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S1 E39 Ann McDougall - Author of 'A Ghost in the Room'
9 Plays5 hours ago
This week, I had the pleasure of speaking to Ann McDougall, who is a writer, actor, and graphic designer living in Toronto.
Ann joined me to talk about her new book, ‘A Ghost in the Room’, but before we discussed that we spoke about some fascinating subjects.
Why do people ask if museums are haunted, and why do people want to seek out ghosts.
We also discussed fraudulent mediums using hot reading, pareidolia and auditory pareidolia. We then chatted about a previous Prime Minister who did seances, and the first fatal séance.
The final conversation included paranormal photography and Table turning/tipping
Recommended
Transcript
Intro
Introduction to Anne McDougall
00:00:12
Lee Hatfield
Hello everybody and welcome to the latest episode of SIPA Paranormal Chronicles. Today i am delighted to have Anne McDougall with us. Anne is a writer, actor, graphic designer living in the centre of the universe, more commonly known as Toronto.
00:00:30
Lee Hatfield
Anne, welcome!
00:00:31
Ann McDougall
Hello, thank you Thanks for having me.
00:00:34
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, so the centre of the universe thing is a a little bit of a dig at Toronto because they think they are centre of the universe, but they're not because Ottawa is. that's just my personal opinion.
00:00:46
Ann McDougall
You know, in fairness, I am originally from Northern Ontario. I'm from the Thunder Bay area. So I am willing to accept that Toronto is not the center of the universe, even though it is my home.
00:00:56
Lee Hatfield
Okay, so the new centre of the universe is Thunder Bay. Okay,
Why Do Ghosts Haunt Historic Spaces?
00:01:01
Lee Hatfield
let's go with that then. So, Anne, what I normally like to do at the very beginning is to get people's stories on how their paranormal road started. So if you can just give us a little bit of information about yourself and tell us about how your paranormal life began.
00:01:18
Ann McDougall
Absolutely. So I spent a big portion of my career working in historic house museums. So museums that are based in a real historic site, a real place, a real time. I worked in a bunch in Ontario, both in Northern Ontario and here in the Toronto area.
00:01:34
Ann McDougall
And what I found in my time working there was not so much that I had paranormal experiences. if to be really honest, I didn't have any major paranormal experience, but people would come in on a daily basis and the first question they'd want to know is, is it haunted?
00:01:51
Ann McDougall
And then when I told them the answer, which was either, you know, maybe some people have experienced things, maybe nothing, they would immediately want to tell me their story of being haunted and their story of a ghost experience.
00:02:02
Ann McDougall
And, you know, early in my career, I found I would get a little bit riled by that because I'd say, no, you're here for the history, you know, internally. why Why are they asking these questions? But As I got a little older, mellowed down a little bit and I got really curious about why people wanted to have these conversations in historic houses because they're old spaces, of course, but they're old spaces everywhere. What what was it about museums that made people want to talk about ghosts?
00:02:29
Ann McDougall
And what came out of that was A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay about working in museums and all of the people who would come in and ask me questions and tell me their stories of being haunted.
00:02:42
Ann McDougall
And that essay was long listed for the CBC Nonfiction Prize. It didn't go any further, but i a publisher reached out to me and said, are you interested in writing a book about ghosts in museums?
00:02:54
Ann McDougall
And I said, oh, yes,
Exploring Paranormal Encounters
00:02:54
Ann McDougall
I am. But I realized I didn't just want to do museum ghost stories because there are already a lot of great books of museum ghost stories. What really interested me was why people wanted to talk about ghosts in these spaces and also why people and how people try to talk to ghosts in general.
00:03:14
Ann McDougall
I found I was less interested in what happens, you know, when someone just sort of living their life and happens to be haunted or happens to have a paranormal experience and more interested in how people seek them out and why they seek them out.
00:03:26
Ann McDougall
So that's what the book is about. It's called a a Ghost in the Room. And I investigated all sorts of things relating to museums and ghosts and spiritualism and paranormal investigation with this sort of, i guess, cultural lens of being a a museum person and asking, why do we do this? And why is this important to us?
00:03:46
Lee Hatfield
That sounds a pretty cool story. So the fact that you got asked by this publisher, and obviously to write a book is quite a daunting experience.
00:04:00
Lee Hatfield
But before we go into that, have you actually experienced anything personally when doing all this research and investigations?
00:04:10
Ann McDougall
So, i it's been a really interesting process because i went in and I have in museums in these historic houses, the kind of experiences that a lot of people, if they're already inclined to to believe in the paranormal, will say, yes, that was a ghost experience. You experienced the feeling of something watching you. You experienced a creepy feeling.
00:04:31
Ann McDougall
you know that That's a paranormal experience. But that that that sort of feeling i would describe as sort of on the cusp of it could be a paranormal experience. it could just It could be something else. It could just be an uneasy feeling. We're not quite sure.
00:04:45
Ann McDougall
In the course of my research, I realized that people really do have experiences that are are far more vivid than that. You met a lot of people and who really do see, they really do hear, they really do experience ghosts, and I've come to realize that's a very common thing.
00:05:01
Ann McDougall
i In the course of my research, I had a lot more of those sort of cusp experience where but it was like, and is this something paranormal? Is this something else? Is this something that's happening in our own, you know, in my brain, in my body, which is also to me very interesting, if that's the case.
00:05:17
Ann McDougall
i So while I wouldn't say I had like a really definitive ghost experience, I was left with the feeling that there are a lot of things we don't understand about our own minds, about this research, about the universe that we live in. And so I
Skepticism and Respect in Paranormal Research
00:05:30
Ann McDougall
was left maybe with more questions than answers, but in a way that I found very satisfying personally.
00:05:35
Lee Hatfield
And I can totally agree with what you've just said, because there was a a long period of my life where I was the 100% – I nearly said cryptic.
00:05:47
Lee Hatfield
100% sceptic was the word I'm looking for.
00:05:49
Ann McDougall
Mm-hmm.
00:05:50
Lee Hatfield
like It's early on a Saturday morning. going to have to forgive me. yeah I was 100% sceptic, and I would completely blank everything as being, oh, well, I must have knocked that thing earlier for it to fall off the shelf, or – What I just saw out of the corner of my eye was a trick of the light and stuff like that. And for the longest time, i like completely debunked every single thing.
00:06:19
Lee Hatfield
Until the point that I started to investigate. And then you get completely different things that happen that you cannot explain. And like you've just said about having individuals coming up you with individual stories, there's too many experiences that people have, it's happened to, for there not to be something.
00:06:45
Lee Hatfield
But what that something is... We may never know.
00:06:49
Ann McDougall
Yeah, and I think, you know, i think in the skeptical world or in the scientific world, there's a a tendency among people to be really dismissive of these questions to say, well, this is a silly thing to be thinking about. This is unscientific. Let's not consider it.
00:07:01
Ann McDougall
But what I've come to realize, is i don't think it's silly to ask these questions at all. Because I think, you know, first of all, if you look at the history of paranormal research, which I did a lot in this book, because I'm a history person, there have been a lot of times when someone has started off researching something completely paranormal, like telepathy, only to discover something that's very concrete and scientific, like brainwaves.
00:07:24
Ann McDougall
And that's happened again and again. And so I don't think it is at all silly to take these questions seriously and to take these experiences seriously. And what I've come to realize also about people who do paranormal investigation is there's really nothing silly about them. Like asking these questions, these are intelligent, serious people who are trying to make sense of their own experiences.
00:07:48
Ann McDougall
And i I've developed quite a lot of respect for that in the course of writing this book.
00:07:54
Lee Hatfield
I could not agree more because i what SEPA do, we we will investigate the rational stuff first. So if you've got noises in your attic, we will look for rodents. We will look for loose tiles.
00:08:12
Lee Hatfield
yeah If you're experiencing like apparitions, we will check your electrical equipment equipment that is not giving off large amounts of EMF that can cause hallucinations.
