Shannon Taggart | Spiritualist History, Seance Photography, & Ectoplasm

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05:35 The planet's puppet masters almost surely have a plan There clearly may be something there beyond the realm of man Until we've thoroughly tested every last closed chested view You'll find the more you think you know, unless you really do Who would we be without THC? We know they're lying to us just don't know what degree Who would we be without THC I said, sure great car would and company

06:23 So say we all, Hiresight Chatters. Doing what we do from the sunshine state I'm Greg Carlwood and as hard as it might be to believe sometimes the brightest minds of spirit and science have told us for years that physical reality is largely illusionary And some non-physical essence is the primary substrate from which everything else arises And if you take that seriously, when we see or experience things that defy logic or make us doubt our very eyes... Is it even right to try and plot such bizarre points on a scale of realness from where we sit inside the construct? Well, it's interesting that the dial on this meshing of spirit and matter is set almost perfectly to where those who are uninterested, blissfully ignorant or unable to wrestle with such strangeness can carry on without ever needing to worry about it. Yet confirmation of our strange situation remains reliably available for the curious seekers willing to dive deeper through all sorts of ways

07:20 And some of those avenues of inquiry include spiritualism, afterlife communications, mediumship and seance which is a realm today's guest Shannon Taggart knows well. She's an artist and photojournalist whose curiosity was kicked off by a medium's unexpected accuracy... ...and she spent an extensive amount of time studying and documenting those spiritualists and mediums who say they can weave between the worlds Now, after almost 20 years in the making her part-documentary part ghost story photo forward book seance blurs the boundary between anthropology and art with an unprecedented look at the religion of spiritualism. Introducing both new work and never before seen images from the history of spiritualism. Strap in for a while one people! The paranormal picture taker ectoplasm investigator and mingler with mediums Shannon welcome to THC

08:12 Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Ah, too kind! I appreciate you sending the book out to me it is a great art book very well crafted in an era of mass-produced poorly printed unevenly formatted self publishing congrats on that certainly something to be proud of thank you yeah and so i mentioned this instance that sort of kicked off your curiosity where a medium randomly picked your cousin out of a crowd and told her that her dead grandfather wanted to correct the record regarding his death. What happened there? Because these examples are always interesting evidence of afterlife communication. Yeah, so I grew up in Buffalo New York which is not far from Lillydale New York which is the town that's home to the world's largest spiritualist community and that's where my cousin went we were raised Catholic but

09:07 Actually, a lot of Catholics are interested in spiritualism and still partake in the rituals. And so she just went for a day... In the summer they hold these things called message services where you sit anonymously on a bench either out in the woods or in their auditorium And they pick people at random and this medium picked my cousin, then kind of got like a masculine voice came over her and said I want you to know I choked to death. That's how I died. This is your grandfather? My cousin was like oh my god this woman is nuts! I gotta get out of here like this is hilarious. She went home and tried to laugh it off with her parents

09:48 who, you know her father is my father's brother and he got like really quiet and said no that's actually true. So the grandfather that we shared he died of brain cancer so we thought but the actual cause of death was a choking incident but our family really never talked about it and this was decades later and my cousin didn't know that story I was 14 at the time and i just thought how could somebody possibly know that like it really shook me. And, I just didn't think much of it though...I mean it didn't-it just kind of kept in my brain Yeah yeah! It is wild I mean so basically the story is that a nurse put some food in his mouth and then neglected to watch him and he choked in the hospital and died

10:39 You could see how that could be maybe embarrassing for a family they want someone's life to amount to more than such a silly little accident. And i guess that may be the motivation to be like well he was in the hospital for brain cancer so it was brain cancer but this detail, it just add that would even be important to a spirit cuz when you try to logic this out and reverse engineer it It's presented as the spirit of dead grandfather desperately wants to correct the record. Of his death and i just find the logic in that you would think he would be moved on to something else maybe this spirit world is timeless but obviously time has passed so the energy of grandfather still intact and i guess waiting for

11:30 spirit telephone person to be able to relay the message is odd when you try to figure out like the fact is the fact can't change that now how did the facts get here like how did. How does this work it is strange what are your thoughts on that so for spiritualists really their primary goal It's not to do magic that shapeshifts reality or anything like that. It's to make a connection between this world and the other world, and to prove that we can do that, and to prove there is another world. They do that through information so they're very much focused on evidence

12:10 I asked a medium once, why do they always come through and say how they died? Because that is so common in a message service. And she said well it's kind of like going into a restaurant the first thing you think of is the last meal you had. It's kind of like their last physical experience in this world so it's very fresh. Like that's how one medium described to me. You know I've heard a lot of criticism of spiritualism that you know a lot of these messages are meaningless sometimes you'll go to a message service and It just seems so non-plus and so watered down and so silly. But I have learned over time that it's not always that way, there is this interior overlap of subjective interpretation and objective pointers that really leads to this third place like I've watched messages that seem completely meaningless then talk to the people who got them and they'll explain exactly beat by beat why it was super prescient

13:11 I had a reading once that was so off base. It was somebody who supposedly is a really good medium, and it's just like this is so meaningless." And five years later everything in the reading ended up being true! So...I don't know. It's very mysterious. It's hard to take a rational look at all of this. You've got to give that action the causality you have to give it up Yeah, I agree and there are other examples of course it seems like not all. spirits are intelligences that are non physical are dead people there's a lot of indigenous cultures it seemed to tap into spirits. And you got the classic dog on story they have this advanced knowledge of serious and be in the star rotates around the other star, and anthropologist go there and i like why do you know this. And well the spirits tell us and that could be another example love

