Sean Bw Parker is a musician, artist, and writer. The short story 'The Peacehaven Ghost' in his book Swimming Uphill: Absurd Theories describes his 2016 experience with poltergeist activity at a music club he was running in Sussex, UK. We delve into the links between creativity, emotional turmoil, and the paranormal, considering the unseen forces influencing our experiences.
Below are two videos Sean provided us. This is CCTV footage of some of the incidents taking place at The Seafish in 2016.
Glass Falling
Clock Falling
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Reading List
Chapters
00:00 Start
2:45 Music and Identity
3:48 First Signs of Haunting
49:00 Folklore and Memories
59:55 The Liminal Space
1:08:20 Awakening to Intuition
1:23:45 Shared Experiences
1:29:55 Processing the Experience
Transcript
Tyler:
[0:01] Perhaps the most common conception of ghosts is that they are shadowy or invisible
Tyler:
[0:06] Beings that throw dinner plates and pieces of furniture around rooms, occasionally materializing as some fearsome entities and sometimes levitating
Tyler:
[0:14] people for good measure.
Tyler:
[0:16] As we shall see throughout this book, there is actually a very wide range of
Tyler:
[0:20] phenomenon that are popularly and collectively called ghosts. The ghosts that throw things and are generally responsible for rather dramatic household disturbances are known as poltergeists german for noisy ghost many contemporary researchers argue that such invisible housebreakers are really not messy and rude ghosts but berserk bundles of uncontrolled psycho kinetic energy the direct action of mind on and over matter such
Tyler:
[0:52] Investigators also attribute the violent disturbances that can manifest in a home or around certain individuals to the sexual changes and adjustments that accompany puberty the early stages of a marital union or feelings of inadequacy and frustration accentuated by some traumatic experience while there may be many instances in which the breakout of poltergeist phenomena might be associated with the dramatic changes that adolescence brings to a child's psyche many of the classic cases of noisy ghosts throwing objects and severely disrupting the normal flow of things occurred where no adolescent was present if the extrasensory ability of psychokinesis mind over matter can somehow cause an individual to become an unaware participant in haunting phenomena then we may have to expand our theory of the poltergeist to include those instances in which the human mind, under stress, fatigue,
Tyler:
[1:52] Sleep deprivation, and so forth, may release uncontrolled, spontaneous energy that has the power to activate and interact with dormant spirit forces.
Tyler:
[2:06] Brad Steiger, Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places.
Sean:
[2:36] So in 2016, I'd just come back from Istanbul. I'd been there for 10 years as a writer and musician.
Sean:
[2:46] And I was getting used to Britain again. And I set up an arts venue, a cafe-type place, which had music and art and things like that on the Sussex coast here in Britain,
Sean:
[3:00] as I say, in 2016. And um as we started to renovate the place to pull up the carpets um and to start to change it from what it was which is like a domestic half domestic kind of place into a wooden box kind of venue um we started having some very very strange activities in uh noises and a few separate different different kind of events which um were very hard to explain as a rationalist and as skeptic as I am and so yeah but after that I'm not so much as skeptic if I would.
Tyler:
[3:38] That's very interesting so like first of all what took you to Turkey like you said you were a musician triveling around and everything but why Turkey?
Sean:
[3:49] In 2004 at the end of my masters I had a few Turkish friends who I met in, South West London I really fell in with them uh like them very much they went back and so i went out for a holiday uh to see them you know in postgraduate kind of depression on me and um stayed and then i outstayed my visa so i stayed for 10 years and i thought right i'm gonna
Sean:
[4:15] be turkey for a while and so yeah that's that's what led me out there.
Tyler:
[4:18] It's crazy yeah 10 to 10 year accident um no it's really cool i've been the uk a couple of times but i spent most of it you know where horsham is like on other side of crawley yeah yeah i have a bunch of friends that worked over there at a company called creative assembly a big big video game company and i would go you know i lived in uh like denmark so i would just you know hop on a plane go visit for the weekend or whatever somebody's birthday but i do love the uk it's very like I guess the culture shock compared to like going from the United States to like
Tyler:
[4:56] Northern Europe, it's like the happy medium.
Tyler:
[4:58] It's like, all right, this is close enough to home accessible. Everyone speaks English, like not so bad.
Sean:
[5:04] Yeah.
Tyler:
[5:06] But I've never been to Turkey. It's kind of crazy that I didn't make that trip at some point.
Tyler:
[5:11] What did you learn? What did you learn there? 10 whole years.
Sean:
[5:16] Yeah. Well, I accidentally learned Turkish, I suppose. I took my conversational degree. I wasn't, depending to your holiday but over the 10 years i was teaching english there in cultural studies ended up teaching doing some lectures at a university at istanbul university um in stammering and creativity which is my uh sort of became my speciality out there being a stammerer um but you know it comes and goes these days and um and i was in a couple of bands i was in the sean parker band when i was a really active solo artist and then a band called scorpio rising which was just after that like this big talking heads kind of arrangement and we became quite big on the independence scene and we were popular and doing good work you know so I tried to fill my time I was there really creatively not holiday and also a lot of thinking and stuff like that you know having a time out there and I got to observe a place in a real culturally a real schizophrenic situation of it's a secular country secular American-British rules about no religion in power,
Sean:
[6:24] religion is safe separate. It's 98% Muslim with a real hardcore passion for that. So they have a constant
Sean:
[6:31] tension in the army and the government.
Sean:
[6:33] And the president now, Erdogan, of 20-odd years, is a hardcore Islamist.
Sean:
[6:38] So he's trying to change things slowly and quietly and having grotesque of God knows what all the time. So it's a very interesting place to live in on that respect, too.
Tyler:
[6:47] Yeah, I would imagine. Like, it...
Tyler:
[6:52] It's so interesting how you can have a secular government and an entire group of people living in a place that completely don't have that perspective. I remember people talking about Soviet Russia. They're all atheists and all this kind of thing. But I've never met a Russian who wasn't superstitious or anything. They had kept whatever version of orthodoxy they could alive all the way through the Soviet Union. And then that was kind of like one of the major things that people don't people have their reasons for not liking him now and i totally get that but i mean vladimir putin was kind of big on like bringing the church back after the soviet union fell um and i know that was like a big reason why a lot of people favored him at the time that he was originally elected so pretty wild man um what kind of you said talking heads that kind of is like so like alternative rock indie stuff that was your yeah
Sean:
[7:51] Yeah I suppose so yeah I'm kind of steeped in kind of American alternative rock I suppose from the 80s and 90s but then I add in weird British elements like royalty music and things like that just from my own, mind but then finding yourself in an expat community and to it I think Istanbul you get to splodge in a violin and a mad bassist and interesting percussion and then you have your own sound. Copia Rising really did by the end have its own sound. Copia Rising had the violins. I don't know. It's difficult to reference your own stuff like that. That's a fair enough way of putting it.
Tyler:
[8:32] Yeah, that's really cool. I love that kind of stuff. I was just listening to Falco, the German new wave singer. Rock Me Amadeus and all that stuff like i really i really like the late 80s european alternative music that was kind of coming this way of course that was before i was even born but like when i listen to it now like okay i can see how this we like everything musical in the last 50 years happens where it's like okay america does something and then the uk does something really interesting and then the uk comes back to america you know like this is like rock and roll and then the beatles and then like heavy metal and then black sabbath and and all that stuff like then we get judas priest and we get diamond head and we get uh whatever and then we come back with something else and it's just this back and forth push but then you have like whatever's going on in germany also but it was a little bit more like kept away from the states i guess because of you know they weren't really a country yet for a while and yeah very interesting yeah
Sean:
[9:43] That's a really good observation i like that.
Tyler:
[9:45] What was your what was your instrument of choice
Sean:
[9:49] I started on drums in my brother's band and then I was like a 14 year old but I then picked up the guitar because I learned that it would be a very versatile way of expressing yourself and so yeah, guitar basically but I can play pretty much all of it you know guitar based drums and I've done it in different bands over the years, I played a few people playing either once so.
