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S1 E31 - Brandon and Mitch from Haunted US
16 Plays21 days ago
I had the delight to speak to Brandon and Mitch from Haunted US.
We start of by talking about Mitch's ghost hunting experiences at 14 years old, and Brandon's door knocking ghost, that spanned generations.
i heard about how Haunted US got started, Brandon’s passion for photographing door knobs, and not visiting the Eloise Asylum.
We then discussed what makes a location haunted, lights and flashlights switching on and off, and some bucket list locations in the US.
https://hauntedus.com/30-haunted-nights-wisconsin-travel-guide-book/
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Transcript
Intro
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:23
Speaker
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the latest episode of SIPA Paranormal Chronicles. My name's Lee. I'm the host, in case any of you forgot. And tonight, I am delighted to have Brandon and Mitch from Haunted US.
00:00:39
Speaker
Hey, Lee. Mitch, good evening. Good evening. How are you? I'm not too bad. Can't complain. Because there's no point in complaining because people never listen. That's true.
00:00:50
Speaker
that's I mean, i feel like in your line of work, it's kind of only people listening, isn't it? Yeah. It's sort of like it goes in one ear and out the other. Oh, there you go. All right. Fair enough.
Mitch's Paranormal Journey
00:01:03
Speaker
Okay. So before we start talking about why we're here tonight, can you guys both in your, not at the same time, because it gets confusing, talk about how you first got interested in the paranormal?
00:01:18
Speaker
Sure. Mitch, do you want to go first? Oh, that was like throwing you under the bus straight away. Oh, it's totally out of respect. Just wait. His story is so much better than mine. i always feel like crap going after him.
00:01:31
Speaker
So it's me owning it. It's me throwing me under the bus. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So I was never really a believer in the paranormal or ghosts growing up or anything like that.
00:01:45
Speaker
I didn't watch any of the the TV shows I might've seen maybe an episode or two of of ghost hunters along the way, but I never really put much stock in anything spooky or strange.
00:01:57
Speaker
And, uh, that was basically it. That's all the, all the thought I gave to it, uh, growing up initially. But then I ended up just moving in next door to uh, a ghost hunter and, uh,
00:02:13
Speaker
a friend of mine, essentially a family of ghost hunters. And it was my first real opportunity to to realize there are people out there that actually do that stuff.
00:02:27
Speaker
act they It's not just you know TV cameras. There are people who who go out there with no cameras and and just try and find ghosts. And that was a fascinating concept to me at the time. A 14-year-old me just flabbergasted by the idea that people would do this.
00:02:47
Speaker
And a few months after i moved in, they invited me on an investigation. We were going to go to an abandoned bar and restaurant that was built into an old mansion in a community close to mine.
00:03:01
Speaker
I thought, okay, I don't really have any other plan for this Saturday, so let's go hunt some ghosts. And so we went out to this old, spooky, abandoned restaurant.
00:03:16
Speaker
It sort of looked, it really did look like an old mansion on the outside, but as soon as you walked in, it was just classic, wide open restaurant space, big bar, kind of tacky early nineties carpeting, just, just classic kind of dive bar-y situation. So it was a very fascinating, very grungy, gross, grimy building.
00:03:37
Speaker
that was apparently extremely haunted. So I was excited to, you know, see what I could see of something I'd never really believed in before. And so we quickly got to investigating and well, I really got to watching.
00:03:51
Speaker
We, we set up on the second floor dining room, which was essentially the entire second floor of this mansion, just cleared out broad wide open space with a, a, a sort of server station in the middle.
00:04:05
Speaker
And the team was setting up these, ah ah EMF detectors, which are very familiar to me now, but were very foreign to me then. Just just devices with with little needles on them that jumped back and forth and they made noise and they lit up. So, okay.
00:04:21
Speaker
And they they put these basically in the corners of this wide open space. So you couldn't really see them through the dark, but whenever anything would get close to them, they would make noise and and you would know that something was was happening over in that corner.
00:04:35
Speaker
And so they set those up and they got to doing and an EVP session, the audio recording process of ghost hunting. And they got to the the EVP process, asking questions out to Seemingly nobody, just just dead air and and awaiting responses.
00:04:53
Speaker
And they had ah an extra tool to to sort of help make sense of what was kind of very odd to someone like me. They had a a little bionic ear kind of device, an extra microphone that you could stick right in your ear.
00:05:06
Speaker
And, you know, it would enhance the the audio around you. So i I gave that a try. I sat on the ah ah the main staircase to the the building and and just kind of listened. And as they gave their their questions and their long stretches of of quiet, I started to hear things from from down on the the first floor.
00:05:28
Speaker
like almost like overlapping conversations. Like the dining room down there was full of people, but of course I could, I could kind of see it through the darkness. It was just as empty as when we walked in there, but, but I, I swear I could hear all of that going on. Like it was a a packed house on, on a prime dinner evening.
00:05:47
Speaker
And ah ah shortly after that, A sound kind of distracted everybody from that. one of and it sounded like one of the EMF detectors going off in one of the far corners, this this very high-pitched whining sound that the old EMF detectors used to make.
00:06:03
Speaker
And so everybody dropped what they were doing and and rushed over that way to try and figure out what was going on. and And the owner of the EMF detector picked it up and shined a flashlight to to try and see what it was reading.
00:06:15
Speaker
And it wasn't reading anything. The sound wasn't coming from the EMF detector. And and everybody took that moment to to kind of listen a little closer. to what this sound was. and And nobody could really place where it was coming from. it was kind of coming from everywhere all at once.
00:06:29
Speaker
and And the more we listened to it, the more we realized it wasn't this mechanical whining sound. It was more of ah a a distant screaming sound. And we tried to find the source of this sound for about the next 30 seconds to a minute, and we never could.
00:06:44
Speaker
And then it just kind of disappeared just as fast as it showed up. And as paranormal locations sometimes are said to do, the the activity sort of died out right there. But, you know, that was that was enough for for young, impressionable me to be impressed by by the experience. And so I've been interested in this kind of spooky, scary stuff ever since.
Brandon's Childhood Haunting
00:07:10
Speaker
I've been exploring as much as I can.
00:07:13
Speaker
So what was kind of your expectations for that night? Did you really have any or did you just go, this is going to be something cool, I don't know what to expect? Bring it home. So I didn't really mind the the ghost part too much at all, but I knew I was interested in, you know, kind of creepy abandoned places.
00:07:35
Speaker
Like i I liked a good abandoned building. I was a wannabe urban spelunker. So they said it was going to be a abandoned restaurant down in this this community. I'm like, okay, at the very least, I'll get to see the inside of this old restaurant, this old mansion house.
00:07:51
Speaker
So at the very least, I get to see this place. So I was excited just to see the place. I really, really did not expect anything at all to happen. So the fact that two kind of, you know, interesting and unexplained things did happen was initially just kind of icing on the cake. But over time, it became the cake.
00:08:11
Speaker
And you kind of gone from there upwards. Yeah, ever since. Okay. I expect from you, Brandon, something just as good.
00:08:23
Speaker
oh Don't disappoint me. I can't do it for you, Lee. But i will I will give you the story. So growing up, I lived in a a house that my family believed to be haunted and had a ah really kind of specific experience.
00:08:40
Speaker
This house was actually owned by my grandparents. It was my mother's childhood home as well. And we moved in when I was maybe nine or 10.
00:08:53
Speaker
And starting at that time, about twice a week, someone would bang on my door, like flat fisted pounding on my door and then run down the hall to my sister's room.
00:09:06
Speaker
So, of course, knowing it was my sister, I'd go and bang on her door and be like, what are you doing? Stop it. As as siblings who are five years apart tend to do. And this went on. It genuinely went on for years.
