Drunken Ghost Hunters: Sydney Quarantine Station

ah welcome welcome welcome it's another episode of decoding the unknown that show on youtube where people like simon just started this channel this podcast because he wants that supernatural money if that's the case i've made a huge mistake because mostly what we do on this channel is uh we look at the supernatural and be like well that is clearly a load of nonsense a little bit of inside baseball on this channel which is an american phrase that i love by the way it means like uh talk within the only people who within the organization or group get and a little bit of inside baseball originally i was going to call this channel like skeptic something skeptic that but then i decided that would turn too many people off because skeptics such a negative word uh so we went into coding the unknown which on the face of things makes it sound like this you know i mean decoding the unknown means like let's look into what's really going on so that was the thoughts behind it why are we talking about this is it completely irrelevant uh this is decoding the unknown what we're doing here is we're looking at the sydney quarantine station something a little bit different today uh david is the author of this script rather than our regular katie katie i've actually got another one from katie right here which i'll be recording probably tomorrow actually probably tomorrow and so david is guest authoring today david has done stuff with casual criminals before he and i are also working on a secret project which we'll be launching in early 2022 i hope fingers crossed and uh he was like can i write something for decoding the unknown and it'll be a little bit weird and i was like david yeah you're great just go ahead just write it for me and uh so this is well he's described as slightly unorthodox it's sort of a first-hand account of his experience and i'm like that sounds like something that i'd never done before sounds like honestly something i'd never do but david go for it man have fun and we'll just see how it goes because you know decoding the unknown's in you there's not that many episodes yet and uh if there's ever a time to experiment it's with a channel that not very many people watch so let's just jump into it drunken ghost hunter city quarantine station thank you david b david baker davey b putting this together let's go [Music] today's episode of decoding the unknown oh by the way i'm simon hello i i some i sometimes forget to introduce myself is slightly unorthodox it's a first-hand account of a paranormal investigation conducted by two of the world's most unlikely investigators david and alexandra while staggering around one of the world's most haunted sites simon quite charitably has allowed me to write up the legendary story of our brave and intrepid efforts for you are loyal faithful kind intelligent and may i say rather handsome audience be warned however zack bagens we ain't who sacked bacons oh no it's like with danny on brain blaze he has so many cultural references that i just don't get and david isn't even english so he's i'm sure he's got these australian cultural references about barbies and shrimps and thongs which is what australians call flip flops which always shook me um the target also what does anyone else have this pro i know i'm sorry we're on like 700 tangents already this episode but does anyone else have this problem where your printer just decides that 93 is the correct format to print a script so this was all size 11 calibri which i love that's like the perfect reading size and font but it's made it inside like 93 of the maximum which i just don't understand and now it's all too small but i'm not going to print out like another 400 pages of stuff in the right size the target sydney quarantine station widely known as the most haunted place in australia might the challenge accepted sydney's infamous quarantine station operated for 152 years from 1832 to 1984. whoa during that time it was used to lock up over 13 000 travelers suspected of carrying disease into the country in the days of sail it sounds like they brought it need to bring it back is that we're bringing back the quarantined station for covid 1832 to 1984 2019 to well seemingly indefinite covid what the [ __ ] in the days of sale and steamboat travel the idea was to prevent shipboard illnesses from entering australia by holding any infected ships in their passengers in an isolated location until the disease could run its course this seems remarkably forward-thinking for like 1832. it's kind of depressing that that's the same we're up to nearly 200 years later i mean plus vaccines and treatments and all of that stuff and way less horrible death but it's like if someone said like in 200 years will we still have diseases and stuff i'll be like nah nah nah we'll bang that nail on the head easy we'll be well done with that by then no worries might i'm gonna stop with my bad australian accent i'm sorry david and all australians listening as a result an estimated 570-581 people died horrible deaths there riddled by everything from smallpox to cholera to tuberculosis to typhoid to bubonic plague to the spanish flu to oh my god that's a lot of diseases but it's kind of amazing that only 570 people died there that seems really low for some