14:10 It's a true thing does it have any meaning like is that valuable in their lives not necessarily. And that seems to be a pattern and non human intelligence information is just a dump of stuff sometimes even the grades they pick people up they take him on a ship they show me star map they say you're here, and then they tell them about some obscure egyptian god and then they wake up in bed and who knows why these Beans want to communicate what they wanna communicate but the other interpretation is that there's just a field of infinite information out there. And theres probably like a million piano keys on it and when you tap into that world you press a key and u get something, sometimes it is random information but im always fascinated with the

15:01 Personality types of these beans on the other side like a dead grandfather it seems like the egos intact just strange stuff but. Let me ask you more about Lillydale. So, Lillydale New York a lot of people might not know that there is an active community slash town of spiritualists all living largely together still today I looked up that there's about 250 residences but you went there in 2001 and spent a lot of time there A lot of the investigation starts there What are your thoughts on that place for people who haven't been there and probably haven't even heard of it? So the first thing I always say is that right as soon as I walked in, it felt magical. Like time didn't work the same way there and

15:53 There is really something very beautiful, very late 19th century that somehow still feels present there. And it's partially because the architecture was this tent camp that then was built into these cottages that you can't build anymore because they're not in code. The streets are really tiny and nothing's really that tall and the buildings are vintage buildings but Once you walk through the gate, the conversation just changes. You know time and space just behave differently in Lillydale and the type of people you meet over and over again people like I never thought i'd be in a place like this but I had this experience and I had nowhere else to process it so I really love thinking of Lillydale as this place that holds a space for us to contemplate this but also engage the imagination in ways that are not acceptable

16:48 places. So there's just something really magical there, it's also amazing that it's still there because spiritualists...it's kind of like rugged individualism like the sovereignty of the gnosis and imagination and so they don't like hierarchy and anybody can become a medium you know? It's not really institutionalized in way that religious communities usually are But it's really amazing and astounding to me that it is still there. Yeah, It's interesting to think of it as like a safe haven for those who unpack strange spiritual experiences when the rest of the world just wants to call them nuts because a lot of times one of these triggering events does send you on a bit of pilgrimage sometimes its just intellectual where your trying to figure out but

17:41 a physical place that people go to try to do that work. That's kind of cool and I know you're also very knowledgeable about the history of spiritualism it is an American born religion, not many of those and they are obviously still out there today Dan Aykroyd who wrote the forward tier book is a fourth generation spiritualist but talk to us about that history how far back can we take it? Yeah, so that really was the kicker for me realizing that you know I grew up in Upstate New York and I went to college in Rochester New York. And this very unique religious history-I did not know about any of it there's very little now a little bit more so but

18:27 The fact that New York State was this spot for this absolute unleashing of new religious thought and Mormonism, spiritualism. The Shakers radicalism like the women's rights movement all kind of erupted in this small 20 square mile radius in central Western New York state called the Burned Over District And the word seance is a French word and we usually associate it with Victorian parlor rooms, but it's an American invention. It's purely American. And you know my work has slowly turned into looking at the mythology of America

19:12 Why did it happen in the Burnover District? Because there was like 30 different, you know... There was free love. You know the Oneidas people playing with natural birth control and natural magic and like all sorts of healing mesmerism like shaking dances You know Joseph Smith found the tablets there and Mormonism ended up becoming a big part of the expansion into the West And why did it happen there? And you know, there's obviously a magical place right but I like to think of it as attached to the Erie Canal and ripping the land, putting a superhighway that connects America with the rest of the world. You could argue that is literally an eruption of American capitalism. And what erupts right there is this trickster energy of wrapping tables in nocks

20:07 Everybody uses that to like flip the script on the social rules and it breaks open the culture. And spiritualists indict death, and indict hell, and allow women to speak. It also erupts in the face of this scientific materialism where it's like their ceremonies kind of become this cosmic dance of these oozing substances I just think it's something that is so, it was just a like embarrassing part of history but I think it's hugely important. It's hugely important to America. It's hugely important to the history of show business, the history of stage magic, the history of the women's rights movement. The women's rights movement actually was spurned by spiritualist practice. So it blew me away at how little of this we acknowledge

21:00 It is interesting to think about where ideas come from, where movements emerge from. Interesting premise about the Erie Canal I wonder if there's any similar paranormal type hotspot near the Panama canal but Water we know holds a memory and i don't have a lot of spirit experience but you talk to people who do and they always associate the environment land and water with. Elementals and spirit energies and maybe if you disrupt their environment day come in may start playing with the minds of those around

21:38 Right. And it's also the culture building and Trickster is always where cultural forces connect or that marginal space of culture creation, and yeah but to speak in the water the Erie Canal connects the Great Lakes to the ocean and then this is how all the riches of America get out to the rest of the world right? But then you have Niagara Falls and that area was like the first electrified area and that's where like hydropower is invented and so there's all this stuff there. And I mean, whatever the literal explanation is it's definitely symbolic there for me. Yeah, I think that's really insightful and many inventors or scientists who are kind of intuitive but keep that part of their

22:29 Discovery on the back burner that i really advertise that but if you pry they'll be like oh well some of these ideas i got from something else that being them in my head. And so there you go inventions and areas like that yeah that kinda goes hand-in-hand and, my understanding is that spiritualism started with two sisters kate and maggie fox day developed letter coded rapping to speak with a murdered man who was buried beneath their home. Talk to us about this, I mean the letter coded rapping? I believe that's just like knock twice for yes and knock three times for no but what a strange way for this all to kick off! Yeah it is so trickster too with the whole Hermes thing of communication

23:18 language and, you know. And it was two young girls who became the unlikely like pioneers of this movement but the situation was ripe for spirit communication and with every story in spiritualism it's always this back-and-forth between the true and the false like they brought forth communication that obviously was compelling You know eventually there were bones and like a peddler's box found under cottage, which kind of attested to there might be some physical reality to this ghost story. But they became super famous at one point they became alcoholics and said they were faking and then they recanted those confessions

24:00 Part of the lore is supposedly on Margaret Fox's deathbed. There were knocks all around the room and in spiritualism, nothing is clear. Everything is ambiguous. It's always this mix of the true and false. It's always evidence that seems compelling that turns into fact, that turns into fiction over and over again. And that's with every bit of this religion. Yeah it seems that way. You mentioned to me Having an interest in contemplating the issue of fraud as a feature not a bug and that kinda goes with the trickster thing that's an area where i do not share that same interest because i just.