00:09:20
Speaker
I think about three, four years that happened. And years and years later, we had moved out of the house. where i'm I'm in my 20s and my my mom and my sister and I are sitting down at some some holiday celebration. We're having drinks and I'm like...
00:09:36
Speaker
Yeah. Remember when you used to like knock on my door and run away? And my sister looks at me with the most frustrated look. And she says, i never did that. I do not understand why you were always asking me about it. Seriously. It never happened once.
00:09:51
Speaker
And my mom goes white. And she said, you, you heard someone knocking on your door. Apparently I'd never told her about this or she was too busy to hear, but ultimately she she says, wait a minute. When I was a kid in that house,
00:10:05
Speaker
There was one day when I got home from school and my brother, who was usually home at the same time, was in his room. And I went to use the restroom.
00:10:17
Speaker
I started that process and he knocked on the door and I was like, I'm in here, you know? And she goes back to to starting that process.
00:10:29
Speaker
And there's another knock. And she's like, listen, man, I will let you know when I'm done. This is not going to make anything go any faster. And she she's back to centering herself to get the deed done.
00:10:41
Speaker
And one more knock on the door. And she's like, I will come get you. i will I will give you personalized service here. i will knock on your door and let you know when I'm done. and And she finishes up, she goes, she bangs on her brother's door, which happened to be my sister's room in the future, says, I'm out of the bathroom.
00:11:01
Speaker
And she walks into the kitchen. And at that exact moment, my grandmother and her brother, who was who she thought was in the house, pulled up in the car.
00:11:11
Speaker
So she was alone in the house when this happened. And the same knocking on the door happened to me 30 years later. That's crazy.
00:11:23
Speaker
And do you have any explanation of why this happened? Why Lee ghosts? That would be my explanation. I don't know. It's it's tough. when i When I look at it, it's tough for me to say anything is like 100% a ghost or paranormal, I should say.
00:11:46
Speaker
In this instance, you know, memory is faulty. our Our brains like to fill in blanks and and all that sort of stuff. My mom's story was 30 years older than mine when she told it, and mine was 10 years old when I told it to her.
Lee's Colleague's Spirit Sighting
00:12:00
Speaker
So ultimately, could it be misremembered? Could it be a kid, you know, in in his room scared, hearing knocking noises that are like totally normal pipes or something? Yeah, absolutely.
00:12:16
Speaker
But it's it's a weird coincidence. Absolutely. and And this is what I always tell people. You can talk to ah ah dozen different people.
00:12:28
Speaker
They all may have a ghost story, but each story is totally different. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Because it's it's it's and I've told this many times before that my first real influence into the paranormal paramedic, and I'm at a cardiac arrest doing CPR on this dude, and my colleague who was a new guy said, oh, the spirit stood behind you. He can tell you to stop.
00:12:55
Speaker
So I'm like, I'm sorry, what? He goes, yeah, the spirit says he's not coming back and it's his time so you can stop doing your CPR on him. It's like, oh, crap.
00:13:08
Speaker
Yeah, so obviously that story is just a little bit longer, but I'll save it because it's about you tonight, not about me. that's I mean, that's a really wild experience. Did yeah that person say that they saw that frequently or was that the one time?
00:13:24
Speaker
Afterwards, he said, oh, yeah, i'm a medium. but this would have been good to start the shift. yeah you got Have you got any hobbies? Rather than that in the middle of a cardiac arrest.
00:13:37
Speaker
my My response was, well, would you mind telling you, I'm still doing CPR. Would you mind telling the spirit that I've got a job to do and I can't just stop? Yeah, tell the spirit spirit they're going against our quota and they need to get back in the body. Exactly, yeah. Protocols, protocols. Standard operated procedures.
Formation of Haunted US
00:13:56
Speaker
So how did Brandon and Mitch meet each other? Sure. So we were we were both in the same paranormal investigation group.
00:14:11
Speaker
And i had been having the idea of haunted us for a while. And there was one kind of crazy misadventure. I have to tell you, have to give you a little backstory on a van, believe it or not.
00:14:25
Speaker
We always traveled. It's got candy in the back. Almost. I mean, it had paranormal investigation equipment. I feel like we could get more people with that anyway.
00:14:38
Speaker
But ultimately, this this van, we frequently traveled long distances in this old van. And in this instance, we were heading down to Iowa. We were going to Edinburgh Manor.
00:14:50
Speaker
And Mitch was going to be meeting us halfway there and getting into the van. And just before we got off the freeway to get to Mitch...
00:15:02
Speaker
a tire exploded on the van and we ended up on the side of the road. Long story short, Mitch and I ended up driving to Iowa together and we didn't know each other very well at that time.
00:15:16
Speaker
And it kind of came up like, oh yeah, I really like taking photos of these different haunted places. And I've been thinking about starting a ah ah website for that and, and telling the stories. And Mitch said,
00:15:28
Speaker
well, I'm a um'm a writer. And I was like, really? He's like, yeah, I've written like 26 novels at this point. And was is it 26 at that time i think it was at the time.
00:15:42
Speaker
yeah so mitch is a very prolific writer and i was like who what would you think of like coming on board and doing this thing? And he, he reluctantly agreed and it's been harmony since.
Writing and Ghost Hunting
00:15:58
Speaker
So let's talk about this reluctance, Mitch.
00:16:04
Speaker
It all makes sense now that you've talked to me for a little while, doesn't it? Yeah. So like, yeah. Okay. I'm not going to slow the, slow the car down, but can you just open it and jump?
00:16:19
Speaker
So Mitch, Brandon has kind of mentioned that you were a bit of a writer. Yes. So can we have a ah ah quick synopsis of some of the stuff that you've written about, please?
00:16:33
Speaker
Yeah. So I started writing ah ah seriously around the time I first started ghost hunting. So the the two started at almost exactly the same time, but they were never written.
00:16:48
Speaker
never intertwined for the the very longest time. I was ghost hunting when I could initially, but I was writing crime thrillers and, and you know, mysteries, things like that.
00:17:02
Speaker
Short, shorter novels to, you know, satiate my desire for more crime fiction in the world. You know, there's that there's never enough of that. And so that's the way it went basically all the way through college for me.
00:17:18
Speaker
And after a certain point, I just kind of started experimenting with more fiction genres. I published a sci-fi novel. That was my first first book to be anything other than self-published. It was published through a little press in Northern Ireland.
00:17:37
Speaker
And that was, gosh, that was 2019. So that was six years ago now. And after that, I kind of stopped writing for a while. I worked in a hospital. So once 2020 came, I got pretty busy.
00:17:52
Speaker
Yeah. And most everything kind of fell away. But once, once that smoke cleared a little bit the following year, I got back into writing a little bit and into ghost hunting. That's when I joined the, the group that Brandon was a part of around that time.
00:18:09
Speaker
And i worked on a novel, another novel manuscript that, I liked, but I never really did anything with. And right when I was wrapping that up and kind of thinking about what what's the next right what's the next big project that I should write about is when we had that little tire snafu and we ended up having that conversation about the the possibility of haunted US. s And I had always been a like Brandon said, a very prolific writer who could really use just essentially bottomless pit of subject matter to write about and haunted locations over the the span of an entire nation.
00:18:54
Speaker
is a bottomless pit of content write about. Genuinely, we have almost 10,000 places that that we have listed. So and if we are done with that by the time we become ghosts, that will be incredibly impressive.
00:19:09
Speaker
Yes, it's it's basically the epilogue. Yeah. Yeah, so now I've got a lifetime of work ahead of me.
00:19:20
Speaker
And you can blame Brandon for that. Exactly. Everyone does. Yeah. So where did you start? Because like you say, you've got a country that's got 50 plus states.
00:19:34
Speaker
And it's like, did you start in your home state or did you decide to go somewhere completely random?
