[SPEAKER_00]: What myth or folklore do you firmly believe in?
[SPEAKER_00]: Cryptids, aliens, wood creatures, demons, other dimensional beings, etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cryptids, especially the more modest ones like the long-tailed Bobcat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I've seen one, I was out hunting for mushrooms and found this big, red turkey tail with the same color scheme as a brown rainbow and sat down to look at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's smell like chicken livers, probably due to the iron content.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right to the left of me was a short berm, with some cedar twigs and grass and shit.
[SPEAKER_00]: I turned to the left, thinking I heard something in the trees, and what I thought was a badger came out.
[SPEAKER_00]: I put on my glasses and got a good look at it from 20 feet off, and it looked like a bobcat, with the ear tips and everything, but the color was damn near white, with a tail like a main cune.
[SPEAKER_00]: It looked around and let out a squawk, then fucked off back into the trees.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's how I know at least one cryptid is real.
[SPEAKER_00]: In all reality, the long-tailed bobcat is probably a cross between a bobcat and a housecat, but I still saw one.
[SPEAKER_00]: One, the Banshee, being part Irish, I have heard tales about it as a child.
[SPEAKER_00]: I grew out of it and stopped believing in it for a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: A Banshee is supposed to scream when you're going into a situation where it is unlikely for you to come out alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I was driving down the road on a rainy day, and I heard this blood curdling scream in my ear that sent a shiver up my spine.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no one behind me, so I slammed on the brakes before crossing at the intersections.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure enough, a huge pickup truck comes speeding down the middle where I would have been and would have been hit.
[SPEAKER_00]: I sat there for a minute, and I couldn't get the scream out of my head, then I thought, Banshee.
[SPEAKER_00]: I pulled into a gas station and called my dad's grandma, who had told me the stories as a child.
[SPEAKER_00]: I told her what happened, and to my shock, she chuckled and said, my dear, you were warned and listened to the banshee, your great grandfather did not.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two, dark watchers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I went up to the Santa Lucia Mountains to be with my friend and her cabin for the weekend.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything was fine during the day, totally normal.
[SPEAKER_00]: When night came, I woke up and decided to go to the kitchen for a snack.
[SPEAKER_00]: Looking through the window, I could see the figure of a man with glowing eyes in the trees.
[SPEAKER_00]: I freaked out and ran to my friend's bedroom and told her what I saw.
[SPEAKER_00]: She looked at me and said, oh, the dark watchers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't worry, they are just curious and won't do harm.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was stunned at what I had heard.
[SPEAKER_00]: I left the next morning, but made sure to say goodbye.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ghosts and demons, though I don't really believe in demons in a biblical sense as fallen angels, just some kind of malevolent force that exists and might be related to ghosts.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I don't even really have an explanation for what ghosts could be, whether they're actually the souls of the dead or just some negative energy that gets left behind after something truly horrible happens or something else entirely.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't convince me and my belief otherwise because I've experienced too much shit to be skeptical, including an instance where we were on a ghost hunt in a location that was part of a huge American civil war battle that later became infamous as a suicide bridge and a location for KKK lynchings.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone asked whatever we were in contact with a really mean question, everyone independently noted that we had all felt the bridge violently shake out of nowhere, and then suddenly I couldn't breathe and it felt like something was tightening around my throat.
[SPEAKER_00]: It didn't stop until I was dragged off the bridge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Apparently I was the most empathetic of the group, so they think I might have been experiencing what it was like to be lynched or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Skinwalkers, as I've read more and more about them, they do seem fairly real.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe not witches that shape shift into animals, but they're said to wear the skins of animals.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'd imagine that back in pre-colonial America, some natives decided to hunt and skin wolves and wear their palettes and then walk on all force, ye naldashi equals he who walks on all force.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you're walking in a forest in the middle of the night and see a creature running on all force wearing a wolf palette and then springing up and walking like a human, your brain might process it as a shape shifter.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then more skinwalker myths can be explained rationally.
[SPEAKER_00]: Looking into their eyes and them stealing your soul is probably an empty, hollow feeling associated with extreme fear, freezing in place.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're breaking into graveyards and using dead people's dust.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I've heard of this on the internet, is probably some weird ritual.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're also said to initiate new skinwalkers with rituals and chants.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my thought process is it's a bunch of druged up natives who like to wear animal pellets.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not a native nor actually that well-versed in native mythology, so you should probably ask an actual native American about them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though they're reluctant to speak about them without siders.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Bogart, a mischievous little spirit hailing from Scottish origins, lives in the house and does both good and bad things for the residents of the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: My dad has been losing things for as long as I can remember, and apparently it happened even when he was a little kid, according to my Nana.
