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
World Unseen
The scariest thing about a haunting isn’t always the shadow in the doorway—it’s the tiny detail you almost ignored. We open with Halloween warmth and a quick safety check, then move straight into a challenge for every investigator and curious mind: the smallest note in your story might be the master key later. A bowler-hatted figure shows up near tragedies across decades, not to be folded lazily into Mothman lore, but to demonstrate how archetypes travel through memory, rumor, and witness overlap. Miss one color, one coat, one odd push on a train platform, and you might miss the pattern that turns a campfire tale into a case.
We share a neighbor’s deep research on Jack the Ripper to explore a less mystical, equally chilling idea: endurance by imitation. What looks like a single, timeless force can be a chain of copycats learning a method and passing it down. It’s the Dread Pirate effect—new hands, same legend. That frame doesn’t cancel the paranormal; it sharpens it. By separating human mimicry from the truly inexplicable, we protect the integrity of both. And when the hairs rise on your neck or the air thins in a room you know well, you’re meeting the edge where brain and beyond collide.
The conversation turns personal with a near-death experience that refuses the usual script—no tunnel, no bright light, no reunion tableau. When a listener asked, “Did you know you were dead?” the honest answer was no, and that dissonance becomes the point. Real accounts aren’t tidy. They’re granular, stubborn, and full of small facts that challenge our models. That’s why we urge you to write everything down: the color of a flash, the time on the stove clock, the texture of the coat. Those notes can convert coincidence into correlation, or debunk a myth that never deserved the stage.
If you love ghost stories, skeptical inquiry, and the thrill of connecting dots that others missed, this one is for you. Hit play, keep your notebook handy, and help us map the world unseen with care and curiosity. If this sparked a memory or a theory, share it with us, subscribe for more strange and thoughtful journeys, and leave a review to tell us which detail changed your mind.
Good evening, everybody. It's Dr. G, Spirit Tales and Magic. Happy Halloween. It is roughly about a quarter after eight in Phoenix. So for our friends on the East Coast, you're well into your celebrating by now. Love to get those emails and even snail mails about what you all did tonight. Did you encounter anything that goes bump in the night? Anything paranormal that goes bump in the night. We'll take this opportunity to thank everybody who listened and will continue to listen. Continue to give us a like, give us a share, follow us, and forward it to all of your friends. We appreciate every single one of you. Be safe out there. Don't take any silly chances just because you're in caution. That's the public service portion of the show. So, how do you close out October? Well, we did promise you that there would be an over-the-airways magic trick that will immediately follow this. And it's only to be done at home or, you know, inside of a building where you're not driving, and you have a deck of cards. So we'll just throw that out there. Do not attempt to do this in a moving vehicle or while operating anything. I used to hate the expression, you don't know what you don't know. For some reason, every time I heard that, it just well, it infuriates me a little bit first, and I don't know why. I had a uh person that I worked with in my life at one time used to say that all the time. Well, you don't know what you don't know. I won't even repeat some of the things that I back to him, it would be highly offensive. However, in the paranormal, sometimes when we do an episode, we've covered this before, we might leave something out because we feel like it's insignificant to the storyline. An example of such a thing would be I covered early on in the podcast world about a story about John Wilkes Booth's relatives and Abraham Lincoln's relatives and falling in front of a train. Now I inserted falling in front of the train because an eyewitness said that they that this person was pushed off of the platform by a man in either a bowler or a top hat in a long coat that later became a long purple coat. This guy has appeared from that time. There were sightings of him in the antebellum south, sightings of him in New York several years ago, sightings of him in 9-11. Now, we don't know all of those things until for some reason he gets under my skin during one of the episodes, and I start looking back. Because when I heard about it for the first what I thought was the first time, I've heard of that thing somewhere before. And you'll hear me mention in in several podcasts if you go back through October. You know, I'll highlight them, you know, it'll say something like, pushed by a man in a bowler hat. That sort of thing. We make reference to the Mothman simply because the Mothman, a lot of people have heard of. This guy has nothing to do with the Mothman, but as a point of reference, so a lot of people know who the Mothman is. Not so many people know who this guy was. I didn't know how prolific he was throughout the time period. So, in that respect, I guess you don't know what you don't know kind of works. It began to get Cassandra and I thinking about in the paranormal world, what else have we overlooked? Because when we told a story to someone, there was some little detail that we just blipped over, or when someone sent us their ghost story, I have this image of someone telling someone that they're with, hey, we're gonna send Spirit Tales and Magic or Ghost Story, and here's how it goes. And the other person says, Oh, you left out the part about Willard, and they say, Oh, that's insignificant, but maybe it's not. What's the point? So in your paranormal travels, if you see something that is now, I can't really say if you see something that's weird because paranormal world. But if you're telling a