The Haunted Thoughtform of the Ozarks: Crescent Hotel, Egregores, and the Ghosts We Made

What Is a CE5 Event?

We attended a CE5 event in Berryville, Arkansas to see firsthand what happens when a group gathers with the intention of making contact. Part meditation circle, part UFO watch, and part social experiment, the evening produced some interesting experiences and raised a few questions about the nature of contact itself.

If you’ve ever been to a CE5 event, you know the vibe. It’s not “we’re hunting aliens.” It’s more “we’re raising the room’s frequency, asking the sky politely, and hoping something answers.”

The facilitator’s approach was gentle. Very love-and-connection focused. That worked for the newbies and for the people who need a safe container to open up. Sarah actually liked that part. It felt sweet, grounded, and human.

I’m not built for the soft opening credits. I’m already plugged into the ether before my shoes are off. I don’t need the warmup. And I definitely don’t want anything touching me. Consent-only paranormal. Always.

We started inside with a guided meditation in a circle. Not everybody “sees” visuals during meditation, so there was a lot of discussion about how people receive things differently. Some people feel. Some people see. Some people just get knocked sideways by an energy shift and spend the rest of the time wondering if their nervous system is glitching.

There was an energy shift.

A few people felt something move through the room, like a presence checking everyone in the circle. Sarah felt a distinct touch and immediately did the correct thing, which is basically “get off me” in shoulder-shake form.

There was also a heavy feeling near the door. That quiet “something is standing there” sensation. The kind that doesn’t need a spotlight to be obvious.

Then we went outside.

Skywatching, weird lights, and the red thing

Outside, we did more meditation and skywatching. There were planes, and you could tell they were planes because they sounded like planes and behaved like planes. Then there were other things. There were intermittent flashes. Brief. Sharp. Gone before you can make your brain cooperate.

And there was the red hovering thing.

A hovering red light that had multiple people tracking it. At one point, a smaller group of us started walking toward it across an open field, which is objectively how you end up as a Dateline special. It hovered. It held. Then it drifted off and disappeared.

There were also reports of military jets overhead, which stood out because that isn’t normal for that area at that time of night. Planes had sound. The hovering thing didn’t.

You could feel the difference. And when you’ve lived near bases, and you know what jets look and sound like at night, you don’t confuse that with a silent hovering light. The contact event itself stayed pretty gentle.

What got intense was everything it stirred up around it.

The conversation slid from aliens into memory gaps, sleep paralysis, astral projection, and that familiar question that always shows up at the worst possible time: what the hell is consciousness anyway?

We talked about missing time from a teenage night near Rocketdyne, a big light in the sky, and the weird blank space after it. About how multiple people remember the light but not the in-between. About how curiosity is sometimes the exact thing that gets you into trouble.

We ended up circling an old thread I forgot existed.

Sarah remembered a “greaser” type figure from my teen years. A presence, an invisible friend, a guide, a whatever-the-hell-it-was. I didn’t remember him at all until she described him, and my brain went cold and clicked.

Then I remembered dreams. Pegged black pants, leather jacket, the Outsiders vibe. A sense of familiarity so strong it feels like emotional fraud. And the creepiest detail: eyes flashing green, then red.

If that sounds like a spirit guide, a thoughtform, an old astral ally, a trauma-born protector, or a straight-up glitch in the simulation… welcome to the episode. One of the things we kept circling back to is how different people react to the same invisible world.

I lean in. Always have.

As a kid, I heard the pacing in the kitchen, stared into the dark like “who are you and what do you want?” and treated it like research.

Sarah got hit with the physical realism. The bearded man. The dead cat she could feel purring until she remembered it was dead. The Ouija board chaos in a house where the vibe already felt wrong. That kind of thing doesn’t make you curious. It makes you build a brick wall and set it on fire.

So when we go to something like a contact event, we’re not starting from the same nervous system.

That matters.

It doesn’t make one of us “more open” or “more blocked.” It means our bodies learned different safety rules. The takeaway: The Berryville contact night was a good experience. Gentle. Weird in the right ways. Interesting without turning into chaos.

But the real story isn’t “did we see aliens?”

It’s this:

When you intentionally open the door, even a crack, you don’t always get what you asked for. Sometimes you get the sky. Sometimes you get your own timeline. Sometimes you get the ghost of a boy you forgot you ever knew, tapping the glass from the inside like, hey… remember me?

If you’re interested in contact experiences and UFO phenomena, you may also enjoy my article on the Hopkinsville Goblins encounter and the strange patterns that continue to appear throughout UFO research.

The Haunted Vermont Farmhouse

The haunted Vermont farmhouse at the center of this story wasn’t just rumored to be haunted. According to witnesses, it became the site of poltergeist activity, unexplained photographs, missing time, shadow figures, and a growing sense that something unseen occupied the property.

On this episode of the NVus Alien Podcast, I sat down with Paul Dulski from the Haunted Vermont podcast to talk about the paranormal experiences that shaped his life and eventually pushed him into investigating the unexplained.

Like many investigators, Paul didn’t start out looking for the paranormal.

The paranormal found him.

What began as strange childhood events in a Vermont farmhouse slowly unfolded into a long series of eerie encounters involving unexplained shadows, missing time during sleep, mysterious photographs, EVP recordings, and something investigators often describe as a “zone of fear.”