[SPEAKER_00]: Literally things would go missing that it just been set down in our house growing up and be found in the most bizarre places, like a shaving razor in the fridge or every scissor in the house in one random drawer.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I was little, I read a book about Scottish folklore and found the beastie that had been following my dad around.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I started leaving out little treats and milk and tiny saucers, talking to the Bogart.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am the only person who can find anything in that household, and I think it was because I've robbed it so much as a kid.
[SPEAKER_00]: Never lose things now, at least nothing like what it was like growing up.
[SPEAKER_00]: My parents still live in a relative chaos of not being able to find things.
[SPEAKER_00]: things in the fields and woods.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm from the south, and I bet you over half the people who live near cornfields and shit will tell you the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't go into an abandoned barn at night.
[SPEAKER_00]: Something lurking will follow you back wherever you go.
[SPEAKER_00]: If something whispers in the tall grass or field, you don't reply or look back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fill inside.
[SPEAKER_00]: If something screams from the woods, don't you dare look and try to see what is calling you.
[SPEAKER_00]: When traveling near cornfields, they'll watch you from within and maybe follow the car for a bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: At night if something scratches on your window or house, don't reply.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what the actual fuck these things would be, maybe the wind, but I'm not going to find out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even the older people know that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Demons in the woods?
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Skinwalkers?
[SPEAKER_00]: Native Americans have stories for a reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: All I'm saying is don't fuck with the woods or fields at night.
[SPEAKER_00]: Smile.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mano Woods from Connecticut.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are inclusive people who live in the woods mostly.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can be driving through the wooded areas that used to be farmland in the 1600s and 1700s.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where you see stone walls that go up into the woods and kind of see something at the side of the road that looks like a person, but when you look directly at it, you don't see it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They used to be seen along old Route 7 before it became heavily populated.
[SPEAKER_00]: That whole route was an Indian path for 10,000 years and had plenty of water and forge material.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because of societal encroachment, they have moved further north.
[SPEAKER_00]: They know when they're being observed and can camouflage instantly.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's set their small and stature, nonverbal, and have limited intelligence.
[SPEAKER_00]: More like highly evolved instinct.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes they will stay in barns on farmland at night, but they do some simple chore to pay for their stay.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you leave biscuits or vegetables out for them, they will maybe stack some what in the night.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't eat meat.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've never been reported to hurt anyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some old farmers who they trust through the years have seen them walking at the far edge of their fields.
[SPEAKER_00]: Abu Gogo and a rangpendak in the islands around Papua New Guinea.
[SPEAKER_00]: Especially on Flores, where homo-floree's eances bones were found.
[SPEAKER_00]: The folklore is, loosely, people arrive on the islands and soon after settling in are greeted by these tiny people from the forests.
[SPEAKER_00]: They live relatively in peace for a long time, co-existing and staying out of each other's ways, maybe doing a bit of trade, but it's normal for multiple cultures living on islands together.
[SPEAKER_00]: the little people speak their own language, which is very different from the islanders we know today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually the peace breaks down when some of the little people kidnap and, in some versions, eat a human child, so the islanders begin to hunt them down until almost none of the little people of the forest exist.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were reported by islanders and even the Dutch colonizers is recently as 300 years ago, but then sightings dropped off, and then they picked up again in modern times, probably due to the legend being more well known by non-locals who went in a
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think they're around today, but I'm very sure they existed very recently in history, and the folklore became a very metaphoric tale of the broader history between homophloories eances and modern men when they first settled the island's thousands of years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: Southern Louisiana is a whole mixing pot of culture and folklore, but there's just this one thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know the exact spelling in English, but it's rougarou.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's practically a wear wolf, but it lives in the swamps.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, 17 at the time, my older brother, 19, and my uncle, 30, were in some small boats, me and my brother and one and my uncle and the other.
[SPEAKER_00]: we were trying to catch some frogs.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about 2 a.m. and we're in water that's about waste deep, but we're still in the boats, and as we come up to some cypress trees, we hear this scream.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like an ungodly scream, it came from the other side of a cypress patch, so we kind of just stopped and looked at each other like WTF.
[SPEAKER_00]: None of us moved, none of us set a word.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only light source we had was the headlamps on each of us on a spotlight, so we couldn't just flick on some lights and try to figure out WTF.
[SPEAKER_00]: As we are starting to realize whatever made that scream was close, we heard a tree shake and then footsteps, but they were fast and didn't really have a thump to them, so we decided to do the smart cage and thing and grab our shotguns.
[SPEAKER_00]: which we brought in because of alligators or snakes or in case we got bored.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever was in the swamp with us was just beyond our lights reach, so we yelled, whoever the fuck is out here better show yourself, or you might get shot, my uncle said while he loaded his shotgun.
[SPEAKER_00]: I and my brother are silently loading hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once I was done, I looked to my right with a spotlight and saw just enough of this black mass that was standing about 60 yards into the patch of cypress trees that I decided, you know what?
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe that's what screamed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I tapped my older brother and told him to look, and neither he nor I could tell what it was, so we pointed our guns at it and started making noise.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it was a deer, it would have run from the noise.
