This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on I heart radio. And welcome back to coast to coast. George Norrie with you are special guest, Anna Maria Manalo, her website is linked up at coast to coast AM dot com. She's got how many books do you have out now, Anna? Um, I have eight now, uh, and then another one coming out late summer, early fall. We'll go through most of them today. Okay. Tell us about the other stories you were going to get into before the break. Oh, okay. Um, well, real quick here, I know we only have an hour. Um, there were two, you're, you're, hold on. You're with us next hour for phone calls. Oh, excellent. That's great. Um, well, I'm going to tell you a couple of UFO stories and then I'm going to step off from that one and go into the paranormal realm because there's a lot of that as well. It's just really what you're interested in, what the audience is interested in. Uh, this one is closer to home. This once again involves a body of water and George, I don't know what it is about UFOs and water. Uh, these two gentlemen were coming home from work. There were buddies. Uh, one gentleman happened to have just had a, an infant, a baby. Uh, and they decided they would go to a local watering hole. So they crossed the bridge into New Jersey and promptly parked at a very, very busy parking lot where everybody was already inside, you know, having relaxing, having drinks, et cetera. Uh, and the one gentleman then approaches the door. Uh, they were parked like right in the middle of the parking lot, a very, very busy parking lot. I can't tell you the name of the restaurant. Um, but the other guy then says, Oh wait, I forgot the pictures. I was going to show you of the baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I gotta get back there. He said, okay, I'll wait for you inside. And then the guy dashes out, goes back to his car. Um, and opens the door of the backseat. He then climbs into the backseat, takes out the pictures, the envelope, whatever they were in. And as he pulls himself out and closes the door, he finds that he's alone in the parking lot. Only his car. Did that surprise him? Uh, yeah. So we're talking just a few minutes here from when he left the door of the restaurant and told his friend he was going to go back and get the pictures walking to the middle of the parking lot, going in and just, you know, putting his head in into the car to get the, he looks back out, closes the door and he's alone in the car. All the, all the cars are gone. All the cars are gone. He then looks at his watch. And when, you know, when people are leaving work, let's say it's 5 36 p.m. He finds that it's one a.m. According to his watch. Missing time again. Uh, and, and so he's, he walks over frantic to the restaurant looking for his friend, the rent restaurants closed, the friend sitting outside. And he said, we have been looking for you. Where have you been? I even called the police. I called your wife. Where have you been? And he, to this day, he couldn't explain what had happened to him. Yet his car was always where it was, right? Yet the car was always where it was. For some inexplicable reason, something happened to him as soon as he climbed into the car to get the pictures. Now, did he have, did he have marks on his body like the other lady did? No, this time he didn't. There was nothing this time. But he wasn't hurt. Nothing like that. He wasn't hurt. Nothing like that. What does he think happened to himself? He, he doesn't know. He, I mean, he, he was at some point laughing, thinking, maybe I went in and had a ton of drinks and didn't realize, but he wasn't inebriated. When would they have scooped him up? That's the good question, George. And I wonder about these things because it just seems to just happen without the person even realizing what predicament they're in. And this brings me to the next story, which also happened on another bridge in that same river. After all these stories, people were telling me, you better watch it when you're crossing those river. Yeah. Those bridges. So this is a bridge that's further up. I would say further down bucks, lower bucks. We have upper bucks here, lower bucks. This is a bridge in the lower box area. A couple this time was approaching a bridge and they proceeded to cross it and they had to stop because there was a van ahead of them. And the van seemed to be moving, but all the doors were open. Driver side, passenger side. And the wife was wondering what was going on. So finally the man started following the van and then the van finally stopped. So if you picture something that was, I guess, in neutral and finally, you know, slows down of its own accord, he dashes out and runs to the open door. There's nobody in the van. No one is driving the van. Both sliding doors in the back were open. No one was in the back. He comes around to the other side. There's no one there either. He then goes in and engages the transmission so it's in park because the thing was moving. It was actually in drive. Slowly but moving. Slowly but moving. And finally it lost momentum. And then he starts looking over the bridge. And there was nothing. Weird. So I don't know how you explain something like that. So that was another case that came to my attention that was reported. And in this particular one, they ran back to the car. They had a very strange feeling. The gentleman who was talking to me told me that for some reason there were no sounds along that river. No sounds. Everything was drowned out. And he just got the creepiest feeling. He ran back to his own car, made a Y-turn and went back. Probably crossed another bridge. I don't know. Your first novel, Anna, was called The Way Through the Woods. Your titles are as scary as the books. Thank you. Tell us a little bit about this without giving away the