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In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
This week, we’re sharing an interview with Karen and Matt’s fellow Coloradan, paranormal author and investigator Richard Estep.
When he’s not saving people in his work as a paramedic, he spends his time researching the paranormal, going on investigations, working as a TV presenter, and clearly also spending a lot of time in front of a keyboard.
My apologies for the quality of my voice in this interview.
I was struggling through this one with yet another round of COVID, but I’m feeling better already thanks to good meds, lots of rest, and my family helping out with all the chores.
So thanks for the kind well wishes on social media.
Karen and my wife both passed those along, and I really do appreciate them.
Okay, let’s hop into the Monster Talk.
Well, golly, I’m excited to welcome back Richard Estep.
So we’re here today to talk about ghostly encounters, terrifyingly true hauntings.
And wow, you’ve crammed a lot of haunted places in here.
How did you, if you don’t mind my asking, how did you pick these cases?
When I was a kid, I’m a child of the 70s, Blake, and I used to get for Christmas the most wonderful treasury books.
Are those a thing here in the States or in Australia?
It would be like I had the Hamelin Book of Hauntings, for example, by Daniel Farson.
And these were the kind of books you would get on Christmas morning, and there would be just enough in them about different ghosts and hauntings and legends and so forth that it would entice you to go read a full-length book on the subject, hopefully.
And so when Visible Inc. asked me what I’d wanted to do next, I said that’s what I would like to do.
I’d like to get my take on some of the classic cases, maybe look at the updates, you know, and this is hopefully the kind of book I would like to have gotten when I was eight years old one Christmas.
Well, I think we had a series like that when I was growing up in Australia, not by the same name, but it was put out by all places target.
had a series in the world’s greatest ghost stories, world’s various different topics of kind of spooky and strange phenomena.
But, yeah, so we had something like that.
But, yeah, I think we wanted to bring you on the show because you have published a number of books over the past couple of months, and I seem to be getting emails from your publishers.
every other month saying, oh, do you want to talk to Richard about this book or this book?
So we thought we’d touch upon a couple of them.
And so Blake has introduced us to the Ghostly Encounters book.
And, yeah, you talk about some of our all-time favourite stories like Bally Rectory, the Enfield Polk Geist, and Jeff the Talking Mongoose.
So we wanted to talk a little bit about these stories that have been around for so long and why they have…
such staying power and how they continue to capture people’s imaginations.
Oh, yeah, and I have a bone to pick with you, Stolzno, because you made it to Borley before I did.
I’m an Englishman who lived there half my life, the quintessential English ghost story, and you made it there.
I thought you had been there, and I get people coming to me all the time and saying, have you been to Uluru or have you been to this place in Australia?
No, I haven’t.
I think that’s what happens.
You tend to move to another country and see more of that.
So I’ve seen it.
Yeah, that’s fair.
I mean, there’s nothing – I know there’s nothing to see now.
It’s the church, right?
But it’s just – I’ve been to Essex.
I just have never made it as far as Borley.
But that story is I think arguably the one that most influenced me as a kid growing up because it had everything, at least at face value, right?
It had the Phantom Nun and the Haunted Manor House.
It’s the archetypal haunted house, isn’t it?
And then, of course, the kind of – I call it the James Dean ending, you know?
It died young, consumed, so no one can ever go back and disprove it, although some researchers have done a great job of digging into the ashes, as it were, and challenging some of the claims.
So how do you approach these stories then when the place is no longer there or it’s inaccessible?
So what to you still feels unexplored about these places?
I feel like Borley is essentially done to death now.
And the only reason, honestly, that I put Borley in this book was that it was king of my bucket list.
It influenced me so much growing up.
And people were so pro-Borley and so pro-Harry Price for the longest time, at least in Britain.
And it was only later on that researchers started to get a little bit more skeptical and evaluate some of the human factors involved.
And, you know, now some of the truth has has come out.
And so I feel like even so, Borley has been, I would say, 80 percent debunked.
And yet you look at the fact that there was still legends of hauntings surrounding the rectory before the Foysters moved in, while the Bull family was in residence, before Harry Price, the showman, you know, ever got in there.
But I think the book that really puts the best nail in that coffin, as it were, is Sean O’Connor’s book, The Haunting of Bully Rectory, which came out in 2023.
And that book is not kind to some of the parties involved, I would say.
