JIM HAROLD: For this Halloween edition of the Paranormal Podcast, I cannot think of a better guest than who we have tonight.  I am talking about the one and only, probably the greatest author of paranormal books in history.  I am talking about Brad Steiger.  For five decades, Brad has been an award winning writer and devoted to exploring unusual, secret, and otherwise strange occurrences.  A former highschool teacher and college instructor, Brad published his first articles on the unexplained in 1956, and since then he’s written more than 2,000 articles with paranormal themes and he’s been author or co-author of more than 150 titles.

BRAD STEIGER: 170.

JIM HAROLD:  170?  I had a feeling.  I had a feeling it was going to be more than that.  We’re been so fortunate to have him on the show a couple of other times, and we’re so glad to have him back for this Halloween edition.  Brad Steiger, welcome back to the Paranormal Podcast.

BRAD STEIGER: Well, thanks Jim.  I’ve always enjoyed our previous experience and encounters together.

JIM HAROLD:  Excellent, excellent.  We’ve got a new book to talk about.  This one’s called Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Dark Side, that’s your latest.  Tell us about this book.  I have it in my hand.  This isn’t a video program so I can’t show people, but it’s quite a tome here, with over 250 different stories about true monsters.  Tell us a little bit about the book.

BRAD STEIGER:  Well, I’m very happy to. This was a case where an old friend like Tim Beckley and a relatively new friend like Nick Redfern both have declared, and others also, that this may be one of my very best books.  So, coming from that range of experience, I feel very comforted as an author, knowing that people are responding.  You know, monsters… I think we all love monsters.  We all love being frightened.  When my sons were little, we’d put together little models of the Frankenstein monster and Dracula and the Wolfman, and monsters, in terms of the popular media, kind of slipped into the shadows for a time, but now they’re back in full force, and I think we’re learning that there are evidences for what the cryptozoologists call “real monsters”, but always we will have the beast from the dark side, the creatures whose legends go back for centuries, go back to earliest human kind.  The very earliest of the cave paintings that we found were essentially of monsters.  When I say that, they weren’t just mammoth or whatever, they weren’t just deer, they weren’t just antelope, but they were half-human half-animal creatures, so it appears that certainly in our psyche, in our subconscious, we will always kind of jump at shadows while wondering what’s rustling those bushes.

JIM HAROLD:  Well, I’m looking at the book here and it looks like you had a lot of contributors.  And we’re not talking about insignificant people here.  I’m looking through and seeing people like Loren Coleman and a whole host of folks, so it looks like you had a good crew working with you and contributing to this book as well as your own efforts.

BRAD STEIGER:  Well, that… I have decided that, at my age … I’ve been writing since about ‘56, I’ll soon be 75, and there are so many young writers out there.  Now, Loren Coleman, we’re been buddies since the 60s, but some of the others are beginning in the field, and they’re darn good researchers.  And, you see, I could have simply interviewed them, as I did in a-hundred-and-some books before, but I thought ‘why not give them an opportunity to say things exactly the way they would, and then give them credit?  Let’s start the new!”  So many of these, they say they’ve been reading my books since they were eleven years old, and many of them are in their 50s now. And some… Nick Redfern said that he used to hide under the covers with his flashlight and read my books, and Scott Corrales said that he would always read my book in study hall and when Sister Mary Margaret clomped down next to him, he would hide it under his English book or whatever.  So, some people would say that I inspired young minds, some would say that I twisted young minds.

JIM HAROLD:  (laughs)  Or a little of both.

BRAD STEIGER: (laughs)  Yeah, maybe a little both.  This is an opportunity to show my gratitude as well, and giving some of them — many of them don’t need it, of course, they’ve already established themselves, but then others have not.  I look to them to carry on the work when I’m gone to the other side. I’m kind of like Jack Benny, though; if I can’t take my work with me, I’m not going.

JIM HAROLD:  There you go.  I like that.  Well, let’s talk a little bit about that work.  And again, this is a large book.  I recommend it to folks if you’re at all… it clocks out at about 400 pages, so it’s not one of these thin, skimpy books.  You certainly get your money’s worth in this book.  Let’s talk about some of the different monsters.  One of the — very early in the book you cover this, and it is probably the most famous monster these days, although it goes in and out of vogue, and that’s Bigfoot. Now, Bigfoot, when you go back to Patterson and ‘67, and the famous film that he shot, it’s kind of waxed and waned over time, and it’s almost become sort of a joke, but it really shouldn’t be, because these… there’s some credibility to some of these sightings, isn’t there?

BRAD STEIGER: You know, Jim, there’s so many sightings, and I’ve had my own peaks and valleys.  I mean, back in the day, when I would go out trooping in the woods where one had been sighted, and I would go where several livestock had been ripped in half, and slaughtered by… we knew it wasn’t wild dogs.  We knew it wasn’t wolves. It had to be something that literally had picked the creature up and ripped it in half, and we found lots of examples of scat — feces — that the animal had left, and we found bits and pieces of hair, but none of these proved to be conclusive.  And then there would always be someone who would put a rubber mask on a dummy and call a big press conference, and “we’ve got proof!  We’ve got proof!” and then it turns out to be another hoax.  Now, I remember, many years ago now, but I’m sure someone such as yourself knows the name Ivan T. Sanderson, the great zoologist.  Many young people today won’t recognise the name, and that’s unfortunate.  But when Ivan called me, and it was just like in a movie, you could hear the wind howling in the back, and this is of course long before cell phones, so he found a pay phone somewhere, and he called me from way up in Northern Minnesota, and he lived in New Jersey so I thought, ‘what in the world’s going on?’.  He calls me and he says, “My boy, my boy, I have found proof.  I have found the proof of what I have sought all my life.  We have a Bigfoot.  We have a Sasquatch.”  And I said, “oh, good grief, Ivan, come on!” and he says, “I’ll tell you more about it when I get back home.”  And so, I’m excited. So then there’s the cover of Argosy, and there’s Bigfoot, the picture that Ivan took.  Frozen in ice.  Well, I don’t know what happened, and I know that Ivan wasn’t dizzy and he had Bernard Heuvelmans with him, the famous Belgian zoologist.  And they both were decreeing it as genuine.  And then something happened and the specimen began to be shown at county fairs and people would walk through and they would smell this rotting meat, and “aw, gee” you know, “this is the real thing.” But then some skeptics looked beneath and saw some beef, some roast rotting under it, and then they looked closer, and they thought, ‘this is a dummy.’  Now, I know that these two brilliant zoologists… Ivan was the Jack Hanna of his day.  He would, just as Jack Hanna goes on Letterman or whoever with an animal, Ivan would do that on the Gary Moore show and other shows. So, I mean… these men who knew their stuff, were they deceived by a mask?  Obviously there was a switching, and this is something that Ivan fought with all of his life: was he part of a hoax, or had he helped set it up?  We have these people who continually muddy the waters, and then I get letters, I get emails, from people who, they swear, people who don’t want any money, they don’t want to go on television, but they describe, and they say how they found their mutilated animals.  So, as I say, he’s America’s King Kong, you know?  He’s a giant ape — we know there were such things as giant apes, we know apes have been found.  I mean, it wasn’t until the beginning of the last century that we knew there were gorillas. This was a legend of the Aboriginal people, and now we know there are mountain gorillas.  So, this is one of the most perplexing, and as I said, I don’t go out stomping out through the woods anymore as I used to, and I had a couple buddies of mine, and they had both been in special forces in ‘Nam, and one in Korea, and I would say, could there really be in the woods? And they would say, “look. We did hide, and we could steal from farmers at night and so forth, we could be here for months and no one would find us.”  So they had to be out there stomping through the bad weather with me, and one was… well, both were in law enforcement, and so these were men used to some techniques of deduction and examination and looking for evidence. And we found evidence, but we never found Bigfoot, and this is the same thing we have today.  We have professors who are interested; professors who are academics who are searching but as yet… where is it?  So I anger my good buddies in the field by saying that I’ve come to the conclusion that I think Bigfoot is multi-dimensional.  Maybe he’s physical for awhile, he’s paraphysical.  He enters the dimension… because I’ve been with people who, you know, dozens of men with .30-06s who, ‘this time, we’re going to get him’, these were not cryptozoologists, these were angry farmers. And it appeared that we had the creature trapped, and trying to talk people out of shooting it, but ‘we’re gonna get it, we’re gonna get it’, and then we go there and it’s completely gone. Without a trace.  So, again, I tend to think, and I upset my cryptozoologist friends, when I say that perhaps the thing is a paraphysical being.  He comes there, he eats, he moves around, and then we have an expedition as we speak in China, trying to find the Yeren.  You know, this is a tantalizing mystery that keeps provoking us, as so many of these monsters are.

