The Exorcist STILL has a great impact on our thoughts about demons, religion and belief.
Joseph P. Laycock joins us to discuss this horror classic which celebrated its 50th anniversary this past Dec 26th.
You can find his recent book, The Exorcist Effect: Horror, Religion, and Demonic Belief, on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3vneXop
Thanks Joseph!
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Sadly, we lost the great Ian Punnett last month. In part two of this week’s show, we pay tribute to the great Coast To Coast AM host and re-air an interview with him from several years ago.
Rest In Peace, Ian. Our sympathies to Ian’s family and the extended Coast To Coast AM family.
You can find his book we discussed on the interview, How to Pray When You’re Pissed at God: Or Anyone Else for That Matter, at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3S56IpF
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TRANSCRIPT
Jim:
Happy New Year. We’ll talk about The Exorcist Effect and share our tribute to the late great Ian Punnett. Up next on the Paranormal Podcast.
Announcer:
This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.
Jim:
Welcome to the Paranormal Podcast. I’m Jim Harold. So glad to be with you once again and happy New Year everybody, and I hope it has been a great start to the new year for you and that you had a blessed holiday season. You may hear a little tinge in my voice. It was not the best holiday season for me and my family. We all got sick. I got sick the day before Christmas Eve, was sick through the whole break, the sickest I’ve been in a long time, but I am on the mend. I’m probably about 90% right now, and my family is still in the throes of illness, so nobody is in the hospital, nothing like that. So we have to be thankful and it’s only uphill from here, but I hope that you’re having a much better year than we’ve been having so far.
And today we’re going to have an interesting show. In part one, we’re going to talk with Joseph Laycock about The Exorcist Effect and really the far-reaching history and implications of that movie. And then in part two, we’re going to have a segment that I certainly wish were not necessary, but I feel it is necessary. This past December, we lost the great Ian Punnett who had been a host of Coast to Coast AM for many years. And I think that Ian knew that I was a big fan of his work. I shared that with him. I interviewed him a couple of times and we actually talked on the phone over the summer and he was just so nice to me and we did not want to let this situation pass without giving Ian a big nod. And also, I’m going to replay the second half of the show, an interview I did with him almost 10 years ago, back in 2014, and let the man speak for himself because he had a lot of wisdom and he brought a lot of insight, a lot of entertainment, a lot of information to many, many millions over the years in his work on Coast to Coast AM and I know he was an educator and a deacon and an author, just an amazing man, and he will be missed. So we wanted to give our tribute to him, and that’ll be in part two of this program.
And briefly, my New Year’s resolution this year is to call upon you to share the show. If you enjoy the Paranormal Podcast, please share the show today with a friend, and you could do that very easily. If you listen from a podcast app like Apple Podcast or Spotify, iHeartRadio, whatever it might be, you can hit that share button and text it right to a friend, and I’d appreciate it very much. But first up, we’re going to talk with Joseph Laycock about The Exorcist Effect.
And there’s people who come on the show and maybe you lose touch a little bit and then they send you a note and say, Hey, I’ve got a new book out. And you’re like, absolutely. Because they were just so fantastic the other times they’ve been on the program. And we’re talking about Joseph P Laycock and he’s the co-author of a new book called The Exorcist Effect: Horror, Religion, and Demonic Belief. And Joe is an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University and general editor for the journal Nova Religio. He is the author of several books that explore new religious movements, possession and exorcism and moral panic. And we’re so glad to have him on the show today. Joseph, thank you for joining us, and thank you for reaching out because this is a cool idea for a book. And it’s kind of on a momentous occasion, isn’t it?
Joseph P Laycock:
That’s right. Yeah. We’re having the 50th anniversary of The Exorcist on December 26th of this year.
Jim:
Yeah, that is amazing to me. It’s been that long, but this is still a movie that has a big, big effect in many ways. It really looms large. So why did you decide to turn, I mean, you’re a serious scholar, why did you decide to turn your attention to a piece of popular entertainment like The Exorcist?
Joseph P Laycock:
Well, I’ve studied The Exorcist since I was a graduate student. I took a class on American religious history and the novel The Exorcist was assigned, and the professor says, if you want to know what sort of the American religious landscape looked like in 1971, read this book because it shows kind of the American Catholics in this moment after Vatican II, where a lot of their rituals and traditions had changed very suddenly, kind of struggling to catch up to all the cultural changes of the 1960s. You could see people are starting to draw on other religions like the New Age movement and Buddhism, that’s all in the book as well. So I wrote a paper about that for the course, and that was one of the first things that I ever published. And then recently I was asked if I could do a new book about exorcism, and I said, I really want to do something on The Exorcist and other horror movies because everybody knows The Exorcist is based on a true story. What we don’t realize is how much The Exorcist is actually also changing our culture. So you couldn’t have things like Ed and Lorraine Warren if it weren’t for The Exorcist. And now those are the subject of a whole bunch of other movies, the Conjuring films or The Pope’s Exorcist, which came out earlier this year. And so what we’re really looking at is a cycle in which events inspire horror movies and then horror movies inspire more events.
Jim:
Now, if I remember correctly Blatty, who wrote the original novel, didn’t he have a fascination with a real life case that The Exorcist was based on? Is that correct?
Joseph P Laycock:
That’s correct. So that case happened in 1949 when William Peter Blatty was a senior at Georgetown University. And the order of priests who did that exorcism were called the Jesuits. Georgetown is a Jesuit university, so he remembers being in class and his professor, who’s a Jesuit priest saying, you guys are not going to believe what one of my colleagues is up to this week, we’re having to do an exorcism. So he was fascinated by it. William Peter Blatty, though, was mostly a comedy writer for most of his life. And finally he said, I want to do something about exorcism. And he reached out to Father Thomas Birmingham, who had been one of his professors, and he said, will you help me write a book about exorcism? I want it to be really authentic. I want it to be really accurate. And Father Thomas Birmingham said, I will help you because in 1968, the movie Rosemary’s Baby came out and the Catholic Church hated that movie so much. They said, we want to do a Catholic answer to that movie that talks about the devil from a Catholic perspective. And so that became The Exorcist.
Jim:
So at least initially it had the blessings of the church kind of to unmask Satan for who he really is. Does that sound right?
Joseph P Laycock:
That’s right. And in the sixties, there were progressive Catholics saying, I don’t think the Satan really exists. I think demons in the Bible are metaphors for sort of human beings’ own kind of sinful nature. And so when the Exorcist came out, a lot of more conservative Catholics said, I’m glad someone’s finally telling the truth. Satan’s not a metaphor. Satan is real, and people really ought to be afraid of it.
