Latest / Hidden Creatures: Stories, Sightings, and the Search for What Hides in the Dark / Episode 5: Ghost Hunter & Paranormal Storyteller Val Griswold-Ford

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Episode 5: Ghost Hunter & Paranormal Storyteller Val Griswold-Ford · Hidden Creatures: Stories, Sightings, and the Search for What Hides in the Dark

• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Hidden Creatures.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Stories, sightings, and the search for what hides in the dark.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Join us as we explore mysterious encounters, legendary creatures, and unexplained stories from around the world.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: From eyewitness accounts to local folklore.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Some stories may be unsettling, eerie, or hard to forget.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Listener discretion as advice.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Something is out there.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Waiting.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Join us as we step into the shadows and follow the trail into the unknown.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is Hidden Creatures.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Let's begin.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_04: I'm your host, Lori Chen, and with me today are my co-hosts Kristen Jones and Richard Seitz.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_04: Hi, everyone.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Hello.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_04: And we're super excited to have in our virtual studio today our guest, Val Griswold Ford from Virginia.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_04: And Val has been investigating the paranormal both privately and as a member of several teams for over 25 years.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_04: Welcome, Val.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks for having me, everyone.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_04: How does one become a paranormal storyteller?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_05: I actually came by it pretty honestly.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_05: I've been investigating the paranormal since I was about five years old.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_05: My dad was very, very interested in the old school paranormal investigators like Harry Price and uh Hans Holtzer, JB Ryan, those kind of folks.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_05: So he he got me started when I was really young.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_05: I was the weird kid in the graveyard, you know.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_05: And uh after college, I actually had the good fortune to join one of the um family teams, Paranormal Society taps.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_05: So I have had the chance to investigate with Jason Haas and Steven Gonzalez, and it was awesome.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_05: I was not on the TV show, but I got to investigate with them, and that was pretty cool.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: What types of places do you typically investigate?
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_05: I actually like graveyards.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_05: I actually adore graveyards mostly because they're accessible to anyone.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_05: You don't need to pay anything to get into it.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_05: The project that I'm currently working on is called Astral Accessibility, and it's talking about ghost hunting and paranormal investigating for those of us who are mobility challenged.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_05: Um, I have to use a walker to get around.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_05: My partner uses a cane.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_05: And so we're looking at showing that you don't have to be young, able-bodied, and rich to investigate the paranormal.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: I think a lot of people will be able to get use out of that.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_03: What's the first thing you do when arriving at a location with reports of paranormal activity?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_05: It depends on the location.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_05: If we're in a public place, especially with the graveyard things that we're doing right now, just kind of set up our area, make sure we're away from other people uh so we don't contaminate.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_05: If we're doing a private investigation where we're at a location that we've rented or something like that, uh we'll do a baseline like you see in a lot of the TV shows where you go around and and see what the normal level of EMF and things like that are.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_05: If your devices go off later, you know it's not because you're standing next to a massive EMF source, like, you know, a bank of computers.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_05: We've had that with the TAPS team, where they were the people were like, well, everybody feels really, really creeped out here.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_05: And we went and there were massive EMF spikes, and then we're like, So what's behind this wall?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_05: And like, oh, that's the bank of computers that runs everything in our office.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_05: That's why it's not paranormal.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: That makes sense.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever have you ever declined to investigate a location?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_05: Absolutely, and this is a big reason we don't do private investigations like private homes anymore.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_05: People scanned me more than the paranormal ever has.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_05: I have never been afraid in a location of the paranormal.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_05: I've been afraid of the people there.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_05: I could see that.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_05: I was gonna say that's why we don't do things like um or been exploring or anything like that, especially since we are both me and my partner are mobility challenged.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_05: And while I am perfectly capable of taking someone down because my dad taught me how to fight when I was little, I don't want to.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_05: And coming across someone who is trying to get out of the weather for the night or something like that, I don't need to deal with that.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_05: They don't need to deal with me.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_05: So that's another reason I will never do any more urban exploring.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_05: I did it when I was young and stupid, and I won't do it now.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Your investigations, do they typically tend to happen during the day or during the night, or is there a mix?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: And why would you say choose one over the other?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_05: Great question.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_05: Um, the stuff we're doing for astral accessibility right now, our first season, which we are hoping to start filming soon and will hopefully start going out in January, um daytime, because walking around with a rollator at night is hard.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_05: And honestly, a lot of the reasons that people will shoot at night, especially if they're shooting for some sort of show or something, they'll tell you it's so that they don't get outside interference like outside noise.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_05: No, it's because it looks creepier if you're walking around in the dark.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_05: There's nothing to say that you can't investigate ghosts in the daytime.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_05: And that's part of what we're trying to show with our first season of astral accessibility.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_05: Is this a podcast or a show?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_05: We have a Twitch channel that we're gonna be running, and basically what we're gonna be doing is live streaming um our actual investigations and then live streaming the evidence review.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_05: It's basically going to be it's just the two of us.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_05: We have a very stripped-down kind of setup because again, we're trying to show that two middle-aged ladies can do this on our own.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_05: We don't need a camera crew, we don't need all the fancy gadgets, um, with the exception of a piece of tech that I literally just bought.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_05: Our entire setup cost us under$150.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_05: Considering you go to like Ghost Stop or something, and you look and a Paratech is$400 and an Ovulus is$600.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_05: And that's like a car payment, you know?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_05: So we want to show that you don't have to use these things.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_05: Pretty much everything we're using is something that we've repurposed, except for the fact that I just bought an Envoy and I did that because I got a bonus on the day job and decided to splurge.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_04: Would you mind explaining those different devices just so we can understand what they are for and what people do use them for, or what you use them for?
