DECEMBER 8th, 2015
By LANA CARBON & JOHN LILIES
[John] Some months ago, while in casual conversation with one of our favourite podcast hosts, we mentioned to him the idea of potentially interviewing him for our blog. He graciously agreed and after some time passing, he likely forgot about it and/or hoped we had forgotten about it. So, in early November while chatting with him about our Hallowe’en endeavour to watch 31 movies for 31 days, said podcast host asked me about interviewing us for his podcast to talk about our experience. Lana and I talked it over, after recovering from brief heart failure, and decided we would be happy to oblige and perhaps it would be a great moment to set up a time to interview this lovely gentleman for our blog.
So, about two weeks later we were virtually hanging out in the parlour talking to the wonderful Patrick Keller, host of the Big Séance Podcast. This was not an easy feat for us as we have enjoyed developing a friendship with Patrick over the last year and we did not want Patrick to be scared off by just how twisted and insane these two fans really can be. We prepared a number of questions to ask Patrick and decided we would let the conversation go where it may, and discover what our final product would be.
We were not disappointed and we know you won’t be. We spent a few hours with Patrick and our interview will be published in multiple parts, so watch closely this week for our posts!
So with that…
Begin Part 1 - pour yourself a drink, grab a blanket, get cozy and join us in Patrick’s parlour for a wee chat.
November 22, 2015
[Lana] What sparked your interest in the paranormal?
[Patrick] I was not one of those people that grew up having all of these paranormal experiences. I don’t remember having any. You know, sometimes I wonder if I ever had the imaginary friend or the ghost friend because when you hear stories about that it’s like they don’t even know the difference between a real human and a ghost. So I wonder if I did have an imaginary friend - that would be a cool story but no, I actually didn’t really have a huge interest until probably around 2007-ish. Ghost Hunters had been out for a while. I didn’t catch them from the beginning but I caught up and saw all their old episodes. Then randomly, I remember, I grabbed a book out of a bin at Borders or Barnes & Noble, one of those places. It was Ghosts Among Us by James Van Praagh and a year before that I had just begun this whole obsession with reading. At that point it was just reading fiction and I had never really been a reader before and someone convinced me to start reading, so I read a book a week for a year. I couldn’t get enough. I was so proud of all of a sudden being a late bloomer in the whole reading area. But I saw this book Ghosts Among Us and I had been watching the Ghost Hunters shows, my parents kind of started watching it too so we would watch Ghost Hunters and then bounce back and forth over the phone and talk about it. I read the book and it just started this whole explosion. I stopped reading the fiction and then I just moved on to completely non-fiction. There for a while it was a lot of psychics and mediums and their take on life on the other side and ghosts (a little bit of that). I also started a few paranormal investigation-type books, which then led to having the paranormal investigation team. Which was the next big step.
[Lana] Did you have any kind of paranerdal experiences?
[Patrick] HA! Paranerdal! I love it.
I don’t think I ever had any experiences when I was just reading the books and watching Ghost Hunters but I was definitely obsessed with it for a while and curious and couldn’t get enough information about it. I don’t think I had any experiences but definitely there were some experiences once we started the paranormal investigation team, Missouri Spirit Seekers. We had a lot of fun for about two years, I guess. We had 10 or 12 investigations and learned so much. We definitely had our feelings in different places. My sister tends to get touched when she goes places. She tends to probably be the more sensitive one out of all of us. This is my family by the way, I guess I should have started out by saying that – it was my Mom, Dad, my sister and her partner. It was a lot of fun but I did a lot of research and figuring out how it would work. The tools and how they work. I got really into E.V.P., which then started my next paranormal obsession (sorry - paranerdal). I have my small handful of stories I usually tell but I don’t have this wealth of all these cool, crazy paranormal experiences that happen, I just don’t. I don’t know how I stay so obsessed with it but I still love it.
[John] What do you think that you were actually drawn to that spawned the obsession for you? What was it that really attracted you to everything?
[Patrick] I guess, and I had never really thought of this, I had grown up going to the Baptist church and growing up in organized religion and having this kind of fairytale Heaven and Hell. You know, that’s what they say and that is just what you go with. I kind of got away from that after high school and college and got to the point where I was not at all interested in the organized religion part of things but was definitely conflicted in my head thinking about things and how things work.
Then, all of a sudden, thinking about ghosts and reading every psychic and medium’s take on life on the other side and then I thought ‘cool, I can totally believe this’. I was no longer fearing things I guess, this whole ‘will you go to Heaven, will you go to Hell?’ - that is such a childlike way of looking at it – but I just started getting so passionate about figuring out what life was like on the other side. What’s going to happen? What’s it going to look like? Who’s going to be there? Are all my past puppy dogs going to be there to greet me?
