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Those thumps recorded in a house by a university academic have never been satisfactorily explained.
They’re the kind of poltergeist evidence researcher Tony Cornell has been evaluating for 30 years.
A graduate of Cambridge, Cornell has lived all his life in the town, except for a spell as a naval officer.
His interest in the paranormal was first roused in India by an old man who could apparently defy the laws of time and space.
He said, well, my son, if you want to learn about wisdom of life, look over the hills, look over the hills.
And I looked over the hills.
And I heard the voice say to me, now do you understand?
And I thought at the time, now do you understand?
Turned, and the man wasn’t there.
He was the other side of a stream.
And I remember looking at him and thinking, well, how the devil did you get over there?
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
We had a really good time a few weeks ago looking into a BBC documentary about ghost investigations in the 1970s.
And from listener response, it seems like a lot of our audience enjoyed it too.
So, Matt and Karen are back with another bit of classic paranormal TV, this time from the BBC TV news magazine show Nationwide from 1983.
This is a segment investigating an allegedly haunted chest of drawers.
Or maybe it’s a poltergeist.
You decide.
I wanted to make a joke about a ghost bureau, but you all know how I like my jokes to be factually accurate.
And it turns out that while in America we might call it just a doors of bureau, that would only be correct if it had a mirror.
And in England, that term’s not really used for this kind of furniture.
So on reflection, I decided against such misguided wordplay.
Besides, there were other jokes that suggested themselves around the French version known as a commode, but I was afraid that joke would bomb.
Anyway, we’ll be hearing more from Nationwide in a future episode because a segment previously thought lost resurfaced a few years ago and is tied to one of my very favorite paranormal monster stories from the UK.
For now, let’s set up our vintage 8-bit computer ghost equipment and make our way to the storage room for some Monster Talk.
Well, it’s the two of us, right?
And we’ve got Matt joining us again so that we can talk about another documentary.
The listeners seem to really enjoy our look at that other BBC documentary on ghosts.
So it turns out there must be dozens of these.
Matt and I came across a number of other documentaries.
There was one on the stately ghosts of England, which we’d like to get into at some other point.
And as you say, the BBC Ghost Hunters documentary that we watched and talked about, people really enjoyed that episode.
And so we went digging and found some other interesting docos, as we’d call them in Australia.
And this one is called Paranormal Investigators and a Haunted Chest of Drawers.
The recording is only 12 minutes long, but there’s a lot to unpack here.
Matt, can you tell us a little bit about why this recording is only 12 minutes long for what would have been probably a 30-minute episode?
Well, actually, this is not a documentary is the difference.
It’s documentary style.
But the thing is, this is just a segment from the long-running BBC series Nationwide.
Now, it’s in its final season in this segment.
And the problem is, is many of the tapes that they recorded on were either disposed of or taped over.
So I can’t find a complete…
episode um that that has this segment in it so we are really really lucky to have this you know the fact that the bbc archive you know put this up on youtube is we’re so lucky to have it and at all when you watch it you’ll see just how lucky we are um i thought i thought it was incredible i don’t know how how you felt about it blake i have a strong affinity for anything like these vintage pieces uh
And I had not really been familiar with Nationwide, or so I thought.
But when I started looking at some of the clips, I realized I’ve seen some of these things before, but didn’t really know the show from which they came, right?
So, yeah.
Me too.
And growing up in Australia, we tended to get a lot of British television.
And so I think I’ve seen fragments of this before.
So it’s kind of still coming back to me.
But this was a particularly interesting episode, just chock full of…
bizarre claims.
And I guess we should start getting into them.
The segment starts off with this really loud pounding and like just photos of people we have no reference of what’s going on.
Those thumps recorded in a house by a university academic have never been satisfactorily explained.
And then they immediately go into talking about Tony Cornell.
Now, I thought that I knew all of the old paranormal investigators and everything, but come to find out, I didn’t have any idea just how popular paranormal investigation was during the 60s and 70s and probably before that.
So Tony Cornell, he’s a really fascinating guy.
And he did kind of try to bridge that old school era of ghost hunting with a more skeptical research based approach.
Now, the interesting thing is he starts out talking about this trip to India and this guy who could, you know, this Indian individual who could defy the laws of time and space.
And, you know, so basically he talks about it, how there he goes there.
And the guy says, you know, well, my son, if you want to learn about the wisdom of life, look over the hills, look over the hills.
And he was standing next to Tony and everything.
And he said, what?
Look over the hills.
So he looks over the hills and then he heard a voice say, now, do you understand?
And he’s, what?
And he turned, and the guy was now on the other side of a river suddenly waving at him from the other side.
There’s no way he could have run and gotten across this swiftly running river to get over there.
And Tony’s like, how did this happen?
What’s going on?
He’s like, oh, well, if you want to understand, look over the hills.
And he’s like, just look over the hills.
So he turns his head, looks over the hills, and then he hears this voice next to him saying, now do you understand?
And he turns and the guy is standing right there next to him.
Now, this sounds amazing, but…
You know, this is a magic trick that has been going on for, you know, at least a few hundred years in, you know, in Western society.
So who knows how long it’s been going on in India.
