The Poltergeist Boy

The first thing I'd like to say is that what you're about to hear is an entirely personal view based on my experience and rests primarily on my testimony.

Many of the people involved in what I will be saying are now deceased and therefore I can talk about certain matters in a manner that is a lot clearer than I would have been able to do if they were alive.

Even so, I may still need to air a degree of caution.

And the first of those notes of caution is that because this is an entirely personal point of view based on my own personal experiences and my own opinions,

it is entirely separate from the SPR and my work for the SPR because the SPR holds no corporate opinion on the nature of psychical phenomena.

The voice you just heard is that of Kieran Farrell.

Kieran has served as a council member of the Society for Psychical Research and the Spontaneous Cases Committee for many years.

He has had many psychical experiences and adventures when he was a boy which led him to formulate his own early theories about ghosts,

poltergeists and telepathic veridical dreams that the dead gained through direct encounters with ghosts,

spirits Poland poltergeists.

In 1970,

Kieran went with his mother and sister and members of another family to an extremely haunted holiday home in Broadstairs in Kent.

There was a great deal of paranormal activity during the holiday which was cut short as a result of it.

However,

the real horror was yet to come as the paranormal activity associated from the holiday followed Kieran and his family back to their home in London and Kieran to his boarding school.

The other family was also severely affected.

These experiences gave him a deep desire to study science.

What you're about to hear is some of the things that happened to me when I was a young boy and a bit later,

some of it can be very harrowing and was.

I'd like to start with a short poem.

The Doors of Perception.

Between what our senses tell us of the world by day and what our minds perceive of it at midnight,

There are doors which, when opened, form a way to turn dark nightmares into a reality full and bright.

Then you will not see if any hope lingers in what lies ahead after your sun has gone down and your moon is dead.

That is to a large extent the reality,

in a poetic form of what I went through.

And it is no easy thing.

It is a case that I have researched for half a century and I have not found the like of it in any of the records that I have researched.

This may sound like an idle boast that I'M setting myself up as somebody who experienced something like Enfield.

Well, the sad and bitter truth is that I did.

I do not think that this is therefore a badge of honor to me personally. It is a curse.

Hence the content of the poem.

To bring that a bit more into a certain context, a scientific one,

because one of my boyhood heroes was Sherlock Holmes.

There was a series called Murder the Dark Beginning of Sherlock Holmes,

which was a TV drama and broadcast in the year 2000,

in which Sherlock Holmes mentor Dr. Joseph Bell, was played by the magnificent actor Ian Richardson and Holmes himself by Robin Lang.

There is a marvelous quote from the first episode called Dr. Pell and Mr. Doyle,

in which Dr. Pell ascends the podium at the lecture theatre in the Edinburgh University where the young Conan Doyle was a medical student.

Dr. Bell is going to perform a dissection and he'd met Doyle earlier and Doyle didn't know who Dr. Bell was.

So Dr. Bell addresses the audience in his lecture theatre and says to them,

no sophisticated deductions of the kind that might cause Mr. Doyle here anguish.

He is a little concerned that he may be in the presence of yet another Edinburgh charlatan.

But I offer Mr. Doyle this simple Be careful.

From the astrologer came the astronomer. From the alchemist came the chemist. From the mesmerist came the mental specialist.

The charlatan is always the pioneer.

The quack of yesterday is the professor of tomorrow.

And now the knife.

Or is it the wand?

My point here is that am I a charlatan? I don't think so. I believe in what I'm saying,

for it has been the bitter experience of my life.

Am I a pioneer? Certainly, because that is what I have spent my life trying to know and understand what happened to me,

how it might happen to others,

and to try to put my own life and my own experiences into a context.

Later on in the same episode,

there is a conversation between the young Conan Doyle and his father who's suffering from Alzheimer's and obviously he's kind of self medicating with alcohol which is causing the family problems.

When Doyle enters the room, his father turns to him and says,

I wish they could take the ashes from my mouth meaning of a dead past and a deathly future.

So I could tell you how to see the truth that I see.

This is what I've started to do in my SPR webinar back in November last year,

where I conducted a comparison between historical records and the dreams and the information that came through to me through apparitions and all through psychical contact of one form or another.

And that bears out that there were indeed a number of ghosts or poltergeists involved in my particular case.

And that that is one of the pieces of proof,

consisting of a great many pieces of good quality evidence that establish that I am no charlatan or publicity seeker, just somebody who's trying to come to terms with their experiences.

Imagine experiencing the paranormal not as a passive observer,

but as someone directly caught in its grip.

Strange cold spots,

ghostly apparitions,

lucid dreams revealing horrifying truths.

What if the unexplained didn't stay behind in haunted houses but followed you home?

Tonight I welcome Kieran Farrell,

a long time investigator,

a member of the Society for Psychical Research and a man whose own life has been shaped by encounters with the paranormal from childhood hauntings that refused to stay behind.

Kieran has dedicated his life to uncovering the truth behind supernatural phenomena.

Over the next few episodes,

we'll delve into his journey,

his path into the Society for Psychical Research and the Spontaneous Cases Committee.

The terrifying haunted holiday home that changed everything.

The disturbing events that followed him from that house,

not just home,

but to his boarding school.

The school's desperate attempts to contain the activity,

including psychical research organisations,

exorcisms and even the involvement of Ed and Lorraine Warren.

The conflicting approaches between the Warrens and the school and what ultimately unfolded.

And this is only the beginning,

what secrets will be uncovered in part two?

Stay with us as we dive into a case that will challenge everything you think you know about hauntings,

right here on Haunted History Chronicles.

So, Kieran, you've described going on holiday with another family to a haunted house when you were a small boy.

Could you tell us more about that?

Yes.

The first thing about this was that the other family were in trouble even before we went to the haunted house for that holiday.

Problems had begun for them when they went prospecting for a holiday home and various things had happened to them and basically spirit attachments, or poltergeist type spirit attachments had been formed on that occasion.

I knew about this later, but the family concerned, whose name I think I ought to protect,

did mention it to me.

The link between the family was through someone who had been an au pair for my sister and myself.

She then went to work for the other family and consequently she knew both sets of children.

So when it came to the other family needing some playmates for their children to go on holiday with, we were the obvious choice.

We were a poor family and therefore we basically couldn't afford to look too deeply or seriously into the gift horse that had been provided for us.

So we went on that holiday.

The holiday itself started in an auspicious way because I received a visitation the night before the holiday and I learned from the link person that she had had dreams and experiences,

as had other members of her family that she worked for, in particular the daughter, and there was a son as well.

So that's what in a sense began the whole thing. And a sort of poltergeist type activity which they experienced when they first visited the holiday home, but that was obscured by one of the two old ladies that ran that holiday home because they maintained that there was a man about the house when there plainly was not.

The issue there being that she had a very close relationship with a lady that was thought to be her sister, but actually was not.

They sometimes refer to each other as cousins as well. They were probably in a same sex relationship.

And back in 1970 that was a bit of a thing.

So it was thought, well, maybe they're just doing this to protect themselves against vicious gossip. But there was a twist.

The twist was that there was a mysterious brother, the man about the house that wasn't.

Now, he was there apparently in spirit,

because they referred to him in partly in that way and partly as if he were still alive.

Everything in the house was set as it was when he died. The clocks were all set to 3 o', clock, the hour of his death,

with the express purpose, according to these two old ladies, of holding his spirit here on earth.

If that's what their desire was, they certainly achieved it and far more.