JIM HAROLD:  Yes, the Chinese expedition, I understand that they’re going to attempt to use the latest in technology and we’ll see if it comes to anything further, because I believe in the late 70s/early 80s there were some big expeditions out that way, to try to find that Chinese version, and I guess they found some prints and so forth, but I guess we’ll see what happens with that.  And we will be right back on the Paranormal Podcast…

(breaks for commercial)

JIM HAROLD: … Brad, I really want to get back into Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside, that’s your latest book.  But before we do, I did want to ask you this question:  I know we’ve talked about changing beliefs and things, and what you’ve seen over your 50+ year career, but specifically, what are your thoughts — and we’re doing this show, and this show wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago, but it’s due to the internet, you know. We’re possible, and people listen to this show all over the world, which astounds me every time I get an email from Australia or Britain or somewhere, just blows my mind — but what do you think about, and I would think there are good parts about it and maybe not so good parts, but what do you think about this phenomena, the internet? How do you think it’s impacted this field?

BRAD STEIGER: Well, at first I thought the internet had to be the anti-Christ, because of all of the wretched things, I’ll just be honest, that I saw on the internet.  And how quickly the lies and misrepresentations and hoaxes could spread, but now as it’s grown… it takes time to grow.  Not only people, you know, but new breakthroughs in technology have to evolve and modify, and so basically, in terms of how I really see it, in terms of research, of course, where back in the 50s and early 60s, this probably won’t seem to be such an exorbitant price, but if you just look at it:  my telephone bill would be sometimes $2000.  Now this is back in the 60s, and I don’t know what would be the equivalent today, but I mean, it would be a whole lot more.  And then, of course, to go to a place, all the way from Vancouver BC to New Jersey to check on the Jersey Devil… all this travel, it was enormously expensive. I would sell… the advance that I got for a book was soon eaten up with my expenses.  I mean, it was… now, the research and the contacts and the communications with the folks is just incredible.  Sometimes we get 300 letters a day, and they can be answered with just a quick word, or a thanks, or “gee, I’d like to hear more” or “terrific, I’m glad; give me some more information?”  I cannot possibly keep up with that type of correspondence as I once did, answering people’s letters. This can be done so much quicker, so right now, you know, I’m looking at all the pros in a very positive way.  It’s the same way with the computer.  I wrote the first 124 books, Jim, on a 1923 Underwood.

JIM HAROLD:  Oh, my…

BRAD STEIGER:  And people tried to talk me into computers because I could increase my output.  I said, “you’ve got to be kidding me.  I’ve written 124 books, thousands of articles, and keep up… who can write faster than I’m doing?”  But then when I got the computer, in a way it saves on the donkey work.  Of course, I miss ripping it out of the carriage and crumbling the paper and throwing it across the room and starting again, but again it’s so much nicer not to do that; to just move this paragraph up to the first, and not the last, and to move things around. It takes time, when you’ve grown up in… we really are evolving into an entirely different culture.  You’ve seen it, it goes around on the internet, what the college freshmen of today haven’t known the world without this and that, this and that. And it’s true.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, for people in the States I’m amazed that people in college now have no idea who Johnny Carson is. It blows my mind. (laughs)

BRAD STEIGER:  Someone just sent us an email saying that the Liberace Museum has closed in Las Vegas.

JIM HAROLD:  A lot of people don’t know who Liberace was, even.

BRAD STEIGER: That’s what Sherry and I wrote back, that it’s because a lot of people today don’t know who Liberace was.  We could go on and on… but again, basically of course, the internet I see now — used judiciously, that’s always the key word, isn’t it? — is an enormous help to the researchers.

JIM HAROLD:  Well, we’re going to do our best to use it judiciously — if I can say that word right right now.  This book has a ton of stories.  One that I’ve always been fascinated by is the story of John Keel and Mothman.  What did you find in the research about that?  That’s fascinates me, because my family is from that area of the country, originally, though I live in Ohio now, and they saw some strange things back in those hills, and I’m just curious to see what you found, and what your research brought about.