plot. Okay. Well, this came to my attention. Very strange situation. I was attending a child's birthday party. And the birthday party was so big. All the relatives, all the friends and everything else was there. There were probably in excess of 100 people. So they had closed the restaurant for the occasion and I happened to sit. Well, she literally almost fell on my lap. Sit next to an elderly lady who was the grandmother of the child. And in the course of the evening, you know, we were being served, etc. She was talking to me and asked me what I was doing. And at this point, you know, I had already been contemplating retiring. And then I said, well, you know, I'm, this is what I'm planning on doing. Well, she was very riveted. And the next thing you know, I had taken her phone number. She started telling me over the phone and in person, her story of what happened to her in World War Two. This woman actually went through the Bavarian Woods to escape the Gestapo. She was only at the time she was 13, 14 years old. Her father had been recruited to do uniforms for Germany. And she, her mother was taken because her mother was hiding a child who had a disability. And you know, George, anything that the Germans felt was an imperfection. People were exterminated. Exactly. Set in camps. Set in camps. So what happened to her was very tragic. I remember how she was so emotionally, even during that time, overwrought over what had happened. She never saw her mother again. But then she ended up being forcibly enlisted to be a teacher of the youth corps, the German, they were indoctrinating children. And she was made to be a teacher. She had to preach to them about all the philosophies of the German movement. And then one day she decided to escape. She walks through the Bavarian Woods and that's when she witnesses things that were being replayed. It was really not happening anymore. But because of the violence and the suddenness of it, the tragedies that were happening, things were being replayed before her eyes as she went through the Bavarian Woods. It took her several weeks to get through them. And by the time she got out without, she had a knowledge of how things were played out when something tragic happens. And you know what I'm alluding to, George, these are all disembodied people, even animals that had passed away because of the war. Were being reenacted in front of her. So what you've done in some of your books is you've taken real stories and have created them as novels, right? Yes. So what I do is I take what I what I do is I set it up in such a way that the plot. Ends up being pieces of the true events in this particular case because it is considered creative nonfiction. It's about 85 to 90 percent true. And in this particular case, what really, and I still don't understand it to this day, is how she ended up entering this particular area, a different dimension altogether, where she was interacting with spirits and not realizing that they were spirits. You've got a book called The Haunted Air Looms. I assume that has to do with artifacts that have been haunted by ghosts. Yes. Yes. So there's four stories in haunted air looms. They were all from actual antique dealers that I had met because I used to collect a lot of antiques in my time. And having now learned about them and their lives, it's been quite a number of years. They finally opened up to me and told me about these objects that they had a problem trying to. They didn't know what to do with it. I mean, whether it was ethically correct to sell it. Some came into them because they were traveling. And once she traveled to Czechoslovakia and ordered an urn. And it came shipped to her door in Boston. And it just went on from there because she did not realize what it housed. She couldn't open the lid. It was what they call a blue and white urn. Beautiful. She doesn't have possession of it anymore at this point. They had to bury it. But it was an urn that was about two feet tall. Were there were there remains in the urn at that time? Yes. Not to give you the spoiler, but yes, but there was something that was around it that was protecting it. And that is what terrified her family and led them to consult other people. At the time, they were living in a beautiful home that had a large patio attached to it. And they were it wasn't even unwrapped yet when it came. But something was trying to get out of the wrapping and something was helping it to get out of the wrapping. So you can picture a big package and big container and something was tearing away at the edge of the box. I'm in St. Louis right now, Anna. And they have arrested a guy who stole 40 Browns urns from cemeteries. These urns would be on top of the gravestone and they'd be the cremated remains of the loved one. And he stole the bronze urns. Now, eventually he's going to get haunted, isn't he? Well, something's going to visit on him. You would think so. My gosh. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to me, George, that people don't realize. I know there's some kind of fad right now about dolls, haunted dolls. And as recently as last year, when I was in a book fest, I actually have a doll prop and it looks like a black eyed kid. And, you know, people thought it was for sale. They always wanted to see one. They always wanted to get a haunted doll. And here's a cautionary note. You never know what you're acquiring when you're actually intending or hoping to get something of that nature. The next thing you know, you encounter one. To see one or actually hold one and to actually own it is not what you want with these particular objects. They're rare. I have to say that they don't come often, but when they do, it is incredibly difficult to get rid of them. If not, deal with the havoc that happens afterwards. Go to Eastern and go to coast2coastam.com for more.