Yeah, and I think a lot of the stories are coming from the church as well.
I mean, we could go into this further, but it’s funny you should say that it’s been done to death because I just wrote something about it recently.
And I think I’ve uncovered some new bits and pieces, but I think we’ll be talking about this in another show soon.
It’s tricky, isn’t it?
Because, I mean, like the classic sceptical thing to say is, well, look.
You know, there’s some interesting stories, but then we caught someone cheating or tricking or hoaxing, and therefore everything is suspect, right?
So it’s like one bad apple destroys the whole pie, or it seems to.
And, you know, I guess that’s not really fair because I think when we’re doing our own investigations, one of the things we’ve learned is, you know, try not to lump everything together into a giant thing and call it a haunting.
You know, try to figure out what the individual phenomena are that are being reported and treat them separately and investigate them separately.
Absolutely.
And I kept coming back to the fact that, again, you know, the rectory was reputed to be haunted long before it was on any kind of national stage, let alone the international stage.
So how much credence you put in those stories varies with the individual, I think.
But I still think there is a kernel of something there long before the main show began.
Oh, a kernel and a nine.
This is…
It was Harry Price in the library with the candlestick.
That would be the best game of Clue, Haunted House Clue, right?
Yeah, how’s that not been done?
I don’t know.
That’s actually a good question.
So just cut that out.
We’re going to be rich.
Well, I guess, Richard, I’ll continue.
How do you manage to visit so many sites?
And what does that process look like?
I’ve discussed this with you a little bit.
just in personal correspondence, but how do you do things like planning and networking with property owners and just dealing with research and investigation?
And do you tend to choose places to visit yourself or do they choose you?
Do you have people approaching you to come and visit their haunted house?
I’m usually wary when someone approaches me, honestly, because we already introduced that bias if they have something to gain by the place being haunted.
Not that I would ever, you know, the idea that you might declare somewhere officially haunted is kind of silly to me or certify or whatever.
But to give you a very recent example, I just got back from California and the Poltergeist House, you know, from Spielberg’s movie, was recently, I believe August, was opened up as an Airbnb.
And so I know we can just name names here, right?
So Ghost Adventures had done an episode there.
Yeah.
and shockingly declared it to be haunted.
And so I did not find anything on that episode remotely credible at all.
But I am that kid, again, that grew up with the movie Poltergeist.
It came out in 82, which, you know, I was 9, 10 years old in 1982.
movie scared the pants off of me.
So purely for the opportunity to sleep in that house, to live in that house, to be in the kid’s bedroom, you know, with the clown doll, I outright rented the place, which normally when I’m writing a book project, and I do not have a book project in the works yet for that house, but normally when I have a book project, I try and avoid money changing hands at all if possible.
It’s not that I’m cheap.
It’s simply that I don’t want there to be the accusation, you know,
I’ve preached for many years that when somebody is getting paid, there is, by definition, a vested interest and a reason to be skeptical, you know?
But in the case of that place, I did take the opportunity to visit, to not just live in that house, but also to go visit the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
That has sent me down the rabbit hole of…
Rudolph Valentino’s ghost and his haunted property which is up in the Hollywood Hills and it turns out neighbors the Manson family it’s in Cielo Drive in that same canyon so what’s weird is these books kind of they snowball and I’ll go do some research and literally they won’t surface again for three or four years and then they will fit into a future project if that makes any sense
And since you’re a local, I wanted to ask you about the melting pot.
Have you ever been there, the fondue place?
I think it’s in Luton.
I have a point.
There’s a method to my madness here.
I don’t know if you’ve been there, Richard, but they state out and out that they are haunted.
There’s something incredible that happens when people share fondue.
My name is Kevin Sampron, and I’m the president of Spirit Paranormal Investigations, and we find the melting pot to be one of the most actively haunted buildings in the state of Colorado.
Okay.
I mean, I’ve been once, I think, yeah, for fondue quite a few years ago, and I’d heard of their reputation.
I know some events have happened there, but I don’t know any further than that.
Can you enlighten us?
Well, I’d heard that there wasn’t quite as much activity lately, that there’d been a real dip.
Yeah, haunted cheese.
I’m not too sure about the claims.
All I know is that they reach out to people and people that I know and have said, oh, we’re haunted, come and investigate us.
Wow.