Jim:
Now, in terms of the impact of the time, I mean now we’re jaded, right? 50 years hence, we are jaded. We’re used to Saw, and before that Friday the 13th, we’re used to slice ’em, we’re used to dice ’em, we’re used to demons and all of those things. But that wasn’t the case in 1973 was it, I mean, it really made quite an impact upon its release, didn’t it?
Joseph P Laycock:
That’s right. And I teach a religion and film class where students watch The Exorcist and some of them say, oh yeah, that looked kind of hokey, or that looked kind of fake. But even today for pretty jaded Gen Z students, some of the scenes are still very shocking today. Not only the infamous crucifix scene, which I don’t need to describe on your podcast, but also the footage of just medical treatments undergoing a medical exam. So in 1973, there were lines going around the block starting at 8:00 AM to see this film, and people were fainting. People were sort of unable to watch it and had to kind of pace back and forth out in the lobby until they had the courage to go back in. One person tried to sue Warner Brothers who said, I fainted and I cracked my tooth hitting my head on a seat in the theater. And some people had to go straight into a psychiatric hospital from the film. And we have psychiatric journals describing this and saying, these people are suffering from cinematic neurosis. And the more that this was talked about in the media, the more people were psychologically primed to have these extreme reactions when they finally saw the film. So it was a really unprecedented phenomenon in American cinema.
Jim:
And some people say that this was, like Rosemary’s Baby, was a cursed film because there were injuries, there were deaths, there were a lot of reports of weird stuff going on. Is that part of what you looked into? What did you find out about that?
Joseph P Laycock:
Yeah, there were all sorts of very strange phenomena that happened on the set. There was a fire of unknown origin. No one ever figured out what caused it. There were accidents. Some of the actors were hurt during the special effects. One of the people working on the set sawed his finger off accidentally. The statue of Pazuzu that was shipped to Iraq by some mistake, ended up in Hong Kong. Can you imagine if you were unloading a plane in Hong Kong? There’s a box that’s not supposed to be there. And inside is this enormous statue of Pazuzu, how frightened that airport worker would’ve been. And William Friedkin was an extremely ambitious director. He wanted everything to be perfect, and so the movie was way behind schedule. It was millions of dollars over budget. And a reporter asked him, do you think your movie is cursed? And whether he believed it or not, Friedkin said, yes, this movie is cursed. That is why all these things have happened.
Now, some of the more skeptical historians have said, well, the longer the movie goes on, the more time there will be for accidents and other kinds of things to happen. Friedkin can ask Father Thomas Birmingham, who is in the film, if he would do an exorcism of the set. And Father Birmingham actually didn’t really do an exorcism, but he did say, I will do a blessing, a Catholic blessing over the cast and the crew if that will make you happy, and then Friedkin and told everyone we had to do an exorcism. That’s how bad the curse got on the set.
Jim:
Now, in the book, you talk about the unholy Trinity. What is the unholy Trinity?
Joseph P Laycock:
Yeah, so 1968 is a big year for horror. Prior to that, horror was not considered a very serious genre of movie. It was something that you saw at the Drive-through while you maybe tried to neck with your date or something like this. But in 1968, you have Night Living Dead, which was a very serious kind of social commentary in the context of the Civil Rights movement and race riots and so forth. And then you had Rosemary’s Baby. And so that was one of the first horror films ever to receive an Oscar nomination. And of course the year after that, the director, Roman Polanski, his wife was murdered by the Manson family. And so those two things got totally connected in the American consciousness, and the idea of the movie is depicting a cult of Satanists. And then there were actually really were people who were committing murders and talking about Satan. So that was 1968. The Exorcist came out in 1973 and was in some ways a Catholic response to Rosemary’s Baby. And then in 1976 you had The Omen about the Antichrist, and the Omen was the idea for the Omen came from an evangelical producer who said, I want Americans to know about the Book of Revelation, and I want them to know about the Antichrist. So it’s kind of the Protestant answer to Rosemary’s Baby.
Jim:
Wow. And by the way, also a cursed film. There’s some wild things that happened in coordination with that movie. I think somebody got decapitated, somebody who worked on that film. Greg Peck’s plane got struck by lightning, I think during filming as he was traveling back and forth. Just a whole range of weird things. And again, it’s kind of like if you buy a red car, you suddenly, everybody’s driving a red car. You’re tweaked for it. But it is interesting. It is interesting. Now, you talked a little about the Warrens. I’m assuming that’s the Warren Cycle. Talk to us about the Warren Cycle and the Martin Cycle.
Joseph P Laycock:
Sure. So the Warrens, as a lot of folks know, had been kind of ghost hunters going back to the 1950s, and initially they kind of styled themselves as paranormal investigators. There were also some elements of kind of the new age. Lorraine Warren, of course, said that she was a clairvoyant. And after the Exorcist came out, all of these people said, oh my gosh, I think I’m possessed. And went to the Catholic church. And the Catholic church, just like in the movie, said, we can’t really help you. We don’t know how to do exorcisms. You need the permission of a bishop. The Catholic bishop is going to say this is an embarrassment. So there was a big demand for exorcisms, and there was no supply. Well, Ed and Lorraine Warren were Catholic. They were traditionalist Catholics. They liked the sort of old rituals of the church.
And so they became sort of middlemen. If you need an exorcism and your local priest wouldn’t help you, the Warrens would step in and the Warrens wouldn’t do exorcisms themselves. Although Lorraine said that she could tell whether or not you had a demon. And Ed Warren said, I’m a demonologist. I can figure out why this is happening to you. And they could either find a priest who could kind of bend the rules a little bit to give them kind of an unofficial exorcism, or sometimes even find churches that had broken away from the Catholic church and get you an exorcist that way. But they basically became famous after that film came out. They went from being kind of sort of regarded as local weirdos in Connecticut to being really famous figures. And so now the Conjuring movies based on their various cases and adventures is a billion dollar franchise, and that’s billion with a B. And that couldn’t have happened without The Exorcist.
The other figure that we look at closely in the book is named Father Malachi Martin, who has had sort of a resurgence of his work. So he was a Jesuit, he was involved in Vatican II, was very highly educated, a very kind of political figure, and he had a falling out with his church and ended up basically leaving the priesthood and moving to New York City and then really struggling to make a living for himself. Although he was highly educated and a great writer and a great storyteller was working at donut shops and things like this. And after The Exorcist came out, he wrote his book Hostage to the Devil and said, these are true stories. I’m a priest. I really know what’s going on. Well, a lot of people read Hostage to the Devil, and it’s a very exciting, very scary, very graphic book.
