Welcome back everyone, and a special welcome to any new listeners. This is the second part of my conversation with some of the members of the Murphy family and their very traumatic and terrifying haunting in their home when they were growing up. In the last episode I talked with Clara, the mum and Sean, Jeanie, and Marion. This episode was recorded on a different day with Sean and another of his niece’s, Natalia. If you haven’t listened to the previous episode then, I suggest that you do. It’s around two hours long and tells of their experiences in the home and how Nat came to live there following her mum’s suicide. In it, we also talk about both tragic suicides of Laura and Mark . . . Again, I give a trigger warning, we will be talking about Laura, Laurie as the family called her, and her suicide in this episode.

Because of commitments and timing issues, I was unable to talk with John, who experienced some of the most horrific events, so for this episode, Sean has given me permission to use some of the clips he uploaded to his blog SeanPaulMurphyville.blogspot.com about these experiences. I’ve inserted these in appropriate places in the episode. In a couple of them, I have used snippets of the text, from Sean’s blog, because they were appropriate to what we were talking about at that time. And there was no audio clip of them available. Those inserts are spoken by myself, identifying John.

Oh, I almost forgot.  As I was editing this episode, I discovered to my surprise a class A EVP. For those who don’t know what an EVP is, it stands for Electronic Voice Phenomena, and it happens when a spirit is able to project its voice onto a digital (these days), or old analogue recording device. In my very first season of this podcast, I did do an episode on EVP for those who want to know more about it. It’s linked on this episodes page on the podcast website www.walkingtheshadowlands.com or simply look for EVP season one on any podcast platform if you want to hear it. Class A, means it is the best you can get. As clear, or in this case clearer than a living person speaking, with no editing to the speech. This is about [ ] minutes into the recording and is in response to what Nat is saying. It most definitely is NOT me, and certainly is not Nat or Sean. There is just one word spoken. But it is clearer than me or Nat, very clear indeed, and I admit, took me by surprise.

Email me shadowlands@yahoo.com and let me know what you think it says? You may hear something completely different, in a different language – or it could simply be in English? I sent this clip to the family when I discovered it and asked Sean if I should keep it in or remove it. Sean asked that it be left it. So, there’s a little extra treat for you all.

Finally, before we begin, I want to tell you a little about Sean and his background. I came across Sean quite by accident and discovered he had written a fiction book, based on the terrifying experiences his family had living in a haunted home. This immediately caught my attention and being the curious person I am, I wanted to hear of his experiences first hand. So I contacted him and I am very delighted to say these two episodes were the result. I was thrilled when he specifically asked if I would like to speak to other family members as well as it’s wonderful to get different perspectives on an event, I feel it gives a rounder, fuller viewpoint.

Sean Paul Murphy is an author, an award-winning screenwriter, and an editor. He’s written 14 produced motion pictures. And written two published books, his memoir, “The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God”  and his fiction book – based on the

experiences we cover in these two episodes, “Chapel Street”. Both of these books were published by TouchPoint Press. He is known for the following movies: The Encounter (2010), Marriage Retreat (2011), and Revelation Road: The Black Rider (2014) and He has been married to Deborah L. Murphy since September 2000.

So without further ado, are you willing to walk back with me into this part of the shadowlands and continue our journey there? Then let’s begin.

Clara, Natalia, John, & Sean

We talked before, but Natalia was unable to be with us due to work commitments, so she’s kindly agreed to come on and talk with us now about her experiences in the home. So maybe, Sean, you could tell us perhaps how it is that Natalia came to live in the home, if that’s OK Natalia?

Sean: OK, that’s, that’s great. Natalie is my niece, Natalia. She’s the daughter of my late sister, Laura. Laurie moved into the house with the rest of the family in nineteen-seventy-four and left when she married. Natalia’s father, Frank, and sadly she took her own life in nineteen-ninety-four. Afterwards, Natalia moved in with her – They left the house where my sister died. She lived with her paternal grandmother for a while and her father. Then she shifted. She lived temporarily at my grandmother’s house, then she moved in back with her with, with her grandmother. My mother’s house which would be the house on St. Helens Avenue. And then she moved, and then she moved with her father. Then she moved back for a number of years at St. Helens Avenue until –You weren’t there ‘til the end, for quite a few years, until at least the end of the nineties or early two-thousands, and in a way, she represents the third generation of our family to live in St. Helen’s Avenue, Marianne. Because you had my mother, to be the first generation, right? I would be second generation and Natalia would be third generation.

And she lived in the master bedroom, which was adjacent to the two the three connected closets, which were the centre of the haunting. In fact, her bedroom door for a while was right up against the door in a closet. And she’s had a very active series of events at the house, a lot of which I didn’t know until I did start doing the interviews for my blog. And then she left out some stuff, too, because I said, so what were some of the strange things that happened? And she left out stuff that happened every day, which most people would consider strange. Unless you lived at twenty- one St Helens Avenue, in which case these things are a daily occurrence that you get used to. So she was – so, when I interviewed her, she mainly talked about some of the, some of the more extreme and isolated incidents.

Right. Oh, thank you so much for that, Sean, and thank you for introducing us. And Natalia, I’m so sorry about the loss of your mom, hon. I just honestly, I just cannot imagine how difficult that was for you. Can you perhaps tell us how old you were when you first came to live at your grandmother’s house?

Natalia: Let’s see. By the time I actually physically lived there, I was 12. That was the first time I actually moved in. That was when my mom died, and so we moved out of our house and into my grandmother’s house, with her. But we spent so much time there. I mean, it felt like we practically, it was like a second home to us, you know?

I was just going to say, obviously isn’t the first time you’ve been there. So when you visited previously, like just for visits before your mom passed, did you experience anything in those times with those times? Or, were those times OK, because you were just coming and going?

Natalia: There were – I wouldn’t say I saw things or heard things. There were just events that would happen that once I got older and looked back at them, it really made you think. One thing that always stuck out to me was a game that myself and my two younger cousins would play. And we – you know kids play hide and seek and we would play hide and seek. One of us would always end up on the landing to the second floor. It was like the very first like foyer landing. We would be laying there and we’d have like a blanket over our head. And it was like, that’s so odd to do. That’s not really a hiding spot and none of us really knew why we did it. We would just lay there and just like, pretend like we’re sleeping or something and then come to find out. I mean, it’s still up in the air whether it’s true or not, but. Later, we found out that the previous owner had died or at least was close to her death on that hall landing, for an unknown amount of time. So, as I got older finding out that stuff was like oh well!

Oh, that’s very interesting, isn’t it? So, and you kids laying down like that, you were like reflecting what she was doing, at that spot.

Natalia: Yeah. We have no idea, because we were so little at that time, that any of that stuff had happened. But, there would be times there were so many people in our house, that I don’t know whether I saw people that were actually there or people that were not there, but there.

Oh, wow. Yeah, it was a pretty busy house, wasn’t it?  Lots of people. So, really, aside from playing the games with your cousins, you didn’t really, until you moved into the home permanently have any experiences to speak of.

Natalia:  Exactly. They didn’t become as prominent to know that they weren’t normal occurrences until I actually moved in and experienced life there.

Sean: Well, I would like to say about the landing on the stairs when we moved into the house, the neighbours, the neighbours said that the previous owner, Miriam Mayford, died on that landing. That she had come down the stairs and died on that landing. That’s what I was always thought to believe. When I eventually got her death certificate, when I was researching things from my blog, it said she died at the hospital. However, recently, about right before covid started, I was at a neighbourhood funeral of one of the local matriarchs. One of the beloved matriarchs in our old neighbourhood. And a number of the people there were my old, you know, were in that street. before us. And they categorically say that she died in that house. She did not die in the hospital. She died on that landing. So my guess, the reconciliation of the two things, is that she probably wasn’t officially declared dead until they took her to the hospital.

Yeah. That’s probably right.

Sean: And they only had probable cause of death too. They didn’t even they didn’t even really give the cause of death.

Really? Only probable? Oh, interesting.

Sean: Yeah, probable pulmonary embolism, is what they said. So that was her cause of death, you know, so. Yeah, so that flight of stairs seems to be – Apparently the mailman spotted her lying on the, lying on the landing from the outside, big glass door on the front door and saw her.

Wow, poor woman.

Sean: And then they entered through the apparently entered our house. When that landing, there’s a big stained glass window. And apparently, the firemen put a ladder up and they entered through that staying opened up that stained glass window and got into the house. I guess it wasn’t locked and the door probably was.

