Dr. Paul Rogers (6:17)
Ken and Deb were living in a place called Doddleston, which is just about southwest of Chester, about five miles of Chester, near Liverpool. If you're not from England, it's not far from Liverpool, it's on the very. On the border of the England, Wales, the crossover part, because that may be a relevant factor. And they were doing their house up very, very, very small house. I mean, literally, it was a Two up, one down. It was tiny. And they had a friend stay over, she was staying for a couple of weeks and the friend noticed some footprints on the wall. Six toed, bare footed footprints and they had a laugh about it and they painted over them. And the next, I mean, there was other things beforehand, like little bits of tin cans moving around or coffee was falling around in the sink, which they just thought was each other, didn't think anything of that. But the footprints was the first strange event they noticed. So they painted over the footprints and the next day the footprints came back, which freaked out their friend Nicola. What was even weirder is that they came back in a different part of the kitchen. It wasn't the same footprint, it was a different footprint. So that's when it all started to go a bit weird. So that was the first bit of poltergeist activity. There was other stuff, like I said, there was things like cat food moved around or things balancing. But the first really weird thing was that Nicola sort of went off on her own merry way. And around about December 84, Ken, who had borrowed a BBC microcomputer from school. This is 1984, there's very, very basic computers. They were essentially word processors with no Internet, no email, no, no remote access whatsoever. He borrowed one of these computers from school and he got a message, or rather there was a message that he thought Nicola had left on the computer. So he opened it up because she was doing a bit of screenwriting and he thought, well, I'll have a little nose, see what she's writing about. And it turned out the message was a very weird, nonsensical poem, didn't really mean much, but it was addressed to Ken, Deb and Nick, the three people living in the cottage at the time. So they didn't really do much about this. They sort of had a joke about it, they accused each other of hoaxing. They thought it may have been a third party, but there was no evidence of a break in. And as I said, there was absolutely no way anybody could use remote access in those days. This is 1984. So about two months later I'm going to say I think it's the first week of March, maybe late late February. 85, they get another message, but this time it's not a poem. It reads like Early Modern English and it talks about. He says, it doesn't give a name, but he says, you're in my house. I can see bright lights, I can see furnishings and items that only the king could afford. What are you doing in My house. Get out, basically. And it's like, you know, so they're just assuming it's a joke. They're assuming somebody somehow has come onto their property, typed this into the computer. Bear in mind, this is not the same physical computer. Now he's taken the computer back and he's got another copy of it. So he keeps going back with the school and borrowing different physical computers. So there's no possibility of anybody breaking into the hardware and implanting anything. So Ken responds to this sort of early modern English message saying, okay, who are you? What year are you talking about? You know, who's the king? And about, I think a day or maybe a week later, I think it's about a week later, he gets another message saying, you know, I live on the property, blah, blah, blah, blah. The king is Henry VIII. And the message is dated March 23, 1521, which is over, what, 400 odd years in the past. So I'll sort of cut down a bit, but there's messages going backwards and forwards between, on the one hand, 1985, Ken and Deb. And on the other hand, this character who initially signed himself lw but he didn't say who he was. As the messages progress, he signs him. He signs his full name, Lucas. And then Lucas Wayneman. W A I, M A N. And so Deb and Ken by this point have had about maybe, I don't know, a dozen or so messages. They start looking in the local libraries for Lucas Wayman. They find nothing. I mean, I'm skipping bits now, but there's other communications going backwards and forward. At one point, Lucas says, I was working at one of the. I think it's Christchurch. I think it was Christchurch College, Oxford, he says. And then the next message comes along and he says, why did you not pick up the fact that there is no Christchurch College? Turns out Christchurch College was built in 1571, 50 years after he was allegedly talking. And it turns out that this character called Lucas was actually trying to trick Ken because he didn't trust who Ken was. He thought Ken was a devil or demon of some sort. Anyway, moving down a bit, it turns out that the character's name was not Lucas Wayman at all. It was Thomas Harden. He'd given a pseudonym to protect himself. So Deb and Ken started to research Thomas Harden and they found Thomas Harden. One of the things he talked about, Thomas Harden, was the fact he was a fellow at Brasenose College in Oxford, which was built at that point. It was built in about 1509, I think. It started. So they found evidence of Brasenose College having a character called Lucas Wayman.