Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
SIPA Paranormal Chronicles S1 E7 Caroline McKendrick-Gibson
16 Plays1 month ago
In this week's episode we speak to Caroline McKendrick-Gibson, Author, Writer and Paranormal Investigator from Somerset UK.
Caroline is the lead investigator and case handler for Somerset Paranormal Investigators UK (SPI UK). She is an avid supporter of research and scientific approaches during investigations into private cases and other investigation venues.
Caroline sits within the executive board for the Association for Scientific Studies into Anomalous Phenomena, (ASSAP). She is one of the Investigations Officers, and Spontaneous Case Handlers on the NIC, for ASSAP’s National Register of Paranormal Investigators, (NRPI), and also their research officer.
Recommended
Transcript
Intro
Introduction to SIPA Paranormal Chronicles
00:00:13
Lee Hatfield
Good day everybody and welcome to another episode of SIPA Paranormal Chronicles.
Introducing Caroline McKendrick Gibson
00:00:18
Lee Hatfield
My name's Lee, your resident host, and today I am over the moon to have talking to Caroline McKendrick Gibson, who's a published writer, author and paranormal investigator.
00:00:23
Caroline McKendrick
like
00:00:31
Lee Hatfield
Caroline, welcome.
Caroline's Haunted Upbringing
00:00:33
Caroline McKendrick
Hi, lee Thank you very much for asking me on here today.
00:00:37
Lee Hatfield
You are most welcome indeed. And I was like to say, i I love having different people to talk to about all different subjects. And I know that you've been published quite a few times and I've been doing my homework and looking at some of the background.
00:00:50
Lee Hatfield
But what I'd like you to do for is just tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into the paranormal and and yeah and stuff like that. And we'll take it from there.
Self-learning Journey and Police Background
00:01:00
Caroline McKendrick
Okay, so yeah, i was brought up in Weymouth in Dorset in the UK and lived in this house that was a four-floored Victorian place, 16 bedrooms at the beginning when we moved in.
00:01:14
Caroline McKendrick
It was extended by my parents. And when I was living in there, we used to have really weird things happen. So as a 10-year-old child, it really was confusing and I didn't know what was going on so really that moment of having that paranormal activity at 10 is what sparked my interest into the paranormal.
00:01:37
Caroline McKendrick
Now I had a religious mother and went to a convent at the time so you couldn't really go in and put this to your friends and your teachers at school so I had to try and learn and find out more about the paranormal so Really, that's where my journey started.
00:01:56
Caroline McKendrick
I've then gone on through self-learning and also i now put all of my skills that I've learned through self-learning and my jobs that I've previously had. So I worked in the government sector.
00:02:10
Caroline McKendrick
So I used to be a police officer and obviously I've got investigative skills that I've learned through the job for the 10 and a half years that I was in. So I use the same principles of taking the evidence, getting the facts, researching and then putting
Unique Team Approach to Paranormal Investigation
00:02:25
Caroline McKendrick
it together. And the unique selling point that we do within our team is that despite having all of the research and the evidence from other people, we then go on and investigate ourselves to see if we can get some collaboration between what it is that they've said and what it is that we found ourselves.
00:02:45
Lee Hatfield
That's really cool. So one of my previous guests that's on the episodes that's been released was a member of the yeah the World Canadian Mounted Police, the RCMP.
00:02:55
Caroline McKendrick
OK.
00:02:56
Lee Hatfield
And he's actually written two books about the paranormal in the police force. So did you actually experience any paranormal activity as a police officer?
Caroline's Writing Projects
00:03:05
Caroline McKendrick
I did, and I'm actually currently writing a book
00:03:09
Lee Hatfield
well That's exciting.
00:03:09
Caroline McKendrick
Exactly the same. So yeah, I'm concentrating. i've I've got about 30 stories from Somerset, Avon and Somerset police officers. and I can't give you too much away or even a name of a title because I don't want someone else to crib it quick before it's been published because soon as the word is out there, it's obviously copyrighted.
00:03:29
Caroline McKendrick
But yes, it will be out. i'm Oddly, if you're a writer, you will know you don't just write one book at a time. So I've got three currently being written, one on Somerset ghosts, one on UK ghosts, and then the paranormal ghosts in the in the the blue light kind of thing.
00:03:40
Lee Hatfield
Oh, wow.
00:03:48
Caroline McKendrick
So yeah, it should be out the end of the year, I should imagine.
00:03:54
Lee Hatfield
Well, as long as your book on Ghosts of the usk UK covers Lincolnshire from where I used to i used to live, then I'll buy it.
00:04:01
Caroline McKendrick
so
00:04:03
Lee Hatfield
that you have to That has to be one of the yeah agreements. Yeah.
00:04:07
Caroline McKendrick
Well, the thing is, I'm quite happy to put something in for Lincoln if you want me to. But really, the unique selling point for me is that it's stuff that's not always in the public domain. It's brand new and cases that I've had come into our team in Somerset. And then obviously we investigate, do all of the research and investigate, write it up. So generally, the stuff that's going to be in the books is unknown.
00:04:34
Caroline McKendrick
So if you know anything and you'd like me to include it, by all means,
Transition from Police Officer to Writer
00:04:38
Caroline McKendrick
let's have a chat.
00:04:39
Lee Hatfield
i want I'll definitely do some digging because I think we've got some mutual friends. I know where took both Katies live that neck of the woods. so kind of show yeah So we'll talk about that later.
00:04:49
Caroline McKendrick
Brilliant.
00:04:52
Lee Hatfield
Can you tell me how you first started to get into the writing aspect of it? What made you go from being a police officer into, yeah I'm going to write about this kind of thing?
00:05:05
Caroline McKendrick
So, I mean, I did have quite a few incidents that while I was on the job, which just kind of fed more into my experience. interest to be honest with you because you know you're working with level-headed people who are as you would call it in a courtroom you're an a1 evidence giver because of your ability to recount the truth and the facts that you see so Having stood back after a couple of calls that we had that I couldn't explain, i i left the job to go into equine physio.
00:05:40
Caroline McKendrick
I was making far more money doing equine and human physio than I was in in the job. So the call to go there was a lot better. But then I also started up my hobby, which was my own group.
