We get a lot of stuff in the mail.
We have a post office box
thats dedicated just to the museum.
We'll get a dozen packages there a week.
It's a lot of stuff that you might think
is typically haunted.
There's a lot of dolls.
There's a lot of porcelain clowns.
Nine times out of ten,
the things that people send us
don't ever do anything strange for us.
That's not to say that I don't believe
someone when they say
they think something's haunted.
I think that our interaction with
these things is a big part
of why they're haunted.
So when we sever that connection
between the person who has the claim,
they just don't do the same thing.
At least not for us.
Nine times out of ten,
we dont experience anything.
But that last 10% is
where things get really interesting,
and occasionally there's 1%
that changes the way that we think
about haunted objects.
A majority of the objects in the museum
have been donated,
and a lot of them come to us
from clients or people
that we've worked with
or people
who really want to stay anonymous
and they just have something
that they want to get rid of
and they feel
as if there's something attached to them
that they're frightened of.
I really think that
when we talk about haunted objects,
a lot of the time what we're talking about
is maybe someone's trauma,
someone's trauma that they're associating
very strongly with an object itself.
And so oftentimes
what happens is when we become
caretakers of that object,
when it's not in their possession anymore,
it severs that connection,
that trauma connection,
they're able to compartmentalize
that fear into the object itself.
And the second
it's not in their presence,
the second that it's not in their home
or they're seeing it every day,
it gives them almost emotional space
to start to let go
of whatever it is that is either
creating the fear or whatever it is
thats coming from their--
even if it's just their subconscious mind.
It gives them space to start
letting some of that go.
Doing this professionally
was not something
that I planned on ever doing,
really fell into it.
Everything that I know about ghosts,
I learned by accident, trial and error.
My friends and I, we went ghost
hunting for fun when we were kids.
I think we formed our first ghost
hunting team when we were 12 years old,
and it was really just a way of going
into abandoned houses
in the middle of the night,
sneaking out, and trying to get scared.
Greg's initial experiences with
the paranormal were really from a place
of wanting to have adventures
and wanting to go out and get scared
and have fun.
Initially,
we ran rival ghost hunting teams
and he and his friends were out
investigating creepy
cemeteries and me and my friends were out
investigating creepy cemeteries.
And we found each other
and we found that we had some synergy
and that we were some of the only people
at the time investigating the paranormal
that way.
And it became something
that we bonded over, was this sense
that like what we were doing was fun,
but also scary, but also interesting.
And we were willing to do the work
and we were willing to do the research,
but we also weren't really willing
to take ourselves too seriously.
And so that was what
initially bonded us together.
I always had a crush
on Dana,
even when I was a kid,
but she kind of scared me a little bit
because she was a witch.
I've been a practicing witch
since I was 16,
and so a majority of my life
has really been as someone
who utilizes energies and works
with with different types of magics.
So it feels like it lends itself
perfectly to what we do with the museum.
And it's really become an asset
to a lot of the things that we do
with these objects, specifically.
I was raised
in a very religious household.
I was supposed to be a Baptist minister.
So a 14, 15 year old kid
who has this crush
on this dangerous witch...
Yeah, she was a little
scary to me, to be honest.
When you're a kid, the idea
of what a witch is very scary,
particularly if you're religious.
Most paranormal media, whether it's
television, film, books, they typically
depict witches in the paranormal space
as a negative thing.
For centuries,
there has been a campaign
to make witchcraft
seem evil.
Theres ulterior motives
to make witchcraft seem
as if its an evil thing.
Even in the world that
we live in today,
considering that witchcraft
is so popular,
And is something that is on the rise
as a spiritual practice,
there are still loads of people who
make it their job to
change the way that people
think about it,
to see it as something
thats evil,
when it really isnt.
Its really a beautiful,
in most cases,
private spiritual practice
of magical people who
connect with the earth,
and connect with the energies,
connect with their ancestry,
and connect with the magic
that is around us all the time.
So because what were going to be doing
is drawing this energy towards us,
what I will do is...
Im going to take a little dab
of my solar oil--
and Im going to be using
my dominant hand...
Dana is also a teacher.
She does workshops on witchcraft
all across the country
all year long.
Our receptive hand is
the energy that were taking into us,
so Im going to be using my dominant hand.
And if youre curious about this,
weve talked about this
in many previous classes
so maybe go back
and check the master list.
She also has a
digital coven, essentially,
of hundreds of different witches
of all proficiency levels.
And Dana teaches them
practical magic, hands on magic.
And in that way,
a lot of her knowledge filters out
into the paranormal community.
So between her and I,
we cover a lot of ground that I think
is often missing in a lot of
paranormal cases.
Back in January of 2016,
there was a post
to the paranormal subreddit by a user who
used a throwaway account to tell the story
of how he and one of his friends
found a strange effigy in the forest
in the Catskill Mountains.
They did what you're never supposed to do,
and they took the effigy home with them.
My friend showed up here at like 11:30.
He's out-of-his-mind-scared.
I've never seen him like this before.
Long story short, he's sleeping over
because something is in his house.
We found the statue on Sunday,
and I told him
not to take it
because it gave me bad vibes.
But he took it anyway.
He's been an atheist
for as long as I've known him.
So when he told me
that something was going on,
I thought he was just f*cking with me
because he knows
I like to watch paranormal shows
and he's always made fun of me for it.
Now he says he can't sleep at night
because banging keeps waking him up.
By Wednesday, he started
waking up in the middle of the night
feeling like something
or someone was watching him.
This kept happening.
Every time I'd wake up, he would smell
a really strong scent like pond water.
He doesn't believe in any of this stuff,
so he just ignored it until a few days ago
when the statue moved from his desk
into his living room.
He says that every night since Thursday,
it's moved into a different room
than where he left it.
He thought it was his dog moving it around
because it smelled funny,
but his dog wont go anywhere near it.
He says that she's actually peed
in the house three nights in a row
and she's never done that before.
Then last night,
someone knocked on his door
at three in the morning.
When he went to open it
there was no one there.
He said that as he opened
up the door to look outside,
he knew that he made a big mistake.
Like he just felt like he shouldn't
have opened his door.
At that point,
I didn't have any reason
not to believe him
because it had gone way beyond a joke,
and he actually sounded really,
really f*cking scared on the phone.
He stayed up all night
and then decided to go to the movies
to take his mind off it.
When he got home,
he said it felt like everything was fine
and he decided to finally go to bed.
This is where it gets super f*cked up.
He says that when he woke up,
which wasn't until like ten,
it was because his dog was barking
like crazy.
And when he went out into his hallway,
he saw all these muddy footprints.
Not like shoe prints, but like, barefoot.
Sitting in the living room
was the f*cking statue
which had moved again.
