Meet psychic medium, Birdie, and paranormal investigator, Robert, who talk about the rise of the word “medium” in the spiritualist movement in the 1840s, the significance of the Fox sisters and their role in the current paranormal movement as well as what being a medium is really like and how modern day paranormal media has continued to shape our perceptions for better . . . or worse!
TRANSCRIPT ● SPIRIT DIARIES ● EPISODE 001
[Introspective piano music playing with indiscernible whispers behind it]
Birdie: Hello and welcome to the Spirit Diaries.
Robert: I’m Robert.
Birdie: And I am birdie and we are your hosts-
Robert: With the most.
Birdie: The most what?
Birdie: Spirits. / Robert: Weirdness.
Birdie: Spirits.
Robert: Spirits. / Birdie: Weirdness.
Both: Spirits and weirdness!
[laughing]
Birdie: For those of you just joining us, welcome to the podcast. We share all things spooky including stories of us both growing up with ghosts, living in haunted houses, and going on scary investigations or not so scary in Robert’s case because he’s a little tough-tough guy.
Robert: I’m a rock.
Birdie: A rock?
Robert: A rock.
Birdie: With zero emotion.
Robert: Strong and unwavering. And you can throw me at your enemies.
Birdie: What?
[laughing]
Birdie: If you’re new, welcome. If you are not new and you’re like, “Oh gosh I thought this was their first episode where did I miss the other ones?” You haven’t! Turns out we decided to delete all of our old episodes. They’re gone. Vanished. Nothing. Actually, they’re over on patreon.com/SpiritDiaries and while we’re saying that we want to quickly thank our patrons.
Robert: Thank you.
Birdie: Shout out to JCLO, Jennifer, Christina, Randy, ChemicallyFeline, Jody, Amy, and Liam! Thank you all, our lovely patrons. We’re really glad to have you. But, yes all of our old episodes are over there essentially, we got better audio equipment we have more of a plan this time. It started off with just me and not Robert. Robert joined later and it was pretty much me just ranting so it wasn’t that great. But we’re trying to be better!
Robert: Plus, that was pre-plastic surgery so now I’m beautiful. I couldn’t be on camera before.
Birdie: Right . . .
Robert: My nose was bad. My teeth were bad. I had to get those fixed.
Birdie: This is not true for those of you listening. For those of you listening, not true. Somebody’s like, “What?”
Robert: They’re like, “Oh God what-what happened to him? And this is better?”
[laughing]
Birdie: A little bit more about who we are . . . [creepy music box music starts playing] I am a psychic medium [woooooo sound] and you are . . .
Robert: A non-psychic large.
Birdie: Great.
Robert: [laughs]
Birdie: For me a psychic medium [laughs] I don’t know how you giggle the table. You giggle the table!
[laughing]
Birdie: So, for me a psychic medium is a label I use because it’s the most popular one that identifies what I pretty much am.
Robert: Yes.
Birdie: Yes. So, I did not always use the term “medium.” I was a little bit turned off by using it. I definitely hated the word “psychic.” I felt like the word psychic meant that I was supposed to be guessing the lottery numbers and you know gazing into crystal balls and having a phone number that you could call like 1-800 I’m a psychic ask me anything and I’ll say yes.
Robert: [laughs] What’s my future?
Birdie: Futuristic things.
Robert: What?!
Birdie: I’m so good. Yeah, I didn’t like it. I definitely didn’t want to be associated with that. Growing up, before I knew the term medium, when I thought I was alone in this world and no one else could see spirits and I was just a little strange child, I called myself a planeswalker.
Robert: That’s pretty cool.
Birdie: I don’t think that sounds “pretty cool.”
Robert: I mean for a kid to come up with planeswalker, that sounds pretty cool.
Birdie: Well, I came up with it because you learn in math, planes. There’s different planes, A and B. To me I was like, “oh I’m a little math/science kid.” So, I’m like, “Oh plane of living, plane of the dead. I guess I walk between the two, at least I felt like, so I thought sure I’m a planeswalker.