24:40 I'm not very forgiving of frauds and i really want things to be clear i don't even spend much time looking at ufo photos or video because it's always just a. Shoulder shrugging okay that was interesting is it even real i don't know and you know these days its like if i haven't already seen it probably won't ever believe any explosive photograph or video again because there's so much ability to make fake things look extremely real But there's something interesting in there about the trickster and just the nature of this space where it is always ambiguous. And I guess you could read it anyway you want if you wanna be a believer, you focus on examples like your grandfather or the fact that there were bones under that house and then if you wanna be a skeptic you focus on the fact that they might have recanted at one point and

25:35 A lot of the photos look pretty fake by modern standards when you look at the history of things like ectoplasm and that. So yeah, you can always look at the thing however you want to I suppose and then that is interesting but i'm just very unforgiving of frauds because we're already laughed at so much and dismissed so much I hate that, but it's an inignorable fact that a lot of people for whatever reason feel compelled to fake paranormal stuff. Inspired by what? Right? Maybe the trickster! Yeah the fraud issue for me is kind of the primary issue and the primary point of where things get interesting. Parapsychologists talk about the elusiveness of psi you know and how

26:27 It has a hiding quality and I mean you could even say it hides in those ambiguous messages. There are paranormal groups who claim that the phenomena starts to behave as if It's framing the people involved to look like frauds. There are arguments that people who are more apt to fraudulent behavior, our natural mediums because Psy likes to take the path of least resistance and if you can accept that it is an intelligent force it would use anything in the toolbox One of the most provocative thinkers, I think in this realm is this British psychologist named Kenneth Batcheldor. And his theories to me are like truly spooky because they...I mean if you are willing to accept that things are way wackier than you ever imagined and that fraud is a primary element

27:27 His argument is kind of like fraud-like things slip into reality more easily and that Psy can hide that way, and that you can't mess with consensus reality too strongly. And so you always have to have the double meaning because the consensus reality needs that interpretation there. He defines paranormality as a rearrangement of normal reality, and that belief allows it to slip in and that the more ambiguous of the situation, like a dark seance room where oh the table... He talks about artifact induction which is maybe something that actually happened but seems paranormal relieves fear and also fuels the belief. And that the belief is actually the pathway. That kind of connects to all sorts of teachings that belief is the pathway you know

28:26 And thinking of the paranormal as like a pop-up autonomous zone, like a black hole or something. Raw paranormality just slips in for a second and then the minute it's challenged by consensus observation it slips away and just the way things behave... Even poltergeist cases like the Enfield case where there was no doubt in investigators' mind that something very strange was going on there, but then the children talked about how even though they're having real experiences they also felt compelled to cheat and to amplify and to be in on it and to do fraudulent things. And I think Carl Jung argued that possibly fraud is a way... That sets in after like a really big explosion of

29:11 psychic feats that it resets to our normal stable reality because we have to be in consensus reality like reality protects itself. Yeah, those are really interesting ideas not to belabor the fraud point cause there's so many other interesting things to talk about but yeah, PsyFX when you look at them remote viewing all this stuff is very subtle it's like 55 percent success rate which is just enough to be like what is there but maybe it's still just chance like. It isn't you can look at either way if you wanna be a believer or doubter but i kinda like the idea that every person has an individual journey so they're gonna be these big

29:56 Broad confirming instances because it's kind of like a personal thing sort of like a synchronicity It means nothing to anyone else, but you find it meaningful and it makes you question the script that your living out because how could this thing have appeared there and been said by this random person? And then meant this meaning to me what I was thinking in my head. Like yeah The universe is weird. And so The books outline says that after spending time in lily dale you expanded the project and travel to sands rooms around the world request a find and photograph ectoplasm the elusive substance that is said to be both spiritual and material. And this is one of things that interested me most because it is like a physical confirming thing, they could be held up instead this is that in between substance this is the proof

30:51 And again, it is pretty elusive. But talk to us about how that journey went and what you think was maybe the most convincing instance of ectoplasm if you ever were convinced? Okay so when I first saw pictures of ectoplasm and i don't know how familiar...I know the first time I had heard about it was through Ghostbusters obviously and learning that you know the Acroid family are spiritualists He's drawing that right from spiritualist practice. And also what I love about Ghostbusters is it speaks to the hilariousness of all of this stuff too, you know? Because there is just this pure form of comedy that comes with all of this ambiguous stuff but so when I first saw the pictures

31:38 I found out there's this whole history of spirit photography. And, you know, I was trained as a photographer. I was working as a professional photographer. I studied the history of photography thoroughly and these pictures were not in any of the history books. You know? The spiritualists taught me about spirit photography and ectoplasmic photography. When I saw them they just blew my mind like they hit my brain in a spot that was like between unconscious and conscious and they were so powerful and strangely disturbing and disturbing in a way I didn't understand And I wanted to really learn and know what the heck ectoplasm was. By the time I got to Lillydale in 2001, you know spiritualism had very much kind of tried to put these types of practices dark room ectoplasm seances into the past right? So what you normally see if you go to like a spiritualist church or even Lillydale when

32:33 You see what you see in those TV shows like the Long Island Medium, just a woman dressed normally talking in a room that's lit normally and it just looks like conversation. So the aesthetic of ectoplasm is completely different but even though they weren't practicing ectoplasm seances at the time in Lilleydale all the mediums I met believed in the reality of it and believed in the past of it and believed in the meaning of it. And so I started traveling around to try and find people who are still trying to produce ectoplasm, you know? That ended up taking me to England and then France and Spain...and this whole trip to finally finding this German medium, this contemporary German medium named Kaimugi who travels the world doing ectoplasmic seances

