Paranormal investigators Thomas Gormley and Charles F. Rosenay AKA 'the Shaman and the Showman' join us to discuss 40 years of lessons learned in the world of ghosts, witchcraft, and show business. Together they host a range of events all over the northeastern United States including the upcoming Salem Paranormal & Horror Convention on Saturday 15 Nov 2025.
Support the Show
If you enjoy this show, please share it with at least one other person. If you would like to get episodes early, exclusive merch, and other benefits, consider supporting In The Keep on Patreon or... If you're not a fan of our other support methods, but do wanna support the show, buying me a book is a great way to do so. If you do, please let me know so that I can ensure that you are rewarded! You can also shop with our affiliate Cora Cacao and get 10% off your order with promo code INTHEKEEP at checkout. - Tyler
Grab The Book
Chapters
00:00 Start
2:39 True Ghost Stories of Connecticut
10:13 Showbiz Background Meeting Charles
21:32 Delegation and Trust
42:46 Facing Pushback
44:16 Perspectives on Witchcraft
1:15:40 Skepticism to Belief
1:26:21 Lessons Learned from Conversations
1:33:39 Community and Connection in Events
Transcript
Music:
[0:00] Music
Charles:
[0:59] Being a skeptic and being a non-believer. Um, but because of my promotional, um, you know, background and, and being an entertainer, it just was a catchy,
Charles:
[1:11] nice, you know, team up name, the shaman and the showman. And, uh, you know, we use it and it sticks and we do a lot of like convention appearances and a lot of paranormal investigations and we produce our own shows under that moniker yeah so uh how does one become a shaman in this context.
Tyler:
[1:32] Uh you can't it chooses you uh it's a path a lifetime path um it'll keep knocking on the door telling you to wake up it's a calling um and i've answered the call and with charles and i able to bring you know the paranormal the metaphysical to people the right way um vision that i see and i'm also part of a group called wardruna which is a healing society a part of the shamanism that i bring also to charles also it's like one big thing and we're able to do that at our events at our you know um we have metaphysical events we have psychic fair fest that we do. We also take people on ghost hunts or ghost adventures, and they get to come with us at locations that are known to be haunted and fresh. So it's not something that's investigated over and over again. So we're going into something with new energy to help people have an experience. And it's always a great experience. So there's tons of stories that we have.
Tyler:
[2:40] And speaking of stories i know we've uh charles has written a book about some of those stories about some of our friends and all that different locations throughout connecticut so tell them tell them about that book
Charles:
[2:52] Yeah so tyler i'm the author of true ghost stories of connecticut very very different than most of those ghost books that are out there you know people write about some haunted locations and they maybe put a little history of the location or a picture of it that you could probably also see on Wikipedia or, you know, if you go online, what we did, what I did is a little something different is I actually got firsthand accounts from people.
Charles:
[3:23] Of what happened at those locations, you know, and I interviewed a lot of paranormal experts, but everyday people also who might've had the most unbelievable experience in their home after someone passed, whatever the case may be. So we got 33 chapters and put it together in a book, Two Ghost Stories of Connecticut, where it's the wows, the, oh my gosh, I can't believe that happened. And it's what make up the book, working on a second volume of it as we speak.
Charles:
[3:53] But it's um the website's paranormal connecticut.com and it encapsulates so much of what thomas and i do you know we go to places that maybe people have been to before and had experiences maybe not maybe we're bringing them to places that they always said well that place looks haunted i'd love to get in there but never knew they could we do it with permission we do it all the right way and we get in we'll we'll have a meal first we'll spend the first hour with the orientation and introduction and, you know, we'll, we'll explain intent and what should and shouldn't be done. We'll show them how to use equipment. And, you know, Thomas will always tell them that the most, the most accurate equipment and the best equipment is right here, you know, in the brain, in the mind and in, in the heart, you know, you yourself is better than any equipment you can use that's,
Charles:
[4:46] you know, on, on a battery or it gets plugged in. Um, but we'll teach them how to use that stuff and then we'll actually spend two three hours at a haunted location and we'll do this every other month and we get the most tyler we get the most amazing results it's crazy so let's really rewind a little bit here yeah when when did you when did you first realize thomas that you were like a an empath or had a had a gift or an ability it's.
Tyler:
[5:15] Been pretty much my whole life. Um, you know, when you're growing up and I grow, grow up, I don't want to date myself, but at the time there wasn't like everything that you see on TV. Now it isn't so apparent out there.
Charles:
[5:28] It wasn't even electricity in those days.
Tyler:
[5:29] No, no. The, the dead sea was still only sick at the time. Dirt was still clean. So, you know, those types of things, but, uh, you know, you, you, you don't know what it is. You just think a lot of times parents just think Their kids are going crazy or why am I feeling this way when I go into a room? Why do I feel this way around somebody? It wasn't until I was in my teens, probably around 15 years old, I went to a lecture. Some friends say, let's go to this lecture. It's Halloween time. It'll be spooky. And I was like, okay, good. So we went, and Ed and Lorraine Warren were giving a talk at Central Connecticut, and we get to meet them afterwards, like backstage, kind of a meet and greet. And Lorraine Warren skipped everybody, like the Red Sea was parting, and came up to me, and I'll never forget it. And she says, you know, honey, she called everybody honey, honey, you've been having problems.
Tyler:
[6:27] And she explained to me what she saw. And, you know, over the next couple of years here and there, I would go over the house for events, never went on investigations or anything with them. But I think it was more of the information of knowing why I felt this way that I think really saved me, you know, just in regular life and in spiritual life. And I ran with it, developed my own skills over the years. And I really thank her for that, being one of my mentors. she was a building block for me. And as I build more blocks and bring the paranormal to people, like I do with Charles, like I do heading the healing society called Wardruna.
Tyler:
[7:11] And that's kind of being a shaman, my responsibility to help heal people and help spirits on the other side that have trauma that are stuck here to make the decision to move on. And Charles has witnessed that and uh sure that's one of those wow moments that'll probably be in the part two of the book and uh we'll we'll save that one story but if you want we'll tell you some of our own stories and all that just to know that charles first book is still available to anybody watching and Hopefully, the second one will be out soon also.
Charles:
[7:46] Hopefully, it'll be out when this airs. And the plan is, if we can get it together in time, it will launch at the Salem Paranormal and Horror Convention, which will be our fourth or fifth year bringing this great event to Salem, Massachusetts, of course, and Salem State University, where there have been conventions and events and more witch-oriented stuff through the years. But we'd like to think that we're the first ones to bring like a world-class paranormal event with guests and special speakers and you know authors and all that all the stuff that you love at a convention we did every year in Salem and this year it's a when November something right Tom November.
Tyler:
[8:30] 15th and 16th but we've had some great guests in the past last year we had the 50th anniversary of the original texas chainsaw massacre yes it was great having those guys still around and they're they're as fun as ever and the year before that we had people from the original friday the 13th
Charles:
[8:52] Right and.
Tyler:
[8:54] Uh you know other silent night deadly night uh our lady from from that and she was also on cannonball run
Charles:
[9:00] Yeah and and along with the horror guest you know we were proud to bring in um the amazing kreskin tyler i don't know if you remember him when you think of paranormal you meant you think of the warrens when you think of magic you think of um houdini when you think of mentalism and all that stuff you think of the amazing kreskin who used to be on the tonight show and was really a mainstay he had his own board game called esp.
Charles:
[9:30] His last yeah his last public appearance where he did his actual show for lack of a better word was at our Salem convention so that's a it's an honor but it's also bittersweet because he's no longer with us it sounds like it's a lot of fun and you guys I mean, I've managed to get together and figure out how to do all this, but I feel like it's like a long story. So, Charles, like you said you had like a background in show business. Can you elaborate more on like what your life was like? Yeah. So I produce a lot of different things and I've done it for many years
Charles:
[10:10] in the music field and in the horror field. In the music field, I've been a big Beatle fan for many years. So I produce the Beatle festivals that they have. I do an annual Beatles tour where I bring people to London and Liverpool on a Beatles magical mystery tour. And I also do a lot of Beatle events. Plus I've published a book on the Beatles.
Charles:
[10:34] Similarly, I do the Dracula tour to Transylvania. Believe it or not, we go to Romania every year on a group tour, bring people who have the travel adventure of their lives. We combined the history of Vlad with the fiction of Dracula. And it's a one-week Dracula tour to Romania. It's unbelievable. And so along with all those events, you know, I've always been producing, but I also act. I'm an entertainer. I DJ on weekends. I do weddings and parties and all that good stuff. But I'm also in a lot of films. If you IMDB me, you'll see that I've been in a lot of really crappy horror movies. But I've had a lot of fun doing it. uh and a lot of a lot of credits through the year so um entertainment wise uh it's it's it's it's run the gamut from the local dj the local party guy uh to to you know being on hbo and being in theaters and being in films and all that but it's the productions it's everything that we do nowadays that i really love focusing on sure yeah i know what you mean though about i've been in a lot of a video games credit where it's funny.
