SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
Our host; Dr.G had his first paranormal experience at only eight years old. With over five decades of storytelling, magic and paranormal story collection he is an award winning story teller on a mission to revive firelight and the telling of stories!
SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
Keepsakes and Ghosts
A small package arrived from the UK with an old skeleton key and a handwritten letter that stopped us cold. Inside was a love story from 1977, a locked door in a shabby student house, and a fire that turned an ordinary morning into a lifetime of what-ifs. As we read Stefan’s words, the room seemed to hold its breath: a second key cut too late, a housemate misjudged until he tried to break down the door, and a grief forged so deep it clung to steel that wouldn’t melt in flame.
We follow the path of this object from Veronica’s bedroom to a burn barrel and finally to our desk, where it asks a larger question: can places and things absorb what we live through? Whether you believe in haunted objects or see them as vessels for memory, there’s no denying the force some items exert. This key became a touchstone for guilt, love, and the revision of a story—proof that even the “villain” we imagine might become a hero in the moment that matters. Along the way, we talk about residual energy, trigger objects, and how rooms can feel charged by repeated emotion, then weigh that against the skeptic’s lens of pattern-seeking and narrative. Either way, the experience is real: your heart knows when an object has weight beyond metal.
By sharing Stefan’s letter, we’re not just recounting a tragedy; we’re keeping Veronica’s name alive and honoring the complexity of everyone she touched. We also open the door for you: if you have an object that hums with memory—joyful or painful—consider what it wants from you. Keep it, pass it on, or tell its story so the love it carries keeps moving. Subscribe, share this episode with someone who believes in meaningful keepsakes, and leave a review with the story of an object you can’t forget. What does yours still whisper?
Good afternoon, everybody. It's Dr. G from 98 Degrees in Phoenix. Actually, I'm from Spirit Tales and Magic, but you already know that. We occasionally get some listeners who want to know the stats. Things like, are you doing okay? Where are you? That sort of thing. So as of this morning, we're in about 25 countries and 187 cities. And I thank each and every one of you for that. I truly appreciate the folks that listen to the podcast, and I'm grateful for all of you. I am amazed sometimes that all of it, it's very humbling, and I deeply appreciate it. A while back, well, I guess before I go into that, I should tell you that when Cassander and I go out, if we're not going to a haunted place or not doing a show, or just, you know, out and about doing whatever it is that we do. Let's say we stopped at a uh pizza place or somewhere, more often than not, there'll be some sort of trigger or thing that happens. We'll hear someone singing happy birthday, or we'll catch somebody looking at us for a long period of time. And that's going to start a 15 or 20-minute impromptu show. Or sometimes we just say, hey, we're going to wander in right there and do an impromptu show. So it was during one of those kind of events that I meant, uh, I met a gentleman who introduced himself as Stefan. Now he's he's clearly from the UK. And what would normally be about a 10-minute discussion turned into uh we went through lunch and then bought dinner. But one of the things is he he wanted to know if there was a mailing address where he could send us something. I said, Well, what would you be sending us? Well, you know, I'd rather not say right now. It's kind of a surprise, but is there any way that I can do that? Now, a long time in ago, uh, Cassandra and I decided not to give our home address out. There have been a couple of incidents. So when we moved, we didn't say, hey, you want our home address? You can have it. So we got a mail drop. And I think I mentioned this before, and I'll apologize if I haven't. So you can have the mail drop address. The you know, secrets of the world are not there, the cure for baldness does not exist, and the mail drops. So um, if you would like to send us your ghost or paranormal story, you can send it to 2636 West Thunderbird Road in Phoenix, Arizona, 85023, and make an attention to Dr. G. Now, sometimes I don't necessarily think a lot of that when people say, hey, I'm gonna send you something, or look in the mail next week because my story's gonna be there. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. But once again, when we're researching something, sometimes strange things happen. So the podcast for today was going to be some trigger objects and haunted things, maybe even a little thing about some cursed things. Can something psychic or some type of entity imprint itself into an object? Can a room be residually haunted? And I think that you know, most of the shows that we watch on TV and most of the evidence, uh, even though there are a lot of naysayers, would say yes, that sort of thing can happen. So, yes, the answer to that is what I would say is yes. It goes along all the time. But we went out to the mail drop early this morning, and there's a package in there from the UK. So I open it. Hello, Doc. I wanted to send you this old skeleton key. There's a brief story that goes with this key, and well, I really wish that you would read it on your podcast. You see, it's a way for me to keep something alive that I desperately want to keep alive, and also love it if you would put this in your show. This is a story worth telling. So please substitute my object for the object that I saw you do something like this with in the restaurant that day. I would be eternally grateful. Your biggest fan in the UK, Stefan. Forgive me, that makes me a little bit weepy. I've read through this story like four times. Trying not to be weepy when I read it. So we'll do the best we can, and here we go. I'll try and do this carefully. Um Stefan, we love you, but your writing is incredibly hard to read. Let me take you back to the year