Hellier

Synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence.

Basically, it’s when these two events correspond

in a way that seems highly improbable, highly unlikely,

but also deeply meaningful for that person.

It relates to some aspect of their life

in a way that feels significant

and purposeful and intended.

Almost by some other kind of consciousness.

Now coincidences happen for sure,

but this is almost in the realm of deja vu

where it seems like there’s something more to it,

particularly when the synchronicities drop all at once,

and there’s one after another, after another

in a way that feels something else is going on,

something bigger.

That’s what started this case

And that’s what plagued us throughout the case.

In order to trace the synchronicity back for me,

we have to go back to the spring of 2016.

I was finishing up my work at the Stanley Hotel,

I was the Resident Paranormal Investigator there.

I was shooting a web series called Spirits of the Stanley

and the final public paranormal event that they hosted in April

was the first time that I met Greg and Dana Newkirk

who run the Traveling Museum of the Paranormal and the Occult,

a popular blog website called Week In Weird

and they’re doing a ton of very novel, very interesting paranormal experiments

in the broader field in general.

We became instant friends. We kept in touch.

A couple months later, in June, Dana posted a blog entry on Week in Weird

about the top five indie paranormal projects people should check out.

And she was very kind enough to include Spirits of the Stanley on the list.

As I scrolled through the article, I noticed another post

about the Euphomet podcast that Jim Perry puts on.

In the article, there was an embedded episode,

and that one that they chose was an interview with Greg.

It was about an hour long interview,

and it was all about this very bizarre, strange case of these Kentucky Goblins

and these weird emails that Greg had gotten starting in about 2012.

I didn’t get a chance to listen to it that June,

but I returned to it in September,

and I got immediately enthralled in the story.

Take us back

to after you received that second message from David.

He describes events that have pretty much left his family in terror,

small, hairless entities, and someone who calls himself "Terry Wriste?"

I thought it was a good story,

but I wasn’t totally on board.

I mean, anyone can write a great story.

Was this ringing a bell with Kentucky?

Was there evidence that there were mines? That this was…

The only thing that it seemed to have anything in common with

was there were some themes that related to the Hopkinsville Goblins case

that happened back in 1955.

And in 1955, this family in this farmhouse was besieged

by these tiny creatures that they thought were from outer space.

I got about halfway through the episode,

paused it, went over to Twitter,

and I blasted it out.

Couple minutes later, Greg hit me back…

I wrote him back.

And then I noticed their Week in Weird account posted an article

about the same Kentucky Goblins case.

Now, thinking that Greg and Dana had used that as an opportunity

to plug their page and their website

because I was talking about it already,

I hit them back with a post that said “I see what you did there”

or something along those lines.

Greg writes back and says, “That wasn’t us who posted that.”

What he told me was that it was a random auto-post

that draws from the entire archive of different Week in Weird articles

and posts throughout the day.

And further, there were 1700 articles

on Week in Weird,

that it could have drawn from,

and there were only two about this Kentucky Goblins case.

Greg had recorded that entire interview six months beforehand

and it was random that I even clicked on the blog

and started listening to the podcast at the time

and equally random that we had this 1 in almost 900 chance

that their account should post,

let alone at the time that it did, right in the middle of me listening to it.

It felt extremely unlikely,

and it felt very pointed,

particularly as I listened to the end of the episode

this was a cliffhanger.

There was more work to be done.

And not only did I want to be a part of it,

I felt supernaturally called to be a part of it

by this synchronicity.

And in the two weeks that followed, it was a synchronicity storm,

there was just one after another after another

all tangentially relating to this Kentucky Goblins case.

So here we are, almost a year to the date

after that series of synchronicities that called me to this case,

and we’re going out to Kentucky…

And we’re going to do our best to try and figure out what was going on.

When I say that I’ve investigated the paranormal for like twenty years,

I typically just don’t even count the first five

because it was all stuff based on things that I’d read

or things that might’ve been on television,

watched a lot of World’s Scariest Places and stuff like that,

and based everything we’d done off of that.

