So I think in the modern world where we are so used to going to the primary care physician, getting lab work done, right? We have blood work and then we see our ranges for LDL, HDL, you know, we see all the major things that are supposedly the main metrics we need to know to be healthy. But so often what happens is people come in and they show me their blood values and they're all within normal range or within normal enough range that the PCP is not concerned. But the person says to me, I don't really feel that well. In fact, I feel terrible. What's going on? And I think it's very important to consider that there is more data than just this mathematical data on a piece of paper that is essential in your healing journey. What's up, you guys? Dr. Alex Hine, Doctor of Chinese Medicine and Licensed Acupuncturist. So before we jump in here, there's a very important link right below this video. If you would like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, check out that link right below, which is to contact my private practice. So in a world of lab work and all this very clear, objective mathematical data, we often don't trust the inner data. And I think in my own story of having lifelong GI problems, you know, it was very discouraging for me to go from nutritionist to dietitian to GI specialist to all these alternative practitioners after that and to feel like I had to go through the entire modern medical system to get to the alternative practitioners who are the ones that actually were able to help me. And I was just so confused by this, this Duke and Ivy League trained GI specialist who didn't really give me much useful information or much useful treatment. And that's pretty common I see in my patients. It's actually very, very common. And I was also confused by the fact that all my lab values looked good. And he's like, maybe you just have anxiety and here I would recommend this script for, you know, like people are often given antidepressants for gut problems and IBS these days. And I was a little frustrated and discouraged that this guy that reached the upper echelons of Ivy League trained medical education ended up just giving fiber recommendations and antidepressants. Like that was the best medicine had to offer felt a bit underwhelming to me. So it was around that time where I still felt unwell. So I was back to the drawing board and had to figure out what to do next. And it was around that time where I started just writing down all my gut impressions, like, what do I feel may be underlying this? I mean, I just went the maximum logic, right? We just went through the highest tier of Ivy League trained specialist, not a lot of help, good people, but didn't really help me that much. So where do I go from here? You have a couple of options. One is more logic, which is more research on the internet, which is dangerous these days. The other is trusting your gut and trying to see if I can lead you to anything that can help. And I was just doing everything. I mean, if you're ill, you'll do anything to get better. So so many people in similar to my journey, get all these tests and they can give me this thick stack of data and all these people they saw, but they're really not any better. And I think often what I see in this case is that what's missing is their own ability to trust themselves to realize that maybe if things are that chronic and you really are eating that well, maybe you really are in the wrong job and you really should have changed your career a long time ago, or maybe guess what? You shouldn't be in that marriage.  That's why you feel like you're dying every day, because every day you're encountering this massive friction internally to wake up to a life you don't even want to have. It doesn't even feel like it has a purpose to wake up. Or maybe you are the single parent who's at your wits end with a couple of young kids and you are the breadwinner and you don't need that antidepressant necessarily.  I think it's highly underrated, trusting your gut when it comes to the healing journey, because when I talk with so many people, it's often not me giving them this information, it's me asking them this information. And then they have this conversation with themselves out loud, that is some of the most profound healing advice they've gotten in terms of the actual healing that they get. And I think so often, when we're lost and scared of when we're sick, we sacrifice listening to our gut. And we over emphasize this objective data from the authority figure that's supposed to have all the answers. In my opinion, why not do both, right? I'm not saying don't go to the doctor, do both. What does your gut say about the situation? And what is your doctor or your alternative practitioner or all 10 of them say? Use all of that as data in your healing journey. But especially trust yourself with what you think you actually need to heal. So sometimes in your healing journey, your gut is giving you the most accurate data, especially if you've run the gamut of the specialist and you're not getting much help. You know, for me, it was Chinese medicine that made the biggest difference in my life in terms of my own problems. And I see that for many, many, many of my patients who say, you know, I wish my doctor knew about this stuff or could refer me to someone like you. Or this was a part of American healthcare because it helped me more than anything I've done. So I feel both inspired and incredibly depressed that so many patients have told me that and it's not taken seriously by conventional medicine. But what I will say, if you are the patient in that seat in the healing journey, really sit down one day and just write down what do I think I need to heal this? What do I think this is really coming from? And use that gut information from your body as one of the healing pieces of advice that you take in addition to whatever practitioner you're seeing.  I've been to the Mayo Clinic and I've done everything. And I was like, I don't really know. I lived in China speak Chinese. I don't even know what what it really was. And it helped me more than anything I've ever done and put me on my Dharma path to go all over the world and to become a doctor of Chinese medicine and to dedicate my life to this. It was never even on my radar, but it was that little inkling of a feeling. Yeah, maybe I should just do this. Maybe there's something here that set me off onto a totally different path of healing.  Make sure you evaluate both in your healing journey because I have seen so many times where people have been to all the specialists, all the experts, and then they decide, screw it. It's it's over for me unless I do something different. I'm just going to trust what my gut is saying. And that's all I have left. So what do I have to lose? And that is the thing that produces the healing. So take that inner data your body is giving you. Take it seriously because it may be the advice that helps you the most. But that's what I've got for today. Before you go, I have two other related videos for you right there. I'll catch you in the next video.


from San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE covering Big Data SV 2016. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are live in San Jose, California at Big Data SV, which is part of Big Data Week, which is concurrent with StructureConf. It's really ground zero for Big Data this week in San Jose at the convention center. We're at the Fairmont at the Gold Room. Got a little event tomorrow night, Wednesday night. If you're in the area, come on by about 4.30. Promises to be entertaining, and we're really excited about this next guest. This is a special company in the history of theCUBE. We do about 1,100 interviews, 1,200 interviews a year, and every once in a while we get a special one where we get book signings, and I don't think we've had any animals yet, launch companies, but this company launched a Big Data NYC, our first big data event in 2013, so we're really happy to welcome Nenshan Bartoliwa. Did I get it? Close enough. Bartoliwa, I'm very sorry. No worries. Co-founder and Chief Products Officer of Puxata, so welcome. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, so hopefully you've pulled up that clip and you saw it again, is really. We watch it every day religiously in the office. Very good. So give us an update. Things have obviously changed since 2013. Actually, I think we had someone from Puxata on at the Spark Summit in San Francisco last year as well. That sounds right. That sounds right. So, obviously we're very proud. We have a long history. Our company was launched at the Strata Conference on theCUBE, so that's very exciting. And look, when we started the company in 2012 as just four guys in a basement in Redwood City, we said to ourselves, the market had clearly changed. We were going from a world where people were using relational database technologies, and we were clearly seeing the move towards Hadoop and other no-SQL technologies like Mongo and Couchbase and many others. And on the other hand, we were also seeing the move on the end user side towards self-service. People were tired of waiting for IT organizations to give them what they needed. They wanted to be able to have the power in their own hands. And so it was with those two insights that we decided that there was a missing layer. The myth is that you can just take Tableau and slap it on Hadoop and then magic happens. And I can most assuredly tell you that magic does not happen unless you have Paxata. And so the real breakthrough for us was knowing that there needed to be a third leg of the stool where being able to empower somebody to turn raw data that was being landed in a system like Hadoop and turn it into information on the fly so that they could power their analytics would be the next major wave. And here we are two and a half years later and we have no shortage of companies who have suddenly found self-service data prep religion and we welcome that. But as the pioneer of the space and the category it's been a really exciting journey so far. So it gives us update, funding, customers, employees kind of give us the quick four one along. Sure, so from a funding perspective we are a series C funded company. So we did our series C funding last year. We announced it in the middle of the year. We are very fortunate to be funded by both Excel partners India which is our original investor. And then we've added EDBI which is the Economic Development Board of the Government of Singapore. So we made a very strategic decision to partner with them because as you can imagine there are really exciting business opportunities in Asia and the broader market and being able to partner with a fund of that caliber allowed us to have an anchor point in the Asia PAC region. So we completed the series C in the middle of 2015. We have been expanding extremely rapidly. We have doubled the number of people we have in the organization. Very happy to say that I'm not the only guy running around doing demos on a MacBook. Took more than two years to get out of that mode. That was not fun. But we now have a very mature field organization both here in the United States with folks in seven different regions. We have people on the ground in Singapore, in Korea. Very soon we'll have more news on the Europe front but we're expanding from a people perspective very significantly. We're at about 70 people right now. In terms of customers, we're obviously the customers who are using our software get a significant competitive advantage. So I won't go into details or names but we're very proud to say that we, the top three banks in the United States are all Paxata customers. We have a very strong