I think that’s fine, actually, as long as there’s not an expectation that you’ll find something or else.
With The Poltergeist House, there was no expectation of that at all.
And so I’m not selling a TV show where I have to find something, you know?
And so exactly one thing happened that was odd in all that time.
The rest of it was just a cool experience to be in, you know, Hollywood’s iconic…
haunted house uh and i was just kicking myself my inner 10 year old was just giddy with glee being at that house haunted um other than the fact that my bedroom door opened itself um in the night um there there was really nothing beyond that you know how that goes right one uh one one swallow does not make a summer as the old saying goes so um i wasn’t able to debunk it
But I also don’t see why the house would be haunted.
There’s been exactly one death in it.
Well, was the swimming pool scene with the real bodies filmed on site or was that on a lot?
So that’s a great question.
And elements were filmed in multiple places because a lot of what looks like the house was in fact recreated in the studios, you know.
But they did a whole bunch of that stuff there.
They sent the whole street to Hawaii for a week while they blow up their street.
Wow.
If you look at the end of the movie, you know, where literally the gas mains are exploding, fire hydrants going off, coffins coming out of the ground.
Spielberg sent the entire street to Hawaii for a week and said, don’t worry about what we’re going to do.
We’ll clean everything up by the time you get back.
Have a nice vacation.
Yeah, that neighborhood is amazing.
And, you know, in many ways, it has not changed all that much.
I am enough of a child that they have a remote control.
You know, that scene at the beginning of the movie where the guys are watching a football game and the neighbor.
Yeah, the neighbor is watching.
Oh, gosh.
Mr. Rogers.
It’s the football game going back and forth.
Yes, exactly.
And it’s the war of the remote controls.
I was standing there zapping the neighbor’s house with the remote control just so happy I cannot tell you.
That’s fantastic.
You left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!
You only moved the headstones!
How did they get the house back out of that dimensional portal, though?
Yeah, good question.
Yeah, and more to the point, what does that do to property taxes?
Yeah.
Well, let’s shift gears just a little bit and move on to another book that came out, I think, roughly around the same time as Ghostly Encounters, and that’s your book Mothman, Sightings and Investigations to the Iconic Flying Cryptid.
So I believe you did a trip out to Point Pleasant, and I’ve seen the photographs.
So could you tell us a little bit about maybe what your investigation unearthed that earlier investigators might have missed?
And also, are there still witnesses who are coming forward?
And how do you differentiate between things like folklore and misidentification and genuinely anomalous reports?
Great question.
Yeah.
So one of the things, because I did not just want to rehash John Keel, although you have to talk about Keel whenever you write about Mothman and Gray Barker as well.
Obviously, that’s been done and it’s been it’s it’s iconic in many ways.
So not only did we go to Point Pleasant, we cast a wider net and we looked at how much broader the phenomenon is.
So it took us to places like Van Meter in Iowa.
You know, the Van Meter Visitor.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, so, you know, again, you’ve got this strange flying creature there.
It took us to Chicago and to the suburbs, Rockford, where we had a bunch of urban sightings of Mothman, Chicago O’Hare Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world.
So we wanted to go beyond Point Pleasant, but…
To answer your question directly, Karen, I wanted to talk to some primary sources, and there is no shortage of people there that remember the original flap, I guess we can call it.
And I say that with no joke because UFO flaps, of course, is something we’re all familiar with.
Yeah.
Was this big concurrent lights in the sky UFO flap going on at the same time as the Mothman?
Yeah.
uh sightings were taking place in the late 60s so i was talking to locals and one of the things that fascinated me the most was um i really have not like has not sit well with me this link between the silver bridge collapse this tragedy that claimed i believe it was 47 lives um and mothman you know um and the blame for that lies in the way the story has been told um
And I talked to multiple people and they all told me the same thing.
They said, those of us that lived in Point Pleasant at the time of the collapse did not in any way, shape or form associate the Mothman weirdness, the high strangeness with that bridge collapse.
That only happened after the books came out, you know, Gray Barker’s book and John Keel’s book.
And I don’t mean to speak ill of another writer, but I’ve come to the conclusion that if you read the Mothman prophecies, without that bridge collapse being tied in, you almost have no ending to that book.
You know, you have no climax.
And the movie adaptation, really, that’s kind of the big set piece in the movie, isn’t it?
Yeah.