Tyler:
[10:13] I was definitely the guy in the band who would like just play whatever instrument someone else didn't want to play so like i show up to band practice and it's like okay well we got a guitar player we got a bass player i'll play the drums or okay we got everybody i guess i'll try to play the keyboards or something like that and yeah nobody wants to be a bass player i will be the best bass player and that's it's always been that way um yeah well it's just to me especially with stringed instruments like they're all the same like as soon as i learned how i played the bass first That was my first real attempt at learning an instrument. And then, you know, it was like, okay, well, I should be able to play the guitar. And then, oh, I should be able to play the banjo. And then now I can kind of just, you know, I'm one of those people that can kind of jump on anything. I don't play the cello, but I feel like if you gave me one, I could figure out a tune or two pretty quickly. And, yeah, if you have like a kind of an adaptable mind where you can put two and two together. Of course, chords don't necessarily work the same when they're tuned differently, but for the most part, at minimum, I could play Deep Purple or something, something really simple. Like Smoke on the Water, I'm confident I can play it on any instrument that has enough notes on it, unless it's a bitonal or monotonal instrument. Didgeridoo.
Sean:
[11:37] Yeah.
Tyler:
[11:39] Very cool, though. Did you kind of always know you wanted to be a musician? Growing up?
Sean:
[11:45] No, no. I mean, it kind of came into our house with my brother in like 1988 with R.E.M. And Michael Stipe. I can remember that arriving like a train through the front window, R.E.M. Green and U.T., though they were huge. U.T., R.E.M. and Cure all came into the house and went, that's fucking cool. And we both started to basically do our own interpretations of the whole thing. And I got naturally behind the drums and started to rig in it because he was doing the frontman stuff and I stepped out and got my own band and said, I'm doing frontman stuff and got my own band around me but none of it was contrived it was the way, expressing myself as a middle class white boy in the 80s in Britain is a pretty cool way of doing it and there was a music management shop doing that and turning that into an industry and a really positive one That's why I loved them then.
Tyler:
[12:44] It's really fun to go back and listen to the early, you mentioned U2, like their early work, because now when we think of U2, we think of the biggest rock band in the whole freaking world and all that. And that's been my entire life. But then when I go back and I listened to their first like two or three albums, like there were a post-punk band, like they were more like Joy Division than they were like, you know, a pop rock, like arena rock band or anything even remotely close to that. And that's still their sound. It's just that they became popular. that people don't think about them as a genre but I love that stuff especially like some of the best bass playing you'll ever hear aside from Peter Hook who is probably the best but yeah enjoy Division Rules and New Order
Sean:
[13:28] You're quite right about youtube i'm unfortunately um almost every band i know i'm a first album plat you know because it's like it's such a it's not a snobby position to say i just like the first album but i tend to like the first one or two often too and then sort of go off it's gone too big now and it's worked out what they want to do too much for my taste and it's not designed that way i genuinely feel like that when i with coldplay those two albums absolutely brilliant 2012 brilliant album everything else since then after dog wash you know, just an observation you two the first one fine two and three are absolutely brilliant war in october and unforgettable fire but when they're fabulous you know so yeah i totally hear what you're saying and i totally agree absolutely.
Tyler:
[14:21] It's so you're listening to all that kind of stuff you end up you go to so did the the none of the paranormal stuff happens to you until you get back to the uk
Sean:
[14:30] Yeah that's true that's true i i haven't had any i've got an open mind like i think you do um but i'm also i'm really i'm very darwinist i'm very rational first occam's razor, rationalist first when that runs out what what what is that there's also a super you know that that's another element to kill yourself and it's like but it never hit me until when it had been age of 41 of it yeah so yeah and then it did hit me properly and i got me to question everything.
Tyler:
[15:05] Yeah so just let's just get like a background for you like you i know you said you were skeptic your whole life you didn't really think any of this stuff was real were you religious like were you in any way open-minded to the spiritual world
Sean:
[15:20] Well, just in the terms that anything is possible, I have that. It's just that the system of doing things and the control system has to be the practical. Is it pigeons? Is it rats? Is it the neighbors? That kind of thing. Once you've got rid of everything, and often there can be a maybe inside all those things, but I couldn't find a maybe. So it's like, I'm personally a cultural Christian. I'm an agnostic person. I don't have belief, and I'm comfortable not having belief. I'm comfortable saying I don't know. It doesn't bother me in the way it seems to bother many people. But I'm a cultural critician. I've learned that over the last 10 years after seeing very attacks on Christianity. I'm a bit like, no, hands off. I'm like bad about it. But that's not based on a belief or faith. It's based on culture.
Tyler:
[16:08] Sure.
Sean:
[16:09] The church is a beautiful thing, and it's better in a lot of ways than without. So that's where I come from. It's a creative on it. But when it comes to... Does it have a spiritual aspect on my life? You don't really know. I love walking around a church, but I never thought, I mean, these things that happen at Seabish, the religious people I've spoken to said that's demon. It's the bad side coming out in that place and on you on things. And I'm like, is it? Those kind of things never occurred to me, but I suppose it could be the case.
Tyler:
[16:42] Right. So, how old are you in 2016?
Sean:
[16:49] 41.
Tyler:
[16:50] Okay. I was 21. So, yeah.
Sean:
[16:54] Right.
Tyler:
[16:55] Interesting, though. Like, so... What was the first thing that happened that made you turn your head and say, like, what's going on here?
Sean:
[17:06] Yeah. My assistant manager was upstairs on the three-floored Tudor building. So it's like a black and white, as you'll know from Horsham, one of those Tudor places. Old, maybe 200 years old building. And he's upstairs taking up the rugs at that barbanging. To create a wooden space for an art gallery i'm down there doing work on the computer um i'm hearing various knocks and things around the way that you'll hear various knocks and things in an old building what's that the matter in the middle of the day and it's very constant and you're doing it for two or four days and on the third day he came down after work like in the evening sometimes i'm like what's all that banging going on it's like constantly all day through all they've heard i have no idea and we both understood that there's a weird banging beyond, like a neighbor saying shut that down it can't be absolutely constant and not when it's coming from various different parts of the building and it's getting louder and louder and almost like it's angrier and angrier to be honest as we're doing more work it's getting crossing and crossing saying get up get off my space that's what it started to feel like.
Tyler:
[18:23] And hmm that like so what was the next part just you hear the banging you don't know what to do did you run out and go find a priest or did you find a paranormal investigator did you run in there yourself like yeah what's this investigation look like um he
Sean:
[18:45] Was doing this work in the run-up to our opening in the middle of April 2016. So at the time that it was starting up, we were opening up, very excited about the whole thing, don't have time to think about problems. So I was just getting on with all that. Quite soon into that, the co-director I worked with there, a benedict person, she's spiritual and very tall at Panikin and in a Christ kind of way, but with her own version of it, you know, she's like her own sculpted costume. And she started to talk about the fact that there's formerly religious energies and all this sort of thing. And she had her own take on it. And she would sort of fearlessly go about being quite spiritual around the place doing, I don't know, witchy type thing being a path of and I mean that in a positive way to just trying to sort of deal with it in a way that we seem to awaken a spiritual thing here kind of exciting possibly um but it ramped up over that opening time the april until the september it ramped up and up and up and.
Sean:
[20:01] Um after the early knockings and things like that on the pike and constantly well no it's not constantly you see it's like eight hours of it something like that and then eight hours nothing you're like uh-huh it's gone away you need to come back, and it would go like do this when you do that over and over again like a day pattern you're like, you start to dread it you start to be sort of you wonder if it's gone away you wonder if it hasn't, um until one day so to take you to a physical example um i was behind the bar and i was getting drinks with the regulars and and i leaned down and as i was leaning down uh a glass, well i'd gone to the kitchen uh leaned down i went to the kitchen and a glass flew from a shelf behind me at the bar over the bar onto the floor next to the regulars and it's smashed it's caught on cctv so um the fact that it's on cctv is very helpful to my story of course do.
Tyler:
[21:04] You have the videos somewhere
Sean:
[21:06] I do i will post it to you afterwards yeah.
Tyler:
[21:09] That'd be great because then i could add it to the article so people can yeah like follow along that's it yeah
Sean:
[21:15] Uh popularly but that it's there and it's happening and you can tell it and everybody looks at it and goes what's that and i'm like i don't know what that is i picked it up and put it away and talked to them all you know a bit later on about it and then two days after that um there was a punk band uh playing on the on the little stage in the corner of the venue that we put in, and I mean there weren't a crazy loud punk band, it wasn't unacceptably loud, it wouldn't have been open if it was, but it was punky stuff it was good rock and roll, I was enjoying it enough and then a clock that was on a high shelf there, fixed to a high shelf, I mean it couldn't be, it'd be in waste so it wouldn't fall off, physically was thrust really quickly it off the shelf and smashed between two customers.