00:08:25
Lee Hatfield
And we do all that kind of stuff before we start playing with the gadgets. and to actually try to communicate with spirits and ghosts, of course, if they exist.
00:08:38
Lee Hatfield
And that's the I think that's the correct way to go about it. So have you actually been out with any paranormal teams to to do these investigations?
00:08:50
Ann McDougall
I have. Yeah. so one of the things I did, there's a wonderful museum in Kitchener, Ontario, which is Homer Watson House and Gardens. They're wonderful. And they are a really interesting site because not only are they a beautiful historic house museum, but the resident of the home, Homer Watson, was a spiritualist himself and a very sort of dedicated investigator in the early twentieth century.
00:09:13
Ann McDougall
And for that reason, they focus a lot of their sort of you know, Halloween season programming on, they call it spirit season, and they focus a lot on very sincere investigation because that's that's the history of the house.
00:09:16
Lee Hatfield
Thank you.
00:09:26
Ann McDougall
And so they partner with TOPS, which is the Ontario Paranormal Society, who do public paranormal investigations as part of their programming. So I participated in one of those. It was my first time ever sort of investigating with equipment.
00:09:40
Ann McDougall
And it was a fascinating experience because i was struck by how meticulous and thoughtful they were in their research approach.
00:09:51
Ann McDougall
And also, never really occurred to me before, but how human they were in their approach. You know, again and again, they emphasized that ghosts, if they exist, are the ghosts of people. They're human beings. They need to be spoken to like human beings.
00:10:04
Ann McDougall
They did a lot of really interesting things, like considering the time period of the people they thought they might be investigating, what sort of tools would they respond to, what knowledge base would they have. And i i was really taken with how human their approach was and how thoughtful of the people they might be communicating with was, even though, and they know this, they don't really, you know, we don't really know the nature of exactly what's happening.
00:10:29
Ann McDougall
There was this sort of very open-mind very open-minded, humanistic approach. It was really neat.
00:10:34
Lee Hatfield
Yeah. so was that your very first investigation?
00:10:37
Ann McDougall
That was, yeah, that was my first time. Previously to that, I had done some like ghost walks and ghost tours where you would you know dabble a little bit with different tools, but that was the first paranormal investigation.
00:10:49
Ann McDougall
And it was just really interesting. And what I loved about it was because it was for you know someone like me, or member of the public who had never experienced it, they really took the time to lay out what they were doing, what tools they were using to show us a range of strategies.
00:11:03
Ann McDougall
And i you know as a museum person, I love a thorough explanation. So I was really, really quite taken with it.
00:11:09
Lee Hatfield
Yeah. So how did your expectations before to what you experienced and what you know afterwards compare?
00:11:20
Ann McDougall
I would say i I'm much more respectful of the process. Like, I think I went in with a bit of preconception that, you know this is unscientific. This is maybe little bit fanciful.
00:11:34
Ann McDougall
And I came out feeling as though this is actually quite serious and rigorous to the point that it can be, you know, we're looking for something. whose nature we simply don't understand. And if you don't understand the nature of something, it means you don't understand really how to look for it. We don't know where it is. We don't know what the rules are.
00:11:50
Ann McDougall
We don't know what the science is. And so we're sort of scanning this broadband of possible ways to communicate. And have a lot of respect. A lot of a lot of early scientific endeavors involve a lot of looking in the dark and trying to figure things out and and taking the tiny scraps of information you have.
00:12:02
Lee Hatfield
Thank you.
00:12:08
Ann McDougall
And so I've come up with a real sort of respect and excitement for that work, if that makes sense.
00:12:14
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, it absolutely does perfectly. And like yeah like like you've just said, there's a lot of gadgets out there. And being a we want to call ourselves scientifically based, so we do the science first.
00:12:29
Lee Hatfield
And we know that some
Writing a Book on Ghosts and Museums
00:12:30
Lee Hatfield
of these devices that people use can be manipulated by walkie-talkies, by cell phones. So we make sure that we completely remove those from the equation.
00:12:37
Ann McDougall
Mm-hmm.
00:12:42
Lee Hatfield
so that we're not getting any false positives.
00:12:45
Ann McDougall
Mm-hmm.
00:12:46
Lee Hatfield
But then we have, like, say, my friend Logan, who is part of the team, He has so many different devices to try to communicate. And one particular device that you're going to find really interesting, we went to a place in Brockville, nice, lovely stately home, hadn't been investigated before.
00:13:06
Lee Hatfield
And there was one room that was described as a library stroke smoking room by the previous owner. And he had a, so you're you're aware of what a REM pod is.
00:13:18
Lee Hatfield
So there's many different varieties. And this particular REM pod was in the shape of a cigarette box with the antenna was a cigarette sticking out the top. So we put it on the floor in the smoking room.
00:13:31
Lee Hatfield
And nobody was anywhere near it. And when I say nowhere near it, you're talking 30, 40 feet away. We were doing an Estus method. So with the headphones, yeah.
00:13:41
Ann McDougall
yes, I've tried that.
00:13:42
Lee Hatfield
And one of the, yeah, that's really cool. And one of the guys that was doing the Estus method just came out with smoking. And as soon as he came out with that, the REM pod went off.
00:13:53
Ann McDougall
Oh, interesting.
00:13:54
Lee Hatfield
Like say, and there was nowhere near it. Logan ran across to make sure that there was nobody in the room. And as he started walking back, the guy doing the Esther said smoking again, and the REM pod went off again.
00:14:06
Ann McDougall
So fast.
00:14:06
Lee Hatfield
And it's like, that is so cool. Can we debunk it? No, we can't.
00:14:12
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
00:14:13
Lee Hatfield
But it's that kind of interaction that really gets people intrigued and interested in what we do. Even when you watch a few TV shows, some of it is a little bit corny and you can go, oh my God, did they really do that?
00:14:30
Lee Hatfield
But when you do it correctly and for the right reasons, you could have so much fun and you can learn so much information.
00:14:39
Ann McDougall
Yeah, I think I was quite surprised by the difference between what I had seen on TV and what people are actually doing in the real world. There's a lot less running and shouting than I expected and a lot more sort of meticulous sitting and watching and thinking and long hours.
00:14:48
Lee Hatfield
Oh yes.
00:14:57
Ann McDougall
And I really I sort of like the almost citizen science side of it. Like, I think we live in a world where people don't always feel empowered to try to understand the world around them.
00:15:08
Ann McDougall
You either, you know, the things you learned growing up and you don't think necessarily too hard about it otherwise. And what I think paranormal investigators are doing right is asking deep questions about what is our world? How does it work?
00:15:21
Ann McDougall
What how do our experiences fit into what we know and actually trying to find those answers. And I again, I have a lot of respect for anyone who takes that approach.
00:15:33
Lee Hatfield
That's it. And so like when when you go into work on the Monday and go, oh, what did you do at the weekend? I sat in a dark room talking to myself for a few hours. So like so you did what? So ghost it a ghost in the room.
00:15:47
Lee Hatfield
You mentioned that you got approached by a publisher.
00:15:50
Ann McDougall
Yes.
00:15:51
Lee Hatfield
And like I said earlier, to write a book is not an easy process. So after this this publisher approached you, What was your first steps with writing a ghost in the room?
00:16:05
Ann McDougall
So I started thinking about my own experiences because I knew I wanted to look at the paranormal through this lens of museums. Because for one, for a reason that I think, at least in my own museum practice, I'd never really thought about why why do people want to have these conversations in a museum space? Why here of all places? You know you come with your school, you're going to learn about the 19th century. Why do we why do we go to ghosts? And why do we go to ghosts so deeply?
00:16:30
Ann McDougall
frequently, like every single day, people would come in and ask about them to the point that it was one of the most popular topics of conversation, even though it wasn't something, you know, in the museum we were trained on, it wasn't something that was in our history.