foothold in the United States government. Our technology which allows analysts to be able to pull data together turns out to be very useful for very specific mission critical use cases which I will not go into any detail about here less this conversation and very abruptly. Then we're also very fortunate to have the world's number one semiconductor company, the world's number one company in audit and assurance. We've been very fortunate to really put a stake in the ground as being the enterprise class mission critical data preparation platform. If you look at the market, you're really seeing a bifurcation, right? There are a number of very good and useful desktop type tools. People who have freemium models who are going that route and we saw that very early on and we made the decision in 2013 that we were gonna be the enterprise class standard and that bet has paid off with the caliber and types of customers that we've been able to bring in. So, Ninshad, let's dig into that a little bit. One of the things we've learned in sort of following the big data marketplace was that the platform itself in the form of Hadoop needed a lot of simplification. And we're slowly getting better on that sort of bending management tools around the expanding zoo of animals and including the use of zookeeper. But the other challenge customers face is the complexity of the data, which is one of the attributes of Hadoop, which is pour it all in and then let's figure it out. That's right. So tell us the progress we've made since your launch in making that easier to do. Great question. So it's a very interesting juxtaposition of two things that we've decided to do. On the one hand, you have the big data environment. And at a conference like Strata, you're gonna hear people talking about key value stores and oh, my nested JSON didn't behave the way I wanted to when I parsed it, which is a very nice technical conversation, but it's not something that you hear business people talking about. So on the one hand, we did bet technologically, and by the way, we were also a pioneer here in 2013. We bet on Apache Spark way before all the Spark mania really took off.  However, what we juxtaposed that with was the ability for the mere mortals among us, the average user to have a point and click declarative environment where they could actually manipulate the data interactively. So instead of writing pig scripts or instead of building a script generator, what our end users wanna be able to do is press a button that says, I want to pivot these columns or I want to profile this data and create a filter. So what we've been able to do in terms of expanding the market of people who have access to data is to combine a really easy front end where frankly the way we qualify our end users is I ask them, do you know what a VLOOKUP is in Excel? And they'll give you that knowing look, right? Yes, this person clearly knows what a VLOOKUP is. Do you work with pivot tables in Excel? Yeah, I work with pivot tables too, great. If you know those two techniques in Excel, you will be a very successful Paxata user. So it's really the yin and yang between a very fluid, easy to use interactive experience combined with a very powerful, spark-based back end platform that we have been building over the last two and a half years. It just strikes me, Peter Burris on an earlier interview talked about these cars will never be successful because there just aren't enough chauffeurs. I'm thinking of the whole data science meme and the data scientist meme. No, there aren't enough chauffeurs. No, there aren't enough data scientists, but that's not the in-game. That's not the path to success. So Prakash Nanduri was my co-founder and our CEO. He likes to say there's a data scientist in all of us. We identified very early on in the market that there's a hierarchy of skill sets that people have in the enterprise. At the very top of the pyramid are the 200,000 to 500,000 data scientists. These are extremely skilled people that understand statistics, they understand how to program, and they have domain expertise. They're not enough of them to build an enterprise software company that can reach really, really big scale, which is why what do you see happening in the data science community is it's largely driven by open source. Great, so building products exclusively for data scientists did not seem like a sensible thing for us. Then there's the developer community or the data engineering community, and you see what's happening there is that there are traditional tools that have existed for a long time for developers that have, I'd say, reached the end of their useful life, but the point is it's a very crowded space. So the insight that we had in 2013 that's really paid off is that we need to go one level below on the pyramid and really expand the market of people who can do this. There are hundreds of millions of people who know how to use Excel, and if they can prepare data in the same way that they can build visualizations intelligently in Tableau, we could have a really successful company. That's funny, so I'm just like Christian Chebeau who we interviewed at Tableau I think in 2013 who again really said it's the Excel people, right? There's a lot of people that know Excel. That's really a rich opportunity to give them a new tool beyond what they've had. So if you could take all the Excel-skilled people in an organization and give them access to the underlying traditional data sources and big data sources, what kind of opportunity would you have to transform those businesses? And the tool, right? That's right. The data and the tool. So you've been around long enough now to have some customers make it, you know, farther along down the journey than just sort of trialing and doing proofs. Absolutely. So what are some of the applications that you've seen or first, how have some of these sort of self-service customers or users been able to refine data to where it's consumable by analytics? Right. You know, what have they done so far? Great question. So we have been successful in building a customer base across a number of different industries, right? Financial services, the government sector, healthcare, consumer products, et cetera. So I'll pick some of my favorite use cases just to walk through. One of the most interesting statistics that we like to talk about is the amount of money that's been spent on fines due to violating regulations in the financial services industry. Do either of you wanna guess how much money in aggregate banks have spent in paying off fines since 2008? Probably not enough. But that's a different conversation. I might get myself in trouble by guessing, but I think I've seen the numbers being in the billions. Hundreds of billions, hundreds of billions in penalties, $250 billion. Oh, that I didn't know. 2009. 2008, when we had the financial crisis. So when you're in that kind of environment, right, the banks are looking for any way possible to be able to make sure that they can keep the money in the bank and not give it to the regulators. So why are the top three banks in the United States, Paxata customers? Because one of the regulations that they have, and there are many, is called CCAR. It's otherwise known as the stress test, right? And in the stress test, you have to monitor not only the quality of the data that you're feeding into your models, but also the quality of the models themselves, right? So what they do is they actually use Paxata to be able to allow business domain experts, the analysts who actually understand that is a correct counterparty transaction. That is not a correct counterparty transaction. You can't expect IT people to understand that that's not their expertise. But if you put the power into the hands of the business domain experts, and they can in a point and click fashion actually highlight the exceptions, highlight which data elements look like they could be suspect, they can completely collapse the amount of time it takes for them to go from detecting an issue to being able to remediate it. So why are the strong industries where regulatory pressures are high adopting Paxata? Because they can, in interactive speed, bring a billion rows plus into a Spark cluster that has Paxata's technology on it, and point and click and find the needles in the haystack, take those needles, and immediately start processing it. So there's a tremendous value to putting in high volume interactive data preparation at scale into the hands of the analysts to actually understand that. So that's one example, okay? So, wait, hold on, I gotta stop you there. So one of my favorite questions is, billion data points, how do you pump it into visualization and find actionable data? So how does that actually work to find, how does the needle surface itself in that scenario that you just outlined? Great question. So we have a capability or technology that we call filter grams, right? And we made the bet very early on because we went with Spark that we wanted to be the vendor that could do interactive data prep at very large scale. So the point number one is to find the needles, you have to have all the data. If you're sampling data and then running batch jobs, you're no better off than you were in the traditional ETL world, right? So our vision and now what we've delivered is that you can load all the data into a cluster and now you actually have random access to that data. You're looking at a user interface and you can scroll to literally any point in this multi-billion-row dataset and actually get access to it. So number one is you have to have all the data. Number two is you have to have both visual as well as algorithmic tools that help you find the needle in the haystack, right? So on the visual tools perspective, we're announcing here at the conference our spring 2016 release and one of the investments we've made is in our filter gram capability, which are basically visual histograms. And those histograms are really interesting because again, they're single click. You don't have to code anything. You click on a column and you'll immediately see the distribution of all the values. So when you're looking for that needle, you'll see a really nice distribution of transactions in a bank. And suddenly all the way out here, like seven standard deviations to the right, you see that there are multiple transactions that have taken place and you can immediately zoom in on those and then go ahead and actually flag those transactions and start to investigate them. So that's a visual technique. Then algorithmically, we also figured out a number of very interesting ways that we can look for deviations in terms of repeated values that show up that look aberrant or to be able to find out how to join different data sets in a way that the interesting aspect of the join is not the things that actually connected but the things that didn't connect because that's how you know that there's an anomaly in the way that the data is structured. So the combination of scale, visual and algorithmic techniques allows people to iterate in a very fast manner to be able to find those needles in the haystack, which is why those banks are going with Paxata as an enterprise class platform. Great story. So once you've, I mean, this is a, it's a very, very clear example with hard ROI. Is it difficult to translate that into other use cases in different industries or do you just go deeper into the bank? Great question. So I think our vision has always been to be a horizontal information platform for the enterprise, right? That's very clearly where we're going and the technology that we have built is a horizontal technology. So our goal has been to become the de facto next generation