[SPEAKER_00]: It didn't move, it just sat there, so we decided maybe we don't want frogs anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: As my brother and uncle started the boats and started backing away, I noticed the black mass had disappeared, but now there was a set of red eyes where we were.
[SPEAKER_00]: The eyes were about four feet out of the water, which was waist-high.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, my brother, and my uncle rarely ever talk about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: the Latusa that shit scares me.
[SPEAKER_00]: A live in San Antonio and coming from a Hispanic family we believe in the stuff I went to an art type show or something can't quite remember at a place called Blue Star near the River Walk.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you don't know what any of these locations are look them up for a better visual in your head, but they had this lady telling ghost stories and she told the one about Latusa after everything was over we left but we parked in an area where it was a little walk to get back to and it meant taking the river walk I was walking back to.
[SPEAKER_00]: I swear something was following me in the trees I could hear the rustling like if something was jumping from tree to tree real scary experience another thing I believe in shadow people have seen them in my house late at night, either walking across the dining room or mirrors.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a whole tree that has a mirror, and that mirror looks into the kitchen across the fridge.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was getting water one night real late, and as I was walking back to my room, also walking towards the whole tree, a saw shadow person.
[SPEAKER_00]: I turned around immediately, and no one was there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another reason why I believe in shadow people or paranormal entities is I had a dream when I was just a kid.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a shadow person outside my window, and he was just laughing at me through it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been burned in my head.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had no facial features, just black all over with eyes and a grin like the Joker, and he was just laughing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Turns out my mom and my grandmother have had a dream with a shadow person in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Coincidence?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think not.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not a believer in the paranormal but have had a few things happen to me in life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Starting off, I used to live in a small town in Pennsylvania, down the street from my house sat an old abandoned jail.
[SPEAKER_00]: The town used it for storing records and such.
[SPEAKER_00]: One night I and my mom were walking next to the jail, there was a very nice park built next to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The power had supposedly been shut off inside the jail, one cell had its light on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Although I didn't think much of it, everything was relatively normal.
[SPEAKER_00]: About a few days later, we were driving past the jail heading home.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was compelled to look up at the top of the jail, where a barred cell window sat, and swore I saw a black shadowy figure looking out.
[SPEAKER_00]: No face could be made out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Philly the Ghost.
[SPEAKER_00]: I act and operate the spotlight in this ancient playhouse.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, no one can remember it not being there, it was a church in the 1700s, and it has a mess of uncharted tunnel snaking through the walls and floors kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I and the other actors slash crew members created Philly to explain all the weird crap that goes on in that place.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't consider myself a believer in the supernatural, but I, like everyone else in my theatre company, believe in the ghost wholeheartedly.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've written him an entire backstory, and it's not uncommon to see the smartest, most logical person you will ever meet matter of factly telling Philly to knock it off when the power goes out randomly or the fire escape door won't stop swinging open no matter what we do.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's customary to have a crew member stand by the door to the house and listen for footsteps on the stairs while our director is giving the start of show speech.
[SPEAKER_00]: Guaranteed they hear footsteps and open the door long enough to let someone from the bottom make it up into the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's Philly, and if he's let in, we know the show will be flawless.
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe in a Slavic house demon known as the Domeuvoi.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's described as a small old man with a long beard and fur cloak.
[SPEAKER_00]: He can transform into different animals, cat, dog, frog, etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: He lives in addicts, closets, or gardens.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can often hear him, but when seen, he can be dangerous.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you don't bring tribute to him in the form of bread, he will bring sickness, unwanted inhabitants, and no luck.
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe in a creature called Polivoy.
[SPEAKER_00]: He lives in fields.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's described as a middle-aged man who can be a shortest cut grass or as large as fully grown corn, depending on where slash what type of field he lives in.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's seen with a beard, sometimes white clothing, sometimes a different color, skin is dark as soil, and is apparently surrounded by wind.
[SPEAKER_00]: He isn't really evil, and the worst he'll do is make people get lost in fields or run you over with his horse if you go to a field of noon.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is believed that he is a family.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also believe in violence their small elves who bring luck, they're about the size of a four leaf clover.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can summon them if you eat a four leaf clover.
[SPEAKER_00]: If summoned, you will be gifted with luck for a long period of time, but I don't know for how long exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Atlantis was real.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a set of large islands on the mid-Atlantic ridge that is now sunk.
[SPEAKER_00]: It inhabited the most technologically advanced human nation ever on this planet from 100,000 to 30,000 years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: Descendants left and went to the Americas, and the closest people who are related to them are the Redskin Native Americans.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am 100% certain that we are not the first group of humans to be advanced in the ways we are.
[SPEAKER_00]: The global flood wiped out almost everyone and everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, the Egyptians created a repository under the Great Pyramid full of such old artifacts.
