Unveiling Wisconsin's Haunted History with Josh from Weird Wisconsin!

[00:00:10] Right then guys, welcome back into The Spooky Shed Podcast, your go-to place for conversations around all things weird, scary and of course spooky. Today with me I've got Josh from Weird Wisconsin. So Josh, welcome into The Shed, man. How are we? Oh, I'm doing great. I appreciate you having me on. Good, good, good. Right then, Matt. So, I always start by getting my guests to leave something in The Shed with me. Now, you said you'd never heard of this term before. So basically what I mean is...

[00:00:37] So to me, a shed is either where you keep all your junk or all your important things. So I say to people, it can be anything you want, something you love, something you hate. Purely hypothetical, of course. So what have you got for me? I mean, people have left things like guitars, Playstations, all that sort of stuff in here. Okay, I'm going to leave you my lake house Airbnb. You can have it. Just take the whole property. I don't want it anymore.

[00:01:02] You know, I had this glamorous idea that owning an Airbnb and renting it out was going to be like rolling in the money and just a super enjoyable experience. But I hate it so much. I am trying to sell the property with every inch of my body just to get it out of here because it's been the biggest headache in the world. So that would be my advice for people is don't buy an Airbnb thinking it's going to be fun.

[00:01:30] And I'm leaving it with you in the shed. Fair enough, fair enough. I'll take it. I'll take it. I know it's not spooky. It's not, you know... It doesn't need to be. I mean, for God's sake, the weirdest thing, the weirdest one yet is someone said a butt plug. So, okay. Yeah, exactly. That's just been top of mind for me recently. I'm like, if I could just get rid of that emotional waste of my life right now, that would be great. So I'm leaving it with you.

[00:01:59] Happy days. Happy days. Right then. So talk to me and tell my listeners about Weird Wisconsin, when you started, what you do, everything. Sure. Yeah. So, you know, it really goes back to when I was a kid. I grew up in Waukesha, Wisconsin, which is about 30 minutes from Milwaukee, if anybody is familiar with Wisconsin. And I had unexplainable childhood paranormal experiences.

[00:02:28] I didn't know what these things were, right? And this was the 90s. So you didn't have the ghost shows. There was no books. Obviously, there wasn't social media. So I started doing research about what ghosts and the paranormal and all that stuff is. And that kind of just led me on this lifelong journey of wanting to further understand, document, and explore anything that's spooky. Spooky, weird, different. And you fast forward to 2020, we were in the pandemic, right? And I had a very bizarre experience in a local park.

[00:02:58] And I started doing research. And I assembled upon American Ghost Walks, which is a tour guide company. They do ghost walks throughout the entire state of Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, all over the world. They're doing ghost walks. And they needed a tour guide in Waukesha. So I signed on to do that. I've been doing that for six seasons now.

[00:03:20] I did like a two-hour walking tour through downtown Waukesha, my hometown, just talking about all the weird, true crime, ghostly, alien things that have happened in Waukesha's history. And then that kind of led me to want to expand upon the tour. So I started telling or creating social media videos about the stories that happened in Waukesha. And my wife was like, you know, what if you run out of stories in Waukesha to tell?

[00:03:49] And I'm like, that's not going to happen. There's so many weird things that have happened in Waukesha. And lo and behold, like many things, she was right. And just here in 2026, I kind of rebranded as Weird Wisconsin. So taking my stories from Waukesha, but doing stuff from all across the state. And it's not just paranormal stuff anymore. It's telling stories about UFOs or the Hodag, which is a folklore creature. Telling real like exorcisms that happened in Wisconsin.

[00:04:19] And also just like weird things you didn't know about Wisconsin. And it's not always like just weird, bizarre, but just like forgotten history through time. And so I rebranded as Weird Wisconsin January 1 of this year. And my account just blew up around St. Patrick's Day because I told a really fascinating story about a church here in Wisconsin that has connections back to the Rock of Cashel in Ireland. And that story just clicked at the right time and just blew up my account.

[00:04:48] And I've got like close to 50,000 followers across all my channels now. So I didn't like do it. To be making money or to have like international followers. But it connected me to you, which is great. And many other people just across the country who are like, wow, I didn't know that happened in Wisconsin, let alone in the history of the world. Right. So I know that's like the super long response.