But a lot of people said, I kind of wonder if Malachi Martin is making this up. He has a little bit of a reputation as a storyteller. And the things that he said about how exorcism works are not really consistent with things that the Catholic Church had said previously. But he presented a very streamlined model of how demonic possession and exorcism work. He said, for example, well, there’s these six steps you always go through in an exorcism. As far as I know, nobody ever said that before Malachi Martin. But now we see those six steps in horror movies. We see them in things like Deliver Us From Evil or the film The Crucifixion based on a true story by the same people who did the Conjuring films. So Malachi Martin, like the Warrens, got his big break from The Exorcist, and now his ideas are the subject of more horror movies. And the cycle continues.
Jim:
We’re talking with Joseph Laycock about The Exorcist Effect and will return right after this.
Announcer:
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 into Jim Harold’s Campfire today. Now we return to the Paranormal Podcast.
Jim:
Now, this next part, I was kind of there. It’s like I was at the war, well, I was a teenager during the Satanic panic of the eighties, and I went for a couple years to a fundamentalist church because it was tied to a school that my parents had sent me to. I remember we had a guy who came in and he was a minister, and it was over multiple nights, and he laid out his presentation on why rock music was the device of Satan, and he had slideshows and still, and he would play the backward masking, the backmasking, the songs in reverse and what they “really said,” and then it was all culminated. And I didn’t attend this, and I think it was because I was just such a fan of records. I couldn’t bring myself to attend it. But many people brought in their rock and roll records and they had a big session of destroying them.
I don’t think they burned them. I think they just kind of broke them and things, you know, to cast out the demons. Now, that seems kind of crazy now, honestly, I mean, I always have felt I’m one of those people who believes that there is evil and there is a devil. But I think this, I don’t think listening to an Eagle’s record was going to damn you to hell. And that was actually one of the ones he talked about, was Hotel California. I’ll never forget it made it an imprint, but that was kind of par for the course back in the eighties. The Satanic panic was real, and police departments would come out and say thus and so, there was Satanic worship going out in the woods. I mean, this was a big thing for people that weren’t around at that time, right?
Joseph P Laycock:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. The Satanic was a huge event, and there were cases like the West Memphis three case where there really were murders. There are actual murders going on. But because of the logic of the Satanic panic, instead of doing a proper forensic investigation, they just pinned it on kind of the local teenagers because maybe they wore black t-shirts or they listened to Metallica or something like this. And today we recognize that the West Memphis three should never have been arrested or convicted in the first place, or the McMartin Preschool trial. The McMartin family owned a very prestigious preschool, and they were accused of being Satanists. And the trial went for seven years. It bankrupted them, a vigilante burnt down their daycare center. And now we recognize this was a hoax, and these people were not actually satanists, but these horror movies made these kinds of claims more plausible.
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One of the shocking things about Rosemary’s Baby, if you watch that movie, the Satanists in that film are your neighbors, and they’re totally sweet, nice people, right up until the very end of the movie. And so it really helped people to imagine, gosh, what if my friends, if people I trust, my doctor? What if they were all satanists that the movie helped to imagine that, and then in The Exorcist, father Carris has a tape recorder going while he’s interviewing Reagan the possessed child, and she seems to just be making strange noises. But later when he plays the tape backwards, then you can hear the voice of the demon. And not only that, but now the demon is revealing its plans. It’s saying something like Fear the Priest. And so this movie put the idea in everyone’s head, demons, they record backwards. And actually, if you play say, an Eagles album backward, you can hear the confessions of the demons. That’s where the demons will really kind of admit what they’re saying. And skeptics say, if you play a record backwards, you’re going to hear a lot of strange garbled noises. And if your pastor tells you you’re going to hear something like Satan’s the source, that’s what you’ll hear, because you’ll be primed to make that sound out in the garbled noise.
Jim:
Yeah, pareidolia, and I think that actually was one of the ones, Satan is the source, now that you’re delving back into my memory bank of stuff I should have forgotten about a long time ago, and it even plays into heavy metal, right? All this plays into heavy metal. The vilification of Heavy Metal is the devil’s music.
Joseph P Laycock:
That’s right. And Black Sabbath started by Ozzy Osborne, it’s considered to be one of the first heavy metal bands. They take their name from a horror movie that’s an old horror movie with Boris Karloff. And the name Black Sabbath certainly sounds very satanic and evil, but if you actually listen to old Black Sabbath albums, it’s actually warning about the dangers of the devil. It’s warning don’t pursue this. Don’t mock God. But the name was pretty blasphemous. And so Ozzy Osborne became kind of a target during the Satanic panic. And in 1990, Cardinal O’Connor of New York actually read from the Exorcist in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and said, Ozzy Osborne is a satanic artist, and his music is corrupting America’s youth. And Ozzy Osborne actually wrote an open letter to the Cardinal saying, this is ridiculous. I’m not a satanist. I’m not doing these terrible things that you’re accusing me of.
And all of this controversy about heavy metal made fodder for more horror movies. So it led to some really funny horror movies like Trick or Treat, where a young kind of bullied high school kid finds he can play a record backwards and summon the angry ghost of this dead rockstar to help him fight off his bullies. And Ozzy Osborne actually is in that movie and gets to play a pastor who is condemning the kind of music that Ozzy Osborne actually makes in real life. So horror films became a way of talking about the controversy in the 1980s.
Jim:
Now, don’t you think it’s fair to say that some of these rock bands kind of played into it, though? They kind of like leveraged it a little bit, who we’re naughty, you should listen to us because they’re telling you’re not supposed to. Hey, even we might occasionally talk to the devil. I mean, I was like, it kind of reminds me of Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dogg plays into the weed thing, right? He’s always kind of wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And they just came out with a campaign, I think for Solo Stove where I’m giving up smoke. And then it turns out, I mean, they kind of milked that a little bit, didn’t they?
