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S1: A listener production.
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S2: The creators of this podcast would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which it is recorded. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the first storytellers of this land. We pay respect to their elders past, present and emerging as well as any Indigenous people who may be listening today.
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S3: The unexplained takes many strange forms. It's every mystery that has not been solved. Every question that has not been answered. A ghosts real. Are we alone in the universe? What is this lump on my testicles? For real. I should probably get that checked out. Charlie Clawson and Ben McClay are here to investigate. This is the unexplained explained.
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S4: Explained it.
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S3: Then, after.
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S4: Much planning, it's nice to say that the first session of the North East Australian Paranormal Society is in session. We both have a shared interest in the paranormal. While not sure if we're believers ourselves. You, I believe, have one of the largest private collections of paranormal literature in Australia.
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S5: Yeah, I'm willing to make that claim until someone tells me that it's not at all true. But also that's kind of like putting bait out there because I would love to meet the person that has the larger collection. Actually, I would love to meet a person that has a collection.
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S4: Well, I have a collection, but mine, that's when I sort of would follow you on social media and I'd see photos of your library and stuff, and I was like, Oh boy, I thought I was had an interest in these weird books. But then I've found a guy who's like, really into it.
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S5: It's it's a little over the top.
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S4: I think that the people who would class themselves as professional paranormal researchers and investigators would have asked kind of I mean, I'm thinking end of right as the Lost Ark kind of.
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S5: Yeah. Although I would maybe if they were the sort of people who took this quite seriously would maybe preclude them from owning any of the sort of stuff that I have like, you know, in that they're like, no, this is just pabulum put out for the masses doesn't cover the real deal. Although I was finding I was reading through a bunch of them today and like how often they reference each other as like fellow academics.
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S4: In the field.
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S5: Yeah, it's so good. It's like a parallel world of people who view themselves quite seriously doing something that is 99% of the time extraordinarily silly.
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S4: So what Ben and I have decided to do is traditionally in the lead up to Halloween, we would get together and we would go through some of the most bizarre, kind of like online stories of like paranormal encounters. And people seemed to like it and we definitely enjoyed it. So we thought what we'd do this year instead, instead of just a one off show, we would do four weeks in the lead up to the spookiest time of the year. We would do a month's worth of shows where each episode we focus on a different paranormal phenomenon with a local focus. That wasn't my intent when I started, but when I just started to sort of go online and look for stories and things to talk about, I kept getting drawn back to Australian paranormal phenomena because I think that the way all of us, I'd say nearly everyone experiences paranormal phenomena is through Hollywood. You know, it's mostly that's how it's, that's how we are informed of it. And our what I've always imagined is what is a, what is an Australian response to the same kind of because I can sort of see Americans behaving like Americans do in supernatural movies when something spooky happens, Oh my God, you know, the kind of stuff that we Australians are very practical people. And I was always interested to know, well, what would that kind of egalitarian sort of blue collar attitude towards paranormal events look like? And so that's what we're sort of like going to focus on over the next few weeks. This episode in particular, we're going to talk about the phenomenon of Poltergeist. Now, Mike, if you want to put it in a spooky, I was going to say Thunderclap, but that feels very hammer horror. I don't know. It's like a theremin or something like that. What's spooky coming when I say poltergeist?
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S5: I like the theremin element to it. There's a real, you know, other world. 70s. Yeah. Yeah. At the edges of science kind of feel to it.
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S4: So for anyone who has never seen the classic Spielberg film and the not so classic remake. Ben, our resident paranormal expert, what is a poltergeist?
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S5: Oh, I'm so glad you asked. Poltergeist. An amazing film, by the way. Just as a side note that What a fucking isn't it? It's a Toby Hooper film, isn't it? But it's the one that they say was covertly directed by Spielberg.
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S4: It's one of those horrible things where a certain directors like The guy directed A Nightmare Before Christmas. Everyone sort of puts it down to Tim Burton or the guy who directed Babe. Everyone puts it down to George Miller. And I think Poltergeist, the idea was that, yes, it was a Toby Hooper film, but Spielberg's fingerprints were all over it, and you can sort of see it stylistically, right?
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S5: Oh, and tonally as well, where it's there's this real capacity that Spielberg has for introducing. An air of menace and then quickly turning it into a sense of awe, like you did the same thing with Close Encounters, where it started to be quite terrifying, but by the end of it, something kind of beautiful. So a huge tangent. I just love podcasts so many times.
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S4: That's not a tangent because that would be most people's understanding of what a poltergeist is. It's a kind of not necessarily a spectral like a singular spectral entity, but more of a force. Yeah.
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S5: Honestly, I learned quite a lot about Poltergeist today or learned I don't know if that's the right word. I read a lot about guys.
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S4: Get into your creaky, like spider Spiderweb Copperfield library and you take down some ancient tome and open it and blow the dust off it.
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S5: I mean, it's more or less what happened. This was actually the first time I've been able to it sort of just sort of looking at it and appreciating it, use it for want of a better word. Like I was like, All right, sweet. I'm going to just pull out every book that looked like it might contain something on Poltergeist or Ghosts, which made me very, very aware that that library is 95% UFO stuff and a very small handful in episode three. Yeah, that'll be tremendous. That, honestly, I think will give me some sort of choice. Paralysis. This one was far easier. So my main source here was a book called Confessions of a Ghost Hunter by a man called Harry Price from like 1935.
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S4: Old time classic The man who got me first interested in paranormal research. Oh, really? Yes. When I was a kid, I'd go to the library and there was a bunch of Harry Price was at Baillie Manor. What was one of his most famous investigations was a manor in the UK that he went to like numerous times.
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S5: I'm not sure, actually. So I've just got the one book from him that only has made a movie about him there.
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S4: There's like a few years ago, there's like one of those kind of Victorian sort of esque horror, classy, one of those glossy horror pictures.
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S5: The Harry Price Ghost Hunter, the TV movie from 2015. I think that's.
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S4: It. I think it's a different one.
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S5: It doesn't.
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S4: Sound great. Rebecca I think. What's her name? Rebecca. Rebecca. You know, from the town. Rebecca. The poltergeist affected memory. Because I think there's a vault. I think.
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S5: I do. Yeah. That's one of the first things I get. So, yeah, I started with his one story of a poltergeist in this book, which was so funny because it's so this is from the 30s like 1936, I think. And you know, this is before we'd really developed the tone of like the 60s, 70s and 80s paranormal detective, where the more of these you read, the more you get the impression that they're all doing a similar sort of it's not generous to call it a con, but it is kind of a con where, yeah, they're doing an air of skepticism, but you know that they. I definitely trying to sell to you that it's real, right? While being like, well, you know, maybe there is some mundane cause, but what if, you know, it's a few.
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S4: Differences, if you know what I mean?
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S5: Yeah, and he's doing that exact same thing. Like, it's totally, it's identical. He's like the proto version of that where he keeps offering all these possible mundane explanations for what's happening in this. So he's visiting this house that's having stuff thrown through the windows and onto the roof. And he says at the very start, well, immediately behind the house there is a private asylum for people with shellshock and they are within throwing distance of the house. And he keeps bringing it back to that while also being like. But, you know, I saw some stuff there I can't really explain. And he he doesn't get to specifically into the nature of Poltergeist but he does sort of set that template where they make knocking sounds, they knock stuff over and then he moves on to the next chapter, which is honestly incredible. It's about him seeing a man with some sort of visible disfigurement four times in a city in Germany, and he's absolutely convinced that it's a haunting. The mayor does nothing wrong to him. He just runs into a couple of times over the course of a week and he just stresses how ugly the bed is.
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S4: It's a immortalising in the time.
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S5: It's very weird. He sounds like he's describing someone with a skin condition and nothing else.
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S4: So what is the accepted wisdom behind why poltergeist hauntings occur?
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S5: That's such a wonderful question. I actually found a pretty uniform answer for that that I did not expect. So I've got three other books here that I was looking at. I have the Poltergeist Experience Investigations into Ghostly Phenomena by Scott Rogo from 1979.
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S4: To investigate that name. That's incredible. That's I mean, I hope it's a pen name.
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S5: I feel like if you had the surname Rogo Rogo, don't do the like first initial and then a name thing. You've already got enough interest happening in your name. Yeah. Keep it simple.
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S4: It makes me think of that Danny Dairy trait they used to have in the 80s for kids years ago. You can go. Go anywhere you go. You can go, go When it's hot, you can with us. It's lunchtime. You can go when it's not.
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S5: Well, they claymation the insane.
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S4: You're a claymation gorilla. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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S5: Go, gorilla.
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S4: You can go anywhere you go. You can really go when it's hot.
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S5: I, um. Weirdly, I feel like those would have been crazy fucking expensive to make.
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S4: Oh, yeah. In the 80s.
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S5: And stop motion.
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S4: Money, it was just cocaine. It felt like filmmaking back in the 80s. Like that's when you wanted to make music videos. Because my wife and I, that's how we sort of started our production companies. We used to make like music videos for Sony and stuff like that, and we were coming into it as the budgets were dwindling. I think the highest budget we ever had was like, you know, maybe $90,000 for like a three day shoot, which is nothing. But in the 80s they would spend like, you know, a half $1 million and you'd get like Ridley Scott in to shoot you. And, and because it's a music video, it doesn't you don't need a script. You don't need to make sense. Just get we've got a bunch of models. We'll just backlot get me some blue neon and we'll, we'll have the band playing in this room. And everyone just did cocaine for four days. It was amazing.
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S5: There's a better time. I also had to look through the Ghost Hunting, A Practical Guide by Andrew Greene, which I think is from the early 80s. And then just a sort of more generic your psychic world. A to Z by an poetry. Two of these books, it turns out I don't know how this happened. Had the same owner previous to me. What do you mean? Like they're both laminated. Like the. The outer cover has got contact on it, but they've got the same name on the inside cover.
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S4: Did you buy them at two different bookstores?
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S5: Uh, honestly, I have no fucking idea. I probably like 90% of the books that are in this collection came from just dozens of visits to the Lifeline Book Fest. Which even then, the odds seem.
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S4: No, not really. Like, if you think of the way you donate to a op shop or whatever you normally bulk donate. So what's the key? Can you give us. You don't have to give us the last name. What's the first name of the.
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S5: Well, it's only a first name in both of it. Someone has taken a like sort of silver marker. Silver metallic marker with Katie. Katie. Oh, it's quite a. Yeah, it's Katie. I actually googled Katie and Poltergeist because they seem to have got quite a specific interest in this because they've underlined a bunch of stuff in one of the books.
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S4: Do you think Katie was a medium? Maybe she was. The. The poltergeist was drawn to her. She was trying to work out why things are flying around her room.
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S5: I mean, let me I'm going to read you some of the things that she specifically underlined, because there's I don't know if I can draw a specific pattern here, but maybe you can. So the first thing she has underlined in the Poltergeist experience is C.G. Jung Freud's disciple believed that the unconscious also houses the collective memories of our entire civilization. The poltergeist is the direct expression of our primitive desires to lash out and express hostility, urges that are generally held in check by our conscious restraints. Okay.
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S4: I mean.
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S5: So she does that.
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S4: Look, I'm immediately my profiling of Katie goes to emo teenager that's to me seems like the kind of thing emo teenager would underline because you're going through those kind of wild emotions, which it feels like sometimes you're possessed or there is a force behind you that you can't control.
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S5: So I reckon it's funny that you say that because that's definitely going to come up very shortly. Really? Um, yeah, some other things she's underlined. Sometimes the objects turn at a sharp angle and continue flight in a new direction. That's it. Just that one sentence by itself. She has underlined the day. Dr. Charles Tart. Nothing else. Wow. Do you think she.
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S4: Planned to get in touch with this Dr. Charles Tart?
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S5: I mean, I think he died in the. Oh, no. Am I? He died in the 90s? I think so. She might have missed out.
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S4: How do you know? Is he famous?
00:14:34
S5: I googled Dr. Charles Tart. Apparently he is. He's famous for some out of body experience experiments that he did. Yeah, right.
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S4: The founders of the field of transpersonal psychology still alive.
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S5: He's 86, 37in Sylvania. Well, maybe we should contact him and see if we can work backwards from there. She's also underlined some stuff about Poltergeist being caused by guilt. So the thing you were saying about teens is that the common definition I found in all of these books is that they're caused by teens. It's not that they're caused by people. They are caused specifically by teenagers, by.
00:15:13
S4: Their turbulent emotional state.
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S5: Yeah, See if I can find it. There was a really good, uh, quite long description of why where they were like, it's a combination of like the sexual frustration, puberty, in many cases, a child at the age of puberty is involved and appears to be the modus operandi. Don't know if that's what that.
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S4: No, I don't think it is either. That's the way of operating. I guess it makes sense.
00:15:42
S5: Sex certainly seems to be the root cause of many psychokinesis.
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S4: Yes, the root cause.
00:15:47
S5: Hey, there it is. Uh, a fairly common poltergeist phenomenon involves bedclothes being moved or thrown about. And this seems to occur more frequently when an elderly person is the agent. Subconscious sexual frustration may be the cause of this. How do you just horniness.
00:16:04
S4: Horniness. How do you get to that with the elderly people, though? Like why? Why? I guess I'm wondering, why is there delineation between the destruction caused by the sexual pent up sexual energy of a teenager? And then what is it? Bed linen typifies elderly sexual frustration. Why bed.
00:16:23
S5: Clothes?
00:16:24
S4: I don't say so. Like young kids hurl around batteries and hammers and shit like that. And old people, horny old people just like, Well, I can just lift up this pillowcase, fling it across the room.
00:16:35
S5: I wonder if he's working under the apprehension that the elderly don't have sex. Uh, well.
00:16:42
S4: I'm certainly operating under that assumption just for my own personal mental health.
00:16:48
S5: I mean, don't think about it too much, but there's, you know, the crazy spread of STIs in old folks homes because, yeah, none of them. That's an episode of.
00:16:56
S4: Protection they missed out on, isn't it? The one where Mulder and Scully have to go? There's like just rampant poltergeist activity at a nursing home because everyone's just got so much pent up sexual energy.