Tyler:
[22:13] So we're not saying it dropped off the wall. It's not like the drums, you know, knocked a glass or the clock off the wall. It like arcs, like it moves with force.
Sean:
[22:22] That's right. That's the Occam's razor. I'm like, was it the energies? You know, we went through all that. It couldn't have been. The band wasn't vibrating the venue. It wasn't like that. Sure. It just went almost as if the presence didn't like you know or didn't like this band yeah in this flop, without any kind of it's going to go it just went gone yeah you know so there was some energy behind it with the glass on that clock.
Tyler:
[22:53] Yeah. So, I mean, so far, whatever it is, it doesn't like punk rock at all. So, yeah. Yeah. So if it is like from the Tudor era or whatever, like some old ghost, it's like, this isn't even music. This is just noise. Where's my, yeah.
Sean:
[23:09] Possibly Because the building Wasn't Was in the Tudor era Like you know 15, 1600s It was A couple of hundred years old In the Tudor style So we can't even say It was an ancient building It was a quite old building In case I'm absolutely Misleading anyone Yeah, Yeah It's been old But it's been old Very well old there.
Tyler:
[23:30] Yeah So you You've got to be freaked out By this point And you've multiple witnesses too You have other people Who've also seen this happening like so does this cause a fuss so are people people talking does anyone come forward and say like i know what to do or are you just left with it
Sean:
[23:47] Um i talked about it because of the loneliness of the situation you know in the sense of i was the boss of the place the cooking director and i was always there my kind of co-director had her own spiritual relationship to it the situation. I wasn't about it to the public. She was going to deal with it on her own. My assistant director, my assistant manager left everything to me in the sense of, do what you want, Sean. So that's us three. We're kind of dealing it in one way. And I talked about it on Facebook a little bit. It gave Facebook time to you much more on that then. And immediately, I had a lot of interest in people saying, people wanted to come out and get the vibe and get the energies and it almost looked like sort of a, pool to get people in, but it wasn't a pool to me, it was an, accidental weird issue that I'd actually only started with living with, because it was coming to me in my bedroom upstairs. It was weird, sometimes that room would ship a pacophony.
Sean:
[24:59] As it would wake up and it would do this thing for a few hours and get worse some work and then that's when it started to depress me as well like stress me out it was the point that the one evening i was there you know in my dressing gown and i couldn't deal with the cacophony i was extremely worried about it i put on my dressing gown and went down to the bar where they're having a lock-in i came into a group of guys having the late night drinks with my dressing gown on. And they're like, you look like you've seen a ghost. And I'm like, they literally said that and I literally had to stay with them. I think I slept downstairs on the sofa after they'd all left. But no, I think it was that weird. Well, towards the end of it.
Tyler:
[25:44] So things would happen even if you weren't present. You said that your business partner also had experiences when you're not around.
Sean:
[25:53] Yeah, I appeared to be the target of the inside parts of the house. It kind of worked out that I was responsible for the changes, I think, and I was always there. So things would often rattle around me. Uh but my the co-director did um experience she was having a cigarette on the back kitchen door which went out to a courtyard which had its own doors from a rehearsal room and um a couple of other rooms off this courtyard and as she was out there having a cigarette the doors started to swing on their own on a windlass night you know swinging like this she came in and told me she was almost charmed by it because like i pointed out just kind of charmed by uh spiritual things not not freaked out by it but the talent of some sort i'm like yeah you what you know i only heard about this from her but um it would have been in keeping with that place and um on the physical again like uh the girl i was seeing at the time like we were having a late night drink um at the bar area again and we were talking about it and she said there's no such thing as ghosts in one part of our chat and I'm like okay and as soon as she said that I swear to God.
Sean:
[27:16] The back door handle that is the same door that the co-workers had the bag out of it started to go up and down chichi-chichi-chichi-chichi just twirling like that for 10 seconds and she just looked at me.
Sean:
[27:29] And she never spoke about it again because you don't sort of but afterwards there's no such thing as ghosts this thing happened you know but well and of course we check to that there's nobody out there there's nothing going on it's it's energy communicating it's um, self, like I'm feeling.
Tyler:
[27:46] Yeah. Yeah, this is interesting. I mean, I'm sure you've done lots of research about what could possibly be the explanation for this and everything. But let's just entertain the idea. If it is a poetry, guys, they're usually centered around one person and almost always correlated with some kind of like sexual frustration or energy like that. So, had you ever in your life had any kind of like telekinetic anything other than this happen around you, near you, to you?
Sean:
[28:21] No, no, no, it's rather than well.
Tyler:
[28:23] Yeah. There's some interesting research about this. Most of the time it's like a young girl going through puberty or something like that. When I talk to other, I'm not some kind of fucking ghost expert, but I read a lot of books and talk to a lot of people. I've got a little bit of a Rolodex here. Usually it's girl prepubescent she's going through something for the first time low iron you know because you're losing blood often times it's like a marker so if you go people will use different names for things different language different ideas about what it comes to but like the sort of through lines like even if you're talking about like the fae in Ireland or something like that it happens to people who are like low on iron because whatever it is the the phenomena is i guess the appropriate thing to say does not like iron at all and you talk like talk to investigators who are like even in like kentucky or something like that and they go into a mine shaft looking for for goblins or spirit you know of some kind they take off all their iron jewelry because it won't come around otherwise so a good question is was there anything iron in the building yeah wow
Sean:
[29:41] I didn't know that um i've absolutely no idea yeah iron what's made of iron i don't know i mean it's a cool material we don't have enough of it these days really.
Tyler:
[29:52] Sure yeah even in your own blood like like i said earlier like a young lady having a menstrual cycle like being becoming anemic essentially the there's a huge correlation between people experiencing like this sort of phenomena and being really low in their iron, in their blood. Like low mineral iron. It's crazy. But apparently they do experiments like this where you blood test someone who's having this sort of thing and it's like, okay, you need to be re-upping on your stuff. There's also the correlation of people who are fasting or starving having spiritual experiences too. So hypothetically, right, like a When someone is describing a poltergeist, oftentimes it's, you know, in the movies or whatever, we think, okay, this person is being attacked by some sort of paranormal entity.
Tyler:
[30:50] And that's what's causing the telekinetic activity. But it could be that the combination of the person and maybe also some spirit are interacting so if you i'm not saying you particular but if the person experiencing it has all of the markers of like that they're going through some sort of you know sexual thing like with their development or frustration or even there's a correlation between this and people trying like attempting sex magic for real which is weird i'm not saying you were doing that but um if you're like low in your iron and other minerals in your blood if you don't have iron around and the the the spirit whatever it is this entity the phenomena around is freaking you out then these things start to happen but it's not necessarily like that a ghost is walking up and picking up your clock and throwing it across the room it's that you're picking up on the energy of the ghost and causing things to happen that you don't understand because you don't even know you have this ability and rightfully so like why would you know that unless you had you know grown up with it or something um so it's i'm curious and i don't know for all i know it was a ghost just picking up stuff and throwing it across the room but people are trying to
Sean:
[32:18] Yeah fascinating thing i um i mean it's uh i was single at the time and i was having various partners so it was kind of that sort of i don't think you could quite that was it my difficulties happened quite a lot more than me because i don't know but it's like um that energy but um it might not have been around me the poke at all um there were other people staying there um in the in the accommodation part we let out the rooms at uh bb so um but for long-term people you had a couple of girls staying there sometimes so just an assumption that it's around me uh but it's like lots and lots of energies in that place to the point that you could it would be very difficult to i mean i felt like it was happening around my room rather than around me of an individual yeah.
Tyler:
[33:17] Yeah and who knows it could be something like the person who's experiencing these things has some sort of unaddressed frustration with you right and that's what's causing it even if they're not cognitively aware of it if if they're you know something you did months ago to them like pissed them off but they haven't thought about it since then they're not even thinking that they hate you or anything like that but because of all these other factors it's expressing itself in that way I mean we do that with just like regular old microaggressions with people we have a problem with you know it could be
Sean:
[33:54] Oh actually but yeah it's a, controversial players so in terms of controversy I mean I was there to make it controversial or to publicizing it there was a good chance that that kind of picked it on the ass in that 10 quest maybe, yeah it's fascinating especially the iron part.
