Paranormal Parlor

Hi there, and thank you for allowing me to be a part of your journey today. I'm your host, K-Town, and you're listening to Mysterious Radio. Tonight we're going to be talking about shimmering specters to mysterious tricks. Varla Ventura's Paranormal Parlor includes original supernatural tales, classic ghost stories, legends, hauntings, seances, superstitions, and death customs. This book showcases a chilling collection of startling ghost stories as told to the author as well as legendary ghosts and haunted locations and an overview of paranormal parlor games that rose to popularity in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It also includes hidden history and the quiet horror writings of the architect who started the Gothic Revival movement. Varla Ventura's Paranormal Parlor, Ghost Seances, and Tales of True Hauntings is available on Amazon, in Kindle, and paperback. And here is my special guest, Varla Ventura. Hi, well, I am Varla Ventura. I'm the author of several books, the most recent one being Varla Ventura's Paranormal Parlor, Ghosts, Seances, and Tales of True Hauntings, which I think we're going to talk about this one mostly today. And I had a little bit of an unconventional childhood that I think led me down the path of ghosts and seances and sort of being a lover of the strange. I have a mom who is a witch. She's not necessarily a witch by rights or by initiation. She's a witch by ability, and she taught me a lot about magical herbs and plants growing up, psychic arts such as the chariot. I think in my baby book, my horoscope was in there before my birth weight. so um i grew up just exposed to a lot of i guess what you'd call the occult or the psychic arts and became pretty interested in them at a young age and as i got older and more into my teen years and then you know on and on into my um 30s and 40s and such i really got more into some of the meaning behind what these people were trying to, some of the original practices of seances and things like that, in particular in the United States and what they were trying to achieve. And so I kind of put that together into this book, along with some personal experiences that I've had with seeing ghosts and hauntings, as well as interviews with people that I've worked with over the years and, you know, pepper it in there with some, throwing a few haunted cemeteries and old institutions and you're good to go. Okay. So that is very, very interesting about your mother. Wow. Can we talk about her a little bit? I mean, do you mind? Yeah. No, not at all. She'd be thrilled. Is she still? Great. That's great. Is she still around? Yes, she is. She is great. No. No. Okay. So she was, you said she calls herself a witch or she is a witch by her ability. So first of all, how, how did she get into it? Is this something that runs in your family? I mean, how did she get started? Yeah, I do think there's a history of sort of psychic and second sight in my family in particular on that side, on my mother's side. her parents were actually both were both deaf and they they used to do all kinds of interesting seances as kids the deaf they're all their friends from the deaf community would come over and they'd they'd do all the kind of parlor games the paranormal parlor games they'd put their hands together and they'd think of something and see if they could get one of the kids to go in the other room and get it. And so, although I would say that, you know, my grandparents were, you know, they were upstanding citizens, they weren't necessarily dabbling in the psychic arts a lot, I think it gave my mom this kind of interest in that other kind of otherworldly ability. And I think she was born with it as well. I think she had experiences she couldn't understand and couldn't quite explain as a child that sort of developed into this interest in what is beyond, you know, why do we see ghosts? What are they here to tell us? So, and then also, you know, she was raised in, born and raised in San Francisco, California, where, you know, come the 60s, there was just so much of that kind of new age, new thought movement happening within the communities there. And though she wasn't necessarily heavily into any of the neo-pagan communities, she was by nature exposed to a lot of these. I mean, it was easy to go down to the, you know, down to the curandera and get a few candles and figure out what you needed for spell work. And so I think she became interested in it in a sort of organic way. And then, you know, I think she was actually raised Catholic. And I think interestingly, there's a lot of, well, of course, if we look historically and we see, you know, Catholicism and Christianity sort of on the opposite end of the spectrum of witchcraft, in many ways, there's a lot of overlap. And you see that in many different practices around the world, that there's this blending of the sort of more devout religious beliefs and some very, very magical thinking. And so, I think she didn't look at Catholicism in the same way that her peers did. She looked at it as this sort of magical pursuit. And so that allowed her to kind of, you know, keep some of those roots while expanding into the other arts without feeling like she was essentially a sinner. So by the time I came along, sin wasn't part of our lexicon. I didn't grow up going to church or anything like that, really. Although I also wasn't raised to think that that was wrong, necessarily. It just wasn't the way that we did things. So, yeah, she's a very interesting person. And I think I have spent quite a bit of time in this sort of like neo-pagan community, both as an author and an editor and as a friend to many who practice from all different ends of the spectrum. and I find it's very interesting that I sort of organically came to a lot of the conclusions that my mom did and then you know by the time I was in my late 20s and early 30s we would actually have a lot of conversations about that aspect of our lives so we kind of came to a lot of the same conclusions without necessarily practicing them together. Okay now you're gonna make me I could do old show about your mom and your family. Really? I mean, very interesting. Very interesting. Can I stay there for just a moment? I still have more questions here about your mom here. Okay. So you've been, so your, your upbringing is very intriguing to me. Um, okay. So your mom was a witch. Did your mom go out and tell people that she was a witch? I mean, what kind of reaction was she? I don't I don't think she had to. I mean, she's the woman on the hill that all the animals come to when they're sick or injured. She's the woman on the hill that we used to joke and say there must just be a neon sign that says strays come here because cats were just always showing up at her property. Just showing up and