S2 Ep3: The Maltese Phantom

Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it, so your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you can save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. At CVS, it matters that we're not just in your community, but that we're part of it. It matters that we're here for you when you need us, day or night. And we want everyone to feel welcomed and rewarded. It matters that CVS is here to fill your prescriptions. And here to fill your craving for a tasty and, yeah, healthy snack. At CVS, we're proud to serve your community. Because we believe where you get your medicine matters. So visit us at CVS.com or just come by our store. We can't wait to meet you. Store hours vary by location. The views and opinions expressed by hosts and listeners on the Astonishing Dead Letter office are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Astonishing Legends Productions, the Astonishing Legends Network, or any affiliated entities or guests. When something unexplainable happens to you, it can make you feel isolated or alone. But trust us, you're not. For over a decade, you've been sending your strange stories to Astonishing Legends. And now it's time for our fellow legenders to hear them, too. Join us weekly in Blanket Fortiana as we dig through your intriguing messages to the Astonishing Dead Letter office. Tonight's episode, The Maltese Phantoms. Our latest submission takes us to the Mediterranean island of Malta, sent in by a listener who was there studying aircraft engineering. He describes himself as a man of logic, someone who relies on physics and mechanics rather than things that go bump in the night. Yeah, we could say a tough crowd for the unexplained. Though, if you're renting a farmhouse on an island with nearly 8,000 years of dense history, the past tends to bleed through, regardless of your degree. And I will say this, when you watch those old History Channel shows, Malta comes up a lot. There was a lot going on there. Yeah, it does. There is a lot going on there. Yeah, Ancient Aliens, you know, all this, again, all the History Channel shows, the Knights Templar. There was a lot of unusual history going on there. I was struck by how much we found, so much that it took a lot longer to prep this DLO than most episodes take. Yeah. Because of the nature of some of the things we uncovered in our research on this. But this story starts, as you might expect from a dead letter, a sensation of being watched, followed by movement in the periphery, shadowy figures in the kitchen that are just out of your eyeline. Oh, that sounds like most parties, too, where everybody gathers in the kitchen and you're trying to cook. But the most compelling part of the story, I think, is the fact that it became an impromptu double-blind experiment. And it did that in a way we've encountered before in the history of Astonishing Legends. Yes, the Krakowski intruder episode. Exactly. I have a rather unremarkable yet remarkable story to share with you. A couple of years ago, I began studying to become an aircraft engineer. It was a four-year bachelor's degree that required an internship of at least nine months with a company of my own choosing. A good friend of mine in the program and I secured an internship with a company based on the beautiful Mediterranean island of Malta. Malta is known for its beautiful weather and delicious food, but also for its incredible history, dating back to 5900 BC. That's almost 8,000 years of history packed into an island that's only 316 square kilometers, or 122 square miles. We decided to rent a small farmhouse just outside the nearest town because we enjoyed the peace and quiet. It was a great place to relax after studying and working. When I first moved in with my friend, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Everything felt normal, except when I was alone. At times, the house gave me an eerie feeling, as if someone was watching me from a distance. I never believed in the paranormal and was pretty skeptical about the phenomenon, so I never paid much attention to that feeling and just shrugged it off as whatever. That was until one day when I was preparing food for my friend and me, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a clear humanoid figure move. It startled me, since I knew my friend was in his room and he obviously wasn't standing there. Again, I brushed it off, assuming it must have been a shadow. A few days later, I was again standing in the kitchen preparing food, but this time, I was home alone. Once again, I saw a clear humanoid figure move behind me in my peripheral vision. And this time, it scared me so much that I jumped around, thinking someone was standing there. But, of course, no one was there. It left me feeling uneasy, so I quickly finished cooking and went to my room to shower and sleep. This became a regular occurrence in the house for me. Whenever I was in the kitchen or living room, I would see a humanoid shadow figure moving around. It was disturbing, but I had to live with it. Now, this is the part where I went from being highly skeptical about the paranormal to maybe there really is something to it after all. Since I studied engineering, I like to think of myself as a logical, scientific person. The strange part? I never once mentioned any of this to my friend and housemate while we were living there. I kept it to myself out of fear of being labeled