33:20 And surprisingly now, you know in 2024 these practices are having somewhat of a renewal in spiritualism. And I think that speaks to our need for this type of contemplation and I don't understand it. Our rational, literal minds are very lost when it tries to come into terms with these types of practices but this is all straight from shamanism, the whole wheelhouse. It's just kind of represented in the scientific age but ectoplasm is a substance that is supposed to merge life and death and the term was

34:00 invented, coined by a Nobel laureate in medicine Charles Richer who When you read the primary sources of all this stuff, it's wild. It's these men of science who are seated in this dark room with these women who say this stuff is oozing out of them and coming to life and making form and shaking hands and moving around the room and building... There's a lot of lore surrounding ectoplasm like it's light sensitive and sticky and it smells bad and if you turn the light on you'll kill the medium It's this cosmic mystery come to life in these spiritualist seances. That's technically how ectoplasm is described." Yeah, that's a really good summary and I was surprised as bizarre and kind of silly as ectoplasm sounds

34:52 that a nobel prize winner in medicine did coin the term the quote that comes from one of your slides is a white stream perhaps luminous taking the shape of gauze and which there develops a hand or arm that gradually gains consistency this ectoplasm makes personal movements it creeps rises from the ground and puts forth tentacles like an amoeba it does not always connected with the body of the medium but usually emanates from her and its connected with her I mean this is just a serious scientist looking at one of the most bizarre things ever. So another thing that I really liked about your book is you have images from the Skoll experiments and this is something I've always been interested in. I've talked to the people who did the experiments, we've come really close to doing interviews before but they always are like well were about to get this documentary out and then were gonna do press but nothing ever comes out so where still waiting but at least you and I can talk about it

35:52 And to talk about the school experiments we really should probably back up to talk about doctor raymond moody. Who is a previous guest here but he started experimenting with a psycho man tm amir scrying device based on, the chamber used at the oracle of the dead in ancient greece movie claims it provided a contact experience with spirits about half the time Even when skeptical people were involved according to moody this mirror gazing research deeply upset his academic colleagues and also resulted in his family temporarily forcing him into a psychiatric facility. In nineteen ninety three so that's the setup from your book but then the school experiments they used a psycho man like device talk about this set of experiments

36:43 Yeah, so the Skoll experiment happened in England in the 90s and it produced a lot of video and photo and all kinds of artistic ephemera that was supposed to be seen as evidence The story is actually absolutely wild, and it's probably the direct reason why a lot of spiritualists started to experiment with technology. Also one of the members who founded The Skull Experiment, Robin Foy was also really primary to trying to bring back dark seances and physical mediumship type stuff. That's what The Skull Project was supposed to be.

37:30 It's one of the great spiritualist stories. I mean, if you read all of their claimed phenomena they were getting plans for a communication device from the spirit of Thomas Edison that was etched onto Kodachrome film and then building this object, and then recording conversations with Edison. And there's floating cameras that take pictures by themselves and there is Polaroid film that becomes embedded with these symbols that look like hieroglyphs. They boggled the minds of investigators I met Robin and Sandra Foy before they passed who were two of the four people who started the Skoll experiment. And also I interviewed

38:10 an investigator, a parapsychologist who was a sitter. And he said there were lights that just showed up that kind of looked like bugs and then he took his hands and tried to catch it. There was no strings around this light you know? It was just there in the room. Skull happened in this area where they attributed to ley lines and a lot of really powerful psychic energy at the spot where they were you know, kind of basement area in Norfolk England. Yeah no I mean the Skoll experiment is one of my favorite stories it's just one of these things...it's so wild their claims are so wild and there are so many people who experienced it and couldn't explain it and its' one of these great spiritualist mystery stories

38:57 Yes so apparently they were directed by the spirits to undertake what they labeled as project alice after alice in wonderland and through the looking glass. The spirits stay got a sense of humor and they basically used something called double psycho man team day built this device that's two mirrors reflecting infinite loop is what you wrote in the book and that could be filmed by camera so They say by combining ancient wisdom with modern technology, the group was promised a doorway to eternity. This portal to the spirit world and other dimensions was said to be both an entry and exit. The resulting hours of Project Alice videos presented by the Skull Group showed exotic landscapes with pyramids, mysterious planets, and the face of an interdimensional being they nicknamed Blue...and you look at it and it's a classic grey kind-of face

39:57 So yeah, very strange. I like the idea that Thomas Edison communicated with them and told them how to build a spirit telephone essentially and when you look at these symbols and writings on the Kodachrome film they're strange i don't know if they've all even been decoded fully i don't know if you can decode them they don't even look like human language in some instances but Yeah, this is a body of work that a lot of people who are even curious about this stuff should look at. How did these make it into your book? Because I've heard you talk about how all the images in your book are sourced and given permission for so you had to kind of get up with these people. You mentioned that you met some but to reproduce these images is kind of a big win. Thank you yeah no the imagery from Skoll is

40:50 provocative. And also, I mean this touches on a point that i think is very important is that parapsychology it lacks an appreciation or an interest in any of the artistic artifacts that come out of these situations. And a lot of this history gets thrown away and me looking as an artist, I realize it's valuable like aesthetics are valuable art is a different way of knowing truth and it speaks to other levels of the world other levels of our reality so to just discount the

41:35 I just feel like it should have a bigger role in parapsychology and that part of what makes skull so provocative is the power of their imaginal products. So, that's something I'm extremely interested in and Robin Foy gave me permission to reproduce some of the skull...I mean, I would love one day edit a book on all the artwork that came out of the skull, like the video stills and photos You know they're making the audio available now actually there's a member who is working with all the audio and so because they tape recorded every session but you know it speaks to this like spiritual shadow of technology and.

