Joshua Cutchin & Ryan Grulich | The Lady Of The Lake, Disclosure Doubts, & Ego Death At The Threshold

The planets buffet masters almost surely have a plan. There's clearly maybe something there beyond the realm of man. And until we've thoroughly tested every last close chested view, I find the more we think we know, the less we really do. Where would we be without THC? Because we know they're lying to us. Just don't know to what degree where would we be without THC. The higher side chat show Greg Carlwood and company. Like a cheeseburger in paradise from the sunshine state. I'm Greg Carlwood. And while we seem to be deep in psyops season and the political changing of the guard has all sorts of strange shenanigans going on, there is something more timeless and no better understood that seems to invade the lives of everyday people regardless of their age, location, or feelings about it. A thing that sometimes presents itself as strange creatures with magical powers or frail beings coming from foreign machines and it sometimes latches onto the psyche of those who have cracked open the door and is often hard to shake off. And the strangest aspect of these things we lump under the paranormal umbrella is the large overlap they seem to have with individuals and states of trauma, tragedy, hopelessness and even death. Sometimes these strange beings deliver messages from the dead or are even seen as companions for the dearly departed. And then we have ghost stories and legends that seem to spring up from nearly every city in town across this island Earth, where tragic and sudden violent death seem to disrupt whatever the life death transition normally is. And sometimes it seems like a person's energy is stuck or imprinted in the landscape. It's hard to know what causes what in these circumstances or know why some get this haunting treatment and others transition more smoothly, but those seemingly unable to transition don't usually have a story that starts with dying peacefully in one sleep. Well, we know damn well that one of the living legends of paranormal research is the prolific and powerful Joshua Joshua Cutchen. He's been here 5 times before talking about his books, A Trojan Feast, The Food and Drink Offerings of Aliens, Fairies and Sasquatch. The Brimstone Deceit, an in-depth examination of supernatural scents, otherworldly odors and monstrous miasmas. Where the Footprints End, High Strangeness in the Bigfoot Phenomenon volumes 1 and 2, as well as Ecology of Souls, a new mythology of death and the paranormal volumes 1 and 2. And today, he is joined by filmmaker Ryan Grolick of Creepy Kingdom to talk about a recently released true crime paranormal documentary they collaborated on titled Lady of the Lake about a murder victim, some odd things about her death, and the ghostly woman seen around the lake years after. I've watched it, I got questions, and I'm psyched to get into it with them. The murder mystery movie makers, Lake Crescent lost investigators, and tellers of forgotten tales, Josh and Ryan. Ryan and Josh, happy to have you here. How the hell are you? It's great to be here. The best intros in the business. I know you're probably tired of hearing that by now, but it's true. It's all part of the 9 to 5. Thanks for having us. Of course. So there is quite a bit I hope we can talk about, but, of course, we start with why we do the dance and that is this film, Lady of the Lake. I understand it all started with an email from Ryan as just a fan of Josh's work and really who isn't, but then it turned into this documentary project. And I'm curious with all the strange unsolved murders and paranormal stories out there, why this story of a murder victim from tossed in Lake Crescent in Washington state? Great question. So as I sit here today in sunny Orlando, Florida, I am remembering the not too distant past where I was a resident of the Pacific Northwest. This story sits colloquially in just sort of the whole area as one of those just anomalous cases. The condition of the body is really what was sort of almost fetishized in discussion. And so I was aware of the story and just kind of as I started to dig deeper, there was a compulsion to follow it largely because of COVID. And we were trying to make a feature film, a narrative horror film, and we couldn't get a crew that big together. And so we started to pick a dock. This one emerged, and it literally took 4 years out of my life to get done, but we had a great time doing it. I wanna compound that with the fact that I'm a Disney nerd. And on December 21, 1937, this victim was murdered. However, also on December 21, 1937, in a great synchronistic adventure, Walt Disney himself released Snow White and the Seven Doors at the Carthage Circle in San Francisco. And so when I saw that those two things collided, it was just more rocket fuel and I kept going. And it was the winter solstice, I understand. You understand correctly. Man, so, Josh, how did you get involved in this? Because when I heard about this, when you told me this was happening, I was like, oh, great. I'm gonna watch a documentary about Josh investigating this mystery, and that is not what I got. How are you involved? No. It's that face for radio thing again. Right? No. I started up a correspondence with Ryan sometime probably around pandemic, around that sort of time. You know, I always try to be really diligent about answering emails and things like that. So I responded, and then it turned into phone correspondence, and then it evolved into what became a friendship. So Ryan and I would catch up. I think it was weekly for a while. And then, thankfully, I well, I was going through a little bit in 2020 as we all were. I'm not shy about it. I I was heading towards my August check-in to rehab for alcoholism. Coming up on 5 years now, we're all good. Heck yeah. Golf clap. But, you know, alcoholics aren't not necessarily the best people about getting back to correspondence. So between the, the collapse of my worldview and the collapse of my world, I sort of ended up ghosting you, Ryan, a couple of times, I'm afraid to say. No pun intended. Yeah. Right? But he was very tenacious, and we reconnected a couple of months later, and we continued to sort of bounce ideas off of each other. And it has emerged as this wonderful sort of collaborative friendship, and I'm really excited to see what has come of that, not only with Lady of the Lake, but with some of the things we have planned in the future. And just what I think is going to be a trend, hopefully, for paranormal media as we move forward, which is the continuous blending and blurring of distinctions between separate domains. And I think that's really what we need a lot more of is looking at the similarities between these parts of the phenomenon that we've often assumed have been discrete and separate and really showing how they all seem to have some sort of underlying connective tissue. Yeah, man. Yes. That's why I've always gravitated to you because I do like that comparative stuff. I like the blurring of the lines. I'm kind of over doing interviews with boomers who talk about the chain of custody of the meta materials from Wright Patterson to here to there. It's like, okay. Let's talk about something, like, weirder. And when you open the door to this kind of stuff as a filmmaker, I'm looking at it. And the reason that I was so persistent in touching this with Josh, I don't know if I've really said this to you, but is that his work sits in that space where Ville sits, where Kiel sits, where these concepts, your head has to make it through the door at the end of this interview. But I think it's in that space, right, where we're not naming it, we're just exploring it. And so as I was going through this with our subject, Amanda Paulson, alongside me and really digging deep into this, we were heading into territory where there were not easy definitions. This was a Fortean affair. And in terms of modern Fortiana in America, Josh is an easy person to go to and say, Hey, I have a nerdy question. As a professional, until I moved to Florida, I was the CEO of a company. I rarely spoke about this kind of stuff ever. And so I was fluent with a lot of the different researchers, and it was an obvious choice for me to go to him and engage him. And so over time, he's being a little bit humble, but over time, he's been a real cornerstone in my thinking about how to approach some of this stuff and how to look at this domain of the larger phenomenon, like a meta phenomenon. And I think that for Lady of the Lake, in particular, as we'll get into it, you can see that we were talking about things like brownies that live out on the Olympic Peninsula and their relationship to potential satanic murders, and they're being seen at the Lady of the Lake. And it got strange real fast, so he was an ally there for sure. Love it. Love it. So, yeah, let's give people the structure, the bullet points of what this story is because it is a specific story. Like I mentioned, this woman died in 1937 on the winter solstice on the release of Snow White and the 7 dwarves. Not exactly relevant or maybe it's all connected. Who knows? But tell us the basic story of Haley so that people have a sense of what we're talking about. Yeah. So Haley Illingworth was born in Kentucky