00:16:42
Ann McDougall
And so I got really curious. And so i sort of broke the book into three parts. One part was
Investigating Mediums and Fraud
00:16:50
Ann McDougall
my own sort of memoirs of working in museums, how that would relate to the paranormal, whether it was a paranormal TV show coming into museum to film, or whether it was a Halloween program that we had put together looking at seances and the paranormal.
00:17:05
Ann McDougall
That was sort of one bucket. The next was to look at other museums and what they're doing today. So how do they handle ghosts in their programming? Because there's a real swing in museums. We always have to think about what is popular versus what is educational. And so there can be a real swing. Sometimes you do lots of ghost programming because it's popular and people want it.
00:17:27
Ann McDougall
And then sometimes the pendulum swings back and you say, no, we're rigorous, we're historical, we're going to focus on only the facts. And so it's how do you navigate that boundary? And then the third sort of bucket that I brought that I think the publisher wasn't expecting at first was that I wanted to sort of investigate on my own, how do people do this? So what are paranormal investigations?
00:17:48
Ann McDougall
What are other techniques that people use? I wound up doing quite a bit of research into the spiritualist church, which is of course, historical body that did a lot of spirit communication, but they still exist today. And a lot of people They take a quite a different tack on this. It's a religion for them. And so this is their faith.
00:18:04
Ann McDougall
And so I did a lot of hands on, whether it was paranormal investigations, whether it was going to seances, going to spiritualist church services. And so I sort of organized those three things.
00:18:16
Ann McDougall
And then I just went out and started doing things. And I realized pretty quickly that there was so much to write about because there's really not one approach to the paranormal. There's a lot of people doing a lot of different things out there and who are very passionate about what they're doing. So I did workshops and seminars and church services and investigations, and it was all, i would describe it as kind of weird and wonderful.
00:18:43
Ann McDougall
It was all really, really fascinating. uh, And that became sort of the core of the book was this sort of investigation side of it.
00:18:53
Lee Hatfield
So when did this actually start to be created?
00:18:57
Ann McDougall
So the original essay I wrote was in 2022. And then about six months later, i was talking with the publisher and things were not nailed down yet. It wasn't necessarily going to be a book, but I decided I wanted to write it. This was a topic I had actually been fascinated with for a while.
00:19:12
Ann McDougall
During the pandemic, I found a book from the early 20th century, just around the turn of the century, that was written about by a magician named David Abbott. And it was a book of tricks used in seances by fraudulent mediums in seances. And it was it was written as an informational book, basically to warn people away from these.
00:19:34
Ann McDougall
And I got so fascinated by it, by all of these tricks and how people were fooled and why you would do this in the first place. And so this had been a topic rattling around in my brain for a long time. So I decided to just go for it.
00:19:47
Ann McDougall
And I went to a spiritualist church in Southern Ontario. And I went because they were hosting what's called an international medium. And an international medium is someone, this one was from the UK, it's someone who makes a their career out of going to different spiritualist churches in the world, and there are hundreds worldwide, and doing what's called platform mediumship, which is when they will give you messages from the dead sort of live in front of an audience.
00:20:15
Ann McDougall
And I decided to go go see what that was like, because, you know, mediumship is so core to spiritualism. It always has been historically. And I wanted to experience that. And one of the things I was interested was I didn't think that this medium would be fraudulent because this, you know, spiritualism is a faith and most of the people who do it are very sincere. And so I thought this would be a person who was sincerely giving messages from the dead and either actually doing that or even if they were imagining they were doing it, they would be you know doing it sincerely.
00:20:45
Ann McDougall
But I wanted to have some kind of test for fraud. And so I thought, gosh, how can I do this? I don't know. And finally, the the method I devised was I invented a childhood dog.
00:20:59
Ann McDougall
And I never had a dog in childhood. i never had a pet growing up. I invented a childhood dog and I used AI to make a picture of this lovely dog that was very realistic. And then I posted it on social media on my Twitter account as though it were real.
00:21:13
Ann McDougall
and I put it there as a test and I thought, you know if this medium is doing what's called hot reading, which is looking people up beforehand, this is a pretty obvious test, but just in case, I will leave it on my social media you know with a little post about how this is my childhood dog and it'll be there and this can be an ongoing test for hot reading. I really didn't think I was going to experience it.
00:21:35
Ann McDougall
But I went to this church and I went to this session and it was it was really quite beautiful as spiritualist churches tend to be. There was singing, there was this really positive energy.
00:21:46
Ann McDougall
and then this medium came in and began and giving people readings. And the whole thing was very moving. And I was really taken by how accurate so many of the messages were. But his his manner was so confident.
00:22:00
Ann McDougall
And he himself seemed such a like such a lovely guy. I began, i was really taken with it. And I thought, you know, either this person is just so sensitive and intuitive that perhaps he's picking things up from people.
00:22:11
Ann McDougall
Or maybe, you know, maybe maybe he truly is psychic. Maybe he really can look into people. Maybe he really is getting these messages. like I was really taken with it. And then toward the end of the meeting, all of a sudden, know, this is a crowd of maybe 100 people. He pointed right at me and he said, you, madam, did you have a dog growing up?
00:22:31
Ann McDougall
And i sort of went, oh, no. And then he began to describe the picture, that perfectly describe this picture. And it became very clear that the reason he was such a good medium was that he had been looking at the social media of the attendees and looking at workshops they were attending and looking at things they'd posted about their relatives.
00:22:48
Ann McDougall
And it was sort of a fascinating experience because on one hand, it was disappointing. I had really sort of experienced in a very short period of time going from being quite skeptical to really believing and thinking, this this is amazing, and then to realizing it was a hoax.
00:23:07
Ann McDougall
But that experience also made me realize how utterly convincing, first of all, an experience like that can be. and how emotionally satisfying an experience like that can be.
00:23:20
Ann McDougall
And that was really my first clue into why we look so hard for ghosts and and why they're such so important to us and why we want so much to be haunted is because we have these experiences that are very real.
00:23:33
Ann McDougall
And we have these emotional connections to people who have departed that are very intense. And so of course, we want to do these investigations. And then unfortunately, there's also an ecosystem, especially in sort of the faith side of things, a fraud that's willing to prey on people who have this very intense desire to connect with the afterlife. So coming out of that first investigation session, before I knew this was really going to be a book, before I really knew anything, I sort of came out and said, wow, there's something really interesting here.
00:24:01
Ann McDougall
and And I know there's something to write about. And that was kind of that was kind of my first step.
00:24:06
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, and what after what you've just said, that also tells me there must have been a way that how he knew who was going to be in attendance.
00:24:19
Lee Hatfield
So the the location were obviously involved with that as well because he's not just going to go through random social media pages because he's not going to know who's attending.
00:24:24
Ann McDougall
Yeah, you know, yeah, I think. Yep.
00:24:32
Lee Hatfield
So if he knew that you were attending, somebody must have told him.
00:24:36
Ann McDougall
That's it. And, you know, when I walked in, someone was standing on the porch and holding a clipboard and going down the clipboard and they asked me my name. And so, of course, I think what happened then and and was that he saw the name, knew I was ticked off, looked at me and, you know, honestly, must have quite a good memory.
00:24:52
Ann McDougall
for names and faces and gone, oh, yes, that's that's Anne McDougall.
00:24:55
Lee Hatfield
yeah
00:24:57
Ann McDougall
That's the lady who posted about the dog. I was actually a little bit surprised that he didn't suspect the dog tweet as suspicious because I posted it right before you know the day before I went.
00:25:06
Lee Hatfield
you know
00:25:07
Ann McDougall
But I think on the other hand, this is probably someone who's not used to being debunked because he's working in a space where people come in with a very high level of belief.
00:25:18
Ann McDougall
Like it's it's a space where people want to believe, where they deeply want to reconnect with loved ones where they've maybe had paranormal experiences that make them believe in the first place.