So I thought that did a real disservice.
And I wanted to see what the locals thought of that.
And they said, yeah, we we never even heard of Mothman at the time.
Most of us called it the big black bird, which fascinated me.
You know, they described it as this big black bird the size of a Cessna.
And so that was pretty fascinating, just hearing it directly from local people.
And I asked one of them, point blank, I said, without Mothman, what do you think Point Pleasant would be like?
And she said, with no hesitation, nobody would come here.
This town would not be on the map, even though it has this crucial historical role.
Arguably, the first conflict of the US Revolution took place there.
In fact, the Battle of Point Pleasant.
Nobody goes there for that.
So they all go to see this big, shiny statue and stick quarters into its butt crack.
Yeah.
Mothman has more drawing power, apparently, than Chief Cornstalk, right?
Well, you know, I mean, just to stick with that same theme, Atchison, Kansas, the Sally House, you familiar with that case?
Yes, actually, I was going to ask you about that.
Yeah.
One of the quietest demonic houses I’ve ever slept well in.
I went to the visitor center in Atchison and had a candid conversation there.
Now, Amelia Earhart’s birthplace is in Atchison also.
That house is a museum.
It’s a wonderful place to visit.
And I was told, talk about a perfect soundbite.
I was told, hey, Sally brings way more tourism to Atchison than Amelia does.
Wow.
Amelia Earhart, perhaps you’ve heard of me?
And this is a pioneer of aviation, let alone the fact that she’s a female pioneer of aviation.
But regardless of that, she deserves her place quite rightly in the field of great aviators and great explorers and is overshadowed by this imaginary, some would say completely made up little girl.
I almost died leaving the Sally House, actually.
Yikes.
I was writing my book, In Search of Demons, for Llewellyn, and I do tell this story at the end of the book, but many, many people had warned me, you know, if you delve into this subject, you should beware, you should, you know, bathe in Himalayan salt and all that kind of stuff.
And I don’t mock because belief is a powerful thing.
And so people, meanwhile, I was leaving the Sally house and we did have something odd happen when we left.
A good friend of mine, we just left at about three in the morning, separate cars.
And they realized they’d left some food in the fridge and didn’t want to be those people, those bad guests.
So he turned around to go back and throw it in the trash.
And my friend, Mike, who’s a police officer.
So, you know, pretty grounded, pretty down to earth guy.
He goes in the house and…
immediately his wife who’s sitting in the car outside sees an upstairs light go on he never goes upstairs he goes in he hears a door closing in the house uh takes the pizza throws it in the trash and leaves and was a little unnerved by this you know um because we knew there was no one in that house we locked it up securely uh and the light switched itself off
Which I thought was quite cool, you know.
But then I’m maybe 30, 40 minutes out of Atchison.
I’m heading back to Colorado at exactly two miles over the speed limit on cruise control.
And there is this colossal bang.
And all of a sudden, my car is in a ditch.
Yeah, one of my brand new tires experienced…
what they call a zipper failure, where essentially it just completely comes apart.
You know, it’s not a flat tire.
It’s a complete catastrophic rupture.
It’s a tread separation kind of thing.
I looked into it and talked to some experts and they said, well, these are pretty rare, especially for new tires.
It could be a manufacturing defect, but it’s very odd that you would see something like this, you know, especially as I had driven out
to Atchison from Colorado with no issues.
It all of a sudden failed on the way out of town.
And…
I mean, not to make light of your bad situation there, but Kansas is known for being flat.
Good enough.
Yeah.
But, you know, there’s, of course, that completely rational part of the brain that says ties fail, mechanical failures happen.
Of course they do.
And then there’s that other part that says, but the timing seems very interesting.
And, you know, I’ve been warned by a number of people about approaching houses in cases like this.
So I talked to another investigator who about the same distance from Atchison hit a deer and totaled her car.
Now, again, people hit deer all the time.
It happens.
And it comes back to that as skeptics, of course, you know, you’re probably ready to make the point, look at all the people that left that house and didn’t have time for it yet.
But it’s these, okay, when people go to these places and they have these heightened…
And then something unusual happens.
It can be transformative.
And I’m not, I mean, I’m laughing about the puns, but I’m not laughing at these people’s lived experiences.
Are yours?
You know, it’s just things happen.
And, you know, it’s some of this that comes down to what meaning do we ascribe to these events, right?