And he says that
when he started to go near it,
he heard someone breathing
that sounded like his grandpa
with a tracheotomy.
He peaced the f*ck out
and now he and his dog
are sleeping in my guest room.
I've never seen him this scared.
He even started crying.
I have no f*cking idea what to do.
I believe him because he has no reason
to lie to me about this
because it's gone
way too far to be a joke now.
I know that everyone says
not to burn it or whatever.
So what the f*ck do we do?
They posted
to the subreddit
and said, listen,
this is what we did.
We're really freaked out.
We don't want to go back to the place
where we found this thing.
We're afraid of meeting who put it there.
What do we do?
Eventually I got called to the thread
because someone that we had just sh*t
a television show with
had listened to Dana and my stories
for like two weeks on the road
and told them, You should get in touch
with Greg and Dana.
They deal with these types of objects.
They could help you.
I tried to give
a really detailed response.
Hey, I get it.
Here's what I would do
if I was in your situation.
It's really important for Dana
and I to never come across
as the people who will solve your problem
for you.
It's very important for us to give
someone the tools
to solve their own problems.
That said, sometimes
people just seem like they're incapable
of dealing with it.
And in those situations, we're happy.
We're happy to help.
After responding to the initial thread,
we private message back and forth
a few times and I gave him some advice on
what I would do in his situation.
Mainly just: take it back, talk to it,
just address
that you made a mistake and say
you're going to take it back to the cave.
It wasn't too long after that
that he messaged saying
that everything had really
escalated pretty badly.
Hey, Greg.
Thanks for the advice.
Today we went back to my friend's house
to get the statue and return it.
When we got there,
his dog wouldn't even come in the house.
I saw the muddy footprints
and the whole place smelled like a dog
that had just rolled around in the dirt.
He went to show me where the statue was
when he left last night,
but it was gone.
When he found it, it was in his hallway
and there was a big cr*ck in the wall
like it had been thrown there.
He swears that he never touched the thing
and left it in its living room.
We told it that we were sorry
about taking it
and that we wanted to take it back
to the cave and asked it what we should do.
I don't know if it was the feeling
you were talking about,
but we both just felt like we should never
go back to that cave again.
He said he felt like
we needed to send it to you.
When we were standing in the hallway
talking this thing,
his dog started barking
like crazy outside.
We both thought we saw a woman
in the dark corner of his living room.
She was totally naked,
really old, and dripping water.
And her--
Her eyes sort of glowed in the dark.
We both freaked the f*ck out
and ran outside.
Whoever
it was wasn't there when we went back in.
We grabbed the statue, apologized again,
wrapped it in a pillowcase
and put it in a box.
He's just going to send it to you.
Give me your address and
well mail it to you tomorrow.
It was maybe a week or two later.
A box showed up, and in it was this effigy
wrapped in an old pillowcase.
And when we rolled it out,
we could see that it was this...
I mean, it was obviously a handmade item
and it had nails nailed into the eyes
and a noose strung around its neck.
And my first instinct when I looked at her
was that it felt obviously,
it felt very symbolic.
There were very symbolic and intentional
symbolism attached to the object itself.
So the nails in the eyes, my first thought
was, is this to blind someone?
Or to cause someone not to see something
specifically? The noose around the neck,
my first thought was,
is this the silence someone?
Is it to keep someone from speaking?
Is it to actually k*ll someone?
Is it to control their energy?
And those two things
were as far as magic goes,
they were so obviously symbolic.
One of the things
that always baffled us about the Crone
is that her hands are to her sides.
And it looks as if the wood
has been split away
between her hands.
Like something had been torn away.
And we always wondered
what that might have been.
We named it after the crone archetype.
The two hikers had seen
an old woman standing in their home.
And the Crone is an old woman,
sometimes seen as a witch.
So we thought that would be
the perfect name
for something that people were seeing.
That sort of archeytpal spirit.
We did with it
what we do with every object that arrives.
We sit it down
and we take photos of it from every angle.
Then that's really it.
We just sort of go on about our day
because like I said,
nine times out of ten, the stuff
that people send us never acts up for us.
We just make room for it in the collection
and if it does something strange,
that's when we'll start to study it.
Later that night
we were in the living room.
We were watching television
and we heard a loud bang
in the office.
I didn't think it was anything paranormal.
I thought it was our cats.
So I get up and I walk
in, realize the office door is closed.
Cats couldn't be in there.
So I went in the bedroom.
The cats are hiding under our bed,
scared out of their minds.
Another thing about having pets
is they're typically
a really great early
warning sign that something
ghostly is happening.
I walked into the office,
didn't see anything out of the ordinary
until I almost stepped on Jesus.
I look up
and there's a crucifix hanging on the wall
and Jesus has been cracked
right off of the crucifix.
This crucifix
only hung on the wall with a single nail.
So whatever did
that had to have held it on
and pulled it off.
Both of the nails
were missing off the crucifix,
except for the one that held the hand.
And I looked right beneath it.
And there was the Crone.
That was the first indication
that maybe there was
something strange happening.
I mean, finding
a desecrated crucifix is definitely
a frightening thing, I think, regardless
of whether you're religious or not.
There's obviously an intention there.
Religious iconography of any kind
being desecrated
is not really a thing
that you want to see at all.
It almost made me feel like I had
to be 100% business with this object.
A lot of people want to
jump to that being a sign of evil,
but I think more importantly,
it's a sign of anger.
And for some reason
that symbol made it angry.
When we thought that something stranger
than usual was happening.
I said to Dana,
Well, we've got this trail cam
we usually use for Bigfoot hunting.
Let's put it in the room.
And if something is moving in there,
we'll catch it.
Nothing happened right away.
But one night between the hours of three
and four in the morning,
the trail camera triggered three times.
One of them had something up
in the corner.
We could easily write that off as a bug.
There was another one
that had a weird globule in it.
We are not orb people.
Those things never excite us.
They're typically
some kind of a lens artifact.
But when you look closer at the image,
whatever this thing is,
is actually giving off
some kind of a light source.
You look at one of the frames
in the corner of the sh*ts
and you can actually see it lit up
only in that image.
So whatever that thing is
that's floating through
the frame is actually giving off light.
But my initial response was,
I think maybe looking to see where
that light anomaly was moving from,
because if it was a bug or something
like that,
we might be able to follow the motion
in which it was moving.
When she did that, we noticed something
we hadn't noticed before.
If you look down in the corner
where the carving is,
it moves ever so slightly.
Nothing else in the frame moves.
There were things
that were sitting on the table
that were much lighter than it.
Things that would move
much easier than it.
We tried to rationalize
how maybe a truck had driven by
or something, but that would have moved everything.
That was big.