Tyler:
[34:20] Yeah it's a weird thing but it's like that's like ancient it's being proven I should say It's being investigated now, like from a scientific perspective in a lot of cases, but like, that's kind of like old knowledge. Like I personally, I don't ever, I can't say that I've really experienced poltergeist or anything like that, but I grew up with a mom who believes very much in this kind of stuff. So you know my house has like crystals in every window and corner and i have like iron spikes like railroad spikes laying in front of the doors just in case just just don't i don't want it to come across this threshold i don't want you invited in here i don't want any trouble you know if it's a nice ghost that like casper and he needs some help i'll talk to you you know whatever but i'm i'm not dealing with any any of this i got a kid like i don't want to deal with that so every layer of defense I you know I'm for it you know I'll sage the place if I think you know just if just someone comes over who I think has like bad energy I want that around here so yeah
Sean:
[35:27] Absolutely right and like before this thing i've been as skeptical than anybody else when things don't happen to you you tend not to really exactly the way we live in the world you know i would, face it like that and it's an easier way to get into life when it do happen you're like a completely understanding of i'm putting those spikes on because it's it was very very stressful and i was very happy when it left it only left i think i jumped to a story when the council started coming and done more heavily on our venue. We weren't very stupid. We weren't very sick. We were asleep. Following the rule, the volume, and people eating without, the kitchen without food, that kind of thing. We weren't as on it as we should have been. And the council kicked him on for us and he told us by the Christmas. And by that time, it had gone completely quiet. It had gone off almost like it had achieved something. So, I mean, I don't know. But that's me after you're putting practice together.
Tyler:
[36:27] Someone once told me that rules and traditions are solutions to problems we've forgotten we had. As much as it is, especially when you're younger and you're partying and all that kind of stuff, like, yeah, fuck all the rules. Very punk rock. I don't care about these regulations, man. We're just going to rock forever.
Tyler:
[36:49] Whatever that may be, something as simple as, hey, you know like we learn as little kids listen to fairy stories and all this kind of stuff people say
Tyler:
[36:58] The best a vampire can't cross your threshold unless you invite it in right and I'm not saying that there's like blood sucking draculas with things or whatever necessarily coming and knocking on your door but negative negativity the kind of person or the kind of energy that will drain you as a poltergeist certainly would like feed off that energy, you know, and cause you to have more and more negative energy. And then it becomes this cycle. Um so like at some point we make a decision to invite that negativity into our life or else it won't be there like it just can't and that's strange but so if you for instance let's just say you have a shitty codependent relationship with like a girlfriend or a you know a friend who's like the guy who always wants to borrow money and never pay you back or whatever you are allowing that person to abuse you you know you we don't think about it that way we think about like i'm trying to be a good person you know but when when dracula knocks at your door you don't think i'm i'm the asshole for saying yes you can come inside and like let me get you something to drink ha ha you know we don't think that we think i'm being a good person but ultimately what we're doing is allowing negativity into our lives and if you have a i mean a music venue you've airbnb like all kinds of different people are coming around i'm sure they're drinking and it's not a straight-edge club, right? So, yeah.
Sean:
[38:26] There's some absolute assholes there. Sure. Very, very popular. Including me in some respects at the time, you know, that's a bit harsh for myself, but I think it's just that I was trying very hard after Istanbul to establish myself in Britain again, and this little town I found myself in didn't seem very keen on that. Like, what's it doing here opening the place?
Tyler:
[38:49] Right.
Sean:
[38:50] A lot of hostility from them so i in response to that got more like right and i do it even harder you know and this is what culture is about and it didn't go down as well as i hope it was a great place i'm very proud of it it didn't go down as well as i hope so and there were, there was hostility about it and the welcoming of um the bad energy that we do yeah you'll be geeky that wickedly human and the be kind things that you need to and gaslighting and codependency, yeah god done it all yeah that's exactly what you mean and you're quite right and it's it's about learning and the problem is the more the more you go through that stuff the less open you are to it in the future and you miss out on good opportunities so hopefully this comes in waves you know because not not everyone can ask but so many are no.
Tyler:
[39:42] Man i i get it like i first i mean i had my own experience with i need to burn my hand in the fire to figure out that fire was hot like that's just kind of how it is for me so i mean i was a fucking alcoholic party animal like i did all kinds of shit i kind of wish i hadn't done now and everything when i was in my early 20s and stuff and
Tyler:
[40:05] I had a bunch of friends or just shitty relationships with people that I realized at a certain point, like, it's this dangerous combination of, first of all, just being kind of negative yourself, but also, if you're really, you know, I thought I was a good person because I'm just like accepting, you know, oh, I know you've got some bumps and bruises and cuts and everything, but, you know, no one's going to love you but me, so I might as well be your best friend.
Tyler:
[40:31] And kept inviting that kind of thing into my life and then wondering why i was miserable and it's like most of the time i'm miserable because i'm around miserable people and you know that's a fine line because you you know cultural christianity like you want to be like what would jesus do well he would take on all the poor and the people with the problems and all this kind of shit but like i ain't fucking jesus man i figured that out like i don't have that i don't have that kind of energy i just have to kind of keep my you know still love people but from a distance to at a certain point and and set boundaries with people and when you're in a like rock clubs and everything i mean there's people fucking doing drugs doing weird sex stuff like you know a lot of daytime drinking or whatever and controversies and fights and in rivalries and everything so i imagine just there's a lot of negative energy coming around in addition to that you were talking about the town doesn't like you. There could be some fucking old lady on the outskirts of the village that put a fucking hex on you, man.
Tyler:
[41:35] Yeah, and you wouldn't even know when it happened other than just like, you know, they're like sending that your way.
Sean:
[41:43] I reckon you probably nailed it. You know, it isn't going to work in the council office there when I'm trying to argue for our little place keeping its license. We've had a fucking hex put on it. You're so close to whatever went on and wrong there. All those bad energies seem quite right. It's a mix of the good times and the bad, isn't it? As you go and the bad times take there are more bad than good, then you realize that change is necessary that you don't need to put it for a while. I don't have to change what I'm doing. If the consequences of being trustful and being nice and drinking too much with that person are going to be this bad, then I've got to stop doing those patterns would be something else. You know, and that person will do what they want. The problem is, though, you still love that person or you still fancy them or a combination of other things. And that's toxicity because you could, But hey, we're in relationships here. I don't know how you went there, but I know exactly what you mean.
Tyler:
[42:44] No, I mean, just think about all the shitty people who are in marriages that they fucking hate each other, but they're still married to each other because they're like, well, I still love him no matter what he does. She's my wife, even though she fucking treats me like crap.
Tyler:
[43:02] And you're just letting this continue to fester and get worse. And resentment, whether we think of it metaphysically or whatever it's bad for us like letting that grow and grow and grow and you don't I don't need a poltergeist to attack me to you know eventually realize like man you're throwing stuff like you're yelling all the time it's a you thing and it's a me thing too because I'm allowing it to happen and then you build up that resentment inside yourself and then you're pushing back and forth and that's I think from what I understand that's a lot of what happens with a poltergeist is like Like the spirit probably doesn't want anything to do with this stuff. The, you know, the ghost, the fragment of somebody's soul, whatever it is, it's still there. Isn't setting out to like cause problems. It's the, all of this negative shit around it is causing it to act up. And then thus causing a chain reaction where you or other people around are acting up towards it or each other. And then it just gets out of spirals out of control until usually someone addresses the problem. But just, we were talking about like, iron and you know minerals in your blood and everything one of the key things why drug addicts and alcoholics have um crazy paranormal hallucinatory experiences whether we explain that spiritually or scientifically it's like if you drink every day and you're not eating a healthy diet or you're fucking on heroin or anything meth whatever you're
Tyler:
[44:31] Coke you naturally don't have you're not your body's not getting what it actually needs so like if you're one of the first things a doctor's going to do if you go to the hospital for detox or whatever is make sure you're injected with all the minerals that you need and i guarantee you if you run the blood test on that it's like you're low on iron you're low on b12 you're low on calcium you know all the things that you need to function normally and that might explain whether something paranormal is happening or not why you're having these you know experiences because your brain's all fucked up from not getting what it wants um yeah wow
Sean:
[45:10] That sounds even closer because yeah i personally wasn't eating brilliantly then and the people around me certainly weren't so yeah that sounds really quite feasible yeah and after you do start to eat properly and to drink less and all the rest of it you do start to feel the difference don't you you sound a bit smug when that when you when you're surrounded by well not surrounded by but when you see the problem people have having problematic patterns over there maybe not like that anymore you can seem a bit smug but you kind of keep it to yourself about you could say you feel better you know um i suppose that's what the trouble is all about yeah.