being fed and, you know, if someone had abandoned. And so while we lived in San Francisco as a child, when I was about seven years old, my family moved to this very, very rural part of Northern California, very off grid. No electricity. We had no running water. It was very rural. And they still live there and they still are completely off grid. They didn't necessarily go off grid to be, you know, trendsetters for the eco movement, although that was kind of a benefit. But they sort of went off grid to get out from the grinds that they had been living under. And I think are you meaning off grid by are you are you saying that because they live like way out in the middle of nowhere or are they disconnected from, you know, like the Internet and the social media world? And are they is it like that, too, or what? It's both of those things. Yes. Yes. We briefly tried to get my mom on Facebook and she just couldn't she couldn't quite quite get on this. So she doesn't I mean, Internet is available in that area now, but she doesn't she doesn't have it. They have TV, of course, so they're not like completely not anti-electronics or anything like that. But they have a generator and solar and wind for power. They, you know, they have a landline. They kind of don't really use their cell phones. They spend a lot of time just kind of in that. So they're off grid in all of those ways. They're aware of things that are going on in the world. So they do watch the news and read the paper and things like that. But they're just not connected. They're not people walking around with cell phones and texting each other or looking on their phones for information or really looking anywhere other than perhaps books for information if they're trying to look something up. Or they just ask their grandchildren who are like 10,000 times more savvy with that kind of thing. So some of it's generational, too, I think. I think even if they had wanted to kind of stick with being online, they really just weren't very interested in that. So, for example, in order for my mom to listen to this interview, I would probably have to get my sister to play it for her on her phone or her computer or something like that at my sister's house. But she will listen to it. Hi, mom. Tell mom hi. So nice. Awesome. Okay, so I'm just wondering, did she have an altar in the house? Did you grow up with that? I mean, did she do? So what did that look like? Can you tell us what that looked like? That whole house was an altar in a way, right? Well, for example, we had Halloween decorations up most of the year. We would frequently, she'd put things up at Halloween and then they'd stay up through the holidays and the pumpkin lights would make it onto the tree. And then there was always like three or four things that just never got put away. And they got integrated into the general decor. So lots of little, you know, plant starts and, and, you know, kind of crystals and things like that on her windowsill above the sink and baskets full of magical herbs and old fashioned, you know, brooms and swords and things like that as decor. and she certainly did have an altar and and that she she also had an altar in her room but as well as she had one or two out in the woods as well as having several places that she would meet with other women in the area and they would get together yes but they don't they didn't call themselves a coven and she primarily would do things in a solitary fashion but she would essentially have, because they kind of say they're a goddess circle. And we'd be like, okay, or a coven mom, like either way, and she'd just laugh. But, you know, some people consider, they come to witchcraft through learning and through trying and maybe going to like some group events and things like that. And I think that if I were to say to my mom, oh, well, you're a Wiccan, she would not even really be sure what I mean by that. So not all witches are Wiccans. I'm not a Wiccan, but I do have some witchery leanings, I would say, some very witchy leanings. But I think she wouldn't necessarily want to define or hold herself to a specific name or type of thing. Having said that, she certainly loved the sort of classic icons of witchcraft, the pointy hats and the, you know, the brooms and the black cats. Now, that was one thing that I learned at a very young age. I was probably one of the only three-year-olds in town that knew what a familiar was because I knew that my mom's cat was a- Okay, so you said that somebody is not going to know what that is. So tell us what a familiar is? So a familiar is a magical, is a magical pet, basically, it's a being or a, an animal that comes to you and has its own sort of connection with you. So sometimes familiars are identifiers, sometimes familiars are actually, I mean, in legend and lore, a familiar is actually can be a shapeshifter and can aid you, you know, in battle or whatever you might need some help with. Traditionally, witches have a familiar meaning. It's sort of an animal liaison into that sort of wild world. And a witch is familiar is frequently a black cat or a wolf. Well, I can't tell you how many black cats my mom now has. And she also has a couple of wolves. so really uh real wolves well they're um they're they're cross they're a couple different kinds of yeah yeah but one of them is so huge if you ever seen a great dane and then imagine the Great Dane with fur you know three inch fuzzy fur and a giant wolf head And you got this this wolf that and my brother lives near her and he also has wolves. So he brings his wolves around and she's got a wolf and all the wolves just, you know, wolf around and run around the property. it's a great deal of fun. You really should come over. That's awesome. Okay. Did your mom do seances? You know, I'm getting ready to get to that. Yes, actually. Now what she did in her private, you know, girl time when we were kids, when she would go off with her friends, I can't speak entirely to that. Although I certainly could ask her if she ever, you know, but I know that she had done a few things like that. But even just with us, we did dabble with the Ouija board. And I know that she would frequently communicate with her. In particular, she had a brother who she was very close with. And she would, as many people do, she would look to him for guidance and would ask him and try and communicate with him in a slightly more ritualistic way than, you know, hey, can you look out for me? So he was, you know, he died and she would still kind of communicate with him. um you know but i think as far as the seances go i do remember we had uh we got a my sister and i that's who i mean by we and i have a sister who's very close in age to me and we got a ouija board for christmas one year is like look like the monopoly board under the under the christmas tree