The Most Haunted Country In The World

Hi there, I'm K-Town, and on this edition of Mysterious Radio. Yeah, I grew up experiencing poltergeists and ghosts and with a strong interest in the occult and supernatural. I was plagued as a young adult and teenager with all kinds of bizarre types of things going on in my life. and it scared me quite honestly it scared me very very much and this continued through college university and into sort of early adult life and then I guess you kind of get wrapped up in careers and marriages and kids and other than the odd event it kind of took a back seat but periodically when I had sort of some downtime, maybe I was working some notice, a job to move jobs or something like that, I would rekindle my interest in the supernatural and the occult and start reading books and sort of, you know, really delving into it again. And that would always seem to trigger a number of strange events. So it got to the point when I was living in Houston, Texas and I reached out to a school of magic a real school of magic not a Hogwarts but a real school of occult studies in the United Kingdom called the servants of the light and I did their five-year meditation course and during the course of doing that course to use the word twice it seemed to me that what happened was I put to write the things inside of myself that were causing all of this bizarre, chaotic, supernatural activity around me as I was growing up. And that meant that I developed an inner contact. That inner contact in meditation would show me things, introduce me to things, eventually told me to write a book. And so in 2006, I wrote my first book called Inner Journeys, Explorations of the Soul, which was about my growing up and, you know, experiencing some of the things that happened to me, why I was so scared, what made me afraid, that my life was being run by fear, and why I went to do this course and what happened and what to expect during the course. And I never expected to write another book again. I mean, this was just something that I did, and I put the book out through a publisher in the UK. It sold a few hundred copies, and that seemed to be the end of that. But, you know, as things happen, the other side will never really truly leave you alone. And so I started to realize that, in fact, I should write some other books about my experiences. And a few years ago, I started writing what's called what I call My Haunted Life, the My Haunted Life series of books. There's three books, and they're all about, you know, the sort of going into more depth to some of those experiences that happened when I was growing up. So, you know, as an example, and I think this is in my bio on some websites, one of my earliest memories is we lived in a little sort of row of houses, as you do in England, in Hull, West Hull in Yorkshire. and I had a little room up top of the house and my parents put me to bed one night I'd be three four somewhere around there and I had a wardrobe and the wardrobe had like a mirrored door it was an old-fashioned wardrobe you know very old-fashioned standalone type wooden thing with a mirrored door and I saw basically this little blue creature jumped out of the mirror and most bizarrely shot me with a toy gun which actually made a bang sound and then laughed hysterically and jumped out of the bedroom window which was two stories up well of course i screamed blue murder but my parents were already up because they heard the gunshot and were very puzzled as to what the gunshot would have been and i mean imagine you know little boy telling you this incredible story about a little blue creature jumping out of the mirror shooting you with a toy gun and then jumping out the window but that was kind of the start of everything and luckily for me my father his mother was a medium and he had experienced a lot of strange phenomena so you know he he was okay with with all of this strangeness and and actually was very helpful He told me that when he was a little boy, him and his brother were in the house one day, and his mother wanted to show them her guide, her spirit guide. And, of course, they were quite young, and he says he can still remember how she was actually physically changing, physically changing into a Chinese man, and this scared the living daylights out of him and his brother, obviously. So my father was no stranger to this strange world of ghosts and strange happenings either. Wow. How interesting is that? Now, you did grow up in Texas, correct? No, actually, I grew up in England. I'm English by birth. And when I was about, I don't know, what would it be, 26, I moved to Houston, spent 20 years in Houston. And then about 11 years ago, I moved back to Europe and now live in Central Europe in the Czech Republic or Czechia. The horrible name that they've given the country recently is Czechia, but it's the Czech Republic as far as I'm concerned. People will know probably the city of Prague, which is the capital city and was the center of alchemy in the 15th, 16th centuries. Now, like myself, many people have no idea about the culture of the paranormal there. Can you tell us how the people there perceive the world of the supernatural? Yeah, well, it's interesting because obviously the Czech Republic was part of the – it was behind the Iron Curtain. It was one of the Soviet socialist republics. And so for many, many years, the people here were living under communism, and the communist state didn't really tolerate any kind of free thinking. Put supernatural and magic in that category. They didn't really tolerate religion. So the country is largely atheist. And prior to that, it was occupied by the Nazis, Nazi Germany. And prior to that, it had a short period as an independent country with its own president. But before that, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So the Czech Republic as a country doesn't have a long history of being a country. But the Czech people have a strong cultural identity. they're Slavs or Slavic people