The Entity Part 2 with Xavier Ortega

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Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Astonishing Legends Network. Listen to the Astonishing Junk Drawer exclusively at Patreon.com slash Astonishing Legends. Getting used to the Brady Bunch factor. I've been to Point Pleasant twice, but I've never been to the festival. Someone made a joke about the Mothman. For the guys on this screen, except for you, Matthew, you know, the 90s were like yesterday. The guy that directed the last film was the creator of Earthworm Jim. Dr. Napel told them that Steven Spielberg had said to him, when you're done with this, I'll take a look at it. It's so hard to explain this and not sound like I'm crazy. I'm impressed Scott found that. Hey folks, a content warning tonight. This episode contains discussion of sensitive topics including rape and sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence, support is available. You can contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 for free confidential support 24-7. Astonishing Legends would like to thank First Leaf, Hymns, our contributors at Patreon.com, and you, our listeners, for making tonight's show possible. As we continue our exploration of the real story behind the astonishing legend of the entity, we return to the woman at the heart of the case, Doris Bither. Doris' haunting ordeal has fascinated and perplexed researchers for decades. In this episode, we'll delve deeper into her background and personal life to reveal details that have never been publicly shared before. When Dr. Barry Taff and Carrie Gaynor first entered the Bither home, they encountered more than they could have ever anticipated. Their meticulous investigation revealed phenomena that defied conventional explanation. From spectral smells of decay to objects that moved with an unseen force. Added to this din of fear was the haunting presence of a giant shadowy figure, flanked by two smaller ones and witnessed by multiple reliable observers, yet eluding capture in any photographic evidence. The story doesn't stop at the bizarre occurrences within the house. Doris' struggle was one of survival and sanity, battling forces unseen while her pleas for help were often met with skepticism and disbelief. Tonight, we'll examine the aftermath of this haunting of Doris and her family as they grappled with its effects long after the investigators had moved on. We'll explore the lesser-known chapters of her life, moving beyond Culver City to her later years, where the shadows of her past continued to linger. At the heart of our exploration is an exclusive conversation with Javier Ortega, the man behind GhostTheory.com, and a rare link to the Bither family. Ortega's unprecedented access to two of Doris' sons offers new insights into the lasting impact of the events, and challenges the narrative that is the only one that most people know about this case. Thanks to Javier's new perspective, we'll venture further into the story, seeking not just the truth of what happened, but an understanding of the human element beneath the specter. What were the lasting psychological effects on the family, and what could they tell us about the uncharted territories of the spirit world? Welcome to the untold continuation of The Entity Haunting. Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess. This story is told from a perspective, from James' perspective, and it's the untold side of what really happened. Javier Ortega, referring to Doris' son in our interview. Join us tonight for part two of our world-exclusive interview with Javier Ortega about one of the scariest hauntings in American history, The Entity. And we're back. That we are, folks. What are your Halloween plans looking like? Nothing good? Well, we're throwing a 24-hour digital Halloween bash in our Facebook group on October 31st, kicking off at 6 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Get ready for a whole day of fun with tons of activities. We'll have lively discussion posts, our top spooky recommendations for what to read and watch, and the opportunity to win some prizes. Join our riddle hunt every Tuesday leading up to Halloween for a chance to win a $75 AL gift card and a blog feature. All you have to do is figure out the exact spot the riddles are leading to. We'll also have contests for the best costume, decor, and AL-themed food or drink. Post your entries on Halloween and vote for your favorites. Each winner will receive a $15 gift card to our store and a spot in our wrap-up blog post. Speaking of the blog, don't forget the 2024 blog-stonishing season is in full swing, with Tess making new posts every day of October. If you suggested a topic, check to see if it's on the blog. We can't wait to celebrate with you. If you have questions about how to join the party, feel free to reach out to Facebook moderator Jennifer Rafferty or Tess Feifel. All right, Forrest, time for Astonishing Al's Spotify playlist announcement. Dial up your spooky Halloween DJ voice. All right, you brave souls at Children of the Night. Astonishing Al is whispering to you from the shadows with some chilling news that'll make your Halloween truly terrified. He has conjured up a haunting collection of sounds on Spotify. We speak of Astonishing Al's mixtape, a playlist so eerie it might just raise the dead. The keeper of this cursed collection, the mysterious Megan Lagerberg, has been possessed by the spirit of her own Tess Feifel's October blog-stonishing gauntlet. She's summoning a new, terrifying tune every day from the 18th of October until All Hallows' Eve itself. But remember, once you start listening, there may be no escape. Dude, that was amazing. That was amazing. That was horrible trash. Only you can do that. Yeah, thank goodness. All right, folks, a quick reminder. Our Halloween merch is back. New colorway, glow-in-the-dark hoodies and tees. They're incredible. But remember, they're limited edition. Hand silkscreen to order until midnight Pacific time, October 26th. After that, gone forever. Head to astonishinglegends.com and click store to grab yours. And a quick note, order early for a better shot at getting one before Halloween. No promises there. Oh, and for our listeners who still browse the web from time to time, we've just launched astonishinglegendsnetwork.com. Yeah, perfect for those who want all of our shows in one place. So check it out. Speaking of which, every single one of them is dropping new episodes right now, so look for The Midnight Library, Scared All the Time, and Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf, wherever you get your podcasts. They're all looking to spread the word, so find, subscribe, and review them if you haven't already. Yeah, folks, The Midnight Library's passed 5 million downloads, Scared All the Time's passed 400,000, and Richard Haddam just passed 100,000. Nice. So get out there and find those shows. Find out what you're missing. Okay, Sarah, let's roll part two of our exclusive interview on The Entity with Javier Ortega. We are back with Javier Ortega for part two of this series on The Entity. Javi, we want to thank you so much for taking the time again to sit down and share this story with our listeners. Thank you guys for having me as a guest. I don't want to tempt fate here, but I'm happy to report that nothing weird has happened to me since we started covering this. Well, speak for yourself. Sometimes I do worry. Sometimes I do worry with ones like this. Right off the bat, let me just address a few things that I wanted to talk about in part one. Because I know there was some confusion about the year that Doris Byler died. Yeah. I think my earliest blog post about The Entity, I put down that she died in 1995, which was something that was related to me via her son, Brian Harris. But when I started to do more research and I got a hold of her eldest son, James, he was the one who told me that she passed away in 1999, and I did see the death certificate. So the year is 1999, and she passed away of acute cardiopulmonary arrest. Okay. And just quickly, just now you said the name Brian Harris, which is not a name you've mentioned yet. Why are you using that name now and you hadn't mentioned it before now? In 2008, when I started Ghost Theory and I had first published that article, right? The first article that I published about Doris Byler was some information that I gathered from Dr. Barry's staff, the now defunct blog. His earlier version of that blog, and that had the address for Braddock Drive, and it had her full name, which is something that I couldn't find back then. So when I wrote that article, I included those tidbits of information. And because of that, Doris' middle child, Brian Harris, contacted me. And I had gotten a phone call, and he was pretty irate, and he wanted to talk to me so he can set the record straight because he felt like the researchers did not do justice. And what had been floating out there on the internet for all these decades was just wrong information about his mother. So I had spent about maybe, I would say, I don't know, a week or so just talking to Brian Harris on the phone. Okay. I would come home from work, and I would talk to him for like two hours, three hours, four hours. And he just started giving me all the information, the background of his mom's life and their time in Braddock Drive. And what year was this when you were having these conversations? I want to say 2008, 2005. Yeah, so a while back. A while back. And I was excited because he was giving me information that I didn't know before. Nobody knew this information, right, because they've never made a public good statement or anything like that. But so I wrote another post on Ghost Theory, and I titled it, you know, Interview with Doris Byther's Son. And I think Coast to Coast picked that up. Right. And that garnered so much attention, that interview, that within a week, I received another, a second angry phone call. And this phone call was from James, the eldest son. Brian's brother. Brian's brother, older brother. Okay, yeah. So he was infuriated, and he told me that I had no right to post stuff about their family. Brian had no right to talk about this and talk about that because he wasn't there. So this is the big brother. He's, first of all, he's admonishing Brian a little bit, but also this is our story and all of that, and then taking it up with you because you're the one publishing their account. Right. So he was very upset, and he told me, like, I had no right to do this to his family and to his mother, that they tried to squash the story and just forget about it and move on. But because of what Brian Harris did, now the attention was back on Thoris Byther. I understood where he was coming from. You know, I told him, I understand where you're coming from, but that information is already out. And he chose to talk to me. So after a while, you know, he just told me, here's what we're going to do. We're going to set the record straight. I have all the information because my brother wasn't there half the time. There's a three-year gap between them. So around this time, like 74, 73, Brian Harris was about 13 years old. Right. And James was 16. So he had more knowledge and in-depth information as to what was happening inside the house. And he was his mother's confidant. So Doris told him everything. And the thing about James, and again, I'm using pseudonyms here. Except for Brian. Except for Brian Harris, because he was the one who gave me permission to use his real name. And of course, their mother. In part one, you were referring to Brian as what? As Michael. Michael. Okay, gotcha. So in my book, his name is Michael, Brian Harris. The other three kids, you're using pseudonyms for all three of them. Yes, because I don't have the permission to reveal their names. And I'm going to respect that. Right. So the thing about James was, you know, he has this impeccable ability to remember dates and names. Okay. So he could go back in chronological order and just tell me what happened since 1968 every month up until like, you know, the 80s. Wow. So that was very instrumental to me, like, you know, as far as research wise, right? Because he was giving me dates, names of people who owned the house previously and stuff like that. And my job was to go in there and verify all this information. I want to stop you there because I want to explain something to people that they might not understand. Because we've been communicating with you for, you know, a week or two now. One thing I think it's important for people to know when they hear this series and they hear the information that you're sharing is that you didn't just take the information and put it out there. You worked like a true journalist and attempted to verify things with corroboration with records and whatever you could find to make sure that everything came together. You just sent us some records this past week that corroborated stuff that you had already said. So I want people to know that that's how you operate. Right. I spent, I would say, an abnormal amount of time in the Los Angeles Hall of Records, you know. Okay. First of all, I wanted to go back and find out everything I could about the house, about the neighborhood, about the city itself. And everything that James was telling me was correct as far as owners of the property, who lived there, who moved out, what year they died. That information, I guess he knew because when they moved in, they had asked the landlord and had just asked neighbors. So he had that information. So that allowed me to really, like, create this timeline of things and just start investigating everything. Like when he told me about his nanny or babysitter, Cecile Thomas, I was able to find those records through Ancestry. And I pulled up the information where it was the immigration log when she came into New York in the 1920s. And that verifies her backstory about where she, and it also showed where she came from. Correct. Where she came from and the time she spent in New York and in California. Now, what James had told me was that, you know, she did work for the NYPD as a psychic. And I mentioned this in part one. I tried to get in contact of the archive records and all that in NYPD, but they had no information on this. They couldn't assist me in any way. So my guess is, like, you know, back then they