Right. Wow, that’s kind of sad.

Sean: I did want to bring up that, that point that, you know, I’d always heard that rumour and then I saw the death certificate, wondered about it. But, the neighbours who were there at the time said she definitely died in the house.

OK, so cool, cool. Can I call you Nat or do you want me . . .?

Natalia: That’s fine.

Ok, I just feel like I’m tripping, tripping over your full name, and I feel like I keep mispronouncing it.  So, how soon after you moved in Nat, did you begin to experience things? And what was your first experience in the home?

Natalia: I would say, and it could have been a month after I moved in that I probably started experiencing things.

John:  . . . as a young kid. I don’t know, early memories that it was always kind of something coming up the steps behind you, something kind of creepy in the corner watching you at night type thing. It’s hard to say. I would say early/mid-eighties? I mean, I was probably nine or ten? I mean, it’s hard to say, you know. Childhood memories are . . . It’s hard to say when all that stuff starts . . . It was just kind of a feeling kind of, for me, that there was just kind of something following you up the steps. Something like you wanted to run in your room and lock the door at night. I always thought that was kind of weird. I always locked my bedroom door when I lived in that house. I don’t know, things that people now would probably say are like shadow people type stuff. Just like maybe not a full form or full figure, but almost like a cloaked type person standing, like, six or eight feet away from you across the room. Not quite in the corner. You could tell they were kind of out in the — it wasn’t like a shadow in the corner. It was kind of three-dimensional.

Natalia: There was always some weirdness about being there. When, before I lived there, my cousin said we’d only play on the first floor. We would never go up to the second floor or even the third floor because that was all the bedrooms and we didn’t have any reason to go in there and be really freaked us out.  So we just never went up there. So when I moved it up, when I finally moved in, it was just so awkward to be like, up in the place, like, we didn’t go that much. It was so weird being there and it just didn’t feel right. As a kid, you can’t really put into words what it is that you’re experiencing. You just know something’s not right.

So, when I initially moved in, I moved in to probably the larger, or the master room with my grandmother. So she had her bed in there. She bought a bed and she put it in there, too. And so, the way the day bed was positioned, the foot, my feet would be at the main door to the room. And then right behind my head was the closet, the bedroom closet door. And then, right next to that was like a French door that went out into a sun porch.  So right off the bat that that closet was always the place that always freaked everybody out. It just didn’t sit right. I mean, it would always be kind of cracked, always be like at least two inches open and it would just be darkness in there. And you’re just like, something’s got to be looking at me. So right off the bat, those things would happen.

But one prominent situation was one morning my grandmother was getting up to take me to school and it was had to have been wintertime. It was dark when we got up. And so she wakes up and. Her bed, when I wake up, her bed would be right in front of my eyes because the room’s not that big, but it would be right there. She woke up and turned on her stand light, and got up to go open the bedroom door. Well, she had been by the bedroom door. I saw her at my feet and as soon as I opened my eyes, there was a face right in my face. But it was like upside down. It was almost like if someone was coming from the closet leaning in her head over and looking almost nose to nose with me. And I just opened my eyes and I froze. And I was like, Gram, what is that? And I didn’t say what it was. I didn’t say what it looked like.

She just said, close your eyes and it will go away. And that’s all she said. I don’t know if she ever remembered saying that specifically to me, but it’s like she knew what it was. I didn’t say what it was. It freaked me out! And I was terrified to open my eyes. And from that moment on, any time I was asleep when I would wake up, I would kind of like peek my eyes open a little bit because I was always afraid to just open them. So I was convinced it was going to come back and like . . .

Be there again. 

Natalia: It was probably the only physical manifestation I’ve ever seen. But it was not clear. Like I couldn’t tell you what facial features, if any, it had, but it was it was a face, but I don’t know what kind of face.  

Right. So just to clarify, your bed was out from the wall? So there was a space between your bedhead and the wardrobe, you could walk behind it?

Natalia: My bed, it was just like – it was just a wall. There were two doors and there was a wall. And my bed was along that wall between the two doors. So the head of my bed was like right there at the door to the closet.

Oh, gotcha. Gotcha. I kind of had in my mind’s eye that your bed I was kind of in the centre of the room somewhere. So I was just clarifying that because I thought that my listeners might have had that same idea as well. OK, so that would have been pretty terrifying to see and, and apart from the shock value, you obviously felt fear from it.

Natalia: I definitely did. I was scared to open my eyes again. I was scared to get out of bed. I was like, you just got to do it. It wasn’t like this long conversation that her and I had about it. It was just she was just kind of like, close your eyes. It’ll go away. We’ve got to go to school.

Right, so you don’t know if your grandmother actually saw it either?

Natalia: I don’t know, and, you know, even after all these interviews, I still have never asked her if she ever saw that, if she remembered that, I don’t know. I’m sure she probably watched my interview, but I don’t know if she ever.

Sean: . . . did it appear in any sort of full apparition or was it just a cloaked figure that you would see?

John: It was always kind of a cloaked figure, I think. It didn’t really, it just kind of stayed, you could say, at a distance. It never really got close or anything, but it was definitely there, just kind of watching, I always felt like it was just kind of affirming itself, kind of showing you that it kind of really was there. 

Sean: Now, did you get any indication that it was either male or female?

John: I never got any indications. I never considered it male or female, to be honest. I never really put a gender to it. Whatever happened there. I don’t think it was human. 

Sean: Did you put any sort – did you think it was human in nature?

John: I never thought it was human. Whatever happened there, I don’t think it was human.

Wow. Interesting. That’s really interesting. So that was your first experience and then how did it progress from there for you? And of course, at that time also you’re processing your mother’s death. So you had a lot going on for you at that point in time. And so these experiences would have compounded everything for you. It must have been just such a tough time, such a tough time.

Natalia: And it was very difficult, but in my child mind, I never equated the two to being the same experience or related to each other. Probably, at least the prominent experience, and I’ve talked to Sean about it, and we have a hard time replacing whether it happened before I moved in or after I moved in, was the experience I had in the third floor attic. At the time, at least at the time that happened, my grandmother loves to sew, so she has a sewing room, she makes all these great things and it was on the third floor of our house. And so there was one occasion where she was on the first floor and she needed something. And she’s like, well, it’s upstairs in my sewing room and she had me go get it. And I was like, I ­don’t want to go get it, but I went to go get it because it’s what we do.

So I just ran upstairs. I get all the way up. I mean, a couple of flights of stairs, I get upstairs, too, it was in the front room, the room we affectionately call the hell hole. And as you walk in, it’s a really small room. You have to go around the door and behind the door is a closet. So I’m going around the closet. I’m looking for this thing that she wants and the closet, because it’s at the attic, it kind of goes down the side. So if you walk into the closet, you’re looking at the back wall and to the left, it goes down into the attic. So I’m looking straight ahead, looking through her stuff. And I hear this noise out of my left ear.

And so I like, I look over and all I see are these red eyes, like probably a foot away from me. And all I hear is hissing and red eyes. And I just freeze and I’m like, what is going on? Like, what –  you can’t figure out what it is? All I see is eyes,  I don’t see like a figure or nothing. I just like back out of the room without taking my eyes off the closet and just book it downstairs. Didn’t go downstairs and tell my grandmother I saw something, I was like, you have to go get it yourself. I didn’t say gran, there was something there. I said you have to go get it. I’m not going back up there ever again.

Wow. So you just saw these red eyes, you didn’t see blackness just the red eyes. Wow. That would have been really terrifying. And of course, that was meant to scare you. That was the intent of that entity was to scare you. Oh, how horrible was that?

Natalia: I mean, that was probably the scariest event I had, and I guess as I got older and got more accustomed to things, I just was kind of like, you’re not really going to scare me anymore.

Really?

Natalia: Because, after going forward, as I got older and longer, I lived there, are things that scare me as much like it wasn’t a jump factor, it was just kind of like whatever, like what do you want.

Well, that’s pretty impressive. And of course, you probably got a lot of the attitude of your grandmother, the way she handled it as well. And, you know, she did a really amazing job, amazing job of dealing with it. Of course, she had no option but to deal with it, because financially they were stuck and said, what do you do? You make the most of your situation. And I think, the feeling that I get is that her attitude really made a difference to how you dealt with it as well.

Natalia: I definitely think so.

So what other experiences happen to you? Like you saw the red eyes, you saw the face over you. What other sort of things like what were the day-to-day things that happened? 