That's something that is so rarely
captured by paranormal investigators
that we knew this might require
a lot more investigation.
One night, things got really unnerving.
It was very early in the morning.
I'd been asleep.
Dana shakes me awake pretty violently.
And...
I turn and I look at her,
and I'm really groggy.
And I can tell that she's really scared.
It takes her a second to actually tell me
what had happened.
The way that it moved,
the way that it felt.
It was like a living nightmare.
Like it felt.
I felt like I was literally
looking at a living nightmare.
I didn't see it, but I believe her
because Ive very
rarely seen her this scared.
That's when she
really started to believe
that there was something
that...
had come into the house.
I'm sitting in the office
doing some work,
and Dana calls me
and I can already hear that
she sounds very unsure.
She says,
Were you standing on the couch tonight?
I said, No.
She goes,
You didn't like get out of the shower
and stand on the couch and change
one of the light bulbs or something?
And I just laughed
because it just sounded ridiculous.
And she said, Come here right now.
And we both kind of
stood there in the living room
staring at these two footprints on the
back of the couch, staring at the wall.
And there was nothing leading up to them.
They were just--
it was as if they had just manifested
there on the back of the couch.
At this point, there were
way too many things to ignore.
So many things were lining up with
the story that had been posted on Reddit.
We realized that we needed
to take our own advice
and address this thing.
So I went into the office
and I grabbed the carving
and I brought it into the living room
and I set it down
on the coffee table.
And we had a talk with it.
And we just say, Listen,
we're happy to share our space with you.
This is something that we like to do.
If there's help that you need,
we're happy to try and help you get it.
But you need to understand
this is a coexistence.
We have to live with each other.
And as we're having this conversation,
we both
hear the sound of rushing water
coming from the opposite side
of the house.
The last apartment that we lived
in, we'd had a burst pipe.
It's not fun to go through.
I thought, Oh, no, not again.
We get up,
we run to the other side of the house,
hoping to stop whatever it is
that's happening.
But nothings there.
And as we're standing there, confused,
trying to figure out what's going on,
we hear a series of loud thumps
in the living room.
We walk back in the living room
and the Crone is gone.
It was sitting right on the coffee table
and now has vanished.
We're looking all over for it.
And eventually I see it
underneath the television stand.
I get down on my hands and knees
and I reach under
the television stand
and I hear Dana absolutely shriek
because the television
has started to tip down on to my head.
If it wasn't for Dana,
it would have smashed right into my head.
This was so upsetting to me
that I said something I never like to say.
I said, if this is how it's going to be,
I'm going to put you in a box.
I'm going to put a lock on it,
and I'm going to stick you on a shelf.
After I'd said this,
we heard three loud bangs
on the kitchen wall.
And I just took that as... okay,
this is how it's going to be.
So I pulled the box out.
I put it back in the pillowcase,
wrapped it up, put it in the box,
slammed the lid shut,
put the lock on it,
and stuck it on a shelf.
And that's where it stayed
until we would go out on the road.
The final straw with the Crone
happened at Michigan Paracon.
This is the 8th annual
Michigan Paranormal Convention.
Its being held at the Kewadin Casinos
in Sault Ste. Marie this weekend,
and its brought some of the biggest names
in the industry to the U.P.
Theres also the Traveling Museum
of the Paranormal and the Occult.
We travel from coast to coast and
bring haunted objects to people.
We let them hold them, touch them,
experience them for themselves.
The idea is to just give people
a paranormal experience.
Michigan Paracon is an event
we always look forward to every year.
It's one of the biggest
paranormal conferences in the country.
And at this event specifically,
a man had come to the event
and he really, really
wanted to see the Crone.
He came back
multiple times throughout the day
and asked if he could see her.
And we himmed and hawed
about it
And finally we said, okay,
we'll pull it out just for a second.
And, seconds...
after I pulled it out of the pillowcase,
all hell broke loose.
The minute that the Crone came out,
it was like a force
sh*t down the aisle.
The presenter that was across from us,
her bottle of soda
just popped and
sprayed all over her books.
Just destroyed hundreds of dollars
worth of books.
She was screaming.
We then noticed that the lights
that are going down
the vendor hall are swinging,
The lights are literally swinging
directly over top of everyone.
There's people all the way up,
all the different presenters down the row
are looking all over the place
because they know something's going on.
And then all of a sudden
I see further down the aisle
on the right hand side, there's a man
who has his head
slunk back in his chair
and I see blood
start to drip down his neck.
And he has a really violent seizure.
All of this happened in the matter
of 15, 20 seconds.
I'm taking it all in,
standing there holding this thing.
And the guy who had asked us to see it
basically starts to weep,
and says, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
Put it away.
I slammed it back in the box.
And I looked at Dana
and I said, We can never do this again.
This cannot come with us anymore.
We need to do something about this.
And it was when the plan first started
and we started talking about the idea
of figuring out a way to bring her back
potentially to the place where she came from.
We're a museum.
We are all about preserving these things.
We're living in a time where it's much
easier to preserve stuff than ever before.
You can even preserve something
by 3D scanning it.
And then the original can cease to exist,
but people can still study it.
They can see every detail of it.
Were going to take a haunted object.
Were going to 3D scan it.
And then were going to 3D print it.
This is a first.
This has never been done.
Ive never heard of this being done.
This is a completely uncharted territory.
Its a new horizon.
And Im really excited about the possibilities.
Our friend Jason Gowin
was our 3D scanning technician.
He had all the equipment that we needed.
He had a powerful enough computer
to run the software
and he'd already scanned dozens
of our different artifacts.
So he was the perfect
person for this project.
My name is Jason Gowin.
I have been a paranormal
adventurer slash investigator since
forever? Like 1998
I guess was when I officially started
doing all of this.
Jason is one of my oldest friends.
We were on the same ghost hunting team
when I was like, 13 years old.
If theres something here,
tell us your name.
If youd like us to leave,
give us some sort of a sign.
He was the wheel man,
because he was a little older than us.
You know, Ill give you credit, Greg.
You were the first... You were the first of us.
When Greg decided to play a prank
on one of our friends,
he asked me to go full Blair Witch
and hide in a cemetery and scare
the living bejesus out of the kid
with as much Blair-Witchy stuff
as I could possibly muster
and we did it.
Yeah!
Because we were trying to terrify you!
Yeah. And you fuckin did.
And we had so much fun that we
started checking out legends for real.
Get down! Get down!
I happened to notice that Greg
had put out a thing
that he was looking for someone
with a 3D scanner.
And so he kind of told me a little bit
about what he wanted to do
with scanning the objects and
making recreations of all of them.
Is it a responsible thing to do?
Who knows!
Because I have no idea
whats going to happen.
And I was really interested
Id been looking for a new
paranormal adventure to have and...