BRAD STEIGER:  Well, again we’ll go back to Keel.  When he was researching that was when I got to know him personally.  We had corresponded for some time, and then I came to New York City to complete my book on Rudolph Valentino, who many people will not know — though maybe they’ll know who he was — the great lover of the silent screen. And I was completing that book, and so I got to meet people I had corresponded with, such as Ivan, John, and so forth, and Keel took me to my first Chinese restaurant. I’d never been to a Chinese restaurant, so I went with John.  And then we went all the way back to his place, and  he started telling me — and this is the time that Men In Black and so forth, these type of things would be happening, and they were becoming part of the mythology of the UFO field — about these phone calls he had been receiving, and what had been happening to him going back and forth… well, at that time, I was obsessed — my other obsession — with weight-lifting at the time.  Here I was, a husky 30-year-old, curling 200 lbs and 450 lbs bench presses and so forth, and I’m thinking, “let’s see one of those little guys scare me!”  Well, by the time I left John’s apartment that night, and he had told me of the experiences — and he was, what do you want to call it?  Otherworldly? Other dimensional? — harassment that he was going through, I mean, that cab ride was a long way back to my hotel, and I barely slept that night, expecting a knock on the door. Because John had told me, and I don’t think this is in print anywhere, but he told me of three men suddenly appearing in his apartment, not — maybe I shouldn’t even tell this over the air, but John has left us now and if he didn’t want this out… John, wherever you are, forgive me — he saw these three men, and they were telling him to leave the whole Mothman thing, leave all that alone.  And, first of all, they didn’t come in by opening the door, they were just there, so John said.  And then to prove that they were something other than ordinary, they asked what he had under his sink.  And John said, ‘well, look and see’ and they went over and took out a bottle of Clorox, and they each took several large swallows out of the Clorox bottle to prove that that wouldn’t affect them in any way.  After an entire evening of those stories, as I said, I barely slept that night, expecting a knock on my door… not a knock, just to see someone materializing in my hotel room.

JIM HAROLD:  Oh, my.  The thing that always fascinated me about this, The Mothman Prophecies and so forth, is the idea that also these sightings coincided with that bridge collapse in the ‘60s in West Virginia Point Pleasant, and just the whole odd nature of how everything occurred. Now, what happened to the Mothman lore after that?  Were there further sightings?

BRAD STEIGER:  Yes. I have several recent sightings included in the Real Monster book, from others who have seen it, and they’re pretty exciting.  I mean, the idea of a creature with wings, a humanoid or whatever you want to use — a hominid or whatever the creature would be — but the Birdman sightings, the Mothman sightings, I have a number of reports in the book that have never appeared in print before, by researchers whom I have come to trust over the years.  Hard-as-nails type of guys, and they sent some very interesting stories, very interesting accounts that I have included in the present book, Real Monsters.

JIM HAROLD:  The thing that’s here is amazing, and I really did enjoy that movie, The Mothman Prophecies.

BRAD STEIGER: That wasn’t a bad movie.

JIM HAROLD:  Yeah, I really enjoyed it. It appears that there was a whole range of strange or unfortunate happenings to people who were associated with that movie.  Is that correct?

BRAD STEIGER: There again, I think Loren Coleman has kept track.  He has an extensive list of people whose deaths seen in bizarre “coincidences” who were associated with either the Mothman sightings, the bridge collapse, or the making of the motion picture.  I’ve abbreviated that list considerably, but I’ve indicated Loren’s website so that people can check it out for themselves.  Of course, some of the people, there were accidents or they were elderly, but some seem to stretch the credulity of being an ordinary accident or circumstance.  You get a very eerie shiver down your back when you do read this list.  As I say, I present a truncated version in the book.

JIM HAROLD:  It is quite, quite amazing.  So, we’ll leave it at that, but even watching that movie you had this funny feeling afterwards.  It’s just always fascinated me. You know, another thing that’s always fascinating, and you hear about it and it’s very, very famous.  Talk to us about the Jersey Devil.

BRAD STEIGER: Here again, I think… I have a theory about a case like the Jersey Devil.  We don’t know the truth of the original story.  It was a woman who was tired of being baby factory and producing children for her overbearing husband, and put a terrible curse on the child, and came out with… there are a variety of different descriptions.  My artist on that, I think, did a magnificent job of capturing an artist’s impression of the Jersey Devil. But it comes out with hooves and wings and a goat’s head and so forth. And sometimes it’s a horse’s head, depending on whoever’s telling the story.  And that’s an interesting thing, because one of the nights that I visited Ivan on his farm in New Jersey was a sighting of the Jersey Devil, so his phone was just ringing off the hook that night, “the Jersey Devil is here” and “the Jersey Devil is there.”  So, it is sighted in that plains area of New Jersey.  Again, one of the more fascinating stories I heard from that — I don’t think I put it in the book, because I need to get more information — there is a man who lives in that same area who claims that even though the old railroad station is no longer there, in the woods where he lives, there used to be a small town there that had a railroad depot, and he says you can still hear the train, you can still hear people gathering, people talking, and he heard this as a child — his uncle had told him — and one night he heard the train and he experienced for himself seeing this.  That’s in that same area.  Now, I think — and here’s where I’m going to theorize — I think when we have something like a Jersey Devil — and let’s face it, nearly every community has, especially around Halloween you start to read in the newspaper, about the convent that burned down and now people see the phantom nun walking around.  Or a dog who died saving his master from drowning, and now you see that phantom dog along the riverbank.  I think that with the belief projected into these stories, I think we are projecting the creative aspect within ourselves.  We are feeding this entity energy, and so many people have seen or reported — and we’ll go back to the Jersey Devil — for so many years, so many people keep feeding it energy, until the entity actually takes on a life of its own. And the more people who sight it, the stronger it gets. Now, we have conducted experiments of which you may be aware, where people have sat around and deliberately projected their energy and created an entity that communicates.  Now, some philosophies would call these a tulpa… a trained monk — and this would be one that doesn’t study martial arts and that, but probably in the Buddhist tradition, and develops the mental power to project either a doppelganger — a double of himself — or another entity which can be sent abroad to communicate and sometimes to frighten people.  To gain control over people.  Now the more people who see that tulpa, like the Jersey Devil, the stronger and stronger it becomes.

JIM HAROLD:  That’s a fascinating, fascinating theory . You know, when I look at this book — and again I reiterate to everybody, it’s 400 pages, way more than we can start to scratch the surface of tonight, but I’ll ask you to kind of close out our final story of the evening, since you are such a great story teller… share with us one of your favourite topics, one of your favourite monsters, that is covered in this book.

BRAD STEIGER: Aww… that’s so hard to do!

JIM HAROLD:  It’s like asking you which child of yours is your favourite.

BRAD STEIGER:  Right.  If I can just kind of spread over a couple that have come to truly intrigue me, and don’t laugh now:  the Boogeyman.  The chapter I’ve included here comes from some very down to earth individuals who are really no-nonsense people in their daily lives. But as children, they swear on everything they consider bright, beautiful, and holy that they encountered a bizarre entity that we collectively call the Boogeyman.  Now, we know every culture, especially in our western world because we’re more familiar with them, have the concept of the Boogeyman.  Now, it occurred to me, and one fellow I corresponded with quite some time, because he tells this story of, just very quickly, of seeing this entity when he was at a friend’s home, and they were playing hide-and-seek.  He heard footsteps coming up to the bedroom where he was hiding under the bed, and then he saw the strangest feet.  They were wolf’s feet, but they had striped socks on, and when you peeked out, he saw a visualization of the Big Bad Wolf in the Walt Disney cartoons with the Three Little Pigs, with the stripes and the big top hat and… here now, he is a down to earth guy, he’s a truck driver.