Robert: I mean I knew some pretty dumb kids and they would have called it like dead talker or something, so I mean planeswalker is pretty good.
Birdie: Thanks.
Robert: Creative!
Birdie: I told everybody that I called myself a planeswalker who I told about my mediumship, which was absolutely no one because I was horrified to tell anybody.
Robert: It’s okay. We love you.
Birdie: Aww, I definitely was very scared to tell people. But don’t worry, though, if you’re thinking these people are off their rocker there’s no way she’s a medium, there’s no way he is a non-psychic large, we’re with you. We are skeptics.
Robert: At our very core.
Birdie: Yeah. We definitely don’t believe things blindly. I have not believed or accepted my mediumship blindly. It has been a very serious thing for me. I don’t take it lightly and I’m here to share my experience about being a medium and what it’s really like. And it’s not like an episode of Ghosts (US), but I would take a Thorfinn.
Robert: Landship!
Birdie: Yeah! I’m down!
Robert: I’m kind of like Thorfinn without the muscles or the smell.
Birdie: I mean I don’t need the smell.
Robert: Just the muscles?
[laughing]
Robert: Sorry. I’ll get right on that. Announcing my new channel Gym Diaries.
[laughing]
Birdie: That came out so wrong. You are perfect the way you are. You know this.
[laughing]
Birdie: I was saying it was good because I was insinuating you had everything but the smell which is why I said I didn’t need the smell.
Robert: I get it.
Birdie: Wow.
Robert: Back pedaling concluded.
[laughing]
Birdie: I’m so sorry. That’s not what I meant. I swear. [laughs]
Robert: I am in shape. Round is a shape.
Birdie: I’m also a shape.
[laughing]
Birdie: So, it’s understandable that people don’t like the word medium. It’s understandable that I didn’t like it. It’s understandable that other people in the mainstream don’t like it. And that’s because the very origin of the word was bullshittery.
Robert: [laughs] Bullshittery?
Birdie: Yes.
Robert: Can you use it in a sentence?
[laughing]
Birdie: Mediumship was bullshittery for a majority of cases.
Robert: Ding! [laughs]
Birdie: So, the word “medium” rose in 1840s New York. It started with the spiritualist movement and these are the people who started the discussions of spirit guides, spirits being on a higher plane than us . . . so spirits being those wise people that we should consult because you learned something after death. Not true for all of them.
[laughing]
Birdie: Some spirits are just plain shitty. [laughs]
Robert: Much like the living.
Birdie: Yes.
Robert: At times they can also be shitty.
Birdie: Yeah, perhaps.
[laughing]
Birdie: The belief came from this time that a medium could communicate with both the living and the dead. Hence being a medium and we see some of these tenants from original origins of spiritualism still popular in paranormal culture. But one of the things I do really support with the notion of mediumship that they had was that people can be born with mediumship but people can also learn mediumship and I support that. For me I have always seen spirits. This wasn’t something that randomly popped up one day and we do see cases of people who just wake up and all of a sudden, they have mediumship abilities which is so much scarier and I’m glad that didn’t happen to me because it’s always been there for me. I don’t have a reference of like life prior to that so I think it would be really scary for that to happen.
Robert: Just overnight . . . like, “Oh gosh!”
Birdie: Yeah. I also agree that people can really learn it because I don’t think mediumship is this like fancy thing that only some people can do and you’re so gifted. Um, no. I think it’s just like instinct but heightened.
Robert: Yes, and practice. It takes a lot of practice. I think confidence is a big thing too. Just being confident in yourself and believing yourself when you have a feeling.
Birdie: Yeah . . . we all know I have such high self-confidence.
[laughing]
Birdie: I think the more modern idea of mediums are these like unicorn people who are so special and so unique and they know everything about everything and have this metaphorical telephone to the spirit world in their head and it is absolute bullshit. I think it stems from the most common misunderstandings about what a medium really is. No, I cannot call up Tesla and ask if he’s disappointed of what his name is popularized for now. I can’t do that. That’s not real. That could be real on a TV show but that’s not real in terms of when we’re actually looking at how practical and mundane mediumship really is because I hate to break it to everybody but mediumship is just not that fancy. It’s not that special. It is not you know this great thing. You’re wrong!