There for a while I kind of got frustrated too, because there are quite a few different takes that many mediums and psychics have on what it’s like and when you read 20 books from 20 different psychics you get a little frustrated. I mean, for real I want to know what happens and everybody’s saying something different. That’s also formed what I kind of assume is going to happen. Right now I have this whole opinion that whatever you envision in your mind or whatever you expect to happen on the other side is what’s going to happen. I don’t know if that’s true but I do know that I don’t fear death and things anymore. I very rarely fear anything paranormal because I’m always running toward it I guess but at the same time, I don’t have a ton of those experiences.
[John] How cool is it though, that you grew up in the Baptist culture and yet your parents and sister were there with you in the investigation crew?
[Patrick] My family kind of grew out of that culture with me too and have moved on to, I think, probably wiser opinions and theories.
[Paranormal investigating] was a lot of fun. It was difficult at first. My Mom would say that I’m a natural teacher and they had a hard time sometimes with me wanting to teach them and take charge. They were there to have fun. You know, this is just a family fun thing and for me it was always ‘but this is serious, this is serious research’. So I had to take a step back for a while and realize that I was the one reading the books and I was the one doing all of the evidence review and analysis, which I would have no other way as a control freak. So I took on that responsibility and was cool with that and loved it. I just had to realize that they were in it for a different reason than I was. They were very good at it. I trained them well, when I wasn’t on their nerves because I was telling them what to do.
I really do believe we made a really good, professional team. We didn’t know all the answers and we weren’t the best team out there but there are a lot of goofball teams out there and I do believe we took it seriously. It might take two months after the investigation to get through everything and go through the analysis with me putting my charts and graphs and everything together and sometimes at the end you didn’t really get a clear answer, you just had 50 pages of confusing data but it was worth it. We did have a lot of fun; we have a lot of memories. My mom would always bring snacks and hot beverages when it was in the winter, so when you take breaks you’d have snacks and everything. She got upset once because on the website, for her title, I called her the Snack Bringer. She was a little upset by that because she’s ‘just as much an investigator as the rest of us!’ but she was a really good Snack Bringer.
[Lana] So why did you guys become inactive?
[Patrick] We went inactive, I think, for a couple of reasons. One of those reasons is that reaching out and accepting phone calls from strangers, accepting a call and going and visiting someone you’ve never heard of or you’ve never met because they need help - as much as that was probably helpful for some people, and I feel like we did help some people, it’s not my most favourite thing in the world. So maybe I’m not the person to be there. I mean that’s just a small part of it.
The other part of it is that my family lives three hours away and so getting everyone together was tough and I think I just got burned out a little bit. When you’ve got a full-time job and it’s a job that takes a lot of time already anyway, and you get so obsessed with data and doing it right and pouring over video late at night; we didn’t have a ton of requests for investigations and that was probably good at the time because when one investigation took two or three months or more to really feel like I got through it, that didn’t leave a lot of time for other investigations. Part of that is just the fact that I was doing all of that on my own.
I guess I got what I needed to learn out of that and that went into my research with E.V.P. and I started experimenting really heavily with E.V.P. I did some things with Randall Keller, my long lost cousin from Maryland. There for a while, I kind of got burned out on that too. I tend to jump into things really heavily, so hard that I get burned out on them so I haven’t done anything with E.V.P. in a while either but I think I used all of those experiences that I learned from both of those things, in what I do today.
[Lana] It seems that you are drawn strongly to spirit communication, from the Spirit Seekers to E.V.P. and wanting to communicate. What drew you into that?
[Patrick] Well, I think there’s probably nothing like the first moment that you realize you’ve captured an E.V.P. I think back to that first E.V.P., and people who follow me probably know that I very, very rarely will say something is definitely 100% communication from spirit but this first one, I am pretty confident that it has to be something. It was our second investigation actually and I don’t know if it’s my favourite because it’s my first or if it’s just the best example we have out there; it was from the basement of a church.
It was so cool that we had a church open to us coming and made it public that we had an investigation. They were very proud of their activity and just the process of going through that and listening to it realizing ‘oh my gosh, I may have just communicated with spirit’. Then, things like when you are on an investigation and when you have a communication through knocks – I tend to have communication with knocking or wrapping several times - you know, some of those experiences you may be able to argue that it was something in the natural world but even when you’re not sure, that just makes it exciting. Just the feel of when the hair on your arm raises and your heart starts racing because you’re like ‘oh my gosh, are we in the presence of something? Are we having a communication?’ It doesn’t happen very often but it’s a really cool feeling and not scary at all. A lot of times around Hallowe’en, you know we play up the whole Hallowe’en spooky thing, those of us in the paranerdal community; it’s almost never spooky, it’s just exciting.
