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In an early episode of this podcast, I remember mentioning that, thanks to the internet, we have never been closer together and yet never been so far part. At the time, I was making a comment on loneliness. People who had active online lives, but had been driven further away from face to face relationships.

I sometimes forget that this podcast was started during the pandemic. That strange time seems so unreal and far away now. Certainly at the time, I had no idea how the isolation was effecting some people. Changing who they were, and how they think.

Believing in conspiracies used to be different. People might believe in a governmental cover-up, believe that certain events in history had been manipulated by sinister forces. It’s true that believing in one conspiracy makes you more likely to believe in other conspiracies, but conspiracists were less likely to believe in all of them at once.

Today, conspiracies are more like an addictive substance. People start off curious, get hooked, get pulled in. And then it’s hard to stop.

It drives a wedge between you and others. It’s difficult to relate to people whose beliefs become increasingly strange and uncreditable. It’s hard not to be critical of those beliefs, which seem so obviously wrong, and are yet held so strongly.

Rejected by those close to them, the conspiratorial find new friends and new community. They find their own news sources and online platforms. And soon they’re living parallel lives. Living amongst us, but not sharing the same reality. 

Conspiracy theorists are not ghosts. But many have passed over into a mirror world, a strange reflection of the reality the rest of us live in. And many of those who pass over, never come back.

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You can listen and download the New Ghost Stories Podcast from a number of platforms. And if you enjoy this ghost story podcast, please take a moment to leave a review. It really helps the show.

Within moments of our death, our bodies start to decompose. All the processes that sustain the body cease, and our systems start to fail and come apart. Cells break down and start to leak. Enzymes, acids and bacteria, normally well regulated, get out of control and attack the body. The colour leaves our skin, the muscles tighten and our bodies become stiff and unflexible.

It takes much longer for the body to completely disintegrate. If buried directly in the ground, it takes about five years to completely skeletonise – nothing is left except the teeth and the skeleton. If buried in a coffin, it may take 10 years or longer to leave just the bones behind.

Whoever we are, whatever we’ve done with our lives, it all starts to come apart the moment we expire. As our loved ones come to terms with our passing, they are already planning a life without us. Deciding what to do with our belongings. Discussing who gets what. How to divide up the money. Who pays for what.

And then within a few weeks your body is in the ground, or reduced to ashes. Your belongings have been parsed out, solicitors are working on parsing out your assets. And soon your friends and family are back to work. You have not been forgotten. But life inevitably moves on without us.

Time is merciless. Whatever mark we leave, however much we are loved, nothing lasts. And it all fades so quickly.

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You can listen and download the New Ghost Stories Podcast from a number of platforms. And if you enjoy this supernatural podcast, please take a moment to leave a review. It really helps the show.

I think we look for ghosts in all the wrong places. Our ghost hunting teams are obsessed with locations of haunted glamour – manor houses, castles, abandoned gothic old buildings. We love the big tragic stories, wronged women, dandy highwayman, bloody murders.

And so we miss out on all the ghosts nearby. There’s nothing romantic about a council estate ghost or a suburban ghost. Ghosts of rubbish tips and car parks. But are there are really no tragedies closer to home? Are all the ghosts really confined to the mists of time? Are there no new ghosts, new tragedies, no new urban legends in the making?

Who do you know who is a ghost in the making? Perhaps someone in a terrible relationship. Maybe it’s someone with a substance abuse problem. Someone with a mental illness. Someone on a downward spiral who seems unable to get out of it.

And what about yourself? What kind of ghost might you be? What daily trauma might keep your tied to this world if your life suddenly came to an end? Where would you haunt? And what would your ghost do? And if the ghost hunters ever found you, what story would they tell about you?

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Photographic memory is exceptionally rare. In fact, some scientists dispute whether it is actually real at all. Photographic memory actually muddles together a number of different types of unusual memory, the type most associated with photographic memory is eidetic memory, but another is Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory – HSAM.