00:05:53
Caroline McKendrick
And we got called into a nightclub. And the nightclub was something that I attended regularly on night shifts. So maybe two out of the four Fridays, Saturdays in the month.
00:06:05
Caroline McKendrick
we would get a call out at about quarter to three in the morning, something like that, half two. And we would have to attend with the key holder. And it was always the movement sensors towards the back of the door that would go off.
00:06:19
Caroline McKendrick
So, you know, that really sparked my interest to get the and back into the paranormal world. But the writing, because obviously I was investigating
Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
00:06:31
Caroline McKendrick
quite a lot. And I joined ASAP, which is the Association for Scientific Studies into Anomalous Phenomena.
00:06:37
Caroline McKendrick
I joined as an executive director. And somebody messaged me and asked, would I like to go on to their podcast to be interviewed? And that was Spooky Isles.
00:06:50
Caroline McKendrick
So david David messaged and said, could you write me up to about 600, 800 words to go with your
00:06:50
Lee Hatfield
yeah
00:06:59
Caroline McKendrick
your interview, just a little bit about what we were talking about. And I said, yeah, no problem whatsoever. And I had so much feedback come back to say, oh my God, you've got a talent you need to write.
00:07:13
Caroline McKendrick
So David from Spooky Isles, my hubby, who was my then partner, and Corinne Bassett, who is in one of the lead investigators, and she looks after the historic side for Jamaica Inn in and Cornwall.
00:07:28
Caroline McKendrick
The three of them all just said, you know, you've obviously got a talent. Let's just see where you go. and I thought, imposter syndrome, can I do this? And I was cheeky. I went straight to Haunted Magazine, which is a worldwide publication, and said, you know,
00:07:47
Caroline McKendrick
What do you think of this? And they said, love it. Would you like to write for us? And I said, oh, okay. So, my first ever publication, I got front page and I was just like, know.
00:07:59
Lee Hatfield
Wow.
00:08:00
Caroline McKendrick
i know So every every copy that I've put in to be published, that's it. They're running with it. So I haven't had anything for the last couple of months because I've been incredibly busy with getting married and all of the after effects of that kind of thing. So that's how I got into writing. And I'm a little bit addicted to it.
00:08:21
Caroline McKendrick
Still have imposter syndrome, though. I still think, am I good enough? I'm good enough.
00:08:26
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, that kind of makes sense because and ie I kind of did something similar. So i i started off in the military, then went into the fire service and then was in a paramedic all before moving to Canada.
00:08:33
Caroline McKendrick
so and then
00:08:39
Lee Hatfield
So I actually started writing stories about all my all the jobs that I went on. yeah especially in the fire service. in the And I'm always thinking to to myself, like yeah is this good enough to actually have published? People go, oh yeah, you've got some great stories. But like you say, it's exactly imposter syndrome for me, too. So I can completely understand where you're coming from.
00:09:03
Lee Hatfield
You mentioned Haunted Magazine. and not I love that magazine. It's absolutely fabulous. And i I've subscribed to it for the last few months. And this is where I'm getting a lot of my podcast guests from.
00:09:17
Lee Hatfield
Because this if I see an article that I love, it's got, right, Caroline McKendrick Gibson, right, how do I get in touch with her?
00:09:17
Caroline McKendrick
Uh-huh.
00:09:25
Lee Hatfield
And I'll do my research online to find out how to get in touch with these people, ask them onto the podcast, and then here we are.
00:09:33
Caroline McKendrick
Well, I'd like to say thank you so very much. I had a little bit of a stomach flip when you said, I read it, I like it, and then I invite them. And it's just like, I really do have a talent then. So I'm still, you know, two years I've been writing for them and I still query, but I'm just beginning to think that, yes, I i could be good enough.
00:09:43
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:09:52
Caroline McKendrick
So, yeah.
00:09:52
Lee Hatfield
Oh, look, let's put credit where credit's due. You are good enough. Let's just get that out out there so that everybody knows.
00:09:58
Caroline McKendrick
Thank you.
00:10:00
Lee Hatfield
So a like you wouldn't keep on doing it and they wouldn't keep inviting you if you weren't any good.
00:10:04
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah.
00:10:05
Lee Hatfield
So what you're doing is great and I love
Founding Somerset Paranormal Investigators
00:10:08
Lee Hatfield
it. So keep but keep up that.
00:10:09
Caroline McKendrick
Thank you.
00:10:11
Lee Hatfield
And we're going to talk about one of your particular articles in a few minutes. But what I'd like to talk about first is the Somerset Paranormal Investigators. Can you tell me how how that group came to came about and your your role and some of the cool places you've investigated?
00:10:19
Caroline McKendrick
Yes.
00:10:25
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah. So my joining of a group to learn and to develop for investigating was a previous group before this.
00:10:36
Caroline McKendrick
And i I wasn't feeling totally aligned. I did learn a lot from them. They were a great group, but I didn't feel totally aligned. I think we were going in the wrong direction.
00:10:45
Caroline McKendrick
So then I created Somerset Paranormal Investigators UK, but it was under a different name. It was called Perties back then. So Paranormal Investigators Research Team Yeovil and Somerset.
00:10:57
Caroline McKendrick
So it's kind of developed as we you know make it snappier and easier to remember.
00:11:03
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:11:04
Caroline McKendrick
So, yeah, that's how the group came about. We collaborate with other people. we We go off and we do group shares for for big places and we split buildings into half for doing private hire for ourselves.
00:11:18
Caroline McKendrick
We've gone through running events for members of the public. And from there, we've kind of taken a step back a little bit from the public events. And we're just concentrating now on private cases.
00:11:31
Caroline McKendrick
I think, like I keep using the word unique selling point when I was talking to you earlier. Our unique selling point is that we go to places that are not currently on the map.
00:11:43
Caroline McKendrick
So if, and and it seems to be a lot of businesses as well. So at the moment we've got a pub landlord who said, oh my staff are walking out. I'm going crazy. Can you come and help?
00:11:56
Caroline McKendrick
So we've been investigating that probably for six months because you don't just turn up on one occasion and everything's there, you know, and you're going to get your answers. It slowly unfolds and whatever's in the property, that's assuming ghosts are real.
