Legitimate Satanic Panic

Are you interested in angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, influence, and how to protect against the unknown? If so, then welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.

Hello all.coming in a future episode. So stay tuned for that. Be sure to follow Southern Demonology on whatever platform you listen on to get alerted to the latest and greatest. And if you share the podcast with a friend, I will be doubly in your debt. My dear friend Chris over at the Wandering Road podcast invited me to join him for a very special conversation he had with none other than Brandon Morgan, the creator and brainchild of the wildly successful podcast, The Devil Within.

Not only is Brandon an amazing guy, but the investigations he has done into a case in his own hometown that involves possible possession and satanic activities is frightening to say the least. So, without further ado, sit back, relax, and enjoy this conversation, which I call legitimate satanic panic.

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Wandering Road Podcast. I'm your host, Chris. Co-hosting with me today is my good friend JJ from the Southern Demonology Podcast. Unfortunately, Dean can't be here today because he's out gallivanting, having a good time in Japan. Hey Dean, bring us back some souvenirs. I like samurai swords, so if you want to ship one of those back to me, that'd be really awesome. We hope you're having a good time out there, bud. Joining us for today's episode is the host of the Devil Within Podcast and actor and producer, Mr. Brandon Morgan.

Brandon, welcome to the show, sir. Hey, I'm really happy to be here. Thank you very much for having me. No, thank you for reaching out to us. When you reached out to us, I was actually in the car on a road trip. Yeah. Driving back. I saw the email came in and I was like, okay, let me Google them. Podcast title sounds cool. And I was like, holy shit, it's the same guy. And here you are.

Well, like I said, I'm happy to be here, man. Thank you for agreeing to have me on. I appreciate it.

Brandon, why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your show, The Devil Within?

Yeah, sure. Purely by accident did I get into podcasting. I was an actor for a really long time. I became a writer about 10-15 years ago. I had sold a different show, a television show to Sony. And I was on the Sony lot for almost two years thinking, here's where I'm gonna be forever. I'm a Sony guy, I'm a company man, all good. And then, you know, you realize, like everybody sometime in life, that there are people that you don't even know that make decisions that completely your life, you know. And so there were some higher level execs that decided they didn't need my show anymore.

And one afternoon, just later, here's your pink slip and give me your parking pass, you know. So then I was just a 40-year-old guy with no college degree and two kids and a mortgage, and I needed a job, you know. And so I had this other creepy little screenplay that I'd written about a true story about a murder in my hometown when I was 14. And it got submitted to a company that liked it and wanted to make it as a podcast. And I had never even listened to a podcast in my life. This was in 2021. So I wrote it out.

We produced it, I narrated it, I interviewed people and did, you know, whatever are the best job I thought what it meant to do a true crime podcast. And I'm serious, just like caught lightning in a bottle and the show opened number one, and it wound up the number five show of 2021. And now almost 200 episodes later, like here I am. I think what really landed with the audience were the the still unsolved aspects of the case that a lot of people think had some paranormal influence on this kid. And so that's what I found interesting about it.

And beyond the fact that he was my age, he lived down the block from me. We grew up in the same town, same rules, same people, same everything. And I couldn't come up with a scenario in my head where I would slaughter my mother and then try to chop my own head off. How did this kid get to that point? So it was a little bit of investigation, a little bit of trying to understand, and a little bit to kind of quiet the own demons in my head about it.

Wow, that's really fascinating. You had that story in your pocket, and it was like, let's see, and it just took off. That it's crazy how that happens, right? It it just takes that one little bit that just that one little thing, man.

And when the it was the podcast network called Wondery that bought the show, and their head of marketing said one thing. He just he said he goes, Listen, Brandon, Satan sells. I went, Wow, okay, cool. Because where I grew up, man, New Jersey's a blue state, but my town was like a raspberry and a bowl of blueberries, right? Like very red, very conservative, very Catholic, like Irish and Italian Catholics, like everywhere. And I'm from a a non-religious family. Okay, so I didn't really understand a lot of that stuff.

You know, I knew these kids went to Sunday school and shit, and I was like, I'm glad that's not me. But this kid Tommy, man, he was he was a really good kid. He was a straight A student and he was like an all-state wrestler, 106-pound wrestler. And if you know Jersey, wrestling is like a religion, it is very, very seriously taking the sport. And he was an altar boy at the local Catholic church, you know, like everything, he was like the perfect kid, and then something, something that something kind of snapped in him.

And uh within six weeks, he went from being this poster boy kid to a satanic murderer. And a lot of people were like terrified by it. Parents were scared that wait a minute, my teenager can murder me in my own house, right? So parents were terrified, kids were confused, and uh no one really knew what was going on, and they still don't, to be honest. 35 years later, it's still like we don't really know. The church says that it was demonic possession, without a doubt. The cops closed the case as a murder suicide, and still no one has any any real answers.

If you don't mind, I like to stay on that topic for a little bit. You mind sharing for the listeners that are not familiar with the case, what the name of that case was?

Yeah, so the kid's name was Tommy Sullivan, and this was in the late 80s, which uh the nation was kind of in the grips of what was called the satanic panic, okay, where people were seeing the devil's influence everywhere. Um yeah, and so again, he was an a great kid, normal kid by all accounts, nothing going on with him, which is scary in its own right, because he obviously had some a lot of problems that everybody ignored, or no one gave a shit enough about to to check in on him.

It was, you know, over Christmas break, uh snowing outside, and one night the whole town just explodes with fire trucks and cop cars, and everyone's like, what the hell's going on? And they find his mom murdered in his basement and she was stabbed like 50 times and and Tommy was missing. At first, everyone thought that it was a murder and then a kidnapping, because they didn't know where Tom couldn't find him. Couldn't didn't find him until the next morning.

He was across the street, he had murdered, he'd killed himself, he'd slashed his left wrist so bad that his hand was useless with a Boy Scout knife he used, and then he took the Boy Scout knife and like buried it under his left ear and dragged it all the way across his throat to his right ear, severing everything, including his spinal column. Like he turned himself into like a Pez dispenser, right? Like his head was almost off.

He had a letter on him that he'd written to the greatest demon of hell, which was a contract where he promised Satan that he would battle goodness and joy everywhere in the world and defeat it everywhere he could, and murder his whole family and live in the afterlife serving Satan on this. I swear, the blah blah blah and like signed it. And he had that on him. And so that's when the cops went, Oh, whoops. Okay.

Then there it was revealed there was a satanic cult in the woods on the outside of town where he was visiting, and the and the town just went completely bananas, went on lockdown, like prom was canceled, and parents were going through all of your music and throwing away your your heavy metal t-shirts and like all that. It was it was a really weird, weird time in Jefferson, New Jersey back then. And then what stuck with everybody was when they found Tommy, like I said, it had been snowing, and there was only one set of footprints in the snow going up to where he they found his body. Okay.

And the interesting thing was that every coroner or paramedic or metal examiner, doctor, anybody who saw his body, the first thing they said was, damn, who did this to him? And when the investigator said, Oh, it was a suicide, they like laughed. They thought that you're like your kid, there's no way. Look, look at that. He would have bled out halfway across his own throat and lost strength. He wouldn't have had the blood going to his muscles to continue the cut, right?

