Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Hello everyone. Welcome back to Mallory's Weird World Adventures, the podcast. I'm your host, Mallory. I'm here to show you just how weird this world of ours really is. I'm very, very excited because I have Robert here with me from cpri. Thank you so much for joining me, Robert.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Sure thing. I'm glad I'm here and I'm really.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Excited to talk with you today about your paranormal investigations that use the scientific method. I think that's so fabulous and I'd love to hear just a breakdown from you of how that works, how you start your investigations and how you incorporate the scientific method into it.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: Well, way, way back when I was a wee thing. Now we typically, how we, how we operate, we basically find a, you know, we, we have a theory, everybody has a theory, you know, this, that or the other thing. The problem that we run into is a lot of people claim their theories are facts with no data to back it up. So I have a problem with that. But the, but what we do is we have the theory on that. Around that theory we develop a hypothesis, you know, a little more refined piece of the theory, and then we design a set of experiments to either prove or disprove the hypothesis. And the experiments, you know, are wide ranging depending on what the hypothesis is.
We're looking at so many different things.
You know, we had evidence that there could be something like a time displacement at one location. And so we designed a whole set of experiments around that. We ran that for four years and saw absolutely nothing.
And, but then we had our, our atomic clocks showed a shift from point A to point B for some reason and they should not have because it was, it was about 500 yards apart. But they should not have shown a change. And that change was significant, like 20 minutes difference.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:02:08] Speaker A: And we're not sure, we're still working on that. That's a one time thing we got to figure out is that this, is that a time anomaly? Who knows? Is it, is it a problem with the clock? So, you know, we need to get more data, you know, if it happens consistently at this location and there might be something to it. But we've got to go back and we got to go back and that's the name of the game. You got to go back, you got to do, you gotta, you know, do the reproducibility thing and you gotta be able to show that the stuff is, you know, that something's actually there.
And you know, like we, we tend to go back for locations multiple times.
Hanover, Hanover Tavern, you know, you were there with us.
We've been there three times and.
But Bacon's Castle, we've been there 23 times.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:02:57] Speaker A: And yeah, and we're. We actually. That is like, those guys down there allow us to a lot of stuff.
And, uh, we.
We have a partnership with them. We help them with an event they run every October coming up this Saturday.
And yeah, if you wanted to come down, you can come down, but we're gonna. Basically, we lead people to. We set up like we're running experiments. We lead people through and show them the experiments.
We don't do the whole ghost thing because we don't even know. We can't even say that there's such a thing as a ghost in this spiritual sense. So what we do is we say, well, you know, right here we got this weird temperature. Well, right here is where we heard this weird sound. Sound like a baby crying. Or right here we heard. You know, that's all we could say. So we take them through the house and show them different things. And then, you know, we have them, they come out and they sit around the fire and drink mold cider and eat stuff from a food truck. And then they're happy. So. But yeah, it's a bunch of fun, though. It really is with that big bonfire they have out front there.
But, you know, they make it to Castle, though. We help them with that event and then they allow us to come in and conduct these experiments once or twice a year.
And so we're. We go in, we spend like 16 hours there and conduct these experiments over time. And we come back time and again and try to reproduce things. And we have a lot of reproducibility in this stuff. And in doing that, we think, you know, that there is definitely a natural cause for a lot of the.
What people think are what they call residual.
You know, we call it non interactive because we can't say that something's imprinted on the environment or whatever. We can't say that because we don't know. So we got to experiment with that too.
So. But we say it's non interactive and we think there's a natural cause because, you know, the. The environmental data is always the exact same around these different. Like the strangest voice you hear, like a.
Or, you know, or. Or a thump or something like that. You might have like a. The same environmental conditions around it. So we think there might be a natural cause there. Now when you get over into the interactive side of things, that's tricky because we have a bunch of data and we had somebody that was a data analyst look at all the day we have terabytes of data and we had somebody that was an analyst come in and look at all of our data. And we were looking for possible causes and they said there could be over a hundred different causes for these anomalies that we were saying.
And some of these, some of these causes could all happen at once.
So that makes it very tricky to find out what is causing a specific thing to happen. So only thing we can do is we can actually focus on one of them at a time.
So I'm going to be dead and gone before we get to the point where we can say something definitive. But we've seen some weird things.
The, we've seen like a, like around and so there's a, like a moving object, let's say like a door moves on its own or a chair scoots or something like that. We've seen a radiation spike, like non housing radiation, that stuff you measure with a Geiger counter. And it, it basically you're talking a lot of. Sometimes it's three times the background, sometimes it's 20 times the background. It depends on where the Geiger counter is sitting in relation to where the thing moves. And we've seen that. We've also seen shifts in the earth's magnetic field around things like that.
And we're not sure what that's all about.
And then we're running experiments around that too. And then we also have seen or what might be considered electromagnetic pulse and like you would see from a nuclear detonation kind of electromagnetic pulse. And as a matter of fact we think one of those happened when your cameras went wonky at Hanover Cavern.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: Oh wow.
[00:07:05] Speaker A: We had a magnetometer within probably 10ft of you and that mag, that magnetometer picked up a pretty significant EMP and it, it, you shouldn't see something like that in a place like Hanover Terror.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: So it was. There were no radios around this magnetometer? There were. And, and it also if it was a radio that caused the spike. These magnetometers connected to CERN between rf, electric electric fields, geomagnetic fields. It can distinguish between those and it indicates that in the electric field there's a, there's a pretty significant bump in the electric field at the same time there is in the rf.