00:17:08
S5: Well, yeah. Or, I mean, they're all fucking and they're fine. And it's, you know, it's clearly got to be something else. Knocking You hear just one of the guys that works there.
00:17:16
S4: That's supernatural. That's it. That's old Mrs. Briggs.
00:17:21
S5: That's another thing that comes up. Crossed a lot.
00:17:26
S4: I just had to take a little too far. I'm sorry about that. I apologize, listeners. Okay, so what else can you tell us about Poltergeist? Is there any other tidbits of information?
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S5: Yeah, so there's a pretty standard form for them, at least according to this is again from the Poltergeist experience by Scott Rogo. Uh, he describes the common things that happened with him, raps and blows. So knocking sound.
00:17:52
S4: So not Smith rapping.
00:17:55
S5: Actually not. They're not spitting bars due to pent up sexual frustration.
00:18:01
S4: I guess there's copyright issues too. Like, I mean, can you be sued if you're a ghost and it's copy written material, you're rapping like Eminem or something?
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S5: There's almost certainly some weird legal precedent in the US for suing a ghost. I bet. Good man. You got it. Uh, movement of objects. That's a common one. Weirdly enough, The In Confessions of a Ghost Hunter, the Harry Price one he was talking about. They had a problem where the chairs were sliding up the hallway and they were piling up on the kitchen table, which is exactly what they do with chairs in Poltergeist, which I wonder if they use that as riffing.
00:18:34
S4: I think that's and there's also a reference to that sort of in Ghostbusters, the stacking. Oh, yeah, I think that's a common part. I remember having a book on the supernatural as a kid and there was like grainy black and white photos of chairs all stacked on top of each other. And it's like only a ghost could have done. And it doesn't Bill Murray have a joke? Like where they find the stack of books? It's like it must be a ghost in Bill Murray's. Like, Yes, of course, only a ghost would stack. No human could stack books like that.
00:19:01
S5: It's such a weird way to like, you know, if you accept that we're dealing with the paranormal and this is some crazy, otherworldly visitation or whatever, these fixations with like specific objects. I was actually talking about this on an episode of Buena Vista recently with a guy who discovered one of the elements on the periodic table of elements who also was fascinated with ghosts, believed like seances and mediums and shit was real. And he was saying that specifically they only ever lifted chairs and he was sort of trying to get ahead of the fact that people would say that was stupid by being like, Well, obviously it takes place in drawing rooms and there's only really chairs in there. So that's what's going to happen. It's not crazy. This is very weird. I like that little moment of self-awareness, but not not enough to stop yourself from doing it. Well, it comes.
00:19:58
S4: Back to my one sort of gripe with any kind of paranormal activity, you know, like I think on the scale of Scully to Mulder, I am like 99%, 99.9% Scully With like a 0.01% chance of of being a Mulder. And that skepticism is all based around my frustration with the cryptic nature of hauntings. Like you had the ability to pick up a chair. Can you not pick up a pen and write something down? Like, can you not hit.
00:20:24
S5: The cable a ghost?
00:20:25
S4: Just tell us what the fuck is going on. What's with all the, like, the cryptic clues and the coded message? And you've got to find this locket because there was a body and body buried in an unconscious created grave. Like, just, you know, just. Just. Just make it easy for me. I don't want to have to solve mysteries the whole way along.
00:20:44
S5: Little side note saying it could be a nine poltergeist. I was murdered. Avenge me. So literally.
00:20:52
S4: The name Poltergeist comes from the German. Right? Which means noisy ghost. Right? Okay.
00:20:57
S5: But all of the experts do in scare quotes here. They don't like that term. I mean, they use it, but they don't like calling it a ghost because they all believe that it is a physical manifestation of someone's pent up emotions, someone with psychokinetic abilities. It's not actually another entity. It's coming from a person, almost always a team. But sometimes I guess, like would.
00:21:24
S4: You say then in a way, Carry is more a film about a poltergeist than poltergeist?
00:21:31
S5: Yeah, yeah, that's very true. Because she's not doing it consciously, is she? Not until initially, I guess the not initially. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That would. That sounds like poltergeist behavior to me. Yeah.
00:21:40
S4: Oh, my God. We've blown the lid off this thing for episode one.
00:21:43
S5: God, my God.
00:21:45
S4: We are Northeast Australian Paranormal society has bloody landed. A huge blow for science. Carry was not a film about a girl with telekinesis. It's actually a poltergeist film. More of a poltergeist film than poltergeist.
00:21:59
S5: That's so true. Have you? I don't know if we've discussed this before, but have you had any ghost adjacent? No. No Things? Nothing?
00:22:08
S4: No. The closest I've come to Ghost is like vivid dreams of dead people talk that people that I know that are dead, having vivid dreams where they're in the room. And where I wake up, I feel like, Oh, my God, that was just there. But that is I have never with my conscious mind and my conscious eyeballs seeing a spooky spirit or apparition.
00:22:30
S5: Wow. Have you? That's. I mean, that sounds more harrowing. Uh, arguably, uh, I wouldn't say I've seen a ghost. I would say I have definitely convinced myself that, uh, I've scared the shit out of myself. I used to work at this cinema in Brisbane. Um, it was called Tribal Theatre at the time when I worked there. Before that it was a it's like a 100 year old cinema, beautiful old historic building that is now a Hillsong, which, um, you know, not great, but what can you do? But the, the people that I work there with were significantly more spiritual and superstitious than I was and were absolutely convinced that there were several ghosts in that building. And I had a few things happen there where I was like, Oh shit, I like heard noises coming out of the basement once. That just scared the piss out of me and I didn't want to go down there. I was absolutely convinced whenever I was vacuuming in cinema one that there was someone walking behind me and that that feeling never really went away. I hated doing that job. And then one time. This is the one that stuck with me the most. Uh, the way the cinema was setting up set up was like it was a proper cinema back when you still had those where there was a projection booth, there was a film projector, and then next to the booth with the projector in it, there was the table that you would cut and like stick back together the your film reel so you could make one continuous reel to put on the thing. And I was in there one time with the projectionist while we were like splicing together something and I kept getting these little the projector was running next to us in the other room. I kept getting this little flicker the corner of my eye. I was like, Oh, that's really weird. Just. But I was like, oh, you know, it's probably just because there's this thing that's just flashing a shitload of light, right? So like, that's sort of going to happen. But like. I felt very distinctly like I kept seeing the flicker as like the silhouette of a person about person sized. And I was just like, Well, that's fucking stupid. So I'm just going to ignore that. And then after like 30s of that, the projectionist turns to me and is just like, Did you see a woman over there? And I was just like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We had someone quit as a projectionist because they got supposedly haunted. They had listen.
00:25:00
S4: I've never had a supernatural incident, but if you asked me to sleep overnight in a famously haunted place, then I'm probably not going to enjoy myself. And we'll imagine that I've heard, seen and heard a lot of things. So I'm still a scaredy cat about all that. In fact, even in doing research for this series, I've been staying up late and I live in an old Queenslander that's full of creaks and knocks and stuff in the middle of the night. And like, even though I'm a sceptic, I have this this kind of sneaking concern that by researching and putting my energy into studying things like this, I am somehow inviting bad things to happen. Like something reading about Poltergeist and like, well, is that if they're all floating around up there just waiting for a green light, if I just give them a green light to come down and start knocking on my doors and windows and throwing things around my house, like last night, I was going up the stairs and I got all the way to bed and I was like, Oh, shit. Like, I think I left whatever down in the office and I have to go down these creaky stairs through my downstairs living area, which has got like reflective surfaces fucking everywhere. So everything looks like you're seeing your, you're seeing your darkened silhouette pass on every angle. And I remember being like, Oh, this is shit. I want to turn all the lights on. Like, I don't want to go down there on my own. So yeah, skeptic but easily, easily spooked by stuff.
00:26:20
S5: I'm very susceptible to the same thing. Like I just, I know on every conscious level, intellectually, I could say, no, none of that is real. That's just not happening. But I can make myself so scared so easily. It's very fucking stupid. The human brain is just like, I don't know. Or at least mine is very capable of being like ghosts aren't real. But what if there was? All right, I'm turning all the light.
00:26:44
S4: I think that's what's going on, though. That's what I'm convinced is happening. Is that because our brains are these problem solving machines, you know, and, you know, we don't necessarily see things light enters our eyeballs. Our brain interprets that data and construct an image of what's in front of us, you know. So it makes sense to me that occasionally that data that comes in is faulty and that your brain, you know, mistakes that shadowy corner for corner for being a woman standing in the corner, and it constructs the most realistic fucking woman that you've ever seen in your life. And for a split second, you see a woman that you're bright from your imagination staring back at you. And then she's gone. And you'd be like, She was right there. I didn't imagine it, you know? So to me, that makes complete sense.
00:27:26
S5: So what's the wood for Delia? Is that it? Is that the pronunciation.
00:27:31
S4: Album by something for Kate? I believe.
00:27:34
S5: Yeah, that's right. Fuck, I love. It's like we're pattern recognition machines. And like you said that so much of what we see is like, I mean, this is a weird philosophical question, but like is interpretation is our brain looking for patterns? And then. It's not. I don't even have the language to describe this. But yeah, a lot of it is just what's been put together by our brain and then it interpreting it and then telling us, I don't know what I am in this situation if I'm not my brain. But that's another question where.
00:28:09
S4: I understand what you're saying. It's a process that is feeding you with its best possible approximation. This is what we think you are looking at. You know, like I remember listening to a Ted Talk which said that, you know, this idea that we sort of just observe things and it's this one way street where, you know, your brain constructs the way the light hitting objects to tell you what's in the room that you're in. But in a lot of ways, it's a two way street and you're, you know, your kind of cognitive biases and your predisposition to believe certain things is going to shape the way that data is interpreted. And so they did this experiment in this TEDTalk where they played this sort of garbled message three times and you kept pressing the audience, Can you hear the message that's in that? Can you hear the message in that? And they'll like, no, no, no. And then he played it a fourth time. And this time you heard quite clearly Brexit was a mistake. And then when he played the garbled for the fifth time, you could clearly hear Brexit is a mistake. And he said, But Brexit is a mistake. He's not in that fifth recording. I just played it to you. That's good. And then you said, okay, well I've been told this is the message I'm listening to. And so there is this idea that that's why people like to say to me, Oh, you need to believe. Then you'll start, you know, you'll have a psychic experience. And it's like, well, yeah, I mean, if I've already decided that it's going to happen, then it makes sense that I'm going to have that experience.
00:29:27
S5: Yeah, but the specifically, the thing where I felt like I was being followed while doing the vacuuming, nothing happened. Like, literally I turned on the vacuum and I vacuumed. There was no other things going on. If I hadn't gone into that experience being like, Oh, this place is haunted to fuck like I would.
00:29:49
S4: Another, I would.
00:29:49
S5: Work just a bit of yeah, I would have just been a guy vacuuming up like tons of popcorn like that. But you know, once you get yourself into that very impressionable state, I think it's we have the same capacity to convince ourselves into being haunted in the same way that like. If you go into a room ready to laugh, you could see the worst comedian in the world and the jokes could be completely nothing. And you probably still laugh once you're primed for laughter. The body just kind of does it. You convince yourself that you're having fun. If you convince yourself that you're about to be spooked by something, you're going to find a fucking way to spook yourself. It's going to happen. Yeah.
00:30:25
S4: Hi, Ben. Are you ready to hear about the poltergeist of Humpty Doo?
00:30:30
S5: Oh, I'm so ready. Let's get to it.
00:30:42
S4: So a bit of background on this story. When I was a teenager, I remember there being a story on Today Tonight about a poltergeist in the Northern Territory. And my memory of this was that it was like an unusually long like normally on Today tonight, the two, 3 or 4 stories, five minutes each. Right. But they dedicated pretty much an entire episode and they treated with such gravitas. And, you know, the phenomena that are capturing of like objects flying across like CCTV cameras and stuff with such kind of seriousness that even though I was a young man at the time, probably like 19 or 20, I was sitting there going, fuck, like, is this evidence that it's real? Like you've got a proper news organization today. Tonight, the that's a serious against the serious journalists of today tonight are telling me that they've been up there. They've spent a week in this house and that they've seen these things and it's real. And so over the intervening years, I had sort of memories, details had faded and to the point where I'd started to doubt whether or not I'd actually ever seen it. I remember talking to my wife about it and being like, I remember watching this fucking crazy episode of Today Tonight where they were just telling us that ghosts were real. Now showing shit flying around and and it wasn't like it didn't stop the nation. And I just sometimes I wonder if I imagined it or not. Anyway, cut to now we're preparing to do this series and I start digging around and I come across this story, which apparently is Australia's like one of Australia's top two haunting stories, which is the poltergeist of Humpty Doo.
00:32:22
S5: Now who's how are they ranking those?
00:32:25
S4: No, Northern Territory, it turns out, is like our Florida like when it comes to crazy ass fucking stories. The Northern Territory has quite a few because I believe they have one and two of the most famous poltergeist stories in Australia. But I want to focus on this one in particular because this was the one that I saw all those years ago. So it's August of 1997. Honeydew is a small town, about 40km outside of Darwin, a little quiet little country town. And in this house, Jill Somerville and Dave Clarke move in, it's 90 mins drive and they have their mate Doug Murphy move in with them as well. Now they're all, you know, salt of the earth, blue collar, maybe some bikie links, who knows? But they've sort of they are, they are not those who are prone to drama. They're just you're pretty ordinary. Northern Taureans or Australians will call them in this instance. Now, in January 1998, so about four months later, another family move in with them and that's Andrew and Kirsty Agius, who have got a daughter, Jasmine, who's about 11 months old. Things are going fine. They're loving living in this part of the Northern Territory. But not long after the all five moving together, weird things start to happen. Objects start flying around the house, bits of glass, beer bottles, knives sometimes and every housemate, apart from Jasmine, the baby felt like at some point they are targeted by one of these objects. You know, they'll turn around and something smashes on the wall next to them or something will fall from the ceiling. Gravel and seashells would start to rain from the ceiling in the kitchen, materializing just below the level of ceiling and then falling onto anyone who's sitting at the table.