42:16 how technology in combination with mediumship, there's always been this overlap. And even with the scientists who created the technology that we are just take it for granted as just like completely materialist normal a lot of these guys were at seances experimenting I mean Edison spent the last 10 years of his life trying to make a phone to talk to the dead The Curies were investigating seances you know, there's so much overlap between elite science and spiritualist seance. And it's almost as if wherever you find 19th century innovation even in art, you also find spiritualism and yeah one of my favorite moments of overlap in the history and Kathy Gutierrez the academic told me this or this I learned that Cesare Lombroso

43:11 had the idea to invent forensic science by investigating spiritualist seances, because it gave him the idea to focus on an absent presence. Focus on the criminal's presence rather than the crime and evidence of the presents. So that's how forensic science was born. There is a lot of real overlap between creativity and technology and science, art and spiritualist seance. Yeah that was going to be one of the things I was going to ask you about is the actual mechanics of cameras just because i know you're knowledgeable and if there's something in there that makes sense of why cameras can sometimes capture this stuff obviously our senses are limiting overall there's a visible spectrum we can't see

44:02 dogs here better than us all this kind of stuff you'll see better than us so our senses are limiting already but then you have or photography which i think checks out in some cases like there seems to be pretty good evidence that some people who developed the ability to see ours Can describe your aura and then an or a photographer can take a picture of it and it will match and that's kinda weird so i'm just curious what you think about. Cameras and even the technology of scrying mirrors and i know you've participated in,

44:38 smoke scrying and water scrine. It seems like any medium that can be kind of flexible or moldable, an image can emerge but what do you think about cameras and why they might be useful for validating some of this stuff when a lot of other technologies are methods aren't? Wow well I think because it's so common for us we forget how weird and spooky photography itself actually is And you only need to look at a picture of a dead loved one to feel that, right? You can time travel. It totally deconstructs time and space. It freezes the reflection which forever has been seen as part of our soul and you can save it, you can hold it.

45:31 There's some true mystery to photography and then when you overlap it with these ideas, there is almost like a reflexive thing that is happening where you really get to some level of fundamentals and paradoxes. And questioning by overlapping the paranormal with the camera. The best evidence for the silliness of spirit photographs... So let's say even UFO stuff that we talked about It's two-faced. It attests to the reality, it's like illustrating the reality but it's also making fun of it at the same time because they could easily be used against it or stand for it now some people say this is the elusiveness you have to have the double meaning in there a lot of times with cameras and you've had heard these stories where somebody sees something and then they have the camera and the camera won't work that's very common

46:31 Or you take the picture and it's either there or it's not in a way that doesn't really prove anything. Blurry images, the classic blurry image? Yeah and even if it was the clearest image in the world it still wouldn't prove it because photography is a representation of reality like your condensing time and space like you're changing it but it's not really the reality you know like what is photography I mean that's like a big Overlapping these things you actually get into bigger questions yeah i totally think that's fair to say and another point i was gonna make just about the whole scene of it all is you have mentioned that.

47:16 You studied photography at an academic level and none of that spiritual photography. Was included in the material and you can understand why that is but from the perspective of some of them being hoaxes you might be looking at some other first iterations of photoshop like editing or from a special effects perspective like some of this stuff is the earliest Creation of some of these processes and in a history of photography it should be included even though it kind of blends like is this real is not the stuff that does seem to be not real. In a technical study,

47:59 might predate industrial lights and magic, Lucasfilms. A lot of the things that in that realm of study they're like well this is how special effects started we'll go back to the 1800s and it seems like they were layering photographs in some of these same ways you think you might have invented Yeah I mean its almost like the belief demanded a visual so spiritualist photography It's using photography to build an iconography, kind of like Catholicism uses painting. And it very much makes sense that it would be this technological art would become the iconographic language for spiritualism. So I think the pictures also serve this metaphysical purpose you know they share the teachings they illustrate the beliefs

48:51 you know, they speak to the cosmic mystery of merging the physical and the spiritual or the material. And there's a lot of mystery in this relationship between spiritualism and photography. I mean what I ended up gravitating towards in the end were photographic synchronicities. Those felt like they spoke to a presence that was harder to explain away Meaning, when I got a picture that somehow spoke to the invisible reality I was supposed to be documenting. The end of the book for example is one of my strongest synchronicities where I took a picture of this medium named Gordon Garforth in trance and he always would say, when I'm in trance you'll see these ectoplasmic masks now that's like another term for

49:47 a shamanic shape-shifting type thing or like spirits coming over the face. And when you see it in real life, because some of these seance situations are sensory depth situations and you're under low light and your eyes can't... A neuroscientist would say your brain is just piecing this together through lack of information But when you actually see something change, it's more like when you see a rainbow or something. The rainbow is there but it's not there at the same time. You understand that it's a structure of light that is creating this physical... So that's what the experience of spiritualist transfiguration feels like to me where you really do see things but they're fleeting and hard to catch and hard to explain

50:28 and they're in this realm of, are they really physical reality? So I was taking pictures of this medium in trance. And you know there are long exposures and I became really fearless with experimenting with time with my camera where that's not a professional thing to do. You're supposed to make a clear picture where I'm like using this long exposure and letting motion in and letting light leak and all this And in every picture I took, he looked like a different person in a lot of these pictures. And there was one picture where it looks like he's wearing glasses and has a little mustache and I actually was afraid of the picture because I thought it was really spooky. I didn't like the little mustache. He just freaked me out. And afterwards when I showed him that picture on my computer, he said, That is the picture! I never asked him to explain that and I didn't think about it again

51:24 I went to his house like nine months later and he brought out this card of Azit of his great-grandfather. And it looks exactly like my picture, which...I don't know what to say about that but it feels like it speaks to a presence. It feels like it speaks to impossible things. It feels like something happened there and was it actually his grandfather? I'm not saying that! I'm saying this is compelling and this is taking me into a mystery." Yeah, that's a great example When these things do involve nuance and extreme levels of detail it's like explaining the synchronicity in general or dream to someone like they kind of.