Joseph P Laycock:
Well, they did. And in fact, it led to a kind of toxic sort of race to the bottom where there were other heavy metal bands who said, no, we really are Satanists. You really should be afraid of us. We’re actually quite serious. And those other groups are posers. And then there was sort of a contest for a while by the nineties to see who could be the most extreme, who could be the most evil and destructive? And this led to a series of actual murders in Norway. There was a film about this called Lords of Chaos. But that is another kind of consequence of sort of where the Satanic panic led, because if you’re already sort of playing the angriest music you can make, if you’re already dressing like a zombie or something on stage, what else can you do to prove you’re serious except for actually killing someone? And so that did actually happen, at least in this one case in Norway
Jim:
In terms of, okay, so we had that first phase, everybody shocked, oh my God, the Exorcist. Oh, it’s terrible. Then you got into the Satanic panic, and then that kind of ebbed a bit. Where are we today in regards to the cultural impact of The Exorcist, and where we are in terms of religiosity, in terms of belief and so forth, in terms of that evolution? Where are we today? And maybe some threads we can trace back to The Exorcist.
Joseph P Laycock:
Yeah, sure. So I think the biggest change is that when The Exorcist came out in 1973, there were really only two cases of Catholic exorcism in American history. Only two cases that we were aware of ever happening. And what happened is once everyone saw that movie and wanted to get an exorcism, the Catholic Church wasn’t equipped to respond to that. But the Pentecostals and the Evangelicals said, we do deliverance ministry. We can cast out your demons. You don’t need the Catholic Church for that. And then the Catholic Church saw that and they said, oh my goodness, we could lose people. We’ve got to compete with our competition. So now the Catholic Church, instead of regarding exorcism as an embarrassment, they regard it as something that should be promoted that makes Catholicism special. So now there are exorcisms going on all over the United States and Europe.
In fact, if you live in the Diocese of Washington DC, you can download an app for your phone and try to get an appointment for an Exorcist by using the phone app. So it’s completely changed, and it all began with that film. The Satanic Panic, a lot of people associate that with the eighties and nineties and kind of feel like it’s over. In some ways, it is. I mean, if you now call the police and say, my daycare is run by Satanists, they’re probably not going to take you seriously, or they’re going to ask for some pretty serious evidence before they go and arrest anybody. But in other ways, these kinds of stories that some people are satanists are doing evil rituals, those are very much still part of our culture. So one of the things that we look at in the last chapter of the book are claims about things like Adrenochrome, that there are people who torture children and harvest a chemical called Adrenochrome from their blood.
This is totally false. There really is a chemical called Adrenochrome, but you can get it from a laboratory if you need some adrenochrome for some reason, it doesn’t really do anything. You can just order it from a laboratory. It’s legal and it’s very cheap to manufacture. It costs a few dollars, but the idea that it can only be harvested from torturing people and Satanic rituals comes from the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which came out in the 1990s. And so we’re still seeing these kinds of rumors, and those rumors are still very much informed by movies.
Jim:
I wanted to touch on one thing before we go. I mean, some of the actors weren’t, they affected long-term by being in this movie? I mean, physical injuries, maybe some, I think Linda Blair had to go to therapy if remember correctly afterwards. And actually that really watching that movie now, I think that’s what shocks me the most, because I’m looking at Linda Blair and I’m like, she shouldn’t really be doing this. She’s a kid. She shouldn’t be subjected to this. I mean, it’s as a piece of art. It is a great movie. It is a great movie. But watching Linda Blair, I’m like, what was she 14, 15 years old? I’m like, she shouldn’t be doing all this.
Joseph P Laycock:
Oh, I think that she was as young as 11 or something.
Jim:
Oh my, okay.
Joseph P Laycock:
Casting her, and William Freakin wanted her to read the entire novel, the Exorcist, and not just her, but a bunch of other young girls all had to read this. And then he asks, do you understand it? And she said, yeah, it’s about a girl who gets possessed and does bad things. And he says, well, what kind of bad things? And she says, well, she kills somebody and she does something with a crucifix. Friedkin did actually buy her a pony once the recordings were over. But there were all kinds of rumors about her for the rest of her life that she had gone insane or that she really was possessed, or that her parents practiced witchcraft or something like this. Chris MacNeil, the character Chris MacNeil, was supposedly based on Shirley Maclaine. So some people said, Shirley Maclaine’s daughter is actually possessed. And she complained about that. And then Friedkin wanted everything to be as realistic as possible. So in the scenes where people are being sort of thrown around the bedroom, he had these wire rigs that would sort of fling people around the set as quickly as possible. And some of the actors said that they were permanently injured by that, they had permanent damage to their spines. But for Friedkin, he said, when you scream it’s real, you can really, the pain
Jim:
The end justified the means, I guess. Yeah, because I heard, and I don’t know if it’s true, Ellen Burstyn and both Linda Blair had pretty significant injuries, if I’m not mistaken.
Joseph P Laycock:
That’s right. Because they both have to do these wire stunts, right? And Friedkin would do things like use gigantic air conditioners to lower the temperature on set to well below zero. He would supposedly fire a gun randomly just so that everybody would be very nervous, and he liked to cast real people. So a lot of the priests in that movie are actual priests. The priest who plays Father Dyer was actually a drama teacher at a Jesuit high school who got to be in the film. And at the end of the film, father Karras has fallen down the stairs, and Father Dyer sort of cradles his dead body, and Friedkin told him, this is your friend and they’re dead. You don’t look shocked enough. And then Friedkin just slapped him across the face and said, there, that’s the look I want. Now you look shocked. So priests were actually harmed in the filming of The Exorcist.
Jim:
Wow. Well, I knew he had done the French Connection I think before this, which made him probably a very hot director at the time, but I didn’t know he went to such extremes. My goodness. Do you think we’ll still be talking about The Exorcist 25 or 50 years from now? I probably won’t be talking about it 50 years from now because I’ll be elsewhere, but do you think people will be talking about The Exorcist 50 years from now?
Joseph P Laycock:
I think we probably will. I think a really great horror movie can have that kind of lifespan. I recently saw a performance of Nosferatu with live music, and that film is from the 1920s. And for this new sequel to The Exorcist, the studio paid $400 million to get the license to make an Exorcist sequel. And the only way they can ever make that kind of money back is if they make 10 more sequels. So we’re probably going to be seeing a lot more Exorcist movies in the years ahead.
Jim:
It’s the Exorcist universe. Well, if you’re interested in classic horror movies and the implications for wider belief, I would highly recommend it. The Exorcist Effect: Horror, Religion, and Demonic Belief. Joseph, where can people find the book?
Joseph P Laycock:
The book is from Oxford University Press, so you can find it on Amazon or you can go straight to the Oxford University press website and purchase it there.
