Tim Dennis has been broadcasting and podcasting on the paranormal for over 16 years! He talks to us about his personal experiences and what he’s come to believe about all things spooky.
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TRANSCRIPT
TIM DENNIS: I look up the stairs, Jim, my hand to God, look up the stairs and boom! Shadow people running everywhere. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: That’s the voice of Tim Dennis, the longtime host of Darkness Radio. We talk to Tim about his lifelong interest in the paranormal and what he’s learned about the supernatural over his many years of podcasting on it on this edition of the Paranormal Podcast.
[intro music]
This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.
JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the Paranormal Podcast. I am Jim Harold, and so glad to be with you once again. One of the things that I love to do is to catch up with other podcasters – people who are in this realm of the supernatural and the paranormal – compare notes, find out their origin story, maybe how the journey has changed them, and why they do what they do.
There are few people out there who have been doing it as well or as long as Tim Dennis. He’s the host of Darkness Radio; he’s been in the broadcasting world for a long, long time. Radio before podcasting. In school he was a broadcasting guy, and he co-founded Darkness Radio with Dave Schroeder back in 2006. He continues to go from strength to strength, continuing Darkness Radio and True Crime Tuesday and everything that he does. We’re just so glad to have him on the show.
You feel like you have certain kindred spirits, that you kind of get each other, and I feel that way about Tim. We have a lot of commonalities, and it’s so good to have him on the line. Tim, welcome to the show today.
TIM DENNIS: Thank you, Jim. I appreciate you having me.
JIM HAROLD: Although he’s much smoother than I am. I flub a lot more. So you can forgive me in advance. We were going to bring on some editors to help out because I’ve got like 20 million shows coming out every week, and I said, unless it’s too egregious, I kind of go the live-to-tape route. I keep the flubs in. And there’s plenty to keep in. So they don’t have to worry about it.
TIM DENNIS: I do that as well. I do very little editing.
JIM HAROLD: I want to get better on air. I don’t want to edit the mistakes out.
TIM DENNIS: Yes.
JIM HAROLD: Warts and all, I say. But you’re a person who is the consummate professional. We were talking about no matter what, you’ve got that work ethic. Weeks off, you laugh at that. But I love origin stories. We’ll talk about the paranormal, but what got you inspired to enter the world of broadcasting, and how far back does that go?
TIM DENNIS: Eight or nine years old.
JIM HAROLD: Same here. [laughs]
TIM DENNIS: I’m actually a second generation broadcaster. My Uncle Robert, who’s in the Green Bay area in Wisconsin, who is now a circuit court judge – which gives you the true crime angle – has been my inspiration the entire time. He and I communicate by Facebook Messenger now quite often. I find it intriguing and fascinating because he’s now intrigued by what I do, which is strange. It’s very strange, Jim. It’s weird because I was so intrigued by what he did. He was the one who put the spark in me.
It happened actually over Thanksgiving, when my aunt at the time didn’t quite have dinner prepared and ready and on the table at said time, so he said, “So, anybody want to go see the radio station?” I heard some groans and I saw some eye rolls, and I was the only one who gleefully stuck my hand up and said, “Me, me, me, me, me!” Because I always thought it was little men in a box talking to each other. I had no idea.
The first sight I remember was the holiday morning crew that was working a little later that day. We were eating extremely early, by the way. It had to have been 11:30, noon-ish or so. But they were still in and they were bored silly, and they were in an area in a production studio just off the studio – you remember carts, right?
JIM HAROLD: Oh yeah. On my first radio job we had carts that were older than I was. And folks, envision this. If you’re old enough to remember an eight-track tape, they had the form factor and casing of an eight-track tape, but it was basically you could put a commercial on it and it would queue up and it would stop after 30-60 seconds, whatever the spot. Or some of the carts were longer. But that’s how they played things like carts or even music in some cases. So that’s what a cart is.
TIM DENNIS: In this time and age, they were still playing songs off of carts, those big carousels. You remember the carousels?
JIM HAROLD: Yep.
TIM DENNIS: So they were sitting in front of two big cart carousels. This was really old. They’re juggling carts back and forth, and it looked like a circus act. This is the thing that got me. I was like, “Wow, if these guys could have this much fun, if I never play pro football, this is what I want to do.” Well, this is what I ended up doing. [laughs] Because obviously I wasn’t a great football player.
JIM HAROLD: So you didn’t play for the Vikings but you ended up playing on radio, which is probably just as much fun.
TIM DENNIS: Exactly.