and migrated all the way across this great big country. Back in that day, it was not an insignificant feat to pretty much the edge of the world. Port Angeles is the northwestern most point of the United States. You can stand in the town and look across and Canada is visible. And so she was out kind of in the middle of nowhere and ended up in a position where she just took this really long journey, and it ended there for her. But the reason we know about her is because in July of 1940, 2 fishermen row up onto what they thought was, you know, some sort of detritus. In actuality, it was a hand sticking up out of the water vertically, which in and of itself is a tremendous anomaly and also harkens us back to the Arthurian legend of the lady of the lake where the hand is actually sticking up out of the water. Okay, that's actually how she was discovered. And there were pieces of the, flesh around her fingertip that were exposed. So her body was found this way, but we didn't know who this person was. When we pulled her out of the water, her body had saponified, and this is a chemical reaction that is also known as adiposere, corpse wax. What happens is under certain conditions, the body basically turns into a soap like substance. In a lot of places like down south in the US and France and some other humid places in the in the southern world, you'll see that graves are above the ground and that the reason for that is the water table. And so while in some places this is an anomalous, in Seattle area in the northwest, it was exceptionally anomalous. So when they discovered this body in Lake Crescent, which is a lake that is famous for literally never giving up its dead, and we can talk about the lake in more detail later, when they found this body, it was an instant mystery. The mystery was very well publicized. They ended up finding out who the victim was through some circumstance, but we know about her because of the conditions of her body. That's where this all started was in the strange anomaly of that and I think amplified by the colloquial sort of the lake never gives up its dead. It's a bottomless lake. And so from a mythology standpoint, she kinda springs out into the public. Mhmm. I read it as the second deepest lake in Washington state. I'm sure there are parts of it where it goes deeper than even is measured. I read that 83 people, I think, have been reported missing around the lake, thought to have died in the lake most likely, but Haley is one of 3 that have ever been recovered or known to be recovered. So if they're unrecovered, I mean, you don't really know if they died in the lake or not. But we assume a lot of people have and very few are recovered. And, yeah, there's obviously a striking visual of a deep, deep lake, a body that's been underwater for 3 years, and then a hand is sticking out above the surface of the water, and that is what people see. And then the body is turned to a soap like substance. These qualities, how much of this do you think is related? Because Lady of the Lake, we're talking about basically a ghost story. There's stories in the area where people see a woman in white crying, walking around, and so there's a mythology that builds up. I mentioned in the intro, all across the country, there's little towns where it's like, go to these railroad tracks, say this name, and then you'll see the thing. This comes up all the time. So this is one of those kind of legends. There's this ghostly figure people see in the area. The assumption is it's pegged to Haley who went missing. Of these qualities, the arm sticking out, the soapification of the body, how related do you think some of these physical things are to the nonphysical weirdness of the story itself? Well, this is something that I've taken a greater and deeper interest in lately is the fact that we should be looking more closely at the story part of ghost story than we do at the ghost part. As Ryan sort of alluded to, there are a lot of archetypal fingerprints all over this whole narrative. Not only do you have the sort of woman in white thrusting her hand above the waves and an echo of the Arthurian lady of the lake, but some of the things that the story touches on are a little bit less publicized. The fact that the lake in question is supposedly bottomless and that it has a reputation for never giving up its dead, these are things that we see in a lot of lakes that are associated with certain mythological characters and creatures throughout the world. Specifically, the bottomlessness nature and the tendency to not yield its dead speaks directly to something that was mentioned as some of the criteria for lake monsters in one of my favorite lake monster books, Michel Mercier's Lake Monster Traditions. It's like Passport to Nagonia for lake monsters. It's an excellent book. But just the fact that you have these sort of archetypal themes popping up time and time again, I think doesn't really suggest a chicken or egg scenario or one or the other scenario, but really a both and sort of scenario. And that where the story of Halle's death and the lady of the lake belief that really has saturated the community, we can talk about that in a little bit too. Where those things meet is really what's at question here. And what I think is what really sets aside this documentary from a lot of other paranormal media out there, it truly becomes something that is less than just, you know, oh, it's a paranormal mystery with true crime elements. Like, yeah, that's in there, but it really does end up being a Fortean story because you do end up with these intersections of larger than life themes that aren't necessarily based on just the facts. Yes. The facts play into it, but there's also the bigger story that we ourselves weave and have woven over our lifetimes, over decades, centuries, and millennia. Mhmm. Well, I like that you said we should emphasize the story part because that is what I came away with and, you know, thinking about preparing to talk about this, like, how can I make this a little different? I mean, that is kinda what I thought about. The Lady of the Lake is an archetype, and so you start to think, man. So what causes the ghost phenomenon? It doesn't seem like it's the physical body because that was found in 1940, yet the imprint in the area, the stories of some kind of ghost are still there. It would be interesting to know if those stories go away when more people see the documentary because the story is now told. Like, that would be maybe a mechanism because we've talked many times about trauma being associated with Fortian Paranormal Stuff. Well, maybe trauma isn't exactly the right word. Maybe it's like unresolved trauma would be maybe a more specific term that once something is resolved, maybe the energy is released. What do you think about something like that? Or the question that, you know, really comes to mind for me is that if Halley is deposited and later recovered from an area that's less strange or from a body of water that has less folklore attached to it in general, does this story take on the life of its own like it has in Port Angeles? Like, I think that's part of the question too. It's almost like a catalyst for the mythopoetic side to emerge into life. And to that extent, I think trauma itself can serve that similar role. And that's what I think that Ryan as director did an excellent job of showing, and I'll I'll let him speak to that here in a moment. But the fact that Halle was a person and had dreams and aspirations. And it's so easy to sort of slip into this trap of using victims as plot points or, you know, sort of deifying the killers when you're dealing with true crime. And I think Ryan's handling of the subject matter really sidestep both those issues in a good way. And to the contrary, it was actually a remedy for a lot of what we see. I don't know if, Ryan, you wanna speak to the role that trauma plays in this particular narrative. Sure. Everything you guys are saying is in line with what I found, and it's more of a yes and situation because what I found was that the community was struggling with the trauma. This is a place where, at this point in time, the population was really small, they were isolated, they weren't and still are not a big city, they did not have big city infrastructure. This murder really shook the town. And because of the implications of the trial once it started to happen and, like, all of the dynamics that were involved with it, it was very close to home. And so prior to the Internet, prior to the collapse of peer to peer communication in real space, we would actually engage in these sort of dialogues meaningfully as small communities. And I think one of the ways that we end up doing that is through story. And so at the end of the cycle, here where we are, story is now what Allie has become. Okay? She is a real person. She was alive. She was no longer with us. And I think you have to treat that with the respect that it deserves. I don't see it as a feat to humanize a person in these stories. I think it's a shame that they're not. Generally, I would assume it should be par for the course, not to go too golf on it, but that should be where it's at. So now she is a story to most people. And I think that the story that we're telling about Hallie and