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_05: So um the Envoy is the Envoy 2, it's basically a Word bank.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_05: It's a Word bank like the Paratech is another Word bank, the Spirit Box is a Word bank, the Ovulus is a Word bank.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_05: They're all devices that either scan FM stations for to provide white noise for spirit voices to speak through, or they provide the word bank where the spirits can the the theory is that the spirits use EMF to choose words out of this.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_05: And they're they're all different devices on that.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_05: There are apps too you can use, most of them are crap, honestly.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_05: Um a lot of what you see done nowadays is very much tech heavy, where people are like, oh, the REM pod goes off, and then we got this on the the ovulus, and then this voice comes out of the spirit box.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_05: That is just really to me, it's very overwhelming.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_05: Um I grew up in the tradition of 99% of ghost hunting was sitting in the dark waiting for something to happen.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_05: I take it as a point of pride that I've been doing this for over 25 years and I've yet to have a ghost tell me to get out.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_05: I think I'm doing something wrong.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know what it is, but they've never told me to get out.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_05: I I feel gypped because it seems like they tell everybody else to.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_05: But, you know, I don't like a lot of the tech toys because they're loud.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_05: And I think it takes away from the experience that we're looking to have.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_05: My partner and I decided that we're both much more spiritual than a lot of the teams that are out there.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_05: We're we're both pagan, we're both witches.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_05: My father taught me that someone doesn't really vanish until people stop speaking about them.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_05: And so we decided what we wanted to do is tell the stories of those who have passed on and let them talk to us, as opposed to investigating claims or, you know, demanding that the I I've always hated the can you tell me your name?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_05: Can you show me something?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_05: Can you I hate that?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_05: We've always gotten our best evidence when we're just talking.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_05: So that's what we bring to the way we do things.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_05: We don't use a lot of the tech.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_05: We only have one or two things that are out at a time.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_05: So, for example, if we are um, if we're gonna use the the Envoy 2, we're only gonna have that out, and we'll have a recorder going nearby.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_05: But that's gonna be it.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_05: We're not gonna have everything else out.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_04: That makes sense because of the interference.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_04: We've had several folks even this week talk to us about paranormal activity, and it theirs were all actually during the day.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_04: I I really don't think that ghosts or spirits care.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_05: Because I don't think it looks the same to them, and that could just be, you know, the way I look at it, but I can't imagine that they care if it's dark or not.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, I could I can see, yeah, maybe you get more if there's more like electricity in the air.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_05: Like we've definitely got more stuff when there are storms going, as opposed to like when it's you know calm out.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_05: And that's a common theory that sites can use the energy coming from the storms to manifest more, which it makes sense to me personally, but um, I don't think daytime versus nighttime has really any bearing on that.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's very insightful because that it's very interesting.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because I of course all of the TV shows that you see, it just seems like they tend to want to do this stuff at night, just makes it seem more, I don't know, creepy.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_05: So um last weekend I actually presented at the um third annual paranormal symposium that is done at Gettysburg.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_05: It's the third year that I've attended this and that they've had it.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_05: It's the first year I presented.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_05: One of the topics of discussion was paranormal investigating versus paranormal entertainment.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, everybody's trying to get followers on streaming.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_05: That's kind of part of streaming.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_05: Are you looking for the jump scares?