and they have a strong pagan cultural identity now having said that there is a strong minority Catholic population in the Czech Republic that's for sure but by and large the people I would say are either atheist or just disinterested in anything religious or spiritual because that's what they've been that's how they were raised in that communist regime and it's only in the last 30 years that they've had the freedom to explore and get interested in such things. So it's an interesting country. For example, we just had the Easter holiday, and the Thursday before Good Friday is known as Green Thursday here, and it's celebrated by most of the local brewers turning out a green-colored beer. And it's quite strong, so everybody goes out and drinks green beer and gets quite drunk on Green Thursday. and then over the weekend basically the young lads the young boys they get they make themselves or usually buy sticks which are willow branches which are woven together they have a handle it might be like a meter long of three foot long foot long to three foot long and they will go around the neighborhood and they whip the girls with this thing while saying a rhyme and the girls obviously like to be whipped they want to be whipped which many americans will find extremely strange i know but they want to be whipped and having been whipped they give the boy an egg a decorated egg or some sweet gift and they then place a tire ribbon on the end of the stick so by By the end of the day, the guys are walking around with sticks that have 20, 30, 40 ribbons, colorful ribbons on the top. And, of course, what this is is this is a pagan ritual that everybody – nobody really knows what they're doing, but they're acting out a pagan ritual. It's a fertility ritual. Basically, the willow tree is a symbol of fertility, and to gently slap the lady's legs or bum, I suppose, with this thing is to let them take some of the fertility of the willow tree. They are then supposed to have a year of illness-free and fertile life, and their gratitude to the boy for doing this is to provide them with a small gift. And this is a really interesting pagan ritual that takes place in a major Christian festival. And it's the same thing at Christmas. Here, there is no Santa Claus. In fact, what happens is the devil, an angel, and one of the saints who's identified with Santa Claus walk around houses and will visit the small kids. So basically the kid has to do something like sing a small song, recite a poem or something along those lines and then is given the gift. Or if they've been naughty, the devil will put them in his sack and take them off to hell. So again, the idea of like chert, which is the sort of devil figure chert, the angel and this saint at Christmas, it's not really – doesn't smack of Christianity. It's more of a pagan type thing. And there's a strong element of obsession with this character Chert in this part of the world, not just the Czech Republic, but in the sort of bordering countries, Austria and parts of Germany. And Chert is this horned sort of creature that lives underground and can use fireplaces and fires to magically appear in front of you and drag you off to hell. where he lives with all the other church. So he's not truly the devil, but he's sort of a demonic, impish type caricature with horns. And you would definitely, you know, as an American, you would definitely identify him with a Satan. But he's not like truly evil. He's more mischievous. So actually what he is is the pagan god Pan. Pan was the nature spirit. the male nature spirit, and he was a mischievous spirit. And this is what that is, is Chert is really the god pen, sort of rethought through. So, you know, there I was writing about my own experiences, anything from little blue men jumping out of mirrors to poltergeist activity and, you know, all kinds of stuff. And I'm sat in the midst of this wonderful country that has all of these strange pagan type traditions and a strong cultural heritage through the Slavs and some real interesting myth and legend. And I started to think to myself, you know, I bet nobody's really actually written a book in English about the Czech Republic from a sort of supernatural perspective. And that's what really drove the book. So it really starts with looking at some of these strange pagan sort of traditions. It looks at the sort of origins of the Slavs, the three – basically the rumor, the legend is or the myth is that three brothers – well, it varies. It could be one brother. It can be two brothers. It can be three. But I like the version of the three brothers are basically thrown out of their homeland. They wander sort of through Europe. they come across this mountain called Zhip which is R-I-P but the R has a funny symbol over it so it's pronounced R-Z-Z-Z-Y-P and that mountain is a strange looking hill just outside of Prague and when they get on top of the hill one of the brothers looks out over the land and says well you know this is the land of milk and honey sounding very biblical and we should settle here and his name is Czech and so his followers become the Czechs and his two brothers move on. One settles in Poland and another one settles in Russia and that is the origin of the Russians, the Poles and the Czechs which are three different Slavic groups. And eventually, you know, the king, the guy becomes king, he has a daughter, the daughter becomes queen but because it's a very male-centric society people are very unhappy that it's a queen leading them and so she feels forced to marry and she has some vision about meeting some guy who's worked plowing a field in the countryside and she sends all of the men off to look and they find this guy as she described plowing the countryside bring him they fall instantly in love, they marry, he becomes the king, she's the queen, and then there's a dynasty of seven other kids or generations that go through. And as you look at all of these sort of myths and legends there all kinds of strange significance like