JIM HAROLD: So here’s the second piece of it. I didn’t have any relatives in the business, but I always thought that was cool, and I remember going on a field trip to a TV station and it’s like, “I want to do something in that building.” It turned out to be more radio for me than TV, but the same thing applied. I loved TV, I loved radio. It sounds similar, like seeing it and saying, “Wow, that’s for me.”
TIM DENNIS: Yes.
JIM HAROLD: But the paranormal, where did that come into view?
TIM DENNIS: Right around the same age, I’d say probably two years older, I had my first paranormal experience, which was an out-of-body experience where I watched my great-grandfather pass away from the ceiling. I’d always watched In Search Of… with Leonard Nimoy.
JIM HAROLD: That was my show, man. That was my jam.
TIM DENNIS: Yeah. But when I had that first experience and I didn’t know what it was, I actually thought I killed him.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my.
TIM DENNIS: Yeah, I carried that guilt for a long time. But I sat and I watched my Grandpa Ernie lying in a hospital bed, and I saw my Grandma Susie on his right, my left, and my Great-Aunt Patty on his left, my right. I’m on the ceiling and I’m floating there, and I see them both crying, and they’re rubbing his hands and holding his hand and talking about, in so much of a matter, “It’s okay to go. you’ve had a good life. We understand. We’re going to miss you terribly, but it’s okay to go see Mom. It’s okay to be with her.” The normal stuff you hear at the end of life.
I’m thinking, “No, it’s to okay for you to go!” As a little kid I’m thinking, “No, you can’t go!” because this was my buddy that I played cribbage with. So I’m thinking, what am I looking at? Then I see him slip away and I’m like, “Oh God, no, he’s dead!”
At that point I come to and I run into my parents’ bedroom. At the time, my dad was a program manager. You have computer programmers, but he was the manager over them. In their bedroom he had a phone – this was unusual, too. You didn’t normally have phones in bedrooms, but he had one because he got calls at all times of the night.
So I run into the bedroom, I divide them perfectly, a perfect baseball slide, jump in between the middle of them, and I wake my dad and I said, “Dad, Dad, Grandpa Ernie’s dead! He’s dead!” He’s in a dead sleep. He rolls over and goes, “No, no, no, honey, he’s sick but he’s not dead.” I said, “No, I saw it, I saw it!” He goes, “How did you see it?” I said, “I had a dream.” He goes, “No, son, that’s a dream. It’s just a dream. What time is it, anyways?” I think it was 9:00-9:30 in the morning. It was a Saturday morning.
I told him exactly what I saw. My mom at this point had woken up and she was listening. I’ve got tears streaming down my face. I explain everything to him; he says, “No, son, that’s just a dream. Don’t worry about it.” About 10 minutes after he gets me calmed down, the phone rings right next to the bed. It’s my grandmother.
My grandmother tells him everything that I’ve just described to him and says, “Honey, I’m sorry to tell you but your grandpa’s passed away. Your aunt and I were at the hospital last night. You know he’s not been doing well for a while, but here’s what’s been going on.”
He’s looking at me as she’s describing what happened, and I start tearing up again. He looks at me – and here’s my mom on the other side – this is early ’80s. If it’s not 1980, I think it was ’81. My mom was into the whole ESP thing at the time, so she’s like “Oh, my baby has ESP! Yay!” I’m like, shut the eff up. [laughs] And my dad’s looking at me like I’m a freak. He just goes, “Go in the living room and pour yourself a bowl of cereal and watch TV.”
I felt like I was being punished. I’m sitting in front of the TV and I’m eating Fruity Pebbles – I remember that – and I’m watching cartoons and I’m sobbing. And there’s nobody to talk to me about it. I just know I never want to see anything like that again. That was my first experience with the paranormal.
JIM HAROLD: I told you off air, and I’ve said this to other people: I still believe in the paranormal as much as I ever have. In fact, I think I believe more than when I started the podcast back in ’05. I believe more. I’m more convinced that there’s something to all of this stuff. Now, what’s responsible for it? I’m probably less certain.
Back in the day, I used to think ghosts are dead people, UFOs are aliens, Bigfoot is real and he’s an animal and/or she’s an animal, things like that. I had a lot more certainty. I’m more certain that there are these things going on, but I’m less certain of their origin. Can you talk to us about your journey from the time you started broadcasting and podcasting on the paranormal to today in terms of your belief system going in and where you find yourself today?
TIM DENNIS: It’s interesting, Jim, because when a lot of people were listening to Art Bell at home, I was board hopping some of those shows and listening to them overnight and getting a really good perspective of what I thought of the paranormal.