of 1977. In 1977, I was twenty-two years old. Yes, for those of you who are concerned, that makes me about 70 years old today. But I wasn't seventy years old then. I was twenty two and in love with a young lady named Veronica. She was eighteen, and I swear it was a case of love at first sight. I don't know if you've ever experienced that, but I sure did. I first saw Veronica on a Friday night. She was at the same bus stop as me, waiting on a transport that would take us into the city for a night on the town. As soon as I saw her, my heart skipped a beat. It felt like it was gonna burst out of my chest like one of those old Looney tunes that we're still watching to this day in the UK. She was stunning. She had very short hair, spiked up in the front, and some bleached blonde peroxide areas. After all, it's the late 70s. This juxtaposition between very stunning girl and harsh hairstyle blew me away. I believe I fell in love in that instant. As fate would have it, a week later, I bumped into Veronica in a nightclub. It turned out that one of my friends had gone to school with her. He recognized her, said hello, and had a brief conversation with her. So I decided to seize my opportunity. I sat down next to her, I introduced myself, and I basically pestered her for the rest of the night. But luckily, she didn't mind being pestered so much by me. Conversations led to longer conversations, and soon we began dating, and I couldn't believe my luck. A few weeks later, Veronica was leaving Sheffield, the city that we both lived in. She would leave Sheffield to go to college in Grimsby of all places. Grimsby has it the College of Food Technology. So we sat down and had a big chat about it. Were we going to just break up or could we carry on as a couple and try and make it work despite living a 90-minute drive away from each other? We decided that we should try and try and stay together and let's make it work. So Veronica left for Grimsby while I stayed in Sheffield. Now, this was back in the days before internet, before texting. So we actually had to write physical letters every week. And then most weekends, I would either travel to Grimsby and spend the weekend with her, or sometimes she would travel back to Sheffield and spend the weekend with me. But mostly it was me. I traveled to Grimsby. Veronica lived in a big old Victorian house that had been split up into what we would call little flats for student housing. There were four people plus Veronica living in the house. And it was very, very old. It was student housing. I don't know if the student housing in the U.S. is like this, but the student housing there, not so great. There were five bedrooms, each of which had a lock on the door so that somebody couldn't go into your room and steal your stuff. It had a communal bathroom, communal kitchen. This house was filthy. It had mold, it had dampness, dirty walls. It had wallpaper, wallpaper peeling off and dirty curtains. The windows were so old and painted so many times over that you couldn't push them up. Yes, they no longer opened. In the summer, the house got way too warm, and you couldn't open the windows to let in any fresh air. In the winter, there would be frost forming on the inside of the glass. Like I say, I would certainly hope that you can't get student housing like that anymore. But despite it all, we had some great times. There were lots of pubs and nightclubs. We were young, silly, and in love. And we had some great nights out. There were four girls living in the house and one guy. His name was Daniel. He was always leering at her, seemed to be undressing her with his eyes, at least that's what she thought. Whenever she went into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee or tea, he would loom up behind her, trying to engage her in conversation. And when Veronica came out of the bathroom wearing only her dressing gown, I guess that's what you people in the U.S. would call a bathrobe. Daniel would suddenly be there, looking at her deeply, trying to see between the folds of her dressing gown. Or at least that's what Veronica thought. So because of this, whenever Veronica went to her bedroom, she instinctively locked the door behind her. And even when I was there, when we were together, if we went into that room, she would always lock the door. She was worried, she said. Her quote was something like, I'm worried, you see, that Daniel would come home from the pub drunk, or he would be so roused by the sight of me that he would do something terrible to me, or he'd come into my room and he might try to rape me or hurt me. Essentially, that is what she was afraid of. So whenever she was in the bedroom, she locked the door to keep him out. Veronica hated Daniel. And I guess because of that, I hated him too. We called him all the names under the sun, and at this point I used several expletives to describe Daniel, but I'll share your blushes and leave that part to just your imagination. So as the months rolled by one Saturday morning, after a particularly heavy night at the pub, Veronica and I woke up in her bed. At this point, there was only one key to Veronica's bedroom, which Veronica always kept about her, sometimes even wearing it around her neck on a chain. The trouble was that sometimes I arrived at the house on a Friday afternoon before Veronica got back. So I wouldn't be able to get into the bedroom. I just had to hang around waiting for her. And on a Monday morning, if she had to get up to go into an early class, then I would have to leave with her because she'd want to lock the door behind her. We smiled, she looks at me and says, This is silly. We've been a couple for so long now. Why don't you get yourself a bedroom key cut? Then you can let yourself in and out with having without having to be reliant on me. Now this is not a key like you're thinking of. It's the key dock that's in the box. A skeleton key. Funny that they would call it that. But I agreed with Veronica. And she encouraged me to get out of bed, walk downtown, and get a key cut at the local hardware shop. She said, Really, you need to do this by yourself. I'm too hungover to accompany you. But she wanted to get another hour or so of sleep. So being