00:12:12
Caroline McKendrick
Because nothing in science has proved that they're real.
00:12:15
Lee Hatfield
Exactly.
00:12:16
Caroline McKendrick
So, you know, is it now that we are, we've been there quite often and not, are we having more of itself, showing itself to us? More of the staff are reporting more activity weekly. So, yeah, you know, this is what our team do. We take private cases that come in Not just that. We have house private cases.
00:12:37
Caroline McKendrick
We've even got a cracking case for a haunted camper van that's come in.
00:12:43
Caroline McKendrick
So, yeah, and, you know, we all used to be a little bit gung-ho, just wanting the oohs and the ahs way back in the day. And now it's more methodical. It's more clean investigating. And the team now are interested in the research side as well as just myself.
00:12:43
Lee Hatfield
wow.
00:13:01
Caroline McKendrick
So there are... currently eight. I've got two trainees. Some people are coming out of their couple of years of of training with us and they're not going to go anywhere. They just enjoy what we do.
00:13:13
Caroline McKendrick
So out of those eight people, we really have quite a lot of professionals. There's another ex-police officer who's ex-CID, but I don't hold that against John at all.
00:13:25
Caroline McKendrick
and You have to have the banter, but you know, obviously I was in the, just the regular uniformed side. I did do undercover stuff, but yeah, CID bless him.
00:13:36
Caroline McKendrick
So that was John. My now husband, we've obviously got married quite recently, Martin. He's a a psychotherapist. So he studies the mind and deals with lots of trauma,
00:13:52
Caroline McKendrick
anxiety, anything you can think of that you would go to therapy for, he deals with that kind of stuff. So, and it's interesting because in his study, he's learned about the brain and maybe how we would interpret information coming in.
00:14:07
Caroline McKendrick
So he can explain a few things away and also about how some hallucinations are caused using binaural beats in like a music form and things as well. So yeah, he's incredible to have on a team.
00:14:20
Caroline McKendrick
We've got a district nurse, we've got a healthcare assistant, we have somebody with business degree that works in public facing area.
00:14:32
Caroline McKendrick
So we really do have a lot of information in their knowledge that's coming in. So yeah, I'm incredibly lucky with the team that we've got currently.
Scientific Approach to Paranormal Investigation
00:14:43
Lee Hatfield
That's great. And it's it's it's weird how you kind of mentioned about doing the the science and the research, because for SIPA, we actually look at things from a logical and rational viewpoint first.
00:15:00
Lee Hatfield
So you mentioned that your husband yeah does what he does and about hallucinations. But a lot of people don't know about yeah EMF can can cause hallucinations like black mold can and stuff like that.
00:15:13
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah.
00:15:17
Lee Hatfield
So we look into that aspect of it first before we look into any kind of paranormal activity.
00:15:24
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah.
00:15:25
Lee Hatfield
But We mentioned paranormal activity. The reason why you're actually here today, one of the articles that you put into the Haunted magazine is the 14 points of recognising a poltergeist.
00:15:40
Lee Hatfield
So if we can now start on that and we can go through the 14 points, I think it would be really good for the listeners because yeah there's a big difference between normal intelligent haunting and a poltergeist and between a poltergeist and a demon, et cetera, et cetera.
00:15:45
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah. i yeah
00:15:57
Caroline McKendrick
collect
00:15:58
Lee Hatfield
So hopefully with these 14 points, the listeners will get a better idea of what a poltergeist activity can actually yeah involve.
00:16:08
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah, sure. So, i mean, what I have to make very clear, though, from the beginning is that even though I've listed 14 points within the magazine article, some of these overlap with other paranormal activity that you could have.
00:16:25
Caroline McKendrick
Maybe residual haunting, you'd have a similar pattern of everything that would happen So it would be what used to be called the stone tape theory. So something is set in history.
00:16:36
Caroline McKendrick
And if a man was a miner and he walked down a certain part of a tunnel every day to go to and from his job, he could be replaying that history.
00:16:36
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:16:47
Caroline McKendrick
It it said that he could be replaying that history. And that's what you would class as a residual energy. So Now, those those energies are not ghosts, they're not spirits.
00:16:58
Caroline McKendrick
It is laid down like a recording on a tape recorder. So once that's there, you can press rewind and play, rewind and play. It's not sentient. It doesn't understand. It's got no knowledge that it's there. It's just an energy placed in time.
00:17:15
Caroline McKendrick
That's what is believed to be a residual haunting.
00:17:18
Lee Hatfield
Thank you.
00:17:20
Caroline McKendrick
Then you have the interactive spirits like your great auntie Maud who wants to come in and just to say, oh, hi, I'm here. And they try and get your attention and they they do things. So this is where the difficulty is. How how can we differentiate between what is great aunt Maud What is your residual laid down recording that's on replay and replay?
00:17:44
Caroline McKendrick
And what is poltergeist? So this is where taking information, getting that log of data is incredibly important. So without having the log of data so that we can look back and say, well, every Tuesday between five o'clock in the afternoon and nine o'clock at night, we have lots of stuff happening.
00:17:57
Lee Hatfield
and
00:18:06
Caroline McKendrick
you know, we need to have these data patterns to see what type of activity, when it's happening, is there anything that's aligning to it? Have the household had a massive blowout?
00:18:19
Caroline McKendrick
So, you know, when we go into a case that calls us in, is it more active on a Friday, a Saturday and a Sunday? Which to me, as an investigator, would make me think, well, people are home more together as a family from Friday to Sunday.
00:18:33
Caroline McKendrick
Are they not gelling well? Is there family interactions that's causing you know a poltergeist type activity from having a clash, arguing more, increasing the energy that way?
00:18:47
Lee Hatfield
I mean...
00:18:47
Caroline McKendrick
So this is what we need to look at. You can't just take these 14 signs and say, well, boom, you know I've ticked six of them. Therefore, it's 100% a poltergeist.
00:18:57
Caroline McKendrick
Well, poltergeist activity is pretty rare, to be honest with you. So it's just understanding how to differentiate between what's your great auntie Maud, you're replaying tape and what was possibly poltergeist.