In this conversation, Paul shares the experiences that led him down the paranormal path and the evidence that still makes him question what might actually exist beyond the normal world.

Paul grew up in Holland, Vermont, and says his first real encounter with the unexplained happened when he was in fourth grade. At the time he and his friend Justin were just kids watching paranormal shows like Ghost Hunters. The idea of ghosts was more entertainment than reality.mThat changed when Justin’s family farmhouse suddenly became the center of strange activity.

Looking back now, Paul says he wishes they had documented what happened. At the time, they were just kids trying to make sense of something that felt impossible. Even today, he admits the story sounds unbelievable when he tells it. But the experiences were real. And they stuck with him.

Some of the most unsettling events happened during sleepovers in Justin’s bedroom. One night, three of them fell asleep on a futon placed against the wall beneath a window. When they woke up the next morning, all three were in completely different positions than where they had fallen asleep.

Paul had started the night on the edge of the bed. When he woke up, he was now at the window. Justin had somehow ended up half on the floor and partially under the futon. Justin later remembered waking up half inside his closet. None of them remembered moving. And none of them remembered anyone getting up during the night.

For that to happen normally, someone would have had to:

• throw off the blankets

• crawl past the other two people

• step over them in the dark

• and somehow reposition everyone without waking anyone up

None of them recalls anything like that happening. To this day, none of them can explain it.

Another night in the farmhouse produced something even stranger. Paul and Justin looked out the bedroom window and saw a shadow figure outside. The shape was unusual and didn’t resemble anything they could replicate later. Even more confusing was the lighting. They couldn’t determine what could have been casting the shadow, or where the light source could have come from.

Justin also remembers an incident involving an orange juice container that appeared to suddenly explode or fly across the room and hit the wall. Paul wasn’t present for that particular moment, but it’s one of the memories Justin still talks about. Before the farmhouse events, Paul had already experienced smaller moments that he now looks back on differently.

When he was about seven years old, several deaths in his family happened close together. His grandfather died in 1994. Within 24 hours in June of 1995, he lost another grandfather and an uncle. That was the first time he truly understood death.

Around that same time, something strange happened one night in his childhood bedroom. He woke up in complete darkness and tried to leave the room. But he could not find the doorknob. He searched the wall and door over and over again, feeling for it, but it simply wasn’t there. Eventually, his mother opened the door.

She told him the doorknob had been only a few inches away from where he had been reaching the entire time. But for reasons he still can’t explain, he couldn’t locate it. Another strange detail from that house involved the attic. Some nights, he thought he could hear voices coming from above, almost like people laughing and talking.

Later, he wondered if it could have been the television in another part of the house. But at the time, the voices sounded like people gathered together, almost like a group playing cards or talking. Years later, in 2007, Paul and his band visited an abandoned church to take photos for fun. That night, they heard what sounded like a woman screaming in the distance, almost like someone being attacked. They dismissed it at the time because animals can sometimes produce similar sounds.

But the location would become important later.

In 2011, Paul returned to the same area with friends while exploring local haunted locations. When they stepped out of the vehicle near the abandoned church, something immediately felt wrong. Paul suddenly felt overwhelming nausea, strong enough that he thought he might throw up. One friend heard what sounded like a growl. Another thought he heard chains dragging against the church wall.

All three of them experienced an intense wave of fear at the same time. They quickly returned to the vehicle and left the area. The moment they drove away, the feeling disappeared. Paul describes it as stepping into what investigators sometimes call a “zone of fear.” Something about that specific location triggered a powerful physical reaction. Interestingly, Paul says he has visited the site about seven times, but that experience only happened once.

The road near the abandoned church has its own folklore. One story involves a male hitchhiker ghost that people claim to see walking along the road. Another nearby legend involves a woman in white who appears along Marble Street in West Rutland. According to one witness, an older man named Frank saw a glowing woman in a veil standing by the road. He offered her a ride. She entered the car. Then vanished.

Stories like that appear across the country, but the Vermont case follows the same pattern that many investigators recognize.

The hitchhiker gets in the vehicle. And disappears moments later.

The event that truly pushed Paul into paranormal investigation happened on October 28, 2011.

While exploring a cemetery with friends, Paul felt something strange to his left. He asked his friend to take a photo. When they looked at the image, something unusual appeared beside him. The photograph shows Paul’s shoulder and arm. Next to him appears to be a floating form. Some people suggested it could be cigarette smoke.

Paul says that the explanation doesn’t fit.

He was smoking at the time, but the smoke in the image looks completely different from the shape beside him.

To him, the form looks like a female figure floating vertically, almost as if it were demonstrating it could move in ways a human body cannot.

When the image is zoomed and rotated, Paul believes he can see:

• hair

• a face

• a gown

• and possibly a raised hand

Five months later, Paul and his friends returned to the cemetery to see if anything else would happen. They recorded audio while taking photos. At one point, Paul thought he heard a voice whisper:

“What is that?”

The voice seemed to be reacting to the equipment they were holding. He had a voice recorder. His friend had a camera. As if whatever was present had never seen those objects before. Later, they took more photos. One image appeared to show particles or condensation forming unusual shapes in the air.

Another photograph captured something that looked eerily similar to the raised hand from the original image. To Paul, the shape looks like the same hand appearing again, but more clearly formed. Looking at the photos together, we discussed what the shapes might represent.