really didn't say a lot about this, about using psychics to solve cases. Right. But from what James told me and what Cecile Thomas had said, that she was very successful. We hear that a lot from people in the psychic medium world that when you ask a police officer or detective if they're using psychics, a lot of times they'll just kind of laugh it off. Like, oh, come on now. You know, don't be silly. But if you ask the psychics themselves who work with them, they'll say, like, yeah, they do. They just don't want to publicize that because, of course, people start to roll their eyes. But they do work with more psychics and mediums than most people would imagine or realize. Yeah, I know. I've seen stories. I mean, who knows if they're embellished. But on Unsolved Mysteries and other things over the years where a lot of times it's a detective who's at the end of his rope or the end of her rope. And they're just like, we've got nothing. We might as well give this a shot kind of thing. Yeah, why not? And they sometimes get some pretty remarkable and accurate information that gives them any kind of a lead when they had none. Or as Scott said, you're at the end of your rope and you've got nothing. Did the family on their own? And, of course, back in the mid-70s and, of course, up until probably the late 90s, it was really hard to get any information online. I mean, other than means that we have now, you have to ask people, did the family start doing any kind of research on their own or got interested in asking neighbors and people who owned or lived at the property previously when the activity started happening? Did they try to look into the history? If we were on the outside trying to research this case, we would do something like that. We would try to talk to neighbors and try to get the history of the house, the location, and all that. But for them, since they were living in that house, they were being victimized by these unseen entities. They didn't want anything to do with that. At least not James and not his brothers and sister. I mean, any free time they had, they would spend outside. They would go to Venice Beach. They would just, you know, be outside the house. Now, on the other hand, Doris, though, she did try to get information. She did ask about the neighbors. She asked her landlord about who had died in the house because she was not aware that her children were seeing things as well. And when she found out that Mr. Who's It was playing some games with them, she was concerned. Right. Outside of that, there was not a lot of information that was gained from this. And they didn't spend much time trying to figure that out. Not wanting to stir up the dust on this and draw any more attention than they were already getting. But Doris did. And then her friend, who was a bit of a self-proclaimed, I think she claimed to have some psychic abilities and some knowledge. She was also, they were trying to get information through the Ouija board and seances and try to get names and find out what's happening. And her psychic friend, at least that's, I think that's what Dr. Barry Taft said, that she claimed to have some psychic ability, was trying to look into it. And that did not go so well. That seemed to ramp up a little bit of activity. Did they get any kind of information that you think was credible or any kind of lead on it? Or were they just getting answers that satisfied them? They were just getting answers that at the time were, I guess it did give them some sort of hope or inclination or idea as to what path they should follow to try to resolve this issue. That's what they wanted, right? But if you guys think about it, what kind of information can you ask a Ouija board and what kind of information can you receive that you can really like, you know, follow? Right. I talked to James and I see this case through his eyes, not from the perspective of the movie or the book or the researchers or even Doris. But I see it from James's eyes, his viewpoint. And I understand his frustration with this. I understand why he was so upset and why he would yell and be inconsolable when he found out that his mom was continuing the seances in the house. Oh, yeah. With Candace. You know, she kept doing it. Whenever he was like, you know, outside, him and his siblings were outside, they would come home. And every so often, they would catch them in the middle of the seance. And that really frustrated him because, of course, Doris and Candace wanted to get some answers. But he thought it was just making things worse. And when they started back with the sessions again, and this is back in Radock Drive around 73, 74, they began using the Ouija board. And the activity in the house just ramped up from that point on, like the smell of decomposing flesh became more apparent. It was all over the rooms. It would travel from room to room. There were cold spots where you would just feel like, you know, a freezing spot in the middle of the room. You would walk by it. You would walk through it. And it would be normal. And just shadow beings. Around this time, like, you know, everybody was just stressed out in that household. Doris couldn't really find a proper job. She was struggling to make ends meet. They had a lot of money trouble. And she really leaned on Candace, I think, around this time. Yeah. You know, and she became her support, her lifeline and everything. And I don't want to put the blame on Candace either. But, you know, it's in the 70s. And I think everybody back then was in this sort of, like, spirituality-like post. Yeah. Hi, right? Yeah. As we mentioned in part one, that was, especially Los Angeles, that was a very common thing. Everybody got the same books and metaphysicality. And I guess in her mind, she was trying to do the right thing. Right. But using the Ouija board just pushed Doris deeper into this hole that she was in. The attacks in the house just continued at that point. You know, Braddock Drive is a small little house. I know that the researchers had said that this house was twice condemned by the city. But when I was researching the records of the property, I didn't find anything about it being condemned. Right. When I talked to James, he said that that was not the case either. So I don't know where they found this information, if it's true or not. But as far as I know, it was never condemned. Now, it was. It did need a lot of repair. And it did need a lot of work, you know, because it was a cheap house and it was falling apart. But outside of that, like, you know, it was livable. So the smells that kept, like, walking in and out, disappearing, appearing, they thought it was due to plumbing issues. Or maybe, like, they had mice or rodents in the house that would just die in the walls and that would create the smells. Right. So they would get exterminators and they would do this, this, and that, try to fix things. But there was never a clear answer as to what was creating these, like, you know, odors. As the time passed, as the weeks passed, you know, these odors got stronger. And they would be followed up by the shadows. The shadowed persons, the shadowed beings. Because there were so many times where James told me where they'd be in the living room playing or just watching TV. All of a sudden, temperature drops to a freezing temperature. And that stench would just walk in the living room, you know. And they could smell it traveling past them, going down to the hallway. As soon as they turned, they would see three shadows just appear in the hallway, walk down the hallway, and turn to their mother's bedroom. Three. It's a pier. Three separate beings. Three separate beings. With Doris being the focus. With Doris being the focus, especially her bedroom. Even though, at times, Doris was not at home. Yeah. They could still see them walk down the hallway and turn. Now, they said that there was – one of them was the bigger one. He was the, quote, unquote, the strongest one, I guess, because he had more definition. The rest was just, like, smaller in size. But looking dissimilar. No hair. Just – they can see the muscles. They can see the chest. The torso. Part of the legs. Part of the arms. Just a faded image of them walking down the hallway and turning. Disappearing. Oh, that's horrifying. And that's the barrel-chested entity, the very large one. One more thing I had – something that Barry Taff wrote in that article that's on ghost theory on your blog, talking about the confusion and people taking a little bit of information, especially back then. And then kind of running with that. And then, of course, that becomes part of the lore. There was a lot of misinformation being put forth that people just kind of run with. And one of them being that even when the date that Doris died or the year that Doris died, he mentioned somebody named Barry Conrad. And Barry Conrad's ex-girlfriend, Lisa McIntosh, passed away in 2006. And people took that to be Doris passing away. Can you tell our audience who Barry Conrad is? He's a filmmaker and ghost hunter, I would say. Yeah. I met Barry Conrad in 2009 or 2010. Nice fellow. I met him in his house, him and his fiancée, his new fiancée. They gave me some information. But Barry Conrad was friends with Dr. Barry Taff. And they both investigated the San Pedro haunting, the Jackie Hernandez case. So, when I talked to Barry Conrad about the entity case, he had very little information, just what he had heard from the researchers. But he had a lot of information when it came to Jackie Hernandez and the San Pedro case to the point where he was the one affected by the hitchhiker effect. He was haunted in his residence. And it followed him. I guess the confusion was that, yeah, his girlfriend had died previously and everybody associated that death with Doris Byther. So, now we have Barry, Barry, and Carrie. Correct. Ball and ball. Barry, Barry, and Carrie. Barry, Barry, and Carrie. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. 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When they first moved in, before Mr. Who's It, before the shadows, before the smells and everything, they had moved in in 1972. And one time, James had come home from school. And it was just him and his mom talking on the couch. And she told him about this story. She said, this afternoon, something strange happened. I heard a knock on the door. I answered, and it was this old lady. She said she was a Hispanic descent, broken English. And she stood in the doorway, like, clutching a rosemary. And she just told her, you know, this house, there's something evil in this house. You need to get out. When Doris tried to press her for more information or just ask her who she was, that lady just turned around and walked away. So she just went in there to deliver that message. And that disturbed her to a point where she was so uncomfortable, she told James about it. And for the rest of the week, she was just on edge. Right. It was out of the blue where somebody came in. And this is why, like, the research that I did, I wanted to go back in there and try to find any history that I could about this property. You know, because before Culver City was those suburbs, it was a ranch, you know. It was a big ranch. It was a big ranch that was divided into so many sections. The problem that I ran into was the Hall of Records. There was a big fire in Los Angeles, and it destroyed a lot of this information that I was trying to dig. So I was able to go far enough where I could see that that area where the house was was just marshland, swampland. But there was also some ranches there. I couldn't get any more information past that. So I knew that before the city of Culver City existed, there were some settlers there, and it had a history. Now, when I talked to James about this, if he had any information, he just told me that the only thing that he knew about the house was, besides that woman making a reference to her living there as a child and knowing that it was haunted, that there was a well that was covered up, but was in their garage. So I guess underground. Okay. That had been there for decades. I couldn't find any information on that. I don't know if it's true or not. I never walked in the house. I never checked. I haven't even contacted the owners or whatnot. The quote that you have listed on your blog on ghosttheory.com is pretty chilling, and this is from the older Mexican woman. You need to get out. I used to live here in this old house back when it was just a farm and I was a little girl. There is something very evil here. This place is haunted and you need to get out. That was relayed from one of the sons, I think, right? James said that's what she had told Doris. And I mean, that's pretty fascinating information in that, yeah, as you were saying, that a lot of Southern California, people don't realize this because they see a big city now, is that even on Wilshire Boulevard, one of the most famous and densely populated boulevards in the United States, has a history of just being orange groves. Yeah, whatever the old pictures you see, the historical pictures, everything is groves. And my house in Valley Village used to be a walnut grove. And the house that my wife and I had there had a full-on 100-year-old poltergeist tree in the front yard that was this ancient walnut tree that it would give us like three leaves once a year. It was at the end. And it wasn't that long ago. I mean, just in the early 1900s, right at the turn of the 20th century, a lot of that was used for farming. So farming was a large, well, California still is, I think, the fourth largest agricultural center. San Joaquin Valley grows a tremendous percentage of the agriculture for the United States, at least, and the world. So there was a lot of farming being done in Southern California. And it makes sense that this was a ranch. And it didn't have to be that long ago that this woman. So that kind of tracks for me is that somebody around that time, the mid-70s, could have lived there. And what's strange is that she may have been keeping an eye or a watch on the house to see what happened after that because she knew of this past history and wanted to warn people who were living there. Went out of her way to go tell Doris or the occupants of the house that something evil was there. It's a terrifying addition to the story because you're right. It was 1972 when that lady approached the