We talk aliens, history and the paranormal on this week’s Paranormal Podcast.
Journalist Melissa Tittl talks to us about the upcoming Alien Endgame documentary streaming this Friday, May 20th on Discovery+
Diane Student and Kelly Rang join us to discuss their popular podcast History Goes Bump!
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TRANSCRIPT
JIM HAROLD: We’re talking about an important new documentary, Alien Endgame, and also about a great podcast, History Goes Bump. It’s all on this week’s Paranormal Podcast.
[intro music]
This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.
JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the Paranormal Podcast. I’m Jim Harold, and we have a great show for you today. Actually, it’s one of those double headers that we do from time to time. So much content we couldn’t just fit it into a regular hour-long episode, so I hope you enjoy it.
First up, we’ll talk with Melissa Tittl about the fascinating new documentary by Discovery+ coming up at the end of this week. It’s called Alien Endgame, and a great chat we had with Melissa. Also, Diane Student and Kelly Rang join us from a great podcast, History Goes Bump. All of this on this week’s show. Let’s start off with our discussion with Melissa.
Aliens – what are they up to? There’s a new documentary out that’s going to talk about that very subject. It’s from Discovery+. It’s coming on Friday, May 20th, and we have one of the main participants in the documentary today, veteran investigative reporter Melissa Tittl, and she is going to tell us about this documentary and about some of the things that she’s learned. We’ve spoken to her in the past on the shows, and we’re glad to speak with her again. Melissa, welcome to the program today.
MELISSA TITTL: Jim, thanks for having me.
JIM HAROLD: I guess my question is this. Have you had a long-term interest in the anomalous, specifically UFOs? I understand I think your dad was an Air Force veteran. Is this something you’ve had a long-lasting interest in?
MELISSA TITTL: When I grew up, we talked about a lot of weird things. It wasn’t like my dad was talking about aliens, but we talked about that there were things that were unexplainable in the sky. We talked about ancient civilizations that left behind possible ancient technology. We talked about different religious structures. This was a normal conversation in my house as a little girl.
My dad having a military connection, I think he looked at things from a very open perspective. He never told me that he witnessed anything; he told me that my grandfather was on a base that he had witnessed something. But he did believe that there was some kind of threat happening to our nuclear facilities, and he thought it was very strange, as a pattern – not that he had witnessed them, but that this was something that was happening over the course of many years, that these things would show up at our nuclear facilities.
JIM HAROLD: You mentioned the nuclear installations. In this documentary Alien Endgame, there really were some compelling cases of nuclear missiles actually going offline. That is incredible to me, the idea that this could happen. I’ve interviewed Robert Sallis, who is one of the people who has reported this, and you had another gentleman in the documentary who talked about this. Isn’t that chilling that aliens could just take our technology offline?
MELISSA TITTL: Yes. Again, it’s that whole idea that at any moment in time, they can shut things off. They’re either using it as a display of power or they’re also saying, “You don’t need this.” So even if you’re looking at it from a positive standpoint, somebody comes in and says, “Hey, you have all these weapons, but I can disarm them.” Okay, that’s great. However, that doesn’t make you feel settled. If they came in peace, why don’t they come down and have a conversation or some kind of interaction with us about that peace instead of just coming to show us that they can shut off our nuclear weapons?
I’m also a believer in the fact that I do think as a human race, we are at a precipice, and that is our problem as a human species. We have to figure out what to do so that we do not blow each other up. However, something coming in that we don’t really know what their capabilities are doesn’t make anybody on this planet feel more comfortable. Because what is their agenda? That’s really what it comes down to. I feel like this documentary really tries to interview people to figure out what that agenda is. Is the agenda to take over our resources, control the human species, disarm us if you will? Or is it to come in peace? Either way, if they did come in peace, please give us that olive branch. What is it that you’re coming in peace for?
When I interviewed Michio Kaku, who’s an amazing quantum physicist – he’s been on a lot of big shows – he had some really interesting takes. You’re thinking, why would this guy be talking about aliens? But he’s saying, look, we need more data. We need to understand what’s coming to this planet. If we don’t understand what’s coming to this planet, we can’t go and make friends with them. It doesn’t matter how much we want peace with another species in the galaxy; we don’t know what they’re capable of, and we don’t know their agenda. And here you have one of the top quantum physicists in the world right now having that conversation.
JIM HAROLD: A lot of people talk about “These are our space brothers and they’re here to help us,” but at the very beginning of the documentary, there’s a very striking case of a gentleman who had an encounter. He had been put under for regression, and he was almost crying. When he saw the location – you guys take him back to the location where this happened – he was crying. I don’t know, do space brothers do something like that, where it’s this traumatic memory? If they were really our space brothers, wouldn’t they be all sugar and lollipops and everybody would be happy and smiling after encountering them?
MELISSA TITTL: Yeah, I agree. Again, I don’t think we know what we’re dealing with. I go back to Michio Kaku saying we don’t know. We don’t have enough data. We don’t know what we’re dealing with. I think that man in particular, and I think a lot of people that have encounters, are at this moment in time thinking about their existence as a human. If they really encountered something alien that disarmed them, what does that mean for their species? That’s something we really dove deep into with that story with that guy.
As a journalist, I don’t want to say that it’s negative all the time because then I feel like I have an agenda. I think that just like people, there’s good people out there with good agendas – we have to think of us as a country. We go to other countries spreading democracy, and we come with an agenda to make things better. Does that mean they’re better? I mean, I don’t know.
JIM HAROLD: Sometimes it doesn’t work out very well at all.
MELISSA TITTL: Sometimes it doesn’t work out very well, sometimes it makes the world a better place. But the thing is, we just don’t have enough information. I think if we’re on more of the edge of caution and collecting data, more than just inviting space brothers to come in and talk to us, I think that we’ll be in a better place as a human species.
JIM HAROLD: One thing I thought you guys did that was really cool is you brought in a lot of ex-military, a lot of people who had had experiences while they were in the military. I’m a big admirer of the U.S. military – not saying that any institution is perfect, but I think overall you’ve got great people there who serve their country and allow us to have discussions like this. What are your thoughts about bringing in so many military people and the credibility they bring to this discussion?
MELISSA TITTL: One of the things that I really liked about this production – I’m in several different productions for different networks, but specifically Discovery – but what I really liked is they really wanted to take this military angle. They wanted to interview people that analyze things for a living. If you’re a pilot, if you are in any branch of the military, you have a protocol to do your job. You have a protocol whether you’re in the field or off the field. You look at things differently because that’s how you’re trained.
