Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back, George, nor with you. Richard A step
Speaker 2: with Us has been a paranormal investigator for thirty plus years.
Speaker 2: He has researched claims of ghosts, hauntings and UFO since
Speaker 2: the mid nineteen nineties. Richard is a series contributor on
Speaker 2: the TV show Haunted Hospitals, Paranormal, Nine to one one,
Speaker 2: Paranormal Night Shift, in Haunted Case Files. He lives in Colorado,
Speaker 2: where he works as a nine to one one parademic
Speaker 2: and also a clinical educator. Richard, thank you for your
Speaker 2: first response to job.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Sara very much appreciate that, and a big
Speaker 3: shout out to all the other responders out there and
Speaker 3: also to the good people who are listening in across
Speaker 3: the country and the world.
Speaker 2: How did you get involved in your paranormal investigating?
Speaker 3: I grew up in a halted house, George. My grandparents
Speaker 3: owned a haunted place back in Native England. I have
Speaker 3: an accident in case you couldn't tell, and I used
Speaker 3: to hear stories about this old lady that would wake
Speaker 3: my dad and my aunts and uncles up in the
Speaker 3: middle of the night during the war, and this happened
Speaker 3: until my grandfather came home from having fought in Burma,
Speaker 3: and it was only then the kids realized that this
Speaker 3: was the ghost of the old lady who had lived
Speaker 3: in the house before they had. She died in a
Speaker 3: chair downstairs, and she was keeping a motherly eye on
Speaker 3: the family, helping my grandmother out until my grandfather returned home.
Speaker 2: Well, your book, Doc Spirits, why don't you get into it?
Speaker 2: You can't put it down, Richard.
Speaker 3: Hey, that's kind of you.
Speaker 4: Thanks so much.
Speaker 3: You know, I grew up as a boy in Britain
Speaker 3: reading those old school kind of ghost books written by
Speaker 3: guys like you know, all hands Hoolder, Peter Underwood, and
Speaker 3: they just told these these stories of you know, some
Speaker 3: of the haunted places in this world. And I to
Speaker 3: write those same kind of books. And I'm lucky enough
Speaker 3: that I get to give.
Speaker 2: Us a little overview of dark spirits.
Speaker 3: Absolutely well. I've written something like thirty books on the
Speaker 3: paranormal Georgian. This one looked at the darker side of things.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to look at perhaps some of those
Speaker 3: cases and places that were not necessarily so nice. But
Speaker 3: I also wanted to dispel a few myths and legends
Speaker 3: along the way. So we cover everything in this book,
Speaker 3: from malevolent ghosts and hauntings to skim walkers to UFOs, abduction, vampires,
Speaker 3: and demonic possession.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about some of the spots that are in
Speaker 2: the book, and you can tell us what's going on.
Speaker 2: Tell us about the history of hotels a seal.
Speaker 4: Oh.
Speaker 3: The Hotel Cecil in Los Angeles used to be one
Speaker 3: of LA's biggest, most glittering hot spots, at least right
Speaker 3: up until the Great Depression. When that happened, plus the
Speaker 3: fact that Americans stopped using trains and started using carves
Speaker 3: to see the country, the hotel fell into a state
Speaker 3: of disrepair, and it's now located in a place that
Speaker 3: we all know the name skid rub. Unfortunately, the Secil
Speaker 3: had seen better days than By the sixties and seventies,
Speaker 3: it became the cut of place.
Speaker 4: Where you would rent a room by the hour, if.
Speaker 3: You catch my drift, very cheap accommodation, not the cleanest,
Speaker 3: not the nicest, and it soon gained a reputation for
Speaker 3: being cursed. It had an unusually high suicide rate, people
Speaker 3: jumping out of windows and from the roof, There were
Speaker 3: several murders, at least one of them unexplained, and a
Speaker 3: reputation for violence, probably not helped by the fact that
Speaker 3: not one but two serial killers lodged their George, one
Speaker 3: of them being the notorious Richard Ramirez, the so called Nightstalker.
Speaker 4: So it has gotten a.
Speaker 3: Reputation for being a dark place that is supposedly, according
Speaker 3: to some cycling mediums, at least haunted by negative forces.
Speaker 2: Has there been a lot of tragedies at the hotel.
Speaker 3: You know, all hotels see death, don't they, But and
Speaker 3: the Cecil has an unusual amount of tragedy. There was
Speaker 3: a military man who cut his own throat open there.
Speaker 3: There was tragically a lady who gave birth and threw
Speaker 3: her baby out of one of the upper story windows.