So it all happened at once which means it's something beyond just a radio transmission.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: Right.
[00:07:54] Speaker A: So yeah, that's that, that, that happened. That's what happened to your, your cameras. If you think thing because it's happened to Us other locations, like at Bacon's Castle, we had one take out every piece of equipment we had in front of a door.
And, and we went back and turned that we could turn the equipment right back on again, which is kind of what you did. And, and it, they were fine, but it essentially turned them all off.
So.
Yeah, except for the one that was RF shielded. And when it was RF shielded was the only thing that survived and it actually picked up the, the empty. Another thing that's indicative, it's an EMP also is that there's a double bump to it.
An emp.
You know, I'm not sure how much you know about these things, but we've been learning from various people, like certain physicists and such, that an EMP will, when there's a nuclear detonation, you have the primary spike at the emp, then there's a secondary one shortly there.
It's like, like that real fast. And that is what we saw.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:09:07] Speaker A: And so that's kind of the signature of those things. So we're going to actually take this data and talk to an astro businesses that we have access to and see what he says and, and see if he thinks it's, it's what we think it is, you know, and, and my personal theory is that we might be stumbling on to what Einstein and Rosen called the Einstein ROSA br. And we might be, who knows. It's never been seen.
It's predicted mathematically, never been seen.
But the things that we're seeing is, are things that you would expect if something like that were to open.
So even at the tiny size that one of those things is predicted to be, and you know, if you think about it too, another, you know, if, if one of those things were to open, let's say, and I say if it's a big if because we only have a little bit of data.
But if one of those things were to open, there would be a gravitational change too. And that gravitational change would be significant enough. It would move a door, it would move a chair.
And that could account for some of the stuff that we've been seeing. Plus you would see a, when people talk about cold spots, you would see when one of those things open, there's a negative temperature that occurs. And so that might explain some of that stuff, you know, and it could even explain hotspots, but eventually it turns up being hot.
So yeah, that's, those are the kind of things you would expect. So we're designing all a whole battery of experiments around this stuff and it's Pretty exciting. We just purchased a brand new ethernet based DDR system that is probably going to get here in a couple of weeks. It's got four thermal cameras in it, thermal imaging cameras, which is one of the things that we would need to see something like that.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Right.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: And so we're going to conduct the experiment, you know, using those thermal cameras. And I've talked quite a bit. So do you have any questions about what I've just been talking about?
[00:11:08] Speaker B: No. It's all so exciting. I'd love to hear about at least when, when you started with cpri, kind of where your hypothesis was, the things you were coming into and how it's evolved.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Well, I came into cpri, I was the. Probably I was. And you know, Kenny's not gonna like this, but I was a Kenny fiddle pipe skeptic. I was that level and, and I came in because I had, I watched Ghost Hunter TV show just because of the interaction between the characters. I didn't care about the fact that early in the early two seasons they didn't catch a lot of stuff.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I loved it back then. It was more interesting to me because.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Plus, you know, Tango and Steve just constantly at each other. It was hilarious. But, but the. They're great guys by the way. I love those guys. But they, but they ended up, you know, I, my wife, right after my daughter was born said you need to get out of the house.
So I'm gonna get you tickets to go see Jason and Grant up at, in 2010, up at their end that they own in New Hampshire.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: And so they had an event, only 30 people were there.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: And I got lucky and got a ticket and so I went up there and I was at their end. Well, they're in. Supposed to be haunted.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: Right, Right.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: Well, I was up there and I was like, yeah, whatever. I've stayed in this kind of thing. And you know, and while we were there, John Zappis was there too.
John Zappis was leading our part of the tour through the coach house.
And so I'm, I'm following along. We're standing in this room and he leaves us. He leads me, another guy and the guy's nine year old daughter in this room and shut the lights off. Oh boy. And says now just wait here for a little bit, I'll come back. So while we were there, something walked between us and the window. You can see the outline of the person and everything the moon was shining in. There was three feet of snow outside. It was free. Right. Coming in the Window.
And it, it was a person that walked between us and the window and the dad, that other dad and I backed up to the wall trying to find the light switch.
Like, we're like, what the heck? And when we finally found it, we turned it on. The, the nine year old little girl had chased whatever that was and it was at the wall and was feeling along the wall. Instead it disappeared into the wall.
So at that point I'm like, you know, I got to know what the heck I just saw. I have to know what that is.
So it just so happens that Jason and Grant know Bobby at our founder of our organization and they know her because they, when we're members of the Tap family. So she got, they got be in touch with her.
She said, yeah, we need a, we need somebody with a chemistry background. Yeah, sure. I said, okay, I'm in. So then I started. And also I have a video background too.
I had a certified video video engineer, one of those certificates. And then so I'm, I'm with them. You know, I'm, I'm looking at these videos and I'm like, you know, I don't know, this, this is kind of hanky to me. You know, I don't know about this. And then I started, I actually got to go on flight with these people.
And I'm going to tell you, the first few times, not a, not a thing occurred.
It was all like, you could tell it was the house settling and there were birds and stuff like that. You could tell this stuff where it was a rat in the wall. But basically though, then something happened and, and you know, and we heard like a woman's voice.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: And we just kind of stopped and I looked at everybody and there wasn't a woman in the house.
It was just me and two other guys.
What did we just hear?
And so now I have to figure that out. Right, Right now I, I convinced at the time I was just a member of the organization and I, I, and I was able to convince them that we needed to go the path of experimental design, you know, scientific methods, experimental design and go that path and try to get some more information about these things.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: Right?