I got what I asked for.
They have their own little souls and personalities
and were about to make them digital.
And then tangible again.
Obviously,
we have some big news to share,
but we'll wait until
weve gotten this thing
spread out on all the channels.
Before we started our
museum membership program,
we used to host pretty regular public
live streams
and during these live streams we would talk
about different items in the collection.
Sometimes we'd do experiments with them,
but we held a special live stream in 2017
where we were announcing the launch
of our museum membership program.
During this live stream,
we were discussing the Crone
and Jason is in the comments.
...and weve made a lot of
breakthroughs with the box
since we last chatted,
I think were really onto something...
Dana and I saw it
and we were horrified
because that's not the kind of joke
that you make to something
as scary as the Crone was.
It seems that ghosts
don't have a great sense of humor.
They seem to be very literal.
And I continued to watch
your live feed.
And all of a sudden I heard this
boom-boom-boom-boom-boom
walking around in our upstairs.
And I looked and could see Lyla,
our cat, was laying down.
And so I was like, okay, I'm
going to have to investigate what that is.
I got up, I started to walk across
the kitchen floor and I stepped in wet.
And that's when the light
caught one of the shapes.
And I'm like, That's a footprint.
I followed the water to the door.
The door was open.
And we had shut and locked it.
The porch light was on,
it shouldnt have been.
But there were no tracks in the snow.
But then I noticed it went back and
back towards our bedroom.
And then I called you immediately.
And you guys were like,
The Crone!
I know it was Dana that said,
Did you go upstairs?
And I hadn't even thought of that
because Jace wasn't home.
So I had no reason to even check.
And we followed the footprints,
which then went up our stairs,
which are carpeted,
up around the hallway,
and they went right towards his door,
which had been shut,
and...
it was open.
So we went in,
turned on the lights,
and the footprint stopped
and left a giant puddle
directly in front of his crib.
Tille Boom
Fortunately for him,
his baby was at his mother-in-laws
house that night.
But it was enough to freak him out,
and he realized he'd done something
he shouldn't have done.
And he asked Dana,
give me whatever
you can to help me with this.
What do I do? What do I do?
So Dana sent him a package full
of all kinds of different stuff,
some things that he could burn,
some rituals that he could do
in order to seal his house back up.
And from that point on,
he was absolutely terrified
of the Crone.
We knew that we were
going to take the Crone back
to where it had been taken from.
And so it was important for us
to get a 3D scan of her before we did.
So we planned a live stream
on Halloween night.
And Jason, of course,
refused to do it at his house.
Happy Halloween, everybody.
We are in a secure location,
in a hotel room,
here in Sayre, Pennsylvania.
I don't think any of us
could have anticipated that
that would be the night that everything
came together with the Crone.
We made every decision about
what we were going to do with her
and how we were going to return her
based on what happened
during that live stream.
What are you going to be doing tonight?
What are you going to be trying?
The Estes Method.
I like to describe the Estes Method
as a form of
technologically-assisted mediumship.
It is a really interesting
technique that makes use of
an SB-7 spirit box,
a really traditional tool
in a Ghost Hunters toolkit.
It's really nothing more than
a radio that has a sweep function,
so it just scans through
AM or FM radio stations
at a fast rate of speed
and a lot of paranormal investigators
like to believe
that the ghosts can
manipulate that sweep
and then when you hear a word,
it means that a ghost has somehow said it.
Can you say the name of somebody
that you want to talk to?
- Uh, did it just say my name?
- Yeah.
I never liked that very much.
So when I saw what our friends Karl Pfeiffer
and Connor Randall came up with,
I was blown away.
What Karl and Connor started to do
is they would use a blindfold
and a pair of headphones,
and the headphones would plug directly
into the spirit box,
meaning that the only person who
could hear the feed was the medium.
That person,
their world was just the audio.
They couldn't see anything,
and the only thing that they could hear
were those sweeping radio stations.
So when whoever was acting as the
questioner would speak to the ghosts,
occasionally, they would start to get
an answer from the medium,
who didnt see them
or hear them.
When I watched Connor become a mouthpiece
for something that we couldn't see,
I knew there was something special
about the Estes Method.
I was really fascinated with it.
- That was Dana talking
- Now that Dana is in,
well pull the Crone out.
...since the last live-stream that we did.
There is motion, yes.
Were going to take you home,
were going to take you back.
but before we do that, we want to
take your picture.
That camera is going to send out little
beams of light
that are gonna bounce off the artifact
that you inhabit.
Its not going to hurt you.
Its not going to choke you.
Its going to bounce--
Its not going to hurt you,
I promise.
It hasnt hurt any of the other--
It, it-- I promise, its not going to.
Oh, its getting a really smooth,
fast scan.
I keep getting weird, sharp pains
in random places.
Ive got one in my upper thigh.
Dana spent most of the live stream
under the Estes Method,
so she was unaware of anything
that was going on in the room.
The first scan, there were two moments
that Dana complained
about feeling sharp pains
at different points in her body.
At both of those moments
we were actually performing
one of the scans.
What?
Well, Im going to.
I have to.
Dont make that.
You dont want us to print you?
Its almost done, sweetheart.
Theres like two people talking.
Two voices.
- Two?
More names. It just said more names.
- Oh man, oh man.
- Theres two voices.
Theres a very deep, growly,
scary-sounding voice
that just keeps trying to scare me.
- Okay. Whoevers calling names,
- But theres another,
theres another voice,
thats a womans voice underneath.
If you are attached to the Crone,
can you tell us what your name is?
She said that as soon as I saved it.
Alright.
- This is so weird.
- Oh yes.
- Its flawless.
Oh my god, thank you.
The only thing it didnt scan,
theres no nails.
- It didnt even pick them up.
- Wow.
Okay. Good
- Here, let me save it.
The first scan that we did,
it went very smoothly.
In fact, it still stands as the number one
fastest, smoothest, best scan we ever got.
The only thing that was weird about it
is that when we did the scan,
there were no nails in the eyes
and there were not even divots
where the nails should have been.
And there should have been--
because it scans the surface,
it bounces light off an object.
So the light hit those and it should have
bounced off the nails, but never did.
and to me that to this day,
it's a still very bizarre phenomenon
that should have happened but didn't.
I keep hearing this thing,
its not a word but I keep hearing it
over and over again,
and it says, Biddum.
- Biddum.
- And its a mans voice.
And he just keeps saying Biddum
and I dont like him.
Is it his name?
Are you Biddum?
Were doing another scan
just to be safe.
Well, youre not the first to
call me that.
- If... if...
- Ah! Pain in my back now.
If you guys have questions...
Three times throughout that hour and
a half long session, I felt physical pain.