crazy. When our internship ended, I had decided to return to the Netherlands, while my friend chose to stay in Malta after receiving a job offer and finding a girlfriend. On my final day in the house, just hours before leaving, I casually mentioned that I was kind of glad to be moving out. Then, for the first time, I told him about the shadowy figures I had been seeing and how they'd scared me. I will never forget the look on his face. He stared at me in disbelief before finally admitting that he had been experiencing the exact same thing. He, too, had seen humanoid shadow figures moving around the house. Then he shared something even more unsettling. One day, while leaning forward to tie his shoes, he saw a black shadow rapidly move toward him. It startled him so badly that he fell over. And, of course, when he looked up, there was no one there. The entire experience made me think. It shifted me from being a skeptic to wondering if there really is more to this world than we understand. In a way, it felt like the perfect scientific experiment. Two people move into a house with no prior knowledge of its history. Both experienced the same phenomenon multiple times. We never, ever discussed or influenced each other's thoughts about the paranormal before this. It just makes me wonder, and I can't shake that feeling, that maybe, just maybe, there's more to this than we think. The veil between the living and the dead is thinner than this commercial break. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible. Financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you can save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Let's get back to unraveling this dead letter. That was a really interesting dead letter for a number of reasons. One, of course, being the detail about the roommate being rushed by whatever entity was there. And not just like a shadow around a corner, seeing something in the corner of your eye. This seems to be some kind of intentional or directed interaction. And it's the difference between some kind of residual tape loop, you can call it, that stone tape. The stone farmhouse theory. Yes. There's things here that are just kind of doing their motions and unaware. This seems to be a little bit, you know, different than an echo of the past, you could call it. Yeah. Something seemingly with some sentience. Something perhaps intelligent. Well, since everyone knows, I'm geographically obsessed. Really? I'm always looking at the maps. I've even done the Google Earth tour of Flight 19. I got to look at where this is happening. I've not been to Malta or anywhere near it, frankly. I have traveled abroad a few times, but never been to Malta. But just so folks know, the footprint of Malta is very small. It's only 316 square kilometers, so roughly 122 square miles. It's basically a tiny rock. But humans have been there at least 8,000 years. For the good food, too. I mean, that's part of the attraction, right? Yes, so the Gigantia temples that are there were standing before the first stone was laid for the Great Pyramid of Giza. Wow. Well, as far as mainstream archaeology would tell us. But, yes. No, it's all ancient. And what you just described there is a lot of humanity for a very long time on a smaller space. Now, I don't know about, you know, the ocean and water levels because there could be a whole lot around there. Not new, but one of the things we're hearing about more is that there's more discovery of underwater archaeology around some of these famous sites. And, of course, the water level was different way back when. And you don't know what's around there. But definitely this point here being a concentration of human activity for such a long time. But maybe not just be human activity, but Earth resonances and natural things going on in the Earth that attracted humans in the first place. Yes. Now, you say you've not been to Malta, but have you seen the Maltese Falcon? I have, indeed, in film school. As a perception of time. Yeah, we're talking, you have to wrap your head around this. It's kind of like Gobekli Tepe. It was something like more time has progressed since the pyramids were built and the invention of the cell phone. Yeah. Than the pyramids being built and Gobekli Tepe being built. Yes. That's a much larger span of time. So it's hard to wrap your head around it. And so when we're talking about those wondrous megalithic structures and temples that people had built previously, ancient peoples of the land there that had magnificent skills and knowledge, we didn't really look too closely about the temples of Malta. You mean never heard of them? Because I'm going to go with that. Ooh. I had not heard of it. And Gigantia, obviously, literally means giant in Maltese. And for anyone having problems with the way I'm saying it, I would like to hear you pronounce a word that the first two letters are both Gs. But Gigantia. Good, good. But yeah, it means giant. It means giant. Well, first of all, years ago, I noticed, I think Apple used to tell you how many listeners you have in each country. I think we had some Maltese listeners. Yes. Yeah, I think we did too, actually. Maybe under five. But I would love to hear from somebody who lives there because, again, it's like a little travel vacation getting this email. Yeah, send us a message. The beautiful weather. We're traveling vicariously through you. Magnificent food. But really, for me, having heard about