To Paul, the original image looks like a floating female spirit raising its hand. To me, the shapes in the photo resemble something else entirely. Almost like a creature on all fours, possibly with wings. That raises a fascinating possibility that appears in many paranormal cases.

Multiple witnesses can observe the same phenomenon. But each person perceives it differently. Some investigators believe these entities might not have a fixed form at all. Instead, they may appear differently depending on the person experiencing them. Which raises the bigger question.

Are these beings physical?

Or are they something more like energy that our minds interpret into shapes we recognize?

Reports of poltergeist activity and unexplained encounters aren’t limited to Vermont. You may also enjoy my investigation into the Hopkinsville Goblins encounter and the strange events that continue to puzzle researchers decades later.

How the COVID-19 Lab Leak Theory Changed the Public Conversation

Once upon a pandemic, Senator Tom Cotton said the quiet part out loud: maybe, just maybe, COVID-19 didn’t originate from an exotic animal soup stand in Wuhan. Maybe it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high-level bio-research lab a few miles down the road.

From Cotton’s original interview:

“This virus didn’t originate in the Wuhan animal market,” Cotton said. “Epidemiologists who are widely respected from China who have published a studied in the international journal The Lancet have demonstrated that several of the original cases didn’t have any contact with that food market.”

“The virus went into that food market before it came out of that food market. So, we don’t know where it originated,” Cotton continued. “But we do know that we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that, just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level four super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”

“Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but, because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says,” Cotton added. “And China right now is not giving any evidence on that question at all.”

Cotton tweeted this article from the Global Times, which stated that a new study suggests the coronavirus did NOT originate from the animal marketplace in Wuhan. They believe that patient zero was a seller at the marketplace, and the virus was transmitted through human-to-human transmission in the latter part of November. The virus spread so quickly because the market is a heavily populated area and reached thousands of people in a short amount of time. The study also said that if there were more warnings in December about the possibility of an outbreak, the coronavirus wouldn’t have spread so quickly and quietly.

Suck it Tom, Cotton.

And let’s not get it twisted. IMO, Tom Cotton didn’t stumble onto the lab leak theory because he’s some misunderstood Cassandra of the Senate. No. This is the same guy who treats China like his personal Voldemort, blames TikTok for the downfall of Western civilization, and probably thinks dim sum is a communist plot. He didn’t “break” the story. He tripped over it while rage-scrolling and muttering about Mao. Just because he accidentally landed on a semi-plausible point doesn’t mean he gets a redemption arc. This isn’t Andor, and he’s no reluctant rebel. He’s more like the Senator Palpatine of Arkansas. Creepy, power-hungry, and weirdly obsessed with surveillance. He can go back to yelling at TikTok in a void and suck it.

-Signed

A Perimenopausal Arkansas Resident Who Has to Deal with His B.S. on the Regular

The Cancel Tour Begins.

Mainstream outlets immediately dragged Cotton for peddling a “repeatedly debunked” theory. Experts popped out of the woodwork to reassure the public that the virus was definitely of natural origin. The word “conspiracy” got tossed around like confetti at a New Year’s party.

At the time, The Washington Post published a scathing piece implying Cotton was fanning the flames of dangerous misinformation, writing that he was intentionally spreading a “repeatedly debunked” fringe theory. A group of scientists doubled down, posting an open letter on The Lancet, saying:

“…We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife…”

Does Anyone Remember Plandemic?

Before the government turned social media into a digital thought police force, Plandemic hit the internet like a live grenade. A documentary so blasphemous it dared to question the holy COVID trinity: the origin myth, the panic protocols, and the pharmaceutical gospel. The response was instant censorship, media-wide meltdowns, and a coordinated digital exorcism. You’d think it was cursed footage from The Ring, the way they scrambled to delete every trace of it.

It got roasted, banned, memory-holed, and treated like a biohazard. Every platform performed its public purge like they were winning virtue signaling points for speed. But, as usual, the forbidden fruit effect kicked in hard. The more they tried to erase it, the more people whispered, “Have you seen it?”

Spoiler Alert: Censorship is the fastest PR machine on the planet. Nothing screams “Watch me now” like an orchestrated takedown.

Mainstream platforms yanked it. Fact-checkers threw tantrums. You had to watch it with the curtains drawn, headphones in, volume down like you were watching bad porn on a stolen laptop from 2003. The internet collectively decided you weren’t even allowed to look at it without first announcing, “I’m not a lunatic, I’m just… curious.” Sure, Jan.

And yet, it got streamed millions of times. No Netflix. No Amazon. No YouTube. Just good old-fashioned grassroots hosting, because the “truth” or at least the uncomfortable questions have a way of leaking out no matter how hard you try to duct tape it shut.

Was every claim in Plandemic flawless? Of course not. But five years later, a lot of the stuff that got it canceled doesn’t sound so out-there anymore. Lab origins? Back on the table. Government-pharma collusion? Actively being investigated. Vaccine injuries? Now with footnotes. The same “debunked” points are now op-ed fodder in the New York Times—but you didn’t hear it from me.

So maybe the real plandemic wasn’t the virus. Maybe it was the media freakout, the coordinated blackout, and the collective gaslighting that followed. Watch it for yourself. Then ask who really benefited from making sure you couldn’t.