00:25:29
Ann McDougall
And so they're not necessarily going in with a mind towards skepticism and debunking in the first place. And I think, you know, unfortunately, that allows frauds to thrive.
00:25:35
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:25:42
Ann McDougall
There's this sort of, i think, a small ecosystem of frauds who prey on these people. but then also a much larger group of people who are sincerely trying to communicate and investigate and figure it out. And, you know, I do want to say that just because those frauds exist, it doesn't discredit what everyone else is doing, because most people I met were deeply sincere and having these experiences they couldn't quite explain and trying to find a way to explain them and to understand them. And that I have profound respect for.
00:26:12
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, because I know that of an individual who's one of the biggest skeptics in the world, and he's quite renowned on UK and now US TV.
00:26:23
Lee Hatfield
And many moons ago, he was on a TV show where he doubted the reliability of a particular medium. And what he did, he created two names and put them on a document on a table.
00:26:42
Lee Hatfield
And later on, this medium actually picked up on these two names and said that they were spirits in the room. But then he actually said, well, this is actually an anagram of the word medium faker.
00:26:59
Lee Hatfield
And called the guy out and the guy got fired from the TV show.
00:27:02
Ann McDougall
Oh,
00:27:03
Lee Hatfield
Yeah. So, yeah, it's yes, it is the fact that yeah there are people out there that are willing to manipulate people for their own kudos, if you want to call it that.
00:27:15
Lee Hatfield
So did you actually do anything with the information that you found? Did you kind of like like send them an email and go, yeah.
00:27:22
Ann McDougall
Oh, did I call them up? You know, I didn't. And that was for two reasons. One was that I was at the beginning of my investigation. And so I didn't want to, you know, I knew I wanted to go to other spiritualist churches. I knew I wanted to interact with other mediums. And it is a small world, if that makes sense.
00:27:40
Ann McDougall
So I didn't want to tip my hand and put other mediums on their guard. And then the other reason I didn't, to be perfectly honest, is that I didn't think it would make a big difference.
00:27:50
Ann McDougall
What I found was that when people are truly believing, when they're really, really focused on their belief, they are aware of the presence of frauds, but they will rationalize fraud to sort of support this belief. And I understand that because this belief, you know, it's it's really rooted in the desire to reconnect with the people you love. You don't want to
Leigh's Unexplained Experiences
00:28:11
Ann McDougall
hear that it's wrong. You don't want to hear that perhaps you've been fooled, especially if you had an incredibly profound experience.
00:28:18
Ann McDougall
And so I found that when people were confronted with tales of fraud, there was a real tendency to rationalize them as, oh, you know, maybe she got that information from you psychically. You hear that a lot. Someone one would say, oh, yeah, it was fake, but it was in your mind. So they got it from you psychically.
00:28:33
Ann McDougall
I found actually throughout my research that debunking the paranormal often is less effective than you would think. Like there are a lot of cases.
00:28:44
Ann McDougall
One things I investigated was or looked into the history of was Mackenzie House here in Toronto, which is a wonderful historic house museum, one of my favorites. But it has this really intense reputation as being the most haunted house in Canada or the most haunted house in Toronto.
00:29:00
Ann McDougall
People really walk around with that belief. You hear a lot about Mackenzie House. And in my research, I found that in the 60s, there was a flurry of media coverage about Mackenzie House being the most haunted house.
00:29:11
Ann McDougall
There were a lot of newspaper articles and there were also articles there was a TV spot on CBC. And that's where that belief comes from. But a couple of years after all those articles came out, a couple of years after the TV spot,
00:29:25
Ann McDougall
Someone spoke to the McKenzie Homestead Foundation, which was the original foundation that built the museum, and they admitted to a newspaper that the ghost story was entirely made up.
00:29:35
Ann McDougall
It was just a hoax.
00:29:36
Lee Hatfield
Oops.
00:29:37
Ann McDougall
They had hoped that they might get some local media coverage and drum up publicity for the new museum, and then it got out of control, and it was picked up by newspapers across the country, it was picked up by youub newspapers in the US.
00:29:46
Lee Hatfield
oops
00:29:49
Ann McDougall
It became this huge thing, and it went out of control. And so they they fully admitted to this. and the wild thing is it didn't matter like this this was a completely debunked thing and if you speak to staff at mackenzie house today they'll happily tell you about the perception of the house being haunted but they themselves you know they don't have these experiences just least to them not a particularly haunted house but But it doesn't matter because of all of the media coverage people have in their minds that Mackenzie House is haunted.
00:30:17
Ann McDougall
And just a couple of years after that article came out, the same stories started recirculating in media, getting borrowed again. You know, by the late 60s, you have all these stories about a schoolteacher coming in with her class and they all believe it's haunted. And and that perception has never gone away.
00:30:33
Ann McDougall
And so I discovered that debunking, oddly, is very difficult. It is really hard to debunk, which is a shame because I think it actually clouds the sort of sincere investigation side of things, right? it's It's hard because on one hand you can produce evidence, you can also produce debunking, but if people ignore one or the other, it becomes very hard to find the truth.
00:30:57
Ann McDougall
So that was that was an interesting layer to all of this.
00:31:01
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, because I've got evidence that yeah of EVPs and visual evidence I know what I saw. i know what I heard. I don't care what other people think because I know that I saw this at this particular time at this particular location.
00:31:14
Ann McDougall
Mm-hmm.
00:31:20
Lee Hatfield
And when we were talking before we came on air about my pictures and stuff, last night was interviewing somebody that could astral project.
00:31:32
Lee Hatfield
So i got her to put it to the test. so that and she's She's in California. I've never met her face-to-face, and I won't go into the full story because obviously it's it's an episode, but I asked her what was basically in front of my my my computer, and I wanted her to be quite specific about what was on my speaker, but then she went, you've got toys there, and as I showed you earlier, I've got toys there, and she said they're action figures, right?
00:32:03
Ann McDougall
Wow. I not.
00:32:06
Lee Hatfield
So it's like, hang on a minute.
00:32:07
Ann McDougall
wow
00:32:09
Lee Hatfield
She's in California. How would she know that I've got action figures there? You probably haven't got action figures. yeah and yeah
00:32:20
Ann McDougall
i do not
00:32:21
Lee Hatfield
Exactly. So how would she pick up on something like that? There's a few other things. yeah She got a couple of things slightly wrong, but there was a couple of things on the light side. I'm not going to tell you now. I might tell you off air later.
00:32:34
Lee Hatfield
But there's one thing that she actually got absolutely spot on. and It's like, how the hell do you know that? So there's got to be something into it, 100%.
00:32:45
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
00:32:47
Lee Hatfield
And I was working with a medium in February and was at a little jail just between here and Montreal near a place called Hawkesbury.
00:32:58
Lee Hatfield
And she was saying, oh, there's three floors to this jail. And I went, no, there's the ground floor and the first floor. She went, no, there's three floors. And she was adamant there was three floors.
00:33:10
Lee Hatfield
And I knew that the last three people to be hung in that jail were buried in the courtyard, but I did not tell her that because I like putting these things to the test.
00:33:18
Ann McDougall
Wow.
00:33:22
Lee Hatfield
And she's going, no, there's three floors. And I went, no, there isn't. There's only ever been two, the ground floor and the first floor. Or, yeah, in North America, the first floor and the second floor.
00:33:29
Ann McDougall
you know
00:33:31
Lee Hatfield
But that's...
00:33:31
Ann McDougall
Yeah. Right, right.
00:33:33
Lee Hatfield
But then at the end, she went, is there anything you want to tell me? And I went, you mentioned about there being three floors. She went, yeah. And I went, and there was a lot of snow around, so she didn't manage to go into the yeah into the courtyard, so she may not have picked up on the three guys that were buried.