Jim:
Excellent. Everybody, Joseph’s always great, highly recommend his books and we hope to speak with him again. The book again is The Exorcist Effect: Horror, Religion, and Demonic Belief. We’ve been talking with Joseph P Laycock, the co-author. Joseph, thank you for taking time today.
Joseph P Laycock:
It’s always a pleasure. Great to be on your show.
Jim:
Joseph is always a great guest, always has such interesting things to say. And up next on the show is our tribute to Ian Punnett, the late great host of Coast to Coast AM who we lost just this past month. We’ll be back with it right after this.
Announcer:
You are listening to the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.
Jim:
Now for our tribute to the late great Ian Punnett. I was shocked and saddened to learn of his death last month as many millions of others were. And Ian was a different kind of host. Ian had intrinsic value many times with interview shows, podcasts, radio shows or whatever. The host is kind of a fill in the blank, right? It’s just somebody you can plug in who can ask questions of the guest, and the guest should be the important person in an interview show. But Ian was a great thinker. He was a host who had intrinsic value in and of himself, much like an Art Bell, and he will be missed, and I hope the good folks over at Coast to Coast and our sympathies to them, and of course with Ian’s family, is that they will replay those shows and we will get to hear that wit and wisdom again.
And in addition to all of his radio work and his educational work, and he was a deacon in the Episcopal Church, he was also an author back in 2014. He joined me to talk about his new book at the time, and there’s a lot of interesting content and information there to set the stage. At this point of his career, Ian had left Coast to Coast because of hearing issues, tinnitus and so forth. He did end up returning, thankfully. Also, this was before the passing of Art Bell because we talk about Art and Coast to Coast in general. So that is the stage. It is 2014, and I got the opportunity to speak to one of my idols, Ian Punnett. Rest in peace, sir.
Well, for many, many years, Ian was weekend host on Coast to Coast, heard across the country on hundreds of affiliates and stepped down from that position last year. But I wanted to catch up with you, Ian, and talk to you about your experience on coast to coast. Again, remind people why you left, tell us how you’re doing and the other projects you’re working on that are also very, very exciting. I guess we’ll start off with, we’ll talk about Coast to Coast AM a little bit. How did you get into that? Because I know you had been a radio host previously, but that’s an interesting spot to land at. How did you get involved with Coast to Coast AM?
Ian Punnett:
I think because I’ve always been a bit of a square peg in talk radio and Coast to Coast is a show for square pegs, so that was a natural fit, oddly. I had been doing talk radio for about five or six years. I had been a morning rock, mostly hard rock, morning show host on radio stations across the country. Biggest was in Nashville at 103 KDF, which was a huge FM rock station throughout the south. And I went from that to WGN in Chicago. Didn’t have a great experience, didn’t love it, loved hanging with, you know, it was fun to do some sports things I hadn’t had a chance to do before. But when I went to WGST in Atlanta, it gave me the opportunity to also go to seminary, which I’d been interested in, and it gave me the chance to do talk radio a little bit differently.
I’m not a table pounding, vein throbbing, white man’s anger kind of talk show host. And so I didn’t quite fit within the station, but it did allow me to fit within a greater scheme of what a show like Coast to Coast was doing, which was being apolitical, but talking about topics of science and alternative religion and alternative politics and alternative a lot of things. And because I wasn’t cornered, I wasn’t branded as having been focused in one area or another, it allowed me to slide in there and to on a fill-in basis, explore some of these topics and to do it with a level of professionalism which the company liked. So if that sounds grandiose, I apologize, but that’s pretty much how it worked.
Jim:
It strikes me that there’s something I always found interesting about you when you were covering the paranormal topics. Certainly I sensed a genuine interest, and we’ll talk about your faith and all of that in a bit, but you didn’t seem to be someone who bought all of it whole cloth, that you were open-minded, but not necessarily a yes man for the paranormalists. Can you talk about your view of the paranormal going into Coast to Coast and maybe how it changed over the years?
Ian Punnett:
Well, that’s a really great point, and I think actually it fit really well with Art Bell. Art., as I listened to him, especially, I appreciated the fact that he could interview somebody who might have a very strong opinion or a very definitive experience without having to accept everything they said, and he could do it in a way that he could stay in conversation with that person and he could offer some perspective or some reflection. And it made for a great conversation about it without Art essentially becoming their PR person. He didn’t become the flack for the guest. He might agree with everything the guest was saying, but he still had brought a level of tension to the interview in his skepticism. And skepticism doesn’t mean you don’t believe it, it just means you’re looking for those things that you are going to use as touchstones for belief.
And that’s what I liked about it right away. It allowed me to be both, to sort of be a scientist, to be a social scientist, to approach it from a standpoint of a person of faith. It gave me all sorts of different ways to, doors into these topics without having to accept. If you accept what one guest says, oh absolutely, this is what aliens are, well then what do you say to the next guest who comes along? You can’t, it’s not your role. You have to be more of the fulcrum on which the show is balanced. And that’s how I saw my role from the very beginning. Nobody ever told me I shouldn’t be that way either. The producers of the show were highly encouraging of that position because it really gives you a longer life than if you become the person who’s leading the charge as opposed to observing the charge. So I think that worked, and I think that’s what I got, I enjoyed support from Art Bell too in the beginning, was I followed his lead on that very effectively.
Jim:
And it’s interesting, we try to do the same thing on our programs that we’ve been doing for the last nine years, try not to, I see us as a platform and our audience can decide and we try to bring questions to the table to bring out the information and let folks say if this is a good thing, if this is a true thing or not. And it’s your observation about if you say the one person’s absolutely correct about aliens, absolutely spot on. There’s, there’s nowhere to go from that.
Ian Punnett:
But to speak back to then what you just said in the subtext of your question before, I had had paranormal experiences or what people would term them, I’m not sure I understand what paranormal means though. If it’s real and it happened, then it’s normal. You know what I mean? I believe it’s either a fact or it’s not. And whereas I kind of get the idea that something could be both a particle and a wave at the same time. And I think there’s some interesting play that we could put in on that that informs the conversation from physics. I generally think that the things I have seen or the things that I have experienced happened, whether they look paranormal to somebody else, I didn’t really care. They were normal to me. So that’s another way in which I approached the show from the beginning is people told their experiences. I tried to treat them like they were normal, not they were paranormal and they’re not around normal. They are normal, and this is what happened to them. And so I tried to be able to respect that just like I would want them to respect my testimony about things that I had seen or experienced
Jim:
Earlier. You had mentioned Art Bell, and to me Art Bell is the Johnny Carson of let’s say Supernatural Talk. What was it like working with someone like that? I mean, I know you didn’t work shoulder to shoulder necessarily physically, but what was it like working on a program being the weekend host? I mean, I could think about the parallel. Let’s use Johnny Carson again when he would have many guest hosts over the years eventually turning out to be Joan Rivers and then Jay Leno, and that had to be an interesting and in some ways challenging position to be in. What was that like?