The walk-back tour is in full swing, baby.

Fast forward to 2025, and The New York Times has now decided it’s okay to revisit the lab-leak theory without immediately labeling it a QAnon fever dream.

Tufekci wrote:

“We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story.”

Let’s just sit with that for a second.

Officials. Scientists. Reporters. They actively worked together to control what the public was allowed to know. Comparing notes. Coordinating messaging. Burying evidence. You know, just casual narrative management in the middle of a global pandemic.

For years, if you said anything remotely adjacent to this. If you so much as blinked in the direction of a lab-leak theory, you were labeled a conspiracy theorist, a science denier, a tinfoil-wrapped lunatic. And now it’s fine. Now they’re walking it all back like, “Oops. Our bad. Turns out some things were… complicated.”

What changed? Nothing except the political weather.

And speaking of science with a suspicious amount of redaction, let’s talk about the Pfizer Papers.

For years, anyone who questioned the vaccine narrative was labeled “anti-science,” shouted off the internet, and fed to the fact-checker wolves. Side effects? Coincidence. Concerns? Ignorance. Hesitation? Unacceptable. The public was gaslit into thinking that “safe and effective” was an unshakable divine truth, not a marketing slogan crafted by a company with a criminal rap sheet longer than most people’s resumes.

But then came the documents.

Buried in the data hidden behind legal shields, time-released in batches, and pried loose by lawsuits were the things we were told didn’t exist. Reports of myocarditis, stroke, menstrual disruption, neurological issues, and more. Not theories. Not rumors. Official internal records. Suddenly, all those “debunked” side effect stories looked less like hysteria and more like early whistleblowing.

And the media has been mostly silent. No prime-time exposé. No public reckoning. Just a slow, awkward rebrand. Suddenly, vaccine injuries were being cautiously acknowledged. Quiet headlines. Soft walk-backs. Footnotes. The same outlets that mocked concerned people as conspiracy theorists now ran pieces with titles like “Rare, But Real.”

We covered all of this in our podcast episode about the Pfizer Papers, pulling receipts straight from the source. It’s all still there. Uncensored. Uncomfortable. And very inconvenient for the people who spent the last few years shouting “disinformation” at anything that wasn’t pharmaceutical fan fiction.

So if you’re still wondering why people don’t trust the science anymore, maybe it’s because the science wasn’t just wrong. It was filtered, manipulated, and sold to us with a media side dish of smug authoritarianism. And when the truth finally leaked out, it wasn’t treated like a scandal. It was treated like a shrug.

Brace yourself for a deep dive into the controversial revelations of The Pfizer Papers. In this episode, Heather teams up with guest Stephanie to unravel Naomi Wolf’s bombshell findings from Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine trials. The discussion delves into the chilling implications for human fertility and raises unsettling questions about population control.

For show notes go here: Unmasking Secrets: Pfizer Papers, Population Control & Government Agendas

Let’s Get Back to Cotton: Roll Call of the Talking Heads

Let’s not forget the full circus of talking heads who weighed in during those early days.

Steven Bannon defended Cotton and accused China of a massive cover-up.

“The mainstream media and far-left [are] saying ‘oh he’s a conspiracy theorist,”‘ Bannon said. “All he’s saying: It’s incumbent upon the Chinese Communist Party and [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] to come out and give all information… this is all Cotton’s saying.”

In another article, the podcaster stated that he knew the coronavirus would become a pandemic in January, talked about it on his podcast, and warned Trump about it.

“If there were more warnings in December about the possibility of an outbreak,” the article stated, “the coronavirus wouldn’t have spread so quickly and quietly.”

Also, Bannon claimed he saw this coming, had sources on the ground in Wuhan, and said NASA had satellite photos showing an industrial shutdown.

Bannon, You Suck It, Too!

And let’s not forget, IMO, the hobgoblin of MAGA media himself, Steve Bannon. If Tom Cotton is the Senate’s Voldemort, Bannon is the basement-dwelling Rasputin of the far-right fever dream. With a spidery red nose that screams, “I drink bourbon for breakfast,” and a podcast that sounds like it’s broadcast from the inside of an ashtray, Bannon has turned unhinged political LARPing into a daily ritual. His entire schtick is yelling into a mic about how Trump’s going to run again as if the Constitution is just a Pinterest suggestion board.

This is the same man who was arrested for fraud, got pardoned by his orange overlord, and still walks around like he’s the second coming of Andrew Breitbart, if Breitbart were drunk, bloated, and way more into overthrowing democracy. He’s been out here promising a Trump third term like it’s a damn Marvel sequel, completely skipping the part where that’s… you know… not how elections work.

Also, for a guy obsessed with the collapse of Western civilization, it’s wild how much he contributes to it. Between the wife-beating arrest, the war crime wardrobe, and the “I read too much esoteric fascism in college” energy, Bannon isn’t a populist hero. He’s a bar brawler with a podcast and a broadband connection. He sucks. His takes suck. His vision for America sucks. If chaos had a spokesperson with liver damage, it would be Steve Bannon.

Rush Limbaugh said it was “probably” a ChiCom bioweapon and the media was weaponizing fear to oust Trump.

Then there was Trump himself, calling it a “hoax” and comparing it to the flu at a campaign rally.

“Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa, they can’t even count. No they can’t. They can’t count their votes.