For he,

what became known as the man in the brown suit, known as L. Leonard,

was not the only spirit involved. There was a man in the black suit,

George Pearce, a doctor,

and there was what became known as the girl,

Susan.

There were also a couple of others as well.

One of them was Sibyl.

And this relates to a double murder case.

Leonard was involved and he was the basic perpetrator of both murders, Sibyl being his first wife and Susan being a victim of a later conspiracy to murder which involved him and the two old ladies as well as someone else that was the brother of one of the sisters,

George Pearce, the doctor, was the father of the brother and sister involved.

So there was poltergeist activity and paranormal activity from the very start.

Although for various reasons,

both the female heads of the family, my mother and the head of the other family did not wish to acknowledge this at first.

And it was myself and the girl from the other Family who carried out quite a lot of detective work trying to piece things out because one of the two sisters had a great deal on her conscience and like her other sister and most of those involved,

she considered herself to be a good Christian and therefore because she was, it was rather late in the day in terms of her life,

she feared meeting the Almighty with murder to account for or she was an accomplice to murder and so on.

So she was prepared to answer certain questions that myself and the girl from the other family would put to her.

The holiday itself was cut short due to the paranormal activity.

Right at the end I saw, we all saw, that's all seven of us saw this man in the black suit.

And there had been a number of rather spectacular incidents that had occurred during the holiday.

We all saw the man on black suit. The night, that fateful night before we left that building, that property at the holiday home,

the two old ladies wished to interview me and they did so on the basis that if I was to answer them truthfully that they would provide a certain amount of discount to the head of the other family for the cost of the holiday due to all the disturbances.

Now, when I first went up to their flat, that was the first time I'd ever been there. Yet I knew it. I knew it for my dreams and my nightmares.

I knew what was there. I knew exactly what was there and I knew what had been there and I knew that it had been the scene of a shooting,

a non fatal shooting this was.

Susan had shot this mysterious brother and severely injured him when he tried to rape her.

She had reached for the gun which had been stored in a desk drawer from this other chap known as Chudley. And I'll come back to him in a minute.

So she reaches for the gun. Leonard thinks she doesn't know how to shoot, but Chudley, who'd been an ex army officer, did know how to shoot and he had taught her well.

So she stands him off.

He then flicks a knife at her and and out of sheer reflex she fires at him.

That is what I told those two old ladies had occurred in that room.

I was perfectly correct.

Now the first thing they wanted to do was to find out how well I had seen the father,

the doctor,

Dr. George.

I described him perfectly and even I had his initials, which I saw on his black medical bag,

which I'm not going to give, but they were accurate after that they knew that they were dealing with somebody who had seen accurately what there was to be seen from a psychic perspective.

And one of Those two old ladies, George's daughter confirmed that she had last seen her father in a nursing home in 1928, where he died along with his wife.

So there was no way that we could have seen him or any of us seen this Dr. George in 1970 in a completely different house where he had never lived.

That, though, was not what the two old ladies wanted to know about. They wanted to know how much of what they considered to be their dirty private linen had been washed in public through my being some sort of psychic voyeur along with the girl from the other family and so on.

This related to a conspiracy to murder Susan and also in part,

a direct murder by one of those two sisters with the man in the brown suit, Leonard,

who murdered Leonard's first wife, Sybil.

So these are the characters that were involved,

both in terms of phantasms of the living,

in terms of the two old ladies,

and also the list of characters I've mentioned, plus possibly one or two others.

So already this is an extremely complicated, haunting case, but it didn't end there because of the poltergeist activity.

Did the paranormal activity you've described cease when you returned home after the holiday or did it continue then? Kieran?

So after that holiday we returned. Well, me and my family returned to London and I was shortly to go to boarding school.

The activity we thought would end when we left the house,

but it didn't,

so it followed us back home.

What we didn't know at the time was it had also followed the other family home, home as well. I was later to find that out because I had meetings with the link person and members of the other family, the head of the other family sometime later,

occasionally when I came back from the boarding school and then after I left the boarding school. So we were able to compare notes and then a lot more of the picture emerged.

So what was the paranormal activity then that you experienced following this return from this holiday?

You've mentioned that you attended a boarding school.

Do you want to explain the kinds of activity that happened there and what your family experienced as a result after returning home?

Yes.

Firstly, a quick note about the actual boarding school.

It was a special residential school for boys with kind of behavioral problems similar to one of the boarding school that one of the boys from the Enfield case went to.

It consisted of two kind of groups of boys,

the crazy mixed up kids, of which I was one, who had various undiagnosed or unrecognized medical problems. In my case, this was because I suffered from oxygen deprivation at birth and Various other medical problems.

I wasn't learning at school for various different reasons and I had a lazy right eye. I was profoundly left handed and left footed and severely dyslexic.

So that was one of the reasons, a series of reasons, why I wasn't getting on at school.

And these problems were not taken seriously, really by the medical establishment or by the educational one.

So I ended up in that particular school.

In doing so, I in one sense landed on my feet and on the other it was entirely the wrong place for a boy like me.

I went there when I was very young, being ten and a half or so.

The school was what was termed an outward bound one,

which meant that all the boys that went there would be prepared for life in the community rather than in other institutions.

Although we were constantly told that borstal was half a step down the road if we didn't listen to what we were told.

The school was very harsh in many ways. Discipline could be instant,

brutal and therefore arbitrary.

It was something that you learnt very quickly.

You didn't argue or there were certain things that you didn't do or you suffered the immediate consequences in that the school was run on very militaristic lines.

So Sergeant majoring, the sort of bullet hectoring, bullying and so on that you see in films like Full Metal Jacket was exactly what we experienced. But not as young men, as boys.

No.

What happened was that something, or rather someone followed me from home and she, Susan,

was present as a shadow form figure and presence moving cold spot.

When I went to the boarding school, there were two rickety old fans that were taking a collection of parents and boys to the school.

That caused a problem instantly and the parents said goodbye to their sons a couple of hundred yards away from the school and were taken back in the second van.

We went on to the school,

whereupon it became even more obvious that something had followed me.

After our initial pep talk,

which was rather brutal,

I was taken into the hall,

main hall of the school, and introduced her to the head teacher who knew and recognized that something had followed me.

He knew what he was looking at and that surprised me because I didn't think he would.

The backstory of this is that he and his wife had experienced poltergeist activity many years ago when they were a courting couple and the head teacher had realized that if he wanted to win his lady, the only thing that he could do was basically to ignore the poltergeist that surrounded her.

Didn't realize it that at the time that came out later,

the activity for me and also in my home and the home of the other family intensified in that it was bit different,

but also far more greater than it had been before.

Although I'm not able to assess that very well from the point of view of the other family.

Because various things had already happened before the holiday had occurred. What they did know was that the clearance that they had organized to take place in their home while they were away had obviously not succeeded.

So that was the first sort of thing that I became aware of.

The second thing was that Susan believed me to be this Chudley.

And she still does.

The thing being is, she would follow me around.

The other ghosts,

spirit or poltergeists would also cause problems.

And this disrupted school life considerably.

And as a result,

the school thought they were going. The school management thought they were going to lose control of the school entirely.

That may sound a bit extreme,

but actually, in those days, in those circumstances, unfortunately, it wasn't.

What that meant was that there was considerable poltergeist activity throughout the school.

That this apparition of Susan would follow me around and would take up station permanently by my bed at night.

She would follow me to and from the toilet. She would follow me around the school.

And the other poltergeists would also be present and cause problems.

Some of those problems were of a fairly spectacular nature.