Then I started doing the show with Dave and I thought to myself, I can have a healthy amount of skepticism and sit and listen to this. I can put myself outside of it, much like when I was watching Leonard Nimoy, and think, I know what experiences I’ve had, but I also know when I listen to somebody on the air with Art or I listen to somebody with us, I can separate so-called “experts” from people who’ve had everyday experiences. And my BS meter, for lack of a better term, can go off and I can tell who’s having a genuine experience from who’s probably in need of some help. That’s what I thought, and I think that’s what our audiences at home probably think.
The older I get, I think, you know what? I think I was pretty arrogant and pretty brash. I think it’s pretty hard to tell somebody that they haven’t had an experience because I think the more experiences you have, it changes you and shapes you. It just begins to sound crazy. You begin to sound crazy as you’re going through certain things. There are a lot of people who would put you in a category that would say, “Maybe you do need medication,” although you just may be an experiencer over and over and over again.
Am I giving a free pass to everybody? No, of course not. But I was a pretty hardcore skeptic when we first started Darkness Radio. As we hit Year 17 here in January, I would say I’m a lot more open. I’m not more of a believer than a skeptic, but I’m right on that 50/50 line, and maybe edging over towards believer. I think that a lot of the things I’ve seen, especially I’d say in the last two years, have put me in that position. In the last two years there’ve been a lot of things, especially personally, that have happened to me that have put me over that spot.
Now, I still have not had a UFO zoom by me and wave as it’s going by. I still haven’t had Sasquatch out on my front lawn asking to have a picnic. I still haven’t had that grand experience that’ll put me over. But there’s little things. They say that these things happen not with a crash, boom, bang, but as a whisper. I think sometimes we don’t settle down enough as a society to see little whispers. We’re not patient enough.
JIM HAROLD: I think that’s very true, and I’ve had the same experience with things that are subtle, but they’re very meaningful to me. We’ll talk about some of these things that Tim has experienced and more about his thoughts on ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, right after this on the Paranormal Podcast.
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If you love the Paranormal Podcast, be sure to check out Jim Harold’s Campfire, where ordinary people share their extraordinary stories of ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, and terrifying encounters. Find it for free wherever you listen to this podcast. Tune in to Jim Harold’s Campfire today. Now, we return to the Paranormal Podcast.
JIM HAROLD: We’re back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our guest is Tim Dennis, and we are talking about all things paranormal podcasting. He is certainly one of the best and one of the longest standing.
Tim, you were talking before the break, and I thought you made a beautiful point there, that sometimes these experiences don’t come with a crash, boom, bang, but they come as a whisper. That’s been my experience, too. People say, “Have you had an experience?” I would say yes, I’ve had definitely two or three, I think, but they were not the full-body apparition. They were just a series of weird things that happened, extremely weird things, at the same time that convinced me it was a message from a loved one, for example.
Those are some of my experiences. I’ve told them many times on the show, so I’m not going to bore people with it. But what about you? What are one or two of these experiences, if you don’t mind sharing, that you’ve had that made you say, “Let’s take a second look at this; maybe there’s really something to it”?
TIM DENNIS: Oh gosh, where do I start? I’ve told this before, but the thing that fascinates me the most is I keep encountering shadow people, Jim. Shadow people are a weird phenomenon. People say, are they ghostly apparitions? Are they alien? Are they something else? I’ve run into them in different haunted places – the Palmer House right here in Sauk Centre in Minnesota, Ohio State Reformatory, Waverly Hills.
The one thing that’s happened to me over the years is I can’t get one to sit for me. I can’t get one to stay even in the same room with me. [laughs] I’ve told this over and over again, but it perplexes me. I can get them to disappear on command.
I’ll tell you a couple of the funniest things that have ever happened to me with shadow people. The first time this happened to me, I was perplexed. We were doing a trip to Waverly Hills, and I had told Tina Mattingly – actually, I told Chip Coffey first – “I’ve never seen a shadow person. I’ve heard of them, of course, we’ve talked about them on the show, but I’ve never seen one in person.” He said, “We need to go to the fourth floor, then, because that’s where we’re going to see one.” I said, “Okay, let’s go to the fourth floor.”
We try to be as quiet about it as possible because of course, we’ve got over 200 people with us. He goes up and he grabs Tina and he says, “Do you think the three of us can sneak up there? Tim’s never seen a shadow person before.” She goes, “Absolutely.” The three of us try to sneak up there and we get up there, and there’s a couple people that stray behind us. Of course when there’s 200 people and it gets out that the three of us are going to go looking for shadow people, stragglers are going to come with. I think there was probably five or six people there trying to run with us.