I think that what they did with this documentary was that they focused on, “Here are these people that are doing this for a living; why would they make it up? Why would they be afraid if they didn’t have a reason to be afraid?” I think that’s a really important point. You have all these credible people in this documentary saying, “Look, I’m a pilot. I’m a military officer. I know what I’m looking at every day, whether I’m in the sky or on the field, and this is not normal and this is not from Earth.” And that’s pretty powerful.
JIM HAROLD: One thing that really struck me – and again, everybody needs to watch Alien Endgame May 20th on Discovery+ – but one thing that struck me is the language that was used with experiencers in the military after they had seen something. I’ll use an example that was not in the documentary so we’re not spoiling anything.
Dr. Robert Jacobs, who actually was a professor of mine, is one of the big experiencers in UFO history and UFO lore. He was a film officer; he worked making films for the Air Force in the early ’60s, and he was in Big Sur, California. There was a test missile launch. He was in charge of filming the launch so they could review it and the performance of the missile and all of those kinds of things. And he literally saw something pop up next to it and shoot it out of the air.
When he came back, he was told in no uncertain terms – first of all, I don’t believe he saw it initially with the naked eye, but when they brought the film back, they said, “What’s up with this film? What were you doing/ were you messing around or something?” He said, “No, what are you talking about?” The commanding officer said, “Watch this.” Basically, the missile goes up, this object comes and it injects the missile – it looks like it’s injecting it with some kind of plasma or laser or something, and then it explodes.
Basically, what he was told in no uncertain terms – and it included a gentleman in a civilian suit, not just the military officer – “This did not happen. You did not see this,” and basically, paraphrasing, “You’re going to have hell to pay if you say anything to anybody about this.” He kept quiet for years.
That very much maps to the experience of people who this has happened to in the military. That’s what struck me. They all say almost the same thing. “You will not speak of this. This did not happen.”
MELISSA TITTL: Yeah. Having been in the space for a while, there’s this idea of this government conspiracy that the government knows everything that’s going on with the idea of aliens and aliens coming to Earth and all that kind of stuff. I think that they do know a little bit more than the public, but there’s also an element that I think they don’t know.
If you look at the Navy videos that were just recently released and all the documents that were released, I think they’re getting to the point where they’re like, “We’re going to release these because we want other people to come forward and give us more information.” I think we think that they know everything, but if those officers go out and talk about this thing that they have no explanation for, that means the government doesn’t know what they’re doing. That means our own military doesn’t know how to handle this situation, whether it’s shutting down our nuclear facilities or blowing up a bomb or taking it apart. That’s saying that our own government, our own military, can’t defeat something unknown. That’s crazy.
JIM HAROLD: Our guest is journalist Melissa Tittl. We’re talking about the new Discovery+ documentary Alien Endgame, and we’ll be back right after this.
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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 with Melissa Tittl, and we’re talking about Alien Endgame. I tend to think there are different factions. When we think about the government, we say “the government,” but what is government made up of? By people, and people are different. I think there are some people – if you look at the late Senator Harry Reid, he certainly was a proponent of getting the word out. If you look currently on the other side of the aisle, Marco Rubio I think is more a proponent of getting the word out.
But I still think there’s powerful people in the government who want to shut this up, and I’ll give you my theory and my proof, and you tell me what you think. I’m really interested because you’re a journalist.
Okay, last year when the UFO report comes out from the government, it comes out I would say roughly four o’clock on a Friday, something like that. Late afternoon East Coast. That is a classic strategy when you want to bury a story. It doesn’t work quite as well now because of the internet, but in the old days, you put it out right before Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Peter Jennings, and it’s not enough time for the news to do anything with it. Everybody goes away for the weekend, and everybody comes back Monday and says, “Wasn’t there some kind of scandal or something?”
They did the same thing with the UFO report, so my thought is there were people within that communications office or someone who told them, “Hey, put this out when it’s going to make the least amount of noise on the end of a Friday afternoon when everybody in the summertime is interested in having their barbeques and going to see the kids play ball.” What do you think about that?
MELISSA TITTL: I think it was definitely strategic. I think the whole release was strategic. I found it really interesting that it was published eventually. New York Times, all these big publications, trusted publications, by people that are not necessarily looking for UFO topics. This isn’t The Enquirer. This isn’t The Daily Sun or whatever. This is New York Times, Washington Post. Big story.
JIM HAROLD: Right, “all the news that’s fit to print.”
MELISSA TITTL: Right. And you know what people still say? “Oh, do you think that’s real?” They strategically made it so big that even after, a week later – I like to watch all the news installations because I’m not attached to one side or the other.
JIM HAROLD: Makes sense. That’s the way to do it.
MELISSA TITTL: So I watched a Fox News interview, I watched a CNN news interview, I watched something on BBC, and they were all kind of joking about it the week after they had dropped all the papers and New York Times had published this. They were like, “Oh, so what do you think? Aliens are real?” I’m thinking –
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, with some X-Files music on the bumpers and stuff.
MELISSA TITTL: Okay, wait a second, a huge publication wouldn’t publish that if it didn’t come from a legitimate source. You know that, right? Because then their newspaper is on the docket for being not legit. So there’s that.
Number two, the government, whether we believe what the government says or not, came out with it. I thought it was interesting that the journalists were asking, “Are aliens real?” instead of saying, “Why did the government release these documents? What are they trying to tell us? What’s their agenda?” It was just the weirdest thing.
And the only people asking those questions are the people that are in this field that have been looking for answers about if aliens are real and what their agenda is and what’s happening. Everyone is kind of shaking their head going, this is great that they released this, but why now? What is it they’re trying to get? What is it they want? What are they trying to tell us?
That goes into this whole story of like, are we under threat, and they’re slowly dripping it to us? The idea of slow drip disclosure, which I feel like has been happening for 20-30 years. This is another piece of that. There are still people that don’t want to even deal with it, and if the government is trying to tell us that there is something happening and they don’t really know what it is, but they can’t tell the public that, so they’re slowly allowing us to know that this could be real, that’s actually more scary for me because there’s a whole part of the population that still is asking, “Do you think aliens could be real?” even though it’s been published in all these major publications.
So they have a long way to go, but again, do they know that there’s some kind of threat and they’re slowly trying to tell us?
JIM HAROLD: Another thing, in addition to UFOs, UAPs, call them what you want, is the idea of objects underwater, USOs. You covered that in the special, and that’s fascinating to me because that goes all the way back I think to Christopher Columbus talking about seeing strange lights under the water. Is that a particular area of interest for you?