[Lana] I find it strange that you have all this luck with E.V.P.s and with knocks but you can’t seem to work the Ouija.
[Patrick] I cannot work the Ouija board! I get so frustrated. I’m excited about it and I think it is really cool. I think you guys probably know how fascinated I am with all things like spiritualism and the whole picture that that paints - with the parlour, the Victorian everything and the crazy medium sitting at the table and the candles - so I love it. I can’t get anything from the Ouija board. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I hear so many people talking about being fearful of the Ouija board and I’m like ‘okay but I’ve tried it a lot and nothing happened’. Until I have a reason to be fearful, I would just like something to happen. I mean I don’t try that very regularly either, every month or so I’ll get it out and try and cross my fingers. Maybe I think too hard.
[John] I was going to say, do you think that you may want it too badly?
[Patrick] That’s sometimes what I figure. I know that you guys know Karen A. Dahlman as well and I get a lot of advice and help from her and she’s been a great friend over the last year. I think that is one thing she has mentioned, ‘maybe you’re just trying too hard or focusing too hard. You’ve got to relax; you’ve got to just let things take over’. I guess I have some more practice at that to do.
[John] You have to let go of some of that control, eh?
[Patrick] It might be some of the OCD too. Just taking over and wanting things to be perfect. Things don’t happen like you plan them out I guess.
[John] No they don’t.
[Lana] For people who want to communicate with spirit, do you have any tips for them?
[Patrick] Well, I guess since that is one of my first lessons, to let go, that would be a good first one. E.V.P., I think is probably the easiest thing for people to jump into if they’re wanting to try spirit communication. People have their different theories about this but I don’t feel you have to be anywhere haunted to achieve spirit communication. It’s my opinion, my belief, that once you reach them, once you send that searchlight out and someone knows you are there and willing to communicate from the other side or wherever, I think they can communicate with you no matter where they’re at. I don’t think they have to be in your room, standing next to your microphone saying hello.
[Lana] Do you think it matters what tool you use? If you can connect with them on E.V.P., is it just as likely to connect on the Ouija or another source?
[Patrick] Well I probably would have thought that until I started doing the Ouija and failed at it so miserably. I guess it’s worth saying also, that I never really got a ton of what I feel is legitimate communication from E.V.P. either but I did have some compared to none.
I think with E.V.P. you don’t have to go all out from the very beginning and have all this equipment. You could even still do E.V.P. with tape cassette. This day and age when you want to share digitally and online, having a digital recorder is usually best but that’s really all you need. There are even some theories out there about how it’s easier to get E.V.P. on cheaper devices that have a mechanism inside that can maybe help with documenting and recording their communication. I think that’s probably something good to start with. Some people like pendulums. I, myself, have never tried that one but that seems another one that would be an easy, cheap form of communication to start with and experiment with. E.V.P. was the most fun for me back in the beginning.
[Lana] Whether with the Seekers or not, what was your favourite paranormal location?
[Patrick] My favourite paranormal location – it’s really unfair – but it’s probably one of the undisclosed locations. We investigated a large facility near my hometown that has a lot of history. It was really, really cool and it was one of the first ones we investigated that we could go back and do some research into the history and connect with some of the stories to figure out what is truth. That’s another one where we didn’t get a ton of evidence but just the experience and the feelings there. Even if it was just us making it all up ourselves. It was just fun. There were definitely some moments where there were some scary, you know, just the sounds and some of the things that happened when you’re in this big, giant basement and all of a sudden this huge machine just goes off or the boiler kicks in or - just the sounds that can be in some of these old places. It gives you a fright and then you laugh and everybody laughs and then you move on. It’s cool!
There were so many cool memories like that. There was a room, I’ll say like a storage closet, where a student in the ‘60s or ‘70s, and we did find out that it was documented - it was a real thing - committed suicide in this area and there have been a lot of legends and stories about that story since. We feel we may have gotten some communication of an emotional kind the few times we were there, but I’m not sure. You know it’s kind of like after the fact, once you learn a little more about the tools and what you’re doing it is kind of like ‘hmmm, maybe that really wasn’t what we thought it was’ but it could have been and that was a cool experience. It was one of the first experiences where we definitely felt the feelings. My sister felt things. It was cool. I can’t say much about it though.
[Lana] Did you like to know things going in or did you like to discover things after you had already done the investigation?
[Patrick] I have debated back and forth on the best way to do that. I think definitely if you are going to have a psychic or a medium on your team - a psychic and a medium can get their feelings hurt sometimes because they don’t want to be used as a tool, they want to really be involved and I think you have to be careful with that - but I think that most of them would agree that you want to keep them in the dark on where they’re going and what the actual place is. We didn’t have that situation. I think I, myself, want to know. I want to know what questions to ask while I’m there.