And besides, it would have taken two hands, and his left hand was useless because he'd already demolished it with the knife, right? So the question was, how did those wounds happen to him? Right. And so the police were left with three possibilities. One, there was someone close to him that was some master criminal that was able to hide his tracks, and they they looked at his dad really hard. Maybe the dad did it, right? But again, no forensic evidence, no other footprints, no nothing. Or it was cult members from in the woods that did some kind of ritualistic slang of the kid.

Or if you ask the Archdiocese of Newark, they said, Oh, it was a demonic possession, and Satan gave him the power to make these these wounds on himself. There's no definitive answer.

So there really were cult members in the town?

Sure. Now they were never caught because they were probably smart and and they took off when all this happened. But a couple of months before that, so the youth detective in town is a guy named Paul Hart, who reluctantly became kind of the face of teen satanic murders after this. He had no previous experience with it, but educated himself very quickly and wound up traveling the country and the world training other police agencies on what to look for.

And in his report, in the months leading up to it, he had found evidence in the woods of satanic rituals happening, like animal sacrifices, you know, like candles and shit in the woods on rocks and stuff like that. And we lived really close, like five minutes away from what's called the most haunted road in America, Clinton Road in New Jersey. And we'd go there just to scare ourselves and drive up and down the road and look for ghosts. If you were super brave, you got out of the car and you went to the ruins of this, what used to be a castle built there.

And me and some of my friends were walking through the woods, and about 50 yards ahead of us, crossing on a different trail in the woods, we saw a dude in a mask wearing like a long like cloak, and it scared the shit out of us. And we're like, we just saw like a freaking Satanist in the woods. Like we couldn't believe that it was real. And we just turned and we just booked it out of there and went home. The general consensus was that yes, that area, North Jersey, just just like just over the George Washington Bridge.

You drive a half hour and you're there, you're in the woods, but it's really close to a major metropolitan area, but it's also very at the same time that a lot of like weekend warrior armchair satanists would go out there because it's quiet and it's private your thing. And apparently, that's Tommy found a home in one of these groups. That is wild.

Because at first I thought maybe this is another case of mazes and monsters, where an investigator came up and thought he saw satanic symbols everywhere within DD, and it turned out to be BS. But if you actually saw it and there is physical evidence of this going on, that's a whole different story, right there.

Yeah, and JJ, that's a really good point that you make. And to expand on that a little, I've I've spoken about it a lot, is that all of the red herrings and all of the the sky is falling reports uh during the satanic panic that turned out to be BS kind of dilute the severity of the actual cases that happened because there were quite a few. There were you know a hundred times more of the of the false flags, right?

But they're but the ones that were real, like Tommy, like the one up in Northern California with the girl, the movie Jennifer's Bodies based on it, where those those three nitwits figured that if they sacrificed a girl that the devil would make them rock stars, right? And so they they actually murdered this poor girl, right? Like it it got to the point after the satanic panic was largely debunked, that every like the baby got thrown out with the bathwater, right? Like when you talk about the th the Tommy Sullivan case, it's like, oh, it's more satanic panic bullshit when it really wasn't.

The funny thing is, is that I had minus the satanic elements to it, but I had a case that was very similar to that. I was friends with a guy named Jonag. I grew up in Tennessee, and he was in the same forensic activities that I was debate, extemporaneous speaking, etc.

And we actually went to like governor school together, and I lived across the hall from him for a month, and he would write me like 50-page letters all the time, and then one day after during summer break, he came back home and he didn't want to go back to college because he hated it, and his parents insisted, and so he parked a block away from his house, walked up, and then attempted to kill his entire family. And he succeeded with his it was either his mother or his father, I forget which, and then his sister, and then the other parents survived, but grievously injured.

And he is so buried in the Tennessee lockup that no one can find him, because we've tried. And it's just it's crazy.

Look, the human animal is dangerous as it is, right? If you have a human being who thinks that they're acting on the orders of a supernatural being, there's there's no stopping them. They're gonna do what they're gonna f do, you know, and that makes it all the more all the more dangerous. Well, I interviewed a woman who was Tommy's uh middle school principal, a nun, her name's Sister Philomena, terrifying to speak to a a believer about what they're scared of.

Because you can you see it in her face and you see it in her eyes, and she was the last person to see Tommy, the last that that sister was alive. Okay, she it was his last day of school before winter break. And she told me, she goes, and I see this boy that I'd known for years, and it wasn't him anymore. It was like I was looking at in the eyes of a different person with cold, empty eyes. And he was leaving class the last day before break, and I yelled for I said, Tommy, and he didn't turn around. I said, if Tommy's in there, I need to tell him something.

Tommy stops, turns, and it still wasn't him. And she said, I want to remind Tommy that exorcism is still a Catholic right. And then she goes, and just for a second, that that cold, empty face vanished, and it was this scared 14-year-old boy again, trembling. And he said, It's too late, sister, and he walked away. And then he slaughtered his mother and chopped his own head off.

Oh my god. Yeah, that's insane. Because I mean, so we have covered like we have an entire demonology 101, 201 series that The Wandering Road and my podcast is put together, and we have you know exorcists that come on and help with some of the analysis. But we've essentially have outlined you know four distinct phases. It is oppression, it's obsession, it's possession, and then there's a final stage of perfect possession. If there really was demonic possession involved, I'm just wondering, is it three or four? Yeah, and you're absolutely right.

When it comes to a believer, and I am a believer, I converted to Catholicism back in college. The moment that I read Father Malachi Martin's hostage to the devil book, I was paralyzed with fear for six months straight.

JJ, I gotta ask you something. I gotta ask you because something Sister Philomena told me, and it look, it may have just been, you know, a representative of the church, you know, governor ass their new position, again, 35 years later, is that it wasn't demonic possession, but specifically because it's only demonic possession if it's an unwelcomed visitation, okay, and it was determined that Tommy invited the demon into him, so technically they can't call it demonic possession. Do you have any any knowledge of that distinction? Or would you speak on that a little?

Yeah, I do. That is where three differs from four dramatically. All it takes is an acknowledgement in order to become possessed. So the the stages are this obsession is when it's just mental, oppression is when that moves into the physical. Possession is when you actually give some kind of agreement, it could be verbal, it could be mental, it doesn't matter. And that's when the thing begins to inhabit you. But there is an alternate stage, and that is perfect possession. And this is what Father Martin wrote about in his book.

Instead of an unwelcomed entity that becomes a symbiotic entity into your life where you form a pact and you are no longer a singular entity. In fact, I I have an interview that I conducted a while ago with Victor of Trailer Trash Terrors. He used to be a nurse in Houston, and he had encounters with three such individuals that were terrifying because he would say that it's almost like normal rules of society break down around these individuals. Shit gets weird to put it simply. I mean, it's just it's it's crazy. So, and that's what I'm wondering if he really.

Could invite something into his life that goes beyond mere possession.