Right.
And bias.
I mean, I was very aware that I was writing a book and there was, even as I am skidding off the highway at 70 miles an hour, there is a tiny part of my brain that’s going, this is going to look great in print.
If I live, this is going to be awesome.
You’re a true journalist.
Yeah, yeah.
Like I need some kind of ending and here we go.
You know, 80,000 words, I didn’t find any demons, or at least not that I’m aware of.
But we have to be aware of our own biases.
And I think, you know, paranormal tourism, we’re still kind of on track with this subject, aren’t we?
When you pay money to rent a place and you give up your weekend and you travel, gas, you know, maybe lodgings as well, there’s a part of you, I think, that’s like…
Well, I better get something for all this because I feel like a right idiot if I’ve wasted my money and my time.
Yeah.
That desire to make every creaking floorboard and every, dare I say, self-closing door, you know, into something more than it actually is.
It’s good to say I’m a weird, but you don’t want to end up with your haunted version of Frank Sinatra has a cold.
I have to ask, though, looking at the books that you’ve written recently, you’ve dipped your toes into true crime, which is up my wife’s alley.
She has before, though.
He has before.
Well, I’m sure.
Yeah, but I was specifically going to talk about Fox Hollow Farm.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So can you tell us?
I don’t know that case, but I wanted to tell my wife about it.
So what’s this book about and what happened at Fox Hollow Farm?
Yeah, I wrote that book six years ago.
But the reason I added this book is because of the TV series that came out earlier this year and that this is a continuing story.
So…
Yeah, Karen’s absolutely right.
It’s the connection to this year.
But I still want to tell my wife about it, so…
It’s kind of rare that a book has this kind of afterlife.
So, yeah, thanks for putting that in there, Karen.
Essentially, I wrote the book six years ago.
The house was home to a serial killer called Herb Baumeister who murdered anywhere between 11 and 19, maybe more men, in his house while his wife was out.
You know?
And…
Herb would troll the gay bars of Indianapolis.
He would bring these men.
He would look for vulnerable young men that were perhaps couch surfing.
We’re talking about now the early 1990s, so, you know, very much ostracized members of the gay community from their own families, from their own communities.
And so he would tell them, hey, you know, I’m a construction worker and I’m working on this house with a pool in the basement.
And, hey, how would you like to come back and party?
I’ve got some drink.
I’ve got some, you know, fun pharmacological accessories.
We could have a good time.
Creepy mannequins.
We’ll get to that, but yeah, definitely.
So that probably sounds like a great deal if you are, you know, a little down on your luck or just looking for a party night.
So they will go back with him to Fox Hollow Farm.
And Herb, before he left, it’s the only house I’ve ever been in where the basement is actually a big swimming pool.
Wow.
He would turn the heat all the way up.
He would roll the pool cover across.
Think of it like a saucepan, you know, simmering away on the range.
And then when he brought his intended victim home, he would roll the pool cover back.
He would open these big French doors to let in the cold air and the pool would fill with steam.
As Karen just alluded to, mannequins were positioned all around the pool wearing beach attire, you know, so bikinis and swimsuits and trunks.
And it looked like there was essentially the beach party, the pool party from hell was going on in there.
Herb was very much into autoerotic asphyxiation, so he would engage in some strangulation with his victims, usually after having plied them with drink and or drugs, we’re told, and then would just not stop, would strangle them to death and then dispose of their remains in the woods directly behind the house.
So…
Long story short, Herb Baumeister is believed, there is some question over this, to have taken his own life when he was discovered.
And the house was bought by a couple called Rob and Vicky who moved in, both very skeptical people, both very scientific.
And they quickly started experiencing paranormal phenomena.
So I was given the opportunity to basically move into Fox Hollow several times and see what was what, you know, see what I could uncover.
And so I enjoyed that case quite a bit, but it was also very dark, very macabre.
And I was happy to be shot of the place.
It’s the kind of place where…
I don’t know that I would want to live there.
It’s luxurious, but you just know what happened down there and in the woods behind it.
You need to be a very specific person to be able to live in a house like that.
Very depressing.
Yeah, and then Hulu made a miniseries called The Fox Hollow Murders.
They bought the rights to the book, and so they used it as a partial basis for that series.
And the main thing I am most proud of, I can’t take credit for this.