But for anybody who’s seen The Prestige…
with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale.
And Christian Bale.
Yeah.
You know the… Yeah, and Christian Bale as well.
Yes.
You know the secret.
And especially if someone’s on the other side of a river, they only have to look vaguely like the original person.
So what I’m saying is there was two people, one that was already on the other side of the river…
And one that was standing next to him.
They were dressed the same and made up to look basically the same.
And so it looked like he transported himself over to the other side of the river when he didn’t.
But Tony was not skeptical at all.
He didn’t ask any questions.
He didn’t say, why did you make me turn my head away from you?
You know, what little trick were you pulling there when I had to turn my head?
Didn’t ask any of those questions.
Just stood in that wonderful place, I will admit, wonderful place of amazement.
Yeah.
And he just stayed there and didn’t go to that place of critical thinking.
So, yeah, we we talked about this with our 10 year old and he watched that part of the prestige as well.
And we said to him, you know, how could you possibly do that?
And he pretty quickly recognized that.
this could not be done by one person.
And that leads you to think, oh, okay, can’t be done by one person, must be two people.
Are we talking about twins?
Are we talking about lookalikes?
Doppelgangers.
Doppelgangers.
But yeah, I think it…
Matt kind of intimated this, that when you’re talking about this case with Tony Cornell and you have some racist ideas about some groups of people and, oh, that they all look the same and he’s not distinguishing between people, he’s not really…
thinking about uh you know could this be two people these people it’s not the same person they they look different he’s just not uh distinguishing so i think uh there’s a little bit of racism underpinning that too that he’s not well you say he’s not distinguishing but he looked very distinguished to me i don’t know what you’re talking about
I think you’re both on the money with how this might have been done.
But I had a strange reaction when I saw this part of the show.
It was because, by the way, you’re absolutely correct with the number of these sort of famous tricks.
And I do say tricks, right?
Fakirs, right?
Yeah, I wanted to go into that a little bit because there’s just so much over the decades that I’ve been researching paranormal claims.
I’ve just come up with so many claims coming out of India and Southeast Asia in general.
Bangladesh and Pakistan, all the surrounding countries, a lot of trickery and fakery, some people call it.
So things like snake charmers and as you say, fakirs and levitation and charlatans in general and godmen as well.
So a lot of them are very theatrical, but some of them can be dangerous too.
And they’re all very good at reading human psychology.
And we’ve seen a lot of this classic imagery too in movies like snake charmers and
the idea that they’re hoaxing a cobra with a flute and that it’s dancing or hypnotized by the music somehow and that it’s…
reacting to movement uh but it’s really a matter of uh and there’s been a lot of investigations into this kind of thing but where the fangs have been removed by the person or they’ve even sewn their mouths shut so lots of cases of that uh and we’ve talked about for years as well doing things like lying on a bed of nails or other performing other supernatural feats
And then God-men.
I know that when I started out with Skepticism going back decades ago, there was a lot of interest in Sai Baba.
It makes me think of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi too.
That was the one that the Beatles were influenced by.
The Giggling Guru, some people call them.
And so they’re charismatic religious figures who claim that they’ve got divine powers and they…
perform miracles and have huge followings.
So I think there’s a lot of interest in that kind of thing, but it might have kind of followed the time of Tony Cornell because I think up until that point, I don’t know if people were really familiar with a lot of this trickery and these charlatans and this kind of showmanship.
This is interesting.
So you may recall when we were looking into Lord Dufferin’s ghost years and years ago, I came across a book by an investigator named Paul Huizet.
He was French.
And I was struck because, first of all, it was really hard to find his book.
And I really would like to at some point help get a new…
english translation of it but uh he he was very much in the sort of uh houdini mold he would go around there there was a big interest in fakir’s uh touring in europe in the 19 teens and 20s and he would go around and duplicate their tricks
and call them out on it for things like, especially things like the bed of nails, stuff that were more a feat of physics than magic.
And, and he had this, yes, all those things.
And he had this idea that it would be really helpful if there was some sort of cash prize for anyone who could scientifically reproduce these, these effects.
And so basically he was doing the sort of the James Randi thing.
years you know almost a century ahead of time right you know so uh very cool guy um
But when I was watching this last night, this segment did remind me of things like the Indian rope trick, which is famously not a real thing, although people report having seen it.
But the way it’s alleged to have been done is so different from how it’s actually done, if it’s done at all.
It’s more of a piece of folklore.
So we’ve talked about John Keel before.
And before he wrote The Mothman Prophecies, his first book was called Jadu.
And it was about him going to the Middle East and India in search of real magic.
And so he’s tracking down people and trying to learn how tricks are done.
But he also wants to know, is there some real magic out there?
And part of that, he tells a story.
about meeting an Indian guru who essentially does the exact same trick of basically teleporting.
And it makes me wonder, not whether, you know…
I think you’re absolutely right, Matt.
I think it could be done with a double.
It could be done in a lot of ways.
But a bigger question, was it done at all?
Or was he basically taking a piece of exotic folklore and retelling it as though he was the central character?
Because who’s going to fact check him, right?
That’s a good point, yeah.
It’s like this might be like the Indian rope trick.