00:19:43
Speaker
what What was our first article, Mitch? the very Okay, so there are a couple answers to this question. And so the very first answer is where did where did that start?
00:19:58
Speaker
And it started with, we had an idea and a lot of drive, but we didn't know how much structure we needed until we
Structuring Haunted US Content
00:20:05
Speaker
started. So we started. Yeah. yeah And what the initial concept was to, you know, visit all of these places, research all of these places.
00:20:17
Speaker
And of course, we would start nearby. it was the the easiest locations to start with were the ones essentially in our backyard. But through through the wonders of of research, you know, internet research, calling locations,
00:20:32
Speaker
Public libraries, you reach out to a public library anywhere, they're they're happy to share some ghost stories about places in their community with you. They're very helpful. I was able to to you know really expand the scope right away of what could possibly be written about. it And so I just started writing on a concept I came up with of we're haunted US, s so we want a broad amount of locations very quickly.
00:20:59
Speaker
So let's do five in each state, just just cover each state with five and start there. And so I wrote with without much you know regard of how these are going to go or or when when they're going to publish, what they're to look like when they get published.
00:21:16
Speaker
I just wrote and I wrote about 150 these things over the course of like months. and Of course, we we gathered a lot of content from there.
00:21:27
Speaker
But then came the question of, you know, what does publishing this content look like? What does being haunted US look like? And that's that's the the public start. The start that that people really see is is the one where we we force structure onto this this you know powerful passion to to see spooky places.
00:21:50
Speaker
And that that was as cataclysmic as it sounds, forcing structure onto that passion. and i to To put it onto a website, we had to figure out you know what Again, what is that structure? And we ended up having to rewrite some of it. There was a lot of traveling to different locations and sourcing different stories and heavy research.
Visual Storytelling in Ghost Hunting
00:22:14
Speaker
And and as a photographer on my side, a lot of you know dusty, grimy places to go and get photos of to make these stories shine and not just be text on a screen and and be something bigger that's that's beautiful and tells a story.
00:22:30
Speaker
So I can kind of have the image head the image in my head of Mitch, you're there writing all this down and Brandon's going, well, I took my pictures 10 minutes ago. Come on.
00:22:42
Speaker
Can you speed things up a little bit? Oh, man. oh mitch Mitch writes faster than I can travel and take photos. Mitch is often ahead of me. He's always a new photo to take.
00:22:54
Speaker
So it's plenty there are plenty of times where where we are sitting down just before even before an investigation where we're going to be spending you know six, eight, ten hours in the place and We're just talking with the owner, getting their stories and their histories and and their anecdotes. That can take two to three hours by itself, just talking to them, taking notes, listening.
00:23:16
Speaker
And when I'm doing that for however long it takes, you know, Brandon is always... photographs or something. there's out There's always, you know, there's the big hallway that you can get a photo of, but then there's the door and then there's the window on the door that that it once the sun hits it just right, it's good.
00:23:35
Speaker
And then there's the door knob. It's got the patina on it, you know. it It really has that spooky vibe to it. you can You can tell he's been hanging out with me long enough. He's already composing the shots for our next location.
00:23:49
Speaker
Yeah, I could just imagine that. so Oh, yeah. the One of the places that I know that's extremely close to where you guys live, and I've seen it on a few TV shows, and it's a place that I want to visit, is Eloise.
00:24:06
Speaker
Oh, yeah. don't Don't tell me that you haven't been there and you haven't written about it because I'll be so disappointed. We haven't been there and we haven't written about it. now but we are We are very aware of it, yeah and it is yeah very on our
Defining Haunted Locations
00:24:19
Speaker
radar. Get out now. Both of you, go.
00:24:22
Speaker
Sorry about that. The one place that I picked. Well, and the worst part is we were nearby and we got 10 or 15 places right around the corner from it.
00:24:36
Speaker
I thought it was going to be the next half an hour of my chat. Nope. Oh, you're going to have to cross out all those questions. do Do it on the screen. Okay. But Like say, a place like Eloise is synonymous for the hauntings.
00:24:53
Speaker
yeah And when you started collating all this information, did you just start off by going, okay, we're going to do it state by state? Because I noticed on the website that you've actually even broke it down into asylums or prisons or restaurants.
00:25:10
Speaker
So at what point did you realize that you wanted to break it down even further from states and then into specific like buildings and locations.
00:25:21
Speaker
Yeah. so that was always, always an intention. When, when I sat down with the idea initially and like haunted us as became a thing, it was because i was able to get out and start a list.
00:25:35
Speaker
And then I was thinking about, what would be useful for me as a person who likes to read a haunted story? What would be useful for me in finding these places? Because I don't necessarily know everything that's in Arkansas, but I might know there's a haunted hotel in Arkansas that I want to know about, you know, and, and that gets me right to the Crescent hotel on the website.
00:26:03
Speaker
So it's, it's all about, kind of angling the matrix toward somebody who's searching for something. And we want people to be able to find that. In an ideal world, we would go even further with the data and you'd be able to link things even deeper. But for the time being, this is where it is and it's it works really well.
00:26:24
Speaker
So obviously you had like a checklist of places that you've heard about, you want to go and visit. can now add Eloise to that list.
00:26:36
Speaker
and But how many locations on the website have you actually been to? a large majority of them.
00:26:49
Speaker
So I think at this point, just photographing, I've been to about across states.
00:27:02
Speaker
So I think that's probably a similar number for Mitch. I think Mitch, you had some before that. Yeah. But that's a vast majority of the ones on the website are there. And we do kind of prioritize the ones where we can visit specifically because we can get that one-to-one interaction. We can actually talk with the owners. We can get photos that we know will be high quality and we'll tell the story well.
00:27:26
Speaker
yeah Few people can get a good doorknob photo quite likely. Hey, no one knows a knob like me.
Skepticism in Ghost Stories
00:27:36
Speaker
no yeah I'm staying away from that. I'm totally staying away from that. What, What is it?
00:27:45
Speaker
but You mean the American version or the English version? ah ah I'm just going to make you spit your drink out now. No. but So I'm going to ask the the next question, but I'd like both of you to give me your own separate answer.
00:28:02
Speaker
In your own opinion, what clarifies location as being haunted?
00:28:13
Speaker
And for the people listening, this is now a stunned silence from both of them. you No, not stunned silence, thoughtful, thoughtful rumination. you know it's a big ones.
00:28:24
Speaker
ah ah Yeah, I have to now I've proven I've proven my foolishness this this entire time. So for me, it's tough to say that anything is is truly haunted. I'm i'm a skeptic at heart.
00:28:35
Speaker
I really am. You would not believe that from the fact that I've spent the last like seven or eight years traipsing around the US taking photos of spooky old buildings. But I would say that the things that make a place haunted are the stories of the people there.
00:28:53
Speaker
Because whether or not there is a force moving objects or showing up in front of people or whether it is somebody misinterpreting the signs around them or being fooled by light of a passing car, whatever.
00:29:09
Speaker
those stories become an entity of their own and they are something that people share and people think about and people freak themselves out with in these places.
00:29:20
Speaker
So they become a real thing. So I think that's all it takes to be haunted is to have and enough ghost stories.
00:29:29
Speaker
Mitch, do you agree or do you beg to differ? I i agree. Places made haunted by the stories that people have about it. I would expand on that and say it's not even just about the experiences that they have there.
00:29:49
Speaker
Because, you know, obviously... haunt Many ghost story comes from piece of reality. you know After an asylum becomes known for neglect and abuse of its patients, once that place is closes down, you know there's going to probably be a ghost story or two about that place simply due to that very real history. or a house that was owned by a serial killer is obviously going to have the ghost stories tied to the the death and suffering that actually occurred.