Yep. Yeah. And that's where they're that's that's their that's the church's position right now, at least according to uh sister Philomena. But something interesting, the victim here, Betty Ann, Tommy's mom, she has a younger sister. So Betty was 37 when she was murdered. Her sister was like 32, and she had a nice career as a school teacher. But the sister took it really, really hard, obviously. Who can blame her? I get it. But she took it a little a little further. She needed to understand what happened. She was lobbying the state to look at all of the evidence in the crime scene photos.

And they're like, sorry, you can't see them. You're not authorized. You don't have the credentials. So she says, What do I need to do to be able to get all the information on this? They said, Listen, you're not going to want to do it. You got to go back to school. You got to become a criminologist. You got to get a degree. You got to do this. And she goes, Fine, watch this. And she did all of it. Took her like three years. Okay. Wow. She quit her job. She goes back to school. She gets a degree in criminology. She gets accredited by the state. She comes back. She goes, Here's my badge.

Here's this. Give it to me. And Detective Hart's like, You really don't want to see it. I'm sorry. You really don't want to see it. She goes, You have to. Too bad. Here we go. So he's like, Okay, you're warned. So he puts her in an interview room with the box of stuff. She's in there for 20 minutes. And Hart tells me this. She goes, he says, when she was done, she comes out of the room. She doesn't say a word. She doesn't even look at me. She just leaves. And I never hear from her again.

But I find out a week when I, you know, and see what happened to her, making sure she didn't go hurt herself, right? She left New Jersey, drove to Philadelphia, and became a cloistered nun in a convent outside of Philly. Wow. And yeah, and that's it. So whatever she saw in that box, just too much. And she just shuts down and just sits in a cell in a convent and chills with Jesus for the rest of her life. That's it.

If I can make some correlations, JJ and Brandon. Yeah. I went on JJ's show to share my story of me growing up in a haunted house in Queens. JJ's convinced that's some demonic activity there, at least stages one or two, to the point where I was on a show earlier today with the podcast Homespun Haints. They're okay. Great, great Becky and Diana were awesome.

Oh, they're fantastic.

Yeah. And even now, JJ, like anytime I talk about those experiences, it feels like something standing there watching. The entire time I was telling that story, it's just exhausting to talk about. And that it's like that thing knows when you're talking about it. I personally think whatever that was with Tommy, I think it was more of on the infernal side. And if I can make some correlations as to why the Catholic Church would probably distance yourself with it, yeah, with that situation.

One, you in the 70s, I think it's the mid-70s, you have the death of Annalise Michelle, where she had documented cases of schizophrenia, she had psychological issues. She was actually institutionalized and given medication and observed. And it wasn't until later on where the church got involved and she went through these exorcisms that she ended up dying through starvation. And they ended up going to court. The parents and the church fathers were charged with yeah, with basically negligence and you know starving her.

She was, if you look at her pictures of when she passed away, she looked like a POW from World War II. So you have that situation where clearly there was a psychological issue going wrong, and then you fast forward to 1981, where the Warrens take the devil made me do it. Yep, trying to bring the devil into the court system. And obviously, I don't know what was going on with Arnie Johnson there. The way they found him, the way he had no recollection of what was going on, may have been something demonic.

Because correct me if I'm wrong, JJ or Brandon, if you're familiar with the case, was it his girlfriend's little brother was afflicted, and he said to during the an exorcism, he said to constantly exactly yeah, yeah, and then he ended up killing the the owner of the kennel for whatever particular reason. Yeah, he invited it into himself. And if you watch The Conjuring, the Devil Made Me Do It, which not their best movie in the series, or not their best, yeah. No, the second is my favorite, but like you have that situation, and then you have this situation with Tommy.

I could see why the Catholic Church would be like, hands off, yeah, we're not dealing with this shit.

Yeah, if in season two of Devil Within, I covered a case in England up in Yorkshire in the late 70s. A guy named Michael Taylor, just normal dude, right? It was there was a recession in England at the time, and so he lost his job and he had a wife and a couple of kids, and he was kind of freaking out about making ends meet. And, you know, a local person's like, hey, you know, not for nothing, it might help. We go to this church group. Okay, it's very informal.

You'll you'll meet at the very least, you get free tea and biscuits, and maybe you'll make some friends and make some contacts and find a job. So he's like, All right, whatever. He didn't want to go, but he goes. The woman who was the pastor was young and beautiful and flirty, and he falls in love with her. It's unrequited, and she kind of humiliates him in front of the group. He attacks her, which is out of character for him, right? And then he starts acting weird, and everyone's like, he's possessed. They bring it to the church, the church okay is a possession, all right?

They tie him up, they're throwing holy water at him and chanting, and they tell him there are 48 demons that are currently inhabiting you right now, and we're gonna get rid of all of them, boy. Just hang in there. An eight-hour exorcism, and then they have to stop because everybody's tired, and they say to him, We got 46 of them out, but the last two are murder and mayhem. So go home and take a nap, but just be careful because just remember that those two demons are still inside. He goes home and kills his family, and so it made its way to the courts. Like, who is who is at fault?

And they tried to blame the church, and the church got off, scot-free. Oh, he did a couple years in an insane asylum, he's still alive and he's out, he's out. They said temporary insanity because he was being tortured. And I'm like, Tortured by who? Tortured by priests. Yeah, but they thought they were doing the you know God's work. Now it's different over there. The Church of England is a is a national religion, so it's not like here, there's no real separation of church and state over there.

So I guess they just protected their own, but it was it was a really and that and not even the young the young girl, the young pastor. Like no one, no blame was placed anywhere, is the is is the bottom line of it, which I think is ridiculous.

Yeah, reminds me, JJ. You remember we did that episode, I think it was like in the 80s or something like that, number sequence where we uh talked about this exact topic, the devil made me do it. And with Son of Sam, where he said his neighbor's dog was Satan, telling him to murder all these people.

You thought the dog was a 600-year-old demon that was telling him to go kill young women.

Yeah, freaking insane. It just that's where the line gets blurred, and where sometimes you know the topic we're talking about doesn't get taken seriously because you have these maniacs that'll son of Sam, they're like, Okay, I maybe have some troubled upbringing, I have bad luck with women, people internalize that. The next thing they do, they get consumed by this rage, and then sometimes they personify it to some sort of being telling them to do these things, and then they go and blame someone else.

When all the while, like things like that really do happen where you do have cases of demonic possession. I like to take an objective look to it. Like, is this really demonic, or is this person a terrible person and they just need to get their shit together? But they went down the path in which they just decided to kill a bunch of people.

Sorry to interrupt you, but I I agree that it's more likely, and and this is gonna be it's gonna sound kind of oxymoronic, but it's it's more likely today, in my opinion, if you hear of an actual demonic possession, because of the safeguards that the church put in place in like 91 or 92, there was some council, Vatican Council, that adjusted the specifically the they made it more difficult for an exorcism to be okayed by a bishop, which and now it clearly states that all medical avenues have to be explored in terms of mental health.