Natalia: I mean, day to day things would be things as simple as you said something down and you walk away and it’s gone or. You are going from one room to the other and. Doors are like kind of open and close. Like those kind of things where you’re like, maybe it’s happening, maybe it’s not happening, where you can kind of negotiate with yourself, whether it’s real or it’s not right. And you’re like, oh, the window must be open or something. Or, you know, it’s not as prominent as some other things, but ­–  as the –  I want to say, into the late nineties, as everybody started moving around in the house to different rooms, people were living in different places in the house. Things started progressing, at least to the point of it was a regular occurrence to hear, like the furniture moving in the house. And you would be like, what is going on? You go out and check, nobody’s there. The furniture’s all on the spot that it was. But it was like, I know that that it couldn’t be anything else except for furniture moving.

Sean: Now, did you ever actually see furniture move or just hear it?

John: I saw paper move, I never actually saw furniture move. I heard it move.

Sean: Okay. Now let’s go back to something that’s part of the family lore. Now, the furniture did physically actually move in your room?

John: Yes.

Sean: Can you tell us that story?

John: Joe and myself . . .

Sean: And Scott Sims?

John: No. It may have just been Joe and myself. Baltimore didn’t have an NFL team at the time so we would always just watch whatever games were on. We always got the AFC games, and we were watching, I don’t know, whatever the big teams were at the time. I think it was Buffalo playing somebody else. It probably was, they went to the Super Bowl all those years. Anyway, we were watching it and my father was always watching downstairs, Joe and I both went running downstairs to say something about the game, we knew he was watching it, a big play or whatever.

As soon as we got down to the bottom of the steps, boom, I mean just a crash was heard upstairs. So we all kind of stopped, you know, talking about whatever it was we were — the football game or whatever, and Joe and I went back upstairs and we couldn’t get my door open. And we couldn’t figure out what was going on, and we kind of went out the window in daddy’s bedroom and went around the roof, opened up the window of my bedroom and went in. And the weight bench, which was kind of, you know, next to the door, the weight bench, the weights, the bars and all that had fallen into the door and were barricaded in a way so that when you, like — when you put a chair behind the doorknob so that they can’t open the door. Like, it was all placed in a way . . .

Clara: Wedged.

John: It was wedged in place.

Sean: Yeah.

John: I don’t see how that could have fallen like that. That was the most I would say the memorable time that that happened. I mean, there were times that, like the dresser would move. You’d go upstairs, the dresser would be away from the wall. You would hear things like (makes dragging sound), stop, you’d go up there and look, and yeah, sure enough, the dresser had moved away. Or back then you had big giant tube TVs, so I always had a big TV, so that stand with the television on it was probably two hundred pounds or something, you know, it had slid away from the wall. Okay, you know. Like, it took two of us to move it back. But yeah, no, that one time with the weight bench, I guarantee you that Joe would verify that.

Sean: Yes, he actually was talking about that with me on Facebook about that.

John: I remember we looked at daddy and daddy was like (lifts hands, shakes head).

Sean: Did he go up?

John: No, he didn’t go. I mean, it was just a big play or whatever in the game so I’m sure he was much more concerned about that.

Natalia: As I moved out of the larger room with my grandmother, I moved into one of the front rooms and so this room was at the very top of the steps. And the house is old. It had all the original doors and none of the doors would actually close all the way in the house. That particular room. The door, even one was closed, you could probably still see like an inch around the door, you could see the light on the other side of the door. And my grandmother always kept this light at the bottom of the steps on. And so as I’d be in my room doing what not because it was just it let whatever could happen–  it was like a safety barrier. So I’d be sitting in my room doing what not. And it was a pretty regular occurrence to see shadows come across the doorway. Cause, like the light would actually be blocked out, and then it would be back. And you’re like, like maybe, maybe, I moved the wrong way, so you would start moving to see, like, maybe I just leaned a little too much and you’re just like, I’m it’s not my room, so I don’t care .

Sean: Hey, do you mind if I jump in and ask Nat something?

No, please do.

Sean: So, but Nat, you are also one of the people it actually spoke to on a regular basis.

Natalia: Right

Oh, thank you.

Natalia: This is true. I wouldn’t say – like we didn’t have conversations, but it often called my name. But it would sound like my grandmother all the time. So she would either be at the grocery store or she’d go away for the weekends and I would like, I was at school or at work and didn’t know. I would hear her calling me all the time. But she wouldn’t be there. I mean, that was like a regular occurrence here.

Sean: And Marianne here’s . . . Sorry, I was going to say here’s something interesting, because we were trying to consider this within the family itself. It would use, it would use my mother’s voice. And I think you’ve heard my mother’s interview, that it used other voices as well. But it always used my mother’s voice with Natalie. And when I was talking to Natalie in the interview, she said, you would think that if it wanted to freak me out, it would have talked in my mother’s voice.

Yes, I remember hearing that.

Sean: And so we were, we were debating that within the family. And I think my mother had the explanation is, even though this thing was definitely malevolent, you know. I think my mother’s explanation was, it probably spoke in her voice because it wanted you to interact with it. If it spoke in the voice of someone who had died, you would definitely know it wasn’t that. You know? And I do think that the more you interacted with this thing in the house, the more you strengthened it.

Correct, correct.

Sean: And so at least that’s my theory, you know. So Nat may want to talk more about that. And also, that didn’t, didn’t it used to get in bed with you, too? So also there’s that.

Natalia: Great Segway!

Great Segway.

Natalia: Oh, I guess we’re going to talk about that one. So, there are often times I mean, if you were to look it up now, they would call it, I guess, night terrors or there’s some name that they call it. And I watched all the stuff and I’m like, I don’t know that that was the same thing. But, there are often times where you would be lying in bed, whether you’re lying on your side or your back, your stomach, and you would feel like just, you know, how somebody gets in bed next to you on the pressure moving and you would feel that. And then you would feel like it would feel like something was like hugging it, like you like dude whatever it is, just get off of me! And you just freeze, because you’re like, do I get up and like, scream? Or do I just sit here and just let it happen? I like. You don’t know. There were often times I would get up and be like, I don’t know what’s going on in my room?

Yeah. Yeah. It’s that’s – the technical term for that is incubus and succubus. That’s when spirits or entities physically interact with humans on a personal level like that. Like touching you inappropriately, or trying to spoon you, stuff like that. And it’s very real. I did an episode on it according to this succubus, and it’s terrifying, absolutely terrifying. And you must have felt violated?

Natalia: Yeah, it’s like, how do you put it into words, because there’s not like an actual person there like you’re afraid to go talk to anybody like they’re going to think I’m crazy. Or they’re going to give me meds or whatnot. I mean, that would happen. I always had my TV on when I was in my room at night because, you know, you don’t want to be in the dark. I know that my uncle used to, my younger uncle used to do that too, all the time. It was like you had to have something there, to give you some kind of security. One of the incident incidents is that I did not talk about when I was in that room with my grandmother. At some point, my grandmother had moved to a different room, and I stayed in that larger room by myself. And so when I did, I moved my bed because I didn’t want it between the closets. . .  I wanted to be as far from them as I could. So it was across the room and there was a morning when I needed to get up for school.

And so, it just so happened I forgot to turn my alarm on that day. And probably about five-forty-five, six o’clock in the morning. My door, someone starts banging on my bedroom door like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And, as I stated before, the doors are old. So this room we have like one of those eye-hooks and locks to come. So we had those to keep just to keep the door closed and the door would still hang open in it, but it could rock back and forth. And that door was rocking back and forth. And I was like, it’s going to come off the hinges. And at the time, my other uncle. I don’t I guess Sean told you he was, he had mental issues, and so I totally thought it was him. I was like, he’s having an episode. That door’s going to come off the hinge. He’s going to come in here. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Bam, bam, bam. Knocking on the door.

So I just go up to the door and I put my hands on it. I’m like, please don’t want this door open. I’m not prepared to deal with my uncle. I was like, my grandmother’s going to hear this any minute. She’s going to be out here. She’s going to be here any minute. And she was just in the next room over in the hallway and she heard absolutely nothing. And so I’m just standing there and I’m like, I know she’s going to wake up.I know she’s going to hear this because she sleeps as light as a feather. And she didn’t wake up and it just stopped. Because I was just sitting there like, please stop, please stop, please stop. And it just stopped and it was dead silence in our house. And house is all you could hear, people walking all over the place. And I’m like, OK, I’m going to sit here and I want to wait because I know I’m going to hear some creaking on the floor. Somebody’s going to be walking away from the door. Nothing! And that light that I told you she had at the bottom of the steps, I could not see that at all. So I’m like, that’s like creepy! No, I don’t want to – like that means somebody’s down there.