Thumping,

banging, moving objects and generally sort of blocking corridors. Because there were extreme cold spots. People. People wear places where people just dreaded to pass. And so they didn't.

There was also a considerable amount of fear and so on around the school, as this was not the sort of additional stress that boys of that particular kind, in the sense that myself and all the rest of us,

we had our own problems to contend with, both in relation to fitting into the institution and trying to follow the rules and keep out of trouble. And also for the staff who, you know,

had to run the school.

Now, the apparition of Susan was not, in a sense, straightforward, or at least it could be. But when she. She would kneel next to my bed and there would be this image of a young girl with a rosary around her wrists,

special kind of rosary with dollars and so on.

So I was able to identify certain things from that kind of rosary.

A special Catholic type of rosary. Now, behind the apparition of the girl, there would be an apparition of a young woman.

Around the skin of the woman was a blue glow.

In part,

the image of that young woman looked natural.

But within that there was the figure of a horribly burnt and disfigured person.

The Same woman.

Her face was to a large extent burnt away, but there was still some flesh there. There was still a little bit of hair. The eyes were present, although they couldn't have been because they, you know, there was no way that they would have survived the fire that killed her.

The mouth to a certain extent had been burnt away. That's because when she was killed, murdered in a fire,

she had been bound and gagged.

This, together with other sort of veridical telepathic dreams was one of the disturbing points that made the school virtually unmanageable.

Because not just the boys in my dormitory would have various dreams. This would extend across a number of dormitories. Staff were having the same dreams, seeing the same apparitions.

And there was the obvious poltergeist type activity which could be as the result of one or more of these ghosts.

Poltergeists basically creating problems, overturning chairs, tables, making their presence definitely known. And there were a number of spectacular incidents.

Now,

what I didn't know, but quickly found out was that that school building itself was haunted.

And the headteacher and his wife knew about that.

They knew about it because when I went there, the school had only been open for 18 months.

In the early days,

a boy with a similar profile to my own.

You know, dyslexic, left handed, lazy right eye and rather overweight.

He was psychically sensitive as well, and he saw things and he related things and he reported things.

Now the situation had been calmed down. One of the things that had happened was, was that he had actually left the school. He returned a lot later and I was able to compare some notes with him.

But the senior staff of the school had already established certain things.

Firstly, that some of the ghosts which inhabited the school were related to the school's past,

because that school had previously been a girls independent school run by two sisters,

one of whom was deceased, the other was still alive.

So the head teacher and some of his senior staff got in contact with that lady and with county hall to confirm certain details. So certain things had already been checked out prior to my arrival at the school.

Consequently,

what had occurred was that everyone had thought the situation was under control, providing the unmentionable never was mentioned.

And there was a lot of heavy discipline to ensure it wasn't. However, when I arrived on the scene then everything kind of broke loose again and that severely disrupted the school.

In addition to the ghosts and poltergeists I brought with me.

What was the school's reaction to this and how did the school deal with the situation?

Then at first, the school tried to clamp down on things through discipline and through sergeant majoring us, and then they tried to drug this out of us through the use of drugs prescribed by the school psychiatrist,

a lot of benzodiazepines,

which are meant to stop people having dreams. They didn't.

These dreams persisted and were experienced by over half the school.

The school was a small one, having only consisted the maximum limit of 46 boys,

but nevertheless,

that's over 20 boys distributed amongst the dormitories and also a number of staff as well.

So the entire school was somewhat under the influence.

Now, as a result of that,

the school got back in contact with some of the psychical research organizations of the day, including the spr.

And I was seen as basically being the focal point of a lot of this for very simple reasons that the ghosts or entities that I brought with me and my obvious psychic sensitivity to the ghosts that were already there, that the school knew about.

So they finally decided to take a different tack.

And what happened was that the bursa of the school took me under his wing because he'd been a soldier and he'd been out in India where he had seen various things out there in terms of psychical phenomena, and he had a bit of an understanding about such matters.

He was also a very resourceful man and although he didn't have a university degree, he was a very cultured and educated man and he also carried out a lot of research.

He started to research how to test me,

how to test my psychic abilities and also how to research them,

as he, the head teacher and couple of the senior staff learnt more about psychical research, psychical phenomena and how to test psychics.

So it was as a result of this that one member of staff, Pat, I will not use his second name,

he decided that he was going to take a different form of action.

Now, Pat was a staunch Catholic and was convinced that I was a devil boy like the other boy before me.

So he had arranged with the local church that he went to for the bishop to come and carry out an exorcism,

which he did.

He exorcised me in outside the school,

in the drive.

He only managed to exercise the main hall. There were two reasons for that.

The management of the school disagreed with that being done because they had already arrived at the conclusion that this was a psychical phenomenon rather than a spiritual one. But Pat had his following and he was a very influential member of staff.

He was a member of care staff, he wasn't a member of teaching staff.

He had been a wrestler previously. And of course, his big thing was being able to control boys that had got out of control as the result of his experience.

He was not a man known for his patience.

So, you know, if you disagreed with him, you could find yourself subject to what he famously called the Irish chop,

a kind of a karate chop.

So that was not a pleasant experience,

I can tell you.

However,

Pat had his following.

So one of the things that occurred was that one of These poltergeists,

George, Dr. George,

would create a din, a racket in the main hall. Now, next to the main hall there was a television room. I used to love that television room. And the television, a big color television, where I could watch things like Star Trek, which I loved.

And they would start off with this great big pounding on the wall, boom, boom, boom, boom,

like this. And the cabinets in the hall would move and shake. They were the older cabinets because it was an ILEA school.

So these cabinets would shake, they'd move from side to side and they'd vibrate, you know, up and down from side to side, moving away from the wall.

And sometimes they would fall over. There was nothing particular in them,

but nevertheless,

they were used for storage. But, you know, there wasn't that much that was stored in them, but they would fall over.

So myself and Pat and the head teacher held me on several occasions on top of those cabinets with the object of finding out whether this,

this poltergeist, these poltergeists were part of me, my imagination,

my sort of thought processes, or psychokinesis directed from my disturbed psyche, as the psychiatrist had diagnosed.

Therefore, just like in the film Forbidden Planet,

I had to confront my inner self, my id,

my destructive elements.

They thought by placing me on top of these cabinets that the cabinets would not fall over on this occasion because that would risk my personal safety.

Well,

all that I can say about that is the three of us ended up on the floor and with a very annoyed poltergeist to deal with.

So that didn't help.

The exorcism carried out by the bishop, no less, didn't help.

Spraying me with holy water made me feel sick,

but it didn't do any good.

So the bishop actually recommended to Pat that in these circumstances he could do little more, particularly in the face of the opposition from the school management who wanted to take a scientific approach to the matter.

The primary reason for that was that they had to account for what was going on to the ILEA because it was an ILEA run school,

and therefore they needed something a bit more tangible. From their point of view about what was going on.

And therefore an organization like the Society for Psychical Research could provide them with that rather than the spiritual side of things.

There was a sort of a priest who did minister to us boys.

Unfortunately, he decided that it was all too much for him and disappeared.

So coming back to the drugs we were given drugs.

So it wasn't just benzodiazepines, it was things like Librium and Valium and a great deal of them.

The psychiatrist who prescribed them described the quantities of each drug that he was prescribing as heroic.

After the shell shock treatments that soldiers used to receive through the use of these drugs in the Second World War,

that meant two and a half or three times the maximum adult dose.

And of course we were boys,

so you can see that we were getting six times or more the kind of dosage that would be recommended because you shouldn't part one drug on top of the other on top of another, which is exactly what happened.