[SPEAKER_00]: This has since been rated and kept away from the general public.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Nazis went on expeditions together as much as they could regarding these pre-deluge people and went to places like South America and Antarctica to research.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hindu books are somewhat based on pre-deluge events with references to nuclear war and flying vehicles.
[SPEAKER_00]: humanity will keep going through these waves of advancement, and then mass extinction events will occur either through war or natural disasters.
[SPEAKER_00]: It all sounds ballistic, but there are still relics today that give aid to this theory.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's naive to think after all the millions of years Earth has been around we are the first bunch of people to reach the level we have right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the region of the Scottish Highlands that I grew up in, most people are superstitious to quite an extent.
[SPEAKER_00]: A couple of events in my life really pushed this into my beliefs.
[SPEAKER_00]: In Gaelig folklore, there are a lot of witches, wear wolves, soul reapers, bansches, giant green death dogs, and all that jazz.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember one time my grand had told me stories about witches and how they helped or fuck shit up.
[SPEAKER_00]: One day, I woke up with a splitting headache and went greeting and complaining to her, I was about 8 or 9, and she asked me to walk over to the table.
[SPEAKER_00]: She proceeds to take and rub an egg on my forehead to remove the bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: After a few seconds, she breaks the egg onto the table to reveal black blobs in the white and yolk.
[SPEAKER_00]: The headache was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still freaks me out.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was definitely a witch.
[SPEAKER_00]: 100%.
[SPEAKER_00]: My mom had many other weird things with her growing up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Best Grand Ever!
[SPEAKER_00]: Culture Guys slash negative energies that affect things a little backstory, I live alone, and I went through periods and spikes of depression caused by fucked up shit from my childhood coming back to bite my brain's ass, and during the lowest point of multiple spikes, crazy shit would happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm talking about things like a painting I have nailed to the wall sort of just, falling, my bed and only my bed shaking, random thumps and walls, getting static shocks while simply sitting down, and rooms being dark despite having broad and bright daylight shining through windows.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of my friends who visited me actually took note of this and mentioned it.
[SPEAKER_00]: These events happen only during spikes, it doesn't matter if it's in the middle of the day or night.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I was in a spike, there was a good 90% chance of paranormal events occurring.
[SPEAKER_00]: and psychism is one of the oldest philosophical positions known to history.
[SPEAKER_00]: It says that the universe itself is mind, and what we call our mind is the universal mind's imaginings.
[SPEAKER_00]: The implication of this position is that everything you and I think of as reality only exists as conscious experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: You and I can sit down at a table and agree there's a table.
[SPEAKER_00]: Traditional philosophy would say that is because the table exists regardless of if anyone is around to see it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what about a table no one has ever seen or will see?
[SPEAKER_00]: What can you say about that
[SPEAKER_00]: And psychism doesn't have this problem, because the table only exists as conscious experiences, in this case as you're in my experiences.
[SPEAKER_00]: The universe being all conscious experiences that exist implies a table that no one could see wouldn't exist because it is not part of any conscious experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: I firmly believe conscious experiences all we can know and ever will know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even then we're very limited in what we can say is absolutely true and not just true because our senses and experiences tell us it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: face-slash fairies.
[SPEAKER_00]: I live in western Washington, which is heavily wooded with plenty of forests and flora and fauna, there are places that look like they're straight out of a storybook up here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like it's kind of low-key because no one really talks about it unless they're asked, but almost everyone I know is very strict about honoring the fey and never disrespecting them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have so many stories, some from myself and people I know, have strange things happening on hiking trails and in forests.
[SPEAKER_00]: These aren't like tinker bell fairies with their pixie dust, these little guys fiercely protect the forest, and they will fuck shit up if you mess with their homes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember when I was a kid in our class one hiking, and this little snott nose brat completely destroyed a whole batch of flowers just for the hell of it and stepped on every bug he could find on the trail.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next day he came down with pneumonia out of absolutely nowhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't have any symptoms until that next morning, and things got so bad so quick he went to the hospital.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you're a kid, of course, it's easy to believe things like that, but I've seen way too many coincidences to not believe the shit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like tearing bark off a tree for no reason and finding a massive snake in your path later on, or littering in the woods and breaking your leg like an hour later.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can think of a thousand times when I've set my keys or jewelry I was going to wear down in one place, and when I turn around it's gone and in some strange place like a downstairs cupboard, fairies love shiny things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It isn't like a religious thing, it's just sort of second nature for me to be aware of that presence there.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not something I think about anymore, it's a subconscious thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every few days people, including myself, put an altar of sorts for the fade to honor them and befriended them so they don't wreak havoc on us.