Ian Punnett:
Yeah, he was good to me, as far as I knew. And Art is a bit of a mystery to everybody, even to people who are close to him as I understand it. But I don’t think I ever would’ve been able to continue on as long as I did on the show, certainly not to enjoy the latitude that I did if I didn’t in some way operate under his Aegis. So I was always grateful for that. I would occasionally hear from him, and we met several times along the way. He was always very generous, spoke as though he would even occasionally listen, which was very cool. And I found him as a person, as a leader of the show, much like to use your Johnny Carson analogy, I found him to be a groundbreaking guy who really did bring a unique set of tools to an opportunity. And he wasn’t the first. There were other people who had done paranormal things before him on the radio, and there were other people who had done it on television, obviously, and Art was the inheritor of other pioneers. But he did it in a way that made it seem like you had been in these topics before and you’d never heard them done like Art did them, and it was a cool thing to be associated with.
Jim:
I’m sure you can’t comment on this too much. Do you think eventually we will hear him back, we know the big Sirius XM controversy of last year and so forth. Do you think that one of these days we’re going to turn on a radio or satellite radio or the internet and hear ’em again?
Ian Punnett:
Well,I hope so. I mean, I’m a fan, George Norry and I have gotten to be very good buds over the years, and I was disappointed to see that that turned into something with Art Bell and many of his ardent supporters. It turned into an anti-George thing. Nobody has been more supportive of Art Bell than George Norry. He truly is, for a guy who sits at the top of that franchise, he couldn’t be nicer about opening up the door for others and for putting his arm around people who are coming up. And I’ve always been impressed with that. And he has always given his props to Art Bell without any sense, I think, of envy or rivalry. And if that’s percolated up from time to time, I haven’t heard it. I hope that Art feels the love out there of his fans and will follow through. He’s getting up there a little bit though, and radio’s a hassle, you know? So I mean, there’s a part of me that wonders whether Art will do it more like a dilettante and just come in and out and not do it on a daily basis, but as the spirit moves him, he’ll do it, which would still be fun. But to do it every day, to do it for hours and hours every day, it’s hard. It’s still a grind. And the older you get and the more established you are, like Art, I’m not sure where his incentive is to get back in that grind, but I’ll be curious to see how that plays out.
Jim:
And you make a couple of good points. And one of them I want to say is this, you have to be pro-Art or pro-George. Can’t we just say they’re both good? I mean, for example, I was on the show last year with George as a guest for my book, and returning in September, I’m excited about that. And he could not have been nicer and he asks insightful questions. And I think people who don’t do this in one form or the other, underestimate how hard it is to do this on a four hour show. I mean, this is not an easy thing to do. It expends a lot of mental energy. I mean, I just went two hours on the show and I felt like I was ready to take a 12 hour nap. It really is not easy to do, and people think that it is.
Ian Punnett:
Well, yeah, and let’s also, let’s not lose perspective, we’re not laying asphalt in Phoenix today. So I mean, it’s still by job comparison, it’s still a pretty cushy gig. But your point, if I can tease it out a little bit more, is that really for somebody like George, he’s in a very different position anyway. I mean, the discussion of alternative radio and where it is today versus where it was really 20 years ago is, you can’t, nobody was doing what Art was doing back then. Today 500 shows are on television and radio doing what Art was doing. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The market supports it. I enjoy being on this one. But back then, he was the only game in town. And so when he was starting these topics, they were fresh. They were wild. No one had ever heard them before. And really it comes down to it is nobody is making new topics.
I mean, there isn’t some topic generator somewhere in a pole in the North Pole, and they’re just waiting to come up with these new things. There really isn’t any. And there will only be a finite number of guests and a finite number of say books or certain number of people who will take the time to actually do original research, which is a real problem in this milieu as far as I’m concerned, is you get a lot of derivative research, but not people who are out there really coming up with something that hasn’t been said five times and they’re just rearranging it in a different order. And I think that’s also kind of where George is versus where Art was. And people measure George by Art’s standard, but it’s a totally different game. And the fact that George is able to keep the whole franchise fresh and interesting as much as he does every night of the week, and that guy works, I think it shows that he’s pulling the rope a lot harder, maybe even than Art was. It just doesn’t seem like it maybe to an outsider,
Jim:
Interesting perspective. Now let’s refresh people on why you decided to leave the franchise and give us a little bit of health update on how you’re doing with that, because I know that folks that were fans of you and are fans of you are still concerned about that and hope that you’re doing well.
Ian Punnett:
Well, thank you. You’re talking about the Witness Protection program?
Jim:
Well, I wasn’t going to mention that, but…
Ian Punnett:
Oh, okay. Yeah, I testified against the mob, and I don’t care what they do in the movies, it’s really not as easy as you think. The checks don’t come regular and well, no, I had terrible tinnitus. I developed it right about three or four years ago, I can’t even remember now for so long. And it came in sporadically at the beginning, tinnitus or tinnitus being a personal thing –
Jim:
That’s why I didn’t say what it was. I didn’t want to have to pronounce it incorrectly. So I just thought that was a good way around it.
Ian Punnett:
It’s better than that. You can’t mispronounce it. How about that? So that problem, this persistent whistle-buzz that I have in my ear had come in sporadically, and then it was only in one ear at the beginning, and then it went to both, and then it just kept getting worse and worse. And along with it, concurrent to that was a persistent low grade headache. And at first I could knock that out pretty easily with Excedrin or something like that, but as it turns out, the things that I was treating the headache with was making the tinnitus worse, and I just didn’t realize that. So I created this whole cycle going where I was doing a morning show five mornings a week, and I was doing coast to coast at least one night a week, frequently two. And by that point it was getting, I could barely hear people just spent my whole day amping up the tinnitus, and then I’d spend the rest of the night trying to treat it therapeutically.
And there’s very few things that you can do to treat it. So it became very clear that I had to go into a direction where I wasn’t spending every day taking five or six hours to make it worse, and then spending the rest of the day trying to make it more bearable. And that was what I finally was able to come to with doctors. And they finally said, look, you’re just going to have to give up all of this headphone wearing and all of this radio work. And eventually I gave up the Monday through Friday thing. First I cut down to just once or twice a month on Coast to Coast. And even there just eventually I had to say goodbye.