information platform across multiple different industry segments and if you look at our customers, not just in banking or in the government sector, but if you look in consumer products, for example, Del Monte is a very well known customer of ours. Obviously nothing to do with banking. We're, you know, that very large semiconductor company that many people know has nothing to do with banking. So the approach that we've taken is to build a horizontal set of data transformation capabilities, governance capabilities, collaboration capabilities and then over time to layer on notions of solution constructs on top of it, right? So taking the core platform and then adding connectivity and models and that kind of thing to make them richer and more packaged from a solution perspective. So let me ask you, I mean the pipeline from data prep, you know, to, all the way to and through the analytic function, it's met by multiple tools today. Because, you know, we just don't have that level of integration. But if one of the key attributes that people need in terms of governance is lineage, what would you plug into so that a customer who's got a multi-vendor sort of pipeline has to, what do they have to manage? Sure, great question. So there's both within product lineage and then the broader ecosystem lineage, right? So the first, in order to play in the broader ecosystem, your product has to have very deep lineage and governance capabilities. So when we established the data preparation category, we said that there were five pillars to building an enterprise class data preparation platform. There was integration, there was quality, there was enrichment, there was governance and collaboration, right? Those all have to be part of one unified platform, not 15 different tools. So if you start with that mentality, from day one, we recorded every single step that the end user takes on the data. Everything we do in our system is versioned, right? So you can actually roll back the clock and look at exactly what George did or somebody else did in the system and see what steps they took, when they took those steps, where other people involved, et cetera. We version all of the data sets that actually flow through the system, both the imported data sets and the exported data sets. So point number one from a lineage perspective is that in order to be a good system or a good citizen in the whole pipeline, you yourself have to have very deep governance capabilities for the part of the pipeline that you own. And that is something that we have had from day one. However, to your point, we don't cover the entire end-to-end spectrum of all data sources.  They should flow through Paxata, but if they don't, obviously you wanna be able to connect that to other systems. And because we chose to go with a REST API-based approach, where the entire platform is enabled through REST, we can use the REST API to connect to other centralized lineage systems, like Cloud Air Navigator, like the Atlas project with which the Hortonworks folks are pushing and that sort of thing. And of course, also in more traditional systems as well. All right. Let's not, unfortunately, we're out of time, which is the bad news. The good news is, for cost you're out, you're not coming back. So when we get, when we see you at Spark, you're back on again.  I'm just a stunt double. That's right. We used to take care of customers and that makes a lot of sense. So that's great. So thank you, great insight. You know, some great stories. It's really important that people understand how their peers get started where they're using this technology. So it's not just a bunch of guys talking tech. It's actually people solving business problems. Yes. There's huge value in this whole space and we're very grateful to have the opportunity to speak with you gentlemen on theCUBE. Absolutely. Glad you came. Hopefully we'll see you. Thank you. Maybe it's Spark Summit in San Francisco. We will be at Spark Summit West. But want to make sure you log on to Twitter. Take a look at the Twitter handle for theCUBE is at theCUBE. You'll see all of our CUBE gems and our Twitter cards and our CUBE cards and all of the great conversations that come out of theCUBE interviews. We're really excited because we get really smart people on who are inventing this technology, implementing this technology, changing the world with the technology. And it's great for them to come on unscripted, share their insight with you, our audience, and our community. And so we're really, really thankful and thankful to our sponsors as well. Pekata sponsors theCUBE. We've got a viewer here. You can see we've got a lot of gear. We've got a lot of people. People got kids. They got to eat, choose the whole story. So without sponsors, we couldn't do it. So thanks a lot for watching. We are live in San Francisco at Big Data SB 2016. We'll be back with our next guest over this short break. Thanks for watching.


ads heard during the podcast that are not in my voice are placed by third-party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome Weirdos, I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. If you're new here, welcome to the show and if you're already a member of this Weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show and while you're listening be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com where you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more, along with the Weird Darkness Weirdos Facebook group. Coming up in this episode. On January 1, 1091, an army of the dead came to Normandy. For one priest, it would be a night that he would never forget. Despite what were led to believe from movies and television, cemeteries, graveyards and churchyards are actually quite peaceful places with no reason to be haunted any more than any other plot of land. They are in fact meant to be resting places, not restless places. Repton Village's churchyard in Darbyshire apparently never received that memo.  Sadly neither is sexual harassment in the workplace and apparently in the 1800s a 40-something boss could try to seduce a 15-year-old worker. And if you guessed, that didn't turn out well for anyone, you'd be right. Men admired and emulated Camille Flammarian and many a woman swooned over him. Which is kind of an odd thing if you think about it, seeing as the man was consumed by thoughts of death. What is it like after we die? Is there life after death? And can science ever get on board with the idea despite testable evidence?  The medieval world believed in ghosts and spirits. There are countless stories from the Middle Ages how people were visited by the dead. While people would naturally be frightened if they came across a ghost, rarely would the ghost itself come to haunt or torment the living. Instead, they often appeared to those people that they knew while they were alive and usually wanted something from them.  The Roman Catholic doctrine believed that even if the soul was not condemned to hell, it still needed to be purified before entering paradise. This is the idea of purgatory, where the souls would get tortured and punished for their sins. The living world could help the dead in getting out of purgatory though, mainly by praying for their souls. By the late Middle Ages, it was a popular practice for people to leave money in their wills to hire priests that would perform mass for their souls once they have departed and the will was read. Many of the ghost stories from the Middle Ages involved souls that were in purgatory but contacted their living relatives to ask them to do something that would help relieve their suffering and assist them in entering heaven. These could range from paying a debt, fulfilling a vow, or just making sure that they were being prayed for. One of the strangest stories to be written down in the Middle Ages comes from the pen of Ordric Vitalis, a 12th century monk. From the Abbey of St. Avril to Normandy, Ordric wrote his ecclesiastical history, offering one of the best accounts of the Anglo-Norman world up to the year 1141. Ordric wrote about the reigns of the King's William I to Stephen, the political events that happened locally and abroad, and even about the news coming from his monastery. At one point in Book 8 of his ecclesiastical history, Ordric pauses from discussing the warfare between William Rufus and his rebellious Count Robert of Bellamy and states, I am sure that I should not pass over in silence or consign to oblivion something that happened to a priest in the Diocese of Lisceau on January 1. Ordric explains that the priest was named Walshalen and he was a young man, strong and brave, well-built and active. On the night of January 1, 1091, he was returning home after visiting a sick man at the far end of his parish. He was traveling along the road, far from any homes, when he heard the sounds of a great army coming towards him. Walshalen believes that these were the soldiers of Robert of Bellamy and he decided it would be best for him to hide behind the trees and let the army pass. Ordric relates what happened next, but a man of huge stature carrying a great mace barred the priest's way as he ran and brandishing the weapon over his head cried out, Stand, go no further. The priest obeyed at once and stood motionless, leaning on the staff he was carrying. The stern mace bearer stood beside him without harming him, waiting for the army to pass by. Walshalen stayed at the side of the road as he watched thousands of people walk by. First came the peasants, who were carrying across their necks and shoulders their clothes, animals, furniture and other worldly goods. To the priest, they seemed to be a mob of people who were carrying off the plunder from an attack. Then came hundreds of women riding side-saddle on horses, but the saddles were marked with red hot nails. As the women rode, they would jump off their saddles and into the air and then land back on the nails, leaving them burned and stabbed. After them came a crowd of priests, monks, even bishops and abbots, all dressed in black cowls and groaning and lamenting as they passed by. Next followed a great army of knights, in which no color was visible save blackness and flickering fire. All rode upon huge horses, fully armed as if they were galloping to battle and carrying jet black standards. What scared Walshalen so much was that he recognized many of these people. They were his neighbors and fellow clergy, but they had all died in recent years. There were even people that Walshalen and others thought to be good Christians, even considered saints, but they were here too, walking with this army of the dead. The worst of this group were those being carried on buyers, suffering terrible punishments. On the buyers sat men as small as dwarfs but with huge heads like barrels. Wani Norma's tree trunk was born by two Ethiopians and on the trunk some wretch tightly trust with suffering tortures, screaming aloud in his dreadful agony. A fearful demon sitting on the same trunk was mercilessly goading his back in loins with red hot spurs while he streamed with blood. Walshalen at once recognized him as the slayer of the priest Stephen and realized that he was suffering unbearable torments for his guilt in shedding innocent blood not two years earlier, for he had died without completing his penance for the terrible crime. As Walshalen watched them pass by, he realized this was Heliquin's army, which apparently had been a folktale for many years, although Ordric Vitalis is our earliest rider to talk about them. Throughout the 12th century, this legend would spread around and around Western Europe. Walter Mapp explained that they got their name from ancient Britain king named Hurla, who made a deal with the dwarf king.  