One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know, we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We’re 15 people [cases of coronavirus infection] in this massive country. And because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that.”

The Daily Mail published a piece outlining how the SARS virus escaped from a lab in Beijing in 2004. They quoted Rutgers biologist Richard Ebright and biosafety consultant Tim Trevan, who warned that China’s top-down structure made open lab culture risky business.

“Monkeys are unpredictable,” said Ebright. “They can run, they can scratch, they can bite… and the viruses they carry would go where their feet, nails and teeth do.”

The article was quick to point out that there is no evidence that such a thing has happened.

However, in 2004, the SARS virus escaped a lab in Beijing.

From the Daily Mail article:

“But worries surround the Chinese lab, too. The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times, notes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Tim Trevan, founder of CHROME Biosafety and Biosecurity Consulting in Damascus, Maryland, says that an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. “Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important,” he says.”

From the same article:

In 2017, the scientists who spoke to Nature acknowledge the opportunity this presents for the development of vaccines and treatments. 

Regulations for animal research – especially that conducted on primates – are much looser in China than in the US and other Western countries, meaning these studies are less costly and face fewer barriers that could limit or slow them.  

Somewhere in all this mess, Zero Hedge even compared the Wuhan lab to the Umbrella Corporation from Resident Evil. Which, in hindsight? Kinda poetic.

Enter: The High Priest of COVID – Dr. Anthony Fauci

Dr. Fauci, the nation’s unofficial President during lockdown, was the spiritual leader of the “Trust the Science” cult. And by science, we mean whatever the current approved narrative is this week.

He was on 60 Minutes saying masks weren’t necessary. Then he was on CNN saying if you weren’t double masking, you were basically licking doorknobs in a COVID ward.

He dismissed the lab-leak theory as a “circular argument” and insisted it was most likely a natural spillover.

When Congress later pressed him about early emails from virologists who raised red flags about possible lab manipulation? He gave the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug.

The Great Censorship Tsunami

(And the Algorithmic Aftershock That Never Left)

During COVID, you didn’t just get silenced. You got digitally erased. Banned on Facebook. Shadowbanned on TikTok. Demonetized on YouTube. Plandemic? Gone. VAERS data? Suspended. If you so much as sneezed the word “ivermectin,” you got slapped with a content warning like it was a communicable disease. Platforms turned into public health enforcement tools, but instead of stopping a virus, they stopped conversation.

This wasn’t community moderation. It was a narrative lockdown. And COVID was just the beta test.

The manipulation campaign didn’t end with the masks and mandates. It rewired the entire digital ecosystem. Now, we live in the age of the Community Guidelines Panopticon, vague, ever-changing rules dressed up in the language of safety and public good. What are we being protected from, exactly? A dangerous meme? A poorly phrased opinion? The audacity of nuance?

“Protecting the community” is just corporate PR for “protecting the narrative.”

Social media companies don’t ban you for being wrong. They ban you for being inconvenient. You’re allowed to speak, sure. But only if you speak the way they want. Words have been algorithmically downgraded, flagged, restricted, and turned into modern-day blasphemy. Say the wrong one and poof your reach disappears. Your post vanishes. Your account slowly dies in engagement purgatory. You’re not censored. You’re suppressed. And that’s somehow better.

COVID didn’t just give us pandemic policy. It gave us narrative enforcement policy, and the tech overlords ran with it.

Now, under the new and improved “free speech” platforms, we’ve swapped one flavor of censorship for another. Facebook still claims it doesn’t censor, but if you post anything vaguely progressive? Crickets. Or worse, your post gets “reduced reach” and buried. Twitter, under its latest regime, pretends it’s a free-for-all but good luck posting anything that challenges the approved anti-woke talking points without becoming a content warning target.

The illusion of balance is the new censorship. It’s not about left vs. right. It’s about control vs. dissent.

COVID cracked the door open, and now the tech giants are walking through it in tailored suits, holding Terms of Service agreements like gospel. Say the wrong thing? Misinformation. Think the wrong thought? Harmful content. Ask the wrong question? Untrustworthy source. It’s all “to keep us safe.”

The real virus wasn’t just COVID. It was the idea that you can’t handle the truth, so it needs to be pre-filtered for your protection.

And now, years later, we’re still living in that echo. The pandemic didn’t just infect our bodies. It infected our speech. It mutated into an algorithm. And it never really left.

Final Thoughts from the Bleeding Edge

COVID wasn’t just some abstract policy experiment or a social media circus. It was real. It killed people. It devastated families. It cracked open the thin walls of our lives and let chaos pour in.

People died alone. Not because their families didn’t care, but because protocols decided connection was a liability. Hospital staff became enforcers of isolation. Ventilators were treated like miracle machines, but in hindsight, may have done more harm than good. The systems meant to protect us turned cold and bureaucratic. Medical protocol became red tape wrapped around grief.

We got locked inside. Life froze. People lost jobs. Lost homes. Missed funerals. Watched weddings happen on Zoom. Masks were enforced, politicized, and weaponized. And all the while, no one really had answers, just soundbites and executive orders.

And under all of it, something deeper happened. Something more insidious.

We fell into mass formation.

That’s the part no one wants to talk about. The collective hypnosis. The emotional overload. The fear so thick it drowned logic. People clung to whatever made them feel safe, even if it didn’t make sense. Even if it hurt others. Even if it broke families apart. Because when the crowd gets loud enough, questioning it becomes a threat. Dissent becomes heresy.