and we unwrapped it as a Ouija board. We're like, huh, okay. We don't really know what to do with this. My mom said, well, let me show you. And so we actually started playing with that quite a bit and made contact. My sister and I made contact with something that said it was the ghost of, or it said it was this little girl. And now I can't remember the name it spelled out on the, on the board, but it was very similar to the name of a single grave that had been found on the property next to my parents. One of the neighbors was looking for one of her animals in the woods. And it was a peacock, which is just another kind of crazy part of the story. But the neighbor had peacocks and one of the peacocks flew off. And this peacock actually led the neighbor to a solitary grave. It was for a little girl who was about, I think she was seven, a little over seven years old when she died. She has a marble headstone. I've seen the grave. She's a marble headstone and a footstone, a very magnificent grave, but it's the only grave of its kind. And we've even had an archaeologist come out and look to see if there are, if it was a tiny little pioneer cemetery that was just not somehow the other ones were all wooden and he didn't see any evidence of it. And we talked about how unusual that was because it was quite expensive to have a marble stone erected. And then the name on the grave was not related to anyone that anyone could remember had owned the property. In any case, we made contact supposedly with this little girl and we were little girls ourselves. We were seven and eight. My mom walked into the room and said, oh, what are you girls doing? Sort of casually, you know, and I remember looking at my sister as we had been, you know, before my mom came in and this, the planchette, which is the little thing on the Ouija board, right? That moves around and leads you to the yes, no, and the letters. that was moving quite rapidly. And I knew I wasn't moving it. And I could tell actually by the look on my sister's face, she's a little older than me. And you know, when like your sister is like, your older sister, especially is afraid, you usually kind of freaks you out. So she was not doing it. She said, were you doing that? And I said, no, I'm not doing it. are you doing it no I'm not doing it and I could tell that she was too freaked out to actually be just kind of joking with me and also that just wasn't really her style and still isn't you know that's not her her style wouldn't be to scare or prank in that way so um anyway about that time my mom walks in and she asks what we're doing and she and we say oh well we're you know talking with Elise, I think the little girl's name was. And she said, Oh, what? And she kind of comes over and we're like, yeah, it's talking. And we still had our fingers on the thing. And all of a sudden, my mom, she just got a little bit pale and she just reached down and she picked that board up, folded in half because it was totally like a Monopoly board, folded in half. I still remember the sound of the planchette kind of hitting that thick cardboard. She tucked it under her arm and she walked out with it. And we were just kind of like, what? What just happened? Like, why'd mom take that away? Now, my sister remembers it, that she was freaked out and never wanted to do it again and was relieved. I remember it like, what did mom do with that? I want to see, I want to finish this conversation. And then years, a little bit later, I did ask my mom why she took it away. And she had said to us, you can sometimes you can open a portal that you can't close. And I didn't realize that you girls could make, she didn't think it would like that it would work. She didn't think two little kids would be able to make contact. And she was concerned that it might be something impersonating that little girl. That was her concern. And later we talked about that when I was an adult, we kind of talked about that in greater detail. Like what happened? And then we also tried to remember what she did with the board. Cause I thought, well, did she just burn it? but my mom was is too frugal to just burn something perfectly good so she we it took us years to try and remember what she had done with it and then one day she called me and she said I put it under my computer at work and used it as a mouse pad really because smooth you know yeah you used to be able to put your mouth on top of a real nice smooth book and it would and it would work so yeah I don't know what happened to the planchette though who knows probably got buried in the yard or something. Yeah. That's pretty scary though. You know, when you see that any, I mean, I think anybody could make contact with that. So easy to use, you know, I've used it one time before myself. I'll never do it again. It's pretty scary. And that plant, it does, it moves by itself. It does. It does. And I will say, I will say as a foolish teenager, uh, on one occasion in particular, I picked the board up on my own. It was not mine. It was someone else's. And it was at this really creepy house where all the teenagers used to hang out. And of course, there was a creepy basement. And again, just hot stove toucher here. Like, what will this thing do? I took this Ouija board alone down into the basement and it started to, it started to move. So I- You were doing it by yourself? By myself. And I wouldn't do that again, I think as an adult. However, I do think when I was doing it, part of what I was experimenting with was a little bit of telekinesis. I was curious if I had a thought, if I wasn't, not that I was physically pushing it, but if my thoughts could sort of guide the planchette. And so that's what I was working on. But then I got totally freaked out and kind of, I don't know if it flew across the room or I just sort of got startled and that caused that chain of like the planchette went one way and the board went the other and I ran up the stairs. Yeah. So I have not really done a lot with the Ouija board since, um, since then, although they don't, they don't scare me if used responsibly. That's kind of the thing that I learned and what my real mistake was, I think was that, you know, if you're using it responsibly as you would with any other kind of ritual or sacred object or any situation in which you might be trying to make contact with any kind of force that is greater than your own, there are some pretty basic precautions that you should take, including having the right mindset, having a mindset of gratitude and openness, having a cleansed space, having some tools for protection such as a you know a circle something very simple like a circle of salt just doing some things that you and and opening it and closing it which is part of the seance and the ritual the seance and so many people don't they just you know