00:33:51
Lee Hatfield
And I went, the courtyard, there's three people buried. And she went, they're buried about six foot under, aren't they? And I went, I guess so, because she went, there's your third floor.
00:34:02
Ann McDougall
Oh, wow.
00:34:04
Lee Hatfield
And it's like she did not know about the people being buried there. Well, you'd like to think she did not know, but she didn't definitely say all these three people buried in the courtyard.
00:34:11
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
00:34:16
Lee Hatfield
She was just pushing this third floor scenario.
00:34:19
Ann McDougall
Interesting.
00:34:20
Lee Hatfield
Yeah. So it and it was it was like, know, if you had looked up on it, you would have known that three people were buried. But she but she didn't come out with that. She didn't because we'd like to say we didn't really touch the courtyard.
00:34:31
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
00:34:34
Lee Hatfield
So the fact that she said there's a third floor, there's a third floor.
00:34:37
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
00:34:38
Lee Hatfield
And it kind of like, I was really impressed with that.
00:34:42
Ann McDougall
That's fascinating. hmm.
00:34:43
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, and it it does make, yeah it's not what is practically there or visible, but it's it's their perception of what they see.
00:34:54
Lee Hatfield
And they could see somebody at a different level, which...
00:34:58
Ann McDougall
Yeah, do you mind if I ask you, because I'm so
Objectivity in Paranormal Evidence
00:35:00
Ann McDougall
curious, like as someone who's very in the world of paranormal investigation, what do you think is sort of the most promising technology or technique for getting this sort of hard evidence that people are looking for?
00:35:13
Lee Hatfield
That, hang on, I thought I was asking you the question. Okay.
00:35:16
Ann McDougall
Sorry, I know I'm flipping this on you, but I'm so curious.
00:35:18
Lee Hatfield
Yeah. So that's a very difficult question to ask because there's a lot of technology out there a lot of gadgets that are just gadgets for the, for the, you know, for people creating them to make money.
00:35:34
Ann McDougall
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:35:34
Lee Hatfield
Yeah. If you buy a gadget, that's got the word ghost or spirit at the beginning of it, you can guarantee it's going to be more expensive. So, If you, for example, have an audio recorder and I was at a different jail and I'm asking if there's anybody there, please make a sign, make a sound.
00:35:56
Lee Hatfield
At the end of my sentence, I heard a double breath.
00:36:00
Lee Hatfield
It wasn't me. I've got i've got a background in emergency services, so i I know how people breathe. I know how people yeah alvi the innards of a person works.
00:36:11
Lee Hatfield
I knew it was not me that did this double breath. So I sent it to a friend of mine for analysis, and he broke it down into voice waves. And he goes, yeah, this is your voice wave, and the double breath is set this voice wave.
00:36:24
Lee Hatfield
And it was two completely different voice waves. So yeah he he could say this this double breath was not you. So I'm not a big fan of some of the devices that are out there But audio devices, even though they can be altered and adjusted, an audio device will pick up a lot of like evidence that you don't hear in real time.
00:36:56
Lee Hatfield
So, yeah, I absolutely abide by the basics. But then you've got something like the spirit box, which is... yeah a white noise device, you've done the Estus, so you know what I'm talking about.
00:37:09
Ann McDougall
Yeah, yeah. yeah
00:37:11
Lee Hatfield
And it scans radio waves. But people could say, well, it it's picking up the odd words from the radio station, which, yeah, okay, it may be doing that.
00:37:23
Lee Hatfield
However, I'm a firm believer in whatever words are coming out of any device, whether it's an app, a spirit box, an ovulus, or whatever,
00:37:36
Lee Hatfield
You should not and cannot fit the words to the investigation. The words have to fit the investigation.
00:37:46
Lee Hatfield
And a perfect example of that, if you ask what day it is and it comes up with a day of the week, it probably doesn't have to be the correct day of the week.
00:37:47
Ann McDougall
Mm-hmm.
00:37:56
Lee Hatfield
But if it comes out with a day of the week, that is still relevant. If you ask what day of the week it is and it comes out with beefcake, it's completely You can't put beefcake into that sentence, but you can put a day of the week into that category.
00:38:11
Ann McDougall
And how is it, do you think, or what do you think is the best method for trying to stop yourself as the investigator from making sense or building a narrative around whatever words you get?
00:38:25
Ann McDougall
you know what I mean? Because one thing I found...
00:38:27
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:38:28
Ann McDougall
was there was a lot, and I found this both both in paranormal investigation and in you sort of spiritualist mediums, there was this idea of, you you know, you get what you get and that's the story, but our I found it was hard not to try to build whatever words you get into a story.
00:38:46
Ann McDougall
And one of the things I wrote about in the book is that, you know, i I'm an actor and I have a background in improv and in improvising, It's very much about the brain's ability to get, you know, whatever stimulus and you just go with it, you build a story around it.
00:38:59
Ann McDougall
And I think like our brains are these natural pattern making machines. And I found myself whenever we were doing investigation or getting messages, there was this real impulse to go, okay, I got the word water and water kind of makes sense because this might've been near a river and there's a real desire to build a narrative. So how do you as an investigator guard against that?
00:39:24
Lee Hatfield
Again, I'm asking the questions.
00:39:26
Ann McDougall
so Sorry. don't know you can tell how much this fascinates me.
00:39:27
Lee Hatfield
exactly Yeah, I know. the That's a very good question. But what I'm also a firm believer in, and if you haven't heard of these expressions, please tell me, you've got pareidolia and auditory pareidolia.
00:39:45
Lee Hatfield
So for those that don't know, pareidolia is the face of Jesus on a toast, or you spill something and you see a face on the floor, that all or the the face of a devil in flames.
00:39:50
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
00:39:58
Lee Hatfield
Pareidolia. If the brain does not know what it's looking at, it will try to make it into something that you understand.
00:40:08
Ann McDougall
Yeah. Yeah.
00:40:09
Lee Hatfield
Hence, it will try to change it into a recognizable feature like a face.
00:40:13
Ann McDougall
yeah
00:40:15
Lee Hatfield
Auditory pareidolia is exactly the same. If you hear a noise that sounds like something, your brain potentially could make you hear that sound.
00:40:32
Ann McDougall
yeah
00:40:33
Lee Hatfield
And a perfect example of that, we were investigating at a jail and there was a spirit box kind of device. And we like putting these things seriously to the test.
00:40:44
Lee Hatfield
And my friend Logan said,
00:40:48
Lee Hatfield
yeah if you are here, please call out one of our names. And there was three of us. There was myself, Lee, Logan and Volta. Volta is not a common name.
00:40:59
Lee Hatfield
The guy's from Brazil.
00:40:59
Ann McDougall
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:41:01
Lee Hatfield
And there was some noises coming out. And then we heard what sounded like we as in yes in French. So Logan goes, okay, we just heard we.
00:41:14
Lee Hatfield
And I went, potentially, but could it also have been trying to say Lee? And Logan's going, that's a very good point.
00:41:26
Lee Hatfield
But there are certain examples of spirit box interaction where it does come out with a perfectly clear word.
00:41:37
Ann McDougall
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:41:38
Lee Hatfield
So again, I was at one of the locations, got the spirit device, and I asked how many people had died in this cell. And pure and clear came out was the word for.
00:41:53
Lee Hatfield
Was it related to the question? Possibly. Can I categorically 100% prove that it was not a coincidence?
00:42:05
Lee Hatfield
No.
00:42:06
Ann McDougall
Right.
00:42:06
Lee Hatfield
but the word for came out and it was clear. So there are examples of an absolute clear word coming out that is in relation to the investigation that you're carrying out.
00:42:18
Lee Hatfield
But a lot of them... are were yeah noises that sound like words which it's that's very difficult to decipher to what that word's saying and i was at another investigation a place near mississippi mills the other side of ottawa and i'm walking in a room by myself and i just hear like someone's trying to get my attention
00:42:45
Ann McDougall
Oh, wow.