Charles:
[11:42] Because I feel like if you look up my resume or IMDB or Moby Games or something like that, read through it, it'll say... Uh special thanks more than it says anything else and it's like why is that like what is that untangible x factor that i bring to the industry that that can only be defined by special thanks don't know what he did uh you know i i got credited in a really huge rts game that did extremely well as special thanks and it was just like what did i do and the truth is i walked around an office building and yelled at people relentlessly that's all i did for six months and then i was gone.
Tyler:
[12:22] It's a way to do it.
Charles:
[12:24] No, but I understand what you mean where you're just like kind of involved in a lot of different things all the time. Natural extrovert, I imagine. Yes, sir.
Tyler:
[12:33] And just a showman.
Charles:
[12:35] Sure. Yeah, I get it. Do you really think that it's an extroversion thing or do you think that you like, this is how it is for me. I don't necessarily like to be at a party unless I am the sender of attention. And then I feel comfortable. Like if I'm playing the guitar and I feel like I have control of the room, I feel fine. And then anytime that it's not like that, I'd rather just be alone. That is exactly, I couldn't have said it better. If I'm at a party and I'm not DJing it, if I'm the special guest for whatever reason, and I'm just like another person who has to walk around and be sociable and talk politics or, forget it, I want out. I want to be the person who's entertaining everybody. I want to be bringing the joy. Otherwise, yes, you hit it on the nose. I agree totally. No, yeah, I totally understand. So you guys, how did you meet? Like, how did you actually bump into each other? Oh, my God.
Tyler:
[13:34] This is the story I always like to tell. So I met Charles a few years ago, and it was kind of in passing, so we don't really remember one of the uh the original paracon there and then uh you know then there was a psychic fair that he had a former partner that told me hey you should come to this so i said okay i wasn't doing anything so i come and uh just kind of hanging out all day and uh talking to some of the psychics doing their readings and all that kind of picking up on them their energy just seeing if they're the real deal and uh when i go over i start talking to them and And then Charles looks at me dead in the eye and says, I don't like you. And I told him, right, but I don't like you either. And we started laughing. And that started it from there because a couple days later, his partner moved on and he needed somebody to assist him. And he reached out. And we've been together ever since going on three years.
Charles:
[14:28] It started out really fun because I do a lot of library appearances.
Charles:
[14:34] I promote my books, a lot of meet and greets and book signings and all that. But I like coming out with two people when I can and having an event. So I'm just not just talking about my experiences and trying to promote and sell the book.
Charles:
[14:49] But bringing in someone who has so much more experience. And some of these libraries were built in the 1800s, early 1900s. So some of them, if they're open to it, we talk them into letting us do an investigation as part of the program. So we're doing our book talk. We're both telling people our experiences. We're asking people their experiences. We want their feedback. We want to hear what's happened to them. And maybe we can give a little semblance of, you know, explanation to what has happened to them.
Charles:
[15:19] And then if the library is up for it, then we'll explore the place. We'll go into every nook and cranny and see if there's any looming spirits or former authors who are still inhabiting the libraries. So when I asked Thomas, would you come along and be my shaman for this? Never thinking, I also asked a gal, one gal did it on a few of them, never thinking that this would be a budding relationship that became a partnership to the point that you know we put on the major major conventions and, consult each other you know he gets all the great guests um does does all the work i just watch him do all the work and i say hey this looks good thank you all right this guy's a pimp i like him.
Charles:
[16:05] We have a lot in common you and me yeah yeah pretty similar it.
Tyler:
[16:09] Just yells at me for six months
Charles:
[16:10] Yeah eight.
Tyler:
[16:11] Months it takes to put them together so
Charles:
[16:13] No i i grew up around you know like i have seven siblings and six of us are boys so like my brothers and i uh had a pecking order i was the second oldest but for sure like the the best way i know how to define my relationship with my brothers is like the three of us get in a car to take a truck to go over to pick up a car that's broke down right yeah i'm the one who's behind the wheel when they push it onto the truck you You know what I'm saying? Sure. And my brother pointed this out to me. He's like, you've always been that guy. Like, we were going to push it uphill onto the trailer, and you said, hey, why don't we turn the truck around and push it up? Like downhill and then up on the trailer it'll be easier and i'll drive and yeah i i get it but.
Charles:
[17:00] Delegation is a is a skill that you have to develop and learn over time like people are naturally gifted at it but you also have to get comfortable with being you know being someone who can have a broad overview of everything but not be involved in all the little details and that's good to have for me it took a very very long time and i don't think i've still perfected i still i'm not happy unless i do 99 of it yeah but sometimes i have someone like thomas who i feel okay take over your you got this and i know he does and i feel comfortable with it yeah but that's hard it's hard if you're a non-delegator to become a delegator yeah for sure like a dealing with when you trust someone with a sector of your business or a project or whatever it happens to be you really trust someone that means that you think they will do just as good a job as if you were there otherwise you would just do it yourself and that's it's a huge amount of i don't think you will appreciate how much trust that involves you know with with a business partner with a collaborator i'm sure it's the same with like rock bands or pro athletes on a team together that kind of thing but so.
Charles:
[18:10] You got go ahead if someone is you know that go-getter that type a personality that's out there and very you know very um extrovert-ish and really wants to be the center of attention it's hard it's not because you're not just delegating work you're also delegating attention and pressure yeah then pressure right right no um i've ran a lot of video game conventions and oh yeah i can honestly say like.
Charles:
[18:41] You get to a point where you just accept that maybe one or two people have an idea of what it's all going to look like when it's done and that's it. And then everyone else just has to kind of like take orders and fall into place and do their job or else it doesn't happen. Um, especially in your case, Scott, you guys are like contracting a convention center and there's all kinds of fun things involved in doing that. Um, I had to rent out a venue one time, have a i was gonna have a wrestling ring delivered to it by the local wrestling company, yeah and then uh i had the entire deal set up and then my employer pulled out of it like last minute and i had to let everyone down so what what i ended up doing was going to their training center and then just becoming a wrestler along with them for like wow yeah i was just like i'm just gonna wrestle with you guys from now and i toured all around the country that i was in right.
Charles:
[19:37] And then at the end of this whole thing i had been promoting to every one of these little wrestling audiences the video games that the company was selling so it was like a cross thing and then when a new like wrestling game would come out i would provide like free copies or something like that to the people who were coming to the shows like to do drawings and giveaways and stuff and i made it work like see i still made that relationship work out just because it was such a good collaboration even though um there was at that time like not even money involved so that was a really cool adventure too um and i think being open-minded to finding yourself in, kind of these bobbing and weaving constantly changing business relationships that you're in a lot of it really does come down to you just like you you trust this person you uh you have a good time around that you can spend a lot of time with this person without wanting to kill them, ideally right yeah so unfortunately.
Tyler:
[20:31] I want to kill him
Charles:
[20:34] If this shaman wants to kill you yeah if you would ruin that truck thing he would want me under the wheel not behind sure yeah.
Tyler:
[20:42] Yeah sure you go
Charles:
[20:43] And yeah but putting putting on convention is hard work even if it's just an online convention just the logistics of dealing with a lot of different people and and play are you guys booking people's plane tickets and hotel rooms and such for this? Sure. Well, I did something in 2010 called Rock Con, which was going to be the Comic Con of rock and roll events. And it was the weekend of 100 rock stars. So it was 100 hotels, 100 flights, 100 limos, plus guarantees. And I lost a fortune, but it was a great event. So when we have an event now and we're only flying like three or four people or worrying about the accommodations for a handful.
Charles:
[21:28] It's okay now. It's not like it was when we were doing monster numbers. Sure. Sure. But I feel like every single event, especially if you're not like a.
Charles:
[21:40] Backed by some giant billionaire type of company is just gambling everything you have and hoping it works out. You know, Ty, that's such a great observation because if you're a millionaire or you're, let's say you're Live Nation and you're doing five shows a week, right? And you're doing five shows a week for, you know, 52 weeks. Well, if you have 10 or 20 bombs, it doesn't matter because all the other shows are, but if we're doing one or two major conventions a year, if one of them bombs, the other one doesn't compensate for it. No. Yeah, it's crucial to try to do the best and make sure everyone who goes there, we're vendors too. We set up at shows and we want them to make money. We want every author to sign a ton of books. Sure. Fans who come to have a great time. So we really take everything to heart. If you're in the business a long time And it's not just a one and done, you know, people will put on a convention and they'll, you know, just never, she never hear from them again.
Charles:
[22:42] It's because they didn't care and they took the money and ran or they lost the fortune and realized they couldn't handle it.