about a lot of these ladies of the lake or these different haunted locations is very similar to what you would get out of a thrill ride when you go to a theme park. You get on, you hop in, you say, Do a trick, ghost. And the phenomenon responds. And then you go home. And in the haunted Words of the Haunted Mansion, a ghost may follow you home and you don't even know it. You're just on this place where you're completely unaware of what you've escalated into. And I think that my intention with this was to, yes, humanize Halle Illingworth, but to also, hopefully, provide her with a vehicle to transcend victimhood. And by taking this story and shaping it the way we did, I hope that the sightings don't stop. I hope that this egregore gets bigger and bigger and that Halle is remembered as the lady of the lake and has a power that was taken away from her in life, restored to her in death. Well, that's an interesting take. Ambitious hopes. I know that you have talked to Mark Stavish in some bonus footage, and I'm assuming that's kind of where the egregore comment comes from. But what do you think about this relationship between an egregore and an archetype? Just this idea that a seemingly random situation, a murder, it kind of falls into being archetypal. You know, the killer didn't try to fulfill some archetype, so there's, like, a weirdness there. But, like, sometimes a murder does fall into that role. And, like, what is the difference between an egregore and an archetype? And what is it that people are seeing? Are they seeing an egregore? Are they seeing an archetype? Is there even much of a difference? I have to jump in. John Tenney says it very well. The aliens land on the White House lawn, and they get out. And the Secret Service is standing there with their guns pointed. And the aliens say, what do you guys know about these ghosts? The question, I think, is more so, what are we dealing with within ourselves when we experience these phenomena? And so in order to classify this and to try to give it a quantified reality of, like, being an archetype or being an egregore and what's the difference, I think you could get into semantics pretty quick, like you were suggesting. But the reality is that when you look at the work on Stavish and guys like that that are talking about this stuff, I think it's really great because it helps us to shape our minds around the fact that reality has a co creative nature, and that for me, the egregore itself is a clinical definition of feeding the archetype. Right? It becomes this group thought form where we're feeding an archetype. And that's really sort of what is happening, in my opinion, with a lot of these stories. Yeah. It's a bit like that definition of pornography. Right? You know it when you see it? Don't I ever? I think there's a quote that Jung has that is about how archetypes are like deep long ago cut riverbeds. And they may sit dry for a while, but when certain conditions are met, that's the course which the water chooses. And, you know, to that extent, I think that there are naturally forming riverbeds and there are some man made riverbeds too. And I think that with enough time and erosion, we can sort of form our own riverbeds. Although, I would suggest that they take quite a bit more time than these ones that were cut long ago. So I think that that might be sort of an open handed way to address that distinction. And I think that there are certain things, certain events, certain personalities that choose the path of least resistance from a underlying source code of the universe kind of perspective and fall into these pathways and these well worn waterways. And I think that when you see that happening, that is really sort of the activation of an archetype. And then when you see something that seems to be the product of collective belief, given enough time, that would fall a little bit more into the egregore category. Although the question is, are egregore's vehicles for forces beyond ourselves or are they purely the force of human will and the force of human belief? I'll have to remain ambivalent on that because that's a question with the sort of durable, long lasting implications that you have to sit with. It's the same kind of question that is, you know, are the spirits real, or are they all in your head? You know, it's the same kind of question. Yeah. I guess my thought is, like, if there is a life cycle to these things, an egregore seems like a young archetype or an archetype seems like an older egregore. But I like the whole thing about man made riverbeds because I I tend to use the term gravity. There's, like, a gravity that kinda pulls things in to an archetype. If it's close enough, like, maybe it comes 80% of the way, and then something else pulls it all the way into being a fulfillment of the archetype. And, yeah, it probably takes more time to try to game that or try to create an artificial riverbed, to use the same analogy. But, man, that's kind of what I think the little green men, sci fi, alien thing has been. I never heard it put in those terms really, but we always talk about, well, the presentation is what you expect to see. Things like that, obviously, are talked about all the time. But it seems like maybe the military set out on an operation to be like, I wonder if we can use Hollywood and use our own whistleblowers to infiltrate the conference scene and describe things in a certain way, and then just as an experiment, see what happens and see if people start seeing this. It seems like that is a great way to contextualize what I think a lot of that eighties nineties UFO stuff was is the attempt to create Edgar Gore archetype riverbed. I think that that's extremely prescient. I mean, I was asked recently at a conference about, you know, do you think the flying saucer is an archetype? And I'm like, well, it's on its way to becoming an archetype. I don't know if something with sort of that relatively short attention and focus as we know the modern UFO to be can really carve that riverbed, but transportation to the other world, the mandala, like, these things are archetypes. So it's almost as if if we're going to continue using this riverbed analogy, you know, a tributary is starting to wear away in the direction of the flying saucer and it'll be sort of an offshoot of that main waterway. And this is exactly what you're talking about, sort of the manipulation of the narrative or the mediation, as my friend, David Metcalfe would say, something that I've been giving a lot more attention to lately. Not to pivot us off of Lady of the Lake because I wanna bring us back around, but I'm working on a book that should be coming out this year called 4th Wall Phantoms. And among the many things that it deals with, in addition to fictions that become true are the possibility that we are the last people to really realize this, that you can sort of reinforce beliefs long enough that they sort of end up reflecting what your beliefs are. There's a passage that can't recall which book it was from. I believe it was transformation, but I might be mistaken. 1 of Whitley Strieber's books, he mentions a memo from Wright Patterson that says that basically the alien invasion can be held at bay through orchestrated belief. And the idea that simply by denying them the power to enter our reality, we can keep them from our reality, which is an idea that I really do sympathize with quite a bit. Might speak to our current point in the timeline. You know, who knows? But, yeah, that's something that I I really do resonate with. It also speaks to the lady of the late, just to be clear. There is the suggestion or implication in the film that we're dealing with nonhuman intelligence. If you watch it, we're using the Estes method to try to engage what we perceive to be a nonhuman intelligence. And I don't ghost hunt. I've never seen a ghost hunting TV show to this day. I am very not fluent with the entire space post the spiritualism and Houdini trying to debunk it. And so I'm looking at that in exchange with nonhuman intelligence in a very different way. And what I see happening is exactly that question. Are we able to limit the transmission of whatever we're encountering by simply denying its existence? Do you have to buy the ticket to take the ride? How does this work? And I think that what I keep coming back to is how do people feel about what they're experiencing and how do people feel about the phenomenon in general has become ultimately more interesting to me than the mechanics of how it works because what we tried to do with this film was see how do people feel when they talk to us about Hallie and her life? How did Amanda feel about this whole entire process? And what are the similarities between her and Hallie Illingworth? And how do they align and collide as she goes and hunts for her? And so for me, that emotional component of story and of this story and kind of all of our stories is becoming, like I say, more fascinating than how the sausage gets made. But the point to me is there's definitely sausage. Right? There's definitely something that we're dealing with. Definitely. 