[SPEAKER_00]: It blew my mind when I got to high school, I went to a small K8 school that people didn't believe in Fay.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just like another animal, like a zebra or a bear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it was just a story my hippie mom told me to keep me from messing with nature, but I don't know, man, weird shit can happen in the woods.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure what to call it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was with my friends riding around empty fields at night in a gator.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a golf cart, but it has a small truck bed in no roof.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two can sit in front, and the rest pile in the truck bed.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember the headlights flickering in my friends falling asleep on my shoulder.
[SPEAKER_00]: I looked out across a tobacco field and saw a long, thin figure, maybe 30 feet tall, all the way at the other side of the field, maybe 200 or more feet away.
[SPEAKER_00]: It looked like it had long, stick like legs and arms and a shaggy, yak like head.
[SPEAKER_00]: Glowing eyes looking right at us as we sped along the dirt path doing donuts and running over flowers that failed to grow.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was petrified.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I get scared, I can't move or speak.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I sat there in silence just looking at the thing from far away, watching it move slowly.
[SPEAKER_00]: I lost view of it when we turned the corner and all the girls ran back inside to get ready for bed.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember carrying my friend to the tiny shack we stayed in.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was at a farm, and there used to be a slave house that was turned into a guest house that was probably only 10 feet wide and 12 feet long.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every year when I go to the farm, something happens that's just a little unnerving.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, we were cleaning gravestones, and my friend Fallon broke her arm.
[SPEAKER_00]: The gravestone that she tripped on was of a little boy who fell to his death.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also the doors there don't lock, and I hate waking up in the night to a wide open door just welcoming bears and coyotes in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Weja, Seyonses, and anything that seeks to communicate with forces on scene.
[SPEAKER_00]: I grew up Catholic, still am, and Catholic teaching says that no one and nothing can externally affect your free will.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not God, not angels, demons, or anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: The catch is, if you allow yourself or open yourself up, then anything is fair game.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way any of those mystical communication methods work is by allowing oneself to be opened up to a spirit and using one's body as a vessel for communication.
[SPEAKER_00]: All that is cool and fun for parties, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what happens if it isn't the soul of a loved one or a wandering spirit that decides it wants to talk to you?
[SPEAKER_00]: What happens if it's a bit more malevolent?
[SPEAKER_00]: and what happens if it decides that it doesn't want to leave afterwards.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rational side of me knows that all of those things are party games and parlor tricks, but I'm still never willing to take that risk, on the off chance that I'm wrong, and all of a sudden I have an unwanted guest who wants nothing but the worst for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ghosts and Witchcraft.
[SPEAKER_00]: My aunts tell me a story about how, when they were children, a woman who was envious of my grandma gave her a plate of tamales.
[SPEAKER_00]: My grandma thought nothing of it and accepted the plate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then out of nowhere, in the span of a few days, she fell suddenly ill and into a six-month coma.
[SPEAKER_00]: They really thought she was going to die.
[SPEAKER_00]: All that time, doctors couldn't figure out what had caused her to be like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounds like a tall tail, but my grandma and all my aunts and mom were born and raised in this rural, rather religious village, where this type of stuff is more common and talked about.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think a woman from a village far away from the city with little education would be able to make or find some sort of undetectable poison strong enough to send someone into a coma.
[SPEAKER_00]: Besides, she only got better after they started giving her a medicine that was given to them by an old man who saw my grandma at the hospital.
[SPEAKER_00]: El Chupacabra.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, regionally, the South Arkansas Panther Slash Black Cat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where I'm from an Arkansas, there's a tale among the older folks, and a few of the younger ones, that out in the wildlife reserves there are big black cats or panthers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't think it was real despite my grandma and mom insisting that seen one several times each, grandma also insisted she saw the ghost light out by the train tracks, so I mean.
[SPEAKER_00]: But one day in high school I was out walking in the woods and found a huge cat print in the mud.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know it wasn't a dog print, there were no claw marks, it had the lobed pad, and the toes were organized like a cat's.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was way, way bigger than any bobcat print.
[SPEAKER_00]: Freaked me the heck out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then a few months later, I heard a sound that I went on an internet research spree over, and it sounded closest to a puma, which should be impossible given our geography.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe an isolated group of melanistic Florida Panthers?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like.
[SPEAKER_00]: A few years later, a few friends passed around a video from a trail cam of some big, dark, cat-looking critter.
[SPEAKER_00]: They also sent it to game and fisheries, and within a week all the videos got pulled from online, early Facebook days, and game and fisheries never responded.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, Sid friends were all convinced there's some government conspiracy at work where there was an experiment that escaped and is on the loose or whatever, but my personal guess is game and fisheries has no clue what the cats are and didn't want people out there spreading panic or getting trophy hunters after what could be a very rare animal, so they had it pulled and didn't comment or respond because they were investigating.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still wild.
[SPEAKER_00]: I quite it actually was, but there's something out in those woods.
[SPEAKER_00]: spirits.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not an mystical sense, I'm an atheist and take anything potentially connected to religion non-literally or as greatly exaggerated.