52:07 Trail off and lose interest because it's just not they're not at the center of it I guess. I don't know but that's what so interesting too is they are personal They're meant for the individual and they're extremely profound life-changing But then you can't tell anybody because there just people just shoulder shrug, and I don't know what's on TV tonight? but Gordon Garforth, I believe he's the one who Provided what I think is one of the most interesting things in your experience which is the Big Hand Experience. Is that him? Yeah, yeah! Tell us about the Big Hand Experience So you know I met Gordon Garforth and his wife Gaynor and they're like such sweet normal people You know like everyday people They're just lovely And first time i met them Oh well you know...I do seances They are both fourth generation spiritualists and I did these seances The spirits use ectoplasm to change the shape of my hands in my face

53:04 There's such an absurdity to that, just say that so normally. So he invited me to take my camera into his seance and I thought to myself, you know, I'm probably not going to see anything because sometimes you're led to believe you're going to see things that you don't see. And sometimes everybody in the room it's not an objective third person experience. It's a very subjective personal experience. So I didn't expect much and I was sitting in the front row And he doesn't sit in a cabinet, you know these mediums they have these amazing things that I'm fascinated with called the mediums cabinet where they make these little stages for themselves and sit into them. But Heath just sits against a black background with a T-shirt on so I could see his arms and there's a red light and I was about six feet away wasn't that far away and it was red light but it wasn't that low. His wife, you have a circle leader who kind of guides

54:01 ritual of the seance because the medium's in trance. And she said, well now you know about 20 minutes in okay we're gonna see the hand change shaper You know they're going to work with the hand and so Gordon in trance put his hand out in front of his body and just moved it slowly and To me It looked like this normal flesh hand Just skipped into this absolutely gigantic hand I mean It was the most magical, strangest bizarre moment of my anything I've ever seen. Like it just looked like a normal hand just skipped gigantic and then he pulled it back and I screamed out because I was so shocked and you're not supposed to do that! It's very bad to do that but everybody else was kind of gasping then

54:54 Oh my God, did they see the hand or they're just reacting to me? Or like I was hypnotically induced to see that hand. And so when I see my camera it's going to be a totally normal small hand but then when i did look at my camera it was not a normal hand It was an absolutely gigantic grotesque scary hand and you know kind of is so big that it looks like one of those foam hands you take to the football game And, you know I love that. I just leave it up to the viewer to interpret it because... You know, I took the picture of Lillydale and the historian there said oh Shannon thats a glove! And Im like no it wasn't a glove! I swear to you it was not a glove It was like flesh that just- and then some people are like its just an optical illusion with the light

55:40 And Gordon's like, no it's my hand just got gigantic. And that's what you saw because that's what they do and I love that there is some true mystery to me or like maybe it was just okay with a normal hand and then my shuttered because of the time made the hand gigantic through motion. I love that the interpretation is open and that there are multiple interpretations there and that's just for me the path forward with all this. Take you at your word like what you saw is what you captured and to me the backstory that you were personally there is more interesting cuz like, you're not shy about saying i went on some adventures that yielded no results now you want a couple of places. I remember one of them was the arthur finley college outside of london it's a hogwarts for adult spiritual as you say but u

56:37 Where are you were going through these sounds like it was a course and not much happened so you're not shy to be honest about like sometimes it doesn't yield results i went to an overnight. They had a haunted place one time early on the shows history and, I also was not super convinced and i realize i maybe have to do this fifty times to get an event like that happen when you have a job still u can't be out overnight fifty times is just not gonna work just hear some wrapping on some door. But let's talk about some other projects because you do have on your website a progress page where you talk about other things that are in progress. One of them that seems interesting is this Sorat group, what is that about? Yeah, that's a big project so

57:31 SORAT, it was a seance group that was started by the American poet John Neihart who wrote the book Black Elk Speaks. He started a seance group with his students and it went on for over 50 years and it's absolutely the wildest psychic media I've ever encountered. And through a series of unlikely events, I have the entire archive and it is massive It's overwhelming. I've been working on it nonstop for four years and just now figured out, like...I mean it's such a massive amount of material. It's 50 years of pictures, audio, movies—the first examples of spirit cinema are these wild absolutely absurd films that they made

58:23 I have all their notebooks. The people in the group wrote books." Every parapsychologist, anybody who was anybody studied SORAT and including George Hansen—you had him on The Trickster and the Paranormal—it was a primary inspiration for his trickster book, and it was the first case he ever worked on. This all happened in Missouri here in Texas. Aren't you from Missouri? Are you from Missouri? Yeah, I'm from Jefferson County, Missouri originally sadly. Okay so it all started in Columbia... Oh! I went to college there and dropped out and hung out for a few more years. So they were students there. You know Neihardt was a teacher there they were all literature students this group and the story is absolutely wild i don't even know where to begin with that yeah i hope you will have me back on once i have the book ready but

59:14 They also had this whole spirit writing pen pale thing called the entity letters, which the sociologist Jim McLennan has written a book about. Which is an excellent book and it was actually through Jim facilitated me saving these pictures and video and photo albums I have a lot. It's absolutely astounding amount of material and it's intact. And then I even went to Missouri and found the negatives so I'm restoring some of the pictures by scanning the negatives. I even had paranormal experiences with the material, it's an absolutely wild story but you know i really care about saving this history and a lot of parapsychologists laughed at their pictures or deemed this material unworthy. I was told by multiple people all this stuff belongs in the garbage so like I'm kind of looking at what is being thrown into the garbage and what that can tell us about the story

1:00:13 It's pretty mind-blowing stuff. I'm really excited about it. Yeah, sounds like you're on a similar path as Jeff Kripal and what he is doing at Rice University. I don't know if you are familiar with the archives of the impossible but... He is basically taking all this discarded material and saying look there is some reality to it even if you don't think so We are in the business of archiving information and this is the information I want to archive. And those who want to laugh at it can, but those who want to study it now there is a place where you can go and study high strangeness events unadulterated in a giant archive. And I think that's a beautiful thing!