Robert: You mean you don’t stare off into the distance while a theme song plays?
[jazzy music playing as Robert hums the “That’s so Raven” theme song]
Birdie: We’re gonna get a milkshake later.
Robert: You’re correct. Validation. [laughs]
Birdie: I’m so psychic, oh my God! I’m so good . . . Yeah, no. That’s not what it is! Ugh! Okay, so, we can’t talk about spiritualists without talking about the controversial Fox sisters. Oh, so controversial. [classical music playing] So these three sisters lived in New York and they claimed that they had made contact with a real-life spirit.
Robert: It’s your grandmother.
Birdie: Is it?
Robert: Maybe.
Birdie: So, they would say that they would knock on the walls and they’d hear knocks back that confirmed answers and this is something we still see in modern ghost hunting shows and modern investigations. People will use the, “Knock, knock. Finish that knock!” as a way to get validation.
Robert: Or they will do that experiment and ask something to knock and three hours later into their investigation they’ll hear a tap or a knock somewhere and they will piece those things together and go look evidence.
Birdie: Are you calling out mainstream paranormal television?
Robert: Yes!
Birdie: Oh.
[laughing]
Robert: Stop it.
Birdie: Yeah. If we could all co-currently agree that we would stop bullshitting that would be freaking amazing.
Robert: Agreed.
Birdie: Yeah, that would progress this field so much quicker.
Robert: There’s no need to bullshit. It’s so evident when it is.
Birdie: Well, and it’s is strange enough on its own. The world is weird. [laughs] We don’t need to try harder. So, oddly enough this mother, Mrs. Fox, had a conversation with this spirit to understand who exactly was haunting this home. She wanted answers. So great! She went into investigation mode. The spirit confirmed that they were a spirit.
Robert: Smart. That’s good validation.
Birdie: They confirmed that they were injured in the house and they claimed the person who injured him, so it was a boy, was still living. They eventually concluded that he was murdered and his remains were buried in the cellar and he had a wife and five children: two sons, three daughters, all living at the time of his death.
Robert: So, you said confirmed and concluded. Was there actual proof of any of this?
Birdie: The proof was in the knocking. There was not any validated historical proof.
Robert: [laughs and knocks on table] Yep, it’s all true.
[laughing]
Birdie: Unfortunately, there was no record. Even more unusual though, is they eventually came to the conclusion that this spirit’s name was Mr. Splitfoot.
Robert: Splitfoot? They couldn’t come up with a better name on the spot?
Birdie: Robert, that was his name!
Robert: Okay, how many people do you know named Splitfoot as a surname? I wanna Google that at some point.
Birdie: George Splitfoot. Harriet S. Splitfoot.
Robert: Harry Splitfoot?
[laughing]
Birdie: Yes.
Robert: Goodness.
Birdie: Okay. So, yeah, I understand it’s a little bit absurd but that like kind of has a connotation with like a split hoofed foot like a devil. Do you think they were trying to be like, “Oh, yeah! It’s Mr. Splitfoot. He’s the devil.”
Robert: They were hinting at it but there were no super good ghost investigators who always claim demons.
Birdie: Oh, yeah. They weren’t around yet. So, later they discovered that Mr. Splitfoot did have an actual name, which also led to no validation. There was also an alleged skeleton which was also not actually verified. This whole thing was this huge mess.
Robert: Alleged. No actual proof.
Birdie: Yeah. They dug in the cellar . . . it was this mix match of: they found something, they didn’t, they did, they didn’t. It was chicken bones, it was a finger bone, you know, it kept amounting into nothing. They did find somebody who matched it. It was not true. They thought they found the murderer. It’s not true. It was a very messy situation. But, these three sisters became one of the first celebrity mediums and they held public seances and they were making like 150 bucks a day.
Robert: Which is good for now.
Birdie: That is good for now.