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_05: We at Astral Accessibility are leaning more towards the storytelling version.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_05: We're you're not gonna see jump scares on us.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_05: You're also not gonna see a highly polished put-together show because I'm not a video editor, my partner's not a video editor, and we decided that what we wanted to do was show kind of the raw footage.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_05: This is what we do.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_05: This is because when you when you see something like ghost hunters or I can say OSI, um old spirits investigations, because I do stuff with them, they're friends of mine.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_05: But when you see shows like that, what you don't see is the fact that they are there for um so ghost hunters used to film at a location over three nights, and then they would have three days of going through the data, and they would cut that all down to a 60-minute show.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_05: And so you don't see what they're doing.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_05: We decided what we wanted to do was we're just gonna live stream it and we're gonna show you that this is what we do.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_05: We sit, we talk, we let them talk back, and then you know, we're gonna have a stream later where we're gonna go back and listen to our audio and say, okay, did we catch anything?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_05: Or look at our video evidence and did we catch anything?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_05: Because I mean, a lot of ghost hunting, um, paranormal investigating, whatever you want to call it, is going through that data afterwards.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_05: And it is tedious and it's boring, and but you get that one or two little nuggets out of you know, an eight or 10 hour audio that you're listening to, that's what makes it all worthwhile.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_05: But people don't see that, they see the 60-minute, slickly produced TV show and go, uh, well, this is easy.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_05: Anybody can do this.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_04: What is it we're communicating?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_04: I know, I know we call it a ghost, but are are there different types of entities that can communicate?
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_04: I've heard everything from shadows, people talk about lights.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know if you overlap into this, but we have some CE5 folks, uh, Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind that talk about extraterrestrial.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_04: Like I'm just hearing so many things.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_04: What is a ghost and are there different kinds?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_05: The answer to that is we don't know.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_05: And everyone will tell you something different.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_05: It doesn't matter to me if I'm talking, say, the spirit of one of my ancestors, or an earth spirit that may have never been human but has always been here, or the universe, or whatever you want to call it, or an extraterrestrial anything.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_05: To me, they're all people, they're all entities.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_05: Now, if you ask me, are there demons, are there evil entities?
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_05: My personal answer is going to be probably because I believe in a balanced universe, and so if you have good, you have to have something on the other side just to balance it out because nature abhors a vacuum.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_04: Do you feel like this was a calling for you?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_04: Did you know you could sense things, or was this just something your dad taught to you about it?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_04: But did you ever have a feeling that you were meant to do this?
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_05: JB Ryan ran the Duke Parapsychology lab in the 60s and 70s and was very influential in the scientific side of parapsychology.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_05: And my father actually took some classes with him because that was at the point where you could just walk on campus and sit down in a lecture hall and take a class if you wanted.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_05: We've always lived in haunted houses.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_05: I've always been able to sense things.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_05: I get that from both sides of my family.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_05: Um, so it was one of those where it just, yep, there are ghosts.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_05: Yep, there are spirits.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_05: Yep, your great-grandfather's gonna come and check on you every once in a while.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_05: It's just that's the way it is.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_05: And I was never taught to be afraid of them.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, they'll spook you every once in a while.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_05: You know, it's it's you kind of think, wait a minute, there's something here that probably shouldn't be, but I mean, I've never really, I've never I won't say I've never met an evil spirit, because I have, but I've never felt that I couldn't protect myself from it, if that makes sense.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have a favorite story that you could tell us?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_05: When I was in college, this is actually my favorite story to tell.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, I went to the University of Connecticut at Storbs.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_05: And one of the weird things about that campus is there are like seven graveyards on it.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_05: We don't know why.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and one of them is actually from the 1800s, and it's about a mile and a half outside of campus, down this old.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I don't know if it's still a dirt road, but it was a dirt road at the time when I went Lothi's many years ago.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_05: So my roommate at the time was an art student, and she decided that she wanted to do an infrared film project that involved double-exposing film.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_05: It ended up being me, her, my best friend, and her boyfriend.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_05: The four of us dragging camera crippling out on the night of the middle of February out to this old graveyard, a mile and a half outside of campus, down an old dirt road that was not lit.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_05: It had woods on three sides.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_05: There was a river nearby, and then there was an open field across the street.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, this thing was way the heck out in the middle of nowhere.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_05: So we go in, it's like midnight, because of course it's midnight.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_05: She and I are setting up the cameras.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_05: We've got a camera on a tripod.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_05: These are these are the old film cameras, because she was developing her own film.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_05: And the boys were up in the back of the graveyard, and she and I are standing next to each other, and the camera was like in between us, neither of us was touching it.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_05: It was it was on its tripod, it was ready to go.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_05: We just hadn't pointed it at anything.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_05: And uh Kevin, her boyfriend, was in the back and said, just jokingly said, So if anybody wants to have their picture taken, let us know.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_05: And the camera spun on its tripod, pointed at a grave, focused.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_05: And she and I are looking at each other, going, Did you touch that?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_05: Please tell me you touched that because I didn't touch that.