It’s a thing you can make explanations for, but maybe it never happened at all.
Like maybe…
Yeah, maybe.
Exactly.
And it all cycles around.
It comes all back together again.
Because Dufferin was basically taking a piece of folklore and making it about himself.
And I can’t help but wonder if this is a little bit of, I’ve been to exotic India and I had this amazing thing happen.
And maybe he’s telling a story that he heard but did not actually experience.
I just think that might be another possibility.
Well, when I went to India and I had this thing happen to me, it was real.
I don’t know what other people experienced, but fact check that.
Matt, you also wanted to talk about another more recent example of levitation.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I think, you know, I remember seeing the photos years and years ago, back when the Internet was getting popular, of these, you know, these Indian men just levitating, just like resting on a cane.
And I was amazed by that.
And then, of course.
When I found out how it was done, it all made sense.
But then recently, more recently, within the last, I guess, a little over a decade, maybe, America’s Got Talent had an individual come on by the name of Special Head.
Have you seen this, Blake?
No.
We’ll have to have a link for this in the show notes because he comes out and it’s a Caucasian man, but he’s bald and he’s doing as much cultural appropriation as possible.
Looks like a Krishna.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he comes out and he starts doing this.
Tuvian throat singing kind of thing.
But he looks just, you know, very strange doing it.
And then suddenly he like leaps up and then levitates just like that.
And everybody in the audience flips out because they can’t figure out what’s going on.
And then, you know, a little…
uh you know explosion happens and then he’s back down with his head on his you know little uh rug that’s laid out on the floor he’s exhausted and it’s drained him it’s drained him and it was just absolutely identical to the old trick so it is amazing how these old tricks can be recycled and people a new generation has not had not seen it now we did show this to our 10 year old and he’s like oh yeah i’ve seen this i know i know this trick i know how this is done
So it’s like you get a certain amount of being jaded, I think, with everything that comes up on the Internet.
It’s Jadu.
But yeah, so it is interesting.
I think that James Randi was very correct in the idea that people that are, you know, have this bit of ego about the fact that they’re an academic.
can be easily fooled based on that, and that having a magician in the ranks is incredibly important.
And we’ll talk more about that as we get further into the episode.
Yeah, I guess moving on, we should start talking about the haunted chest of drawers.
It’s a lovely piece of furniture.
Well, yeah, and I think that that’s the funny thing because they did end up, the owners sold it to the researchers so they could take over and study this intently and intensely.
And I just think it’s funny because it was just missing handles and was so beaten up and just a terrible old thing.
And I think it’s kind of funny that they sold it, made some…
Yeah, this is before Antique Roadshow became a big thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Antique Ghostshow.
Matt’s going to supply some photographs, I think, for the show notes of this haunted chest of drawers.
Right.
But I think you came up with some pretty good theories on what was actually going on here.
Well, you know, and that’s the thing is in this short 12 minute segment, we’re given no information.
It’s really, really sparse.
So all we get.
Not exactly.
It’s not hard hitting journalism at all.
No, no.
But, you know, to be fair, it’s just a segment.
So they’re giving you the sensationalism of it because that’s all the public wants.
But when you look at this, you do have to ask some questions.
Now, when I’ve done several investigations of the Stanley Hotel here in Colorado, and one of the interesting claims is in room 401, otherwise known as Jason’s room from Ghost Hunters, the haunted chest of drawers in that room would move out into the room.
And it would happen over the course of hours or even days.
But little by little, it would move itself out.
Come to find out, there’s very, very, very subtle seismic activity that just kind of always happens there.
On top of the fact that that room is butted up against a very old elevator that shakes the entire building, but it’s not noticeable, you know, as you’re just walking around or, you know.
Sitting on a nice padded, you know, lounge or whatever, you’re not going to notice.
And just, you know, the air moving equipment in the building, you know, such as air conditioning and heating and all those things, they all contribute to this overall vibration that happens in the building.
Now, this was, what was it, East Anglis?
I’m going to leave it for you to pronounce.
He’s been making mistakes today.
So East Anglia.
Anglia.
Anglia.
Anglia.
Yeah, yeah.
East Anglia.
Yeah, that’s where this took place.
Yeah, and one of the things that I find interesting about this area, it’s got a railway museum, it’s got a transportation museum, and there’s a lot of trains that go through.
How close was this house to train tracks?
Because these drawers coming out, if they’re not on a very, very flat level surface, as the train goes by, they’re going to vibrate right out.
But what they did is they used the best equipment at the time, which was, I believe, a Timex Sinclair.
Spectrum computer.
Yeah, the ZX.
And I used to have one and I loved it.
I learned to do basic programming with it.
It was a wonderful machine.
I saw War Games with Matthew Broderick and I got that computer and I was ready to blow up the world and I loved it.
And I had it talking to me and everything so I could…
do all kinds of other stuff, but I never considered hooking it up to a haunted chest of drawers.
So that was pretty cool that they did that, but it was right around the same time that I got this.
I think I got mine in 81, and this was in 83.
Okay, long-time listeners will have seen this insert coming as soon as Matt mentioned the Spectrum.