MELISSA TITTL: USOs? Of course. There’s this idea that things are coming here and interacting with us from the sky, but what if they’re already here? What if they’re in our oceans, they have bases? That gets into that whole conversation. And then if they have been here, then who are they infiltrating? One, why are they here, if that’s true? Two, who are they infiltrating and what’s their agenda?
I go back to Michio Kaku because I thought this interview was so fascinating. The one thing – I’m going to keep saying it again – he’s like, we need more data on these things. Well, if they are here, if they are under our oceans and a USO is a representation of ships that have a dock in the ocean somewhere, then they’ve been collecting data from us for a long time. And if that’s the case, then they already know what our weaknesses are. That’s scary.
JIM HAROLD: Do you think there’s a trickster element to this, that maybe they’re just messing with us? It’s like, “Let’s do this and see how they react”? Do you think there’s maybe something to that?
MELISSA TITTL: There could be. That’s more like a scientist. You have a job as a scientist or a biologist to study a certain species, and you’re like, “What would happen if I did this to the deer population? What would they do?”
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, change the stimuli.
MELISSA TITTL: Yeah. “What would they do?” Then you watch them. But then your agenda as that scientist would be what? What be your agenda? You’re studying deer because you want to see how limited amount of forest they can live in? You want to discover what their weaknesses are, what happens when they get afraid, what they do? But again, you’d be figuring that out for what? That their species stays healthy? Or that they need a certain amount of resources? You know what I mean? There’s always an agenda. It’s never like “Oh, we’re just doing it because it’s fun and we want to see what they do.” You want to see what they do because (fill in the blank).
JIM HAROLD: You talked about this drip, drip, drip of disclosure. Do you think in the next 20-30 years – I say that because I’m hoping to be around on the planet that long, another 20-30 years –
MELISSA TITTL: You’re not that told.
JIM HAROLD: I’m older than you think. [laughs] But do you feel like we will get an answer in the next couple of decades? I’ll give you an example. I was at a UFO event probably about 10 years ago, before the Blumenthal stuff in the Times and all of that. Things seemed to be stuck in the mud. I looked around the room and I brought down the average age of the group there by like 30 years. They were great people; I’m not trying to cast aspersions. But I thought, “Oh, this UFO thing is just dying off.”
And then these last few years, everything has changed. We see – I think it’s on Tuesday of this week that there will be open hearings about UFOs in the Congress. So much has changed. So if it’s changed that much in just a few years, how much more can it change in the next 20 or 30 years? What do you think?
MELISSA TITTL: I think if they keep on this pace, if they keep people’s attention on “This is real, this is happening. What do we need to do next?”, in the next 5 to 10 years we are going to see something huge. I don’t want to say something’s going to land here, but all those people that are still asking that question, “Do you think aliens could be real?” – that’s not going to be the question anymore. I think they’re going to catch up to the rest of the people in this space that have been talking about this for a long time and saying, “Oh, okay, so what is their agenda?”
If this is the pace, I think in the next 5 to 10 years, there is going to be something that people cannot refute.
JIM HAROLD: The one thing that I never understood, the arguments – and you don’t hear them as much, but the argument used to be “If people are seeing craft or so forth, that’s impossible because the distances would be too vast for ET to travel this far.” I say, yeah, based on our science. But if they are visiting here, by definition, their science is much, much more advanced than ours. And yeah, you couldn’t have gone to the moon and back in 1500. That would be utterly impossible. But in 1969, we did it.
The point is, to apply our science to their abilities really makes no sense because by definition if they’re visiting us, they’re way more advanced then we are.
MELISSA TITTL: Right. That gets into a whole conversation of understanding the universe that we live in. On the side, I talk to a lot of engineers that are either working for the government or they used to work for the government, and they say they have this technology that they believe is how the aliens get from here to there, transcending through space and time.
One engineer told me this, and I’m going to use this as an analogy. He’s like, look at it this way. For 200 years before electricity was discovered, we were all observing it. People were talking about it. “Could it be possible? How does it work?” There was a lot of different sketches and different scientists working on it. But then when it was discovered, meaning everyone stopped observing it and it became real, it changed the modern world. Meaning for some reason it got to a point where people stopped observing it and they understood it enough, and then electricity happened and we moved on.
I feel like we’re in that space right now. We’re observing this idea of quantum physics at a level that we can’t figure out on this planet, but people have been talking about it. They’re figuring out how to make that work, and I think once we understand that, we are going to understand how things can travel vast distances. That argument, when people say that to me, I’m like, every day there’s something new that comes out in a science journal. And you’re going to tell me “Oh, it’s because it’s physically impossible from the rockets we have from World War II”? I would say yes, then you are correct in that factor.
JIM HAROLD: Right. It makes a huge assumption that they’re working with our current science, which makes absolutely no sense.
On that topic, you talk about Kaku, who is certainly a very important figure, but then you have somebody like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who just throws up ridiculous excuses – I’ve heard interviews with him. But do you think that science and scientists are starting to open their mind to this? Because I sense that they are. It used to be it seemed like they were almost in lockstep, “This is impossible, this is B.S.” It seems like there’s more people like Kaku who are coming out. Do you have a sense that the winds are shifting in this direction?
MELISSA TITTL: I think they are. Kaku decided to come out publicly; I think there’s a lot of people privately that are trying to work on theories, trying to understand it, but they’re not going to come out. I saw an interview with Elon Musk and he was saying, “Aliens aren’t real. If they were, they would come down and say ‘hey.’” I thought, okay, you’re one of the smartest people on the planet, and I think you’re kind of like “I don’t want to think about it. I have other things to worry about. I’m trying to change the planet here.” That’s great, but in private conversations, I wonder if he really thinks about that.
So there’s people that just want to continue on the narrative of “I want to stay out of that conversation because I can’t see it and I want to focus over here.” And I think there’s also a growing community really talking about, “If this is possible, what are we capable of as humans?” Meaning something comes here that we don’t understand the technology; we need to understand that technology, and can we understand it? And does that make us a force in the universe? I think there’s a lot of scientists privately having that conversation.
I mean, look at Avi Loeb. Harvard scientist.
JIM HAROLD: Oh yeah, I’ve interviewed him. He’s great.
MELISSA TITTL: Fantastic guy. He came out with his book saying, “Look, I don’t care if you think I’m crazy,” and he has so much money behind him with a bunch of millionaires and billionaires and government officials working with him because he’s like, “We’re going to find out if this is true or not.” I think the public doesn’t necessarily know all of that. They might’ve heard of Avi Loeb; they might’ve read his book. But there is a lot of support. It just is kind of private.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, and hopefully those efforts will be successful in getting us closer to those answers that we all want. I think one of the ways to help move the ball forward is to increase awareness, which you guys are certainly doing with Discovery+ and Alien Endgame. Tell us how we can watch it and how we can check it out.