There were situations where we were going somewhere that was known to have possible child spirit communication and you don’t want to go into a place asking questions that might be inappropriate for a child. If you are going to use trigger music, I want to be able to plan that. I liked picking out music from the era that you think the spirit may be from. I kind of got into that too. I like to prepare, I guess too much, and so if I went in blindly it would take all that fun away from it. There are just so many things you don’t know until three or four months after the investigation so if I really didn’t know anything, I would not be able to go back and try something again until three or four months later when I found out, so I probably like knowing before going in.
[Lana] If you could get everybody back together to do a dream location where would it be?
[Patrick] I like a lot of the really creepy asylums like the Trans-Allegheny - that one would probably be up there. I don’t know if I would get my whole, entire family back. I might be in there by myself but that’s where you are almost guaranteed to have some kind of experience - at least from what I’ve heard from everybody else. A big creepy location like that would probably be my pick.
[Lana] So I’m going to veer off just a little bit for this one question. You have said on your podcast a couple of times, that you are not a fan of a haunted ghost tour. Why is that?
[Patrick] First, I should tell you I haven’t been on many, to be fair. They tend to be more goofy, I guess, and I’m all about taking it seriously all the time. I sometimes need to lighten up and have fun on those things and realize that people are there for fun. The few times that I’ve gone - and sometimes the tour guides get on my nerves. They talk down to you or assume you don’t know anything or you can clearly tell they are making some things up like we’re children. Then there are some really interesting paranerdal folk out there and when they break out some of their tools and toys and start walking around, I don’t know, it just bugs me sometimes because I’m like ‘this is serious, what are we doing?’ You know, people walking around with tools they have never touched in their entire life and don’t know how to use it. Not all tours are like that, I’m sure. When we went to the Myrtles Plantation, the tour there was kind of interesting but there was a lot of ‘you can’t do this and you can’t do this and you can’t record’ and I was just like ‘Uhhh! People came all the way here and this could be so cool’. I don’t know - I guess I just have issues with tours. I guess I probably need to get over myself mostly.
[John] Or you need to start your own so that you can run it the way you want to.
[Patrick] There you go.
[Lana] That would be cool actually.
[Patrick] That would take a lot of research too. I was in the position to possibly be involved a couple of years ago and it didn’t come close to being a real thing; but one of the conditions that I brought up was that I would have to be able to have time to research these things. I would have to interview some people because I’m not going to make up things. Nothing’s going to come out of my mouth that I don’t think really happened or are real stories. So I would not be one of those people who could do it for fun, for entertainment and just embellish things. I wouldn’t be able to get myself to do that. I’d feel bad. I’d be like ‘guys, I just lied to you - I’m sorry’.
[John] So when you do get yourself up to Canada to come and hang out with us up here, you would have to do the Haunted Walk in Ottawa, Kingston or Toronto because they vet all of their stories. So they have actually done the research and they’ve talked to, if there are still living, witnesses and any new stories that come up they actually go and do the investigations and spend months researching everything before they actually incorporate it into their tours.
[Patrick] I like that. That sounds right up my alley.
I have to tell you, as many things that get on my nerves about the paranormal; I mean I definitely play a part in that too. There are a lot of paranormal things that I still participate in. I will go to a lot of ghost tours just because it’s paranormal and it’s cool. You know, so, I don’t know, I’m kind of bipolar about the whole situation.
[John] I think that’s normal though, really, if you think about those of us who love it and we believe it and we’re just that skeptical. I’m on the fence so much and so Lana watches all of the ghost hunting shows; and I don’t watch that much TV but when I do watch those shows, I love watching them and I think that they’re interesting and the whole time I’m sitting there watching, I’m saying ‘there’s no way that this would happen!’
[Patrick] That happens to me every week when I’m watching Ghost Hunters or Ghost Adventures – and I love them, I will never stop watching them, I will always be a fan – but oh my gosh it works my nerves. Because you know there’s such a produced element to it. Yet if they didn’t have that produced element then I probably wouldn’t have been attracted to it from the very beginning.
[Lana] Exactly.
[John] It’s a bit of a dichotomy, right? I think those of us who are the most skeptical are probably the most guilty of perpetuating the whole thing, right?
[Patrick] Yep. I agree.
END PART 1
[John] Thank you everyone, for joining us in our time with Patrick. We have a lot more of this interview to share with you, so please stay tuned for Part 2 to be released soon!!
In honour of Patrick and the Big Séance Podcast, if you read through Part 1 then please tweet us @carbonlilies and Patrick @BigSeance with the hashtags #paranerdalexperience and #snackbringer.
See you again soon with Part 2!