place that's like three people a year or something three in a bit that's not bad with over 500 people dying agonizing deaths in the isolated wilderness in a strange new land surrounded by the sick beds of others also moaning and crying helplessly in pain it's no wonder that dozens of spirits felt compelled to stalk the grounds for all eternity sounds real the quarantine station is located just off the entrance to sydney harbour in an area that is still heavily forested and separated by bushland from the residential dwellings and businesses of the nearby holiday suburb of manly the manliest place ever ah the station is composed this is a terrible joke i'm sorry sorry the station is composed of a small number of buildings all of which are chock full to bursting with ghosts oh my oh they're not though if you tried to escape the compound you'd face the ocean on one side and high cliffs on the other and if you tried to make your way into manly a couple of kilometers of dense forest made impossible by thick brush filled with poisonous brown snakes and red back spiders confronted you australia you're the worst australia seems like you know really nice like chill they all drink fosters have a good time chill out on the beach they do surfing there's that big reef where people go diving sounds like great it's super great except every animal there seems to just want to destroy your body many of the gravesites of the dead were knocked over as the years went by and new buildings were callously erected over the top of them and around them auxiliary graveyards still sit atop the cliffs of north head peering out into sydney harbour the headstones are faded and chipped the graves are overgrown with brush and signs are posted warning you of snakes should you decide to walk inside personally i've never seen anything up there beyond a cute little e-echidna waddling around digging for bugs this must be some australia's like this alien land to me it's like you got animals that i've never heard of plants just from my dreams with all those graves with all that suffering countless reports of paranormal activity sometimes quite violent and troubling have been made over the years the ghost hunters i first heard about the quarantine station years ago when i heard about the title most haunted place in australia this immediately presented itself to me as a challenge i wonder if uh so far i i get the feeling just from my email extra i've never talked to david i never talk to any of my writers i don't know is that surprising to you guys they all just send me scripts and i read them like especially danny like on brain blaze our communication is almost 95 through scripts which is crazy and the same for david but with my brief email correspondent i'm not so briefly about correspondence with david um i get the feeling he's probably a skeptical dude but i don't know he could be i mean he's obviously not going to persuade me that ghosts are real because even if i saw a ghost myself i would not believe it was real until like science or nature or one of those big prestigious peer-reviewed journals is like ghosts say turns out they're a thing then i'll be like nailed it cool the paranormal just became normal uh but i think david's probably skeptical he's not gonna persuade me of anything and uh uh yeah yeah this show let's show you sometimes it's like what is this show about it's a show about the paranormal hosted by someone who absolutely loathes that [ __ ] why did i make this show i'm so confused anyway i'm the sort of skeptic ah there we go that occasionally enjoys watching ghost hunting shows and paranormal documentaries while shouting perfectly reasonable and rational explanations loudly and obnoxiously at the screen david preach it is just that uh what's that what i i it's more for me as just like clips on youtube from like ghost hunters or whatever that show is called and it's like our readings are doing up this and there's and it's just like a bunch of jump scares and bull and i'm like oh it's entertaining it's entertaining just like other fictional shows you know like every it's just fiction okay stop it whistle boy carry on for some reason the slack jawed yokels and credulous idiots who decide to humiliate themselves on television for a bit of attention never seem to listen to me neither do the huckster-ish badly dressed hosts with weird haircuts who obviously don't believe any of this [ __ ] while they deliver cliched and corny lines over a spooky royalty-free soundtrack unfortunately for my plans for years i had a girlfriend who kind of believed in ghosts and was too scared to ever go there with me i wasn't going to make her and so the mata rested for a time a few years later free and signal and ready to mingle with all manner of spooks inspectors i decided to go and not just for a laugh i hatched an elaborate plan but more on that in a bit joining me was my friend and fellow ghost hunter alexandra who had been to the quarantine station before and had largely enjoyed herself like me she's a skeptic and she won't mind my saying that she is a somewhat cynical grumpy no-nonsense sort of person who's more likely to kick a poltergeist in the balls and call it a wood than to run away screaming alexandra you sound like a legend yes in fact a veteran bush walker surfer and spear fisher oh