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- [00:00]
A
Hey, before we jump back into the show, let's take a quick break. But not just any break. This is a refreshing break with Snapple. We all know about Snapple's iconic real facts, so let's take a minute to go over some of my favorites. Snapple Real fact 1517 in New York, it is illegal to sell a haunted house without telling the buyer. Snapple Real Fact 855 Oregon has more ghost towns than any other US state. Snapple Reel Fact 964 it is illegal in the United Kingdom to handle salmon in suspicious circumstances. Snapple Real fact 1477 France used the guillotine as recently as 1977. So grab a Snapple, take a second and enjoy the moment. Because let's be honest, this might be the most refreshing part of your day. Snapple, make your break more interesting. Alright now let's get back to the show.
- [00:53]
B
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- [01:39]
A
Welcome to other World. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. A while back, a girl named Emma wrote us about her mom, Beth. She said that while she was growing up, her mom worked full time in the paranormal industry. She was a radio host, author, investigator, and even was on a few paranormal TV shows, some of which you might recognize. Now. Typically, you won't hear people from paranormal TV shows on Otherworld. That is not an accident. I started this show to intentionally cover the paranormal in a different way than how it's usually covered on those shows. But Emma explained that at some point out of nowhere, her mom Beth abruptly quit her radio show, stopped the investigations, stopped all of her writing projects, and left behind the paranormal side of her life completely. And for the longest time, Emma was left wondering what happened with her mom and why did she suddenly choose to end that chapter of her life. In this episode, I speak to Emma's mom Beth to get a behind the scenes look into the paranormal entertainment industry and the experience that made her decide to leave it all behind. This episode is Called the Ghost Box. And you're listening to Otherworld.
- [03:15]
B
Hello, is this Bobby? Yes, it is.
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A
At its core, the science you can't argue with.
- [03:20]
B
I'm worried about all of a sudden up in the sky.
- [03:23]
A
It's almost frustrating that it's happening.
- [03:25]
B
I'm literally, I'm gonna die. His limbs were just like, wrong. Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a. Hi, my name is Beth. I am from Richmond, Virginia. I'm a seventh generation Richmonder. I am a writer. I work in marketing. I've been in marketing for about 20 years. I have two grown children and a husband. I've been married for 30 years. I grew up in sort of a suburb of Richmond called Varina. And Varina is a very old community, dates back to 1613. And I grew up essentially in the midst of Civil War battlefields. Richmond is just, you know, it's a hotbed for all of that because it was the capital of the Confederacy during that war. My association with the paranormal started really, really young. My father passed away when I was only three. So I grew up in a single parent home and in middle school, would stay after school for clubs and things like that. But because, you know, my mom was working, I would walk from school to the library, which was really just a couple of blocks away, and wait for her there, read books until she could pick me up after work. And was always in. In the paranormal section, you know, just anything occult reading. Hans Holzer when I was like 11. But that just kind of spiraled this almost an obsession where anytime I was able, I was either on a battlefield, in a cemetery, in someone's supposedly haunted house, just trying to experience something firsthand. And I feel like now, you know, as an adult, I can look back on this and with education in psychology, I can obviously see the connection to, you know, losing a parent so young. I'm looking for this connection to something in the beyond to know that people that I've lost are still out there somewhere. We were never a religious family, so that was not faith that was instilled in me. I had to go and find some proof. I spent years just observing, recording, and compiling data. I then somehow landed a spot as a co host on a paranormal radio show. We