Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Scoring the Strange. This is Pascual Romero and this is episode 12. You may notice that I’m flying solo for the intro right now and that’s because I just got home from a lovely trip in the Northwoods with my family. Uh, and we had a lot of fun and I’m glad to be back, but we have been a little pressed for time in the last couple of episodes, you may notice, uh, the two leading up to this one were a little bit

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different in terms of format. And this one’s going to be slightly different as well. Uh, only because I had to assemble material that we already had recorded ahead of the trip. So, uh, you will be hearing our more timely stuff next week when we resume our regular recording schedule.

PR: So this week I’ll be reading a listener email. Ben will be speaking a bit about the book 1984 and how it applies to modern times and then we’ll be covering our topic which is an article that Ben wrote recently called The Mirror in the Last Haunted House, where he talks about his journey with ghost hunting and what the future has in store for him.

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But first, here’s Celestia with another Skeptical Fortune Cookie.

CW: Hey Squares and hey Strangers, Celestia here with your Skeptical Fortune Cookie. It’s almost the 4th of July and I found a really neat red, white, and blue fortune cookie at the Party Supply Store. So let’s crack it open and see what we have. “It is error only and not truth that shrinks from inquiry.” Well, this is indeed an American Independence fortune cookie, because it comes from none other than founding father and noted skeptic Thomas Paine. Called a corset maker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination, Paine was instrumental in moving America toward declaring its independence. His widely read pamphlet, Common Sense, was written in clear and persuasive language, and in 1776 you could hear it being read aloud at various taverns and meeting halls across all the colonies. Saying it went viral would be an understatement.

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When measured with the population at the time, common sense had the largest sale and circulation of any book published in American history. Without it, John Adams later said, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain. This quotation on truth and inquiry comes from a letter addressing the response to his book, The Rights of Man, which Paine had written in support of the French Revolution. Paine welcomed inquiry as a way to improve one’s thoughts and philosophy, and he castigated those who seemed to dread it. When the government and the Constitution are faced with close examination, he said, quote, every attempt it makes, either by proclamation, prosecution, or address, to suppress investigation, is a confession that it feels itself unable to bear it. It is error only and not truth that shrinks from inquiry.

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This is something to keep in mind the next time you examine any period of American history, or perhaps even the next time you see the dismissal of a special prosecutor. For more about Thomas Paine, check out the Free Thought Society at ftsociety.org, which has a committee dedicated to promoting his life and legacy through walking tours, assemblies, and public outreach. And now, back to Ben and Pasquale.

PR: We got an email from a listener named James on my skeptical take on the sound wave tattoos from our Roswell That Ends Well episode or episode 6 if you’re into the brevity thing. James writes, hello I was bemused by the audio tattoo concept. The idea that a waveform does not illustrate sound as stated in the show was somewhat confusing. We do not see frequencies in a waveform because our eyes aren’t designed to do it. Do a spectral analysis and then we can quote-unquote see the frequencies.

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But if you zoom into a waveform you see what your eardrum sees. I was hoping for a little more analysis on your show about this concept. First off, thanks James for your response. I love being able to bring some of my areas of interest out more often, especially ones that aren’t necessarily directly related to skepticism. It’s also worth noting that while I’m by no means an expert level audio engineer. I do a little bit of work in that area for a living but you know I work with much more capable people. So to get to your question, I believe we’re talking about two different things here. Now this is speaking strictly from a recording standpoint or a studio kind of recording software standpoint. The company that makes these so-called sound wave tattoos uses a waveform as they are used in recording software. These are the same kinds of waveforms I’m looking at right now as a matter of fact. They are not run through a spectrum analyzer, therefore there isn’t usable data in terms of harmonics and pitch. In terms of studio recording, the visual result of audio that is run through a spectrum analyzer would be referred to as a spectrogram. Waveforms, as I was referring, are representations of audio recording that include things like amplitude, loudness, and dynamic range, among a few other technical specs, but they don’t contain enough information to be fully interpreted, no matter how detailed a view we get of them. So in a nutshell, from a recording software standpoint, and as it relates to these sound wave tattoos a wave form is what I was talking about and a spectrogram is what you’re referring to.

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With that said I invite our listeners to head over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange where I’ve posted the full email. In it James does a pretty exhaustive breakdown of how one could theoretically make these tattoos work in a way that can be interpreted. And again James thanks for writing us we sincerely appreciate the feedback and I’m always happy to hear that there are other audio enthusiasts listening.

PR: So I hear a lot of people these days comparing the world political and social climate to George Orwell’s 1949 book, 1984. Now that’s a book we’re all pretty familiar with, at least those of us in like Generation X and our parents’ generation, kind of the 50s, 60s era.

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And I think that a lot of themes in it definitely, I would say, come from a little bit of truth in political and social issues. But it seems that people are really applying a lot of it to acting like it’s almost uncanny. I haven’t read the book in its entirety in probably 20 years, but if I recall correctly, the tone was maybe a little different than nowadays. I figured you recently spoke about that in an interview, so I’d like to get your thoughts on that.

BR: I did, yeah. I was interviewed by a British-based program called Voice of Islam Drive Time Show. I’d been on their show a couple times before.

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They asked me to comment on 1984. Like you, I read it probably 15 years ago or so. I have a copy in my… I went and refreshed myself. I was like, oh, I have to talk about it. But it was interesting. One of the questions was, as you mentioned, how much of Orwell’s dystopia has come true? and that’s, you know, we hear all the time, you know, 1984, Big Brother, sort of these bohemian words. And, I mean, the fact, as you mentioned, it was written in 1949, and Orwell was writing it in response to the rise of communism in Nazi Germany.