00:34:05
S6: Now.
00:34:07
S4: After a while, they sort of take it with good humor. And this is what I mean about that Australian response to kind of poltergeist activity. It's it's an annoyance and an inconvenience more than anything. But they like the house and they don't want to move out. So they put up with the fact that occasionally things go flying off the walls or fall from the ceiling and they just consider it's just, you know, part of living in this part of Australia and Humpty Doo.
00:34:31
S5: So presumably no one's been hit by a knife or broken glass.
00:34:34
S4: Yet they felt vaguely threatened, but not ever like they felt that they were. The poltergeist wanted their attention, but was not actually trying to hurt them, just like an annoying housemate more than anything. So then comes the day where they think, well, maybe we should try and communicate with said spirit. So they laid out some scrabble tiles and they told the Spirit that if it wanted to communicate, it could. The next day they wake up to find that some of the tiles have been arranged to spell out words. But not only that, some of the pebbles that have been raining from the ceiling have also been arranged into words that spell out fire, skin, car help and Troy. Now, one of the housemates, Murphy, had a friend called Troy Raddatz, who had died in a fiery car crash only two months earlier. Apparently he'd been transporting tins of paint thinner and the car had crashed in the fire and he'd burnt alive, so immolated in his own car. On March 20th, a large trident and cross appeared formed in the middle of the kitchen with pebbles and stones. Now, a number of witnesses came round and saw this school teacher, Annette Taylor, and her partner Lloyd Green witnessed the the Trident and the cross. And they said that it happened in an area that people were passing in and out of the whole day, and it was impossible to conceive that someone could have put these intricately built sculptures together with the with the pebbles in such a short space of time. In fact, Lloyd said he couldn't have done it with hours and a straight edge and a ruler. So, Dave, one of the housemates decides that they need to move the Pebble Trident and the Pebble Cross from their kitchen floor. But when he touches the pebbles, they go flying and then everything goes apeshit. Everything in the kitchen flies off, windows get broken, appliances are flying around.
00:36:34
S5: Do he. Were there any guesses as to the symbolism of the Trident?
00:36:40
S4: No, actually, it's a good point. I haven't actually come across anything in all the articles I've read about this. There was they just mentioned there was a trial. I guess maybe Aquaman.
00:36:50
S7: Yeah, Aquaman, maybe. Yeah. Like in 20 years.
00:36:54
S4: Jason Momoa is going to capture the hearts.
00:36:56
S7: Of the world.
00:37:00
S5: Like, it'd be very odd if we got a message from the afterlife, and they're like, Oh, it turns out two two religions were right. A Christian, God is real. And Neptune, the God of the sea is real.
00:37:09
S7: I mean, I don't know.
00:37:10
S4: What is the is there any kind of symbolic relevance of Trident? What does it suggest? Or maybe it was a pitchfork.
00:37:19
S5: Pitchfork Maybe, yeah. That's the both ends of the spectrum.
00:37:21
S4: I guess you got a choice between the cross or the pitchfork. Jill One of the housemates said at the time we would have moved out, but we had nowhere else to go. So now it's become a bit more threatening. The references to Troy have unnerved everyone quite a bit, so they decide they need help. So what's the first thing you do when you need help with a spook or a specter is you call a priest?
00:37:47
S7: Yep.
00:37:48
S4: So they contact Father Steven D'Souza. Steven D'Souza. Right. Like RoboCop or Alien or something. Or is that another D'Souza?
00:37:56
S5: I'm not sure.
00:37:57
S4: I might be Stephen Souza. Actually, I think he wrote Streetfighter anyway. Not the same person, I'm assuming. Well, that would be amazing if the man.
00:38:04
S7: Who wrote the movie.
00:38:05
S4: Streetfighter, it was.
00:38:06
S7: Also a Catholic priest.
00:38:08
S4: So he did an inspection of the house and he said that he went into the kitchen and he saw a steak knife on top of a microwave and he turned his back. He heard someone call out his name. When he turned around, he saw the knife fly off the microwave and head towards him, stop inches from his chest and then drop to the ground.
00:38:28
S5: Well. So that's like the sentence that Katie underlined in the Poltergeist book about them stopping and then changing direction suddenly. Well, there we go.
00:38:37
S4: And what was unclear from that statement was when he heard his name was that one of the housemates called his name to say, hey, look, there's a knife coming. Or if it's the poltergeist, I'm not sure. Doesn't seem very consistent with poltergeist activity that it would yell something out. I mean.
00:38:53
S7: Yeah.
00:38:54
S5: It's also it's quite funny to imagine the Australian accent really undermines a haunting. Yeah. Like, you know, when whenever in a movie a ghost is saying something, it's always in like a Vincent Price. Sort of like very over-the-top theatrical accent. But just imagine someone just being like, Get out.
00:39:12
S7: Piss off! Fuck off. Rack off. Oh, Ralph, it's.
00:39:18
S4: It's Alf from home and away. He's haunting your house. So Father D'Souza wasn't fazed, and he speculated that someone in the house was a medium and was attracting this negative energy. Which is kind of what you're saying. Less of a a ghost haunting and more of a energetic imbalance. So I love this quote. So he performed a religious ritual, but admitted that they very rarely worked. So what's the fucking point?
00:39:46
S7: That's how like.
00:39:48
S4: A pest inspector coming in and said, look, he got termites. Sure, I can spray him. Probably not going to do anything, but I'll still charge you for it.
00:39:54
S5: Start looking for other places now. Yeah. That's a very funny admission as well from a priest. Like the idea of, you know, God's power is total infallible. Yeah, except when it comes to getting rid of Poltergeist, we're like, Ah, there's like, 10% of the time maybe. But otherwise, you shit out of luck.
00:40:14
S7: Sorry.
00:40:14
S4: So he performed the ritual, and that housemate said that they did experience a brief respite from the poltergeist activity. The priest informed them that they weren't going to get rid of it with any kind of blessing or ritual, that the poltergeist will just move on when it's good and ready. Which is the same advice I got from a snake catcher in my area when I found a python and I said, Can you relocate? And they said, Well, you know what? The python's probably better, better to live with it than not because it'll keep, you know, rats and bigger and scarier, more venomous snakes away. And also it'll move on when it's done. So it's good to know that if you ever.
00:40:49
S5: Learn to live with the python, that's the stage that we're at.
00:40:52
S7: Right?
00:40:53
S4: Um. So after this brief respite, the activity started up again and it was worse this time. So they turned to a second priest, Father Tom English, who I presume presume was the brother of Pirates of the Penzance. Johnny English.
00:41:08
S5: That's right. Yeah.
00:41:10
S4: So that's a bit of a reference to one of my other podcast. Anytime we come across anyone with this in English, we assume that they're related to musical theatre star Johnny English.
00:41:20
S5: I know a Johnny English.
00:41:21
S7: Do you really related to Johnny English, sir?
00:41:23
S5: No, he actually took he took English on as a sort of a pseudonym because he didn't like his his previous surname. But it was he did it before the release of Johnny English.
00:41:33
S7: The movie, right.
00:41:35
S5: Starring. Yeah. Very unfortunate.
00:41:38
S7: So over the next.
00:41:38
S4: Four visits, Father Tom English said he saw objects fly through the air and stated the entity does not obey the laws of physics. I would argue, Ben, the entity does obey the laws of physics because it's throwing objects and they're falling to the ground that is showing gravity at work. That's showing.
00:41:59
S7: They're exhibiting.
00:42:00
S5: Ballistic motion.
00:42:01
S7: Yeah.
00:42:01
S5: If they had instantaneous acceleration or, you know, they broke the speed of light, maybe you'd be like, Wait a damn second. This is completely outside of our understanding of physics.
00:42:11
S4: So something new happened when Tom came to visit Father Tom, and that was a pistol cartridge materialized out of thin air and dropped to his feet. Now, that is an image I remember from the Today Tonight episode because it was so specific. I'm like, why is this poltergeist dropping like pistol cartridges? Like, I can understand household items, but that's, you know, that's that's that's oddly specific.
00:42:38
S5: Yeah, it seems sort of almost gauche. Almost, you know, like usually thick. Yeah, because they're doing things in a sort of more timeless fashion. Are you moving chairs around, you doing whatever, that, you know, that's classy.
00:42:51
S7: That's subtle.
00:42:52
S5: Just like the knives and pistol cartridges, You're like, What are you doing? Settle down. Yeah. Don't overplay your hand here.
00:42:58
S7: Well, unlike.
00:42:59
S4: Father DeSouza, Father English decided that a blessing would help, but it went wrong. And the poltergust and completely apeshit windows were broken. Appliances again flying around multiple broken windows. Enter a Greek Orthodox priest. So I love that. Fool me once. Shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me, fool me the third time. Let's get. Let's get a Greek Orthodox priest.
00:43:23
S7: Let's get serious.
00:43:24
S5: Let's go to the one church I definitely respect.
00:43:26
S7: Yeah.
00:43:27
S4: So he tried blessing the house, but the poltergeist did not like that. And he was assaulted. At first the ghost tried to rip the book from his hands. I guess, like the the Greek Orthodox Bible or whatever it is. And then in a move that mimics many bullies across Australian schools, he bent the priests arm behind his back.
00:43:51
S7: Oh well, I would love it if you got.
00:43:52
S4: The typewriter and his mouth.
00:43:55
S5: It's such a classic move.
00:43:57
S7: That's wild.
00:43:58
S4: Or a wedgie. Yeah. Imagine getting a wedgie from a poltergeist. So the disturbances from then on were very irregular, just not only in timing, but their intensity. Sometimes it was sort of a constant, like, you know, a days, hours, days on end of disturbances. And sometimes it's very intermittent where you'd have something happen and then nothing. For days the occupants found themselves bothered by the disturbances, but other times they found it kind of amusing, a bit like being in a theme park. But they were very tough and working class people and ultimately the ghost just gave them the shits.
00:44:36
S7: So you're wondering.
00:44:38
S4: What that Aussie response is you got there? It's giving me the shits. I'm sick of the fucking thing, said Murphy.
00:44:45
S7: Fuck.
00:44:46
S4: The only room that wasn't affected by the poltergeist was baby Jasmine, the 11 month old suggesting that there was some kind of intelligence behind this poltergeist, that it was saying that the child, the child is off limits or.
00:45:03
S5: That whatever human was pranking them was like, I can't fuck with a baby.
00:45:07
S7: That's just.
00:45:08
S5: Mean.
00:45:09
S4: So the two journalists from the Lit Field times hear about this haunting. It spread, the word spreads from Humpty Do all the way to Darwin. So they travel down from Darwin and witness several incidents themselves. They run a story in the local paper and it goes the 1998 equivalent of viral. And suddenly they're getting requests from all around the world radio stations in America and Europe. They all want to know about the poltergeist of Humpty Doo. So the residents of the house getting more stressed out by the media attention than the guys now. And so in their minds, they'll just do one exclusive deal with a network and they feel like that's it. That'll take away the other media interest. Hopefully it'll bring some answers and they can just like. So they signed an exclusive deal with today. Tonight, who spent the whopping amount of $5,000.
00:46:00
S7: For exclusive.
00:46:01
S4: Rights to the story? I mean 98 like inflation hasn't sort of gone up by that much that 5000 would be. That's not life changing money even back then, right?
00:46:10
S7: No.
00:46:11
S5: No. That's cheap as fuck.
00:46:13
S4: So that's like $1,000 per housemate. I guess that's why they broke it down. So the Today Tonight crew come and spend a week at the house. So there's the the field reporter. There's the producer, a couple of cameramen. Another journalist from the Good Weekend has hitched a ride. He's written an amazing column about it that you can find online. Max something another I forget his name, where he's sort of like going in thinking, oh, this will be fun. Like, you know, ghost hunters on the trail, but then gets very much sucked into the story. It's a very it's a really good ride. So anyway, the camera crew become quick believers from today. Tonight, as I experience objects moving about, cameras having their focus adjusted and changed and twisted around batteries becoming hidden or flying around the rooms. However, despite what they experience in person, on camera, they only capture three events that could be considered paranormal. One is a baby bottle falling off a fridge, another is a bullet falling from the ceiling, apparently materializing out of thin air. And another one is just a jar lid falling off a table. So despite what they experience in person, what is captured on camera is not that convincing. So even though the field producer and the host and the cameraman all fly back to Sydney like professing that what they experienced was probably paranormal, the producers back in Sydney and the host at the time, Peter Luck, they decide that it's bullshit and so they twist the story from being a a story about this rare phenomenon into an exposé about a house full of conmen trying to pull one over the Australian public. They sort of pointed to events like the the first occurrence occur, the first paranormal occurrence on April 1st in 1998. Oh, sorry, yes, in 1998. So there was rumors going around that it was just this huge prank. And in that other article, the Good Weekend article written by that journalist, he sort of talked about, you know, coming away from the trip with the Today Tonight crew and being a believer as well, and then getting a phone call from one of the producers and going into the edit a couple of days later. And apparently after the initial shoot was done, they sent a cameraman in to get some pick ups. And in his footage of an object flying across the room, if you zoom in, you do the enhance, enhance. You could see the reflection of Kirsty, one of the housemates in the background, appearing to throw an object. So that was enough for the producers of Today tonight to say this is a hoax. No one should believe it. So the housemates were devastated because they felt like they'd been lied to by today. Tonight, rather than getting vindication for this kind of traumatic four month experience, they were painted as being like these scumbags and drug addicts and liars and con men. Two days later, a couple of paranormal researchers, Tony Healy and Paul Cropper, make contact. And and you can imagine the housemates are pretty surly. They don't want to talk to anyone else. They think the media all lying scumbags, but they explain that they're actually not from the media. They can't offer any money. They're just paranormal researchers and they just want to sort of see what's going on. So they are allowed to stay. And over the next few days, they experience what they claim to be up to 30 instances of supernatural activity, much of the same thing, gravel falling from the ceiling, seashells, things getting flown, flung around the room. Now Tony Healy and Paul Cropper, they admit that they are inclined to believe they're paranormal researchers. And so, you know, they try and sort of back this up with as much evidence as they can. But ultimately they know that they they cannot produce that peer reviewed data that would conclusively state that poltergeist or exist. What they found very compelling, though, was the testimony of the housemates, which they said if it was a con, it seemed odd that they would continue this con for two guys who were there with no money and no cameras for the next week, like why would they continue to sort of pull this con? I mean, I would argue to save face.