were sort of a roundtable format show, and we spoke to people who had experiences with everything from cryptids to extraterrestrials to your garden variety ghost stories. And because I was the one always trying to prove something to myself, to amass all this data, to sort of wrap logic around Something that was essentially illogical. I ended up being the skeptic of the show, the one who would more or less be the. The bad guy and ask the hard questions or poke holes in people's stories. If I had to label myself, I would say I was a hopeful skeptic. I always wanted to be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt convinced that there was some sort of energy that survives our living consciousness. But even after, you know, more than a decade of recording and observing, I was still always able to look at things and go, well, yeah, that might have been this other reason for that experience. Or this could have always been X, Y or Z. Folks who were seeing faces and photos, which we. You know, there's a much more widespread understanding of pareidoia now. Like that is a survival instinct in humans. We see faces where there maybe are no faces. You can make out a voice where there's no voice. If you're just hearing muffled sounds, your brain tries to interpret that as something that you can connect to or understand. In many cases, it was just a lack of understanding of technology that they were using to try and record paranormal activity or to communicate with spirits. All kinds of devices were being developed at that time period. This was early, early 2000s, where we were first starting to see things for EVP, for instrumental transcommunication, really just gimmicky things that were banking on that whole wave of paranormal reality tv. Everybody wanted to jump in and research, quote, unquote, on their own. While I was working radio, we did a lot of travel investigations as part of the show. So my co host and I went to some. Some different locations around the US we did some live broadcasts, did some investigation into historical background for some productions for A and E and Bio History Channel. I did not appear on TV until a little later. And I laugh at it in hindsight because you can see if you catch any of the appearances I made, my heart was not in it. I did a pilot for Celebrity Ghost Hunt. I was a judge on a couple of episodes of a sort of a paranormal reality competition show. There were two teams of paranormal investigators sent into these haunted locations and given tasks. And basically the judges were there to assess how the investigators did. Did we feel like they were scientific in their approach? Did we feel like they were contaminating their own evidence? It was not a really hard, fast rubric on how we. We judged them, but it basically was who was the most thorough and most intentional team to investigate each site.
- [10:33]
A
Okay, I'm seeing the show Paranormal Challenge with Zach Baggins. This looks absolutely insane.
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B
Also, he would freak out if he heard you say Baggins. It's Baggins. And I have Baggins. Yeah. I have somewhere on a recording of him saying, why does everybody call me Baggins? It's elementary school readings stuff. It's Bagans. Bagans.
- [10:56]
A
Zack Bagans.
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B
Yeah, Zack Bagans.
- [11:00]
A
So it's. He wants you to do, like, a Midwest accent on it.
- [11:03]
B
I don't know. There's one G, right?
- [11:06]
A
Yeah, I guess you're right.
- [11:07]
B
B, A, G, A, N, S. I don't know.
- [11:09]
A
This is really throwing a curveball at me because I've always said I respect Zach Baggins for getting the bag in so many ways, but apparently. Apparently that doesn't work anymore, that joke.
- [11:21]
B
But I just poked a pin in that balloon. Yeah. Zach Bagans, he's actually a really funny person. And a lot of his Persona on TV is an affectation.
- [11:33]
A
I am not surprised by that.
- [11:36]
B
He is just. He's just a bro. He's just like a. A gym bro who wants to eat, but then gets tired because he has to eat all the time and gets really excited when, you know, things are active paranormally on a set. And then when things aren't, he tries and hypes it up anyway. You know, I'm sure you could read that from whatever you've seen him in.
- [12:06]
A
Yeah, he has a big personality.