So, I’m just sitting there. And I’m like, I slid something behind the door and I turned on all the lights. And I’m like, I just I guess I have to open the door because my grandmother’s not getting up. So at this point, you know, I’m still thinking it’s my uncle, so who knows what could have happened? And so I just will myself to open the door, and there’s nobody there. I walk out into the hallway, nobody’s there. I go into the bathroom. I check the closet in the bathroom. There is not a single person there. I go knock on my grandmother’s door to make sure, like, that she’s never even heard anything. 

Wow, how terrifying. What a brave kid you were.

Natalia: I don’t know if it’s brave or stupid!

No, that. I think, I.

Natalia: Cause, that could have been dangerous!

It could have been, but I mean, just even having the guts to open the door into check around, you know? Absolutely incredible! Incredible. And, and, of course, who could you talk to about these things apart from family? Because nobody would believe you.

Natalia: Nobody would believe me, especially knowing our family already had mental health issues within our family. Who are you going to talk to about that?

Yeah, yeah. And that would have put extra pressure on everybody, actually, because of it. So did you guys ever sit down and talk about what was happening in the house, Nat?

Natalia: That – It was not until probably just in the last couple of years, I, my younger uncle John and I, because we shared the same room, well, we didn’t share the room together. We had we each lived in that room. And we have just like. Things happen and be, did you already have this happen, and he’d be like, yeah.  But, we never actually sat down and talked about it. Oftentimes, it was usually through like his friends or people that would come to visit us. Because they would have some kind of weird experience and they’d be like, what is going on in your house?

Oh, really? So friends experienced it as well.

Natalia: Yeah.

It wasn’t just you guys? Oh, that’s really interesting. So, so it was just a whole pile of things, one after the other, one after the other, pretty much? And this just continued on until you left the house?

Natalia: Yes, I moved out in two-thousand-five, I moved out. And that was after my grandfather had died, and I remember I was I don’t know if Sean had this on film or not, but closer to my grandfather’s death, he never would come upstairs. His bedroom remained on the first floor. And he would slowly – he started coming upstairs. And he would not come upstairs to the second floor, he would go all the way up to the attic. And at the time, Sean didn’t live up there. Nobody lived up there. There was nothing up there. My grandmother had went and cleaned out the whole attic and stuff because it was just there was a bunch of stuff stored up there. She’s like enough, let’s clean it out!

So he would wander up there and I was like, why is he going up? Like, there’s nothing up there? And he never had a room up there or anything. He would go up there and just start talking to people. And, I would creep up to the attic door, to kind of see who’s he talking like, what’s going on? What’s he doing? I tried to creep up a couple of times and he actually did, like, scream out. He was like, don’t you come up here! I was like, how do you even know I was coming up here?  You’re like, you know how you are when you’re younger, you figure out how to walk around the house without people hearing?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you do!

Natalia: Fine, I’m going to creep up here, and I don’t know how he knew I was coming up there, but . . . I don’t know what he was doing.

Sean: Ah, Marianne, I want to add that I think, this story, which I didn’t hear about until I interviewed Natalie just like two years ago, right around the time I finished my book, I really found this extremely disturbing because my father was a sceptic. You know, my father was a computer scientist, a very intelligent man. And when we first had a real serious haunting, I invited him to – We only had a couple of meeting, family meetings about it before we stopped. And I invited my father and he just like looked at me like I was crazy. And my mother attributes the fact that he was working so much, that he wasn’t home that much. But in the end, this room that she was going up to didn’t say it was the front room, that we call the hell room, which was the place of the most aggressive behaviour.

And my father was also a drinker. And, you know, I can’t blame them after losing two children to suicide, you know? But, him going up there and talking to something in that room. I, you know, I just filed, you know, when he was like sick and in a weakened state, just very disturbing. And my other, younger brother, John, who was also at the house late with Natalie, my youngest brother, that’s when she was talking about my youngest uncle. You know, he would hear my father talking to something, too. So, it’s interesting that my father, who was the sceptic, was like –  and this wasn’t like alcoholic rambling, cause we all knew what that was, you know. But this, this was like something. And he would always be quiet if anyone came close. So it was, it was a situation which, which I personally found very disturbing, you know, as well. So I just wanted, wanted, to throw that in.

That would be incredibly disturbing. Well, one, who is he talking to? And what is it that they’re wanting from him? And, are they feeding his behaviour patterns?

Sean: Well, I do want to add that because, you know, as you know, and I don’t know whether you’re cutting this thing with the previous interview, is that we lost two, I lost two siblings to suicide. And I often call my father the third suicide. Because he essentially was drinking himself to death. So we kind of got – stopped drinking a little at the end. So in a way, I considered him the third suicide. And I just think something, something dark was feeding on us in that house, you know, and I attempted suicide there. My sister Jeannie also attempted suicide in that house. So, I mean, there was you know, it’s not a coincidence. We’re not all crazy. And I know. Well, maybe, Nat, maybe. I don’t know? But I just think, and I always say, that there wasn’t one haunting at the house. It was like seven hauntings. Because it interacted with each of us differently. And interacted in a way which made us unwilling to talk to others about it.

You know – Sorry, isn’t that a classic abuser scenario? Isolate the victim.

Sean: Yeah, I felt very isolated, I really didn’t discuss it with any –  When, when, my sister Jeannie had her incident in the hell room with her husband before she moved out, she said, we have to talk about this. And we had a couple of meetings, but after that, we didn’t talk about it again. Until essentially, in a systematic way, until about two years ago.  So, but yeah, I think. I think it, it was an attack and it was, I think mainly spiritual and psychological. And, and I really think it was, you know, it was feeding off of us. What do you think, Natalie?

Natalia: Oh, without a doubt, I mean, after, even after I had moved out. It was many years before I even felt like a normal human, just being in a house that’s not haunted is just a weird feeling. And even after I moved out, there were still. I still kind of felt connected to that, I guess, like the spiritual realm. Like, I would go places and I could still experience feelings of there’s something here, too. And one incident that I haven’t told Sean yet, is after I had moved out, it was probably a year later I was sleeping in bed. And at the time I was with my fiancé. We were living in a different state. I was sleeping in bed and my bedroom door was partially open. And I woke up in the middle of the night to all these people talking to me. It was like all these people were at the door just talking to me. And I rolled over and I said to him, as I go, close the damn door because I’m tired of them talking to me like they can go. He got up and closed the door and they all shut up and left.

That’s interesting. That’s interesting. So do you feel that – and have you had any, like, spiritual experiences since then?

Natalia: Definitely

OK, that’s what, that’s what I felt. So, so, your experiences in the house actually opened this aspect of yourself. Perhaps that may not have opened as fully as it has, had you not had those experiences?

Natalia: I think so because I think you had –  once you experience that, you kind of know what it is that you’re like, you recognize it, I guess, in a way. I mean, there were times back when I was, I had my first marriage. We were looking at houses and we would walk in the houses. I’d be like, absolutely not. This house is not on the list. Take it off. And you’re like, why? I’m not going to tell you why. We’re just not getting this house.

So you would feel the energy of the place and because you’ve experienced it before, you recognized it, right?

Natalia: Yeah.

Right, yeah. So that’s quite handy actually, isn’t it?

Natalia: Yeah. Sometimes.

So, what was the final experience that happened before you moved out?

Natalia: Oh, it’s hard to say which one would be the final experience. Probably the recording of the EVP was close to one of the final experiences. Because, at that point I was like, I’m tired of living like this. I want to get to the bottom of it. I need to tell you where to go because you’re living, you’re, messing up my life. Like I was at that point, you know? Just drowned out from all the, just being on edge all the time. So this was. This was. This had to have been after my grandfather died because it was only me and my grandmother and my uncle John that lived in the house.

So, we would sometimes go to my aunt’s house for dinner, my grandmother and I, and I was like, you know what? Today is the day we’re going to do it. I got like this little old recorder, one of those big old things. It’s really loud when you record. I was like, this is what I’m going to use. I got a tape. I got like a ninety-minute tape. My grandmother went to my aunt’s house. I said I’ll, I’ll meet you there because I was like, I had a plan. I’m OK. I’m going to record this. I watched the ghost hunters. I had the whole thing down. My uncle wasn’t home. I was like, it’s perfect conditions. It’s nice. There’s not a lot of traffic. Nobody’s home. Good deal. So I ran upstairs. I put that record in and I was like, peace out, ghost. I’m going to get you today. And I went to my aunt’s house there. And the whole time I was like, I wonder if the recording is a timely one or if it’s done. And it was done, but it was dark. So I was like, I have to get home. I have to see if there’s something on this tape.

