Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norrie with
Speaker 2: your Graham Phillips back with us. I'll tell you a
Speaker 2: little bit about Graham. Also this book, Strange Fate and
Speaker 2: Extraordinary True Story of paranormal Discovery. He wrote with Jody Russell,
Speaker 2: who lives in the Los Angeles area. Graham lives in
Speaker 2: the United Kingdom. He's been one of Britain's best selling
Speaker 2: nonfiction authors for forty years. Has published twenty books concerning
Speaker 2: historical mysteries. They include investigations in the Death of Alexander
Speaker 2: the Great, The Secret Life of William Shakespeare, The Mystery
Speaker 2: of King Arthur. His book also covers his search for
Speaker 2: historical relics as the Holy Grail. He's considered a real
Speaker 2: life Indiana Jones. Graham, Welcome back. It's been a couple
Speaker 2: of years.
Speaker 3: Hi, George, Yes it has, but I'm still alive and
Speaker 3: still going.
Speaker 2: Good for you. And how's Jody doing? What do we
Speaker 2: hear about her?
Speaker 3: She's fine, but I'm not sure if she's listening to this,
Speaker 3: might be asleep, but she's in Los Angeles, so hopefully
Speaker 3: she's awakened listening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not too late. It's only a little after midnight,
Speaker 2: so she might be up. Hi, Jody, wherever you might be. Hey, Graham,
Speaker 2: tell us a little bit about strange fate. Tell us
Speaker 2: about this investigation.
Speaker 3: Well, it's a little bit different to my other historical investigations.
Speaker 3: It started off as an historical investigation into a secret
Speaker 3: society that existed in the mid nineteenth century based in
Speaker 3: central England. They claimed to have found in an old
Speaker 3: burial mound in central England. They claim to have found
Speaker 3: this small stone that was shaped in the shape of
Speaker 3: a heart. They called it the Heart of the Rose,
Speaker 3: and they believed that it had extraordinary supernatural powers, specifically
Speaker 3: the power to alter fate time even to cross into
Speaker 3: different universes. Now, they wrote about this in the mid
Speaker 3: Victorian period, before things like the multiverse became popular, so
Speaker 3: I thought it was fascinating that they even claimed to
Speaker 3: have done this sort of stuff. But in the end,
Speaker 3: Jody and I decided to go in search of this
Speaker 3: stone that this strange group called the Me and Aia
Speaker 3: group had claimed to have hidden.
Speaker 2: This group what is the name mean? Me and Aya?
Speaker 3: Well, it's an anagram for I am one. They believed
Speaker 3: that different cultures throughout the world had different ways of
Speaker 3: different forms of mysticism, like in China, India, the ancient
Speaker 3: United Kingdom and elsewhere, and they believed that they were
Speaker 3: all different ways of looking at the same thing. So
Speaker 3: it was firstly an anagram for I am one, but
Speaker 3: it was also the name of an ancient land in
Speaker 3: what is now Turkey that they believed these stone was
Speaker 3: originally made over three thousand years ago.
Speaker 2: Now you were looking for, as you mentioned, the Heart
Speaker 2: of the Rose, what is that loss relic?
Speaker 3: Well, it hadn't been I hadn't found any reference to
Speaker 3: it before, as you mentioned in your introduction. I researched
Speaker 3: things like the Holy Grail and gone in search of that,
Speaker 3: investigating all sorts of different references in history to it.
Speaker 3: But there wasn't really any other references to this Heart
Speaker 3: of the Rose other than what this ME and I
Speaker 3: group wrote about it. But they claimed, for example that
Speaker 3: in eighteen fifty one, on May the fourth, specifically that
Speaker 3: one of the daughters of one of the people involved
Speaker 3: in this, a girl called Mary Heath, went into an
Speaker 3: old burial mound in central England at a place called
Speaker 3: the Bridestones. It was around about fifteen hundred years old,
Speaker 3: which historically speaking, dates from the kind of period that
Speaker 3: King Arthur is said to have lived. She entered this
Speaker 3: too while an archaeological dig was going on there, and
Speaker 3: somehow managed to find this small stone at the heart
Speaker 3: of the rose. When she came out, she said that
Speaker 3: she had felt impelled to dig in a certain place
Speaker 3: and there she found it, and afterwards she became psychic,
Speaker 3: as the only way to describe it. She had all
Speaker 3: sorts of strange abilities. She started telling her parents and
Speaker 3: others in this group that all sorts of things about
Speaker 3: themselves that they couldn't have known. And she eventually proved
Speaker 3: herself by taking them to an old ruined church on
Speaker 3: the not far from where this burial mound was, and
Speaker 3: she said that if you dig down here this part
Speaker 3: of the ruins, you'll find a stone slab, and underneath
Speaker 3: it is an old crypt containing old documents belonging to
Speaker 3: the knights templars from the Middle Ages, all sealed in
Speaker 3: lead containers. And she was right. I mean, five or
Speaker 3: six of these people all wrote separate accounts of how
Speaker 3: this happened, so they've been led to find some ancient,
Speaker 3: hundreds of year old manuscripts and a lost crypt by
Speaker 3: a seven year old girl, which is absolutely.