that, I had heard a little bit about some of the ancient structures. Yeah. They're fascinating. And then recently, my dad and I went and watched Ancient Aliens, and they had covered – there's a few episodes on that, which we're going to talk about here in a bit. Okay. But that's knowing more about them. Like, wow. It's like to your point. Like, I heard they were there. I didn't really know this much about them and what makes them so marvelous and just mysterious and just awe-inspiring. And that's what connects back to this story from Alex. It's pretty fascinating. So, the reason that they named this place Gigantia is because the later inhabitants couldn't figure out how anyone but giants could have moved the stones, right? Yeah. These are megalithic blocks, the kind we've talked about on our main show in several episodes, some weighing over 50 tons. But the key here is the timeline. Gigantia was constructed between 3600 and 3200 BC. So, as we were talking about, and Forrest was talking about Gobekli Tepe a minute ago, these structures are older than Stonehenge and predate the pyramids by centuries, according to current archaeology. But they really are some of the oldest freestanding structures in the world, only superseded by Gobekli Tepe, which is 11,000 to 12,000 years old. The Maltese temples are younger than that, but still among the oldest on Earth that we know about. Right. And like Gobekli Tepe, they are structurally sophisticated. Yes. And you got to look at the photos, folks, because it's a wonder. Imagine trying to carve this out yourself, you and your friends over a weekend. But archaeologists think this was a major center for ritual and ceremonial worship, likely dedicated to a fertility goddess. But with that kind of deep time comes deep folklore. In Malta, it goes beyond just residual hauntings. There is a specific concept called Il Haris. Yes. So, Il Haris comes from the word meaning to watch or to protect. This is effectively a domestic guardian spirit. Now, we know this largely thanks to Michiel Anton Vassali. He was a philosopher and linguist who lived in the late 1700s. You can think of him as the father of the Maltese language. He collected these traditional stories when they were mostly just oral history. And thank God for these folks. And we come across these guys all the time in our work and our research. It's the people who took the time to capture the knowledge that they knew was going to be gone forever if someone didn't write it down. No, hats off. And domestic. Who knows what that means right here? So, I guess domestic in this case of a domestic guardian spirit, that would mean it's home or home related, right? That's right. So, in this case, we're talking about a spiritual being connected to your home. And Vassali wrote that Il Haris often appears as a black snake or, more commonly, a shadowy humanoid figure, which sounds a little familiar, doesn't it? And the lore says if you're a good tenant, the Il Haris is silent. But if you're an outsider or if you don't acknowledge the soul of the house, it becomes active. It's very territorial, like when this thing rushed at the roommate. Yeah, so that's the folklore explanation and territorial house spirit. But as we looked into this, an old chestnut for astonishing legends came up. Folks who've heard our series on Dyatlov Pass will recognize it immediately, infrasound. Ah, yes. Talk about old chestnuts here. Yes, yeah. Explanation for everything. Lump it in with swamp gas and sandy hill cranes. Venus. What was the new one? Oh, yes. We were recently talking about Mylar birthday balloons. Yes, exactly. That's the swamp gas of the sky. Yes, yes. Or that's the crane of the sky, whatever. Now, there is such a thing as infrasound, and it does have some interesting properties. But it's just physics. But here's the thing about this story. This angle presents the idea that for our ancestors, though, concerning infrasound, physics was the supernatural from their viewpoint. So just a little bit ago, I was talking about ancient aliens. And there is an episode, I think, featured in Season 12, Episode 8, titled The Alien Frequency. And it's a pretty fascinating one because it goes beyond just some sites into actual—now you're talking about the physics of sound and frequency and harmonics and vibration, all the big concepts of existence here that have been popularly banded about for quite a while, but also recently here. There is a site that is explored in that episode called the Hal Saflieni, but that is a hypogeum. And what a hypogeum is, is essentially an underground chamber, an ancient one, or it could be a temple, but was primarily used for religious rituals. It could be burials, could have acted as both. But basically a sacred site that's built underground, again, it could be like a necropolis or with niches for burial chambers for bones or whole bodies. Right. But usually places of worship that were somewhat secretive and kept from view and damage and all the other bad things other people do. So they're usually carved out of the rock underground, and the design sometimes or often will reflect the architectural styles that are seen above ground during that period. And some of them now what we're discovering are huge, vast networks. And I think, as we mentioned before, Malta has a long and very fascinating, mysterious connection to the Knights Templar. Yes. And the Knights of Malta. And there's a lot of lore