And it was dark when I got home and I was like, oh, so I have I sat there. I was like, do I have to listen to it tonight? Like, this is a big deal for me to go get this. Can I wait until the morning? You know you do something like that, you have to play. You don’t hear as I grabbed the recorder, I was like, oh please, don’t follow me downstairs. And I put it on my stereo, like, you know, those big stereos they had, like the big speakers. I had them all over my room, turned it up all the way. And I’m just sitting there doing my thing. And all of a sudden I hear, like, noises on there, like people moaning and stuff. And I was like, what? At the time then my Uncle John was home because this is this had been a couple of hours later. I run downstairs, John, you’ve got to come up here and listen to this. He was like, why? I was like, you just have to listen and tell me what you think this is? So he comes upstairs and he said, What is this? I was like, this is recorded in the attic. And he was like, don’t tell my mother you did this. It’s like, she’s so pissed. But it was like it was a good couple of minutes, Sean has it posted, I think, on his blog of what the actual EVP sounds like.

Oh, do you Sean?

Natalia: It’s obviously, it’s really like it needs to be cleaned up because the sound of the cassette recorder is really loud on it. But you can still hear the noises behind it.

Sean: Yeah. I’ll, I’ll send you a link to it. It’s really only a minute of the recording. Or, I think, yeah, I think it’s about a minute. You know, we once we, like the tape itself was kind of a pariah. I know that she took it over to my aunt’s house and played it for my nieces and one of them went running from the house and she couldn’t play it. She brought it to my house where I’m here with my wife, Debbie, and we only got a couple of minutes of it, ‘til Debbie made us turn it off. And it ended up when it moved my, you know, my mother, her grandmother, was very upset that Nat had gone up and recorded this cause she was under the impression any attempt to communicate with it strengthened it. Certainly didn’t want to do that. And, and for this, I was trying to find the original tape, because this was like a recording of a recording and it’s only a bit of it. And apparently, it was at my grandmother’s house in a box in a garage. And not this Christmas, but last Christmas, my other nieces, they looked for it because they thought they were the ones who put it out there, and they couldn’t find it. So we don’t have the whole tape. But, I will send you this little snippet we have of it and feel free to use it if you want to.

Natalia: It’s still it’s got so much background noise. But I mean, this was a completely empty room. So all any sound on it, I don’t know where they came from.

[Cleaned up EVP repeated three times]

Wow, how cool is that?

Natalia: But, my grandmother was very mad that I did it.

Oh, I can imagine. 

Natalia: I mean, for a while she was like, why did you do that? Everything was calming down! I was like, you know, I’m not the one that’s going to make anything happen. I mean, it’s just going to it’s going to do what it wants to do.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so when you finally left the home for good. Did you feel like a weight had been taken off you? Did you feel liberated, or like something was missing?

Natalia: It was like – I still felt like something was watching me all the time. One of the things, that you always felt like in the house, is that something was constantly watching you, like all the time. So that feeling just took a long time for that feeling to ever go away. And every now and then I have that feeling. I’m like, look, I’m not playing. That’s not something good, you’ve got to get out of my house.

Oh, good for you. Good for you! Yeah. It’s that, it’s a feeling of not being safe is not the feeling of being watched, which, of course, you were in that house, by these entities.

Natalia: It’s like the watched, or like something going to jump out all the time. It’s like. Like you feel like you’re anticipating like something’s going to happen. 

EVP: āna

John: I never felt safe when it was around at all. There was no way to get away from it. I mean, you would be so scared that there wasn’t much you could do. Like, you see it in the movies when people get so frightened and they freeze, you know, and it’s kind of, you know, fight, flight, or freeze.

Right. Absolutely unsafe feeling. So I totally, I totally get that. And you would have felt on edge the whole time, even if you weren’t consciously aware of it in that home. Knowing that something could happen at any time. It would be like living in a war zone for all of you. Really?

Natalia: I mean, it really. The day to day, you kind of just get used to, but once you leave and you go to a place that doesn’t have those experiences, you’re kind of like, what did I live through? How did I get through it? There was a couple of years ago that the house was for sale and Sean was like, oh, let’s go look at. I was like, absolutely not. Like, I’m not! I’ll see it from a distance. That’s all I want to do. Because it was just even sometimes when I go home, I drive by that house, or I’m just like, I wonder, I wonder, like, do I still feel that way? Just driving by it. I’m like I know it sees me. I’m like, no, let’s keep the pedal to the metal going.

Right. Recognizes your energy. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, there’s always the possibility that if you went back, you could take it with you.

Natalia: Yes. Which my husband now, any time my grandma gives me anything, he’s like, is this from her old house.

Oh, wow.

Natalia: Like we’re not. No! 

Sean: Marianne, I just want to say that, what I call, it’s interesting because there’s like different periods for different people. But in the late eighties, at the height of the like, haunting, the poltergeist. You know, when it was seemed to be at least more active. I remember I was, I was single and sometimes co-workers would have me house sit for them. And I remember I had to house set at this row house in Baltimore was like a townhouse. And I got there. I stayed there for like three nights. And it was really weird the first night. And I couldn’t figure out what it was, until the second day. And I’m like because this house felt so weird. And what it was, was it was just clean. In the sense of, it was the darkness wasn’t there. And it was just so, you know, you get so used to that spirit of oppressiveness that, you know, that darkness in that house. You know, you, know, it’s, it’s like the air you breathe. And you don’t see the air you breathe. And, but, when I was at that other house, it was, it was really, it was really different! And it was noticeably different to be in a house not like that one.

You know, I think I said in the first interview, that eventually I was troubled less by it. But through prayer, you know, I was able to seal it out of my room, the back bedroom. But, and I hate to say that, you know,  you know,  since it wasn’t bothering me, I didn’t take an interest in it elsewhere in the family. So for me, like, the haunting was essentially over, other than one big showy event, right before I left. But, you know, it was still bothering other people. It just wasn’t, you know,  openly bothering me anymore, so . . .

Right. What was the showy event before you left?

Sean: It’s funny. It was an event just like, similar to one Natalie discussed. And my brother Mark would tell you of another one that these were not the same event was. Natalie heard this as well. It was literally my last day of living in the house. I was moving out of the house I live in now. And, you know, I’m on the third floor. It’s, it’s the morning, and there’s this banging! And I knew the banging was from the second – there’s a doorway that leads up to the third floor. There’s a doorway, a stairs, a landing and another longer stairs that lead to two bedrooms on the third floor. And there was this incredibly loud, fast banging, horrifying banging on the bottom, attic door. And I know they heard it because usually, things happen to people isolated at the house.

Yes, right.

Sean: But in this case, you know, Nat – And I heard my mother yelling to Natalie, like, Natalie, stop that banging and Natalie going, Grandma, it’s not me! And I got just chills, just remembering that and,  and so but that was sort of, you know, I joke about it, I said that’s what it was saying, goodbye, kill you later. And, but it was really terrifying. And my brother had another experience and I when he started telling it because he had never told it to me before. I thought it was the same one. He’s like, no, you were gone by then. And in that case, there were one, two, three, four, I think six doors, six doorways on that downstairs in that corridor on the second floor. And he said it was something was banging on all of them, you know, and he said it was like the most frightening thing he experienced. And he experienced some stuff at that house, too, you know.

John: Natalie was in, we say the master bedroom. The room with the sunporch, so that’s the master bedroom.

Sean: Yeah.

John: Mom was either upstairs in the front room or in the bathroom, and I was in that bedroom still, and all the doors started banging. And I mean, if you had ten people banging on the door, you couldn’t have banged as hard and as fast as the knocks were coming on the door. And it sounded like all the doors on that landing, which there were what, one, two, three, four, five, six doors, were all just, I mean, banging in the hinges. It woke me up in the morning, Natalie was screaming and mom was saying, “Nat, don’t open the door.” And she — I mean, that’s what I remember hearing, bang, I mean banging at like — I can’t describe that type of banging on the doors. 

Sean: I think that was the same incident that I had.

Clara: No.  

Sean: I had an incident like that on my last day at the house. 

John: And it went on for a good maybe ten seconds. 

Clara: That wasn’t the same time one. 

John: It wasn’t the exact same incident, I guarantee you. I don’t think you were there anymore. I think you had moved out. 