Mass formation isn’t just groupthink. It’s spiritual anesthesia. It’s what turns neighbors into informants and questions into crimes. And it thrived during COVID. It fed on fear, isolation, and a 24-hour ticker of doom. It made people feel righteous for shaming strangers. It made people believe safety came from obedience, not understanding.

The trauma didn’t end when the virus slowed down. It lingers. We’re walking around with COVID-era PTSD, pretending life has resumed while knowing something inside never un-paused. Friendships ended. Families split. Entire communities fractured. And why? Because people weren’t allowed to think out loud.

This wasn’t just a pandemic. It was a mass psychological event. One part virus, ten parts manipulation. And now we’re supposed to move on like it was all just a bad season finale.

Whatever COVID was supposed to teach us, the lesson hasn’t ended. The gaslighting might be quieter now, but the damage is loud. And some of us are still listening.

If you’re fascinated by conspiracy theories and hidden narratives, check out my Conspiracy Tarot Spread for a symbolic way to explore what might be happening beneath the surface.

Safe Spirit Communication Practices

Spirit communication is one of the most misunderstood topics in the paranormal field. Between television shows, social media influencers, and misinformation, many people never learn the practical techniques, safety practices, and discernment skills needed for meaningful spirit contact.

In this episode, Stephanie and I pulled apart something most people in the paranormal world take for granted. Spirit communication. Not the cute Instagram version with aesthetic candles and soft-focus angels. The real thing, with all its mess, trickster energy, and human ego.

This all started because I watched someone at a metaphysical fair do almost everything wrong in front of a room full of people. And I realized how much of what Stephanie and I do in the field is instinctive now. Protection. Discernment. Ethics. Knowing when the “ghost” is actually the land. Or a thoughtform. Or you.

So this episode is about that. How we actually work with spirit. Why “exclusive” machines and “paranormal experts” piss me off. And how you can talk to the dead without getting wrecked by someone else’s theatrics.

Spirit communication is not a lottery win.

Stephanie and I have been investigating together for years. Not cute little haunted B&Bs once a season. I mean, road trips across the country, “most haunted” locations, sanitariums, hotels, battlefields, private homes, the whole thing.

We work very differently, which is why it works. Stephanie is deeply empathic. She embodies spirits. She feels their personalities, emotional landscapes, and inner weather more than she sees or hears them. When someone comes through, she usually knows their flavor before we get a single EVP.

I’m more of an antenna and facilitator. I attract things and pull them into the room. I can talk to them, but half the time I’d rather point at the energy and say, “you, deal with Stephanie,” and then ask questions from the side. I’m the one who sets the circle, frames the questions, pushes back, and watches for trickster patterns.

We’ve done this long enough that a lot of it is muscle memory now. Which is why what happened at that metaphysical fair hit a nerve.

The metaphysical fair machine guy.

Picture this. I’m at a metaphysical fair, selling books and doing readings. There’s a guy there doing a “talk to your dead loved one” demo with a special machine he built. Cool in theory. I am absolutely the person who will sit front row for a new weird device. I have built spirit boxes. I love gadgets. If you tell me “I made a thing that talks to the dead,” I want to see it work.

Instead, I watched a 45-minute TED Talk on quantum immortality and entanglement that did not need to happen.

If you’ve never heard the term, “quantum immortality” is basically a dramatic way of saying energy doesn’t die, it changes form, and every choice spins off a different possible timeline. Cool. Fine. We do not need a graduate seminar on this in a hotel conference room. Say “parallel universes” and “multiverse” and call it a day. Everyone has seen Marvel.

Then he shifted into the “exclusive opportunity” pitch. He announced that only one person in the room would get a chance to use his machine and speak with a loved one. Already gross. Spirit communication is not a raffle prize. You do not need to win a spot on someone’s list to talk to the dead.

He had everyone raise their hands if they wanted to participate. I raised mine. Not because I needed to talk to anyone, but because I wanted to see how the machine responded if I didn’t feed it a sob story. I lied and told him no one close to me had died. Which is absolutely not true. I simply wanted to see if he was willing to work with “let’s see who comes through” instead of preloaded grief.

He was not. He bypassed me and picked a girl who was under sixteen, already emotional, and obviously still raw from her father’s death.

Red flag number one.

Then came the machine.

The “exclusive” machine that did what a seven-dollar app can do. Update: It’s now free.

His device was basically a dressed-up version of something I already use. Think Huff Paranormal’s Portal concept. He had phonetic fragments, audio chopped into small bits that can be recombined into words. The machine would spit these out in real time, so whatever energy was present could use it like a magnetic poetry kit.

Here’s the information straight from the app page:

Experimental ITC Tool optimized for use with the Portal/Wonder Box/similar device or can be used alone.

Steve Huff of Huff Paranormal was looking to experiment with vocal banks from various age & gender people. This app will sweep randomly between 7 short single file reversed human speech vocal banks. Young male & female/Middle aged male & female/Elderly male & female & 1 whisper bank. During your sessions look for intelligent replies to questions asked & always keep the audio reversed for better validation of audio manipulation.

This is not new. This is not proprietary.