And I remember thinking that it was
very interesting because I had never felt
anything physical in connection
to doing the Estes Method before.
So I felt pain in my thigh,
in my upper back and in my throat,
and it felt as if it was happening
at random.
And I remember it was strong enough
that I felt it was important
to vocalize it, even though I didn't know
if it really had anything to do
with what was happening
around me at the time.
Is there somebody...
Are you being held prisoner
by something else?
That was so sad.
Its frozen.
Theres two voices!
Who is talking to me right now?
And whats your name?
Biddum,
You were alive?
What the f*ck did I tell you?
I wasn't terribly familiar--
I knew of the Estes Method.
But here I am watching it happen,
you know, in person and happened
very intensely and build very quickly.
So I was... to say I was hooked
is an understatement
because it was truly mind-blowing
what I was watching happen.
Something is...
Theres a woman crying.
A crying voice.
Under all of it.
As it goes, duh-duh-duh-duh,
I can hear a woman crying.
Male voice number two,
are you Biddum?
What does that mean?
Dont ignore the question.
Im too loud?
I think that the womans
being too loud.
And this guy Biddum,
Is telling her to shut up.
- Hes telling her to shup up.
So he wasnt addressing me.
So theyre not talking to us,
theyre talking to eachother?
I think that were watching a conversation happening
between two entities.
When you do the Estes Mehod,
one of the things
that I don't think is necessarily
as important is the idea of listening
for the same sounding voice.
I think because you're listening
to random radio stations
and lots of white noise,
it's easy to sort of think that
you're hearing the same person
talking to you
if it sounds like the same voice.
And that's kind of something
that I really don't agree with.
I think it's not really necessarily
as important,
but what was really interesting
was this night specifically,
I felt as if I was hearing the same
two voices distinctly,
a male voice and a female voice.
And that felt important.
It felt different.
I had never experienced anything like that before.
I was hearing
two people have a conversation.
What I dont understand is
who did this to this?
Biddum?
Who are... who is in the room
with us right now?
Thats how he said it.
Shhh!
Im trying to figure out who Im
talking to right now.
That was loud.
- Oh, f*ck.
- I made it.
Brother Biddum?
The nice thing about doing these live
streams is there's sometimes 100 people
or more watching them
and they're all sitting at their computer.
So plenty of people were Googling this
and they had all kinds of different ideas
about what this could mean.
Some of them found translations
of the word that related to prayer.
It seemed that whatever it was, the root
word of Biddum
had something to do with prayer.
Okay. Wheres the cave?
Its high. Is it in the mountains?
Its in the mountains?
What mountains? New York mountains?
The Catskills?
Okay.
Is it in a park?
Something just put like a big...
a sharp pain in my throat.
Between the second and third scanning,
there were 40 minutes.
So within that 40 minute time period,
I did not experience
another physical sensation
until they literally fired up the
the scanner for the third time.
And that's when I experienced
the pain again.
I like to think that that night
and that Estes Method Session,
that I really did connect with her,
with the energy of her,
with what had been happening around her.
I really feel like I tapped into something
and I think that it was that
trance state that doing the Estes
Method can bring you to,
I think that that was
what really allowed me to tap into her.
And I feel very strongly
as if there was a connection
that really happened that night.
If you understand this,
tell her...
Tell her to not...
Tell her that he has no power...
He does not have power over you.
He has no power over you.
We were saying this earlier.
You can leave. You dont need
to stay there.
Whoever is keeping you there,
you dont need to listen.
He has no power over you other than
what you percieve.
I know. You need to ignore him.
Ignore him. He cant do anything.
He cant do anything.
No.
We are.
You have permission.
She said permission so loud.
You have permission.
You do not need to listen to this person.
Whatever or whoever it is,
you are your own person.
You can leave. You can go.
It seemed that the larger
picture was coming into view.
Biddum, or Brother Biddum implies
some kind of man of religion.
Even the name Biddum
seems to relate somehow to religion.
The Crone itself was very obviously
an act of witchcraft, of some kind,
and one of our first interactions
with whatever entity was attached to
the Crone had to do with the desecration
of a Christian symbol.
To me, it seemed like what we were finally
realizing was
there was a visceral reaction
by this entity to Christian iconography.
And it could be because
there was some form of persecution
that had happened to
this person or thing
at some point in the past.
Were going to help.
We are.
Youre in control.
Youre not tethered.
Shes so loud right now.
If its him, we will get rid of him.
Well get rid of him.
I think in that moment it's
very easy to wonder
if we were being manipulated or not.
But if you hear someone
screaming down a dark alley for help,
are you going to go help them
or are you going to stand there and go,
No, that's a trick.
And I think we felt
very strongly that at that point,
the right thing to do was to help.
A few days after
the Halloween livestream,
Jason contacted us with some progress
in his 3D scanning.
There was no way to
3D print it with the nails and the noose.
They were too thin.
The nails were definitely too thin,
so they had to be digitally removed.
And we thought it would be interesting
to put an actual noose on the 3D print.
In order to do that, he had to actually
separate the Crones head from its body.
I mean, I had manipulated
probably a hundred different things
from children's toys
to accessories for,
you know, our Amazon equipment.
I had, you know,
I had started to build a drone.
I was 3D printing a drone.
I had done post-production
on dozens of these objects.
Never,
not before, not after,
did I ever anything happen
like it did with the Crone.
I have no idea whats going to happen
because Ive never had it just openly,
defiantly change the design
of what Ive built.
When I started editing the file, I was able
to get the noose off, no problem.
But I was left with two pieces:
a head and a body.
But when I did that,
it looked like these fingers or tendrils
were coming out of the bottom.
They were twisted,
they were in the wrong position,
and you could tell what they were
because they had fingernails on them.
We would have known if somebody
had scanned their fingers into this thing,
we would have seen it on the 3D scan.
We were able to look at both of them
immediately as it scanned.
And I had taken my hand away from
the mouse,
so the file was manipulating itself.
At no point did I--
I have no explanation for what I saw.
It just seemed like
a really obvious indication
that something was trying to escape
from this piece.
It was a visual reminder
of what we were trying to do.
We'd had enough problems
with the 3D scanning project at that point.
The Crone was sort of the last straw.
But the preservation of these things
was still very, very important to us.
And knowing that our time with the Crone
was coming to an end,
it was more important to us than ever
to somehow preserve her.
It's very serendipitous
that we met Tyler Strand
around the same time.
- There he is!
- Whats up!
Hey buddy.
- Cmon in!
- Were like half an hour early...
My name is Tyler Strand.
I am a special makeup and effects artist,
so I'm involved in everything from
molding objects, creating custom
prosthetics, dental wear, prosthetic eyes,
the whole gamut of works,
creating monsters
on top of being a paranormal investigator.