Charles:
[22:50] You know, people have been in the business a very long time. You got to tip your hat to them and respect for the people who keep doing it
Charles:
[22:56] and hopefully do it right and do it successfully. It's ironic but like the truth is i think that the people who make the most out of show business are the ones who can do everything for themselves like one you know one person who's who knows their songs are like stand-up comics because it's just them right whereas like the more people you have involved in whatever machine it is that you're trying to run the it's it's like newton's second law of thermodynamics it's friction creates entropy period um and the more moving parts you have in a machine the more likely it is to just break down on you at some point um and it's hard i remember uh i think it was the original wrestlemania i think vince mcmahon put all of his money on the line like millions of dollars borrowed from other people and everything he had on that one show and it worked out but it could have just not worked out you know somebody hulk hogan might have broken his ankle the night before yeah yeah uh you were talking about having a mentalist speaking at your event and i wonder because i imagine the conversations that get had at an event like this you know even amongst the staff or like the people who were speaking and.
Charles:
[24:09] Stuff have to be super interesting right and i hope i i assume that the crowd is you know in on this too to some degree but you know like having a mentalist who's really good uh hanging out with a bunch of psychics and whatever.
Charles:
[24:25] You would imagine that would be the person most equipped to tell who's real from who's fake, right? And the other way around. Right. And they wouldn't do that. Right. They wouldn't do it. There's a respect across the board. Like when someone comes into one of our fairy fests and they go, hey, which psychic should I go to?
Charles:
[24:44] I mean, there's probably one or two that I would want to direct them to. But I say something like, walk around the room. Do a complete walk around. And then when you walk the second time, whoever you get a vibe for, whoever you feel comfortable with, go to that person, you know, because it's not fair if, you know, if I'm sending everyone to one or two people, because maybe I'm more inclined to think that they're more legit. They're all legit, but there's probably different levels, you know, of intensity and how and how deep they'll get into somebody's, you know, psyche or whatever it is they need. So the mentalism is very very different because i don't know if a mentalist who does a stage show you know who can predict people's birthdays and know how much change is in someone's pocket and all that have you call your friend about your ex-girlfriend and then tell you your uh.
Charles:
[25:36] Bank cards pen code or something like that yeah they're good well is that person on the same wavelength of being able to determine another person's level of psychic ability i don't know I don't know if it's the same realm, but it definitely makes for, like you said, interesting conversations. I mean, we love just overhearing the people who come into the convention and have their stories to tell and have their issues they want to solve. And they'll go to that. We hear them going to the psychics who are doing readings. You know, there's tarot card readers and palm readers and bone readers. People read bones and read, you know, tea leaves, you name it. There's all the different readers. and there's healers and all that. And so the people get a nice variety of different opportunities to really, I don't want to say solve their problem, because it's not always people coming in with problems.
Charles:
[26:33] Maybe they want to connect with someone who's passed, or maybe they're having an issue that someone outside, I mean, a therapist can't solve, but maybe someone with more psychic insight could. And this is what's really great about these Fairfests and these conventions, because it's not judgmental at all. If someone has an issue and they walk over to somebody, that somebody treats the person coming over like they're the only person in the world, and they will try to do everything they can to comfort that person, to help the person, or whatever need be, if it's beyond that, maybe reaching out to somebody on another side. So I wondered.
Charles:
[27:18] When people walk into a convention, right, and they go, I don't know, get their tarot card read, that kind of thing. How many, if I walk over to Lady A, who's doing one thing, and then I go across and there's Guy B, and they tell me two conflicting things, stuff like that. I wonder how many times that could happen to somebody in a single day. That's a good question. I don't find that happening a lot. No. I find variations of the theme. Like someone will have come to A, and they were told something about their past, which showed as something for the future. And then B would have done something, well, this is what I see in the future. There's not a lot. I have been doing this not a long time, five, 10, 15 years. I've never had someone come over to me and go, oh, it's ridiculous. He said that I'm going to be jumping out of an airplane. And she said, I'm going back to college. And I have neither of those plans in my mind. I've never had that where someone has come over and said, there's, you know, such diverse, conflicting things. Tom, am I crazy on that? Have you had a lot of that?
Tyler:
[28:28] No. You know, the thing is, is a lot of people that read or give that insight, they always have people's best interest. Um i don't think they're going to give them the wrong information but just so you know nobody's perfect um you could give information that you're receiving and it just it still comes through like for me it could come through in symbols sure and i have to interpret it and give that message am i interpreting the symbol for that particular person right i don't know nobody's perfect you know paranormal metaphysical nobody's 100 right or wrong about it but i'll tell you this um
Tyler:
[29:09] Psychics and all that there's a lot of you know i don't want to say they're a dime a dozen you know but the ones that we have at our our fairfests are some of the top in the country we want to bring that to the people that come like again charles and i want to put on a world-class show and bring in world-class readers um you know but in the psychic world just like the sporting world you know you could have somebody that's a psychic like tiger tiger woods or you could just have a psychic that's a weekend golfer. So they're still great at what they do. They're great golfers, but you're always going to have that different skill level. So again, there could be somebody that interprets something maybe a little different, but it's still the same. It's just the way that it's purveyed. Some people that aren't open to it are always looking. The ones that aren't open to it and are looking for the fraud are the ones that are going to misinterpret what the message that was given to them. I could give you a message and it doesn't make sense, but two weeks later it happens. And then you're like, oh, okay. Or you talk to a family member and they say, hey, I had Uncle Joe. And like, oh, she talked about Uncle Joe. I never met, but that must be who it was. You know, sometimes the message happens later. It doesn't happen right at that moment.
Charles:
[30:24] That's a great point. Great point. Now, I mean, the reason why I ask is because I find that talking to people who are practicing psychics. That it's kind of a cutthroat industry. They're often very quick to speak out about frauds. The more... The more you kind of poke at why that is, it's almost reflective of just, it's a competitive space. You know, there's only going to be so many psychics who are selling, you know, their new book and all this kind of stuff at the top of the heap. Doing every convention, all that kind of thing. Getting advances on their next, whatever it is.
Charles:
[31:06] But then you talk to someone, like I had a, oh my goodness, what was her name?
Charles:
[31:10] Palm Reader, Miss Goldbaum, I believe is her last name. And she's been doing it for 70 years she's 85 years old and still reading palms and.
Charles:
[31:21] Incredibly accurate like can look at a picture of your hand and basically tell you what you know everything about yourself but down to your child it's weird um you know and there's just no denying a certain point that you know your your body of work speaks for itself the people who atone to what you can do speaks speaks for itself uh to a large degree um and then there's just this this constant sort of competitive space and i think that's an ending any field at all you know if you were running a popsicle convention there would be competition amongst the people who make the best popsicles i assume it might be more popular i mean i bet popsicle festival would be really fun you just gotta hope you gotta hope that it's done yeah with the right spirit you know competition is fine but yeah maliciousness isn't you know the backbiting isn't you know the the the talking you know online cryptically or directly someone else that's that's that i i hate that but yeah there's there's no doubt there's competition and there's you know jealousy and you know we've had our share of it and we do our best to avoid it we do our best to always take the high road whenever possible sometimes you can't but we always do try to and we always try to uh you know give the people the best, the best possible everything.
Charles:
[32:41] Yeah. You guys grew up, but did you both grow up in Connecticut? I grew up in the Bronx in New York. And then you moved that way.
Charles:
[32:50] Okay. Well, it's interesting. So you both spent some time in Eastern Europe, right? At least to do these Romania trips and such. Yes. Mr. Shaman. What's the first thing you thought about when you first landed in Europe, like your feet touched the ground.
Tyler:
[33:06] Now, I, I've never been to Europe.
Charles:
[33:09] You've not gone to these?
Tyler:
[33:11] I've never gone. The furthest I've been out of the U.S. was Cancun, Mexico. Or Hawaii, which I still consider not part of the U.S. because it's such a long flight. It's closer to Japan than anything else. But that's besides the point. But, you know, I do have pull. Being a shaman, I do have, you know, an Irish Celtic background. So I do have a pull for over in that area. um you know you always think of lifetimes before that you might have had and i think i spent a few over there i think if i ever went over there i think you know i've been a few places where it felt like i knew what street to go down it's like i've been there before and i've had that happen in a few places in this country and uh you know that it's just one of those things but charles is the one that spends more time over there than than i do um you know i'm a little more u.s grounded for some reason but i really want to get out there a lot of bucket list places and that's particularly one of them there's a lot of energy there that i know
Charles:
[34:14] You should go to prague and just walk around, somewhere like that somewhere in like the ancient bohemia yeah been there three times with different groups we did uh what we called our frankenstein tour and we went to east germany we went to uh Three different places, part of Czech Republic and Prague, and amazing, beautiful, and creepy at the same time. Just one of my favorite places to visit. And you'll hear that. You'll never hear someone say, oh, I went to Prague. It is boring. It's impossible as an American not to have a good time in Eastern Europe. Yeah. Because it's like they have everything that you want. You know it's modern but it's also like people are people are extroverted like i shouldn't say like socially more extroverted than say if you go to scandinavia or somewhere like that like they will just walk up and talk to you and want to be involved with people in general and i think that is.