[00:05:15] But Weird Wisconsin is bizarre stuff in the States. And it's going great. Good, good, good. No, I like it. It's cool. And it's like you said, doing stuff. Doing stuff like this, like, I mean, I don't make any money from doing this. And I mean, if I could, then cool. But even if I never make a penny from this, I'm still going to carry on doing it. Because to me, it's just cool to like learn stuff and just talk to people about all the weird things that happen to people. Yeah.

[00:05:43] And it wasn't like my goal was to be making money off of social media. But one day, Facebook just sent me a notification. They said, hey, you're monetized. You will now start making money off of your product. I'm like, oh, I didn't even know that was a possibility at my level. And it's not anything much, but it helps fund doing additional things.

[00:06:06] So if I want to travel for a weekend, I have a little bit of money set aside from like Facebook that's paying me so I can go do that. You know, so it's I would definitely be doing all of this regardless of any of that. But it's definitely a nice perk I didn't expect. And I just love talking about it because it's it's it's really fascinating how social media is changing the way just people interact with the stuff that we create. Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

[00:06:34] So before we jump into like some so we are personal things and so the ghost walks, what are some of like the some of the highlights of them? And what are the what are the weird things on the ghost walk? So Waukesha is relatively a small city by, you know, like by Milwaukee or Madison in Wisconsin. It's smaller.

[00:06:57] But there's a lot of just weird things that have happened in the I think it was created in about 1834 is when the first white settlers came here. So it's it's it's not that old. Right. In the grand scheme of things. But there was a string of events that took place in the early 1900s that really kind of defines the whole tour. Most of the stories I tell are between like 1870 and 1930, I would say after that, it's been relatively quiet.

[00:07:27] Other than a few recent events, but I would say one of the more bizarre ones. Is is this little boy that was found dead in a local quarry here in 1920. And to this day, we still have no idea who he is. And if you go up to the cemetery where he's buried, it just says unknown boy found in quarry with the exact date that he was found. Now, there were a lot of leads to figure out who his parents were, who killed him, who disposed of his body in the quarry.

[00:07:56] But most of them, they weren't able to, you know, charge or find evidence to to put on these people. And so when they found the boy, they actually put his body up in a local funeral home window and invited the public to come by, take a look, see if you know who he is. So really, really different times back then, obviously, to try to crack this case.

[00:08:18] And then after a week, a local woman raised money, gave him a suit and a coffin and paid for the headstone and buried him up in the cemetery. You know, back then, they didn't even take a photograph. All we have is a little sketch to identify this boy. And they used psychics to try to figure out who his parents were or who killed him.

[00:08:39] The most promising lead on this story came in the 1950s when a local man in Milwaukee lost another son and another wife under very bizarre, similar circumstances. So basically, he said the one son that he lost was adopted by cousins from Chicago and all three of them moved down to Argentina and died in a car accident, which is not believable in the least bit.

[00:09:07] And then when his wife went missing, he said that she wanted to move out to California with family and nobody ever saw her again. And so when they started questioning this dude and trying to piece everything together, it seems like most likely he was the father of this boy they found in Waukesha. But they didn't have any evidence, so they couldn't pin it on him. And there's been a lot of renewed interest to possibly exhume the remains of the boy and do proper DNA testing.

[00:09:36] And people just are like, why don't we do that? Why can't we do that? I'm like, well, it's not as simple as just digging him up, right? It costs a lot of money to do that DNA testing. And even if I raised enough money to pay for that, the city just doesn't want to do it. And I understand with good reasoning. You don't want to dig up this story and maybe disturb some ancestors that are living today.

[00:10:05] Obviously, they have nothing to do with it. So I'm like, as much as I want to figure out who this kid is, it's better to just let the dead rest, I think. Because you would just open up a whole new can of worms by identifying him, you know? Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. It's funny you say that because I often think now like how the police solved any sort of murders, like you say, back in them sort of days. Because now it just seems that every single murder is solved by like some sort of DNA or something.

[00:10:33] And I'm just like, I mean, police now are shit compared to what they were back then. Because now they can't seem to do anything without their DNA now. Right, right. And there was another, there was an infant found in a sewer drain in Waukesha, I think in the 60s or 70s. And they actually exhumed her body a couple years ago to try to do the same thing. And they didn't have any luck.