None of that actually helped and caused considerable problems.

So when eventually the school doctor found out about what was going on and examined a couple of the boys,

he became very concerned and had a major argument with the headteacher because a couple of the lads had to be taken to hospital because they weren't breathing properly.

After that,

a different approach was taken.

The benzodiazepines and the other drugs did not stop the apparitions from appearing. It did not stop the dreams from happening either. On one occasion,

that dream went on and on, round and round, at least 10 times in one night.

So these things were depriving us of sleep because we couldn't actually carry out the normal sort of mental processing during sleep that we were expected to in order that we could, you know, cope or function as individuals, as boys within the school environment.

This was also affecting some of the staff.

So Pat's reaction to this was to ask the bishop, look, look, Bishop, is there somebody else that can help with this?

Because if the Church can't officially, is there anyone else who can get involved who will see it from my Catholic point of view and will see this as a spiritual crisis,

not some sort of secular ghost experience,

as the management of the school were determined to see it as he gave Pat an address of a couple in America and they turned out to be Ed and Lorraine Warren.

So, Kieran, do you think you could maybe Cher. For anyone who's unsure about the Warrens work and who they were,

do you want to give a brief summary about their work and some of the Cases that they were involved with.

Yes,

Ed and Lorraine Warren are two of the most well known American ghost hunters and paranormal investigators.

Ed Warren is a self taught demonologist and Lorraine a clairvoyant who used to help him with investigations.

They were involved in a number of high profile American cases and maybe one or two British cases as well most notably the Enfield case but they were barely involved in that.

Now one of those cases or in a series of them really relate to the conjuring movies where the whole sort of business has been put through the Hollywood machine, shall we say.

One of their cases was the Lyndon Lindley street poltergeist and this was a very well known poltergeist case which was thought at one stage to be a hoax because it was dismissed as such by the police department which it wasn't.

Now after I left the boarding school I again had contact foolishly with Ed and Lorraine and I'll explain why that all came about.

They sent me some clippings from newspapers because they wanted to use me as a consultant though I was still a schoolboy because they'd learnt that I had something to offer so they sent me some clippings and they wanted me to do some psychometry something that I've always sort of been able to do although I don't really know why or how it works as far as I can really figure out psychometry,

it's a practical skill to be learnt and applied bit like dowsing rather than a set of theories, philosophy and so on to be understood and applied in that way it's a practical skill.

So I was able to pick up on the little boy that the couple the center of the case had who sadly died and the girl that had been adopted by the family the Warrens worked with a medium and Mary Pascaro Downey now she'd run a school from about the 1950s or so so she was quite a big name and she was the one who originally gave Ed and Lorraine a report about Lindley Street.

Now when I was asked to provide this sort of report on what I saw of these press clippings I was advised don't do that because they know the answers in the back of the book because they know what you know, the actual press reports say But I thought well I've got.

Well all I'm going to do is just give them my impressions whether whatever they make of it, that's up to them I should not have been so naive.

However, I'll come on to that the point here is that as in a Number of other cases.

The Warren's involvement in this case was controversial. They called the press in and that led to large numbers of people hanging out around the house and a public order problem for the police.

The Warrens also ran up considerable phone and other bills as although they didn't charge directly for their work,

they used the resources and facilities of those that they helped and asked them to sign up to various book and movie deals and whatever.

So there was a dispute between the family and the Warrens.

The family's lawyer got in contact with me through intermediaries because they considered that the report that I had made was not correct.

And I'll come back to that in relation to another case.

But they certainly worked on the Lindley street case and that was in that case. They certainly didn't distinguish themselves.

There was also the Amityville haunting in which they were involved.

And that again was another case where they had actually asked me to give them some information about what I could make out from the press,

just the press clippings. Now when I say press clippings I simply mean the photographs of the house.

I actually asked Ed for a proper photograph and he didn't go to the house and take it, although he said he did. It was something else that I found out later on that he'd obtained from another source.

Now what I found there was that there had been a dispute between a younger and an older man, father and son, I thought, in the sort of main living room.

And there were cold spots as far as I could ascertain,

in the bedrooms where I thought there had been some rather dire happenings,

people had died and so on, which turns out to be correct.

But again,

the Warrens involvement in this case was controversial.

And that was another instance in which they brought together what I had said and misrepresented it in the form of a letter. This was really for the Lindley street case to try to bolster up their position that the poltergeist activity was actually demonic when it was not.

So although I was still a schoolboy at the time,

apparently I had written a letter report stipulating that I was a senior consultant medium to a well known psychical training organization.

I don't want to be too specific about which one that is.

Now, the headed paper on which it was written was not current and therefore that organization knew that there was something very wrong.

They also knew me at the time.

So they realized that I wasn't the culprit.

But the Lindleys didn't.

So that took a while to Sort out.

Now,

there are a number of other cases that the Warrens investigated as well.

Oh, the haunting in Connecticut.

The haunting in Connecticut.

That one was again a Warren case.

And this shows some of the controversies about the Warrens.

Because what happened there was. There was a book that was made into a film which features the paranormal experiences of the Snedeker family.

Now, Ray Garden, who had been engaged by the Warrens, came to write the book,

found that because of issues within the family, drugs, alcohol and the mental health of the central person,

he took this whole matter back to Ed Warren because the family couldn't get their story straight, as you will see if you research this.

So what happened was that Ray Garden apparently recorded the call in which he took this matter back to Ed Warren. Now, Ed told him, and this is. You can find this online.

Oh,

they're crazy.

Everybody who comes to us is crazy. Otherwise why would they come to us?

You've got the sum of the story.

Just use what works and make the rest up and make it scary.

You write scary books, right?

That's why we hired you.

So make it up and make it scary.

That's a direct quote. Now, you might think that that's just a bit of journalistic license on the basis that never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

But in my experience,

this was very much the way in which the Warrens operated. They saw demons in every corner and they were not prepared to listen to other explanations.

They also thought they should have the monopoly on the case.

And that happened in my case as well.

But the school were determined for various reasons to hang on to the spr. As I've explained,

the school also contacted various other people.

Now,

Lorraine Warren said she had been tested and endorsed by Dr. Thelma Moss of UCLA. I ended up speaking to Thelma Moss and she told me that she'd never tested Lorraine Warren.

And she wished that Lorraine wouldn't say those things because it was causing her a certain amount of professional difficulty.

Thelma Moss was an expert in Kirlian photography and humanoras.

She was not an expert or had much if any real knowledge about hauntings, poltergeists and, you know, high level poltergeist activities.

So that was a bit difficult.

The other difficulty I had with working with the Warrens was essentially that they tended to see things very much their own way.

So instead of looking at things from a broad perspective, they tended to focus in on the demonic straight away.

Now, an initial conversation was held between the head teacher, the bursa and myself in the head teacher's office. This was done by telephone. Ed and Lorraine Warren tended to visit the UK on a semi regular basis as the head contacts here.

But there was also, of course, they made calls from America to the school and the school made calls, various calls to various national and international experts within these psychical research organizations.

So the school kind of really ran up the budget there and I was very thankful in many ways that they did that. The good side of that was that they could do what they liked to help you.

The bad side of it was if you got on the wrong side of them,

they'd certainly make your life very difficult for you.

However,

in this initial telephone conversation,

Warrens had already been primed by a letter from Pat to let them know what they thought rather than what he thought.

And therefore they were convinced that the school was under demonic influence.