So I live a life of monsters.
He's a really great artist
and he's someone
who can help us preserve
objects in the museum
at a museum-quality level.
And he felt like someone
that was really going to be a big help
when it came to the act of actually
preserving the Crone.
I'm passionate about
the paranormal because it's a pursuit
of everything that I view as
higher or thought-provoking in our reality.
You're tackling age-old mysteries
that have always been at the forefront
of the human experience,
and I can't think of anything else
that invokes that in me
or has so much substance to it.
The study of the supernatural, to me,
is the study of the self.
We made a promise to the Crone
that we were going to return her.
We were coming up on almost a year
since we made that promise,
And we were having a really busy year,
and we had one short window
where we could still take her back
in that year before it got too cold
and there was just no way
we were going to make it up the mountain.
So we made plans and picked up Tyler
and drove to Ellenville.
Ellenville is the town at the base
of the mountain
that the crown came from.
We get to Ellenville
and we start to notice
that there's Ukrainian text on signs,
on businesses, on churches.
What... is... is it. an old...
Church! It was a church.
It says Ukrainian Native Faith Church.
What we didn't anticipate
was the massive Ukrainian community
that was in this town
and that started to spin our wheels
and we wondered,
could there be some kind of Slavic or
Ukrainian connection to this item?
We're on the road so we don't have access
to a lot of research materials
except for Google.
What we did is,
we texted our friend John Tenney.
Johns a font of knowledge
on the paranormal
and he keeps lots of files
on all kinds of stuff.
He's a really great resource to have
when were stumped on something.
John knew what we were doing.
He knew where we were.
He knew that we were out
to return the Crone.
So when I texted him, I said, Listen,
can you think of any connection
that that might have to this item?
And he texted me back and said,
Well, Baba Yaga.
Baba Yaga is arguably
the most famous witch
in Ukrainian folklore.
She has existed,
I mean, basically since the beginning
of Ukrainian folklore.
She's sort of that Crone archetype.
She exists in the forest,
in a house with chicken legs.
People are kind of scared of her,
but she does good even though
people are scared of her.
And it seemed really interesting.
After Tenney came back with Baba Yaga,
I started to do some Googling.
As I'm scrolling through the search results
for Baba Yaga,
looking at pictures,
I see a carved statue.
I click on it,
it takes me to an Etsy shop,
and this is an Etsy shop based out of Russia
that creates custom, carved,
altar dolls meant for religious worship.
Traditional Slavic paganism.
The Baba Yaga doll didn't quite look right,
but as I scrolled,
there was another altar doll named MoKosh,
and it looked pretty darn close.
I googled Mokosh,
which led me to the story
of really the only female goddess
in the Slavic pantheon.
The name Mokosh
comes from the root word mokry,
which is the Russian word for wet.
Mokosh was the goddess of moisture
and fate and witchcraft.
My name is Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby
I am a professor of Russian folklore
and linguistics
at the University of Kentucky.
We have no actual evidence
about the Slavic pantheon
or the Slavic gods.
Well, particularly East Slavic,
which is what you're interested in.
Unlike in Greece and Rome,
these were not literate people.
There were no ethnographers
who were coming in to write down what
these people believed or what they did
or what the rituals look like,
or what the practices were.
So everything that has been written
on this topic,
well, 95% of it, is based on speculation
and parallels to what they know
about other European cultures,
which may or may not be what was there.
So there's almost nothing.
But the Russian specialists
felt that Russia suffered
from not having the same type
of heritage documented
that were in other great nations,
and so pretty much out of whole cloth
they determined what it was on the basis
of little scraps
of very little information.
We know that to some extent,
obviously, there was a belief system
and we know that those gods
were worshiped by somebody.
But what the organization was
and how they were worshiped
and really what they mean is--
a lot of it is extrapolated.
So that brings us to Neopagans, right?
Because what the Neopagans are arguing
is very much like the Soviets:
Christianity is not our faith.
We had an older faith.
And so what they've done
is they've seized on these
beautiful pictures of constructed pantheons
written by these 19th century
and Soviet era scholars to create
a belief system.
How popular are Neopagan,
Slavic beliefs in the United States?
There's very small groups,
but they are really small.
So one of the groups that--
there are some in Canada,
there are some in the northeastern U.S.
There's one in New York
that's pretty small.
Again, not much going on,
and that's about it.
I mean, except maybe emmigrates
who've come and brought
their religion with them.
But the image you have, well,
that statue does not--
What's weird about that statue to me,
that makes it an anachronism...
If it's a Neopagan group,
I don't think there'd be any reason
to have a noose or nails.
It would be different
because the model
is so powerful for them,
that is this established model
in the literary tradition.
So if you go to their pages, again,
all in Russian or Ukrainian, but if you go
and look you see that they keep using
these same old images
and when they create contemporary
versions, they're models of those.
And that statue does not,
to me, look like that.
Is it mostly the nails and the noose
that causes...
Yeah.
Plus her hand would almost inevitably
be holding something.
Looking at images of Mokosh,
there are statues that show her
standing with her arms at her side,
holding a bucket of water.
Sometimes she was depicted
holding a ball of twine because she was
also the goddess of fate.
For the first time,
we realized
what went between
the Crones arms.
What we found out when we
were trying to make that replica,
trying to make it as accurate as possible.
The carving itself seemed fairly old.
The nails and the noose were pretty new.
They were added.
We were able to find-- the closest we could
find-- we went to every
hardware store we could find.
We found the nails and the noose
material both at Wal-Mart.
Which is the only big store at the
base of that mountain.
So it seems like somebody had taken
an existing carving,
and potentially had-- you know,
who knows the purpose of it--
had done something to it, theyd
added those to it.
She is strongly associated
because of this connection with Paraskeva,
with weaving, spinning,
obviously fertility,
particularly of cows and women.
People sought her for help,
but then she also sometimes scared people.
One of the things that she did
was she quite often stole children.
Yes, there is definitely...
definitely the potential for...
for conflict
between Neopagan groups
and Christian groups,
particularly because the Neopagans
are saying that Christianity is false
and not ours or especially orthodoxy.
And the Orthodox groups
have done very well
in the post-Soviet period,
you know, the first ten...
the first decade was
tricky, getting reestablished,
but they have really established themselves
as powerful social forces
and they do not want
any potential competition.
Yes, definitely the potential
for a great deal of conflict.
Mokosh was considered
a Chthonic deity,
not good and not evil,
a complete gray area.
Basically live and let live.
And this entire time
we were struggling with whether or not
the Crone was good or bad.
And really the answer is
neither.
The night before
we were set to go up the mountain,
we stopped about an hour
outside of our destination
and got a hotel so that we could prepare.
One of the most important things
to get a replica of the Crone
was to create a box mold.