[00:11:01] So I think after they've done it once, they've just, you know, in going back to 1920 to try to figure that out, I don't think it's going to be possible. No, no. Yeah. You're a little boy.

[00:11:31] Simply being disposed of in a quarry. It's very sad. But also, it's just very intriguing to learn more about it and educate people. So I think it's kind of like the perfect thing. And, you know, there's no ghost story to it. I've done a few investigations at the gravestone near the quarry to try to see if anything comes through. Haven't had any luck. But every year we, a friend and I and my daughter, we take flowers over to the grave at the anniversary just to kind of make sure that people are remembering this story.

[00:12:00] Because that's the most important thing is to keep telling the story and remember it. Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Well, just see, you've brought the mood back up a little bit there. So I'll bring it back down and tell you about. So there's a woodland area about, well, it's probably 200, 300 yards from my house. Me and my old co-host, we've done an investigation there once. It's a very small woodland area. It's probably about eight acres.

[00:12:26] And there's a lot of, considering how small it is, there's a lot of horrific stuff that's happened in there. And the worst one, it was 2003, a group of teenagers found a dead baby in a bin bag. So I'm pretty sure I could be wrong because I've not looked into it for a while and I can't really remember because it was, I didn't really want to look into it too much because it's very grim. But I'm pretty sure that like nobody, like no parent was ever identified for that baby, for that baby.

[00:12:55] So that's horrific. And like you said, that was on, that was in the early 2000s. So, I mean, like you said, 1920s, you've got no luck. Right. Yeah. And much more recent. I don't know, it just, it makes it like hit harder, I guess. Like when it's so far ago, there's nobody alive anymore that was around when that was told.

[00:13:17] So it's, I don't know, it seems like heartless to say it doesn't feel as real, but it just, it's like when things happened so long ago, it's hard to have that like emotional connection to it sometimes. Yeah. And I suppose, and I suppose as well in like, like that situation and like you said, if he's found in a quarry, I suppose, I suppose that could very well have easily been some sort of accident. Like he could have been down there playing or something and fell. I don't know but like you said when it's a baby and he's in a bin bag has clearly been discharging to put it in the best way possible

[00:13:46] The one detail I forgot to mention was they thought that the boy might have drowned on accidents but when they pulled the body out they actually discovered the back of his head was bashed in with something so he had been murdered and then thrown in the quarry like garbage so that's what makes it Yeah It was purely intentional and but that's one of the ones that when I first started doing the tour I just

[00:14:15] really connected with that story and a lot of people really find it fascinating because all those places where this happened are still around and you can physically go see the gravestone and people leave like little toys and trinkets on there so that's one of the ones that I really enjoy telling and trying to further investigate There's a really good one about a family of German immigrants that came here in the 1840s so big German family built a big farm

[00:14:45] had a very great prosperous life and then kind of out of the blue the mother gets ill and they get the doctor over to the house you know rural farmland and he actually gave her an overdose of morphine on accident and she died that night and over the next 30 years there was more than a dozen deaths that took place on this property and so what they say is that the curse of that farm was born on that day when the mother died

[00:15:15] you fast forward like 20 years the youngest son gets gorged to death by a bull literally like drove its horn into his stomach and ripped out his innards and then three years later the two oldest siblings murdered a neighbor boy of farmhands they killed all their farm animals their dog and then went upstairs in their bedrooms and killed themselves and that's like the most I'm summing this up

[00:15:44] in like 30 seconds but the whole story goes is that they this was in 1917 so they believed that this German family was German sympathizers during World War I the police believed that they had been caught somebody was trying to blackmail them and so they said screw it we're going out with a bang and they just they murdered anybody that was there and that was basically the end of the family that originally owned the property

[00:16:13] but the deaths keep happening on the property in the 1930s there was a couple that had two infants die under the age of one there was a man who was fishing near the river and fell in and drowned and then another man was trying to dynamite a boulder in the farm field and blew himself up so even more deaths taking place on this land even up until the 1960s there was a woman who owned the property and lost a son he was swimming in a nearby lake

[00:16:43] and he died and then her youngest son who was I think four at the time was in the barn playing and fell into an auger and was crushed to death that was the last and probably the most tragic death on the property and ever since then there's been no more deaths thankfully but people have constantly seen ghosts in the farmland in the barn in the house very very old you know 1840 classic Wisconsin farmhouse and I've talked to