It goes to Mr. Jellison, the local coroner, but they’ve been working diligently to identify some of the human remains, the bones really is all that’s left, from DNA samples.
And after the show aired,
hundreds of volunteers came forward with missing family members from the Indy area, gave DNA samples.
And so the work is now progressing and they are putting names and faces to some of these lost men.
That’s wonderful.
And it sounds like there’s more, the story’s continuing.
I don’t know if you can tell us about that at all yet.
You know, I can tell you that the series did very well and that there is a second part coming, which I chose not to be involved with because I was asked to do something I did not consider appropriate.
Yeah, so I walked away from that because there are some lines I don’t believe in crossing.
But I’m very proud of the fact I’m very…
I’m thrilled with the fact that the series has promoted the work of the local authorities that are working diligently to bring these men, you know, some kind of closure.
Closure is so important in those cases.
It just really, you know, there’s no justice to that community.
That community is so vulnerable, especially back at that time.
My God, like with the AIDS crisis going on.
Yeah, quite, quite.
But we can follow on from that and just chat a little bit about paranormal tourism.
I mean, that is just – we should start to wind down soon too.
We’re at that point.
But what do you make of – it seems like another surge of paranormal tourism and just the trend of people making pilgrimages to sites like cemeteries and movie-related properties.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes, yeah.
And it’s one thing for you to do that.
You’re writing books.
You’re doing research and investigations.
But what do you think of the interest for the average, the general public?
Yeah, and we can tie it into a case, I think.
I believe paranormal tourism is definitely the ultimate double-edged sword.
On the one hand, locations like Fort Mifflin, which I’d written about, is known as the fort that saved America, the fort on the Delaware, which essentially held up the British in
during the Revolutionary War and bought crucial time for Washington to mobilize his forces and strike back.
So the fact that people go to learn about the ghosts of Fort Mifflin, and as I like to say, go for the ghosts, stay for the history, you know?
that your dollars can support historic sites, I think is a wonderful thing.
So long as there is no misrepresentation going on.
And the case which I think I’m angriest about that I put in Ghostly Encounters is Enfield.
which I know you’re both very familiar with, the Enfield-Poltergeist case.
Because you mentioned Guy Playfair earlier, who wrote the definitive account, I would say, because he was embedded with that family, along with Morris Gross, and was there through thick and thin.
And then we have The Conjuring 2 comes along.
yeah and puts the warrens um center stage sidelines guy and morris the guys that did you know years of work and i understand it’s a controversial case and whether you believe it was genuine or not what we can say for sure is that they were there through thick and thin the warrens were there for less than a day yeah guy play fair said openly before he died ed warren took him aside and said you know if we play this right we could make a lot of money
And we now, if you don’t take the time to read the literature on Enfield, you may watch The Conjuring 2.
You know, the first Conjuring movie is equally problematic with what it did to the memory of Paul Bathsheba Sherman.
Yeah.
And there’s a danger that people take what they see in 95 minutes of Hollywood drama as being the actual truth, the history.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
So…
That angers me incredibly.
And so I think it’s paranormal tourism.
We do see people, Enfield, people are stopping outside their house regularly.
And still the residents don’t like being known as the Enfield Poltergeist House.
Well, you know I did that.
When I was there, we stayed in Ponder’s End in Enfield.
We went along to the place, and obviously you cannot enter the property.
There were lots of looky-loos around there, lots of tourists.
I’ll tell you, mate, I would have done it because I read that book when I was 14.
I just, it’s one of the great cases for me.
Oh, it is, yes.
I would have done the same.
You didn’t go knock on the door, though, right?
Oh, didn’t.
So, yes, you understand propriety.
But, yeah, you told me, too, that the new owner just doesn’t look kindly upon visitors.
They do not get that they want their privacy respected.
Fair enough.
And the same is true, by the way, with Fox Hollow Farm.
Like when the series aired, they had a police guard on the house for days because of so many trespassers swarming the location, feeling that they had the right to know more by going on to private property.
So that is kind of the darker flip side, I think, of paranormal tourism.
And especially the cases which are being deliberately misrepresented in order to make money.
Yeah, we’re in agreement there.
Yeah, because, I mean, you know, the money factor, but, you know, I…
It’s also these are really I still think these are very important mysteries.
Right.