Tyler:
[45:48] So like how did it go like it you're still you're having like these weird things knocking wrapping around you you said that it would come into your room at night so like does it continue to escalate from there
Sean:
[46:02] Yeah i mean sometimes typically the biggie uh the big um.
Sean:
[46:08] Actual thing that i remember very clearly happening um which i've kind of written down so i don't forget the ones i told you there's also one where i was in the bathroom one day you know right towards the end of all this um question i think it like in morning and um but i was the only one in the whole building because i was the only one living there permanently, and with fucking my teeth in the little bathroom and there was a bang and the knee was sent and i'm like that's the thing what else can that be like 10 seconds left another bang even harder i'm like okay you're being a bit expensive very soon aren't you and another 10 seconds later the biggest bang like uh like a like a truck had just hit the wall of the bloody bathroom i'm like fuck this and i just got out of that bathroom left the building and went down to the beach over there just to trying to get out of that building and like it said it was saying with those things sean get out of here for now whatever and so off i went and i don't know these things where i had to leave that, where i had to go down into the bar and the jetton down it was ringing in the sense of you can't beat uh supernatural or whatever this thing was um energies really unless you were kind of.
Sean:
[47:29] Strategized out of it and trying to forget about it you know it sounds quite it's all very interesting, I think, talking in the way we are in the retrospect about folkloric memories now. But at the time, it was deeply stressful. It really was.
Sean:
[47:45] People are only interested in the sense of, wow, let me come and see that. Wow to you. It's fucking awful to me. Do you want to know what I said? I think a couple of people stayed over and nothing happened. It was like people go quiet until they're gone. Back on the again. So yeah, like I say, it's, It drifted off in the September, October that year when the council was sending us writs and saying you need to be at court in December for a licensee and all this sort of stuff and just having arguments about very bureaucratic things. It felt like it was done. Iron or whatever, disregarding, it almost knew that we were coming towards. It was practical incidents of timing, but it went when the official problems started.
Tyler:
[48:40] I'm sure it was awful, but like, it sounds like it didn't get that bad. You know, you weren't having like things writing on your window telling you to kill yourself or, you know, like, like nothing.
Sean:
[48:50] Not good. No, no. People were doing that, but not the thing it's got.
Tyler:
[48:55] That's interesting. So people were doing that around you.
Sean:
[48:59] Yeah. I was doing it.
Tyler:
[49:00] Okay.
Sean:
[49:01] That's good. It was a controversial place, like I said.
Tyler:
[49:03] Yeah. Yeah. it's always funny when it's like you know you're dealing with somebody who has all these like problems or whatever and you find out they have like a demon tattoo or something on their body or like they like whoa tell me about when the you know when when did you like kind of first have these experiences and they don't really think about it but it's like something when they're young they make some like really dumb choice and it almost like you're talking about like folkloric storytelling
Tyler:
[49:33] You realize at a certain point that it sounds a lot like this person made a deal with the devil and they don't understand or something like that um somebody was telling me that he was a prison guard um this i think in west west germany back in the 80s during the cold war and he was talking about like a hundred percent of mass murderer type folks have like some kind of like relationship with something demonic like they'd have a tattoo of of a demon on their body or something like that and it's like why if you question them like why did you do that like of all the things you could have on your body like why baphomet you know giant pentagram on your back or whatever and it's like they don't really know you know they're subjugated to a certain degree whether that be to an entity or to an idea but it's just like you know they're a negative person and they invite negative things around them and that causes them to lash out because you know you're in that feedback loop of what i'm getting from the world is negative so what i'm putting out into the world is negative and then if unless you make a change nothing else is going to change it's just this constant cycle like a vicious circle it's like fat bastard in austin powers like i eat because i'm unhappy and i'm unhappy because i eat and it's like the solution here is that you need to fix the things that are within your control right
Sean:
[50:51] Um yeah well i mean what happened with this place is that um the town in which we opened it was quite a depressed seaside town which i'm sure you've got a few of them out there yeah.
Tyler:
[51:04] A lot of a lot of sad bored kids looking for something exciting
Sean:
[51:07] Yeah yeah and it's not even that bland because people are generally older and um britain has a tendency to put all of it uh from marginal casings down to the coast whatever kind of way they are but anybody we're interested and not able to do or interesting they put them down to the coast you know it sounds like coming and let's give this town a bit of culture hoping this thing would be great what ends up happening is that there's a handful of people who are sort of cool and then there's a whole other sort of people who are semi-criminal to be kind about them, you know? It's just that very marginal resistance of mental health, addiction stuff, and everything else. Basically, toxic situation, as you mentioned, coming into our little place, which, yeah, is already quite gothic-looking, but gothic-looking shouldn't necessarily be negative energy, right?
Sean:
[52:05] But to put it together with those people, that can happen. Because I'm far from negative but when I used to drink the negativity situation would come around me so it's like that kind of tension has existed in my life.
Tyler:
[52:22] Me too man
Sean:
[52:26] You put it together with things I'm mentioning I can certainly see how those things would conspire to make what happened happen have.
Tyler:
[52:36] You ever had your palms read
Sean:
[52:40] An ex-girlfriend did for me years ago but not for me yeah I did have it once.
Tyler:
[52:45] Did she mention how many exes you have like under your index finger or anything like that like your psychic ability potentiality it's interesting I just learned this recently I never really thought about it but apparently you can tell I don't even know how to do it but like by looking at someone's palm like how much potential they have for psychic ability right and so like edgar casey or you know some of these like great clairvoyants of history would have like five but you know most people have none or one maybe you know somebody who's like kind of midway two or three but yeah apparently that has that that has something to do with predicting how well somebody would is is likely to have these kinds of things happen to them or even notice because it could be that it's happening and then most people are just not aware like almost like a matrix kind of thing um yeah Go ahead.
Sean:
[53:48] I'm quite frightened of being susceptible to something like that. If a person says, oh, you've got five, you're very open to having this thing. Why don't you bring it on to yourself then?
Tyler:
[53:59] Then it starts happening. Yeah. Yeah. Now that you have it in your head, you're going to start noticing things that you didn't notice before or whatever. I wonder. Yeah.
Sean:
[54:09] Intuitive. I like being intuitive and being human and stuff like that. But then to be in touch with the liminal, with the other side. I've got some friends who say they're hypersensitive, you know, and they are, and they don't talk about it. And I'm like, I'm not, you know, but I'm told that I am by other people. I don't like to define myself very much. So I'm like, I think I'd be afraid to find out if I am a self-volient potential. You know, I don't want to know.
Tyler:
[54:37] If you don't want to, don't do anything you don't want to do. But I would just be interested to know, like, If you told me, yeah, I got my palm read, came back, I have five X's on my finger,
Tyler:
[54:48] I'm like, okay, well, then maybe we need to, you know, figure out what's going on there. Like, maybe that's why shit is fucking with you, you know, in your place. Or maybe that has some factor in it. you know everything like this kind of research is so full of nonsense you know just people making shit up bullshit you know fold wives tales everything that you know i just look for cross references like okay this matches up and this matches up and this matches up which one you know what's the causality or what's the correlations because you can't you know you really know um
Sean:
[55:23] Well absolutely but because it's like it is a mystery the thing i'm telling you about i wouldn't have offered to come on if it wasn't a genuine mystery i don't know what it's all about i don't know the person that it might have been in that building we haven't been able to work that out we weren't then you are now i don't know if it's that and so it's like but it absolutely happen i will swear on anything that it happened i always i know he wouldn't be doing this so i'm trying to and we're men right and without wanting to be not that women don't do this but men like to find out in recent fucking things happening so they can do something about it in kind of a systemic let's sort the problem out kind of way so when you can't it's a bit, annoying it's also interesting but you do try and get to whatever it is exactly like you're saying so yeah I didn't know about the crossings and I think these are actually very interesting, details of life which I'm going to have a rest ticket and I'm sure once this comes out there'll be comments saying oh it's all a load of rubbish underneath it but sure.
Tyler:
[56:28] Yeah. I mean, historically, like in folklore, vampires and werewolves do not like iron either. Demons don't like iron. Like it's, it's just like one of those weird through lines. Yeah. Through the, the stake, through the heart. Yeah. So I think in some of the more modern movies or storytelling that they say a wooden stake, but apparently it's iron. Like that's the thing. um and you know all the a lot of the vampire lore we have comes from like eastern europe you know transylvania romania hungary that kind of that kind of area so they have their own you know overlay of their folklore their superstitions as well but i've
Sean:
[57:10] Got a question you can probably answer i don't know you might look you know if you with blood when you taste blood because you inside of your mouth or you know from time to time we taste blood because it's coming out of our face right you know yeah yeah.