As a passionate fan of vintage personal computing, I’ve long been interested in how certain machines that were introduced around the early 1980s became monumentally significant within certain cultural niches.
In the U.S., Apple computers’ Apple II became a de facto standard for school computing based on Apple’s aggressive pricing programs for educational adoption.
And it’s said that Steve Jobs wanted to get Apple computers into the hands of students who would then grow up already familiar with the brand, which would then impact their selections when they became able to afford their own machines.
Meanwhile, Commodore’s C64 dominated the personal computing gaming scene and sold millions of units by 1985.
However, in England…
The ZX Spectrum was significantly cheaper and much more widely adopted.
The original model had 16 kilobytes and in 1983 a 48kb unit was released.
It was priced at around 125 pounds for the 16k version and 175 pounds for the 48k version.
Meanwhile the Cummer 64 was introduced at 400 pounds which made it more of a luxury item.
A generation of British kids grew up with the Speccy and its impressive portfolio of original games and fan-based and official arcade boards.
One visual difference that is striking to Commodore users is that the sprites in the Speccy games tended to be monochromatic, each sprite composed of one color.
whereas the Commodore 64 handled up to three colors in a sprite, which game designers used to remarkable effect.
Both systems were adequate platforms for learning the basic programming language, which was the lingua franca for coding in the day.
In this clip, although we don’t see it explained or used, the Speccy’s been modified to include a new piece of hardware that appears to be both a power unit and a plug board for audio jacks or something similar.
It’s intriguing and disappointing that the tech side of this clip is not explored more.
Looking back at vintage computing videos, the original early days of home computing was a landscape of electronics hackers looking to get access to the computational power of big computers normally hidden
behind a layer of clerical hardware attendees and sorcerous software developers.
The home computer scene gave users a chance at digital disintermediation, and early projects from this era often included integrating home projects like electric model railroad switches, home weather stations, and even early attempts at smart home automation being modems and dial-up to one’s own computer.
Popular operating systems like Mac OS and Windows made computing widely popular among non-technical people, and the pricing of computers made people afraid to approach electronics projects as amateurs.
But in the past few years, low-cost machines like Raspberry Pis and interface modules like Arduinos have reinvigorated the creative space of hardware hacking.
Now this may not lead to a better understanding of haunted furniture, but it is a welcome change to the landscape of potential innovations.
All right, back to the show.
Yeah, and I want to note, too, that this is right around the time of the release of the movie Poltergeist.
So I think that they could have been influenced by that.
But you have to wonder at the ghost’s game.
I mean, what is their purpose that they’re edging out these rules little by little over the course of hours or days or weeks?
I mean, what is their purpose?
What is the point of them haunting in this way?
They can find nothing to wear.
Yeah.
They’re rifling through looking for looking for bras.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
They’re tired of the Victorian dress and they want to find something more comfortable.
The Tories looking for lingerie.
Exactly.
There’s just nothing good in there.
But, you know, the thing is, is they like tape it up with these.
It looked like scotch tape, to be honest, but it could be Irish.
We don’t know.
They had electronic contacts.
So if they came out too far, it would break and it would set off cameras and everything else.
The thing is, is if we’re talking vibrations from whatever is going on around the house, it’s only going to come out until it meets resistance.
And that resistance could be something as simple as tape.
So they’re like, ooh, it only came out just enough to not break these electronic contacts.
No, the tape stopped it from going any further because we’re only talking about vibrations.
That’s one possible explanation.
In just a few years after this, they would have been using floppy disks instead of tape, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Well, no, they’d still have to tape the floppy disk to the church.
But yeah, so it’s a lot of questions aren’t being asked about this.
You know, for one, we always seem to have a young person in the house that often will be part of what’s going on or the center of what’s going on.
So that in itself is another possibility.
Often the girl who’s 12 or 13, but these cases, I don’t know about the haunted set of drawers, but certainly with the other case that we’re going to start talking about, there was a young boy involved.
Yeah, a number of cases involving young boys, but I think the stereotype is a young girl.
Right.
It’s a little confusing because they don’t really lay out exactly what are the claimed phenomena, right?
We know there’s noises because they play us an audio tape.
But in their recreation of these effects, it looks to me like the furniture is perfectly empty.
So they’re not filling it up with clothes.
So it’s a little peculiar.
Look, I’m not trying to say they’re not being scientific.
But if you’re going to replicate whatever the phenomena was originally…
Not the same conditions.
You try to reproduce the conditions in which this was happening.
Also, the room where they’re doing this work…
It’s not exactly a lab, is it?
It looks like a storage room.
It is.
It’s got like a ladder and some tarps and all kinds of stuff laying around.
And that’s on the property.
It’s very rudimentary.
Yeah, and that’s on the property.
That’s where it was sitting this whole time was in the storeroom.
But you notice as soon as they take it out of the storeroom when they’re suckered into buying it, nothing happens anymore.
Yeah, it stops.
And that’s one of the themes about this that is not focused on but mentioned is that as soon as a scientific attention is given to these things, everything seems to stop.
I know where you’re going here.
Do you want to tell us the next story?