similarities with the biblical story of Adam and Eve and some of the other biblical stories of the creation There also the number seven keeps coming up seven generations seven children seven this which is the seven days of the week, the seven metals. The sort of seven is this mysterious, magical number. So it's all great fun. And then, of course, the other side of it is the ghost stories, because Prague is a magnificent city in the 15th, 16th century. It was the center for alchemy and alchemists of, you know, much renown. And so there's a lot of rich legend, myth and ghost stories in Prague that I'm sure are based on some truth and not just there to encourage tourists. Well, let's touch on that a bit because I found that chapter in your book very interesting. Can you share with us stories about some paranormal hauntings that are happening in the city of Prague? Well, the Prague ones, I think, are all very sort of whimsical and are often founded in a sort of romantic sort of sense. So the one that I like is the story of the Turk. One of the small squares in Prague is supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a Turk. and the story goes that this Turk, Turkish man, fell in love with a young Czech woman, asked her to marry him. She said yes, but he needed to go back to Turkey to ask his parents permission and get the approval and all that kind of thing. So off he goes. And of course, the journey for some reason took much, much longer than he had expected and anticipated. And the young woman in Prague grew worried and then concerned and then restless and eventually decided that he must have been waylaid and killed or he wasn't coming back at all. So she started to pursue a life. She married a local man. And, of course, the Turkish man gets back to Prague sort of like the day after she's married somebody else. And he finds out that this is what's happened. The young lady goes missing. the man the turk hangs himself and the story goes that if you do meet the ghost of the young turk he will have a box and he will try to show you the contents of the box and inside the box if you were unfortunate enough to see it is the severed head of of the bride that was supposed to marry him and ended up marrying somebody else so the stories are all all sort of like um this you know romance that went wrong um there are other stories uh that i think are really fascinating there's a church in prague where as you walk in um you might not notice it actually but um if if you've read the book then you may well be looking for it as you walk in there's an arm hanging uh from the entrance uh ceiling it's a skeletal arm these days but um the story goes that this particular gentleman, or rogue, shall we say, thief, wanted to rob the church. And in particular, he wanted to steal something from the statue of Mary, mother of Jesus. And he tried to, and as he reached out, the statue grabbed his arm and held him in a vice-like grip until the following morning when the congregation and the minister or the priest came. and no matter what they did they could not free his arm from the grip of the statue and so they had to actually cut it off and so they've hung the arm sort of in remembrance of this event and this miracle of the statue grabbing the would-be thief and I think that's a pretty macabre sort of story and of course the poor armless ghost goes around that part of Prague as well so the the stories of prague ghosts are all very as i say they're all very sort of romantic um sort of nice neat stories which is why um although i'm sure there's um you know some truth in in many of these uh stories you do get the idea that that perhaps um the cult the czech culture has sort of taken stories and made them nice and put them in a sort of romantic context that sort of suits the culture of the city. That's my impression anyway, because once you get out of Prague, the ghost stories get much more sort of horrific and less sort of romantic. They do have more than their fair share of haunted cemeteries. Would you say that? Yes, it would seem that way. I think almost every cemetery over here is reputed to be haunted. I think one of the best ones, though, is there's a town. It's not so far away from where I live, actually. and I've visited a couple of times, where a man died under peculiar circumstances. He was buried in the churchyard, and he was then seen a number of times, and other people in the village went fairly sickly. And eventually, someone suggested that perhaps he wasn't as dead as they thought that he was. so reputedly they dug this man up found his body extremely fresh uh decided he was a vampire and chopped his head off um the body and reburied him uh in concrete with you know garlic and stuff to to stop him from coming coming out every night and that solved the problem so there's also this you know not unsurprisingly there's this strong vampirism sort of um myth in this part of the world um you know vampires hungary is a neighboring country and that's where vlad the impaler or you know the the precursor of of dracula uh is you know came from and so that there is that element of vampirism as well so you often hear sort of vampire stories uh like that one in this part of the world and who knows how much truth there is to this stuff but certainly there's a there's a strong suspicion that you know the undead do exist and that they do come out at night and feast on on young maidens and that sort of thing but it's it's really an interesting country in the sense that they seem to enjoy these stories. And you're right, almost every cemetery has some kind of a story about ghostly happenings. And I think that it's a part of the landscape, the cultural landscape, to have supernatural stories about cemeteries and so on here. Some of the stories also revolve around forests. forests the czech republic is is a country that still has a lot of very nice forests as a part of the the country called cesky rye which translates to uh bohemian paradise or czech paradise