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Hello all. Welcome back to another episode of Southern Demonology. As always, I'm your host, JJ. We all have a natural instinct, or at least most people do, to take care of and assist our family and friends in times of trouble. And today, I bring you the first part of an interview with David, or as he is known in our Discord server, Ravensong, an experienced paranormal researcher. He does delve into some of his techniques and experiences while in the field. But then the story takes a darker turn. For it is this exact instinct of kindness that brings him into contact with the demonic.
Yet before we go there, I want to talk about a recent phenomena of film and the ultimate use case to examine it. Horror in the high desert. I came across this highly unfortunate quote unquote movie while browsing through Amazon Prime. And I thought it sounded interesting. The synopsis was about a wilderness enthusiast who goes missing. And I wanted to like it. For the missing man had a similar speech impediment to mine, which is a rarity to find in any kind of media. And it started off decently enough. It supposedly was a documentary examining the case.
It went through interviewing several people, including his sister, roommate, a private investigator, and a journalist who picked up the story. Yet this film committed three cardinal sins. The first is that you can tell the film was desperately attempting to pad out its running time. For it began introducing erroneous false flags during these so-called interviews. Did the sister resent her brother? Was the roommate secretly out to kill the man? It attempts to become a whodunit. But all it takes is reading the bloody blurb about the movie to know that all of these are going to go nowhere.
And given the fact that there's so few interviewees, these false flags are quickly resolved and are ultimately just a waste of time. And boring to boot. If you are going for a mystery, then for god's sakes, get more people involved, create more connections, actually do something with some of the possible conclusions. The second was leaving huge, gaping plot holes that makes everything so unbelievable that you want to turn it off right then and there.
We find out that this man, who was all over the news for a time and the focus of a statewide manhunt, ran a video blog that had a huge following. And no one was supposed to know about that? And even worse, all evidence of this blog and videos just suddenly disappeared from the internet, because we all know how common that is. The first is improbable to say the least. The second is nigh on impossible. The last nail in this coffin was the absolutely final part of this film, which was video evidence of this man's final moments.
I won't spoil it, just in case you're desperate to be bored for an hour and a half, but it's one of the most anticlimatic and pointless things that I have ever seen. See, the movie is interspersed with video recordings of some of the things that the man runs across in the wilds. And some of them are old graveyards of miners from the 1800s and Native American sites. But what becomes the culprit in the end is nothing even nearly as interesting as these. And this part goes on for so long that I would skip ahead by 30 seconds at a time with nothing happening.
It attempts to replicate the Wears Waldo phenomenon of the paranormal activity movies, with none of the payoff or suspense. A third of the way through this film, I realized that this was a pandemic movie. One where people could not be in close proximity to each other, and so they attempted to cobble together something for the sake of producing something. It didn't try to tell a real story, it wasn't crafted with love, it's nothing more than a blatant cash grab. In short, it's the horror movie equivalent of a reality show.
We've seen this before in other search movies as the host, which I've covered before. Having limitations can make a genuine effort even better, for it forces those involved to find workarounds. If, however, the workarounds form the basis of the entire movie and there's nothing genuine about it, then you'll get only one thing in the end garbage. Horribly smelling garbage. Before we cut over, I do want to welcome our newest Patreon user, Bert. I really appreciate that. And if you would like to support the podcast for as little as three dollars a month, then please go to patreon.
com slash southerndemonology. You can also find that link in the show notes. But now that I've gotten horror in the high desert off of my chest, let's dive into the main point of this episode. Our interview with David in a tale I entitled I Renounce Thee. Hello all. Yeah, and I just want to point out that David actually was just raised up to our highest level in Discord, which is a scholar.
For those that don't know, we have an experience system, which is something that one of our one of the add-ons that I have uh thrown into the server allows for, which is every time you post a message, you gain a little bit of experience. It's like gamification brought to chat. Yeah, and if you do enough and interact enough, then you will be raised up to the various levels, and our highest is Scholar.
But David is a very frequent guest in all of our Wednesday movie nights and every other activity that we possibly have, and he has really brought a ton of knowledge and friendliness to the server, which I cannot tell you how much I appreciate.
Well, we we appreciate all the community there, appreciate you setting up the Discord server. You know, my name Ravensong is on there from uh playing EverQuest years ago. I I just happened to have the account and I'm too lazy to change it, but we've had some great conversations and it really, really has expanded uh my own knowledge from hearing what other people have to say. Great discussions.
Exactly. Yeah, it's been so much fun just gathering everybody's different perspectives and ideas. We all come from different walks of life. Yeah, it's it's been it has like truly become what I have always like really hoped for. And actually it's gone beyond what my even what my hopes were. Alrighty. What originally got you into the paranormal?