They have to avail themselves of the current understanding of of mental disease and rule it out completely before an exorcism will be okay. And that's a kind of an extension of of an edict that already existed, where like if you have a brain tumor and and you're like a nun or a priest, like you get you don't get to stick around. You get, I don't know if it's defrocked or if it's they ask you to leave, but and that is because they don't want you to have a false vision.

And sometimes a brain tumor can cause you to hallucinate, and they don't want you to think that you're seeing God when you're not. So if you have any kind of mental problem like that, like a tumor, you can't be a priest or a nun. And if you think someone is possessed by a demon, they have to get a you know, mental health check up to make sure that it's not psychosis or bipolar or whatever. Yeah. For something to snake its way all the way through those safeguards and still be considered demonic possession, I'm more likely to believe that it's that it's accurate.

To quote a frequent guest of R is Father Birdson, who is an exorcist, you can't cast out mental illness and any safeguards that are put into place to help distinguish that from the real thing, it's always a good thing.

Yeah, 100%. 100%. I spent my summers in a haunted house up in New Hampshire, Chris.

You want to get into that a little bit? Yeah, what do you experience? I say it's smiling.

I say it's smiling because it wasn't scary. They were good ghosts. So I grew up hearing about it, and and unfortunately, nothing specific ever happened to me. But I grew up around the stories with my aunts and uncles and cousins that that stuff actually did happen to. And then the way the story ends is is what kind of cements everything for me. So basically, they grew up in one of those pre-revolutionary warhouses, like a farmhouse built like in the 1750s or something like that, right?

Tons of history and old wood and brass and antique stuff everywhere on a beautiful piece of land in southern New Hampshire. My grandmother would, you know, things should always like weird things would happen. They had like old antique furniture with like the couch cushions were like real feathers. So when you sat in it, like it left your ass left an impression, right? And so one of the last things she would do every night before bed is she would smooth out all the cushions to start the day fresh, right? In the morning, all of them would have been sat in. Okay.

And she's like, Okay, that's a little bit strange. My mom tells me a story that she was in the kitchen helping my grandmother do the dishes, and the cuckoo clock went off at like three o'clock. You're cuckoo koo, whatever. My mom's like, Oh, that's nice. When did you get a cuckoo clock? And my grandmother's like, We don't have one, they just like they just like you know, messing with me. Mom's like, she goes, Whoever they are, like there was no cuckoo clock in the house, but you hear it. So that would like kind of freak me. I never heard it, but you know, other people did.

And then um, one of the big ones, and if you tell my aunt that she's lying, she'll smack you in the face. So my aunt had a newborn baby, she was upstairs and she was bringing a load of laundry downstairs to the laundry room, and she was coming down the steps. So she had laundry in one arm and my and my baby cousin Kim in the other arm, and she tripped and she's just airborne going headfirst down these stairs. And it's the type of stairs where at the bottom there's a little landing, and you got to turn left 90 degrees to get into the living room.

So there's a wall, like right at the bottom, and she was just going headfirst in the wall. And she said it was like slow motion. It all happened in a second, but she goes, I remembered mid-air thinking I've got to turn to my right, so I hit the wall with the laundry and not with the baby. And like right before she hit the wall, she said this huge bright light and like a laser beam went across in front of her like a rubber band and caught her and put her back on the steps.

It was Christmas, the house was full, no one saw it happen, but everybody was there for the aftermath, where she's just screaming and crying, and everyone thought she was hurt, but then they realized she was screaming thank you, and she didn't know to who. She was just yelling thank you to whoever just basically saved her and the baby's life. So that was a big one. And there are a lot of other little stories like the the most interesting thing was that so they sell the house when I was like 13 or 14 years old.

They sell the house, but they moved right up the street, and the people that they that bought the house were antique dealers, so they had like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of antiques in the house. The house was where they lived, it was also a showroom, and so they were very specific and very careful to lock all the windows and doors every night. Okay. About six months after living there, they invite my grandparents over for lunch. They're sitting there having lunch, and the woman are in the middle of lunch, says, All right, I gotta ask.

Any weird shit ever happened to you when you were living here, right? My grandparents about her, and they're like, Yeah. And the woman says, I don't think we need to be worried. And they go, You don't, but but what's going on? She goes, Well, we have all these antiques and we have the windows locked and the doors locked every night. Every morning we wake up and the windows are all open and the doors are unlocked and open a little. And we don't feel in danger.

And my grandmother's like, No, that's them letting you know that they're not gonna let anything bad happen here, that you're safe, that you don't have to worry about locking. And they're like, Okay, cool. It doesn't feel like dark, it feels like protective, and they're like, Yes, 100%.

That's actually refreshing and really awesome to hear. Ain't that right, JJ? In the sense that, like, dude, everybody we talked to, you're aside from you, we had one other person, Lisa down in Tennessee. She moved into this house, and the former owner like died in a house fire. This like middle-aged lady. The ghost is just great. She played with the kids, took care of stuff, and was just a welcoming presence, yeah, the entire time. As opposed to like what I went through and some of the shit that JJ has seen, polar opposite.

So, you know, it's really refreshing hearing that you know you had something protective in that house helping people out, especially saving your aunt.

My dad tells a story where you know he was in high school and he he had this dog Jed, this lab mix for forever. And he comes home from high school after a basketball game and they lost, and he was feeling and just collapses in his bed and he's restless and he can't sleep. And and he hears his dog walk in. He hears like the claws on the wood floor, right? Hears the dog breathing on the rug at the foot of the bed, and he lays down and he reaches over and pets the dog, and he feels better and he falls asleep, right? And then he wakes up like 10 minutes later, cold sweat.

Holy shit, because his dog had died like six years previous. He reaches down and he feels the rug where ostensibly the dog had been, and the rug is still warm. And he's like, Okay, that kind of made him feel good, but also scared him a little bit. So, you know, and my grandmother had a similar story that we think was the dog, also, where she was home alone and her bedroom was at the top of the stairs, and she hears someone coming up the steps in the middle of the night. And this is in the woods of New Hampshire, right? Where you're there's no one around if if you're in trouble, okay?

And so she hears something crawling up the stairs, and she and she's like, uh oh. And she counts the number of steps in her head, she knows when it's at the top, and she's looking and there's nothing there. Then she hears something jump and it lands on the bed. She can feel it on the side of her leg, she could see the indent in the quilt on the bed, nothing's there, and she like shakes her leg and she goes, shoo, shoo, get out of here. And whatever it was that was on the bed jumps, and then she never hears it land. She's like, Okay, well, now what?

I guess I'm just gonna go back to bed, you know. But nothing you could do at that point, yeah, never felt threatened. So that which is a which is a good thing.

Stories about pets and in the afterlife are just fascinating because my mom had a case of that where she had a old cocker spaniel that would sleep with her, she rescued it and loved this thing to death, even though it hated everybody else. And when Sugar passed away, both her and my uncle were sitting at the kitchen table and they heard her claws tapping on the linoleum. Yeah, uh still no idea, but and that lasted for about six weeks and then it faded.