[00:17:13] a handful of people that have lived there or worked there and they're like yeah we see shadow figures and hear things and smell things all the time on that property that you know shouldn't be there and I've had a lot of interest in why is this land cursed and if you kind of look back at Wisconsin's history almost everything around us was Native American land right and there's belief that maybe some remains were disturbed that kind of

[00:17:42] cursed the property or if a local tribe put some sort of curse on the land you know I haven't gone too far with those theories because you can't exactly prove any of it but there is a lot of interest into that and as to why this land in this area has seen so much tragedy over the years so do you have any sort of like belief on that then do you think they could be cursed or do you think that's just or do you just think it's really bizarre and unfortunate coincidence

[00:18:13] I mean I definitely believe it's cursed there is no way this amount of bizarre things happen in one house and there's not something wrong or tied to the land I mean it's going back basically when that first family built that house their entire family died on that property almost they had like seven or eight kids only one of them would go on to get married and have children of their own

[00:18:44] two of the other sons that you don't really find much about in the history books they were civil war veterans and came back from war and they didn't leave their bedrooms until they died so I mean that could be like some P you know some post war stress going on but the fact that none of them ever got married or had kids and the most frustrating part is that not a single damn photograph exists of any of them I don't know what any of these people look like

[00:19:14] and that's the most frustrating part is you know I did like a 45 minute um lecture not lecture but presentation on this story at a paracon and everyone's like well what do they look like what's the family look like I'm like that's my biggest frustration is there's no photos and when the original um father that built the farm died there was a nice obituary about him in the local paper because he was a Waukesha pioneer but not a photo I'm like why was there never a photograph taken and I know it's a it's a rural

[00:19:44] farmland and a lot of their belongings probably just got disposed up when they died but it's just weird that there would never be a photograph taken you know that's bizarre that like you'd almost assume that have like a family photo or something at least within the house nothing yeah and that's that probably sense my frustration because I want to see what these people looked like I even found uh the great great granddaughter

[00:20:14] of the original family I used to work with her so I said hey did you ever hear about this story and she said that people in her family would talk about it during the holidays um and she's like no there was never any photographs of them so I've I've followed a lot of leads on this I I've a lot of dead ends but it's it's gotta be one of my more favorite stories you know hence why I did a 45 minute presentation about it but uh it's just so bizarre because it's got the suicides the murders you got world war

[00:20:43] one you've got a ghost story tied to it um it's just there's so many fascinating elements to it yeah that is that is that is really bizarre and like you say all the stuff to come afterwards as well like I've over the years of doing this podcast I've stopped believing in coincidences I think something just I don't know there's just connections somewhere to everything I don't think there is coincidence anymore I don't believe in them no and

[00:21:13] that's I mean I've done another lecture about is coincidence real or not there's just too many bizarre things that happen in life for things to we could go on a whole two hour podcast talking about that but yeah exactly even even

[00:21:43] just like the smallest thing like a really random example I could be I could be sat at home thinking oh I really want chocolate ice cream and then my wife walks through the door with chocolate ice cream like even like people would say that's coincidence but I'd be like no there's a reason that somehow I managed to tell her through my head that I wanted chocolate ice cream and

[00:22:27] was going on good and bad but I just started seeing repetition in numbers in my daily life and the past couple months it's been 222 so like I'll look at a social video and it'll have 222 views or I'll wake up abruptly at 222 a.m. or I'll be passing a street and the house will be 222 it's like I've been seeing these repetitive numbers that are supposedly angel numbers

[00:22:57] what's really weird is we've been doing this for 22 minutes and it's 22 minutes past the hour see there's something to it it was it was it started with fours it was a lot of fours four four four four and now it's been two so it's like it's nice when I'm having doubts in my career or doubts with personal matters and then I'll look at the clock and it'll be 222 I'm like what are the odds you know so just on this whole thing of

[00:23:27] coincidence or not I'm like no coincidence does not exist at all ever yeah that's it that is definitely bizarre right then so when it comes to like the paranormal ghost aliens all the weird stuff where did your interest in that start when that start when you were a kid or was it when you got a bit old

[00:24:26] when I was a kid again it was because I was having experiences so I was seeing shadow people in my these are older homes with histories