JIM HAROLD:  That’s pretty down to earth.

BRAD STEIGER: But, you know, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking, and going over.  Some of the best accounts are from truck drivers.  They’re out there, they’re alone at night, and they see things. So, we corresponded quite a time.  He said, “this is nothing I imagined, this is nothing I… I mean, I heard the breath, I heard.”  Now, I go on to account other stories like that.  Every little kid thinks that the Boogeyman is in the closet, or the Boogeyman’s under the bed, or whatever. What if they’re is a kind of entity that has as its mission the…

JIM HAROLD:  The frightening of small children?

BRAD STEIGER:  Well, not the frightening them, but to… control.  Or give them a glimpse into another reality.  Because even though, if we see something with anger, or with fear, we remember it. In other words, if your aunt, if every time you came over to see your aunt, when you were a small boy, she gave you a lollipop.  That would just kind of be absorbed into your unconscious.  Let’s say that one time you came to see your aunt, and she picked up the fly-swatter and just whaled into you without any reason at all.  That you would remember, right?  Maybe you were reaching for her prized antique whatever.  We do remember lessons when they’re super-charged with fear or with anger and a response.  So this is something that I hope I hear from others.  I know it sounds like kind of an amorphous area, but I just became intrigued by the number of people that I’ve heard from that swear that they have encountered the Boogeyman.

JIM HAROLD:  And it’s interesting.  You mentioned the one time he looked like the Big Bad Wolf portrayed in some Disney movie.  Maybe the Boogeyman projects that thing that will make the greatest impression on the child.

BRAD STEIGER:  Exactly. That’s what I was trying to say… thank you, Jim! (laughs)  That was one of the things that I was trying to say, an image that he just wouldn’t forget. And an image, then, that throughout life we should mind our Ps and Qs, because we never know when someone or something is watching us.

JIM HAROLD:  You mentioned that there might be a couple in addition to the Boogeyman?

BRAD STEIGER:  I’m intrigued by the large cats that are seen where they shouldn’t be.  As I say, every winter that I’ve seen when I was younger, I live in the midwest, and I live in Iowa where there are no black panthers. They’re not indigenous to the state. But every winter people would report seeing this black panther.  They see it by their mailboxes, they see out chasing the cattle and so forth, and it would be there for awhile and then it would disappear.  I became intrigued by reports of big cats, and I have found… I have reports in quiet little New England villages where a woman looks out at night and she sees an African lion, male lion, with full mane, walking across her yard, going down the street.  These reports come from Great Britain, big cats in Great Britain… we know perhaps the sabre tooth tiger was there at one time, but today in modern history, or in the history we have of England, there’s no history of lions and tigers and so forth in the British Isles.

JIM HAROLD:  No.  That’s very odd.

BRAD STEIGER:  But year after year, people report encounters.  There’s a society in Britain where they swear that, just as with Bigfoot in the United States, they swear that there are these, that they do have the giant cats, big cats.  Because there are so many reports in those English village’s and moors and so forth, of people encountering huge black panthers, mostly, but again, African lions.  Here again, I have to go back to one of my theories, that these are other dimensional demonstrations.  I can see where a panther leaps at its prey in the jungles of South America, and lands in a snowbank in Northern Iowa.

JIM HAROLD:  I’ve heard of things like this before. In other contexts… it’s very interesting.  Somehow it crosses a dimension of space and time…

BRAD STEIGER:  Exactly.  A vortex of some kind.

JIM HAROLD:  Yes.  I can’t recall if it was Phillip Imbrogno or who was on the program, but we were talking about this situation where two people pass each other — and I can’t remember if it was in a cold situation or a desert situation — but one was dressed as if dressed for a desert, and the other dressed for the arctic cold, and they were talking, they ended up talking to one another.  And the one said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s very warm here” and the other person said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s very cold here”… I can’t remember the context of that, but a very similar type thing.  Maybe there’s some kind of seam in space and time, or a vortex as you say, but I’ve heard of this before.

BRAD STEIGER:  I think there are openings.  In an earlier book of mine, I had collected a large number of accounts of people who had left, in one case, had left a pub in South Africa and appeared on the streets on New York City.  Completely baffled.  I mean, you can imagine what that would do to your mind. And he had identification.  So they said, “well, you’re from South Africa” and he they said, “How did you get here?  Where’s your passport, where’s this, where’s that?”  And he said, “I don’t have them.  I was just on my way home!  What am I doing here?”  And there are a number of cases like that, and Charles Fort had a number in his books, of people who just appeared out of time and space.  We had an astonishing case of a missing child who completely disappeared.  They had a large number of people searching, searching, searching… they came home after the parents were exhausted and grieving, and there’s the child in bed, but she’s covered with mud.  And they say, “where have you been?” and she said, “a man took me to our other world, and now took me back.”  And they could find no one.  Again, you know, was this a pedophile or so forth, but they eliminated all of those things. The child wasn’t in any way harmed, just a little muddy, because the other world — and she claimed she could see the people searching for her and calling her name, but she called back and they couldn’t hear her. And they walked right past her, and they jumped out in front of them and said “I’m here, I’m here!” and they would just pass.  So again, it seems to be some kind of dimensional overlap.

JIM HAROLD: Interesting.  It’s a fascinating, fascinating topic, and we’ve had a fascinating time here talking with Brad Steiger, the legendary paranormal author.  Now, I can’t resist asking this:  you are, again, the preeminent author of paranormal books extant, in existence.  But, I’ve got to ask, this is an interesting time for you.  It’s Halloween. What’s your idea of a fun Halloween?  How do you spend Halloween?  Is it kind of a busman’s holiday?  What’s your idea of a good time at Halloween?

BRAD STEIGER: Well, I guess it’s doing radio shows such as this one.

JIM HAROLD:  There you go!

BRAD STEIGER:  And podcasts such as this one.  And people… the interest in the paranormal is so high that every day is Halloween.  You turn on the television or a podcast such as yours are springing up. You know, it’s become alright to talk about these things.  You asked earlier, back in the late 50s and early 60s, when I did my first radio shows on this subject… wow.  If you got on at all, you can imagine the reception I’d receive.  This was wacko, and this was looney, and this was ‘boy, we’re gonna rip you apart’.  All I could say was, “go for it.”

JIM HAROLD:  It’s interesting.  Although there are probably a lot of skeptics out there that are not happy about this, on the iTunes chart, which is kind of like the old hit parade for music, but on the podcast chart for science just a day or two ago, the Paranormal Podcast hit #5 in the United States under the Science category.  So…

BRAD STEIGER:  Congratulations.