I mean, for pets to be there in our moments of need, even after passing over the rainbow bridge, is just it's it's their responsibility, you know, and they take that shit seriously, JJ. That's accurate, yeah. Oh wow, we don't deserve dogs. I'm telling you.

Oh gosh, are you kidding?

I just lost one of my own a few months ago, and I'm still close to my dog died when I was 15.

I haven't gotten another one since. It's just too much. I can't I can't handle it.

Yeah, I got two right now, both are eight years old, and I get that pre-dread.

Oh, yeah, it's real, it is real.

Oh rescued Daisy when she was seven years old from the from the shelter, and yeah, she lasted till she was 13. Whew.

No, it's never it's never trying to drag it down, it's never long enough. And one one thing I'll always say is I I just moved into a new home back in October, and me and my wife, we have two dogs and we have three cats. One thing I'll always say is like, okay, if the animals are comfortable, I think we're good. Yep. That's like my biggest indicator that there's nothing crazy going around at all.

Yeah, because dogs, I think a little more than cats, because we have cats now, also. I think dogs, dogs are a little more attuned.

You know? Because they have that protect protect you instinct that you don't have. You know? So dogs are like not only are they in uh attuned to I think other stuff, but then that protective instinct kind of kicks in, and so they let you know when when when some shit's wrong. Yeah. So yeah, if your animals are are content and chill, things are good. I agree.

I did have a a question for you, Brandon. What are your thoughts on, since we were on the topic earlier, of demonic possession in general? Because I've been a huge fan, like of The Exorcist. I've read Malachi Martin's Host to the Devil. I've read the Exorcist book, which I think is scarier than the film. Absolutely. I had to put it down a a couple of times, even though that film was I watched that movie for the first time in 2001 when I was 11 years old. Yeah, okay. I wasn't supposed to, and it just it just stuck with me, and that's where my hate for Ouija board started from.

So, so like what are you what are your thoughts on like demonic possession and demons and stuff like that in general? Like you said, you didn't really grow up in a religious household.

Well, I got exposed to it the first time through through the Tommy Sullivan case because everyone in town got got exposed to it. So that reading and studying it more and and really kind of researching it, and then now it's kind of my my work, and I've done several seasons on stuff and a bunch of standalone episodes on possessions. And what I come away with, okay, is that every religion has some kind of possession myth or possession dogmatic kind of possession kind of rules in their in their teachings, or so one school of thought is they can't all be wrong.

Then there's another school of thought saying, like, well, you know, we also used to think. That the sun revolved around the earth because that's how it looks to us, right? And then we learned some shit through science and we figured some other stuff out. And so it's I'm not quite there yet, but I I think there's as strong a possibility that all of these possession stories might one day be attributed to a very deep brain-centered kind of synapse not firing or something like that that we haven't that we haven't discovered yet.

Or or all of these religions are correct and there's a demonic plane that sometimes they cross through and and because they want to inhabit this dimension and they get into us. You know, like I I'm I'm squarely on the fence on this one because there are some that I've investigated. There was one in Flint, Michigan, where the where the kid like ran up the wall. People saw it. Not like the mom or like the brother, but like two welfare workers and a registered nurse saw it.

Oh, are you talking about the Ames family haunting the house that Zach Began's bought? Oh, demon house? Yeah.

Yeah. Like it was witnessed by professional people who put their reputations on the line and signed that they saw it happen. Okay, so things like that. I'm like, okay, I'm not gonna tell someone they're lying. I'm not gonna tell a person who swore, you know, in a legal document that they saw what they saw. So there's some stuff that has that is unexplainable. Tommy's murder in my in the murder in my hometown. That's still unexplainable. There are questions you ask professional people, they'll be like, we don't know, stop asking me. I don't have an answer for you. Leave me alone, you know.

And I'm like, but I want to know the truth. Right.

No one and no one knows. There's no way he could have done that to himself. There's no way. I agree. I agree. There's no way. There's no way. It either has to be it had to have been some sort of unseen entity, or like you said earlier, some people that were really good at covering their tracks. And it depends how much it was snowing, too. You said he was found in the snow.

So who knows if the snow that night was a lot of snow.

The snow could have covered tracks too.

So, like, you could have covered tracks, but it would have left some kind of impression, you know. And it's like size six Converse All-Star, like a grown man can't like walk backwards through those tracks without his own boot prints, you know, right? Right. So, what did he like? Tom Cruise Mission Impossible, like, did he repel down and like cut the throat, right? And then pull himself up. Like, who knows? Who knows? Yeah, but some weird shit happened that we don't have the answers for.

On the religious side of things, now that you've delved into this more with your podcast and one of your recent episodes, if you don't mind, we could go into that a little bit. I haven't covered Richard Ramirez yet because I'm just we do true crime episodes. The most recent one we did was Jack the Ripper trying to figure out like why because apparently they said they found him, they knew who they know who he is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's like you you know, you try to figure out what the hell's going on. But before we get jump into that, now that you've delved into like you know, true crime and its crossover with potentially demonic possession and the paranormal, how has that affected you and your religious or spiritual beliefs? Like, where were you before and where are you now that you kind of deep dive into the paranormal?

Yeah, it hasn't really shifted. If anything, it's kind of solidified my my belief structure a little bit. Like, like I've been, and again, no no offense to anybody, but my personal belief is I've just seen a lot of destructive outcomes with with religious people, you know. I just you know, Christopher Hitchens said, he said, you know, the best people, the good people do the best they can, wicked people will do the worst they can. But if you want to make a good person do something wicked, it takes religion. Okay.

You know, and especially like en masse, you know, you get like millions of people or tens of thousands, like with the crusades or with or or or with whatever, you know, it's spirituality, awesome. Totally into it. Seek peace, seek connection with something greater, seek, you know, and and I'm all I'm all for that. But I think everything that religion offers, I think you can get elsewhere without the need for it for it. But then I also know men and women of faith, towering men and women of faith, who do wonderful things in the name of their religion. I'm not discounting that at all.

It it hasn't swayed my whether or not I believe in any way at all. What it has done is is make me get an alarm system on my house and and make me think about becoming a gun guy. Okay, doing true crime and knowing what drives people and having young kids at home. It scared me a little bit and made me put security really kind of at the top of my list for my family.

Can't say they'll blame you on that one. I mean, I am a believer, yes, but at the same time, even within just the one sphere of Christianity, you have both phenomenal representations, and you also have Christian nationalism going on. So, yeah, the human element of the human church will always cause issues because of what we are.

Couldn't agree more, man. I couldn't agree more. And you know, I have friends across all religions here in LA. LA is such a melting pot, gay, straight, and Muslim and Jew, and Christian, and atheist, and trans and everything in between, right? And they're all I'm friends with everybody. The only time that there's actual division that I see like human division comes from the religious side, not from like LGBTQ, not from people of color, not from any of that.

It's like a Jewish person can't shake my wife's hand at a wedding because Orthodox Jews aren't allowed to touch women that aren't their wives. And when that's bullshit, my wife said, hi, nice to meet you, and you and you go, Oh, you don't shake my wife's hand. Like I take that personally. I get it, it's a religious thing, you know, that's fine. But then also, you know, or like Christians can't do this or Jews can't do this on Saturday, or or whatever.