[00:15:26] Speaker A: And lo and behold, it's panned out. It is, it's, it's, it's basically we're seeing things now because we're structured and we do it structured and we did. We don't want him for the experience, you know, just for the experience type of stuff. Tell you the truth, Mallory, when you guys, when we went to Hanover Tavern with you guys I was worried that we wouldn't see here a thing, because it happens. And so we.
I was always keeping my fingers crossed.
You know, it's like, oh, I don't want to look stupid on this show, you know, And.
But.
But yeah, it. It turned out we actually heard some things. We heard female voices, footsteps, and that one voice sounds like. Or somebody's talking on the radio. There wasn't a single radio inside the building.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: Yeah. That. You haven't heard that yet. I'll explain that for you at some point. But it's.
It's. It sounds like. You remember Ladakh. I remember that was there. It sounded like her talking on the radio.
[00:16:26] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:16:28] Speaker A: But we were all with her at the time, and we heard it coming across the speakers, so we wrote it down.
But we. We. We thought it was. We were hearing things. Right, right. Because there was a lot of chatter in that room. And so. But I went back and listened. Sure enough, you can hear it in there. It sounds like Lana on a radio. Not Ladonna talking like this, but on a radio.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: Right.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: That's what it sounds like. So that was weird.
But, you know, we saw stuff, and we actually. We captured some really good data out of that. And. And so we're. We're still analyzing that data. We got. We had so much data that it is taking us a bit.
The magnetometer data was taking long enough because we had five of those bad boys sitting out there. Wow, that. That takes a while, that. Go through that. And also Tommy, you remember Tommy, our president.
Tommy actually has all those sensors that he built that use sensors from cell phones.
And. And he built them, and they. And they collect data on vibration, emf, and actually it's magnetic field, vibration, I think, temperature and humidity, those four things. And he was running all those and all those. The magnetometers are only sampling, like, twice a second.
His stuff is sampling a hundred times a second. So you can imagine how big those files are.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: So we're sorting through that stuff, plus Tommy's using our. The algorithm. We have to do video analysis. And going through all the videos, we saw something that we thought, oh, yeah, something came up on the video, too, that was pretty interesting. We thought it's like, oh, my gosh, we might have caught something.
Right?
[00:18:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: No, it was not. When you go back and you look at it, the. The algorithm picked it out as an anomaly. So we went in there and we found it. We found the frames that it was talking about. We went through there, and what happened was the piece of dust Moving across that. Changed angles a little bit and disappeared and then changed back and you could see it again on the other end. And so that, that's what, that's why it threw up the anomaly signature. So you still gotta, even though AI is in there, you still gotta be able to detect what it finds.
Yes.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: I'd love to hear more about the, the algorithm you guys use as well to kind of analyze the data before you look at it.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: Well, it's, you know, basically on the numerical data.
I use Google Gemini Pro and it goes in and it finds anomalies in the, in the background that I never would see. Because if you just look at it rapidly, it's, it's these anomalies are still within the noise of the data and so, but it'll find them.
And it's, we look at them with a D score of 3 or higher and if they have that kind of a score, we, that's the, those are the anomalies we really look at.
And you know, it's really obvious when it's a big spike. Right. But sometimes those things in the weeds, those are hard to find. And the problem is in the, in the, in the name, in the name of science, you need to look at minutia, which is.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Itty bitty. So if you're looking at minutia, small changes, then you know, that's why you need that algorithm. So that's what kind of what I use to look at the data, that numerical data that's in, that's like CSV format or what have you.
But then for the video data we have a.
Tommy actually wrote. Tommy, Tommy and Tommy's daughter actually wrote, she's actually at mit and they actually wrote a, an algorithm that will go through and look for anomalies and videos and kind of like what DARPA used uses too, which did I see DARPA didn't mean to be. But yeah, they'll be at my door in a minute. But, but, but no, they, but you know, the NSA people use stuff like this all the time and we, we actually have our own version and, and we can throw, instead of spending, you know, eight hours per camera watching video, we can do it in an hour or less per camera, which is great.
And, and it'll find all the anomalies and give them to you in table format. So you can go to each of the frame sets at the table that's in the table and look at it to make sure it's really anomaly.
Could be dust, could be like one of us walking through there, you know, what have you. But you know, it picks up it. It picks it all up. So you got to go through it. But that's way better than just staring at dust bunnies all night long, right?
So. But that's, that's what we use there in regards to audio. We don't have anything. We have to listen to that, those, those recordings and that, that can be tried.
Luckily, we have a lot written down on our logs.
You know, you hear me, because they all make fun of me all the time, but you hear me when we're at hq, and I'll say, write that down because I'll hear something. Write it down, Write that down.
You know, something like that. You know, and.
But we write things down and we go back and look at those first. That helps. But if you really want to catch some of the minutiae, you got to listen to the whole recording from. Because beginning command. And that's how come I found the. One of the. One of the other voices that I heard in there. And we heard several of them. That sounds like. One of them sounds like a woman laughing.
And Jack reported that while they were in the, in the house, they heard it. And I did. I. We didn't hear it outside, so. But I think the recording, sure enough, it's there.
[00:22:07] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:22:08] Speaker A: And so, you know, that's why you, you, you have to listen all the way through.