there, possibly the Knights Templar finding all kinds of treasures. There's a recent Instagram post by Scott Walter talking about a document, and I can't remember the name. It's a little unfamiliar to me, but basically like a list of all the ancient treasures in there. And one corpse, one mummified corpse, but a very big find, you could say, for the Templars. Ancient lost texts. And secret ancient knowledge discovered there. So a lot of lore. I mean, this place is rich. But getting back to the idea of the frequencies, just briefly, in that episode with Giorgio Succolos, our favorite, when they explore the Safflieni Hypogeum, they were talking to a researcher named Linda Ineix, who is an archaeoacoustic researcher. Right. And was claiming that some of the chambers there, especially the Oracle room, have a built-in acoustical shape that resonates at 110 hertz. Now, something they did that was kind of fascinating, too, is in a later part of the episode, it's like, okay, so what's so important about 110? And they did some measurements there. Oh. And you could see the meters, it's like, yeah, it seemed to be, you know, the sound reverberates and resonates there at 110 hertz. So in one interesting later part of the episode, what they did was kind of an interesting experiment. They had a volunteer wear something like a god helmet, except it was for audio acoustics. And they would play a random series of frequencies to see if there's any response. And the person was, it covered their eyes, so it was dark. They could just hear this, and everything else was shut out. And at the end of it, they said, did you feel anything when we played these random tones or frequencies? Did you have any specific feelings? He said, yeah, there was one. It was like number seven. And that one, I felt like I was rising above my body somehow. I was having not a full-on out-of-body experience, but he said, I felt like just ethereal or just kind of rising above or feeling that kind of floating feeling. Right. Some kind of ascension. They said, that's interesting because that was the 110 hertz frequency. Oh, interesting. So in that kind of blind study, you could say, you would have to keep testing it on a bunch of different people. But if we're talking about infrasound, that's a similar thing where that low frequency there with infrasound does have an effect on some people. In this case, this helmet, though, this was just playing sounds, which just so people know, the god helmet is actually electrical stimulations, right? Electromagnetic stimulations. Right. And that gives you the whole, like, you're seeing the light experience or whatever. Yeah. That some people describe as a life after death experience, which is different from this one, which is actually playing audio at different frequencies. Right. So that's all it is. It's a fancy set of speakers that covers your whole head. Right. And what the person notices is just is some kind of change, feeling different where the other frequencies had not much effect at all. Right. If any. Also in connection with that are these other megalithic structures and elongated skulls. So now we're connecting with the whole long skull thing happening in various parts of the world here. But essentially the idea is that these really intelligent past civilizations of the land there were creating things because they understood that different frequencies can induce altered states of consciousness or possibly create visions in your head. Right. Or basically just feelings of emotional uplifting, feeling something outside of your body for ritualistic purposes. In this case, it's like an audio stimulation that you might say, oh, well, you know, because they talk about the Nazca lines and hallucinogenics. Right, right. You're getting a hallucinogenic in this case, not necessarily by ingesting something, but by hearing something or experiencing a certain frequency. Now, some of this stuff falls into what Forrest already said, the word archaeoacoustics in terms of looking at archaeology and thinking about what sound was doing in these environments. This is an emerging field which looks at the sound properties of ancient sites. Now, the theory is that ancient populations chose locations of their ceremonial sites specifically because of natural phenomena in these cases that influenced the human brain. Yeah, for those who haven't heard us talk about infrasound before, we're talking about sound bands normally inaudible to us. You would maybe feel them more than you can actually hear them with your ears. Right. Infrasound is defined as sound below 20 hertz, so I think it's roughly around 18.9 hertz precisely, I think. And then where you might hear a 30 hertz tone, once you get down to around 20 hertz and lower, you don't necessarily hear it, as we're saying, you feel it. And I remember when we were studying this, there are certain effects that happen with it that you're going to talk about here in a second. Yeah. But when they started to play that, it could occur naturally. Of course, everybody was saying that was the cause of the freak out at Dyatlov Pass. Right. It was infrasound. Right. And wind whistling through telephone lines can create infrasound. And bad HVAC systems that are humming and blowing sound can create ultrasound and vibration. Which actually happened. That's not an allegory. That's a story where they couldn't figure out something was going wrong in this one building and they tracked it down to infrasound in the HVAC system in the basement. Right. Yeah. We're talking about people experiencing infrasound and feeling like there was a presence around them. Right. To the side, to the back, sometimes floating above them perhaps, and also seeing gray blobs. Now, in remembering all the research we did back then, which I still think holds, is that it was never really described much more than something like gray, misty blobs. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. It wasn't specifically humanoid figures. It was just blobs. Right. Which, of course, is like the thing they extrapolate to whenever they're like, oh, it's infrasound. Right. And folks that are experiencing it don't know enough about these studies to know that maybe it's similar in its origin, but as it develops, it's completely different from what they say happens with infrasound. Yeah. And it's a small percentage of the entire population that actually feels or experiences any kind of stimulation like that at all. Right. Most people just, you might just feel like uneasy, like you want to get out of there. It's like, I feel uncomfortable. Or it can go all the way to a sense of dread. So like what they say here is like there's at high intensities, it's perceived as a sensation or vibration in the body. But it can be produced by primal forces like earthquakes, volcanoes, calving icebergs, but creates a specific problem for our mystery. Infrasound can get around obstacles with very little dissipation. Right. It's like a VLF, the very low frequency waves that travel really far like they used to use to talk to submarines. It's like a low frequency rumble generated deep within the geology of Malta could theoretically pass right through the walls of the farmhouse that Alex and his roommate were renting. Right. And as it turns out, Malta is a hotspot for this. That's right. The Superbrain Research Group, or SBRG, conducted analyses at the Tarxian temples and the Jagra Hypogeum on the neighboring island of Gozo. And once again, the name Hypogeum derives from the Greek words hypo, meaning under, and then gaia, or gaia, meaning earth. So essentially, it translates directly as underground. Okay. I know, there was nothing revolutionary about that. But yeah, mind the gap. I'm thinking of toast of London. But anyway, these folks found a very powerful vibration peak right at 28 hertz. Right. So this suggests that these ancient structures, particularly the underground ones, act like a geological musical box. Right. They amplify natural sounds already present in the ground. And the most plausible source for that sound is the frictional movement between the African and Eurasian tectonic plates located close to the archipelago. The entire island chain is sitting on a deep sound generator. Yeah. So they built a physical structure that apparently turned a continental grind into a spiritual experience. And what we also know from other studies is that sometimes the use of water flowing through some of these structures, which could be Hypogeum-esque or above ground. But there's a theory that those created frequency vibrations that were used for healing. Right. Instead of like, imagine air going through a wind instrument. Yes. It was water passing through and creating vibration, which was, again, used not only for the healing properties of the water itself, but the vibration it was creating, the frequency, had a healing effect. But what we're talking about here in this case is really just a physiological side effect. Right. But the roommate saw a shadow figure rush at him. And tectonic rumble and infrasound even doesn't cause that complex of a hallucination. That's not like what we were talking about. When you said earlier, people see a gray blob, but we've not read anything or heard about, like, it's not just a gray blob. It's more of a black blob, and it looks like a dude, and also it's running at me. That's the other interesting thing about the story that was sent in to us is that it was seen, but it didn't get much sense of a feeling, an emotional feeling. Right. And it makes me think of our good friend Gletters. I'd asked him, he's had a few odd things happen to him that he's experienced. And one, he was in his flat, and he loves bushcraft. So he was putting, you know, I think he was testing out a tent or a backpack in his apartment there on the floor. And that corner of the eye thing happened where he noticed, like, he was looking down, and he got the sense or a peripheral vision of some black humanoid mass standing a few feet away. And he didn't fully look up, I don't believe, just because you get that fear of, like, maybe you don't want to look up fully. Yeah, yeah. Also, that it's going to go away, probably, if you look straight at it. But he got this intense feeling of hatred from this thing. Ooh, yeah, yeah. And it's like, he just moved in. He didn't do anything. Right, right, right. Like, maybe you have the wrong apartment. Why are you putting a tent inside? That's bad luck, don't you know that? So, no, he just, but he got this tremendous feeling of, that's also probably why he didn't look up. Whatever this thing was, just had, was oozing just hate at him. So. Yeah, I know that. But talking about these complex hallucinations that happen, unless it's in that unforeseen range, as you're talking about, this all goes back to that ghost in the machine study done by Vic Tandy. The fencing foil