00:50:25
S5: Well, yeah. Yeah. Because that far into it, it would kind of be humiliating to backtrack now. Yeah.
00:50:31
S4: Over the next week or two, more journalists visit and by when Then things are all said and done, they're up to 30 witnesses who claim to have experienced, if not direct paranormal activity events that they couldn't explain. Now, while this is all going on, the landlord of 90 mins drive is like, What the fuck is happening at my house? Why do I keep saying it on the news and in the paper? So he pays a visit to the house and he finds broken windows she finds like.
00:51:00
S7: Smashed.
00:51:01
S4: Appliances. So when he comes across all this damage, he's like, You're fucking out of here. Like, I'm tearing up the rental agreement and I'm evicting you. However, the housemates appeal, it goes to arbitration and the housemates win.
00:51:18
S7: Now, I can only.
00:51:19
S4: Assume they win because the only argument for them not being evicted is that the person leading the arbitration is like, well, clearly the victims of a poltergeist haunting.
00:51:28
S5: Poltergeist real. You guys are fine. Don't even worry about it. Fuck, That's amazing.
00:51:34
S4: So the tenants eventually move out and then the incidents immediately cease, Which is an odd coincidence, isn't it?
00:51:41
S5: That's very strange.
00:51:44
S4: So the two guys, Tony, Tony Healy and Paul Cropper, who initially in their first investigation of the house, said, you know, look, we don't know conclusively, but a lot of the stuff we felt experienced, felt very real. And so I read this article that was like a a what would you call it, like a they revisited one of the articles. They wrote about this. And he sort of talks towards the end of the article in the original article about viewing video footage they shot at the time where he was talking to one of the housemates and one of the housemates saying to him, You know, it's the thing about living with a poltergeist is you just never know what to expect. And then bang, like, you know, this battery goes rocketing across the room and he talks about like, oh, God, like how unnerving it was. And so then when he sort of revisits that same article, he's watching alternate footage that another camera crew shot with another group of people and he sees the housemate go through the same spiel where she's like, You never know when the poltergeist is going to do next. And then a bang and battery goes, Oh. And so he writes this little postscript saying, yes, you can see the poltergeist has very good timing indeed. So after all that, the the one true believers, it feels like we're skeptics by the end.
00:52:56
S5: God damn, that's a damn, damn shame.
00:52:59
S4: It still hasn't stopped me, though. Like, if you are listening and you know where I can find that original today. Tonight footage, because there is one little clip on YouTube. It's like a two minute clip where they use thermal cameras because the idea being that if the objects are being thrown by human, when you put the thermal camera on it, you'll find fingerprints or like a handprint on the object. But when they use the thermal cameras, the whole object is heated up. And apparently that is quite consistent with poltergeist activity as well.
00:53:26
S5: There's objects like.
00:53:27
S4: That get quite heated. So the expert, the thermal camera expert in today tonight is like the only explanation I can give you is they were microwaving the objects and then hurling them across the room, which seems unlikely.
00:53:39
S5: But they don't microwave batteries. I don't know what will happen, but there's no way it could be good.
00:53:45
S8: So that was the first.
00:53:47
S4: Meeting of the North East Australian Paranormal Society. Thank you for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with us, we would love to hear your stories of the unexplained no matter what it is. Ben and I are ready to believe you.
00:54:01
S7: That's true.
00:54:02
S4: So if you've got a story to share with us, even if it's a story that you heard secondhand, we would love to hear it. So just got a tip. Com and contact us via the website. Hey Ben, we've got someone on the line with a story to tell. Emily, are you there?
00:54:17
S9: Yes, I.
00:54:18
S4: Am. Thank you so much for for joining us on the show. Now, I believe you had a spooky encounter with a ghost. Is that right?
00:54:27
S9: Um, I suppose you could call it a series of ghosts, if you like. Even better.
00:54:33
S5: Oh, that's very intriguing.
00:54:36
S9: So to kind of set the scene, I work in an old church that had been converted to a music store. So my.
00:54:45
S7: Colleague.
00:54:46
S4: Sanity or JB Hi-Fi?
00:54:48
S9: No. So a standalone music store. We sold string instruments.
00:54:53
S4: All right. Like an actual proper. Like you sell instruments? Not. Not. Yes. Okay.
00:54:58
S9: Not music to listen to. Okay. Um, so I kind of seen a few unexplainable things over the years on security cameras, like light that shouldn't be on security cameras, things like that. But old church, you know, rickety old building on.
00:55:15
S4: So let's let's not burn the steps. I want to want to soak up every detail. So when you say you seeing lights as in lights in rooms within the store would come on when they shouldn't be coming on that kind of thing or like floating through the air like orbs?
00:55:28
S9: Yeah, kind of like things floating through the air or like, flashes of light in the corner of cameras. But there would be no one, like, up in that area where the security cameras would kind of be on, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So like, or there'd be unexplained noises, like footsteps occasionally where there was no one upstairs, like we'd be all downstairs and you'd hear footsteps and would kind of just be like, oh, you know, the creepy old building. Like it creaks just is what it is.
00:55:59
S4: Was it a was it a joint? Was it freestanding? I mean, could it have been like your next door, like the tenant next door walking?
00:56:06
S9: Um, so it is free standing. But there was a boys brigade hall next door.
00:56:12
S4: Okay. Well, that's. I mean, we don't have to here anymore that the boys brigade that was responsible for 95%. Yeah. Yeah. Everything that happened, anything spooky, it was the boys.
00:56:22
S9: Yeah, totally. And because, you know, they had scouts and bands rehearse and all those kinds of things so often you could be like, Oh, probably the boys Brigade. But it would sometimes be so late at night that it couldn't logically be the boys brigade and we'd all be a bit freaked out.
00:56:37
S4: So you'd hear footsteps when the boys brigade were long gone. Yeah. Do you do you did you investigate? Like, if you heard footsteps coming from upstairs, you go up and go, Who's there? And like, put the light on and stuff.
00:56:48
S9: Yeah, yeah. So we would do that or we'd because we had access to the security system on our phones or our laptops or whatever, we would look at the security like all of the security cameras and just double check. There wasn't kind of like a customer around or someone had broken in or whatever, like, you know, because there was a security element to it being a store. Um, so we would always check it out. But I the kind of flashes of things that I saw in the corners of cameras occasionally, like, you know, sometimes I'm very cynical about ghosts and then other times I'm like, Oh, it was a ghost like explanation. So yeah, always, always kind of checked it out, but it was unexplained. Um, and so, yeah, a few years ago I was downstairs. We've closed the store for the day. Um, no one was upstairs, so it was just me and my colleague, and we were, ah, how should I wear this? Having a little bitch about everything and everything.
00:57:51
S4: All right, Even if not having sex. But I don't know why you're being so polite about it. That's fine. Yeah, we do that. Of course.
00:57:58
S7: Okay.
00:57:59
S9: Um, and so we were talking shit downstairs, and we'd been there. Like, we would close at 5 p.m. We'd probably get customers out well and truly by like 515, 530 depending on the day. But it was like 730, 8:00 at night. So like, well, well and truly closed. And no one was upstairs. And it was just my colleague and I and I heard footsteps above us because we're in the offices downstairs. But the weird thing was, is I also heard giggling.
00:58:35
S7: Yeah.
00:58:36
S5: Hate that.
00:58:39
S9: And so I, you know, being very cynical, but then also sometimes being in touch with the other side, I'm like, oh, I won't say anything because it could just be me imagining it. I won't say anything. And so I kind of just let my friend keep talking. And he was like, Did you hear that? And I was like, Oh my God. I'm like, the footsteps. He's like the giggling. And I was like, Oh my God, you heard it too. Like, no way. And did it sound.
00:59:06
S4: Like the giggling was coming from the same place as the footsteps like a child was running? Yeah, like, yeah, some Victorian child who died of consumption.
00:59:14
S7: Or something like that.
00:59:16
S4: Running through your store.
00:59:18
S9: It kind of, yeah, it kind of sounded like little kids kind of playing around like a ring around the Posey or something like that and giggling like it was very innocent sounding, but it was super creepy because it was like later in the evening, like no one was in the store. Like it was just me and my colleague. Like it was kind of weird. Um, and so we had the security cameras, like on our laptop, so we brought it up. Nothing upstairs. The footsteps continued. So we went upstairs to like double check. There was no customers because we were kind of freaking out at that stage because the giggling had kind of continued.
00:59:59
S7: Oh my God.
00:59:59
S9: And nothing. And so we went back downstairs. So I kind of grab our stuff and we were like, Oh, you know, maybe it was the boys Brigade. And then my colleagues like, No, no. Remember the Boys Brigade came over and told us there's nothing happening this week in the building. Like we've we've got the keys, like make sure it stays locked and no one kind of messes about on the premises. So there wasn't even like the boys brigade excuse this time. So we kind of hightailed it out of there pretty quickly after that. But in the kind of days afterwards, we were like, Oh, you know, like being old turds. Like, is it kid that something's bad happened to you in the church and they're haunting the church? Or is it like a happy haunting like Emily?
01:00:45
S7: I've I've got some good news.
01:00:46
S4: Nothing bad has ever happened to.
01:00:48
S7: A child church.
01:00:49
S5: Yeah. Christ, a.
01:00:50
S7: Lot.
01:00:52
S9: Yeah, like we were. We were so freaked out.
01:00:56
S7: That is a creepy story.
01:00:57
S4: Actually, the other night I was doing some reading about ghosts and stuff, and then I went up my daughter's bedroom, adjoins the master bedroom, and my wife was already asleep, and I thought I'd just go check on my daughter before I went to bed, having just read for a couple of hours about spooks inspectors. And when I go in, she's on her knees, she's facing the wall, just bolt upright.
01:01:19
S7: Just facing them on like.
01:01:21
S4: Classic Japanese, like a long hair, just hanging over her shoulders and was like, hey, I you're not.
01:01:27
S7: She didn't.
01:01:27
S4: Respond. And I put my hand on her shoulder fully expecting her to turn around with the face.
01:01:32
S7: Of some kind of demon. But she was she was just a.
01:01:34
S4: Slight she was having trouble breathing because she had a cold.
01:01:38
S7: Oh.
01:01:39
S5: I love having friends of mine who are new parents who have, you know, stories of their kids just like facing a corner and just being like, hey, what are you doing? They're like, Oh, I was just talking to the nowhere, man.
01:01:49
S7: Yeah, you don't fucking yet.
01:01:51
S5: You weren't having a conversation with the nowhere man. Don't say shit like that.
01:01:55
S7: He says he needs souls to fuel himself to sustain himself.
01:01:59
S5: He's so.
01:01:59
S7: Hungry.
01:02:02
S4: Emily, thank you so much for coming on this show. And hopefully that is your last encounter with phantom children.
01:02:10
S9: Oh, I hope so. Meanwhile, I just worry about the man that I occasionally see roaming through my parents house. Unexplainable.
01:02:18
S7: What is that you just going on? You got.
01:02:20
S5: To leave that on the cutting room floor.
01:02:22
S7: That you know. You know what we're going to do, Ghost.
01:02:24
S4: Is we're going to call Emily next week for next week's show and we're going to get.
01:02:29
S7: That story. Okay.
01:02:31
S9: I love it.
01:02:32
S7: Thank you. Emily was.
01:02:34
S9: Speaking. Thank you. Bye, fan. Thank you. Bye.
01:02:46
S4: Next week, we're going to be in search of the famed Australian Bigfoot, the Yowie. And here's a little teaser. In the morning, they found a large indistinct footprints in several metre high bushes, which had been ripped right out of the rock hard ground and held all over the place because the school staff wanted to utilize the campsite regularly. The boys were ordered on their return to Southport not to say anything.
01:03:11
S7: About the incident.
01:03:14
S5: We graced a lot of palms. Get this campground. Don't fuck this up for us.
01:03:18
S4: An article about it in the school paper was censored. There you go. There's your answer. Ben, thanks for joining me on this journey. I hope you have a restful sleep and there are no strange knockings or scrapings or things being flung around your home or apartment tonight.
01:03:37
S5: Yeah, fingers crossed, I. I don't want batteries being thrown at me. I don't want to be like someone playing against any of the Philly sports teams.
01:03:45
S7: Or at least if something.
01:03:46
S4: Happens, just don't be on the nose. Don't drop anything threatening. Like just make it mysterious, mysterious and alluring. You know, some a locket, you know, a hint of a clue. I've got I've got to find something to uncover the mystery of what's going on. But if you're just some emo teenager who needs a route.
01:04:03
S7: Yeah, Yeah.
01:04:05
S5: I want a partial map from the grounds of my apartment building. Yeah, that's. And I'll.
01:04:10
S7: There was a hidden something within.
01:04:11
S4: There was a hidden room. Did you not know? And the last known worker down there was sealed in.
01:04:16
S5: There is a weird door at the bottom of this apartment building that I've. I've never gone in there, but it doesn't seem like it's for anything. There's nothing that it could be for. It's a doorway.
01:04:25
S7: To another dimension.
01:04:26
S4: That'll be episode for.
01:04:28
S7: This series.
01:04:29
S5: If we survive that long after attracting these demonic forces.
01:04:32
S4: I'm Charlie Clawson.
01:04:34
S5: I was Ben McClay.
01:04:45
S1: Listener.
S1: A listener production.
00:00:04
S2: The creators of this podcast would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which it is recorded. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the first storytellers of this land. We pay respect to their elders past, present and emerging as well as any Indigenous people who may be listening today.
00:00:27
S3: The unexplained takes many strange forms. It's every mystery that has not been solved. Every question that has not been answered. A ghosts real. Are we alone in the universe? What is this lump on my testicles? For real. I should probably get that checked out. Charlie Clawson and Ben McClay are here to investigate. This is the unexplained explained.