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So it’s the product of a very specific era. That doesn’t mean it’s not generalizable to other things, but it needs to be understood in context in what he was actually talking about. The book itself is a satire, and so it’s full of hyperbole and exaggeration. In the book, for example, relationships are outlawed and all citizens have to swore loyalty to the state and are constantly spied upon. Now, does that happen in some places? North Korea? Maybe Turkey?

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I mean, absolutely, there are totalitarian governments that spend a lot of time and energy spying on people and controlling them. Absolutely. Yeah. Is that happening here in America? I wouldn’t go that far. I mean, it’s again, the Big Brother motif, the 1984, the name, the idea, it’s an easy sort of pop culture, you know, it’s a convenient reference point for cultural touchstone. We all know what that means, so it gets thrown around a lot.

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For example, in 1984, one of the themes is that writing and journaling is forbidden because you’re putting down private thoughts. You’re not allowed to keep diaries and whatever else, but of course, in today’s society, it’s the opposite. We have the internet. Anyone with an internet connection can blog or write about whatever they want. In that regard, 1984 is completely wrong. If anything, people have more freedom to express themselves than ever before.

PR: Right. If anything, they voluntarily give that information out.

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It’s not like Facebook is prying this info out of you.

BR: Exactly. You’re exactly right. That’s one of the things that struck me when I was thinking about it and preparing for it was, and I’ve written about this before, but it’s interesting in today’s era of the spying scandals. In the United Kingdom, they had tabloids hacking people’s phones. The News of the World, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid got a lot of trouble for that. Some people lost their jobs. And of course, we had Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, things like that. And so it seems like there’s always this constant drumbeat of warnings about how the government is watching you and NSA surveillance and all this sort of thing.

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But the fact is that, I mean, I get that. I’m not a big fan of government either. I’m not a paid shill.

PR: We’re not paid shills here.

BR: Not for the government. Not the government, right. The reptilians or whatever. That’s a different thing. But government, no.

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Yeah, yes. And by the way, we’d like to thank our new Patreon, the reptilians overlords.

PR: These guys, they’ll pay, man. So what can I say?

BR: I mean the fact is that even if the American government wanted to, it couldn’t spy on all of us. It’s just not possible. There’s too many people. In fact, you know, after I think it was the Paris bombing, I was reading an article talking about how in order to keep one person under more or less constant surveillance, I think you need like seven or 14 people or something to monitor emails, to watch you, who you’re talking to, phone conversations, text, that’s not practical. The American government couldn’t keep track of the population of Cleveland, much less the United States of America, much less the entire world. So as a practical matter, the government couldn’t spy on all of us even if they wanted to. And besides that, why would Why would they want to?

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Most people, there are people who have some personal involvement in terrorism or wherever else, but 99% of the people in America, we don’t have any information the NSA needs. There’s no knowledge in my head, or your head, I assume, that the US government doesn’t have. It’s not like, oh, we need this piece of information and the only way to find out about this is to spy on an assistant Chili’s manager in Topeka.

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That’s not how that works.

PR: I mean, I don’t think they have any interest in bulk collecting and skimming through my rather prolific postings of every stupid thing I think about.

BR: And which of these 10 bands did you not see, right?

PR: Yeah, exactly. First email I opened that morning after the 10 bands meme, the NSA going, which one was it? But no, so I believe it’s possible to collect all this information in a very broad, very almost near anonymous way, but in order to actually actively monitor you as an individual and use any of that against you, it’s a stretch.

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BR: Is it possible? Sure. And again, I’m well aware the U.S. government has spied illegally on people. Absolutely. No one denies that. On political activists, social activists, sure, granted.

PR: That’s not the criticism at all.

BR: That’s not the criticism at all. The question is whether the US government and British governments, MI5 or wherever else, are collecting personal data on any one of us, and the answer is almost certainly not. Keep in mind, of course, that most people willingly give up all sorts of privacy online. It’s fascinating to me, I’ll see people ranting about how they’re so pissed off that the revelations by Edward Snowden and oh my God, they’re watching us all the time and it’s important to keep all your information private and then on their Facebook page, it’s like here’s my entire family, here’s their birth dates, here’s where we live, here’s my puppy dog, this is where I work.

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I’m like, you’re, 99% of the information that they might wanna know about you, you’re freely giving out to people.

PR: Yeah, that’s kind of the big kicker to me. I kind of pride myself in being… I post a lot of things and a lot of opinions, but I don’t talk about when I’m leaving town or where I’m going. I usually don’t, unless I’m on tour or something, I don’t even post about being somewhere. And it’s mainly because I think it’s, you know, if I could imagine an easy way to compromise my own personal security and privacy, it’s to say I’m not home, you know.

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And so there are things where I absolutely do try to keep a level of privacy and I keep my profile fairly private and I try not to add too many people that don’t have some kind of connection to me. But at the same time, I mean, I know I’m on Facebook. I know whether or not the NSA cares about what I’m saying, what I’m putting out there, regardless of my privacy settings and regardless of what I think my rights are as an individual on someone else’s server, I think I try to be as realistic as possible. definitely compromise my own security.

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But the NSA, do they care? I just don’t see why they would bother.

BR: Well, I mean, again, is it possible? Sure, anything is possible. But I think that by far the biggest threat to the average person’s privacy are hackers and malware. Ransomware, for example. I mean, these are not state agents, this is not the NSA, I mean, the NSA doesn’t care who I’m emailing, they just don’t.