We’re talking about the thumping recordings, but also some of the people who’ve investigated this kind of phenomena, not only in this documentary, but also people we know.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Now, I do want to say that Tony Cornell is actually a really interesting individual who has done some great stuff, and a lot of his stuff is very skeptical.
So the fact that they focused on the sensational ideas and everything in this television segment shows you that television and entertainment in general has not changed.
Right, yeah, since the time of Harry Price and here with Carrington, yeah, there’s always the focus on the belief rather than the science.
Yes, make it go viral.
That’s what’s important.
But they did interview somebody that I think was a brilliant choice, and that was this magician by the name of David Burglass.
Yes.
And I feel so out of it because I didn’t know much about him.
And he is amazing.
He’s an incredible magician.
He’s an international man of mystery.
I loved how they labeled him that before Austin Powers was a thing.
They labelled him that.
You know, seeing some of his tricks makes me think of a lot of the contemporary magicians that we know.
So people like Banachick, some of his tricks, like driving blindfolded around central London.
I know that that’s…
the driving blindfold has been one of Banaszczak’s big tricks, but it seems like David Berglas was doing all of these tricks before anyone else was.
And boy, did he live a long life.
And he died two years ago and was born in 1926.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He almost made it to, to a hundred.
Yeah.
And just, he did.
He, he was amazing.
And what I love about this is they brought him in and they were talking to him about this case.
where these hands on this clock kept getting bent.
And they couldn’t figure out what was going on.
They called him in.
And he basically just got the little boy of the house alone and said, why did you do it?
When I came along and talked to the family, they were quite convinced that somehow I would get to the truth, whatever it might be.
When I came to the little boy, I decided to play it very cool rather than being the heavy investigator, and I put my arm round him and I said, Eric, why did you do it?
He assumed that I already knew, so he said, just for fun.
At that moment, the whole thing had been solved.
It was then up to me to try and find the exact way it had been achieved.
For instance, why did the father manage to swear to it that it had happened when they were on holiday?
And the answer to that was, of course, that Eric had already bent the clock hands in the house just before they left.
They locked the house up.
When they came back, they discovered the bent hands.
So they assumed that it had happened whilst they were away.
So he saw the whole case right there.
That quickly, just by using some psychology.
And he is also a trained psychotherapist as well as being this amazing magician, which I think is a really important thing for being a good magician is understanding psychology, which he showed there.
But another good magician and investigator of the paranormal who has been on the show, he’s a friend of the show.
is Massimo Polidoro.
And he had a similar case that he was telling Karen and I about years ago.
And the little boy’s name was Marco.
And there were, you know, there were things.
Yeah.
There were things going on in this house where things were breaking and thrown against walls, and it was just really heavy poltergeist activity.
And Massimo…
Really, when he came to investigate, he just stuck with the kid and didn’t really give him any time.
He just would play with him.
And suddenly all the phenomena stopped.
It just stopped completely.
Now, as soon as it was announced that Massimo and the team were leaving, because they were there for some time, that they were leaving, the boy started to get very anxious again.
And was trying to get Massimo to, you know, look over the hills, look over the hills.
Right.
And, you know, so he had a situation where he’s like, I need to get my books ready for school.
So you just keep playing that computer game we’ve been playing together, Massimo.
And Massimo’s like, no, I’ll be glad to help.
And he’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Just let me let me get this.
I’ll be done and I’ll be right back.
So Massimo allows it, but he watches the kid in the reflection of the window.
and keeps an eye on him.
And the kid is watching Mossimo very closely, but doesn’t realize that he can see him in the reflection.
So after a few moments, he grabs a glass and throws it against the wall.
And it shatters and Mossimo turns around and goes, why did you do that?
And the kid stammers, I didn’t do it.
He’s like, well, yeah, you did.
I saw you in the reflection.
Why did you do that?
And then the father comes running in.
Did it happen?
Did it happen?
You know, he’s like, no, no, no.
I accidentally bumped a glass because he didn’t want to embarrass the boy.
Yeah.
That’s kind.
Yeah.
He’s a gentleman.
Oh, he is.
Mossimo is a superhero to me.
When they say don’t meet your heroes, he is one that you can meet.
Definitely.
He’s safe to me.
He stays true.
I think there are two things that are going on here with the young boy.
I think one is a case of pious fraud.
And we’ve seen this with stories like the guy or a ghost where the kid is wanting to, nothing’s happened the whole time that Mossimo and his team were there.
And so he’s trying to produce some phenomena so that he can say, look, this thing is really happening because he’s potentially believing that this is happening anyway, but also a matter of attention seeking behavior.
And so I remember Mossimo talking about how the parents didn’t give him enough attention.
Is this a singleton child?
Doesn’t have any siblings.
And suddenly he’s getting all of this attention with this phenomena that seems to be surrounding him.
And then to find out that the team are going to be leaving, he’s not going to get this attention anymore.
He’s, I guess, trying to keep them to stay there so that he has that attention.
And perhaps something like that was going on too with the Enfield case.
Yeah.
I also want to note, just with Mossimo, seeing what was taking place in the reflection of Blake’s favourite case in Humpty Doo, where the…
The inhabitants of the house, the guys who were renting the place, were caught when they were throwing batteries around the room and knives and razor blades and other things around the room.