People with eidetic memory are able to remember remarkable visual details about an image they have seen, even if only very briefly. Despite what is commonly believed, eidetic images don’t actually last long, sometimes only for a few minutes. And recall of their details are also far from perfect. Like normal memory, eidetic memories can become distorted as the mind fills in any gaps. Eidetic memory is also almost never found in adults, and nearly exclusively in children.

HSAM is more common and involves the incredible recall of details rather than images specifically – the ability to remember what you were doing on a certain date and at a certain time, many years later. People with HSAM don’t typically have anything unsual about their brains. One theory is to how they come to have such astounding recall, is that people with HSAM have a form of OCD. They may be repeatedly replaying their memories, over and over, training their minds to recall details from years past.

There is a World Memory Championships, which involves challenges such as memorising the order of an entire deck of cards, and long lists of binary digits. Not a single winner of the contest has ever claimed to have photographic memory. Instead, memory champions usually train their minds using a variety of techniques. The most popular is the method of loci, which dates all the way back to ancient Rome and Greece. It involves memorising the layout of, say, a building, a street, route, etc. Then visualising the items you need to remember as being part of that journey, which you recall as you imagine yourself taking that journey.

Alas, I was not able to get any information about the techniques or innate skills of the ‘Man Memoriser’. I tried to contact him during the research for this story, but he declined to respond to any of my attempts to contact him. Perhaps it was simply never meant to be…

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Poe’s life and legacy is too vast to deal with in a single blog post. But I am an avid collector of trivia. So here are 10 things you might not know about Edgar Allan Poe:

1.     The Allan in Edgar Allan Poe comes from his foster parents. Edgar Poe’s father left before he was a year old, and his mother died soon after. He was taken into the care of John and Frances Allan, who later christened him Edgar Allan Poe.

2.     His first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was published anonymously. Only 12 copies out of the 50 published are known to exist. It’s so rare it was thought for a time to not exist. A copy sold at auction in 2009 went for $662,500.

3.     Despite his reputation for being a sickly character, Poe was very athletic. He was a boxer, long-jumper, rower, and swimmer. He gained a local record for swimming 7 miles against the current along the James River in Richmond, Virginia.

4.     Amongst Poe’s more successful publications was a book on seashells - The Conchologist’s First Book. The first edition sold out, but Poe was denied royalties until the second edition

5.    Poe was the first well-known American writer to earn a living exclusively through writing, but also one of the first American authors to be more famous in Europe than America. He struggled to make a living.

6.     Poe had a fascination for cryptography, and advertised in local newspapers for people to send him ciphers to crack. Code-breaking is a key part of The Gold-Bug, a story which netted him £100 in a competition and was the story he was best known for during his life. Two of Poe’s ciphers were not cracked until 1992 and 2000 respectively.

7.     Though Poe’s stories and poems did bring him some success, he was best known in his day for literary criticism. His brutal reviews gave him the reputation of being a ‘Tomahawk man’.

8.     Poe knew the value of a good literary feud, but it would ultimately cost him his reputation. After his death, his greatest rival, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, quickly produced an obituary which cast Poe as a lunatic, who “walked the streets, in madness or melancholy.” He later created a longer biographical work which portrayed Poe as a drunkard and drug addict. Although fabricated, Griswald’s image of Poe stuck in the popular imagination.  

9.     From 1949 onward, a mysterious masked person would appear at Poe’s grave in Baltimore to toast the writer on the day of his birth. The ‘Poe Toaster’ would raise a glass to the writer, then leave the bottle and three roses on his grave. The tradition ended in 2009 and the identity (or identities) of the toaster have never been revealed. A new toaster was chosen in secret by the Maryland Historical Society in 2015 to revive the tradition.

10.  There was no rest for Poe in the afterlife. A number of psychics channelled his spirit to produce supposedly new works. Poe was notably one of the spirits channelled by clairvoyant Lizzie Doten in her book, Poems of the Inner Life, along with new works from Shakespeare and Robert Burns. Her Poe works were revised versions of his existing works, but given a new positive outlook.

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