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And between the information that people happily and freely give out on social media all the time, and the likelihood that some hacker’s gonna break in your computer and steal your stuff, the likelihood that Big Brother, which is to come back to 1984, is a serious threat to privacy. I’m personally not that concerned about that. Maybe some of our listeners are. I imagine some of our listeners are just livid that we’re not outraged. How could you… Whatever.

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I’m not that worried about it. If any of our listeners have important, world secret, top classified information that they think the NSA doesn’t have that they need, maybe you need to watch out.

PR: That’s pretty much it. I think anyone, you know, it’s certainly realistic to consider that if the government wanted access to your information, they could get it. I don’t doubt that at all. And I don’t doubt that you could definitely trigger some kind of investigation based on your behavior online.

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That’s entirely, not only possible, but probable.

BR: I would agree.

PR: But on the other hand, you know, the people who are getting under the radar and passing off emails to each other about planned attacks and, you know, these horrible things are not posting about it on Facebook and they’re not, this information can’t even really, you know, easily be gleaned from an email because I don’t think terrorist A is going to email terrorist B and say The dirty bomb is going to be in Times Square on Wednesday and you know because then it’s like well What kind of you know people always argue about well, there’s keywords and well, but what about keywords journalists use those words?

BR: I mean, it’s hold on here. I mean we can we can go this we can test this I mean this is what we’ve seen in fact in the in the recent Manchester bombing in England, right?

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We can test this. This is what we’ve seen in fact in the recent Manchester bombing in England. The guy that did it was under surveillance. His name had popped up. They were watching him. So keep this in mind. If the world’s top governments can’t keep track of someone who is already on their watch list, who they have identified as possibly being a terrorist, if they can’t even keep track of that guy, why do you think they’re watching you?

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Really? So anyway, I just, so I think that the mass surveillance part of Big Brother has not come to fruition. What’s more interesting to me is the notion of thought crimes. Not just in Orwell’s novel, but in, if you look at Orwell’s other writings he’s very concerned about the use of language in precise language right and and being clear and and that’s one reason he included the concept of double speak in 1984 yeah and so I think that the the thought crimes today that I see are more enforced by social media right such as public shaming. You know when people have unpopular ideas for example than by the government right so I’m I’m I’m personally far more concerned about people being silent and being silenced because they’re afraid of being piled on on social media and being branded a racist or being branded whatever the insult du jour is, than I am that the Trump administration is going to try to stop me from saying something.

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So there’s a sort of self-censoring mechanism which I think is cause for concern. Now of course, anybody can say anything they want and you know what, there’s consequences to it and if you say something that’s obnoxious or racist or sexist, you get piled on and you know what, that’s what happens. even within that context. You know, I can think of times when I myself have not said something that I think was legitimate. It was not wrong. It was not in politic, but I knew that people were gonna jump on me for saying it for totally without reason. And I imagine that’s the case with a lot of people.

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PR: You know, I’m someone who very frequently can be seen criticizing the so-called anti-PC crowd, mainly because I think that they have some very skewed ideas about what free speech is and what constitutes one’s right to free speech versus what constitutes the right to disagree with their speech. It’s kind of interesting because you did kind of hit on that, that you still have to be very kind of measured in how you approach a conversation online now. It’s gotten very… There’s been some actual very dangerous situations that have come out of things people have said online where it’s called doxing where people’s personal information gets spread out and and basically a witch hunt happens and and you know to me that’s certainly, there’s almost no situation where where I would think that would be correct In fact, you know off the top of my head There’s no situation where I would condone it maybe you know, maybe if someone’s making a terrorist threat or something, right?

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I’ll harm someone but

BR: in which case that’s against the law.

PR: Yeah, and that’s law enforcement issue. Exactly. And so, you know, but it’s also now, I think it’s starting to become part of the social media contract, you know, that it’s like, well, now you have to decide if what you’re going to say is worth saying. And I don’t necessarily agree that it should be that way. But again, and to kind of loop back on the First Amendment thing and tie it back into 1984, this isn’t the government enforcing this and the government If anything tries to protect people from this as best they can you know and and again, you know, First Amendment is simply a protection from prosecution for Your speech you you know, you it all it all it says is the government isn’t gonna screw with you If you say something they disagree with. That’s it. You know, the public, what your boss can do, you know, and that’s the, that’s a huge misunderstanding. And I think that that’s kind of where that, that kind of misconception with 1984 kind of comes in is people, you know, they, they see, you know, some kind of dramatic article about, you know, some liberal kids on a campus in, in Canada getting offended at the lyrics to, to, you know, a Lou Reed song, that was a recent one.

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And certainly that happened, but at the same time, it’s like, I don’t see the government coming in and telling them, you can’t play Lou Reed on campus.

BR: No, no, you make a very important distinction because you said, I mean, that’s not Big Brother. I mean, the concern that I have is that social media and the, particularly in some cases the trolls on social media have become the de facto big brother yeah so I do agree that’s not all there’s certainly it’s not the government keeping from saying things it’s someone who’s afraid to say anything because they’re getting a pile on me you know Jon Ronson wrote a good book a couple years back I think it’s called So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and he gives several examples of people who you can argue that they should have phrase something better or may not have said it, but they certainly didn’t deserve, in many of the cases, they did not deserve the just the horrific pile on and just death threats and people losing their jobs. I mean, we all say things that we don’t necessarily mean or we could have phrased differently. And I guess I would just, I always try to act on the principle of charity.