Hurla soon realizes the dog will not leave his arms, and so he and his companions are doomed to wander the earth as a kind of undead. There are several tales about Heliquin's army, or Heliquin's hunt, some of which involve King Arthur or other medieval legends. Church riders apparently associated this ghostly ramble with purgatory, offering a horrific example to the living on what awaits those who sinned when they died. As Walshalen continued to watch the medieval horde pass before his eyes, he said to himself, I have heard many who claimed to have seen them, but have ridiculed the tail-tellers and not believed them because I never saw any solid proof of such things. Now I do indeed see the shades of the dead with my own eyes, but no one will believe me when I describe my vision unless I can show some token to living men. I will catch one of the riderless horses following the host, quickly mount it, and take it home to compel the belief of my neighbors when I show it to them. He tried to grab the first riderless horse he saw, but it bolted away before Walshalen could reach it. Another steed came along. The horse stopped for the priest to mount, leaving from its nostrils a great cloud of steam in the shape of a tall oak tree. The priest put his left foot in the stirrup and, seizing the reins, placed his hand on the saddle. Immediately he felt an intense burning like raging fire under his foot, and an indescribable cold struck into his heart from the hand that held the reins. Just then four of the dead knights rushed towards them, shouting, Why are you molesting our horses? Come with us! None of our people has harmed you, yet you try to take what is ours. Walshalen was very frightened, but one of the knights told the others not to harm the priest. He identified himself as William of Gloss, and he spoke about how his sins in life were punishing him in his death. But most of all usury torments me, for I lent my money to a poor man, receiving a mill of his as a pledge, and because he was unable to repay the loan, I retained the pledge all my life, and disinherited the legitimate heir by leaving it to my heirs. See, I carry a burning mill shaft in my mouth, which, believe me, seems heavier than the castle of Rowan. Therefore, tell my wife Beatrice and my son Roger that they must help me by quickly restoring the heir the pledge, from which they received far more than I ever gave. As Walshalen heard more about this knight's sins and his demands, he decided not to help him. It is not right to declare such things, in no circumstances will I carry your orders out to anyone. A knight in a terrible rage then put on his hand and seized the priest by the throat, dragging him along the ground and threatening him.  Just then another knight appeared, waving a sword in his right hand and saying, Wretches, why are you murdering my brother? Leave him and be gone. This new knight came to Walshalen and revealed himself to be his brother Robert, who died in England. The Walshalen did not recognize him or believe him, even after Robert revealed things that only his brother would know. Finally the dead knight exclaimed, I am amazed by your hardness and obstinacy. I brought you up after both our parents died and loved you more than any living person. I sent you to schools in France, kept you well provided with clothes and money, and in many other ways, furthered your progress. Now you have forgotten all of this and disdain even to recognize me. It was only then that Walshalen believed him, and the two brothers talked for a while. Robert explained, After I last spoke to you in Normandy, I left for England with your blessing. There I reached my life's end, and when my creator willed, and I have endured severe punishment for the great sins with which I am heavily burdened, the arms which we bear are red hot, and offend us with an appalling stench, weighing us down with intolerable weight, and burning with everlasting fire. Up to now I have suffered unspeakable torture from these punishments, but when you were ordained in England and sang your first mass for the faithful departed, your father Ralph escaped from his punishments, and my shield, which caused me great pain, fell from me. As you see, I still carry this sword, but I look in faith for release from this burden within the year. Finally, as the last of Helikwem's army went by, Robert said, I cannot speak longer with you, my brother, for I am compelled to hasten after this wretched host. Remember me, I beg, help me with your prayers and compassionate arms. In one year from Palm Sunday, I hope to be saved and released from all torments by the mercy of my creator. Keep thought of your own welfare, correct your life wisely, for it is stained by many vices, and you must know that it will not be long enduring. Once the ghostly army had gone, Walshalyn fell ill for a week, but he slowly recovered and told the local bishop of what he saw. Orderith Vitalis reveals that he himself had heard this story from Walshalyn himself and even saw the scar on his face caused by the evil knight. Walshalyn would live for at least another 15 years. Orderith sums up this event by writing, I have recorded these things for the unification of my readers, so the just men may be encouraged in good, and the vicious may repent of evil. When Weird Darkness returns, office romances are nothing new. Sadly, neither is sexual harassment in the workplace, and apparently in the 1800s, a 40-something boss could try to seduce a 15-year-old worker. And if you guessed that didn't turn out well for anyone, you'd be right. But first, despite what were led to believe from movies and television, cemeteries, graveyards and churchyards are actually quite peaceful places with no reason to be haunted any more than any other plot of land. They are, in fact, meant to be resting places, not restless places. But Repton Village Churchyard in Derbyshire apparently never received that memo. That story is up next on Weird Darkness. The Chilling True Terror of the Black-Eyed Kids, a monster compilation by G. Michael Vasey. The Black-Eyed Kids are an urban legend of vast proportions. The stories of small children turning up on people's doorsteps all across the world, spreading fear and terror, have only increased over time. This compilation of G. Michael Vasey's books on this scary phenomena include new material and new true stories as well as the complete texts of the Black-Eyed Demons are coming and the Black-Eyed Kids. Supernatural expert G. Michael Vasey carefully investigates this truly terrifying phenomenon using real-life encounters with these scary supernatural beings. The result is an unsettling and sometimes terrifying book that will have you fearfully anticipating that knock at your door late at night. Who and what are these mysterious visitors to the doorstep? Are they demons? Aliens? What do they want? Why do they need to enter your home and what happens if they do? Small kids that ask to use your phone or for a ride and yet those who encounter them are scared to death even before they notice their Black eyes. The chilling true terror of the Black-Eyed Kids, a monster compilation by G. Michael Vasey, narrated by Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar. Here a free sample on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. Despite their macabre associations, churchyards are not normally more liable to ghosts than anywhere else. For in normal circumstances, churchyards are simply resting places which should not contain any restless spirits or echoes of a troubled past. In Derbyshire, Repton Village Churchyard has certain distinctive features which makes such echoes slightly more possible. The Church of St. Winston contains a unique Saxon crypt which is one of the most important surviving pieces of Saxon architecture in England. It dates from around 750 A.D. and contains the tombs of King Ethelbald of Mercia, 757 A.D. and King Wigliffe, 840 A.D. When Winston, grandson of Wigliffe, a Saxon prince, was treacherously murdered, he was buried in the crypt with his ancestors. Soon after, the crypt became a shrine where miraculous cures were claimed to take place. Historians claim the site of the church was previously occupied by an old Saxon abbey with a secret passage leading to Anchor Church nearly three miles away. As the capital of the kingdom of Mercia, Repton had a fairly active history which culminated in 874 A.D. when the town and abbey were sacked by Danes. The abbey was completely destroyed, but the crypt partly survived to be built. The area has had a varied history, but recorded curiosities do not begin to occur until much later. Sir Simon de Guy, traveling in Derbyshire in 1727, gives this account of an unusual story from an old labourer. About 40 years since, cutting hillocks near the surface, he met with an old stone wall. When clearing it further, he found it to be a square enclosure of 15 feet. In this he found a stone coffin, and saw in it the skeleton of a human body nine feet long, and rounded 100 skeletons of the ordinary size, laid with the feet pointing to the stone coffin, the head of the great skeleton he gave to Mr. Bose, master of Repton School. I inquired at this school and one of the present masters, who is the son of Mr. Bose, concerning the skull, but it is lost, yet he says he remembers the skull in his father's closet, and that he often heard his father mention this gigantic corpse and thinks that the skull was in proportion to a body of that stature. The present owner will not suffer, it opened, the lady of the manor, having forbidden it. This grave was in a field now covered by the northern position of the churchyard. It was eventually dug up again at the end of the 18th century, but this time only a confused jumble of bones was discovered. Perhaps it is from this that the impression of a disturbing influence in the churchyard dates. At some time before the mid-19th century, the villagers are said to have gone searching with lanterns for ghosts, and in 1861 a boy, watching from a window in the neighboring school, said that he had seen three white figures crossing the churchyard at two in the morning, then vanish suddenly before his eyes. Could this be the ghostly figures walking the line of the secret pathway to anchor church? Later, a village gravedigger used to complain that when he was digging graves, he was made uncomfortable by the specter of a 17th century gravedigger who stood among the trees watching him. Another fascinating local belief is that a goblin-type entity lives at the top of the church's steeple. Scarcely less strange are the twisted figures which sometimes appear sitting on top of gravestones and a wreath of smoke. A cross from the church is a cross, reputedly where Christianity was first preached in the Midlands in 653 AD. Until the end of the 19th century, regular markets and fairs took place in the area between the cross and the Priory Arch. It was here that in 1848 a man brought his wife with a halter round her waist and offered her for sale for one shilling. Back in the churchyard is the grave of Frederick Wickham Railton, who died at the age of 14 years and eight months in 1853 while a pupil at Repton School. The grave houses the body of an uneasy spirit, which has been known for the last 120 years as The Gallery Ghost. The boy is said to have been murdered and his ghost makes its appearance on the night of the senior steeplechase running race and haunts the unfortunate winner. Apparently in his lifetime, Railton himself was notable as a good runner. The gallery into which the boy's bedrooms opened is in the top story of the Repton School's accommodation. It was here that Railton was made to run the gauntlet for some schoolboy offense, six times up and down the gallery between assailants armed with towels and pillowcases.  