Did they for sure convict them of that or were they just charged?
Weren’t charged at all, evicted.
But yeah, a lot of similarities across these cases.
But I do just love that psychological angle of just kind of waiting and observing and then just reasoning with the child and just how much comes out at that point.
But yeah, apparently after that had happened, there was no more phenomena that took place in the house.
So Mossimo solved that one.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that’s just another one of those things where when you bring in a magician, they look at it through a different lens.
And I think it’s really important to kind of have that.
And I feel very privileged to have gotten to work on a few things with, say, Banachek and getting that different perspective.
So that’s all been really great.
But another interesting thing is they didn’t seem to bring David in…
To meet Tony, and I think that would have been really valuable because David did another great little thing where he was talking about how easily people can be fooled by technology because, you know, the the reporter, his name was James Hogg, and he’s got a long, great pedigree as well.
as a BBC reporter.
And he did a lot of these segments for Nationwide as well.
And he really brings a lot of good…
He’s the surrogate audience’s voice.
you know, in a lot of these things.
So he was great, I thought.
But, you know, he mentions that Tony’s using technology to help suss out if there’s fraud, you know, if someone’s being a trickster.
And…
David immediately cautions against that.
He’s like, you can be very fooled by that.
And he’s like, going to touch this cord where there’s an inline switch on this cord to his lamp.
And it shocks him and the lights go off.
And he’s like, ow.
He’s like, oh, it’s kind of funny that we were just talking about that.
And he’s like, but he gets back to his conversations.
You have to be very careful because then…
And he like just kind of moves his hand in a magical way.
And the lights come back on.
Yeah.
And he’s like, how easily you could be fooled.
And it’s like, well, I thought that was great acting because I was because the reporters like, wait, was that a trick?
Right.
Of course it was.
But I thought he’d really shocked himself, you know, and the way he laughed about it and just tried to keep going and talking.
I thought that was such great acting.
Yeah.
That when he did that little hand gesture and the lights came back on, I thought, oh, that was beautiful.
But it was a great representation that if Tony Cornell had seen that.
I think he would have jumped to that feeling of amazement and left his critical thinking at the door.
And so I really appreciate having a magician around.
And I think that we should do a deep dive into talking about David Berglas in another episode.
He had a very famous card trick that was called the Berglas effect, or that’s how it’s known today.
And so I think maybe if we can find either we can do some research and talk about him or we can bring on a guest to talk about him more.
Banachek would know it completely.
He’s such a historian when it comes to this stuff.
Yeah, that’d be cool.
Yeah.
I think we’ll do that.
But I think there was this one last segment that we wanted to talk about.
Yeah, Dr. Alan Gould.
Yeah, so he was a collaborator then with Tony Cornell, specifically about poltergeist activity.
Yeah, he wrote, he and Tony had co-written a book called Poltergeists.
And there’s an interesting statement, and they’re referring to both Dr. Alan Gould and Tony Cornell.
Those who study these matters are concentrating on two possible explanations for poltergeist activities.
One is that someone in the house unconsciously creates, perhaps through tension or aggression, a violent surge of energy which makes things move without being touched.
The other theory is that disembodied spirits are somehow involved.
Now, first off, I want to stop there and say two.
There’s only two possible explanations.
One is that someone in the house is unconsciously creates, perhaps through tension or aggression, a violent surge of energy, which makes things move without being touched.
And the other theory is that disembodied spirits are somehow involved.
So those are the only two possibilities.
Yeah, not trickling or hoaxes.
Right, or misunderstanding or natural causes.
Exactly.
So when you narrow it down like that, and that’s all you’re giving yourself as possibilities, why even bother with critical thought?
Mm-hmm.
You know, it’s like those are the only two things you have to worry about.
So that really does just kind of disturb me.
And they talk about how, oh, I don’t think there’s any trickery involved because it’s how I feel.
I don’t feel like we’re being set up.
Don’t think, I don’t think anybody’s fooling around.
I think that’s genuine.
And how much of the rest is?
I didn’t get the impression that I was having my leg pulled.
No, not at all.
So the mystery deepens, does it not?
It does.
So the mystery deepens, does it not?
Yeah, that’s a good clip.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it’s just kind of hilarious.
And I know that they are not giving these men who actually are skeptical and they are intelligent about things.
They’re only focusing on some questionable things that they do.
I mean, there’s another one where while Alan is being interviewed, that Tony has to go back to the house because they got a call.
Oh, something else has happened.
And it was, you know, a photo frame fell off the wall and down the stairs.
And it’s like, oh, that’s totally authentic.
Well, yeah, I mean, that can happen accidentally as well.
Or it can happen from someone picking it up and throwing it down the stairs as well.
Or they were framed.
Totally.
Well, and it depends on how you frame it because it could be many different things.
But Tony does this interesting thing where he says there are 38 events.
So he basically gets 38 copies of the blueprints of the location.
And each one he maps out where the people said they were during the instance.
And he does that as if it is proof.
And I think that that’s very bizarre.
It’s like, you know, if there’s more than one person or where three people were or, you know, whatever, it’s like you’ve got to do that because you’ve got to find out whether they’re taking you for a ride or not.