and it's it's a beautiful part of the country that has these sort of sandstone this sandstone that erodes out of the countryside so it's like sandstone pillars with very narrow gaps that you can you know that sometimes walk down through these narrow sandstone pillars, and it's all forested. And I was there last weekend, actually, on a family trip. And I sat and meditated for a while in the midst of these sandstone pillars and the forest with the canopy and the wind blowing. And you can well understand that with a pagan mind and a slight imagination, You could well imagine almost anything happening in such a forest, in such a place. And so there are a lot of legends and myths about the forest. There's a forest near Czeskia Budyavice, famous for its beer, that has everything from UFO sightings to the mysterious disappearance and death of Soviet-era soldiers at a camp there to a dark shadow that rides a horse. and we'll let you know its presence because you can hear the hoofs and the cracking of the branches and the hoofs of the horse as the shadow rides by. So this one forest has almost every connotation of supernatural activity from, as I said, UFO activity to mysterious deaths and disappearances to a black rider on a horse. And I think there's also a young woman. And that's the kind of culture this is. It's really amazing. It sounds like it. And your book, you know, you put a little bit of everything in there and I absolutely love it. Well, yeah, I also tried to sort of – I tried to do it in a sense of encouraging people to come to the Czech Republic and experience it. You know, when people come here, they visit Prague, they spend a weekend in Prague, they do what all tourists do, and then they move on. And they're actually missing out because the whole country, every town, every village has a castle, a myth, a story, a tale, a place to visit. And you could literally just lose yourself in the country for a month and have a great time. And so I included not just sort of ghost stories and myths and legends, but I also included places that I think are really interesting. So here in Brno, B-R-N-O, Brno, it's the second largest city in the Czech Republic. It's sort of halfway between Prague and Vienna or Prague and Bratislava. just recently in the last few years one of the churches medieval church in town they were they were basically just sort of trying to excavate and clean up and put a new road by the church and they discovered basically forget the name of it now one of those places where you store bones an ossuary that's right and it was a bit of a mess but they estimate it had like 60,000, but the remains of 60,000 people in it. So of course, what they've done is they've now spent some European money, grant money, and they've turned it into something you can actually visit. So it's a very, very creepy. It's below a medieval church. You go down there and literally there are the skulls and the bones of nearly 60,000 per soles. So it's a very creepy place. It's underground, it's dark, it's damp, but it's well worth the visit. And of course, there are a number of these osheries in the Czech Republic that you can visit. And basically what it relates to is that back in the 15th century, maybe 14th century, people wanted to be buried in the churchyard, which would be inside the city walls for safety. Well, of course, you'd have a plague. A lot of people would die very quickly, and the churchyard, the consecrated ground was quite small. So in the end, the solution was you bury somebody, you leave them in the ground for a short period of time, and then you dig them up, and you put their bones and remains somewhere else in this storage room. And that way, everybody can be interred in the cemetery, and you keep recycling it, basically. But you build up all of these bones that are stored in the ossuary. And eventually they get forgotten about, you know, and then rediscovered like this one in Brindler. And hey, presto, you have somewhere really interesting to visit. And, you know, another place that I would recommend in Brindler is the Capuchin Crypt. This is another small church. It was obviously run by the monks, the Capuchin monks, and they would bury the dead fellow monks and the local sort of well-to-dos, the Duke of this and the Archduke of that, in the cellar beneath the church. And it just so happens that the combination of the soil, the airflow, the temperature means that these bodies have been extremely well preserved. and they only had one coffin because they were an order that believed in in poverty and blah blah so they would reuse the coffin for the actual ceremony and then lay the body out on bricks in the cellar and so for about i don't know a couple of dollars you can actually now go down into the cellar of the capuchin the capuchin crypt and you can you can look at these mummified remains of monks and the local 15th century, 14th century landed gentry. And again, it's a very, very creepy environment. And the first time I went down there, it gave me the shakes. I mean, it's really quite creepy. And I wouldn't call them sort of really well mummified, but you can still make out the features and so on. And on the wall there, it says something along the lines of painted in Latin and translated for you by the tour guide, as we are now, one day you will be, which I think is quite threatening, actually. And they're lining the walls, right? Yes, yeah, yeah. And in a place called Kutnohora, which is about, I don't know, maybe 30, 40, 50 kilometers outside of Prague, there's this other ossuary. And there, sometime in the early 19th century, a local sort of artist, I guess, was asked to help decorate. So there's actually a working Christian chapel that's all constructed from the burns in the ossuary. There's the local landlord's coat of arms constructed in the burns from the ossuary. and all of the light lamps that hang down are all made from skulls and crossbones Yeah skulls and crossbones And so you know it just bizarre and just