house. And according to what James told me, you know, she was old. She was mumbling a little bit. She had broken English. But to me, that says that maybe she was a little girl back in the late 1800s, around that time. Yeah. So there might have been a ranch there. I don't know. But you're right. For her to keep tabs on this house, this property, come back after everything has been, like, you know, demolished and they paved, they made sidewalks and streets and all that. For her to remember that location. That also tells me that James is correct about the well. There's something there that she knew there was a marker before and anything existed. And that covered up well. Now, we've talked about this before. Like, I don't know what the relationship is between water underground or well when it comes to the paranormal. But there seems to be a tie to that. Yes. We've come across that quite a bit. Water is a major indicator or facility route medium for lots of spiritual activity. We've seen that in Atchison with all the limestone and its retention of water and rivers and streams. So, yeah, water is a big connector here. And a lot of the story has a lot of the telltale signs. You just mentioned something about the limestone. On my blog, there is an article about this mass UFO sighting in Greece. Yes. And this mass UFO sighting happened like when I lived in Greece. It happened in my backyard like five minutes away. I went to several different villages and I asked them if they saw something, you know, during this time. They all pointed that, you know, these lights were coming from this one area. And I went to that area and it was an old limestone quarry that had been abandoned. And that's where they say the lights were hovering over and moving around. And then they shifted from there to a local mountain and it kind of disappeared in the mountain. Okay. No, there's something to it. And then the water and old wells, things abandoned, limestone, a lot of these things are just natural fonts, you could say, springing forth these kinds of stories and anecdotes in that there is some kind of connection there. So it's a very common thing. And as we were hearing from you in the house, what's happening is this is all laying out like a very classic haunting and spirit oppression story. Just the smells moving, the cold spots, the shadow figures. There's more detail, I think, with the shadow people than I usually hear about. Like you don't usually see the outlines or muscle definition. Usually they're more just like a black smoke, blacker than black, kind of smoky kind of character. Here they seem to be more defined and frightening looking and multiple entities bound in the house. And there could be other ones. Like I said, there is an entity that is oppressing the other spirits as well and keeping them there for some kind of power or control and feeding off their energy as well as the living people. And in this case, there was one that was more friendly or didn't really bother the kids. But then there's others that really gave them a really bad feeling and are probably doing the abusing. Have you guys ever had any experiences with shadow people? I have not, no. I have a story. When I was a kid, I lived in Guadalajara, in Mexico. And I think I was around nine years old. Back then, we didn't have AC or anything like that. So in the summertime, it would be really hot and it was almost impossible to sleep. It was just too hot, right? So I remember this one summer night. We were laying in bed, me and my brothers, because we shared this bed in a room. And I just couldn't sleep that night. And I was looking around, just, you know, my eyes were wandering the room. And I happened to catch the bathroom door. There was no door to this bathroom, but the bathroom was in front of the bedroom, like in front of the bed. There was no door to this bathroom, but there was like a sheet, a curtain. The bathroom had one window. So the moonlight would come in through the window and I could see the shadows behind that curtain, right? Because the bathroom was illuminated by the moonlight. As I was laying in bed, I was just looking around and all of a sudden I saw this shadow person, but it was like a toddler. It was so strange. It was about a foot and a half or two feet tall. And it looked like a baby, like the figure, you know, short arms, a head and all that. And it was moving. It was trying to get my attention. I lay there in bed and I saw it like poke its head out, the shadow. I saw it, I saw it walk across, wave the arms, wave its arms and kind of like move around trying to get my attention. And I just froze in fear because I knew what I was looking at. It wasn't a trick of light or anything like that. Right. I could see the, you know, the humanoid figure in this, even though it was like a foot and a half or two feet tall. And I'm sitting there like just freaking out. And all of a sudden to my right ear, I hear this breathing. I hear this like, like, like that hard breathing. And I'm like, I'm freaking out. So I didn't want to look, but I turned and it was my brother. My brother was wide awake and he was staring at the same thing I was. That's what the breathing was? That's what the breathing was. He was freaking out. Oh my God. His name is Jonathan. So I turn to him. I said, Hey, Johnny, like, do you see this? And he's like, yeah, because he didn't know I was awake. So he looked at me and he startled. He's like, what is that? I was like, I don't know. He says, is that a person? And we spent about like five minutes just staring at this thing. We didn't want to get up. We didn't want to get up. I didn't want to turn the light. I just wanted to go away. I was freaked out. After a while, he just says, like, what do we do? I said, just close your eyes and go to sleep. That was pretty much all I could tell him. And that's what we did. I don't remember much. I just remember falling asleep the next morning. Like I checked the bathroom. I was like doing some, just trying to figure out what was causing the shadow. Right. Right. We never found anything. And I've never seen anything since then. But I do know that what I saw was, was real. And it was something that was, it was, it was a shadow person, you know? Yeah. So when I, when I got involved in this story and I, and I started talking to James and he started telling me the stories of, of him seeing Mr. Who's It, it reminded me of that. There was, there was some fear, but he wasn't. Right. He wasn't like petrified or terrified like that. He was more curious. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great term for that. They're curious about living perhaps and who's in their space. Right. And checking them out. But there's no, there's no horrible rotting flesh, uh, burning feces smell. And that's the thing about this story that when Mr. Who's It made an appearance, there was no cold spots. There was no smell. But the thing is like, I do believe for some reason, this entity that only stayed and remained in the kitchen area was trying to communicate with James. Yeah. Okay. Right. After the first visit by that old lady, James told me that, you know, he was laying in bed and he heard the kitchen sink, uh, water running in the faucet. He heard it turn on. He could have cut on the squeaking, the water, you know, gushing, splashing on the aluminum sink or whatnot and making that noise. Right. So he gets up, he turns on the light and the sink is bone dry. Right. So he thought that was weird at first, you know, he thought what kind of plumbing issue would cause, you know, the faucet to turn and like, you know, water come out and it closed by itself. But it kept happening for a while until they started seeing Mr. Who's It, that shadow. As far as I know, Dora's father never saw that shadow. Right. And she wasn't aware that her children were, were interacting with this child because they called him Mr. Who's It. They would ignore it. They would like play games with it, like trying to see, like, you know, hide from it or whatever. Yeah. It speaks volume as to what was happening inside that house, uh, slowly. It was a progression of things. It was the shadow at first where they didn't think anything of it, but then the smell, you know, the cold spots, and then the other shadows came. And that's when things got, you know, terrifying for the children. For them, um, they would report, like James would say that him and his brothers would get pinched every so often. They would get pushed, slapped. I don't know where they'd be like, you know, laying in bed or whatever. Somebody would pinch them, pull on them, call their names. Typical haunting poltergeist activity. When you say the word poltergeist, were there other, I mean, you read about the skillet that flew across the room or were there, was there that kind of stuff happening? Like classical poltergeist activity? And to what degree was that happening? The skillet incident happened with Dr. Barry Taff and Kerry Gainer first went into the house, right? So they were there for that. They were there for that. Yeah. They witnessed that. I mean, they witnessed a lot of other things too. You know, when UCLA and all the researchers, which were about 20 or 30 that were in that small room, they all witnessed one of the entity beings like manifest. They were a witness to that. They saw a skillet fly out of a cupboard, like fly across the room. Just random objects like the stuff with the Uriah heat record, the plants. It started with typical poltergeist activity, you know, and it just escalated. One thing I wanted to ask about Barry Taff's position on this, and again, we're coming from a more academic perspective here in that with his writings about the case, did he seem to maintain even towards the end or everything's wrapped up and had years have passed that it was more of a case of Doris manifesting psychokinetic energy and poltergeist activity rather than outside spirits because maybe they didn't want to believe as much in malevolent entities and spirits rather than more so wanted to focus on human beings causing this kind of really spectacular parapsychological or psychokinetic energy manifesting through her. Was he more of that kind of angle in that this is more of a human, living human kind of thing rather than a spiritual, other side, dark, you know, dark entities kind of case? That was the angle that UCLA and Barry and Terry Gaynor approaches, you know. Yeah. They believe that it was her psychic abilities that was causing a lot of this attack that because she was under duress and she was stressed out financially, they associated the three entities with her three sons. And they wanted to paint that picture that, you know, they were causing so much tension in the household that she didn't know where to put it, where it was coming out in these forms. But, I mean, it's a theory, right? Sure. I don't know what to say about that because it doesn't explain anything else. It doesn't explain the old lady. It doesn't explain the information that I found to Seal Thomas. It doesn't explain the shadow being in the kitchen. Right. So, I don't know. But, yeah, that was their angle on this. They were like, okay, well, maybe she's causing this and this is because of her voice. You know, they're coming of age and there's some sort of, like, sexual tension that might be construed in some sort of, like, abnormal psychological way. But there was no evidence for that. And the more I talked to Brian and to James, that was never the case. There's been an implication over the years, and I'm not even sure who made them, that there was some kind of inappropriate relationship between the kids and her. And then that's what was happening. And the ghost part was a cover-up for that. But do you think that there's any truth to any of that? And how do her sons feel about the fact that that got out there in the world? It's understandable that you would go that route as a scientist, as a psychologist. You would think about those things. But there's no truth to that. Doris had a very open relationship with James. She shared a lot with them, you know, that they were like friends. And this is a different time, you know, just coming from the 60s and all that. And she was just a free spirit. So because of the way she was with her own sexuality, I think she was tarnished. I know that the researchers thought that she was like a little bit promiscuous, that she was bringing in men, and she didn't know if she was being like drugged, or maybe she doesn't remember having had sex, or whatever. Or maybe she did have an inappropriate relationship with her sons. That was the angle they were coming from. But that was never the case. And I asked James about that, and he answered truthfully, and he was upset. They would even go that far when they had spent some time with them and inside the house, and they saw what was happening. But yet they still pushed this narrative as a maybe or a possible explanation. Right. We can see them kind of grasping at logical straws here, because that's another step. And we talked about this in part one on the framing of the academic world, and that they're more likely to believe that this is caused by a human nature as phenomenal and spectacular as that is. It's more live human cause than spirit world, because that's another level that they can't really and don't want to delve into. And that they're more likely to believe, like, no, the human mind is pretty powerful. And it's some kind of ESP that she's displaying here, and where she's getting this unknown information, rather than a spirit delivering it to her. Yeah, she's reading people's minds and seeing into the Akashic Record or whatever. There could be some truth to that. Like, there's so many variables in this story. Like, it was their job, and I'm talking about UCLA, it was their job to go in there and investigate. And now, one of the things I do remember that James was a witness to, that when Dr. Thelma Moss, the head of the psychology department for UCLA, she went to visit the Byther Place after the second or third time. And James was present there, and he heard what she had told Barry and Carrie. And she was very straightforward when she said, like, you know, you have to make sure that this is not a hoax. You have to make sure that, you know, she's not, like, you know, on any drugs or substance or abuse or anything like that, because our reputation's