So you writing down where they said they were.
is proof.
And if it is not a human agency, if we’re talking about movement, seismic movement or trains or buses going past and shaking a picture off the wall, then that’s all for naught.
Going around and asking everyone to report where they were.
We have an RTD route that goes by our house.
And every time they go by, for some reason, the air brakes make a weird noise because they hit a little divot in the road out in front of our house.
Makes a strange noise.
But I’ve noticed that over time, I’ve got two photos or two pictures, framed pictures hanging up on the wall.
And I noticed that after a week of that bus going by, both pictures are hanging at an angle and I have to straighten them.
So if that were, I mean, they’re haunted, obviously, and it has nothing to do with the bus.
Well, around the house too.
I think with other paintings and portraits that we have, they’re just slowly kind of shifting and askew and have to be straightened pretty much weekly.
Yeah, or strongly.
It’s a…
One of those things where it is constant though.
And if we had decided not to connect the dots in any logical way, you could absolutely feel that there was something going on.
And the sound that the bus makes when it hits that divot echoes in the house in a very odd way.
So up on the top floor, it sounds almost like a…
I don’t know if anyone’s familiar with road roadblocks.
There used to be a, when a character listens to this show, right?
Right.
Anytime a character died, they would make this sound.
And that is the sound that is made by the bus going by.
You hear it up there.
It’s like, you said it just like it then.
And it’s so bizarre.
And yeah, I mean, you don’t know where it came from.
You just hear this sound that represents death.
And what’s going on?
Another one finds the dust in a Roblox game somewhere.
Somewhere, yeah.
I know that Blake has had some strange sounds in his house too.
Was it a previous house or with the stairwell?
I remember you talking about something, some strange sounds.
Oh, this…
Coming up the stairs at my house, I’ve seen this effect in other people’s houses too, but when you’re going up the stairs, there’s a little bit of delay and then the sound gets echoed back to you.
And it creates this really compelling audio illusion that there’s somebody right behind you, like following you up the stairs.
Even though I know what it is, it still makes me go faster and faster.
And then it’s faster and faster, too, because, you know, so it’s like being aware of what’s really going on.
There’s no proof against your body’s just, you know.
Reactions.
Reactions to these sort of visceral threats.
They’re not real, but they feel.
It’s still real to me, damn it!
You know what somebody ought to do?
Somebody ought to write a story, a ghost story, where there’s a skeptic who by the end of it is converted to a believer.
Because that’s never been done.
Never been done.
Never been done.
Because they think they’re figuring things out throughout.
And then, oh, lo and behold, they are convinced.
It’s real.
That’s the trope.
Ghost-proof my basement just by putting a sound-absorbing tile up to the top of the stairwell.
Ghost-proof of ghosts.
Ghost-proofing, yeah.
I love this idea of, we talk about it a lot, there’s a culturally available template to explain a thing, you know, so that when people sort of fit their story to what’s out there, you know, I saw a weird animal in the woods.
Maybe it was a Bigfoot.
You know, Bigfoot’s there ready to, you know, be an explanation.
Ghosts.
Very much so.
Poltergeist.
I got kind of curious, like, well, how often do poltergeists come up in the news?
Right.
So when they talked about this poltergeist book here in the episode or this in this little clip, they show the book Poltergeist by Gauld and Cornell.
And that was widely regarded as being a very good book, scientific sort of book tackling this.
This was shot in 83.
And so.
Colin Wilson had done a book called Poltergeist in 81.
And of course, Guy Lyon Play Affair had done his This House is Haunted.
We talked to him.
That was 1980.
William Roll, who taught here in West Georgia, famous for the Columbus Poltergeist, among other things.
He’s really sort of codified the idea of like a psychic energy.
You know, he’s from the J.B. Ryan School.
So his book was 72.
Nendor Fodor and Herewood Carrington wrote Haunted People in 1951.
And I guess to some extent, the Borley Rectory’s case has some sort of poltergeist elements.
That was 1940.
I saw your note there, just in our notes, and I just wanted to say, yes, there were absolutely claims of poltergeist activity.
So when you go back to the Bull family, who originally…
There in Baldy Rectory, they didn’t really talk about poltergeist activity.
It was mostly the headless coachman and the nun.
But then with the family who came in and got the SPR involved and therefore Harry Price.
they were experiencing or claiming that they were experiencing poltergeist activity.
And certainly with the Foister family, the activity was predominantly poltergeist in nature.
So it did play heavily into the stories, especially in the 1930s and the 1940s.
And I had thought maybe…
some famous case would be bringing these things up to the surface and they would go die down and come back up.
But at least in England, since the 1920s, there’s been a constant stream of poltergeist stories in the news.
There’s never a decade when there’s not some.
It’s just constantly poltergeist in the news.
And this sort of segment, this nationwide segment, that’s not what the whole show was about.
But these these sort of supernatural elements really stick out in the memory and become the thing you think about.
Kind of like Unsolved Mysteries.
Like that’s not a supernatural show for the most part.
It’s missing persons, that sort of thing.
Unsolved crimes.