Personal Ghost Stories
00:30:21
Speaker
But you know to the beauty of a ghost story is it can come from a very specific something, and it can also come from a total absence of anything. And, you know, when I think of the earliest ghost stories I heard when I was a kid, the the classic schoolyard ghost stories, they weren't about anything super specific. They weren't about a a ah piece of history or a piece of of well-established knowledge.
00:30:46
Speaker
They were about the lack of knowledge. They were about the spaces you didn't see, the the buildings you couldn't look inside of, the the empty, spooky house or building.
00:30:57
Speaker
with that that was surrounded in fencing and no trespassing signs, where the inside was a total mystery. The story of the building was a total mystery. And so the mind can can fill in that gap with with whatever. and And many times people fill that gap with ghosts. And you know those cases are are many times simply just fictional ma matter of the imagination cases. But even those you know, fascinate me because they, they are a piece of culture and, you know, that, that can in its own figurative sense, haunt a place.
00:31:37
Speaker
And, you know, so it it really is the, the figurative senses that, that make a place haunted ultimately. And if there are ever actually ghosts out there,
00:31:48
Speaker
Well, that just makes it Haunted with a capital h Yeah, and i I do like what you've just said because if people experience a paranormal event, nine times out of ten, it's a personal experience. It's very rare do you get multiple people seeing the same thing.
00:32:14
Speaker
yeah And all three of us can go to the same location, And we can all experience something completely different that the other person didn't even realize was happening.
00:32:26
Speaker
And that's that's what that's the key that I find with talking to all these different people. that that it's that It's that personal aspect of each and every different ghost story.
00:32:41
Speaker
Yeah, and we we love that. that Again, when we're when we're driving all over the country,
Challenges of Debunking Paranormal
00:32:48
Speaker
spending hours and hours in the car, when you end up somewhere and you have somebody just tell you like a 20-minute story and you drove all that way, the fact that it is so unique every time and they bring such a unique mindset to it – and And you're talking to such different people. You're talking to a hotel owner, a museum curator. You're talking to an actor who's who's been at that theater for for years or a stage manager. And the difference in the stories, the difference in their perspective, the difference in their reaction to the ghost story, you know the... the
00:33:24
Speaker
yeah i i saw that and i ran out of the building or the yup we wave at the ghost every night and and leave comfortably like it is so interesting to get that that myriad of different experiences and and be able to share that yeah and and before we go into so some locations that hopefully you've been to um what Have you guys ever experienced something that you'll never forget? What's your most compelling piece of evidence that you both had?
00:33:57
Speaker
So we've we've had a few together. Mitch, do you do you want to take one? I'll take one. Sure. Flashlight or light switch?
00:34:10
Speaker
m You take light switch. Okay. So... if my mind does not deceive me, it was year of our Lord, 2022. We were deep in the jungles of Ohio, Ohio, United States, Lancaster, place called Fairfield County Infirmary.
00:34:32
Speaker
Lovely place, former poor farm kind of building, turned into a nursing home. And then was abandoned for a few years and is now a very popular and honestly very well kept haunted location in central, basically central, south central Ohio.
00:34:52
Speaker
And we were there. Just getting started, we we took a lot of time to set up. There were a good few of us, probably six of us, six or seven of us at the time.
00:35:02
Speaker
And we took a good long while to set up. We got all of our cameras set up. We got our body cameras set up. We got our EVP recorders going. And we we picked the first couple of places, pretty much hotspots around the building to start doing EVP sessions. And we eventually made our way down to I believe they called it the morgue.
00:35:25
Speaker
I wasn't precisely sold on its use as a morgue. It was definitely food storage. Yeah, but it was it was decorated as a morgue. so you know same thing Same thing. Yeah, exactly. exactly it's It's a cow morgue if you think about it.
00:35:39
Speaker
So the the morgue consisted of two rooms, one connected to the the broader hallway that was kind of like a preparation room. It was a larger room and then a smaller room off to the side that had a big kind of morgue table in it.
00:35:52
Speaker
And Brandon and myself were in this smaller room and everybody else was in the main room. And we had just everybody got sat down and acclimated and it was all darkness. So everybody shut their flashlights off one by one and all the flashlights went off and and we were about to start our EVP session and the overhead light in the main room comes on.
00:36:13
Speaker
And at this point, it had been kind of a long time that Brandon and I had been sitting in this room waiting for everybody else to set up. And so I kind of annoying annoyed, pardon me, kind of annoyed.
00:36:24
Speaker
I said, you know, who turned on the light? What do you need? And a few seconds of dead silence before somebody said, nobody did. Now it's going to be a whole thing.
00:36:37
Speaker
And oh, yes, yes it was whole thing. Because the whole thing nobody, nobody flipped the light switch. And yet everybody crowded around this very much flipped on actively, you know, physically flipped up light switch in a room full of people.
00:36:54
Speaker
This light switch seemingly flipped upwards by itself. And initially they thought that in the other room that Mitch and I were in, there was another light switch and they thought we had flipped it on and we had to bring them in the room. There's no light switch in here.
00:37:09
Speaker
So there are there are handheld cameras. Everybody has a body camera. So there are probably a dozen cameras in this room when this happens. And so we spend about the next two and a half hours going through footage and and checking angles very closely to try and determine you know what happened? Did somebody nudge it? Was it kind of partially up already? Is it possible for this particular model of, of, of electrical component to do that kind of thing?
00:37:36
Speaker
We got very- To put that, to put that into context, it was also one of those really heavy duty, like industrial lights where it's like, ka-chunk when you turn, when you turn it on. like And we had gotten it to the point where we, we had Googled the model number of the light switch to see- yeah If this was like a known defect.
00:37:57
Speaker
Yeah, know basically call the local Ace Hardware and can be like, listen, you're you're our ghost hunting partner tonight. But ultimately we couldn't figure out whether it was caused by anything normal.
00:38:10
Speaker
And so i I personally stamp it with my my big red imaginary stamp that says it remains unexplained. And that's that's the good thing about a...
00:38:23
Speaker
and reliable paranormal investigator. We're not saying 100% that this is a ghost. We are saying this is unexplained. And the unexplained pile of people just gets bigger and bigger and bigger because we
Science and Skepticism in Ghost Hunting
00:38:42
Speaker
can't explain it. We've tried to debunk everything we possibly can and we've been unable to. So it stays on that unexplained pile.
00:38:50
Speaker
There's a lot of stuff that we can't. But this big pile is getting bigger and bigger but as each day goes by of the stuff that we can't explain. Well, I think it's important that your your methodology for explaining gets bigger and bigger too, right?
00:39:06
Speaker
Before I started being interested in paranormal investigation, I didn't know that when you closed a door in a house, you created a negative airflow that would possibly move another door or that...
00:39:17
Speaker
Wood, when it's when it's heated and cooled, can release scents because it's porous. Those sorts of things are things that you learn as you go into this. And the more that you can debunk, the more impressive the things that you can't debunk become.
00:39:33
Speaker
So, yeah. Yeah. And that's interesting because, know, when people call you call us out and say, yeah, every time I'm in bed, i experience apparitions and we go, oh, yeah do you have an alarm clock by the side of your bed?
00:39:50
Speaker
Yes. Is it an old one or modern one? Oh, it's an old one. Oh, yeah. you find out that it's got some loose wires and it's giving off large quantities of EMF. Well, let's take that away from the equation let's and and let's see if you still have these apparitions.
00:40:05
Speaker
but Oh, no, it's all stopped now. So there wrong definite... natural phenomena that anybody that's in the game for the right reasons will go through before they see or before they say, yep, this is a white sheet with two holes cut in.
00:40:24
Speaker
this is This is one of those ghost things. Yeah, actually, in that in that old ah paranormal investigation group that Mitch and I were both in, the first thing that we would prescribe to someone who thinks that they're being being haunted was the greatest piece of paranormal investigation gear. And that's a notebook.