As with many haunted towns, Repton has a strong link with religion and specifically the Augustine Abbey that now houses Repton School. With its strange mass grave that contained over 250 skeletons, subterranean crypts and secret tunnels to its local folklore stories relating to unusual entity manifestations, Repton certainly seems to have a field of strangeness or what I term haunt field. From its foundation, the land has been interpreted as being a part of the borderlands of human belief, whether being deemed holy or cursed through the last 500 years since the Reformation that field of belief has developed and entered modern society. Ask any old Reptonians about the ghost of young Frederick and they will know if a fellow pupil who allegedly witnessed the specter, or stranger still, may have seen one of the many entities said to haunt the area around St. Winston Church. Fanny Windley began working in the factories of Brooklyn at the age of 10. When she was 15, Fanny was seduced by her 45-year-old employer George W. Watson. Watson's unwanted attention continued for the next two years even after Fanny's marriage. Then, one day on the stairway of the factory, she countered Watson's lewd advances with a gunshot to the head. There was no question that Fanny Windley Hyde killed George W. Watson. It would be up to the jury to decide whether this act was first-degree murder or if Fanny was under a weight of grief that could not be resisted. John Windley brought his family to America from Nottingham, England in 1864. He was a poor man and Fanny Windley had begun working in England when she was eight years old. She was 10 when they arrived in America and soon after, the life of a factory girl in Brooklyn. She was a bright girl, attending school when she could, evenings and Sunday, and as she approached adolescence, she was also considered quite beautiful. When she was 15, Fanny went to work at a hairnet factory owned by George W. Watson, a 45-year-old married man with five children. About four months after she started the job, Watson called Fanny into his office and forced his attentions on her. To keep from losing her job, Fanny let him have his way. For the rest of her time at the factory, Watson took every opportunity to take advantage of his young employee. When she tried to leave the job, Watson threatened to reveal to her father what they had been doing, knowing he would view Fanny as equally culpable. Inevitably, Fanny became pregnant and Watson gave her some medicine to induce abortion. The medicine did the job, but had the additional effect of destroying Fanny's health. During this period, Fanny had moved out of her father's house. She came to see him after two months' absence and both her father and stepmother commented on how much weight she had lost and how pale she was. Her weight had dropped from 125 pounds to 95 pounds. At her new lodgings, Fanny met a man named Hyde, a widower with a daughter around her own age. He asked her to marry him, and she agreed. George Watson had promised Fanny that if she married, he would leave her alone. In fact, she had him swear to this on a Bible. But the promise did not last long, and soon, Watson was up to his old tricks. This time, Fanny told her husband, and Hyde was livid. He went to see Watson himself and threatened to expose the situation to Watson's wife. Once again, Watson promised to leave Fanny alone. And once again, he broke his promise. In January, 1872, Fanny's brother helped her buy a gun. She said she intended to use it only to frighten Watson away from her. The pistol was small enough to conceal in the bosom of her dress, and it was hidden there when she went into the factory on January 23rd. She met Watson on a landing at the stairway as he was leaving the office for lunch. There, she shot Watson in the head, killing him. Several hours later, Fanny turned herself in to the police. The trial began April 15, 1872. The prosecution of Fanny Hyde was one of the sensational New York murder trials that dominated the headlines in the 1800s. Watson's family hired a prominent criminal attorney to assist the prosecution, making sure that Fanny was convicted and as much as possible mitigating the damage to George Watson's reputation. The district attorney declined the offer. He believed it was an open and shut case of premeditated murder. Fanny had laid in wait on the stairway landing and shot Watson in cold blood. The defense argued that it had not been cold-blooded murder. It was a chance meeting on the stairway. Watson accosted her as usual and Fanny had resisted. There was evidence that she had fought him off. The body was found with scratch marks on the face. When this did not stop him, Fanny pulled the pistol from her bosom and shot. In her own testimony, Fanny recalled that Watson had called her a whore and said that she should go with him. She had no recollection of the shot itself. The defense took a two-pronged attack. First, they argued for justifiable homicide. Why, gentlemen, the meanest worm that walks the earth in human form, the frailest thing that reveals night and day in the meanest dens of infamy, is mistress of her own body, and the man who dares to lay violent hands on that body against her will and attempts to use it against her will, and she kills him, she is justified in doing so, and so the court will instruct you. Then they argued for temporary insanity. We shall demonstrate to you, as clear as sunlight, that the defendant was no more responsible at the time of firing that shot than the pistol from which it was fired. Her mind was stormed in its citadel and laid prostrate under a stroke of frenzy. In either case, don't you see enough in this case to show you what a weight of grief must have been borne down upon this frail creature's head and heart, that this act was perpetrated under a weight of grief that could not be resisted. The case was given to the jury at 2.30 p.m. on April 19th. They seemed somewhat baffled over what direction to take, and at 10.30 they requested that the court provide them with precise definitions of first-degree murder, manslaughter in the third degree, and justifiable homicide. The judge declared that they had already been given those definitions but obliged them anyway. At around midnight, they sent word that they were hopelessly deadlocked. The judge sent them back and told them to work out an agreement. At 7 a.m. the next morning, they tearfully told the judge there was no possibility of agreement. The New York Times reported that the jury had been swayed by a sentiment toward a pretty woman. Ten jurors had voted for acquittal while the other two wanted third-degree manslaughter. A compromise was proposed in which they would find Mrs. High guilty of fourth-degree manslaughter. The resulting fine of $1,000 would be paid by the ten jurors favoring acquittal. It was not enough to sway the holdouts, and the jury remained deadlocked. The verdict? A hung jury. Fanny Hyde was released on $2,500 bail. In January 1873 her case was called again, and Fanny failed to appear, forfeiting her bail. In March, she was arrested and sent to Brooklyn's Raymond Street Jail to await trial. There, she met Kate Stoddard, the city's latest sensational defendant. In September 1873, Fanny Hyde was again released on $2,500 bail. She was never heard from again. When Weird Darkness returns, men admired and emulated Camille Flamerion, and many a woman swooned over him. Which is kind of an odd thing if you think about it, seeing as the man was consumed by thoughts of death. My doc agrees that I need to lose a few pounds. I knew that going in. But he also told me that the meds I'm taking for my type 2 diabetes aren't going to do me much good if I finish each meal with ice cream or cheesecake. I kind of knew that in advance, too. But cutting back on carbs and sugars is a lot easier said than done. I've tried a lot of protein bars while on the road, but I swear it's like eating non-sweetened chocolate-dusted particle board. But now I travel with built bars. Built bars taste like candy bars. In fact, I'm now using them for my dessert. And in about 150 calories per bar, less than 3 grams of sugar, up to 19 grams of protein, I can satisfy my sweet cravings guilt-free. Visit WeirdDarkness.com slash Built in Try a Box. You can go for a variety pack of several flavors to try, or pick and choose to build a box of your own.  That's WeirdDarkness.com slash Built. In late 19th and early 20th century France, a famous and favorite personality was the astronomer, science popularizer and science fiction writer Camille Flammarian. It's difficult today to gauge the celebrity status that Flammarian held. Men, at least some men, admired and emulated Flammarian. And many a woman swooned over him. As the saying goes, some would give their right arm to be in any way associated with the great Flammarian. Indeed, in a bizarre but true story, Flammarian received a body part from a deceased young female admirer. How this may have influenced his serious scientific interest in the possibility of life after death is unclear. A young French countess became amorously infatuated with Flammarian. She's reported to have had an image of Flammarian even tattooed on her body. She came down with tuberculosis and before dying prematurely, she instructed her physician upon her death to cut a large piece of skin from her back and deliver it to Flammarian with the request that he have it tanned and use the leather as the binding of his latest book in honor of her and thus she would always be close to him, at least in some sense. The desires of the countess were carried out and the skin delivered to Flammarian. He duly had it prepared and used it to bind a copy of his book, The Land of the Sky, which he kept in the library of his private observatory. On the cover in gold, he placed the following inscription, Pious fulfillment of an anonymous wish, Binding in Human Skin, Woman, 1882 The basic truth of this story has been confirmed. The skin was received and the book bound with it, but there are tantalizing details and variations that may or may not be true. In one version, before her death, the beautiful countess invites Flammarian to her chateau. He compliments her on her shoulders and as a way to ensure that he will never forget her, she arranges for the macabre gift upon her death. In another variation, which Flammarian stated, was the real truth of the matter, he had never met the countess in life and may not have even known her name. Apart from his anthropodermic adventures, Flammarian had a long and continuing fascination with physical studies. In modern terms, we would call them parapsychological studies, and the question of what, if anything, lies beyond bodily death. Indeed, this was apparently one of the consuming passions of his life. By his own account, Flammarian's serious research into psychical studies began in 1861 and continued until his death some six and a half decades later. In his lifetime, he published such works as The Unknown in 1902 and Mysterious Psychic Forces in 1907, but his masterpiece and grand synthesis was the three-volume work Death and its Mystery, published 1921 through 1923, with volume one being titled Before Death, volume two at the moment of death, and volume three after death. Death and its Mystery is a massive compilation of evidence with Flammarian's analysis bearing on psychical phenomena and the evidence for an afterlife. In many ways, it encapsulates the work for his first generation of serious afterlife researchers beginning in 1882 with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, or SPR, in London. Yet