00:00:56
S4: Explained it.
00:00:57
S3: Then, after.
00:00:58
S4: Much planning, it's nice to say that the first session of the North East Australian Paranormal Society is in session. We both have a shared interest in the paranormal. While not sure if we're believers ourselves. You, I believe, have one of the largest private collections of paranormal literature in Australia.
00:01:18
S5: Yeah, I'm willing to make that claim until someone tells me that it's not at all true. But also that's kind of like putting bait out there because I would love to meet the person that has the larger collection. Actually, I would love to meet a person that has a collection.
00:01:31
S4: Well, I have a collection, but mine, that's when I sort of would follow you on social media and I'd see photos of your library and stuff, and I was like, Oh boy, I thought I was had an interest in these weird books. But then I've found a guy who's like, really into it.
00:01:46
S5: It's it's a little over the top.
00:01:48
S4: I think that the people who would class themselves as professional paranormal researchers and investigators would have asked kind of I mean, I'm thinking end of right as the Lost Ark kind of.
00:02:00
S5: Yeah. Although I would maybe if they were the sort of people who took this quite seriously would maybe preclude them from owning any of the sort of stuff that I have like, you know, in that they're like, no, this is just pabulum put out for the masses doesn't cover the real deal. Although I was finding I was reading through a bunch of them today and like how often they reference each other as like fellow academics.
00:02:24
S4: In the field.
00:02:25
S5: Yeah, it's so good. It's like a parallel world of people who view themselves quite seriously doing something that is 99% of the time extraordinarily silly.
00:02:34
S4: So what Ben and I have decided to do is traditionally in the lead up to Halloween, we would get together and we would go through some of the most bizarre, kind of like online stories of like paranormal encounters. And people seemed to like it and we definitely enjoyed it. So we thought what we'd do this year instead, instead of just a one off show, we would do four weeks in the lead up to the spookiest time of the year. We would do a month's worth of shows where each episode we focus on a different paranormal phenomenon with a local focus. That wasn't my intent when I started, but when I just started to sort of go online and look for stories and things to talk about, I kept getting drawn back to Australian paranormal phenomena because I think that the way all of us, I'd say nearly everyone experiences paranormal phenomena is through Hollywood. You know, it's mostly that's how it's, that's how we are informed of it. And our what I've always imagined is what is a, what is an Australian response to the same kind of because I can sort of see Americans behaving like Americans do in supernatural movies when something spooky happens, Oh my God, you know, the kind of stuff that we Australians are very practical people. And I was always interested to know, well, what would that kind of egalitarian sort of blue collar attitude towards paranormal events look like? And so that's what we're sort of like going to focus on over the next few weeks. This episode in particular, we're going to talk about the phenomenon of Poltergeist. Now, Mike, if you want to put it in a spooky, I was going to say Thunderclap, but that feels very hammer horror. I don't know. It's like a theremin or something like that. What's spooky coming when I say poltergeist?
00:04:21
S5: I like the theremin element to it. There's a real, you know, other world. 70s. Yeah. Yeah. At the edges of science kind of feel to it.
00:04:29
S4: So for anyone who has never seen the classic Spielberg film and the not so classic remake. Ben, our resident paranormal expert, what is a poltergeist?
00:04:39
S5: Oh, I'm so glad you asked. Poltergeist. An amazing film, by the way. Just as a side note that What a fucking isn't it? It's a Toby Hooper film, isn't it? But it's the one that they say was covertly directed by Spielberg.
00:04:52
S4: It's one of those horrible things where a certain directors like The guy directed A Nightmare Before Christmas. Everyone sort of puts it down to Tim Burton or the guy who directed Babe. Everyone puts it down to George Miller. And I think Poltergeist, the idea was that, yes, it was a Toby Hooper film, but Spielberg's fingerprints were all over it, and you can sort of see it stylistically, right?
00:05:11
S5: Oh, and tonally as well, where it's there's this real capacity that Spielberg has for introducing. An air of menace and then quickly turning it into a sense of awe, like you did the same thing with Close Encounters, where it started to be quite terrifying, but by the end of it, something kind of beautiful. So a huge tangent. I just love podcasts so many times.
00:05:32
S4: That's not a tangent because that would be most people's understanding of what a poltergeist is. It's a kind of not necessarily a spectral like a singular spectral entity, but more of a force. Yeah.
00:05:46
S5: Honestly, I learned quite a lot about Poltergeist today or learned I don't know if that's the right word. I read a lot about guys.
00:05:52
S4: Get into your creaky, like spider Spiderweb Copperfield library and you take down some ancient tome and open it and blow the dust off it.
00:06:01
S5: I mean, it's more or less what happened. This was actually the first time I've been able to it sort of just sort of looking at it and appreciating it, use it for want of a better word. Like I was like, All right, sweet. I'm going to just pull out every book that looked like it might contain something on Poltergeist or Ghosts, which made me very, very aware that that library is 95% UFO stuff and a very small handful in episode three. Yeah, that'll be tremendous. That, honestly, I think will give me some sort of choice. Paralysis. This one was far easier. So my main source here was a book called Confessions of a Ghost Hunter by a man called Harry Price from like 1935.
00:06:44
S4: Old time classic The man who got me first interested in paranormal research. Oh, really? Yes. When I was a kid, I'd go to the library and there was a bunch of Harry Price was at Baillie Manor. What was one of his most famous investigations was a manor in the UK that he went to like numerous times.
00:07:03
S5: I'm not sure, actually. So I've just got the one book from him that only has made a movie about him there.
00:07:08
S4: There's like a few years ago, there's like one of those kind of Victorian sort of esque horror, classy, one of those glossy horror pictures.
00:07:17
S5: The Harry Price Ghost Hunter, the TV movie from 2015. I think that's.
00:07:21
S4: It. I think it's a different one.
00:07:22
S5: It doesn't.
00:07:23
S4: Sound great. Rebecca I think. What's her name? Rebecca. Rebecca. You know, from the town. Rebecca. The poltergeist affected memory. Because I think there's a vault. I think.
00:07:34
S5: I do. Yeah. That's one of the first things I get. So, yeah, I started with his one story of a poltergeist in this book, which was so funny because it's so this is from the 30s like 1936, I think. And you know, this is before we'd really developed the tone of like the 60s, 70s and 80s paranormal detective, where the more of these you read, the more you get the impression that they're all doing a similar sort of it's not generous to call it a con, but it is kind of a con where, yeah, they're doing an air of skepticism, but you know that they. I definitely trying to sell to you that it's real, right? While being like, well, you know, maybe there is some mundane cause, but what if, you know, it's a few.
00:08:21
S4: Differences, if you know what I mean?
00:08:24
S5: Yeah, and he's doing that exact same thing. Like, it's totally, it's identical. He's like the proto version of that where he keeps offering all these possible mundane explanations for what's happening in this. So he's visiting this house that's having stuff thrown through the windows and onto the roof. And he says at the very start, well, immediately behind the house there is a private asylum for people with shellshock and they are within throwing distance of the house. And he keeps bringing it back to that while also being like. But, you know, I saw some stuff there I can't really explain. And he he doesn't get to specifically into the nature of Poltergeist but he does sort of set that template where they make knocking sounds, they knock stuff over and then he moves on to the next chapter, which is honestly incredible. It's about him seeing a man with some sort of visible disfigurement four times in a city in Germany, and he's absolutely convinced that it's a haunting. The mayor does nothing wrong to him. He just runs into a couple of times over the course of a week and he just stresses how ugly the bed is.
00:09:34
S4: It's a immortalising in the time.
00:09:37
S5: It's very weird. He sounds like he's describing someone with a skin condition and nothing else.
00:09:41
S4: So what is the accepted wisdom behind why poltergeist hauntings occur?
00:09:48
S5: That's such a wonderful question. I actually found a pretty uniform answer for that that I did not expect. So I've got three other books here that I was looking at. I have the Poltergeist Experience Investigations into Ghostly Phenomena by Scott Rogo from 1979.
00:10:05
S4: To investigate that name. That's incredible. That's I mean, I hope it's a pen name.
00:10:10
S5: I feel like if you had the surname Rogo Rogo, don't do the like first initial and then a name thing. You've already got enough interest happening in your name. Yeah. Keep it simple.
00:10:20
S4: It makes me think of that Danny Dairy trait they used to have in the 80s for kids years ago. You can go. Go anywhere you go. You can go, go When it's hot, you can with us. It's lunchtime. You can go when it's not.
00:10:32
S5: Well, they claymation the insane.
00:10:34
S4: You're a claymation gorilla. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:10:37
S5: Go, gorilla.
00:10:37
S4: You can go anywhere you go. You can really go when it's hot.
00:10:42
S5: I, um. Weirdly, I feel like those would have been crazy fucking expensive to make.
00:10:48
S4: Oh, yeah. In the 80s.
00:10:49
S5: And stop motion.
00:10:50
S4: Money, it was just cocaine. It felt like filmmaking back in the 80s. Like that's when you wanted to make music videos. Because my wife and I, that's how we sort of started our production companies. We used to make like music videos for Sony and stuff like that, and we were coming into it as the budgets were dwindling. I think the highest budget we ever had was like, you know, maybe $90,000 for like a three day shoot, which is nothing. But in the 80s they would spend like, you know, a half $1 million and you'd get like Ridley Scott in to shoot you. And, and because it's a music video, it doesn't you don't need a script. You don't need to make sense. Just get we've got a bunch of models. We'll just backlot get me some blue neon and we'll, we'll have the band playing in this room. And everyone just did cocaine for four days. It was amazing.
00:11:33
S5: There's a better time. I also had to look through the Ghost Hunting, A Practical Guide by Andrew Greene, which I think is from the early 80s. And then just a sort of more generic your psychic world. A to Z by an poetry. Two of these books, it turns out I don't know how this happened. Had the same owner previous to me. What do you mean? Like they're both laminated. Like the. The outer cover has got contact on it, but they've got the same name on the inside cover.
00:12:07
S4: Did you buy them at two different bookstores?
00:12:10
S5: Uh, honestly, I have no fucking idea. I probably like 90% of the books that are in this collection came from just dozens of visits to the Lifeline Book Fest. Which even then, the odds seem.
00:12:23
S4: No, not really. Like, if you think of the way you donate to a op shop or whatever you normally bulk donate. So what's the key? Can you give us. You don't have to give us the last name. What's the first name of the.
00:12:33
S5: Well, it's only a first name in both of it. Someone has taken a like sort of silver marker. Silver metallic marker with Katie. Katie. Oh, it's quite a. Yeah, it's Katie. I actually googled Katie and Poltergeist because they seem to have got quite a specific interest in this because they've underlined a bunch of stuff in one of the books.
00:13:00
S4: Do you think Katie was a medium? Maybe she was. The. The poltergeist was drawn to her. She was trying to work out why things are flying around her room.
00:13:09
S5: I mean, let me I'm going to read you some of the things that she specifically underlined, because there's I don't know if I can draw a specific pattern here, but maybe you can. So the first thing she has underlined in the Poltergeist experience is C.G. Jung Freud's disciple believed that the unconscious also houses the collective memories of our entire civilization. The poltergeist is the direct expression of our primitive desires to lash out and express hostility, urges that are generally held in check by our conscious restraints. Okay.
00:13:40
S4: I mean.
00:13:40
S5: So she does that.
00:13:41
S4: Look, I'm immediately my profiling of Katie goes to emo teenager that's to me seems like the kind of thing emo teenager would underline because you're going through those kind of wild emotions, which it feels like sometimes you're possessed or there is a force behind you that you can't control.
00:13:58
S5: So I reckon it's funny that you say that because that's definitely going to come up very shortly. Really? Um, yeah, some other things she's underlined. Sometimes the objects turn at a sharp angle and continue flight in a new direction. That's it. Just that one sentence by itself. She has underlined the day. Dr. Charles Tart. Nothing else. Wow. Do you think she.
00:14:23
S4: Planned to get in touch with this Dr. Charles Tart?
00:14:26
S5: I mean, I think he died in the. Oh, no. Am I? He died in the 90s? I think so. She might have missed out.
00:14:31
S4: How do you know? Is he famous?
00:14:34
S5: I googled Dr. Charles Tart. Apparently he is. He's famous for some out of body experience experiments that he did. Yeah, right.
00:14:42
S4: The founders of the field of transpersonal psychology still alive.
00:14:47
S5: He's 86, 37in Sylvania. Well, maybe we should contact him and see if we can work backwards from there. She's also underlined some stuff about Poltergeist being caused by guilt. So the thing you were saying about teens is that the common definition I found in all of these books is that they're caused by teens. It's not that they're caused by people. They are caused specifically by teenagers, by.
00:15:13
S4: Their turbulent emotional state.
00:15:15
S5: Yeah, See if I can find it. There was a really good, uh, quite long description of why where they were like, it's a combination of like the sexual frustration, puberty, in many cases, a child at the age of puberty is involved and appears to be the modus operandi. Don't know if that's what that.
00:15:36
S4: No, I don't think it is either. That's the way of operating. I guess it makes sense.
00:15:42
S5: Sex certainly seems to be the root cause of many psychokinesis.
00:15:46
S4: Yes, the root cause.
00:15:47
S5: Hey, there it is. Uh, a fairly common poltergeist phenomenon involves bedclothes being moved or thrown about. And this seems to occur more frequently when an elderly person is the agent. Subconscious sexual frustration may be the cause of this. How do you just horniness.
00:16:04
S4: Horniness. How do you get to that with the elderly people, though? Like why? Why? I guess I'm wondering, why is there delineation between the destruction caused by the sexual pent up sexual energy of a teenager? And then what is it? Bed linen typifies elderly sexual frustration. Why bed.
00:16:23
S5: Clothes?
00:16:24
S4: I don't say so. Like young kids hurl around batteries and hammers and shit like that. And old people, horny old people just like, Well, I can just lift up this pillowcase, fling it across the room.
00:16:35
S5: I wonder if he's working under the apprehension that the elderly don't have sex. Uh, well.