So that was the first time
that Tyler had the opportunity
to actually hold the Crone and see her
even just in closer detail.
And it was a big moment for him.
I knew that there was going to be
a lot of manhandling of this object
that for a very long time
had not even been touched.
And so I was very nervous
about the idea of Tyler coming at her
with implements and measuring her
and having her out of the box
and really kind of putting her through
what felt like a very sterile exploration.
It felt frightening to me because I wasn't
sure what was going to happen.
This object had not been handled very
much, let alone in the past few months
at that point.
The atmosphere inside of this room
significantly changed, rapidly,
almost like there was an electricity in the air.
After a few minutes,
Tyler went and he grabbed
his Gauss meter.
This things really sensitive.
Are you serious?
I've never seen anything like that before,
especially not with
an inanimate object,
seemingly, made out of wood.
I've never experienced
those kinds of spikes
that were so apparent in something.
It really set the tone for how whatever
it was seemed to be ramping up.
And that put us on edge because you could--
you could hear it.
And it it felt a lot
like handling a live grenade.
I feel as if it was tolerated
because of the just
her physical proximity to the location
that she was going to be returned to.
It felt like there was
some sort of an intelligent
energy there that was aware of that
and that's why
it was being tolerated.
So we knew that
we were going to return the Crone.
We knew we were going to unbind
whatever was attached to the Crone,
and we knew
we were going to make a mold of it.
This presented a really big problem.
We couldn't make a mold of the Crone
until we had removed
the nails and the noose,
which were part of the unbinding ritual.
But we couldn't do
the unbinding ritual anywhere except
her place of origin.
- Are you ready?
- I think so.
It was very, very important,
Dana stressed how important it was,
that we did it on the mountain,
which meant we had to do
the molding on the mountain
because we were not going to leave
that location
with the carving.
This is going to be a hell of a hike.
This is gonna feel fuckin horrible.
I honestly think that the ritual
to unbind the Crone began
the second that we got to the trailhead.
The second we started that walk,
I was very aware of the fact that we were
already moving into that ritual headspace.
One of the oldest
stories about Mokosh
is about how she was kidnapped
by the God Veles,
who was the God of serpents,
God of the underworld.
And Mokosh's husband, Perun,
had to chase him up a mountain
and cut Veles belly open to release her
from his grasp.
Which was pretty much
exactly what we were doing,
and we didn't even realize it.
We were taking an item
that seemed to have
something trapped in it
to the top of a mountain
to release it.
We're absolutely exhausted.
We finally get to the top
of the mountain
and Dana felt like
this was the right place.
This was the place
that we were supposed to be.
Look at that view...
And then as the sun went down,
Dana reiterated how important it was
that we stayed inside the circle
no matter what.
Then she cast it.
Do we have everything that we need?
- We have wood.
- Yeah.
- We have food. We have water.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Okay. Lets start.
Because were doing things that are
a little bit scary,
its just going to protect our space,
so that whatever potentially could be
drawn to it cant enter the space.
And thats what the black salt is for.
Extra on all our doorways.
I didn't know how we were going to finish
everything we had to finish.
We had so much to do.
And as were sitting there,
our phones start buzzing.
And it was because at that moment,
all of Dana's witches
were doing a ritual at the same exact time
and they had just started.
These are magic practitioners,
people that I've been teaching for years and years
and we knew they would be able
to lend us just as much energy.
So in one of the months
we included an optional ritual
that they could do alongside us
as we were doing our ritual.
So we had this huge group of people
who were able to lend their energy
and lend their magic to us
as we were up on this mountain,
exhausted and tired
and ready to give up at certain points,
we could feel them pushing us
through the final mile of this
exhausting journey that had taken us
three... three years to get to.
With twine, nail,
and wood times three...
No longer shall her binding be...
- There?
- This way.
With twine, nail,
and wood times three...
No longer shall her binding be...
With twine, nail,
and wood times three...
No longer shall her binding be...
With twine, nail,
and wood times three...
No longer shall her binding be...
With twine, nail,
and wood times three...
No longer shall her binding be...
Hail and welcome to
the earth, air, fire, water.
With twine, nail,
and wood times three...
No longer shall her binding be...
We prepared our space
and I started to cleanse and consecrate
the mundane tools that we would be using.
So literally pliers, things that would
be used to pull the nails out
or a pair of scissors or whatever
it was that we were going to need.
We were prepping
that space and I was cleansing them
so that we were removing any energy
that potentially was attached to it
by people who had touched them previously.
Anyone who had used them
without a ritual intention.
You want to clear that energy away.
We consecrate you.
And unbind you.
Dana's job was to consecrate the area
and consecrate the tools and the Crone.
My job was to pull the nails out.
That was really the first time
that it set in on me
what we were about to do,
what was going to happen.
We release the negativity
bound to this object,
And we bind them to the nails
and we release them.
And we release them.
It really struck a chord with me
because it felt less like something
that we were fearing at that point,
and it felt a lot
like he was holding somebody down
and he was doing something painful.
...to the nails. And we release them.
It was overwhelming.
Every one of the nails
was so hard to pull out.
With every one,
I reminded whoever or whatever it was
that what we were doing was
we were unbinding
any source of negativity from this piece.
What we were doing was to help.
We release any negativity
associated with this object.
We bind it to the nails.
And we release it.
And that left Tyler to pull the noose off.
Youre not bound by this anymore.
You dont have to suffocate anymore.
And it felt like
there was just a pop in the air.
And all of a sudden
this thing was just a chunk of wood.
Whatever it was was gone.
That felt right.
- Listen, do you hear those coyotes?
- Uh-huh.
- Listen, listen!
- Listen!
And as soon as that realization
set in, we could hear
all the coyotes on the mountain start
howling at the same time,
we hadn't heard a single
one up until that point.
The mountain literally
lit up with the sounds of coyotes,
coyotes singing this song
as if there was a rejoice of some kind.
And it didn't feel like we had this
heavy burden anymore.
It was light.
After the unbinding ritual,
we took the Crone into a tent.
And Tyler and I tried our best to make
a mold of this item.
We werent very confident in
how it turned out.
But wed already done what we
were there to do.
And that was good enough.
The next morning,
we wake up from what little sleep we got
and we knew we needed to have a burial.
We wrapped the Crone in a black sheet
and we found a nice, quiet, shady spot
where we didn't think
anyone would ever find it
and dug a hole
and we buried her.
And just kind of had a moment of silence.
We just sat there and thought
about what we'd been through
and said a few words.
And then started our descent.
Its very easy to put your own fears
and thoughts onto an item
to kind of force it to fit a narrative.
But to us this thing was just a scary statue.
that was exhibiting scary stuff
and it felt like we have
to make it stop.