Now, what the Warrens planned to do was they told the headteacher they would come to the school,

they would conduct all the necessary exorcisms, starting from the senior staff down,

ending up with the boys in group and me, of course, and one or two other boys in my dormitory. We would have special particular exorcisms because we were the foci of the problems.

After which they would take me back to America with them.

They would finish my education and my education would be finished in America.

The head teacher objected to this on two grounds. Obviously he was responsible to the education Authority for my care and welfare into education.

But he then,

he then said, sort of, who do you think he meaning myself is?

Something, something Joan of Arc.

And this made Ed see red because he didn't mind people swearing. He swore quite a bit himself,

but in terms of blaspheming and taking the Lord's name in vain, oh no, he wouldn't have that. So it was a massive row,

after which everything went quiet.

What then happened was that Pat sought another allegiance through the headteacher's wife, who was extremely influential.

And I then was hauled out of the shower one day by Pat to take a call from my Auntie Lorraine,

whom of course I'd never really heard of because I don't have an Auntie Lorraine, but I soon actually inherited one.

So I was standing in the hall of the school on a picking up a payphone, you know, in the cold hall with nothing around me but a towel,

having this conversation with my Auntie Lorraine,

who explained to me that the headteacher was under demonic influence and therefore his views couldn't be trusted and that she had made arrangements with his wife to get this matter sorted out and that the score had been infested by seven devils,

all of whom had 49 demon servitors to look after their needs and cause mayhem. And I was trying to calculate this was amounted to something like 328 demons, or whatever it was.

And I was told by Lorraine, no, you've got the wrong idea here, Kieran. You know,

basically, we're going to have to come to your school and, you know, carry out Plan A as we originally intended. But we're going to have to start with the headteacher first,

so you're going to have to help us.

The help that they wanted me to give them was to make representations to the senior staff of the school that only they could sort out the problem,

no one else, not the spr, not the other psychical research organizations. That school had been in contact with Ed and Lorraine Warren personally themselves.

And in order to help them do that, they needed to. They needed three things.

They needed an office.

There were spare rooms at school, apparently there were also some spare bedrooms,

so they would stay in one of those.

And of course, there was, you know, enough provisions to go around, so basically free board and lodging.

So did this lead to problems for you? You know, tension between the Warrens and the school, basically, that put me in

a very difficult position because there were two camps involved here. The senior management of the school,

who at least were listening to me,

and Pat and his brigade, if I can put it that way, and I was caught between the two.

So I had to choose a side. And the side that I chose was that of the senior management of the school,

I think for fairly obvious reasons,

because only they could help to protect me against the other.

Well, the Warrens did come to the school on a number of occasions,

and this is very difficult for me because I've got to be careful of what I say.

The first difficulty was that I was told to give them a tour,

which I did,

and that was to go round to the sort of places where Susan would hang out.

That included my bed space in the dormitory where I was first staying when I first came to the school,

a couple of the other dormitories where I had stayed, and also places where some of the more spectacular incidents had occurred.

I gave Lorraine a full and accurate report and I restricted myself to things that had been confirmed by witness statements and discussions with the senior members of staff and other members of staff.

So I did that because I knew that I could not be criticized too fiercely for having done so on each and every occasion. Lorraine told me that I was talking absolute rubbish.

Now, it was quite apparent that in some of these places there was a horrible presence.

The lino near my bed, for example.

There was a stain there which had appeared and had lingered on where the apparition had stood,

as she always stood by my bed each night, every night from the time I went to bed and the time I got up in the morning, and I said she'd follow me into the toilet, and so on and so forth.

Now,

that was there. There was.

The room was cold.

There was a cold spot there, and so on. Anything and everything that somebody with any psychic sensitivity would see and know and understand and some would probably take fright for them was there.

Lorraine said there was nothing there, and she told me that I didn't know what I was talking about,

but she would get Ed to come along and give a second opinion.

What they made me do was they made me trail them while Lorraine explained everything I had explained to Ed.

I was then told there were no spirits involved. There were no poltergeists involved.

There were only demons.

And everything that I had said was evidence of demons.

I complained about this because this was the report given to the head teacher. He had not undergone his all.

All his exorcisms, and therefore they didn't know whether they should report to him.

But there was no one else,

so they had to.

And then they complained that I had been misrepresenting matters and lying to them. Now, the bursa came to me to explain this and said I would need to account to the head teacher for this.

I was upset because I had been accused of lying and misrepresenting and objected to that.

Now the bursa told me off. He said, look, Kieran, you're not seeing the bigger picture.

You don't understand.

And I said, well, what could be more important?

Ah,

you know, we here pride ourselves on putting old heads on young shoulders, even if we have to knock sense into people one way or another.

Now think, Kieran.

And I said,

I know.

I think. I understand. Now,

they have essentially taken my work and rebranded it as theirs,

citing all my evidence and my experience of ghosts and poltergeists and whatnot as demons. He said,

now you understand.

So they're not dismissing what you said, they're just relabeling it.

Be careful.

I tried to be.

Now,

there were instances where what was going on was claimed to be the work of Bathsheba Sherman, somebody I'd never heard of and couldn't sense at all.

But I couldn't sense anything evil or bad about Bathsheba Sherman.

Nothing really I could say about that.

Only a few indications. And I wasn't sure whether what was happening was I was picking up something from Edin Lorraine or whether there was just nothing there to be picked up.

What I could sort of figure out was this was a sort of like an American middle class lady.

That was about it, really. She seemed to have nothing particularly unusual about her life or anything like that. No sense of evil.

But anyway,

the Warrens claimed that some of this was her work and that therefore they had a locus to stay and investigate.

Now I was therefore again put in the middle of the two groups.

As far as I could see, there was no basis for this Bathsheba Sherman that I'd never heard of.

Whereas I knew and understood most of what was occurring with the other poltergeists.

Hadn't tucked it all down.

But one of the things that the school did was, as I said, the bursar used to carry out quite a bit of background research. He went to places like the British Library, went to the spr, he talked to people.

Now, on one morning when this dream had run on those 10 occasions,

I was very sick that morning.

And so were some of the other boys, but me, I particularly Syl.

So I was in class and we went out for our usual break.

And something compelled me to go back into the classroom.

I then started writing my exercise book.

I didn't know what I was writing, but I knew it was the most important thing I had to do.

I was aware that my teacher, the headteacher's wife, had come back into the classroom and had and was somehow asking me questions. And she was yelling at me. She went to get her husband.

I was completely absorbed in my task.

I knew what was happening in the sense that I was a fly on the wall. But I couldn't break the spell.

And what I wrote in my exercise book was the inscription on this Chudley's lighter.

To my darling Charles, the kindest man I know or ever shall,

on the occasion of our 25th wedding anniversary,

1941.

Winifred Blank,

or rather X.

That was a silver chrome Ronson table lighter. It had to be a table lighter to be able to get that kind of inscription on it. Because it's pretty long.

Now, with a little bit of knowledge you can work out, okay, if you know who these characters are,

then you can check that information.

And that's exactly what they did.

Because 1941, 25th wedding anniversary. Well, they must have married in 1916. And I knew where they were married. King's Lynn which is true.

I knew a lot of details about exactly who they were and where they got married and so on.

And an odd, strange fact was that I always knew that there was something wrong about that marriage, that it was bigamous on her side, not his her side. And that she had children with another man.

Two children, two girls. They had two soulmates, two boys and so on. But this is getting into some of that detail rather than following the Warrens. But the point is that this was part of the key that unlocked the door that made the difference between looking at things from a disciplinary point of view as far as the school were concerned,

rather than any, you know, going back down that road and trying to investigate and find out what was going on.