JIM HAROLD:  So, it just shows you how deep the interest — nothing about me, I think it’s just lucking out and picking a good name for the show — but I think it just shows that an interest in this is at an all time high, particularly at this time of year, but all times of the year.  Even in the last four or five years I’ve noticed a difference. It’s certainly fascinating.  And Brad, I’m quite confident that as long as you keep writing these great books, there’s going to be a fantastic market for them.

BRAD STEIGER:  Well, I will take you at your word.  From your lips to God’s ears.

JIM HAROLD:  Thank you so much for being on our show.  I’m guessing that there’s probably another Brad Steiger book in the offing, isn’t there?

BRAD STEIGER:  Oh, yes. Yes there is.

JIM HAROLD:  And I hope that we can have you back on the show when that comes out.

BRAD STEIGER: You certainly will.  I always enjoy appearing on your program, Jim.  You’re a very good host.

JIM HAROLD:  Thank you very much, I really appreciate that.  And I appreciate you listeners tuning in to the podcast. Have a happy Halloween!

JIM HAROLD:  Really, really excited about tonight’s show, and that’s because of our guest.  The gentleman that I’m speaking of is Brad Steiger, and he was writing great paranormal works before most of us were born, and for five decades Brad has been devoted to exploring and examining unusual, secret, and otherwise strange occurrences.  A former high school teacher and college instructor, Brad published his first articles on the unexplained in 1956. Since then he’s written more than 2000 articles with paranormal themes.  He is author or co-author of more than 170 titles, including Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places; Real Vampires, Night Stalkers, and Creatures from the Dark Side; and The Werewolf Book: An Encyclopedia of Shape-shifting Beings.  He lives in Iowa.  And Brad, before we started, I was looking at your website again at bradandsherry.com, and I was looking at all the great shows you’ve been on over the years:  Nightline with Ted Koppel, of course Georgy Noory, Art Bell, the Mike Douglas Show… legends.  So it’s always a little intimidating to have you on, but it’s always a pleasure. We love having you on.  Thanks so much for coming aboard.

BRAD STEIGER:  Oh, it’s my pleasure Jim, and you need take a back seat to no one.  You do a very fine job on your program.

JIM HAROLD:  Thank you so much.  I appreciate it.  Well, I have in front of me, looking at me — literally — there’s this kind of… well…

BRAD STEIGER:  It does look at you, doesn’t it?

JIM HAROLD: It’s literally Real Zombies, The Living Dead, and Creatures of the Apocalypse by Brad Steiger, and there’s a being on here — I take it it’s probably a Zombie — with yellow eyes looking right at me.  What inspired you to write this book, because it’s a fascinating subject?

BRAD STEIGER:  Well, it’s… there are a number of reasons.  First of all, as with Real Vampires, I see all the young people going to see Twilight, screaming when Taylor Lautner takes his shirt off, screaming when Robert Pattinson comes out in sparkles in the sunlight, and I think, (laughs) that isn’t what vampires are all about!  And we’ve had this with the vampire now since Bela Lugosi, that the vampire is some sexy creature that you meet at a ball, and he takes you out on the veranda and with just a little bite on the neck you can be young and beautiful and I can be buff and handsome forever.  And this is a pretty potent lure… so I wrote that, as you know — because, as I recall, you did a very fine show on it.

JIM HAROLD:  Yes, you were on and it was a very interesting show.

BRAD STEIGER: At least from my perspective, and thank you for saying from yours. But I wanted to do the same with the zombie.  When I wrote the History of the Hollywood Horror Film in 1965, I didn’t even have a chapter on zombies.  There was only a few zombie movies out, and they weren’t really that in-depth.

JIM HAROLD:  And then came George Romero with his Night of the Living Dead, right?

BRAD STEIGER:  Exactly!  And then came George.  He saved up $5.98 and he managed to shoot it on the cheap with a bunch of friends, and you know, the rest is history.  But it’s a history, Jim, that keeps repeating itself over and over and over.  You know, from the very first, I liked the movie, but I thought, you know, the Night of the Hungry Ghosts or something would have been better, because I looked at that and I could say, ‘okay, this is spooky’, you know, ‘and they keep coming, and we keep shooting, but those aren’t zombies!  That’s your grandma and that’s your grandpa and that’s your uncle, and why are they coming to eat you?  Why do they want to feast on your brain? Why?

JIM HAROLD:  When people — and again, you’ve hit the stereotype.  I think that most people think of Night of the Living Dead and all the subsequent sequels — I think people might be likely to think there are real vampires out there, but you’re here to tell us there are actually real zombies out there, and it’s not just celluloid creation.

BRAD STEIGER:  Exactly, just as there are real vampires, there are real zombies, and they aren’t what you see.  Romero just did another one called The Crazies, and you might as well have called it the zombies, because it’s basically the same thing.  We have a strange virus that comes from somewhere outer space, or maybe some laboratory… they left the door open and an infested rat ran out, or whatever… and it starts biting people, and they die, and then they come back and they want to eat all the living.  Now, I think that those of us — now, this is the point, I guess, that bothered me from the beginning, when I saw the first Romero film, though I’ve probably seen it ten times like everyone else — I think for both of us who were reared in the Abrahamic tradition, you know, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, we have been taught since six years old in Sunday school, that the one great gettin’ up morning people are going to rise from their graves and walk about.  So, right away, when you’re a kid, you’re like “I’m not going near the graveyard!” because the Sunday school teacher tells you that not even the angels know when this is going to happen, so listen, you can really get taken by surprise.  And I don’t know if anyone has ever made that point before, but I make it in the book, that I think that is why subconsciously we are both so repelled and attracted, and that’s where the apocalypse comes into the cover title, because I think there is something very apocalyptic about it, I think unconsciously, and maybe I’m only talking from my own fevered mind, here, but I think unconsciously we kind of tie that in, so I think throughout the book I make the point that not only are there real zombies from their religious expression, but I think it really had a run on us.  Now the first one, Night of the Living Dead, he wanted to be about vampires, but then he decided — rightly so — that it would have been too close to Richard Matheson’s classic, you know, I Am Legend.  At first, you know, and then it became the first movie and, really, the better one, with Vincent Price, called The Last Man On Earth.  If you ever have the chance to see it on some late feature, be sure you check that out. And then of course, the Will Smith one, I Am Legend.  But it’s too close to have them vampires, so he changed them… what can it be?  What can it be? Well, gee… can’t be a werewolf… Zombie!  Because it really hadn’t been dealt with before.  So now we have, essentially — and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, but we have a certain sameness to all of the zombie movies, but nothing about the tradition from which they actually do thrive, if you will, and how those legends came about, and how we have this combination of African religion and Roman Catholicism, that has given us another version of the resurrection, which they do a lot quicker than making the zombies.  You don’t wait until the trumpet blares and the sky clear on that great gettin’ up morning, you can have your zombie right away, put in your order.  Which a lot of rich, wealthy white men did, you know, around the 1820s.  They wanted some young, beautiful, light-skinned Negress, as they would call them in those days, on his arm at the ball.  And so there were zombifiers who would enspell these young zombie women.