despite the wealth of case studies it contains, many modern investigators of the afterlife have not cited Flammarian's opus. Find this situation rather strange, even inexplicable, unless it's possibly due to Flammarian's style, which can be rather opinionated to the point to perhaps alienating the modern reader. Be that as it may, I will briefly introduce you to some of Flammarian's main themes and also place his work into historical context. One reason Flammarian was so popular with the public is that he was not afraid to speculate. He was not satisfied with simply recounting data and hard facts, but would extrapolate from those facts, mixing in his own speculations. This is seen in his astronomical work from the start. His first book, The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds, originally published in 1862, Flammarian had barely reached adulthood at that time, was a bestseller, going through dozens and dozens of editions. Part of its amazing success was no doubt due to the stance taken by Flammarian, namely that the universe is teeming with life, exotic species and even intelligent beings on other worlds. Extraterrestrial life, at least according to Flammarian, undoubtedly exists. Such themes were followed up in many of the dozens of books, both nonfiction and fiction, that Flammarian authored during his lifetime. Given this speculative and open attitude of Flammarian, many of his devoted readers expected him to also be open, even supportive of the concept that there may be more to life than simple material existence, more than the physicist's matter and energy as we know it. That is, if there is life on other planets out there in the universe, could not there be the continued existence of life or something in some dimension or space after the disillusion of our material bodies? As Flammarian wrote, when the first editions of my book, The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds, were published, a certain number of readers seemed to expect the natural sequel, The Plurality of the Existence of the Soul. If the first problem has been considered solved by my succeeding books, the second has remained an open question, and the survival of the soul, either in space or on other worlds or through earthly reincarnations, still confronts us as the most formidable of problems. But though they may have had to wait nearly 60 years, ultimately Flammarian's readers did receive their answer with the publication of Death and Its Mystery. The 19th century saw the rise of modern spiritualism, essentially the belief in both survival after death and the ability to communicate with the deceased, for instance, during a séance. Flammarian was not the only person of the educated classes to take a serious interest in the subject. The SPR was established by a group of Cambridge scholars who seriously and scientifically investigate among other subjects, spiritualist claims, and the possibility of an afterlife. Before addressing the question of life beyond the grave directly, the SPR first explored the issue of the reality of telepathic or direct mind-to-mind interactions. This was seen as important both in its own right and as a possible way that discarnate spirits might communicate with living body-bound individuals. The initial study, spearheaded by SPR member Edmund Gurney, polled 5,705 people concerning possible telepathic experiences and resulted in the two-volume 1886 work titled Phantasms of the Living. The evidence and phantasms of the living supported the reality of telepathy, but not everyone was convinced, so more data was collected, resulting in a truly massive study. Between April 1889 and May 1892, 17,000 sane and healthy people were polled as to whether they had ever had any hallucinatory experiences, the vast majority had not, and if so, the details of their experiences. The large number of people polled for the senses of hallucinations was necessary in order to develop a meaningful statistical analysis of the data. As the author of the study realized, given the labor it involved, it was unlikely that such an extensive study would ever be undertaken again, and so far this is true. While information on all kinds of hallucinations was collected, a special focus of the study was to collect data that could add to the examination of the evidence for telepathy. In particular, there was a special examination of death coincidences. Here is an example which I have paraphrased, collected as part of the census. Mr. S. Walker Anderson was living in Australia, while an aunt of his, Mrs. P, was in England. During the night of 17 November 1890, Mr. Walker Anderson woke up from his sleep and saw his aunt standing near the foot of his bed. He watched her lips move, and although he could hear no sound, he understood that she meant to say goodbye. The figure of his aunt then gradually vanished. Early the next morning, he told his wife about the incident, being convinced that his aunt had died. Both Mr. Walker Anderson and his wife made written notes of the time and date of the hallucination or apparition. Some weeks later, they learned from first and English newspaper and later via a personal letter that the aunt died on the same day and about the same time as Mr. Walker Anderson's hallucination, within a few hours, taking the time difference between England and Australia into account. This, like all material collected for the study, was carefully examined and cross-examined by the researchers, so that no false evidence would be included. The authors analyzed 65 attested death coincidences collected as part of the census. A death coincidence was defined as a hallucination, similar to the case I just shared with you, occurring within 12 hours before or after the death of an individual. Eliminating all questionable cases, for the purposes of statistical calculations, only 30 of these death coincidences were accepted. These death coincidences were compared to other hallucinations found among the census participants, the probability of a person dying on any particular day, and various other factors. Ultimately, the result was that even though death coincidences are very rare, they occur at least 300 to 400 times more often than they should due to chance alone. The authors wrote, between deaths and apparitions of a dying person, a connection exists which is not due to chance alone. This we hold as a proved fact. The authors of the census were less sanguine concerning possible evidence for post-mortem existence. Although they had received some tantalizing suggestions of possible communication from the dead, they did not regard the evidence as conclusive. Frederick W. H. Myers, who had helped author both phantasms of the living and the census of hallucinations, continued to study the issues of the afterlife until his own death. In his massive, posthumous two-volume work, human personality and its survival of bodily death, Myers assembled the best evidence up to his time for life after death. His conclusions are summarized as follows. I hold that certain manifestations of central individualities associated now or formerly with certain definite organisms have been observed in operation apart from those organisms, both while the organisms were still living and after they had decayed. Thus, in a limited and somewhat circumspect way, Myers asserted that there is an afterlife, at least to some degree for at least some people and possibly other organisms. This was farther than phantasms or the census had taken the subject, but still did not match either spiritualistic or everyday conceptions of an afterlife. Enter Camille Flammarian. The first task the Flammarian set for himself was to prove the existence of the soul independent of the material body. The second task was to demonstrate that the soul persists even after the disillusion of the physical organism. Let's see how he approached each issue. Flammarian devotes much of his first volume of his trilogy before death to a discussion of the evidence for, in his terminology, supra-normal faculties. These include the ability to receive information psychically at a distance, classic telepathy and precognition. Like the SPR studies, Flammarian is absolutely convinced of the reality of telepathy. He also argues strongly for the reality of precognition. Flammarian essentially equates the psychic element differing from the material organism with the concept of the soul. As he stated at the end of volume one, to solve the mystery of death, to establish the survival of the soul, we first had to prove that the soul does exist individually, an existence proved by special extracorporeal faculties which could not be included among the properties of the material brain, or among chemical or mechanical reactions, faculties essentially spiritual such as the will acting without the spoken word, telepathy, the sight by the spirit of a far off country of a future scene or event, all phenomena outside the sphere of our physical organism lacking any common measure with our organic sensations and proving that the soul is a substance which exists in itself. Flammarian discusses the possibility that at least some psychic phenomena might be due to unknown but nonetheless physical or material or energetic causes, for instance something analogous to radio waves as the mode of telepathic transmission but essentially dismisses such arguments as unrealistic. In particular, Flammarian places great importance on the fact that precognition can occur even if there is some chance that other psychic phenomena such as telepathy might ultimately be explainable by some sort of matter or energy phenomena currently not understood. In Flammarian's opinion there is no conceivable manner by which precognition, seeing or knowing the future, will ever be explained by conventional physics. I'm not so sure this is actually true given recent developments in physics. For Flammarian, the reality of precognition proves incontrovertibly that the psychic element, the soul, is real and distinct from the physical, mechanical and chemical organism. Given its importance to Flammarian's reasoning, what evidence is there for the reality of precognition? Flammarian cites several examples to make his case but perhaps the best can be summarized as follows. On June 27th, 1894, at 9am, Dr. Gallet at the time a medical student was absorbed in studying for an examination in Lyons, France when he was suddenly obsessed with a sentence that came to his mind. Manchure-Casmer Perrier is elected president of the Republic by 451 votes. He not only wrote down the sentence but told a fellow student. After lunch the two students met a couple of other friends and all had a good laugh at the prophecy since Casmer Perrier was not considered a serious candidate. The election took place at Versailles at 2pm and that afternoon the students heard a newsboy shouting, Manchure-Casmer Perrier is elected president of the Republic by 451 votes. Given the fact, at least as established to Flammarian's satisfaction, that the soul can somehow access the future, Flammarian posits that the soul, as an independent being, can survive into the future after the dissolution of the physical body. Volume 3 of Death and Its Mystery is devoted to the supposed occurrences or manifestations of the once living at time periods that clearly fall well after physical death. The second volume is devoted to manifestations of the dying, death coincidences that may be explainable by telepathy among the living, even if some of the living are about to die or in the throes of death. Flammarian cites numerous reputed manifestations and apparitions of the dead. Here is one which, for the sake of space, I have paraphrased. On September 2, 1916, Madame A. Clarenvall