on the line. And what they wanted was hard evidence that these things were happening, right? So I think that drove the team, that put pressure on the team to record something, to show academia and to show the world, like, hey, this is real, and here's proof that ghosts exist. And so UCLA is deeply involved at this point. And remember, they spent 10 weeks at that house, and that was the extent of the research in Braddock Drive, just 10 weeks worth of data. They would set up these grids all over the bedroom, right? And each board had a number in it. So when they would take a picture of these manifestations of war, they can kind of track a reference as to where it appeared in the room and whatnot. It was very meticulous scientific data, you know? Why would a scientist put those things on the wall if they hadn't seen something that they now want to prove to other people has happened? Because they had seen the skillet fly on their first visit. Exactly. That's my point. They put up there because they were experiencing something, and now they're trying to collect data on it. If you didn't believe it, or you didn't think anything was happening, or you hadn't seen anything, why would you even bother to put up a tracking system or a measurement system on the walls? Correct. Their first visit, I think within the first hour, they had a case file that they were writing down their information doors, like name, date of birth, claims, and everything. And I remember that James had told me that he saw them put a big P on the case file for psychotic. Right. Because they didn't believe her. And at first, you know, she's drunk, she's off her rocker, she's not making any sense. It's just, you know, a hoax. But it was then that they saw the skillet fly across, and then they started experiencing like cold spots and the smells. So that got them interested enough to come back with equipment instead of the boards and everything like that. And from that point on, their mission was to antagonize these spirits in order to get a reaction. Because every time they would, they would get a reaction. Right. They would hear like popping noises. They would see balls of light, and they would get the smells and the cold spots. So there was a lot of witnesses to this. It's a shame that none of this data exists. As far as I know, like, I tried to contact UCLA's department. Nobody was very helpful. But I don't even know if they know that they had a parapsychology department back in the 70s. So that data is probably sitting in some basement somewhere, or it might have been destroyed. But the data was like, you know, audio recordings of their reactions to things. Because they tried to film the orbs, and they couldn't get many of them. You know, they tried to record on video. And back then, the technology wasn't as good. But they were using some infrared film and whatnot. And even then, they couldn't capture anything. But it was in one of those situations when they would tell Doris, hey, can you be more aggressive and taunt these entities? And half the time, Doris was drunk. She was under the influence because she just couldn't cope with things. So she would start drinking. She would have a sense of, like, you know, courage, right? Yeah. So she would get up there in front of everybody and be like, show yourself. Like, you know, where are you? You cowards. Like, I think what the famous line is, like, now that I have my army with me, you guys are not here. And that would get a reaction. That would get, like, you know, these balls of light, the popping sounds, the wasping, like, you know, green mist or whatnot coming to the room. And then they would ask James, hey, can you play your Uriah Heep record? Because we want to capture this on film. We want to see these lights. And to them, it was, like, sort of like a parlor trick. It was like, you know, like, remember the movie Beetlejuice when they go in there and they're trying to do the seance and they're having fun. That's what it seemed like to James, what they were doing. They were just kind of, like, so excited, like, high-fiving each other, while at the same time, these kids are terrorized. Yeah. Just somber, not doing anything. It was an interesting dynamic that was happening in that house, you know, because as far as James and them were concerned, like, these guys were professionals and they were there to help. And they were going to get to the bottom of this and they were going to have a solution so that they wouldn't have to suffer. But instead, all they got was just more and more, like, we want to capture this. We want evidence. It's important to get evidence. They're becoming, or I guess they have been fixated on collecting proof and evidence and something we've talked about on the show. The difference in where people are on their journeys when they get into the paranormal is when you go into the place and you take 25 tons of gear and then after you've been doing it a long time, you just kind of go in with a stick of chewing gum and if you see something, you write it down, you know? One camera, one recorder. But Scott, this is, what's funny, what I notice here is the attitude is as much as the academic viewpoint might be very dismissive and eye-rolling towards, especially these cable ghost hunting shows, they're doing the same thing. You know, you have to realize that a TV show, they're only there for a short amount of time, same with these folks, much longer, of course, with 10 weeks, but they need to get something on tape or on film or recorded. They need some proof here and evidence. And so what they're doing is taunting these, which they say never to do, but they're doing the same things that they might laugh at with some of the hosts on these shows. And even people that are well-respected will go in and sometimes have to taunt a little bit because, as I've always said, you know, having done just a few ghost investigations or been part of one, if you go into a party as a live human being and you stand in the corner and you don't talk to anybody, well, you don't get really anybody talking to you. Somebody might come up to you occasionally, but you have to be interactive for people to talk to you and to get some action going. And I think it's the same on the other side. If you don't ask questions, and maybe taunting is too much, but if you're not interactive, you're likely not to get anything because they're also, as you said, with your toddler shadow baby, that they're curious too, is to see what you're going to do, what you're going to say. They're observing us as well. But the point is that they're going in and doing the same things because it's human nature. You poke the bear to get the bear to growl. I always found that fascinating when it comes to like, you know, parapsychology or ghost hunters on these shows. It's like, you know, everybody talks about, you know, going into a location and being a recorder to get some EVPs or the fluctuation of this and that and whatnot. But what does that really mean? Yeah. What can you deduce from that? Like, are spirits out there communicating through us via electronics? Like, I don't know. I don't know. And in this case, there wasn't anything that they gathered from all this. It was more like, you know, let's do this. And then you get a split second reaction and everybody would clap and high five. And that was it for the end of the night. Right. There were times where, like, you would just get a popping sound or a light and that's it. But you're right to the point where they would leave the place with whatever evidence they collected or their spirits hide. But the family was left to deal with the aftermath. And the aftermath being that whenever UCLA went to that house on Braddock Drive, that Doris paid for it. These forces, like, took it on her and it would get really bad every single time UCLA was there. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of. Or artificial sweeteners do all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. You shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious. And that's what makes Aloha stand out. Aloha protein bars nail the delicious and nutritious. They're USDA organic and made with ingredients that actually grow somewhere. It's their whole taste that grows philosophy. 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And they were reporting to her, and she was the one that was very serious about, we've got to get proof. We've got to get evidence. I want to make sure this isn't just a hysterical situation and that sort of thing. She was a famous American actress. Her name, she was born Thelma Schnee in 1918. She passed away in February of 1997. Now, apparently her whole life dealt with some psychological problems of her own depression because of her husband passed away right after one of their children was born. However, she was fascinated with this kind of stuff. And she studied at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, got a PhD in psychology from UCLA and became a professor there. And she studied parapsychology, including hypnosis, ghosts, levitation, and alternative medicine. And then she did a bunch of research on Curly and photography, which we have barely talked about, but it's a fascinating idea. So that was the main root of her work was Curly and photography. But the other thing is she had gone out to LA to become a screenwriter and actress, and her biggest success was a screenplay of a movie that she wrote for Alec Guinness called Father Brown, which did get made. I haven't seen this movie, but I've been reading about it a little bit. We'll have to watch it now. But one of the things that's interesting about this, for those of you who know Alec Guinness was namely Obi-Wan Kenobi, which went from the movie that he initially called the little science fiction film that he made, but he was out to dinner with her in Hollywood and they were eating when James Dean came up to their table and they spoke. And we talked about this in our series on James Dean's car supposedly being cursed and haunted, Little Bastard, which is missing to this day. That car disappeared after Dean died. And that dinner at that encounter was when Alec Guinness, for whatever reason, told Dean that he was going to die in that car. And it was only a week before he did die. And so sitting at the table with him that night was this person that Carrie and Barry were reporting to during the investigation of the entity house. So everything is connected. That's quite a coincidence. Of course, you know, it's California. It's everybody's, you know, it's what's Moss went out there to get into acting, performing, and so did Doris Bither. Yeah. So, Javier, tell me, like, how long did the investigation go on and why did it stop? The investigation went on for about 10 weeks on Braddock Drive, but then it continued sporadically after that point. And the main reason it stopped was because Doris stopped communicating with the researchers. She stopped talking about it. She stopped mentioning anything even to her own family about the attack. So there was a good maybe two decades where not much information is known about Doris. She just decided that whatever they were doing wasn't working and she was going to change the course of how it was being investigated then. Sort of in a way, it was more like she was running away from things, I think, you know. Yeah. After about 10 weeks, you know, they weren't getting any results. This is why, like, in the beginning, Doris and Candace were trying to get some answers. But then when UCLA showed up, they kind of, like, stopped their path. Because if you remember, they had done a seance and one of the spirits from the board told Doris that it was a ghost of a police officer that was haunting her. Right. Right. That she had in a previous life had killed him and he was back for revenge. So her and Candace went off that premise that, you know, there was a slain police officer. They were trying to make amends and trying to see if they can help the spirit move on to the other side. But that's where it ended. It didn't follow up with that lead or anything like that. Now, going back to what we're talking about, like, you know, communicating with spirits, how do we know that this was the truth? How do we know that the Ouija board wasn't telling her some other things, right? So what happened after that? She wound up leaving Culver City at some point, right? After repeated attacks, it did attack James. They couldn't get any information. They couldn't get any help from UCLA. And things were just getting worse and worse for them. And so the landlord was instrumental in helping Doris, like, leave that place because they had nowhere else to go. She had no money. She was strapped for cash. She had no families. It was either stay in the house or be homeless, go to a shelter with her kids. But after a while, she managed to find a new apartment in Carson. Carson being about, I don't remember, it's about maybe 20, 30 minute drive from Culver City going south. Yeah. So she moved to Carson. And when she moved, she stopped communicating with Barry and Carrie. She wanted to just hide and start over again. But the thing is, in Carson, within a couple of months, the activities started up again. Now, it wasn't at the level where it was on Braddock Drive. She wasn't being attacked like that. There was no, like, sexual assault or anything like that. It was along the lines of apparitions, smells, voices. She was in Carson with them. And there were a neighbor couple that she befriended. And these guys, from what James told me, they were like bikers, like outlaws or whatnot. So they were like the party people. They somehow took the place of Candace because Doris had confided in there what was going on. So they would also start drinking, smoking a little bit of weed or whatnot. And then, like, you know, doing soundness to trying to get this information. Trying to get help for Doris. At that point, James was, I think he was 17, going on 18. And he was just graduating high school. And he was just, like, infuriated with her. But he also understood because they had just moved. They thought it was Braddock Drive that was causing all this. But they moved to a new location, to a new apartment. And the activities are happening again. There were still shadows, apparitions. There were the phantom smells, the cold spots were happening. And one of