Charles:
[35:12] More palatable for a lot of americans but yeah so the reason why i asked though is i had this experience i was standing like kind of on the coast of northern amsterdam with one of my friends.
Charles:
[35:27] And he was kind of just telling me about the area and i realized that you know 10 feet away from us we're standing on you know this there's just freshly planted grass and underneath it is just bones from dead people from a thousands of years of them burying them there and then now they've raised up the land or something and re-terraformed the area right and it's it's really a kind of a thing that i don't think a lot of it is if you grew up in the bronx it might be different for you a lot of like americans who grew up in rural places where there's fields and grass and like you could reasonably you know walk 10 feet in most places in america and say okay probably no one died right here while i'm standing and then in europe it's like just millions of years worth of dead bodies everywhere under you all the time and there's like a there's like a resonance there's like this psychic thing that i think goes on with people where it's not quiet anymore so like you could be very peaceful and kind of in your shell and then when you're in a place that's just that packed with lives that have, you know, and in a lot of cases, if you go to like Gettysburg or war type places.
Charles:
[36:43] There's this feeling you get where it's just overwhelming. It's like a lot of noise that you're not used to hearing. It's almost like being in the jungle, you know, where you, you hear every bug and every, you know, gust of the wind, every little thing that slithers in the grass. But usually that's all just kind of tuned out for you because you're in your quiet. Yeah.
Tyler:
[37:03] I have that. I, Charles knows he's very extroverted I'm a little More introverted. I do what I do. I come out. I have to prepare myself to do certain things because my empathic abilities could become overwhelming. So I have to create those boundaries for myself to maintain my energy. Um i haven't been to gettysburg since i was little and i i it's not that i have a fear i just feel like if i go it's going to be so overwhelming that i don't know if i'm going to be able to help spirit because it's so overwhelming and busy uh to pinpoint it on something but you know i could be just overthinking it but i really want to get the opportunity to be able to do that one of these days but i've been to savannah georgia when my daughter graduated and that was pretty overwhelming because that whole city is buried on top of its dead so when you walk through those parts you hear somebody calling out when you're open like i am and all that and then i realized jesus is going to be overwhelming now i have to sit meditate and try and you know prepare myself a little better so a lot of people that have the ability that i've been blessed with they have to go through the same thing and a lot of people when they first realize their ability it is overwhelming.
Tyler:
[38:24] People get psychologically affected until they know what it is. For somebody like me, I thank God that I met my mentor when I met her and people over the years that have helped me to get to the point where I could shut it off and then turn it on. So not many people could do that. And that's when it becomes overwhelming as a gift.
Charles:
[38:48] Yeah, I think you got to be prepared for that sort of thing yeah i heard a group of guys that had visited the isle isle of the dead in ireland or whatever and gone and just deep into whatever it is that they were looking for and they all were every single one of them when they were done with the expedition they're like i need like months off of to just do nothing i got to re recover from everything that i just experienced there um yeah so like when do you have the same experience even in the conventions themselves, like just having a lot of people around?
Tyler:
[39:24] Yeah. It takes me a while. I think a lot of it is because Charles and I don't really sleep that whole weekend when we run these things because we're up early. We stay up late. We're talking to everybody. We're making sure everybody's having a good time. So it's a lot of that human energy that we're putting into it. But spiritually, it affects me a lot too because we're amongst like-minded people and their energy gets high and ours gets high and it is draining uh we we do all you know the uh It's like the adrenaline gets out of you so quickly. And then after a couple of days, you're feeling like you've got a paranormal hangover for a little while to get over. And I'm glad that Charles and I do spread our events out. I just always want to make sure we're 100% to help or entertain all of our patrons in what we do. It could be overwhelming. So we're usually doing at least one thing a month. And I think that's good. It's hard to do a couple things, but July is going to be busy for us. But a lot of it's our own thing and then helping some of our other friends out with other things.
Charles:
[40:35] Do you guys ever deal with any pushback from the anti-occult folks? Like, you shouldn't be doing this? Yes, sir.
Tyler:
[40:45] Yes, sir. Yeah. What about big events?
Charles:
[40:48] We don't want to shout them out, but yeah, we're dealing with it now. There's a place in Connecticut called Dudley Town. which I visited three times with groups and then got a cease and desist from the Dudley town, you know, whatever community it was. Um, and that sucks because you know, we're, we're, we're adults. We go there, we do everything right. We leave, we don't leave trash. We don't make a mess. We don't do a disrupt in any which way. Um, for a lack of better word, we're professional about what we do and we bring people and we, we're not allowed to bring people. And it really is too bad because we would do that on a regular basis. There's a few places that are that iconic that people are asking us all the time. Can we take us there, please? And we can't. So, yeah, we get pushback. And if the people themselves were open-minded and realized what our intent was and that there was nothing, nothing demonic or evil or negative in any way, yeah, they'd still push back. They're still stubborn. You know, there's that group of people that no matter how you explain it or how you do right by it, it doesn't help. Yeah, I mean, I can imagine a more conservative area being like, hey, we don't want your literal witch festival in our town.
Tyler:
[42:14] We've had issues with that, too. So just, you know, there's some ancestral pushback on an event that we do. But we appreciate their feedback, and we always want them to come. And even if they don't want to support us, we want them to see what we do to bring the knowledge to what happened in Connecticut 45 years before Salem. You know, with there was a witch trials there. And, you know, of course, at the time, the panic, you have to blame something
Tyler:
[42:43] on somebody. A lot of the rich blamed it on the poor. And then you get people getting hung and being accused of witchcraft when they never were. They were just the odd person in town. And, you know, unfortunately, without that education, it still goes on today, even on the internet. So you don't like somebody on the internet, people just blast them, and people make bad decisions for themselves mentally. Sure. That still goes on.
Charles:
[43:07] I'm glad you mentioned that, because we do an annual summer witch festival in Connecticut, in Hartford, which was one of the places where the trials, the atrocities took place, and, it would think that it would be a welcoming event across the board. It's free admission. It's not like, you know, we'll make a million dollars on this event. The witches who have current stuff, love it. They come, they sell, they show how to make brooms. Whatever they do is all cool. And then the people who are ancestors of witches have a problem with the current witches and And they don't feel it's as respectful as it could be. And we understand that. So we want them there to show their side of it. You know, use us. Use this event to, you know, to talk more about the history of what happened. To tell people what happened to your ancestor. To raise money for whatever plaques we can do. We want that. We beg for that. And there's a lot of pushback, even within that one little realm of doing a witch festival once a year. Sure.
Charles:
[44:16] No i mean it's a it's kind of a big deal it's one of those things where you know people don't really think about it but yeah in a lot of cases people living in these areas directly have like lineage to that time you know when these events took place and everything and you think about it from one perspective it's like from the the version of the story that gets told when you're in school and you read the books and all that kind of stuff. It's like, okay, well, basically a bunch of young girls or whatever. But if you're looking at it throughout all of the time that it happened, even going back to Europe with it, there's just this long-standing, basically just massacre. I mean, near genocide of women, especially older, wiser women in communities because they knew how to do medicine and didn't learn it from Jesus or something like that. Even just putting it in the most simple mild like not religious tones it's just that happened historically and on the other hand you know they're.
Charles:
[45:19] They were witches or something like that that's the it's the two polar opposites of just the public argument but even within the communities it's like you have i'm assuming you have like a generation of witches who learned from reading books about wicca at barnes and noble and then you have a generation of witches who were like um probably involved in the order of the golden dawn or something like that like really legitimate ritual magic or something like that versus you're kind of like i think a lot of younger girls nowadays are like herb witches or something like that you know they they have like a specialty because they learn autodidactically without the institution around them yeah that's very interesting i bet you guys, see some of the most interesting drama that there is you could probably make a reality show if you wanted to i'll just yeah make a few different reality shows yeah biting an eye and then they'd be very interesting and they'd go on forever. Sure.
Tyler:
[46:18] We've witnessed a lot of stuff. We've gone through a lot of stuff doing this. And our main goal, again, is keeping it simple. You know, just putting on the conventions, putting on these festivals for people to have a great time and learn about the metaphysical to get answers for themselves of what happens afterwards. You know, and I've preached ever since I started doing this. All I do in home cases, I'm helping the living, I'm helping the dead. That's it. So I try not to complicate it. And unfortunately, in any profession, people complicate it. People are competitive. People have big egos. They have all that stuff. They want to be number one. I don't blame them for that. That's their process they go through. They'll learn from it, but they have to learn from it on their own.