- [12:09]
B
Yeah. Being part of paranormal TV was very eye opening because they knew when I went into this that I had a skeptical side and that I was the token skeptic on radio. Right. But when cameras were rolling and then in between takes, I was told, you know, you need to hype this up a little more. We need to up the stakes. You can't be so much a wet blanket. You can't snuff out all of the possibilities because that's what people are watching, you know, constantly being pressured to up the stakes. I will never forget that phrase to save my life. It grates on my nerves even now, just to say, really put me off to unscripted television. And you can see in those shows, like. Like I said, my heart was not in it. You know, I got signed up for this because of my stance and how I looked at things more analytically or logically, but then was told essentially to suppress that for the cameras and to up the hype so that folks would want to tune in and not cut away every commercial break. I did not personally witness anything being faked, but I know that there were instances where, you know, just the tiniest, tiniest little Maybe sort of situation was elevated to something, you know, astronomical. Just because there wasn't anything happening at a supposedly haunted location, you can't coax the stuff to happen while you're there and you're watching. And when nothing was happening. And you know, the cost of production is high. If you catch someone's foot scuff in a recording and it could maybe possibly be interpreted as a voice or a breathy whisper, of course that's going to get blown out of proportion because they have nothing else to work with. The timelines for paranormal tv, just because things are so tight and budgeted, were very off putting. And there's so much pressure from, from the crew, from the staff, from the producers, especially to essentially make something happen that you just feel completely misunderstood. Like they are the worst at sensationalizing anything that could possibly be construed as paranormal. And it really just felt like the opposite of where my interest in the field came from. And it just, it tarnished my view of how the public saw these unexplained occurrences. Television was one of the last things I did before I walked away from the field. It was fall of 2010, and a friend of mine, a fellow radio host, paranormal radio host, was organizing his own conference in Utah. And I was on the short list to come out. He wanted me to speak. He wanted me to talk about battlefield hauntings. And I did not know until after I got there that he also had in his back pocket that he wanted me to attend a gallery reading of a very unusual psychic that he had in attendance that I had heard about. Before this, I had interviewed him once on my own radio show. Really did not give this guy, you know, a second thought. My friend Brian, who was organizing the conference, kind of dropped this bombshell in my lap. He says, hey, you know, after you give your presentation today, stick around. Don't leave the hotel. I want you to stay. Attend Jeff's conference to his gallery reading at the conference tonight and figure out what he's doing. Tell me if you can figure out how he's pulling this off. So obviously I was like, absolutely, I'm going to see this myself. I've heard about this. I've heard people that were totally convinced of what he was doing and its legitimacy. I've also heard people, you know, ripping this to shreds, like, oh, clearly he's got plants, or he's done background research, or there's someone in the distance with a walkie talkie feeding him information or something. So this evening rolls around and just for some Background. We are in Ogden, Utah, which is a beautiful town right on the edge of the Rocky Mountains in the Ben Lomond Hotel, the most haunted place in all of Ogden, I'm told. So the vibe was weird. The whole day, the vibe was weird. And I go into this room expecting a huge gallery reading, like the kind of thing that you would see on TV back, you know, in the 90s, early 2000s, where basically it's an auditorium of people. But this was a small room. We're talking like maybe a conference room in a hotel. There were about 20 people and the hosts of the conference and Jeff, the medium, and myself. And he has this device that he calls it the telephone to the dead, which sounds super hokey. Immediately, I'm thinking, this guy's a crackpot. He claims to have this long lost invention of Thomas Edison, the thing that Edison worked on until his own death. And the way Jeff, of course, this is not his real name, the way he ends up with this device is the guy who built this device for him is a man named Frank Sumption. And Frank contacted Jeff and said, the voices told me how to build this, and they told me it needs to go to you. So immediately you're thinking, okay, this man's crazy. He's hearing voices, right? What he was hearing were allegedly voices coming over radio waves giving him instructions on how to adapt and create this device that, you know, at the time, there were all of these things being popularized that would just scan radio frequencies and give you a fraction of a second, a blip of multiple frequencies strung together, very choppy. This device was a little different. The common spirit box is typically a device that scans radio frequencies and gives the fraction of a second of different frequencies where you might pick up a syllable or a short word from multiple broadcasts. Sometimes it's music, sometimes it's talking. Folks think that if you listen carefully, you basically can hear a voice or a word spoken in context to whatever you were asking or requesting. Like, this is a channel for spirit energy to convey a message to the living. I had heard a lot of spirit boxes before I encountered the ghost box. And the biggest difference that I noticed was that the sound is smoother with the ghost box. You don't have the choppy, obvious radio frequency sampling there. I am not sure the mechanics of the ghost box. And I had interviewed Jeff on the radio before, and I had seen his promo photos and I knew kind of what to expect. But seeing him in real life was very different. He not a huge guy, but he has a big personality, and he Was a singer in a metal band and, you know, long, straight hair, goatee.