So back to the Warrens.

They were not interested in anything like this.

This was not part of what they considered their evidence set was they weren't interested in comparing what I had to say against fact,

whether that be my psychical perceptions of the staff and the ghosts that had inhabited the school,

or whether they were Susan or Sibyl or anything else.

Now, I was sleepwalking at one occasion. I was writing on the blackboards, and so on and so forth, sipple lives and so on.

This didn't interest them because all they were concerned about was chasing demons, identifying demons, blaming demons,

having battles with demons.

But they didn't actually stay around that often to actually carry out the battles in person. They would tend to tell other people what to do and how to do it.

And they began briefing me in how I should act and respond to the demons.

Now, the school had already got a pretty good profile on the sort of activity that was going on,

and because of the pressure on me, I dared not change anything, any of my story or anything like that, for fear of the consequences.

So I was again caught between the Warrens and their supporters within the school and the senior staff of the school.

So therefore, when it came to phenomena being faked or things being put down to Bathsheba Sherman, I knew what I had to do.

I had to report that I had to tell the senior staff of the school.

I had no choice unless I wanted to suffer the consequences, which I did not.

So those circumstances made me honest.

Whereas if it had not been so much pressure, then I would have responded to the pressure from the other side because I was caught in the middle.

So there were a couple of occasions when certain things were said to me.

If you want you know what's good for you,

we'll look,

we'll involve you.

You know, you'll have always have a place with us, Kieran,

because we know that you can do these things.

You're valuable, you're an asset, but you're going to have to learn to see it our way and do it our way.

And as a result of that,

you've got to meet us halfway.

You have to get those resources for us.

And you have to start saying that these things were demonic. And you have to say that these things were in part the result of Bathsheba Sherman's.

I was not prepared to do so.

So these discussions ranged on and on with various visits,

and the school could see that the Warrens were not really the sort of people that they wanted. But they always said that I or Pat wanted them involved.

Now,

I couldn't really say to them,

go to blazers, because, again, that would have had consequences. So I had to work with both sides as far as I could.

One of the interesting things that occurred was that there used to be what turned out to be the spirit of a girl from the old days of the school,

when it was a girl's independence school.

She used to walk around the top circuit of the building.

She was rather lost and lonely and she was seeking her special friend and she'd returned to the school in spirit because of her special friend.

Now, this was to a large extent proven later on through newspaper articles that school actually found, and I found through my own researchers.

So this girl's spirit used to go round and round and the boys used to scare the boys and they used to play games, running before the spirit, trying to stand up against it and so on, and it would sort of waft through you.

It would produce a shock like a bucket of cold water,

and some of the boys would just sort of shiver and sort of, you know, oh, that was horrible, and so on and so forth. However, I'd learned something. I'd learned something by hanging out in haunted hospitals and so on.

If you really want to know and understand if that's a spirit, what kind of spirit it is, who it might be,

the sort of information that you can get from it.

You need to make contact.

But if you just stand, let the thing walk through you,

then after that shock of initial contact,

then there's a very brief moment where there's a sort of a kind of a simpatico between you, yourself and the spirit.

And then there's this kind of wrench, like going over a humpback bridge in a car and that sort of pulls at you. I suppose you could think of this as sort of a clash of the ethereal body of the spirit, with your own internal ethereal body being pushed out of your body,

and then that springing back, as it were.

But the point is that if you want to know that bit more, then that brief contact can tell you there's only one thing to do.

You follow the spirit, you walk within it. You walk within its ethereal body,

you try and communicate with it, you try to become one with it.

And so I was able to.

To find out a bit more information,

information that was then used to test me and to test out what I was saying. Now,

I remember this because Ed and Lorraine used to stop over on a number of occasions with someone else I'll come on to as Judy Penny. But Lorraine had never seen this before.

The spirit coming down the corridor was like a clear air turbulence,

a bit like in Lord of the Rings where Frodo and company first see the Black Riders, a ball of cold air turbulence heading towards you down the corridor.

So I used to walk within it and I gained this information.

But Lorraine was totally stunned by this.

She didn't know what to say or do.

And I had a conversation with her and I persuaded her, as the spirit was going round, as it used to do a number of occasions,

to stand in the way of the spirit.

So it went through her and she fainted. And my point to her was, look,

there's no demon here.

That's the spirit of a girl, a young woman,

not that of a demon.

So I think Lorraine may have learned from that because later on there was a case on American base where she followed in the footsteps of a spirit.

But that was the first time she'd ever seen anything like that, let alone comprehended its possibility.

Now, Judy Penny. Judy Penny was Ed Warren's underage girlfriend.

She moved in with Ed and Lorraine in 1963 when she was apparently 15, or that could have been a little bit earlier, but that would mean that she would be over 10 years older than I am now.

On several occasions, Judy Penny used to accompany the Warrens, and she also caused a certain amount of difficulty as well within the school because she thought that the sort of attention that Ed had paid to her, even though she was, by her own admission, underage, was a good thing.

And therefore this did not constitute abuse because it'd been a wonderful experience.

There were other occasions when she would decry Ed and Lorraine would decry Ed about his treatment of her and Ed would protest that he was always seen as the bad guy,

but he wasn't.

Now, without getting into all of this,

there were some occasions when Judy caused various problems again in return relation to kind of faking phenomena. And there was the question of occult practices and the injury of a couple of birds that were supposed to be either a bat or used in these occult rituals.

Actually, there was no occult rituals at all,

only the want of them.

And again, this falls into the category of phenomena that were not genuine.

My point in all this was that I to a certain extent was blamed for it,

but I had no part in it, nor did I want any part in it, nor did I have any knowledge of it, any other than what the other boys saw.

So my experience of the Warrens was not a good one,

not at all.

But there were certain things that came out of that that were interesting.

Now, in the end,

the school basically contacted the police as the result of a number of,

well, a night of altercations. It was referred to as the altercation and a number of people, including myself and some of the staff, made statements to the police and Ed and Lorraine were banned from the school.

Did you ever have any involvement with any of the items in their occult museum?

Ed always struck me as a very arrogant man. Good indication of that was that the Bersa had an old Daimler car,

used to like the style.

And those old Daimlers had one thing that a lot of modern cars at the time didn't, that was a manual crank facility,

which was important on cold days when, you know, the car didn't start properly.

Now, I was one of the few boys who learned the art of hand cranking the thing.

Now, there was an occasion when Ed and Lorraine were in the school when the school minibus, which is a converted Ford Transit,

had packed up and again it was a problem with the battery. So I,

being a boy, didn't have enough strength to be able to turn over the engine of that vehicle because it was a high compression engine and much larger than the one in the Bourse Daimler.

I suggested rolling the van forward so that if something happened then the crank handle would not fly up and out and across,

which it could do with great force. If you got it wrong, if the engine caught and you were unaware, it would throw the crank handle right out of right away and you could sprain your wrist or break it if you weren't careful.

So my point was roll the van a little bit further forward, get it out of the way so that if something does happen, the crank handle will be thrown across the playing field, it wouldn't end up smashing the window.

Ed, however,

who had no Experience of these things, decided he was going to take a hand in the matter.

And he had seen me try to do. Try the crank and I couldn't do it because I didn't take. Have enough strength. So he was going to take over.

And of course what happened was he was unprepared when the engine did turn over and,

you know, it's prined his wrist, but the crank went straight through a window,

bounced off the ceiling of a classroom,

took a trunk out of the plasterwork under the blackboard. How many people would have actually even attempted such a thing on that basis?