Robert: That is rich for then.
Birdie: Oh, beyond. 150 a day now? That’s not bad.
Robert: They were making bank back in the day.
Birdie: I know, I know. Which is a problem. This is where corruption gets in. So, 20 years have passed. They’re still doing these seances in public. One of the sisters comes out and is like, “Hey, this is all a hoax. I took an apple tied it to a string and was dragging it around upstairs, creeping my mom out. Sorry, mom.” She was like, “Look at my knee.” [clicking sounds] She was like, “My knee is the popping noise” and she’s like, “Look at my toes [popping noises]. My toes were the poppy noise.” She does this in front of an audience and the audience was like, “Um, no. Come on, you’re playing.” It didn’t really go over well. Some people were like, “Oh, we knew.” Some people were like, “No. You don’t have to say it’s all fake. We believe you!”
Robert: I think it kind of falls into one of those things too, where people don’t want to believe that they were duped. You don’t ever want to admit or look like you were stupid or unintelligent. People don’t want to be like . . . and I think in today’s society even if people are shown something-
Birdie: Evidence.
Robert: Evidence or proof of something they’re like, “No, that’s not true” because they don’t want to feel dumb.
Birdie: Yeah, they don’t want to believe it. That’s kind of what was happening here. Shortly after, to add to this confusion, she recanted that admission. I also understand people wanting to defend her because I totally had this secret pact when I very first started the podcast a few years ago. I was like, “Robert if this ever goes wrong here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna say I made the whole thing up and then we’re just gonna nope out and delete everything.”
Robert: Just, clean wipe.
Birdie: Yeah. We’re gone. Never talk about it again.
Robert: Okay, bye!
[laughing]
Birdie: Yeah. That was kind of my like backup plan. I understand when people are like, “Oh you don’t have to lie, it’s okay. We believe you.” I think people were more thinking in the spiritualist community, who have believed all these things . . . I mean 20 years have passed. This started the beliefs of so many things that they didn’t want to believe her admission because if that wasn’t true, what about all these other things they had concluded since then? Were those also not true? So, now we’re getting into questioning beliefs and yeah, it was a tough thing. But what was really cool about this movement, was this is one of the first times where women were at the forefront of speaking events. A lot of the topics that the spiritualists would channel in trance mediumship, which is where the medium goes in a trance and essentially allows the spirit to like minorly possess them to speak through them. It’s something I definitely don’t do.
Robert: Right? It just feels weird.
Birdie: Kind of like Ghost with Whoopi Goldberg, how she was being spoken through. That would be very similar to like a trance mediumship. But this allowed women to go, “Oh I’m channeling this raunchy pirate. Fuck you, men! Women deserve equal rights. Or hey guys, sorry, we were swashbuckling wrong. We should not have slaves.
Robert: Yarg, let the women vote!
Birdie: Yes, exactly. And these ideas of women equality and anti-slavery and everybody having equal rights where a lot of these things that these spirits happened to be talking about. Which, um, progressive spirits for the win.
Robert: Interesting, very interesting.
Birdie: This gets into tricky territory because on one hand I am really excited that there was this really cool way that these topics started coming up in our history with a spiritualist movement. That’s freaking cool. Secondly, as a medium this also hurts because it’s like . . . oh, no. You use this thing that’s like very real for certain people like myself and so many others who are experiencing this and you kind of made a little bit of a mockery out of it because here you are saying like you’re doing this and you’re not. It kind of sucks in that matter. I am proud and annoyed.
Robert: They had good intentions and were using it for good but ultimately screwed the community.
Birdie: Yeah, thanks . . . So, mediums attracted the draw of chemists, physicists, biologists, and all these scientific minds who wanted to study these phenomena which I think is incredibly cool because this is the start of the Society of Psychical Research in 1882, which is still around to this day and so many other scientific groups have formed up from this because here they are having people who are like, “I have all these abilities” and now they’re like, “let us study you!” How does this work?
Robert: Let’s test it.