00:19:14
Lee Hatfield
i Exactly. And I 100% agree with what you said, because reading your article and the fact that I've done some research on poltergeist with an online course.
00:19:26
Lee Hatfield
both of the yeah subjects can absolutely blend together. And you can go through the checklist and go, well, a ghost does that, a ghost does that, a ghost does that.
00:19:38
Lee Hatfield
But you can also go, a demon does that, a demon does that, a demon does that. So like you said, it's it's it's getting the evidence and putting it in logical format for you to definitively say, yes, this is...
00:19:53
Caroline McKendrick
so just before we move forward to believe in demons you've got to believe in god so obviously i'm going to strike them out of my
00:20:02
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:20:03
Caroline McKendrick
of my diary for today let's just say so that i would never refer to anything as being demonic because yeah i'm i'm a science-based girl and i need to have a science-based fact and i i don't necessarily per say believe you know that there is a god or a demon but there let's just use the terminology demon is very very different vastly different from poltergeist a demon is said to be something religious that was around when God created the earth, fell from heaven out of grace, all that kind of stuff.
00:20:36
Caroline McKendrick
And poltergeist is an energy form that has never been on the earth plane. So it's not a human that's passed and it's not a ghost and it's not a spirit. It's an energy form born from the person centred.
00:20:54
Caroline McKendrick
So say, for example, i have a poltergeist here. I don't know if I do. My house is haunted, but I don't know. We're still working on this one. We could say that, you know, activity is increased when we argue. We we don't we don't argue very often, so it's not something that we would notice.
00:21:17
Caroline McKendrick
But a poltergeist is from a person and they call that the person centred that creates this energy. And that's very, very different from what's alleged to be a demon.
00:21:29
Caroline McKendrick
So that's the difference i just want to make before we move forward, that it comes from the person. And, you know, there's not any rhyme or reason sometimes why this person-centered activity occurs.
00:21:44
Lee Hatfield
No, and I 100% agree with what you say.
00:21:45
Caroline McKendrick
have a
00:21:49
Lee Hatfield
Unfortunately, when you watch a lot of these TV shows, they use the D word far too often.
00:21:50
Caroline McKendrick
question.
00:21:56
Lee Hatfield
And yeah if people actually looked into it, they would know that when the Catholic Church trains padres in exorcism, the first thing they do is teach them about mental health.
00:22:10
Caroline McKendrick
Yes.
00:22:11
Lee Hatfield
So that kind of breaks that down so we can but can put that to one side. but yeah But because we're talking about poltergeist, a lot of people do not know the difference.
00:22:20
Caroline McKendrick
No.
00:22:21
Lee Hatfield
and that's And that's one of the reasons why I'm getting you here today. So you can kind of we can go through it together yeah the the the checkbox, so to speak, of what is and what isn't.
00:22:32
Caroline McKendrick
See the brain is this massive muscle that is so untapped you know we're only using 20, 25% of it knowingly you know when you go and have scans.
00:22:44
Caroline McKendrick
So what part of the brain is kicking into play to cause poltergeist activity from a centre-born person creating that energy?
00:22:55
Caroline McKendrick
We don't know. We don't understand it. So at the moment, everything that I'm telling you is theory-based.
00:23:03
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, and it's it's like we've mentioned earlier about electromagnetic fields.
00:23:04
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah, that's it. Yeah.
00:23:09
Lee Hatfield
If you've got a faulty device that's pushing out high EMF, it can make you hallucinate. So, yeah, that is not paranormal activity.
00:23:15
Caroline McKendrick
Yes. Yeah.
00:23:20
Lee Hatfield
You've got something that's generally wrong wrong in your property.
00:23:20
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah.
00:23:23
Lee Hatfield
So, yeah, the fact that we kind of have a...
00:23:23
Caroline McKendrick
ye
00:23:27
Lee Hatfield
the proverbial checklist to go through.
00:23:29
Caroline McKendrick
question
00:23:30
Lee Hatfield
it's not even yeah It's not going to be 100% correct. It's going to be these are the typical kind of activities, whereas a lot of people will just go, oh I've got that.
00:23:39
Caroline McKendrick
yeah
00:23:43
Lee Hatfield
I must have a poltergeist where it's not exactly that fact.
00:23:46
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah, definitely. I mean, EMF is responsible for quite a lot of stuff for causing some lot of paranormal activity. If it's high enough, it has been known to leave burn marks on the skin.
00:23:59
Caroline McKendrick
So this is why, I mean, we had a case in Dorset. So I'll just call it the Dorset case. And their EMF that it was kicking out at the bottom of the stairs was about 64 years.
00:24:13
Caroline McKendrick
minigas which is quite high and if you're constantly living in that and and in the kitchen they must have had some kind of fault it was a council owned property and we did get the council in to check the electrics when we were getting these high readings so and the council being the council did the normal you know, inspection tests of the what's coming into the house, but they didn't check necessarily the connections in the house.
00:24:39
Caroline McKendrick
So it was so bad in the end, the person moved out of the house. But that was causing a lot of burn marks when they were in a certain area of the house as well.
00:24:49
Caroline McKendrick
So yes, it's really important that you get somebody who's scientifically based investigators with enough knowledge to be able to go through these scientific knowledge-based checks and make sure that your problems that you're having in the house have been discounted through the normal stuff like emf and as you mentioned black mold we've not dealt with black mold our ourselves so i cannot give you any information on that unfortunately but yes you know once you've had the house checked
00:25:21
Caroline McKendrick
was the one of the first things that we do is look at the electric coming in.
Ethics and Responsibility in Paranormal Investigation
00:25:25
Caroline McKendrick
This house had 190. I forgot what it is coming in. Is it volts or watts coming in?
00:25:33
Caroline McKendrick
And it was not enough and the lights were flashing and it was blowing things in the house. So we got the board out. They put a meter in left it there for a week, checked it and said, you weigh under will increase the amount of electric we've got coming into the house. And that resolved a lot of the lights flashing.
00:25:51
Caroline McKendrick
didn't stop the activity in the house, though. So we then moved on to recording, logging, and seeing what information we've got for that. But yes, EMF is the first point that I would do. Obviously, you've brought up mental health.