guy. Right. Right. Yeah, you get Vic Tandy, it just, it sounds like a cocktail. I love it. I'll have a Vic Tandy, please, straight up. Anyway, so Vic Tandy, he's the guy that does, why do they call him the fencing foil guy? Well, he was working in a lab. He also felt like he was being watched, and then he saw a gray shape in his peripheral vision, which we were just talking about. He also noticed that the tip of this fencing foil that he owned was vibrating wildly, even though nothing was touching it. And it turned out a new fan in his lab was vibrating at 18.98 hertz. Right, and this is crucial because NASA technical reports have established that the resonant frequency of the human eyeball is approximately 18 hertz. Uh-huh, right. So the sound wave hits the eye, and the eyeball physically vibrates, just like his foil was vibrating in that case. You know, I remember, I could picture it clearly, like, I think it's in a vice, he's- Yeah, that's right. He's interpreting it or something. Yeah. But it's just flexible enough that it's picking this up and producing a visual expression of the invisible waves. Yes. You know, because our eyes are less focused on the edges, like in the case of the foil, the brain tries to interpret that peripheral blur and then fills in the gaps. It's often creating the image of a figure or a shadow, you could say. That's a theory anyway. Yes. And infrasound also causes a feeling of dread. Right. So the question is, the lurker in the house here could be a combination of tectonic infrasound causing the dread and also vibrating the fluid in their eyes to create this shadow, maybe? I mean, if you're going to have a mundane, rational explanation. Here's the other thing we'll tell you. Sometimes we know exactly where these places are, that when people send dead letters, we know where the home is or whatever. Alex did not indicate that in his story. It just said outside of a town. So we're not sure where it is relative to these hypogeums. And in fact, the Jagra hypogeum is on a different island. So, but there are ones on Malta. So it's all part of the archipelago. But anyway, that's if people are like, okay, what's really going on here? The mundane people, the skeptics who aren't buying into this. We got to consider the possibility that some combination of all those effects, you know, carbon monoxide, radon, other things that are going on. I kind of doubt that's what's happening here, but, you know. I get you. And yes, those should all be considered, but that other old chestnut radon and carbon monoxide poisoning and all these things. But what's interesting to me is the commonality of what's seen is like, okay, does this all produce the same effect? Now we're talking about infrasound. Yes, but it's not what was seen. Right. Not just a nebulous gray blob. Right. This had shape and it had movement. And in this case, it has context, which is what we're talking about here. The ancientness, ancient inhabitants of Malta, the farmhouse, the lore of the spirit that protects dwellings. Right. And watches over them. And the newness of the people, like being, you're renters here, you weren't born here, you're just kind of vacationing, you better watch your P's and Q's. All those things add to the context. But yes, so now I think we've thoroughly and adequately covered any kind of natural thing going on. And again, that should be considered here. But one thing that stops me from closing the book on it, you could say, you know, it was just infrasound, is that two people here, you got a little bit of a double blind nature to this experience. And I know, yes, it's not totally scientifically rigorous, this little experimenter or this experience between two different people that were unconnected. But you're never going to get that. So stop using that as like, well, it's not scientifically duplicatable. You can't replicate it in the lab. It's like, okay, we're like, we're past that. It's not going to happen. Yeah. But if you talk about the nature of the two people reporting this, aircraft engineering students, they are, I would say, maybe more than just the average observer, possibly trained observers who know the effects of physics and things like that and machinery. Yes. And pay attention to detail, the details around them. Yeah, right, right. It's not just a thing that necessarily happens to them. They're paying more attention to their environment, probably by the nature of their professions. Right. And people, at least with our author here, somebody starting off as being more skeptical and not really believing in this kind of hoo-ha. Yeah. And then having something that was so different in their experience, it made them wonder about it. Right. And the fact also that they hadn't talked about their experiences until later, they weren't influencing one or the other, or it's not the landlord, like, this place is haunted. Right. You know, you're going to see a shadow and then you see it. Or like a ghost hunter, as it's often said, well, you just saw that because you were going into an ancient place and you were expecting to see something, so you did. Right. Neither one of them knew the other had these experiences. Just like our relatively infamous episode of Astonishing Legends called The Krakowski Intruder. Look that up. No spoilers. Yeah, right. But if you haven't heard it, check it out. C-A-C-K-O-W-S-K-I. Something similar happens in that story. So the other thing that's