00:40:45
Speaker
Write down when it happens, write down the situation you're in and see if there's a pattern. Because you know what? If it turns out that the things in your house rattle when the train goes by, that's very explainable.
00:40:57
Speaker
and And that's something we can we can bring and teach people about yeah instead of necessarily saying, oh, it's definitely a demon. I'll say. And even, you know, each day goes by, more science is is is coming out.
00:41:11
Speaker
And, you know, there's... definite devices that we can use now to prove that things are of a natural nature rather than paranormal nature.
00:41:22
Speaker
And you've if you're in the like's say if you're in the game for the right reasons, you've got to prove to people that there are natural phenomena that can debunk a paranormal activity.
00:41:34
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. so Right on the money. So Brandon, your story. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about the Lincoln Tolman house. And this is actually in Mitch's hometown of Janesville.
00:41:46
Speaker
And Mitch had tried to get into this place for what? 13, 14 years. 12 actually. 12. Sorry. yeah I was giving you way too much credit there.
00:41:57
Speaker
So finally haunted us s is, is happening. We have, we have some kind of, um, um, credibility behind us. There's a website we can show articles and say, hey, here here are the high quality things we do. And Lincoln Tallman House comes into the conversation and they finally say yes.
00:42:16
Speaker
So this is a big deal. We're so excited for this night. And we are actually there with the local newspaper. and And so we're we're taking them through. We're kind of doing a little investigation.
00:42:28
Speaker
For the record, we don't consider ourselves an investigation team. We do sometimes investigate, but that's more for for our fun and our curiosity. But we we consider ourselves you know more a publication.
00:42:44
Speaker
But we're there with the news crew and we're in this upper hallway and we were looking at an EMF meter. And there had been this cold breeze that Mitch felt turned out to be totally explainable old windows. It was a snowstorm that night.
00:43:03
Speaker
And as this is happening, I go to click on my flashlight. Now this is, i mean I'm going to, going to say this, this is on like the, the ghost hunters bingo card. I had just changed the batteries and,
00:43:16
Speaker
I did though. And I go to click it on it is. Yeah, exactly. It's one of those led flashlights. It has a recessed button. So you have to press in to click it.
00:43:26
Speaker
It's not half unscrewed or anything like that. I click it on and nothing happens. I click it again. Nothing happens. Click it a third time. Nothing happens. And I say, okay, well, I guess I don't have a flashlight. like I click it off and I put it in my back pocket.
00:43:43
Speaker
And I think, you know, i'm I'm a ghost hunter. I'm here to be in the dark anyway. So totally fine. About five minutes go past. We're back into an EVP session.
00:43:54
Speaker
There are people situated throughout the room and all of a sudden everybody gasps. And I'm like, what did I miss? what What happened that I missed?
00:44:05
Speaker
And I look up and there's this bright light on the ceiling. And I realize the flashlight in my back pocket had turned on Again, this is a recessed button.
00:44:17
Speaker
So something has to go into a space to click it. And that didn't happen in my back pocket. So I pull it out and I was like, wow, this is crazy. And I click it off and I set it on the stairs next to me. And I said, hey, listen, if you turned on that flashlight,
00:44:34
Speaker
Turn it on again and you can have it. So now it's sitting about five, 10 feet away from me and everybody else. And we are back into the EVP session, not even thinking about it anymore.
00:44:47
Speaker
And it clicks on. We hear the click of it clicking on and it lights up. And that flashlight still lives at the Lincoln Tolman house to this day.
00:44:59
Speaker
yeah. they They like that flashlight, they can have it. I hope they click it on and off for people all the time. And if you've got a rational head on your shoulders, you're going to try and debunk that as much as you can. So if you've got a bit of a knobbly butt, it's not going to be knobbly enough to push that on.
00:45:21
Speaker
And I do have a knobbly butt, Lee. I really do. But it's not that knobbly. Okay. i i Thank you for that clarification. So, Mitch, I'm just going to talk to you.
00:45:34
Speaker
but and But that that's that's the thing. yeah If you need to push it in and you can't do it just by having it in your pocket, like yeah you put your cell phone in your pocket and you can book dial people, and these are touchscreen devices.
00:45:50
Speaker
But if it's got something like that, How can you explain it? And all these people out here that like to debunk stuff, okay, put it in your pocket and switch it on.
00:46:01
Speaker
Yeah, without touching it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was ah it was just so strange. And genuinely, I can't explain it. Was it a ghost? i I can't say.
00:46:13
Speaker
But certainly i can't explain it. yep Yeah, exactly. And and we had we've had a bunch of others, too. There have been a few places where we've genuinely seen people who should not have been where a person was seen.
00:46:30
Speaker
and In fact, um fact, um another Wisconsin place, the Brumder Mansion, it was about 3 a.m.
Favorite Haunted Locations
00:46:38
Speaker
We were cleaning up after a public investigation, and I was going up to the third floor to break down some equipment.
00:46:46
Speaker
And the third floor, it was an old servant's wing. So there's there's one stairwell up there. It's on the back of the building, and there's only one entrance and exit, which is this stairwell.
00:46:59
Speaker
on Once you hit the landing of the floor, it is one long hallway and two doors at the end. And so I get to the landing and I turn and I see a woman walk between the two rooms. And I think, oh, somebody left a purse, somebody left a wallet or a phone or something. I'm going to go help them get this and help them see them out of the building so that we don't get in trouble because no one else is supposed to be in here but us right now.
00:47:25
Speaker
I walked down to the end of the hallway and I walk into one of the old other rooms, which the only way out of that room other than that door was a three story drop and there was no one there.
00:47:37
Speaker
So it's another instance of like, I know I saw somebody, but man, they sure weren't there. And I assume that you did check out the window to make sure there wasn't anybody.
00:47:50
Speaker
Yeah, we didn't like we didn't find any corpses in the morning. So at least none that we didn't expect. that That's always a good thing. That's always a good thing. So obviously the US is a big place.
00:48:04
Speaker
It is. And you've got 50 plus states. You've only been to half of them. So if you...
00:48:16
Speaker
could pick one of the places that you visited that stands out in your mind as a place that you would love to go back. ms Yeah. Where would it be? Mitch, why don't you go first? I feel like i've been talking a lot.
00:48:31
Speaker
Because Brandon can't think of a place. That's why you're going first, Mitch. Wow. Lee, just pull the mask off. Well, honestly, it's an easy answer because there are,
00:48:44
Speaker
so many places I would be happy to go back to that I pretty much have a running list of places I'm always happy to go back to that I can always happen to pick out and say is first for the day.
00:48:56
Speaker
So the the easy first for the day is the Mabel Tainter Theater up in northern Wisconsin. And I like that place simply because it is you know the the most meticulously well-maintained historic building I've ever encountered in all of our travels anywhere.
00:49:17
Speaker
It's the, the building is entirely, of course, the exterior is original, but you go in the, the windows are exterior, the heating system, the radiators are all original to around 1890 when the building was built.
00:49:31
Speaker
The, the plumbing system is original to 1890. The, uh, the I don't believe the actual water fountain had been invented yet, but they had kind of food. You can drink from this actual fountain fountains, and and those were all still there and fully functional.
00:49:46
Speaker
They had even a couple of light bulbs that they said were fully original to when the building opened. And of course, all of the the theater seating, the the drapery, the upholstery was all fully and meticulously maintained from its 1890 original. So It really was and always is like walking 130 years back in time.
00:50:11
Speaker
Cool. And so for ah for someone who's predominantly a ah researcher, it it stands out when the the research is literally just still there and alive like it always has been for a century.