3 of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right here. Where's Amanda? Oh, I can't speak for her, but I watched someone sort of engage with that as a documentarian, and I really did come away feeling like the feelings are the things that probably matter the most. Right on. Well, on the subject of the feelings, like, this is something I copied down from Josh's last book, Ecology of Souls, and I was gonna try to shoehorn it in somewhere, and it fits right here. But this is a quote that is about the Tibetan book of the dead. And you write, the book explicitly guides readers through the afterlife, encouraging the dying to remain as lucid as possible when entering the Bardo between death and rebirth. Within this realm, the dead realize their fate over several days before experiencing the primary clear light at the death moment. Those who are enlightened see it and ascend. Others drop to a lower level, experiencing visions created by their karma, the good and bad deeds of life. They must confront both peaceful and wrathful beings, human emotions incarnate, if they wish to move towards Nirvana, liberation from reincarnation. According to Gregory Shushan, who I've interviewed since the last time we talked, the book so closely corresponds to the near death experience that it can effectively be seen as verification that the book genuinely is what it purports to be, a preparation for what happens at death. And I just thought the concept of confronting beings that are human emotions incarnate is definitely in the wheelhouse here. I recently interviewed someone who thinks that when a person has experiences like a Whitley Strieber archetype, that if you go back, it's probably unresolved trauma. Not that these beings are related or are attracted to the trauma, but that it's something manifesting from inside. Because you're not dealing with what's inside, you're projecting it out and it's coming at you from a third party perspective. But, I mean, that right there, human emotions incarnate, now that's after your dead, but if this mechanism is there in any way, shape, or form, maybe the lines between life and death and these things spilling over into life are there. Maybe that's a pretty good clue to what the answer to these things are. Yeah. I mean, I find myself sympathizing with ideas and concepts like idealism more and more lately, the idea that everything is based in consciousness. And I think that perhaps emotions are the very thing that reality runs on. Right? And it's part of the reason that I've become sort of frustrated with people needing any sort of proof for these things to exist. And I don't just stop at, you know, photographic evidence or audio evidence. I'm talking about, you know, your eyes and ears, you know, like I it frustrates me and maybe I've just been doing this for a little bit too long, but it frustrates me that we seed supremacy of those senses. We see the supremacy of our other senses to those senses. Right? We have to see it. We have to hear it. We have to smell it as I've talked about. And I'm starting to see. Even if you don't have any of those things going on, there is such a thing as feeling something in your gut. There is a world between your ears, which is probably no different from the world around your ears and outside. And I think that so much about our lives would make a good deal more sense if we could really grasp the false dichotomy between interior worlds and exterior worlds. And to start to realize that these things are both reflections of one another and that we don't necessarily have to see something or hear something to know it's there. And that might really be all that psychics are tapping into, right? They're sort of abandoning the pretense that we need to see or hear things audibly with our organs and we can just sort of reflect and pay more attention to those inner ways of being. I think that might be what's going on with psychics in general. Could be. And there's this world of felt experience. Right? So anybody who has had any sort of experiences with the paranormal or strange, which I have throughout my life. And if you have had those moments, then you have your own language for them, and you have your own approach to what they could be, and you wrestle with that probably for your entire life. And so it's gonna be unique to everybody because everybody does have a different opinion. Everybody does have a different culture and background. But what's really sad is that we are obligated to apply ourselves to a post industrial sort of mentality when looking at something that is literally a primeval part of the human experience, and possibly the larger cosmic experience. Right? And so when I think about whether a particular experience may be valid or not, again, I go back to how does that person feel about it. Right? And so for whatever reason, we have shied away from listening to each other. And I think that that unresolved trauma, Greg, to your point, is a byproduct of us not listening to each other and not talking to each other and not resolving issues at scale, which is part of this meta crisis that we exist in today. And I go back to reality and the nature of it. When our friend Harry Potter dies and goes to King's Cross Station and he meets up with the great wizard, Albus Dumbledore. Never insult Albus Dumbledore in front of me. But he goes to him and he says, is this real? Is this all in my head? And Albus says, of course, it's all in your head. But why shouldn't that make it real? And so, like, this idea that consciousness is the thing, this idea that we're exploring this stuff through our mind, through our feelings, it's really an old idea. And we just now got perverted to where science becomes religion in a lab coat, and you're supposed to be convinced that there's nothing, there's no there there unless you can view it under a microscope. And I think that that's kind of unraveling in the face of a lot of the change that's going on in the world. Yeah. Well said. So this is getting a bit heady. Let's bring it back to brownies and ritual murder. I mean, I took a note. I'm definitely gonna come back to that, but just, really, Crescent Lake itself. This is kind of an area that is a hotbed for more strange activity than just this instance. And it's funny because I've been in that area. A lot of people don't even know the continental United States has a rainforest, and I've been up to the Ho Rainforest. Really fun, cool area to see. Crater Lake, not exactly close, but also a serene crazy place. And I just love the whole area from Crater Lake to the Ho Rainforest, and this sits in that area more towards the top. But, I mean, I've heard that this is a Bigfoot hotspot. I've heard that, Ryan, you got involved in a Facebook group about the paranormal, and the stories just kept coming. Talk to us about some of the more bizarre things that this region seems to be known for. Sure. Everything I talk to you about here in this next diatribe is gonna be what literally catalyzed the friendship between Kutchin and I because I was struggling, right? I knew Kiel, I knew the window area concept, And I knew then through my research in the region that the whole rainforest, as you mentioned, is actually the single highest spot per capita of big flood reportings on the planet. Oh, shit. And that that, as the crow flies, is a good 20 miles from Lake Crescent. I knew that we had a paranormal thread going on in the Facebook group for Port Angeles citizens that I had to sneak my way into, thanks to my unknown researcher, who I won't put on blast in public. But they're very private, and and the they were verifying. And so I got in, and they were willing to talk about Lake Crescent. And there was everything from, you know, folks who are of the tribes out there sharing, you know, some of their stories about what's going on in the lake. There are people that are experiencing wars, the woman in white, more traditional ghosts, aliens, and UFOs, and all alien like creatures, little people, right? So we get into the brownies and stuff. And so all of this stuff kind of came flooding at us. And I guess I was sort of trying to say, okay, now my brain's broken. So that's where I went to the Obi Wan Kenobi with Josh and sort of said, help me, Obi Wan. You're my only hope. I'm not Obi Wan. You did a Terrence begin an impersonation and explained some things to me. So I think I always wanna make you do that. But let's go ahead and tell us in Terrence's voice where you took that conversation. Oh my goodness. I don't know if I have an applicable Terrence quote for that specifically. While you think about it, the ritual murder component, in the satanic panic, there was a retired FBI guy named Ted Gunderson who kinda got popular for a hot second. He's on Geraldo Rivera, you can find the episode out there. He makes the claim that there will be a body pile, a ritual burial ground discovered in the woods that are again adjacent as the crow flies sub 50 miles from Lake Crescent, and it makes it into the press. There was a collection of this stuff. And again, I went from brownies and what do we do with that? To this satanic panic influenced egregore of potential ritual murders that probably didn't happen. God forbid, let's hope they didn't. But there was all of this stuff that was just ripe in this little area. And the whole Pacific Northwest is a hotbed for strange stuff. But for whatever reason, this little area, all the way back to Kenneth