[00:24:57] and it didn't really click until I got older when the TV shows started coming out and social media started becoming a thing that oh I was experiencing a ghost when I was a kid my friends had ghosts in their houses we weren't just kids with active imaginations and so it was after it for the thrill seeking I want to experience a

[00:25:39] second time it like time travel in a way because you get to talk see experience somebody that's been dead for 60 years or older you know so it kind

[00:26:09] you know kind of like stone tape theory I'm not sure if you've heard of that at all but I gone on a deep dive on stone tape theory the past couple years to understand why hauntings are occurring and especially in older places like you're part of the world why these spirits remain for thousands of years right like over here if the house is 100 years old it's like okay that's old but when you've got castles that are in ruins that are from 1150 it's like why are those sorts of places still haunted and

[00:26:39] that's really where stone tape theory is more applicable because it really explains when you don't have windows or roof or people living in these places anymore why the spirits and the energy still remains so I don't super long witted question to you know my focus on all this but it really has evolved as I've changed as a person and gotten older and you know as your life changes I think your interest and your approach to this field

[00:27:09] that we're in definitely changes with you yeah definitely I mean I remember as a kid like one of the reasons I was because mine's a bit of a weird story so I used to be really into it when I was a kid and then I sort of lost interest in it and became very skeptical and then really got back into it but now in a very different way when I was a kid it was almost morbid reasons I just feel like how cool

[00:27:40] to actually hear their story not just because they're dead right and that's why people who just want to experience a ghost and don't really do research I'm like sure that's fine for you but that's not my reasoning for doing this anymore so when people ask me if I

[00:28:10] you how long they lived there what their life was like who's here what's your name when did you die are you man or woman no it's like I know your name

[00:28:40] going in blind hoping that something happens yeah yeah definitely it's true yeah I mean I've done I've done sort of like both sides I've gone to places where we've known history and you know who you're trying to contact and then places where we don't know as much history so you're not sure who you're going to contact so I've experienced from both sides and I don't know which I prefer like you said when you know the history and you know you're trying to contact that's good

[00:29:09] because then if you get what you're expecting to get then it's a real confirmation whereas when you don't you can maybe still question it a bit yourself I don't know if that makes sense yeah it just becomes a little overwhelming I see why people like to go to those giant asylums like Pennhurst in those places but that's never been my thing I don't know if it's because it's so big it'd be overwhelming there's just

[00:29:39] too much to cover investigate or explore I also don't like to pay to investigate I don't like to have to pay a fee to go talk to a ghost potentially so I'm not sure what it is but I think it comes down to I these places for the most part so it becomes a little easier and I really just like having the focus

[00:30:09] of like this is my ground I know this territory very well and that's kind of been again with the focus of being the tour guide in Waukesha and doing weird Wisconsin is just you have the famous asylums and stuff I've always

[00:30:38] wondered why we don't really have them here but I suppose the majority of the old asylums are just genuine hospitals now I think so we don't really have them here but I still think I'd like to go to them just to say that I have been to them and it's a winery now but it's

[00:31:08] down in Missouri the ghost adventures ghost hunters destination fear they've all covered it but it's a winery now it used to be an odd fellows home and a military hospital so it's a big complex type structure with many buildings in a kind of rundown states at least the buildings that they don't use and we were there kind of who are you what communicated to us that it was a demon or something that just

[00:31:38] doesn't have a good intention and that's where it kind of like clicked off for me of like I don't want to be doing this I don't want to be interacting with something that identifies as that or is maybe trying to scare us away by saying that so that's why I think it's almost unsafe to go into places that you don't know what you're dealing with like if you do know that you're going to be interacting with something

[00:32:27] like in the afterlife and when you become a ghost is the rules to it because I have a lot of experiences in my house that I've been told and I feel as my granddad and I know my parents and my grandparents have had experiences what they say as my granddad and stuff but then there also seems to be places where ghosts spirits seem to be trapped in certain places so I'd love to I mean it's one of the things that

[00:32:57] we can't really answer but I'd love to know a reason for that and I don't know if the rules I've always thought maybe it's something like Beetlejuice I'm sure most people who are listening have seen Beetlejuice and how time works in that movie and that's the best way to approach it every couple of years so we lived

[00:33:26] here for three or four years nothing happened and then it was like a light switch turned on and there was non-stop activity for a couple of months but then it goes dormant four years at a time so that's where it's so complex to start to think about how the rules work on the other side because there almost seems like no rhyme or reason specifically in my situation to when this spirit is interacting with us