goof around with it and that that I think is really because I do know there there are a couple modern practitioners that use Ouija boards as divination tools. They're not always used in seances though, right? I mean, true. Yes, exactly. If you were to use it as a divination tool, you might use it to make some kind of contact with an entity or a general, you know, universal entity in the same way you might pull a tarot card to get an answer to a question, or you might shake a magic eight ball, right? It's all kind of the same basic principle as you're just sort of asking the universe to come back to you with a answer. But, um, but there are, and there are plenty of witches that use the, um, spirit board or the Ouija board in a responsible and ritual way and can conduct seances. And also you don't have to have a Ouija board for seances. That's the other thing. I mean, that that's just it's just one of the tools yeah wow um i haven't been part of one i haven't i don't know if i would ever do that but i know i did experience the ouija board thing and it scared me so i'm never done it again um but okay so i wanted to see i got a couple more questions asked about your mom but i'm gonna wait until the end because she's just interesting tell her i said that very interesting woman you know and your upbringing is very interesting too you know i haven't heard that, you know, and I've interviewed a ton of people and I haven't heard this. Um, so I'm interested to go, okay, let's go back to you. And you said that you saw ghosts and you experienced some hauntings. Is that right? As a, as a, okay. So can you tell us about some of those? Yeah. I mean, I think I probably saw my first ghost when I was a pretty little kid. And I also had a few experiences. For example, my mom sort of taught me how to lucid dream when I was very little. And it's a wonderful thing to teach very young children because it's very easy for a young kid to learn. And lucid dreaming is essentially, you know, being conscious in your dreams and sort of taking some control over your dreams and being able to use them for guidance or to, you know, just kind of like, you know, get to a place or see, um, see loved ones like deceased loved ones. It's a great way to, to visit. And that's primarily how I use lucid dreaming today. If I'm trying to be conscious or, or otherwise, um, it's frequently to visit with, uh, people that have died that I love very much. And it's kind of one of the only ways I get to see them And you can sometimes get messages from them and such. But yeah, I've just had numerous experiences. But the lucid dreaming, I remember having, this is a very simple tool. And anyone can really apply this. But basically what happened is I was very little because I remember kind of where my room was and where my bed was. And my mom said, well, you were probably only three or four years old at that time. I had a nightmare. She came into my room. I was crying and I told her the nightmare. The nightmare was that I was running through a field and I fell into a hole and I couldn't get out. And I was tiny at the bottom of this giant hole and I was stuck. Now, most parents, when they hear that their kids had a nightmare, they just say, it's just a dream, honey. Not my mom. She said, all right, I want you to go back to sleep and I want you to run in that field again. And I want you to fall in that hole again. And then when you get to the bottom of that hole, I want you to imagine. And at the time we had a great Dane, so there's always been large dogs in our family. She said, I want you to imagine this great Dane, whose name was Kind Sir. I want you to imagine Kind Sir comes to the edge of the pit and drops you a rope and pulls you out. And so I said, okay. So I went back to sleep. I had the dream. I ran through the field, I fell in the hole, and my dog appeared at the edge and dropped me a rope and pulled me out. And I never had the nightmare again. And ever since then, I had a very natural understanding that we actually have control in our dreams. And so that sort of, I don't know if that was a real pivotal point or not, but it sure feels like that when I look back, it stands out to me as a point in which I understood what lucid dreaming was before I knew that lucid dreaming was a thing. And very similar relationship with ghosts. My mom was not one to come in and say, it's just a dream. Oh, it was just a nightmare. Oh, there's nothing there. And dismiss it. She would ask me questions. She would ask me what they look like. Ask if it was someone And if it was someone familiar or not familiar, if it was frightening, why it was frightening. And so instead of giving me the feeling that it was something to be ashamed of or afraid of, which is frequently, and as a parent, I can completely understand this, your gut reaction when your child says they're afraid is to tell them it's okay. And to say, no, no, there's nothing in your closet. Don't worry. But how many times have we heard these stories of people remembering as kids that something kept coming out of their closets and they felt like they couldn't tell their parents or they felt like they weren't in control and they were more frightened and they didn't want to say anything because the parents said, oh, there's no such thing as ghosts. so I even remember you know being being careful in how I worded to my own son how I worded whether or not monsters were real because there's a fine line right you don't want to freak him out and say yeah monsters are totally real and they're under your bed right like that's not your course you don't want to do that but at the same time if they're having that experience if you dismiss it it can be damaging Because especially for someone with psychic abilities or that second site that keeps having visitations you start thinking you crazy after a while And you feel like there no one you can talk to And you feel like if you said anything, everybody's just going to laugh at you. So you don't, you just keep it all inside. And that can, you know, that can be damaging for kids. So we spent, yeah, I mean, I think all of my sisters have probably had more than one paranormal experience. I've certainly had a lot of not as many visual manifestations. I think I have one sister that's actually seen like a much more physical manifestation. I'm more in the like shimmering light corner of the eye, but a lot of feeling. So sitting on the bed or touching, I've been tapped on the forehead and tapped on the shoulder, hair kind of tugged, a lot of little things like that. But certainly had a few kind of unexplainable what even is that, what was that blob at the end of the hallway. Interesting. That's awesome, though. Thank you for sharing that. And I want to give you plenty of time to talk about your book here. It's called Paranormal