the scariest things that happened to them was, in Doris' bedroom in that apartment, James was outside in the living room, and he heard his mother screaming. He runs inside the bedroom, and she's pointing at the wall, saying, like, it just walked through the wall, meaning one of the entities. And in the wall, they saw the outline of a person, but it was made out of beads of water, water droplets. Oh. Okay. But he could clearly see the outline of, like, you know, the head, the shoulders, the torso, legs, the arms, everything. And at that point is when she decided to call UCLA again. Okay. So it had been months at that point. I don't remember exactly how many months, but it was months that passed that they didn't hear anything from Doris. And out of the blue, she called them again, and she's like, hey, it's happening. So Dr. Barry Taff and Carrie Gaynor drove to the new location, and they continued their investigation. There were some seances performed. There were some recordings. They didn't capture anything, of course, on video or whatnot, but there was an incident that James told me about when Doris was with her friends, and they recorded via audio one of the seances. Now, when this seance was happening, there were four adults in the room and James. They were all sitting around, and they were asking a question, but they didn't get any response. So they stopped the tape, rewound the tape, and played again, and listened carefully, and while they were asking the questions, they heard footsteps. While they were talking amongst themselves and asking those questions, they couldn't hear anything, but it was only after they played the tape that they heard footsteps going around the table. As soon as that happened, Doris' friend, he was picked up and thrown across the room. I remember that, I think it was you, Forrest, who asked me if there was any levitations and whatnot, and I don't consider this a levitation, more of a big push, kind of like how James was pushed. You're right. So he was sitting on the chair, and just he flew up and hit the wall, and he just fell. So there was that going on. When that happened, this couple took off and never came back, and it's kind of the same thing that happened to Candace back in Brodick Drive. Candace and her husband, I think, had a hard time dealing with what was happening with Doris. When they were smacked in the face with how intense it could be. Right. And after a while, she just disappeared. I think she moved away, but she disappeared. Yeah. And there was this Doris back again, just alone, dealing with this stuff. And then fast forward to her being in Carson, and this happening again. She was talking to Carrie and Barry, and they were doing some research. They were doing the same things, but she wasn't getting any information. And eventually, things started slowing down a bit, less and less activity happening in that apartment. And it was around that time where James just, he found a job in Texas. So he was hesitant, but he left. He left his mother and his siblings, and he moved to Texas, and he started his own life. And at that point is when we don't have much information, because we know that Doris did move around a lot, and she didn't keep tabs with UCLA. So from Carson, she moved to San Bernardino. So she's keeping within Southern California. I mean, is this because of economic opportunities or work? I think she had a boyfriend, and he moved her out there. So there was some financial things going on. Right. He was abusive. I think there was some mention of him being abusive, physically abusive and whatnot. But when I talked to James about it, you know, he tells me that his mother did date some bad people, but his mother always had a sense of, like, just how to take care of herself. Right. Yeah. She moves to San Bernardino, and James just keeps in touch with her every so often, like, you know, calling her, how are you doing? What's going on? She never reported anything. He did ask her, is it still happening? She said no. She didn't feel the need to contact, you know, Barry Taft and Carrie Gaynor. But around that time, she was in talk with Frank DiFellita, who was the author of the book, The Entry. So James was upset. He told me that he spoke with his mother about it, and he said, you know, you're finally getting some sort of relief, and you're still involved in this? You're trying to make money off of this? Yeah. You want something for all your troubles? We've mentioned this before, everything's, oh, you're in it to make money, but at some point, it's like, well, it's sitting right there. And do we know how Frank DiFellita found out about the story to even write a book about it? You know, the first real article about this happened in September of 1975. It was an article that was published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the IEEE, I think. Yeah, yeah. IEEE. Right. It's a very famous journal, right? Scientific Journal. It was published there in September of 1975, and the title was Hell of a Haunt. So that's where, like, you know, UCLA started putting all the information, all the data of the case, what type of cameras they used, the speed, the film speed, and everything, right? It was very technical. They posted everything in there. And I think that's where Frank DiFellita found that information, and he contacted him. Okay. Because I was also told that it wasn't just him that was snooping around. It was also the author of The Exorcist, William Blatley, right? Yeah. He was the one also trying to snoop around for that story, but as soon as they heard about him, they denied him any kind of, like, you know, access to the place. So the only one that got in was Frank DiFellita, and he wrote that book. So he spent some time with Doris, and he got her side of things and also UCLA's side of things, and he made a story based off of that for his book, The Entity. So she was talking to him, and they were trying to work something out. Now, when Doris was excited when this was happening, because she was getting some sort of attention that she didn't have before. It was a positive attention. It wasn't just about, like, you know, let's try to get this, let's try to get that. He was really, like, you know, trying to get her side of things and trying to understand what had happened to her. So she trusted him. When she told this to James, James was just upset, you know? He was like, why are you doing this? Why are you trying to make money off of this? I thought everything was fine. I thought you had almost forgotten about it all this. Well, not forgotten about it, but, you know, it was in the past. Because for a few years, he had called in, and they had a relationship over the phone, and she wouldn't say anything. She would just say, no, no, everything's fine. You know, it stopped, and I haven't had any issues going on. But now you're back at it again. Now you're talking, trying to make a movie that's only going to bring more attention, and heaven forbid, it brings these things back. And, you know, her point was like, you know, well, I didn't get any help from anybody. They all came, they studied me, but they really didn't help me. And I was left alone to deal with all this stuff. So, you know, at least I can get some money out of this and, you know, help myself out, right? So, I get it. She wanted to tell her story, and she wanted others to know what she had been through. I totally don't understand that. The problem is that she wasn't educated enough to sign the proper contract when it came to the rights of her story. Yeah. Because they took a lot of liberties, and they changed a lot of things. Yeah. And that was one of the issues that James had with it, and he told her this. He was like, if you do this, they're probably going to offer you very little money, and they're going to, like, do whatever they want with your story, with your life. She didn't believe him. She thought, no, I have this contract here, and, you know, Frank is a very good friend of mine, and all this stuff, blah, blah, blah. But fast forward, like, a few years later, and the book and the movie was based on her life, but a lot of it was fictionalized, you know? It was hyped up. The poster for the movie, The Entity, it was so overly sexualized. Yeah. You see her in this, like, provocative, like, position in bed, and half naked, and with the sheet wrapped around her. It was done to make money, of course. And that was the issue that James had with it, and that was the problem that Doris had later, because she realized that, no, she only sold her story for $10,000. From the whole thing, she got $10,000. That was it. Yeah. I mean, she was happy to have that money, because, you know, she was strapped for cash. I think all her life, since, like, the 1960s, when all this started happening, she just had so many financial problems. She couldn't keep a job, basically, you know? And it's understandable, you know, when all this is happening. Absolutely. Well, she can never get ahead, and I think people have to realize, too, is that she also had dreams of stardom and making it in Hollywood, and here's a little bit of a connection to a book and possibly a movie and a little bit of fame. She was seeking that fame and attention, and here now she's going to get it, again, after all her troubles and suffering. And now that it's kind of dying down, as they say, pain has no memory, so maybe that's fading as well. And it's like, well, you know what? I should get something out of this. I went through a lot, and my family did as well, but she's seeing it now as, like, I think I deserve this. I've earned a little bit of cash out of this, but just, again, it's ironic, her wanting to break into show business and then getting ripped off by it, as many folks do with selling their stories. You never end up making the big bucks, as people often accuse you of doing. It is a good observation that, you know, she did go to L.A. for that particular reason. She wanted to be in entertainment. She wanted to experience that lifestyle. And in the end, I guess she sort of did, you know? Not the way she thought it would, but, I mean, her story is a big story. I think she was very upset with Frank Tifelita at that point because she realized, like, she kept calling him. She kept hounding him for more money. Hey, you know, you sold this, and you sold that, and you changed this, and you said you weren't going to change it. And now the movie is out, and it's showing something completely different. Spoiler alert. You might find out how the movie ends if you haven't seen it here in the next few minutes. Like in the movie, towards the end, the character for Dr. Thelma Moss, she has an idea to, like, recreate Doris' bedroom in the lab in UCLA. Yeah, right. And then have her, like, you know, taunt the ghost, and the ghost appears. And then they use Freon or whatever it is to, like, freeze the ghost. And then they crack the ghost or whatever, right, and explode. And that's how they kill the ghost, which is very scientific and science fiction. Right. And also, it robs stories of her story. Yeah, exactly. Right. It even takes it out of her house. But, I mean, when I saw the movie years ago, it was a fascinating concept, I thought. Can you actually, like, take something like liquid nitrogen vapor and freeze something that is – well, you can freeze, of course, physical objects here, but something that is ethereal like that. Or does a ghost have mass? That's a big question. And can you manipulate it? Obviously, a lot of ghost hunters will tell you you can put up a laser grid, and they'll bend light. They're blocking things from our world. They can pinch us. They can slap us. Can we affect them? And I thought it was a fascinating concept. But, yeah, by that point in the movie, it's taken it literally out of the house into the lab, where now she's just basically a test rat. It's the ghost in the jar, too, right? Well, literally, yeah. If you can freeze it, then you can capture it. At least you can photograph it. And when's the battle royale? When's the boss battle? And this is it for this film, where they go up against it now. The entity is on their terms, is in their house. They have possibly the upper hand, but do they? And in this case, though, Doris, she's kind of past the story. It seemed to follow her. I did a quick side question, though. Do we know if anybody else involved with the case? Did anybody get any hitchhiker activity? There was a person who was a photographer for the researchers. She was a professional photographer that they would call on at times just to get her help on things. And she had showed up to the place. And, you know, she was young. She didn't quite exactly know what she was getting into. But then she happened to, like, you know, visit once. And then she saw some orbs. She tried to photograph them and all. And then when she got home is when she felt sick. She was terrified because she had this feeling of, like, you know, just foreshadowing or just doom itself. Right. Right. I don't think she reported any poltergeist activity. But there was some strange, like, I would say, knocking her voices, maybe, that she experienced. But outside of that, the hitchhiker effect in this case was not very present. Yeah. As far as I know, I mean, the kids had it. James with the shadow people, right? But outside of the family, no. I don't think so. In the movie, there's a scene where Doris Bader is driving and the entity or the forces, the unseemed forces, take control of the car and try to kill her that way. That did happen in real life. And according to James, he came home that day and she was just in hysterics. She was freaking out. She just crying, sobbing. And she was uncontrollable, I should say. And she just told him, like, yeah, I was driving down the street. And all of a sudden, the pedal went all the way to the floor. The steering wheel locked and it started turning. And I couldn't control the car. She was terrified by that. So that's something that's in the movie. I don't remember if it's the book, but it is in the movie. And it did happen. It was a true event. Forrest, something similar happened in the true story behind the Exorcist case, didn't it? When they were trying to, Ronnie was, and speaking of, again, it's all a little bit connected, especially with Hollywood and big stories like this and William Peter Blatty, who wrote the Exorcist and helped with the