Lorraine had been trying to persuade him not to do it, but he decided to do it anyway. I don't know. That kind of tells you something about him.

He was, I must admit, they were both a very determined couple and you had to see it their way.

I met them again later, even after this business with the letter that they kind of made up back in the 80s.

That was an SPR meeting, if I was recall correctly, although I'm not sure I should mention it, but I think I have already.

Ed thought that I was a crisis apparition because at that time I looked very much like one of his friends and colleagues, Mr. Bart's. I wasn't, of course, and I tried to explain this to him, but the newer I came to him, the more he would panic and so on.

So, you know, I had to sort of back, back away.

And afterwards it was, you know, we didn't get talking again and so on and so forth. But the thing being is, coming back to Judy Penny, she kind of wanted attention from the boys and then she didn't.

I think I better kind of draw a discreet veil over exactly what went on. But that caused problems.

So all in all, the Warrens were a bit of a bad lot, but.

But one day Edd brought something with him and I knew that he had.

He came in a car and he was kind of kangaroo hopping. And he got out of the car and he said from across the driveway,

calling out to the front, because I'd been told to expect them because I was with the bursa.

And what happened was he said, oh, I can't get my car around the drive because there was a sort of no old drive. There was a poplar, trees and sort of.

And he wouldn't be able to steer it around. He didn't want to. So he said he would go around and then park up the road and walk back on foot.

And I said to the purser, he's got something.

He's got something he wants me to tell him about something.

I don't know what it is,

but he's definitely got something he wants me to see.

The bursar looked at me and he said,

your intuition serves you well,

but be careful because don't be too curious.

Remember, it was curiosity that killed the cat.

However,

when Edari came back,

he had something was partially hidden by his coat.

And I said, oh my God,

I got what I know, I know,

wait a minute. I could start to feel things from that object.

And I thought,

he's got a doll.

He's got a doll there in his arms. He's got a doll that's not an ordinary doll, it's a silly doll. I don't know why it's a silly doll, but that doll has seen too much.

That's why he's brought it.

So I.

The birds had tried to stop me, but I ran along the drive and Ed handed me this doll and he said,

I want you to tell me what your impressions of it are and then I'll tell the rain and then we can talk about it.

Now versus warning,

were they again going to make use of what I had said in their own way and put this down, possibly to Lorraine's clairvoyance rather than my own or whatever?

I didn't really care if that's what they were going to do, but I should have had taken more heed of the bursa's warning anyway. The images that came into my mind were of where that doll had been.

It had been obtained in a car boot, sort of a car boot sale, and it had been purchased by a lady whose daughter was a nurse.

And there'd been problems as a result of that.

The images that came into my mind were of a scene in an upstairs apartment where there was a man the doll belonged to.

I think it's about a seven year old girl, something like that. She was in a neighboring room and hadn't kind of ventured out,

but she'd left her her doll, her prized possession,

which was a Raggedy Ann doll in the room sitting on his chair.

And that doll was the witness to a murder. There was a woman. It was a love triangle. There was a woman who was associated with that man and another man.

She had left the door open. A second man came in,

got a gun,

shot the first man and that's where he lay on the bed.

He lay on the bed.

That man and the woman then decided that they were going to go.

But there was a bit of a discussion what to do about the girl, the daughter,

what to do about her.

And basically the man was saying, leave her,

leave her. You know,

the. The authorities will take care of her. You got to come away with me now. Right now.

They did.

That's exactly what happened.

Because he left his car outside.

They got into the car and went away.

I don't know what happened to them.

This was the Annabelle doll.

And again, I could not find anything there that was demonic.

Not at all.

Just this story.

The doll was haunted.

Because later that girl didn't understand very much. It's probably not seven years old, is less than that. She was crawling up the bed, wanting her daddy and not understanding when she got to, you know, his throat,

that he'd been shot and he was dead. He was gone.

She didn't understand that.

So this in part explains some of the experiences that people have had in relation to the doll,

that terrible crawl of that young girl. And this shows you some of the difficulties with this sort of work.

Because the impression that I got was the girl was about seven, but obviously a small. She was obviously younger than that.

Probably about three,

something like that. Two, three. However,

that's what I got from the doll.

Now, one of the difficulties, as I've sort of explained with the Warrens, is they tended to sort of set me up with something,

and then they would either confirm it in their own way or they pull the rug from out of my un from under my feet.

So I was very careful.

I related this to the bursa and one or two other people.

It was later that I found out the true or some of the history behind the doll, that it was meant to be demonic.

I don't know why they would have brought a demonic doll into a school that they considered to be haunted by a bunch of demons. But anyway, there we are.

Part of what they wanted me to do was to see if I could gank the dollar walk.

Well,

no, I couldn't,

but I was able to get the girl to stand up,

but not on my own.

I had to ask that that be done through someone else holding the doll.

And that was something again,

because through that interaction,

Susan was able to hold the doll up.

Otherwise, it was a floppy Raggedy Ann doll would just. Would have just fallen down because I couldn't get the doll to stand up because it's just a fabric.

There's no plastic, no metal to support it to stand.

And I remember, you know, the Bersa seeing this.

How the hell did you get that done? How did you do that, Kieran? That's impossible.

Look,

look,

look, because they're just. Behind the doll was the apparition. The apparition was kneeling down,

holding the doll by the hands.

So she was holding the arms of the doll, holding the doll upright.

I suppose this is one of the spectacular things, although most of the other ones were violent, but this one wasn't.

This just showed how you can seek the corporation of these spirits.

Susan has always believed me to be Chudley, and she has always been very protective of me.

So that at least was a result,

although it tended to cement the bond between us, which is something that I didn't want.

In terms of the doll. What had happened was that I was told it was basically demonic, which I didn't accept.

And then I was told essentially that there had been a dispute over the ownership of the doll because the two nurses.

The boyfriend of one of the nurses had been offered money by Ed Warren because it was valuable to the Warrens to put in their museum.

And he admitted to kind of faking the phenomenon. Now, whether this was about money because he had some sort of drug and alcohol problems and that's what was motivating him to do whatever he felt necessary to obtain a payoff, I don't know.

Or whether this was just another means of trying to manipulate me, I don't know.

But what I did know about the situation was that I should have heeded the bursa's advice.

Don't get involved with those people.

If you want to say anything,

say it to us,

don't say it to them.

Another occasion when something interesting happened was that there was one of the sisters that had run the old girls boarding school.

She used to come out from between one of the outbuildings where the boiler house was and the main building.

She used to do this often about 11:30 to meet a delivery van.

And she used to. Little old lady glasses. And she used to come out and she used to say, hmm, I am the headmistress of this school. Now, what I want to know is what you are doing in my school.

Exactly where she came from. The words that she would generally say and the time at which she would tend to appear was something that was known. And because it was made,

notes were made.

So when this is part of one of these things that Ed and Lorraine were there,

and they took this lady to be a solid, real person.

And I said, she's not, Chino. She's not.

She's a ghost.

No, you've got it wrong here.

You know, that's absolutely. You've got it wrong this time. No, no, no, no.

So I walk Genos the person's sight.

I walked through the ghost.

I walked through that lady, straight through her.

And strangely enough,

there was a reaction to it because she said, you incredibly rude boy. You know, I don't know what you're doing here, but whoever you are, I wish you'd go away.

That stunned me.