a little hungover myself, too, I thought, well, perhaps I should get moving. I'm not going to lie about it, but I could have sure done well with staying in that bed. But just the same, I decided to get up and head out. Because any of you who've been in a long-term relationship will know. Even with the best will in the world, sometimes you just need a bit of time and space to yourself. I decided I'd pop up to the hardware shop. I'd get that key cut. Then maybe grab a coffee or tea next door. There's a little cafe close to the hardware store. And who knows, maybe I could run into some of the other girls that lived in the house to see what their current Veronica stories were. Of course you would call that flirting, but here flirting is a different kind of thing. Ton. And who doesn't like to flirt? I was madly in love with Veronica. Don't get me wrong. I was twenty-two years old, and the thought of what you would call flirting with the other girls in the house certainly wasn't an unpleasant one. But as I say it, completely heartless. Because my heart definitely belonged to her. And no one else. So I climbed out of the bed, I get dressed, picked up the bedroom key, and headed out. Veronica calls to me, hey, remember to lock that bedroom door on your way out because you know who is lurking. I locked the door, locking her in. That would be the last time I would ever see her. I walked into town, I got a key cut, I grabbed a coffee. I was walking up the road toward the house when I became dimly aware that there seemed to be a lot of smoke around. I thought that some idiot must be burning leaves in their garden on a Saturday morning. But then the smoke became more and more intense. I noticed there were fire engines and police cars and an ambulance outside of the house. I almost tripped over one of the hoses from a fire engine. And there was water all over the pavement, all over the road. Then I realized that the house that was the source of the smoke, it was Veronica's house. It was almost impossible to actually see the house. There was so much smoke. I began to run. I felt like I weighed a thousand pounds that I was running in slow motion, but I was trying to move toward the house. The policeman tried to hold me back. Then I saw three girls who lived in the house. They were sat by the side of the road, hugging each other. One of the girls, her name was Anne. She saw me and ran over to me, threw her arms around me, and just wailed. I can't believe how much she wailed. She made this animalistic scream. It was like nothing I've ever heard before, and I've never heard it since. It was almost unearthly. This was the seventies. Veronica always used to have candles and incense burning in the bedroom. She must have fallen asleep, hung over, and a candle or some embers had fallen, and well, there was so much paper and cardboard in her bedroom. Record sleeves, magazines, posters on the wall, college books. The room must have gone up in a flash. There was an inquest. The coroner said that they thought the smoke got her long before any of the flames did. Excuse me for a moment. I really hope so. I don't know if they just say that to make people feel better. I I just don't know. I hope she never woke up. But even if she had woken up, she was locked in. I had locked her in at her request to keep her safe. And she wouldn't have been able to get out. And what about Daniel? Here I must recount some of the expletives I used earlier to describe him. You see, it turns out that he's a bloody hero. He was trying to break down the door to rescue Veronica. He could not leave her there, so he continued trying to break down the door. The fireman had to literally drag him out of the house. He breathed in so much smoke and toxic gases that he had to be on a respirator for weeks after the fire. His breathing never recovered. His lungs became permanently damaged. While I was wandering about, like Jack and the lad drinking coffee and thinking about chatting up some of Veronica's housemates. Daniel was trying to save Veronica's life. And I find out a very difficult truth to live with. Pardon me. We became friends. We've had many talks, but I must admit I haven't seen him for years now. And it turns out he was a thoroughly decent guy. So yes, I've got to live with that as well. And here it is. The key that I got cut that Saturday morning. The key that could have opened the door saved my Veronica's life. But it's a key that was never used. I carry around with me always. Doc, it's my wish. Daddy would tell this story. The key that's in your hand now is not the key I had got. It's the original key to the door. For some reason I have too much pain when I retain it. I put it in a box and I put it in a burning barrel. I lit a fire. Some friends of mine and I toast it as it burned. Excuse me. And we talked about love. The loss of love. And how we wish love would go on. A couple weeks later, one does have to empty the barrel. And of course the key didn't burn, it's made out of steel. Then I thought of the day in the restaurant. I had your address. And I had an idea. Would you please substitute this key for the one in the story you told? And could you please tell Veronica's story? If that happens in some way, she gets to live on. Pardon me for a second. Yeah. The key in the story are definitely in the show. Where they will stay as long as I'm capable of doing a show. Which brings me to the question, whereas I always say, the question remains, asked by the gentleman concerned, do you have an object like that? Is there something that when you look at it or you touch it, it brings back a story, hopefully, not a tragic one, but some of them do. We'd love to hear your story. You now have the address of where you can send it snail mail, and you have many ways from the website to send it. A world that exists all around us all the time. And every now and then, for whatever the reason, we catch a glimpse of it. And the dead get in. Sometimes the memories just get in. A paranormal story if possible. Perhaps a ghost story, or perhaps just a tale of love, because telling those stories. Yeah, it's good for ya. Thank you for listening, my friends. We'll talk tomorrow. Good afternoon from Phoenix.