Tyler:
[47:06] They're all on their own path. And hopefully what Charles and I do when they come to our events and have a good time, and their questions are answered and it makes them think differently. You know, you can't change people sometimes, but you could help their path a little better.
Charles:
[47:21] Sure. Sure. Do you feel like having the contribution or whatever is like a calling to you, like you making these events happen and bringing all these people together? Is that part of your greater work?
Tyler:
[47:40] Yeah charles and i always want to bring people together you think about it this way when we run an event it's like-minded people that have a safe place to talk about things that they love or things that they're curious about or wanting to get answers um you know i can't go to a normal job and start talking about what i do you know they're probably gonna call the lulu wagon for me so but uh but that's what you go up against and some of these people have these answers and to get that anxiety and it does affect them psychologically and spiritually and they need that outlet they need to know that they're not crazy that this stuff's really going on or anything like that so we provide that outlet for them you know a whole weekend of something to be able to talk to people that are very well versed in the topic to be able to get those answers or put them in the right direction you know and that's the main important part people nowadays got to realize that we all have trauma we all want to heal from it and charles and i provide that in these
Tyler:
[48:44] Events and also my group that i head up wardruna when we're part of these events we help them you come to the event you get to meet these people and the type of stuff they do and it expounds on that you know then we go from the event to something else to help you get answers so it's never ending it's just you know like you have your convention with uh the um video games sure so all these people are coming to see all these video games and oh i like this video game i want to get involved with this group and then that creates you know that spider web in that community so and that's what we try and do and give people that outlet when we provide these events in a safe place
Charles:
[49:29] Right so charles what are some of the things that you thought were nonsense before you got involved in this and nothing differently about nothing specifically but and and i would never use the word nonsense but um i i just you know didn't believe that there would be as many results and many experiences that are like oh well i i can't dispute this we're at a we're at an old home in a place called bristol connecticut first floor nothing happened second floor not so much third floor which was the the children's playroom and we we have one of these communicating devices, and we're going through all this white noise and you're hearing.
Charles:
[50:13] And then crystal clear the voice says thomas sure oh no trying to communicate back with with with thomas it's just incident after incident like that i mean i've taken pictures of areas where you know people said hey take pictures in that corner some it's i'm feeling something i don't feel it tyler i feel nothing but they tell me to take pictures and i take a slew of pictures and And I'm looking, okay, nothing, nothing. And then in one of the pictures, you actually see a whole specter walking across. And that's probably what that person sensed. The cover of my ghost stories book was the upper level, the balcony of an old opera house in Ansonia, Connecticut, where I took a ton of pictures of this one door. And nobody had access to the door. Nobody was up there. It was just the light shining through.
Charles:
[51:11] Every picture, it's a blank door. And in one picture, there's a shadow figure. I had to use that cover of my book. So none of it's nonsense. I never thought it was nonsense. I don't think anyone who believes in anything, if you're saying it's nonsense, that's the ultimate in disrespect. But I never had proof. An atheist can't believe in God unless he feels that he has proof. And someone who doesn't believe in the afterlife, someone who doesn't believe in the supernatural somebody doesn't believe that there's entities whatever it may be, you're entitled to not believe it i didn't believe it but until you're faced with it over over and that you can't deny it anymore that's when it's no longer it's never nonsense but that's when it's no longer uh prove it to me it's been proven to me too many times sure yeah i can't imagine just taking it on someone's word like.
Tyler:
[52:06] Yeah well you can't yeah you can't take it on anybody's word and charles knows when we do the library events and he knows the first thing i say when i start talking is everything i'm about to tell you is what happened to me i don't expect you to believe it but hopefully you'll hear the message and it'll help you on your own journey but that's the thing is is any paranormal experience you have is for you individually so that's the message that's coming to you you know even if you don't have any experience people's well how did you experience that i didn't experience that sometimes it's just for the individual um you know to help them on their way uh you know i don't never want to make somebody yeah you should believe this but i will say when people are adamant about it i says have you ever gone on a ghost hunt or anything like that to see if you could experience that instead of denying it and they always say no And do you want to come out? No. So it's, it, you know, that's the thing is, is, uh, you know, um,
Tyler:
[53:10] I wish more people would take that advantage or take that risk to possibly have something happen. Like Charles here, you know, like he said, he's seen it over and over again. I can't deny it, but that's his experience. Nobody has the same experience as Charles or nobody has the same experience as me, but we take people so they could have that individual experience, you know, and that's what it's all about. It's about you. It's about what heals you, what you notice that comes in, what gives you answers. It's not going to be the same as for everybody else.
Charles:
[53:44] Sure. It's very interesting, and I think that it's something that kind of echoes throughout different communities in different ways. So, like, if you have people who, I mean, who grow up in a church and they're all in agreement on what they believe in, you know, um and they have conversations about that regularly versus i would say probably a lot of people who are involved in the occult esoteric witchcraft metaphysical you know kind of community ufos i'll throw them in there too it's all the same to me but uh.
Charles:
[54:19] They they have this tendency to just sort of group together and do the same thing that they do in a church right just in something else i wasn't really informed about this a lot until i talked to uh a guy named dr justin sledge he's got an amazing youtube channel called esoterica he's like a scholar of you know esoteric books and occult knowledge and alchemy and secret society all that stuff is like everything that happened in the west he's got it right um not so much the you know oriental arts the vedic stuff that's a different you know different field to study but you know and he's a he doesn't seem to be a person who believes in ghosts and ufos but he informed me of the concept of ufo religion being studied right he tells me you know like this is something that there are already people writing books about um and the same thing applies to um parapsychology is a field too it's been around for a long long long time and and most of the most of the stuff that we now consider to be the scientific arts have a root you know algebra Libra is literally Arabic for the numbers, right? You know, there's a, uh, alchemy, you know, chemicals, same thing. Um, all of this stuff.
Charles:
[55:36] Mattered to the development of what we now call science and the way we understand the world and but they they just dismiss half of the story right it's like yes this is the this is important for mixing chemicals together and it's also important for a lot of other reasons we just ignored that, it seems to me like one of the many ways that the world is like a video game is that you only need to spend a few minutes really looking below the surface to notice that there's a lot of strange things that aren't explainable happening around you all the time i mean just in the room you're sitting in there's a lot of stuff i'm pretty sure you can't explain exactly why it is there's all all sorts of mystery just at the base level um but we're sort of wired to kind of only tune in on what we're supposed to do. In the same way that a video game character is like, you know, if you don't, even in like the most immersive RPG, if you're not progressing in your story, you'll find very quickly that things are repeating around you, like the car or the horse or the characters keep saying the same thing over and over again and going in a loop. And life really feels that way.
Charles:
[56:49] Whereas if you are, if you're just living a regular ass life and you don't ever think about anything paranormal, anything metaphysical, anything below the surface, you will just, you know, you'll not notice it. You just tune it out. The same way that you tune out, The things in a game that are not the story that they're trying to tell you, like, oh, there's a bug here or a glitch there, like a guy halfway standing out of, you know, out of a house or a thing that showed up in a level that it wasn't supposed to be in or anything like that. You just ignore those things. You're like, oh, yeah, well, you know, that that happens and you move on. Same thing in real life. It's very strange how our brains are just attuned to think that way.
Tyler:
[57:33] Stories happen. Yeah. Stories happen all the time. there's videos you can see online they test uh how much you're able to concentrate they say look at the boy bouncing the ball right you know and then the video is over and they said did you see the gorilla walk across the room and then you watch the video again there's the gorilla that walked across the room because you're so pinpointed in and you're not staying open that's basically the metaphysical the you know the paranormal but unfortunately there's a lot of people trying to go in trying to prove it scientifically um me personally and i don't want to upset anybody i don't think it's ever going to happen because the thing is is scientifically if i'm doing an experiment with water and i drop three drops of water i could repeat that over and over again but i can't repeat somebody calling my name at the same time at the same day or something so i could quantify it uh it's it's impossible so it works on its own time if
Charles:
[58:31] You count time and like space time as as einstein defines it if you count those as coordinates you technically cannot replicate an experiment because you'll never be able to do the same experiment at the same time you know so the position of our star in its orbit around the center of our galaxy's black hole or whatever right will never be the same no matter how many times you do that experiment, Much less the earth around the, you know, like I have really fun time talking to astrologists about this because, you know, just the stuff in our solar system is all that they focus on. And I'm like, what's it going to be like, you know, when we're in Andromeda or somewhere like that? And you've got to read the new horoscope. Have you thought about this? You know, what about, what about where our galaxy is around the super cluster or whatever the fuck that stuff? Who knows? But yeah, so technically, if you want to argue the point, you cannot actually replicate a scientific experiment.
Tyler:
[59:35] No, so nothing really technically in that aspect is provable.
Charles:
[59:39] Sure.
Tyler:
[59:41] We put our faith in that. Just like in the paranormal, I put faith in. For me, you know, you're talking about repeating things over and over again, and some of the witches do their magic and all that. But he is a shaman, and I've said this to people before. I have spirit guides that work through me.