0:24:52
If there’s some ambiguity, I prefer to give the person the benefit of the doubt. You know what? I don’t know what was in their head. If it’s self-evidently wrong and obnoxious and racist, sexist, whatever, that’s fine. But if there’s a gray area, I personally prefer to give someone the benefit of the doubt and just say, you know what, because I’d like to be given the benefit of the doubt on that.

PR: For sure. I think the… It’s important to keep in mind that this door swings both ways. I have seen some horrific internet fallouts over people trying to do the right thing and trying you know and and you know it in a lot of cases had nothing to do with Racist or sexist things if nothing else it was that a certain segment of trolls decided to go after someone because of some perceived You know ideological difference or something and and you know a person who otherwise tries to be as well-meaning as possible Just gets piled on not for what they say necessarily, but just for being who they are and yeah, you know it’s a little scary but again it’s not the government doing it.

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BR: Right, right. So, but to, then the question came up, what about Orwellian elements in the Trump administration? And again, I think there’s sort of a mixed bag here. I mean, I don’t really see the Trump administration as necessarily trying to chill free speech. There have been cases where, you know, he’s tried to discredit journalists in terms of calling people fake news. But let’s be very clear here, that’s not censorship. It may be chilling, that is not Donald Trump censoring anyone. It’s trying to discredit people, and he does that a lot. That’s not the same thing. And so my biggest concern, to be honest with with Orwell elements in trump administration is his use of double speaking ambiguous language uh… we sees over and over and over again in the campaign as president and before that he revels in ambiguity he revels in saying something and then contradicting himself you know minutes later or weeks later and rarely does he acknowledge it.

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It’s all sort of, well, you know, you know, he said this, he says that. And, and I remember this, this one interview was a few weeks back where someone was asking the question and Trump says, you know, and the reporter’s asking him to clarify. And Trump says, I think you know what I meant. And the reporter says, no, I don’t. He said, no, I think you know what I meant. And he was very dismissive. And it was like, he was putting the onus on the journalist. It’s like, no, you need to interpret.

0:27:42
Like, no, no, no, no, no. You’re the president of the United States. You should be clear about what you mean. There should not be ambiguity. Like, is this right or is this wrong? Where do you stand on issues? And I understand that during a campaign, you know, whatever, all politicians waffle and they say different things. I get that, but I’ve seen that to an unprecedented level with Trump. And that’s really my concern is that his use of double speak and just sort of saying things that he knows can be read different ways just sort of give him some wiggle room.

0:28:18
And I think that’s concerning to me. So I think the biggest threat to democracy is not Big Brother per se, but a citizenry that chooses not to inform itself and think critically. And that’s part of what the show is about. And what we both do is trying to sort of get people to say, okay, you hear X statement in the media or in the advertisement or wherever else, think critically about it. Don’t take some weasel answer, demand clarity. And that’s exactly what Orwell was writing about in 1984.

0:28:52
To my mind, that’s the biggest threat that I see. That’s the biggest element of the Orwellian dystopia in the current regime.

PR: You and I were alive during the Cold War era, and I’m a little younger than you, but I know we both grew up at a time in elementary schools where there were still fallout shelters and there was always a lot of uncertainty about the USSR. And so we have a frame of reference for Orwell’s kind of, where his mind was when he wrote it because in 1949 that was the beginning of all this. And we just saw what happened with Nazi Germany and we were seeing this rise of communism in Russia. And this wasn’t even new at that point. I mean, communism had already been government there.

0:29:44
It just was that we fought alongside them during World War II, so we weren’t against each other. But once the dust settled, suddenly we had a new enemy. And Orwell was writing from that reference point. And so 1984 very, very easily could have felt just as real back then as it does now. We apply it to our current situation, but you could have applied it to the Cold War era, you could have applied it to the Reagan era, you could have applied it to the Nixon era.

BR: You could have applied it to Chile and Argentina in the 1970s and 80s when they had Operation Condor was going on there were under Augusto Pinochet. Yeah, and other other other regimes In in Latin America that were very much like in 1984. Yeah, so it’s not like it’s not It’s not a question of has it become 1984?

0:30:39
It’s always been 1984 somewhere.

PR: And and in a lot of ways much more accurately than than what we could possibly apply to current democratic countries. I mean, 1949, that wasn’t long before Korea. And you look at Korea, what that ended up being was probably the world’s closest example to the actual dystopia of 1984. They live under that kind of totalitarian big brother environment. And even still, North Korea is not that well locked down. A lot of people get out, a lot of people have stories about it, you know, and, you know, but that social phenomena with, you know, being able to, you know, control whether it is willingly or people just play the part. I mean, you see a public that marches in step with the government in a way that is, you know, maybe it’s out of fear, but at this point I kind of wonder if, you know, I don’t know that it’s entirely out of fear.

0:31:43
I think people have been brought up in this cult of personality to the point that they have no reason to doubt it, you know?

BR: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, of course the novel has universal themes, you know, individuality and totalitarianism and fighting against authority. And these are resonant themes. These are universal themes. Yeah, you know Pink Floyd’s the wall was full of this. There’s nothing new here, so I think that you know is 1984 relevant today sure it is Yeah, is it uniquely relevant today?

PR: No no so it seems like in in reality what we’re looking at is a man writing about the the the the possibilities he saw at the time, which are, you know, as you said, not unique to any era.

0:32:28
They’ve always been a fear and a theme in everything from literature to music to film to, you know, to folk tales, you know. So it certainly seems that, you know, if anything, that book was, you know, appropriate for the time it was written and that’s appropriate now too.

BR: Yeah, I think we just, there’s elements to it that resonate with all of us and it will always be relevant in some way. And so the thing to do is just keep it in mind and keep vigilant and make sure that things don’t encroach to real 1984.