Parlor Ghost Seances and Tales of True Hauntings. Fantastic cover. I really love it. And it is available on Amazon and Kindle and also paperback. Vala, go ahead and start. Let's let's look at chapter one. And you talk about child ghosts. Where did this particular story come from? Well, it's one of those really, of all the books I've written, this one probably is the most magical in its own way because I knew all along that I wanted to interview people, such as people who I had been on their radio show for years. and we talked about paranormal experiences and we'd had these conversations or we'd been on, you know, whatever panels together and things like that. And I thought, well, I want to ask some people in the paranormal community that I've worked with about their experiences. And truthfully, I was thinking I haven't had that many, like mine aren't that great, right? But as I started building, so originally I thought I was just going to do like chapter two was going to be all stories of these midnight podcasters. That was like sort of the how I thought it was going to go. And I had sort of built out this rough structure, which my editor, of course, was like, yeah, that that totally works. Well, then I started conducting the interviews and every single interview fit in its own way into a different section of the book. And it sort of it sort of made this this theme throughout, which allowed me to then weave my own paranormal experiences as well throughout. And so, for example, I always knew that I wanted to, in chapter one, my sister, the one who was doing the Ouija board with me when we were kids, she came to stay with me in San Francisco when her children were pretty young. And she had one daughter who was around seven or eight. The other was a little bit younger and then a son who was a little bit older. And she came with my mom and they all stayed. And this was before I had a child. And they all stayed in this apartment I had in San Francisco that I had kind of just moved into like a slightly bigger apartment. I was like, everybody come down. So they all came down, which was really nice. And I wrote this story, actually published it years ago before it was in the book, a version of it on Huffington Post. It was called The Curious Case of the Haunted Toothbrush. And it was completely this. I had suspected there was something in this. I sort of lived in the attic. And the interesting thing about the place I lived is I lived in the front apartment, which was tiny. And then the people in the back moved out and I convinced the landlord that, that I, you know, to not raise the rent too much, but that I would just, you know, drag my stuff across the hall and no repairs needed, didn't even need to paint. So I got this bigger place in the back, but it was all essentially had once upon a time been the sort of like top floor, um, attic space in this old Victorian and the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. So it's pretty, pretty unique space. And, um, in any case she came in, so I hadn't been in that apartment very long, but in the other apartment, I had had numerous experiences like going to sleep at night and, you know, being all alone in the apartment, going to sleep at night and feeling something sit on the bed and then thinking, oh, the cat's on the bed. And then remembering that I didn't have a cat at the time. Like I was in between cats. Well, kind of slightly freaky things like that, where you think everything's fine. And then all of a sudden you realize, wait, that just happened. And I have no explanation for it. So in any case, we had moved into this apartment. We were all in the back apartment. And the room actually that the kids were sleeping in was this room that I had because I had said no paint. Don't worry about it. I'll take care of everything. And I had found this underneath the paint full of lead, no doubt. There was this old wallpaper. I mean, this is like straight out of a horror movie. There was an old wallpaper that had like a circus theme, probably from the 1920s or 30s or something like that. So not quite Victorian, but it was pretty old. You could tell I saved a piece of the wallpaper. And so I thought, well, this was the nursery, right? Because it had this like kids circus, creepy circus wallpaper. And that was happened to be the room that the girls were staying in. And they all have their little toothbrushes all lined up in the bathroom and their little electric toothbrushes. Well, in the night, I kept hearing this noise and I couldn't figure out what's going on until finally, like as dawn was breaking, kind of got up, got out of bed. And the one little girl was just, what had happened is her toothbrush kept going off. And so she'd go and she turned it off, set it back, went back to bed. It'd go off again. She got up, went, turned it off. It happened like three or four times. So finally she just got totally fed up with it, turned it off and marched it down into the other room because she just couldn't take it anymore. So we thought, oh, well, I guess the battery, what was going on with that? You know, we're all kind of giggling about it. But then we was like, well, is the battery going out? The other ones didn't. And then it never did it again. It didn't do it the rest of the time they were there and it didn't do it at all when they got home and they never replaced the battery in that time. So we just started saying it was the curious case of the haunted toothbrush, because as I grew to live in that space, I became convinced that there was a child ghost in that space. And my mom had stayed there one night. And then actually, I had a baby. And then I brought my son home. And I had paranormal activity sort of increased, nothing threatening, but definitely more present. And my mom came and stayed one time, I had to go to work for a couple of days or do something during the day where I couldn't be home with him. And she stayed and she told me that she saw or felt a, you know, a figure that felt very nanny like and was watchful, not, not negative, but not particularly approving, kind of curious what this woman was doing with this baby. And so the front we thought had a couple of people and a cat and the back actually kind of this whole cast of characters, probably people who had lived there once upon a time. But a lot of things started sort of increasing, including, you know, those strange things where the toys go off in the other room, and you can't explain where one thing was, you know, it's just like, like, it's creepy in retrospect. But at the time, you're living it. And you just like with a lot of paranormal experiences, at least for me, when it happens, you're just, you don't actually think, oh, I'm having a paranormal experience. You're trying real hard to rationalize it because that's what