Charles:
[59:59] You wouldn't be a real shaman if you didn't say that. That's my new thing, by the way.
Tyler:
[1:00:03] Yeah, and they work through me. It's not me. I don't have ego in it. They work through me, and whatever they tell me to do, I trust it. And it's worked for me for a long time. But I don't do ritualistic type of things. People say, oh, you should do this and that. No.
Tyler:
[1:00:21] There's a lot of shamans that are different there's different callings and all that and how my calling is to counsel the dead to help them through their trauma to help them make the decision for themselves they don't have the meat suit anymore they still have that consciousness to in my mind prove it or not you know don't believe it or not that's whatever but i know i'm speaking to something that's stuck and you could literally feel it leave and charles knows that there was an event um that that happened at and the people that were there and witnessed it uh i think their mouths are still on the ground they didn't realize what just happened and this is stuff i do on a daily basis to help you know because when i sit home and i let myself open coming home from work I'll sit in my chair and just watch a little TV. And then a moment before I go to sleep, I take that moment and I let things in and I meditate with them and try and hear their story and say, hey, you don't want to be here. You know, just this is what happened to you. This is what I think. How do you feel? You know, and you feel that energy change.
Tyler:
[1:01:36] I don't know where they go. We don't know until we actually die ourselves. But I feel like they're leveling up and they're sending them to a plane or of existence that's better for them. So that's what I hope and pray for.
Charles:
[1:01:50] Sure. Yeah. No, and like a video game, right?
Tyler:
[1:01:54] Exactly yeah level up
Charles:
[1:01:55] It's it's weird but it's a really good metaphor i mean it's i'm certainly not asserting that that's my actual view of.
Tyler:
[1:02:03] I've used the metaphor before yeah you know what has me has a shaman um i learn things and then i get to a different level but if i fall back on my training i go back to that level i already played that level so i know all the tricks to get to the next level quicker sure so you you do that forward and backward but the times when you go forward if you fall back you've already been there so in your mind to stay positive so i've already been here i could get through it quicker let me work through it again so you know the two you know one step forward two steps back is not what i think i say two steps forward one step back is more of the way i look at my journey.
Charles:
[1:02:47] Sure. Have you ever had your palms read?
Tyler:
[1:02:51] What's that?
Charles:
[1:02:52] Have you ever had your palm read?
Tyler:
[1:02:55] I might have had it painted red, but no.
Charles:
[1:02:58] No, that's really funny.
Tyler:
[1:03:00] No, I haven't had a lot of people read me. A lot of people that have tried to read me and they said no. I've had people tell me it's too overwhelming. They don't understand what's going on around me. I've had that happen. I think the only people I've had, maybe two people, three people in my whole life read me. But on different planes, Chip Coffey has read me. He's a famous psychic medium. I've had some friends of mine read me to help out just more of a healing thing than reading what it's about. My business partner besides Charles as my friend Stacia Wills, we do Warjurna. She picks up on stuff on me all the time, but it's more of a healing journey thing, you know, to help me to be able to help other people. So I got to heal myself. I'm going to help heal people. So you work through that stuff. It's never ending.
Charles:
[1:04:02] Man. Charles? I just love how, you know, you bring in the relativity to game playing. And I'm not a game player, but I love hearing that the things correspond in different ways. And I do that a lot with other things like, you know, so much of what we do in the paranormal. I think it's all for the good. And, you know, when people down it, I get frustrated. I really do. Only because there's no ill intent in anything that we've ever done. If anything, it's the opposite. And if that's something we can show in anything we do, whether it's in one of my books or it's in our festivals that we do or in bringing people to haunted locations, if someone said, Charles or Tom, we want to go to your Salem Paranormal Convention, Salem State University, November, remember, we only can afford to get a reading, we can't afford to get in, we would let them in. Or if they said, we need a reading so desperately, can we come in and have that done? I would pay for a reading for them if someone is that desperate. And what proves the point is someone calls and they need their home investigated or cleansed, cleaned.
Charles:
[1:05:25] There's never a thought of a, well, you know, you want to buy us a gift, we'll take a gift. But there's never the thought that we're charging to do what i think is a good deed and a necessity no but you have a strong network of people that you know like if somebody calls you and needs to talk to somebody you know who to call period like i'm the same way man like that's if i have one talent it's just networking like really someone calls me and says like oh i need a level designer or whatever i'm like i'm pretty sure i can find you one who's looking for work right now i need someone to do the soundtrack for this thing i'm doing i'm like i probably know a guy oh i need a and more lately it's been like someone came to me and said like i really need to talk to a paranormal investigator about this thing going on my house i'm like dude i know who to call and it's weird to say but it's true and in your case i'm sure it's a wide rolodex of stuff within that realm right and so it's a wide it's a defer to Tom. I'll go to Tom's, you know, this guy needs help. What do we do? And I leave it on him because I know he'll know the right thing to do. Sure. When you're, uh, when you're ushering someone's soul from this plane to the next, can you just kind of walk us through maybe a story or two, how that works for you and what your experience has been?
Tyler:
[1:06:51] There's, there's tons of them, like I said, on a daily basis. There's some wow ones. This story I'm about to tell you is... It's going to be in Charles' book. I'll say it now because by the time this comes out, the book will probably be out. It'll be one of those teaser stories to make sure everybody buys the part two of the stories from Connecticut there. So we were doing an event at a trolley museum in East Haven, Connecticut. And these trolleys are ancient trolleys. They're in this museum. And one of the trolleys we were on was from New Orleans. And we're picking up on some energy so this is we do two nights uh that's something that charles and i like to do because we get different people each night and it's fun to see how much the energy changes between the people that we bring in their energy on top of the energy that's at this building so sometimes we get different results on those nights and it's always interesting that way but the first night we go we're on the trolley and i'm picking up through itc devices which is It's just basically, you know, your device where you hear voices live going on, the white noise, voices coming through radio signal wise or whatever way they're able to communicate through that type of device in theory.
Charles:
[1:08:13] Right.
Tyler:
[1:08:14] So a voice came through and it said his name was Billy and Billy wanted to go to college. And that's all I really got the first night. And as I'm driving home, it really affected me. I think I felt Billy was with me trying to communicate. and i'm more thinking about how the night went and i really didn't tune into it but then on the drive the next day up i could feel billy again and i'm like i really need to communicate with this billy so i wanted to make sure we went back on this trolley and uh so we go on the trolley and like all the patrons are there and we let them use equipment of course so one of them had equipment that you know that picks up uh the electromagnetic frequency or anything like that in milligalls so usually it's like a something weird going on is like 0.1 0.2 but she's at the head of this trolley and she's with our guide um and he is all of a sudden the meter is going up to almost 120 milligalls which is like a crazy dangerous type of level and the guide starts trying to hold himself up. He feels like he's about to pass out. So I had everybody, it was kind of getting like a little feeling the energy. So I had everybody sit down and then all of a sudden, as soon as they sat down, I could see in my mind playing pictures of World War II.
Tyler:
[1:09:43] And as I'm picking it up and the instrumentation's going and everybody, you could feel the energy. And all of a sudden I picked up, it was Billy. And my first thought was Billy went off to World War II. He didn't get to go to college because he probably got killed.
Tyler:
[1:09:59] And then it kind of dawned on me. And I said out to Billy, I said, Billy, you going off to war and dying for your country is college.
Tyler:
[1:10:08] You made that ultimate sacrifice. and that that is a scholarly great thing to do as soon as i said that you could feel a whoosh through the trolley you know all the instrumentation went back to zero and then nobody said anything on the try for at least 10 15 minutes they didn't know what to make of it so but that's something that at that moment we were having a good time and all that and i felt like i needed to go to work and help the spirit and just the people were there at the time um and they were able to witness it and it it gets crazy sometimes and that's what it is and charles talked earlier about our house in bristol hearing my name called and i explained to charles over the time we've known each other that you'll hear my name a lot because some spirits don't want to go anywhere you know it's not just make them all leave or anything like that it's the ones that are having problems just like anybody else if you're having an issue you go see your doctor so as a shaman if a spirit's having an issue it tells my guides to tell me to call it says just call his name it'll come through an itc device it's come through pendulums spelling my name out so all those different things that have happened and that to me tells me somebody needs help and i'm gonna try and communicate with them and hear their story and help them make that decision to move on never
Charles:
[1:11:33] Force it never force it and never uh push ourselves where we're not wanted and and that's in this world and whatever other world there are yeah i uh i've heard it described like when you when you're walking around or if you're open to it that it's it's like if you open up the doors to a concert hall and people are like flooding to try to get to the stage first It's a lot like that. And I wonder, do you... Do you feel like when this is happening, like someone is communicating to you through your spirit guides or whatever, are there ever negative ones trying to get into that space, like not good spirits?