Well, I don't know, about twelve, thirteen years ago, my uh wife and I were watching Ghost Hunters and a couple seasons into it, I believe, and she looked at me one night and said, you know, I think I'd like to do that. And I'm like, really? And you know, of course it was it was great for me because there's all kinds of gadgets and electronics and cool places and hanging out in the dark. So so we kind of dove in. She she found a place, uh, a local group uh that did public, you know, investigations and dipped our toes into it.
And I think by about our third investigation, we went to a place that was super, super active, Hillview Manor up in Pennsylvania, and we were hooked. So you know, we we spent as much time as we could investigating after that. For a couple of years we were part of that group and and helped them lead investigations. When they would break into groups, we would take one of the groups and lead them through. We did like plantations and all kinds of old old buildings, you know, an old monumental church. This was in Richmond, Virginia. Lots of great places to go see near there and investigate.
And we went through some burnout, we did too much, and then you know, over the past couple of years we sort of pick and choose. We do investigate you know, local places or nearby whenever we can. But you can get hooked in, it can be a big passion and and a lot of fun. And you meet some great people.
I can only imagine what kind of tech did y'all have for your investigation?
You know, my favorite things to use are are fairly simple, the you know, the digital recorders. I have thousands of hours probably of audio that I've listened to from all the investigations, because usually I have a full spectrum camera going or two of them as well. Almost as much to see what's happening in the room while we're recording the audio, so I can exclude things that you know somebody moved their chair and it sounded like get out in a demonic voice. So we use video, audio, the ovelice. I have an oveless four that gotten mixed results on.
But what is that? I'm actually not familiar with that one.
Sure. So the Ovelice it was created, uh, I think it was Bill Chapel, digital dowsing. The first ones were fairly simple, and then he, as he's gone through generations of them, have advanced the electronics in it. Uh it's a word generator. What it does behind the scenes, I'm pretty sure it uses EMF and I don't know what else. So magnetic fields and a certain frequency triggers a certain word. The one that I have has like a 2,000-word dictionary.
So the theory is you know, if a spirit is communicating with you or trying to, they figure out how to manipulate this device and get the words that are relevant to what they want to say to pop up on the screen. You can have a voice come out and speak it and all that. It actually has other features as well, like a yes or a no uh sort of radar feature and things like that. But the word generator is what we use mostly when we investigate. You know, a lot of times it's quiet.
If there's an old home and there's a lot of bleeding of EMF through old wiring and fixtures, it'll go crazy because it's picking up on that. So it's not always something, it's not something you want to look at and go, well, this is exactly what a spirit said, but it does give some relevant answers sometimes to the line of questioning and to the site that you're at. That's when we you know we start perking up and paying attention, especially if it's really quiet and then you start talking and it says words relevant to what you're you know, what you're asking. So it's just one of the the tools.
So it sounds like a much more advanced kind of uh spirit box, is that right?
Yeah, so the spirit box uses radio waves and it's doing a a radio frequency sweep. So it's spinning through the dial as quick as it can. Some spirit boxes will let you go forwards and backwards, and some of the old ones are really annoying because they go tick tick tick tick tick tick every time it uh skips a channel. But that, you know, you're you're using not a translation database, right? So there's no mapping of those radio waves to words. The radio is picking up the words coming through the signal, just as if you were listening to a radio station.
And when that happens, because it does spin through just regular radio stations, it's going so fast that with those you should only get bits and pieces of words, you know, as it passes whatever the local talk radio is. But when you get uh sentences or uh, you know, a nice l couple of long words, that's when the spirit box can really shine and and you can get some interesting stuff out of that. A lot of it's noise, a lot of it's really short. Sounds like it might be a yes or a no. You just never know.
So how many investigations would you say that that you and your wife have clocked up to this point?
We've probably done fifty or sixty investigations over that twelve year period, some of them in the same night when we go to someplace like Gettysburg and we can do a couple of places, you know, or on the same trip. But you know, we've probably investigated 35 different places, some of them multiple times. And most of these are public. Just a point. We we don't, you know, in the past we've very rarely have done a like a private investigation where somebody is having a problem at their house, and we go in and try to help them figure out what's going on.
We've done that once or twice, but uh that's not typically what we do. A lot of responsibility in that, and you really need a a bigger Pro Football is back, and so are the predictions.
Understood. What has been kind of your favorite spot to go to?
My favorite spot is the one that hooked us to start with. That's Hillview Manor. It's up in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. And for a while there, we were going about three times a year up there. And it's a huge building. I think it's 65,000 square feet. It's an old um was a a poor farm that you know eventually was turned into a nursing home and then went out of business, I think in 2004. I don't have it right in front of me, but something like that.