It's like it's the roadblocks to, in my opinion, and this is all just my opinion, the roadblocks to a real cohesive society, in my experience, always come from the religious side, not from like the cultural side, or not from the sexual orientation side, or not from the you know, the different races side. It's it's always the religious people, you know. Like I could walk into I could walk into like little Tokyo here, and no one's gonna give a shit that I'm walking into a Raman place because I'm not Japanese and I'm in Little Tokyo. No one cares, right?

I go down to Alvera Street, I'll be the only white guy for six blocks, surrounded by Latinos everywhere. No one gives a shit. But wait a second, you know, if I try to do something, you know, or you know, if like a Muslim mosque comes into a synagogue, whatever, people lose their minds. So that's my thing. And I and and uh and and I I do I admit that I have a little bit of a you know passionate kind of view on it just from some from life experience, but you know, would we be better? I I I can make the statement, and I've got taken a lot of heat for it.

I I can make an argument that the world would be a better place without organized religion.

That's just I mean the division aspect that you speak is sadly true. I mean, if we can't accept others that are different than ourselves, and especially if we assign scripture to be that reason, then that's a big problem.

But yeah, there's always one underlying factor that c always causes division. And before I got into like the IT like career path, I I love history, I got two degrees in history, I wanted to be a history professor, but shit happens, and like when I when I study you know the crusades and you even with ancient Rome, like you look at the difference of societies from antiquity and societies like in the Middle Ages, when you have the rise of Christianity, when you have the rise of the polytheism to monotheism, like that you would right, yeah, yeah.

You could see the polarization between groups of people happen even more. Obviously, it it would happen sometimes in antiquity, but more often or not, you would see like when Romans would go on their conquests, like for example, the Gallic Wars with Julius Caesar, their average soldiers, they oh, you have a war god, I have a war god. What does your war god do? So they just incorporate it into their belief system because it's already similar.

To give a different example, you also had the Essenes who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, we believe, who thought that the Romans were the sign of the end times and that angels were going to come down and fight for them. So there was still a ton of division going on, goodness knows.

Yes, tons of division going on. It's sad, it's it, but it's it's where we're at, and it's not like it's new, you know what I mean. Like to your point, Chris, that's something that we've always done, you know. So we've been tribal from the word go. Here's mine, I gotta protect my family, and you know, and if I need to, I'll come take what you have to try and do it.

Yeah, I I think it's something genetic when uh within us as well, like even pre-civilization, because you have people I know good, people different from me, bad, bad, correct. Those people want to take my wife, they want to take my kids, they want to kill my livestock, they want to do this and that. Yeah, and to the core, when you see societies going through strife, times of strife, that tribalism will always come back. You'll flock to people that look like you, you'll flock to people that believe in the same thing as you, and it's just a sense of comfort.

There are a lot of things that humans do that I know we tend to bicker about when it comes like comes to society and when it comes to like politics and psychology. There are certain things that we do that are genetic that are ingrained in our DNA based off of previous experiences.

That's why we have a lizard brain. Yeah, definitely.

There's some evidence that that belief in a higher power has through the series of evolution of endless generations of of that, that it's become part of like it's it's almost unavoidable. The the the belief gene or the belief kind of portion of our brain has has you know become ingrained through evolution.

Yeah, and I think it has to do with like motivation as well. It's a it's an internal mechanism to keep you going because if you if you think of it this way, if you take it like if you take the rise of Christianity and you take an ancient Roman peasant in the late Western Empire, there's wars everywhere, you have the invasions of like Huns, Goths, all this stuff. Yeah, what the hell is the point of me living? But I have this belief system that I can turn to that allows me that says it doesn't matter what you go through in life, all your hardships you'll be rewarded in the kingdom of heaven.

Yeah, so I'll just keep going to get to that point. There has to be a point for my existence, yeah, and it happens to be that. Like for me, when I work out every day, like I don't I used to be an atheist, I dealt with some really shitty hauntings growing up, and that pushed me back to Catholicism. I'm not the greatest Catholic, I try my best, sure. But but like when I work out, I'm not thinking of like Jesus, you think of shit in your head like okay, if I don't get to this m complete this mile, and if I stop running, I'll get eaten by something or somebody something battle happen.

So it's I think that's that's connected with that belief system.

No, man, yeah, and look, inspiration, motivation, yeah, absolutely. And I think the problem comes with you know, if if we don't conquer Jerusalem and slaughter everyone, you know, you know, God will be angry. Right.

And and and so on an individual level, yeah, great, you know, but then writ large across a society that shares that same, you know, ability to be motivated by something, it it can get dangerous. And but but not even not with religion, with any ideology, political ideologies, social economic ideologies, any of these big passionate kind of movements has the potential to be destructive.

Yeah, even McCarthyism in the 50s with everybody being a communist, yep, yep, like exactly it it just has the potential to to run rampant, Brandon. I wanted to get into your podcast a little bit here, The Devil Within, and some of the topics that you cover. Before we talk about Richard Ramirez, I wanted to ask, have you ever looked into the Cecil Hotel? Oh, yeah, and all those weird things that that go on specifically because I think Ramirez stayed there.

I think it's episode two, episode two of this series. I think it's two. The whole opening is a brief history of the Cecil Hotel. Crazy, crazy stuff has gone on there from murders and suicides and Elisa Lee Lila.

Elisa Lamb.

Elisa Lamb, thank you. Yeah, that weird story. Ramirez living there, Ramirez walking through the lobby covered in blood one night after a murder, and no one said shit until the cops came and asked. And as soon as they realized, oh, that was the night stalker. Yeah, he was all proud. You know, I mean, just really, really strange and unfortunate place. It's a victim of geography, right? It was built as a luxury hotel, and then city planners didn't say, Well, let's have this area be Skid Row. That's just kind of how it happened, right?

And so, right, Skid Row being a block away, no one's gonna go to that hotel. You know what I mean? So it's just unfortunate for the Cecil. Big 700 rooms, and it's gone through so many different iterations. I think it's subsidized public housing now. I don't even think it's a hotel anymore. Because it is, it's just it's a war zone down there, man. It is it is nasty. Have you ever been there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so to get from well, I used to live in Hollywood, and so to get from on the freeway from Hollywood to there was like a new kind of hip part of town for a while.

The only way to get there really was to drive through Skid Row. You gotta get off the free freeway and drive like 10 blocks to where there were all of these refurbished old factories that became cool hotels and restaurants and whatever, and you had to drive through the really bad, bad part of town. And and you know it as soon as you get there, man. It is it is no joke. Like you don't stop for red lights, and no one can no one can't everyone just keep going, just fucking fucking.

Yeah, I grew up in the South Bronx in the 90s, so so I get it.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, I've been there. I get it. There's so many Yankee games I can't count.

Yeah, have you been there? Been back to the stadium recently, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was there gosh, two years ago. Okay, I caught a game. Yeah, it's very it's really nice, it's really nice.

Yeah, Soto. That bastard.

Oh, yeah, that goes to the Mets.