So we’re up on 4 and Tina goes, “There’s one right there.” I just happened to catch it out of the corner of my eye and boom, it starts running. Tina goes, “Come on!” and grabs Chip’s hand. Chip grabs my hand, and we’re running. I mean we’re full-out running. She goes, “I don’t get it. I have never seen a shadow person run like that in my life. Let’s go! Let’s go get this thing!” We are running, Jim, full sprint through the fourth floor, chasing this shadow person.
It runs around the corner – at the time it’s nothing but beams, and there’s this cutout of a sink and a mirror and a stool. It was a half-finished bathroom of some sort, or like a half-bath. The thing runs around the corner and boom, disappears into it and it’s gone. Tina looks and goes, “Well I’ll be damned, I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
I said, “I don’t know, but that was kind of fun.” It was kind of fun to run around Waverly back when I could run around Waverly, before the Charcot foot. I went, “Huh. I saw it. I can’t say I didn’t see it. I’ve seen it running.” Chip goes, “That was exhausting.” [laughs] Which it was.
Second time I run into a shadow person is on a different investigation. It does the same thing; it runs from me. I’m like, what is this all about?
Third time, I’m at Ohio State Reformatory and I’m sitting with people, and I have the Charcot foot at this time. I’m in the midst of the bone in my leg moving through the foot, so I can’t really go up and down stairs. I’m sitting at the bottom of the stairs with other people who have different issues, whether it be extreme arthritis or different maladies, and I’m sitting with them at the bottom of the stairs just keeping them company. We’re in the administration building. You know that big famous staircase in Shawshank Redemption with the big picture window?
JIM HAROLD: Yep.
TIM DENNIS: The rumor, or the story, is if you sit and watch it in the moonlight, you can see shadow people walking back and forth in front of the window – which is a sight to behold in itself. Worth the price of admission even if you can’t walk up and down those stairs.
So we’re sitting in front of it, and by this time I know I chase shadow people away. I just know it. I don’t know why, but I just know it. I have my head down so that – I don’t know why I think this, but if I look at them I know they’ll run away. So if I have my head down, for some reason they won’t run away.
A couple of the people in the group are looking up the staircase and they go, “Oh my God, look at that.” I go, “What?” They go, “Look, Tim!” I go, “No, just tell me what you see.” They said, “There’s shadow people up there. They’re walking up and down the little landing up there in front of the window. That’s amazing.” I said, “Are they coming down the steps?” They said, “No.” I said, “Okay, that’s great.” They said, “Look at it!” I’m like, “No.” “Why?” “If I look at it they’re going to run away.” They’re like, “No, whatever, that’s not gonna happen!” I said, “You want to see it?” They’re like, “Yeah!” I said, “Okay, watch.”
Have you read an X-Men comic or seen X-Men?
JIM HAROLD: Sure.
TIM DENNIS: You know when Cyclops looks up, flips up his visor and shoots that red beam out of his eyes? It was almost like that. I look up the stairs, Jim, my hand to God, look up the stairs and boom! Shadow people running everywhere. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Wow, that’s pretty cool. What do you think shadow people are?
TIM DENNIS: I don’t know. I wish I knew. I thought I knew up until – you ever have a guest on that, although they might be a little brash, they start saying stuff that kind of connects a different part of the puzzle?
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, definitely. I’ve been in the middle of an interview and I’ve gone, oh, that makes sense; I’ve never thought about it that way before.
TIM DENNIS: I had a young demonologist on last week by the name of Nathaniel Gillis, and although he rubs a lot of traditional demonologists the wrong way, he’s got a theory that’s not all that out there. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it, but he has a theory that demons and aliens are the same thing.
JIM HAROLD: Oh, sure. I’ve heard that before, yeah.
TIM DENNIS: Right. You and I have both heard it in the time that we’ve been around. But he links it to different passages throughout the Quran, the Bible, and he makes a very solid point. He’s done his research.
The way he describes it – I’ll just make it quick and then I’ll get back to the point – the way he connects it is that these creatures, as he puts it – he doesn’t say “demon.” He won’t say “alien.” These creatures will create the disguise that you see fit, whatever visage of evil that you want to see. If it’s a demon that you believe is haunting you or trying to possess you, then it’ll come forward as a demon. If you think it’s an alien that’s trying to abduct you, then it’ll show itself as an alien. If you think it’s a Grey, it’ll come as a Grey. If you think it’s a Reptilian, it’ll come forward as a Reptilian.