1:00:56 The only other one I wanted to ask you about before we call it and was Basement Voodoo with Mambo Rose Marie Perrie. Yeah, Pierre. Pierre? So yeah so i was living in Brooklyn and I knew there was a Haitian community nearby and I always wanted...I was interested in voodoo mostly because one of my patron saints of art is Maya Deren the filmmaker and she famously wrote a book about Haitian voodoo that Joseph Campbell helped facilitate called Divine Horseman. But she's one of my favorite artists, the filmmaker and she actually became a mambo and made films about Haiti. And so I was interested but it was also comparative because I wanted to see how voodoo was different from spiritualism. It couldn't have been more different. I actually had to photograph it in a completely different way like flash mostly black-and-white

1:01:55 It was very performative. You had to catch the spirit in action rather than this slow, barely anything happening process of spiritualism which is like voodoo. The spirits are costumed and they're dancing and they're right in front of your face—the whole act of possession. Rosemary and I have talked about maybe doing some writing. I'm not really sure what i can do with that project, but I did photograph very intensely for five years on that. I no longer live in Brooklyn and I'm not actively photographing it but you know I work on things for a really long time like I worked on the spiritualism stuff for 18 years before that book came out but that's the project that is in The Aether. Yeah! I'm not sure if you're familiar with Richard Stanley he's one of the most interesting characters I think I've ever interviewed

1:02:49 directed color out of space with nick cage but he has a documentary called the white darkness about voodoo and i can understand that it seems like he does a commercial film. Just to get some money to then go do the non-commercial stuff you want to do and its a pretty low budget honest raw look at possession and voodoo it's quite strange but these people are just like yeah we love these beans take over our body and they basically give us orgasmic like feelings when we do that so we'd like to do that cuz that feels great. And is this like super bizarre and strange but the world is weird

1:03:33 Yeah, Richard Stanley and I have actually met him before. We have mutual friends and I listened to your episode with him it's great but yeah the white darkness that term comes from Maya Deren that's how she describes the act of going into trance it felt like a white darkness well there you go It's all connected Wow well this has been a lot of fun really interesting stuff impressive work for sure What do you want to tell people before we call it in about links, where to get the book? All that good stuff. The reason why we do the dance. Okay great so my site which is my name shannontaggart.com The book is available multiple places So I have all those links on my site what I'm really excited about that's upcoming is every summer I host an event in Lillydale

1:04:26 that is, you know in the spirit of like the old 14 and like trying to bring conversation but I'm trying to bring like artists and academics and experiencers. And people who are just kind of don't believe but are interested in the study of all this stuff. I am trying to bring together all these mindsets because I really think the approach to this should be much more interdisciplinary than it is. We're too stuck in these boxes and also, it's just in the spirit of fun and interesting so Larry Arnold will be there talking about spontaneous human combustion and the filmmaker Jody Wiley is going to screen a rare Unarian film

1:05:06 Marjorie the Medium, which is one of the most famous cases in all of psychical research. Like her great-granddaughter's gonna come and share the family side of the story. It's two and a half days it's going to be like... A mega event! I'm so excited about it The full schedule is at my website. It's at the end of July, July 25th through 27 You know, the artist Tim Kerr is doing a painting exhibition that's made specifically for Lillydale Weird Studies is going to do a live podcast. It's going to be really exciting, I can't wait! So if anybody is interested in coming to Lillydale, I want to give you an excuse to come to Lillydale.

1:05:48 Yeah i hope some people will take you up on that if it's an annual event maybe i'll see you there down the road but. This has been great and i do appreciate you send me a copy of the book there is multiple people who have seen all the weird stuff on this bill desk can they gravitate towards the sounds book because something tells him to so, I think it works on anybody's weird stuff bookshelf. I mean, i would call it a coffee table book because it's so picture heavy and it's big like that but that almost sounds like a pejorative to people who do the hard work? I don't know how its taken... No no! I love it and I made it for multiple audiences so the fact that is

1:06:28 I get a lot of feedback that it is communicating in the way I intended and I'm just so thrilled about that. Through making that book, I learned about the magic of books and I really do think books are magical. So I'm really thankful it's in the world and thankful people are enjoying it." Heck yeah, well congrats on getting such a crazy detailed book and project actually completed. It's no easy task and thanks for joining me today and for listening on occasion too! Oh yeah I'm a big fan, big fan. Too kind alright well have a good one Thank you Alright how about that? A little outside the box for us i can't really recall a spiritualism focused episode in years if ever really

1:07:14 I've said before that with the range of paranormal topics we get into, I think ghosts and spirits of the dead are just kind of the least interesting. Not that i doubt these things...I take them as a given but the encounters usually don't offer much and maybe have been ruined by ghost hunting shows but the only way I like to get into that kinda thing is through a magical context or contact contexts like spiritualism When we sat down to record this a few weeks ago, my dad wasn't even in the hospital yet. So it's weird one to be releasing after trying to take a short break to go through some grieving as well as dealing with all the logistical stuff of a person dying in their own home and getting my mom sorted out with bills and driving again after many years... And all those sorts of things As only child, A lot has fallen on me

1:08:11 I do appreciate the avalanche of kind words and thoughts and prayers, you guys have been really great. Huge bump in plus signups which i don't really know if it's related or not maybe some people decided to throw me a bone during all this but it helps when you're taking break from work and your worried about things and you check and the subs are still up that takes a little bit of stress away so I do appreciate that also I'm fortunate that i had time to say goodbye and there wasn't much pain and we got him home. The sad thing is he really liked fishing and boating, but never got back to doing it with them after my teenage years