Jim:
And I think that you’re very much missed after the break. We are going to talk about what Ian Punnett is up to these days, some interesting stuff, books, seminary, all kinds of interesting things. We’ll be right back after this on the Paranormal Podcast.
Speaker 4:
You are listening to the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.
Jim:
We’re back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our guest today is broadcaster, although he’s not doing it these days. Ian Punnett, you know him from his work, likely from the great Coast to Coast AM where he held forth on weekends for many years, and now he is dedicating himself to the pursuit of a PhD. I incorrectly said seminary before, but a PhD. And he is also a successful author of children’s books and also a book that is very much for adults. And we’re going to talk about that in a moment. Ian, so what – I mean, this had to be difficult. You probably, I’m guessing, self-identified in many ways as a broadcaster and to have to walk away from that for medical reasons. How did you come to terms with that and what have you done to make lemons into lemonade as it were?
Ian Punnett:
Yeah, that wasn’t an easy thing. I mean, fortunately I’ve never been one to over identify with what I do. It’s who I am, I think, that’s more important. So it was not breezy, but it also didn’t force a crisis of the soul. I’ve kind of fashioned myself really, first and foremost is just being a really good dad in every way I can. And so nothing about the tinnitus, nothing about any of the health complications from that period, was taking anything away from me being able to be dad. And that was good. And then I had to change my livelihood, that it was really a test of ego.
I could have kept riding that pony. It would’ve been very hard, and it would’ve become increasingly almost more painful every day to do it. And more complicating for everybody else around me who would have to continue to pick up the slack on things. And I had already begun to have many errors on the air when I couldn’t hear what somebody was saying because I was getting a really bad tinnitus spike. And so it would just drown ’em out and I couldn’t hear. So I gaffed unfortunately a couple of times under those circumstances and didn’t know it until later, but I could have hung out there. I had an offer, I could have kept going. It just really came down to it is, I didn’t need it. I don’t need it to know who I am. I don’t have to be the guy on the radio.
And I’d had my fun. It was actually kind of easy to turn around and say it’s time for somebody else. I’ve been sucking up enough of the good gigs. It really is. I just sort of thought, well, I had this a lot longer than I deserved, and whether it was Coast or the local show, which was also very popular, yeah, it’s time for me to step aside and let newer younger people come up. And I wasn’t without options. So I had to decide what those options were. And after some contemplation came to a pretty good place about going back and getting a PhD and getting into either research in communications or teaching communications or some mix of both. And that’s what I set my focus on was what’s next? And by doing that, it made it easier to give up what I had. And plus everybody was just being really sweet about it.
So I mean, it might’ve been harder if I said I got to go, and everybody’s like, okay. But there was a lot of handwringing, a lot of other stuff. So it made feel like, I felt it was nice to be missed. And it was nice. I kind of liked that. That was cool. But I also don’t live for it. And so it was really in the end, I think the day I turned off the microphone, I just walked away from it feeling like, okay, I did that about as well as anybody could. And that’s it, next. And that’s where I’ve been focused on now is next.
Jim:
So speaking of next, and at the end of the show, if you can give us some resources for people who are suffering with tinnitus or tinnitus, because I would love to do that. I think that’s something where maybe we can help some people with this situation. But one of the things that was next or right at the tail end of your broadcasting career was your book, how to Pray When You’re Pissed At God or Anyone Else for that Matter, that seems pretty. Some people might say, well, that’s disrespectful or irreverent, that title. Provocative. How and why did you arrive at that title and talk a little bit about being pissed at God.
Ian Punnett:
Well, this came from this sort of alternative soundtrack I have in my life of doing church work. And I’d always done everything pro bono. And I worked as the deacon of St. Clements Episcopal Church in St. Paul for many years. But before that, I had done some rotations as a hospital chaplain intern. And so I was doing a lot of that sort of triage spiritual therapy work where you go in and you talk to people and you try to figure out where they are and how they are feeling about their relationship between whatever is hurting them or threatening to kill them in the bed where they are sitting in the hospital and their faith. And so the notion for this book had been around in my head for a long time because of the number of people who actually would say exactly those words to me.
I’d like to pray, but I’m just so pissed at God. And I thought, okay, well fair enough. I can’t change that title. That is the theme I keep hearing over and over again. And so that’s what I decided to work on is a book which was permissive, and it gave people a faith who were not feeling it a chance to see how the model works. And the model is biblical. It’s not extra canonical at all. This is a completely biblically based book. So many of the Psalms that exist and have been in the Bible for years are really angry prayers to God, and they’re vitriolic and they’re ugly. They say terrible things about their neighbors. It’s not at all what people think. And in fact, that was a big part of the therapy was working with these folks who are in transition in life and looking down the barrel of a very bad diagnosis or two, and giving them the model, the framework that says, well, if Bible allows you to be pissed, if the Bible says, take out your anger in prayer, let it out, then why don’t you do it? Why do you stop yourself from doing it? And a lot of people, the responses were, well, I don’t think it’s right or I wasn’t raised to think like that, or, I’m Lutheran.
But really when it comes down to it is that’s where you start. You start with where you really are and you don’t shine on God with stupid libelous prayers that waste God’s time. And if it’s not true, that’s just what you’re doing. You’re better off. If you really do believe in the power of prayer, say exactly what you’re thinking. If you really do believe in an omniscience God,
Jim:
He knows anyway.
Ian Punnett:
So who do you think you’re fooling?
Jim:
Now, let me ask you this. Do you think that people have the wrong expectation when they approach God in prayer? Do you think that they think it’s like a genie and three wishes and stuff is just supposed to happen? In other words, the fact that people are pissed is at least part of that because they have unrealistic or inaccurate expectations of what God is or what he does.
Ian Punnett:
It’s just always worked that way until now. And so is it unrealistic or is they just the sum total, their experiences that it’s always worked that way? But suddenly now they no longer have a protective faith bubble around them. Something bad has really happened to them or somebody they love and it makes it a much rawer experience. So yeah, I mean, I think that there are people who need to adjust their expectations and what we call sometimes in seminary, the God as valet theology, that you’re there to dispatch God to fetch you things. That’s not fair, and it, it’s not fruitful at a time like this, especially when people are in crisis, it doesn’t have a payoff. I think this is where it’s always better to be real no matter what it is, no matter how good things are going, just be real and say exactly what it is that you’re thinking or feeling. And your prayers will have, I believe, greater value and give you a greater sense of satisfaction.