He has this as such proof because there’s been a client of his that said the minute it turned, the little image that it was portraying, or whatever it was, disappeared and its true image started to show. And it wasn’t that of an alien.
JIM HAROLD: A lot of people have said things like this. If you look at the work of Jacques Vallée, Keel with the tricksterism – I’m not saying it’s right, but it sure would explain a lot.
TIM DENNIS: Yeah, exactly. So to wrap that point up, when you say “What is a shadow person?”, it’s a good question. I’ve heard certain psychics saying a shadow person is just a spirit trying to manifest that can’t quite manifest. I’ve heard shadow people are also from a different realm. It could be a realm that’s just a step to the left of an earthbound realm. I’ve also heard that they’re somewhat alien.
So your guess is as good as mine. I just find it weird that they don’t like me. [laughs] I think that’s where I’ll leave it. But I don’t know. After talking to Nathaniel this past couple of weeks, he hit my reset button. Now I’m intrigued more than ever. I guess I have more research to do.
JIM HAROLD: That’s something that I love about what we do. I love the fact that we could be doing this for years, for almost decades now, not too far down the line, and still you can have a guest and talk to someone and it relights your fire.
People say to me – they don’t really say it, but I think they think it – “You got into this paranormal stuff because you saw it on TV and you thought there was big money in it.” First of all, there’s not big money in it. [laughs]
TIM DENNIS: Oh God no. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: For me at least, I can say that. But the other thing I will say is that I was like a six-year-old kid watching Leonard Nimoy. That little six-year-old kid didn’t know anything about podcasting, which didn’t exist, didn’t know this was something you could do for a career, didn’t know this was a way you could earn a living. What he knew, or he felt, was that the world was much stranger than just the stuff that is laid out for us. And that six-year-old little boy is still somewhere in here, and still feels that way.
So is it my business? Is it my vocation? Is it my job? All of the above, but it’s also a passion that has continued to burn brightly for… [makes garbled noise]… years. [laughs] That’s kind of neat.
TIM DENNIS: To add to that, too, Jim, some people wonder why Darkness Radio was started initially with a sense of humor. They’re like, “Why’d you throw a sense of humor into it?” You know why? Because first of all, I was raised Catholic. If you don’t have a sense of humor being a Catholic, I don’t know what you’d have.
But secondly, the other part of it is I’ve been through probably as many death scenarios as you could imagine in my life. If you can’t laugh at death, you can’t laugh at anything. And on top of that, that’s just my personality. There’s something about – whether it be an old-fashioned – I want to say Catholic funeral or Irish funeral, one or the other – where there’s got to be a morbid sense of humor about things, too.
When we do Supernatural News on Wednesdays, I throw a sense of humor behind it because sometimes you’ve got to laugh at the end. We don’t get out of this thing alive, Jim. I hate to spoil the end of the movie here. We’re not getting out of this alive.
JIM HAROLD: That’s right. Hank Williams, Sr. wrote, “No matter how I struggle and strive, I’ll never get out of this world alive,” and it’s true.
TIM DENNIS: That’s right. So you can either build up a huge anxiety about it, you can go through life worrying about it, or you can chuckle and have a good laugh about it. You can enjoy life while we’re here. You can be the life of the party or you can sit against the wall and be the wallflower. You can do one or the other.
I think most people have a goodhearted nature about it. We can speculate what this life is about, we can talk about it, we can be healthy about it – or we could just be morbid about it. There’s one or the other. You’ve got to pick one or the other road. Me, I choose to be a little happy about it and just say, hey, you know what? This life is a gift, so let’s be happy about it. Let’s be excited about it, and let’s joke about it every once in a while.
JIM HAROLD: I agree. I think almost any aspect of life, whether you’re talking about mortality, you’re talking about politics, religion, sex, whatever it is, I think almost any topic in human life should lend itself to a little bit of humor because life in some ways is absurd. [laughs]
TIM DENNIS: Yes.
JIM HAROLD: I agree with you. Now, I’m relatively serious on the shows; I try to inject a little humor here and there. But the thing is, I still feel you’re right. It doesn’t mean you have to be disrespectful or nasty – and you’re not, obviously. You’re very understanding of people. But I guess what I’m saying is I think that is completely appropriate, not only in the paranormal, but every facet of life. I think sometimes you’ve just got to laugh.