[00:33:56] it does seem to pick up around the holidays like Christmas lights will turn on by themselves and those sorts of things and also we just did a vibration in this kitchen I'm in and the first couple days of demolition I would light was on upstairs when I know I turned it off that morning so I definitely think

[00:34:26] like you know typically when you're doing renovations spirits come out that's what a lot of people say and that's when she explain it it's one of those things everyone wants to know the answer to just like what happens when you die but

[00:34:57] we'll never know the best thing we have is Beetlejuice to compare it to yeah it's a good comparison actually I've never thought about it like that but it is a good comparison I like that yeah well I think I think that's kind of my point it's almost it's like like there is no rules it seems to be that's like you say I mean some can travel some seem to not be able to travel it just I don't know maybe it's maybe it's luck of the draw maybe it's maybe it's I don't know where you are in a mental state

[00:35:26] when you when you pass over or where you are or I don't I don't know I mean I suppose I suppose the beauty of it is we're all going to find out one day right and then it's just going to be like ah now I wish I could go back and tell somebody on their podcast what the rules are now that I know them but it doesn't it seems like if there was rules or a system of how travel works on the other side why can't all of our

[00:35:54] ancestors come visit us when they want to yeah exactly you know or do like some spirits have more power or energy than others or are more people open or able to experience the paranormal versus other people I don't really know and I don't know if it changes with age like are you more open or energized to do it when you're younger

[00:36:20] I definitely believe in that I mean I mean I know I know you've got obviously you're a little one now have you had I mean I don't know I mean I don't I don't know I don't know how old she is but I mean I mean my son he's nearly two and he's done some he's done he's done some things that I can't explain and like saying like definitely seen things that I can't explain whether I can't see but I know myself up until I was about five

[00:36:46] years old I sit in my bedroom and talk to people that weren't there and then almost almost had it confirmed to who it was so I had I had a I had a medium on the podcast and they say she she was over on your on your side of the world so literally halfway across the world from me I don't even spoke to her via Instagram before so didn't have any on any personal accounts or anything and when we were talking she randomly asked me if I remembered if I remember talking to someone

[00:37:12] called Charlie and I was like no I don't know anybody called that and then she told me to ask my mom because my mom is also a medium so I asked her and then it turned out that my mom's spirit guide is called Charlie my dad's granddad and uncle were called Charlie so I'm like again that can't be coincidence right right yeah and yeah so my daughter's a little older than your son but just this morning she was hiding behind me there's uh stools she was hiding behind us so

[00:37:37] what are you doing I just thought she was pooping but she she said I'm hiding from the monster and I said where is the monster and she said living room and we have like a front part of her house that's like the the formal like sitting room if you want to call it it's it's the old part of the house but she says front room and I'm like what does the monster look like and she said Elsa from uh Frozen and she said old Elsa pink I'm like oh well come show me where is the monster what is it doing and

[00:38:06] she said it was standing by our record player but now it's gone and I'm like is that an imagination or did she actually see something and she was hiding from it and I've from a very young age I've been trying to teach her like you can't be afraid of these things if you are seeing something tell me because then I can help validate if I know what you're seeing is something uh a spirits like a family member or the ghost that's been in our house so I try to teach her these things aren't

[00:38:34] scary they're not monsters uh talk to them interact with them you know I'm a little envious that she's seeing uh these things but uh there's been multiple occasions where she's seen a an older woman that she's communicated to us so um it's interesting it's never been scary but it's just been like there's somebody there you know yeah it's it's it's it's definitely interesting and like I say I mean

[00:38:58] once once my son's like actually having full-on conversation and stuff and if he if he starts talking to people then I'm going to be asking him more questions than he's going to be asking me right yeah it's gonna be fun and that's uh I've uh I've already again she's experienced a few things already so I'm excited to see like as she gets older like what what she's seeing because that that would be the ultimate validation of like we know the stories from before she was born and now if

[00:39:26] she's experiencing them without knowing what those stories are yeah it's just the gold mine right there right and and of course if she like continues to do because again again speaking of rules in quotations there as as a rule typically from all the people I've spoken to it's usually around five or six when it stops and that was this that was the same for me that was the same for me and I I have