00:16:42
S4: I'm certainly operating under that assumption just for my own personal mental health.
00:16:48
S5: I mean, don't think about it too much, but there's, you know, the crazy spread of STIs in old folks homes because, yeah, none of them. That's an episode of.
00:16:56
S4: Protection they missed out on, isn't it? The one where Mulder and Scully have to go? There's like just rampant poltergeist activity at a nursing home because everyone's just got so much pent up sexual energy.
00:17:08
S5: Well, yeah. Or, I mean, they're all fucking and they're fine. And it's, you know, it's clearly got to be something else. Knocking You hear just one of the guys that works there.
00:17:16
S4: That's supernatural. That's it. That's old Mrs. Briggs.
00:17:21
S5: That's another thing that comes up. Crossed a lot.
00:17:26
S4: I just had to take a little too far. I'm sorry about that. I apologize, listeners. Okay, so what else can you tell us about Poltergeist? Is there any other tidbits of information?
00:17:36
S5: Yeah, so there's a pretty standard form for them, at least according to this is again from the Poltergeist experience by Scott Rogo. Uh, he describes the common things that happened with him, raps and blows. So knocking sound.
00:17:52
S4: So not Smith rapping.
00:17:55
S5: Actually not. They're not spitting bars due to pent up sexual frustration.
00:18:01
S4: I guess there's copyright issues too. Like, I mean, can you be sued if you're a ghost and it's copy written material, you're rapping like Eminem or something?
00:18:08
S5: There's almost certainly some weird legal precedent in the US for suing a ghost. I bet. Good man. You got it. Uh, movement of objects. That's a common one. Weirdly enough, The In Confessions of a Ghost Hunter, the Harry Price one he was talking about. They had a problem where the chairs were sliding up the hallway and they were piling up on the kitchen table, which is exactly what they do with chairs in Poltergeist, which I wonder if they use that as riffing.
00:18:34
S4: I think that's and there's also a reference to that sort of in Ghostbusters, the stacking. Oh, yeah, I think that's a common part. I remember having a book on the supernatural as a kid and there was like grainy black and white photos of chairs all stacked on top of each other. And it's like only a ghost could have done. And it doesn't Bill Murray have a joke? Like where they find the stack of books? It's like it must be a ghost in Bill Murray's. Like, Yes, of course, only a ghost would stack. No human could stack books like that.
00:19:01
S5: It's such a weird way to like, you know, if you accept that we're dealing with the paranormal and this is some crazy, otherworldly visitation or whatever, these fixations with like specific objects. I was actually talking about this on an episode of Buena Vista recently with a guy who discovered one of the elements on the periodic table of elements who also was fascinated with ghosts, believed like seances and mediums and shit was real. And he was saying that specifically they only ever lifted chairs and he was sort of trying to get ahead of the fact that people would say that was stupid by being like, Well, obviously it takes place in drawing rooms and there's only really chairs in there. So that's what's going to happen. It's not crazy. This is very weird. I like that little moment of self-awareness, but not not enough to stop yourself from doing it. Well, it comes.
00:19:58
S4: Back to my one sort of gripe with any kind of paranormal activity, you know, like I think on the scale of Scully to Mulder, I am like 99%, 99.9% Scully With like a 0.01% chance of of being a Mulder. And that skepticism is all based around my frustration with the cryptic nature of hauntings. Like you had the ability to pick up a chair. Can you not pick up a pen and write something down? Like, can you not hit.
00:20:24
S5: The cable a ghost?
00:20:25
S4: Just tell us what the fuck is going on. What's with all the, like, the cryptic clues and the coded message? And you've got to find this locket because there was a body and body buried in an unconscious created grave. Like, just, you know, just. Just. Just make it easy for me. I don't want to have to solve mysteries the whole way along.
00:20:44
S5: Little side note saying it could be a nine poltergeist. I was murdered. Avenge me. So literally.
00:20:52
S4: The name Poltergeist comes from the German. Right? Which means noisy ghost. Right? Okay.
00:20:57
S5: But all of the experts do in scare quotes here. They don't like that term. I mean, they use it, but they don't like calling it a ghost because they all believe that it is a physical manifestation of someone's pent up emotions, someone with psychokinetic abilities. It's not actually another entity. It's coming from a person, almost always a team. But sometimes I guess, like would.
00:21:24
S4: You say then in a way, Carry is more a film about a poltergeist than poltergeist?
00:21:31
S5: Yeah, yeah, that's very true. Because she's not doing it consciously, is she? Not until initially, I guess the not initially. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That would. That sounds like poltergeist behavior to me. Yeah.
00:21:40
S4: Oh, my God. We've blown the lid off this thing for episode one.
00:21:43
S5: God, my God.
00:21:45
S4: We are Northeast Australian Paranormal society has bloody landed. A huge blow for science. Carry was not a film about a girl with telekinesis. It's actually a poltergeist film. More of a poltergeist film than poltergeist.
00:21:59
S5: That's so true. Have you? I don't know if we've discussed this before, but have you had any ghost adjacent? No. No Things? Nothing?
00:22:08
S4: No. The closest I've come to Ghost is like vivid dreams of dead people talk that people that I know that are dead, having vivid dreams where they're in the room. And where I wake up, I feel like, Oh, my God, that was just there. But that is I have never with my conscious mind and my conscious eyeballs seeing a spooky spirit or apparition.
00:22:30
S5: Wow. Have you? That's. I mean, that sounds more harrowing. Uh, arguably, uh, I wouldn't say I've seen a ghost. I would say I have definitely convinced myself that, uh, I've scared the shit out of myself. I used to work at this cinema in Brisbane. Um, it was called Tribal Theatre at the time when I worked there. Before that it was a it's like a 100 year old cinema, beautiful old historic building that is now a Hillsong, which, um, you know, not great, but what can you do? But the, the people that I work there with were significantly more spiritual and superstitious than I was and were absolutely convinced that there were several ghosts in that building. And I had a few things happen there where I was like, Oh shit, I like heard noises coming out of the basement once. That just scared the piss out of me and I didn't want to go down there. I was absolutely convinced whenever I was vacuuming in cinema one that there was someone walking behind me and that that feeling never really went away. I hated doing that job. And then one time. This is the one that stuck with me the most. Uh, the way the cinema was setting up set up was like it was a proper cinema back when you still had those where there was a projection booth, there was a film projector, and then next to the booth with the projector in it, there was the table that you would cut and like stick back together the your film reel so you could make one continuous reel to put on the thing. And I was in there one time with the projectionist while we were like splicing together something and I kept getting these little the projector was running next to us in the other room. I kept getting this little flicker the corner of my eye. I was like, Oh, that's really weird. Just. But I was like, oh, you know, it's probably just because there's this thing that's just flashing a shitload of light, right? So like, that's sort of going to happen. But like. I felt very distinctly like I kept seeing the flicker as like the silhouette of a person about person sized. And I was just like, Well, that's fucking stupid. So I'm just going to ignore that. And then after like 30s of that, the projectionist turns to me and is just like, Did you see a woman over there? And I was just like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We had someone quit as a projectionist because they got supposedly haunted. They had listen.
00:25:00
S4: I've never had a supernatural incident, but if you asked me to sleep overnight in a famously haunted place, then I'm probably not going to enjoy myself. And we'll imagine that I've heard, seen and heard a lot of things. So I'm still a scaredy cat about all that. In fact, even in doing research for this series, I've been staying up late and I live in an old Queenslander that's full of creaks and knocks and stuff in the middle of the night. And like, even though I'm a sceptic, I have this this kind of sneaking concern that by researching and putting my energy into studying things like this, I am somehow inviting bad things to happen. Like something reading about Poltergeist and like, well, is that if they're all floating around up there just waiting for a green light, if I just give them a green light to come down and start knocking on my doors and windows and throwing things around my house, like last night, I was going up the stairs and I got all the way to bed and I was like, Oh, shit. Like, I think I left whatever down in the office and I have to go down these creaky stairs through my downstairs living area, which has got like reflective surfaces fucking everywhere. So everything looks like you're seeing your, you're seeing your darkened silhouette pass on every angle. And I remember being like, Oh, this is shit. I want to turn all the lights on. Like, I don't want to go down there on my own. So yeah, skeptic but easily, easily spooked by stuff.
00:26:20
S5: I'm very susceptible to the same thing. Like I just, I know on every conscious level, intellectually, I could say, no, none of that is real. That's just not happening. But I can make myself so scared so easily. It's very fucking stupid. The human brain is just like, I don't know. Or at least mine is very capable of being like ghosts aren't real. But what if there was? All right, I'm turning all the light.
00:26:44
S4: I think that's what's going on, though. That's what I'm convinced is happening. Is that because our brains are these problem solving machines, you know, and, you know, we don't necessarily see things light enters our eyeballs. Our brain interprets that data and construct an image of what's in front of us, you know. So it makes sense to me that occasionally that data that comes in is faulty and that your brain, you know, mistakes that shadowy corner for corner for being a woman standing in the corner, and it constructs the most realistic fucking woman that you've ever seen in your life. And for a split second, you see a woman that you're bright from your imagination staring back at you. And then she's gone. And you'd be like, She was right there. I didn't imagine it, you know? So to me, that makes complete sense.
00:27:26
S5: So what's the wood for Delia? Is that it? Is that the pronunciation.
00:27:31
S4: Album by something for Kate? I believe.
00:27:34
S5: Yeah, that's right. Fuck, I love. It's like we're pattern recognition machines. And like you said that so much of what we see is like, I mean, this is a weird philosophical question, but like is interpretation is our brain looking for patterns? And then. It's not. I don't even have the language to describe this. But yeah, a lot of it is just what's been put together by our brain and then it interpreting it and then telling us, I don't know what I am in this situation if I'm not my brain. But that's another question where.
00:28:09
S4: I understand what you're saying. It's a process that is feeding you with its best possible approximation. This is what we think you are looking at. You know, like I remember listening to a Ted Talk which said that, you know, this idea that we sort of just observe things and it's this one way street where, you know, your brain constructs the way the light hitting objects to tell you what's in the room that you're in. But in a lot of ways, it's a two way street and you're, you know, your kind of cognitive biases and your predisposition to believe certain things is going to shape the way that data is interpreted. And so they did this experiment in this TEDTalk where they played this sort of garbled message three times and you kept pressing the audience, Can you hear the message that's in that? Can you hear the message in that? And they'll like, no, no, no. And then he played it a fourth time. And this time you heard quite clearly Brexit was a mistake. And then when he played the garbled for the fifth time, you could clearly hear Brexit is a mistake. And he said, But Brexit is a mistake. He's not in that fifth recording. I just played it to you. That's good. And then you said, okay, well I've been told this is the message I'm listening to. And so there is this idea that that's why people like to say to me, Oh, you need to believe. Then you'll start, you know, you'll have a psychic experience. And it's like, well, yeah, I mean, if I've already decided that it's going to happen, then it makes sense that I'm going to have that experience.
00:29:27
S5: Yeah, but the specifically, the thing where I felt like I was being followed while doing the vacuuming, nothing happened. Like, literally I turned on the vacuum and I vacuumed. There was no other things going on. If I hadn't gone into that experience being like, Oh, this place is haunted to fuck like I would.
00:29:49
S4: Another, I would.
00:29:49
S5: Work just a bit of yeah, I would have just been a guy vacuuming up like tons of popcorn like that. But you know, once you get yourself into that very impressionable state, I think it's we have the same capacity to convince ourselves into being haunted in the same way that like. If you go into a room ready to laugh, you could see the worst comedian in the world and the jokes could be completely nothing. And you probably still laugh once you're primed for laughter. The body just kind of does it. You convince yourself that you're having fun. If you convince yourself that you're about to be spooked by something, you're going to find a fucking way to spook yourself. It's going to happen. Yeah.
00:30:25
S4: Hi, Ben. Are you ready to hear about the poltergeist of Humpty Doo?
00:30:30
S5: Oh, I'm so ready. Let's get to it.
00:30:42
S4: So a bit of background on this story. When I was a teenager, I remember there being a story on Today Tonight about a poltergeist in the Northern Territory. And my memory of this was that it was like an unusually long like normally on Today tonight, the two, 3 or 4 stories, five minutes each. Right. But they dedicated pretty much an entire episode and they treated with such gravitas. And, you know, the phenomena that are capturing of like objects flying across like CCTV cameras and stuff with such kind of seriousness that even though I was a young man at the time, probably like 19 or 20, I was sitting there going, fuck, like, is this evidence that it's real? Like you've got a proper news organization today. Tonight, the that's a serious against the serious journalists of today tonight are telling me that they've been up there. They've spent a week in this house and that they've seen these things and it's real. And so over the intervening years, I had sort of memories, details had faded and to the point where I'd started to doubt whether or not I'd actually ever seen it. I remember talking to my wife about it and being like, I remember watching this fucking crazy episode of Today Tonight where they were just telling us that ghosts were real. Now showing shit flying around and and it wasn't like it didn't stop the nation. And I just sometimes I wonder if I imagined it or not. Anyway, cut to now we're preparing to do this series and I start digging around and I come across this story, which apparently is Australia's like one of Australia's top two haunting stories, which is the poltergeist of Humpty Doo.
00:32:22
S5: Now who's how are they ranking those?
00:32:25
S4: No, Northern Territory, it turns out, is like our Florida like when it comes to crazy ass fucking stories. The Northern Territory has quite a few because I believe they have one and two of the most famous poltergeist stories in Australia. But I want to focus on this one in particular because this was the one that I saw all those years ago. So it's August of 1997. Honeydew is a small town, about 40km outside of Darwin, a little quiet little country town. And in this house, Jill Somerville and Dave Clarke move in, it's 90 mins drive and they have their mate Doug Murphy move in with them as well. Now they're all, you know, salt of the earth, blue collar, maybe some bikie links, who knows? But they've sort of they are, they are not those who are prone to drama. They're just you're pretty ordinary. Northern Taureans or Australians will call them in this instance. Now, in January 1998, so about four months later, another family move in with them and that's Andrew and Kirsty Agius, who have got a daughter, Jasmine, who's about 11 months old. Things are going fine. They're loving living in this part of the Northern Territory. But not long after the all five moving together, weird things start to happen. Objects start flying around the house, bits of glass, beer bottles, knives sometimes and every housemate, apart from Jasmine, the baby felt like at some point they are targeted by one of these objects. You know, they'll turn around and something smashes on the wall next to them or something will fall from the ceiling. Gravel and seashells would start to rain from the ceiling in the kitchen, materializing just below the level of ceiling and then falling onto anyone who's sitting at the table.