really creepy I mean, if you're into like visiting strange, creepy places, there are many of them in this part of the world. It sounds very interesting. I don't know if I would have the nerve to do it, but I think I would have to see it one time. Let me ask you this. Now, are people open-minded enough to the idea of the paranormal to have, like, ghost tours and such at these locations? Yeah, certainly in Prague, there are many organized ghost tours. I'm not aware of any in Brindna, but there are other kinds of tours that would take in some of these places. You know, under what's called the cabbage market, there's a whole array of medieval cellars and catacombs that were used by the merchants to store their wares at reasonable temperatures. And so you can do a tour of the catacombs and then the crypt and all of this kind of thing. It's not necessarily a ghost tour. and I know that there are societies here of people that are interested in supernatural stuff and try to document it and of course the local tv stations are always into a good ghost story there was a lovely one a few years ago which I think I included in the book I'm pretty sure I did about a village where a house was being reconstructed and the house was was reputed to have had you know activity in it and the activity took the form of a poltergeist which would start fires and the fires were described as cold fires you know that the flames were not hot the flames were cold and almost anything would set a flame concrete steel it non-flammable stuff you know would burst into this cold flame fire and i think the fire brigade were reputed to have been called out 45 times in three days to attend these small cold fires. So the builders, they were reconstructing it, more or less knocking it down and rebuilding something else. And the builders were having some real issues. For example, you know, a circular saw. Apparently, one of the builders was sort of leaning down, doing something. And he heard this whirring sound. And when he turned around, this circular saw was embedded in the wall just by his head about three inches deep. Oh. So they had some real problems. It might be time to leave. Yes. Some of these workers no longer wanted to work there. So this was a poltergeist sort of activity story that was on the news and for a few evenings anyway, it was good fun. And it does seem there was something to it. I mean, I saw the photograph of the embedded circular saw. And, yeah, it would have to have been thrown with some force to embed itself in the wall like that. Absolutely. And now, Gary, I want to ask you, and I didn't see this in your book, but do you conduct paranormal investigations? I don't, no. I actually try to leave well alone. and this dates back to the time when I was experiencing stuff. I've got some theories, but several years ago when I was a college student, a friend of mine and I, visiting Hull for the weekend, went back to visit with a girl that we were both interested in at the time. and when we arrived at her house she was with a group of friends and they were doing Ouija board in the kitchen and I said no I'm not gonna I'm not gonna participate in that so I sat and watched the tv in the tv room my friend went through and joined them and after about 20 minutes all hell broke loose the door flew open and my friend comes running through uh through the tv room up the staircase and he's screaming crying everybody's chasing him around the building his behavior is just bizarre and eventually I managed to catch him uh caught him by the leg and I I said made the mistake of saying whatever it is come into me and apparently for the next 10 minutes everybody was chasing me around the building I was crying and screaming and behaving bizarrely uh and eventually I woke up at the bottom of the staircase I came back to myself at the bottom of the wondering what on earth had happened. So I tend to take the view that I don't want to play with this stuff. I don't want to encourage it. I'm interested in it. I think I have some ideas about what causes it. And organizing paranormal tours is something I would not do i i am inclined to to like to talk um about the stories and stuff so i will occasionally you know do like shows in local libraries and things and talk about phenomena but um i don't like to actively participate in it because i feel it encourages the energies um and sets up for an environment which um i don't really want to have to be bothered with quite frankly don't Don't blame me one bit. Do not blame me one bit. I'm serious. So have you ever encountered anything during your research for these books or while visiting these haunted locations that scared the living daylights out of you? Not doing the research. I mean, quite honestly, well, I think there's not much in the cold light of day really scares me anymore. but I must admit that I run a website called My Haunted Life 2, and hopefully people send me their stories, and I put the good ones up, and you know the kind of website. And about 18 months ago, I got this story in about black-eyed kids, and for me, I'd heard about it, but I kind of discounted it as an urban myth. and I read this story and for the first time in a long time I got that you know cold fingers at the back of my neck I mean the idea I've been woken up at two o'clock in the morning by the doorbell ringing and then going to the door and finding a couple of 10 year old kids demanding to be let into your house who have black eyes that that really did scare me and then I did a full investigation of that phenomena and wrote a book about it as as as i tend to do and i still find myself i just recently quit smoking but i used to pop out the back into a courtyard of our apartment and if i was alone um occasionally you know maybe maybe my partner was out and my kid was in bed and i would go out back and smoke a cigarette and i i that that was the only time when i was thinking my goodness me, I don't really want to look around the corner. What if there's a 