- [21:03]
A
For the listeners at home. I'm looking at this man right now, and I would say that he looks a bit like Edgar Winter, if anybody knows who that is. And long, extremely straight hair with piercing eyes. And I cannot find a single photo of him where there's not some sort of digital smoke effect going on in the photo. He's very ethereal and mysterious looking. It's very obvious he's a psychic. I'll say that it seems like a
- [21:35]
B
Persona, like some sort of affectation. But having gotten to know him a bit since my initial meeting, I can say that it is genuinely who he is. So he was just kind of standing in the front of the room with his mom, who accompanies him to a lot of these things. Jeff switches this device on in this gallery reading. The device generally sits on a table in front of him. It's got a built in speaker. He sometimes has his hands on the box, sometimes just on the table near the box. There's a slow hiss. He gets into his seated position, looks very intense. His hands on the side of the box. You know, I'm thinking, okay, here's the show. A voice comes across, the white noise, very quietly, but distinct from the white noise. And it sounds like a male voice very far away. If you remember landline telephones from a long time ago when we would have long distance calls where maybe the connection was not great. Someone sounds like they're in the bottom of a hole. This voice comes through. He sounds like a young guy just, you know, maybe doing his customer service job on the other end of the phone. I hate to laugh about it that way, but he's not emotionally connected to the messages he's sending. He sounds all business. Jeff and the voice, Tyler. I'm told Tyler is what Jeff calls an operator. He's his counterpart on the other side. And he conveys messages to the living, where Jeff conveys messages from the living to the other side. And Tyler comes in and says, you know, there's a message for some woman's first name. And there's a woman in the gallery who looks absolutely stunned and just completely goes pale. She acknowledges that that's her name. And a quick message comes through from some family member who's passed on. And I'm thinking, this whole time, okay, it's very easy to see who's in the room. People have registered for this conference. Their names were already on a list. Anyone could look up some background. So there are a few More contacts like that. I'm thinking, of course there's someone feeding him this information, this voice. Tyler is someone who's close enough by that their broadcast can be picked up on his device. We're about to wind down, and Tyler says that there is another message coming through. And my name gets pulled out. And I'm thinking, oh, boy, here we go. Now, some background on this to this point, because I had been dealing with people like this. I hate to say it that way, but mediums and alleged psychics who essentially preyed on people. I had a series of questions. If anyone supposedly came through for me, you know, it's the questions that only those people could answer. Only the people who have passed on could answer. I'm prepared. I'm waiting to see who they say is coming forward for me. And Tyler gives a name that immediately raises my hackles. And this. I've not talked about this publicly since, and I don't ever see myself in a situation where I would have to use this information in the same kind of way. So I'm okay sharing that now. But Tyler says there's a message for Beth from Bud. And I must have looked like I got hit by lightning or something, because everyone in the room turned and is staring at me, and I'm not responding. And Jeff is just looking at me like, okay, yeah, you gonna acknowledge? And eventually, I must have muttered something, but Bud was a name that my father went by when he was a kid. He was little Buddy to his dad, and eventually it grew to Bud as an adult. That was not his legal name. It is not recorded anywhere that someone could have accessed, was known to family and very close friends. And my dad passed away in 1980, so that was 30 years before this. So I'm a little shaken at that. But I'm still, you know, approaching this as best as possible, still with the thought in the back of my head that this is a setup. So Jeff asks, okay, you know, Tyler, what's the message? And there's a pause, and Tyler says something about let her know that I see the kids and she's doing a good job. And I cracked. Like, there was just. And you can tell I'm emotional now, like it was a trigger, but I'm still not believing this. You know, everybody there knew I have kids. Yeah, that's not an easy thing to hide, clearly, when you are in the public eye, or at least, you know, a voice in the public realm. So they knew I was skeptical. I asked Jeff. I was like, I need you to ask Tyler to Relay something. This is very important because I can't trust this message until I have this information. So they're waiting, and I ask for Bud to tell me what he called me when I was a child. Again, family nicknames, they were only known to a very small circle of people, and at that point, I was the only person living who still knew what that name was. He relays that to Tyler. Tyler relays that in whatever way he does. And the nickname that I was waiting for came back loud and clear. And when I didn't react, he repeated it. Jeff repeated what Tyler said exactly the way Tyler said it, which happened to be exactly the way my father used to say it. And for your input, the nickname was.
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A
That's pretty specific.