All these years later, seeing that
entire journey, having that perspective,
and going, oh my god, all of these details
about Mokosh
line up so perfectly with everything that
we and others were experiencing,
with this item,
leads me to believe that theres
objectively something happening
outside of us.
That it wasnt us haunting this object.
That this object either already was
or became
a conduit for something old.
We were engaging with this ancient
archetype of the Crone,
of Mokosh.
And we didnt even know.
This whole time we had no idea
that that is what was coming through.
Thats what we were experiencing.
The things that we found out
about Mokosh
years after we thought we were done
with this story,
are so compelling.
It doesnt feel like this was just something
that we impressed upon it.
It feels like...
something was subtly guiding us
to an end.
Its three years later.
We're finishing up all
the last pieces of this documentary,
and the one thing thats bothering us
is the fact that we can't put a bow on Biddum.
We don't know what Biddum means.
So we're sitting in the living room,
we're going through Google.
And while we couldn't find a meaning
for the word Biddum,
we found a few things
that really startled us.
...actually chilling. Like that is
the stuff that--
Like, thats magic at work.
The problem with Slavic paganism
is that
there's only like bits
and pieces of it that exist.
So there are lots of different entities
that share traits
with Mokosh or sometimes
accompany Mokosh.
One of them is an entity called the Kikimora.
There are two different kinds of Kikimora.
The other one comes from the swamp.
It is said that she can be identified
by her wet footprints.
When the home builders
wanted to harm someone buying a house,
they would bring in Kikimora.
Once she is inside, it's
difficult to get her to leave.
Swamp Kikimora was described as
small, ugly, hunchbacked,
thin and scruffy old woman
with a pointed nose and disheveled hair.
I'm f*cking getting goose bumps.
She was said to use moss and grass
as her clothes.
It was believed that she frightens people,
knocked travelers off the road
and also kidnaps children!
Yeah, that's f*cking creepy.
As happens with a lot of pagan religions,
Christianity has a habit
of incorporating pagan gods
and turning them into saints.
And they converted Mokos,
or Mokosh, to Saint Petka.
Saint Petka has a very specific holiday
that is celebrated
the final weekend of October,
usually between October 25th
and November 1st, depending on where
that weekend falls in the year.
The festival dedicated to this goddess
was celebrated sometime between
the 25th of October
and the 1st of November,
depending on which date
happened to be a Friday.
Unbelievable.
What day were you guys on the mountain?
We were on the mountain on October 26th,
is when midnight struck,
when we were making the mold
for the Crone.
My birthday, October 26th.
It's horrible out here.
What?
Thanks.
27 years old,
sleeping on rocks.
Historian and religious scholar Max Dashu
informs us that
the old goddess of the pagans
was known by many avatars across Europe,
and that Friday was observed
as her holy day, beginning with
its eve on Thursday night.
You said it was between, what?
The 20...
The 25th of October
and the 1st of November.
Whichever day was a Friday?
Yeah.
The 26th of October 2018
was a Friday.
- Haha! Get out of here!
- Get out!
What we didnt realize at the time
is we were actually climbing that mountain
on Thursday, October 25th
and performing that ritual as the clock
turned over to midnight on Friday.
Her feast day is celebrated on Friday,
but traditionally
begins on Thursday evening.
That is insane
Hows that... Hows that happen?
How funny is it that we were
so adamant we had to do this now?
- Yeah
- We had to do this now!
Of all the other days we could have gone,
of all the other windows we could have
even had to go there,
things had to line up so specifically
for us to be there at that exact time.
It should even exist. It shouldnt be real!
Its so specific. Its so specific.
And its that type of strange...
Heres the thing,
we can call it a coincidence if we want,
but theres too many coincidences
in this entire case.
Its direct. It feels...
I mean, I cant talk about it without having
full-body chills because it feels like
something else was in control.
I am not the same person
now than I was before
the Crones investigation.
And the realization
that we were communicating
with or interacting with
a beloved goddess,
its...
I don't think you can be the same person
after having that kind of an experience.
Its made me change my mind about how
we approach a lot of these things.
Its made me change my mind
about what is behind
the activity with a lot of these things.
It feels incredibly narcissistic
to think, oh, we were doing this on
behalf of an ancient goddess.
But I do think we brushed up
against something
bigger
than a ghost.
If you go back and you look at the stories
of most of our ancestors,
a lot of those stories are scary.
And that doesnt make them evil.
It makes them complex.
It makes them
human.
And thats the irony.
The irony is that its that complexity
that often gets looked at as evil
when it is something that should
actually touch us on such a deep
human level that we recognize
that these stories are us.
They are a part of us.
And my hope is that people will
walk away
and recognize that sometimes things
are scary because theyre real.
and sometimes things are scary because
thats part of the growth process.
And that sometimes things are scary because
they have to be scary.
sh*t has to be scary sometimes
for us to change.
It has to be scary for us to have
an initiatory experience.
It has to be scary for us to
grow spiritually.
We cant always sit in this place
of love and light,
we have to recognize
that the scary things are just
the complexities of us as people.
And the complexities of a spiritual
growth process.
...Right up to the base...
Just right there.
- Do you want me to hold this?
- Okay, wait, heres the thing,
I want you to hold this open like this.
Keep it open.
Hold it just like that.
Its still toasty, but...
I dont want to rip any more of that silicone...
Its coming out!
Oh my f*cking god.
Oh my god, dude, its perfect!
Oh my god.
Holy sh*t.
- Look at that.
- Wow.
Dude, thats not nearly as bad
as you made it out to be.
No...
Sometimes I think about the goddesses
and the gods that have been lost.
And I think about how they are
still here and still alive.
And I feel like the gods and
the goddesses are coming back to us
to remind us of who we are.
And that history is--
it's not history.
It's like an organism.
It's like a living, breathing thing.
It's finding its way back
into the collective consciousness,
and it's allowing
people to reconnect with who
they used to be.
And I think that that's
a really beautiful thing
and that it is
a living thing
and will continue to be a living thing.
Most of the objects that we encounter
I think are because someone has put
so much
intention, emotion, fear,
love, happiness, whatever
into a piece,
that that piece begins to exhibit
those types of traits.
But I see it all the time that someone
is so scared of something
that maybe never was haunted before,
they give it to somebody else,
and that person actually feels that fear.
And sometimes, it moves.
Or they see a strange shadow
that theyve never seen before.
If people can do that with an item,
what happens when theres millions
of people
doing that with the idea of a god?
Thats the type of thing we experience
first-hand with haunted objects all the time.
These stories that people have imbued
into these objects.
Its the belief and the telling of the story
that gives them power.
And to us, thats why its so important
to tell the right kind of story,
because if its told enough times
it becomes real.