Birdie: Yes, and I think that is so cool because I think we need more of this. I think we need more people studying this and figuring out how it works and actually accepting that this is a very real and normal phenomena. We like to say it’s paranormal, but ultimately, I think it’s very normal. I think this is a part of our human experience, is having this connection with the dead.
[Airy creepy music as Birdie stares at Robert]
Robert: [laughs] That deep stare.
Birdie: I don’t know where I was going with that. But, with this came the science-minded people who love to shut down absolutely everything. It also came with the mediums who were faking stuff. There was active debunking of slate writing, table turning, materialization, spirit photography, all of this stuff was being debunked, debunked, debunked, debunked and these people who believed in it started to lose their faith in mediums because it’s like, “oh man this is like the sixth medium I’ve seen and they’re using all these tricks” that we now see other people use like mentalists or more stage crafted people who are magicians and using these tactics.
Robert: That’s hard when the majority of people are faking it and the minority of people who are actually real are being left out in the dust and instantly being called fake because nobody believes them by default.
Birdie: I mean, that’s kind of how I feel like it still is. We have at the forefront of popular media, whether that be indie or mainstream, people who are questionable. There’re a few good people in that mix and there’s a few really questionable people in that mix. Unfortunately, one bad egg can ruin the bunch and it sucks. This is where I think we went wrong with it all. There was so many people coming forward instead of shutting everybody down I think this was the time that we needed to really find the real side of mediumship. There’s no way that everybody who came out during this time was a fraud was a performer was people wanting to push a personal agenda, or politics, or just trying to make some cash. I truly believe there was some people in here who had to have been real.
Robert: There had to have been. It just makes sense.
Birdie: And while the spiritualist movement survived and is still around today, it has shifted and changed. More modernly, we have had the rise of ghost hunters and people who are actively trying to figure out what spirits are. Some of them negate the use of mediums because they think it’s complete BS, but these are also the same people who use questionable equipment that’s also not scientifically proven to communicate with the dead.
Robert: Right. We’ve used equipment in our investigations but it was strictly using them experimentally. We never looked at the equipment as proof and most of the equipment, we actively make fun of because it doesn’t work or it’s broken or insanely flawed.
Birdie: All of it is flawed. The whole thing is, is there’s no basis. There’s no way to know that if somebody walks in our house right now and it says, “I’m a medium” there’s no way to know if they’re real or not unless they start validating stuff. Same with this equipment. There’s no way to know if it works unless this equipment is having a relatively high accuracy rate and connecting to validating information that we know. What color are these curtains? If we get red coming through a Spirit Box, hmm. Are the next seven responses gonna be bullshit though? Then that one wasn’t that significant. Same with mediums. If a medium is spot on of, “oh there’s a woman here” but then the rest of it is completely wrong, well then.
Robert: They had a 50/50 chance.
Birdie: Right. We have to be more analytical when it comes to this stuff. But, for me, when I was a kid I was seeing these people on TV, I was in late middle school when I think Paranormal State was really getting started. It was the first time I had seen someone who I was like, oh my gosh, they call themselves a medium? There’s a ghost? They’re acknowledging the stuff is real and they were [frustrated sound]. It still makes me so crazy because things I had said or things I had described to my family, I was seeing echoed in these hypotheses on these shows. I was like, “Oh my God, there’s people out here who are thinking like the same thing as I am! This is really cool!” and you started to see the rise of Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures, Paranormal State, all of those things boomed up and then the world started getting a little more accepting when it came to it and it made me feel like there was hope, that I wasn’t all alone.
Robert: Everyone started coming together and go, “Oh, wait. So, I’m allowed to do this? This is cool?” And everyone’s like, “Yeah.”
Birdie: And be it fake or real. With mainstream TV, we never really know. But whether it was real or fake the fact of the matter is, is it made me feel more comfortable coming forward about very real experiences that I have been having. I am always grateful for this media because ultimately, it’s gonna help somebody go, “Wait, actually I have had a paranormal experience or I think I can communicate with spirits.” I am still grateful for a lot of that.