- [29:15]
B
Yeah. And, you know, not like I wouldn't think a common nickname. Not something that somebody could just pull out their ass and have convince someone in the gallery reading, even if they had time to go back and do some digging or some research into a person. And it's also something that I have kept very close to the vest. Never shared that with anyone, much less, like, put it out there in a public realm. No way was that known by anyone other than me. My own husband didn't even know this. So, you know, this is. It's. It was that close to the vest. I immediately just shut down. It was like the windows, blue screen. I could not do or say anything at that point. I was just so shaken and so stunned that I have no idea how long I sat there after that gallery reading stopped. They eventually all clear out the room, and I'm left there with my friend who organized the conference. And, you know, he's checking on me, and he was like, I'm getting the idea that you don't think this is fake. You know, are you doing okay? I don't know. I need some time. So I went back to my room that night, and I did not sleep. I was one. Still kind of reeling, like, how I got this answer, this response that I never expected to hear. Like, this has always been in my back pocket as the. The question to ask to debunk these sorts of predatory psychics. I'm also having all kinds of weird stuff happen in my hotel room. You know, the bathroom door is opening and closing throughout the night. I keep seeing what I feel like are flashes of light in my peripheral vision. I can't explain any of this. This is just kind of piling on to the experience of the gallery reading. And the next day, I'm supposed to fly home. And the feeling doesn't let up. It compounds to the point where I'm in a plane on a flight from Utah to Virginia, and I see, you know, these flashes of light in my peripheral vision and what looks like birds, birds just out of my line of sight inside the plane. Like, I don't know if you've ever had a bird inside your house. You know, just this, this fluttering, dark movement out of the corner of your eye. This went on for a week or two after I came home. I would have this happen daily. I was driving the car. I would see it. It got to the point where I was afraid to leave my house. I was afraid to try and focus on anything where, you know, I might be a danger to myself or other people because this was so distracting. And just when life started to kind of mellow back out, I got another call from my friend who had organized this conference where I met Jeff and was tasked with debunking his gallery reading. And he says, are you by any chance available next month? We want to go out to this haunted location in Iowa that Jeff has been to several times before, and we want to shoot a pilot for a TV show. We want you there because this place is like a hotbed for communication for this device he has. And if you can truly debunk what he's doing, we think it's going to happen there. So, of course, I said with some caution, yes, I want to try this again. I want to kind of distance myself and my personal experience from it and look at this much, much more critically.
- [33:40]
A
All right, we'll be right back after this quick break.
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B
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- [34:23]
A
On my new podcast, On Par with Maury Povich, we're getting down to the truth behind the names that you know and love. Unfiltered conversations with legends like Leanne Morgan, Kathy Griffin, Ricki Lake. To find out when they feel the most on par, we're breaking it down with Don Lemon, Aaron Parnas, Lamani Jones, Laughing it up with Josh Johnson, Dan Soder, many more. You know, the results are in great conversations are always on par. So follow and listen to on par wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [35:19]
B
Oh hey friends, this sale's for you. The DSW Friends and Family event Is on DSW VIP members get 25% off almost everything in stores and online for a limited time. Don't miss out. This only happens twice a year. Not a vip. You're still family to us. Join for free to get in on the savings. Plus VIPs always get free shipping on anything. Save on must own shoes today when you shop the DSW Friends and Family event at your DSW store or dsw.com so good, so good, so good. Everything you want for summer is at Nordstrom Rack stores now and up to 60% off. Stock up and save on the brands you love, like vendors Vince Sam, edelman frame and free people. Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. November 2010 we head out to the middle of nowhere. It is Benton's Port, Iowa. There's nothing, nothing around. You know, we approach this town that literally is maybe three blocks long. It is the tiniest, if you even want to call it a town. We're filming at a place called the Mason House Inn. This inn, it was pretty strange. It was active. There were a lot of unexplained things happening before we ever started filming. So immediately I'm going into skeptic mode, trying to find logical, natural explanations for a lot of the things that that I'm observing. I was lying in bed, was woken up by someone messing with my hair while I was asleep, like lifting my hair and dropping it onto my face, you know, two or three times before I was swatting away invisible hands. Still haven't been