Yeah, like what was it, a five million dollar difference?

I don't know. Garrett Cole needs Tommy John. I mean, we'll see. We'll see.

We're we're cooked this year. I think we'll be all right, but playoffs. I don't know.

I feel like last year was that came through the series in LA in October. I won't talk about it, Chris.

It makes me feel better.

I've internalized so much. Right, you have okay, geez. No, because I live in LA, but a bunch of douchebags, you know, you'll yell at me when I have a Yankee hat on. Like, all right, whatever. So, no, so we want to talk about Ramirez or no?

Yeah, yeah, let's get into Ramirez.

Yeah, well, because being a history guy, I think you'll like it. So uh, you know, with all of my so this is my fourth full season of the show, and that like not counting the weekly episodes, but so like like I did a whole series on on Berkowitz on The Son of Sam. I did that thing on Michael Taylor exorcism, I did Tommy Sullivan, and this season is Ramirez. And so when I decided I want to do it on Ramirez, I just started asking people in LA who lived here in the 80s when it happened because I wasn't here yet, and they all said the same thing.

They all said it's like it's like we were descending into hell, descending into hell. And so that reminded me of, you know, reminded me of my Dante that I read when I was in my 20s, you know, and and The Inferno and the Nine Circles of Hell. The parallel to the Ramirez story is it's nine episodes. Each episode we explore one of the circles of Dante's hell and how it relates to where we are in the investigation with Ramirez. And and those two stories dovetail really, really nicely.

It chronicles his drug addiction, his mental disease, the horrific conditions under which he grew up, terrible influences he had from his cousin and his and his brother-in-law and his dad, and then moving to Los Angeles and just being completely left unsupervised with this blistering cocaine addiction and and a newfound interest in Satanism in the 80s that became a driving factor in his and in everything. And the escalation of his crimes that was just I mean, mind-blowing how active he was.

He had like seven attacks in the first uh eight months, and then like 12 attacks in the next like six weeks, like insane escalation in his uh in his attacks, and how confounding uh he was for investigators because he changed his MO almost every time. The only thing that was consistent is that he would look for an open window because there was a heat wave in LA that summer, it was like 110 degrees, people were leaving their windows open. Right. But he would kill by strangulation, by gunshot, by tire iron, by machete. I mean, like crazy, disgusting, brutal things.

And it's just endlessly fascinating. There was one he broke into the house, found a 16-year-old girl asleep in bed, and he had a tire iron and just started wailing on her head with a tire iron. Okay. And then he heard her still breathing. So he's like, All right, I'm gonna finish her off, I'm gonna strangle her. So he grabbed a cord from a lamp, ripped the cord, tied it around her neck, and then what he recollected was he thought he'd grabbed a foam cord, okay, but it wasn't.

Wraps it around her neck, and then all of a sudden he sees these sparks come shooting out of her, and she's bathed in a blue light, and he thought that Jesus had intervened to save her life, and that Satan was no longer powerful enough to drive his actions, and he left. He's took off and she survived. And it was an electrical cord that was still plugged into the wall that that spark, but that put the literal like fear of God into him, and so things like that.

He was such a true believer, making people swear on Satan that there's no more jewelry in the house, swear on Satan that you won't call the police, swear on Satan that you won't look at me or whatever, like doing all that shit all the time, and drawing pentagrams on the walls and upside-down crosses on victims. I mean, just brutal, brutal stuff. So it's been like I said, just as kind of like an intellectual exercise, as a psychological profile, as and then as a literary kind of cliff note version of the inferno. I'm just it's I'm I'm having a blast with this season.

Yeah, that's actually one of my favorite books, and one of my favorite audiobooks.

Really? Divine comedy.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm only covering Purgatorio. I'm sorry, no, the front I'm just I'm covering the inferno right now. Sorry, just the first the first third of it. And it's great, dude. It's great because I I I hadn't read it probably since in 20 something years.

If I could recommend the audible version of it, it's just narrated so perfectly with the sound effects and everything, you'll you'll love it. Like anytime they switch a chapter in The Inferno, there's like screams of pain in the background and all that stuff.

And the I did some of that in the in the season, yeah.

Yeah, the narration. It's a dude with like a British accent, and I apologize for not recalling it the narrator's name, but it's like it has that perfect, like monotone type of voice.

Because it's one of the greatest poems ever written, you know.

Yeah, it's so it's so incredible.

And and I give a little again, I'll be a truncated history of Dante himself because that's a super interesting story, just with him and Beatrice, a woman that he didn't know and barely spoke to in life. He immortalized her in these works of his, you know. So that's that's super interesting. And and just Dante politically, how he was always trying to stay on the right side of history with Florentine politics and made a mistake, and then he so he filed and he can never return to his city. And I mean, that's really interesting story about the man, let alone the work.

I draw a parallel between Dante and Virgil with the two detectives that are after Ramirez. You know, one's guiding the other because he's more of a more of a seasoned veteran who had just put away the hillside strangler five years earlier. And here's this young detective who represents Dante, who's you know, and and so they they go on the journey together.

So, just in terms of a of a story and just as a as a piece of art, I'm really happy with how it's turning out as true crime, and then as being adjacent to paranormal with Richard Ramirez's beliefs and Satanism and stuff, it's this the show's the season's doing really well. I'm I'm very proud of it.

It's the way that you do it and construct it together. I'm like, this is well written, well argument, well orchestrated. So keep it up, man.

I like a good time. Episode, I think, seven dropped yesterday or the day before. Yeah, so uh got two more, and then it Then some bonus episodes. I'll you know I'll string it out as long as I fucking can. Yeah, yeah.

Back to the weekly episodes, you know what I mean? But uh yeah, it's been great, it's been a lot of fun to see this season.

Yeah, yeah, and the divine comedy, it's narrated by Charlton Griffin. Oh, okay, cool. Yeah, so like awesome, awesome. It's about it's 17 hours and three minutes, so it's an unabridged report. Yeah, it's an unabridged, it's all three.

Well, it's great. Did you study Dante in school, or do you read it on your own?

Or I had a philosophy class, we brushed over it, and then I was like, you know what? And I think it was like my sophomore year of undergrad. I went to the bookstore and I bought a copy of the Divine Comedy, and I just read the whole thing like twice over. It was it it's one of my favorite books, and it's funny if you pay attention to who he puts in hell.

Oh tossing his enemies there, it was amazing.

Yeah, how upset he was to see the people in limbo, right? Like his heroes, like the great poets who, through no fault of their own, happened to live in a time before Christ. Yeah, like that was I was that, but in the Seventh Circle in violence, like I was reminded because again, I hadn't read it in so long, and from from the first time I read it until now, one of the historical figures I've studied a lot is Alexander the Great. Yeah, and there he is in the phlegathon in the one of my favorites, right? And I'm like, Oh, damn it.

But of course, I see him as a military strategist and as one of the greatest leaders of men to ever live. He's like, Yeah, through slaughter and murder.

So of course he's in the but he has Caesar and Limbo, yeah, Caesar and Limbo, right?

Right, I know it's crazy.