00:26:06
Caroline McKendrick
So we would be asking very delicately questions about mental health and medicines that people might be on. Yeah, definitely.
00:26:15
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, and and people don't kind of get that part of a paranormal investigator's job.
00:26:16
Caroline McKendrick
and
00:26:22
Lee Hatfield
They just think it's like a lot of the TV shows where you turn up at a house and you're seeing shadow figures or you're seeing yeah the proverbial white sheet with the holes in.
00:26:26
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
00:26:34
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, but it's not that at all. The objective of a paranormal investigator is to help that individual. So if it turns out to be a rodent problem or an EMF problem or a black mole problem, that's something that can be rectified.
00:26:41
Caroline McKendrick
yeah
00:26:49
Caroline McKendrick
yes
00:26:49
Lee Hatfield
And then at the end of the day, you've still helped the client.
00:26:54
Caroline McKendrick
yeah
00:26:54
Lee Hatfield
And that's what a lot of people don't understand. They just think that you walk into a haunted house looking for for ghosts and getting voices and that and that kind of thing. and And that's it at the end of the day. But that's that couldn't be further from the truth.
00:27:08
Caroline McKendrick
This is the the thing that members of the public don't understand. you When you're looking for somebody who is a suitable person to come and investigate your house, I mean, if you're living out there in Canada and you'd like us to visit, if you want to trump up two airplane tickets to come out, Martin and I would be very happy to come and help you at any time. but but please if you're looking for somebody to investigate your house do your checks do your due diligence have a look at them online see what kind of content that they're providing on their social media are you having the the woos and the lights that's flashing and the attention listen i've just got this orb and no orbs are not dead people orbs are dust and moisture but that's another story so we'll leave that for another day
00:27:42
Lee Hatfield
Thank you.
00:27:57
Caroline McKendrick
really be careful who you're inviting into your own home. You wouldn't invite an unsolicited seller of double glazing into your own home without doing checks on them. So just make sure when you're inviting people in for your own safety, see who you've got coming in, because I feel responsible to the people who call us in our team to ensure that they understand fully that we're not there to be like a certain Mr Bagans on TV and, you know, go down the route of demons.
00:28:27
Caroline McKendrick
We are science based and it's more like social worker that you're going in and reassuring them. that everything is okay, it's going to be okay, nobody's been seriously injured by any paranormal activity, you know, nothing lasting, no one's died, no children have ever been noted in history of of being injured, you know, so this is our job to make them feel comfortable and reassured.
00:28:53
Lee Hatfield
Exactly. And yeah I even made a comment on a post that I saw this morning on Facebook where someone was saying, oh, I've been scratched multiple times.
00:29:03
Lee Hatfield
It must be a negative entity. So I kind of did my diplomatic thing and put, OK. It's not always negative if you are being like manhandled by a spirit.
00:29:15
Lee Hatfield
At the end of the day, if that spirit is reliving its life and you're in its way on a corridor, it could be just trying to move you out of the way. Or if it has tried to communicate with you and you've ignored its voices because you can't hear them.
00:29:25
Caroline McKendrick
yeah
00:29:31
Lee Hatfield
The next logical choice of actions is to try to reach out to you. So it may not be the fact that they're trying to hurt you. It might just be that they're trying to get your attention. So just because you've got a scratch, it doesn't mean that it's a malevolent spirit that's trying to hurt you.
00:29:51
Caroline McKendrick
that Exactly. i mean, I've been doing this within a group for, I would say, 12 and a half years. I've only ever had one physical scratch.
00:30:06
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:30:06
Caroline McKendrick
You know, was it was it that was it caused by, as I've mentioned, high EMF?
00:30:06
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:30:11
Caroline McKendrick
Who knows? It was quite a pleasant, unpleasant feeling to the room. that we were in and a lot of people were feeling odd. And yeah, so that's one time that I've been scratched. But I believe that if there are such things as ghosts in life, you are in death as you are in life.
00:30:32
Caroline McKendrick
So if you're a bit angry, you're going to be a bit angry. Yeah.
00:30:35
Lee Hatfield
Yeah. and And like say, we is it sounds like you and I are on the same wavelength with regard to how we do our investigations.
00:30:37
Caroline McKendrick
wait it not
00:30:45
Lee Hatfield
You have to, you have to, have to, have to do things logically and you have to rule out. yeah I've got noises in the attic. Okay. Do you have a rodent problem? Well, I don't know. I've not looked.
00:30:57
Lee Hatfield
Yeah. And it's that kind of thing that you that you have to do it first. It's all good and well have yeah watching these TV shows. like Like I said earlier, we walk through the door and things are happening straight away.
00:31:09
Lee Hatfield
But that is not always the case.
00:31:09
Caroline McKendrick
Oh.
00:31:12
Lee Hatfield
So yeah I did learn on one of my online courses that.
Role of Adolescents and Adults in Poltergeist Activity
00:31:16
Lee Hatfield
a lot of the times the agent involved in a paranormal occurrence can be an adolescent teenager because of the problems that they've been going through in their life, problems at home, problems at school, et cetera.
00:31:29
Caroline McKendrick
but
00:31:33
Lee Hatfield
Can you kind of elaborate on if you've kind of looked into, yeah done the research on that just to prove that as a fact?
00:31:41
Caroline McKendrick
Yes, so academia has looked into this, whether or not it's more prevalent poltergeist activity in adolescence. And the answer that's come back through academia trials is that it doesn't seem to be favoured for adolescents or teenagers.
00:32:01
Caroline McKendrick
It does seem to have an impact of hormonal effects. And I'm not just talking about a lady at certain times of the month. If you have an imbalance of proturity glands or chemicals within your brain, then obviously that's going to be causing some type of hormonal imbalance so that your body is not in sync.
00:32:12
Lee Hatfield
Thank
00:32:24
Caroline McKendrick
So yeah, that could possibly be reason why. upset and argument seems to be more prevalent in poltergeist type activities and unsettled environment.
00:32:36
Lee Hatfield
That's a good point to continue with that kind of train of thought.
00:32:37
Caroline McKendrick
but
00:32:43
Lee Hatfield
Before we came online, we were both talking about an individual that lives in Seattle, whose husband and wife living in a house and the amount of paranormal activity that he encountered.