MELISSA TITTL: You’ve got to go to Discovery+. I just know that because I have been working with them for some time now, and they have so many programs on all of this alien content. So if you go to Discovery+, sign up for a subscription. Alien Endgame is there, but there are so many amazing pieces coming out about what’s happening, and great interviews. So I hope that you can check it out.
JIM HAROLD: I’ve been lucky enough to see it. I highly recommend it. Alien Endgame. It’s coming on Friday, May 20th. Make sure that you sign up so you can see it. Melissa, thank you so much for a great discussion on the topic of UFOs and Alien Endgame.
MELISSA TITTL: Thank you very much.
JIM HAROLD: Really enjoyed getting Melissa’s perspective and her expertise. I hope everybody will check out Alien Endgame on Discovery+.
Next up, we have a very fun and interesting interview with two great podcasters, Diane Student and Kelly Rang, and we’re going to talk all about History Goes Bump.
We’ve been speaking with paranormal power couples this year. We had Dan and Lynze from Scared to Death. We had Kat and Jethro from The Box of Oddities. We’re going to have Jerry and Tracy from Hillbilly Horror Stories. And today we have Diane and Kelly from the History Goes Bump podcast. History Goes Bump has been going on for a long, long time, over 400 episodes. I think they’re up to 430 now. We’re going to talk to Diane and Kelly about their interest in the paranormal, this journey, and all about History Goes Bump. Guys, welcome to the show.
DIANE STUDENT: Hey Jim, thanks for having us.
KELLY RANG: Yes, we appreciate it.
JIM HAROLD: Feels like déjà vu all over again. [laughs] I’ve got to ask, Diane, I know that you started – you’re right there with me; you’ve been podcasting for a long time. Have you always been interested in the paranormal? How did that happen for you, and how and why did you decide to start History Goes Bump?
DIANE STUDENT: Like you, Jim, I’ve always been interested in the spooky side of things, the weird stuff. I started off watching In Search Of… when I was a kid, which of course will age me a bit. That went into Unsolved Mysteries and Sightings and other kinds of shows like that. My mom was a historian in Colorado, so she ingrained this love for history in me and would take me to all kinds of old historic places.
One year – I think I was about 16 – she said, “We’re going to do something special for Halloween. We’re going to go to some haunted houses.” I thought she was talking about haunted house attractions, and I knew she wasn’t into that kind of thing, so I was like, “Okay…” Well, it turned out we were going down to downtown Denver, because I grew up in Colorado, and we went into these old Victorian mansions there, and we were told the different ghost stories that go with these particular places.
I just fell in love with that. I thought, this is so great. And that got me into looking at ghost stories with historic locations. So any time I would go anywhere, I’d always look to see if they had a ghost tour, because I think that’s the best way to get your history because you get the seedy side and the stuff that they don’t like to talk about necessarily. Plus you get the real history too.
Then when it came to the podcast, I had always wanted to be on radio, and back in 2009, Blog Talk Radio had just come on the scene and you could have your own live internet radio show on there. So I got on there and I was doing a political talk show and that kind of thing. I got bored with that, so in 2014 I was like, I think I’d rather do something where it’s more of a podcast. The live show would go to become a podcast, but I wanted to do something where I could choose the day and time and everything without having to be there at the same time for something live. And I wanted to do something different.
I thought, I always loved the ghost tours, and there’s not a whole lot of stuff out there like that. I had been listening to this show called the Paranormal Podcast. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: I’ve heard of it. [laughs]
DIANE STUDENT: And I really loved the stuff on there. [laughs] So I was like, I’d like to do something like that, but more focused on historical locations and ghost stories. So I started writing a blog, which was called History Goes Bump in the Night, which is a bit long for a podcast. So I shortened it down to History Goes Bump, and I started it in 2014 and it’s been going for seven years now.
JIM HAROLD: That’s great. That’s fantastic. Kelly, I know that you came along a little bit later in the run as being part of the podcast, but tell us about your interest in the paranormal. Does it go way back? And how did that develop into getting behind the mic as part of History Goes Bump?
KELLY RANG: It does. It actually goes way back to my childhood. I had a few different experiences when I was younger. Unfortunately, growing up I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to have anyone support me with that in terms of my interest. Obviously, I was also watching In Search Of… and a lot of the different TV shows. As it developed, your podcast was actually one of the first I started listening to. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Thank you.
KELLY RANG: Because I was already looking into that. Obviously, when you don’t have a lot of family members that are really supportive of that, it can be a little bit difficult that way. But I had a lot of different experiences and I really wanted to dive in.
In terms of jumping into the podcasting – I’m looking over at Diane – I was very hesitant. I am not a public speaker. I am not comfortable speaking in front of anyone. It took a bit of time. If anyone listens to our podcast, the bloopers at the end was my addendum saying, you know what, let’s break that fourth wall. Because I’ve always loved that listening or watching anything where people break that fourth wall and let them see the human side of you.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, and be a real person. That’s for sure.
KELLY RANG: Exactly.
JIM HAROLD: Go ahead, finish up.
KELLY RANG: Oh, I was just going to say I have been loving it ever since. It was a growing period, obviously, but I love the fact that we get to go and do investigations now. I had always wanted to do that and I just never had that opportunity. It’s just really fantastic.
JIM HAROLD: I wanted to talk to you about that, because I talked to the other couples – you guys are engaged, congratulations.
KELLY RANG: Thank you.
JIM HAROLD: I talked to the other couples about the dynamic of being a couple who happen to do a podcast together, be it paranormal or anything. What’s that like?
DIANE STUDENT: It took some convincing to get Kelly to get on the mic because she was like, “This is not something I can do. I’m not a public speaker or anything like that.” The way I do it is I do the research and the writing, and it’s mostly scripted. We do go off script and throw in comments here and there. I said, “All you’ve got to do is just sit there and read the script and you’ll be fine.” So the first few shows, she was really nervous and didn’t go too much off script, and now she’s gotten it down. She does great with it. She’ll throw her own stuff in. Like she said, we’ve been doing investigations and stuff, and I love doing those episodes because she can throw in all of her own content and her own feelings and observations about stuff.
KELLY RANG: And Diane’s a great editor. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: There you go. On those investigations, I was just listening to one of your recent episodes where you had an investigation. How do you pick the places that you go to, and why do you pick them?