I always tell the story about the one and only time I got fired. You think of the funny aspects of it. It was crushing at the time, but there was humor in it, too. I think anything in life, almost, there can be – even pretty horrible stuff – there can be some element of humor to it.
TIM DENNIS: Exactly. We keep the humor for Supernatural News and on True Crime Tuesday on “Dumb Crime, Stupid Criminals.” That doesn’t go over into the interview segments, and it never goes into someone’s experience.
JIM HAROLD: Right, exactly.
TIM DENNIS: When people write in with their experiences, it never goes into their experience. That’s the thing. We keep it out of interviews and experiences. The only thing we’re joking about is either ourselves, because we love self-deprecating humor –
JIM HAROLD: I always say I like self-defecating humor, but yes.
TIM DENNIS: Oh yes, that’s a good one too.
JIM HAROLD: Yes, yes.
TIM DENNIS: Although there was one story last week about – did you hear the story about the woman at Belk Department Store who died on the toilet?
JIM HAROLD: Oh, no, I didn’t hear that one.
TIM DENNIS: They didn’t find her for four days.
JIM HAROLD: Oh, that’s unfortunate.
TIM DENNIS: That is sad. I would not want to go that way. That’s not the way I’d want to be found.
JIM HAROLD: Not at all. Well, Tim will still be here after this break on the Paranormal Podcast. We’re having a great time talking with Tim Dennis from Darkness Radio. We’ll be back right after this.
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JIM HAROLD: We’re back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our guest is Tim Dennis. He is the major DOMO over at Darkness Radio and has been doing this and doing it so well for many, many years. Tim, we were talking about that need to inject humor, and I think that is such an important part of being human. I agree fully.
But I want to switch topics a little bit on you. When it comes to being human, are ghosts just dead people? What do you think ghosts are?
TIM DENNIS: They have to be one of two categories. I think there’s live interactive ghosts that can talk back and forth with you, of course – the ones that we all hope we catch with a recorder or a camera or other device. But there are residual hauntings as well. I’ve caught hints of a residual haunting in Gettysburg and other places. Especially battlefields. Battlefields have deep residual haunting scars, or areas of war like the Civil War. And they’re there. They’re absolutely there.
There’s an EVP that Stacey Jones has – and it’s grizzly. Jim, it is grizzly. It’s of a rape and a murder. I don’t remember where she caught it. I know it was in Syracuse, New York. This residual EVP is something like 18 minutes long. I used to have it on a drive. I was trying to clean it up for her a little bit. I think I actually sent it back to her. I don’t know what I did with the copy.
But all they did was set a recorder in the back hallway of this hotel – I think it was a hotel, not a motel – and they just let it be and let it run. The fashionable thing to do with a recorder these days is to do the quick burst EVP, but they set and let it run as long as it would go, and they caught this amazing residual EVP. Of course, they had cameras in this hallway. There was nothing there at the time they caught the EVP. It was just this amazing spiritual scar that had happened in that hallway.
When they cross-referenced records, there had been an incident like that that had happened at that spot.
JIM HAROLD: It’s really interesting. Loyd Auerbach tells a story where people kept seeing a replay of a murder. They would go to this one place – he’d done a segment for the old TV show Sightings on it. Of course, the person murdered was dead, but the interesting thing was the murderer was still alive and in prison. I think we have this feel that ghosts are always dead people, and that might certainly be, and I think it probably is part of the picture, but there’s so much more to it.
And then Dave Schroeder has told the story – and I’m guessing he told it on the show when you guys were doing the show together – I forget exactly how it went, but it was these guys who went to this house and saw an old lady ghost, and then earlier, the old lady had reported these three ghost men came in. Something like that. It was kind of like they had seen the ghost of each other. That gets into the whole idea of time and so forth.
To me, it seems kind of complicated. It’s not necessarily cut and dried, but there it is.
TIM DENNIS: Yeah. I think if people were to keep in mind that everything you do is like a ripple in a pond when you throw a pebble in the pond – that everything you do energetically not only touches people immediately in the space around you, but has an energetic ripple from that point on. It has consequences. Everything has consequences in the here and now in the physical, but also in the spiritual. But people don’t think that deep, Jim. They really don’t.
If you were to think that each action you have has a reaction and a spiritual consequence throughout your life, I think people would be weighed down by the spiritual consequences. Life would be too heavy. So I think it’s a failsafe of the brain to say, “You just need to get through your day, so let’s go. Here we go.”