But when they would do these poltergeist stories or weird UFO abduction stories, those would really stick out and be it was especially credible.
Because everything else they’re showing is, you know, ostensibly real crime or real mystery.
And then how do you explain this supernatural thing?
Which I think that’s it.
They give it a lot of added weight even.
But this sort of ends in a cliffhanger, though, right?
I mean, it doesn’t they don’t really they set up the experiments.
They show you what they’re going to be doing.
Do we ever get a follow-up?
I don’t know.
Well, no, we don’t.
And the reason we don’t is because of the fact that this was the final season of Nationwide.
And so it’s one of two things.
They ran out of time because it was the ending of the season and the end of the series.
But there’s also the thing is that they didn’t have anything compelling to tell after they moved that chest of drawers and found that it did nothing.
Yeah, and I fished around a little bit, and I couldn’t find out what had become of the chest of drawers.
So I guessed landfill somewhere in the end.
eBay.
Antique Roadshow.
eBay, yeah.
Haunted chest of drawers, for sure.
Yeah, we should look that up.
But another interesting thing is the way they started off this segment is with that photo taken of a reflection in a mirror.
Yeah.
And it was just so full of pareidolia.
You could not see what it was.
No, it was a chihuahua.
Yeah, Karen saw a chihuahua.
I saw like a woman wrapped in white cheesecloth or something.
I couldn’t tell what it was.
And when they zoomed in on it, suddenly you could see that it was a young boy asleep or pretending to be asleep while this incredibly loud banging was happening.
And, you know, again, we are given such a lack of information.
Oh, we were watching him.
Where’s the proof you were watching him?
You have a picture of a photo of a reflection in a mirror.
That’s not a good scientific photo, you know, because it’s so…
Well, yeah, yeah.
It’s hard to depict what’s there.
And I sent those pictures over to you, Blake, if you want to put them in the show notes.
And also the drawers out on the Chester drawers.
Amazing.
The thing is…
You know, there’s such little information.
How could this young boy, and you can see from the photo, he’s probably 12, 13, 14 maybe, but how could he make these sounds of a man?
Well, how do you know that that’s the, what is the sound of a man?
It’s usually flatulence.
I know.
The thing is, is how could he make this powerful sound?
Well, I demonstrated it to Karen that all you have to do is stomp.
All you have to do is use something in your hand, whether it be a baseball bat or whatever.
But something simple could easily create those sounds.
It sounded a little bit to me like pipes being hit with a bat, maybe a cricket bat in England.
I don’t know.
When you think in terms of natural explanations, there are just so many potential explanations in a natural sense to rule out paranormal claims.
But it also makes me think of the Enfield poltergeist and Janet making the sounds of the ghost of a man and just putting on that kind of gravelly voice.
And making sure everybody had to turn their back or he wouldn’t talk.
Yeah, and even babies can make growling sounds.
You can go and look on YouTube and find demon babies.
Oh, I’ve got a great piece of footage of Blade doing that when he was a baby.
He sounded just like a demon.
He’s in his crib going…
And it’s beautiful.
He’s so artful.
He was, yeah, just playing with his vocal apparatus and learning.
We have the new vocalist for Behemoth.
He’s excellent at it.
But so, yeah, anybody can do that.
And for her to go, you know, the very eloquently stated, I’m not a heaven man.
I love that.
Yeah.
It’s hilarious when you think about it, especially in retrospect.
Now, I’m sure there were elements when you were there that you could find yourself terrified.
But once you get past that feeling, you can tear it apart.
I guess that’s about it for this episode.
I would say we’ll put some links to other clips that they did.
We’ll delve into this more as a series.
I think just these, as you say, Blake, these vintage documentaries and shows, they’re good fun.
So I think our listeners should go and check that out too.
It’s only 12 minutes, but wow, so much there.
They cram a lot in, so it’s kind of cool.
It’s great.
I mean, for us, it’s very cool.
So I think they’re, I mean, I know we just sort of dissected it, but, you know, it’s also beautiful as a living frog and not just as a bunch of pins and flesh.
So, yeah.
That was a strange metaphor.
I don’t need lunch now.
Yeah.
Anyway, so thanks for bringing this to our attention.
And I think hopefully the listeners enjoy this.
Again, you can check out the clip if you want to cover this material a lot faster than we just did.
Yeah, yeah.
And we’ll certainly circle back so that we can talk about some of these characters like David Berglas.
Well, and it’s interesting because this whole area of East Anglia is, I found so many videos on YouTube talking about the ghost of East Anglia.
And it’s just like, how many could there be?
I’ve never heard anybody talk about West Anglia.
It’s always East Anglia.
Is there a West Anglia?
Oh, it’s, don’t worry about it.
Okay.
Yeah.
It’s not haunted.
We’re not referred to.
It’s not built over an ancient Native American burial ground.
Interesting.
Like East England is.
They only moved the heads and headstones.
All right.
Well, maybe we can have some listeners in Great Britain who can help us out here.
Yeah, teach us, school us in this.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You’ve been listening to Karen and me discussing a haunted chest of drawers with Matt Baxter.
Check the show notes for the full segment.
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Plus, there’s other links for further reading.
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