00:34:05
S6: Now.
00:34:07
S4: After a while, they sort of take it with good humor. And this is what I mean about that Australian response to kind of poltergeist activity. It's it's an annoyance and an inconvenience more than anything. But they like the house and they don't want to move out. So they put up with the fact that occasionally things go flying off the walls or fall from the ceiling and they just consider it's just, you know, part of living in this part of Australia and Humpty Doo.
00:34:31
S5: So presumably no one's been hit by a knife or broken glass.
00:34:34
S4: Yet they felt vaguely threatened, but not ever like they felt that they were. The poltergeist wanted their attention, but was not actually trying to hurt them, just like an annoying housemate more than anything. So then comes the day where they think, well, maybe we should try and communicate with said spirit. So they laid out some scrabble tiles and they told the Spirit that if it wanted to communicate, it could. The next day they wake up to find that some of the tiles have been arranged to spell out words. But not only that, some of the pebbles that have been raining from the ceiling have also been arranged into words that spell out fire, skin, car help and Troy. Now, one of the housemates, Murphy, had a friend called Troy Raddatz, who had died in a fiery car crash only two months earlier. Apparently he'd been transporting tins of paint thinner and the car had crashed in the fire and he'd burnt alive, so immolated in his own car. On March 20th, a large trident and cross appeared formed in the middle of the kitchen with pebbles and stones. Now, a number of witnesses came round and saw this school teacher, Annette Taylor, and her partner Lloyd Green witnessed the the Trident and the cross. And they said that it happened in an area that people were passing in and out of the whole day, and it was impossible to conceive that someone could have put these intricately built sculptures together with the with the pebbles in such a short space of time. In fact, Lloyd said he couldn't have done it with hours and a straight edge and a ruler. So, Dave, one of the housemates decides that they need to move the Pebble Trident and the Pebble Cross from their kitchen floor. But when he touches the pebbles, they go flying and then everything goes apeshit. Everything in the kitchen flies off, windows get broken, appliances are flying around.
00:36:34
S5: Do he. Were there any guesses as to the symbolism of the Trident?
00:36:40
S4: No, actually, it's a good point. I haven't actually come across anything in all the articles I've read about this. There was they just mentioned there was a trial. I guess maybe Aquaman.
00:36:50
S7: Yeah, Aquaman, maybe. Yeah. Like in 20 years.
00:36:54
S4: Jason Momoa is going to capture the hearts.
00:36:56
S7: Of the world.
00:37:00
S5: Like, it'd be very odd if we got a message from the afterlife, and they're like, Oh, it turns out two two religions were right. A Christian, God is real. And Neptune, the God of the sea is real.
00:37:09
S7: I mean, I don't know.
00:37:10
S4: What is the is there any kind of symbolic relevance of Trident? What does it suggest? Or maybe it was a pitchfork.
00:37:19
S5: Pitchfork Maybe, yeah. That's the both ends of the spectrum.
00:37:21
S4: I guess you got a choice between the cross or the pitchfork. Jill One of the housemates said at the time we would have moved out, but we had nowhere else to go. So now it's become a bit more threatening. The references to Troy have unnerved everyone quite a bit, so they decide they need help. So what's the first thing you do when you need help with a spook or a specter is you call a priest?
00:37:47
S7: Yep.
00:37:48
S4: So they contact Father Steven D'Souza. Steven D'Souza. Right. Like RoboCop or Alien or something. Or is that another D'Souza?
00:37:56
S5: I'm not sure.
00:37:57
S4: I might be Stephen Souza. Actually, I think he wrote Streetfighter anyway. Not the same person, I'm assuming. Well, that would be amazing if the man.
00:38:04
S7: Who wrote the movie.
00:38:05
S4: Streetfighter, it was.
00:38:06
S7: Also a Catholic priest.
00:38:08
S4: So he did an inspection of the house and he said that he went into the kitchen and he saw a steak knife on top of a microwave and he turned his back. He heard someone call out his name. When he turned around, he saw the knife fly off the microwave and head towards him, stop inches from his chest and then drop to the ground.
00:38:28
S5: Well. So that's like the sentence that Katie underlined in the Poltergeist book about them stopping and then changing direction suddenly. Well, there we go.
00:38:37
S4: And what was unclear from that statement was when he heard his name was that one of the housemates called his name to say, hey, look, there's a knife coming. Or if it's the poltergeist, I'm not sure. Doesn't seem very consistent with poltergeist activity that it would yell something out. I mean.
00:38:53
S7: Yeah.
00:38:54
S5: It's also it's quite funny to imagine the Australian accent really undermines a haunting. Yeah. Like, you know, when whenever in a movie a ghost is saying something, it's always in like a Vincent Price. Sort of like very over-the-top theatrical accent. But just imagine someone just being like, Get out.
00:39:12
S7: Piss off! Fuck off. Rack off. Oh, Ralph, it's.
00:39:18
S4: It's Alf from home and away. He's haunting your house. So Father D'Souza wasn't fazed, and he speculated that someone in the house was a medium and was attracting this negative energy. Which is kind of what you're saying. Less of a a ghost haunting and more of a energetic imbalance. So I love this quote. So he performed a religious ritual, but admitted that they very rarely worked. So what's the fucking point?
00:39:46
S7: That's how like.
00:39:48
S4: A pest inspector coming in and said, look, he got termites. Sure, I can spray him. Probably not going to do anything, but I'll still charge you for it.
00:39:54
S5: Start looking for other places now. Yeah. That's a very funny admission as well from a priest. Like the idea of, you know, God's power is total infallible. Yeah, except when it comes to getting rid of Poltergeist, we're like, Ah, there's like, 10% of the time maybe. But otherwise, you shit out of luck.
00:40:14
S7: Sorry.
00:40:14
S4: So he performed the ritual, and that housemate said that they did experience a brief respite from the poltergeist activity. The priest informed them that they weren't going to get rid of it with any kind of blessing or ritual, that the poltergeist will just move on when it's good and ready. Which is the same advice I got from a snake catcher in my area when I found a python and I said, Can you relocate? And they said, Well, you know what? The python's probably better, better to live with it than not because it'll keep, you know, rats and bigger and scarier, more venomous snakes away. And also it'll move on when it's done. So it's good to know that if you ever.
00:40:49
S5: Learn to live with the python, that's the stage that we're at.
00:40:52
S7: Right?
00:40:53
S4: Um. So after this brief respite, the activity started up again and it was worse this time. So they turned to a second priest, Father Tom English, who I presume presume was the brother of Pirates of the Penzance. Johnny English.
00:41:08
S5: That's right. Yeah.
00:41:10
S4: So that's a bit of a reference to one of my other podcast. Anytime we come across anyone with this in English, we assume that they're related to musical theatre star Johnny English.
00:41:20
S5: I know a Johnny English.
00:41:21
S7: Do you really related to Johnny English, sir?
00:41:23
S5: No, he actually took he took English on as a sort of a pseudonym because he didn't like his his previous surname. But it was he did it before the release of Johnny English.
00:41:33
S7: The movie, right.
00:41:35
S5: Starring. Yeah. Very unfortunate.
00:41:38
S7: So over the next.
00:41:38
S4: Four visits, Father Tom English said he saw objects fly through the air and stated the entity does not obey the laws of physics. I would argue, Ben, the entity does obey the laws of physics because it's throwing objects and they're falling to the ground that is showing gravity at work. That's showing.
00:41:59
S7: They're exhibiting.
00:42:00
S5: Ballistic motion.
00:42:01
S7: Yeah.
00:42:01
S5: If they had instantaneous acceleration or, you know, they broke the speed of light, maybe you'd be like, Wait a damn second. This is completely outside of our understanding of physics.
00:42:11
S4: So something new happened when Tom came to visit Father Tom, and that was a pistol cartridge materialized out of thin air and dropped to his feet. Now, that is an image I remember from the Today Tonight episode because it was so specific. I'm like, why is this poltergeist dropping like pistol cartridges? Like, I can understand household items, but that's, you know, that's that's that's oddly specific.
00:42:38
S5: Yeah, it seems sort of almost gauche. Almost, you know, like usually thick. Yeah, because they're doing things in a sort of more timeless fashion. Are you moving chairs around, you doing whatever, that, you know, that's classy.
00:42:51
S7: That's subtle.
00:42:52
S5: Just like the knives and pistol cartridges, You're like, What are you doing? Settle down. Yeah. Don't overplay your hand here.
00:42:58
S7: Well, unlike.
00:42:59
S4: Father DeSouza, Father English decided that a blessing would help, but it went wrong. And the poltergust and completely apeshit windows were broken. Appliances again flying around multiple broken windows. Enter a Greek Orthodox priest. So I love that. Fool me once. Shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me, fool me the third time. Let's get. Let's get a Greek Orthodox priest.
00:43:23
S7: Let's get serious.
00:43:24
S5: Let's go to the one church I definitely respect.
00:43:26
S7: Yeah.
00:43:27
S4: So he tried blessing the house, but the poltergeist did not like that. And he was assaulted. At first the ghost tried to rip the book from his hands. I guess, like the the Greek Orthodox Bible or whatever it is. And then in a move that mimics many bullies across Australian schools, he bent the priests arm behind his back.
00:43:51
S7: Oh well, I would love it if you got.
00:43:52
S4: The typewriter and his mouth.
00:43:55
S5: It's such a classic move.
00:43:57
S7: That's wild.
00:43:58
S4: Or a wedgie. Yeah. Imagine getting a wedgie from a poltergeist. So the disturbances from then on were very irregular, just not only in timing, but their intensity. Sometimes it was sort of a constant, like, you know, a days, hours, days on end of disturbances. And sometimes it's very intermittent where you'd have something happen and then nothing. For days the occupants found themselves bothered by the disturbances, but other times they found it kind of amusing, a bit like being in a theme park. But they were very tough and working class people and ultimately the ghost just gave them the shits.
00:44:36
S7: So you're wondering.
00:44:38
S4: What that Aussie response is you got there? It's giving me the shits. I'm sick of the fucking thing, said Murphy.
00:44:45
S7: Fuck.
00:44:46
S4: The only room that wasn't affected by the poltergeist was baby Jasmine, the 11 month old suggesting that there was some kind of intelligence behind this poltergeist, that it was saying that the child, the child is off limits or.
00:45:03
S5: That whatever human was pranking them was like, I can't fuck with a baby.
00:45:07
S7: That's just.
00:45:08
S5: Mean.
00:45:09
S4: So the two journalists from the Lit Field times hear about this haunting. It spread, the word spreads from Humpty Do all the way to Darwin. So they travel down from Darwin and witness several incidents themselves. They run a story in the local paper and it goes the 1998 equivalent of viral. And suddenly they're getting requests from all around the world radio stations in America and Europe. They all want to know about the poltergeist of Humpty Doo. So the residents of the house getting more stressed out by the media attention than the guys now. And so in their minds, they'll just do one exclusive deal with a network and they feel like that's it. That'll take away the other media interest. Hopefully it'll bring some answers and they can just like. So they signed an exclusive deal with today. Tonight, who spent the whopping amount of $5,000.
00:46:00
S7: For exclusive.
00:46:01
S4: Rights to the story? I mean 98 like inflation hasn't sort of gone up by that much that 5000 would be. That's not life changing money even back then, right?
00:46:10
S7: No.
00:46:11
S5: No. That's cheap as fuck.
00:46:13
S4: So that's like $1,000 per housemate. I guess that's why they broke it down. So the Today Tonight crew come and spend a week at the house. So there's the the field reporter. There's the producer, a couple of cameramen. Another journalist from the Good Weekend has hitched a ride. He's written an amazing column about it that you can find online. Max something another I forget his name, where he's sort of like going in thinking, oh, this will be fun. Like, you know, ghost hunters on the trail, but then gets very much sucked into the story. It's a very it's a really good ride. So anyway, the camera crew become quick believers from today. Tonight, as I experience objects moving about, cameras having their focus adjusted and changed and twisted around batteries becoming hidden or flying around the rooms. However, despite what they experience in person, on camera, they only capture three events that could be considered paranormal. One is a baby bottle falling off a fridge, another is a bullet falling from the ceiling, apparently materializing out of thin air. And another one is just a jar lid falling off a table. So despite what they experience in person, what is captured on camera is not that convincing. So even though the field producer and the host and the cameraman all fly back to Sydney like professing that what they experienced was probably paranormal, the producers back in Sydney and the host at the time, Peter Luck, they decide that it's bullshit and so they twist the story from being a a story about this rare phenomenon into an exposé about a house full of conmen trying to pull one over the Australian public. They sort of pointed to events like the the first occurrence occur, the first paranormal occurrence on April 1st in 1998. Oh, sorry, yes, in 1998. So there was rumors going around that it was just this huge prank. And in that other article, the Good Weekend article written by that journalist, he sort of talked about, you know, coming away from the trip with the Today Tonight crew and being a believer as well, and then getting a phone call from one of the producers and going into the edit a couple of days later. And apparently after the initial shoot was done, they sent a cameraman in to get some pick ups. And in his footage of an object flying across the room, if you zoom in, you do the enhance, enhance. You could see the reflection of Kirsty, one of the housemates in the background, appearing to throw an object. So that was enough for the producers of Today tonight to say this is a hoax. No one should believe it. So the housemates were devastated because they felt like they'd been lied to by today. Tonight, rather than getting vindication for this kind of traumatic four month experience, they were painted as being like these scumbags and drug addicts and liars and con men. Two days later, a couple of paranormal researchers, Tony Healy and Paul Cropper, make contact. And and you can imagine the housemates are pretty surly. They don't want to talk to anyone else. They think the media all lying scumbags, but they explain that they're actually not from the media. They can't offer any money. They're just paranormal researchers and they just want to sort of see what's going on. So they are allowed to stay. And over the next few days, they experience what they claim to be up to 30 instances of supernatural activity, much of the same thing, gravel falling from the ceiling, seashells, things getting flown, flung around the room. Now Tony Healy and Paul Cropper, they admit that they are inclined to believe they're paranormal researchers. And so, you know, they try and sort of back this up with as much evidence as they can. But ultimately they know that they they cannot produce that peer reviewed data that would conclusively state that poltergeist or exist. What they found very compelling, though, was the testimony of the housemates, which they said if it was a con, it seemed odd that they would continue this con for two guys who were there with no money and no cameras for the next week, like why would they continue to sort of pull this con? I mean, I would argue to save face.