JIM HAROLD:  Now, isn’t there a combination of different potions and so forth that can medically induce a type of zombification?

BRAD STEIGER:  That is exactly right, that’s what it is. Again, if you look at the side of the zombie actually being dead, there is that belief.  But in essence what we’re really talking about is a series of potent drugs — and I have a zombie potion, as you noticed, in the book, but I left out a couple key ingredients, but I think by the time you got through the list there you’d be so nauseated that you wouldn’t go any farther, and then I have some anti-zombie potions in there too that you might have better luck putting together, to prepare — but the zombifying reaches its peak in the name that almost everyone knows who is attracted to the paranormal, the occult, or the weird and unusual, and that’s Marie Laveau.

JIM HAROLD:  Yes, absolutely.

BRAD STEIGER: I don’t think anyone will argue with me in saying that she’s the most well-known zombifier in the world.  And actually what we have, then, as I said before, we have especially from the Aruba area of Africa, which is present-day Benin, in which they have a national zombie day once a year, national voodoo day and zombie day once a year, and the high priest struts about, but it came with the slaves, and the slaves of course were — not only had they been ripped from their homes and their families and their villages — but they had been ripped from their gods.  What can we do now?  The gods are home in Africa, and here we are — and I’m talking primarily now of Haiti and Brazil — so we have Spanish, French, and Portuguese dominance, and each one of those countries decree that every slave must be baptized Roman Catholic.  So their Shaman — now we say “witch doctor” but it’s actually a translation of “doctor” and then “witch” got thrown into it — but we say Shaman, it’s really a Siberian term which has come to be a collective for ‘medicine man’ or ‘medicine people’.  But the Shaman, or the doctor, or the priest — which is to say who they really are, they’re priests — not to worry, not to worry, the white man says we must worship Saint John, we must bow down to Andrew, we must… no!  It’s just, we call him Baron Samedi, now, and we call him… right down the list of primary saints, and gave them their names. And so, in public and in front of the white man, in front of the slave masters, they were attending mass. In their minds, and back in the jungle, they were having their own rites.  And it’s a combination of the two.  It’s interesting… we’re talking about Brazil. We’re going to have the next Olympics there. People are going to line up, and they’re going to dance to Samba– the rhythm of the saints. And what is the Samba?  It’s the original voodoo dance.  I can see people from all over the world who unconsciously are going to these various clubs, and they’re doing the Samba, and that is the rhythm of the saints, that’s what was devised in Brazil to appease the Portuguese masters.  Now, they had an advantage in Haiti, which was French until the revolution of the slave uprising, and in Portugal, and in the other South American countries, because the slave masters there let them keep their drums.  But, the Southerners in the United States and again just making a generalization, the countryside aforementioned were probably Roman Catholic at that time, and I think we will agree that the American South before the Civil War was primarily Protestant. And therefore — a little Calvinistic here — none of that drum beating; they were afraid in beating the drums and seeing the dance, and there were, as you know, Jim, a number of slave uprisings, that it would encourage a slave uprising.

JIM HAROLD:  If you look at the American South, there are whole sexual undertones and drums and rhythmic beats would engender a certain kind of sexual uprising, too, so I think that would seem to be a part of it, too, that sexual energy

BRAD STEIGER:  And then we have New Orleans.  New Orleans had been under French control, and we’re not certain when, but Sanite Dede, who was the first of the priestesses was brought over, we think she was brought perhaps from Haiti or Jamaica, then we have Marie Laveau, probably brought from one of the same two places, and New Orleans doesn’t have that kind of stricture, and they don’t have that kind of sexual repression at that time.  They have a much different attitude, as I said, Marie Laveau then could provide zombified, light-skinned Negresses — again, as I said, they were called then — for rich white men to go to their big parties and balls.  There they could dance freely, there they could drum freely, and the marvelous place where they did it was right next to Saint John’s church right in the square.

JIM HAROLD:  That’s such an interesting area, because of kind of the amalgamation of different cultures.  You have somewhat of the American culture, but as you said, extremely heavy French influence, heavy African, so it’s really kind of a melting pot, truly.  Now, when we think of Voodoo, you know, for most people Voodoo equals evil.  Voodoo equals bad.  Why is there such a negative spin on the religious beliefs of Voodoo, or the misconceptions?

BRAD STEIGER: Well, again, I think it’s because of the area.  Now, we have Brazil — just allow me to digress, or divert your question just a little bit.  But what do we have in Brazil?  We have… let me rephrase that.  Let me ask you a question: where is spiritualism stronger than anywhere else in the world?  Brazil?

JIM HAROLD: Yeah.

BRAD STEIGER:  There we have santisimo, which is grown up from the area.  We have a little bit of the native, and again we blend the African with the indigenous people of Brazil, and combined again with Roman Catholicism, again making the rhythm of the saints.  In New Orleans, then, we have that same kind of blacks, African Americans, who could buy their freedom easily in New Orleans, and make their own establishments.  Marie Laveau, in one of her lives, was a hair dresser.  Now she was in a very fortuitous area to pick up gossip about people.  Where — not to insult our lady friends, but — I’ve heard it said that there’s a lot of gossiping, and I can’t verify that but I’ve heard rumours that happens.  So she heard her gossip and she seems to know secrets about other people. That really catapulted her, and in those days who went to have their hair done?  The wealthy women, so again she gained the wealth.  And then there was Doctor John.  Now I don’t know if Doctor John really existed or not, but I include him in here because he’s legendary.  Doctor John was able to zombify you with just a wave of the hand or a flip of his fingers, then you’d be zombified. And even now they have certain areas in New Orleans, where if you sit on this one stone chair in Saint John’s cemetery, Saint John might appear and ask if you are going to obey him or not, but you don’t know what to say because either way you end up in either Saint John’s clutches or the deal is that you have to go to hell before he does.  But then when he goes to hell he gets to sit on you, so it’s not much of a deal to have Voodoo powers there.  But maybe I’m straying from your question.  We do have, of course, the negative aspect, because a zombie is, at its essence, a slave.  Someone who has been drugged, and remember in those days they surely didn’t embalm the dead, and they surely didn’t dig them six feet under.  So maybe under a foot and a half or two feet of dirt, after the individual has been lying there in what seems to be a death state, he is revived by another potion and then in this hypnotic trance-like state, there he is working a plow for the Voodoo priest who has now made a slave of him.  This still happens today.  I have an account from a gentleman in Miami who went to Haiti before the terrible tragedy that happened there.  But when Haiti was really a swinging place.  So he went over to Haiti from Miami, and he sees this lovely Haitian maiden who, seductively, ‘lets dance’ and he says he’s there for a good time and he’s dancing and then all of a sudden he feels this sharp prick in his shoulder. And he feels dizzy, he feels faint, ‘man I must be drinking too much of this rum’, and the next thing he knows, and he doesn’t know how much time has passed, he wakes up, he still has his nice white suit on, only now it’s stained and soiled and worn and ripped, and he’s working a hoe in somebody’s field. Now, he managed to gain enough consciousness and willpower to escape back to Florida, but he’s one of the lucky ones.  A friend of mine was in the Intelligence, he was working under cover in Germany after the war, and he was working on the drug detail, and he became acquainted with a very lovely Fraulein and soon their relationship led to the point where it was going to become intimate, and when she disrobed he saw the most horrid disfigurement on the lower part of her body.  And then she said that she had been zombified.  She had been put into the sex traffic trade; she had been just a living mannequin which could be used for any sex that individuals wanted.  Now here, as we know, there’s also another underground movement, underground Nazi groups — many many groups, perhaps, in Germany — and her father found out what had happened, and he got some of his boys to track her down and dealt extremely severely with those who had captured his daughter.  And she was now leading a normal life, but you know, but because of various unpleasant things that had been performed on her, she had a number of serious scars.