suddenly and inexplicably knew that her son, a pilot with the French Air Forces, was in danger. Two days later she was informed that at that very day and hour her son had disappeared behind German lines. After the end of the war, the family found out the son had died and was buried in a soldier's graveyard in France. Madame Clarenvall and her husband made four trips to the graveyard but were unsuccessful in locating their son's body. Then on May 25, 1920, Madame Clarenvall had a vision. She saw the face of her son in a group of trees and on either side of him were the faces of two young men, a Russian and a German. It was subsequently discovered that her vision happened when, to the day, bodies were being exhumed from the graveyard and moved. Ultimately she and her husband went back to the cemetery area and found the body of their son buried between that of a Russian soldier and a German soldier. Madame Clarenvall was convinced that her son had come back from the grave to direct her to the location of his bodily remains. As Flammarian acknowledged, the issue is whether or not such cases necessarily require the manifestation of the dead to explain all the details. In general, we can eliminate only with great difficulty the possibility of influence exerted by living person's minds. In the incident of Madame Clarenvall, everything could conceivably be explained by telepathy between her and her son when he died and possibly between her and grave workers, although she did not know the grave workers, perhaps combined with her own precognition of the future, namely a precognition of finding her son's grave. However, if we are to posit a precognition on her part of finding the grave, the precognition also seems to be the very factor that allows her to find the grave. How can this be? Flammarian and like-minded thinkers find the argument that the son is actually communicating from the beyond more convincing. Flammarian, like Myers before him, concluded that apparitions or manifestations of the dead are real, but they decline sharply with time after death. The vast majority occur within the first days and weeks after death, and by the end of the first year, manifestations of the dead are exceedingly rare, although Flammarian contends that some have occurred up to decades after death. What do we make of this pattern? Do the deceaseds perhaps occasionally remain in our everyday terrestrial realm for a short period of time before leaving? The longer the temporal duration after bodily death, perhaps the more likely it is that the deceased will have left the terrestrial realm. Such a hypothesis would account for the rapid drop-off of apparitions as we become further removed temporarily from the death incident. But what happens to the deceased? Where do they go? Well, here are Flammarian's speculations. In our total ignorance from a scientific point of view of the conditions of ultra-terrestrial life, we can only make conjectures as to this life. We know and shall know henceforth that the soul exists. To admit the survival leads us to admit pre-existence. Earthly life is but a phase in the life of the spirit. The doctrine of reincarnation is, moreover, the only one which remains admissible after we have pondered all metaphysical considerations, and it is the oldest of definite religious beliefs. There must be both a previous existence and an afterlife. Ever the astronomer, Flammarian adds, there is no reason for thinking that the reincarnations of the human soul are limited to our planet, nor is it unscientific to attribute to psychic monads the faculty of voyaging through the immensities of space, of passing from one planet to another, from the earth to Mars, Venus, or some other world. So what is it like after we die? Is there really life after death and can science ever get on board with the idea, despite the testable evidence? We'll look into that a bit more when Weird Darkness returns. 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Weird Dark Roast Coffee is not actually knocked on your door because it doesn't have arms or hands, so if you hear knocks at the door and no one answers when you ask who it is, it's probably paranormal and you should just leave the door shut and locked. What happens when we die? Human beings have asked this question probably more than any other. With does God exist and what is the meaning of life coming in as close seconds? All three of course are intertwined, but while the reality of the deity and the solution to life's riddle may be grasped in the here and now, what happens when we give up the ghost seems to be something we can know only by doing just that. It seems that the only way we can know for certain what happens after death is by dying. And while the attraction of that ultimate mystery is strong, the means of solving it appear to most of us at least somewhat less attractive. But is it really the case that the answer to what happens after death lies beyond a threshold which once crossed cannot be uncrossed? While messages from the dead fill folklore, myth and seances and religions around the world and through the ages have in different ways assured their devotees of the reality of an afterlife, many of us are nevertheless not entirely certain that anything awaits us beyond the grave, except perhaps annihilation, which is of course the standard modern view. In recent times however, assurances of a continuity of consciousness beyond the brain have come not from the camp of religion, mysticism or the occult, but from that of their often sworn enemy, science. In 2001, a paper appeared in the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, reporting to show evidence supporting the reality of near-death experiences or NDE's. In near-death experiences and survivors of cardiac arrest, a prospective study in the Neanderthals, the Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel and his research team presented the results of a 20-year-long study of the strange experiences reported by patients who survived heart failure. At these patients reported being aware of anything during cardiac arrest was strange enough. The standard view is that when the heart and lungs stop, so do the brain and consciousness. What should have happened was that they experienced nothing at all. Nevertheless, they did. The patients Lommel studied reported that during the period of unconsciousness brought on by their seizure, they experienced some very remarkable things indeed. Many recounted feelings of bliss and intense happiness. Many spoke of a bright white light of a tunnel of seeing deceased relatives and of going through a kind of life review in which their entire lives, as the cliché goes, passed before their eyes. Many spoke of having an out-of-the-body experience of seeing themselves and their nurses and doctors from some vantage point near the ceiling. Many spoke of guides, angels and spirits come to comfort them. Many also assured Lommel that the experience was entirely beneficial, that it relieved them of their fear of death, that it had transformed them in some way and that it gave them the certainty that the life we know here on earth is not the only one. Lommel's Lancet paper understandably caused an uproar, yet the research was impressive. The statistics Lommel and his team provided seemed to show that the usual explanations given to account for NDE's from the mainstream scientific view did not at least in these cases work. Lommel studied some 562 survivors of cardiac arrest and he discovered that up to 18% of them reported having had an NDE. Of these, none could be chalked up to oxygen deficiency to the brain, the effects of drugs or other physiological or psychological reasons usually offered as a way to explain the phenomenon. Lommel and his team concluded the NDE was an actual, objective event and that it argued in favor of some kind of post-death survival. Perhaps even more controversial, the findings also seemed to offer proof that consciousness can exist outside or even without the brain. While most mainstream scientists will merely snort at the idea of an afterlife, they will positively bellow at the suggestion consciousness is anything more than a by-product of that three-pound mass of gray matter that we have. According to a number of prestigious neuroscientists and philosophers of the mind, consciousness is absolutely, positively 100% produced by the brain. Lommel was unrepentant and in 2007 he produced a book, Consciousness Beyond Life, based on his paper presenting his case studies in greater depth and bringing his research to a wider public. You can actually see that paper in New Dawn Magazine, if you wanted to check for it. The results were encouraging. The book was a best seller in the Netherlands, then repeated its success in Germany, the UK and the US. Lommel has presented his ideas in interviews and videos and on television. Lommel's work has, of course, attracted criticism. Yet his findings seem to stand and, for the open-minded, provide the kind of hard evidence that scientists dismissive of any non-materialistic accounts of consciousness demand in order for them to consider changing their minds in any way about the matter. Lommel was not the only medical practitioner to take NDE's seriously and to subject them to study. Even more controversial than Lommel's findings was the account by the American neurosurgeon Evan Alexander of his own NDE. Alexander had 25 years experience studying the brain and teaching others how to study it at institutions such as the Harvard Medical School. Like most of his colleagues, he accepted the dogma that the brain produces consciousness. Then, in 2008, a bacterial infection, a rare form of meningitis, had him in a coma for a week and taught him otherwise. His chances of recovery were slim at best and his family was advised that if he did survive, he would be little more than a vegetable. The infection had caused irreparable brain damage. Yet on the seventh day, under a ventilator, Alexander opened his eyes and came to. This was miracle enough, but the story Alexander had to tell was even more remarkable. The white light was there and also beautiful melodies, angelic choirs, fantastic landscapes with strange plant life, waterfalls, crystal pools, and thousands of beings dancing and a girl who came to him on a butterfly wing. During the week of his coma, when his brain shouldn't have produced the slightest hallucination, should have produced no consciousness at all, Alexander went on a journey to higher realms and eventually to what he calls the core, a center of reality filled with the infinite healing power of the all loving deity, the source of everything. He was privy to fundamental realities for which God seemed too puny a little human word. He speaks of experiencing a higher dimensional multiverse and an over sphere and that his notions of time, space and everything else were radically changed. During his coma, he underwent a kind of spiritual evolution from what he calls the earthworm's eye view to the core, many times learning truths about the nature of existence and our part in it. One truth was about the reality of the afterlife, knowledge of which Alexander has tried to pass on to his many readers in his bestselling books, Proof of Heaven and Maps of Heaven. Like Pym Van Lommel, Alexander came to believe that human beings are much more than their physical bodies and consciousness is something more than a byproduct of the brain. They disagree with the philosopher John Searle, who argues that the brain produces consciousness as the liver does bile. Consciousness, they argue, is not localized in or produced by the brain because consciousness itself is the ultimate reality, not the physical world. An insight echoed down the ages by mystics and visionaries, but which in recent times it seems some scientists are cottoning onto as well. They see it as a way out of the cul-de-sac reached by trying to solve the hard problem in mainstream neuroscience.  