DIANE STUDENT: Number one, we like to go to a place that we haven’t covered on the podcast before. We’ll look for something that supposedly has some hauntings going on there. A lot of places you need to go in with somebody who’s got access, so a group or something. A lot of our local ones, if we have a local paranormal group that’s going in, we’ll ask if we can join them, or they’ll be offering tickets.
The most recent one we did is a small town here in Florida and there’s an old opera house there. We’d seen that a local group was going to be hosting a ghost hunt there, so we bought the tickets to go and do something like that. There are a few times that we have rented out a place ourselves, like the Villisca ax murder house. We hosted our own ghost hunt there, and we did that at the Squirrel Cage Jail, which is very close to that as well. We’ll have some of our listeners join us for that kind of thing.
JIM HAROLD: What’s your philosophy of ghost hunting? I know some people are big tech people, they’re bringing in gear and cameras and meters and infrared detectors and Ovilus and all these different things, and then some people simply walk through and have a little notepad they write on, maybe a recorder. What’s your guys’ philosophy on ghost hunting? Are you big tech people? Or ghost investigation, I should say. Are you minimalists? Where do you come in at?
KELLY RANG: We’re about middle of the road. We do utilize the spirit box, and we do that with the Estes Method, meaning that there is a headphone that is plugged into the spirit box; the spirit box runs through different radio channels, the bands in the local area, and it moves through very, very quickly – a second at a time. We’ll usually run it backwards on the AM stations. We have headphones plugged into that where Diane will put those into our ears.
And then we also have earmuffs that actually are used for the gun range, for shooting practice. Essentially, she can’t hear anything. I’ll be the one asking questions, and we actually have had a really great response in regard to that. It’s really fantastic because she can’t hear anything that I am saying. We actually do this all the time, where I try to speak with her in the middle of it to get her attention and obviously she can’t hear me, so I have to tap her. I know that kindred spirits do that process quite a bit, and that’s actually one of the reasons why we started trying it.
We actually do that with the dowsing rods as well. I utilize dowsing rods. I have found a favorite set that I utilize. I just have a better connection with it, and I will actually do the Estes Method with those as well. And Diane will ask the questions and the dowsing rods will respond without me even hearing what the question was that was asked.
DIANE STUDENT: And being good podcasters, we always take in an audio recorder with us. That’s the number one piece of equipment so that we can at least keep track of what we’re doing, and then of course we sometimes catch EVP. But we’re really on a budget.
And we’ve found it doesn’t really matter if you have the expensive equipment; we really do a lot of that for the sake of the listeners because it’s mostly a feeling that we’ll get at a place. You can’t show that to people who want you to prove things with science. We’re open-minded skeptics ourselves, so I want to see some proof, and that’s really the best way to prove to people. You tell them, “Oh, I had a weird feeling going in somewhere,” they’re like, “Okay, maybe it was something you ate.” [laughs]
KELLY RANG: Right. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: What is the most haunted or the most spirit-filled place you think you guys have gone for the show?
DIANE STUDENT: That’s a tough one. We get a lot of activity at a lot of different places. I generally tell people the St. Augustine lighthouse is one of the best locations because we’ve been in there multiple times and always had something happen. So that’s a guaranteed “you go there looking for something, you’re going to find it.”
KELLY RANG: Yeah, I have a few favorites.
DIANE STUDENT: I’d say probably the Squirrel Cage Jail in Iowa was one place that we got a lot of evidence there. The fun thing for us with that one – it was the first time we ever hosted a paranormal investigation ourselves, so of course you’re nervous going in there because you’re like, “I hope something happens because these people are paying for it.”
KELLY RANG: Right.
JIM HAROLD: The pressure is on.
DIANE STUDENT: Yes. And then we also occasionally do the flashlight experiment. People have probably seen this on Ghosthunters and other shows like that where you turn the flashlight on and then you turn it back enough that it turns itself off, you put it down, and you ask a spirit to turn it on. You can sometimes ask them yes and no questions and they’ll turn it on and off. When you see it on TV, you’re like, “Is that for real or is there a way that they’re making that work?”
KELLY RANG: It’s the battery heating up, different things.
DIANE STUDENT: So we’re like, “Okay, we’re going to try that.” We went out and got our own flashlight for it, and this was the first time we were going to do it. I set it down and I’m like, “Oh gosh, I sure hope this really works.” We asked the spirit, “If you’re there, can you turn on the flashlight to let us know you’re there?” And it blinked on, and I remember I wanted to squeal with delight, but I also wanted to ask professional, so I came across as “Oh, thank you for lighting that up for us” while inside I was going “Oh my God, I can’t believe this really works!”
KELLY RANG: For sure. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: [laughs] That’s funny. When you’re tapping into these things, when you go out on investigations and you see something turn the light on, do you think you’re tapping into the dead? Or do you think you’re tapping into non-human entities? What do you think is turning that light on?
DIANE STUDENT: See, this is the question I love to ask everybody: what is a ghost? [laughs] My answer is I think it’s a variety of things. I think that it could be a human spirit. I obviously believe that we go on after this life, so that’s a possibility. I also think there could be entities, whether you want to talk angelic, demonic, something else that we don’t understand like a fairy, anything along those lines. It could be something that’s interdimensional. Aliens.
And then I sometimes think that we might have some kind of a time–space loop continuum that we’re crossing over each other. Like when people see something that keeps replaying itself, some people will say that’s the Stone Tape theory, it’s energy that’s been captured in a stone and you’re just seeing that. I’m sometimes like, maybe we’re actually watching something in history replaying because there’s a click there. We don’t understand how time works, and we also don’t know – maybe that woman over there in the Victorian dress, the reason why she’s looking at us kind of weird is she’s going, “Why are those women wearing pants?” because she can see us in 2022.
JIM HAROLD: There’s been a lot of stories like that. We just had one on Campfire where a woman saw her own doppelganger twice in the same day, and in both positions. I’m spoiling the story if nobody’s heard it, but she was a medical technician, a respiratory therapist. She was transporting a patient in the morning, looked up, she was in this freight elevator, looked across, there was a passenger elevator, and guess who’s looking back at her? She is. Later in the day, she’s getting ready to go home, gets on the passenger elevator, looks back – there’s someone transporting a patient, and that person looks up and it’s her.