Arnold, is attracted to this stuff. Maybe it is an archetype in and of itself. Maybe it is an inevitable slide into a region having all of this lore. But for whatever reason, I can't tell you I was smart enough to be able to differentiate it and to know what to do with it. But it all kind of came at me and I had to look at different resources to try to contextualize it. And there's a lot of things in the film that you didn't see. But what you did see was a great example of how story is gonna interface in Israel Keyes. So Israel Keyes was a serial killer that killed himself in jail after being caught. He's known from a body count standpoint to I think he's somewhere around 7 or 8 bodies that are confirmed, but it's rumored that he killed just a ton of people. And if you look him up, he's a very disturbing guy. And I found his interview tapes because he had lived out in the area by Lake Crescent and apparently at some point admitted to putting a body in Lake Crescent. So then I went in and looked up his interviews, looked up all the transcriptions from the FBI, and I found this segment where he was talking about Lake Crescent and says basically, I'm not quoting him, but basically he says that you should have known, I thought you would have known that this is one of the places I would put a body because it's got a history, essentially. And as soon as he said it, I'm like, he's talking about this story because people know this story out there. And so then a serial killer goes and he admits to putting a body down there, and he assumed that the body would be in the exact same condition as when he put it in, which goes back to Hallie, and to her being saponified and basically being a statue that emerged out of there. So he knew the story, I think, and there's just all of these different variations on it. Some are very disturbing and very dark, and then others are a bit more whimsical and fun. But there was no really great way to parse the data. You just had to sit back and take it all in and go, what context does an audience need to have? And, again, that was where I sort of, you know, had a lot of outside help. Yeah. And I think one of the things that emerges out of Lady of the Lake, and it's part of what I love about watching it, you know, rewatching it, is that you get about 2 thirds of the way through, and you're like, what the hell am I watching? Because, you know, it does take a turn into this other territory that we are not used to seeing in ghost media or true crime media, and I think that's the discussion that we need to be having. The fact that some of these manifestations of Halley around the lake have all the earmarks of what you might call urban legends. There's a story of how she is signaling to drivers to, you know, slow down or be aware of an abrupt curve so that they don't go off the road. I mean, that's classic urban legend stuff. Where I am, there's a story of a trucker who went off the road on in Monteagle, Tennessee and does the exact same thing. Like, you'll find this story everywhere. But, you know, people still report these stories outside of that sort of matrix of folklorists that talk about these things as being recurring themes and motifs. So what do you do with the fact that some of these sort of broader stories seem to use the events of her death as sort of a vehicle, a sort of a launching point to sort of enter our reality. Similar to that, you've got these stories of Halle crying alongside the lake, which is very evocative of the stories from Latin America of La Llorona, who's, you know, seen in white weeping alongside the lake. As Ryan alluded to, you've got all the sort of window area strangeness there from Bigfoot to UFOs to these stories of little people. And Claude Lecouteau, former Sorbonne medievalist, said that fairies were so closely associated with bodies of water that they might be considered primarily of an aquatic element. And you've got stories of sirens luring people out to their death Oh, I know that. In bodies of water. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Paging doctor Knowles. You start to view this as variations on a theme or as attributes of lived experience being plugged into a broader story. It does paint a picture that we are dealing with something that really transcends the narratives that we've all grown up with and the narratives that we've all sort of come to expect to the extent that, you know, it's not a household term. People talk about the ETH, the extraterrestrial hypothesis in regards to UFOs. There is a similar stranglehold in parapsychology regarding ghosts that you could call the DPH, you know, the dead people hypothesis. And look, I'm very sympathetic to ghosts being the dead that obviously plays some sort of role in whatever that contact is, but it still remains a hypothesis. And before even getting into stuff like, you know, emotional imprints on the land or the stone tape theory, I think we also should pay some attention to how these stories and myth themes seem to repeat themselves and often repeat themselves alongside other things that are considered just anomalies. Yeah. I'm with you there. And I'm glad you mentioned UFOs because I did want to kinda jump over to the UFO topic while we're still in this first hour so we can kinda slide in some current events because people are gonna wonder why the hell I'm not talking about it. It's because I booked my show way in advance, and I wasn't expecting weird shit to happen, but I guess I should have. But there really is a lot of UFO stuff going on right now. Obviously, some people think the drones over New Jersey were more than just drones. And now people are saying that they're not just over New Jersey, they're over Denmark. They're all over the place. People are suddenly recording weird stuff in the sky. And then the Cybertruck bomber apparently had some manifesto about the drones using anti gravity propulsion. Lou Elizondo released a book not too long ago that talks about ATIP and surgeries to remove implants where the implants move deeper into the body to get away from the surgical tools. It is hard to keep up with these things, the congressional hearings, the new whistle blowers. I don't follow it as closely as I should even though it is my job to be somewhat aware because it's not the context in which I'd like to think about 40 and UFOs paranormal y stuff. It's all just very military heavy. But if you look at the UFO forums today or the UFO subreddits, it's flooded with drone stuff. It's funny because the conspiracy subreddits are talking about UFOs and the UFO subreddits are talking about military psyop conspiracies. And that's a little unusual. But in the context of all the geopolitical tensions, it's just weird that this dead guy has this manifesto and says, well, these are China's things, and we gotta be scared. And then he goes on the Sean Ryan podcast. I don't have anything bad to say about Sean Ryan, but the FBI comes out and verifies the manifesto as authentic before the podcast comes out. It's like when does the FBI or the Pentagon ever verify anything? They either say nothing or they deny, deny, deny. So it stinks to me, but it is interesting that we're talking to the king himself, King Kutchin, and you gotta have some thoughts about these recent events and these stories. I'm gonna try to address as many as I can. The first thing is that none of these stories are new. The moving implant under the skin, you can find examples of monks writing in their diaries about the devil putting a pea sized object in their skin that always flees from the touch. So these are always old stories that get co opted and reused by authority figures. Right? So that's point 1. On the drones writ large, it's an amazing time to be interested in UFOs and to see this happening. Right? Because the phenomenon has always adjusted to expectations. You have the steampunk airships around the turn of 20th century moving into these art nouveau flying saucers in the mid century into the black triangles of the eighties. And then come 2017, we're all talking about this tic tac, tic tac, tic tac, drones. We've been primed to view the UFO phenomenon as a drone. And I've had some friends who said, Yeah, but people aren't really seeing those. And I said, Just wait. And now in the course of, you know, 3 short months, that's the way that the American public has been conditioned to think of UFOs and UAPs as drones to the extent that, like, they might as well be synonymous in coverage right now. So I think that this is one of those watershed moments where the UFO, regardless of what the drones actually represent, right, regardless of what they are, the public, how it's changing the minds of people, is to think of UFOs as drones. So I think it's another example of the phenomenon really plucking a commonly reported shape out of the zeitgeist and applying it to its form and function. 