Tyler:
[1:12:22] Well, that's where discernment comes in. That's where trial and error happens over the years of what you're dealing with, how you feel it. Charles knows and I've talked to him about it. I've had cases where I won't talk about anymore because I don't want to reactivate the seriousness of it for the client that I worked with or anything like that. But I've dealt with a lot of different things and, you know, I'm a human, but also being a shaman and trying to do that soul retrieval type of work, it's that balance. And, you know, it is, it is scary. You do have things that come through to try and trick you, pretend to be something else, which happens with a lot of home investigations where kids are talking to what they think is another kid, and it's not. And you have to discern that and help that family. But yeah, there's been things. Charles and I had an event where we had an angry spirit that was angered that there were a woman in a Masonic Lodge. And I channeled that spirit, and I felt myself become angry. And Charles actually captured a picture of me doing this called an Estes method where I'm not seeing anybody. I can't read their lips. I have headphones on and I'm listening to a device and saying whatever comes through. And people ask questions and it kind of corresponds.
Tyler:
[1:13:44] But, you know, I felt myself getting angry and Charles is shooting pictures of me. And in one of the pictures, my face more, my beard left, my hair got longer in the picture. And I think it was at that moment he captured the spirit
Tyler:
[1:13:58] Taking me over to get his anger out or his message to me to purvey to the people that were there, uh, basically get the heck out of here kind of thing. And I felt his anger and Charles had to, you know, get me out of it. And cause he felt, he saw my breathing changing and all that and got worried and just kind of took me out of that trance. But, uh, that's what happens sometimes. It gets a little, a little freaky for some people sometimes. But after all this time, am I perfect at it? No, nobody is. But I do have the experience to know when enough is enough or to know when to move everybody away. Because every time we do an event, Charles and I usually go to the venue first. And I just want to make sure it's safe, you know, spirit wise or energy wise to bring in people that may not have done this for years. I don't want to put them at risk. so that's we're always like I said we always want to bring people a safe place but I've experienced a lot in my life and I know when it's not right it's just it's like anything it's like walking to me now I know when something isn't right anymore and I like to teach people that and get them to experience it but I always hope that nobody has to experience the demonic I have and
Tyler:
[1:15:18] You know if the time came I would and somebody's there, I wouldn't teach them about it, but it's hard. I look at things differently than most people that you see on TV. Everybody thinks everything's demonic. It's like they're looking at it linear. I'm looking at it 360. So it's a little different.
Charles:
[1:15:41] All right. So, yeah, I wanted to ask Charles, like this entire experience of, you know, going from being relatively skeptical to, to writing two books now on the subject. Yeah. Um, what, what is the, what is the experience really of when you read these stories or when you write them down and everything and you, you're spreading this out into the world, you know, your own experience and things that you guys do together. Um, does, has that changed you? like the way that you think about your experiences documenting them and knowing how much change has occurred just in your own thought process.
Charles:
[1:16:25] I've never really thought of it. So now that you're asking, I have to think of it.
Charles:
[1:16:29] I started out as a monster guy, you know? I'm the guy who watched all the Frankenstein
Charles:
[1:16:34] and Draculas. And to me, that was all, you know, great fiction. And then if I saw Sixth Sense or The Others or a great ghost movie, a ghost story, ah, another great fictional thing. And so it was all, you know, just a fictional thing to me and a hobby, you know? So you sort of liked the macabre as a genre of fantasy. Oh, my God, yes, yes, yes. I mean, everybody does, I think. Right, and what's crazy is I mentioned that I do the Dracula tours to Transylvania every year. I also do ghost tours. That's how I got to Prague, and that's how I've gotten to Hungary and Israel and Cuba and Eastern Germany. And I can go on and on. England, Scotland, Ireland, we've done ghost tours to all those places. But to me, that was just a title. It's a ghost tour. And we're visiting these places that have legends and lores of being haunted, you know, and what happened in these castle 300 years ago. But I never went with the mindset of we're going to go there and do an investigation and, you know, raise a spirit. Now it's the opposite, opposite. Everything I do now, I have that awareness. It's an awareness that I've never had, that this place could still be inhabited by energy that hasn't moved on.
Charles:
[1:17:57] And it's just embedded in me the way it's probably embedded in the walls of a place or in the atmosphere or in the ceiling of a place. Now it's not, it was used to perhaps maybe subconsciously I might have thought, but now it's my conscious thought. And it's a good thing because when we do our paranormal investigations.
Charles:
[1:18:22] I go there with, before I'm going there, I'm going to take that picture. I am going to. You know, have my, whether it's proof to someone else or to myself that, you know, that this isn't just a lark, that there's more to this than I ever believed there would be. And, uh, I really like your choice of words to say, like, sometimes it's just to prove it to yourself. Like you're doing these reality checks because I feel the same way. Like I will find myself going down these rabbit holes and then I have to start questioning, like, is it possible that I'm just going insane find some way like even you know i had a gentleman on the show who had a regular communication with a being that he calls uh uh i'm gonna be so embarrassed but anzar right he's from he's from the star on the right most of orion's belt if you're looking at it from the northern hemisphere right and it's fascinating you know really because he's his some of the answers he gives are very interesting you know it's like it's not as simple as just like oh it seems like you're a crazy person he's a doctor he's a college professor he's a perfectly functional member of society who just has a similar experience you know with he's got this relationship with his spirit guide so to speak that he knows his name and he gives him information helps him out with stuff right um and.
Charles:
[1:19:50] As I'm getting into this conversation, I start to think like, okay, there has to be some way, even if, because no one will ever believe if it was real, right? Like it's, there's, it's an audio podcast. We could have doctored it, you know, that there, there will never be convincing anyone else. But if there was just some way I could convince myself that it's real. And I would do things like that. Like, I wonder if I give this guy a password. Will, will his messenger, spirit messenger be able to carry it back to him and him tell me what the password is? Something like that. But I'm constantly having sanity checks all the time. Like, am I going crazy thinking about this sort of thing? I think, you know, anyone who is in contact with Houdini, Houdini himself, you know, his one of his main purposes on life was to debunk the fake psychics who were, you know, ripping off people. And yet, yet he didn't believe that he could do the things that they said they did. But yet he said to his wife, you know, I will come back to you, try to reach me. And Halloween, next year or the year after or one of these years, I will somehow find a way to contact you from beyond. And he didn't, you know, and he was the, if anyone on this planet ever could, you would think that he could. Now, maybe he didn't have that power.
Charles:
[1:21:14] Maybe he had every other power of magic except that. And maybe it's unfortunate that had he had that power, he would have been the one who did that.
Charles:
[1:21:23] But you can't. Who are we? Sure. Who are we to say, you know, it's nonsense? Who are we to say you're full of shit? Who are we to tell that professor or whatever that he's not communicating with someone else? There was a time where I would have just rolled my eyes and said, Ooh, Looney Tunes, you can't anymore.
Charles:
[1:21:44] It's interesting that you bring it up, you know, in his, in his context, how, and he was kind of the marriage between these two worlds of thought, right? He comes into it, tries to debunk everything and then leaves with, it's, it's even more complicated than I thought from the jump, you know? And I think a lot of people, no matter what discipline they're in, find themselves feeling the same way. I talked to an astrophysicist recently and he was just like, dude, the more you understand about it, the more miraculous it seems. That's, that's all I know to tell you. It's like, it's not, oh, well, now we've just solved the universe. It's like the more questions we ask, the more complicated it gets every day. And there's really no reason to doubt that there's an intelligence behind that. That's just his point of view. And if you talk to someone who is a psychic or a priest or a cultist, some of the greatest theologians of all time were people who set out to be basically like, I have to find the most reasonable thing to believe in.
Charles:
[1:22:41] And I'm not gonna stop you know at rhetoric I'm just gonna go figure out what I really think and most of them arrive on like it's way more complicated than we thought like it just well it.
Tyler:
[1:22:52] Is it gets more and more complicated you think about it even in the paranormal there's been so much we've learned over the time I've been doing it
Charles:
[1:23:00] Oh yeah just the past 30 years yeah of the The difference between the business of paranormal before digital cameras and after, so different.
Tyler:
[1:23:11] I know, but I'm not a big digital camera guy because technically the way digital cameras work, if it misses part of the picture, the pixels fill it in, so it could be off. So I still prefer the old make the development or Polaroid or whatever. But even beyond that, you think about it, how it's come. But we'll look at something more scientific, medical doctors.