[SPEAKER_00]: But spirits, or ghosts, or whatever you call them, I think are real.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that they are aware that I have evidence.
[SPEAKER_00]: First, I believe consciousness is one of the ruling parts of the universe, alongside space and time.
[SPEAKER_00]: For my rationale to make sense in some places, you need to at least entertain that thought, unless you ask why I won't go down the rabbit hole of explaining why.
[SPEAKER_00]: but the first piece of evidence is when my great grandpa died.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before I was born, my mom had a dream that night of him hugging her and telling her it's okay while in an odd voider space.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next morning my great grandmother calls my grandma, her daughter, saying that he had died.
[SPEAKER_00]: That same great grandma, before she died, I had a dream about her.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a long time ago, and it was after her death.
[SPEAKER_00]: All I remember is walking down a quarter in her house out of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Third, this is where I believe that all spirits are connected, or it was another byproduct of my hallucinations.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I did not take psychedelics.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was hospitalized, near death, for two weeks, and the entire time I was off pain killers, but the state of Oregon shut down I was in was making me delirious.
[SPEAKER_00]: I kept having visions of old clocks or being in a different bed before I fell asleep or shortly after I woke up.
[SPEAKER_00]: This hallucination, however, was different.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was midday, and I had just had a wicked nose bleed where I lost at least a lot of blood, like a horror scene out of a hospital be rated movie amount of blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: An hour later it sounds like someone is playing a harp or stringed instrument, and it makes me feel awake.
[SPEAKER_00]: I felt more aware at a wake and energized in those moments I heard that music than any other time in that hospital.
[SPEAKER_00]: I felt myself sit up, but my body didn't follow as I did, and the room was more bright.
[SPEAKER_00]: My mom woke me as I was falling asleep, and it was back to the groggy haze I was familiar with.
[SPEAKER_00]: I later go to an operation that saves me, but that's not relevant here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lastly, and this is where you need to follow my idea of what consciousness is.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it is something so rooted and as obvious as the breath you take or the passing of time or the rotation of the earth, do you want to explain how it just vanishes into nothingness?
[SPEAKER_00]: How come I don't linger like the previous second in your mind after checking the time?
[SPEAKER_00]: It does, to me anyways, and the consciousness just finds a way to carry on without the human body bound to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, I do have a whole explanation of why I put consciousness and lead with time and space.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Filipino, so stories about the white lady, Duende, Montenegal, and the creatures inside trees, I forgot the name, come to mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: The white lady is basically a lady with a white dress who you'd supposedly see on an empty road during nighttime or in places that were not blessed.
[SPEAKER_00]: My mother's childhood homes were considered one of those places, and she said she woke up one night to look at the window to see a white lady just staring at her.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Duende, or Dwarf, is a tiny creature that can either be white or black.
[SPEAKER_00]: The white dwarves don't do harm as long as you don't bother them and can even bring good luck at times.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you see a black one, it means danger and evil.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mononongal is a woman whose torso is cut in half, and she flies around with wings at night, but during the day is just a normal person.
[SPEAKER_00]: a way to defeat her is to put salt on her lower half, as she has to go back to it to become a person, and the salt would burn her as she would merge her torso.
[SPEAKER_00]: The creatures inside trees are the ones I firmly believe in.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is said that one should not cut down old trees because there are creatures living in them.
[SPEAKER_00]: In my mother's childhood home, yes, the one with a white lady, their other family members live nearby, and it was a family-owned land, like her father owned this land, and his brother the one beside it, and when they eventually sold it, the construction people couldn't cut down a tree because people would die or something bad would happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: The folklore said that within the trees are creatures de Taga Otto, or not from here, who if mentions under the tree in its roots, which are bigger and more extravagant than any human could imagine.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are just a few, Filipino mythology has a lot of stories, and in our area, these are some of the common ones I've heard.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, let's do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Being obsessed with mythology my whole life, I think many myths and folklore are derived from actual events kept for posterity and the only form early humans had.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, I think many are true in their own way and changed by thousands of years of being passed down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Plato describes this in one of his talks, Tamayas or Kritis, by using the myth of fate and wanting to drive his father's heavenly son chariot and crashing it into the earth, saying that basically this is a story to convey the falling of a heavenly body from the sky.
[SPEAKER_00]: The story is meant to stick with people but also convey some information.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fate and story tells you what constellations fade and passes through as he drives the chariot, hence, when the meteorite fell, it was potentially from a comet that could be seen because these things were cyclical according to the ancients.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many myths are like this, you can see this tradition of Godhood of the mighty continued as kings throughout history elevated themselves to Godhood, trying to be as big as their ancestors were.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the gods in antiquity are essentially our famous ancestors of a forgotten history.