2nd part of that, regardless of what the drones were, I do think some people are seeing some genuinely anomalous stuff, some stuff that might not even be terrestrial. Maybe the phenomenon is being attracted by all the extra attention in the skies or this is how strange our skies always are. And it's just now that people are paying attention and looking up, you know, looking up and seeing things until they're finally realizing how strange things can get. They saw the Superman trailer. Right? Yeah. It's a bird, it's a plane, no, it's a drone. And we got a constellation of things going on here. We've got some shady terrestrial drones. We've got some abject misidentifications of very mundane things, and we probably have some strangeness up there too. I do not know what to make of it or the manifesto as it came out. I have to admit being attracted to the parsimony of 2 conspiratorial flash points coming together, as you alluded to with the different subreddits sort of cross pollinating in that way. I'm trying to remain aware of the fact that that flatters my sensibilities and that I love seeing how these things are connected. That does feel a little bit too parsimonious to me. And if it flatters my sensibilities, I usually become quite skeptical of it right away. So Amen. Amen. Here's been my biggest problem throughout this whole drone flap and I do appreciate the coverage of the manifesto because it does resituate this. Ufologists are so obsessed with exo politics that they forget about geopolitics, which still exist and are still a thing and present a more ominous threat and concern than any of the exo politics stuff. Right? So I do appreciate the fact that people are talking more about geopolitics in the past 24 hours since all this came out. But at the same time, that could be a cover for something as well. So I think that the best sort of remedy for all this, for me at least, and people can take this or leave it, is to proceed with open minded interest and to, you know, constantly perform a gut check and see what they think about it. I do think that something about the Las Vegas incidents don't pass the smell test, but I could have told you that on day 2. So who knows? It's just here's your Terrence McKenna quote, Brian. You wanted a you wanted a Terence McKenna quote, you know, okay. It is this idea that, you know, we're cascading towards an ever increasing advent of novelty that will become so suffocating and frequent that the only thing by which we recognize our entire reality is the ever increasing novelty. And he was right. I mean, like, let's take a step back and say that, you know, time wave 0 might not have been spot on and the timing might have been funny, although a strong case can be made that 2012 is when things started to sort of get strange. Yeah. I interviewed a guy whose whole claim was that we all died in 2012. Yeah. I heard that as well. Yeah. But the point is, is that the broader point that Terrence was trying to make is that yes, we are on an asymptotic curve towards ever increasing novelty. That seems to be apparent to anyone paying attention. Yeah. And I just wanna say 2 things. Number 1, to Rifan McKenna. In the last interview that he gave where he's out in Hawaii and going into some of that stuff, he talks about how he fully expects us to be able to transfer consciousness from one body to another, to travel faster than light speed, have all this amazing technology while at the same time we're displaying unlimited barbarism and killing each other and doing all of these terrible things, and that both of them will be happening at scale. And I think that that sort of novelty is absolutely the state that we live in. I think that there's also and I'm not a parapolitical person, but I do believe that we are sort of existing in an MK Ultra sort of state. Oh, now we're in now we're cooking with gas, Ryan. And have been for quite some time. And so now that that's become the norm, I can basically talk about the drones this way, just to say this is my thought. The disclosure, which is what's happening, the disclosure is a cover up. But the cover up is the disclosure. So the fact that they're even engaging with the cover up, to me, implies that, you know, we're we're getting to the point where it's like we're getting softened, you know, to be able to, like, experience more things based on the Brookings Institute. And I I'm sure there's a trajectory that makes sense for a larger apparatus like the government in that way, plus all of the political implications and commercial implications that come along with maybe hiding some of that technology or whatever has been going on. But at the end of the day, I go back to, isn't it amazing to see people feel enchanted by this whole process? And if they can avoid the razor wire of World War 3 or impending reptilian domination, if they can avoid those two things and just for a moment suspend disbelief and find themselves engaged with this experience of life, right, Whatever's piloting these things. I love seeing people talking about this and not talking so much in the pejorative about life for a minute. That was really inspiring to me. That's what all good eschatology does. Right? Is it has a re enchanting sort of quality to it. It's that old question of, like, if you knew today was the last day on earth, what would you do? And everyone's answer is hugging loved ones, having the best meal that they could have, going outside and hugging a tree and putting their toes in the grass. Like, it's all about stuff that we do day to day and take for granted. So that's what really confronting mortality, be it of yourself or of the world, does. And so, yeah, that is a positive side to this. Seeing a UFO as a beautiful thing, that's the component that I think is missing. And, you know, we go through cycles like this too. Anybody who's into film history can easily riff on Star Wars emerging out of Dirty Harry. Right? And all of the fantasy movies coming out of these darker times and as a response to them. So I really hope personally that we're walking the razor edge towards the next Harry Potter or something as opposed to World War III. But there's definitely a really dark sensibility to this time period as well. So I can see how people are responding to it in a negative way. But I would also venture out on a limb and just say, Stop looking to the government to qualify your existence. Stop looking to the government to justify your lived experience and stop looking to the government for your source of truth, right? We go back to how are you feeling, right? In your stomach, how does it feel when you saw that thing that you saw? In your stomach, how does it feel when you hear these people talk who are talking? Use that. You've had that beaten out of you. So go ahead and try to use it now and see how that works out because in the end, that's gonna be the best barometer for truth you have because we are moving into that wacky MK Ultra novelty period, and you kinda have to assume that you are your own best advocate. It's like when you go into the hospital, you really are your own best advocate. You're kind of in that liminal space right now. Amen. And not to take us too far into conspiracy land, but you said MKL is your first, Ryan, so I can say it now. But, you know, both of the New Year's Day attackers, the New Orleans guy and the Cybertruck guy, they both spent time at Fort Bragg. And Fort Bragg is known for having a psychological warfare division. It's basically the MK Ultra hub. So you have 2 ex military guys who did time in the exact place. I mean, if you know the Michael Aquino stuff, that all comes out of Fort Bragg too. It's like something dark's going on there that is a real hub for this activity and how it's crossing over into UFO space. Well and, you know, it occurs to me that someone doesn't necessarily need to go through MK Ultra experiments experimentation on you to be in that milieu. And, you know, if we do believe, as people like Chris Knowles have talked about MK Ultra being more about calling down demons than anything else, you know, it stands to reason that something like that could be called down and sort of set up shop in a location and then have an entire array of people to pick from regardless of whether or not they were actually approached or not. Just the fact that something dark might hover around a location seems entirely plausible to me. And if you ever read like Program to Kill, there is actually a paper trail for these sorts of things happening. To what extent is obviously kind of spurious, but there is definitely a paper trail for some of these things type of like, you know, people becoming having tendencies towards these sorts of violent outbursts after participating in certain types of programs or being in certain places, there's definitely correlations that you can draw. Like, that's common sense. Everybody knows it. Can you attribute some sort of government program to these things? That's spurious. It's total conjecture. But how do you feel when you see it? Where is your gut when you see this stuff, right? And, like, for me, what I think with these activities is that we are just headed into the cuckoo land. And if you've ever taken psychedelic medicine and had to get through it, and if you feel like you're going to die and you just have to lean into the death, like, here's where you are. You're in that space where this is going to get weird. I personally think it's gonna intensify. To the point of these demons and the idea of this demon haunted world, not to make too Sagan was against it, right? But, like, this idea of the demons, I kind of have had this wonder in me about the UFO phenomenon as it sits because