1:08:54 But in an effort to right that wrong, I had rented a boat for his 75th birthday and we were going to take the family out. And it just didn't get to happen. He knows I made the gesture but this all went down within that window His birthday was May 30th and he died just a few days later... ...but hey if i'm dealing with my first real loss in life at 39 It means I've been pretty lucky! And he was 75, he had a good life The hard part is taking a new funny picture of the kids or even seeing a trailer for some new show or movie that he would like and just re-realizing that there's a hard stop there. My daughter is almost three, and it finally hit her yesterday what it means to say that he's gone forever

1:09:41 We've been hanging out with Grandma a lot and she's only used to seeing them together. And then she's asking, where is Grandpa? And yesterday she cried the whole ride home from Grandma's like it finally clicked and that's really tough but it would only be worse if she was older I guess Not that this is some better help grief counseling hotline But I shoot from the hip on these things though content wise I found a lot to like in this one Lillydale seems like a wild place, the history of spiritualism is interesting and when spiritualists get personal hits that resonate like Shannon's cousin story it's just so weird. Obviously there's something to it It doesn't come from the individual's subconscious in my opinion because oftentimes they don't have this information but I am always a little confused by the content that The Dead decide to communicate

1:10:38 And her story was a good example of what I'm talking about. Ectoplasm and aports are fun topics too, probably the strangest aspect of the whole thing those are great pictures in the book Dr Raymond Moody's Psychomantium and Skull Experiments Those are two topics that I always love to fit in when they're relevant Good stuff, and her book is really well made. If I ever get a book out, I want a nice hardcover physical copy like this even if it costs me... A lot more money just as a fuck you to the throwaway mass production digital era So i thought it went well and its been awhile since we had a lady too but who's counting?

1:11:18 For Plus members, the second hour got into stuff like Aports as mentioned. The ITC movement orbs seances in the Lincoln White House spiritualist painters alien channelers the psychic mafia scrying Loch Ness spoon bending demos and channeling Louis Armstrong sign up for plus if you want to get the full two-hour ad free episodes it makes my world go round But Shannon really knows her stuff and there is something to that overlap between camera technology and spirits. Really just electronic technology, there's some kind of overlap there. Spirits seem to maybe have an electrical essence? I'm reminded of Richard Dolan story of his own father and the flickering lights. That's a common trope even in horror films and that sort of thing

1:12:14 But it's a trope because there is something to it. They are able to affect electronic devices in weird ways. I've even heard of people getting calls from their dead relatives' phone, If you think of electrical energy as something akin to the ether or something universal and ambient in the environment, it seems like spirits are occasionally able to just bang on it like a cymbal real quick. Just to say hey I'm over here! I'm not gone and spiritualism is definitely past its peak but I'm glad it's still around

1:12:52 I thought Shannon's whole journey in exploring these things was really great. She went to some of the world's most well-respected communities and also institutions, and she went through the processes and sometimes it yielded results and sometimes it didn't As for The Last Show with Jim Willis... Man! Would you believe that on the very episode I mentioned my father's death The guest also died shortly after, probably within the same 48 hours or so. I got an email from his daughter saying that a lot of our listeners have reached out to say they liked his take on things only for her to inform them that he passed Just another kind of eerie sync with this whole thing because that doesn't happen very often. I think back to the very early years and the first guest i ever had that passed on And that was Philip Coppins

1:13:49 We had done one interview and we were all set up for the second, and he had to cancel the day of because he was on his way to the hospital because he didn't feel right. And a couple weeks later... He had died! I'm pretty sure it was brain cancer too. Definitely some kind of cancer, I know that. Well, the rating on The Jim Willis episode, the reason i brought it up did hit the top shelf 4.7 Very cool glad you guys liked it Many of the comments on the website are condolences and I just wanted to say, I appreciate all that. I did read them all and I'm glad it was so well received Jim seemed very zen and very comfortable with the process of death And it was an honor to host his last interview especially when these topics were a big part of it Much respect to Jim and a big thanks to Shannon for sharing her work as well Let's look at the Meetup calendar and call out some events before I call it in

1:14:48 We got an event tomorrow at the Coral Tree in LA. This is the LA Truth Monthly Meetup, it looks like they've changed the venue Then June 18th in Casa Grande Arizona The Hideout Steakhouse June 20th Corner Bakery Cafe in Pasadena June 23rd The Broadway Café In Kansas City Missouri And June 30th The Poor House Barbecue Meet Up In Canaan New Hampshire Great. If you heard about an event near you, go to highersidemeetups.com for all the details and RSVP or if you didn't hear about one near you can make your own event free and easy I'll call it out and people might show up It's available to everyone who feels like the odd man out

1:15:36 But that is the show. Take care of you and yours, don't put things off that are important to people you love and just try to be the best version of yourself I'm getting out of here...I've done my part Your move Spiritualism Specialists, Seance Sitters & Resident Residents Of Lillydale YOUR FUCKING MOVE All along thought they were rooting for the home team As they're sent to the game and torn apart We twist this tourniquet upon the pipeline That it carries all of pain and looms As we blindly clap and cheer from the sidelines It's clear, on a losing streak from the very start And that's where they found

1:16:41 In that cemetery A smoking gun in my I'm down for THC The Arrogant Scream They took that faded ribbon off the oak tree Poured out all the hope in their hearts How long thought I was doing Now I'm lying in a pool of my blood And thats where they found me

1:17:31 In the cemetery A smoking gun in my From the land of the free Sing with me And that's where they found In the cemetery A smoking gun in my and now I'm down From the land of the THC The American scream! The American scream!

1:18:26 And that's where they found in the cemetery A smoking gun down from the window So if me, the other can scream