I mean, these these even if I suspect most of them have a rational explanation, I just these are the places where the normal world and the supernatural kind of overlap.
And, you know, that’s what we want.
We want to see that proof.
We want to hear those stories.
We want to have those experiences, you know.
I don’t think anybody would be doing all the dark tourism and ostention and traveling to these places if we didn’t have a little bit of hope that maybe there’s still some magic there to be had, you know?
Yeah, I mean, you went to the Black Monk House on East Drive also, right, Karen?
Oh, gosh.
How long do we have?
And, you know, that tourism at its finest.
And I co-authored a book on that location.
I moved into that place.
Again, as long as you are as honest as you can possibly be about the history and the experiences, I think it’s terrific.
We don’t all have to agree as long as we’re being honest.
as diligent as we can.
But I think we’re seeing some cases of paranormal tourism in which, you know, now it’s become a thing that you can buy a ramshackle old building, call it the something house.
Yeah.
Effectively invent this story, but with the words, it is said, it is said that magic rituals there, it is said there were animals, you know, who’s it said by Jeff down the pub, probably.
Yeah.
And suddenly you’re charging three, four hundred bucks for people to come investigate your demonically infested shack.
You know, there might be actually a legitimate opportunity for some case studies here, because we’ve been talking a lot about community having embracing these things like Point Pleasant.
small community festivals around monsters, ghosts, whatever.
Oh, like the Loveland Frog.
We were talking about that recently.
a bed and breakfast, like the, those rentals are sort of more trackable.
You can like literally see how much revenue is coming in from those rentals.
Right.
So in a way that maybe you, you know, it’s kind of obscured when you have a festival, you can say how many people came, but how much money was generated is, is sort of hidden, but.
And then there are the individuals that, naming no names, but, you know, they’re putting the faces of murder victims on backpacks with bloody hatchets on them.
Oh, I know what you’re talking about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, there are some people utterly devoid of conscience.
Yeah.
And they’ve turned the tourism is dependent upon tragedy and it’s a necessary byproduct.
It demeans the dead.
I always thought that was actually the worst thing about Amityville.
Not that there’s any tourism with the house, but with the movie and the sequels and the vast juggernaut that Amityville became in the entertainment world, most people forget that this was built on the tragic, horrific murder of a sleeping family.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
The goo and the noises and all that other stuff is far more well-known than the real tragic family’s murder.
Ghost Hunters never used to be told to get out until Rod Steiger got yelled at by them, right?
Yeah.
But, yeah, we’ve been delving into this kind of thing a lot more of late, talking about the history and folklore and just culture behind a lot of these stories too and how there’s the human side and how important that is.
And how they change.
Like, you know, Mothman, as you said, was originally a bird, you know.
And now it’s, you know, a humanoid with wings.
And, you know, it’s changed.
Like, even Kiel starts out by calling it the year of the Garuda, right?
But then by the end of it, you know, like now, I think people expect Mothman to look much more like a human than a bird, you know.
Well, do you know where the name actually came from?
Well, I don’t know specifically who, but someone riffing on Batman 66 called it Mothman.
Exactly.
Move over, Batman.
Here comes Mothman.
Yeah, and it worked.
Yeah, it did.
But the fact that we’re still going with that 40 years later is just amazing.
Sorry, 50 years later.
Yeah.
And just to further your thought, I love that you’re delving into some of these cases.
One of the things I would love to emphasize is, you know, folklore, the absolute boost of a multi-billion dollar movie franchise.
Yeah.
You know, whether you’re looking at The Conjuring verse, whether you’re looking at the Amityville movies.
you cannot compete with that with research.
You know, there are those honest researchers that are out there saying, well, it didn’t quite happen like this.
And then you have, you know, on the big screen, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, you know, doing back forces of darkness.
The pop culture war is going to be won by Warner Brothers.
It’s not going to be won by the honest, diligent researchers.
And that’s a great tragedy.
Yeah, it is.
That is true.
Well.
Thank you so much for joining us, Richard.
Can you tell us what you might be working on next, or is that all hush-hush at the moment?
No, it’s not.
The next book I have coming out is probably the one I’m most desperate for people to read.
It is my paramedic autobiography.
It comes out February 11th.
Oh, your memoir.
My memoir, yeah, it is called Help is on the Way.
So it’s my most deeply personal book going from 9-11 until 2024.