screenplay on the movie. And here we have the real boy from the Exorcist story, Ronnie, who I think they were trying to take him to the dormitory at the church, at the Catholic church, where they were going to kind of keep him while the priests were going to work on him. And that car almost crashed. I think either getting to there or since it's been a while here, basically the car went out of control and the steering wheel kind of thing lurched, drove up onto the curb, I believe. It was not a fluke. It wasn't just, you know, sometimes that does happen mechanically, but here we do seem to have some attachment to her specifically. And so I just want to get back to that point where people talking about, is it the house, the land, or the person? You know, is it the building, the house, or the person that is the anchor to this kind of spiritual activity? And here it seemed to start off as Doris was open to it back in her youth, because again, it happened before she even moved to Culver City. We were talking about Santa Monica and small occurrences and her childhood and the upheaval there and her free spirit colliding with her parents' traditional religious values. And so there was a little bit of a turmoil. So she was probably a door that was left unlocked a little bit open for these kind of things to happen. And then she gets to Culver City and it starts to uncork. And then now it's kind of attached a little bit to her, where it's following her around in the car. And then, of course, as you said, to Carson, California. I don't want to get ahead with the theory discussion, but I'm just going to put it out there now. It's like, it does make you wonder if she, about the hitchhiker effect and her just kind of dragging these things with her. And then she just happens to be passing through some dark areas. And if the house on Braddock was already, already had something, and then she comes in the door and she's already bringing some stuff with her and also doing Ouija sessions and that sort of thing. And then this just keeps accumulating because it seems like whenever, and no disrespect to the Byther family, but it seems a little bit like she was kind of taking almost all the wrong steps in terms of how to mitigate it. It just seemed to exacerbate it, make it worse. I think she did. She took all the wrong steps. You are correct. What's perplexing to me about this case is if it's a location haunting, it was Braddock Drive that was the catalyst that everything was happening. But this started happening in Santa Monica in 1968 when she started to dabble in the occult. But it only was physically attacking her on Braddock Drive. The shadows were only on Braddock Drive. The researchers all saw something in Braddock Drive. The boys experienced something on Braddock Drive. Once they leave that, then it stops, but there's just some sort of, like, vestiges, I guess, of the haunting that continue. So I don't know if there was, like, a hitchhiker effect or it's a locational haunting because we have the old lady who comes in and says, yeah, I lived here when I was a child. And it's definitely haunted or something evil. But then you have people who own the house, like, in between that time who didn't report anything. There's people who don't report anything now. Like, they live in that house. You know, I think the house is for rent right now. Nobody has reported anything. I haven't made contact or anything like that. If whoever lives in that house is not aware of this, then I'll just keep it like that, you know? I don't want to be the person to tell them, hey, by the way, something happened here. You don't want to be the old lady showing up at the door telling them. Well, yeah, I mean, and if you believe any of this at all, you've got to go back to the old, was the old lady an old lady? Or was that a spectral being or something from another plane? I don't know. We've heard stories as well of people delivering warnings. And then it turns out they suddenly vanished or weren't people at all. And you wonder if that was some kind of good force that lived there. But in this case, with the more detail of her saying she lived there as a little girl, I mean, we have no track on her or who she was. But it is odd, as we were saying, that she would be kind of keeping tabs maybe on the house or just driving by every once in a while. Maybe she lived in the area. But it's just kind of an odd thing to do. For the entirety of her life, she was a little girl to like, I would guess she was in the late 70s or 80s when she knocked on the door. And to have that kind of dedication or that memory about what happened had to be something horrific to her, right? So maybe these ghosts were, or these spirits, or whatever you want to call these, were attacking people back then. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you have a little battle going here on the other side where it sounds like you have some very dark, negative, evil-minded presences. And then you have ones that are more neutral or even nice, Mr. Who's It. There's a bunch of things going on in the location. We've often heard that as well. There's a lot of different entities. It's not just one thing or one force. You hear this a lot, too, if you watch some of those paranormal survivor shows and whatnot, that somebody will come in and do a cleansing. And they accidentally get rid of a good spirit that was trying to help them or mitigate the bad actions. And then things get worse because perhaps the dark entities weren't as prone or vulnerable to these procedures, these spiritual cleansing procedures, and that they leave. And now the activity gets worse because now there's no spirit on the other side kind of helping them or doing battle with them, you could say. And here, like, you wonder, yeah, if the old lady who showed up, if she was spectral or just a real person, oddly, who just happened to be driving by and said, oh, there's people here now. It's being rented again. I should warn them. And how she got there and where she went to. And she did, at least Doris, had some activity that went with her. And so you do wonder if the evil part stayed there. And then she kind of took some good spirits with her. I mean, she had it before, right? When she was in Santa Monica, she started seeing some things. But before that, as far as I know, as far as, like, James knows, she never had any issues in her childhood or anything like that. When it comes to the ghosts, they're paranormal. Right. I don't know. The fact that it only was concentrated on that house, but then, again, people who live there now don't report anything. As far as we know, yeah. As far as we know, right? Right. It hasn't been anything. But I also find it baffling when people say, like, you know, there was a ghost in my house and it was a good ghost. And then we had two other spirits that were really bad and they were fighting and they were trying to protect. Like, how do you know that? Like, how do you know that's the case, right? Because as far as we know, like, if you talk to the UFO people, the UFO people will tell you, like, you know, if you ask them what a UFO is, they're going to tell you what's a craft from another dimension or it comes from another planet or some sort of, like, you know, government tech. Like, there's so many theories, but everybody, like, assumes that their theory is correct. Right. And in this case, there was a lot of assumption, too. Yeah. You know, like Doris assumed, like, you know, she. She, in her previous life, she killed somebody. She killed a police officer. And so now she's paying for it. I don't know who Mr. Who's it was. It's like I told you, because I try to find out the people that died in the house and information, but the records were gone. So I don't know. It's a mystery. But I do know that the further away she moved, the less she reported. Right. Right. You come down to the whole hitchhiker thing. You wonder if there's, like, a maximum orbit, you know, from home base for something. Or maybe it was just a change in her nature, the nature of how she was going to let it treat her. Maybe she figured out a way to reduce that interaction, and the geography had nothing to do with it. But as she's getting older, perhaps the activity is matching her aging as well, and things getting a little bit more quiet. Her energy, her spiritual energy, all of that stuff. Yeah. Something is kind of quieting down in her life. Although, I mean, she's hanging out with people that she's probably not partying as much. I mean, who knows? You said there's a little bit of that going on still. I think it has to do with the people you're surrounding yourself with and that kind of energy. How old is she at this point when she does move to Carson and James has moved on to Texas? It's in her early 40s. So James goes to Texas, and he continues, you know, talking to his mother here and there. But for years, she denied that everything happened. I know that there was a point in time when she was in San Bernardino that she did call Barry Taff again and was claiming that she was pregnant by these unseen entities, by these ghosts. And I think what ended up happening was an ectopic pregnancy. I don't have any information on that. I don't know if it's true or not because this is based on what Barry Taff told me. James was not aware of this conversation. So I don't know if she had a partner and she became pregnant and she thought it was like the ghost or whatever. But that tells me that she was still being attacked, that these things were still happening around that time, you know, in the mid-80s. Right. Which she denied. Fast forward a few years, you know, and Doris is in her 50s, and she moves to Texas to be closer to James because James is more established. She has a house. He's going to, you know, help her out and whatnot. And they continued their relationship. They were very close. And every now and then he would tell, like, you know, what happened with this? What happened with that? To deal with the book would come up again. And they would, like, have an argument about it, talk about it. But throughout all that, she just denied everything. She denied that she was still being haunted and whatnot. And it so happened that one day she was staying with James and he lived alone at this point. I think he was divorced. I don't remember. He lived alone. And one night he had happened to walk past her room and he saw a flash of light. He saw a flash of light coming from underneath the door. He stopped for a minute. Everything was quiet. And he saw another flash of light. And all of a sudden, he hears his mother say, get away from me. Get away from me. And he didn't know what to think. So he knocks on the door. He opens the door. And he tells her, is it still happening? And she didn't say anything. And I think a week after that, she passed away. Again, you said you saw the certificate that was heart failure or respiratory failure? Acute cardiopulmonary arrest, which is a heart attack. So I don't think they knew what really happened. So that was on her death certificate. But from the mid-80s to 1999, she claimed that she wasn't being attacked or she wasn't being harassed or followed or whatnot. She made no contact with anybody besides her son. And it so happened that James caught that. So it never really left her. So as far as hitchhikers, I guess, I mean, it started back in 1968. And it ended in 1999. Something in your blog that really struck me, I really love this piece of writing here in your article. That's part two of you talking about this case. Part one being Dr. Barry Taft's thoughts on the case. And then you finish up with part two here. And what you say here is Doris Byther passed away alone in a room, a room from which her son reported seeing balls of light appear just as they did back in the early 70s. You see, Doris died a haunted woman. And I think that's a great sum of her life here is that whatever was going on, she was a target for it, kind of exacerbated it. And it followed her perhaps until her death or something was keeping an eye on her, much as the old Mexican woman was keeping an eye on the house. Something was always there present. And it may have, I mean, we always say, who knows what the sense of time is or if there's any sense of time on the other side. And, okay, so nothing happens for 10 years, but that could be 10 seconds to a consciousness on the other side. It doesn't seem to matter. And so they're just there and they pop in when they will. And from your statement here, did James see her at the moment she passed away and that's when the orbs appeared? Or was this, again, like you said, connected with this flash of light that he saw? He had seen the flash of light. So he knew, I mean, he remembered what they were. He knew exactly what it was, you know. Right. He also, I mean, reported that around that time he felt the cold spots in his house where he did it before. But once his mom moved in, he started to feel that again. So when he confronted her, she flat out denied it. And he said, I just saw the orbs. I just saw the light, you know. Yeah. She was like, no, no, no. And she just like, you know, denied it and tried to change the subject and just ignored him basically. But, you know, he was a grown man, so he didn't want, he was so tired of it. He didn't know what to think because, you know, they had that argument. About the movie and the script and how she treated it all. And he was just upset. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of. Or artificial sweeteners do all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. You shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious. 