonly used by seafarers. Though a number of peculiar events continued to take place in and around Jackie's trailer in Weldon for a good few months after the seance, by the end of nineteen ninety all strange activity seemingly
afflicting Jackie Hernandez came to an end. In nineteen ninety seven, Barry completed his documentary titled and Unknown Encounter, A True Account of the San Pedro Haunting, and in two thousand and nine published the follow up book, in which he went on to detail an extraordinary array of later incidences that seemed to focus on him and Jeff. However, nothing would quite match those bizarre events that took place in Sampedro back in nineteen eighty nine. To this day, all
of those involved have maintained their stories. It has been suggested that Jackie Hernandez simply manufactured much of what took place in her home. Some, including doctor Barry Taff, speculated that she'd unwittingly caused the various phenomena herself with some
kind of psychokinetic power. Many have also questioned the veracity of all those who claim to witness the Sampedro haunting, as it is commonly referred, despite the majority of them having nothing obvious to gain from upholding such as charade, and yet for a great number of people, the possibility of such an event remains an especially alluring and terrifying one, whether you're one of the forty five percent of the American public who believe in ghosts, or one of the
thousands in southern China so concerned by the superstitions of ghost month that their heightened sense of caution going about their daily dealings actively brings the area's death rate down. As a species, we are thoroughly preoccupied by the idea of them. It is often poetic to talk about ghosts in the sense of being haunted by others, or in the sense of them perhaps being something that exists in some other kind of world, theoretically present but forever impossible
to reach. But for me, the idea that ghosts might exist has always and only ever be about one thing, the possibility of life beyond death. Not for me the stone tape repetitions of a moment captured in time, or the artificially atomically perfect replication of my person to a digital cloud. If it isn't me, as I am now, who's aware of my continuing existence, then I'm not interested. Although it would remain to be seen just how enjoyable
an infinite existence might be. Since my fear of death remains as strong today as it was when I woke screaming into the night at six years old, with the sudden and inescapable epiphany of my own mortality, an eternal life still seems preferable. Failing the likelihood of achieving infinite life, I often find myself searching for new ideas with which to reposition my understand of just how such a thing might be possible. And what better place to start than
with our strangely simplistic notions of time. When we think of time, we tend to picture a clock or a set of numbers with which to reference our day. We may say that time is the aging of things, or talk about the passing of time. We once counted it by the rising and setting of the Sun, becoming in turn the revolutions of the Earth and its orbit around the Sun. Yet this isn't time in any independent sense, but rather just a convenient way to structure the world
around us. Not only would two separate inhabitants of two different planets have completely different understandings of how long a day would be. Even if they both understood the same principle of an Earth hour, neither would experience it as the same length of time, unless by some freak coincidence, both their planets were orbiting, spinning, and stretching across space time at exactly the same rate. In other words, time, as discovered by Albert Einstein, is entirely relative to the observer.
It is not an objectively quantifiable unit. Since the early twentieth century, scientists have been searching for the theory of everything, a framework to unify the seeming incompatibility of Einstein's theory of general relativity with the laws of quantum mechanics. Einstein's theory, which centers on the function of gravity and describes processes on large scales such as the orbits of planet prefigures, are deterministic universe in which it is possible in theory
to calculate the cause of any event. Processes in the quantum realm, however, which govern the universe on the minute subatomic level, are considered nondeterministic due to Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which states it is impossible to know a subatomic particle's position and momentum at the same time. Calculations in the quantum realm are measured as probabilities as opposed to definitive answers.