Speaker 2: Astonishing, incredible research. Is this stuff similar to like Stonehenge?
Speaker 3: The burial mound is like similar to Stonehenge. Yes, right
Speaker 3: next to it, it's about fifteen hundred years old. It
Speaker 3: is thought to have contained one of the last druids
Speaker 3: of Britain, the old priesthood of the Celts before the
Speaker 3: Anglo Saxons invaded, and it was thought to have been
Speaker 3: a woman who was the inspiration behind the Arthurian legend
Speaker 3: of Morgan le Fee, the wizardess if you like, of
Speaker 3: the Arthurian legend, or more Gana if she's sometimes called so.
Speaker 3: She was supposed to have been buried seemingly with this
Speaker 3: stone that gave her remarkable powers that this little girl found.
Speaker 3: But right next to it there was a stone circle
Speaker 3: that was even older about the age of Stonehenge, and
Speaker 3: something similar to Stonehenge.
Speaker 2: There's an area called Bidolph Grange where this group met
Speaker 2: back in the eighteen hundreds. You write, what's so strange
Speaker 2: about this place?
Speaker 3: Well, once they found this stone and this little girl
Speaker 3: that led them to all these ancient manuscripts and me
Speaker 3: talismans that had belonged to the Knights Templar group in
Speaker 3: the Middle Ages. They started this me Andia group based
Speaker 3: at Bidoff Grange, an old Victorian mansion then it was
Speaker 3: just built then, and it was on the grounds or
Speaker 3: in the estate of this Bidoph Grange that this burial
Speaker 3: man had been, and also this old ecclesiastical building where
Speaker 3: they discovered this crypt. What they'd started to do then
Speaker 3: was practice various ancient forms of mysticism. They built a
Speaker 3: mock reconstructed Egyptian tomb on the estate. They built a
Speaker 3: Chinese sanctuary like a pagoda and pool and other ancient
Speaker 3: Chinese mystical sites. They built a Celtic glen, as they
Speaker 3: called it, which was basically what the rich ancient Britons
Speaker 3: used to worship at, which was like a sacred spring
Speaker 3: coming out of the rocks, a pool, and also standing stones,
Speaker 3: some of which they actually moved from right next to
Speaker 3: the bridestones this tomb nearby. So they built these, and
Speaker 3: they also built an underground Roman temple right under the house,
Speaker 3: and it was here that they met and performed whatever
Speaker 3: strange ceremonies or whatever other mystical practices they did in
Speaker 3: the belief that they could alter fate, or even in
Speaker 3: some cases, believe that they could travel through time or
Speaker 3: to other worlds.
Speaker 2: While your investigation was under Waygraham, didn't weird things start
Speaker 2: happening to you two?
Speaker 3: Well? Yeah, at first, I was just regarding this as
Speaker 3: an historical investigation into a bunch of people with rather
Speaker 3: weird beliefs. I did think that there must have been
Speaker 3: something pretty weird going on, just beyond historical, if you like,
Speaker 3: and more mystical, especially so because so many witnesses claimed
Speaker 3: that this young girl was able to perform amazing feats
Speaker 3: of prophecy or whatever you'd want to call it. But
Speaker 3: when Jody and I visited the where the two was,
Speaker 3: it's just a load of old stones that remain now
Speaker 3: where this little girl, Mary Heather name was had found
Speaker 3: this stone. We went there and suddenly, whether there's a
Speaker 3: nice sunny day, suddenly the rain started pouring down. There
Speaker 3: was thunder lightning, far more violent weather than you'd normally
Speaker 3: get in England. But there was a massive cloud directly
Speaker 3: over us that seemed to have come from nowhere were
Speaker 3: all around us. It was completely clear that the thunderstorm
Speaker 3: could be directly overhead, and while we were there, we
Speaker 3: filmed what was going on while we were there on
Speaker 3: a phone camera, and what seemed to be a kind
Speaker 3: of ball of light seemed to shoot from these stones
Speaker 3: and into the nearby bushes. Now people said it could
Speaker 3: be lens flare or something, but experts had examined it
Speaker 3: so they couldn't really explain it, but it might have
Speaker 3: been something to do with it electrical storm one way
Speaker 3: or the other. The storm lasted for about five minutes
Speaker 3: and was only present when we were there at the stones,
Speaker 3: and nowhere else in the area around.