But eventually, the longer we were in this...

Dana and I even met because we ran rival ghost hunting websites as kids

and eventually we got together

and we started to try and think of things a little bit differently.

So we come from a pretty hardcore ghost hunting background.

That was really what we started out as.

And then eventually we started to look into things like bigfoot

or we’d start to look into things like UFO sightings

and then we’d start to get into people who believed

that there was some kind of weird unifying theory

that mixed all this stuff together.

And so that’s where we’ve stayed.

We really strongly believe that if more paranormal researchers

would communicate with each other

from different communities...

Like ghost hunters don’t typically talk to bigfoot hunters

and bigfoot hunters don’t really talk to UFO investigators,

but if they did,

they’d notice that there’s a lot of weird crossover there.

So as far as we’re concerned, there’s really nothing that’s too weird.

In fact, the weirder, the better.

I think that…

I mean, initially, it started off as a joke.

Our first kind of adventure away from ghosts was bigfoot

and it was as a joke, again like by accident,

we went out to have fun with a guy that we thought was probably crazy

and he was crazy,

but he also brought us to places where we were experiencing legitimate activity

You’ve got five rounds in here.

Five rounds...

- You always save the last one for yourself…

Okay.

It kind of felt the same way

that it did when we both first started ghost hunting.

The first few times that you experience something

that you legitimately can't explain,

it fuels your curiosity and continues to push you forward.

I think it tends to happen that the longer

somebody researches this type of stuff,

and the more broad that they decide to cast their net,

the more they realize things are so much stranger on an even deeper level.

“Are we causing hauntings with our mind?”

to “Is bigfoot just the ghost of a Neaderthalic man?”

Stuff like that. The longer you do it,

the more you start to see this stuff that never quite adds up in popular theory

but when you start researching a little bit deeper,

you start to see people like John Keel, who believed in window areas

and that all kinds of stuff came from it.

And then you start to believe things like:

“Well, maybe UFOs aren’t coming from outer space,

maybe they’re coming from here, from another type of dimension.”

And that’s the type of stuff that’s really hard to tell people

and get them to swallow,

because it’s hard enough to tell them

that there’s a giant, hairy creature in the woods,

or that there’s aliens coming and abducting people

and performing experiments on cows and stuff like that.

It all just comes from continuing to follow these rabbit holes,

and it just gets weirder and weirder the longer you’re in it.

I think when you start to invite that type of weird thinking into your life,

that type of stuff just has a habit of finding you then.

And I don’t know if that’s because you’re paying more attention to it,

and you’re trying to look for those weird connections,

or if it’s because they’re like, “Oh, somebody's paying attention,

let’s go screw with that guy.”

It's nice...

to be married to someone who is equally as weird as you are.

It’s always nice,

especially when both of us have such huge histories in the paranormal

because then you can go on all these weird adventures together.

Our dynamic is different, and it changes from case to case

and from even just subject to subject.

There are specific things, like for instance,

when it comes to UFO research,

I tend to take a little bit more of a skeptical stance.

And that’s really just because it’s not my world,

and I don’t know as much about it as Greg does,

so I tend to come at it from an outsider’s perspective,

which makes me analyze people a lot more

than I would from a ghost perspective,

which is, I’m all in

That’s where I feel the most comfortable.

For the most part, Greg tends to go in to all of the things we investigate

ready to believe.

Not in a, like, “everything’s a ghost!”

or “everything’s a bigfoot!”

It’s not necessarily like that, he’s just ready to believe people.

And I think that I tend to be a little bit more standoffish.

So I’m more about observing how people tell me their stories

and the nuances of those stories

and then comparing them to evidence at the same time.

So it’s good because I think that we will balance each other out

and we don’t let each other get too carried away

because when one starts to go into a place where “everything’s a ghost”

or “everything’s a bigfoot,"

the other person is there to go, "Let’s reign it in a little bit,

pull back and look at it.”