Jim:
Do you believe that God sometimes puts us through different trials and tribulations because there is some outcome that we can’t see that will either better us or better the lives of other people?
Ian Punnett:
Yeah, I struggle with that. I understand that’s how it feels. And I certainly have felt that way too. But I am not sure other than poetically whether I buy into the there but for the grace of God thing or that God only gives us what we can handle and all that. I mean, I think anytime we’re contemplating the suicide of somebody like fellow Episcopalian Robin Williams, I think it’s good to remember that sometimes some people just can’t handle it no matter how much prayer and no matter how much they want to, they really can’t. And I am not advocating suicide in any way, but I kind of get it sometimes too. I mean, for example, the suicide rate amongst soldiers returning from war from Afghanistan and Iraq, what did they do wrong? They served their country. They did everything they were told to do, and now the paradigm shift that they face back in their hometowns is more than they can handle.
And by the way, there’s also a tinnitus piece to that because the amount of returning soldiers who have tinnitus is staggering. And when you’re dealing with a mental crisis and you’re already perhaps suffering from some level of insomnia or mind chatter just as the Buddhist call it in general, the last thing you need is something buzzing in your ears all night long. So that creates all sorts of other complications. And I believe that this is where it’s easy to try to speak for God and say, well, this is what God needed another little quarterback in heaven, or whatever things that people say at times. And if that brings somebody great peace, that’s fine. But I think most of the times people say something like that, it’s really because they want to reorder the universe and they feel the need to defend God or something, and they feel the need to try to make everything look like it happens for a reason. And I’m not so sure of that.
Jim:
That’s why I was going to ask you, do you think God is kind of like a watchmaker who set everything up and just kind of lets it wind down and maybe in extreme cases, maybe when the world’s ready on a brink of nuclear annihilation or something will intervene, but he’s kind of selective in that? Or do you think that God takes a role in all of our lives every day?
Ian Punnett:
Well, I’m much too mystical to think of what you refer to as deism. It’s the classic, God is watchmaker analogy is what many of our founding fathers believed, and it was a very much of a fad theology for a while, and there may be some value to it. I tend not to think occupationally in that way. Every analogy, especially to the divine, has its limitations. But I just tend to think of, I try not to think, I’m not trying to create a catechism all the time. I really just sort of want to be a little bit more experiential about faith and not so much trying to make all of the corners fit. I mean, it’s entirely possible that tab A really doesn’t go into slot B when it comes to God because our brains are way too puny to figure that out. And so I just got to be good with that. And I’m not trying to order the universe. I just try if I can every day bring value to my experience and have my experiences bring value to somebody else.
Jim:
Ian, I think you’re one of the most, I guess, qualified people to answer this. You’ve probably talked to hundreds, if not thousands of people interviewing them on Coast to Coast in regard to supernatural topics. And then you also have this background of faith.
Ian Punnett:
Sure.
Jim:
Do you feel that a belief in quote, and we’ll use the phrase for lack of a better term, paranormal topics, ghosts, UFOs, those kinds of things, are compatible with the Christian faith?
Ian Punnett:
Compatible? Yes. Identical? No. And so I think as I’ve always tried to frame it, to me there’s a difference between what I think and what I believe. So I believe in my articles of faith, if I’m going to take a leap of logic on something, I have a short list of things that I believe in. But I’ll think about anything. I’ll think about stuff all day long that has nothing to do with what I believe, so I won’t even bother to try to incorporate an experience I had with UFOs into a theology. It’s just one experience. But I think about it all the time and I’d like to have another one, two, but that’s why I say they’re compatible. They don’t have to be the same, but they can be on the same road trip of life, sometimes sitting next to each other in the front seat. Hell, I’ll even let some of the things I think about drive for a while and I’ll put my beliefs in the backseat for a while, but in the end, that’s how I always separate them. And I find that it’s much easier to be careful about what I believe in and then just have a great time with the things I’ll think about.
Jim:
Also, another kind of quill in your toolkit there, I think I just mixed some major metaphors there, are your children’s books. Tell us about those and the positive reception that they’ve received.
Ian Punnett:
Well, we did ’em for charity, which was good. We did ’em for dog charities in particular, a couple of groups that were helping strays and also helping to reduce the stray population. So I did two books, Dizzy the Mutt with the Propeller Butt and Jackula the Vampire Dog. And those are fun books. And we had them, I think they’re still available for purchase, I’m pretty sure. But we did two good runs of each of those. And then how to Pray When You’re Pissed at God is still in print. And if anybody wants, they can always contact me through Twitter at Deacon Punnett, D-E-A-C-O-N-P-U-N-N-E-T-T. And I’d be happy to reach back to them if they’re trying to find something of something I’ve created and I can’t find it. I’d love to be able to try to connect if I can.
Jim:
One last question for you, and I know you’ve kind of hung up the mic, the headphones for the time being. Do you see a day maybe when there are new treatments available, maybe when you can do something on a more ad hoc basis? Do you ever think that you might open the mic back up and do something, whether it’s on radio, the internet, whatever it might be?
Ian Punnett:
Didn’t I just do that? Isn’t that what he’s just been doing for 45 minutes?
Jim:
Point taken. Touche, touche sir Ian Punnett, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Ian Punnett:
Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it. God bless.
Jim:
And we might have many great words or tribute and things that we want to say, but I thought it was best to let the man speak for himself. Rest in peace, Ian, and God bless your family.
Thank you for tuning in today and happy New Year. I hope this is the best year ever for you. And as I said earlier, we’re recovering from the sickness. So certainly hoping that 24, I almost said 2014. 2024 is onward and upward. And along those lines, we have those New Year’s resolution. My New Year’s resolution is on every show to make sure, to make a point, to ask you to share this episode if you enjoyed it, because that’s the only way we’re going to grow. We’re up against these huge conglomerates with all these deep pockets. Oh my goodness, how are we going to compete? We’re going to compete with you. So please share the show today. That’s the only way that we can grow. And in 2024, we have some exciting plans for the Paranormal Podcast. So we want to get this show cooking again. We’ve been around. This will be our 19th year during the summer. We will celebrate our 19th year, but I think our best work is yet to come with your help. We’ll talk to you next time. Have a great week, everybody. Stay safe and stay spooky. Bye-Bye.
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