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_05: So we took the pictures with infrared film.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_05: We didn't have any infrared lights set up because she wanted to do it with just the temperature.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_05: When we developed those pictures, it looked like that grave was standing in bright sunlight, which was really cool.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_05: So we did the double exposure pictures that we were going to do after that.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_05: And uh, we were just starting to pack up.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_05: And then all of a sudden, we heard from all three wooded sides at once.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_05: We heard something that sounded like something big coming through the woods.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_05: And all I can think of was like deer or something.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_05: We weren't sure though, what it was.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_05: I don't think any of us have ever run a mile and a half with that much camera equipment that fast in our lives.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_05: And I'm pretty certain we scared the clerk at the 7-Eleven because we wanted to be somewhere with light and not in that creepy graveyard anymore.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great story.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think anything's ever followed you home from any of these places that you've investigated?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_05: We've had uh a couple of spirits follow us home.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_05: We went to uh Pennhurst last year and had a little girl who followed us home, actually followed my niece home and decided basically that she just wanted to stay somewhere where somebody would take care of her.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_05: And since my niece is now living in my parents' old house and we know both of my parents are there, she's just kind of decided to stay there until she's ready to move on, which is fine.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_05: We have um a little boy that came home to my house uh with my roommate from uh Trans Allegheny, I think.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_05: We kind of just tend to collect them.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_05: I know both my partner and I are sensitive that way.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_05: And we do different kinds of protective magic, but we're both protective witches.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_05: And so every so often something will come home with us.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_05: And as long as they're polite, we don't mind.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_05: We have stuff set up at our house so that if anything that isn't polite shows up, it is shown the door very quickly.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned that you had not felt uneasy necessarily around any of your spirits or your entities that you've encountered, but have there ever been any situations involving or not involving entities that made you feel maybe unsafe?
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_05: Yes and no.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_05: And the reason I say that is because before I ever went out, my father was very big on protection.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_05: His basic ground rule was we're not going out investigating until I know you can protect yourself.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_05: We always go out with protection.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_05: I make my own, I call it you're not welcome here salt, basically.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_05: And um, my partner has something similar that they make, but we have charms, we have sigils.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_05: Um I have not been in a situation.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_05: In a very long time.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_05: I did.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_05: In college, I was dumb.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_05: I was young.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_05: I was invincible as we all were when we were 20.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_05: I did get into some situations that looking back now, I should have been afraid and wasn't because, you know, I was invincible.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_05: But nowadays, no, we we tend to make sure we're pretty well protected before we go in.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's good.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh is there a universal collection of charms that someone would take, mixtures or or things that you carry with you?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Do these are these things that are very personalized as a protective device or the something that you could sell them on eBay and would help somebody else?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_05: It is kind of personal simply because at least for me, you have to believe in the efficacy of what you have.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_05: So if, for example, um you are a Christian and you don't believe in witchcraft, or you think it's of the devil or something, any charm bag I'm gonna make you ain't gonna work.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_05: Um my my friend Kevin, he was a very devout Roman Catholic, and um he had actually had some rocks that were blessed by um Pope John Paul II.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_05: So he would always have one of those rocks with him, and that was his protection.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_05: Whereas, you know, I would have a charm bag filled with the herbs and the salts that I make.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_05: Um my friend T carries a I think he has a St.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_05: Christopher's medallion.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_05: So, you know, it's it's definitely personalized.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_05: Can you get stuff off of ebait?
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_05: Absolutely, but if you don't believe in it, it's not gonna help.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_05: How do places get haunted?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_04: When something a house is haunted, what what actually is happening there?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_05: It could be that something happened there, it could be that someone living who's there right now is going through something and triggering it.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_05: Um, there's there's a lot of thought that poltergeists could be partially living human who is going through something and just not able to control the way that their energy is moving.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_05: That's been a theory for a very long time.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_05: It's kind of hard to prove because we we don't have the technology to see that yet.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_05: Although, I mean, the way technology is advancing, who knows?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_05: There's there's thoughts of um something called the stone tape theory, which is if something very emotional happened, or if something that just always happened.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_05: You know, if you live in a house for 60 years and every morning you get up at seven o'clock in the morning and you go downstairs, you make your cup of coffee and you make your toast, it could be that the house remembers that.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_05: So a hundred years from now, somebody who wakes up at seven o'clock in the morning might see you walking through, and it's not actually you, it's the house remembering what you did.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_05: It could be almost anything.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_05: There's talk about time slips where it all kind of happens at the same time.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_05: Maybe what we're seeing is something that happened in the past, but because of the way time works, we're actually seeing it as it's happening, even though it happened a hundred years ago.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_05: There's all sorts of theories, and because no one really knows.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: How common is that uh imprinting type of scenario on a on a building or a home?