I tend to focus on the quiet part. Quiet moments like when there's nobody in there and I listen and I can see the waveform is flat, kind of flat, but there's bumps on occasion. I'll just sit and listen to those sections first, and then I'll go back and listen to the noisy sections where Jack is talking to Aaron or what have you. But that's, that's, that's how we handle all that.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: There was a very loud air freshener in there too. You know, when you're quiet and you're just trying to hear something, you never realize how loud an air freshener is to the point where we all went, what the heck was that? And then we had to. We heard it again. It's an air freshener in the bathroom.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: Yeah, we have those marked on the log when those happen, because I think it was you guys that actually identified it as an air freshener. So we wrote that down every time we heard it. We wrote it down with air.
Now we did get a sound that sounded like somebody was dragging a box across the floor.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: Oh, weird.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: And that was not an air pressure.
You know, we heard this what sounds like a sniff and that's the air freshener at the distance that, that at the mic that one of the reporters. I was looking at the recorder. That's real close to where the air pressure was. Man, it's, it's loud just like you said.
But, but yeah, we actually heard. We, we heard several things in there now since we've been in there, the, the, the people that run the building actually have heard some other things and they heard actually this past last weekend they heard what sounded like woman actually talking.
And, but it wasn't in the area where we caught. We've seen this about everywhere that, when we caught things that. Was that what we call the creepy hallway? Yes, that hallway.
And also in that stairwell and that's where the vast majority of it stuff captured.
Either that or right there where the DVR was sitting near the front door.
But the, this is over where the archroom is and where the cage bar is. Stuff like that they picked up sounded like somebody talking over there.
And then you heard a really loud bang that came in over there. And they played me the recordings yesterday.
There's going to be ghost walk at night there this weekend. Also Bacon's Castle. Saturday and Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, they're having ghost walk at night. And that's where you, they lead you through tours through Hanover Tavern and they have people dressed up in period, like as people from different time periods and also as ghosts. And they tell their story right. As ghosts and stuff as you go through there. And it's pretty cool. My daughter's going to be a maid, a ghostly maid.
It's going to tell her story. But, but, yeah, that's, but you know, while we were having rehearsal, they, they played me these recordings. I'm like, whoa. Yeah, I wish we could have caught something like that in those rooms because our recorders didn't get diddly wanted in those rooms. We didn't get anything in there, but they did. And they were sitting in the, in the archery at one of the, at the table.
But yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty interesting that, you know, we, we, we'll be in the, in a building and multiple times and you never. And sometimes if you're only there like three times like you were, we'll get something different each each time we're there, which doesn't help reproducibility at all.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:25:43] Speaker A: We gotta, we gotta reproduce what we got last time, you know, so we gotta go back and we gotta go back.
So.
[00:25:50] Speaker B: But anyway, we also had a run in with the wolf spider.
[00:25:54] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that was great.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: It was my, my camera guy, Matt, got there before I did and he was setting up the lights and he's like, well, I need some. I need people to stand right where that spider is. And it wouldn't, it wouldn't move for him. It just, it just stayed there.
[00:26:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:11] Speaker B: And then when I got there, I'm like, well, let me go over and see. And then of course, it wanted to come at me and I'm like, oh, this is gonna be fun.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: So. Oh, yeah.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: Started the night with the giant wolf spider hanging out.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I saw it. I saw it down there on the ground over near where we had to stand.
But, yeah, I saw it over the. Man, that, that, that, that thing was big. That was as big as the inside of your palm.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: Terrifying. I'm not a spider person. I can do many other things, but not, not spiders. But we, we coexisted just fine.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: There you go. Well, you know that.
Did you see the big web that was out there?
Yes, that's an orb weaver that did that. And we have one of those outside my, my door onto the driveway. And that. You can tear that, that web completely down. In an hour, it'll be completely built back.
[00:27:02] Speaker B: Man, those, those ones freak me out too, because I, I did research. I did penguin research. We were. It's kind of like a penguin rescue mission on Robin island in South Africa. And those orb weavers are all over the place. And I'd love to do an experiment one day about why they position themselves in certain places on the island. Because there's. It's a very small island, and in certain places they're everywhere. And then in other places, there's just not a single one. So you could. Depending on where we were going to work with the penguins that day, we wouldn't see any spiders or we'd have a day just full of spiders. And we walked through many in orb weaver webs. And it was not fun.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: Right.
[00:27:38] Speaker B: But we learned.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: Well, that's. I'll tell you what, if you want somebody to, to help you with that experiment, we're available.
I mean, we don't just look at ghost stuff. We look at a lot of different things. As a matter of fact, we have. Some of our members are active with mucon, and we have some folks that are active at bfro and, uh, also, uh, we have some folks that are, uh, active in the world of demonology, in our organization, so that we have a lot of breadth. We have 40 people in our organization, and each one of them brings a certain skill set. And it's really great when you talk to these people in the other. In the other disciplines because you learn so much, you know. Yeah, I may not follow the same path as the Catholic immunology. I may not. I may not agree with that path, but however, you can't refute some of the stuff that they talk about. So it's like. Well, yeah, okay. And I'll tell you the. The guy, our founder's husband, Rick, is very knowledgeable.
Oh, my God. He knows more about it than anybody I've ever met. And including some of the TV demonologists.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: I mean, like the Warrens.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Don't get me started.
But yeah, he. I mean, he knows a lot about it and historical type stuff. And, you know, he. He's very knowledgeable. So we. We refer to him sometimes when we ask questions, you know, about, you know, historical facts about this. This kind of situation. And he also. He knows a lot about, you know, the encrypted situation too. Yeah, like he's. They've actually gone. Some of our folks have. Alan may have told you this, may have actually gone down to eastern Tennessee and looked for.
