S1 Ep12: Stained

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Her Yorkshire accent required some concentration to follow, but her story was amazing. Yeah, I sent that one out for transcription. Asking for a human transcription versus AI, and even the humans had a hard time getting that transcript. Well, it's, yes, Yorkshire accents are very distinctive, even within England, but I find them pleasing. Yeah, they're fun. Well, but sometimes people here in the States... You just have to get tuned in. Yeah, it's like listening to Shakespeare. You gotta get in the vibe of it. Well, Eric, who sent tonight's dead letter, stayed in the actual Black Monk house. A lot like how you can stay at the Sally House in Atchison, Kansas, and he had quite the experience there. I live in Wales, near the UK's Roswell, and I've worked all over the UK. My first job after university was for a funeral company. Which was actually a fantastic job, where I got to see a part of life many people forget about until that time comes. After this, I wound up working in, let's just say, a highly secure area of the justice sector. Where I've met some interesting and sometimes infamous characters, but sadly, I can't say too much about them. What I did want to let you know is that from around 2013 through 2016, I lived in Pontefract, West Yorkshire. While here, I got my Scooby on and signed up last minute to a night stay over in 30 East Drive, home of the Black Monk. Anyway, after turning up, I was brought into the house to meet the rest of the Scooby gang, who I'd only talked to prior via social media. They seemed a genuine bunch of hippie-cum-pagans, and I felt at ease even with the weight of such a presence around the house. Which was difficult to explain, as perhaps I had built the emotion in my head too much beforehand. I had watched When the Lights Went Out not long before. So, after a few talks from our host, who looked as though he should be giving talks in a graveyard for the way he was dressed in a long, black trench coat, we started with a small seance. Several of us felt a cold chill in the living room, emanating from the back far corner, but this could have been a draft. We were told that the owners of the house were quite strict on who they let inside, as several people have been caught trying to five-inch or pinch various household items and sell them online. Then came my time to shine. The group set up a small Ouija board on the kitchen table. They asked the usual questions. Is anyone there? Etc. But then they asked if they would like anyone to venture into the upstairs bedroom, alone. And if so, would they please choose who would dare? And so, without a moment's hesitation, the planchette heads straight towards me and shakes. Great. So, armed with a walkie-talkie and a torch, I head upstairs into the back left bedroom. I sat on the bed and immediately noticed I was not alone in the room at all. About half a dozen dead-eyes children's dolls stared back at me from the mirror. I tried not to turn around and look at them when the questions began. The host on the other end of the line told me to start asking the usual questions. Is anyone there? Etc. As soon as I opened my mouth, I felt as if something seriously dark filled the room and if I wanted to get up and run, I couldn't have. My body was frozen. It was all I could do over the next 15 minutes to try to convince myself I had not seen the dolls move behind me. When they finally said I could come back down, I bolted down the stairs as fast as humanly possible and went nowhere in the house on my own the rest of the night. I tried to explain the feeling from the room but could only describe it with one word. Oppressive. I later learned that one other from the group suffered temporary panic attacks following that night from being alone in a small closet upstairs, although he was back to himself within a week. What I wanted to say was though we know these dark energies exist, I am unconvinced that they are the work of the Black Monk. I often feel that we visitors to these haunted places leave our own fears there as a sort of byproduct and these linger to infect others, leaving a stain which increases as more enter these grounds. Why are places haunted so many years after the original events? Are they? Or do we power up these places with our own fears and energies, therefore keeping them alive and preserving them? Well, classic activity, especially for some place as infamous as 30 Pontefract. In that house, I think there's a lot of things residing there, much like the Sally House. It may not be one specific thing, but for ease of discussion, we focus on one thing. So Sally House, it's Sally, a little girl, which probably isn't a little girl, but maybe. Maybe a spirit there. And here you have a Black Monk, but there's also been described a soldier dressed in armor with a pike or a halibut of some kind, a battle axe that people have seen, I think from the Battle of Checkerfield, if I remember correctly, there was a famous battle, very bloody battle that happened near the grounds there and in the vicinity. And so people have seen soldiers as well. It's a type of portal that house is, I think, where there's a lot of things passing in and out. And the one thing that you tried to look for is, what's the cause of this? Was there some horrible incident that happened? And remember, Carol had said that, I think it was her husband, that they were doing some digging in the crawlspace or the basement area. But I think there was some cause for it, some reconstruction or shoring up the foundation. And Carol Fieldhouse had said that, I think it was her husband who said that they dug up and found four stones buried under the house. And they each had a strange symbol carved into them, not unlike the symbols on the Led Zeppelin album, Zoso, speaking of Ouija boards, as the spirit of the Ouija board. And so is that something that's binding them all there together? And, you know, so you have that theory going on is that there's just a, it's a highway, a grand central station for the spirit world happening. But also I like the idea that Eric is presenting in that we do add to it with our own emotion. And I think that's all just part of it too. It's why our, you know, hospitals and theaters and churches so haunted usually, because there's a lot of human emotion and energy that gets spewed all over and absorbed by the premises and the