There’s multiple stories about what you talked about, the Victorian lady, that example. There’s been various stories of that where – we had a guy on Campfire and he said when he was a little kid, he remembered seeing this hooded figure. He’s going through the hallway as this little six-year-old kid, he looks in his kitchen, and there’s a hooded figure making a peanut butter sandwich. Then in his teenage years, he’s minding his own business, he’s making a peanut butter sandwich, he’s wearing a hoodie, he looks out in the hall and there’s this little boy that runs in and out, little figure.
KELLY RANG: Oh my goodness.
JIM HAROLD: So you’re right. We don’t understand time. We don’t understand how it works. And I think reality – I’ve often said after doing these shows that I don’t know what’s going on, but (a) I believe something’s going on, and (b) I believe reality is much weirder than we give it credit for.
KELLY RANG: Certainly.
DIANE STUDENT: I agree.
KELLY RANG: And we are Christians. It’s one of those things where you really don’t know until you know, and we might not even care once we get there. [laughs] But in terms of the experiences that we’ve had, we’ve never had anything negative. Even in situations like at Squirrel Cage where we felt like we were speaking with convicts and people that had actually murdered someone, we’ve never had anything really negative.
Now, we always go into it very respectfully, and we always at the end make sure that we let any spirits know, “We respect you but you have to stay here. You cannot come with us.” But we’ve never had – who knows, maybe in the future. I hope not. [laughs] But we’ve actually had really positive experiences.
JIM HAROLD: Maybe it’s because of your attitudes. There’s people that go in and provoke and say, “If you’re here, come out and show yourself!” and I know you guys don’t do that. I can tell you would not do that. And maybe it’s like a lot of things in life: you get back what you put in.
KELLY RANG: Exactly.
DIANE STUDENT: You kind of think of it as you’re going into somebody’s house, and most people, when you’re going into somebody’s house, you’re not going to go in there and say, “Come at me, bro!”
JIM HAROLD: [laughs] Yeah, and somebody might just if you do that. Another one before the break I wanted to talk to you about – I’ve always been fascinated by history, and one of the most historical places you can look at are cemeteries. I know you recently did an episode on haunted cemeteries. Talk to us about that, because again, it’s one of those things – in our society, we tend to put death over here, like “Let’s not look at it, let’s not see it.” But you walk through a cemetery and there’s not much ignoring it. It’s there. Talk to us about haunted cemeteries.
DIANE STUDENT: I think it’s great; it seems like there’s a real positive death moment that’s been going on in the last couple years, and I like that because I think the problem for a lot of people is they’re afraid of death, so when they go to a cemetery, it just reminds them there’s one thing we all know for sure, other than we’re going to have to pay taxes: we’re all going to die. You’re reminded of that when you go to a cemetery.
For me, I’ve always loved the symbolism and the iconography that you see there. A lot of our cemeteries that we have, especially here in America, are garden cemeteries, so they’re made for you to take walks in them. Some of them have 200 varieties of trees and flowers and that kind of thing.
KELLY RANG: Beautiful.
DIANE STUDENT: They’re places that you want to go for that. It’s funny, Jim; I used to say that I didn’t really think cemeteries were that haunted because who wants to hang out with their dead body? I want to go check out things. If I’m dead and can move around, I want to go see stuff. I don’t want to just hang around with my dead body.
Well, now I’ve had to eat my words because we’re up to Haunted Cemeteries 22, and these are the favorite episodes for our listeners. They love it when we do these, and I just keep finding more and more cemeteries that have these stories connected to them.
Granted, a lot of them are legends, and I think that comes from we have a lot of teenagers – this is the way that we challenge each other when we’re young, “Can you stay all night in a cemetery?” or “Go up to a statue that maybe has been called the Black Angel and look into its eyes, and is it going to cause you to melt?” or something like that. These legends get developed over time that way.
One of the things that we try to really develop through not only our haunted cemetery episodes, but we also do a thing called Cemetery Bingo where we have people go in and you have a bingo card and you’re looking for different symbols – we’re trying to get an appreciation for cemeteries. We’re trying to get people away from vandalizing, wanting to go in and make sure that you keep everything looking nice. If I walk through a cemetery and I see a floral arrangement that’s tipped over, I’ll put it up. I don’t know who that person is, but I would appreciate somebody doing that for me.
JIM HAROLD: That’s very nice. That’s one of the most disturbing things you can see, when people vandalize a cemetery. In my area, there’s a town – it’s not been vandalized, but they have a cemetery that dates back to, gosh, the early 1800s. Then when I was in England, some of the historic cemeteries there, people born in the 1500s and 1600s – it’s amazing.
KELLY RANG: It doesn’t even compare. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, it’s really a whole new level. I want to talk to you about another place in England when we get back from the break.
We are today with Diane and Kelly from History Goes Bump, and we’re having a good time talking about history and talking about ghosts and being a paranormal power couple. We’ll be back right after this.
Enter to win Jim’s Spooky Studio Book Giveaway. Go to jimharold.com/giveaway for the rules and get yourself entered. Now, back to the Paranormal Podcast.
JIM HAROLD: We’re back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our guests are Diane and Kelly from the History Goes Bump podcast, and we’re so glad to have them with us. They’re such great fun and so knowledgeable. Just having a good time talking about the paranormal and history.
Speaking of history, I’ve heard people say something like the following phrase, and it kind of bugs me. People will say something like, “I like the paranormal, but I’m not so interested in history stuff.” I’m like, come on! This is the thing, man. This is part and parcel. This is part of it. The history is part of the fun. Can you really lay out for people why history is so important when you’re looking at the paranormal?
DIANE STUDENT: For us, there’s no way to be able to tell exactly who you might be speaking to, if you are speaking to some kind of human spirit, unless you know who had been there before. It gives you a way to be able to have a conversation with them if you know ahead of time what’s going on there.
When I first started the podcast, I would occasionally get people who would be like, “There’s so much history in there. Can’t you just get to the scary stories?” I was like, there’s plenty of shows out there where you can get a bunch of ghost stories if that’s all you’re looking for, but I just love history.
One of the nice things about some of the paranormal investigations that we’re doing in these buildings is we’re saving the buildings, because these are things that might’ve been demolished because they don’t have the money to upkeep them. If you’ve got people coming in that are doing investigations and paying money, it helps to upkeep these places. It just gives you that appreciation for the history that’s there as well. In your town, you’re not going to know what was there before if all these buildings are knocked down. I don’t know, I’m just very partial to the history, so it’s easy for me.
JIM HAROLD: I agree with you 110%. Go ahead, Kelly, I’m sorry.