I guess it was either Bigfoot or Dogman or one of the.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh.
[00:29:41] Speaker A: And so they act, but they. What's really interesting is that all these people that do these different disciplines all report the same kind of things that we're picking out, like changes in the magnetic field.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: Right.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: You know, spikes in radiation and what have you, gravitational changes. And they report these things and we're seeing them looking for ghosts.
[00:30:05] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:06] Speaker A: So now you gotta think. I used to think that these people that talk about unified paranormal theory were crazy, right? I don't know. Now I'm starting to have to rethink that little bit, so.
And I keep stealing. I. I keep stealing your time and talking.
[00:30:23] Speaker B: Oh, no, this is. That's the whole point. I want. I love picking your brain on this stuff.
I have to ask too. What are some of the most unusual, unexplainable things that have happened to you and some of your investigations to me?
[00:30:39] Speaker A: Well, one of the things that scared my. It scared me is that actually. Actually it didn't really scare me, but it sure shocked me.
I was at Pennhurst Asylum and you know where that is. And I don't know if you've ever been there, but the Mayflower building, they only have power on one floor in it first.
[00:30:58] Speaker B: Oh, boy.
[00:30:58] Speaker A: And so we were up on the third floor and we set up a bunch of battery operated equipment up there. Recorders, environmental sensors, you know, all that kind of stuff. No blinky lights and.
But we. We went up there and set up all these environmental sensors. And while we were setting those up, we didn't have a chance to turn on the DVR yet.
And it's pitch black up there except for the light coming from those sensors. So I'm up there and I hear coming down the hallway out way off in the distance.
It sound like somebody moving furniture.
That's.
I said, and you can hear me on the recording. I go, huh? And I go down. So you can hear me go down the steps to the next level where the extension port ended, where the DVR was sitting. And I talked to Kenny, who you met, and another guy named Mike Magner.
He. They were down there getting ready to set up stuff. I said, hey, I'm hearing some weirdness upstairs.
And.
And then they said, oh, really? So one of them went up to check on the recorder. They had. They heard the same thing.
They came back down. So we all three now go up. We're standing in the light of the sensors, looking. Trying to look into the dark and see if we can see anything.
And I stepped out of the light of the sensors into the darkness to try to, you know, so my eyes would get acclimated and see if I could see better. And lo and behold, it looked like something came down the hall at me like.
Like that, you know, almost straight out of Scooby Doo.
And I fell.
And when I fell, all the other two guys, you know, hit their lights and everything, and there's nothing there. However, every sensor around where I saw that lit up like a Christmas tree.
[00:32:46] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:32:47] Speaker A: Temperature spikes, humidity spikes, radiation spikes. It all happened right there where that. Where that occurred.
And so I have something to back it up. And plus, you can hear. You can hear the movement on the audio, too. That happened. You can hear the footsteps coming at me.
And we didn't have a camera going yet, which is always what happened.
[00:33:10] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:10] Speaker A: But. But that. That right there, it kind of. My hand was shaking and I went downstairs and had to sit for a minute.
Yeah, I've never had that happen to me before. Ever had that happen to me before.
I had a door open on me. You know, you always hear about, you know, well, these doors open, you know, see them on video, stuff like that.
You don't realize what that does to you. So it happens right in front of you.
And we were at. We were actually at Scotch Town, another Preservation, Virginia site.
And we were there, and we had set up A tent outside. And we had, you know, just like what you saw at Hanover Tavern. And we were monitoring the sound, and people were getting ready to leave to go get dinner.
And so they. As they were getting ready to walk out to the car, we heard a very. We heard a very loud bang. Like, really loud. I mean, it clipped them. Like, you know how it clipped the audio. And yeah, we're like, what the heck was that? So I was like, we didn't knock something over, did we? Oh, my God, we're so proud. And so I. And the president and Tommy went in to see. And everybody else was waiting outside, right? And we looked around and there was nothing out of place.
And we're like, well, we don't know what hat. What that was.
So I'm standing right next to a door, and all of a sudden I hear the doorknob turn.
And I turn and I look and Tommy is not in, even in the room yet, right? And. And I hear that hit the doorknob turn. And then all of a sudden, the door swings up and I'm like. And I'm just, like, shocked. And then. And then it slams real hard.
That was the sound we heard. That was the sound we heard.
And I was like, oh, my God. And so we actually went back to the cameras and look, and sure enough, you can see the first time when we heard the sound to go in there, you heard. You heard that, too.
And if you saw it on camera, it just. You could see the doorknob turn, the thing swing open and it slams shut.
[00:35:20] Speaker B: That's crazy.
[00:35:21] Speaker A: I know.
[00:35:22] Speaker B: Especially the doorknob turning, too.
[00:35:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I know.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: Adds to it.
[00:35:27] Speaker A: Now, we've heard that doorknob. We've heard that doorknob rattle before, but we thought that could have been something else, right? You know, it's one of those things where the skeptic in you comes out and goes, oh, I cannot possibly be paranormal. You know, that's what. That's what we. We. And I'm not going to lie to you, sometimes we're biased that way.
And people do call us skeptics a lot.
We're not at Kenny's level, but we. We do. We. We tend to look for the probable versus the improv.
[00:36:00] Speaker B: Right?
[00:36:01] Speaker A: We did have one other thing happen there.
I was. We were running a.
Just a clean old audio cable, 3.3.5 millimeter headphone extender, and we had plugged it into a recorder so we could listen live.