JIM HAROLD:  First of all, I must say to the listeners:  there’s so much in this book, I’m only scratching the surface here.  Now when we get back from this break, I want to talk about some more of the specific stories…

(break for commercial)

I was telling him during the break that at time I find what he has to say so fascinating that I become more of a listener than an interviewer, and we’re so glad to have him here.
Brad, you know, there are some great chapter titles here, and I’m just going to read off a couple and let you vamp on them and let you talk about it. And one that got my attention was “A Devil Baby of Bourbon Street.”  Tell us about the devil baby of Bourbon Street.

BRAD STEIGER:  Well, as I said, there are a number of stories of the Devil Baby, and it’s hard to know where these end, and a very fine writer — and I must say, at this point, one of the other reasons I wanted to do a book about Voodoo and zombies is that I really didn’t know that much about it, and unless I had received valuable help from practitioners, from priestesses, from those who are practitioners, priestesses and so forth, who attend the rites and been taught by some of the masters and mistresses of the art and the religion, I wouldn’t have been able to do this book.  So, this book relies very heavily on the research assistance I have received from those who are actually performing and are actually doing these things.  So, the devil baby of Bourbon Street is fascinating — as I interrupted myself, as I often do — Alyne Pustanio, who is a folklorist, not one of the practioners, as are some of the others that I will mention later, and I even have a section in the book — almost a directory — with their various numbers and so forth so you can contact some of those people.  She writes a story that tells of the devil baby occurring to a wealthy family who made a deal with devil, so to speak, one of the — and here we have religion, let’s face it, and those who are really sincere and devout and those who will take a little silver, will take a little gold, and do things they should not — and that is one story that even Marie Laveau said, ‘uh-huh.  I’m not messing with what you have done.  Don’t you realise that when you make a deal with Baron Samedi, with the gods, now you are in trouble.”  In that version, it is eventually Marie Laveau who has to kill the baby, because as soon as the baby is born, they know right away that something is wrong with this baby, because he starts eating his brothers and sisters.

JIM HAROLD:  That would be a clue.

BRAD STEIGER:  (laughs) Yeah, that would be a give away.  Then the other story of the devil baby is essentially that — and again, there’s always some curse or some involvement in which someone has transgressed one of the basic laws of Voodoo, and then brought this wrath down upon them.  In this particular version, the devil baby again starts gnawing on his brothers and sisters, and is essentially cast out of the home, but continues to haunt the area of Bourbon Street and Saint John’s, and hides in the bushes and jumps out at people and even today you have to be careful because that little devil baby with the horns and the tail… they tried to get him once, a group from the church, he would howl during church services, so a group from the church managed to capture him, and they took him to the altar and they nailed him to the altar and they cut him into several pieces and they buried him under the tombstone of allegedly Doctor John or one of the other great Voodoo masters, but that didn’t stop him.  He just put himself together again and he’s still roaming the streets, especially at Mardi Gras.  If you say the right thing to him at Mardi Gras, he might leave you alone.  But you have to be certain to phrase it just right, like “I really love New Orleans, I really love visiting here.”

JIM HAROLD:  I really wouldn’t want to upset him.  Now, you talk about curses, spells, and hexes, and I think when you talk about Voodoo, most people think about the Hollywood version of the Voodoo doll. Did you do any work on that, and is that a total misnomer or is that a real thing?

BRAD STEIGER:  See, this is again the reason, you know, I try — it’s the teacher in me — I want to try to straighten out certain matters.  Most of what we hear about Voodoo that is negative has to do primarily with people who have immigrated with certain superstition beliefs from Europe, and then projected those superstitious beliefs and fears on the Voodoo, and there is… there has never been human sacrifice involved, but there has been sacrifice of an animal, primarily a chicken.  And yes, blood is consumed, and the dance is danced until the loa — a loa which is a spirit — comes from Baron Samedi, or comes from Damballa Wedo, that is the serpent and the rainbow.  Damballa is the great python that coiled and formed the earth, and then looked over the ocean that he had just created, and said, “look at that beautiful rainbow.  That is Wedo, and I’m going to marry Wedo.”  So Damballa Wedo is really what we would call Voodoo.  It’s the worship of Damballa Wedo. So, in the doll, the idea of sticking a pin into the doll, that comes from a European black magic, probably from … you can’t pinpoint it, but probably from the area of Northern Spain, when we had the invasion of the Moors and we had a combination of several cultures, and the Witches — the true Witches — began to use the doll to pierce.  Now, when a Voodoo practitioner puts the pin into the doll, it’s not to curse anyone or to hurt anyone or cause any pain, it’s the key to keep the loa, which has now entered the doll during the ceremony, it’s to keep the spirit in.  It’s the complete reverse.  The pin keeps the spirit in, so you carry your Voodoo doll and your mojo bag, and it wasn’t Austin Powers who came up with the mojo, it was Voodoo. The mojo bag comes from Voodoo, and you keep your doll with the pin, keeping the Voodoo inside the doll.

JIM HAROLD:  I’m looking through the directory or the table of contents here, and I’m just going to read off a few so folks can hear some of these titles, because they’re great.  I know we’re not going to have time to go through all of them, and I do want to get to this Bobby Kennedy question, but we do have, you know, “How to Make a Zombie,”  “Witchcraft and Voodoo,” “Black Mama Couteaux and the Great Zombie War”…

BRAD STEIGER:  (laughs)  That’s one of my favourites.