While the respective laws that appear to govern both the quantum realm and the more large scale world of classical physics give extraordinarily accurate predictions at each of their respective scales, when the laws of one realm are applied to the other, they completely break down. As such, those two worlds, despite coexisting in the same universe, are currently considered to be
fundamentally incompatible. In the mid nineteen sixties, John Wheeler and Bryce de Witt, two theoretical physicists from Princeton and the University of North Carolina, believed they had devised a way
to combine the two processes. Wheeler and de Witt's radical approach was to simply ignore the rules of the larger scale laws and treat the entire universe as a quantum system, applying the laws of quantum mechanics to the function of gravity and space time, or more precisely, assuming the universe to be a closed system, they imagined it as one
single quantum object. According to the law of conservation or the first law of thermodynamics, the universe as a closed system, meaning the total amount of energy that exists in the universe is the same now as it was when it was first created. No new energy is ever created within it.
It simply changes from one form to another, or, in other words, as Wheeler and de Wit have it, mathematically, the sum total of all the information within our universe is constant, which in effect means ultimately the universe doesn't change. Of course, we see change or the time flowers blossom, trees bloom, and birds fly. But what the Wheeler DeWit equation, as it came to be known, implies is that there
is no external time reference to measure this change. If such a thing were to be true on paper, at least, the linear notion of past, present and future is nothing but an illusory process within a much larger system that ultimately doesn't recognize it. The only thing that is fundamentally
demonstrable is the whole of it existing together constantly. Although many scientists have rejected this consequence of the Wheeler de Wit equation, it is widely considered a useful step toward understanding decoherence, the name given to the process that occurs at the border where the rules of the larger scale world of classical physics begin to conflict with the laws
of the quantum level. One suggestion as to why we don't perceive time as it truly is is that the language we use to describe it prohibits us from seeing its true state. As the saying goes, time is simply what keeps everything from happening at once, which is to say that its appearance as something that flows from present to the past emerges solely because we describe it in
that way. Ted Chang draws on the idea of how language restricts our understanding of time to startling effect in his nineteen ninety eight novella Story of Your Life, later adapted as the twenty sixteen film Arrival directed by Dennis Villeneuve. Chang's poetic and revelatory story opens with the sudden appearance of one hundred and twelve monolithic structures suspended in the
air in various locations across the globe. When the structures are found to be audiovisual links to a highly advanced species recently arrived in Earth's orbit, linguistic specialist doctor Luise Banks is tasked with deciphering their language in order to communicate with them. What Banks eventually discovers is that the written language of the aliens, called heptopods, due to their seven limbed appearance, is essentially without linear structure, Their sentences
a collection of idiograms that appear simultaneously. Banks makes the startling realization that rather than experiencing time in a sequential,
linear fashion, the heptopods experience it all at once. As Banks becomes more adept at the heptopod's use of language, she finds herself becoming untethered from her human constructed sense of time, until finally, she too begins to see her past, present, and future as one without for a moment, suggesting that Wheeler de Wit equation is right to remove time as a quantifiable variable and much less that it proves the existence of ghosts. I find myself oddly reassured by the
nonlinear interpretation of time. Perhaps, if we were so blessed or cursed, we also might imagine ourselves, like Chang's heptopods or Kurt Vonnegut's Troupamadorians, as creatures that have evolved to see not just the present, but the entirety of everything that has been and will ever be. Ghosts would thus become not the spirits of the dead, but instead the bodies are the very much alive, existing alongside us in perpetuity.
In a quote tentatively attributed to the Australian author Christina Stead, it is said that every love story is a ghost story. But might it be more correct to say that every story is a ghost story? That every tale we tell is something that has once passed, yet somehow remains kept alive or in existence within us. Isn't all of life just a story that we tell each other, whether it be shared by memory or through the very genetic imprint
of our blood. And when or if all stories were to finally disappear, we might hope that somewhere a ghostly imprint will still remain. And if there really is no such thing as time, and nothing ever truly dies, then really there would be no ghosts, only us and everything else existing together forever. This episode was written by Richard McClean smith. Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClean Smith. All other elements the podcast, including
the music, are also produced by Richard McClean smith. Unexplained. The book and audio book, featuring stories that have never before been featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes, and Noble Waterstones, among other bookstores. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the story you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of
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