Tyler:
[57:23] When i'm eating somebody's arm no actually we
Sean:
[57:27] Know what blood tastes like there's a metallic thing isn't there the metal taste like it's that weird is that connected to the iron.
Tyler:
[57:36] Yes yeah that's the like when people say take your minerals i mean it's the minerals in your body like you're you've got copper and zinc and iron all kinds of stuff flowing around in there and it's that's how you know that's how the electrical circuits in your body work you know your your brain needs metal in order to conduct electricity to send things through your synapses so if you are low on those minerals i mean your brain stops working you know the the electromagnetic connections of things in your body just cease to work correctly so like things aren't communicating with each other because electricity doesn't you know if you have pure distilled water with nothing in it you know no minerals whatsoever it's like one of the best insulators you could ever have so people always think about like water is a great you know conductor of electricity but it's not really the water it's the metals the minerals in the water that conduct the electricity um so same thing like if you take a potato and you put it in the uh in the microwave and just leave it on for a long time it'll start to spark not just pot because you know it's not just the water's heating up it's the minerals in the water are heating up and those little tiny micro pieces of metal will start to catch on fire because if you go take a tin cup and stick it in the microwave it will combust.
Tyler:
[59:01] It's just one of those things. I feel like for the vast majority of human history... People have noticed things but not been able to get on the internet and message other people and cross-reference and do, like, genuine research outside of wherever they were. You know, your Van Helsing-type characters, your Agrippa, you know, that kind of stuff. They're just Isaac Newton, you know, some alchemist sitting in a room by himself, like, just throwing things together to see what sticks. But, you know, now we have the benefit of, like, okay, paranormal investigator can talk to a medical scientist or doctor or whatever. and like, okay, these are the things that we're noticing. What could be potential explanations for that? And it's like common knowledge to a doctor or an electrician too. Everything that I just said, you know, probably from talking to those different people and kind of, okay, it's all seems to cross.
Sean:
[59:56] Yeah, yeah. That's right. I'm very interested.
Tyler:
[1:00:00] Yeah. It's, yeah, it's so fascinating how, It seems like just now, in the last 30 years or so, a lot of different points of view are coming together and then overlapping. Like, oh, never considered that before. Because like a paranormal investigator in Japan and a paranormal investigator in South Africa and a paranormal investigator in the UK and another one in the United States were not talking to each other necessarily unless they got on a boat, traveled. Now it's like internet. You know, somebody can go on a Discord server somewhere and it's like, I just had this crazy experience where my daughter dreamed of a wolf or a man with a wolf's head and the glowing red eyes. And then, you know, 15 different people from 15 different backgrounds could be like, well, I can't say what it was. But in the Hopi American Indian tradition, this is actually a sign of, you know, whatever that is. And then someone else can say what they think of that symbol. And then to me, yeah, where all the lines cross, worth investigating or worth looking into or considering at least.
Sean:
[1:01:13] Intersectionality of coincidence.
Tyler:
[1:01:15] Sure. Synchronicities, if you will.
Sean:
[1:01:17] Synchronicities, yeah, lovely.
Tyler:
[1:01:19] Did you... So you stopped having the experiences, like basically when they start serving you the papers, you know, like we're going to shut the place down because you're not complying with the rules. What was that like for you emotionally?
Sean:
[1:01:35] Oh, well, it was very frustrating because we had to have something happen at the venue every day in order to keep the money coming in and to keep the place lively. Because we were trying our best to have a good first year, and we were good at times.
Sean:
[1:01:54] So it was constant bookings constant promotion constant getting in of the artists getting people in to come and think and watch the artists make sure they weren't drinking while they were eating all this sort of stuff all these things to consider.
Sean:
[1:02:07] And then when they drink too much they start to fight so you have your security issues I was escorting people out of my own lending and I'm not really, built for any of that but I'm still doing that kind of thing all these stresses were piling up and I was starting to go i'm a very consistent steady bloke when i'm doing creative projects and i like doing them for ages and even well i love that but this one i'm like am i still going to be doing this in five years this is necessary and it's so i think other people are doing it for money and because i don't really view things in life for money very much it's like um you know explicitly for money i find difficult to commit when something gets so it just started to knock on me out and the ghost was something that the president was knackering me out the council was and i started to feel tired so, the emotion was tiredness slightly worried because it's like you know investors who, were going to get let down if you weren't careful and they could end up getting let down including my family um so it's like disappointment and tiredness it um as the worry about the ghost went away. Disappointment in time that's about living itself, claiming that's the emotion.
Tyler:
[1:03:25] What was your childhood like like i think a punk rocker doesn't come out of a normal circumstances necessarily so what happened
Sean:
[1:03:33] I've got a punk rocker i'm finishing day i'm an artist but um yeah no my parents um split up when i was nine they were a university lecturer and a speech therapist with 20 years between them sure um yeah not an ideal childhood but not a violent one we were cuntified so we lived in a nice area of england and in the southwest we lived in the country, and they didn't get on very well so i earlier spotted what dysfunctional relationship was but i loved both of them and then we were moved to another part of the country by our dad to south wales where we were.
Sean:
[1:04:16] Bullied a little bit because of the english so i started to see what, racism felt like which is such an overused word but what's the term i don't know discrimination between english and a wealth town is what why i won't be i'm being a stamina so a bit of the parental separation bit going on with the own boy and then the bullying as i was growing up, might make the person that i am but also i have a critical mind and i think that can come from having if you're a very peaceful person without any weird background i've got a critical mind anyway but you but i think it means you're going to take apart a subject and i enjoy getting apart a subject you know not to win an argument i'm not really an argumentative bloke but just to, find out the truth of whatever is in front of you you know yeah.
Tyler:
[1:05:11] Yeah, sounds familiar. I get it.
Sean:
[1:05:14] Yeah. But I'm innately creative. I love creativity. I've done it ever since I was 14. I've been painting, writing books, music, all these things.
Sean:
[1:05:26] And they still keep me going now. And the older I get, the more I love it. I'm doing very well in the art these days. so yeah, all these things have never left me and that's the most physical, for the community and the community said, fuck you so it was like, alright, well at least I tried, you know, that kind of feeling.
Tyler:
[1:05:48] Sure I'm still so fascinated about what's the through line here that goes to ultimately dealing with this this poltergeist situation like i wonder i wonder if you you never had any experience before you never like talk to somebody weird like you said you've had people did people come to you after this telling you that they think that you have like a empathic or like psychic liminal ability or was it ever before that
Sean:
[1:06:29] Um i don't think people have ever well the co-director did say that there were energies around me and stuff like that sure uh i'm like you can say so i can't believe it you know um so i don't ascribe things for myself so it's like i just go about trying to be nice to people or, you know i don't know it's you know i haven't had lots of people uh say i think that you're in touch with any, spiritual back then. I'm going to investigate it a bit more.
Tyler:
[1:07:02] Yeah. It's worth knowing about yourself. Like, I reckon if you,
Tyler:
[1:07:12] I mean, if you're not aware of it and you didn't grow up around people who would foster that, you know, like plant that idea in your mind early so that you could interface with it, then it's a shock, you know, if it happens when you're older. Like if you realize this stuff and then you, but you've got this belief system in place that you have to like tear it down in order to have that revelation.
Tyler:
[1:07:33] So, I mean, that, that is quite literally what happened to me. Like I grew up around my mom who really, really, really believes in this stuff. And I was a total skeptic. You know, I went into the military. I was like totally like left brain science, nothing that I can't observe and measure could possibly exist. And then as I got older, astrologists would tell me when Saturn returned for me, I was like 27 or so. It's when I really became like, boom, like I'm seeing, I'm feeling experiences, like I'm catching up on stuff that I feel like has been there for me the entire time. But I just ignored because it's like, oh, that couldn't possibly be real. I'm just crazy or like I'm just, you know, the trick of the mind or something like that.
Tyler:
[1:08:20] Um so that's pretty common you know and i think i think sometimes you need that shock to kind of wake up to it but so you said that you're always trying to be nice to people were like were you were you taking in a lot of lost children did people come up to you and just tell you all their problems out of nowhere nothing like that i'm
Sean:
[1:08:45] Not i'm not so like a like a carer professional kind of carer type of people who just like take people in i don't i'm not that kind of caring i don't care people can just get away from me yeah i'm concerned.