Robert: And while theatrical, most of those shows, at their core, are trying to find information. They are TV shows so they have to make it interesting. If you have an hour and a half of someone reviewing footage, let me tell you, we’ve reviewed a lot of footage and it’s boring most of the time. They have to make sure that they’re showing you something interesting in order to keep you entertained.
Birdie: Yes, it is very boring. We have lots of footage. If you are into watching all the footage, it is all available every single piece we film is all available on Patreon.
Robert: If you’re someone who likes to comb through hours upon hours of footage in different angles and just stare at a screen then, boy, do we have news for you!
Birdie: It is actually like it’s one of my least favorite things to do and favorite things to do because when something does happen you’ve been like this for three hours and then all of the sudden you’re like what?!
[laughing]
Robert: Or you’re watching it and your eye starts twitching you’re like, “Oh, wait, I missed something go back five minutes.”
Birdie: I grew up on the side of skeptics. I wanted proof. I wanted validation that what I was experiencing was real and I actively sought medical and scientific explanations. I am a science-minded person. I have degrees in science. I definitely want to find out the answers to how all this worked. I went down every single doctor from neurologist, to cardiologists, to psychologists . . . I hit them all because I wanted to figure out what was going on. Ultimately, I diagnosed myself with multiple chronic illnesses along the way.
Robert: That were real that were.
Birdie: That were real, but nothing explained the mediumship. It was really interesting and I’ve learned to accept that validation is going to be the most accurate we can get to figuring out what is real and what is fake. I have to accept that what I’m experiencing is real and know that there’s not a scientific or medical explanation for what’s going on. Mentally I’m all there, albeit weird, but I’m all good. So, yeah. It’s interesting. To me, mediumship is nothing special. It’s nothing more than using your instinct and your senses, which we all have. You can tell when you’re driving down the road and the person next to you is for some reason staring at you. You feel it and you look and you guys both awkwardly make eye contact. You’re just like, “Okay, this is weird.” Or, somebody’s standing close to you in a grocery store or that one annoying person is gonna come by your office and you can feel their annoyance coming. All those very normal human things is what it’s like to be a medium. You just do it with people who don’t exist physically.
Robert: Yeah.
Birdie: Yeah. But, it’s nothing new. It’s nothing like these shows. It’s nothing like the media portrays. It’s very mundane.
Robert: It’s not theatrical.
Birdie: It can be sometimes.
[chime music plays as a flashback of Birdie freaks out on an investigation]
Robert: I mean, all of the time. It’s not five minutes of theatrics.
Birdie: I’m just so flashing to when something’s happening in our house and I call and I’m like, “Oh my God. Please come home. Things are moving.”
[laughing]
Birdie: It gets crazy a little bit . . . sometimes. But we also don’t disregard the tech. Again, validation with tech, validation with people. I think this is the key and ultimately despite the unusual rise of the word medium we do want to encourage the possibility that perhaps all of this might be true. Perhaps there are mediums who are real. Perhaps there are other people who experience paranormal things that are telling the truth. I just don’t know why anybody would lie. This is not something fun to lie about. Growing up with mediumship was not cool. The people I told I lost friends, quickly. Even to this day, I have had adult friends that I met as an adult that eventually I have confided in, of like, “By the way do you believe in in mediums?” and I’ll bring up the topic and those friends have all left.
Robert: Ultimately, we just have to keep an open mind. Skeptical, but open.
Birdie: Right and being skeptical is a good thing. I think so many people are like, “Oh, no. Skeptics are the worst.” Skeptics are not the worst if you’re still open to it. Being skeptical doesn’t mean you have to shut everything down. Just be open to the possibility that, hey, maybe there is something going on here.
Robert: Well, you can be skeptical without being an asshole.
Birdie: Oh? [laughs]
Robert: They are not one and the same.
Birdie: They are not. I hope you enjoyed this first episode. I hope you learned a little bit about who we are and how we feel and we will see you all next time. Thanks for listening to the Spirit Diaries.
Robert: Okay, love you, bye!
Birdie: Bye!
[introspective piano music plays]