10-year-old kid with black eyes waiting for me? That story, you know, that really got to me. I mean, that's the only one that's really gotten to me is the black-eyed kid. I find that quite disconcerting. I still do. There are several researchers that go around doing shows about it. And every time I hear it, I look over my shoulder. So because it is very creepy. Kids anyway, Stories about kids creep me out anyway. Yeah. And it's the sort of, for me, it is the kid. It's the innocence combined with the demonic of the black eyes. Absolutely. And the let me in is basically let me in to occupy your body. I mean, it's asking permission, basically. It's asking permission to possess you. And there are no real stories of what happened to people that let them in. But there are thousands upon thousands of disappearances across the United States every year. And I mean, you know, I just wonder. I've seen two stories where they were let in, and that's it. But one, an old couple, she developed cancer. The pets all died of cancer. He then developed cancer, and it was a bad situation all around. And in another example, they were momentarily let in by one person and kicked out by their spouse. And they told the person that you're going to die. and she went to the hospital and had a checkup and found that she had cancer and was terminally ill. So, you know, those are the only two examples where black-eyed kids have been let into a house that I've come across, yet there are hundreds and hundreds of stories. So you've just got to ask yourself, surely they must be successful at being let in, otherwise why would they keep doing it? And if so, where are these people? Let's touch on this for just a moment. When you are gathering your information for the book, are you talking to people firsthand or are they writing into you? How are you getting these stories? I do it always. Basically, I ask people to submit stories to the website. We have a Facebook group where we ask people to submit stories. I talk to people, friends, family, friends of friends, strangers in pubs at night. I visit Reddit. I visit some of the review websites for hotels and things because quite honestly, if you're bored one evening, go to one of the review sites, TripAdvisor.com, for example, and just put in the search criteria, haunted or ghost. And you'll find quite a lot of reviews of places that are absolutely wonderful ghost stories. You know, we checked into the hotel and the covers were pulled off me. The light in the bathroom kept coming on. Someone was flushing the toilet all night long. We complained. The maid wouldn't come in the room. I mean, there's some really great stories on those review sites. Well, when you're looking, when you're doing your research and you're looking for stuff, you know you get pretty creative as to where you go and I often I try to post something on the website every weekday and sometimes of course I've had no stories and I'm not going to make them up so I'll go looking I'll go looking on Reddit, I'll go looking on TripAdvisor and other review sites or I'll write about a place that's creepy like Cut Nahora or one of the examples we've already discussed and I keep, I just keep going I mean, I'm absolutely fascinated. Just recently, I mean, I'll give you an example. What I'm doing right now is because I've been a bit busy and trying to write a 100-plus page book has been difficult. But I want to keep putting material out and I want people to be interested in what I'm doing. So I came upon the idea of doing like a series of Kindle short books, all sold for 99 cents, nothing expensive. and doing, say, one every couple of months that's maybe 30, 40, maximum 50 pages long. And then at the end of the series, I can turn it into a bigger book, a paperback, for example, a compilation paperback. So that's what I've been doing. The first one I put out about two or three months ago was a Black Eyed Kids book. And the last one, this is a good example of how things seem to happen. my mum's in her 80s and she lives alone in Hull still in England and I tried to talk to her once a week or so on the phone and we get along real well and one day the phone rang and I picked it up it was my mum and she was a bit perturbed and I said what's the problem she said well you're psychic and you know these things I said well I'm not really you know but you know how mothers are She tells everybody all kinds of weird things, I'm sure, with great pride. And I said, well, what is the problem? She said, well, Gary, she said, in the last three days, I have seen my sister. The other day I was in my kitchen. I was in the oven when I stood up. She stood there momentarily right in front of me, giving me the biggest shock of my life, and then disappeared. uh this morning i was vacuuming the lounge and i saw her come up to the front door and i switched off the vacuum and went to the door there was nobody there and i'm a bit worried because obviously she's still alive i thought to myself wow what a great premise ghosts of the living yeah how could you have ghosts of living people and this set me off so the second book in the series is called Ghosts of the Living. And I look at things like doppelgangers, bilocation, astral projection, remote viewing, and all of these kinds of phenomenons looking for an explanation. And I actually came to a pretty quick conclusion that if you know what bilocation is, it's where a person is said to be in two places at once. And in the Catholic Church, many of the saints are credited with the ability to bilocate. And if you look at the old sort of alchemists and philosophers of the 16th, 17th century, many of them too were credited with this ability to be in two places at once and bilocate. And it seems to me that, you know, this idea of bilocation, what if it was a natural phenomena that we didn know we had an ability that we didn know we had but that in moments perhaps of deep concentration daydreaming you can physically be in two places at once Maybe my aunt was