able to logically explain that, but that's the kind of thing that apparently happens in this place on the regular. We were shooting there for a couple of days and I learned that Jeff has a he has a relationship with the folks who own the inn, they have done some private events there. Paranormal enthusiasts would come, of course, and either do like a ghost hunt at the end and then wrap it up with these readings, these gallery readings, or these private readings that Jeff was doing with the ghost box. Because they had this long working relationship, I could tell that Jeff was really comfortable around them and he was letting down his guard a lot, which to me, I felt like this was a great opportunity. Maybe if there's something going on, he's going to get comfortable enough that it slips and I'll be able to kind of catch this without him really being the wiser. The woman who owns and operates the inn, she was describing to me how sometimes they have a lot of talk happening, lots of messages coming through the ghost box, and that she and Jeff have worked with Tyler to kind of get her coached in a way to serve as like a battery where she basically offers up her energy. She goes into sort of like a. A meditative state and lets her energy be used by the box. So I'm like, okay, sure, lady, whatever. Let's, let's see what happens. Sure enough, the first gallery reading I sit in, it is far clearer than the gallery reading that I observed at the conference in Utah. Tyler is much more crisp. It's easier for everyone in the room to understand him. The white noise that kind of lays the bed behind Tyler's voice is very, very low in comparison. There's a great contrast between that noise and his voice. And the room is small. And I get there and it's very crowded. I'm not expected to be on camera for this at all. So I'm standing in the doorway, sort of a little side into the hallway. There are several messages that come through from what they call the regulars, the spirits in the place. Lots of folks in attendance ask questions. Generally, the answers that you receive, if you receive an answer, have to do with time, if that makes sense. If you ask someone, you know, what is it like where you are? The response is often like when they're not in the now. It's very bizarre. So there were a lot of questions where people were asking, can you see us? Are you here in the room with us? And the responses would come through as time related things. It's like the spirit's concept of time is totally lost. There's a whole lot of quantum theory in that. Is this energy unaffected by time? Is time linear for us, not for them? Is it linear for anyone at all? And, you know, maybe 15, 20 minutes into this reading where lots of messages are coming through all from the spirits of the house, Tyler again. He stops, and he's like, hang on. We need a timeout. And Chris is, like, clearly stunned. Like, okay, this is something that is not regular. He's trying to keep the flow going as smoothly as he can. And then loud and clear. And when I mean loud, like someone in the room with you is what this sounded like. A voice comes through the box, and it says, hey, girl. And Chris looks shocked. Chris looks like clearly something has gone awry. And the people who are regulars there were looking at each other like, what? What the heck is this? And Tyler's like, we have a message. There's somebody that needs to come through. This is important. And again, when this voice comes through to say, hey, girl, suddenly I am thrust back a month where I'm stunned. I can't speak. I immediately recognize the voice. This was clearly not a bentonsport, Iowa, voice. This was Brooklyn, Sicilian loud, big personality voice. I'm too stunned to say anything. I can't pipe up that, okay, I think this is too familiar. And again, I'm still trying to debunk what's happening there. So I don't want to immediately jump in and be overeager. Tyler continues and is saying, there's this message that has to come through, but basically, you can tell Tyler is thrown for a loop. And it's almost like he's struggling on the other side because he's almost being overpowered by somebody else. Like, in my imagination, it's sort of the insistence, like somebody pushing their way to the front of the line. And Tyler calls me out. This is for Beth. And everyone in the room looks to me. Jeff looks to me like, do you know what's going on right now? What's happening? And I'm probably just completely pale. At this point, this voice comes through again, and it says, I told you, I'm learning. At this point, Tyler's like, did you get that? Do you understand? He doesn't even try and relay it. He knows that it's come through loud and clear. And Jeff doesn't say anything because he can clearly see. So I just nodded. Yeah. And at this point, Tyler, he kind of leads me in. He's like, is there anything else that you want to say? Like, do you have a message? And I asked about what I had been seeing. The visual phenomena that I'd been witnessing since my encounter in Utah. The lights in my peripheral vision. What look like birds? I asked the voice that came through, I said, is that you? Are you trying to get my attention And Tyler stepped in and said, no, that's just the energies. Your eyes have been open now and again I'm feeling like part of some grand scheme, like there's a big prank being played on me. And he