KELLY RANG: In regard to the history, if you don’t have that, how can you be certain of the hauntings that are happening? You can always rely on scary stories that are word-of-mouth, but if you don’t have anything historically to back that up, where do you really stand? It’s just, again, word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth is good, people have their own personal experiences, but it’s also great to have the history of a particular location, especially if you’re going in and investigating.
JIM HAROLD: And they work hand in hand. I’m Mr. Campfire, so I love personal stories, but if you have that story and you know the background of the place, that just adds a whole other dimension. I couldn’t agree more.
There’s one historic place that I’ve been, and I saw that you did an episode on it last year, I believe, that I wanted to talk to you about. When I saw in the list of your episodes that you did this one, I’m like, ooh, I’ve been there! Westminster Abbey. That was so cool. I didn’t see a ghost, but I was just blown away. When I thought about Westminster Abbey, I thought about the abbey part. I thought about the beautiful windows and the ceiling and the pews and all that. But I didn’t realize till I got there, it’s a cemetery, essentially. An indoor cemetery. It’s a tomb.
I’m walking around, I look down, and it’s like, “Sir Isaac Newton.” I’m like, I’m standing on Sir Isaac Newton’s grave. It just blew me away. And it was beautiful, don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to insult it. I highly recommend it. If you go to England, you’re in London, you’ve got to see it. On the other hand, it was a little creepy knowing that all these bodies – it was just weird. Especially in the States, I don’t think we think of – I know there are examples, but we don’t think as much of a church, even a big one, being necessarily a graveyard. But that’s what Westminster Abbey is in many ways.
What did you learn about Westminster Abbey in your episode?
DIANE STUDENT: That’s true. A lot of churches have the graveyards on the outside, but yeah, Westminster Abbey, they have a lot of them in there. Poets’ Corner is sitting right there, and it’s got Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer.
JIM HAROLD: Big names.
DIANE STUDENT: Yeah. At first you probably would be thinking those are just nice little memorials, but no, they’re actually buried there too. I know one of the stories there that’s really cool – there’s a statue, and his name is Daniel Pulteney, I think is his name. This is in the South Cloisters. Let me tell you, I am so jealous that you’ve been in this building because it just looks amazing.
JIM HAROLD: It’s amazing.
DIANE STUDENT: He’s holding a book, and there are people who say that sometimes when they’re looking at the statue, it looks like he’s turning the pages of this book that he’s holding. That’s just really bizarre when you’re thinking this is just a statute.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, that statuary there is so well done, and it’s so lifelike. If you look at the eye, you can see where the eyelid is. It’s so detailed how these artisans did this. Just aside from this potential supernatural piece of it, the talent and the art that went into making these – I didn’t see anything move, but it looked like something that could come to life. It really did. Amazing.
DIANE STUDENT: And it really is full of all of these kinds of statues. Even some of the tombs, on top of them they’ll have the likenesses carved out.
JIM HAROLD: Yes.
DIANE STUDENT: I think one of the queens is buried there and she has her likeness on top of it.
JIM HAROLD: Yep. That was one I was like, that’s a queen. [laughs] Again, I know there’s been this little pandemic thing – and I don’t mean to be facetious; it’s been a horrible thing. I know a lot of people haven’t been able to travel. But if you get that trip over to the UK – or, of course, we have many listeners in the UK – Westminster Abbey, highly, highly, highly recommended.
There’s certain haunted places that get a lot of street cred, you hear a lot about them. Waverly Hills, and it goes on and on. But is there one that you guys – and it could be different answers for both of you – is there a place that you guys feel, “This place is just as good as any of those, but it doesn’t get enough publicity, people don’t know about it, they don’t realize what a great location this is”? Is there a place like that?
DIANE STUDENT: We’ve been to a couple of local jails that we have here that are just these little knockabout places that have been – oh, I don’t know, they’re about 100 years old. Nobody really pays any attention to them. They’re museums. We’ve had amazing interactions in there. We mentioned Squirrel Cage earlier; that one to me – it’s an amazing jail to see because the mechanism in the way that this one was built is that it has this circular rotation of all the jail cells. They’ll just move in a circle. It was at the time – even now, it would be amazing technology.
KELLY RANG: And it was, what, three stories, four stories high?
DIANE STUDENT: Yeah.
KELLY RANG: Cells upon cells.
DIANE STUDENT: Just to see that is amazing, and then we’ve had so many interactions there. I really feel like a lot of the places that maybe people don’t know – let me give you an example. We went to a place here called the Baker House. It had never been investigated before. We had a local group; they said they were going to go in there and investigate it. We didn’t even know what to expect. We went in there and the flashlights were turning themselves off and on like crazy. It was like these people had never been spoken to before and they’re like, “Wow, these people are in here to talk to us!”
So I think it’s actually better to go to places that aren’t as well documented or haven’t had as many people in there because they’re not saturated. And I know you’re fascinated with the same thing that fascinates me, tulpas.
JIM HAROLD: Oh yeah.
KELLY RANG: I sometimes wonder in some of these places, when you have so many people going in and out and investigating over and over, if they’re not creating something that wasn’t actually there.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I want to ask you about something. You brought up all these entities, and we talked about the nature of ghosts – are they dead people or whatever. One thing that troubles me, and you may have heard me refer to this before; I don’t know, but it’s really something that I worry about, actually: when people talk about spirits being “stuck.” As Kelly said, you guys are of the Christian faith. I am of the Christian faith, although I’m probably not anybody’s textbook definition, but I still adhere to the major tenets.
But I tend to think that the world hopefully, at some level, ultimately is a just place, and that if you’re Hitler, eventually you’re going to have to pay. And if you’re a decent person, and try to live a good life and try not to hurt anybody and try to help people when you can and do those things, hopefully you’re going to end up in a better place than Hitler. [laughs]
KELLY RANG: [laughs] Yes.
JIM HAROLD: Because I do believe in an afterlife. But I hate to think that there’s someone out there, even one person, who maybe died unexpectedly of a heart attack or a car crash or, lo and behold, a child who doesn’t know what happened, and that they’re stuck for eternity unless a paranormal investigator comes and rescues them and “makes them go to the light.” I really hope that’s not the case. What do you think about that?
DIANE STUDENT: That is always so tough for me. When I first started this, I was committed to the idea that there was no such thing as a child ghost, that maybe it was something imitating a child. As you said, I’m not a strong Christian; I don’t go to church every Sunday or whatever, but I believe that we have a loving Creator, and I can’t imagine him leaving children behind.
JIM HAROLD: Exactly.