Speaker 3: But I think the Cecil became most commonly known. I
Speaker 3: think when a poor young lady named Alisa Lamb went
Speaker 3: missing while staying there, and her body turned up in
Speaker 3: a water tank on the roof of the hotel seesaw
Speaker 3: sometime after her disappearance, and was only discovered because some
Speaker 3: of the residents complained that the water takes is a
Speaker 3: little strange in the hotel.
Speaker 2: How did you get up there?
Speaker 3: Well, that's the question, isn't it. There's some rather unusual
Speaker 3: footage of Lisa Lamb.
Speaker 4: She seems to be.
Speaker 3: Based on what the hotel CCTV camera system found, either
Speaker 3: talking to somebody who was there, talking to somebody off camera,
Speaker 3: or unfortunately, perhaps having a mental health episode. It's impossible
Speaker 3: to say exactly what did cause that poor young lady's death.
Speaker 2: But you're saying physically the hotel structure is still there.
Speaker 4: The hotel structure is actually still there.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, it was originally being turned into a boutique hotel.
Speaker 3: Now it's kind of in a state of flux, in
Speaker 3: the state of limbo. I really do hope. Though they've
Speaker 3: changed out the plummet.
Speaker 2: Why don't they level it?
Speaker 3: What a great question. Well, it's baked in downtown Los
Speaker 3: Angeles with seven hundred rooms. You could house a great
Speaker 3: many people there and perhaps make it dent in LA's
Speaker 3: homeless situation if you repurpose the SECOL properly. And they're
Speaker 3: wearing deep plans of foot to do exactly that. But
Speaker 3: one wonders whether it's dark reputation will follow it no
Speaker 3: matter what.
Speaker 2: I go to Denver monthly the taper Beyond Belief TV shows, Richard,
Speaker 2: But I've not been to the Denver Botanic Gardens. What's
Speaker 2: going on there?
Speaker 3: That's right, You and I filmed a show for Guy.
Speaker 4: I think Colorado is great. You know.
Speaker 3: I love the movie Polter Guyst.
Speaker 4: George.
Speaker 3: I think it's an absolute classic, one of my favorites
Speaker 3: growing up and probably contributes to me being a paranormal
Speaker 3: investigator and a ghost And for you, he asked, I
Speaker 3: love that line. If you remember where the coffins are
Speaker 3: coming out of the ground and Steve Frielan's boss turns up.
Speaker 3: You know, the guy that is kind of shady, that
Speaker 3: has decided he's going to build this housing estate on
Speaker 3: top of an old cemetery and he's going to be
Speaker 3: so cheap. He moves the headstones, but not the bodies,
Speaker 3: you know, and Craig T. Nelson grabs him by the
Speaker 3: shirt and he says, you fob, you move the headstones,
Speaker 3: you didn't move the bodies. Well, that actually happened in Denver,
Speaker 3: Denver's old cemetery, which was in the heart of the
Speaker 3: city until, you know, the city.
Speaker 4: Started to expand.
Speaker 3: They decided to move the cemetery and gave people an ultimatum,
Speaker 3: you know, essentially you have a few weeks to move
Speaker 3: your loved ones. When that didn't happen, they hired a
Speaker 3: contractor to do it. Now, the contractor used to get
Speaker 3: paid by the number of bodies that he moved. Orthough
Speaker 3: he's personnel moved, but he was kind of cheap as well.
Speaker 3: So we had cases of that guy breaking up bodies
Speaker 3: and stuff in three four skeletons into one coffin in
Speaker 3: order to save one coffins. Became a scandal quite rightly.
Speaker 3: There was a public outcry, George, and so what they
Speaker 3: did was they said, all right, no more of this.
Speaker 3: We are moving the headstones. We're going to put grass
Speaker 3: over and we're going to turn it into a park,
Speaker 3: which is now Denver's Cheeseman Park, and that directly abuts
Speaker 3: the Botanic Gardens. Now, the Botanic Gardens is slowly but
Speaker 3: surely thinking because there are several thousand sets of unclaimed
Speaker 3: remains underneath that building, and quite regularly when the utilities
Speaker 3: technicians come in to check the water mains or to
Speaker 3: lay new cables or whatever, they find skulls and females
Speaker 3: and bones and things of that nature. It is one
Speaker 3: big graveyard in the heart of this major city, and
Speaker 3: the staff of the botanic gardens have heard laughter and
Speaker 3: disembodied voices at night, phantom footsteps they hear themselves being
Speaker 3: called out. I was able to go spend a few
Speaker 3: nights in there because the night security guard quit. He
Speaker 3: actually ran out of the building, locked it up and
Speaker 3: never looked back.