interesting, and you alluded to this a little bit earlier, is the stats on the eye resonance thing. They're a little bit tricky. It's not that everybody exposed to infrasound sees stuff, right? No, and that's the point that I bring up when people want to use that broad brush to paint every experience as merely infrasound. Because I get it, it's convenient. And I'll never forget, I got to bring this up again, but when we did Dyatlov Pass and we saw a video of Donny Icar, author of that great book, Dead Mountain. Yes. Right? Yeah. And he was at Google, which is, that's one of the perks of working at Google. You could have experts come in and talk about books and authors and researchers come in and think for free. And so he had a little audience there talking about his new book. And I don't know if this was acting or what, but it was a very real and vulnerable moment, I think, with Donny when at the end, basically he's summing up what he thought caused it. And he was like, yeah, it's infrasound. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. He just did not sound convinced. No. He did not. And can you look at him? It's like, did you mean to say it that way? Yeah, we posited, I remember back when we did our series, that the publisher forced him into that so it couldn't just be an unsolved mystery, maybe. But who knows? By the way, we've never asked him, and we've had a lot of authors on the show, tons of authors on the show, but we did not at that time have the stones to call Donny and ask him to join us when we did that series because we were pretty new. So who knows? Maybe he's into it. I'm not. And I don't buy the, there's a lot of new theories on that too. But let's not get on a Dyatlov Pass tangent. No, no, no. But here's the thing though, in talking about infrasound and wanting first to rule out everything, you can go back to a follow-up to the Tandy experiments called Project Haunt. Yes. Where something like 75% of the people felt dizzy or slightly odd. Yes. But only about 8% or 9% actually reported seeing vivid images or shapes. So it's a very low percentage. Yeah. Right. And I remember, you know, reading up on that you can go to a concert and they got that giant stack of martial amps. Yeah. And that can create infrasound. And some people dig that. That's right. You know, the headbangers at the edge of the stage are getting into it. Yeah. And then other people just like, not uneasy, but like maybe a little bit on edge or it creates a little tension. And then some people just feel a mild discomfort perhaps. And maybe want to move away. But it's not like they're freaking out and they want to cut a hole in the side of their tent and run naked into the woods. Right. So what are the odds though that two people in the same house would both fall into that 9% percentile here and then see the same aggressive shadow figure? That's a really good question. It leaves the door open, honestly. The vibe of this place was heavy in that there's that biological ping being watched. And for an engineer, that's a sensor alarm. Our ancestors survived because they knew when something was about to make a move. And in this house, the lurker, whether it was Ilharis or a standing wave, had 8,000 years of seniority, possibly, over these two students. And, you know, that's the reason that we survived to where we are was because we knew when somebody was out there that wanted to either eat us or steal our very well-appointed cave. And we knew they were out there even if we couldn't see them. That's how we survived. I'm going to alter your hand cave paintings from 67,000 years ago. Yes. Whether you like it or not. Which has just came out in the news recently. So, again, everything's changing, folks. You think you're settled and like, this is it. And you write to folks and you say, no, no, no. It has to be this way because that's the latest. I have read five books on it. There's new discoveries. There are things that will be older than Gobekli Tepe. I'm convinced. Now, for a second, I thought you said there were nudists. And I was like, wait, this show took a turn. There are, oh, of course there are going to be, Scott. If you don't have a fence around Stonehenge, you're going to have a, you're going to show up and find weird people doing things at midnight. There was definitely in the old days of Stonehenge. There's no question there was some weird. Well, yeah. Yes. Here, I mean, this is what's fascinating to me is that you have this story happening in a very rich environment, you could say. Yes. Just ripe with legend and lore and humanity and ancient mysteries, perhaps. But a very contemporary and ancient experience. Because I believe people throughout all the ages, since the first, were seeing things like this that were unexplainable. Right. So you have different legends in the lore to explain that in the past. But in looking at the mundane reasons, you have to ask the people. I go back to the storyteller. It's like, does that fit with you? Does that sit right? Is that what you felt? Right. Because I never want to be that person like, well, this is what you experienced. This is what you saw. You didn't see that. I know you think that. And that's, you know, bless your heart. This is what happened to you. Right. And so it goes beyond that. It's like our friend Glitter's like, you know, he's a very rational guy most of the time. But he said like, no, no, I felt this really deep emotional thing. It's