00:50:25
S5: Well, yeah. Yeah. Because that far into it, it would kind of be humiliating to backtrack now. Yeah.
00:50:31
S4: Over the next week or two, more journalists visit and by when Then things are all said and done, they're up to 30 witnesses who claim to have experienced, if not direct paranormal activity events that they couldn't explain. Now, while this is all going on, the landlord of 90 mins drive is like, What the fuck is happening at my house? Why do I keep saying it on the news and in the paper? So he pays a visit to the house and he finds broken windows she finds like.
00:51:00
S7: Smashed.
00:51:01
S4: Appliances. So when he comes across all this damage, he's like, You're fucking out of here. Like, I'm tearing up the rental agreement and I'm evicting you. However, the housemates appeal, it goes to arbitration and the housemates win.
00:51:18
S7: Now, I can only.
00:51:19
S4: Assume they win because the only argument for them not being evicted is that the person leading the arbitration is like, well, clearly the victims of a poltergeist haunting.
00:51:28
S5: Poltergeist real. You guys are fine. Don't even worry about it. Fuck, That's amazing.
00:51:34
S4: So the tenants eventually move out and then the incidents immediately cease, Which is an odd coincidence, isn't it?
00:51:41
S5: That's very strange.
00:51:44
S4: So the two guys, Tony, Tony Healy and Paul Cropper, who initially in their first investigation of the house, said, you know, look, we don't know conclusively, but a lot of the stuff we felt experienced, felt very real. And so I read this article that was like a a what would you call it, like a they revisited one of the articles. They wrote about this. And he sort of talks towards the end of the article in the original article about viewing video footage they shot at the time where he was talking to one of the housemates and one of the housemates saying to him, You know, it's the thing about living with a poltergeist is you just never know what to expect. And then bang, like, you know, this battery goes rocketing across the room and he talks about like, oh, God, like how unnerving it was. And so then when he sort of revisits that same article, he's watching alternate footage that another camera crew shot with another group of people and he sees the housemate go through the same spiel where she's like, You never know when the poltergeist is going to do next. And then a bang and battery goes, Oh. And so he writes this little postscript saying, yes, you can see the poltergeist has very good timing indeed. So after all that, the the one true believers, it feels like we're skeptics by the end.
00:52:56
S5: God damn, that's a damn, damn shame.
00:52:59
S4: It still hasn't stopped me, though. Like, if you are listening and you know where I can find that original today. Tonight footage, because there is one little clip on YouTube. It's like a two minute clip where they use thermal cameras because the idea being that if the objects are being thrown by human, when you put the thermal camera on it, you'll find fingerprints or like a handprint on the object. But when they use the thermal cameras, the whole object is heated up. And apparently that is quite consistent with poltergeist activity as well.
00:53:26
S5: There's objects like.
00:53:27
S4: That get quite heated. So the expert, the thermal camera expert in today tonight is like the only explanation I can give you is they were microwaving the objects and then hurling them across the room, which seems unlikely.
00:53:39
S5: But they don't microwave batteries. I don't know what will happen, but there's no way it could be good.
00:53:45
S8: So that was the first.
00:53:47
S4: Meeting of the North East Australian Paranormal Society. Thank you for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with us, we would love to hear your stories of the unexplained no matter what it is. Ben and I are ready to believe you.
00:54:01
S7: That's true.
00:54:02
S4: So if you've got a story to share with us, even if it's a story that you heard secondhand, we would love to hear it. So just got a tip. Com and contact us via the website. Hey Ben, we've got someone on the line with a story to tell. Emily, are you there?
00:54:17
S9: Yes, I.
00:54:18
S4: Am. Thank you so much for for joining us on the show. Now, I believe you had a spooky encounter with a ghost. Is that right?
00:54:27
S9: Um, I suppose you could call it a series of ghosts, if you like. Even better.
00:54:33
S5: Oh, that's very intriguing.
00:54:36
S9: So to kind of set the scene, I work in an old church that had been converted to a music store. So my.
00:54:45
S7: Colleague.
00:54:46
S4: Sanity or JB Hi-Fi?
00:54:48
S9: No. So a standalone music store. We sold string instruments.
00:54:53
S4: All right. Like an actual proper. Like you sell instruments? Not. Not. Yes. Okay.
00:54:58
S9: Not music to listen to. Okay. Um, so I kind of seen a few unexplainable things over the years on security cameras, like light that shouldn't be on security cameras, things like that. But old church, you know, rickety old building on.
00:55:15
S4: So let's let's not burn the steps. I want to want to soak up every detail. So when you say you seeing lights as in lights in rooms within the store would come on when they shouldn't be coming on that kind of thing or like floating through the air like orbs?
00:55:28
S9: Yeah, kind of like things floating through the air or like, flashes of light in the corner of cameras. But there would be no one, like, up in that area where the security cameras would kind of be on, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So like, or there'd be unexplained noises, like footsteps occasionally where there was no one upstairs, like we'd be all downstairs and you'd hear footsteps and would kind of just be like, oh, you know, the creepy old building. Like it creaks just is what it is.
00:55:59
S4: Was it a was it a joint? Was it freestanding? I mean, could it have been like your next door, like the tenant next door walking?
00:56:06
S9: Um, so it is free standing. But there was a boys brigade hall next door.
00:56:12
S4: Okay. Well, that's. I mean, we don't have to here anymore that the boys brigade that was responsible for 95%. Yeah. Yeah. Everything that happened, anything spooky, it was the boys.
00:56:22
S9: Yeah, totally. And because, you know, they had scouts and bands rehearse and all those kinds of things so often you could be like, Oh, probably the boys Brigade. But it would sometimes be so late at night that it couldn't logically be the boys brigade and we'd all be a bit freaked out.
00:56:37
S4: So you'd hear footsteps when the boys brigade were long gone. Yeah. Do you do you did you investigate? Like, if you heard footsteps coming from upstairs, you go up and go, Who's there? And like, put the light on and stuff.
00:56:48
S9: Yeah, yeah. So we would do that or we'd because we had access to the security system on our phones or our laptops or whatever, we would look at the security like all of the security cameras and just double check. There wasn't kind of like a customer around or someone had broken in or whatever, like, you know, because there was a security element to it being a store. Um, so we would always check it out. But I the kind of flashes of things that I saw in the corners of cameras occasionally, like, you know, sometimes I'm very cynical about ghosts and then other times I'm like, Oh, it was a ghost like explanation. So yeah, always, always kind of checked it out, but it was unexplained. Um, and so, yeah, a few years ago I was downstairs. We've closed the store for the day. Um, no one was upstairs, so it was just me and my colleague, and we were, ah, how should I wear this? Having a little bitch about everything and everything.
00:57:51
S4: All right, Even if not having sex. But I don't know why you're being so polite about it. That's fine. Yeah, we do that. Of course.
00:57:58
S7: Okay.
00:57:59
S9: Um, and so we were talking shit downstairs, and we'd been there. Like, we would close at 5 p.m. We'd probably get customers out well and truly by like 515, 530 depending on the day. But it was like 730, 8:00 at night. So like, well, well and truly closed. And no one was upstairs. And it was just my colleague and I and I heard footsteps above us because we're in the offices downstairs. But the weird thing was, is I also heard giggling.
00:58:35
S7: Yeah.
00:58:36
S5: Hate that.
00:58:39
S9: And so I, you know, being very cynical, but then also sometimes being in touch with the other side, I'm like, oh, I won't say anything because it could just be me imagining it. I won't say anything. And so I kind of just let my friend keep talking. And he was like, Did you hear that? And I was like, Oh my God. I'm like, the footsteps. He's like the giggling. And I was like, Oh my God, you heard it too. Like, no way. And did it sound.
00:59:06
S4: Like the giggling was coming from the same place as the footsteps like a child was running? Yeah, like, yeah, some Victorian child who died of consumption.
00:59:14
S7: Or something like that.
00:59:16
S4: Running through your store.
00:59:18
S9: It kind of, yeah, it kind of sounded like little kids kind of playing around like a ring around the Posey or something like that and giggling like it was very innocent sounding, but it was super creepy because it was like later in the evening, like no one was in the store. Like it was just me and my colleague. Like it was kind of weird. Um, and so we had the security cameras, like on our laptop, so we brought it up. Nothing upstairs. The footsteps continued. So we went upstairs to like double check. There was no customers because we were kind of freaking out at that stage because the giggling had kind of continued.
00:59:59
S7: Oh my God.
00:59:59
S9: And nothing. And so we went back downstairs. So I kind of grab our stuff and we were like, Oh, you know, maybe it was the boys Brigade. And then my colleagues like, No, no. Remember the Boys Brigade came over and told us there's nothing happening this week in the building. Like we've we've got the keys, like make sure it stays locked and no one kind of messes about on the premises. So there wasn't even like the boys brigade excuse this time. So we kind of hightailed it out of there pretty quickly after that. But in the kind of days afterwards, we were like, Oh, you know, like being old turds. Like, is it kid that something's bad happened to you in the church and they're haunting the church? Or is it like a happy haunting like Emily?
01:00:45
S7: I've I've got some good news.
01:00:46
S4: Nothing bad has ever happened to.
01:00:48
S7: A child church.
01:00:49
S5: Yeah. Christ, a.
01:00:50
S7: Lot.
01:00:52
S9: Yeah, like we were. We were so freaked out.
01:00:56
S7: That is a creepy story.
01:00:57
S4: Actually, the other night I was doing some reading about ghosts and stuff, and then I went up my daughter's bedroom, adjoins the master bedroom, and my wife was already asleep, and I thought I'd just go check on my daughter before I went to bed, having just read for a couple of hours about spooks inspectors. And when I go in, she's on her knees, she's facing the wall, just bolt upright.
01:01:19
S7: Just facing them on like.
01:01:21
S4: Classic Japanese, like a long hair, just hanging over her shoulders and was like, hey, I you're not.
01:01:27
S7: She didn't.
01:01:27
S4: Respond. And I put my hand on her shoulder fully expecting her to turn around with the face.
01:01:32
S7: Of some kind of demon. But she was she was just a.
01:01:34
S4: Slight she was having trouble breathing because she had a cold.
01:01:38
S7: Oh.
01:01:39
S5: I love having friends of mine who are new parents who have, you know, stories of their kids just like facing a corner and just being like, hey, what are you doing? They're like, Oh, I was just talking to the nowhere, man.
01:01:49
S7: Yeah, you don't fucking yet.
01:01:51
S5: You weren't having a conversation with the nowhere man. Don't say shit like that.
01:01:55
S7: He says he needs souls to fuel himself to sustain himself.
01:01:59
S5: He's so.
01:01:59
S7: Hungry.
01:02:02
S4: Emily, thank you so much for coming on this show. And hopefully that is your last encounter with phantom children.
01:02:10
S9: Oh, I hope so. Meanwhile, I just worry about the man that I occasionally see roaming through my parents house. Unexplainable.
01:02:18
S7: What is that you just going on? You got.
01:02:20
S5: To leave that on the cutting room floor.
01:02:22
S7: That you know. You know what we're going to do, Ghost.
01:02:24
S4: Is we're going to call Emily next week for next week's show and we're going to get.
01:02:29
S7: That story. Okay.
01:02:31
S9: I love it.
01:02:32
S7: Thank you. Emily was.
01:02:34
S9: Speaking. Thank you. Bye, fan. Thank you. Bye.
01:02:46
S4: Next week, we're going to be in search of the famed Australian Bigfoot, the Yowie. And here's a little teaser. In the morning, they found a large indistinct footprints in several metre high bushes, which had been ripped right out of the rock hard ground and held all over the place because the school staff wanted to utilize the campsite regularly. The boys were ordered on their return to Southport not to say anything.
01:03:11
S7: About the incident.
01:03:14
S5: We graced a lot of palms. Get this campground. Don't fuck this up for us.
01:03:18
S4: An article about it in the school paper was censored. There you go. There's your answer. Ben, thanks for joining me on this journey. I hope you have a restful sleep and there are no strange knockings or scrapings or things being flung around your home or apartment tonight.
01:03:37
S5: Yeah, fingers crossed, I. I don't want batteries being thrown at me. I don't want to be like someone playing against any of the Philly sports teams.
01:03:45
S7: Or at least if something.
01:03:46
S4: Happens, just don't be on the nose. Don't drop anything threatening. Like just make it mysterious, mysterious and alluring. You know, some a locket, you know, a hint of a clue. I've got I've got to find something to uncover the mystery of what's going on. But if you're just some emo teenager who needs a route.
01:04:03
S7: Yeah, Yeah.
01:04:05
S5: I want a partial map from the grounds of my apartment building. Yeah, that's. And I'll.
01:04:10
S7: There was a hidden something within.
01:04:11
S4: There was a hidden room. Did you not know? And the last known worker down there was sealed in.
01:04:16
S5: There is a weird door at the bottom of this apartment building that I've. I've never gone in there, but it doesn't seem like it's for anything. There's nothing that it could be for. It's a doorway.
01:04:25
S7: To another dimension.
01:04:26
S4: That'll be episode for.
01:04:28
S7: This series.
01:04:29
S5: If we survive that long after attracting these demonic forces.
01:04:32
S4: I'm Charlie Clawson.
01:04:34
S5: I was Ben McClay.
01:04:45
S1: Listener.
