Transcript
A (0:11)
Welcome to Other World. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode comes to us from a man named Connor and his wife Lacey. At the time that all this took place, Connor and Lacey had just left Mormonism, which they had been raised in their entire life. This was a very big change for Connor and because of it, he had a complete crisis of faith. He experienced a complete 180 in his beliefs about the spiritual. And when we interviewed him, Connor referred to himself as being a cringe Reddit atheist. He is not the first person to come on the show and describe himself that way. I think a lot of people who grew up in very religious households end up having a complete reversal, like Conor, and they end up being a person who goes out of their way to try to disprove other people's beliefs. So Connor had a hardline, skeptical belief until one day some strange things begin to happen in his house that seem to be connected to a certain family heirloom that was being stored in the closet. This episode is titled Heirloom and you'd're listening to Otherworld.
B (1:39)
Hello, is this Bobby? Yes, it is. At its core, the science you can't argue. I'm sorry about is up in the sky.
A (1:47)
It's almost frustrating that it's happening.
C (1:49)
I'm literally, I'm going to die.
B (1:51)
Its limbs were just like, wrong.
D (1:54)
Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a minute.
B (2:22)
So I'm Connor Cox. I'm from Mesa, Arizona. I was born and raised here. I've spent most of my life here. It's only been like maybe a nine month period where I was living in Oregon and I was actually on a Mormon mission. My parents were very, I guess you'd call them devout Mormons. It sounds weird, but yeah, they were. They were very devout Mormons. I wasn't really given a lot of choice or like freedom growing up. It was kind of. It was a. We had a very strict, very structured household. So, like, for example, my parents would go through our music, like our song, and go through like the song lyrics, decide which content they wanted us listening to. And like, even beyond swear words, like they were worried about like subversive ideas, stuff like that. So that was my life. And then I ended up actually going to serve a mission. And so a Mormon mission with that is once you reach a certain age, what you do is you go out and you basically try and convert people to Mormonism in a very structured sort of way. They send out the missionaries and all that. While it is like voluntary, it's kind of the only choice you have if you want to be, like a good Mormon, that is what you need to do. At least as a Mormon, man, that was an expectation. I ended up serving a mission at least nine months of one. I came home because I got lyme disease. I think just my overall experience with that is actually the first thing that kind of made me start doubting Mormonism. I kind of decided I didn't think what they were saying was the truth, and I didn't believe that the church was actually like, God's hand in our life. Now it just seemed like it was an organization, and it seemed like they were even kind of corrupt and doing a lot of bad stuff. So that causes a full faith crisis is what I would call it. When your entire worldview and just everything, your whole outlook was based on this very structured belief system, you try and leave that belief system or try and kind of like, take that framework out of it, you're gone. It's like, what do I believe about anything? What happens when I die? What is the point of this? What's going on? What do I wake up for? Everything goes into question or even, like, is honesty good? It's just like, everything. Like, you gotta. You gotta figure it all out for yourself. And that's kind of the process I had to go through rebuilding my belief system without that framework that I was started with for that the first 20 years of my life growing up. And like, with Mormonism, a lot of the kind of paranormal stuff, either either they've come up with, like, a good Mormon answer for it, or you don't talk about it, and we don't talk about that. So specifically, I'm thinking, like, ghosts. I remember growing up, like, even trying to, like, talk ghost stories and that stuff. My dad was very quick to, like, shut it down. He'd say things like, oh, these kind of conversations invite these, like, bad things, was basically what his answer was for it. But so we never talked about it, and so we never really got to, like, explore that or really go there after Mormonism. So after I kind of left that belief system, decided that wasn't true. And, like, that wasn't really how you get close to God or. I actually, at that point, didn't think there was a God. I thought that maybe that was another deception that kind of, I think maybe threw the baby out with the bathwater and was like, oh, yeah, no more God. Like, no more Jesus, no more spirituality. Like, none of that stuff exists. It's not real. It's a trick to get you Tithing like, and that's where I was at. And so I kind of was definitely very jaded. And that kind of turned, I would say, like cringe. Reddit atheist. It was very like, if we cannot prove it in a laboratory setting, it doesn't exist anymore because someone hijacked my feeling system. Now I can't trust that. So it's like out the window. That's where I was at for a while, like a long time. And it's wild that I was in that headspace when this experience happened. So I'm actually not positive how the. I mean, it's good that you'll be talking to my wife for this because I'm not sure how the doll came into our lives. We'd recently moved in together. We'd been together a few years, but it's kind of still in that new period where like just stuff appears and like you're like, oh, there's more stuff. So the doll just kind of appeared one day in a closet. And I believe that she. It's like an heirloom or something she can explain.