Clara: Because the three of us were only — it was only the three, Natalie, you, and I in the house at that time. 

Sean: Yeah. 

John: But that was definitely — that was definitely one of the scarier things. You would get bangs like that sometimes. I was woken up by, I’ll say, maniacal banging on the door a couple of times. But that time stands out because it went on, like I say, probably for ten seconds. And when something like that is banging at your door, ten seconds is a long time. Okay? That is — I mean, if you can count to ten seconds and imagine, you know, the sound of a dozen maniacs trying to break your door down as you wake up out of bed, that’s terrifying.

Sean: So but yeah. So that was like my last day. And it was sort of like a showy event. You know, normally it’s a little the entity could be a little more subtle than that. I think it was most damaging actually when it was subtle.

Right. Couldn’t see what it was doing to you. Right. Right. And that affected you more mentally. Yeah. It was definitely an entity from what I’ve heard, that liked to play mind games. Liked to get into your mind and create these terrors for you, that made you question yourself, made you question your sanity. It made you question what you were experiencing was it real? Wasn’t it? Was that how you found it Nat?

Natalia: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you’re really like, there’s no way I’m experiencing this. And like I said before, you would kind of be like, oh, well, it had to be a window or, you know? You try to rationale it out to be something. Like, it can’t be what you actually think is.

Right. Because that doesn’t fit. That doesn’t fit in, what is the paradigm of belief.

Natalia: Yeah.

Doesn’t fit into reality. Yeah. Yeah – So, looking back now, as an adult, as a mature woman and a mom yourself, how do you feel about the whole experience?

Natalia: I don’t know how I survived the whole experience. And, you know, it makes me a little more sensitive to I mean, it’s natural for kids to have, like, nightmares and to think like there’s ghosts in their room and stuff. Like for my kids, I’m like, what are you saying? It’s like I question a little bit more because I know that I experienced some crazy stuff when I was little. So I’m like, this better not be coming back.

I guess, I guess there’s always that fear in the back of your mind, isn’t there? After living through something like this, what if? What if?

Natalia: Yeah.

Personally, though, I think you’re pretty safe. It’s attached to the house and the land, not to you.

Natalia: I absolutely think so.

Sean: And can I ask you, Nat? So, how do you think this affected your faith, Nat?

Oh, good, good question.

Sean: It was actually my wife’s question to ask.

Natalia: I think it actually helped my faith. And a lot of people would disagree with that, and I know that I’ve talked to a lot of people that, think that I shouldn’t say that this stuff was OK. But the way I look is the Bible talks all about angels and demons. So, if you don’t believe in demons, then I don’t know how you believe in angels and believe in God because they both are all throughout the Bible. So I think it just helps my faith to help me believe in God a whole lot more because I feel like I experience evil way more than most people would of.

Right. So that affirmed your belief in God and that’s cool. Whatever helps you and helps your faith, in whatever you believe in. That’s, that’s a positive thing, it’s a, so positive things have come out of the negative experiences, for you?

Natalia: Absolutely, yes.

Yeah. That was a good question, Sean, thank you.

Sean: I hope – Yeah, and I also hope that something –  I mean, I wrote my novel, Chapel Street, to sort of, to sort of like work a way through my feelings for this, before we could deal with it,  this reality. And I’ve been starting these blogs. And what I’m hoping for in the end, is a real detailed examination of what happened. And I’m hoping – and maybe some of your listeners, you know, who can really give  – I’m trying to get viewpoints, ultimately. Once the entire document is done, you know, of the blogs, of the actual haunting – and I’m about little less than halfway through. I’m still trying to deal with the haunting before I go to the deaths. And to see if the deaths were in any way influenced by the haunting?

But I’m really hoping that ultimately we’ll create a document, you know, something that will be useful to other people in these circumstances. One that our experiences, will make their experiences more realistic, and allow them to deal with it more directly. But also, we did a terrible job, you know? I mean, I don’t think we handled it as well as we could have, you know. And maybe this thing was attached to this land in a way that we could have never expelled it. You know, maybe, maybe it was and we had no chance. But, you know, I’m hoping to get some ultimately, when all the info, when I’ve gathered all the data. I’m hoping that we can get some interesting analysis of what happened? What we were dealing with? And what would have been the best way to deal with it.

So I’m hoping that we will provide something. People are concerned. You know, people who read my first book are saying, are you going to write a book about the real haunting? And I’m like, I’m like, I don’t know, not yet, because I like a book with a happy ending, and this doesn’t really have a happy ending. You know, we were too down when this was over. And I’m and I’m also I don’t want to be one of these kinds of people that’s like saying my siblings killed themselves. My father sort of killed himself in his own way. And I’m just trying to find a supernatural explanation for it. You know, I’m not trying to invent something. You know, I’m not trying to make an excuse or anything. But I’m just, it’s just it seems like an intersection of a lot of stuff and. . .

Yeah, I would say so.

Sean: Yeah, you know, so I’m hoping that we’ll have something, you know, positive in the end as a result of this.

And healing for you all as well, and I think, I kind of feel like talking about it, you know, the way you guys are doing it –  and Sean would you like to give your blog address again so my listeners can check it out for themselves?

Sean: Ok, yes. My blog address is SeanPaulMurphyVille dot blog spot, dot com. And you know, it’s all things, Sean Paul Murphy. And on there you will, you could search, or just type in the Google, haunting of twenty-one St Helens Avenue. Twenty-one. Or, go to my blog spot, go into the search and type twenty one St Helens Avenue. I have about twenty-three blogs up there, currently. Covid has stopped me. I really do to have my entire factual examination of this done. But I have not conducted any, you know, really any interviews since we’ve gone on lockdown. I know in New Zealand you’ve pretty much stopped the covid there, so. 

Natalia: Sean, but I can intercede to say? That he started, we started talking about this as a family after his book. Because he sent me a copy of it, and he was like, I want you to read it. I thought it was great. But I was like, I have a question for you, though. I was like, where, I said where did you get the information about smelling this, the smell, when there’s like a demon or something by? And he was like, I don’t know, I just felt like I should write it.

That’s actually factual.

Natalia: And I was like, Well, I was kind of curious that you did because that’s something I experienced! Especially after my mom died. I smelled that for like a whole month. It was just a rotting corpsey smell, you know, like it was like stuck in my nose. And so that’s when Sean and I started talking about, things that happened. And he’s like, well, maybe we should all get together and start really talking about it. But I was like, that was where did you get that from? Because, like, that was a real experience and he had no idea that I actually really experienced that, until I was like, that’s weird!

Oh well, now there you go, see that come out at the end, you know. One of the things that I have experienced and I know from my own personal experience is as a medium, is that entities that are more negative do have an odour. Often it smells like cat pee, or it can smell very rotten. But it’s an odour that they let off and they can’t help it. They can’t disguise it, it’s part of their energy vibration. So the fact that you brought that up, great point! And great that you obviously were listening to ah,  your inner knowing Sean, when you wrote that.

Sean: Well, yeah, I’ll if you read my book, Chapel Street, read the blog on Amazon, Touch Point Press. Pretty much every person in there is based on somebody real, it’s really exaggerated. I mean, the book is really exaggerated. The end is really over the top. Nothing like what happened at the end of the book happened in real life. But, the smaller things, the relationship, things, you know, the character, Lenny. And it’s really, the book is really about two brothers, one Rick, who is very much like me, and another character brother named Lenny, whose dad was very much like my brother Mark. And I think anyone who reads that book who knew my brother Mark, will definitely see my brother.

Yeah, yeah. It’s a good book.

Sean: But honestly a lot of the things in there – Oh, did you say it was a good book?

Yeah, it’s a good book. I really enjoyed it.

Sean: Well, thank you very much.

And as I was reading it, I was thinking oh yeah, this would be a great movie. This would be a great movie. And actually, like the mausoleum stuff. That was very, very good. It’s a great book listeners. It is fiction. So it’s not the story of the hauntings here at Chapel, at 21

Sean: 21 St Helens Avenue.

Thank you, 21 St Helen’s Avenue But it is based on character, based on people. And it’s really, it’s a good book. It’s a good read.

Sean: Well, the main event of the book is the guy walking out on the balcony to kill himself, every night. And if you remember from my previous interview, that’s inspired by the real thing,

That’s right!

Sean: When I was climbing out of that attic, I woke up every night, you know, at three a.m. climbing out of that attic window.

Oh, really?