Tyler:
[1:23:39] So you look back, not even that long ago, they used to think bloodletting would cure people. You know, we look at that now as being like crazy, but they were seriously thinking that that's what it did at the time. We're always learning. Something's always happening. And yeah, a lot of people complicate it, but it sounds complicated. But if you keep it simple and you just keep trying things and getting experiences and sharing, you know, your thoughts or your theories at everybody else, That's how we grow in our certain field. If we're just doing the same thing over and over again, it's just going to become stagnant and just go by the wayside. So we always got to try and look at things differently. And that's why in the paranormal, I never knock anybody for what they're doing. They're trying to come up with the answers. And I love talking to different people, whether they're day one or year 50. You know, everybody has a different view of things or different experiences. And how that experience might help me on my own journey or my experience to give to somebody else. It's the same with psychics. They're all different. We're all born with it. A lot of people don't know this. You're all born psychics.
Tyler:
[1:24:50] What happens is you're a young child and you always have your imaginary friend. It may not be an imaginary friend. You're just more open to it because you are in what's called theta wave until critical thinking kicks in at the age of six, seven years old. Then your parents say, that isn't real. and then you shut it down. It's like a muscle. You have to practice it. The next time that you become psychically aware is when you're about to pass away. A lot of people in hospice, what happens is they start seeing their loved ones come to them because they're opened again. The only other time it seems to happen, if you're not practicing at all times and practicing that muscle, is when something traumatic happens or a near-death experience where you start becoming aware again, and then you could develop that. So it's just one of those things that's been proven for that part of the metaphysical.
Charles:
[1:25:38] And at the risk of, you know, sounding like the cliche, I think the more we learn, the more we learn that there's more to learn, the more that we don't know. As experienced as someone is, there's always that, well, wait, am I doing this right? Am I getting it right? You know, there's just, with this, there's no, I don't want to bring religion into it. But there's such a similarity and you know the more religious a person is the more they feel they have to learn the more we want to learn about the paranormal
Charles:
[1:26:17] the more we realize that we don't know anything about it yeah.
Tyler:
[1:26:21] Without failure without failure you can't succeed um you know that's how you learn uh look at i look at uh edison 10 000 tries before he got the light bulb right so what if he quit what if he didn't put that energy into it in the try over and over again learn something fail learn something fail learn something until you perfect it that's what any profession if you're dedicated to it and have passion for it and you know i know charles and i have a passion for what we do that's why we want to learn and we want to keep trying have we failed before yeah there's things that have failed for us but we learn from it And we make it better for people, especially with events and things like that. That's what it's all about, making everything better and letting people have that opportunity to learn and progress in the field.
Charles:
[1:27:16] What are some of the lessons that you've taken away from talking to all of these different people from different backgrounds, their ideas? What are the truths that you've noticed where they overlap? For me, it's to just not disregard anything, to not just say, oh, you know, you're so way off, because their way off could be correct. I think I've learned, like I said earlier, the more I've learned is that I don't know, and I want to know, and I think everyone wants to know, what's the secret of life, what's the secret of the afterworld? There's secrets because we're on one plane and we can just get just high enough in our own plane. And there's other planes that we can attain while we're alive and probably won't. I don't know if we can get to them after we're gone. I don't know. Sure. Tyler, you're asking very, very tough questions, my friend. Very introspective questions. Yeah. I mean, I try. I try. Yes. What have you learned that's different from maybe 20 years ago when you first started this?
Tyler:
[1:28:35] Oh, my Lord. There's so much difference. Back then when I learned, you know, some of my mentors are very geared in on, you know, one certain way to do things. It wasn't like an outside the box thing. They were known to more Catholic oriented, priest involved, those types of things. And what I've learned over the years, little by little, my failing, my listening to other people that have knowledge or beginners that have experiences.
Tyler:
[1:29:09] You learn that okay let's try this and then something happens i learn from them and i want to try like a thing is is i could read all i want and i could hear speeches all i want but until i take what i learned and apply it i can't progress so that's what i learned okay whatever i hear i'm not going to deny that they're wrong but i'm going to try it so if they do an experiment i want to try that experiment, see what happens. I'm on my own journey and people are coming along with you and you're learning from each other. You're sitting at the table, breaking bread with people and getting those ideas. That's what's not going on right now in the paranormal. And that's what I wanted to get to. Because when I first started years ago, it's almost like things changed in a different way. Yes, there's more people involved in the paranormal and trying things, but yet there isn't that small group that exchanged these theories and tried these things to see what would happen. That's what's kind of lacking where it's more open. People are too competitive.
Tyler:
[1:30:18] There's enough ghosts to go around and enough ways to try things and all that. So I don't think it should be competitive like that or never tell anybody in the paranormal they're wrong because nobody knows if we're right or wrong. It's one of my quotes I say all the time repetitively, and I'm going to stick it into everybody's head until I'm blue in the face. You're never 100% right, or you're never 100% wrong about the paranormal. And it's the simple way of putting it. It's the chase. It's for me. It's helping the living, helping the dead with those questions that I've garnered over the years of my experience. And listening to my mentors or listening to the people at a paracon that are versed or have questions, and it makes me think, oh, that's a great question. Then it gets me thinking to look at something a little differently, too. So that's how I keep open. I don't have that ego where I think I'm right all the time. So just when I think I'm right I'm probably wrong Just like Charles said We learn something, we think we know it And then we don't So something else comes up
Charles:
[1:31:24] Do you guys think that you'll ever take it on the road?
Charles:
[1:31:28] We do We do a lot of appearances As the shaman and the showman At other conventions We just did one in New Hampshire, We've done Florida Yeah We take it on the road whenever we're doing library appearances. I mean, if we got a call from Oshkosh and said, would you come into our library? We'll gladly do it anywhere. You know, where there's an open ear and open-minded people. Yeah, well, definitely. And if there are people who want a convention in their town because it's missing one, call us. We're more than happy to help and do all the things we do. We'd love to. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Do you, uh.
Charles:
[1:32:11] Do you find that as you do more and more of this traveling around and press promoting the events and everything do you feel like you get people who travel long distance to come to your events or your signings that sort of thing it's the salem paracon it's crazy people come.
Charles:
[1:32:32] From so long distances sometimes it's because they want to go to salem so they're combining their visit to salem with other people will come because of a certain guest like our special guest in connecticut this past summer was it was a really out of the box guest who had nothing to do with the paranormal but because it was our fifth anniversary we wanted to bring in a special celebrity so we brought in butch patrick the original eddie munster to come in and people came from, you know, multiple states from all, not just the East coast, but to meet him, to get his autograph, to take pictures with him. So yeah, there's people coming from everywhere. Um, because either they don't have that event in their backyard, you know, maybe, maybe it's the same flying a thousand miles that it would be driving, you know, 200 miles. So they just take the trip and join us. But we love that. We'll shout out to them. We love when people are coming from foreign places as opposed to from 20 minutes away.
Charles:
[1:33:36] 20 minutes away, we expect you to come. It's not a big deal. But when you're coming from 12 states over or you're coming cross-country, you're coming from a foreign country, we respect that. We treat it special.
Tyler:
[1:33:49] What about the pad? I mean, like all over, like you said, the past summer event, um we had people flying in from california wisconsin you know up in chicago down in florida you know all over the place ohio you know pennsylvania a little further out pennsylvania so really um i think it was the draw uh the advertising that we do um the guests that we have there people want to learn i think the more and more of these events go on people want to come and they want to hear what people have to say again like we're talking about what are you learning people want to learn when they hear these speakers they don't want to hear the mumbo jumbo they want something that inspires them or gives them the answers that they're looking for and uh you know when charles and i put the these events together we always want to make sure that we have the best speakers that have something to say or have a book out or a vendor that may have something they're selling that's going to help somebody and be interested to buy that. Yeah. And just sit with somebody like Butch Patrick or somebody from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and get to relive that movie and what happened or relive that TV show and get that experience and remember your childhood and be in a safe place and all that. Yeah, that's what it's all about.
Charles:
[1:35:15] I still try to keep a little horror in everything I do. So when we have the guests from Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Friday the 13th or the Munsters, it's just me still being a monster kid. That's what they called us when we grew up. We were monster kids. We read famous monsters of film land. We watched all the universal films and we built all the models. And that's in my blood. So if I'm doing a convention and there's any chance I could sneak in a few horror guests, Tyler I do it I admit it that's great I think that's awesome it sounds like it's a really fun thing, yes maybe I'll have to figure out my trip to Salem one of these days or something or if you guys could do like Point Pleasant West Virginia I would just show up there too but yeah.
Tyler:
[1:36:06] Little moth man
Charles:
[1:36:07] Yeah I like a little moth I would love to alright well thank you guys so much.
Music:
[1:36:11] Music all right thank you again to the shaman and the showman thomas and to charles for coming on the show i really appreciate uh everything they had to bring to the conversation um maybe i'll see one of you guys at one of these witch festivals or whatever they're putting on at the time, um links in the show notes see ya wouldn't want to be it, oh wait no i'm supposed to say uh I remember it. I love you. God love you stay in the keep there now I did it.
Charles:
[1:36:12] Have a great day thanks for having us take care,
Music:
[1:37:00] Music