And we ran it out to where the tent was, but it wouldn't quite Reach. So we put a, another piece on there, 100 foot piece on there. So. So when you have 200ft, of course it reduced the volume quite a bit. So we had to put it amplifier on it, what have you. But it pulled apart right at that connection. So I went out to fix it and everybody was standing around looking at me. And then all of a sudden I picked up the two pieces and as I went to plug them back in, this hand gets jerked this way and I'm like, what the heck? And it was the cable that was in the house and something had jerked that thing right out of my hand.
Wow. And nobody was in there and so we weren't running in there real fast. And of course it's just laying there, but it's all piled up where it got pulled, right? And so that happened there at that location.
And I know and at Bacon's Castle we have so much data, probably a full terabyte of our data is.
And we, we actually, at the very first time we had a door open on us. Was something move on us? Anyway, was it 2012, 2014? 2014? We were standing right outside this one door and all. It's 4:00 in the morning, we're brain dead. And all of a sudden this door, you hear the doorknob turn, popping quick. You know, we turn and look at it and the door just swings all the way open. Now it didn't close but it swung all the way open and. And that was the first time Jack had ever experienced anything. You know, you met Jack Tr.
Dr. Tr.
That's the first time he had ever experienced anything. He goes, well, that can't be paranormal. And I was like, well then what turned that door knob, Jack? I don't know what, I don't know what did that. So we're going to write that.
We've had a lot of different things happen at different locations.
It's been crazy.
We had, it was funny. We had some guys, we were at St Alban Sanatorium at Radio and we were there actually to conduct, you know, some research, right. And that was one of the few times we were, you know people, they don't let people in there for free, right? But we actually did some volunteer work for them and they let us in there for free. So we actually did a red light experiment. Instead of using it for red, we used red physical light and had it shining down their version of creepy hallway on the second floor. And so we had that going on and we had some guys there from the Discover Channel that Were looking to see if we would fit this show they were going to put together.
Right. So we're. We're standing there and this is. Long way. A long time ago. This is. That was before that Bacon Castle incident. This was like 2013 maybe. And they.
Those two guys were standing behind us and all of a sudden we see this black.
I don't know, kind of like a black mat down the hall in the red. And we saw it. Everybody saw it. And we're all just staring at it and they're. They're standing behind us. And the guy that was holding the camera, he actually stopped. He stopped videoing.
Dropped, dropped it down and his hand was doing this.
[00:39:31] Speaker B: Oh, my God.
[00:39:32] Speaker A: And then it shot right over Organisation. We have that on video. It shot right over our head.
And then when it shot right over our head, you can see us duck and look at it like that. Those guys left, never came back.
[00:39:48] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:39:49] Speaker A: Yeah, that was. That was something else. And of course, we didn't fit the show. They were looking for. They were looking for something, you know, more along the lines with Ghost Adventures. They didn't fit that. We didn't fit that. So.
But they.
Yeah, but they left. They never came back.
[00:40:06] Speaker B: Wow.
My gosh.
[00:40:08] Speaker A: Yeah. So it was. It was. It was neat. So we've had. We've had a wide breadth of experiences.
Pretty. Pretty. It's pretty. I mean, it's been pretty exciting.
[00:40:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:18] Speaker A: Yes. There's a whole lot of tedium that you experience while we were there. When you're sitting and nothing's going on. Yeah. Then all of a sudden something happens.
[00:40:27] Speaker B: Right.
[00:40:27] Speaker A: You know, and so now you're. Now you're all lit up again. But then you sit there again. It's like, man, I'm not gonna be able to stay sleep. I'm not gonna. I'm gonna go to sleep. I'm not gonna sleep.
You know, your eyes are closed and you know, then all of a sudden, bam. Something loud happens or something. Somebody sees something on the monitor, you know.
[00:40:44] Speaker B: Right.
[00:40:45] Speaker A: That keeps you awake. That keeps you.
[00:40:48] Speaker B: Kind of out of left field. But have you, have you ever heard of the Brown Mountain lights?
Okay.
It just reminded. It reminded me of this because you talked about how everything always happens when the cameras are off. But we. We've gone a couple times to try to see the Brown Mountain lights. And we went once for the show and it was just all fog and it just wasn't going to happen because it was just all around you. Right. And I went back with my husband last year. We were Writing a hiking book for the Snow Peas. It's on the way back. Let's just stop by Wise Man's View late at night and see what happens.
And we. We get there, and I see what looks like a firefly.
And it's this tiny. And I'm like, that's weird. There's a firefly here because it's November and kind of wet. Like, those are the right conditions for it. And then it sparks almost like lightning into, like, four different little lights, and they start shooting around each other like crazy.
And.
[00:41:45] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:41:46] Speaker B: I'm seeing it. I'm seeing it. And so I start freaking out. He thinks that I just want to see, like, okay, sure. And then he saw it too. And we had a GoPro. We had his good camera. I had my phone. We had all this stuff, you know, pointed at it, and those little lights reoccurred for maybe, like, 20 minutes on and off. And you can hear us in the audio like, oh, my God, I can't believe this crazy, you know, just screaming and. And all this good stuff. And then there starts pulsating these large lights. So then from, like, around the corner of the mountain, you just see these large pulsations, pulsing lights to the point where I'm like, this has to be a flashlight or something. Right? I think we're the only people here. But this is so bright. So we tried to even recreate it where I went kind of around the side. And it was just a clip, so there's no way, like, you know, someone could go down there. But I'm trying to shine the flashlight. Like, does it look like this? And just there was no way we could recreate it. And those stayed on for some 20 minutes, and we get back home with all of our stuff, and it doesn't show up on anything.