00:50:26
Speaker
But i will I will cheat a little bit and add a second one simply because we've covered a couple of Wisconsin places and I'd love to cover... another place that that's always stands out to me. And that's the Villisca axe murder house in Villisca, Iowa.
00:50:42
Speaker
It's a very, very, very far flung little town in a very rural area of the United States. ah ah You essentially, you get off the the main interstate, the the major highway in the country, and it's about another hundred miles just through nothing to get to this little town. And it's the site of, I think one of the, one of the,
00:51:03
Speaker
biggest murders in the state's history still, a family of six and and two other neighbor girls. So eight eight people were killed in this one tiny little house. And that one stood out to me because I i had happened to visit there right after a ah ah team of not ghost hunters, but crime scene investigators who were still trying to solve the crime because it remains unsolved who killed these people.
00:51:31
Speaker
And there was a team of crime scene investigators trying to do their best to solve a hundred and like 15 year old murder at the time. And they had sprayed what's called luminol all over the house.
00:51:43
Speaker
and Luminol, I don't know what it does precisely, kind of binds with the the the contents of dried blood and makes it shine under blacklight. So being diligent and and equipment heavy ghost hunters, what did we have?
00:51:59
Speaker
We had blacklights. And and there's There's still a whole lot of sign of that very old murder in that house, if you have the right tools. and And, you know, going into the Mabel Tainter Theater is is one really interesting and vivid way to experience history coming alive.
00:52:19
Speaker
Spraying luminol in the Villisca Axe murder house is another way to make history come alive. and And so always, always shouts out to those two places.
00:52:32
Speaker
That's pretty cool. Okay, Brandon, beat that. oh no why you can't pit us against each other can't i am oh no lee no so recently i had had the opportunity to fly down to nevada and just do a road trip through as many of the haunted places there as i could actually photographed
US vs Canada Investigation Challenges
00:52:57
Speaker
i want to say 19 places while i was there over a couple of days which was wild it was so much fun
00:53:05
Speaker
And i'm goingnna I'm also going to cheat a little bit here since Mitch cheated. Yeah, i know. Hey, man, we fight dirty. We fight dirty at Haunted US. guess yeah Virginia City, I'd have to say, really all of Virginia City. And in the same way that Mabel Tainter has that history right there in front of you, Virginia City also has that with the McKee building, with um old Washow Club.
00:53:31
Speaker
I actually stayed in a room at the Silver Queen Hotel, which was... horrifying and the gold hill hotel all of those right there i mean the the bloody bucket there there are so many haunted places in walking distance of each other it's almost comical for a for a ghost hunter so honestly being there was was such an experience i will say this i did not have a single weird thing happened to me the entire time i was there but man did i get a lot of good photos
00:54:05
Speaker
And that's kind of, yeah, it's kind of cool, but it's also kind of disappointing because, yeah you know, people always expect things to happen. And one thing that I found is it seems to be a lot easier to go to locations in the U.S. compared to Canada because there's a lot of red tape over here.
00:54:28
Speaker
And some of these locations are really quite expensive to go to. Oh. Whereas we went to a small place called Casanovia in New York State.
00:54:41
Speaker
It's about an hour and a half over the border. And we were it was the Braylock... and And it's a nice Scottish themed hotel, very old you worldy.
00:54:54
Speaker
It's a huge, huge location. And the owners gave us the full run of the entire building. It was still, it's still an operational hotel. that And the bar closed at midnight, but she says, yeah, if you want to come down and stay downstairs for the entire evening, be my guest.
00:55:13
Speaker
Wow. And we walked in and we're just setting up a couple of cameras. There's two rooms that are supposed to be the most haunted. So we rented both of them. There was three of us, two guys in one room and I'm i'm in another.
00:55:26
Speaker
And we're just setting up tripods and this cabinet door just creaked open. Being the sceptical kind of people, we go, okay, well, yeah, it must have just been on the edge.
00:55:39
Speaker
So we tinkered with it. We moved it. We banged on the tap on the desk. We stamped on the floor. We banged the sides of it. We moved the catch to as close as we could to open it, put it fully, and that we could not get that cupboard to cup door to open.
00:55:56
Speaker
open Wow. So lesson lesson learned, as soon as you walk into a building, make sure you've got a recording device on because we didn't, so we don't have that.
00:56:08
Speaker
Yep. and And that's why yeah, it's interesting to go into the procedure that people do when they go to these locations because some of these locations, like I mentioned Eloise, it's got such a,
00:56:25
Speaker
a big history of hauntings. Waverly Hills is another one. Have you guys happened to been there? you know if he I have not. Mitch may have.
00:56:36
Speaker
So again, I'm going to talk to you, Mitch. But yeah, and that's another location that's got so much history and so many stories. So yeah,
00:56:49
Speaker
Out of all the places that you haven't been to, and Brandon, you can't mention Eloise and you can't mention Waverly Hills. Do you have a number one bucket list location to go to?
00:57:05
Speaker
For me, I think it's the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. that is That is a huge, gorgeous old Kirkbride building and men... ah ah You know, a lot of people see that building and they think, I'm going to go there and find ghosts.
00:57:19
Speaker
I just want to get in there with a camera. Oh, so bad. I want every doorknob in that building. was going to mention the doorknobs.
00:57:30
Speaker
I wonder how many doorknobs it's got. Oh, thousands, I'd bet. More for my collection. You can't see it behind me here. There's there's a huge, huge wall of doorknobs.
00:57:41
Speaker
so hey He's not lying, is he, Mitch? No. and And they all open something somewhere in the world, but it's a mystery.
Hotels vs Hospitals Haunting Debate
00:57:50
Speaker
It's unexplained. Yeah.
00:57:53
Speaker
So that place is also on our bucket list because there's so many different locations that you can do go to. Yeah. Let us know when you come down. We should go split the bill. That sounds like an awesome idea. i will definitely yeah take you up on that for sure.
00:58:09
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Mitch, bucket list number one. Number one. Well, excluding Trans-Allegheny, because that would certainly be up there, but I won't and won't repeat a selection.
00:58:23
Speaker
Gosh, I would have to pick the Hotel Del Coronado in California. Yeah. It's one of those places that is not, you know, it's it's not known for being overrun with all these ghosts, but the ghosts it does have, the stories are very clear, the identities are very clear, you know who you're trying to communicate with, you know.
00:58:49
Speaker
who supposedly haunts there and they have a very long and and involved, almost kind of romanticized story about themselves. And it's, it's a fascinating place. Historically, it's a, it's a interesting place, go story wise.
00:59:06
Speaker
And then it's, it's, fascinating architecturally. It's very interesting to look at. And it's a beautiful, beautiful building in really beautiful area of California.
00:59:18
Speaker
And I recently just happened upon sort of sketch drawing someone did of it in a thrift store in in Wisconsin. I just happened upon someone's very old drawing of the Hotel Del Coronado, of my bucket list locations that I haven't been to.
00:59:37
Speaker
So of course I had to buy this thing and it's been hanging on my wall and I look at it every day and it's just, it nags at me. I should get there. We got to get out to California, man.
00:59:50
Speaker
I will carry your luggage for you, gentlemen.
00:59:54
Speaker
Perfect. Yeah. So I can always tell how good a podcast is by how long we've been talking before. so And we're we're currently at an hour. So I'm going to keep it going a little bit longer. Sure.
01:00:08
Speaker
like Mitch is great to talk to. Hey, you're not wrong. He is. It's almost like I can talk for two people. Yeah. And I'm here too.
01:00:23
Speaker
so if you guys had to pick one specific type of location, a jail, asylum, a hospital, a hotel, which would you say is potentially the most haunted?
01:00:41
Speaker
I'm going to say hotel. And i know i know that's going to be controversial. But hotels, because... with With an asylum, you have people there long term. With a sanatorium, you have people there long term.