like, no, what is that? Is that, yeah, do I have faulty HVAC? It's like, no, never happened again. And he said it was a figure of a man. But who knows? Was that from some past English battle of the Britons? Yeah. What was that? Well, we don't know, but he's pretty certain it was a male figure that didn't like him. Yeah, and the other thing I always like to mention, especially for people who are not familiar with some of our very, very early shows, we had a show called The Laughing Indian. That's another show to listen to because there's an interesting case in that. The story is really, that's a really fun. That's very much of a Jim Harrell's campfire type story, which I love. But also the person at the center of that story, his mom at the same house where everything takes place in that story, she used to see a figure out of the corner of her eye on their land, they had a big lot outside of Woodstock, New York. And she'd be out working in the yard or doing stuff in the garden, and she would see this person along the tree line. And for her mind, it was a British red coat. She described it as a red coat. And it's just so interesting. First of all, that's not the infrasound thing. It's just gray blob. This would be, but whenever she looked right at where it was, it wasn't there. But when she was looking away, she could almost very clearly see it. And she had to concentrate on not looking right at it to be able to take in the vision that it was presenting. Right. Clearly to her though, I think also another interesting aspect of it, which I have heard before, we've heard this from other stories about spatial distancing with these experiences. I think he mentioned that it was in the corner of her eye and it was clearly like, look, everybody who studied American or UK history, you know, you have a picture in your mind. If you watched any movie dealing with it, you know what a British red coat looks like. It's a very iconic outfit uniform. It's a look that sticks with you. You can, you can picture it pretty clearly, but I think wherever she said she would turn her head, it was still in the corner of her eye and her peripheral vision, perhaps. That's right. It shifted. That's fascinating. It shifted. So what's going on there? And we've talked about this before. I want to dig up this email again because we have a terrific long time listener talking about a discussion with famed Chicago area ghost hunter, Dale Kaczmarek. We talked about him back in the Resurrection Mary episodes, but he, I believe she got this or heard about this concept first from him is that why is it happening in the corner of your eye? And we've mentioned this theory before, but I like it. So I'm going to repeat it here again in that one theory that Dale was espousing was that it has to do with the, the shape and length of the rods and cones in your eye. So we're not going to get into how the eye works, but they're apparently longer, I believe around the outer edges of your eye, your cornea. And that may deliver more information than you would see with looking at something straight on. So quickly, I wouldn't normally mention this, but it was pronounced enough for me to naturally just kind of do a double take where I thought near me, probably a few feet away as I was sitting on the couch, a, a streak of very bright light passed in the, my peripheral vision so much so that I, I then looked, I opened the curtains, looked at the window because I thought a car was turning into the driveway at night with the headlights on. That was weird. And so, I don't know, I might, I might have a neurological condition, but I don't know what that was, but I have no doubt that these people are seeing and describing exactly what appeared to them. And it may have something to do with it for sound, as far as being able to pick up on this, maybe it's just an aid in seeing these things that are normally there, but invisible. And there is a lot of what we label as supernatural that might be just the earth speaking to us or maybe through us, these natural vibrations and pathways of communication via frequencies that we don't consciously perceive. Even though 6,000 years ago, whoever was living on Malta, these, these ancient peoples, I believe with these skilled and advanced knowledge may have figured that out. The Astonishing Dead Letter Office is hosted by Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess and is executive produced by Tess Feithel. The show is edited and mixed by Sarah Voorhees-Wendell at VW Sound. The theme is based on the Astonishing Legends theme by Judson Crane at Founder Music, arranged by Alan Carissia, who composes all the other music in the show. Tommy Beaver Design created the logo. The announcer is John Bolton. That's me. Stories are lightly edited for length, content, and readability, but otherwise presented as they're sent to us. We're always looking for more Dead Letters, so if you have a story of your own you'd like to share, email it to deadletteroffice at astonishinglegends.com. Please include how you would like to be credited. First name only? First name last initial? Anonymous? A pseudonym? Let us know. Due to the number of emails coming in, we often cannot respond, but we do read them all. No part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright, Astonishing Legends Productions. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. 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