00:32:52
Caroline McKendrick
because
00:32:56
Lee Hatfield
They don't have any children. The relationship seemed to be going fine at that particular time. Okay, yeah, it broke up afterwards, but before that. So for it to be centered on adolescent children kind of takes out the equation.
00:33:13
Lee Hatfield
Would you kind of agree with that?
00:33:15
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah, like I say, academia, all investigations into that and studies has not proved that adolescence has prevalence to why this would happen.
00:33:27
Caroline McKendrick
No, it it doesn't come out higher. It's probably, i would say, almost an even split between male and female, almost.
00:33:39
Lee Hatfield
can see Right. Yeah, because I know, especially in the UK, and we've got the example in Seattle that I just mentioned, there's a couple of really high-profile cases in the UK that say this is definitely poltergeist.
00:33:41
Caroline McKendrick
right
00:33:58
Lee Hatfield
But even when you look at some of the the the the still photographs, from a complete lay person not knowing anything you would say that these photographs are staged because of the the the positioning of the of the individual what's going on in the background yeah it doesn't look as realistic as what
Challenges in Proving Paranormal Activity
00:34:23
Lee Hatfield
they say it is. But obviously we we weren't there, so we don't know that.
00:34:27
Lee Hatfield
But just by looking at still photographs, that doesn't give you a true and an accurate report of that particular incident.
00:34:27
Caroline McKendrick
no
00:34:33
Caroline McKendrick
no but see nowadays we're moving into ai even having video footage is not going to be something that is going to prove that it was poltergeist uh our team very very rarely put anything out there that we capture because it's it's exhausting trying to explain to people that we're science-based, we're honest.
00:34:54
Caroline McKendrick
Two of us are ex-coppers, so, you know, we don't stage anything because there really wouldn't be any point. But in all of the cases that we've dealt with and high-end cases of high-end reports of activity, every single one has some element of faking and hoaxing.
00:35:13
Caroline McKendrick
So I have done a talk for ASAP It's in Bath University that I gave this talk about hoaxing and within the paranormal misinterpretation of information, why, you know, they think that it's poltergeist or why they think it it's haunting and the different reasons why you would be given false information.
00:35:36
Caroline McKendrick
So if you wanted to have a follow up, go and have a listen to that talk as well. But I think in high end cases where they're telling you we've got X, we've got Y, we've got Z, they feel that they have to constantly keep giving you stuff.
00:35:49
Caroline McKendrick
And if you have a lull in paranormal activity, I've got to fill that gap. I've got to do something. Or is it an element of control? Is it some kind of coercive control within the family?
00:36:02
Caroline McKendrick
Is it some kind of intimidation of another family member to keep them there in the house?
00:36:08
Lee Hatfield
yeah
00:36:08
Caroline McKendrick
So this is the type of thing that we look at. But yes, there's always an element of faking and hoaxing. So some of the pictures could be hoaxed.
00:36:14
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:36:18
Caroline McKendrick
Some could be very real, but it's very difficult. i I wasn't thinking clearly when I had what I consider to be contagion paranormal. poltergeist activity here in the house, I was so blown away, so absolutely terrified by what happened in our own house that I just took a still photograph. I didn't video and walk it through and say, well, that's where this thing started before it apported.
00:36:43
Caroline McKendrick
And that's where it, you know, I took two stills and people could just go, well, you know, you staged it. And it's just like, I haven't made it public, but, know, i think people who have genuine paranormal activity,
00:36:57
Caroline McKendrick
will be the quiet ones that don't put it out there.
00:37:00
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, and i agree.
00:37:01
Caroline McKendrick
yeah
00:37:01
Lee Hatfield
And I was talking to a complete random fact, a Bigfoot investigator a few few weeks ago, and I asked him if he would publicize the fact that he'd had genuine contact.
00:37:02
Caroline McKendrick
but
00:37:18
Lee Hatfield
And he actually said no. because he would not want to jeopardize that species if he did find it. And it's like it's a the same kind of concept.
00:37:29
Lee Hatfield
Yeah. Unfortunately, like you said, you mentioned AI and we've got these phone apps nowadays that can speak to your mother.
00:37:36
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
00:37:38
Caroline McKendrick
and state
00:37:39
Lee Hatfield
yeah You've got stick figures and stuff like that. If you're going to use those, You've got to be really, what's the word I'm looking for?
00:37:52
Lee Hatfield
Like conscious of the fact that this is AI at the end of the day.
00:37:56
Caroline McKendrick
boom
00:37:57
Lee Hatfield
If you've got a bank of words, who's saying that that app's not listening to what you're saying and just producing the bank of words. So I tell people that if you are using any kind of app that's got voice activity,
00:38:13
Lee Hatfield
If you ask a question, if you say, you know, what day
Skepticism and Technology in Paranormal Evidence
00:38:17
Lee Hatfield
is it? And they come out with Monday, that's a relevant answer to your question.
00:38:22
Caroline McKendrick
yeah
00:38:22
Lee Hatfield
If you come out with what day is it? And they say Somerset.
00:38:26
Caroline McKendrick
well
00:38:26
Lee Hatfield
It's not not a relevant answer, so you can kind of completely debunk debunk that. And I think that's kind of the best way to go forward. You've got to be logical about it. We've already mentioned about orbs, and people will argue the fact that orbs are spirits or orbers until yeah the end of the days.
00:38:45
Lee Hatfield
But...
00:38:45
Caroline McKendrick
I'm not saying that orbs can't be a spirit manifestation. I'm not saying that because my mind is pretty open.
00:38:53
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:38:53
Caroline McKendrick
I'm a, a skeptical believer. That's how I would class myself.
00:38:59
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:39:00
Caroline McKendrick
We can take 99.9% of orbs and completely give them a rational explanation and dismiss them. And it's very easy how we can do that, with and especially with single lens reflexes in cameras. You get light anomalies and camera anomalies.
00:39:18
Caroline McKendrick
We've got a photographer in our group, a professional photographer, and we look at a lot of AI-generated and camera caught things. So we do dismiss stuff.