Yeah, well, here's here's a fun little historical factoid. The literature of the Ethiopic Orthodox Church actually has Alexander the Great as the greatest Christian warrior that has ever lived.

What? Yep, like the 300s BC.

Oh, yeah, but that didn't stop them at all. If it was written today, it would be nothing more than fan fiction, but there are so many works that go through and categorize how Alexander the Great would just proselytize the name of Christ everywhere. It's it's hilarious.

What are those Ethiopian? What are they drinking out there on the Horn of Africa?

They produce some really interesting works. That's the main thing that I studied when I was at Harvard getting my theology degree was the Ethiopic language. There's some good stuff there, though.

I bet there is. So tell me about your show. Tell me about Southern Demonology.

Yeah, so it's I started it back in 2017. Okay. And it started off really uh, I I think my co-workers just got tired of me talking about all the weird shit that I studied in in college and in grad school. So they said, okay, just document this shit. So I started, even though I have the a face for newspaper and yeah, I mean, and a voice that's pretty much the same. But anyway, yeah, it's it's been fun, and it's I've I've grown it a grown it a good bit, and it mainly focuses on two different aspects.

You got your let's interpret the Hebrew Bible, so I mainly focus on Second Temple Judaism, but let's interpret that correctly and let's see how the ideals that were grown up during that time still impact directly how we think of these matters today, and then flipping over to the modern side and looking at protection mechanisms and how exorcisms work, etc.

So I have a friend in LA, he's been one of my best friends for like 30 years. His best friend, he's older than me, his best friend that he grew up with is this super crazy rich dude. Okay and apparently he paid the Vatican untold millions to get complete access to the archives, to the Vatican archives.

Oh, holy crazy. Can we go?

With the representative, of course, with him the whole time, but unfettered access to whatever he wanted to free, like anything, proof of whatever, proof of anything, proof of this or that. Like he held like one of the original copies of the Ritual Romanum that had all the incantation. Holy shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, he couldn't have a phone, he couldn't take pictures of anything, and and he had to sign some NDA or whatever. So he can't like you know, of course he can't talk to someone like me because I have a show and I would probably repeat shit because I can't be trusted with that kind of you know information.

Guilty.

But but I asked him, I said, was it worth the money? He goes, I would have spent 10 times what I spent to learn what I learned in there.

Oh my god, so bad.

Yeah, imagine to be able just to go through there and just to hold some of the artifacts, right? Right and then to read shit and to get some questions answered, and and yeah, so but you know, he's a man of his word, and he's not gonna talk out of turn or anything, but but what what great use of your money? He he does charities and all he does all that other shit, also to be rich enough to be able to just write a check and say, I want to get it, I want to know all of your secrets.

Does he want to sponsor us three to go and find I asked him that?

I asked him that. I said, Yo, he gotta take me next time. He goes, I don't know if there's gonna be a next time, it's not something that they do a lot, whatever. And and you know, there was a negotiation for with lawyers and all that to get him in there, but he he he went, he did it.

I I just want to see what they really have about the Templar case.

Like, I really like me too, me too. I'd love that among a million other things I want to know, right? I want to see transcripts from the Inquisition, you know, like I I want to see Galileo's notebooks, I want to see Da Vinci's stuff, I want to see, you know, gosh, I don't even know where where I would start, you know.

Yeah, because this would have to be a multi-year hall pass in order to even begin to wrap your head around some of that stuff.

Yeah, he had five days and a very specific list. They said you gotta like narrow it down, and again, this was all through like negotiations, but you had five days, I forget what like 10 hours a day or 12 hours a day, something like that. Found he got everything that he was looking for. Oh, that's freaking wild.

And I would say, like, take me to your ancient Roman section and show me what you got.

Right. I haven't I haven't been to Italy probably in 10 years, but I'm going back, we're taking the family, and me and my oldest were gonna stand like on the spot where Caesar was assassinated.

Oh, yeah, that's my plan to get there.

Right to it, dude. You can stand like right there. It's crazy. I can't wait.

I would tell you this one of the highlights of my academic life was serving as a PhD consultant for a student and getting to rifle through all of the prayer scrolls, the demonic prayer scrolls of the that had been preserved at Howard University. That was amazing. And I just I compare and contrast that with the ability to get access to the archives, and I couldn't even begin to imagine the wonder, the it just leaves me breathless, I've thought about it almost every day since he told me it's been four, three, four years now. I would too, yeah.

Yeah, God, instead of wondering what your superpower would be, that would be okay, what five topics would I pick in order to do the research? I want to think about that for a damn long time.

Yeah, yeah, but during the fire, during the fires here in LA in January, we got an evacuation order. We didn't have to, we were it was ready, set, go. We were in the set place, and so it was like pack one bag, pack one bag, and be able to get ready to get the f out of there. And as I'm back in the bag, I'm going, man, what if I had that in the archives? I was like, okay, you got to learn one thing. You got like a 20-minute session in the archive, like, where would you get up? I don't know. But it was like that jumps into my head at moments like that, or like I'm sitting at a red light.

I'm like, oh, I wonder if this was on Chris's list. Oh, I wonder if this was on his list. He wouldn't answer anything. And I get it, I respect him for it, but still, maybe one day you'd be lucky. I don't even know where I would start. Start. Oh, that's anyway. But this is this has been great. I'm really I'm I'm very happy with that that you had me on. This has been awesome. I hope this is the beginning of of of a thing and not you know, like not a one-shot deal. Like, like, let's stay in touch. Absolutely, man. Something would be great.

Yeah, and I would love if you ever had the time, I would love to be able to have you on Southern Demonology.

Let's make it happen. You get my email from from Chris and let's let's go. Let me know, and we'll we'll we'll nail down a date and time and we'll get it, we'll make it happen.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. Thank you.

Beautiful, Brandon. Thank you so much on today's show. I thought we would just talk about you know some true crime, but we touched a little bit of everything, and on top of that, you are a Yankee fan, so you are always welcome back on the show. Brandon, tell the people how they can find you, find your podcast, and what you got coming down the pipeline.

Yankees to the bone, first of all. Okay, second, that's right. Show's called The Devil Within. I'd appreciate if you guys go check it out. Um, I've got almost four full seasons out and about a hundred weekly episodes, and uh, I update weekly. And season one of the show about the Tommy Sullivan case is being turned into a four-part documentary on a major streamer. Sorry to sound like a douche, but I can't say which one it is yet until it comes out. But keep an eye out for it, you won't be able to miss it. It comes out in October.

Other than that, just happy to be here and I look forward to talking to you guys some more in the future.

Absolutely. Same here, man. And listeners, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Go ahead and check out Brandon's show. It's awesome. Hope everyone enjoyed today's episode.

Thank you for listening to Southern Demonology. Find us online at Southern Demonology.com, which offers links to all of our social media and episodes. Southern Demonology is solely owned, produced, and edited by myself. And the intro and outro music are composed by me as well. If you have a moment, please rate, like, and share this podcast, as it is the best way to help support my work. As always, I am JJ, and it has been a pleasure to speak to you today.