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Yeah, I did walk away from ghost theory for a minute. And I told you guys earlier, it was due to mental health. You know, it was just, it had gone to me. It wasn't the writing. It wasn't the other stories. It was this story that got to me. I mean, every day I had to deal with, you know, reconstructing this woman's life. And Doris' life was the life of an abuse victim. She called for help. She asked for help. She begged for help. And people that would come in and show up, they weren't really listening to her. And I mentioned in part one where I was just like, you know, I was having a lot of nightmares. It was just so negative, you know, being inundated and surrounded by this story that I kind of just like walked away from it all. Well, I did finish the book, you know, years ago. And I sent it to an editor. I got it edited and everything. But during all that time, I was less and less involved with ghost theory. Yeah. And ghost theory has a fan page on Facebook, which is ran by Vinci Sales. She's been like instrumental in helping me with ghost theory. And she's been promoting it. And when I was away, she kind of stepped up and she was like, you know, dealing with the questions, the Q&As and everything. But I had to step out of that for a minute. But as soon as I did that, I began my journey in martial arts, you know, and I got really good, you know, in that. So I became an instructor and I taught classes in Los Angeles. And then when I moved to New York, I also taught classes for Krav Maga Self-Defense in Manhattan for a number of years. And that surrounded me with people who were like-minded, right? They were training. They were just like all this stuff. So it took me away from that. And I enjoyed that because it was kind of like a new beginning for me. Like I didn't have to think about it. I put that book, it was finished. And I put it up in the attic and just forgot about it. But even though things were happening, I was, you know, reaching these milestones. I became a father at age 40 and I was just excited. But there was always that nagging feeling that that goes in the attic. You know what I mean? That it's still there, you know, it's still nagging and everything. And it wasn't really like until you guys sent me that email that I got excited about the whole thing again. Sorry about that. I thought I left it behind, man. Yeah. No, but seriously, like Astonishing Legends, like I listened to this podcast way back in the day and like, I like what you guys do. So when I saw that email, I was excited and I said, what am I doing, right? Because in the beginning, there was a lot of like insecurities with this. Like I would get so many people just saying like, oh, you're writing sucks. Like, you know, you should get back to do whatever you were or death threats, like all this craziness, right? And the pressure was just building to release this book. Yeah. And I started to doubt myself. I'm like, am I going to do Doris by their any justice by telling this story? But then I started to think about, you know, well, this is the story is not a story from the point of view of Doris or the investigators, but her son. Yeah. Scott, you and I were talking about it earlier, how you relate to the things that are happening like that. And I felt a lot of guilt in abandoning the story. But at the same time, like I really had to like think about what I was doing to myself and where I wanted to go with this. You know, whenever you were talking about that, and I've already mentioned this in part one, but that openness between James and his mother, Doris. Yeah. I had the same kind of relationship with my mom. You know, she was a single mother bringing me up. And again, I didn't have siblings, as I said, but, and my mom wasn't really dating, but all of this stuff about like what we lived in Denver and there was, you know, there were books around the house of his famous book, Our Bodies, Ourselves about women. And for that, like all of that was a different time, which I think a lot of younger people might not understand what, what that was like. And they might be critical of when you're describing what that relationship was like between James and Doris. But I understand it, you know, I'm not too far away. They're a little, all of them a little older than me, but I wasn't too far behind in that culture. It's still there, but in Denver, especially Denver's a very hippie town. I don't know if you've spent any time there, Javi, but. Very little time. Yeah. It's a beautiful place now. In the seventies, when I was a kid there, it was the dirtiest area in the country, just about, but. Yeah, the mile high of smog. The smog was unbelievable. They fixed that. But there's a lot of things about it that I relate to and, and, and James's scenario as well. And I guess, you know, it's interesting to me that they came to you after they found what you had been writing and it gave them a chance to kind of even it out and get it where they wanted it to be, or at least get their voices heard out there. And that's what I hope that we can do too, is bring that to a wider audience to kind of set the record straight, which is something that Forrest and I like to do when we can, can't always do that with these kinds of stories. It's hard. Right. Because, you know, you don't have survivors or it happened so long ago, records are lost. There's always a fire. There's always records are lost in a fire. Right, yeah, of course. Or there was one story we covered where the, the policeman investigating it had all of these records in a shed behind his house. And when he died, his wife burnt the shed to the ground. Oh no. Yeah. That was the Somerton man. Yeah. Yeah. That was the Somerton man. He was an investigator and he collected a lifetime of, of evidence and information. There's films and all kinds of stuff. He's been torched the whole thing, huh? Wow. Yeah. To them, they, it's just frustration and a mess and, uh, it's consumed this other person for so long and they're not in the shoes of the person who the story has consumed. And I understand where you're coming from here. And I just want people to know how I personally feel that this story, as long as it took years, it's been years since Scott and I first talked about this probably 2015, 16, like, this is a great story. Like, does anybody, uh, you know, back in when we started the podcast, has anyone done this? And we've been keeping notes and adding a little article here and there and doing a tiny bit of like research into who the players were and it's taken this long. And I just want people to know how kind of a coincidental or tenuous this resurgence is and that the story I feel is wanting to be told and the record wanting to be set straight. Scott put a message on ghost theory, I think in the comment section, didn't you, Scott? Yes. I mentioned this in part one. Just as a Hail Mary, right. In the part one is a Hail Mary shot in the dark. Like, I mean, how many people still monitor their messages? I can tell you had left the internet already. And I was like, this is just, I'm, I'm, I'm throwing a tennis ball after a train that pulled out of the station 20 minutes ago. Yeah. I caught it, bro. I caught that. Well, just, that's, I just wanted to ask you, cause I don't think we talked about this in part one. I think the last few messages on there, or of course, people who, you know, love the blog and they're asking about the book, when's that coming out? And the last few messages were from like 2011, I think. And suddenly now, and then, and 2024, were you getting these emails or updates when people post a message or? Yeah, I do. And for a long time, like every now and then, like when I first started posting the interviews and, and the stories by their blog posts, I was getting a lot of like people just reaching out to me, you know, telling me their stories. A lot of women who were saying like, Hey, it happened to me too. Yeah. I went through something similar and whatnot. It was just the outpour. And that's what made me feel like this is more common than, than I thought, you know? Right. Yeah. And it's one of those cases, like nobody really wants to touch because of the subject matter. And I do, I do remember reading something about when the, the internet movie was released in 1982, there was a backlash when it came to the movie in the UK. Oh, that's right. I read about that. Yeah. They were complaining about it. They were saying like, it was too graphic. Well, it had an X rating for a minute. I think, I don't think it released with an X rating, but maybe it had one and they had to recut it a little or something. But it was pretty intense because I did read about Barbara Hershey. She was reluctant to do some of the rape scenes they were portraying, but they were, they were like, well, we're going to have a body double, et cetera, you know? And then I was looking while we were talking about it and thinking about Doris only getting 10,000 forward, it made 13 million, but it costs nine to 11, they think to make it. So it didn't, it certainly didn't have a high profit margin, but she certainly could have gotten a lot more money. That's for sure. In that movie, the scenes of rape and the attack by the unseen entities, it is pretty strange to me at least, because when I talked to James and when James told me what his mother reported, it was nothing like in the movies where she's asleep and she starts feeling something and there's some sort of like a moment of enjoyment. At least that's what the movie portrayed a little bit in the beginning, but it was never like that, you know, because when these attacks would happen, right off the bat, the temperature in the room would drop and then the smell of decay or human feces will like permeate the whole room and then she would get attacked. So it wasn't, it wasn't anything that was building up slowly. It was just like, I'm here and boom, that was it. It's an immediately violent act. Correct. So this is why I had the problem with the movie and the book to see that aspect of it, of how you should be showing the true story of what this woman went through, you know, being attacked, sexually attacked. It's a violent crime, you know? Yeah. And if you try to like downplay or hide it or, or, or be against it, it speaks volumes, you know, as to where we are culturally. So what do we know about the house today? You said that you thought people were still renting it. Does the original structure still stand on Braddock Drive? It's still there. I know it's been remodeled. The outside facade looks a bit different from what I remember back in 2008. I know that property is the rental property, but I don't know exactly what's going on now. I don't know what happened when, when they moved out, because I know one store has moved out, like, you know, the, the landlord, she cleaned up the place. She got it fixed and then she rented out again, but there was no other issues, uh, reported. That often happened. I just want to say quickly, like with these famously haunted places, I personally believe that it can reside there. It has to do a little bit about the people living in it. It's like, we talked about the conjuring house quite a bit after the Pereira family moved out. The couple, I think that moved in, lived there for 20, 30 years, 30, over 30 years. They ran a daycare out of it for a number of years. They say that, uh, well, nothing now we never really had anything happen except for a few times that the kitchen table rattled, started shaking, vibrating by itself. But we thought maybe that was a truck, although there were no trucks passing by outside or a bus. And then all the, the dishes in the cabinets rattled by themselves. But we, again, we thought maybe that was just a, you know, just a passing big truck or something, uh, without having noticed one. And so nothing really happens. Although there's little hints and people like that who don't really want to believe it or don't care about it, just kind of brush it off as nothing. And, uh, again, we see this quite a bit with other people and, uh, famous places that have been haunted. It could be years or decades or other renters coming in one after the other and nothing ever really happening. But then again, you don't know, because if the people aren't willing to talk about it, then you kind of chalk that up to, that's quiet. It was just them or that family, or they were making it up again. It has to do with the people that are in it specifically, but it's not to say that things have kind of cleared up, uh, since then. Or again, I believe this could also be tied to the land itself. It could be ancient peoples living on it. You don't know what happened there. We're just, there's just so many possibilities, right? Like exactly. It could be the land, but then again, like, I don't think many people have reported anything since then. It's also like, um, a poltergeist case, you know? And I think, I think Dr. Barry Taff and Kerry Gaynor were kind of leading towards that, Torrey being a, some sort of poltergeist, uh, incident, which I guess it makes sense. And I agree if you study all the poltergeist cases, it has a lot of that, right? Absolutely. Well, I was going to say about the land versus the building and you never know what's, uh, you can only speculate and have a kind of a gut feeling of what's going on. But I used to work in Torrance, California, which is just the neighboring neighborhood city next to Carson heading West. And when I started working there, it was like, I don't know, seven, eight years old, 10 years old at the most and newly built. But I had felt that there was some little odd things happening in there. And then I started to ask people, it's like, you ever noticed, uh, things going on? And, uh, but I used to work there late a lot. And then, you know, it's just small things. Like one time I was stepping over a stack of laptops and I weirdly lost my balance in just a weird way that didn't feel like me losing balance as most people do. Like, not that I felt a shove, but just like, like I was thrown off, uh, somehow just like, whoa, I started to, I just even remarked like, that's odd that the physics didn't feel right. Or another time I'm there all by myself on the whole floor. And I hear somebody typing, you know, in one of the offices and it's like, Hey, somebody else is here too late. So I get up and go look and the office is dark. There's nobody there. And you start asking people like, Hey, have you noticed something? And then, you know, some of the gals are like, yeah, when you're in the women's bathroom, it feels like someone else is in there. And then like the door will rattle and, uh, and there's no one else there. And then you talk to the building managers like, Oh yeah, I call him George. It's like, there's a name. It's like, yeah, I don't know why. I just feel like, you know, I just got a sense like that's his name. So I started calling him George. And then, uh, you know, the push bars on the conference door will, will, will rattle or push in like somebody who's there. But again, it's not an, it's not an ancient historical