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_05: It depends on a lot of things.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_05: If you like, so I I grew up in New Hampshire where we're called the granite state for a reason.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_05: Everything is on granite.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_05: Granite is an actual really good conductor and almost like a memory stone in a way.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_05: There's lots of talk of residual hauntings in New Hampshire because of the granite.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_05: If you have something like um Gettysburg, for example, a lot of what is reported on the battlefield is said to be residual hauntings because it was so horrific and so many people died that they didn't realize they died.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_05: So they're just reliving that because there's so much blood soaked into that ground.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_05: So it really could be anything.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: Could could that be the same for land as well?
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, do you think this has changed how you might look at death?
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_05: And no.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_05: And I say that because yes, because I do think that something remains on in the past 10 years, I've lost both my parents and my husband, and I know that they're still around.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_05: I have dreams where they come back and talk to me.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_05: Um, my mother checks on up on us all the time.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but also there's that fear of am I gonna change when I die?
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_05: Because we're gonna change, and it's it's another step.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_05: And I don't always like change, and so I'm still concerned about how that change is gonna affect me, even though I know it's a change and not an end, if that makes sense.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_04: Val, I did want to ask in terms of the future, what do you hope or will happen of the paranormal investigations, the paranormal storytelling, what you're doing?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_04: Um, if there's any thought about how technology can change, would we want that?
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_05: Would we want to know more if if we could always want to know more?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, even though I don't think I'll understand all of it, I still want to know.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_05: We continue to ask the questions, we increase our ability to know.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_05: So I am hopeful seeing where we can go with this.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_05: I think there's so much we can learn not just from speaking to those who have passed on, but also how what we're doing now will affect those in the future.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_05: Because if you think there's nothing after death, or that you're gonna go on to a different place, you I I feel personally that you're going to treat the here and now differently than you would if you think of it as just you're moving into a different form within the same place.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_04: Is there anything that we didn't ask you about that you'd like to share with us and our listeners?
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_05: We just want to encourage everyone to to look around with eyes that are more open, you know, look for the wonder, look for the the paranormal, look for the cryptids, look for those little bits of joy that the world offers to us.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_05: And don't think that you're too old or you're too unhealthy or you're too poor, because in my opinion, that is closing yourself off from the universe and everything it can offer.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_05: And there's so much that we don't know that is waiting for us to ask the questions.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_05: So please ask the questions, look around.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_04: I love that.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_04: If you'd like to share, how can we follow you?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_04: How can our listeners follow you?
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_04: You're live streaming.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_04: Can you give us all that information now?
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_05: Yep.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_05: So we are going to be live streaming on Twitch under the name Astral Accessibility.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and we have an Instagram and we're working on the website right now that should be going online by January 2027.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_05: I can't believe I'm saying 2027 already.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but that's when we hope to start live streaming our first season of Graveyards that we're going to be investigating and talking to the folks who are stopping by there and seeing what their stories are.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_05: You can find me under VG Ford on Facebook and Instagram, and my website is VG-Ford.com.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_05: And you can find my books, you'll find astral accessibility and all the other nonsense that I do.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely love it.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_04: Val, thank you so much for joining us, especially traveling throughout multiple states.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_04: I just appreciate your time.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you again for coming on the podcast.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_04: I hope that we get to have you on again.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_04: And have a beautiful evening, and thank you so much for talking to us tonight.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to uh tell a joke about a ghost, but I'm afraid you'd stay right there.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_04: Richard!
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I have too much.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_04: These are the encounters that they happen, told by the people who live through them.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_04: Whether they reveal the unknown or simply deepen the mystery, that's for you to decide.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_04: And if you've had a terrible experience you'd like to share on this podcast, email us at hiddencreaturespodcast at gmail.com.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_04: Until next time, stay safe and don't wander too far alone in the dark.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_04: We have plenty more thrilling stories to share with you.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_04: And maybe one day we'll share your story too.