DIANE STUDENT: So I’ve always had a difficult time with that. We’ve had so many interactions with entities that are presenting themselves like children. I had to back away from that. It’s hard. I don’t know the answer to that. Obviously, we’re not going to know. I hate to think that people are stuck in a location, especially if they’ve had something traumatic happen to them, because they’ve already had something horrible – say a murder. That’s already horrible.
And then for you to have to be stuck there – or sometimes you’ll watch these shows on TV where they’ll say, “The perpetrator’s there with them and they’re not letting them speak or letting them leave.” I’m like, how can that go on into a just afterlife? I don’t know. I don’t know what we’re interacting with to begin with. So, like you, Jim, I just hope that they’re not stuck. I don’t think we have the power to make somebody move on, either.
JIM HAROLD: That’s what I thought, too. I’ll give you an example. My mom died. She was 70, and she had had some health challenges, but I certainly didn’t expect her to pass suddenly. And I don’t think that she expected to pass suddenly. I talked to her, and three hours later she was dead. She would be the kind of person who would be – and this was nine years ago – surprised by her death.
That is to say, it wasn’t like someone who’s ill and knows that their time is coming or something. That’s still horrible, in just a different way. But I hate to think my mom’s stuck because she was surprised. And that extends to all those people. So that’s one of the more troublesome aspects for me.
I will ask you guys this: there’s certain things in the paranormal that I find more frightening than others. What things scare you guys the most? It could be the same thing or it could be different things. What things are really like “Ugh, I don’t want to run into that!”
DIANE STUDENT: I always say the first time I actually see a full-bodied apparition, I’m not sure if I will pee my pants, run, or just be very excited. I have to say, I have never been afraid going into any location yet. We’ve been into some pretty scary on the outside. I would be terrified to run into something that seemed like it was a negative entity that was physically wanting to hurt somebody. I guess that would be my biggest fear. But so far I haven’t been scared yet. Knock on wood.
KELLY RANG: And we have gone into places where it’s proposed that that was going to be a possibility. But we haven’t experienced that. In terms of one of my very first “investigations,” I saw a shadow figure. I was completely shocked by that, but I didn’t feel any negativity around it. And I think it just boils down to what you’re putting out there, your respect that you have. It turns around back to you.
I’m just going to roll back a minute. When it comes to people being stuck, spirits being stuck, I don’t necessarily think that that’s the case. I feel like they have the ability to come and go. When somebody passes, even before they pass, they so often talk about seeing family members. I don’t think those family members have been standing around, waiting for that person to pass away. I think that they’re able to come and greet.
And I feel like in terms of different locations, if there’s a spirit that wants to come and communicate, if they feel the opening in terms of a communication that they want to get their story across, or they feel that welcoming – I do actually get a lot of children that communicate with me. And I don’t feel like it’s a demon masquerading. I’ve never had any negative experiences. We always go into everything very positively. We always protect ourselves. We take our black tourmaline with us. We’ve been in areas where everybody says, “Oh my goodness, it’s so negativity, it’s so bad, it’s all this dark energy”; we’ve had some contact with spirits that definitely weren’t good, but overall it’s been very positive. I think it really boils down to your intentions.
JIM HAROLD: That’s great. That’s great that you’ve not had any negative experiences. Do you think sometimes the paranormal, though, is maybe in some cases – I’m not saying negative, but has a little bit of a trickster element? Maybe a sense of humor, where it likes to pull some tricks? Have either of you experienced anything like that or heard of other people that you know and trust who have experienced things like that? Because there seems to be a little bit of shell game going on with the paranormal, a little bit of “now you see me, now you don’t.” What do you think about that?
DIANE STUDENT: Absolutely. And I have to say, when I am a spirit, I plan on being a prankster. [laughs]
KELLY RANG: But not a trickster.
DIANE STUDENT: No, but I think I could pull some pranks on some people. I think there is definitely an element to that. And it could be that negative entities do put forward – just like I said, I don’t know sometimes when we’re interacting with what we think might be a child, if it’s not something else impersonating a child. So I think there’s a possibility. I know Kelly gets her hair played with constantly, and you’ve got to wonder if it’s not them rolling up behind her and going “tickle, tickle, tickle.”
KELLY RANG: But at the end of the day, we’re not ever going to really know until we know. And at that point we probably won’t care. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: We talked a lot about the paranormal piece; I want to ask you about one of your favorite places you’ve been not as much for the paranormal, but just for the sheer history of it, because it’s obviously the first word in the title of the show, and that’s a fun piece of it too. So just based on its pure history and being there, which place has it been?
DIANE STUDENT: That’s another tough question, but getting to see the Queen Mary over in California was so neat. This is what would’ve been considered a grand ship in its time, which is so different than the cruise ships we have today. Then you think about the fact that it also served during World Wars, so it has those double historical things going on there. You have the value of what it was like to be a rich person getting to sail across the Atlantic at this time on this kind of ship, and then also knowing that this thing had once been crammed full of soldiers who were either going to war or coming back home. For me, that gave it a lot of historical value.
KELLY RANG: It’s so funny because I grew up in Southern California for 45 years, and I’d been on the Queen Mary previously; I had never had the opportunity to investigate or tour it in the manner in which we did. That was a fantastic experience. But I would probably say the USS North Carolina because that was pretty amazing. It was one of the most decorated ships, and just imagining everything that it had been through and the experiences we had there – I would say that’s probably my favorite.
JIM HAROLD: Well, it’s been a lot of fun to speak with you guys. Anybody who’s done over 400 episodes of a podcast, I know what it’s like, and hats off to both of you for your efforts, and many more years of success to come. The important question now is, I’m sure that people have listened to you guys and said, “Okay, Jim, shut up, I want to go listen to History Goes Bump.” So where can they do that?
DIANE STUDENT: We’re on every podcast platform out there, and if you want to find us anywhere on social media, just head to our website, historygoesbump.com. We have all of the information there.
JIM HAROLD: Our guests have been Diane and Kelly from the History Goes Bump podcast. Do check it out. It’s a fun time. Guys, thanks for being part of the show. We appreciate it. And continued success.
DIANE STUDENT: Thanks for having us, Jim. We really appreciate it.
KELLY RANG: Thanks, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: What a great show that was. A lot of fun. I love what I do. I get to speak with great people about great projects and their great work. Always interesting, always fascinating. Thank you to Melissa and Kelly and Diane. All very interesting people in their own right, doing great work.
I hope that you enjoyed the show very much. If you do like what we do, please rate, review, follow or subscribe wherever you listen. Also, please tell a friend today about the Paranormal Podcast. It means so much. We’ll talk to you next time. Have a great week, everybody, and bye-bye.
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