we do, right? We're just like, no, that, that must've been this, that must've been that. Yeah. And then later you're like, wait, that just doesn't add up. And, um, so then as it turned out, there's this wonderful man named Hunter Shea, who I had been on a show that he was on. And then he, writes horror novels and we kind of connected. And he told me this beautiful story about his wife was very, very sick, like almost, I mean, it was like critical and she was at home care. And they both separately saw a child who kept coming into their house and checking on what they thought later was that he was checking on her and his wife made a full recovery and is healthy today. But it was just this beautiful story about this boy he kept seeing come into his house. And I had already started out and was writing about the haunted toothbrush. And so that sort of became that first chapter about the ghosts of children, child ghosts, how children see ghosts more frequently and don't dismiss them because, you know, their minds are just more open, right? They're still in the world of possibility. So, yeah. Yeah, that's awesome, though. And that's exactly what I love to read about is child, you know, child hauntings, things like this. Because it's creepy. It creeps me out more than anything, to be honest with you. I know. Just the thought of a child just being in a dark hall and, you know, they're not supposed to be there or something just freaks me out. Oh, absolutely. Or like, you know, clown wallpaper or something like that. It's just like, ah! Yeah. No. Like, no, no, make it stop. Yeah. And yet I can't look away. Yeah. Now there's something else that caught my eye in your book as well. You talk about haunted hotels. Did you stay at any of these that you mentioned in your book? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And they're actually all on my bucket list. So there's a couple that I haven't stayed in. One that is, I think it was like slated to open and then it got delayed for other reasons. And then it got delayed again because of COVID and everything being kind of shut down. But there's one in San Antonio that I stayed in. I think actually a number of them that I included. The only ones I didn't include as far as haunted hotels were ones that either I have always wanted to stay in and I talked to other people who had stayed there or like a sibling or something had spent some time there. So all these in your book now are the ones that you actually stayed in. Is that correct? I think they're either – I'm just looking to see if there were any that I didn't actually stay in myself. but there's one that wasn't open. What about the Baker Hotel? That's what I want to know about. The Baker. The Baker Hotel. Yeah. Yeah. I've stayed in the Baker Hotel. Well, tell us about that because I haven't heard. I heard about Stanley. Everybody talks about Stanley, but what about the Baker? The Stanley is the one I haven't been to actually. I haven't been to the Stanley because I just haven't made it there, you know? So that's one of the ones that I hadn't, but of course that one's the most well known. Yeah. So the Baker Hotel, because the Baker Hotel is the one that's opening. So I have been to the Baker Hotel, but I have not stayed in it. The Baker Hotel is like the one that is completely undergone renovations. And that was the one I was saying was, it was under construction and it was delayed. And I was just following their website. And there's a fellow podcaster and investigator, and he and I have talked about how as soon as this place opens, we have to go and stay there. And it's been investigated a fair amount of times. What kind of things are they saying have occurred at that location? Well, it was this pretty amazing hotel for its time. So it was opened in, I think, the late 1920s. And it was open. It's Mineral Wells, Texas. So it's called Mineral Wells because there are all these mineral wells there. So, you know, kind of those sort of pools and places where you can go that have restorative properties. So it was opened with that in mind. And there was a huge pool put in. And this is the 1920s. And all the starlets would roll through there. And it was actually a pretty renowned hotel in its day. And supposedly, if you swam in this pool, which had a high mineral content, it had restorative properties and could heal wounds and things like that. So the hotel itself continued operating and was pretty grand until the 50s or so. And eventually it kind of just started having that decline in probably the 1970s or so. But there were a couple of pretty renowned deaths that took place there. Um, one was the guy who actually start the whole, start, started the whole thing. His name was Earl Baker and he died in the Baker suite. Um, so that kind of gave it a little like, you know, people, Oh, someone died there and it became this, um, uh, kind of lost a little bit of its luster, right? No one wanted to stay in this very expensive suite. So that kind of started. And then that was in like the late sixties. And then gradually, you know, someone else took it over. But there were other things about like supposedly someone tried to dive into the pool from way up on like a balcony and, you know, of course, died. And then other people say that they've seen the ghost of this woman and she's in a swimsuit or she's naked. There's a bunch of people who say that in the elevators and at the elevator door they've seen someone and they think that maybe he was an elevator operator or he might have died there. So they started actually a new hotel group bought it in 2014. And it's been a pretty long process. And it was pretty cool because if you went to their website, they didn't just say like, hey, coming soon, this fancy new hotel. They actually had a lot of creepy before pictures. And I think there's like an episode of one say it's ghost adventures from like around that time just before it the renovations began. And it just looks very it looks totally trashed, totally abandoned. but yet you can see that thick fancy hotel carpet like all of the shining right And it just got this and it it pretty huge I think it like nine stories high or something So there just been a lot of um you know a lot of activity over the years that have been recorded. People have recorded lots of EVPs and crazy pictures, but before that people were actually having sightings when they were staying there. Um, and so now it's actually, now I haven't checked it. I actually haven't checked it. And I'm glad you asked about that. So I haven't checked it for the last like six months or so, but it was well underway to being completely renovated as this like luxury hotel, which is, you know, there's a place in San Antonio I stayed at is the same thing. It was like this hotel back in the heyday, you know, really in