Josh, you made a comment, we were on a show the other day, about the potential for the Tic Tac or the drone even becoming the next physical visual manifestation of the UFO phenomenon in a long series of them, right, from airships to drones. So you're talking about that and I was thinking about if I were a hungry non human intelligence sitting on the other side of the veil that actually needed belief to exist, right? I would be looking at the world and going, It's so secular. How do I get people to believe in anything again? And I think that shaking the tree proverbially here could be almost a ploy from a hungry psychic entity that does want us to speak to your point on that. Is there like a precedent for alignment between the changing modes of how we experience, let's say, the UFO and also folklore or traditional religion around entities that are looking for belief to manifest? I'm sure you could draw some rough correlations between the eighties ascension of the new age and sort of how that was an inflection point when things changed. And obviously, world wars tend to have an outsized impact upon spirituality too. So that might be tied up in the whole Kenneth Arnold era, the flying saucer era. I think that if not orchestrated by some sort of outsized meta intelligence that this time period is just scheduled. I find it really fascinating to me that we're going through all this and that, look, I've been historically very critical of disclosure, but I think we can all say that it seems as if some sort of gains have been made if in no other way than getting people on the street to say, yeah. There is something funny about this stuff. That's a sea change. Right? Yeah. It's sad how little How little it takes. We get. Yeah. I mean, the crumbs, you know, we're really just eating crumbs here, but That that is a sea change. And I think that the success of that movement for whatever you wanna call it, and I think it still falls short of what it could accomplish or what they seek to accomplish, but still the relative success of that movement, coupled with the lack of faith and authority structures, coupled with bizarre geopolitical tensions, I think it all speaks to the time that this is trickster time. Like I think that these things are not unrelated at all. That's going in the title. Well, I I just think that it's this ties back onto some stuff that I first learned about in some of your conversations with Gordon about Fort's dominance. It does seem like as if there is a prescribed time where it is trickster time now. And the level of not only acceptance, but fluency with which I see people discussing the UFO topic in particular is quite shocking. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with average people on the street where, you know, they ask me what I'm into and I mentioned the UFO thing. And I'm preparing my spiel to say that I don't think it's ET. Right? And before I can even say that, the person will say, I think they're interdimensional. And I'm like, what in the John Keel did you just say? Like like, how has this discussion moved such that people will sort of offer that? Regardless whether or not it's accurate or not. Like, that's a bizarre thing. You know, another example that I've been using lately is I have you know, I used to not talk to people at my church about what I I'm into because, you know, it opened up a whole can of worms and the obvious conversations that have to come out of that. And now I'm at church functions and people are coming up to me asking me about Skinwalker Ranch and Chris Bledsoe. And it's like, what happened? And I think it's tied into that ever increasing novelty, probably tied into the 2012 shift, probably tied into this trickster era. And I think these things whatever gains disclosure has made, I don't know if any of them would have been made in any other time period. I think that this is a top down sort of permission to do this from forces we can't comprehend. The coyote is on the prowl. Being aware, right? Like being situationally aware is so important. Amen. Amen. Well said. Okay. Well, I think this was really great. We gotta find some place to land. I will be honest. When I put my producer hat on and I was, like, getting ready for this, as you know, we rescheduled because I was like, I need more time to figure this thing out because I was worried how are we gonna talk about this film that is as long as the interview that I need to do and not give away the whole goddamn thing. And, you know, now this is one of my favorite ones in a while, so it all worked out. And let's do the promo thing one more time. Tell them where they can see Lady of the lake, tell them about the upcoming projects mentioned. Anything else you got going on? I know, Josh, you wrote a novel too. If you haven't done enough to make me look lazy, hit them with all the good stuff. Ryan, I'll let you start with the lady of the lake details and VOD and all that. Yeah. So the Lady of the Lake is streaming on all of the platforms, but we prefer you go to Amazon or Itunes if you can because they give us the most coin. And movies ain't cheap. And like I said, we're self financed. So if you like it weird and you like it true to your individual self, then keep sponsoring weird people You're doing that. And then online, you can follow Creepy Kingdom to see the menagerie of stuff that company does. That's the best way. I'm not that interesting on social media. You are the co creator of that company, right, Ryan? Co owner, yeah. Co owner. Yeah. Cool. I, am Joshua Cutchen. And still Joshua Cutchen, I think. And since we've spoken last, I have a novel that's out called Them Old Ways Never Died. And I have another nonfiction book pending in the spring, hopefully, if everything goes well, called 4th Wall Phantoms. It's all about fictional incursions entering our reality and what that possibly says about the UFO question and the spirit question and the cryptozoological question. I am currently available for your viewing pleasure in the, documentary, Kosmosis that can be found through YouTube, Apple Plus, and Amazon Prime. We are still in preproduction on a documentary together, Ryan and I, on the UFO topic. So look for some news to continue to come out for that in 2025. Probably some other TV stuff coming up later this year that I'll be making an announcement on. But to find out when and if that is happening, you can head on over to joshuacutchen.com, joshuacutchin.com, and you can track me down on Facebook and Instagram if you are so inclined. Love it. It's like you've done that before, but you still miss something. So I'll swoop in with an assist and say that you even have an NDE course that people can take. I do have an NDE course, so thank you. You're welcome. Part of the reason that it slipped my mind is because I actually offered it this past spring, but it's available through the Cosmos Institute. They were so pleased with the result that they have actually made it an evergreen course and all the classes were recorded. So if you're interested in that, you can go over to cosmosinstitute.org. That's cosmos with a k. And, yeah, you can see what you missed out on the spring, seeing all of my pontificating on the NDE. Thank you for reminding me of that. Of course. It's what I do. I I got too many things going on. What can I say? I know. I know. Man, makes me feel like I should be doing so much more. But anyway, this was really great. I super enjoyed talking to you guys. We were all over the map, and I think that we covered, really important ground. So I appreciate it, and I look forward to seeing the other projects you do. Take care. Thank you. Alright. And boom goes the dynamite. Joshua Cutchen, always a treat. Ryan Grolick, a nice addition to the conversation. Lady of the Lake, an intriguing decades old true crime mystery that was only unraveled because of the sightings in the years since. I enjoyed the film, but I really enjoyed the parts of the conversation that got deeper into their thoughts on broader topics, like the big picture ideas regarding 40 and High Strangeness and also their thoughts about government disclosure and the Cybertruck bomber manifesto situation. Somebody on the higher side chat subreddit actually started a thread about the Sean Ryan show and their thoughts on that being a genuine situation. And it made me feel a little bit better because I said I kinda doubted it in this episode and I just thought, man, I'm probably bringing on a lot of unneeded heat because that audience is so much bigger than my own. Apparently, I'm not alone in thinking something was fishy with that, and that's good to know. So I thought that's when it got extra fun, and I try to keep from tainting Josh with my conspiracy lunacy, but the streams are crossing more and more these days. And I'm glad he was just willing to indulge me a bit on it. As is usually the case, the second hour really shouldn't be missed especially if you liked where we were at the halfway point because we got into even crazier stuff from there. The nature of true disclosure, rituals, intention, and collective consciousness, retrocausality, and the future of humanity, collapsing world views, new understandings, the human experience in the UFO narrative, shamanism and stewardship, the role of trauma in all