But there has to be a place where those actions are stored. Sometimes they’re stored in the earth, sometimes they’re stored in other places. And it just so happens that for extreme energetic actions, they are stored in the earth. Wars, murders, things with extreme anger and rage, they have to go somewhere. Where do they go? They’re not of the divine. They’re not of positive energy. They have to go somewhere.
JIM HAROLD: It’s interesting. I think that’s very true. We haven’t even gotten to cryptids and UFOs yet. I want to get all your paranormal philosophies in 45 minutes. [laughs] I’d like to do a little bit of a survey and see where your temperature is on some different things after all these years.
I guess next I will go to UFOs, because I’ve always been a big believer that in the topic of UFOs, there really is something there.
Now of course you’ve got hoaxers, which is unfortunate, but you’ve got hoaxers. Then you’ve got honest, good people who just are mistaking Venus or Saturn for space aliens. Then you’ve got the military component, which I think is a very real component of this. We don’t know what the military has, and I’m sure – I think when most people think of the height of military aviation, for instance, they think of something like the stealth fighter or the stealth bomber. You’re talking about 40- or 50-year-old technology. I think the U.S. government and other governments have things that would absolutely blow our minds that they’re not going to necessarily tell us about.
But even if all those other categories are taken into account, it seems to me there’s definitely something strange going on in the skies that’s not necessarily of current human doing. And I said current human because I just did an interview the other day with Dr. Michael Masters who said that they’re time travelers. At first glance it’s like, “Oh, come on, they’re not time travelers.” But then, kind of like your Nathaniel Gillis story, he made a lot of sense.
I guess what I’m saying is, what are your thoughts on UFOs and the uptick that we’ve seen, it seems like, in reports and with the seriousness that these reports are being taken?
TIM DENNIS: Your guest is I think onto more of things that you think. I love the people who say, “The government can’t have that kind of technology, come on.” You guys are going to hobby stores and buying drones that you couldn’t get 15-20 years ago. Where do you think that technology came from? It just all of a sudden showed up? Some hobbyist just went, “I’m going to make something called a drone”? it’s amazing how this technology gets out on the market. And I don’t think it’s because there’s an alien making this technology and throwing it at you.
There’s an interesting story, Jim, and I’ll try to make this as fast as I can. A couple weeks ago, U.S. Navy comes out and says, “No more alien videos. We’re done. It doesn’t matter.” The whole reason they’re doing this, they claim, is because of national security. Now, why do you think the Navy would put out a press release saying, “No more videos, national security”? It isn’t because they’re holding on to alien videos that they care about.
They’re holding on to those videos because it has either other countries’ tech that they’re aware of and they don’t want those countries to know that they know about it, or it has our tech on it that they don’t want released to the public or other countries to know about. They have, on these videos, technology that is going to blow people’s minds. They claim they can only fly so fast in a jet or a plane. “No, no, no, we only have technology that goes this fast.”
JIM HAROLD: They’re not going to tell you their top speeds.
TIM DENNIS: That’s right.
JIM HAROLD: I still believe there’s a nonhuman component, but I believe what you’re saying is part of the answer. I’m just throwing my beliefs out there.
TIM DENNIS: So did Roswell happen? Sure, I absolutely believe Roswell happened. Did we take some alien tech and maybe reverse-engineer it? We had to at one point. I don’t think human evolution with electronics and all that takes an exponential leap without grabbing some of that tech.
JIM HAROLD: See, I kind of had that discussion with Jacques Vallée – he was on the show a couple of weeks ago, which was fantastic. I loved speaking with him. He’s legendary. But I said that, and he kind of pooh-poohed it a little bit. But I’ve always felt, Tim – and this is such a great point, I think – that somewhere around the World War II or immediately post-war time, there was some kind of inflection point for technology.
We’re roughly the same age; I think you’re a couple years younger than me. But when I was a kid in the ’70s – and granted, my parents weren’t wealthy or anything like that, but we had one telephone. It was one of those old black dial telephones, Western Electric. You could have used the receiver as a murder weapon, and they often did on Columbo.
But the point is that we’ve gone from that in a relatively short time to – I have not the 14, but I have the iPhone Pro Max 13 in my hand. It is a worldwide communicator. You take a RadioShack ad from 25 years ago and it does everything in that ad and much, much more, and it has much more processing power than the computers that helped send us to the moon. How does that ripple of technological advancement happen without at least some little nudge? I’m not saying it’s all because of that. Vallée said it’s because of the integrated circuit. My question would be, could the integrated circuit have come from that?
So we are 120% on the same page with this idea of some kind of technological intake of some type post-World War II.