Speaker 2: The living daylights out of them, didn't it?
Speaker 3: Should it? Security guards are great for intruders, not so
Speaker 3: great for ghosts.
Speaker 2: Sometimes, have you been to most of the places that
Speaker 2: are in the book.
Speaker 3: I've been to about half of them, George. The ones
Speaker 3: that I could investigate in first, and I absolutely did.
Speaker 3: There are some that I would love to get to someday,
Speaker 3: and they're on my bucket list, But I'd say I
Speaker 3: got the majority of them.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Are there's some places, Richard, you would not want to
Speaker 2: go back to again.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's a really great question. One of the more
Speaker 3: disturbing places is Fox Farm in Carmel, Indiana. And if
Speaker 3: that name strikes a bell with your listeners, it's because
Speaker 3: it's currently featured on the Hulu TV series The Fox
Speaker 3: follow Murders playground of a serial killer. It is the
Speaker 3: home of the iced seventy Strangler, a man that murdered
Speaker 3: probably a minimum of twenty to twenty five men during
Speaker 3: the eighties and nineties before taking his own life before
Speaker 3: he could face justice. Unsurprisingly, at home like that where
Speaker 3: many of these poor unfortunates were killed, has a reputation
Speaker 3: for being haunted, and I spent quite a bit of
Speaker 3: time there researching the haunting and experiencing some parts of.
Speaker 2: That for myself, well, with Richard A Steps book is
Speaker 2: called Dark Spirits, Monsters, Demons and Devils. His website is
Speaker 2: his name linked up at coast tocoasdam dot com. What's
Speaker 2: the story behind the London Underground, Well, you know, it's.
Speaker 3: The world's oldest mass transit system. It's absolutely honeycom the
Speaker 3: ground beneath the city of London, and it has had
Speaker 3: a reputation for being haunted for as long as I
Speaker 3: think most people can remember. Certainly, it's had its share
Speaker 3: of tragedies. You know, during the Second World War, for example,
Speaker 3: the Underground was used as a shelter of the civilians
Speaker 3: from German bombing and there were a number of casualties
Speaker 3: when some of those stations sustained direct hits from bombs.
Speaker 3: And those stations are said to have ghosts to this day.
Speaker 3: There was also the tragic King's crossfire which took place,
Speaker 3: took a great many lives, and it's believed that one
Speaker 3: female apparition who is seen in King's Cross Station is
Speaker 3: perhaps somehow connected to that incident, as are phantom smells
Speaker 3: of smoke and sometimes account the same screens which can
Speaker 3: be heard when the station is otherwise relatively quiet.
Speaker 2: I spent a lot of time at Saint Louis Richard
Speaker 2: where they had the hospital of the Extracis that William
Speaker 2: Bladdie wrote about that was turned into the movie The Exorcist.
Speaker 2: What do you think is the true story behind that one?
Speaker 3: I want to give a shout out to researcher Troy
Speaker 3: Taylor who's looked extensively into that case and consulted with
Speaker 3: me on this book. But it is a true story.
Speaker 3: It was a boy, not a girl, as we saw
Speaker 3: in the novel. In the movie, a young man named
Speaker 3: Ronald Hunkler who at the age of thirteen began to
Speaker 3: behave as if he was possessed by some demonic entity.
Speaker 3: He would act out of character, he would curse, his growl,
Speaker 3: spit poltergeist activity would take place around this poor young man.
Speaker 3: The furniture would shake, objects would fly from the shelves,
Speaker 3: and apple flew across the room. Finally, members of the
Speaker 3: Capitol Church Jesuits were called in to assess his suitability
Speaker 3: for an exorcism. That position permission was granted. Now, the
Speaker 3: exorcism took place in three locations, much of it being
Speaker 3: in the Alexian Brothers Hospital in Saint Louis.
Speaker 4: Which is now gone.
Speaker 3: The only building still standing is a relatively normal looking,
Speaker 3: modest home in the Saint Louis suburb of Belnor, and
Speaker 3: multiple owners of that place have said that that house
Speaker 3: remained haunted to this day.
Speaker 2: There's an incredible story. Bladdy did a great job with
Speaker 2: that book, did he not?
Speaker 3: He absolutely did, And I think the exerssif I always
Speaker 3: described it as the top gun of the Catholic world
Speaker 3: because it recruited so many people to the Catholic faith
Speaker 3: during the nineteen seventies. It's also responsible for making us
Speaker 3: terrified of Wiji boards. But yeah, Bladdy did a fantastic job.
Speaker 3: It's a wonderful novel, terrific movie, and contains a great
Speaker 3: deal more accuracy than many of us realize at the first.