JIM HAROLD:  “Recipes to Feed Hungry Ghosts” and it goes on and on.  Really, I do recommend this, if you’re at all interested in the paranormal or the topic of zombies, this is a great book to have.  One thing you talk about is a zombie maybe in more modern times, you talk about Hitler’s quest to zombify the world, but also you talk about… I’ve always been interested in the paranormal but also in politics and history and things like it, and I think most people would agree that one of the turning points in the twentieth century was the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and I’ve seen documentaries that have nothing whatsoever to do with the paranormal that say that Sirhan Sirhan, the gentleman who was convicted of being the lone assassin, that he was almost in a spell.  So when I saw what you wrote here, I thought it was very, very interesting.  Can you tell us what you learned in your research about Sirhan Sirhan and perhaps if he had in some way been zombified.

BRAD STEIGER:  Yeah, that’s going to be a tough one to cover in a limited period of time (laughs)

JIM HAROLD:  We’ll get into the highlights and then they can buy the book.

BRAD STEIGER: Yeah, highlights.  We have to start, of course, in Nazi Germany.  We have to start with the techniques that they were employing.  Fluoride was given heavily to the inmates in experiments to see how it would break their will.  It was Hitler’s belief when he invaded Poland that he would put large amounts of Fluoride into the water to make the people just zombies.  Hoffman was experimenting with LSD at the same time, and so they tried in the camps first to use LSD, which was unsuccessful, and so they thought to make super warriors, they wanted to make super warriors, so they gave it to a squad of German soldiers just going on a field march, but without telling them, they gave them all LSD to see how fierce and angry and ferocious they became, just like Vikings. Well, it didn’t happen that way, they ended up hugging each other and climbing trees and look at the beautiful flowers…

JIM HAROLD:  Just the opposite effect.

BRAD STEIGER: Exactly!  The opposite effect.  So they kept experimenting with this, and we have then individuals, before the smoke had even cleared from World War II, we had brought individuals over who then formed our CIA, which had been the OSS in World War II. These individuals began experimenting and in the book I have how the CIA, how the entire nation, we will hope the CIA always stays true blue and salutes the red, white, and blue, but we have right now the power to make large portions of the nation zombified.  With Sirhan Sirhan, there is strong evidence that he was programmed.  He liked to hang out at this one occult shop, and that was noticed by certain individuals.  He began to be programmed, he carried his Madam Blavatsky with him all the time; it’s the first book he asked for when he was put in jail.  He began to work with the occult, and certain people began to appear. Now I would suggest that he was strongly hypnotized, and a mirror was used, which was an ancient technique, also for him to stare into to hypnotize himself. He was programmed to do this.  As you said, he seemed, after he had shot Kennedy, he said, ‘what happened?  Who got shot?  What am I doing here?”  And then there are many people who are sighted, we have pictures of them, the girl in the red polka dot dress and all these individuals who just seemed to vanish, and they actually, I remember the trial.  They were going to use as a defense — now this is a matter of record — they were going to use as a defense in his trial that he was possessed by an Arab terrorist. Now, again, his little village, which I happen to have gone through, is not a place that would encourage terrorism, and because he had been a very gentle individual, how does he become the man who assassinates. Well, the other chapter — I have a number of chapters related to this in the book — of how this programming can be done.  Ted Kaczynski, the unibomber, was another one.  He was in college when he was seventeen.  He was selected, he was programmed, only it backfired again. He started attacking his professors and started attacking… the complete reverse of how he had been programmed to do.  There is that within us, I feel, a moral fence, that will fight evil.  But I’ve got in Real Zombies techniques that have been used by our own forces, even killing individuals and seeking to bring them back.  The Frankenstein monster ties into this too; we have this as our zeitgeist.  We have so many philosophies, thoughts, all these things going.  That’s why it’s not just “real zombies”, but also “the living dead” and “creatures of the apocalypse.”  These things I brought together, I hope, in some kind of cogent form.

JIM HAROLD:  And kind of to wrap up, bringing it full circle, you talked about the apocalypse.  Aren’t the return of zombies saying to us that we might be on the doorstep of the end?

BRAD STEIGER:  Well, I started, when I sat down, I was thinking and I went to see Shaun of the Living Dead, which satirized it…

JIM HAROLD:  That’s a sign of the apocalypse itself!

BRAD STEIGER: (laughs) and satirizes it, and then, here they are again… and suddenly, I thought, “wait. Wait, now.  Is some force, is some intelligence, trying to tell each other not that the dead is going to return and start eating us and needing our brains… what if the entire arrangement that we’re involved in is programmed?  Maybe the zombie is telling us something about the apocalypse?”  Now, you’re familiar with the Gaia theory, and that was very big and new age.  Gaia’s our mother, and now a professor’s come up with that maybe there’s an anti-Gaia force.  Maybe a species as created has its time on the stage, and then the entire earth is made barren again, and we start over with another species.  So maybe, maybe the zombies, and the fact that we’re so fascinated with the zombies now, maybe we recognize that they’re our evil twin.

JIM HAROLD: That certainly is an interesting thought. And an interesting, interesting 45 minutes or so we’ve had. Brad, you have such a great body of work over the last 50+ years.  Where can people go on the internet to find out more about what you have done, what you are doing, and what you’re going to be doing in the future?

BRAD STEIGER:  Well, they can go to our website, of course, that would be the place to start.  You can go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble to see the books, but if you want to read articles and some of the books and reviews and so forth, just go to our website, and it’s easy, at www.bradandsherry.com is enough to get you there.

JIM HAROLD:  And we will put links to this book and also to bradandsherry.com at jimharold.com.  Now, obviously, right now this book just came out and you’re right in the middle of the promotion of this, and I’m sure you’re going to be on a ton of media and radio shows and so forth. We expect to hear you all around the dial.  In addition to this, what else do you have going on?

BRAD STEIGER: Well, coming out in time for Hallowe’en is Real Monsters, Creepy Creatures, and Nightmarish Beings.

JIM HAROLD:  Ooh.  That sounds like a good one.

BRAD STEIGER:  That is being promoted at the great book fair in New York right now.  That’ll be coming out on Hallowe’en.

JIM HAROLD:  Can we have you back to talk about that one, too?

BRAD STEIGER: You’d better!

JIM HAROLD: I will do my best!  Brad Steiger, thank you so much for being on the show, it’s been a lot of fun, and I haven’t gotten quite through this book because, folks, there’s a lot here.  But I’m working my way through it and I appreciate your time tonight.

BRAD STEIGER:  Well, I appreciate always your attention and your ability to ask the right questions.  And I promise you, if you’re not quite finished, you got a lot of scares left in this book.

JIM HAROLD:  I’m looking forward to it, and listeners, thank you for tuning in to this edition and we’ll talk to you next time on the Paranormal Podcast.