01:00:59
Speaker
Hospital, kind of similar, but hotels are a place of anonymity for a lot of people and a lot of people coming for very short amounts of time. So there are massive, massive droves, especially if it's a popular hotel.
01:01:15
Speaker
Recently, I stayed at the Brown Palace in Denver and seeing the sheer number of rooms in that building and knowing that likely most of them were full, it was mind boggling. So the thought that all of that energy, all of those people could move through a space, have experiences, be be really sad, really happy,
01:01:40
Speaker
die sometimes like like deaths occur and in hotels fairly frequently whether self-inflicted or otherwise that it's a very very very um unfortunately likely place to to pass away this isn't
Public vs Private Ghost Stories
01:01:57
Speaker
hotels that you're staying at at that particular time is it
01:02:01
Speaker
i I mean, the police haven't found a pattern that they can follow. Okay, that's good.
01:02:08
Speaker
Being outed as a serial killer on a podcast, it's so faux pas. Mitch told me to say that. Oh, did he? Yeah, wow. Hey, I'm at most of those hotels with him at this point. So, yeah, ultimately I would say hotels just because of the sheer throughput of of human energy.
01:02:30
Speaker
That makes perfect sense. ah ah Okay, Mitch, over to you. Kind of places that are usually most haunted. i would probably have to say specifically hospitals, specifically city hospitals, most more more often than not.
01:02:50
Speaker
Because, you know, Similar to Brandon's reasoning for hotels, you know a lot of the the other kinds of hospitals out there, you know nursing homes, asylums, they are long-term chronic care facilities. And the people are there for a very long time.
01:03:09
Speaker
And an asylum might have you know ah thousand rooms in it that are that are full, but the the people in those rooms aren't cycling at the the same rate as, say, an emergency rooms are.
01:03:22
Speaker
rooms um And so if you've got a you know city hospital building that's seen you know patients for 50, 60, 70 years or longer, you're you're talking incalculable numbers of people.
01:03:36
Speaker
And whether or not they died there, very likely incalculable amounts of human suffering. Nobody goes to the hospital because it's fun. They go there because they're they're sick. They're not feeling good. They are injured. They are experiencing some serious trauma in their life, some impactful trauma in their life.
01:03:52
Speaker
And if you believe that locations can absorb energy, imagine that energy from one of those moments multiplied by, you know depending on the size of the hospital, a dozen or two dozen or more at day.
01:04:06
Speaker
Yeah. And you've got a recipe for if you believe in hauntings, the most haunted place around. And I think that if you're there are a lot of things I say that are, you know, if you subscribe to believing in hauntings, like the little asterisk that says, you know, if ghosts are real, if hauntings are real.
01:04:25
Speaker
But if you're someone who subscribes to believing that they are. it would make sense that the suddenness of death could matter. And, you know, if, if I'm subscribing to the belief that ghosts are in fact real, that places are truly and honestly haunted, then I, I would honestly believe that it, it, it does matter.
01:04:48
Speaker
And, A lot of these these other kinds of locations, the the nursing homes, the sanitariums, the asylums, people age in these places and they they die as a result of age a lot of the time or or they they die as a result of tuberculosis or the the reason that they're in the sanitarium, but they die slowly and and knowingly.
01:05:10
Speaker
When you go to ah ah critical care hospital, You know, you could have started your day perfectly normally that day. And then you go to the hospital and you don't leave. And that's just that.
01:05:21
Speaker
And I think that the the the idea of death just being that, just being that very sudden thing. And and the these kinds of hospitals being the reci that the you know ah source the main...
01:05:36
Speaker
of this kind of thing the the main essentially the the place where that kind of death happens nine times out of 10 would make them especially or exceptionally haunted.
01:05:48
Speaker
And I think what you both said is really important because if you've got a location, whether do it be a hospital, sanitarium, a warship, a theater, a hotel,
01:06:05
Speaker
you've got a lot of capacity of individuals that have come and gone. Some have died, yeah some have been born in hospitals, et cetera, et cetera.
01:06:16
Speaker
And i think it's interesting that even though people say that my person my private dwelling is haunted, a lot of the time you can debunk that due to natural phenomena because the individual doesn't quite know what's going on in their own home with regard to electromagnetic fields or black mould, for example.
01:06:44
Speaker
So the fact that these these locations have a high quantity of turnover, whether it be good or bad, I think yeah that it is important to realise that these locations are probably going to get the most activity.
01:07:01
Speaker
Because you can go to you can go to a battleship yeah served in World War II. You've got a lot of death, maybe. You've got a lot of ah ah spirits still there for whatever reason.
01:07:13
Speaker
And you can say the same about all these different locations. And I think that's really interesting for people to to grasp onto. Don't concentrate on the small locations it's it's sometimes going to be the bigger ones where you can get many different examples of paranormal activity if they do exist.
01:07:36
Speaker
But I did interview a guy a few months ago who lives in Seattle who experienced two or three years of paranormal activity. So, yeah, I'm not saying that it doesn't happen in a private dwelling, but it's just more rare, i think.
01:07:53
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the the varieties of ghost stories that come from each kind of place tends to differ. And you know that I think is what makes the Hotel Del Coronado's very vivid and specific ghost stories kind of exceptional because you know hotels are very come and go places.
01:08:16
Speaker
They see a lot of people, they see a lot of traffic and the places that see a lot of traffic have you know the The ghost stories, they start individually, but they snowball into broader kind of, you know once once 20 people have experienced ghostly footsteps, hearing ghostly footsteps in a place, you know, one might hear them on the stage of a theater.
01:08:36
Speaker
The other might, another might hear them in the aisle. To some people, it might sound like high heels. To others, it might sound like boots. But once, you know, dozens of people have these experiences, it becomes phantom footsteps is what it is. is It's, you know, and and it comes down to who you, who individually you're speaking to about it, which story you get.
01:08:55
Speaker
And then when the with the private dwellings and things, you know, because they are there are certainly a lot of places with a lot of history and a lot of potential to be haunted that are not accessible to the general public at any given time.
01:09:09
Speaker
and But those stories, you really generally only have the people who are living there or the people who do have the access, a much smaller pool of stories. And so you're going to get only the really specific individual ones. and And it creates a different kind of, you know,
01:09:26
Speaker
informational atmosphere, at least, between the
Lee's Unexplained Experiences
01:09:27
Speaker
two different kinds. And i we have to two jails that are local to us, both of them about an hour away.
01:09:37
Speaker
And at one of them, I've had multiple EVPs that we cannot explain. And we've had the sound waves tested and yeah this is your voice and this is what you heard and two completely separate.
01:09:52
Speaker
And then another one, i actually got stroked on the side of the face. But I was in a sterile room that was being redecorated. So there was decorated sheets and boards on the floor.
01:10:04
Speaker
And it had got whitewashed walls. And the decorators had been in that day, so there wasn't any time for spiders or anything to to to make a web. And, yeah, just got a nice little stroke down the side of my face. Oh, wow. Well, that's fun. Yeah. And it's like I was so excited. I thought I'd been touched.
01:10:26
Speaker
So, yeah we do yeah, I know that we've mentioned hotels, and I know we was offline talking about the place that we visited a few months ago, Casanova. yeah So I told you about the yeah ah ah cupboard door, but I actually saw and what I think is an apparition.
01:10:44
Speaker
I can't prove it. i was the only person in the room. So old-fashioned four-poster bed. You've got the old-fashioned blankets on. So as you know, that when you crawl into bed at the in these type of beds, you can feel the blankets settle. Once you've got your comfortable position,
01:11:03
Speaker
yeah know if the If you've created a space, then the blanket will will settle. So that happened, didn't think anything of it. And then about 30 seconds later, so 2 o'clock in the morning, i wasn't hadn't been in bed for more than two or three minutes max.