00:42:46
Lee Hatfield
I've got a body cam, I've got a camera, and I've got an audio device. I heard it with my plain ears. I automatically spin around because i think that someone's trying to get my attention and there's nobody about.
00:42:58
Ann McDougall
wow
00:43:00
Lee Hatfield
I then go, right, did I brush past a table or a chair? So on the camera, you can see me walking back and forth to try to replicate that. And I couldn't replicate it.
00:43:12
Lee Hatfield
Somebody said, oh, it might be a car. I'm sorry, but what kind of car makes that kind of sound?
00:43:17
Ann McDougall
Oh, yeah, Mm-hmm.
00:43:17
Lee Hatfield
Well, it might have been one of your sneakers.
00:43:17
Ann McDougall
Mm-hmm.
00:43:20
Lee Hatfield
And I was wearing soft shoes. I've never heard that sound come from a sneaker. And I could not. confirm what it was and I could not debunk it. I sent it to a different person that I know.
00:43:33
Lee Hatfield
And because it was audio audio and video, he sent it to one of his is guys who deals with that as a profession. And he went, the video was not tampered with, the audio was not added.
00:43:45
Lee Hatfield
It's not anything that we recognize. You could hear like a fridge freezer in the background. You've got that hum.
00:43:52
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
00:43:52
Lee Hatfield
You could hear a high pitched of a smoke alarm that the battery needed, like that beep kind of thing. But it wasn't anything like that. It was a basic and we cannot debunk what that is.
00:44:07
Ann McDougall
wow
00:44:08
Lee Hatfield
you know, there's those kind of pieces of evidence that you can use. And people can go, well, it might be this. It might be that.
00:44:20
Lee Hatfield
And at the end of the day, the words it might be could be used so many times.
00:44:26
Ann McDougall
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:44:26
Lee Hatfield
But if you get a real clear piece of evidence then you can categorically say, well, that was definitely that word because we heard it. And if other people don't tell them what, you what you think it is, what do you think of this? Oh, it's saying the word cat or it's saying the word dog.
00:44:45
Lee Hatfield
And if multiple people come back with that thing straight away, you can pretty much say, okay, that's the word that we hear. And then you can move forward and investigate investigate it more.
00:44:58
Ann McDougall
I guess that's where the audio really comes in, right?
00:44:58
Lee Hatfield
So it's,
00:45:00
Ann McDougall
The good, yeah, audio technology.
00:45:00
Lee Hatfield
exactly Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
00:45:02
Ann McDougall
Interesting.
00:45:03
Lee Hatfield
But like I say, you've got a lot of these devices that yeah if you press a walkie talkie, they will go off. And we had a REM pod at a location and it this this location didn't have any air conditioning. It was last July.
Canada's Paranormal History
00:45:19
Lee Hatfield
and Volta unplugged this fan so we could do some, and the REM pod went off. And we thought, well, that's weird. So he goes, well, it might be because you unplugged the fan.
00:45:32
Lee Hatfield
Plug it in again. Plugged it in, REM pod went off. Unplugged it, REM pod went off. So the power surge caused by the unplugging and plugging of the fan caused enough EMF to set the REM pod off.
00:45:48
Lee Hatfield
so yeah I probably really extended that answer, but it's it's very difficult to 100% 100% confirm the words that you find because we posted a video on our Facebook page and Logan put that it sounded like a child laughing, and it does, but then someone said, well, it sounds like a metal chair being dragged.
00:46:04
Ann McDougall
yeah
00:46:18
Lee Hatfield
It sounds like this. So we kind of could then come back and go, okay, well, yeah, there's no metal chairs in that room. we We know where everybody was stood and there was nobody near the audio device.
00:46:34
Lee Hatfield
So for people that are there, they can debunk any kind of statements that other people come out with because they were there and these people weren't.
00:46:40
Ann McDougall
Right.
00:46:43
Lee Hatfield
So it's very easy for us to go, well, it wasn't a car. It wasn't this. It wasn't that. Because we were there. You was not.
00:46:50
Ann McDougall
yeah
00:46:51
Lee Hatfield
And these people that hear this or see this are coming out with with what they presume that it is rather than...
00:46:59
Ann McDougall
hmm.
00:47:00
Lee Hatfield
what it definitely is. But we never say, oh this was a ghost. This was a like a ghostly voice that we've heard. We just put go, this piece of evidence is unexplained.
00:47:14
Lee Hatfield
And we put it on an unexplained pile. But unfortunately, that pile is getting bigger and bigger.
00:47:19
Ann McDougall
but Right. And that's that's why you keep investigating. That makes sense.
00:47:23
Lee Hatfield
Exactly. So let's go back to a ghost in the room. do want And there's no point in telling me the whole book because otherwise people won't buy your book. But if you want to, like, just give us a little bit of an insight into a couple of the stories that piqued your interest.
00:47:39
Ann McDougall
Yeah, absolutely. i did a lot of historical research. And one thing I realized in that research is that the history of spirit investigation and sort of spirit communication in Canada is really rich. It's really interesting. So in the sort of late nineteen early 20th centuries, there are all these stories about prominent Canadians and prominent Torontonians who got really into this idea of communicating with the dead.
00:48:03
Lee Hatfield
Thank you.
00:48:07
Ann McDougall
You see a lot of people like, you know, famously the Prime Minister of Canada, William Lane Mackenzie King, was a sort of closet spiritualist and was conducting seances you know throughout his late adult life.
00:48:18
Ann McDougall
But what I learned is it's it's not just him. the There were a lot of people Mary Fulford in the widow of a prominent senator was holding a lot of seances. She actually introduced King to the idea.
00:48:31
Ann McDougall
and I also found this fascinating story of a man in Toronto in the 1870s who unfortunately died as the result of a seance gone wrong. He yeah he got wrapped into, he started attending seances. He became really interested.
00:48:48
Ann McDougall
And one of the reasons he went kept going back was when he went to these seance rooms along King Street here in Toronto, he kept seeing prominent Torontonians, so men who were like leaders, political leaders, captains of industry.
00:49:01
Ann McDougall
And so he took it as, you know, very legitimate and he really saw how popular it was. Unfortunately, he fell in with a fraudulent medium who promised to give him spirit manifestation. So promised actually manifest the face of his friend.
00:49:16
Ann McDougall
And he promised that his dead friend would not only manifest, but write answers to questions and letters made of light in the air. It was incredibly compelling promise. And so they went to a hotel here in Toronto and they started the seance and he saw this ghostly face.
00:49:32
Ann McDougall
And then he started hearing the medium screaming for help. And what happened was the medium was using a white phosphorus to create a sort of ghostly glow. It was fraudulent.
00:49:45
Ann McDougall
And the thing about white phosphorus is under the wrong conditions, it's extremely flammable. And so it started a fire, it caught the building on fire. this poor lovely man, he actually saved the medium's life, even though he was a fraud, by scooping up the burning material and and putting into a bucket of water, he probably saved the building.
00:50:03
Ann McDougall
And you know in that time period, Toronto had had a lot of major and very destructive fires. So it was Very heroic, but the white phosphorus, it's really nasty stuff. when If it gets on the skin, it burns you deeply.
00:50:16
Ann McDougall
And so he wound up with these horrible burns and he eventually died. And so that was Canada's first fatal seance in the eighteen seventy s
00:50:24
Lee Hatfield
Wow.
00:50:25
Ann McDougall
It's a wild story. And I found a lot of stories of this type. Like Canada has this really fascinating paranormal history, this real history of investigation and discovery and and unfortunately frauds, but also successes. And it's it's really, I found a ton of fascinating history.
00:50:42
Ann McDougall
It was, to me, this was a surprisingly rich subject. Every time I sat down to write a chapter, whether it was about, and you know, my chapters were about different things. They were about channeling or about haunted dolls or about, automatic writing. Every time I had a topic, I would think, gosh, this topic, it's so narrow.