The answer is, it doesn't. It's the other way around. Whatever we think of Alexander's account of the afterlife and his ideas about mankind's spiritual evolution, he has since become a popular advocate of the union of science and spirituality with appearances on Oprah Winfrey and other talk shows, the notion of a non-local consciousness has a history. What was remarkable about the cases Lommel studied and Alexander's own was that they reported vivid, inner, transformative experience during a time when the brains involved should have been incapable of producing anything. If brains produce consciousness, this should have been impossible, rather like a flashlight shining without a battery. Some studies done in the 1960s suggest consciousness may not need much brains at all. In 1965, John Lorber, a specialist in hydrocephalus or water on the brain, published a paper as remarkable as Lommel's. In Hydroencephaly with Normal Development, published in Developmental Medicine and Child Psychology for December 1965, Lorber presented several case studies in which people with little or no cerebral cortex functioned normally. In one case, the subject had an IQ of 126 and an honors degree in mathematics. Two girls born in the 1960s had fluid where their cerebrums should have been, with no evidence of a cerebral cortex, yet both had perfectly normal intelligence. Unlike the Wizard of Oz's Scarecrow, they and the other cases Lorber studied seemed to get on perfectly well without a brain. Such cases, though well documented, may push the believability barrier, but we need not resort to these extremes to argue the brain does not produce consciousness. In the late 19th century, the philosopher Henry Bergson argued eloquently that rather than produce consciousness, the brain served an eliminatory function, acting as a reducing valve, filtering reality and allowing only what was necessary for survival to reach conscious awareness. Rather than produce consciousness, the brain edits it down to something manageable. Otherwise, we would be overwhelmed by reality's complexity, condition common to many mystics. Aldous Huxley resorted to Bergson's idea when, in The Doors of Perception, he tried to account for the effects of the drug mesoline on his consciousness. The mystical effects of the drug, Huxley believed, were due to its opening the filters of the brain, allowing more consciousness than needed for mere survival to flood into awareness. The fact that in the cases Lommel studied and in Alexander's own, the brain was out of commission seems to support the Bergson-Huxley thesis. With the filters off, much more of reality, what Huxley called mind at large, became available. If the brain mutes reality, allowing, as Huxley said, only a thin trickle to enter consciousness, in the NDE, the taps seemed to be on full blast. The analogy is apt, as our kitchen taps do not produce the water in our sinks, but quite the opposite. They stop it from running. It's already there in the pipes. Some variant of Bergson's idea is popular among alternative scientists such as the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who speaks of the brain acting as a kind of tuner, selecting different wavelengths of reality, rather as a radio works by cutting out all transmissions except the one you wish to hear, or as a television that picks up a broadcast but is not responsible for it. Neither my radio nor my television produces the programs they play. They receive them from the broadcaster, and Sheldrake and other scientists and philosophers like him see the brain as a kind of inner TV, picking out different channels broadcast by, well, we're not quite sure. The general idea is that consciousness is the fundamental reality. Rather than being stuffed into the cramped confines of our skulls, it pervades the universe. This is the panpsychism that philosopher David Calmer's advocates, following in the philosophical footsteps of Bergson and his contemporary Alfred North Whitehead, who in different ways envisioned some version of mind at large. Needless to say, or perhaps not, such an idea as an all-pervasive consciousness or mind is of course a staple part of many pre-modern worldviews. Another who accepted the idea of mind at large was, oddly enough, an early investigator into NDE's, although in his aptly posthumous human personality and its survival of bodily death in 1903, the first scientific study of the afterlife, F. W. H. Myers did not call them that. Myers spoke of the subliminal mind, by which he meant something different than Freud's unconscious, which Myers coinage preceded by some years. It was Huxley who in his forward Myers classic compared his subliminal mind to an upstairs in the house of the soul rather than Freud's garbage littered basement. This upstairs had some unusual characteristics, and in the late 19th century, Myers and his fellows in the Society for Psychical Research devoted their lives to studying them. Take, for example, the remarkable experience of Dr. A. S. Wilts, who in 1889 died from typhoid fever. Wilts was pronounced dead, but found himself waking up inside his body and gradually being released from it. He felt himself emerge from his body and found that he could walk away from it. No one noticed him, and, stranger still, he found that he could walk through people. Wilts then found himself confronting huge rocks standing beneath storm clouds. A voice told him that if he continued past them, he would enter eternity, but if he desired, he could return to life, a common choice in many modern NDE's.  Myers' account of Dr. Wilts' experience was preceded by an even earlier one. In 1871, Albert Heim, a professor of geology, fell some 70 meters while climbing in the Alps. During the few seconds of his fall, Heim experienced a panoramic life review, seeing his whole past take place in many images as though on a stage at some distance from me. Like many who have experienced an NDE, he saw a heavenly light and was free from fear and anxiety. Conflict was transmuted into love, and he found himself moving painlessly and softly into a splendid blue heaven. Heim survived his fall, but the experience so moved him that he began to collect accounts of similar experiences by other climbers. Forgotten for years, Heim's work was rediscovered when what we might call the NDE and afterlife boom of the 1970s and 80s in the work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring and others, brought it back to light. Another fairly well-known account of an NDE is that of CG Young, who in 1944, following a heart attack, found himself orbiting the earth and confronting a strange temple and Hindu floating in space. Young was about to cross the threshold, like Dr. Wilts, when he found himself whisked back to earth, disappointed at the prospect of coming back to life. Do Lummel and Alexander bring anything new to this study? Their scientific and medical credentials certainly bring new attention to it, although to be sure not all of it is positive, and the claims and expertise of both have come under heavy scrutiny and criticism. But part of what makes there and other studies convincing, at least to the open-minded, is the similarity between the accounts they study and older reports on what happens when we die. As told me Tompkins in The Modern Book of the Dead makes clear, there is much overlap between accounts of the afterlife found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Dead to speak of only the two most famous earlier reports on the beyond. And these two share much with recent investigations, such as the insights about the life between death and rebirth, gleaned by the spiritual scientist Rudolf Steiner through his access to the Akashic record. For instance, Steiner too makes the life review a central part of the process of dying in preparation for reincarnation. But as Tompkins makes clear, there are also differences. The Swedish scientist and religious philosopher Immanuel Swedenborg, who wrote much about the brain, journey to heaven, hell, and also to an intermediary realm he called the Spirit World, not through an NDE but through inducing visionary states. He gave his own proof of the higher spheres in his book, Heaven and Hell, yet his account is somewhat different from Evan Alexander's, while both Swedenborg's and Alexander's differ considerably from Steiner's. Enough similarities exist among these accounts to suggest that in some way they and other voyagers were encountering different parts of the same inner landscape. And if the proofs of heaven that we have glanced at here are at all reliable, it is one that at some point we will all have an opportunity to journey through. In this life and the next. Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do. You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at darren at WeirdDarkness.com. Darren is D-A-R-R-E-N. And you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the show's Weirdos Facebook group on the Contact social page at WeirdDarkness.com. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, click on Tell Your Story. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. The Medieval Walking Dead was posted at medievalists.net. The Ghosts of Repton is by M.J. Wayland. A Weight of Grief is by Robert Wilhelm for Murder by Gaslight. The Mystery of Death is by Robert Scotch for New Dawn Magazine. And Life in the Afterlife is by Gary Lockman again for New Dawn Magazine. Weird Darkness is a production of Marlarhouse Productions, and now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Isaiah 9 verse 2, The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned. And a final thought, start making your own happiness a priority. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Her mind was stormed in its citadel and laid prostrate under a stroke of frenzy. In either case, don't you see enough in this case to show you that On September 2nd, 1916, Madame A. Clarenval, on September 2nd, 1916, Madame A. Clarenval suddenly and inexplicably knew that her son, a pilot with the disappeared, knew that her son, a pilot with the French air forces, was in danger. Hey, Weirdos, our next Weirdo Watch Party is coming up fast. It's Friday, February 9th. A gruesome twosome of Graveyard Cinema, Horrible Henry and Mad Marty are presenting 1950s Quicksand, starring Mickey Rooney and Peter Laurie. In the film, a man takes $20 from his employer to go on a date, planning to replace the money the next day. But he falls increasingly into more disastrous circumstances and further in need of more money, and it spirals out of control. Join us Friday, February 9th for Quicksand. It's free to watch online, and you can chat along with the rest of us Weirdos as we watch the movie together. The show begins at 8 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Central, 6 p.m. Mountain and 5 p.m. Pacific. You can watch a trailer for the film and watch horror hosts and schlocky B-movies anytime, day or night on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. 1950s Quicksand, starring Mickey Rooney and Peter Laurie. Friday, February 9th on the Weirdo Watch Party page. Hey Weirdos, be sure to click the like button and subscribe to this channel, and click the notification bell so you don't miss future videos. I post videos seven days a week, and while you're at it, spread the darkness by sharing this video with someone you know who loves all things strange and macabre. 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