PR: Yeah, and don’t be part of that troll big brother that we are already dealing with nowadays.

0:33:46
PR: So I was looking at the spring issue of Skeptical Briefs and I noticed that there was a front page article titled The Mirror in the Last Haunted House. And of course, you had given me a heads up that you did this article. And I really found it to be a very, not only interesting, but kind of poetic article for being about ghost hunting, and I think that it really makes a great topic for this week and also kind of gives you a chance to sort of present it in a different medium, you know, so. So you want to give us a little background on how this article came to be and what you were doing when you wrote about it?

0:34:27
BR: Sure, sure. Yeah. You know, as you know, I’ve been investigating weird things, including ghosts, for 15, 16, 18 years now. So a wide variety of things, chupacabras, crop circles, this and that. But one of the things I’m known for is ghost investigations, of course, from a skeptical point of view. And in fact I have a book coming out later this year titled Investigating Ghosts which will be out hopefully by fall and it’s it’s a overview of ghost investigations and it’s not just ghosts. I mean there’s lots of books on ghosts in terms of folklore and ghost stories. That’s not really what I’m writing about. I’m writing specifically on the history of ghost investigations, how to do it right, things like that.

0:35:19
So anyway, writing this article was part of what prompted me to do that book. And basically it’s a story of the last haunting investigation that I did at the St. James Hotel here in New Mexico.

PR: Up in Cimarron, which is up in northeastern New Mexico, kind of near Colorado.

BR: Yes, not far from the Colorado state line. I’d heard about it for, of course, many years. When we talk about ghost stories and haunted locations in New Mexico, it’s certainly one of the top ten, if not in the top five. Kimo Theater and La Fonda, and there’s other ones, but that’s right up there.

0:35:59
I’d heard about it, but I’d never actually been there until a few years ago. I was like, well, you know.

PR: Yeah, for those listening, it is a bit out of the way. You’re never on your way to anything when you go to that part of the state.

BR: Like, oh, I just happened to be here. No, you didn’t. No. No, in fact, you didn’t. No offense to the Cimarron Tourism Board.

0:36:19
But anyway, yeah, a little bit of background. It’s a historic hotel built in 1872 as a Lambert Inn. It was a prominent stopover during the gold rush. You know, people were headed west to go seek their fame and fortune in California and elsewhere, and it was one of the hubs of the Wild West. So, historically, people like Jesse James and Wyatt Earp and Annie Oakley stayed there. Both probably, according to legend and probably in fact.

PR: Probably did yeah that’s Eastern New Mexico for those who don’t know Northern New Mexico in particular is actually not unlike Colorado the the eastern half of Northern New Mexico is is mostly out in the plains and it’s basically adjacent to the actual Great Plains I think the Great Plains actually do touch into the eastern corner northeastern corner but what happens is you hit the Rocky Mountains right in the middle of the state and and so it’s very much like when you’re coming into Denver from the east or anything like that it’s it’s plains and then you hit mountains and so places like Cimarron and Las Vegas, New Mexico are these very famous old western towns because a lot of the time people stopped there as winter approached and you know they obviously weren’t going to try to take it you know through the mountains.

0:37:38
There was a lot of temporary population in these towns and a big reason why there were such huge hotels and fairly developed towns in the middle of nowhere, essentially.

BR: Yeah. You’re exactly right. A lot of the stuff, a lot of the buildings are, of course, historic. Some are actually landmarks and things like that. At the St. James, the hotel itself is parsed in two parts. The first part is the modern part of the hotel, and there’s more modern conveniences, and the rooms are more or less modern times.

0:38:13
The older part of the hotel, the historic part, of course, is kept, I don’t want to use the word decrepit, but it’s intentionally left Old Westy.

PR: It’s kept vintage.

BR: Vintage is one word you could use. It has a like peeling wallpaper, antiques around here and there. And that sort of thing. And so it’s you know like a lot of these places that are advertised as being a ghost destination, of course they’re looking for ghost tourists. In fact, one of the things they do is, they’ve had many TV shows out there, they invite ghost hunters to come out there and investigate. That was actually one of the few places, actually, I think the only place off the top of my head where, as I was wandering in the hotel, there were actually signs up prohibiting the use of Ouija boards. It said that you will be removed if you use a Ouija board in the premises. The assumption was that it was going to open up the door to occult powers.

0:39:19
They didn’t say anything about like Parcheesi or chess or… But anyway.

PR: But a magic eight ball, they didn’t say anything about that.

BR: No, you’re cool if you do that. But so I was up there and investigating and I actually have not written my investigation up. I probably have maybe a dozen or so cases, places that I investigated, including the Myrtle’s Plantation in Louisiana, St. James, the Whaley House out in San Diego. I just don’t have time. Sometimes I’ll go do an investigation, I’ll interview people, I have photos, all the research. I just don’t have the time to sit down and write up the thing.

0:40:03
This is one of those cases where at some point, maybe one day, I’ll go into all the interesting details of the story. In this particular case, I found myself… It was a long drive up from Albuquerque. I think it’s five, six hours.

PR: Yeah, it must be a bit of a haul.

BR: It’s quite a haul. The roads there are not direct. It’s sort of a little secure just once you get up there. And long story short, I found myself just before two in the morning at the top of the stairs in the older part of the building, because of course if you’re going to stay at the St. James, you want to stay in the old part, right?

0:40:38
The haunted part. I don’t want to stay in the new part. That could be the Motel 6. I don’t know. What you’re paying for is the ambiance and the ghostly stuff. So of course that’s where I was. And so, but I was just exhausted from the drive and I’d been interviewing people and going through the records and photographs and accounts and all sorts of stuff.