story and there's this thing that you think is insignificant, like for a second there was a blight, bright red light, but the bright red light really doesn't have anything to do with the storyline. Write that down so that the next time you hear of it, you can go, wait a minute, I've heard of that before, and you can go back and maybe even research back. And you might accidentally unwind one hell of a ghost story. We'll continue to put a little research into this guy, who has also been seen close to where we are in this time frame, this year. What kind of philosophies or theories might you have about something like that? We don't particularly pin down any particular thing. I'm not gonna say it's a time traveling spirit, or I had an interesting conversation. This is the first Halloween that we're not out doing a show. Yeah, and I don't know why that is. That's uh maybe it's a blessing in disguise. We'll see when we find out something horrible happened about someplace we're gonna be, or you never know. There it is. You don't know what you don't know. But I had a long talk this morning with a resident in our little 600 unit area. His family, way, way, way, way back, has had a an interest, if you will, or more of an obsession with Jack the Ripper. This guy could probably write a Jack the Ripper book that would outshine just about any of them that I've I've read. Generations of his family have theories about Jack the Ripper and a couple of other serial killers. And it doesn't have anything to do with portals or time travel, it has to do with copycats. I can tell you in all of my years that I've been doing a lot of things that I can't even tell you about. Does that make sense? Things aren't always as they seem. And when a mind becomes I'll use the term sick since we don't use crazy anymore. And of course I have to do something and say like, oh bet shit, crazy doesn't do it for you anymore. But anyway, I digress. If I am an individual who admires uh Pete the Hankerchief Killer, and I see all this these things that Pete the Hankerchief Killer has done, and I begin to subconsciously either want to be like Pete or idolize Pete. Ah, but then Pete gets caught and he gets the death penalty. No more Pete. And then I say, wait a minute, I'm half Pete's age. I can carry this on. Theoretical, yes. No such thing as Pete the Handkerchief Killer that I know of. Don't go out and be Pete the Hankerchief Killer. I'll be incredibly angry with you. But let's just say that I become that person, I carry on his tradition, I keep up his MO because I was impressed with it. And one day I get caught, and they've abolished the death penalty by then, let's say, but I'm gonna rot in some prison for you know 10 counts of life. I'm not getting out. But somewhere out there there was a guy or a girl who was following this legend and said, Wow, I can be like Pete. It's kind of like in the Princess Bride, the dread pirate. I'm not the original dread pirate, no, nor was the man before me or the man before him. That sort of thing. So you could see how something like that, and it wouldn't be far-fetched to believe that such a transition could happen. So as the original people who knew this theoretical killer, age gets us all, we grow old and we die. And as generations change, someone sees an article or hears a newscast about Pete the Handkerchief Killer. They say, hey, wait a minute, my grandfather told me that story, and he said that his grandfather told it to him. This must be some time traveling entity who never ceases to exist or can travel through all kinds of realms. No, it's just somebody that likes Pete. Years of study of the mind and paranormal stories, tracking actual serial killers, and all the things that I've done. And I'm not blowing my own horn. I I will always tell you that anything I've ever done in ten dollars to get you a coffee at Starbucks. I don't support Starbucks, and this is not an ad for them. But you know what I mean. In all that time, and thousands and thousands of stories and case studies and apprenticing with my mother in a very crazy place. You cannot deny that this stuff exists out in the world. That, like my daughter says, there is indeed a world unseen. What that world is is not explained. But you know it's there. You feel it. It's the hair on your back at the back of your neck when it stands up, or that feeling like I can't take one more step in this direction. Something very bad is going to happen over there, or the feeling like you're being watched, but you just don't want to turn around. And finally, when you do, nothing's there, and you're relieved until you realize that whatever you feared is standing right behind you. What gives us those experiences? There are a thousand psychological ways to reason that off. But again, you don't know what you don't know. And I don't know what I don't know. Go back to the episode, Did You Know You Were Dead? Because I didn't know I was dead. The rest of the world did, but I didn't. And when I came back, they welcomed me back. And I said, I didn't go anywhere. What's the matter with you people? They asked me, What did you see? What did you experience? And when I tell them, they're like, No, where was the where was the bright light? Where were all your family members? And and did you see God? No. And if you listen to that episode, you'll you'll see or hear what I saw. And then one of the listeners writes in and says, Doc, did you know you were dead? No, I didn't. And damn, you don't know what you don't know. Again, thank you everybody for listening. Be careful out there on Halloween. We have a lot of good stuff coming up. And you are perhaps at a crossroad in some of the places where you are of some either real paranormal or crazy wannabe paranormal happening. So write it down so you'll remember it in case you hear of it again, because there is indeed a world unseen. It's 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. And you know we're gonna say, tell a paranormal story or a ghost story. It's good for ya. We'll talk soon. Good night, and be safe.