[SPEAKER_00]: This would explain why Pantheons of God's beyond seven mirror each other across Europe slash Asia slash Africa.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why beyond seven?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the seven primary gods in ancient history all over the world almost always represent the five planets we can see, the sun, and the moon.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why do you think you have a seven day week all named after God's link to planets?
[SPEAKER_00]: I could go on and on.
[SPEAKER_00]: ghosts, or interdimensional beings, or whatever label people use to explain whatever it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not the type of person who wants to believe in ghosts because I think they're cool, I'm a realist.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been told I caused a couple friends to give up on religion, not intentionally but because I don't have patience for what I perceive as unrealistic.
[SPEAKER_00]: My aunt and uncle have always said their house is haunted, until I lived with them, I never believed any of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't normally talk about this because it scared the shit out of me, and I hope I never experienced it again.
[SPEAKER_00]: I noticed my dog would randomly growl and bark while staring at nothing in the hall.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the hair on his back stands up, I know he's upset, the cats would get obviously terrified with their first sticking up and tails fully puffed out while staring at nothing like my dog.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then I started finding the Latin cross emoji that hung on my wall and weird places, like in between my pillows.
[SPEAKER_00]: What really freaked me out is what I repeatedly saw happened while I was in the house alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was plywood blocking the entrance to the dining room about four and a half feet high to keep the dogs out, as nobody used that area.
[SPEAKER_00]: My aunt has a big cabinet with glass doors that spans the entire wall opposite of the entrance.
[SPEAKER_00]: The lights in the cabinet were touch activated, so when you turned it on it would be bright, but could be dim three or four times before turning off.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cabinets full of Disney villain porcelain figurines she enjoys collecting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Countless times when I'd walked by that room to let my dog outside, a glance over into the dining room, and literally while looking, the cabinet light would turn on, but immediately on the last creepy low dim setting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then all those figurines would glow eerily in this ominous low light that I know requires contact to turn on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then similar things started happening, like the TV at the end of the hall would turn on as I'd look when walking by.
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw my cousin's toy fire truck light up and roll across the floor three feet in front of me, that caused the cat lying on my lap to panic and dig its nails in me, poof up, hiss, and bolt out of the room in fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's plenty more to.
[SPEAKER_00]: It absolutely 100% was specifically fucking with me, and the more I reacted, the more creepy shit occurred.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually it got to the point that I just ignored everything it did to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know why I decided to mess with me, all I know is I never want to interact with anything like that ever again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Less than a year ago I lived in this house that was a little over 100.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first night we moved in, I saw five red glowing faces in the window, and I started rubbing my eyes and blinking to make sure what I was seeing was real, and sure enough, they were still there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I started screaming, go away, and luckily for me, they did.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next morning when I woke up I saw a hooded figure sitting on my bed, but this time I didn't feel threatened.
[SPEAKER_00]: War black robes and a hood and slowly started to levitate before getting sucked into a hole.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were so many times I heard whispers and saw things out of the corner of my eye that weren't there.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this one time I woke up in the middle of the night and felt like someone had a scarf around my neck choking me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could feel old, extremely worn out fabric around my neck, but when I clawed it to get it off, I just touched skin.
[SPEAKER_00]: I legitimately could not breathe, so I tried to get up to go to the door for help, but I felt like it was pulling me back.
[SPEAKER_00]: I fell to the ground, and eventually it let go, and I was able to breathe again.
[SPEAKER_00]: I went to the bathroom to just get myself together and probably went to sleep on the couch.
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe that at some point in earth's history, aliens have visited our planet.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it could be much more recent than others believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's break down religion.
[SPEAKER_00]: In almost all known religions, gods are depicted as coming from above, or the stars.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when they come down from the heavens, it's in a great big ball of light or fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are also shown to possess magical powers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are told to have large amounts of knowledge in wisdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And lastly, in lots of religions, they are shown to be deformed or very.
[SPEAKER_00]: Alien looking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now if an alien race were to visit us, they most certainly would have all of these traits.
[SPEAKER_00]: Falling from the heavens in a ball of fire?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what ancient civilizations would describe a rocket burning up from reentry as.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also modern technology these days would be considered magic to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now take into consideration an interstellar race, and think of the technology they would possess.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would be gods to them, beings of unimaginable power and strength, so much so that it would seem as if they were omnipotent.
[SPEAKER_00]: And knowledge, these aliens would possess a greater amount of knowledge than these people would be able to understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you may be asking, if they could communicate with us, then why are the stories less detailed?
[SPEAKER_00]: These are aliens, they have a completely different language or way of communicating.
[SPEAKER_00]: So communication would be very simplistic.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if an alien points to the sky to signal they come from space, it could be interpreted as them coming from the heavens.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if I'm going back even earlier than that, say prehistoric times.
[SPEAKER_00]: When humans were very primitive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Genetic memory is the theory in which our instincts come from past trauma and early humans.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you look at pop culture and all the similarities, then explain this to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are scared of slender man, siren head, SCP-096, skin walkers, and all of these.