[00:42:46] Speaker A: What?
[00:42:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And. And it was bright. I'm like, it was pitch black. But those are bright lights. I mean, it looked almost like little like. I believe it. Ball lightning is, like, kind of one of the theories. And it kind of looks like that. I'm like, how could this not show up on a camera?
[00:43:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
Wow.
[00:43:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:43:05] Speaker A: That's crazy, because we. We've had simple. When we haven't had stuff like that happen, but we've had other things that happen. You know, it's like. It's almost as if that whatever. Whatever's causing the. The manifestation, whatever it happens to be, knows that we've taken the cameras down.
[00:43:19] Speaker B: Right.
Right.
[00:43:21] Speaker A: Take the cameras down. And all of a sudden, there it goes, dancing across the camera. It's like, hey, wait a minute. Did we just see that?
Wow.
[00:43:28] Speaker B: And I sent it to Kenny, to Kenny Biddle, and I sent it to Brian Dunning, and they're both, you know, there's just nothing on it. I'm like, Kenny's like, maybe I can pull something. And it's just like, nope, nothing.
[00:43:40] Speaker A: That's a shame.
Yeah.
Wow. I, I, I'd love to see what you saw.
I've never seen that.
There's. We have gone looking for the, the ghost light, the good train light at West Point. I don't know if you've heard about that before.
[00:43:56] Speaker B: I haven't.
[00:43:57] Speaker A: Yeah. They're supposedly. If you're in West Point on the tracks and you look westbound on the tracks northwest, when you look that way, you'll sometimes see a light on the track that is not explained. It's not a train.
It's, it's, it's just a light on the tracks. And I thought, you know, I was thinking, well, maybe it's a car or something like that crossing or something like that. But, yeah, I, we didn't see, we didn't see it at all. We didn't even see cars. So I don't even know what caused a light on that thing. People have pictures of it.
[00:44:28] Speaker B: That's crazy. It's.
[00:44:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I know.
[00:44:30] Speaker B: Will of Wisp used to be, like, a theory back in, when they, like, recorded about it originally, because it's been, you know, going on for centuries. But I see now why people believe in fairies. That's what I said when I saw it. I'm like, it looks like, I mean, obviously it's not, but this is why they're called fairy lights or ghost lights. I totally get it now.
[00:44:48] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Well, that's great. I was, I wish I could have seen that, because that would explain some other things that we've seen too, where we actually have a, have incidents of a. Just a white dot will appear in the middle of the room about that. And it will appear and then disappear. It's almost like, what do we just see that? And sure enough, it'll be on camera.
And we've seen it twice. Three times now. Three times now. We saw it once at, at Hanover Tavern with you guys and in the stairwell, and we've seen it at Don Marshall House.
And once there, and then we saw it also. What was it? Gosh, my brain is mush. When you coach, when you coach soccer all evening, that's, that's what happens.
But the, the other, the other one, I can't remember off the top of my head, but yeah, those. Actually, no. Two of them were at John Marshall.
And then now we saw another one at a state park. We talk about at Liberty Save this Park parking lot. We saw another one at a state park too. And, and they're just like, they're, they're not against the wall or anything. They're out away from the wall. They're out away from the object. And sometimes they'll even. They'll be close enough to an object where they'll. They will illuminate the object.
And so that's that. Those are, those are interesting to us. And that also goes. I'm. That's also data that I'm putting in my onset reserve.
Yeah.
You know, we're seeing something there. I don't know if it's, you know, what's causing it, but there's a little like, like tiny things, size of a dial, you know. Yeah. You see them and you think, you know, with your eyes, especially when you get old like me, you see you, you know, you have floaters in your eyes. And that's a shadow that can, that can create shadow stuff. So I don't trust my eyes when it comes to shadow. But this is bright white.
[00:46:45] Speaker B: Right.
[00:46:46] Speaker A: And I'm like, I'm not sure what I just saw kind of thing.
But. Yeah, that, that, that was. I mean, seeing what you saw kind of goes right down that road maybe. But that's, that's wild. I wish I could have seen that. I've always wanted to see the Brown Mountain lights, but I've never. I've been there, but I've never. I've never seen the one we.
[00:47:05] Speaker B: I went twice and the first time was a bust. And it has to be like November is a good time to go or early December when it has to be cold, but it needs to be a little bit, you know, damp outside. So it's like a good kind of pre rainy season. But the problem is in the mountains of North Carolina, when that happens, it gets very misty and foggy. But if it's. If you get on a good night and there's no fog, that's when. And we just happen to have the right conditions. And man, I.
We. We've researched it a lot. Like, you know, ball lightning is the theory right now that, that people are leaning to. But there's been hundreds of ideas and I have never seen anything like it. And in that moment you just kind of forget. All reason of like trying to figure out what it is. And just like we have to get this, this, this is insane. And it did look kind of like light. The little balls looked almost lightning esque because it moved so jagged and so out of control, like in the way that a lightning might.
[00:48:02] Speaker A: But they're little bones.
[00:48:03] Speaker B: So crazy. So crazy.
[00:48:06] Speaker A: Wow. Well, I mean, if you guys are going to take another trip down there, I know, I know somebody that might want to go.
[00:48:12] Speaker B: Yeah, we, we were talking about doing a whole like group thing with, with Kenny Biddle and Brian Dunning. I had a few people that have all been about the Brown Mountain lights that were like, well, let me know if you guys do it. So I'll have to put up an adventure out that way.