said, you've had a revelation. And things kind of wind down after that. Tyler says, you know, the person who was communicating is happy to have made contact. He's gone on. And after we stopped filming and the, the gallery reading has concluded, again, everyone descends on me. What was that? Who was that? What's happening? Jeff is full of questions which that to me signaled, okay, clearly he's not as in on this as I thought he was. And I have to get the crew to run back the sound. I was like, can you just play that for me one more time? I just need to make sure that I heard it the way I think I heard it. And I got to, to hear it right there again in the room. And it was very clearly the voice of my father in law who had passed away earlier that year. His name, Frank, was Brooklyn Sicilian. Very much the father figure for most of my life. Like I said, I've been married for a long time. And he'd been really the only father that I had for most of my adult life. And he died from pancreatic cancer in February of that year. It was a really quick illness. He was diagnosed and then passed away like five weeks later. But he, he was always really interested in what I was researching, what I was doing, and had told me, you know, after he had his, his diagnosis and he knew what was coming, he said, if there's any way that I can let you know anything, I'm gonna do it. You know, I'm gonna do it because I'm stubborn enough to do it. And, you know, I'm thinking, this man is sure this is his way of comforting me. I get that. So I have no doubt that he made good on his promise. And it shook me up every bit as much as that first encounter that I had had a month before in Utah. After I returned from Iowa and continued to try and process all of this really overwhelming experience, very similar to what I had experienced in Utah the entire trip home. And really for a few weeks after I returned, I was having the visual disturbances, things that look like either bright flashes of light or birds in my peripheral vision. And this was indoors, outdoors, you know, while I'm trying to drive a car. This happened on the airplane back home. I saw my eye doctor like it was weighing on me. I wanted this to not be something that Was related to this experience and couldn't find any logical explanation for it. Now, I've been in. In the same house for 25 years, but at that time, I'd been here about 10 or 12 years. And bizarre activity had been irregular in this house since we moved in. But visually, we would occasionally see things that. And I say we. This was the whole family. Things that looked like. I guess I can only describe as like a heat ripple. Like when you see heat on a road and you get that wavery light disturbance, little pockets of that in strange places in the house that would last, you know, maybe two seconds. There was always sort of a olfactory phenomenon in the house too. This started off. We would smell flowers. That was one of really the first things that the family noted after we moved in was the random smell of something like lilac would pop up. After I returned from Iowa, the smell started to shift a bit. I would pick up smells that reminded me of specific people who had passed. And I feel like the most intense was one that smelled like tobacco. That was a common thing. And my father in law's truck always smelled like that. He worked about a block away from a tobacco plant here in Richmond. And I think that the upholstery in that vehicle absorbed it. His work clothes absorbed it. He smelled like that. So immediately, you know, you smell that in the house. Even my kids noted it. That was the first person who came to mind. We've always heard unusual or unexplained sounds in the house. Most of the time it had been just sounds of people walking. For the few weeks after I came back from Iowa, this was every day. One of the most peculiar things involves a dog that people see regularly. We don't have a dog. Our dining room and living room are connected by an archway. And when you are in the living room, occasionally you will see what appears to be an animal, maybe like knee high, go through the dining room. Mother stayed with us. She was recovering from an injury and was camped out in our living room and said something about the dog that we had. She knew we didn't have a dog. She was wondering why we were keeping a dog secret from her. The kids, their friends have commented on seeing a dog. You know, as my children were growing, they start noticing things. I know one is very firmly imprinted on my daughter. I want to say she was five. She may have been four when this happened, But I was standing in her bedroom door waking her up to go to school that day. And we are on opposite sides of the room from one another. She's up in her bed, I'm in the doorway. And we both registered movement in one part of the room at the same time and turned to look. And she had a tall bookcase with books and bins with toys in them. And we both watched as a bin slid out from the shelf and drop to the floor like five feet below. Her eyes were just as big as saucers. And she looks directly at me, does not say anything, just is looking at me for my reaction. And being the parent, you don't want your child to be afraid, but you also don't want them to not trust you. You need to acknowledge what's happening. So I think I said something like, okay, then, well, let's