Sean:  Yeah. I would hit my head because it was a wooden window frame. And either I hit my knee going out that window, or hit my head on it. It would wake me up. And that’s how I knew what I was experiencing was real and wasn’t just mental, you know? And I’ve never slept walked. I haven’t done it since. But, you know, it was either three nights in a row or five. I honestly can’t remember so, but I think it was more than three. And that’s when I really got into prayer and tried to seal my room because that’s like when you finally, you know – it’s a psychological attack, but it was really showing its hands there. And that’s why that, and an instant my brother had where he was literally picked up and thrown,

John: I think the upstairs front bedroom, as we say, the Hell Room. 

Sean: Yeah. 

John: Was certainly the centre maybe of it or whatever. There was a short period of time when I thought it would be fun to go up there, and I, you know, took some stuff up there and tried to stay up there a couple of nights, but I would always either end up on the couch or camped out back in the bedroom down there. I mean, like as a, I don’t know, maybe twelve, fourteen, teenager or whatever. Because it was a cool room. It had the sloping ceilings, you know, and you had the great view of the street from up there. And it was private, it was away from the rest of the house for the most part. You know, I mean, it was quiet up there. But it was definitely creepy up there. I don’t think I ever spent a whole night up there. Both of those closets up there were terrifying. That little cubbyhole was really scary. Just the fact that — I mean, it was — I don’t know, it was always just so dark in there in that little corner where the cubby was, and it had another weird cut up into the ceiling that just kind of made that really dark over there. 

Yeah, and I had a — I had a really — probably the most realistic experience I ever had in that house happened in that room. There used to be — I’m guessing this is before — it’s probably right before Jeanne moved back because I’m guessing they probably would have redecorated it a little bit, but it was basically an empty room. Like I said, I had a little bit of a handful of things up there, it was an empty room. It had been painted already because, if you remember, it was painted all . . .

Clara: Dougie did that

Sean: Dougie painted it with black lines. White and then spray painted black lines. 

John: Yeah, it was white and then black all over, and it was like a zigzag crazy pattern or whatever kind of random pattern on the wall. It had already been painted. 

Clara: To grey. 

John: Yeah, it was grey with, like, grey tones on the woodwork and stuff. And then there were — you had the mirror in the center of the front wall — I mean, I’m sorry, you had a window and you had mirrors on either side of the window. 

Clara: Mark did that. 

John: And then on the one side, you had photographs of old sports teams, maybe it was Mark’s, Dougie’s . . . 

Clara: Yeah, Mark’s. 

John: Sean’s, whatever. Anyway, they were hanging up there. They were old, washed-out photos, and I can specifically remember standing there, looking — I don’t know why I was up there, but I was up there, I was young. Like I say, it was probably — it had to have been before Jeanne moved back, so I was probably eleven or twelve. Maybe I was thirteen, I don’t know. I was standing up there, looking at the photos, and I was always trying to find whoever it was, you know, trying to find a person in the photo. It was a whole team of kids, and I remember almost getting, like, hypnotized by the photos and just kind of zoning out for a second. And something, a hand on each shoulder, lifted me and threw me into where the photos were on the wall, like off of my feet, boom, into the wall. 

And I remember coming off of it, stunned, and I said, “Sean, that’s not funny,” and quickly realized Sean wasn’t there, nobody was there. So obviously you weren’t there, you would probably remember responding to something like that? And I remember seeing — I remember it all clicked in my head that I could see the mirror, I could see the doorway of the Hell Room behind me into your room where your door was open, so nobody came through that doorway because I would have seen it in the mirror. There was nobody in the room with me. Something definitely grabbed each side of my shoulders, lifted me and threw me into the wall. So that happened. 

You know, I was probably, I don’t know, at least 150 pounds or something. It’s not like I was light. I didn’t stumble. Wind didn’t do it. I don’t know. I didn’t slip, trip, fall. So that is the experience — a lot of the other stuff, maybe I could say it’s mass hysteria, maybe I could say, you know, yeah, everybody’s crazy, maybe I’m crazy too. You know, maybe it is a hallucination, maybe there is a more natural explanation, which is something I’ve been always looking for, which helps to explain my belief or lack of, maybe you would say. But that one thing really stands out to me, because I can’t explain that one away. 

Sean: it made me think that, that perhaps my sister and my brother Mark were influenced by this thing towards self [inaudible].

I absolutely agree with that.

Sean: Because, if I had gone out that window of that third floor – the thing right out is like a flat roof for the sun porch. But our house is on a hill and there’s a very deep drop. I would have been dead and there would have been no – the only thing you could have thought was that I killed myself. There’s like no other explanation for what would have happened if someone woke up the next morning, looked out back and there’s my body. You know, I killed myself. There’s, like, no other explanation for what you wouldn’t have thought anything else. You know?  It wasn’t like I’d be out there sweeping the chimney or something, you know what I mean? So that’s really the incident that fires the book. And like Betty, you know, the villain was based on a real fortune teller. That my sister, Natalie’s mother, visited like three days before her death.

And I finally found out this week what Betty told her, on that last visit. I had never discussed it with my mother because I knew my – I have an aunt that just died and I was hoping to talk to her about it because she drove out to Betty with my sister. But I discovered one of my aunts, friends who died before I could talk to her about it, that Laurie didn’t tell her what Betty said. And it always bothered my aunt that she never asked, especially since my sister killed herself so soon afterwards. That she never asked what Betty had told her. But my, you know, I was discussing my death of my aunt, what I wanted to ask her. My mother said, oh, I know what daddy told her. And I said, well, what did she tell her? Said Laurie. Ask her what she saw in my future. And Betty said I see nothing. Yeah, so there it is. So I don’t feel bad about making Betty the villain of my book!

I would have too because you know, you just don’t say stuff like that. It’s just not helpful. It’s not uplifting. It’s not helping the person if you’re – Oh sorry, I get so angry when I hear stuff like that, Sean.

Sean: Well, if you read my book, she’s called bad news Betty, because well she did, she gave people bad news. Because I talked to, like, another author with my publisher, Touch Point Press, who lives in the same region, also visited her. And so, it was interesting to hear her experiences. And Betty would tell people horrible things but put it into context, that you could change it, you know. But this is what she saw, you know. So that’s what she told, that’s what she told my sister.

So then you question the source that she’s getting her information from.

Sean: Yes, I do. And to me, that’s another piece of evidence that makes me think that there was something spiritual about, you know, her death. Not naturally.

Natalia: Absolutely!

Absolutely. I agree!

Sean: I did kind of cut you off. So what do you think of a medium that does something like that?

Oh look

Sean: I think my sister was in an emotionally distraught time. She was definitely visibly distraught in that period.

Natalia: Oh, absolutely!

Sean: It was

Of course

Natalia: In fact, the day she got into a car accident earlier that day, I don’t know how much of the story that you know? She got into a car accident earlier that day. And my dad and I went to go pick her up. And I’m like a tweleve-year-old girl at the time. My dad tells me – he has a pickup truck. He’s like, stay in the car, I’m going to go take care of this. He has my mom get in the car, and I just remember sitting there like, here it is, your mom got into an accident. Instead of being worried, I was terrified. Because it was like I looked at her and I was like, she looks like I mean, she looked like a demon. It did not look like her. She was just grey. And I just remember this smell. And then later that night, obviously, she took her life.  And then from that moment for like a month, all I could smell was just this rotting, like terrible smell. But it was like, I knew that day that, that was not her like I was like terrified as I’m sitting in this car like, I don’t know who this is. Who this is, I’m sitting with in this car, but it’s not my mother!  I can tell you that much.

Aw Nat, I’m so sorry, hon. I’m so sorry. Oh, that’s awful. So it,  that is definitely –  she’s definitely been influenced. Definitely been influenced. I can tell, yeah, straight away. As far as your question goes, Sean, they’re crap! They and their sources are – they’re not getting source – information from positive, uplifting, genuine sources. They’re getting their information from sources that want people to be miserable, that want people to harm themselves. That want people not to make any effort to look after themselves and improve their lives.

I, as a medium I take my role very, very seriously. It’s a sacred trust. And I never, ever will look at a person, or read a person without their explicit permission. You just don’t do it! It is unethical. I will – and I have this thing with spirit. I see it – I set boundaries. With them, really firm boundaries. Don’t give me any information about people that’s not helpful to them. That’s not going to be of positive benefit to them in their lives. Don’t tell me things that they can’t alter. Don’t tell me things about their health, unless, something can be done to improve it. So those are the guidelines I set with Spirit. So when I, and I hardly ever do consultations these days, because, it just takes so much energy.  I’m really blunt with people. I’ll tell people what Spirit tells them. Like, I don’t, I don’t sugar coat it. I’ll say, look, this and this, and this is happening in your life.  Because of this, or this behaviour. You need to perhaps look at the way you’re doing this. So, it’s like a positive thing. So even if they’re getting growled by whoever is in spirit, they come away feeling uplifted. And they come away knowing that they can make changes in their lives, that will make a positive difference to them. You know?