00:39:29
Caroline McKendrick
But you can get that 0.1% that you look at it and you say, you know what? That's just not the right shape for dust or an insect. And you slow it down.
00:39:43
Caroline McKendrick
You put it through, you know, very, very slow frame by frame. And then when you're listening to it, you then get a noise that comes through on a frequency. that isn't necessarily a frequency of the human voice or human sound.
00:39:58
Caroline McKendrick
And you think, well, okay, I can't explain this one. So I'm now gonna put it in that box that's called unexplained and we will leave it there in the unexplained box as just something that you know we we cannot debunk.
00:40:14
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, and I hope so.
00:40:14
Caroline McKendrick
So yeah i have seen orb that I class to be not dust and not moisture and not an insect.
00:40:23
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, and we do exactly the same if we pick up EVPs. I've got a friend who's got a great audio background, and if I pick up an EVP, I will send it to him and he will do the complete waveform and he will check it and he'll go, yeah, that's your voice.
00:40:40
Lee Hatfield
That's the EVP. And they're completely different.
00:40:43
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah. Yeah.
00:40:43
Lee Hatfield
and Again, we don't say, oh that's a check for the haunted box. We just put it on the same pile as you do. So that pile is getting bigger of unexplained, that we cannot put a rational explanation to it.
00:40:53
Caroline McKendrick
yeah
00:40:56
Caroline McKendrick
You see, if you take the word paranormal, para means outside of, and obviously normal means normal. So paranormal is just a word and a box that we have lumped everything into that we can't explain away.
00:41:10
Lee Hatfield
Oh, 100%.
00:41:10
Caroline McKendrick
Now, as we progress with science and we progress with knowledge and understanding of the human mind and other things that can have an influence on us, less things will be in that paranormal box and more things will be debunked.
00:41:24
Caroline McKendrick
So we are slowly moving towards finding more and, you know, but there is huge amount that we don't know. So have to stay and remain in that box.
00:41:32
Lee Hatfield
oh hundred to percent
00:41:35
Lee Hatfield
Exactly. Well, we are coming close towards the end of our conversation, but I would love to know a little bit more about what's happening in your house.
Personal Experiences of Paranormal Activity
00:41:46
Caroline McKendrick
So, I've lived here for, i think, eight and a half years now and we've had activity from the minute I came in. my late husband passed away 10 and a half years ago and never came to this house at all.
00:42:03
Caroline McKendrick
But back in the other house, my smoke alarms used to go off at like three in the morning, quarter to three, four, something like that. And they would ring three times and then stop. And it would always be birthdays or anniversaries or special occasions.
00:42:17
Caroline McKendrick
And i thought once we'd moved here or I'd moved here, I wouldn't have that anymore. But that was one of the first paranormal experience I had when this place was being ripped to bits and I was having a full renovation. There was no electric in most of the house and I had battery operated smoke alarms.
00:42:36
Caroline McKendrick
So I was talking to a friend. a close friend of the family who's like a daughter and saying about, oh, the smoke alarms won't go off here because there's no electric.
00:42:48
Caroline McKendrick
And at that moment, the smoke alarm went off the three rings on the battery operated one.
00:42:48
Lee Hatfield
I think.
00:42:53
Caroline McKendrick
And I just thought, do ghosts have free will? Can they move? Is he here? Is he visiting here? So it was almost right towards the beginning that things started happening, but I've now got eight and a half years worth of logged stuff.
00:43:12
Caroline McKendrick
And I call it stuff because it's in that box. of the unexplained and it started on and it's really weird, so weird that it goes in like cycles, it recycles itself of what it does.
00:43:26
Caroline McKendrick
So I was having a dog barking and a man coughing to start with and I thought, oh, this is weird, you know, a dog barking and I've got a dog but my dog was asleep on the floor by my feet.
00:43:38
Caroline McKendrick
and as we've progressed through time, it's got weirder. I've, I think I had a little bit of, crikey.
00:43:49
Caroline McKendrick
I've, I've said the word a minute ago, when you pick up a poltergeist attachment from somewhere else and it can come back with you,
00:43:56
Lee Hatfield
Right. right
00:44:00
Caroline McKendrick
I had dealt with a high end case that I was working with a field investigating with another team for the SPR and it was up in Essex area. And i I don't know if we got a bit of contagion or if somebody is the person centered agent here in our property, but when I was writing this article for the poltergeist, I'm reading out bits to my partner at the time, my husband saying, what do you think? Does that sound okay? Cause in my head, it sounds a bit weird.
00:44:32
Caroline McKendrick
And you know, the more I was reading it, the more weird things were happening in the house. And literally after I'd sent this off to my agent, my editor, I woke up the next morning, Martin's watch went off at five o'clock because he was going out and doing a marathon run.
00:44:44
Lee Hatfield
with cardiac..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
00:44:49
Caroline McKendrick
And it went off at quarter to five in the morning. Five minutes past quarter to five, he, we heard a little girl on the hallway upstairs going, la la la, and I'm like this.
00:45:05
Caroline McKendrick
And he's up on his elbow looking out And he's went, oh my God, did you just hear something? I said, yeah. And we're now going to have to go. What did you hear see if we're not priming each other?
00:45:05
Lee Hatfield
so
00:45:19
Caroline McKendrick
And, he said, I don't know what the hell that was, but it sounded like a girl, a lady singing. and I went, that's exactly what I heard. But if you go through my list of items on the article,
00:45:34
Caroline McKendrick
One of the things that I was saying is that poltergeist activity can take on the form of mimicking voices and mimicking. And I was particularly picking on this point to my husband the day before.
00:45:49
Caroline McKendrick
so
00:45:49
Lee Hatfield
That's what it means.
00:45:50
Caroline McKendrick
Oh, my God. And of course, I i was talking to Andy, Andy Saw, and he says, oh, my God, if you've got a contagion, what happens if we put this into print and we send it to thousands of people all over the globe?
00:46:06
Caroline McKendrick
Are they all going to have your paranormal contagion of a poltergeist? I said, oh, it doesn't work like that. Like, I know the rules completely.
00:46:15
Lee Hatfield
but
00:46:16
Caroline McKendrick
for contagion, I am...