TIM DENNIS: There had to be a boost somewhere. I’m not saying that the tech was given to us. I don’t think it was given to us, but there might’ve been a boost. Just a small boost. [laughs] But yeah, I do believe in the ingenuity of humans. I really do. We’re not a dumb species. But there had to have been a boost somewhere. Someone was copying somebody’s paper, we’ll just put it that way.
JIM HAROLD: I’m with you. We don’t have much time left. You’ve been so generous, and it’s been such a great discussion. I’ve really enjoyed this today. Quickly – I’ll give you one that’s probably the one that I’m most skeptical about, but the jury is still out for me. Bigfoot. Okay, hear me out.
One day I’ll say, “I don’t buy the excuse that nature takes care of its own. We haven’t found any remains. We haven’t found a body. I don’t buy that.” Then the next day I’ll get up and I’ll remember I saw the stabilized version of the Patterson–Gimlin 1967 film, and I saw muscle tone. Then I’ll say, “Yeah, there is something to this.” Plus, not to mention, I think there are hoaxers and bad apples in any area of these studies, in any area of human endeavor, but I think there are some good people who believe in it and believe they’ve had experiences. I absolutely do.
So I kind of oscillate. For most things I’m more on the believer side. Your description earlier of being on the 50/50 line, that’s where I am with Bigfoot. What say you?
TIM DENNIS: I’ll tell you where I used to be and where I am now. I spent a lot of time in the woods as a youngster because not only did I spend my formative years in a more rural area, but I also did some hunting in my day. So I’ve been out in the woods. I’ve spent a lot of cold days in the woods, a lot of cold mornings in the woods, and I’ve never once heard a wood knock. I’ve never once seen a structure. I’ve never once seen anything. Like you, I’ve never seen a set of bones, I’ve never heard anything crash or be seven foot tall or come up to me, nothing like that. And I’m supposedly in an area, and hunted in an area, that had Bigfoot. Never seen him.
With that being said, I also have people I trust implicitly that have, and have taken pictures of these structures and heard wood knocks and recorded wood knocks, but gone into the forest not carrying a gun. So maybe that’s part of it. As I get older, I entertain the possibility that it’s very, very real based on those people that I know that I trust implicitly.
I wish I could, Jim – being I do have this damn Charcot foot, I really wish I could get back out there in the woods and sit and not have it be a danger to me, because I would like to sit out there once again, maybe out in a stand, and get a higher perspective and just be silent and be able to look and see if I see anything.
JIM HAROLD: Well, it has been a fantastic, fantastic discussion. The time has just flown by, and I’ve really, really enjoyed it, Tim. For maybe the one or two people listening who haven’t listened to Darkness Radio and have been maybe hidden away somewhere – or maybe, in fairness, people may be new to paranormal podcasts as well and they’ve just found this show and they say, “I’ve heard of this Darkness Radio. Where can I check it out?” Where can people find the shows and everything you do?
TIM DENNIS: Darkness Radio is available anywhere you get your podcasts. It can include Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, iHeart Radio, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. However, if you’re a little confused as to where you get your podcasts, just go to darknessradioshow.com. There’s a list of different places where you can click and add it to your regimen.
We also do a show called True Crime Tuesday on Tuesdays. That’s part of the feed at darknessradioshow.com. We have some websites as well. Officialtruecrimetuesday.com gives you a list of our archives from 2017 forward that used to be on Patreon, so you can listen to those shows as well. It’s kind of a lost part of True Crime Tuesday that I brought forward through the magic of the internet.
And if you’re on iPhone, like Jim is, there is a Darkness Radio Apple app in the iO store. If you just grab that app if you’re an Apple user, there’s all kinds of goodies on there, Jim. You can get the Darkness Radio show on there. You can have access to the True Crime Tuesday website. There’s all kinds of goodies. Even Jeff Belanger’s Legends podcast is on that app as well. Lots of good stuff.
JIM HAROLD: Very cool. Jeff is one of our favorite guests and one of our favorite people as well – as is Tim Dennis. Tim, continued success. Stay well, stay spooky, and thank you for being a part of the show today.
TIM DENNIS: I appreciate you asking me, Jim. I love being here, and I just wish we had more time, that’s all. I love visiting with you, my friend. Thank you so much for having me.
JIM HAROLD: We’ll do it again. Thanks again, Tim.
TIM DENNIS: Thank you.
JIM HAROLD: Great to catch up with Tim. Just a great guy and very, very knowledgeable on all things spooky. So make sure that you tune in to Darkness Radio.
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