So emergency medicine as I’ve lived it.
But stepping into the monster talk realm, I have a book that I’m working on at the moment called In Search of Bigfoot.
Nice.
Where I’m looking at, shall we say, the less biological and more esoteric aspects of the Bigfoot phenomenon.
So, no spoilers, but do you think that the more liminal, supernatural Bigfoot is winning out?
Because it feels that way to me.
I feel like when you have shows, not just thinking on Finding Bigfoot, but any of those shows where you have multiple seasons and you really don’t find whatever it may be you’re looking for, either it isn’t there or you have something stranger going on than simply a living, breathing, eating, pooping biological organism.
That’s what I think.
Yeah, I think it is a sort of special pleading to kind of account for that.
People still see it, but it doesn’t leave footprints, doesn’t leave bones.
And I know you guys have done that on the show and you have great expertise in this field.
One thing I’m noticing is that there are more claims of what I’m calling the trifecta.
When I started investigating haunted places in the mid-90s,
We were the ghost people, air quotes, and we didn’t talk to the monster people, air quotes, or the UFO people.
Now that we all talk together, not least because of shows like yours where we all compare notes, it’s starting to seem like there are more commonalities than differences between these disparate phenomena.
Yeah.
And so I’m looking at identifying places which claim to be haunted with claims of Bigfoot sightings and UFO UAP.
And I’m finding several.
I just was investigating one in Virginia, in fact, which is quite near the army base Fort Hood.
And it has all three legs of the tripod there.
And I tracked down a case report of a Marine unit on exercise at Fort Hood that claims that the perimeter of their training camp was invaded by a Bigfoot in the trees above them.
Interesting.
I am fascinated by the commonalities between these three, what we thought were totally separate faces of the triangle.
Yeah, I have several colleagues who are looking into the commonalities there.
Exactly.
That’s a good way of putting it.
So I think a lot of really interesting research is going to come out over the next five or six years.
So I’m looking forward to that because finding a way to explain.
why these peculiar stories have so much overlap when you get, if you don’t, what is it Joshua Cutchin calls it?
Weird washing.
Like when people take out the weird stuff, it doesn’t sound quite so strange, you know?
Oh, I love Josh.
In fact, he’s going to be one of my interviewees for the book.
And I’m spending some time up in Bailey, Colorado.
So Karen, if you ever feel like squatching, skeptical squatching.
I’ve been to the Bigfoot Center there before.
It’s good fun.
So there are these, it is, it’s a great museum.
There are these stories of there being kind of a Bigfoot portal in the woods up there.
I’ve been out there a couple of times.
By all means, consider yourself and your family invited.
Oh, thank you.
I think you can guess how I voted when I went there.
I also think you could probably outrun me.
So you’re quite safe if Bigfoot.
Right.
Always try and go with someone that you can outrun.
You only have to be faster than your friends.
That’s right.
Well, I fear that my voice is failing me now here at the end of this.
You sound pretty bad.
We need to go and rest.
But thank you so much for joining us, Richard.
And it sounds like you’ve got lots of other books that we need to talk about in the new year.
And I love your selection of cases for your ghostly encounters book.
This is a fun one.
It is fun.
our listeners need to go out and purchase all of his books.
That’s right.
Check this show notes for a link.
You can, you can get these books from your local library and or from your local independent bookstore as well.
And they probably could use your support.
Absolutely.
For sure.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, have a great night, everybody.
Feel better soon.
Yep.
Happy holidays.
And yeah, we’ll be in touch soon.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard a chat with author Richard Estep about some of his books, some new, some old, and some just about to come out.
Check the show notes for additional reading, links to his books, and more.
Hopefully my voice will clear up soon, but going back to the archives, it seems like getting sick in time to record ghost stories at Christmas is shockingly common for me.
Hey, but it looks like Mark Gattis is doing yet another adaptation this year, and it could be very good.
This one is The Room in the Tower by E.F. Benson.
That’s not my favorite Benson story, but it’s a solid choice, and I look forward to seeing what Gattis and the Beeb do with it.
Tonight, if the weather’s clear, we’re going to sit socially distanced in my backyard and see if we can enjoy some hot cocoa and watch a meteor shower.
I have no idea what the visibility will be like, but I’m hoping we see some good ones and enjoy some warm drinks and cold air.
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
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Happy holidays, everybody.
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