thinking about my mother and there she is for 30 seconds in my mother's kitchen or walking up to the front door. And it doesn't sound very tenable talking about it this way, but I think if you read the book and sort of followed my logic and some of the other examples of how biolocation can occur, it begins to be a bit more credible. No, I find this very, very, very fascinating. As a matter of fact, I want to have you back to talk about that specifically. That book is amazing. Actually, yes. And this is part of the thought process that led me to that conclusion, is that there are a couple of stories that I've had submitted to me where two people have been together and one of those people has left to go do something maybe in another part of the house and yet the other person who was left alone has seen or observed the other person return either to sit with them or to be in the room and has tried to engage in discussion with that person only to have them be silent and sort of non-responsive and at some point the person who had left the room shouts from above or some other room and the person realizes that what they thought was their colleague or partner was actually a doppelganger and has now disappeared and i actually think the best story um that that has been submitted is is the one where a teenage boy um walks into his room bedroom and there is his grandmother opening the wardrobe doors and the boy says to the grandmother granny granny what are you doing in my room and the grandmother says nothing and continues to to sort of rummage around in the in the wardrobe and the young boy says granny what are you doing what are you looking for can i help and he's the granny turns around and looks at the young boy and that is a teenager and the boy's like is totally fearful because the eyes are just vacant not only vacant but he describes it as evil the evil it's his evil granny looking at him and this spell is broken when a voice from down the stairs which is that of the same grandmother says i can't remember the kid's name david dinner's ready oh gosh and of course then that the granny in the wardrobe is no longer there no he goes downstairs and his granny is there laying has been cooking dinner the whole time and yet there was evil grandmother you know evil version of grandmother rummaging around rummaging around in his wardrobe ignoring him and you know again this kind of this kind of doppelganger thing where the doppelganger doesn't seem to be conscious in my opinion the evil look really probably was just his interpretation of a blank look yeah a vacant look right because if you think about it if the granny's downstairs preparing tea or dinner and gets into the right frame of mind very deep meditative sort of thought you know completely lost to what she's doing and she's put herself maybe in in the bedroom thinking about you know the grandson but she's doing it in a day in a non-willful daydream so so her double when when a double physically manifests it's got a vacant look about it it's not quite with it he interprets that vacant look as evil but in reality it's just a vacant look so this is how i kind of come to the conclusion that perhaps we can all by locate we've forgotten how to do it it's an old magical or religious technique and sometimes perhaps in a moment of stress or a moment of sort of accidental deep meditation we're able to do this momentarily And that's given rise to the doppelganger stories and some of the other stories. There's a Vargoga or whatever it is story in Scandinavia that's very similar to the doppelganger. And I do think that's something that deserves a little bit more looking into, to be honest. The idea of another physical presence of the same person being with you and the real person is in another room. The thought of that just scares me to death. It does. Now, your book is great, by the way. I did read that. I want to ask you this. Haunted hospitals are something I like to hear about as well. Do you have any in your book or any that you know of there that are known to be haunted? In the Czech Republic, there probably are haunted hospitals. I'm not aware of any. I don't think I put any in the book. But there's a book called True Tales of Haunted Places that I put out about a year ago that has ghost stories from different types of locations, hospitals being one of them. And, of course, hospitals are notorious for sort of strange activity. So I've had quite a lot of stories submitted and heard a lot of stories about haunted hospitals that vary from footsteps and things moving around to the wonderfully scary sort of thing where you go into the waiting room. You sit in the waiting room. There's one other person in the waiting room perhaps reading a newspaper. You say good morning. They look at you. sort of maybe say good morning back. And then a nurse or a doctor walks by and you say, you know, excuse me, do you know how much longer we're going to be waiting? And the doctor stops and looks puzzled and says, we, it's just you. Then you look around and there's nobody else there. I mean, I've had several stories like that told to me. And it's the same kind of effect. It's very creepy that you were sat in a room with somebody that you thought was a physical reality, only to find out that either they were a product of your imagination or something else. Right. Creepy indie. And a lot of those type of stories in hospitals. Also, I had a couple of good stories from sort of mortuaries. There's one where the guy observed like a dark shadow emerge from one of the bodies and go through the window and up into the air, which I thought was a rather nice potential confirmation of some form of life after death. So some good stories about hospitals and asylums and all that kind of stuff. And they're in that book, and I do get stories like that from time to time. I think my current interest is poltergeist, and I think the next book will be poltergeist stories because we've had quite a lot of poltergeist stories. But I