[00:48:26] Speaker A: Yeah, put my name down. I'll go through it.
[00:48:28] Speaker B: Yes, definitely.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Next time you talk to Kenny Biddle, tell him that I, I still think he's a parasolute. Don't cut me out. But that's okay.
[00:48:38] Speaker B: Well, you know, he, we talked and bonded over the Ouija board collection because I, I think when I met him, I had just come back from Salem and we went to the, the Witchboard Museum in Salem and this guy had a pink Ouija board from Toys R us in the 90s. That was quickly discontinued because parents were so offended. They had a pink Ouija board in Toys R Us, but before they could discontinue it, it had sold out and now it's like a collector's item. And of course I wanted it. So then I'm on ebay trying to find it. And I think I had just gotten it when I met up with Kenny and he had one in his collection. And I was like, oh, we have the same pink Ouija.
[00:49:17] Speaker A: But, well, the.
I, I don't have a Ouija board.
And I, I'm the kind of guy, you know, that doesn't temp fate, knock on wood kind of thing. I'm from West Virginia, so we have certain superstitions that I just can't.
[00:49:32] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:49:33] Speaker A: But yeah, the, the. I think it's interesting, you know, his take on the, on the Ouija board. I mean, you know, it's just another toy.
[00:49:42] Speaker B: Right, for the idiomotor effect.
[00:49:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And so I, I like know, I like when, when somebody comes up to him and talk to him about it. When I'm in, when I'm standing within earshot, I just sit there and I just sit back and smile. It's like, oh, you just bit off way more than you can do.
[00:50:01] Speaker B: Because.
[00:50:02] Speaker A: You got those full on believers that want to prove him wrong. You know, they Want to prove him wrong.
[00:50:07] Speaker B: So, yeah, my husband and I actually wrote a piece on the idiomotor effect for Skeptical Inquirer.
[00:50:14] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, I heard. I heard about that. Speaking of which.
It is. I would be totally remiss if I didn't congratulate you on not only the Congressional Award, but the presidential, you know, Medal of Freedom. What the heck? Here.
[00:50:31] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:50:32] Speaker A: That is great.
[00:50:33] Speaker B: Thank you. You know, it just kind of, you know, things happen for a reason, I guess, and my husband and I kind of fell into the world of IP and privacy advocacy for online crime, and it was, it was. It just kind of felt into our journey, I guess. And so there was been a couple years in the making where we've been fighting for privacy rights, and then it just snowballed from there. And we're. We're so happy about it. Thank you.
[00:51:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I saw you post that. Like, holy cow, that's.
[00:51:08] Speaker B: A lot of the laws from the Internet were from, like, the 90s, and it's changed so much since the 90s, and legislation's just not keeping up with it. And we're like, somebody's got to do something about this. There needs to be some kind of reform and not only laws, but, like, enforcement of laws for online. Like, somebody at some point has to be accountable for what's going on there. So we've. We've been working hard for that. So thank you.
[00:51:33] Speaker A: That's great.
[00:51:34] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:51:34] Speaker A: I'm proud of you.
[00:51:36] Speaker B: Thank you.
And I guess, my Gosh, it's almost 9 o' clock already. We are out of time.
But is there anything else you'd like to tell us about CPRI or you and your journey?
[00:51:48] Speaker A: Well, you know, CPRI is a 501c3 nonprofit. We get donations, corporate donations, private donations. We just had a guy donated $1,000.
Wow. I know. And it was like. It was a private citizen, too. It's like, oh, okay. But, yeah, he's. He's very much into trying to find out what's going on. So. Yeah, and we're using that money. He's listening. We're using that money to help buy. He bought it, essentially bought two of those thermal images for our New year. That's great. But, yeah, we. We're. We're basically all about trying to find out what people think they see in here.
And we're not. We're not. We don't operate, you know, and, you know, make sure Kenny holds his ears for this. We don't operate like skeptics. Sometimes we operate. We gather as much information as we can sort through it. And we don't throw the baby out with a bathwater, which some people claim that we do, but we don't because we have all that data. We have it all. And we mark every anomaly and then we identify each anomaly. And the ones we can identify, those are the ones we focus on. And there aren't. There aren't that many of them. Right. But, you know, there's, there's enough that, that allows us to keep running experiments. So that's, that's, that's how we operate. That's what I want you to know about cpri.
A good bunch of people, you know, they, they, they basically are, are keeping, they're keeping this going.
And, uh, you know, it's not going to fade because you get some people out there, like individuals that want to do this just as an individual, and they don't have resources, they don't have backing, they don't have, you know, people, you know, just the emotional support, the social support, they don't have it. So it goes away. And now this, this organization is going to be around a long time, even, even when I go.
So.
But yeah, that's what I want to say about that. And, and by the way, you. Everybody calls me Brad. Just. My name's Robert on here, because Robert. So you could call me Brad or you just. You can call me whatever you want to, as long as you don't forget to call me for dinner. How about that?
[00:53:59] Speaker B: Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Brad.
[00:54:02] Speaker A: Sure. And thank you for having me. This has been great, Valerie. And don't forget, you've got a.
You're going to come to one of our meetings.
[00:54:09] Speaker B: I am. I'm so excited.
[00:54:12] Speaker A: If you're going to hear about a lot of other stuff besides the stuff that we just talked about.
[00:54:16] Speaker B: Fantastic. Thank you so much.
[00:54:19] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:54:20] Speaker B: And until next time, everybody stay weird.