00:51:00
Ann McDougall
I'm not going to find anything. i found everything. Every time I found too much to write about. It's such a rich history of our our desire to contact the dead and our investigations into the paranormal.
00:51:12
Ann McDougall
There's so much here.
The Mind's Role in Paranormal Interpretation
00:51:13
Ann McDougall
The book isn't just about Canada. It is about sort of the whole world, but a lot of it wound up focusing on Canadian museums and Canadian history. And I found that it's just such a rich history for us. I was really surprised.
00:51:25
Lee Hatfield
Yeah. So I have a couple of points about what you just said. Number one, I know why so many people did seances back in the day, because they did not have a TV.
00:51:35
Ann McDougall
I agree with you.
00:51:36
Lee Hatfield
It was as as simple as that.
00:51:39
Ann McDougall
You know, what's interesting is if you look at early seances, at like how they were conducted, a lot of people were writing, you know, the rules of a seance, how to how to have a a successful one. And especially before the 1920s before the sort of rise of mass media and movies,
00:51:56
Ann McDougall
often the procedure involved sitting in the dark for like an hour before anything was expected to happen. You would sit in a seance circle in the dark and just wait.
00:52:09
Ann McDougall
And you would wait an hour or more. I read some descriptions of people waiting three hours before they experienced phenomena. Can you imagine a modern person doing that? I mean, maybe you can because you're used to paranormal investigations where you sit in the dark, but it's to me like our
00:52:20
Lee Hatfield
but well Yeah. it soon as that happened As soon as that happened, people will going, okay, I'm going to go.
00:52:28
Ann McDougall
Right? Like our attention, we do not have that attention span anymore. and and it's,
00:52:33
Lee Hatfield
No, Absolutely. absolutely
00:52:36
Ann McDougall
You know, and also our, you know, one of the chapters of the book is about spirit photography, which is a big trend from like the 1860s through like the 1920s. And it's really interesting because if you look at those photographs now, a lot of them are pretty obviously faked. They're pretty obviously double exposures. And, you know, to our eyes, it's so obvious because, you know, the people are the wrong size or they're all, you know, the angle is wrong. They're looking the wrong way. It's clearly double exposure.
00:53:05
Ann McDougall
But it's because our understanding of media and technology has changed so much. In the 1860s, most people had never been in a photograph, let alone taken one.
00:53:16
Ann McDougall
Whereas today, we take millions of photos collectively, globally, every single day. like There are now more photos taken by humans in existence than there are stars in the galaxy. like That's how many we take. And so our understanding of the world has shifted so much, which means that how we view the supernatural and the paranormal shifts along with it and what we look for and where we investigate these.
00:53:43
Ann McDougall
This has changed so much with who we are and what we can do. And I, that really fascinates me.
00:53:47
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, and i I'm a member of quite a few paranormal Facebook groups, obviously. And there's a lot of people that post photographs ago.
00:53:59
Lee Hatfield
What do you think's in the background?
00:54:00
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
00:54:01
Lee Hatfield
Yeah. Where's this person come from? And you know that a lot of it is double exposure or lens flare or whatever.
00:54:08
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
00:54:10
Lee Hatfield
And I actually teach a course for a company that are based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. And I do it on paranormal equipment.
00:54:22
Lee Hatfield
So week one, I do cameras and audio. Week two, I do like the the devices that we use in everyday life. So it the EVP, and not the EVP, the EMF detectors,
00:54:40
Lee Hatfield
Because they can be used in commercial environments, like if there's radio masks and stuff like that, they can pick up EMF. So it's all about the diagnostic equipment in in week two, or the official stuff that you can buy for construction and stuff like that that we use in the paranormal world.
00:55:00
Lee Hatfield
Week three is the pseudoscience equipment, the REM pods, the cat balls, and all this kind of stuff. And then week four, I go back to the old-fashioned stuff of the Ouija board, the pendulum, the dowsing rods, and that kind of stuff.
00:55:14
Lee Hatfield
And will call a spade a spade. yeah If people go, oh the cat ball went off. yeah i I do it in a sigh and go, okay, where did you put it?
00:55:29
Lee Hatfield
If you put it on the floor, the chances are you've called to set the cat ball off.
00:55:35
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
00:55:37
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, and stuff like that. And I'm so logical that, and quite abrupt with some of the answers that I provide. But if you're going to use something, you have to use it correctly.
00:55:50
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
00:55:50
Lee Hatfield
Like if you've got a stone windowsill, put it on a stone windowsill because if you kick the bottom of the wall, with it being stone or concrete, or what the vibration is not going to go up like a dozen bricks.
00:56:01
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
00:56:02
Lee Hatfield
So put it somewhere where if it goes off, it's going to be a genuine vibration.
00:56:02
Ann McDougall
yeah
00:56:08
Lee Hatfield
interaction Don't put it on the floor where somebody can kick it, been there, done that, and then you just see a load of flashy lights going down the corridor. So you've people use these, but they don't realize about the false positives that can be occurred.
00:56:25
Ann McDougall
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:56:26
Lee Hatfield
If we do an investigation, everybody has to put their phone on airplane mode. If they don't want to do that, they will leave their phone at the base station. because we can't afford to have any false positives caused by a text message coming through or call coming through.
00:56:44
Lee Hatfield
So we try to narrow down the amount of false information that we can receive. We don't use walkie-talkies. We have them, but we don't use them for exactly the same reason.
00:56:56
Ann McDougall
Right.
00:56:58
Lee Hatfield
If you press a walkie-talkie next door to a REM pod, it's going to set the REM pod
00:57:01
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
00:57:02
Lee Hatfield
So and that's the kind of way that you have to look at it and you have to like stick to your guns and sort of like you have to be able to justify what happened and why it happened.
00:57:09
Ann McDougall
Yeah. Yeah.
00:57:17
Lee Hatfield
So we do have devices that have gone off that we cannot explain why they've gone off.
00:57:21
Ann McDougall
yeah
00:57:23
Lee Hatfield
yeah we have something that's called a flux two, which is a triangle. It's got a yes, no.
00:57:26
Ann McDougall
Yes.
00:57:28
Lee Hatfield
So you have to literally be on one side of the triangle for it to activate. If you come at like from the side, it's not going to go off.
00:57:39
Lee Hatfield
And we've had a couple of interactions where it's gone off, and then we've had to test it to see where the where the area of like EMF kind of thing goes. is So did we accidentally set it off? And most of the time, we're at the wrong angle or we're stood too far away from it.
00:57:57
Ann McDougall
Interesting.
00:57:57
Lee Hatfield
So we can't explain it.
00:57:59
Ann McDougall
Yeah. And it takes a certain amount of rigor, doesn't it, to really sort of keep all of those variables under control. And also, imagine you have to also be very conscious of yourself and of not wanting to take, you know, just because you want something to have existed, to to be sort of conscious of when you might be biased and and correct to that to the best of your ability, right?
00:58:19
Lee Hatfield
That's it. Yeah.
00:58:19
Ann McDougall
There's a lot to it.
00:58:20
Lee Hatfield
And if you if you kick something or if your stomach grumbles, come out and say it. yeah if
00:58:26
Ann McDougall
Right?
00:58:26
Lee Hatfield
if If you fart, come out and say it. Because if you if somebody else is reviewing the evidence and they hear that, they're going to put a question mark by it. But if you go, oh, yep, sorry, that was me.
00:58:37
Lee Hatfield
I had beans for dinner.
00:58:37
Ann McDougall
Mm-hmm.
00:58:39
Lee Hatfield
Then they can debunk it straight away.
00:58:41
Ann McDougall
Yeah, yeah. And it can be, I think it can be difficult to do that too, in certain circumstances. You know, one of the things I did was I attended a table turning workshop and table turning sort of in the 19th century, 1850s especially, was really popular as a way of spirit communication.