Tyler:
[1:08:56] Yeah but
Sean:
[1:08:58] They tend to come toward especially especially um uh people who have problems and that they're always you know uh.
Sean:
[1:09:08] I think they can spot things like the stammer and i i had anxiety came in my early 20s that's a real, a real bad like at the time you're in the army i think i'm probably having panic attacks after a bunch of doing things you know and answered the question thing is but i've got awful time when i had to deal with myself and i dealt with a lot of things i think you're pointing towards um yeah, but like since then i i just i don't open a massive door to the thing it would come to me and tell me weird shit with the expectation that i'll understand uh because i'm not explicitly about money or um things like that if you say i'm not into money people just think you'll talk about any old bollocks all the time but i actually will depending on if i vibe with the person or not and if i don't vibe with the person you know and i i've got big difficulties with um.
Sean:
[1:10:02] I don't know how well this is going to go across in our podcast, but with autistic people, you know, because I've got lots of autistic people around me. I like to very much on a kingdom level, but they often think that their egocentric perception of the world and the non-binaries have some sort of a moral justification. I'm like, no, no, you've got to see the new one. You've got to train yourself to somehow see the new one, or you're too wrong. I'm like, I'm not wrong. I'm like, no, you are wrong, and it is possible to be wrong. And this kind of thing yes interesting and the thing about autism is another bit of honesty no one's ever told me that before I'm saying I'm wrong yeah do you want to fucking talk about it then you know and so when you have these actual.
Sean:
[1:10:43] Honest conversations you know, their relations don't know how to deal with it because they've always told them anything that they say is completely acceptable i'm like no it's not you don't have to say bullshit things like a like a five-year-old after working the adult world yes um so that's where i am on the be kind debate i'm very kind in my own um adult kind of way.
Tyler:
[1:11:04] Yeah i think it's good to you know be able to set boundaries with people and and not in a lot of ways it is like a defense mechanism like you pick up sort of naturally like somebody wants to come to you and you i need you to solve all of my problems or just they're just gonna emotionally dump everything on you um then you eventually you get to a point where you're like hey that's enough you got to solve your own fucking problems like i can't deal with this but even you know i work with lots of people who are most certainly on the autistic spectrum because it's video game design and even before that you know meteorology like people who are wicked smart you know like yeah have lots of talents and everything and then you you kind of grow up in the mindset of like well i'm i'm really smart so therefore i can't be wrong about anything uh like developmental psychology right when you're supposed to learn this stuff when you're a kid that like the world is not centered around you like you are not the center of the universe uh at all but you know a lot of vast majority i shouldn't say majority but a lot of folks just don't get that they never make that step in their development towards being an adult i totally get that and they tend to gravitate towards people like who are going to solve their problems for them or people who are doing the work so that they can kind of latch on to that um
Tyler:
[1:12:32] And if you're, if you're a subscriber to the whole, you know, as above, so below, like in the liminal space, whatever it is that's pulling the puppet strings there, you, we, we, you know, we have to have people take responsibility for their own actions, but it's also like what's going on psychically with them and, or psychologically, however you want to look at that, you know, what's going on, why they're, why they're acting this way or why they, why they have these quirks,
Tyler:
[1:12:58] these things about them. And somebody had told me that if you if you imagine it like a concert hall where you you have an innate ability to communicate with that space or recognize it or whatever that once you open yourself up to that it's like when you open up the door to a concert hall and it's not necessarily that anybody has like really bad intentions but you know they all run in towards the stage or whatever and people get trampled over and then the person there you know that they're whatever it is that they're attracted to gets overwhelmed and flooded with just all of this stuff but from their perspective it's not necessarily i want to go cause this thing a problem it's that you know they're all like the little kids like swarming the beatles you know and and then john and you know ringo are like oh my gosh it's so much mate it's it's just too too overwhelming i want to go sit in my toll bus and toke on a fat doobie or you know like
Tyler:
[1:14:01] Yeah um and and it's hard it's hard to like set it's hard to set those boundaries that's why there's this sort of tradition and ritual magic of like having a sanctified space even in churches you know like hollowed ground like demons can't come here and you do all these things in preparation because it's like when you're opening yourself up to people period like on earth and also the spiritual world the more barriers there are for them to have to cross before they run it you know if you're calling it the concert hall you know there should be a couple of turnstiles and a ticket booth and maybe like a barriers that cause them to kind of funnel in in a neat and organized way such that it's not overwhelming whatever it is that they're trying to run towards um so that's yeah i i feel like i hate to tell you this i think you are probably you have that propensity and this whole story kind of sounds to me like you got like in look in too deep too many people too much negative energy all at once and it manifested to you if i had to guess
Sean:
[1:15:14] Oh i'm i'm not for that i'm not for any solution and yeah there was a lot of people there and a lot of a lot of love but more negativity actually coming towards me in the form of jealousy and i want to say jealousy in a wanky way just in a you know continuity about how come you're opening that place and i'm not you know you're pretty much that energy yeah and that's gonna I get only projects and people don't really like it.
Tyler:
[1:15:44] Hatred is just love. The same emotion, just expressed in different ways, I guess.
Sean:
[1:15:50] Hope.
Tyler:
[1:15:51] Yeah. So how did you recover from this? Obviously you had to process all that experience and you wrote your short story and you're publishing your book, which we'll put in the episode notes, by the way, if people want to grab it somewhere. But yeah like how did you process all this what's been that experience
Sean:
[1:16:11] Well that um it was, the um the fallout from the venue is a thing i can't actually talk about at the moment, so but i'll come back on your podcast in a year or so and we can talk about it then but there were other fallouts which weren't about this pulper though so, the pulper guys was mixed up in the place being, the glorious failure that it was success and failure, whatever it was it shone and then it exploded, Kurt Cobain but it's like it went wrong and then my life went wrong for some time so it's like, but not in a psychological way you know easy the license and everything else after all.
Tyler:
[1:17:05] Sure yeah you got money invested in it you know all kinds of things
Sean:
[1:17:10] And other stuff which literally is another story and an interesting one so i can tell how broad you are so you know with next time um so it had a and then covid came and then a bunch of culture war bullshit so the venue closed but my writing went into, overdrive and i did a book in the year ever since about the cultural war issues and and and then over covid time i really got back into the art again i i actually did that at university in your, early 20s so i thought massive with me and then i brought it back out and i've been doing that ever since i'm getting bigger and bigger and better and better actually with that so sea fish went wrong but then it fed into the art it always goes somewhere now you'll be creative you never It goes into something else, isn't it? It's a gift I got.
Tyler:
[1:18:02] Yeah. It sounds like it was probably really fucking hard to get through. Like, I'm happy you got through it, and I'm happy you're okay. Because, you know, that could really break someone down, a lot of this. Especially, like, something happened to you that you don't understand. I mean, it's traumatic as hell. It's like a little kid, you know, in, like, a molestation situation. They don't understand what happened to them, you know. But it was nevertheless awful. And I think a lot of people who have these paranormal don't even get me started on like UFO abduction scenarios and stuff like that where it's like and you can't even talk to anyone you go tell someone like I had this horrible experience where someone came into my room at night and they took me into a spaceship and plugged all kinds of things into me and you know stuck stuff up my butt or whatever and you can't tell anyone that because they just think obviously you're insane
Tyler:
[1:18:57] And regardless of whether it happened or not like the fact that you had that experience in your mind is like fuck up i have a friend who's making a um making a game a video game right now from that perspective of like a man whose wife was abducted and you know he's years after the fact still trying to process what happened and everyone you know around is like oh well you're just she just ran off you know his you're crazy that didn't really happen um meanwhile he's stuck with the trauma and there
Tyler:
[1:19:30] Yeah the the studio they have like parapsychologists and ufo experts and like they're even speaking with people who are like um it's an organization i forget the name of it but they they are professionals that kind of like caregiving to folks who have these experiences because they have no other options you go to go to your shrink and say like oh well you know this happened to me and your shrink's like oh i guess we're just going to have to put you on some medications or whatever and address your hallucinations because that can't possibly be true um and regardless even if they're right even if it is a hallucination that's not necessarily the way to deal with the problem is to just tell the person they're they're insane and lock them up or whatever or just drug them to oblivion so that they don't process their emotions um come to grips with it and whatever it is and no one really knows but even if it's not aliens like it could be that's the way that whatever it is in the spiritual realm manifested to that person and to apparently a lot of people right yeah so i've
Sean:
[1:20:36] Got a good pal who's very very into um all that culture and she's very you know very serious about it her and her boyfriend and uh we i used to go we used to talk about such things in south wales um the closer you get to london the less able you're allowed to be in touch with the liminal when you go out i'm sure it's the same in america when you get further or further away from the cosmopolitan centuries the weirder things get you know but yeah i kind of like that about the world and i suppose we all intuitively know that don't we you get a permission to go out there.