building. It's a fairly new building. We don't know if somebody who worked there previously who'd passed away and wants to keep working, but the more you find out about it again, if you don't ask anybody, they don't really say they don't come forth with it, but you ask the cleaning crew there late at night, like, Oh yeah, we'll be vacuuming. And then the vacuum stops and we know somebody's unplugged it. It's like, well, there's plenty of slack on the line. So it reminds me of a story when, uh, when I lived in downtown LA, because I lived in a building called the PE loft or the Pacific electric loft. And that building used to be a train station hub. Yeah. Cause back then LA had a trolley system, right? Right. And the trolleys would go in there as I get service or whatever, it was a station or whatnot. But they, in 2005, I think that was remodeled into like loft buildings and whatnot. And I moved in, into that building and within a few months, this is when I was starting ghost theory. I, you know, I befriended the cleaning crew and whatnot. And we started to talk and yeah, there were reports about that too. They would say the fifth floor on the PE loft is haunted. Right. And there were reports seeing just shadows, like darting across the hallway or in the units and whatnot. And there was a lot of that, you know? Yeah. But it wasn't just that building. I mean, almost every other building in downtown LA has the same thing. If you, you have to really talk to the cleaning crew, the people who spend a lot of time in those buildings to get those stories, you know? No, I was just about to say, those are the folks that are there late at night, uh, throughout the night cleaning. And, you know, then you start asking them and befriending them. And like, you know, the, uh, I was friends with the night security guard. And she said, uh, oh yeah, sometimes like the elevator door will just kind of like the, you could hear the elevator come down. It opens. There's nobody there. So you start asking around and then, uh, then the building manager's like, oh yeah, we've had a lot of the cleaning crew quit because of the small things that have happened. They just don't want to be here late at night cleaning. But one thing I want to get back to when we were talking about things happening to people who were involved in the case, one thing I may want you to clear up if you can, is that you'll see online and in social media, a lot of people connecting the fact that, uh, Dr. Barry Taft these days have, has had a lot of health problems and a lot of it, you know, people connect to like, oh, that was his time because he researched the entity and something dark has followed him and he's being plagued, but it's not necessarily the case. I mean, people get health problems anyway, just living life and through their genetic conditions and lifestyle and, uh, just what they're prone to. It's not necessarily the case, but you don't believe that he's had any kind of connection or, because you've, you've talked to him since the case, uh, quite a bit while it was going on for a little while. When I lived in LA, uh, we became friends, so I would hang out with him, uh, at times. So I don't think that was the case with him. I think he's been part of like a lot, hundreds of other cases in LA with the same type of activities. And I mean, not to that level, but you know, uh, there were other terrifying aspects of these cases, very little hitchhiker effects from what he told me. But as far as his health, I think it was all naturally, you know, progressive health problems. Yeah. I think, uh, from what I've read, it doesn't seem kind of connected. You're not struck dead as soon as you leave the house, that kind of thing. I mean, with Doris, I think the appearance of the orbs, I think is just something that was following her around or keeping an eye on her and was there when she finally passed. And I think with other people, it's like, you could say, well, what is the cause? Well, people who have no connection, of course, have health problems again, through, through family and just what's going on with their own bodies. It's not necessarily connected. So I would take those with a grain of salt saying that, uh, you know, he was plagued by demons after he left that investigation. And as far as, as you were saying earlier, no one else that, you know, has had any kind of, uh, connection of, uh, just bad luck following them or anything kind of happening. Uh, James and, uh, the other sons or the other family members, as far as you know, just went to live on, went on to live normal lives, right? I mean, as normal as you can. After that, sure. Go through this, right? Because I do know that some of his siblings had some problems, substance abuse. I think the youngest, uh, the, the, the sister, uh, she had some problems. Um, she was, she wasn't part of this, so she was too young, so she was removed, right? She has no, no input on this at all, you know? But yeah, it's, uh, they did suffer. Uh, when I talked to James, he did tell me that he believes that they were all psychic. They had some sort of ability, all of them, the mother and the kids. This is why he was able to see these, uh, these shadow beings, Mr. Who's it, and be part of that as well. But he did tell me, like, he believes that everybody has that ability, if you just focus, you know, that, and it makes sense when you start, uh, you know, investigating cases about like remote viewing. Right. I know this is the most informative update on this case that has ever been done, thanks to your input and you sharing your research and the time you put into it. I hope that your book gets published soon. I want to read it. I think it would be the most important way to set the record straight for the by the family. And I think the other thing about this is it really brings to mind the ethics of a paranormal investigation in a case that's serious like this. And we've talked about this before on the show about like just getting past really focusing on hard proof that something's happening that we don't understand and we want to prove it to everybody else that it's real. I don't know if I believe in ghosts anyway. There's probably radon gas leak or some other thing is contributing. Black mold is making people feel weird and all of that kind of stuff. And everyone gets really caught up in that. And I think sometimes what happens to people like Doris is they get chewed up and spat out by the process. And I'm not, I'm not saying that investigators necessarily had ill intent. Everybody has their goals and people want to help each other, but they also want to prove to the world X, Y, or Z. But I think, and it was, this was a different time too, when this was all going down. But there was also a lot of assumptions, right? Because she was having a hard time. And of course, like, you know, the way she would deal with these, with these things was to like drink at times, you know, and every time UCLA would show up, she would, she would be drinking because she just couldn't deal with it or she was just too afraid. And they took that as her being like, you know, a raging alcoholic who neglected her sons. But that was never the case. Because they scrutinized her, her sexuality, you know, they were saying like, oh, you know, you've been with so many men that you don't even know if it's like, maybe it's one of them doing this while you're passed out drunk or something, you know, but that was never the case. You know, she was a mother, first of all. And James told me that he was, she would take care of them. She would lay down the law in the house. She wouldn't allow men to come in when, you know, when, when they were around, just stuff like that. But so there was a lot of accusations and they did see her in a bad light. And I think that kind of like helped like objectify her in a way. And where everybody just wanted to get the story, they want to get the, the ghost, they want to get the scary details of it, but always forgetting that there was a human, there was a woman behind all this who was asking for help, who was saying, I'm being attacked. Nobody's listening to me. Somebody helped me. And nobody did. I think that's a great point you made and something that we talked about, the attitude perhaps of people coming in were just more as clinicians. They're seeing her as a test subject, an element in this equation or in this lab, something in a test tube to be studied. And they kind of lost track of the human element of that. Something horrible is happening to these people. And I think perhaps, as you just stated, their attitude was, well, that's stuff that she's doing through poor choices and bad, you know, lifestyle and, uh, associating with the wrong people and self-medicating this and that. And we really can't do anything about that. That's her choices. You know, we're not, we're not a rehab here. We're not trying to fix her, uh, her drinking problems or her, uh, her social and psychological problems. We're here to study the phenomenon and I can understand that point as well, but they're forgetting that something awful is happening. And as what you described earlier, that when things did happen, it was kind of a joyful mood of like, all right, we got this thing to respond. We got something on tape. And, uh, you know, I can understand that with getting EVPs and Scott having a bad time. And I'm thinking, Hey, this is great. This'll be great on the show. And, you know, that's a natural reaction. I think to this, especially when you don't know what's happening and really what the root causes of all this, uh, weird torment that's happening to her, you have no way to fix that anyway. So it's not like, again, these are people who are not spirit remediators who can come in and say like, okay, we're going to get a team together. We got a psychic. We're going to do some procedures here. We're going to, you know, as folks do, uh, in some of the cases that we've come across, like the sludge entity, like they know what to do to perhaps. Alleviate or mitigate this problem. They're just coming in. It's like, well, we, that's not our toolkit. What we can do is collect evidence. And we're just really happy we're getting some evidence. And so we're going to, we're going to put aside all the causes of this because again, we have no answer. And I think that's very disappointing for people like Doris. I expect it to like, here, you have some academics. It's like, when I go to the doctor, like now I'm going to get some answers. They're going to know what's wrong with me. They're going to prescribe something. They're going to do a procedure. But finally, someone's going to take a look at this ailment I have and get some relief. That's the most terrifying thing of this case, I think, because like all the research and everything that they went through, like, what did they gain from this case? Yeah, nothing. Right. Did it advance parapsychology? Did it advance ghost hunting? Did it advance our understanding of what happens when we die? Right. I don't think so. I don't think it did. Yeah. And in the end, like, you know, she was left alone to deal with these things. And this is what got me like, you know, excited again when you guys contacted me. It's like, okay, well, I have this book and I reviewed it just recently. And this story is, you know, told from a perspective, from James' perspective. But it gives, at least to me, these, you know, for a decade and a half I spent researching the case and writing the story, it gave me a lot. I did gain the perspective. I understood people better, I think. But at the same time, it also took away from me a lot, you know. I feel like I lost a lot in this story. And going through it with you guys and everything, I can see how it could be beneficial to a lot of people just to see that other side of this, you know, that other side of ghost hunting, other side of what you guys would, like, you know, curl up on a Friday night and watch, like, you know, whatever television ghost hunting show you watch, like, there are humans behind all this. And it's affecting them in different ways that they might not share or for the fear of, like, you know, ridicule or whatnot, you know. But these things do happen and it's horrific. That's going to wrap up episode 294 of Astonishing Legends. A very warm thank you to our returning special guest, Javier Ortega of GhostTheory.com. We'll be back next week with a new show. Find and subscribe to the other shows from the Astonishing Legends Network, The Midnight Library, Scared All the Time, and Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf. We have links to all of them in our show notes. Our show is edited by Sarah Voorhees-Wendell at VW Sound and co-produced by Tess Feifel, who is also head of research and the social media manager. Our technical producer is Ed Vakola, or as we call him, The Mechanic. Special thanks to our announcer, John Bolin. Our theme, which is available as a ringtone, was composed by Judson Crane at FounderMusic.com. All other music and sound design for the show is composed and created by Alan Caressia. Our logo was created by Tommy Beaver Design, and our animated graphics for social media and YouTube are done by Joshua Sloan at DeadStreetProductions.com. Many episodes have transcripts available. For ones that don't, you can request them by emailing transcripts at AstonishingLegends.com. Astonishing Legends would not be possible without you, our listeners. Visit our store at AstonishingLegends.com, or interact with us and other listeners on Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Facebook, and YouTube. You can also visit us at Patreon.com slash AstonishingLegends, where patrons have access to commercial-free versions of the show and additional bonus content, including the Patreon-exclusive show, The Astonishing Junk Drawer. If you're new to Patreon, you can save money by signing up on the web through a browser, or using an Android device rather than Apple's App Store, where Apple is now charging a 30% markup on signups through iOS. No part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright, Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. Raise your hand if you want your nails to look perfect all the time. Me too. I'm Sarah Gibson Tuttle from Olive and June, and this is exactly why we created the Manny System. 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