grounds themselves. And I've heard of mediums tell me you go somewhere and you get some EVPs and it's like, well, there's really no haunting in the house. There's nothing inside the house that they could detect. It's coming from the grounds themselves. And just humans living there over centuries could be a thousand or two years when you're talking about Europe or more. And that has absorbed a lot of the spirit energy and it's just coming back. Although it's not like there's a residual haunting or by a ghost, you know what I'm saying? Not like there's a resident ghost there that had some tragic end and he's haunting people and wanting to get his message out. It's just like, there's just a lot of spirits there. So I think somehow whatever's going on at Pontefract, it's displaying a lot of energies and there could be very well a black monk or central figure that's manipulating other entities and controlling them for power and energy and just a bunch of other spirits there just kind of roaming the halls. The question though, Scott, is that after your experience at said infamous house, would you go to 30 East Drive? I mean, it's not the top of my list. Why not? But I, you know, at this time, and I might, there's a difference between coexisting with something dark and then having it feel like it's got it in for you, which is the experience I had at Sally. It felt more personal and ways that I can't describe. But yeah, so no, I'm not, I'm not ruling it out. I'm not ruling it out. Yeah. I'm never going to go into a haunted location again with a mindset of this place isn't haunted. I think that was the biggest mistake I made. That may be the lesson. That might've been the message to you is that, oh, not taking it seriously. Well, take this seriously, buddy. Giving you a little spiritual sunburn. Yeah, and, but I do love his idea of like these impressions. I've thought about that. We've talked about that on the main show before, you know, the collection of this energy and these fears. And in some cases, maybe people leave their fears behind when they go to places like this and that, and that does wind up becoming like a Petri dish in a way where it just continues to develop into something more. Maybe our fears are, have a kind of spiritual mass to them that is real, that it can exist outside of us. It can detach from us and connect to something else, animate or inanimate. And I mean, I do like the idea of that. And that's why we named this episode Stained. Because when he said, it's like, maybe it's like a stain. So yeah, maybe it is. That's an interesting idea. Because when you think about what George Knapp and Colm Kelleher were talking about in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, which we had them on our show to talk about that a year or two ago. I know it was January, but I can't remember which year, 23, maybe 22. But one of the things that's interesting in that book was the whole idea of this contamination and how you encounter something and it contaminates you and can also contaminate people you know that you don't even have to have recently been in proximity with. It's fascinating. Yeah, it is. And it's a spooky action at a distance. And that's the thing. People would say, well, it's supernatural. There's no reason for it. There may actually be some physics, laws of physics happening here. Quantum entanglement and things that we are just now theoretically exploring with theoretical physics and experiments, the double slit theory, in that things don't behave the way we expect them. And so there's another set of laws going on that we just don't know about. And so, like I said, this might not be just, well, that's a neighbor of Fred's who was just here at Skinwalker Ranch. I'm going to go haunt the family next door and start pop up behind trees and run around as a giant shadowy, hairy beast ducking in and out and scaring the crap out of people that just know this person. But we are all connected, I think, spiritually and psychically as people. Uh, that's a common idea with those who have, uh, or claim to have experienced past lives is that we all know each other from other past lives. And we're all kind of in this, uh, infinite journey with each other. But a lot of people that you know in this life, you knew in a past life, certainly you've had that experience with a medium, Rebecca Fearing telling you that a very close friend of yours was a friend of yours in a past life. Well, that makes sense. We just want to keep those around us closer and we have some kind of connection that has been proven out, uh, I think with just people's anecdotal experiences where they just know something bad or has happened to somebody they love or care about. They just got a feeling, especially with family members that is so common where there's no proof or reason for it, but they just knew something was off and then they call them and they find out. And so there is that psychic connection. And it's all kind of tied together in the same energy in here though, you know, another good question, you know, why are these places so haunted so many years after the original events are, or are they haunted? Is this what we think of as a haunting? You know, do we contribute to this? Well, it is a stone tape theory idea. I believe that, yeah, energy has, and thoughts, noetics, they have mass, they have substance, thoughts, thoughts, or things, and you can have emotion and thought and intention imprinted into physical objects. And have you ever been around somebody that was, you know, close to a fire, you know, at a campsite and, uh, or walk through a mist of perfume or just been close to somebody or somebody that had a strong perfume or aftershave on them and they've been out of the room for 20 minutes and you can still smell them. And that's not spooky, well, it can be depending on the cologne, but it's physics, it's chemistry, it's just part of our world. Like you leave a trace of wherever you've been for at least a little while. And oftentimes that can be picked up by those that come after. Well, Eric, the next time someone sends you upstairs alone in a notoriously haunted house, bring a paranormal state stick with you. The Astonishing Dead Letter Office is hosted by Scott Philbrick and Forrest Burgess and is executive produced by Tess Feifel. The show is edited and mixed by Sarah Voorhees-Wendell at VW Sound. 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