00:58:52
Lee Hatfield
Thank
00:58:59
Ann McDougall
You know, it's when everyone sits around a table, places their hands on the table, this predates the Ouija board, but it's a similar concept. It's the idea that the table will be shaken and moved by the spirits.
00:59:10
Ann McDougall
And it is really fascinating in its time because it was investigated by Michael Faraday, the English physicist and and chemist did quite a bit of research into it and how it worked.
00:59:21
Ann McDougall
And although, you know, they never conclusively proved or disproved spirits, it did lead to the discovery of the ideomotor effect, which is really interesting.
00:59:26
Lee Hatfield
Thank you.
00:59:31
Ann McDougall
But table turning is still practice today. And so of course I went to a workshop and it was this really fascinating thing where, you know, at a certain point we've been doing it for a long, long time. And it was sort of that, it was like you said, that long period of doing nothing and being sort of bored that really is part of that process.
00:59:48
Ann McDougall
And then eventually it did start to shake. And I was really questioning like, where's the shaking coming from? Is it us? Is it something else? It's very unclear and very fascinating. And then eventually what happened was our our table did tilt up and it tilted and it was quite dramatic. it was very exciting moment.
01:00:05
Ann McDougall
I was sitting there and I was experiencing it. And then all of a sudden I became aware that I was holding it up and i I wasn't doing it on purpose. It had tilted. We all had our hands on it, but I realized that, you know, all of us had our fingers on it so lightly and now it was in this tilted position.
01:00:05
Lee Hatfield
Thank you.
01:00:19
Ann McDougall
And I realized the weight was in my hands and I was the one holding it up. I was the one making it seem to tilt at this point and I hadn't done it, but now, if I knew if I would take my hands away, it would fall.
01:00:31
Ann McDougall
And I had this very odd moment because I knew if I removed my hands, it would fall. I knew that at this point, nothing paranormal was happening. But everyone around me was there and was so excited that I had this moment of, should I take them away? I don't want to don't want to crush everyone. I don't want to disappoint everyone.
01:00:47
Ann McDougall
And then of of course, i I did take my hands away because I wasn't trying to fool anybody. But it really made me realize that there is an amount of social pressure when people really want something to happen and they really want something definitive to happen.
01:01:02
Ann McDougall
And again, I hadn't lifted the table. That had sort of that had happened collectively and it might have been paranormal. It's really hard to say. But once it was up, I was the one who dropped it. And like there was a real pressure, you know, not explicit.
01:01:12
Lee Hatfield
Thank you.
01:01:16
Ann McDougall
Nobody was telling me not to do it. But there was this like social pressure not to ruin it for everybody. and i It must be a challenge sometimes to you know really stick to your guns and say, no, we're not going to see anything that's not real. We're not going to see anything that's not happening. We have to be objective about this.
01:01:34
Ann McDougall
I imagine that can be difficult.
01:01:36
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, and we actually did a seance at an investigation a while ago. And when we posted the video, one of the first comments was, oh, you're playing you're playing with toys now, are you?
01:01:51
Lee Hatfield
And then we just commented, watch the rest of the video. Because as soon as they saw it, they stopped watching it.
01:01:58
Ann McDougall
Oh, wow.
01:01:59
Lee Hatfield
And they went, what do you mean? And i went, look at the rest of the video. And we actually had the three people doing the the seance were blindfolded. So there was no internal manipulation for them to, to move the planchette.
01:02:11
Ann McDougall
Oh, interesting.
01:02:14
Ann McDougall
And did did the planchette with blindfolds on, did the planchette spell out real things?
01:02:21
Lee Hatfield
Didn't move.
01:02:21
Ann McDougall
Yeah, you know, we actually did the same experiment as part of the book. There's a chapter on Ouija boards, which I find fascinating. It was actually sort of my starting point for writing because we at one point in my career, we did We did a museum event that was sort of about historical methods of fortune telling and connecting with the dead. So we did Ouija boards and we did tea leaf reading and we did crystal balls. And all of it was in this sort of, you know, museum-y way where we educated people and then they could come in and try it. And they all, yeah know, it was a great experience.
01:02:55
Ann McDougall
And I found that people were really, they loved the crystal balls, they loved the tea leaf readings, and they were terrified of the Ouija boards.
01:03:02
Lee Hatfield
Thank you.
01:03:02
Ann McDougall
So I wound up writing about, you know, why is that culturally? Why is this object scarier than others to people? And there's a lot of like media reasons for that. But it was really interesting because one of the things I wanted to know was how do they work if you're blindfolded? So I got a group of friends who often does a games night together. And I said, all right, we're going to do a really weird board game.
01:03:24
Ann McDougall
And so we used the Ouija boards and we got some very coherent answers. And then we did them blindfolded. And just like you, we got no coherent answer at all, which I thought was really fascinating.
01:03:35
Lee Hatfield
Yeah. And I think if people are not blindfolded, even though people do not really realize they're doing it, the subconscious is probably moving it.
01:03:47
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
01:03:48
Lee Hatfield
to where they want. So like say, to blindfold somebody, you're taking away that sense because you're then not going to know if the planchette is moving where it's going to.
01:03:56
Ann McDougall
That's right.
01:03:59
Lee Hatfield
So yeah we love doing stuff like that because it does put that kind of stuff to the test.
01:04:02
Ann McDougall
Yeah.
01:04:06
Ann McDougall
And I love that kind of stuff because I think even though it doesn't necessarily answer a paranormal question, it is so revealing about how the human brain works. And if there's one thing that I took away from writing this book, it's that our brains are so weird and so interesting and they do all of these things subconsciously that are beyond, you know, beyond our awareness and are so fascinating. So I think that's a really interesting piece of this whole puzzle is we're investigating our our world.
01:04:34
Ann McDougall
we're also to a degree investigating our own minds and our own perception of the world. And
Anne's Book Release and Future Projects
01:04:38
Ann McDougall
I think that's very worth doing.
01:04:39
Lee Hatfield
Exactly.
01:04:42
Lee Hatfield
Absolutely. And like i say, if you decide that you want to write book two or book three, then please feel free to reach out and I will give you some really honest answers on pieces of equipment that that I've seen and been used in the past.
01:04:57
Ann McDougall
I would love that. That's wonderful.
01:04:59
Lee Hatfield
Absolutely. Okay. And we are coming towards the end, unfortunately. yeah I've actually, but can't believe that we've been talking for over an hour.
01:05:07
Ann McDougall
it's It's flown by. Thank you so much for having me.
01:05:09
Lee Hatfield
I know.
01:05:10
Ann McDougall
This has been fascinating.
01:05:10
Lee Hatfield
and problem Okay. So the killer question, when's the book out? Where can people buy it?
01:05:15
Ann McDougall
oh Yes, so the book is out next month. Its official release date is November seventh but actually you'll be able to find it in a lot of bookstores, especially in cities before then.
01:05:26
Ann McDougall
But officially by November 7th, you should be able to find it anywhere fine books are sold. You can buy it on Indigo. You can buy it online. It's called A Ghost in the Room, Supernatural Adventures in Historic Houses by me, Anne McDougall.
01:05:41
Lee Hatfield
Oh, that is you. Oh, yeah, right. That's why you're here. So I will arrange for you to sign a copy and send it to me if that's okay.
01:05:49
Ann McDougall
I would love that.
01:05:50
Lee Hatfield
we can We'll arrange something. Okay, Anne, it's been and absolute pleasure. I could talk to you for another hour, but unfortunately, i do have to go to the store to do some chores.
01:06:01
Ann McDougall
Well, same. Thank you so much.
01:06:03
Lee Hatfield
No problem. Like I say, it's been an absolute pleasure. You have a great rest of the day and we will definitely you'd be talking in the near future. Thanks very much.
01:06:11
Lee Hatfield
Take care. Bye-bye.
01:06:11
Ann McDougall
Thanks, Leigh. Bye.