Speaker 2: That's pretty dramatic, isn't it. Do you think you stumbled
Speaker 2: into some kind of like parallel universe.
Speaker 3: Well, at the time, we just thought we'd distumbled into
Speaker 3: some rather strange weather phenomenon. But shortly after this we
Speaker 3: began to find out that things were rather different to
Speaker 3: how we remembered them. For us, start bit Off Grange,
Speaker 3: the Victorian house nearby. What all these people had met
Speaker 3: was there was a fire there that we as far
Speaker 3: as we know, the research that we'd carried out Jody
Speaker 3: and I a fire that had taken place in eighteen
Speaker 3: ninety seven. We'd written all about this, and we'd done
Speaker 3: all the research about it. It was still in the
Speaker 3: books that I'd written referring to it. But suddenly we
Speaker 3: went back to the grange house itself, which is now
Speaker 3: open to the public, and one of the we were
Speaker 3: just discussing the history of the place if one of
Speaker 3: the guides, who suddenly told us that this fire had
Speaker 3: taken place in eighteen ninety six, And we said, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: it's eighteen ninety seven, because you'll see it there on
Speaker 3: one of the pictures that you've got showing the grange
Speaker 3: as it used to be. But no, it had changed.
Speaker 3: And that was just the first of a whole series
Speaker 3: of small, little incidents that could be down to faulty memory.
Speaker 3: But as these strange changes in dates and reality carried on,
Speaker 3: we had to think we were in some other kind
Speaker 3: of world. For example, there was one person we'd been
Speaker 3: talking to a few days before who didn't even remember.
Speaker 2: Um, that's weird. Now are there any members of this
Speaker 2: group two offspring still alive today?
Speaker 3: Well, this is what we're still trying to find out.
Speaker 3: I mean, we've been investigating this or a good cup years,
Speaker 3: I mean, on and off I've been looking into this
Speaker 3: group for about forty years. It's only now I've gotten
Speaker 3: to write the book about it, but that the last
Speaker 3: of these people were called the Heath family that lived
Speaker 3: at Bidolf Grange and ran the whole thing. Mary Heath,
Speaker 3: a little girl, ran it for a while when she
Speaker 3: was an adult. Her sister in law, a person called
Speaker 3: Laura He's, took over. She died in eighteen ninety seven,
Speaker 3: and after that the group seems to have broken up.
Speaker 3: There were offspring, but these people didn't seem to know
Speaker 3: very much about it. We found one family who had
Speaker 3: old documents written by the me and I a group
Speaker 3: that were kind of hidden away up in their attic.
Speaker 3: They really didn't understand the significance of them and had
Speaker 3: no idea of what their ancestors had been doing. So
Speaker 3: we're still looking for people today who may still today
Speaker 3: be carrying on whatever this group were doing.
Speaker 2: Were they like strange people in those days? I mean,
Speaker 2: were they violent and older?
Speaker 3: Though no, not in the slightest. The interesting thing is
Speaker 3: most of them were women. They came from rich families
Speaker 3: that lived in stately homes throughout Britain. They who then
Speaker 3: traveled to bid Off Grange for these meetings. They included
Speaker 3: a number of female pre Raphaelite artists. They were mainly women,
Speaker 3: as I say, female pre Raphaelite artists, writers, and also
Speaker 3: people who were pacifists and specifically a lot of women
Speaker 3: who were into the early sort of years of feminism.