He made a big deal about his machine “removing the static” spirit boxes usually have. You can do that with a basic noise gate or guitar effects pedal from Amazon for twenty bucks. I know this because I have done it. I’ve also built my own spirit box with crystals and an anti-distortion pedal. It cost me fifty dollars and a Saturday afternoon.

His special twist was a giant crystal bolted to the front and a copper handle that the sitter had to hold, which supposedly connected them energetically to the machine. Only one person could hold it at a time. Which, if you’ve ever done group spirit work, is already backward. You want the group field. You want shared energy. You want the hive mind.

He never explained what the knobs did while he was turning them.

He never set an intention.

He never grounded the room.

He never talked about protection.

He never said, “Here is how you validate who you’re talking to.”

He put this teenager on the spot, handed her the copper piece, and then let the whole thing turn into a spectacle.

Leading questions, trickster answers

The questions he fed her were long, leading, and designed to generate drama, not clarity.

“Do you remember that one time when we went on a drive in the forest, and we played that one song?”

The machine would spit out “yes.”

He would point and say, “See how clear that is?”

It wasn’t.

There were maybe two or three phrases that sounded like actual speech. The rest was vague noise and pareidolia. But he treated all of it like gospel. At one point,t the machine said, “I’m behind you.”

If you’ve ever done ethical mediumship, you know how wrong that is. Her dad, who she adored, is not going to lurk “behind” her like a horror movie extra. He is going to be beside her. In front of her. Holding her hand. The “behind you” line is classic fear theater. Trickster energy. It reads like something trying to get a reaction, not a father trying to comfort his daughter.

She started crying and hyperventilating. He did not stop. He did not give her grounding tools. He did not ask for confirmation; only she would know. He did not ask for a specific detail. He simply kept pushing, while his assistant beamed at the audience like they were witnessing something profound.

Someone else in the room had to go comfort the girl.

I sat there angry. Not just because of him, but because an entire room of people watched this and thought, “This is how spirit communication works.”

And it gets worse. This same guy is the “official investigator” for a very famous, very accessible haunted hotel. He uses this same machine at their paranormal weekend as a premium, exclusive add-on.

Which is ridiculous. I have been to that hotel with friends, stayed there with equipment, and had a full run of the hallways. Staff literally step over you while you sit in the hall with your spirit box. Sometimes they even point you toward the “good spots.” There is nothing exclusive about talking to the dead in that building. You can walk in with a seven-dollar app on your phone and talk to whoever is there.

That is the problem. Not the tech itself. The performance. The upsell. The message that you need a special machine and an “expert” to talk to your own dead.

We are chaos witches, not hall monitors

Stephanie and I are not pearl clutchers.

We use Ouija boards. We use tarot. We have sat in dark basements and told things that claimed to be demons to chill out and give us something useful. We have had things thrown at us. We have been in old hospitals, prisons, cemeteries, and private homes where the activity went sideways.

We are absolutely “fuck around and find out” people.

We are not love and light, sage everything to death, never touch a talking board types.

What we are is intentional.

We do not walk into liminal spaces blind. We do not hand the steering wheel to whatever wants attention the most. And we do not treat people’s grief like a stage prop.

Over time, without really naming it, we built a protocol. Not a rigid ritual. More like a set of habits and expectations that keep us safe and keep the work honest.

Our actual protocol, underneath the chaos

Before we investigate with a group, we almost always eat together. We sit. We talk. We relax. Everyone comes down from the drive and their adrenaline. You cannot do clean spirit work when everyone is brittle, hungry, and anxious.

When we start, we set an intention. Out loud. Simple. Clear. Something like:

“We intend to communicate with whoever is present who is aligned with the highest good. We are not here for tricksters, parasites, or bullshit. If you are those things, you are not welcome in this circle.”

We usually create a circle energetically, even if it’s just a felt boundary. Sometimes we’ll cast in a more formal sense. Sometimes it is more casual. Either way, there is a container.

We acknowledge that the trickster is real. That thoughtforms are real. That feedback loops are real. We assume that at least part of what we experience is our own energy mirrored back to us. That assumption actually makes the work stronger, not weaker.

We ask very specific questions. We do not lead.

We ask spirits to show us they understand the tools we are using. With a talking board, we might ask, “Do you know how to use this?” or “Do you know how to spell?” You can tell a lot by how the planchette moves, by the language, by the mistakes.

We validate with details. We ask for names, dates, locations, and specific phrases. We cross-check what we receive with research later. We do not build entire narratives off one dramatic phrase that “sounds right.”

We command the space. If something feels off, we say so. If something feels like a trickster, we tell it to leave. If something claims to be a demon, we treat that as a bit first, not as truth.

The point is agency. We expect communication. We are not chasing scraps. We are hosting a conversation.

One of the best examples of how this plays out is the Fee House.

By the time we went, a TV show had already filmed an episode there. The story of the house was pretty established. Certain named ghosts. Certain tragedies. Certain “known” hauntings. There was a script.

Before the trip, we did dream machine work, pulled cards, and ran Estes sessions to get a feel for who or what we were actually going to meet.

What we got did not match the public story.

Where everyone else described playful, chatty spirits who loved to respond on cue, we were getting angry, frustrated people living with secrets, double lives, and unresolved mess. We were picking up on something heavier, more complex, and much less marketable.