Tyler:
[1:21:13] There's arguably like the more in touch you are with the world and like less if you're if you live in a like a concrete jungle like london for me beautiful city and all that but i would never ever fucking consider living there it's too big too many people but you're you're very much entrenched in the material world when you're in a city everything is man-made everything is you know like people are focused on what they're doing you got to get out of the way if somebody's like walking up the escalator and all that kind of shit and it's like in the countryside people you know you go to your grocery store and the guy behind the counter wants to talk to you and ask you how your day was doing yeah like go to the petrol station and the guy's like oh you might be the only person i see all day so let's have a conversation versus just treating people kind of like a number but sensory input just just the amount of stuff you're taking in you know when you're in a place with a whole lot of people a whole lot of things that you don't have time to sit there and think about liminal stuff like people are like nope i've got an appointment i gotta be there on time i don't care about hearing out what you have to say anything and it's not necessarily that those people are bad people it's just like that's the world they live in um out in the countryside you have a lot more time to think you have a lot more space to you know let your imagination perhaps get the better of you but also to you know explore things that you wouldn't have the time to explore if your life is just to get to work get home take the train all that stuff exactly
Sean:
[1:22:38] And the absence of people around you actually enhances the humanity that you feel and getting back yourself and the couple of people that you do see so it's a real contradiction of our human humanity film isn't it.
Tyler:
[1:22:52] Sure i mean it's economy the economy of humans if you have a million people then every one of those people is their value is intrinsically lower in our perception anyway you know i don't think anyone's worthless but i just mean if you're going to see a million people today it's a lot different than if you're going to see 10 people today you got a lot the time you spend with them has more intrinsic value so
Sean:
[1:23:18] That's right if a hundred people got killed in a disaster um that is no worse or better than one person getting killed in a disaster but it's very difficult to see it like that and that isn't how the news see it because it knows is not how
Sean:
[1:23:38] they respond to it but actually you know the one is as bad as 100 that's yeah have.
Tyler:
[1:23:45] You had uh if you had other people who had similar experiences come forward and like talk with you about what they went through too
Sean:
[1:23:53] Um some people got in touch at the time on on facebook about um that place and they came along and tried to pick up the vibes and uh, they should i mean people throughout my life have always come to me as empaths as they're types psychic types all right and i i don't really care what people define themselves as although you're the person you know but um we always seem to think i've got some sort of sympathy with it well it's only in the humorous right i don't know i just listen to people you know, and, uh, not very many ghost stories though. I mean, if what I'm telling you a ghost story, I don't know. It's an experiential reality for me.
Tyler:
[1:24:37] Yes.
Sean:
[1:24:38] Yeah. But those stories in the way that we're presenting now, but, um, I haven't had very many of them. No, to be honest. So, you know, not that they've told me, perhaps there's embarrassing anybody else to, you know, you should go take your piss. I don't know.
Tyler:
[1:24:51] Sure. Yeah. Have you had, uh, i don't know have you have you looked into the history of the building like do you know what what happened there how old it was all that stuff
Sean:
[1:25:03] The place was i did look in just after three days um about 200 years old like i said 150 200 um so 200 i think, and my assistant manager because i'm not from that town myself but my assistant manager was he said that, there had been a guy that died of a heroin overdose in one of the upstairs buildings to the best of his knowledge being really mounted, and that's as far as we were able to get in terms of research about what this might be, where it might have come from and it could have been anybody who could live there up until then, from 150 years without understanding about it so we're quite a, just for a nomadic species now aren't we so if you go and live in a place for a while you don't think to go and because we're not really attached to things very much and that town didn't want me to get attached to it so it's like off I went out of there afterwards, and the people that were there before, went back to the Isle of Wight they had a restaurant that they didn't do very well, they were kind of into the liminal they were doing witchy I know.
Sean:
[1:26:18] So my co-direct is like a good question mark about all that like it's all their fault and i'm like i don't know what we're seeing here but they were trying to get to the bottom of it like you are but we know that kind of understood yeah.
Tyler:
[1:26:33] It it does you will never know what the singular source is but it really does just sound like a lot of negative energy manifesting in one place and uh it seems like you were the Catalyst, so to speak.
Sean:
[1:26:49] Catalyst, Conduit.
Tyler:
[1:26:50] Sure. Huge. Yeah. I mean, have you ever watched the movie Poltergeist?
Sean:
[1:26:56] I have. I watched it again recently for a bit of nostalgia. And I get that thing with, This film particularly, the first part is brilliant because of the Spielberg family drama, when it's really cool. And then when you get to the pyrotechnics at the end, you completely lose me. Most films, I get turned off by most films in that way, I don't know about you. When they go, these explosions and pirates, it's like, fat up, it's rubbish. Yeah. And the first half of Walking Grows I love, it's just about the human attention, you know?
Tyler:
[1:27:30] Yeah. The movie does a good job of in terms of like accurately describing like the victim of the case or the conduit of the case like anytime that there's poltergeist activity there's always one person who's like the thing if you remove that person from the situation the thing goes away like the stuff stopped happening or even uh stephen king's book uh carrie i think there was a couple of movies made about that too but that's same sort of thing emotionally distressed person uh losing a lot of blood in this case but you know low on their minerals and everything uh dealing with a lot of distress and then like without really understanding it psychically telekinetically lashing out and whether or not there's even a spirit involved doesn't really matter but i could totally understand if you're like sitting in a place and then this stuff starts happening around you like the last thing you're going to do is prescribe it to it's me yeah you're gonna think this is like this is happening outside of me it's like it's over there that happened right there like what is it um no i
Sean:
[1:28:41] Could tell i was being targeted by it at some point because it would go quiet forever, not always so i did work but i didn't find the pole myself responsible i'm just like um would get a good idea to take the carpets up which is what I was always thinking about it you know but the other things you care about it are much richer yeah.
Tyler:
[1:29:05] Super fascinating man and I'm looking forward to hearing how you how you figure things out over time even it may take you a whole lifetime to figure this one out but
Sean:
[1:29:14] There is absolutely a part two to this which you touched on and I literally can't but I'll explain to you I'll do for a time so yeah we can't but apart from that I will.
Tyler:
[1:29:25] Shoot me an email come back and we'll talk it through and see what you figured out since then or whatever even if it's just like a thought you had or whatever bounce it off me because at minimum I'm in touch with a lot of people who I could ask questions to like what do you think of this yeah yeah thank you for sharing your story and it's brave of you to do so a lot of people will just keep this shit locked up inside forever and yeah
Sean:
[1:29:48] I'm a true child of these days fuck it yeah um You're very educational, open-minded. It's been real sweet and very interesting.
Tyler:
[1:29:59] Yeah, thank you, sir. The track you are hearing is called Electric Celebrants by the great Sean Parker, yeah. I'll let it play after I'm done talking here, but this is really, really, really fascinating to hear his story. And there's much more, you know, that we'll be revisiting maybe, you know, in the future to get the kind of the post-clarity, like what's going on with all this how did this all happen and uh how he's processing it it's clearly clearly very strange i've got the videos that he sent me of some of the stuff you know flying around the glass and the clock um inside of the bar if you're interested in seeing that um you know and as usual transcript episode notes and all that stuff will be in the article on in the keep.com as with every episode at least you know recently
Tyler:
[1:30:58] Yeah wondering what you guys think wondering what you what you make of this whole thing what are your thoughts discord.inthekeep.com if you want to join the conversation happy to hear any feedback you might have and if you want to support the show of course the number one way to do that is to tell a friend share the episode that you like the episodes that you like of course you know leave those good reviews on Spotify or YouTube or wherever comments like what I you know all that normal stuff people say at the end of podcasts and also if you really want to support the show you can join our Patreon if you'd like to we wouldn't be mad if you did that or any of the other ways that you can do so through our website again that's all linked to right there um scary stuff man i love you god love you until next time stay in the keep
Music:
[1:32:03] Music