grew up – and to be honest, I've probably written the stories already. But when you – I used to come home from school and I'd put my keys down. In the hall, we had a window with a window frame between the lounge and the hall. I'd put my keys on the window ledge and maybe go into the kitchen, make a sandwich or something. When I'd come back, my keys would be missing. and we would search high and low for keys and they would they would turn up in the bathroom sink upstairs or um you know on top of the television and tv lounge or something and this kind of objects disappearing and reappearing was part of the phenomena along with uh really horrendous um scary creepy sort of sounds so footsteps breathing horrible rattling sighs at night, all coming from the attic or footsteps coming up the stairs. The worst thing I think that ever happened to me was when I came home from university for a weekend and I was sleeping on my brother's bedroom floor in a sleeping bag. And I'd been to the pub and I had probably, I don't know, five beers, pints, and I was really sleepy. And I thought I was literally just going to lay down and pass out. and I remember I got into the sleeping bag and just about on the point of sleep and I heard the front door open and I thought that's weird did I did I leave the front door unlocked and I realized I thought no I didn't I not only did I lock it but I think I left the keys in the lock so that kind of grabbed my attention so from being woozy half drunk half sleep I'm now wide awake with with the hair on the back of my neck stuck up on end. And I hear the footsteps slowly up the stairs and the sighing and the breathing and the moaning. And it's getting closer and closer and closer. And the closer it gets, the more I'm sitting bolt upright in the darkness, terrified. And I'm looking at the bedroom door. And sure enough, the bedroom door starts to open very, very slowly. And then all of a sudden, it opens with a bang. and my father walks in in his pajamas and switches on the light and he says you all right i said yeah he says i heard that too i heard that too gary i heard it someone came in and walked up the stairs very slowly i heard it let's sit together until the atmosphere calms down and you know that was a terrifying experience and it happened in that house to me quite often and my father as i say was a great guy and very, very supportive. And, you know, he made me realize I wasn't going crazy, that some of these things really were happening. But that to me was probably one of the scariest things that ever happened to me in my life. I was literally about to scream. I bet you have a section in your book where you discuss a strange document that was on display. Can you share with us what that was exactly? Well, the Devil's Bible. Is that what you're talking about? Yes. The Devil's Bible? Yes. Yeah, I was fortunate enough to see that there was an exhibition on just outside of Brindner several years ago. What's it called? The Gigas Codex, I think. And it was a replica, actually, that I went to see, but it was still pretty astounding. I mean, it's this huge, massive, leather-bound Bible. It's not really a Bible, actually. It's a leather-bound book. and it was reputedly written by a single person overnight. And the story goes that a monk in a monastery somewhere in the Czech Republic, I guess in the 15th, 16th century timeframe, committed some kind of horrible sin and the punishment for this sin was he was going to be put to death by being bricked up in the wall alive, which is a horrible, horrible, horrible way to die. And so he said, well, look, would you forgive me if I were able to write a book that contained all knowledge overnight? Apparently, he was granted an opportunity to do this. And of course, by midnight, he'd barely made any progress at all. And so he made a pact with the devil. This book was written overnight. It contains the entire Bible. It contains a number of other writings. and in the middle of it is what is reputed to be a self-portrait of the author, which is a picture of the devil himself. And that's the story behind the devil's Bible or the GIGAS Codex. And if you do want to Google it, you will see pictures of the devil, the self-portrait of the devil himself that's in the middle of the Bible. And that's the story. And it's a tremendous-looking – I mean, it's huge. It's like, I want to say it's like three foot long by, you know, two, four foot wide or something like that. It's a massive document. Well, I've never heard that before. And where was this on display? This was on display at a place called Rairad, just outside of Brno. I think the actual original is held in Sweden for some reason. The Swedish invaded Brno, sorry, Czech Republic at one point in history. So that's maybe how it ended up there. But if you go out and Google and just put in the devil's Bible, GIGAS Codex, G-I-G-A-S Codex, you'll be able to find some pictures of it. And you'll be able to find pictures of the devil, the self-portrait, the reputed self-portrait. Outstanding. Thank you so much, Gary. And I want to give you an opportunity now to tell my listeners where they can find more information about you and your books. Sure. Well, of course, on Amazon, I have an author's page. If they just put in G. Michael Vasey, V-A-S-E-Y, that'll bring up all of the books on Amazon. But if they want to sort of engage with me a little more, they can go to Gary M. Vasey or G. Michael Vasey dot com, which is my personal website. Or they can indeed go to MyHauntedLife2, that's T-O-O as in also, MyHauntedLife2.com. And there they can either submit stories or read other people's stories and interact by commenting or submitting their own experiences or writing to me or whatever they like to do. And I'm always interested in hearing from people and I'm certainly interested in stories and collecting stories. All right. Thank you for joining me on Mysterious Radio, Gary. No problem. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you very much.