Speaker 2: Class, since you brought up weedy boards, what do you
Speaker 2: think of those things?
Speaker 3: You know, I respect everybody's belief when it comes to
Speaker 3: wigi boards, and I think they have this fearsome reputation
Speaker 3: for being some kind of portance to hell, to the underworld.
Speaker 3: I've never found them to be that way. And my
Speaker 3: friend Robert Merch, who is the chairman of the Talking
Speaker 3: Board Historical Society an owner of probably the world's biggest
Speaker 3: talking board collection, agrees with me on that. But there
Speaker 3: are undeniably some cases in which the board can be
Speaker 3: a little bit frightening, and there have been a number
Speaker 3: of murders which took place because the Wija board told
Speaker 3: somebody to do it. Do we believe that it's just
Speaker 3: the subconscious of the sitters. Well, sometimes it is, But
Speaker 3: I've personally experienced cases in which the board has said
Speaker 3: things that nobody that was touching it or even in
Speaker 3: the room could possibly have known. There are times it
Speaker 3: seems that some kind of intelligence that we cannot see
Speaker 3: can communicate through that board, and on occasion the consequences
Speaker 3: can be violent and tragic.
Speaker 2: Do you know, Karen Dolman, I.
Speaker 3: Do Karen is a very good friend of mine. She
Speaker 3: was kind enough to consult with me on my book
Speaker 3: In Search of Demons, and also an acknowledge that's on
Speaker 3: the talking Board. She loves Luigi boards, she does and
Speaker 3: she is a ranking member of the Talking Board Historical
Speaker 3: Society and a wealth of knowledge on that particular subject.
Speaker 2: What's going on with London's Highgate Cemetery.
Speaker 3: Well, you can't talk about Highgate and not talk about vampires, George.
Speaker 3: Highgate is one of those old Gothic cemeteries that is,
Speaker 3: you know, so historic. If you walk through that place,
Speaker 3: it just streams haunted. You know, it is so atmospheric
Speaker 3: if you go to Highgate, especially when there is mist,
Speaker 3: when there's fag, it looks like horror movies ought to
Speaker 3: be shot there. But there were claims, and these reached
Speaker 3: the national newspapers, and there was some kind of hysteria
Speaker 3: that a vampire was rising from a tomb in Highgate
Speaker 3: Cemetery and was preying on stray animals and ultimately human
Speaker 3: beings in the vicinity of Highgate. And this caused such
Speaker 3: a few sorry that British people were Londoners were coming
Speaker 3: out at night and doing vampire watch, getting ready to
Speaker 3: confront and possibly stake this thing if they ever found it.
Speaker 3: There were many stories. I don't know that despite some
Speaker 3: of the claims, that anybody ever actually came face to
Speaker 3: face with the Highgate vampire, but there were many stories
Speaker 3: of this red eyed, pale skinned, grulish figure prowling the
Speaker 3: lanes around Highgate after dark.
Speaker 2: What does youve got to tell you, Richard about vampires?
Speaker 3: You know, historically speaking, things like vampires have been used
Speaker 3: to explain stuff that we don't understand, so they've made
Speaker 3: a fantastic black box for human beings who did not
Speaker 3: understand things like tuberculosis.
Speaker 4: If you look at the New England vampirism.
Speaker 3: Cases of the late eighteen hundreds, you see cases in which,
Speaker 3: you know, tuberculosis and coughing up blood accounted for the
Speaker 3: blood stained teeth that were found on some people when
Speaker 3: they were dug up. This idea that the fingernails and
Speaker 3: the teeth and hair grow after death is inaccurate. But
Speaker 3: what does happen is that the scalp shrinks, the cuticles
Speaker 3: around the fingertips shrink as well, so it does appear
Speaker 3: as if there's been growth, and of course dead bodies
Speaker 3: will sometimes grown as gas moves throughout them from decomposition,
Speaker 3: they will sit up, you know, they will behave as
Speaker 3: if they are alive. So it's very easy to understand
Speaker 3: why some of our ancestors, who did not perhaps have
Speaker 3: the medical knowledge that we have to day, believe that
Speaker 3: the dead would get up and walk and seek the
Speaker 3: blood of the living.
Speaker 2: Do you believe in the story that the silver bullet
Speaker 2: theory will take down a vampire.
Speaker 3: I don't know that silver would take down a vampire,
Speaker 3: and that I'm not convinced that vampires as we think
Speaker 3: of them are actually real. But you know there is
Speaker 3: not that. But law goes back generation. So it does
Speaker 3: seem to be based on something, doesn't it, George, It
Speaker 3: truly does.
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