0:41:00
But I didn’t wanna go to bed because I’m there, right? If you’re in a haunted hotel, you don’t go to bed at nine o’clock and wake up, well, no ghost there. You know, and so you wanna give it a fair chance. So anyway, there was no one else staying there at the time. Well, there was one other person that was with me, but there was no other patrons on the floor. And so I would walk up and down the halls, and they have different rooms are associated with different person that stayed there.

0:41:31
So for example, Jesse James is said to haunt room number 14, which is where he stayed, for example. Of course, in classic tourist fashion, they’re named after the ghost or the person that may have stayed there. So again, I was just exhausted. At the top of the stairs, there’s a huge, very old mirror, the old silvered mirror of the kind that you see that date back 70, 80 years, 100 years. And I just was, it was quiet and I was very tired and there was nothing going on. There were no ghosts that were showing up. And I remember very clearly, in fact, there’s a photograph of this on the page of the Skeptical Briefs, looking into the mirror, just sort of looking at myself in sort of classic cinematic fashion, the self-reflection motif, right?

0:42:24
But I was like, what am I doing here? You know, I mean, I’m investigating ghosts, and that’s great, and I’m interviewing people, and learning stuff, and debunking things, but at some point I’m like, so I’m looking at the mirror, and it’s sort of pockmarked and silvery, and I was getting frustrated at the hours spent there, and the years spent there and elsewhere not finding ghosts. And it wasn’t really burnout. It wasn’t really disappointment.

0:42:58
It was just sort of this like, I just, you know, I, as an investigator, it’s important to me to actually go investigate, right? I mean, my position is you don’t know if you don’t look. So, you know, as you know, I don’t consider myself a debunker. I’m an investigator. And in the process I happen to often debunk claims, but I don’t go into trying to disprove. I’m trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. If there’s a ghost there, great. If there’s not a ghost there, then that opens up other questions like, what are people mistaking for a ghost? But at some point I was trying to picture, I was trying to be open to, I was trying to think, what should I be expecting to see? And so I was like, okay, well, here I am again, there’s no one else up, I’m standing here, I’m really tired, but I’m trying to do an investigation and no ghosts are showing up.

0:43:51
The ghost of Jesse James is not showing up to shoot me, Annie Oakley is not doing, there’s nothing going on here, which is often the case in ghost investigations. And so I began sort of pondering and just sort of thinking, well, what should I expect? What would genuinely frighten me? And I was trying to picture, you know, I actually, let me just quote a little bit from my article because I think I phrased it better than I can just stammer it out. “I had to admit in this hotel and at this late hour to a certain numbness, a discouraged cumulative emotional and intellectual exhaustion with evidence that never seemed to improve, no matter the location, reputation, or particulars. It’s a sea of teasing second and third hand stories seemingly accepted as self-evident documentary evidence.

0:44:43
A litany of twice told tales confirmed by psychic visions, feelings, and science-y Radio Shack beepy things”. And that’s how I felt. It was just, after you’ve done your 20th or 30th or 50th ghost investigation, and you see the same orbs, you see the same evidence of, I feel something weird in the corner, and I feel an old man’s spirit. I mean, at some point, each case needs to be investigated independently. But you do see patterns, you see the same types of evidence. You see the orbs. It’s always frustratingly non-evidential. James Randi has talked about this before, about how many times if you believe that cats can fly and you throw a cat off a building and it doesn’t fly and it falls to the ground.

0:45:40
You say, well, maybe the next cat will fly. So you get another cat. After a while, at some point, you have a pileup of dead cats and you have to say, okay, well, is it possible that the next cat can fly? Sure, anything is possible. But given the robust history of failure and non-evidence, how likely is it? So this is always the struggle, certainly that I find, and I imagine many skeptics find, is trying to remain open-minded but also acknowledging that the evidence is not there and it’s not improving. And so I began thinking, okay, well, if there was a ghost here, and I’m very familiar, of course, with ghost reports and lore and things like that, what would it be?

0:46:27
What was interesting was, I’m sitting there thinking about this and I realized that among the things that would generally frighten me, the things that I thought of were all from movies and TV. They weren’t personal to me. These were scenes, for example, from movies I’d seen. Jacob’s Ladder, this great film with Tim Robbins.

PR: Awesome scary movie.

BR: Scary movie and there’s a couple terrifying scenes in there and that scared me. The Exorcist or scary scenes in any number of other films. But I realized, hold on here, those are contrived, those are artificial, that’s not my personal fear.

0:47:15
Those are fears that are created by a screenwriter and director and a cinematographer and visual effects artist and prop maker. They’re artificial. They’re not genuine. They’re mass marketed, mass media depictions of what people should be scared of. And of course their inner cut with jumps, scary music, and you know, it’s also artificial. And that was really what I sort of gradually came to understand is that all the things, or I take a scene from like The Ring, you know, the creepy girl coming towards you with the hair, it’s very terrifying.

0:48:01
And it was frustrating to me and sort of enlightening to me to realize that in terms of what would genuinely frighten me, like as a person, not as a moviegoer, not as a horror novel reader, not as a TV fan, but as a genuine human person who’s in a weird place, a sound in the dark doesn’t scare me. I’ve seen that. I’ve been there, done that. I don’t want to say it’s jaded, but there’s a certain familiarity with the evidence and things that are offered, and it sort of paints me into a corner where the things that, in theory, should frighten me are all media created, and they’re not genuine. You see what I’m saying?