[SPEAKER_00]: They have the same traits of being tall, slender, and very plain or lifeless monsters.
[SPEAKER_00]: What kind of creature with those traits could have tormented or scared humans so much that the fear has been carried for thousands of years?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know exactly what myth or folklore it fits into, but I do believe in ghost slash spirits and would consider that to be rather myth-wise in the scope of the general public.
[SPEAKER_00]: I worked in a historical village for a year and had my own encounters as well as work there while people had their own encounters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not all the houses, but certainly a few, are believed to have spirits living in them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The village are not all in situ, located in their original place of construction, as most are moved in modern tech slash wiring slash etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is stripped from them, but they are all historical buildings in that they were built and lived in by certain families slash groups of importance.
[SPEAKER_00]: The village spans from the 1800s to 1920s, and we go through the buildings in chronological order.
[SPEAKER_00]: The 1800s log cabin, for instance, has a large stone hearth on the right as you enter, and we would only like the hearth on a Saturday.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, even until Friday night you could go in there and feel warmth, the whole cabin was always a place of happiness and warmth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Always.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's another house on the other side, around the 1870s, and there have been multiple instances of people seeing a woman in a blue dress looking out the window.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, we had a maintenance guy who would work later into the evening sometimes, and he had once seen the woman in blue and then saw our coworker in her blue costume dress on the other side of the village and went to inquire how she had gotten across the village so fast, it wasn't her.
[SPEAKER_00]: The village ended up having a new employee only building come in, and so the old one was to be stripped of wires slash cables slash etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because for some reason the light in the top floor would be left on at times even after all was shut down for the night.
[SPEAKER_00]: He went in to go unscrew the bulb, and as he reached out for it, he felt hands rest on his back.
[SPEAKER_00]: He left the bulb in and went home for the night, in the morning it was off.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bulb is still there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've also experienced two situations in the same house.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's an 1850s hotel that I never, ever, felt good inside.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, on my first walk through alone in the building, I spoke out loud, saying I was there for a job and would be coming and going and leaving at the end of the day, but I was not there to disturb anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the building that would go on to have claims that someone felt hands pushing them at the top step when they were walking down the stairs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, everything was pretty peachy for me in that building for most of the year.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, one Sunday morning I opened up the first door of the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: Only one door could be opened from the outside.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rest were all locked from the inside to prevent intruders, and I noticed the house was cold.
[SPEAKER_00]: See my breath cold.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was maybe 15 to 18 degrees Celsius.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first room I enter has a door on the left, which is padlocked but hangs open about 1.5 to 2.
[SPEAKER_00]: That door leads to the other side of the hotel, where the family would have lived.
[SPEAKER_00]: That room being their living room, and immediately on the left the door to the servants room.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stairs going up would lead to the family's bedroom and connection to the top floor of the hotel.
[SPEAKER_00]: A head of me is the hallway leading down to the tavern slash kitchen.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can only go forward to continue to open the hotel from the inside.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I proceed forward, and it gets colder.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it doesn't take long for me to see that the kitchen door is wide open.
[SPEAKER_00]: This door and I have a history of annoyance because you have to put tons of strength into closing it, and it has a twist latch, so once that is closed, it is closed, if it's too lightly closed, it pops open.
[SPEAKER_00]: I closed at the night before with a longtime colleague, it was definitely closed.
[SPEAKER_00]: I call up on the radio to my sister, who was my supervisor, and tell her that the door was opened.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm instructed to search for forced entry slash shenanigans slash wrapper slash etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It looks perfectly as I left at the night before.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to radio up when I hear footsteps.
[SPEAKER_00]: I turned around to face the entrance I had originally come through, and I laugh, thinking it's my coworker trying to sneak up on me along the porch outside, and I call to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: On this particular Sunday morning we were short staffed, so he and I were the only people within a ten minute walk from the entrance of the site to the village.
[SPEAKER_00]: I start to trace my thoughts and realize he was on the other side of the village opening the blacksmith's shop, which means I would have heard the gravel road long before I'm reaching the porch.
[SPEAKER_00]: I start to eggs at the building hastily, and as I do, I have the instinct to look over my right shoulder.
[SPEAKER_00]: There, in that door that is padlocked and hangs open an inch and a half that leads to the family quarters, is a young girl with a dirtied face staring at me through the gap.
[SPEAKER_00]: I booked it to the blacksmith's shop, cleared a three wall by jumping over it inside the shop, and we open the rest of the village together, except for that one building.
[SPEAKER_00]: It stayed closed for the next few hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a group we went through it to open it, no girl was inside.
[SPEAKER_00]: Since then I've kind of accepted the idea that it was the servant and she had opened the kitchen to start chores.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the moment it terrified me, but I've had worse experiences than that, and really it fits the pattern that she would stay out of my sight if she were indeed the servant tracing her patterns of work.