like the 20s was just like the super fancy hotel. And then a few people died and then a few more people died. And then there was some kind of weird murder there. And it sort of just fell into, you know, San Antonio had some pretty hard times economically. And they've had like quite a revival in the last 20 years or so with, you know, they put in like a river walk. And so a lot of the hotels have been restored. and um uh i stayed in a hotel there called the saint anthony and had had several things happen in that hotel and and didn't realize that it had a reputation for being haunted and of course uh oh yeah what happened so the first thing that happened was um we stayed two nights there and the first thing that happened was we were up on um it wasn't the very very top floor but it was a floor that had led to like a roof deck. And actually I was with my sister, the same one I'd been doing the Ouija board with and in an earlier, um, earlier in the show. And, um, we were, we were down there to visit an old uncle of ours. And so we had flown into San Antonio and it's like, we're going to stay somewhere. We're going to stay somewhere nice. And she loves, you know, old hotels and things. So we're going to stay somewhere nice. And we asked when we checked in, So is this place haunted? And we just kind of got that like, kind of like, oh, no, like, like people like at that time, this was probably 10, 15 years ago. It just wasn't that cool to be haunted. I think it's much more cool today. You could say like, yeah, we're haunted. And I've even joked like, wouldn't that be great if you were a hotel owner? And you could just say it was haunted and people would come, you'd all you'd sell out the entire month of October, right? You should just like triple your rates. But in any case, so we go up to this roof deck and we're just up there probably smoking and kind of hanging out, just checking out like the skyline. And, um, I turn to go, uh, back in and I look down the hall and I see a woman. I think it's a woman. She's, you know, it's a person who's a little taller than me and seems to be in kind of like a, uh, like a long dress. And like, it was enough for me to think, whoa, is that like, I thought it was, you know, my people, some kind of goth or something. Right. I was like, oh, who's that? and then I kind of opened the door and walked in because something about it didn't quite feel right and I walked down the hall. It was like about, you know, I don't know, 50 yards or something to where the elevator doors were and I thought what had happened is that I would get there and we were kind of going back in anyway but I thought that I would get there and the person would be waiting for the elevator and I could say something to them because it looked interesting. And I got down there and there was no one there and the elevator wasn't, you know, had one of those things that moves when it goes up and down and that wasn't moving. And I just couldn't explain it. So I thought, okay, that was kind of strange. It seemed like someone came out of a room and walked across the hall and went into, you know, hopped on the elevator. So I didn't, I just thought my, and my sister said, what did you see? because she could tell by the look on my face. And I was like, I don't know, I saw someone. She's like, okay. So then that night we went to bed and I kept hearing like this noise in the bathroom, like not a pipes noise because keep in mind, I lived in an old Victorian in San Francisco at the time. So I was used to the shuddering and clunking of old things. And my sister, she sleeps with like earbuds. And so she was like listening to something and totally asleep. And I kept hearing this noise and it sounded to me like, um, you know, I wear contact lenses. So it sounded to me like someone was taking the contact lens container and throwing it on the tile floor. It was like this kind of plasticky smacking sound and other sounds sort of sound like lids opening. And it's just, it was very strange. And at one point I got up and I kind of, I kind of looked around and then I just went back to bed and I heard it again. And then the next morning when I finally woke up, I thought I was convinced that my toiletries were just going to be everywhere in the bathroom. And I went in there and everything was perfectly in order. So those two things happened. And then we finally found someone upon checkout. We finally found someone that would talk to us. And they told us a couple stories about things that they had seen. and then I went home and researched it and it turned out on that floor that I saw that woman that there had been there had been quite a few sightings on that floor and there actually was apparently some guy who committed murder like a couple of hotels down in the 1930s and then he came to the hotel and got into a room and holed up in that room. And basically, I can't remember what if he was just covered in blood or something like that. And I can't remember if he actually died in the room or if there was somewhere else in the hotel that he died, but it was on that floor. And people have said they've seen a variety of things, including the woman that he murdered appearing on that floor. So yeah, freaky. I have to put that one on my bucket list as well. Yeah. Yeah. So, and, and that, that was a cool one too, because I didn't know that much about it, but you know, when you stay in an old hotel, you can kind of, kind of guess that some of those things. And then a couple of ones in Nevada, I've stayed in the Holbrook Hotel. That's near, a town that I grew up in. And I have had a couple strange things there. That was the hotel that like, you know, in high school, if you would, you'd go and get your like prom pictures and the on the stairs at that hotel, and you'd eat in that restaurant if you were doing something fancy for your like teenage birthday or whatever. And then when I would go home to visit friends, we would meet in that bar. And I've had a couple things that I couldn't quite, I'm not quite sure what happened, but you know, you get a few cocktails in you and you kind of don't always trust your own judgment. Um, but I do know people who've stayed there and have had, you know, covers pulled off of them. And, um, you know, one person said they saw like a woman in white in the hallway. So, yeah, but there's, there's a, there's actually one not far from where I live now that I haven't been to. And, um, that one is one of the more known haunted hotel. I think it's like the most haunted hotel in what's the name of it. I'm trying to remember the name of it. It's in, it's in Minnesota and now I have the Baker in my head. So, uh, I can't remember the name of it and it'll pop, it'll pop into my head in just a minute. I just took a picture of it recently. Yeah. So that one is one that is