PR: Absolutely. I think that is, it’s kind of interesting.

0:48:57
As a person who’s been a lifelong fan of horror films, I kind of think back and I still see a lot of horror movies and my wife watches quite a number of them and she tends to kind of like the ghost story type movies. And I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve seen them all and I grew up in a world where it was, there was a lot of belief around that stuff and it got to the point that even in the film sense, it’s like, I don’t, there’s nothing that just feels genuinely frightening or terrifying and occasionally they’ll get me with a jump scare or something, but it’s never like the theme and the character and the ghost or whatever is just never really grabs me like it used to when I was younger. And I think that in a way, that’s sort of similar to what happens to someone who spends all their time investigating it.

0:49:53
And I think in my life, while I never actively conducted an investigation, I always put myself in a position to go into old abandoned houses and do these things in the middle of the night.

BR: And be open to it, right?

PR: And I’ve always loved that stuff. And when I was 12, sure, you get this exhilarating kind of fright out of going through an old abandoned house with no windows and the wind blowing through and knocking a board over or something. But there comes a point in your life when you’ve been exposed to it enough that you get kind of desensitized to it and even more it it takes away kind of the impact of it, you know and you know it’s you know the first time you go into an old abandoned house It’s it’s real creepy And you just you get that sense of kind of anxiety and what are you gonna see and what’s gonna happen in there?

0:50:46
But once you’ve done it 50 times, you’re just kind of, you know, it’s the same thing’s going to happen. The wind’s going to blow through. It’s going to knock something over. The floor’s going to creak. I’m going to hear a raccoon or something upstairs. You know, it becomes kind of routine and it loses a lot of its magic.

BR: And I think part of it is, you know, there’s been research that has looked at the differences between skeptics and believers in terms of how they interpret things. And what they found is that skeptics are more likely to assume there’s a natural explanation, rational explanation, for what they experience.

0:51:20
They may or may not be right, but in the skeptic mindset and world view, they don’t suddenly reach for the most extreme, wild, what could that be? Well, it’s clearly a ghost. Like, well, no, it could be any number of things. That’s just sort of inherent in the mindset. And I’ll just read another section from my piece. It says, “it was likely much easier to be scared in the years before the light of science chased the shadows from the dark corners of the world.

0:51:47
Our Western forefathers lived not so long ago in a world populated by unseen malevolent spirits such as fairies, vampires, and witches. Fear has its roots in the unknown, and as more and more is known about the world around us, ranging from mapping remote islands to understanding germ theory, it stands to reason that the world becomes less and less frightening. Fearsome monsters once rumored to roam South America and Africa or lurk in the murky depths have now been proven not to exist.” So I think that there’s a real sense in which the more science knows about the world, the less scary it is. Which is, I would dare say, a good thing.

PR: Yeah, I think that’s a great thing.

0:52:31
I understand the argument that science takes the wonder out of things. I don’t agree with it. I don’t think science takes the wonder out of anything. But I understand what they’re trying to say. But understanding things is a wonderful thing. It’s beautiful. It’s the pinnacle of human endeavor, is to understand the world around us. And we should not apologize for that. We should encourage that.

PR: Oh, yeah I that’s and to me the most important thing about science this is just personally speaking., maybe not necessarily philosophically But but is that every mystery you unlock in in one area

0:53:04
Puts a it lays out another puzzle piece for a different mystery, and to me, that’s that’s the most phenomenal thing I mean you look at the way technology works these days and the things that have developed because, you know, we had a need that was completely separate from what the technology ended up being, you know, like a lot of, half the things we use nowadays were developed by NASA, and it was for space travel and for going to the moon, but you know, and these principles and these ideas all, you know, were, and that’s not necessarily just when you’re talking about technology, but even, you know, you understand something about biology and all of a sudden it fills the gap in another set of research.

0:53:42
And to me, you need to look at it in the broader sense and understand that every time you discover and you solve a mystery and every time you collect a new piece of evidence, you’re basically piecing the world together a little more. And I think that’s a fantastic thing and a great thing about researching anything.

BR: And that’s why I’ve never criticized people who genuinely search for the paranormal. In other words, Bigfoot, crop circles, ghosts.

0:54:15
I’ve never mocked anybody for doing that. I think that’s misguided. I’ve never, ever said that’s too silly or too stupid. No, I do that. I don’t think it’s too silly or too stupid. I think it’s interesting and it’s important. If for no other reason than it helps identify the things that are mistaken for ghosts or mistaken for lake monsters or whatever else. I have always genuinely supported good research and I’ll emphasize good research, investigation of the paranormal. I think it’s wonderful and I’ve spent years trying to do that and trying to help other people do that. What I was trying to do was, by recognizing and trying to strip away the artificial cinematic elements to my supposedly personal fears, I was trying to sort of dig deeper and say, okay, well, if when I try to think of what would genuinely scare me, I go to the Exorcist, that’s not scaring me personally. That’s William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty and the actors all working really hard to scare me. And I don’t believe for a second that genuinely demonic or evil forces, if indeed they exist in the world, are going to conform to our cinematic expectations and act like they should act in horror films.