And it has a lot of character and it has a lot of activity, different types of activity that happen and runs the gamut from seeing lights that bounce down the hallway, like a little red light, to you know, I've been touched there, tapped on the shoulder. And we've had something one night we were we were uh in the one of the bingo rooms. They had like this common area they would do bingo in. And we had a spirit that wouldn't come down the hallway.
So we were in there calling out bingo numbers, but this thing was just pacing back and forth at the other end of the hall long hallway and you know, there's all the chips of paint and stuff on the floor. You could hear the scuffing and the tapping and actual footsteps. I put a recorder down there and we were able to capture that on recording. So I mean we've had lots of stuff happen there. It's a very interesting place.
Isn't that the location where they hold a a type of paranormal convention or something or another type of activity there?
Yeah, I think they have this thing, I think it's called Hillcon. We haven't been to it, it's been we're pretty far away now. So that would be a a really long drive. But I think there the the people who are managing it right now do a a conference there once a year.
Yep. That's exactly it. First time I heard about it, I was really curious about going, but then I realized, no, it's like a six hour drive. So I'm like, yeah, I'm okay.
When we used to go, that's about what it was. Actually, it was a little bit a little bit further for us because we were probably another two hours away. But it's a hike. But if you go for the weekend and not just a night, it makes it worth it. It's it's definitely a place that's worth going to see.
So I know that you've mentioned some of the experiences you've had there, but what are some of your other memorable moments that y'all that you and your wife have had while doing investigation?
Well you know, each place is different. Each place has sort of a different feel for it. One of our our favorite places in downtown Richmond was Monumental Church, which was a the old Richmond Theater back at the I think it was the turn of the century, like nineteen oh one or two or something, burnt down. Sad story. The doors opened inward and people crushed up against them and couldn't get out. And yeah, it was it's horrific. A lot a lot of deaths there.
And because it was such a massive fire they took the remains and did a common burial in a you know essentially a crypt that's beneath the the church that was built on top of it. It's Jeffersonian architecture. It's an absolutely gorgeous building octagonal set up as a church and then there there is a steps to go down to sort of the basement.
It doesn't have a floor or anything, but that's where the brick enclosed crypt is but you know we spent spend quite a few bit of time in there and and I'll never forget that last night that we were in there we we use dowsing rods sometimes and I and I'm I'm very skeptical of dowsing rods. They can be super manipulated without even realizing you're doing it. It takes very little hand movement to make it turn.
But we were under that crypt and we were reading names from the marker and my wife was holding the dowsing rods pointing downwards actually at an angle and and one of the names the dowsing rods lifted and crossed against gravity and that was a a memorable place and a memorable occasion. It was one of the few times I've seen dowsing rods and I'm like well you know you can't do that on your own.
Right.
That was unique.
I know in conversations that we've had through movie nights and just through regular chats on Discord you have mentioned having an encounter with the demonic and I would love to be able to hear more about that.
Yeah so that was uh that was an interesting and unpleasant experience I couldn't imagine for a bit of time. I consider it to be like catching a demonic cold ironically as much time as we spent in paranormal investigations it had nothing to do with that. It was from you know a friend who does do paranormal investigations but it wasn't while we were on one he was having some real problems with a demon in his life. It was tearing it apart, turning it upside down. And you know I wanted to help him and he said well you know this is this is not fun.
You really don't want to be a part of this but if you don't mind me ask I'm not asking for any details or anything like that, but how was this negatively affecting his life just at like a a a broad level?
Yeah so relationships everything in his life was sort of turned upside down. You know it's it's really his story to tell I'm just on the the outside of it. But you know I wanted him to to be able to have somebody to talk to about it and and I was curious. Not something I'd ever experienced or you know I've heard of people having demonic issues but you know back when this started that all the paranormal shows you know weren't saying oh it's a demon all the time, right? It was mostly just paranormal activity. And they didn't talk about that as much.
So I took him uh took him hunting over to my dad's my dad had some land with a camper on it and we went up there and it was his first hunting trip and we got a deer and we were all done with the day and took care of everything, had dinner and I guess we're finally relaxed. And I'm like, look why don't you tell me about this? You need to talk to somebody because it's obviously what's affecting you.
And so he he said all right and he he told me his story and everything that was going on and it was just amazing to hear somebody having those kind of issues and and how broad it was I was like okay that's terrible you know if there's anything I can do let me know and you know we sort of called in a night and went to bed. Now when this happened it was uh it was no moon. We're in a camper in the middle of the woods as dark as can be and he's sleeping on one end of the camper and some bunks that were there and I was in the main bed at the other end.