[00:39:50] like I have a weird little theory behind this so I don't I've I've said this to somebody before annoyingly I've I still haven't looked at the film and I can't so I can't remember what it is well I'm pretty it was out in the 90s and it was like babies that could talk to each other telepathically and then once they get to a certain age they almost they cross over so then so then that's why like babies don't remember stuff and I'm thinking maybe maybe when you get to like five or six year

[00:40:14] like someone switches in your brain so like say then you can't do that anymore I think that was uh baby geniuses yes that was that's that's that's the movie because I kept thinking it was that look who's talking now but I was like no it definitely isn't that we're also a big fan of that movie but yeah I think it was baby geniuses I don't know if it was very good but I think they say that kids

[00:40:43] experience it because they aren't told that it's not real yet so they just think it's real and it's you know we become you know around seven ten years old ghosts aren't real ghosts are made up ghosts or fake you know if you tell somebody something they're gonna okay well then they're not open to that experience you know it's the same thing with if you teach your kid that spiders are scary they're

[00:41:08] going to be afraid of them but if you encourage them to interact with snakes and and things that typically make people afraid um then they're not going to be afraid so it's I've learned so much uh raising a child that it like helped me open up uh as well you know emotionally and and all those things too so it's this is a uh an advocate for having kids everybody if you're afraid of it just do it it's it's a mind opening it's not as exhausting as they make it seem either

[00:41:38] yeah I don't know about you but we got a really good sleeper so she we have to wake her up every morning so we've been blessed with some kid that loves to sleep yes you yes you have I don't like to rub in people's faces too much but yeah we we have been blessed uh he he he has days where he'll sleep for 12 13 hours and then they'll have days where he'll sleep for three oh my goodness

[00:42:02] i don't know what i do yeah luckily i'm sort of the same so i can i i can deal with it me so i don't i don't mind it too much but i'd still prefer he slept a lot more oh yeah um so just before before we finish then so i i i i often like to ask people less and i'll be interested like i said the way you've spoke what your answer will be what would you say the scariest experiences

[00:42:31] or the creepiest or the most unexplainable experience that you've had is that's a good question and it's like i always go back to the same one um because i think it is the most prominent in my paranormal investigation history you know i had the stuff when i was a kid fine um i've had

[00:42:59] stuff as an adult but i've been a bit more i would say understanding of what it is however uh in college i was i think 20 years old we started a paranormal research group at the university i went to and our first ever investigation with like cameras and like the ghost toys at a incredibly haunted location that used to be a an antique store uh we go there we're setting up we got all our stuff and it's like okay

[00:43:28] it's it's time to investigate right and within the next three hours everything you could imagine happened to us we were touched we were seeing full apparitions um we were hearing footsteps uh all of the the gadgets that we had were giving us results uh the ghost writer on my phone was giving us intelligent answers so we had a ghost box that literally i turned it on and it said hello to me

[00:43:57] and that wasn't like a feature it actually something's communicated hello and i'm on one part of the building and my friend is in the other and she's like hey you need to come over here right now this thing just said my name and she had a very unique name and i wasn't getting the results that i wanted and i slammed my fist on the table in frustration and i said what is the name of this device we're

[00:44:21] using and it was a ghost box so and it was actively scanning through radio stations and it stops as if it was like turned off and it just said frank which back then in 2010 they used to be called frank's box that i forgot why they called them that but we used to call it a frank's box before it was renamed a ghost box but it said frank and i was like holy shit like um are we allowed to swear yeah i was like

[00:44:48] it was just like i can't believe that just happened and then uh about two hours later we're in this basement where supposedly the body of a little girl is buried under cement and i'm like let's turn off all our flashlights each of us are about six feet apart and i'm like let's turn the flashlights off see what happens so the room is pitch black and i feel this hand squeeze my shoulder and then run down to my thigh and there isn't somebody within arm's distance of me and you would have heard

[00:45:15] somebody walk up walk over and touch you and i literally dove underneath the table because it was i haven't been touched like that since by a spirit it was i asked so we had mentors there with us this an older couple who had a local ghost group and i said is this normal and they said at this spot yes but what you experienced tonight was like a whole nother level um and i don't know if it was

[00:45:44] because you have a bunch of super excited uh 20 year olds uh with a lot of emotion uh into this investigation um maybe they just knew it was our first time and wanted to really make it a special for us but uh i had been back to that location a second time we had nearly the same results not as electric but it was still very impactful and then i went back um probably 10