00:46:20
Caroline McKendrick
99.9% confident that you have to have had a personal connection with that house that's got that activity.
00:46:28
Lee Hatfield
Right.
00:46:28
Caroline McKendrick
And Martin and I had been there and literally within 48 hours, we had all hell on earth kicking off here in this house when I put that article in and, you know,
00:46:40
Caroline McKendrick
I've had objects apporting, so they go missing. Martin's running watch went missing and it went missing for six months and he went out and just went, Oh, do know what? Blow this. I am going to go and buy another one. I've got big runs coming up and I need my watch.
00:46:57
Caroline McKendrick
So he went and bought one and literally the day after he bought it, his other watch turned up where we had pulled apart. the seat that he sits in, in the front room and he plugs it into the, puts it on his little cabinet next to the chair in the front room.
00:47:13
Caroline McKendrick
We pulled everything apart. He did, I did. have a lady come in to help deep clean every now and again. She pulled the whole thing a apart, nothing. And then the day afterwards, this turned up.
00:47:24
Caroline McKendrick
And then the next week, the other one went missing and it turned up somewhere really weird. that he would never go and just stumbled upon it by chance. Like what the hell's your watch doing here? And it's stuff like this.
00:47:40
Caroline McKendrick
But the smell, we'd just gone out to go to a wedding fair and came in the house.
00:47:46
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:47:46
Caroline McKendrick
And I said, right, when we go in the house now, because of all this happening, because of this magazine article, we won't talk about poltergeist activity. We won't discuss it. We won't try and entice it to feed off our emotions and feed it.
00:48:01
Caroline McKendrick
But as soon as we walked in, we walked into a smell of rancid sweat. I've never experienced anything like that. And the smell was so pungent. It was like a workman had been on a building yard for a week, had gone home every day, not washed and put the same clothes back on. Sweaty smell.
00:48:23
Lee Hatfield
I'm like, how can you explain that?
00:48:24
Caroline McKendrick
going not be
00:48:24
Lee Hatfield
You can't, can you?
00:48:26
Caroline McKendrick
We both smelt it. it dissipated within three seconds of smelling it. It's like... that's vile and then it went and then you walked into the kitchen and the smell was in front of you like it had walked before you.
00:48:41
Caroline McKendrick
I've only ever had that again about a month ago. that's the two occasions in the whole time I've lived here. We get cigarette smoke that you can smell.
00:48:52
Caroline McKendrick
But the clock, we've got a grandfather clock, the winder gets thrown regularly. And the more activity that we have in the house seems to be when we wind the clock up. And I don't just mean wind it up by going, oh, you're a clock.
00:49:05
Caroline McKendrick
We physically wind this grandfather clock up and it seems to be increases the activity. So one of the theories is that some of the activity could be linked to this object that was brought in when Martin moved into the house, because I bought this house two years prior to meeting him.
00:49:25
Caroline McKendrick
So is some of it caused by this really old antique?
00:49:31
Lee Hatfield
Maybe you can you can write a book on just the house.
00:49:32
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah.
00:49:35
Caroline McKendrick
Oh, I have eight and a half years of logged information. It's keeping people occupied because we're now, we've put the team to work that once a month we investigate And if you know John Fraser from the sd he's he's written
00:49:49
Lee Hatfield
No, I'm not familiar. Okay.
00:49:52
Caroline McKendrick
he's written poltergeist books and things as well. If you haven't bought his book, it might you might be interested in reading some of the things that he's done himself with his own investigation for the SPR.
00:50:04
Caroline McKendrick
he
00:50:04
Lee Hatfield
need to.
00:50:04
Caroline McKendrick
I send him regularly couple of times a year the updates and he's baffled to the stuff that I've written and You know, we've got scientific equipment that's put all over the roof, all over the the lower part of the house that measures atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity.
00:50:23
Caroline McKendrick
So we're looking at all the science based and, you know, we are finding that we get atmospheric pressure differentiates really massive peaks or massive drops in change with the pressure when we get activity. So, yeah, we are studying things a lot.
00:50:41
Caroline McKendrick
the knocking and the banging that's been going on this place over the last two weeks is crazy. And the newest activity to start is that a spoon in the coffee making area in the kitchen gets regularly dropped into a bowl.
00:50:58
Caroline McKendrick
It's like a ceramic bowl. and And I showed you that before we started this.
00:51:02
Lee Hatfield
yeah
00:51:03
Caroline McKendrick
Is it loud enough that you heard that?
00:51:05
Lee Hatfield
oh definitely yeah and it's like your husband was across the kitchen yeah that's
00:51:06
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah. Yeah.
00:51:10
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah. So the only thing that is, you know, out of sight of the camera is the the kettle right underneath it. I mean, it's it's a flat wall, it's an external wall.
00:51:21
Caroline McKendrick
And there's no way that anybody will be able to stand there. I am thinking about getting other cameras so that people can't say that we fake stuff. There's no need for us to fake it.
00:51:29
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:51:30
Caroline McKendrick
There's so much stuff that happens here. It's But everything that's on my 14 list, basically, we've had, except for, I don't think we've had stacking of objects.
00:51:44
Caroline McKendrick
We've had objects being thrown, moving, apportations.
00:51:49
Caroline McKendrick
I don't, no, we haven't had any water appearances and no spontaneous fires. That's the three things on my list that we haven't had.
00:52:00
Lee Hatfield
Wow, that's unbelievable.
Closing Remarks and Future Invitations
00:52:03
Lee Hatfield
And what a way to what a way to finish an interview, to have some personal experiences.
00:52:03
Caroline McKendrick
Yeah. but yeah Yeah.
00:52:10
Lee Hatfield
So, Caroline, thank you very much. It's been a most enjoyable and informative interview, episode, whichever you want to call it. And I hope we can do this again.
00:52:22
Lee Hatfield
You're getting official invite now to come back for one of your many other topics that we can talk about.
00:52:28
Caroline McKendrick
I would love to. Yeah, I'd love to.
00:52:30
Lee Hatfield
That'd be awesome. Okay. Thank you for your time and we'll definitely speak again. Thanks very much. Take care.
00:52:37
Caroline McKendrick
Thanks, bye.