And sometime in the middle of the night stuff started happening. And and I sort of break it down into sort of three events that happened that night. And the first is it sounds crazy. Okay so I realize how I sound when I talk about these experiences but this is the way I remember it and this is the way I you know I experienced it. But the first thing that happened is is I woke up middle of the night and again it's pitch black can't see your hand in front of your face but I wake up and and I feel like I'm floating above the bed. Like this is kind of weird.
And I'm floating there and and for some reason I don't know if it was a dream that I had or something I was thinking about but I I start contemplating God and what is God and I don't know how long this goes on for. It was almost like a meditation session right and I and at the end I'm I I come to this realization you know my dad loves me it's an unconditional love. No matter what I do he's still going to love me and that that's God's love. That is that's the core of it. After that realization I just fall back asleep.
Sh sometime after that I don't know how long I wake up and there is this something stomping from one end of that trailer all the way up to the end of my bed. I don't know if it's boots or hooves or what it's a thick heavy thud type of stomp. And whatever it is is tall. It's got to be as tall as the ceiling and I and I again can't see a thing but I can hear it huff. It gets to the end of the bed and it's like I can hear it breathe and it's looking down at me and you know whatever it is at that height it's got to be like seven feet tall.
And it was terrifying it just felt evil and I guess after 20 30 minutes or so it just slowly just fades away and I can't hear it anymore. It's not there it's dark I'm like well that's weird and tired. It's been a long yeah yeah weird is probably yeah you're right on understatement. So I fall back asleep. Now the third thing that happens I'm clearly I wake up and I am clearly levitating over top of the bed.
I can feel it my body is buzzing with energy and I'm floating there and I don't know what's going on but I just had this sort of feeling of power in me and I don't remember what I was thinking through this you know this last event but I remember the ending which is I stood up and I shouted that I renounced Satan and everything stopped and went back to normal and I sat back down on the bed and I'm just in awe of what that was just no clue, no understanding.
I don't know where even that renouncing came from it's not I said I renounce the Satan that's not how I speak you know yeah I was gonna ask you what prompted you to say that suddenly out of the blue I mean to this day no clue.
Wow okay my after everything my only assessment is that it was God working through me right God helping me get past something. And it's you know the terminology is interesting too it wasn't denounce it was renounce. So it was almost like a clearing satanic influence from my life not that I was a Satanist or a anything negative like that but you know we over time we make choices and there's sin in our lives and it was sort of like a cleansing of that and I don't know that's my own my only way of thinking of it.
But what prompted your friend to think that it was demonic and what made you agree with that? I mean apparently I mean obviously from you know what you just described there's definitely a lot of weirdness in the air but what differentiated it from you know anything else that it could possibly be to y'all?
Yeah that um I would say that there are there are spirit attachments and spirit activity paranormal that you experience if you do enough paranormal investigations you you pick up an attachment it follows you home it wanders around your house and you ignore it eventually it leaves you alone and most of it is to get attention you know hey tap on the window knock a cup over make a balloon float around the room I had that once but it's it's all pretty uh benign. This was not the things that were happening to him were extremely negative.
The feeling he had was that it was evil and while I have had a strong spirit attachment once that was not fun and was negative it wasn't evil. It never felt evil this thing it felt evil it was blacker than black evil heartless wanted you dead feeling and I'd say that was probably what he experienced in his life and it's certainly what I experienced with this and after.
Dear Lord what happened after that third event of that night so back to sleep and wake up in the morning you know get up and and I'm like look you got we talked last night let me tell you what happened to me after we went to bed and and he experienced similar things that night even the the feeling of levitating over top of his bed I don't know how everything ended for him it wasn't the same as for me as far as uh renunciation or whatever but he clearly he heard the stomping he had some sort of and and the way he described it is is which sort of put some things together for me was that the it was trying to offer power for following right oh I can you can levitate you can astrally project you can have all of this power just listen to me type of thing and so I look at my experience that night as sort of this good versus evil experience.
The first part I don't think had anything to do with the the demon I think it was me experiencing something to do with God. And then there was the arrival of the demon and then the demon trying to manipulate me and then God helping me say no. That's sort of my assessment of what that night was like so you know we talked about that the next day and then we went home and tried not to think about it.
So I don't know how long it was it was maybe you know a week two weeks three weeks but uh with with nothing really happening and then I wake up one night and it's terrifying thank you for listening to Southern Demonology find us online at SouthernDemonology.com where you can find all of our social and podcasting links.
Also if you have a moment please feel free to rate this podcast and leave any encouraging feedback that you may have as always I am JJ and it has been a pleasure getting to talk to you today football is back and so are the predictions traders on Kelsi America's number one prediction market platform indie takes up Kansas City with indie currently trading at 28% to win a $100 trade pays up $336 if they win.