this, Gertrudeff and the importance of death awareness, and living with purpose and active engagement. No shortage of good points and little insights. Sign up right in the show notes or at thehiresidechats.com. And THC can keep on being one of the last remaining independent and listener supported shows out there in a very ad heavy world. But there is a lot going on out there. Lots of recent events and shenanigans that need deconstruction, and I should've known January would be jam packed with all kinds of chaos leading into Trump's inauguration. But I booked a few guests on very specific topics and I'm super happy with most of them. I mean, ancient mysteries and plasma are great, but they aren't really the kind of guests who are gonna comment on current events. And the shit that happened on New Year's Day and these fires. There is so much to talk about and I'm gonna get us a few good guests to break down a lot of it because there's no shortage of things already just 12 days into a new year to talk about. But I'm probably, like usual, not gonna be the fastest to break all the news. But we will be thorough. I can promise you that. But I'll try to be more conscious of that and make sure that I always have some current events, guests peppered in so that we can be more up to date on the news, but it just didn't happen in this first couple of weeks of the new year. But these fires in LA, man, there are fires every year but not usually in January. January was usually the wet season. People know it doesn't snow there, but we would get lots of misty rainy days throughout the winters. And I don't know where that went. Now it's apocalyptic fire covering over a 100 acres. And, obviously, there's gonna be many micro stories in all of that, but I did hear 2 that were particularly sad. 1st, the Theosophical Society in LA burned down. This was part of their statement. This was the world's largest archive of Theosophical materials, including a library with 40,000 titles, the entire archive of the history of the Theosophical Society, as well as about 10,000 unpublished letters pertaining to Blavatsky, the Mahatmas, W. Q. Judge, and several other people I'm unfamiliar with, as well as membership records since 18/75, art objects, and countless other irreplaceable materials. The archives also contain works of Baum, Gichol, donations from the King of Siam, including rare Buddhist scriptures, and so on. Really sad to hear that. Lots of history lost. We don't like that. And it's a shame they didn't have a digital archive of this stuff. Not really a new idea, but hindsight is 2020. Obviously, I greatly prefer a library of original materials, but a digitized archive is a nice plan b for situations like this. And then the second sad story I heard is that Maja, our last guest, has lost her home and everything in it. There's a GoFundMe you can find on my Twitter, but just another sad story out of what is 1,000. Again, we will make time to cover all that in detail soon with a great return guest, but the hits just keep on coming in 2025. Either way, I got a lot out of this interview. It is hard to make 40 and high strangeness shows fresh, but there is a good way to do it and a deeper way to do it. And I think with Josh Cutchen, you're always gonna get there. I know I said that I didn't find the whole feelings connection aspect to be the most exciting conclusion. I'm just being honest about that, but I do want the true conclusion. I wanna understand the phenomenon as it is, not as I wish it were because it's more exciting to think it's disembodied separate beings. The more I learn, the more it does seem that these things are deeply personal and maybe even emerge from within an individual. There might even be a set of circumstances that all have to line up, and only one of them is the emotional state of the individual. It's hard to say. But I like to think that we had this conversation at a high level, especially as it went on. With the lady of the lake situation in this instance in particular, it's got a very 6th sense vibe. Right? She won't move on until the story is told. The unfinished business is complete. But her body was recovered and the sightings remain. I can't remember the exact number now, but there was what? Dozens of more people that were thought to have died in the lake? Maybe there's more than one lady. Certainly an interesting story, and I know true crime isn't our thing usually, but I'll take any reason I can to talk to the Kutchmeister. And I considered the story to be a bit more interesting because of the archetypal overlap. Even in previous episodes, I know Josh has told a couple of Lady of the Lake stories. I guess it's just one of those grooves, you know. But as for the last show, yes, with Maja, it was a pretty mixed bag according to Plus members. She was kind enough to jump into the comments herself and navigate the good, bad, and the ugly there. But the rating came in at a 4.2. Not the greatest. I don't worry if we're still above 4, but it's clear people had strong feelings. Those who liked it really liked it and those who didn't were not shy about saying so. Maybe it was a little bit broad, but she's someone who has had this connection to the field from a young age, going out of body because of fevers, knowing that the material world was only half the story. That set her up for a really interesting life and a deeper connection to the field, and we explored different aspects of that. And sensing that entanglement with spirits, I mean, you know, you heard it, but I was kinda surprised that it was a 4.2. Regardless of how you feel about our conversation, to have such a devastating thing happen so soon after, Man, thoughts and prayers. Right, guys? I guess there's not a lot more to say. I realize it is a bit of a slow start for us in this new year, but my editor has 2 shows in the pipeline right now. He's moving as quickly as he can. I'm recording again tomorrow. I mentioned this, but I was sick. My 2 kids were sick. My wife was sick. And none of it overlapped exactly perfectly. So the last half of December wasn't great. So we're still just trying to get back up on our feet in the Carlwood household. And with the production chain of this show, when I'm doing a really work heavy couple of weeks, it takes a while for you to notice as it does take a couple of weeks for you to notice that I lightened my load. But wheels are in motion, and it's gonna be a more action packed second half of the month, it looks like. But let's do the meetup calendar thing, as we tend to do. I'm recording this on January 12th. January 11th was our big day with, like, 5 or 6 events. I hope they went well. January 13th, we got one in Miami at Lincoln's Beard Brewery. January 25th, Allentown, Pennsylvania, McCall Collective Brewery. February 1st, Conway, Washington, Conway's Pub. The locals might've liked this episode. February 3rd, Auckland, New Zealand, Gale Brath's Ale House. February 8th, Baringsville, Pennsylvania. McCall Collective Taphouse. Two places called McCall's in Pennsylvania, but in 2 different cities. I don't know about that. Locals can probably sort it out. But go to the meetup calendar, higher side meetups.com, for more information on any of these events or to make your own. And Gordon and I will be having our event here in Tampa on March 8th. We are still narrowing down the venue, but that is the date. I think we're gonna do what we did in Austin, which is not charge for the event at all. No ticket price. But we keep it to the inner circle of paid members as a thank you. I feel like if you keep me and Gordon going with a subscription to what we do, then this can be considered an added bonus because you really do keep our lives running. So we're gonna be doing a lot of hanging out and mingling as we do, but then we will also do a live interview kind of thing. Recorded, of course, 4 plus members who can't make it. And we got a pretty good topic lined up. I'm pretty excited about it. It will be good to see him again. It's been a while. In fact, maybe I haven't seen him since the Austin event. I know I certainly haven't gone anywhere. But that is, the show. That's about all she wrote. Thanks for listening. Check out the film if you think it's your thang. You will find more from Ryan at Creepy Kingdom, and of course, Josh is as active as ever, and his books are top shelf. Big thanks to both of them for taking the time. Thanks to you for listening. Try to keep your head on straight out there. That's it for me. I've done my part. Your move, trickster beans, disclosure, disseminators, and lake ladies. Your fucking move. Roads wind around the redwoods, circling the water's edge. Many mysteries to see, at least the visitors allege. Elemental sprites and hairy beasts might manifest, But one legend's most persistent standing out above the rest, the lady of the lake. She sometimes appears a ghostly woman in white orphaned and tears. An unexpected death, a secret still unknown. Alone. Break the case back open. Send her home. What's the connection between violent tragedy and the strange reported sightings of imprinted energy? Maybe it's tied up in how you feel. The more you ask, the more you wonder what is even real. The lady of the lake, she sometimes appears a ghostly woman in white, often in tears. Her home.