01:11:19
Speaker
Really heavy sensation on the bed to the point where I thought that one of the guys had come in, not that I heard the door, and sat on the bed. Opened my eyes and I saw this white thing go past me.
01:11:33
Speaker
And it's like, what did I just see? My first instinct was and need to go and grab my ah ah cell phone to record it. And it had gone. Oh, wow. So I know it wasn't.
01:11:44
Speaker
You said white thing. Do you have like a size, a shape that this took? Now, this is really weird because there was lace over the top of the four poster bed.
01:11:57
Speaker
Hmm. This was the second night that I'd stayed in it. At no time during any previous time during the day or the night that we were investigating did this lace move.
01:12:09
Speaker
There was no open windows. We turned the air conditioning off because obviously you can't do an investigation with your air conditioning going. yeah So I know that it wasn't the lace that was moving.
01:12:21
Speaker
And it just looked like somebody had got a white piece of card and just kind of walked away. in front of And it was like, can I explain that?
01:12:32
Speaker
No. Have I got any your witnesses? No. But i know i I know that I saw something, but I don't know what I saw. And I felt the sensation of the of somebody sitting down on the bed.
01:12:47
Speaker
And it was a heavy sensation. It wasn't like the blanket settling because that's a nice light sensation. This was a heavy sensation like somebody had sat on the bed. And then I opened my eyes and I saw this white thing go past me.
01:13:00
Speaker
Wow. How did you sleep that night? Perfectly. Yep. Good. that That is when you know you've been doing this long enough, when you can have an experience like that, and you're like, no, I'm tired. I'm going to bed now. Yeah. It's like, yep, screw you. Don't do it.
01:13:17
Speaker
and do Get it over and done with. It's bedtime. Hot me in the morning. I'm busy right now. Exactly. and it's It's weird that, well, I was really pleased that it happened because I could experience it and I can tell people, yeah, I've got a story for this location.
01:13:32
Speaker
And we have a, I'm not a fan of orbs by any way, shape or form. And one of our guys was doing a solo and me and my other colleague were was in the toilet where the NVR ah was because it was the only other room.
01:13:50
Speaker
Don't go there. It was the only other room where we could set set stuff up and the door was closed and we're watching and we'd got like five or six different cameras. And then this massive orb, and it was huge, came spiralling down from the ceiling.
Future Investigations and Collaboration
01:14:06
Speaker
So our media immediate thought was, Was it a moth? Was it a bug? But we hadn't seen any insects in the building the entire weekend.
01:14:19
Speaker
Was it a particle of dust? No, because it was too big. And was it a flake of paint from the ceiling? Well, if there was, there'd be evidence on the floor and there was nothing.
01:14:32
Speaker
And it's really weird that this happened and we sort of like, oh, my God, what was that? what this guy was doing is is solo.
01:14:44
Speaker
And we cannot explain it. yeah Some people go, well, it was a flake of paint. Well, yeah it was a wooden floor. There would be a flake of paint on the floor. if it was ah If it was a big moth, we would have seen it flying around elsewhere yeah if you move the curtain and it takes off.
01:15:01
Speaker
so we yeah And there was nothing that we could put down to what this was. oh That's wild. Yeah. So that's really strange.
01:15:14
Speaker
Well, we'll be adding this place to our list. I will send you some details. is It's not far from Chicago-ish area to New York State. What's that? Three hours? Four hours? don't know.
01:15:25
Speaker
A little more than that. yeah but and depend Depends how fast you walk, I suppose. Yeah, exactly. exactly it's It's three hours with two jet engines. Yeah.
01:15:40
Speaker
It's nothing. It's nothing. So gentlemen, i I know that you've got something exciting to tell us. We do We do. i actually have a copy of it with me.
01:15:51
Speaker
How convenient. Yeah, it's almost like this was planned. So then we have we have written a book. It's 30 Haunted Nights in Wisconsin. You should get your copy. It's going to be out on August 18th, available on Amazon.
01:16:06
Speaker
This is our first book. It is actually my first first book. Mitch is like almost 30th. But this is... It is your 30th. Oh, the irony.
01:16:19
Speaker
Yeah. may should be held a ni enthusiasm please but You know, the enthusiasm comes with the third, the a slow ah slow draw comes with the thirty yeah yeah Yeah. So it's been, it's been a huge journey doing that and, and really shockingly different than working on the website, working on the book.
01:16:45
Speaker
Because what we would do is line it up by regions in, in the Wisconsin state and drive out there and just get everything in an area and, and do not only haunted locations, but oddities in the area. So things like the hoedag and,
01:17:02
Speaker
you know, the, um, Dr. Evermore's forever Tron, those sorts of things that are in Wisconsin and are just really interesting. you should stop and see them alongside all of the haunted places.
01:17:13
Speaker
And actually a couple of places we mentioned here tonight, uh, the Mabel Tainter, the Brumder mansion, those are in the book. So if you want to learn more about those, pick up a copy. And where else can people find you?
01:17:28
Speaker
Oh man, we are available at haunted us.com, believe it or not. And we are at haunted us on almost every social platform. We publish a new deep dive article into a haunted location every Thursday.
01:17:43
Speaker
We also have a podcast, the haunted Atlas, which comes out every other Tuesday. And that is also on every podcast ah platform you could hope for. Perfect.
01:17:53
Speaker
So just to finish off then guys, what, apart from this new book that everybody needs to go out and buy, what what's next on the agenda for Haunted US?
01:18:06
Speaker
Oh man, more travel, more locations. We're going to be going in September down through Illinois and getting the first round of places for our next book.
01:18:17
Speaker
Did you about the next book, Mitch? I did. yeah okay i i am i am reluctantly ready for it. I think we both are. It was a long year. a lot of lot of road time.
01:18:31
Speaker
is Is your next book going to be a different state? oh Yep. Yeah, believe it or not, Illinois. it's just down the road.
01:18:42
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I mean, start with the close ones first.
01:18:47
Speaker
that so lovely like Yeah, that and we're we're headed down to Pythian Castle. And then in November, I'm going to be heading down to Savannah, Georgia and trying to photograph every place in Georgia that I can get my hands on.
01:19:01
Speaker
And we will also have a public event for people. boom Yeah. yeah General Chicagoland area. They're probably familiar with an interestingly named town named Sandwich, Sandwich, Illinois.
01:19:15
Speaker
just outside of Chicago. i know where that is. Really? Well, you should come down Halloween night because we're having a public paranormal investigation there and tickets are on sale now.
01:19:27
Speaker
Yep. I'll see what I can do. I'm in Winnipeg the week before, I think. doing Doing a convention. so I'll see. Nice. and like Come on down. like I expect to be and dined.
01:19:40
Speaker
whied and dined Oh, happily. Absolutely. And the the location's perfect for it. the The Sandwich Opera House, very interesting location, lots of interesting ghost stories. So if anyone is in the area and and wants to have an evening of ghost hunting with Haunted US, then this Halloween's time to do it.
01:19:59
Speaker
Yeah. Awesome. Gentlemen, it has been an absolute pleasure. We've not had any laughs at all. No, not one. It's been really, really boring and maintained. Yeah.
01:20:10
Speaker
It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you both.
01:20:14
Speaker
Hopefully we can do it again soon because I i think we've only touched the tip of the iceberg with all the different locations. Yeah. absolutely we'll actually have have been to some of the ones you ask about next time can i have that in writing in please you need to let us know beforehand which ones you're going to ask about so we can get those on our itinerary but like i'll let you know a week before perfect okay guys it's been an absolute pleasure thank you for having us on yeah this is great this is great i you have a great rest of the evening take care
01:20:51
Speaker
You as well, Lee. Okay, bye-bye.