And first of all, serves you right, Kieran. Serves you right. You shouldn't mess around with these things like that. But again,

Lorraine, you know, pretty much it kind of almost fainted having seen this,

because literally, she saw me walking through the body of that lady,

straight through it.

And again, she didn't believe that any such thing was possible.

So if that's. If she doesn't understand,

you know, ghosts in that sense and doesn't have the courage to explore in that kind of way,

one has to kind of ask to what extent these people really knew and understood something that is well beyond ghosts and poltergeist things like demons.

So going back to Annabelle,

I always felt that that doll was essentially a witness to a murder,

that there was a sort of a linkage between the girl whose doll it was and the murder.

What she'd witnessed, what the doll had witnessed, what the girl in the other room had heard.

And therefore it was a sort of a spirit attachment that was responsible for the haunting side of the doll. Nothing to do with demons.

And whether or not the doll had actually moved as a result of that spirit attachment, I don't know.

It could have done.

But what I do know is that was this, as far as I could work out, that was the spirit of the doll. It was no demon. I would like to actually hold that doll again and see what secrets it has.

But I don't suppose I'll get the opportunity because it's lodged in the Warrens Museum or wherever.

But I wouldn't be afraid of the doll,

because I think the most important question is not to start blaming people or anything else like that, is to ask the simple question,

what happened to you?

What can you tell me?

What would you like me to know?

And that really, in a sense,

says it all about how to contact some of the spirits.

You know,

just treat them almost as if they're like living people.

My experiments with various ghosts started at an early age because I used to run away from school and hide in haunted buildings. And that was my playground, that was my laboratory.

And so I learned to,

you know, carry out these sorts of experiments because nobody told me not to.

Or rather, sometimes they had, and I reacted against it.

But I had to find out the hard way that sometimes when you leave a haunted building,

that haunted building, or rather its residents don't always leave you.

So there we are.

That was my experience with the Annabelle doll. But I think the medium who originally had some contact with the doll came up with the name of Annabelle Higgins. Now,

Annabelle Higgins is not a name that I actually came up with at all. I knew that from.

My experience is that there had been an accident outside the building where the murder had taken place sometime before and that involved a seven year old girl or thereabouts. That's why I get them confused.

But that is a different question. Now when the school actually found out about this and the Warren's involvement and what I'd made of the dollar, they said again,

you know, let us, you know, you've given us your, your,

your perspective on this. Kieran, your report.

Fine, leave it at that.

And they went and investigated and they found of course that what had occurred was that there had been an addition of the the Twilight Zone involving a doll called Talking Tina.

The mother involved in the case in this episode was called Annabelle.

There was no mention of the name Higgins, but nevertheless the dole came between the husband and wife.

And this particular program was known by the headteacher and his wife because it again related to their experiences,

or rather hers in relation to. To the poltergeist activity that had centered around her. Although the episode of the Twilight Zone was produced years later after they were married. But nevertheless it was something that was a haunting experience for them because it had a ring of truth about their earlier relationship.

So they knew about that and they were suspicious.

I, for my part, wasn't able to get a name and at all because my experiences with the doll weren't sufficiently long enough or focused on that because they were only on my initial impressions and on trying to get the doll to stand up rather than anything else for which I needed Susan's assistance.

So I was able to call upon Susan.

She did protect me in a number of occasions when I was subject to some exceedingly harsh discipline at the school, which may be a subject for another podcast.

So how then, Kieran, did this situation play out? And you know, in particular, how did it end for you?

Well, it didn't end in the sense that with a certain amount of acceptance I accepted that these things were going to be with me for a great many years.

Things did calm down, came to be on a more manageable level,

but I had to accept that I had a long term problem.

The school did as well The Warrens were banned from the school and I didn't see them until after I left the school and went home to home and out to school at the local comprehensive.

And then the school contacted me and asked me if I wanted to have any further contact with the Warrens, which I did.

And I think I've managed to cover some of what happened as a result.

For me,

various haunting and to a certain extent, poltergeist activity has always followed me.

That has not been easy to live with,

and that has been the curse that I have or cross that I have had to bear over the course of all these years. I have done my best to investigate my own case and a great many others,

as I did train to be a private investigator in my 20s when I was at university to give me some sort of means of being able to investigate the paranormal.

Long before we had the rise of the paranormal investigator.

I quietly and discreetly investigated many cases over the years, and I have researched poltergeist phenomena and all the rest of it, but I have never come across the depth, breadth and complexity of the case with which I was one of the principal people involved.

I know that Susan also followed a girl from the other family, but I don't really want to go into too much detail about that because of confidentiality.

But the things did play out for them as well.

But it took a very long time.

So it has left a long shadow over all our lives. And there's certainly been a scar on my life which I would have hoped and prayed I would have never had to bear.

But I suppose it was always a question of curiosity.

Killed the cat.

Kieran, it's been such a privilege to be able to hear more of your account and your experiences.

And I think it very much comes back to the journey that it's taken you on in terms of taking you down this path of inquiry and research and discovering more.

And of course, that then leading into institutions like the SBIR getting involved with that kind of research and work.

You can see the trajectory that it helped to put you on the path, that it helped you to, you know, to take you down.

That this has been this lifelong inquiry to try and understand some of the experiences that you had early on in your life and subsequently then throughout your life.

Yes, that's right. I mean, this is what motivated me to study science in the first place, to try and understand, to try and find rules by which,

you know, ghosts, presences,

cold spots or whatever worked. How could I predict them? And if I could predict them, maybe I could Control them. And if I could control them, maybe I wouldn't have to fear them.

That was always my guiding philosophy in exactly the same way that, you know, Dr. Bell was relating in his little speech to the young Mr. Doyle, be careful, because these things,

people are maybe seen as charlatans today, but they become the experts of tomorrow. Not necessarily because they have anything different, but they're willing to see things through because there's that thin line between genius and obsession.

Thomas Anderson,

who's got credit for inventing the light bulb, for example, it took him 20 years,

20 years of obsession to get it right. He did in the end.

But for my personal search, I have my personal answers.

They may not be the most logical,

but I have been forced to accept the reality of certain things.

Not for others and for myself.

And that is, in a sense, where my quest has taken me to.

To try to prove scientifically that there is a basis for all of this. For ghosts, for spirits, for poltergeists.

I don't know about the demons yet, maybe that's another story.

But there we are.

That's my life. There we are. I want to spend the rest of my life, such as it is, researching, writing and giving interviews like this. So maybe I've reached the point and hopefully inform others about these things so that I can leave something at least to the world of psychical research.

Honestly, I hope we get to have further conversations like this.

It's a real pleasure to be able to talk to you and I'm just very appreciative of you giving up your time to come and share your account with people listening for the podcast.

Thank you so much for that time, Kieran, in coming and sharing this with everybody who's listening.

Well, thank you very much for having me, Shel. I greatly appreciate the opportunity that you have given me to be able to talk about these things and being able to listen so intently to my.

My answers, which I greatly appreciate.

Thank you and I will say goodbye to everybody listening. Bye, everybody.

Thank you for joining us on this journey into the unknown.

I really appreciate you spending your time with my guest and I,

and I hope you've enjoyed today's conversation.

If you enjoyed today's episode,

please subscribe,

rate and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform.

You can follow us on social media for updates and more intriguing stories.

Don't forget to come back for part two of my conversation with Kieran Farrell,

where we'll take an even deeper dive into his remarkable experiences at the school,

explore the Warrens involvement and uncover even more fascinating details that you won't want to miss.

Until next time,

keep your eyes open and your mind curious.