And people who go to see mediums, genuine mediums, even if their mothers like – I remember one time I had a gentleman come to see me and he was older than I am. He would have been in his late sixties and his mom was like immediately, right there.  And she said, tell him he’s a bloody idiot! And I said I can’t say that to him!  I can’t tell him that! She says you tell him that he’s a bloody idiot! And I looked at him and I said, look, your mom’s asking me to tell you something in and I apologize in advance, but these are her exact words. And he burst out crying, straight away, burst out crying. And I felt so rotten, because I never try to hurt people or, you know, I try to uplift and comfort and give hope. And, after he finished crying, he said to me, thank you so much. I needed to hear that. That’s exactly the words my mom would have said to me!

So, yes. So I’ve learned, like, you have to have really firm boundaries. And like, I run a Facebook group called Walking The Shadowlands, from which the podcast started. And in it, I help people as much as I can. People come to me with their spiritual issues, or spirit issues, or just questions in general. And I always try to be positive. And I try to give them tools so that they can help themselves. Because, people have, people are so quick to give their power away to others.

And so, I like even cleaning your house from energies. You don’t have to get somebody in to do that, you can do that. You don’t have to give your power away. It’s all about intent. The intent is the key, the absolute key.  And so that’s how I work. I try to always be positive. And even if they – and I will and I will say to them up front, I’ll say, look, you’re not going to like to hear what I’m going to tell you, but you need to hear this. And I’ll tell them straight up what Spirit wants them to know, because, they need to hear that so they can make positive changes in their lives.  I’m not a fortune teller. I call myself a spiritual counsellor. Because I really just give people tools so they can make changes themselves. That’s how I work anyway. But you’re your negative, your bad news Betty, yeah, they’re not working with beings that come from the highest realms. For sure.

Sean: Yeah, well, my mother may be she’s like, oh, she was such a nice lady, this and that. And the other writer was making me feel guilty that I based the villain on her. But because, I thought you had said something else to my mother, which my mother said, no, Betty wasn’t what you said that, but that what I just heard, this thing that she said to my sister, I’m like any guilt I had about naming the character in the book Betty, it has been completely alleviated.

Yeah. No, no, no, no. You just don’t do stuff – And of course, there are a lot of people out there who profess to have abilities. And they may have a little bit, but they don’t have much as they think they do.  Or they don’t get the information correctly. Or they, because it has to filter through our own knowing,  our own interpretation. So they put their own spin on it. Or they say things that they think might be what the person wants to hear. But it’s not genuine. You have to be genuine. You have to do it. And I hate these terms. I hate these terms, I hate these terms with a passion. But you have to do it with love and with light.

Sean: Yes. And I think.

Natalia: Oh, that’s so sweet Marianne, it’s been a pleasure. It’s been a pleasure listening to you. And you certainly are a sweet, sweet soul.

Sean: Yeah, you’re are just the kind of people we want to talk to, you know what I mean?

Natalia: You just have a way about you, the gentleness and you know. Just sweet, your spirit is just sweet.

Aw, thank you.

Sean: You know, Marianne, I don’t want to keep you because I know,

Natalia: We’ve been holding her up all day.

Sean: I often weighed this and I’ve asked this to my siblings and all about the things. The things we would hear, I mean, obviously, when that door is banging, other people could hear it, it was audible. But I often wondered whether some of the sounds and all, we were hearing were actually real sounds or whether they were just things I was thinking I was hearing them. Not that I believe they’re any less real, whether these were like thoughts being implanted into my mind.

They were projected into your mind. Yeah, yeah.  When it happened – and there’s this effect. And I forget what the name of it is now, but it’s quite often – Like when people have UFO encounters, it’s, it’s, – Oh, the Oz Effect, that’s what they call it!  It’s like there’s this stillness around. And in like in that stillness, you can hear sounds, but anybody outside of it can’t hear it. So there are questions of whether it’s interdimensional saying they don’t really know but is very real. So the sounds that you hear that other people don’t hear, there are two options. It could be projected into your mind from the spirit. It could be that Oz factor in which the energy kind of surrounds you, so that the sound doesn’t travel.

Sean: Yeah, well, that is something that happened in the house, a lot like being in a room, becoming – you know, even you screaming in a room and no one hearing you outside, like Nat’s experience with the banging, not waking up her grandmother. That was actually quite common. 

Natalia: The deafening silence. It was always like the precursor to things, with the deafening silence.

Yeah.  And the other thing is, do you are you on social media and are you on Instagram or Twitter?

Sean: Yes, I’m  Sean Paul Murphy on Instagram and Sean Paul Murphy on Twitter. And I’m Sean Paul Murphy on Facebook. And I’m also Sean Paul Murphy on, on YouTube as well, I’ve been putting a lot of clips of the haunting interviews, I don’t put any I don’t put the whole interviews up because, you know, there are some privacy issues,

Yeah, yeah. Of course, yeah.

Sean: I only put up segments of them.

Thank you both so very much for your time again today, and Nat, thank you for coming and sharing your experiences. I know it was a pretty horrific time for you, all over. Not only with losing your mom, but having to deal with all this spiritual attack as well! And kudos to you for coming out as well balanced, and your grandmother. Actually, your grandmother has to take a lot of credit for this, because she, through her attitude and the way she dealt with it all, made a huge difference to how you dealt with it.

Natalia: Absolutely! Thank you for having me.

I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much, Nat. And Sean, thank you once again. It’s just been a tremendously interesting experience listening to both of you guys. And I know how horrible it was for you all. And I’m really grateful to you for sharing with me and with my listeners. So thank you. Thank you both.

Sean: Well, Thank you.

I have enjoyed my time talking with Sean and his family both on, and off air. They are all very warm, loving and caring people, who didn’t hesitate to share their pain and journey with me, a complete stranger, even on the most sensitive subjects of the suicides. They virtually, took me into their homes and shared openly with me about their terrifying and painful experiences. Talking with Clara, Sean, Jeanie, Marion, and Nat, has given me a perspective on how one family was able to not only survive, but thrive, despite the devastating and traumatic suicides of Nat’s mum, Laura, and Mark. There are other family members, that I have not spoken with, but they all have had their own experiences and encounters with the exception of the oldest sibling, Douglas. He tells Sean that he never experienced anything in the house on St Helen’s Avenue, that Sean turned into his great fictional read Chapel Street,

If you want to know more about their experiences then go and visit Sean’s blog, there is a link to it from this episodes page on the podcast website www.walkingtheshadowlands.com, or simply visit www.seanpaulmurphyville.blogspot.com to read the written transcripts and watch other video clips from family members discussing their experiences. If you want to read the fictionalized novel of the events, Chapel Street, it can be found from all good book sites, like Amazon, etc.

Did you hear the EVP? Here is what I think it says – āna. My son who studies and teaches Te Reo, the Māori language at a local high school says that in the Māori language, that the word āna roughly means to be in agreement. So agreeing with what Nat is saying. Although, he and I disagree on where the stress in the word falls. I feel it’s on the beginning of the word, he feels it’s on the end. Which of course, would alter the meaning. What did you hear? Email me at shadowlands@yahoo.com and let me know.

And just a reminder, as I mentioned last episode, these two episodes were recorded on my old iMac, before it died on me, so there is discrepancy in the parts of the audio, with some parts of the episode that were recorded after the interviews were completed.If you enjoy our podcast, then please consider becoming a patron. Just head over to patreon.com/mcc15 and sign up now. As a patron, you get early access to the podcast episodes and a special members-only page on the podcast website, that has bits that end up on the digital cutting board. And little extras, like the disembodied voices, that I heard during my conversation with Patti. And you can download, full written transcripts of each episode. And you get my absolute appreciation and gratitude. Patreon.com/mcc15

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If you don’t have a smartphone, then you can listen to the episodes from the podcast website www.walkingtheshadowlands.com. For those hearing-impaired, there is a full written transcript of each episode on the website. So you don’t miss out at all. Tell your friends! Tell your family! Tell your workmates about our show! Encourage them to listen, and to subscribe also – the more the merrier!