Speaker 3: They were some of the people that were involved in
Speaker 3: campaigning for votes for women women's rights, generally at a
Speaker 3: time when they was extremely unpopular, and from the few
Speaker 3: writings we have got from this group, it seems that
Speaker 3: they wanted to try and add mysticism to their intentions
Speaker 3: of changing the world to some degree so that women
Speaker 3: got a far better lot. They were known as the
Speaker 3: first wave feminists, and a lot of the ones who
Speaker 3: started the votes for Women's campaigns both in America and
Speaker 3: this country and other women's rights groups were also members
Speaker 3: of this mystical me and I group who seemed to
Speaker 3: be trying to use the paranormal if you like, or
Speaker 3: the supernatural to change the world in favor of more
Speaker 3: equality for women. So opposite of being violent Graham.
Speaker 2: When Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland, was he somehow
Speaker 2: stumbling into this tool?
Speaker 3: Yes, he did. It was quite interesting because just a
Speaker 3: few months after this little girl Mary Heath discovered this
Speaker 3: stone pretty much started the whole thing off. Once she
Speaker 3: had found this old crypt, that's when the group started.
Speaker 3: A few months later, in the summer of eighteen fifty one,
Speaker 3: her father and mother went to stay at a nearby
Speaker 3: other stately home belonging to a man called Lord Halifax,
Speaker 3: who was a member of the British government. He was
Speaker 3: an extraordinary wealthy man. Mary's father, Robert, was into mining,
Speaker 3: coal mining and iron production. He was staying with Lord
Speaker 3: Halifax as ongoing meetings and discussions about mining rights on
Speaker 3: the Halifax estate. So Robert and Ann, his wife, went
Speaker 3: with them, and so did little Mary, the oldest child
Speaker 3: and who was just seven at the time, went and
Speaker 3: stayed with them at this house. Interestingly, at exactly that time,
Speaker 3: Lewis Carroll was the tutor to the children of Lord Halifax,
Speaker 3: and it was at that point that he first came
Speaker 3: up with the ideas in tandem for both of the
Speaker 3: Alice books, Alice in Wonder vand Analyze through the Looking Glass.
Speaker 3: And it wasn't until many years later that the story
Speaker 3: was published, but he always claimed he had based his
Speaker 3: story in eighteen fifty one on a real little girl who,
Speaker 3: according to the books, is exactly seven and a half
Speaker 3: years old. Now, some people have suggested that he based
Speaker 3: it on one of the children the girls of Lord Halifax,
Speaker 3: but none of them were that age. But Mary Heath,
Speaker 3: who was staying there, who was probably also for a
Speaker 3: short while shooted by Lewis Carroll, was that exact age.
Speaker 3: She was staying there. She'd just recently remember crawled into
Speaker 3: a hole in the ground, into a tomb. She'd come
Speaker 3: out saying she'd been to a fantastic land where all
Speaker 3: sorts of strange things had happened. They put that down
Speaker 3: to imagination. And this may be whereas he was in
Speaker 3: spe to write the story of Alice in Wonderland.
Speaker 2: That's fascinating. Might they've been this group stumbling into time travel?
Speaker 3: Well, the time travel bit is quite weird. That they
Speaker 3: claimed that they could see through time. They didn't that. Unfortunately,
Speaker 3: the evidence we've got is rather fragmentary in documentation. But
Speaker 3: what happened on one occasion Jody and I went into
Speaker 3: the mock Egyptian tomb that I was telling you about,
Speaker 3: into a central, dank, cold chamber that's there and in
Speaker 3: there there's the figure of a statue they put of
Speaker 3: an ancient Egyptian god called Arne, also known as the
Speaker 3: Ape of Thoth. It's like a human sized baboon creature
Speaker 3: who was supposed to be the lord of time. And
Speaker 3: in that particular chamber, Jody was filming me, just talking
Speaker 3: about it for a YouTube thing I was doing, and
Speaker 3: when the film came out on it you can see
Speaker 3: quite clearly. It's dark, but you can see that there's
Speaker 3: a figure seemingly of a Victorian lady standing there looking
Speaker 3: at me as I walk past. And the couple of
Speaker 3: weeks before that, Jody had had this vision. She does
Speaker 3: meditation quite often and sometimes she does get experiences of
Speaker 3: things that are you know, that proved to be accurate
Speaker 3: that she couldn't have known about, And she had dreamt
Speaker 3: of this actual event taking place, and she'd seen me
Speaker 3: in the future to her standing next to this woman
Speaker 3: exactly that I had appeared on this film, a woman
Speaker 3: in Victorian clothes who was seemingly was able to see
Speaker 3: me because she turned and looked at me as she
Speaker 3: went past. So it appears that there was both past,
Speaker 3: present and future nighting in one place and that's just
Speaker 3: one example.
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