on my list as well. I'll, I'll look on my Instagram real quick and tell you the name of it. That'll help me. I want to ask you something while you're looking for that. I want to talk about the, the parlor games that the only one, okay. So I've never heard actually the term parlor game, paranormal parlor, parlor games. I'm sorry. And so you mentioned like your, I guess your grandparents would try to do these things where they think about something and see if the, you know, the child go in the other room, I guess, and get it. Can you tell us about some more of that stuff? Like what kind of games, what other games they were playing? Yeah, well, sure. And then like the whole idea of kind of like a parlor, a paranormal parlor game is just kind of the idea that you're, it's that, that sort of that gathering place where, you know, you might do card tricks, you might do seances. And it kind of comes from the idea that once upon a time when people would conduct seances, specifically during the spiritualist movement, which was very established, it kind of started around the 1830s, but it was pretty established in the 1840s, especially in the United States. and it had a run, a good solid run through about the 1930s, but there's still people that practice spiritualism today, so they would say it still exists, but it really kind of fell out of fashion in the 20s. The spiritualist movement is founded, it's rooted in the idea not just that we can communicate with the dead, but that we can communicate with the dead because they have powerful messages for the living. And that's when seances and spirit boards and that kind of communication with this specifically trying to make contact with the dead. Now, we know cultures have made contact with the dead or the great beyond for, you know, aeons, right? But the idea that you could specifically get like a message in writing, this is when automatic writing became very popular. Channeled stories became very popular. Spirit photography was kind of on the rise. And so my grandparents were kind of on the tail end of that. You know, they were born in the turn of the 20th century. And they were, as children, part of that, just by nature. It was something that people did. If you were sort of the more prominent member and you had a nice parlor and a decent sized house, you would host a famous spiritualist and they would come through and you'd have a medium and they would host a seance in your house and it would be in your parlor because that's where you would entertain and where you had room for people. So this was very frequently kind of the upper class women in particular who would host these things. And they would kind of invite people in. And it was not viewed as in conflict. You could go to a seance on a Saturday and go to church on Sunday morning. And it wasn't viewed in conflict because it was part of this spiritual pursuit or this kind of desire to learn more. And it was kind of put in that sort of pursuit of knowledge category. And it was interesting times, actually. There were quite a few people who were both abolitionists and suffragists who were also part of the spiritualist movement. because they all lent themselves to the idea of thinking beyond what was the norm in society at that time. So it was a pretty interesting time. And I think my grandparents kind of came on the childhood end of that, and they did it in a little bit more of a kind of fun way. But at the same time, I do think that because my grandmother in particular, she lost her hearing when she was 10 years old and she gained some serious psychic. I don't know if she already had psychic abilities before that, but she certainly had some sixth sense. She knew things, um, that, you know, there, there, you couldn't really figure out how she, how she knew those. And it was her group of friends that they would, they would do these kind of, you know, parlor games. Okay. We're thinking of a red ball, see if we can get, you know, Charles to go in the other room and get the red ball. And of course they wouldn't speak because many of them didn't speak. They would only speak in sign. And, um, you know, they would all just kind of like picture something in their head and see if they could, they could, uh, transmit it to, uh, the kids and also, uh, amongst themselves. That is interesting. Wow. I've enjoyed this conversation with Evola and time has flown by. I'm sorry about that. This is awesome. But tell my listeners where they can find out more information about you or anything else you're working on. Yeah, you can visit my website. It's varlaventura.net. And I have information about, you know, projects and things. I'm also on Facebook and Instagram and, you know, Twitter, I guess. I occasionally go on Twitter. Um, but you can contact me, uh, through usually people, if they need to get ahold of me, we'll try and reach out through Facebook or, um, you can reach out through the website. And then my books are available everywhere. Books are sold and, um, you know, just kind of, kind of just out there at the Palmer hotel. I got it. That's what it is. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know where you're located, but, um, it's in, it's in a, uh, town in a small town in Minnesota and it's not terribly far from, I don't live in San Francisco anymore. Now I live in, um, near St. Paul. So it's not that far and I haven't been there yet, but it's definitely on my, um, on my bucket list. Now it's on my bucket list. So you've been filling up my bucket list for me tonight. So I appreciate that. Yeah. We should exchange bucket lists. Yeah, absolutely. It'd be great to meet each other there. You know, I was planning on doing a lot of traveling here to tour some of these places together. I've loved it. I really have. And I'm definitely going to have you back on Bizarre Times to talk about more bizarre subjects in that book. And that book is called what? What's the book that we're talking about on Bizarre Times? What's the name of that? Yeah. So I have two books of Bizarre Trivia. One is called The Book of the Bizarre. And then the follow up one is called Beyond Bizarre. And they're both various collections of same gist, you know, as part one and part two, a freaky fact, strange story. Is there some paranormal stories in there? There's some like, you know, stranger than fiction type stories, weird laws, all that kind of, you know, kind of stuff. You just probably read as a kid and like Reader's Digest meets Fate magazine. Yeah. Awesome. I have the links for all of those in the show notes as well as for your website and your social media links. Varla, many blessings to you and I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. So delightful to talk to you. To find out more about our guest and all others, please visit our website at mysteriousradio.com.