0:55:50
In the same way that I see no reason why aliens would look like anything like what we see in Spielberg films. If these things are real, why would they conform to movie versions of themselves? It just doesn’t make any sense to me. So I was trying to sort of dig deeper and strip away the imprinting, the sort of fake contrived artificial scares that I had experienced over the past 40 years and dig deeper. And I wanted something that was real. I’m sitting here, again, at two in the morning, tired, staring into this silver, old, mottled mirror, wanting something to scare the shit out of me. I’m being totally…

0:56:37
I sincerely wanted this. I wanted something to jump out at me. I wanted the clock on the wall to fly across from me, hit me in the head. I wanted some scary, demon creature to reach out from the mirror and grab at me. I wanted something to happen. I’d been there, investigated, read the eyewitness accounts, read the stories, debunked some of them, verified other ones, and after all that, I’m like, okay, give me something real. Scare me, please. I’m not being sarcastic, I’m being sincere. Nothing came up.

0:57:17
And so, you know, I finally just sort of, I just realized that there was nothing there. My head had been filled with artificially constructed, carefully choreographed scares from movies and TV that weren’t organic to me right to my to what I personally fear. And I just, So I just sort of I gave up you know and I just I looked in the mirror and waited some more and and I finally just went to bed. One more, you know, it was just one more haunted house where I had spent hours and hours researching the history and reading anecdotes and looking at bad photographs and looking at the history and investigating what false libel claims I could.

0:58:23
And at the end of the day, I’m left with nothing. And I mean I want to say nothing I mean you know the investigation is interesting and I mean I but I felt a resignation I think as I stood there at the St. James Hotel and finally went to bed so that’s sort of what the piece is about.

PR: So now you basically sounds like you’re hinting at or almost in so many words saying this is your last ghost investigation period. This is it for you?

BR: Well, I think it is. Never say never, but I’ve been doing this for 18 years now. I don’t want to be chasing ghosts when I’m 60. And I’ll probably still do investigations.

0:59:19
First of all, again, as I said, I have a backlog of cases I’ve already investigated. I mean, I could do two more books on nothing but investigations I’ve already done. But in terms of new investigations, I’m guessing the St. James is the last one. It’s a lot of time, it’s a lot of effort, it’s a lot of work, and the evidence doesn’t get any better. I wish it did. I really do. I sincerely wish it did.

0:59:46
I really wish that with each new haunted house I investigate, each new place I go and interview people and look at evidence, I wish that the evidence got better. I’m like, wow, this is better than the last time. And it doesn’t. It flatlines. And at some point, again, I don’t want to sound bitter or jaded or anything, at some point I’m just like, you know what? I think I’m done here. So again, never say never, if there is some spectacular haunted house case that there’s good evidence for, I may go look at it, but unless something really remarkable comes up, I’m probably done.

1:00:27
PR: Okay, that’s understandable. Unless maybe 10 years from now, some crazy thing happens and you get a call at 3 in the morning and some government officials yelling, get me Ben Radford.

BR: Well, it’s interesting. In a way, it’s sort of similar to the Chupacabra story. I spent five years researching that. I wrote the book on it, I’m interviewed on it now and then, but for the most part, the Chupacabra stuff, it’s old news to me.

1:00:58
I mean, I’m happy to talk about it, I’m proud of the work I’ve done, it’s a high profile mystery that I solved, at least much of it. So, as a result, I don’t pay as much attention to the next time someone, I mean, again, if there’s good evidence, I’ll look at it. But at this point, it’s like, I have nothing more to add. I mean, there it is. And hopefully, again, with my book coming out later this year, I’ll sort of give the baton to other people and say, look, if you think you have a ghost in the location here’s how to do it.

1:01:38
If you don’t need to call me up, don’t bug me with your ghost photo. Again, not to be dismissive, but there are ways to investigate. I’ve written about it, other people have as well. And probably my answer to somebody is going to be read the book. If you need advice, I’ll be happy to help you, but I’m not going to be running out to some haunted house in Topeka to wander around in the dark.

PR: Unless it’s in Hawaii or something.

BR: Well, right. To be fair, let’s not be hasty here, Pascual.

1:02:18
For example, with the White Witch of Rose Hall, which we talked about a couple of episodes back, I’ve been flown down there for TV shows. And just if any TV producers are listening, fly me back to Jamaica any time. I will reinvestigate that case to your heart’s content.

PR: In fact, if you want to tie the podcast into it, fly us down there because I would love to go there as well.

BR: And we know what keeps away the duppies, so we’ll be safe.

PR: Yeah, I’ll be packing the sulfur. Well that’s really cool. I think it’s a very kind of noble article. The way it comes off, it feels like the way you kind of sign off on this one is very poetic.

1:03:03
I really like that you kind of have that not only figurative but literal reflection happening in that moment, looking in the mirror and there’s sort of a cinematic quality to it that one day when they do the film based on your life, they’ll have a really intense moment of that scene and The Rock will be playing you or something.

BR: Can you smell what the rock is cooking? No, I appreciate that. I do appreciate that. I put some thought into it and I’m happy with that article. It’s a personal memoir. It’s an overview of 18 years’ investigations.

1:03:42
Again, it touches on some of the stuff at the St. James. It is the mirror in the last haunted house.

PR: Well, very cool. This isn’t to say that we won’t be covering ghosts in future episodes. I’m sure we’ll be coming back around to it pretty regularly. I’m happy to talk about ghosts. I mean, there’s all sorts of elements of ghosts, folklore, investigations. I’m just talking about in terms of like going to a location, doing a full investigation because, you know, one of the things that I pride myself on in my work is doing a thorough investigation.

1:04:21
Not a half-assed thing, not just scooping stuff off the internet, but go there, find things out, interview people, cross examine, it’s a lot of work. I’m not complaining, it’s just a lot of work. So it’s not that I’m not going to be talking about ghosts anymore, I’ll be happy to talk about ghosts, but in terms of doing a full-fledged on-site field investigation, this is probably the last one.

PR: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

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1:05:11
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