get out of here. Let's get dressed and go. And at this point, you know, this first few weeks back home, things being emotionally raw, intense, I'm feeling extremely overstimulated in my own home. Like there's no place that I can go for peace and quiet or escape, which was really difficult. As someone who was working in this field of paranormal study and interviewing people every week, researching supposedly haunted sites for books, it was too much to continue to focus on day in and day out without just complete overwhelm. And at that point I had to back away just for my own mental health and preservation. So I took a bit of a hiatus from writing, just, you know, a month or two, as much as I could without having to really negatively affect deadlines and things like that. Took a little time off from radio. And when I tried to return to these things, I realized that despite the time off, I was not, not even then, at a place where I felt like this had lessened. It was still so intense. So I ended up leaving radio over the course of about six months or so. Resigned myself to just canceling book contracts. There was no way I was going to be able to drag myself out to these locations and sit and observe and study and interview people and continue to talk about these unexplained phenomenon. Knowing that there are things still happening to me. And it was difficult to separate what I was observing or what I was experiencing and what was actually happening on location for so long. At that point, it had been 20 plus years. So really distancing myself from it felt like, I don't know, closing the door on a phase of life, I guess, or almost like a little a death in itself. So it's been about 15 years since I last saw Jeff or had contact with them. It wasn't like we had some big falling out. It Was just when I backed away from paranormal everything, I fell out of touch with him as well. I do still occasionally get contacted, people requesting me to come speak or investigate, and I have not done any of that in more than 10 years. Before I had these experiences with the ghost box, I would label myself as a hopeful skeptic, Definitely not a cynic. I wanted, of course, there to be something that, you know, could be proof, I guess, for lack of a better word, that our energy continues after our consciousness maybe doesn't, or when our body stops, that the consciousness does continue. It was an exhausting place to be, but it was a place that I was familiar with because I'd been in it so long. The encounters that I had with the ghost box and the questions that were answered for me in that experience Convinced me strongly enough that I didn't feel like I had to continue searching. I think ultimately that's what maybe all of the overwhelm and overstimulation that I experienced after Were trying to push me towards was that I just did not need to continue to search. I do still take the observations and experiences of others, look at those through that skeptical lens. I do like to, even if I don't voice it, think, well, you know, could it have been this or this other thing? Maybe it's just a peculiar bit of trickery and perception, But I don't know that I would ever find myself completely discounting someone else's experience Because I've had one that I can't discount myself.
- [58:14]
A
Thank you to Beth for talking to us. Also special thank you to her daughter Emma for introducing us. I also spoke to Emma during the making of this episode. I did decide to look around quite a bit for footage of Beth on these shows. In particular, I was looking for this pilot that she was filming when this main experience happened. Let me tell you, it was definitely a lot of fun. Looking back at the early 2000s paranormal investigation footage, There were lots of incredible outfits being worn in some of this footage. However, I could not find anything from that specific event or that pilot. And sadly, the video and audio quality on a lot of these clips wouldn't be very useful anyway, Because a lot of the stuff I was seeing was uploaded in the very early pre HD days of YouTube. Honestly, I think that's for the best. Sometimes when a story is so personal, it's very hard for video to even capture the intensity of what it was like going through it yourself. And that's part of why I prefer this show as a podcast. Thank you so much to Beth once again. This episode was called the Ghost Box and you've been listening to Otherworld. Otherworld is executive producer, produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our producers are Theo Schaeffer, Theo Krantz, Haley Pearson and Nikki Kate Delgado. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by North Americans and Juice Jackal. Our artwork is by Cul de Sac Studios. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five star review and telling your friends about the show. If you want to hear bonus episodes of Otherworld, you can become a patron@patreon.com Otherworld Our social media is Otherworldpod. Thank you to the team at Odysee. Leah Rhys Dennis, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Colin Gaynor and Hilary Schuff. Follow and listen to Otherworld now for free on the Odysee app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural or unexplained, you can send us your stories@storiesotherworldpod.com.
- [61:06]
B
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