When we arrived and started working in person, the “famous ghosts” did not show up for us at all. The personalities, language, and emotional tone we picked up matched our pre-work, not the TV script.

Later, the owner confirmed some of what we found. Off camera. Quietly.

It fits a pattern we see everywhere. Hotel ghosts that never existed in life. Entities like “Theodora” at the Crescent Hotel who are actually stitched together from multiple people’s experiences and rumors. Thoughtforms born out of repetition, investigator attention, and the expectation of a haunting.

None of this means the phenomenon is fake. It means a lot of what people are talking to are egregores, not the original dead. If you walk into a place assuming the legend is true, then any blinking meter becomes “proof.”

If you go in with discernment, you start asking, “Who are you really?” and “Who made you?”

When people ask me how to talk to their dead, I do not say “buy a portal device from a guy in a hotel ballroom.” I tell them to start with:

Cards.

Any kind. Tarot. Oracle. Mediumship decks made specifically for connecting with passed loved ones. Shuffle. Ask a clear question. Pull a card. Sit with it. Look at the image, the keyword, and the feeling you get.

Automatic writing.

It freaks people out, but it is simple. Sit down with a notebook. Ask to talk to one specific person. Write whatever comes without editing. Most of it might be junk. One or two words might be gold. I have seen people channel the title of a painting they had never heard of that later checked out historically. Two words is enough.

You do not have to go to their grave. You do not have to sit in a dark room at midnight. You do not have to earn the right by being sad enough.

You can talk to your grandpa from your kitchen table.

If you want to invite a specific person in, say their full name and birthdate out loud. State clearly that you only invite that person, and that nothing else is welcome. Then ask them to give you something only you would recognize. A phrase. A joke. A location. A very specific memory.

You are allowed to say, “If you cannot give me that, I don’t believe you are who you say you are.”

You are allowed to say “no.”

Which brings me to fear.

You are probably the haunting

Here is the part most TV shows skip.

A lot of “hauntings” are human emotions with nowhere to go.

If you are in a heightened state for a long time, you can absolutely affect the physical world. Doors slam. Lights flicker. Plumbing fails. Dark figures appear in hallways that feel like “someone watching you.”

I have lost count of how many clients told me they saw a tall dark shadow at the end of their hall, and their lights keep flickering and things move around the house, and when I ask what is going on in their life, they say:

“I just went through a divorce.”

or

“Someone close to me died, and I haven’t cried about it yet.”

Or they grew up being told their feelings do not matter, so their body and their house start screaming for them.

Water signs are especially bad for this. I recently talked to someone whose rising sign is Cancer. Her house kept having water issues. Pipes. Flooding. Backups. She felt invisible and unwanted. As soon as she started setting boundaries and talking about her feelings, the water calmed down.

Stephanie has had multiple floods at emotionally intense times in her life. Washer hoses exploding. House flooded. You cannot convince me that is random.

We are not separate from our environment. We are generating phenomena all the time. So if you get an EVP that screams “run” in a room full of jumpy people, that might be the room reading you, not an outside entity.

When we investigate, we always ask:

What state were we in emotionally when that happened?

Is this us?

Is this the land?

Is this a thoughtform?

Is this something truly other?

We do not assume every noise is a ghost with a tragic backstory.

So how do you do this “the right way”

There is no single correct way. There are ways that are less stupid.

Set an intention. Know who you want to talk to, or at least what kind of energy you are willing to entertain.

Claim your authority. This is your body, your mind, your circle, your house, your time. You are not a victim wandering into the dark with a flashlight. You are a host. Act like it.

Work with people you trust. At least at first. Go out with folks who have done more than binge-watch paranormal TV. Let their calm regulate your nervous system.

Keep your nervous system online. One drink is fine. Seven is not. Weed, psychedelics, anything that blows the doors off your perception can also blow the doors off your discernment. If you already struggle with anxiety or intrusive thoughts, you need more protection, not less.

Be specific with your questions. Avoid leading and yes or no questions. Ask for details and be willing to sit in silence while the answer forms.

Document everything. Video. Audio. Little notes in your phone. You will not remember half the weirdness later. You will see patterns only when you zoom out over time.

Research what you get. Names. Phrases. Locations. Titles of things. Sometimes you will find nothing. Sometimes you will find enough that you sit back and go, “Okay, that was not from my head.”

Stay open to layers. A phrase can mean one thing now and a different thing years from now. It can refer to a person, a place, and a project all at once. Liminal work is rarely linear.

Most importantly, drop the idea that spirit communication belongs to people with special titles or special machines.

Spirit communication without the performance

The reason this episode exists is because I watched a teenager be used as content. Her grief was a prop to make a machine seem powerful. No intention. No protection. No grounding. No education. Just trauma theater.

You deserve better than that.

If you want to talk to your dead, you have that right. You can do it at your kitchen table with a deck of cards and a notebook. You can go into haunted locations with your friends, a cheap K2 meter, and a clear head, and get incredible results.

What you need is not gear.

You need intention. Discernment. A sense of humor. The ability to say “no” and “prove it.”

And the willingness to accept that sometimes the ghost you are chasing is your own reflection, blinking back at you from the dark.

If you’re interested in practical methods for contacting spirits, you may also enjoy my Spirit Calls Tarot Spread for Spirit Communication, designed specifically for safe and intentional spirit contact.