[00:46:12] years after that it's no longer an antique store it was being renovated into apartments and like a mutual co-working space and it was like a dead cell nothing happened i wasn't afraid to be alone i i freely walked the building by myself in the dark not a single damn thing happened so i think the reason this building with its storied history of murders and suicides and gangsters and all this stuff over

[00:46:39] 150 years i think the antique store all the belongings that were in there kind of amped up the activity times 100 because once you took all those old antiques out of there uh again it was like a dead cell it was ridiculous the night and day difference between an antique store when i was younger and then being renovated when i was in my 30s and they always say that antique stores

[00:47:07] do kind of possess that level of energy and paranormal activity because you have a lot of old old items that somebody could have owned their entire life they pass away and perhaps they're still attached to that object so you potentially have you know a couple dozen or hundreds of um you know at least pieces of these spirits attached to these items in these antique stores so that's i'm another advocate

[00:47:33] big advocate for investigating antique stores because you're always going to experience something and all those feelings and those vibes that you have from those places i don't think it's random i think it's because there is that much spiritual energy around still yeah definitely i mean i i completely agree i completely agree with you there um flip the flip that around so my my friend she's just opened up a

[00:47:58] haunted museum so and the building it's in a really it's like an old it's an insurance building or something so i mean not a lot of history to it that they know of and since they've only been open two weeks i think they've had people in doing investigations and stuff and i went to the big grand opening of it and weird stuff was happening then like they're cupboard doors opening for no reason also whilst we were there and like i say i definitely think like things spirits energy does

[00:48:27] attach itself to certain objects i believe yeah definitely now i don't understand like why someone has a haunted egg time or something like that but we the uh the people we're with they said if anything happens around an object buy it no matter what it is just buy it and i think we were so at the end of the night we were terrified like i'm still getting goosebumps thinking about it but we the

[00:48:54] the eight of us 20 year old college kids were so scared we slept in a row uh there was like shelving shelves of objects and we all slept together in one row like little burritos like we were all wrapped up in our blankets next to each other it was the funniest picture uh but we were as we were falling asleep uh like a juice pitcher falls over and and i was like god i don't want a haunted juice pitcher but

[00:49:21] somebody did buy it and they said that they were experiencing things uh and so much in their their dorm in in uh in oshkosh wisconsin that they threw it away because they were like i don't want this anymore i don't know why i bought it to begin with but i'm getting rid of it and the activity stopped but man we were a bunch of little babies at that antique store but it was because it was so intense

[00:49:44] like we had a reporter there with us who uh after like a half hour ran out of the building and went home and i had to call him and be like what's wrong and he's like i just saw an eight foot tall shadow step into a doorway he's like i didn't sign up for this i'm leaving i'm like if you were doing a story about a haunted location with ghost hunters he's like yeah i didn't think anything would actually happen though and then he sees something that you know most of us would would love to see and and he

[00:50:14] was like yeah he's like i went in there not expecting or not even believing in ghosts and he's like i now i fully believe 100 so it's it really is a shame that that building changed so much but i'm glad i got to experience it when i did yeah i bet i bet uh right then josh so i've really enjoyed speaking to you so thank you for your time so before we finish do you just want to let my listeners know where they can find you and all the socials and everything platforms that you're on yeah i think if you just uh

[00:50:44] search weird wisconsin on all of them except for x i don't i x is too much to keep up with but tiktok facebook instagram youtube weird wisconsin you'll see my face you'll see my stories uh follow me send messages whatever uh i'm very active i like to communicate with everybody just because that's where i get like majority of my um like local stories is from people who are like have you heard of this have you heard of that so i'm like sometimes yes sometimes absolutely not but yes i want to

[00:51:11] you know do a video or do a post about this because there's a lot and social media it's allowing us to reconnect with those stories that people are still telling so hit me up send me stuff would love to hear from you nice nice i like it right then guys so we shall leave it for there for this one so as always go and follow the instagram page at the spooky shed podcast link in the bio there for the all the other socials youtube channels merch store and all that good stuff and we shall speak to you next

[00:51:39] time the spooky shed podcast is a pod shed production this podcast is part of podomity the uk's podcast comedy network why not laugh at what else we've got visit podomity.com