what i'm not sure what a bush walker is is that someone who just goes out for a walk in the bush but i do know a spearfisher is that someone who legitimately goes swimming around underwater with a spear australia man why is up with you this is i mean i'm from the uk like you try to go spearfishing you're looking around underwater it's like why is it so murky i can't see like no spear fishing sounds awesome oh my god my parents have like a house by the beach and uh by the beach in the uk it's like nine months out of the year it's freezing ass cold and in the summer it gets a little bit warm and i remember as a kid my dad would go out to swim in the sea and i'd be like dad it's all rocky there's seaweed there's weird in there i don't want to swim in there it's so salty and then in the evening the tide would go out so so far it would be like you can't swim when the tide's out because it's like a half hour walk to get to the bloody sea oh australia you land a beautiful oceans and spear fishing legends she is ridiculously brave and brazen in the face of physical danger to the extent that it is difficult to tell who where the where's the pants in our ghost hunting partnership yo yo yo david i hate to break it to you but if anyone in in any relationship is this is is spear fishing mate they're the ones wearing the pants uh she's maybe a little rough around the edges and not very diplomatic bless her but that'll come into play later it should be said that both of us have received quite a considerable degree of academic and scientific training over the years to a fairly experienced level in yesteryear we both conducted complex research involving disciplines as diverse as evolutionary biology psychology and a fair bit of physics sounds like exactly the sort of people who would definitely not believe in ghosts i i don't have an education in any science um and i feel like if i did i'd be even more like why are we even talking about this we weren't just curious of hooligans looking to laugh at some urban myths and popular superstitions we had serious intentions we had a plan we're going to go into this with our eyes wide open intending to deliver concrete results there was even talk of publishing an academic journal but nothing came of that dodie you slightly disappointed that your dreams of academic journal turned out to be a strangely presented youtube channel slash podcast several years later read by a british factboy i mean it's kind of fun though isn't it this is more fun than an academic journal the plan the pseudoscientific theories surrounding ghosts and poltergeists are unsurprisingly somewhat of an incoherent mess a jumble of half-baked ideas and explanations but one thing most of them seem to have in common is that ghosts are supposed to exist on a plane of existence parallel to ours they are held there by strong emotions usually surrounding the circumstances of their death or the suffering they experienced in life these ghosts supposedly manifest themselves in our reality via the electromagnetic spectrum of our quantum physics both versions of this explanation are pseudoscientific gibberish yes it's like do you understand what the electromagnetic spectrum is because it exists in our dimension not in other parallel were they story about dimensions uh what was it different planes the electromagnetic spectrum exists in this plane regular ass reality as does quantum physics ghosts are left over signatures of human energy capable of both movement and a certain degree of consciousness why the brain chemistry and perpetual firing of hundreds of billions of synapses which are required to make human emotions and thoughts exist would physically survive decades after the brain has rotted away into putrid marsh has never been adequately explained and if it had we'll be having a very different conversation wouldn't we david would be like yeah yeah yeah so in 1972 they explained how ghosts uh exist and we'll be like oh good okay nevertheless like vinegar mixing with baking soda these spirit-based energy signatures are highly reactive to the presence of living humans though no one has really cared to explain why at least beyond the fact that they are people and we are people the same species i guess that's why we don't see more ghosts of holy mammoths and saber-toothed tigers roaming about or the ghosts of a cockroach we crushed last tuesday but ghosts have a profound impact on living people and we in turn have a profound impact on them probably because they're figments of our imagination that wasn't me that was david it's like yeah ghosts do have a profound impact on people's lives it affects their lives doesn't mean they're real harry potter had a profound impact on my life it was a very interesting book that i read actually the impact wasn't that profound i'm sure there are better books that have a profound impact on my life harry potter is not one of them but they exist it doesn't mean they're real i mean obviously the book's real but wizards wizards aren't real some ghosts react to the living in benign and even pleasant ways other ghosts are a little creepy but largely indifferent to us than some ghosts are quite malevolent angry and aggressive ghosts are also known to react differently to different people or to people with differing intentions a ghost might calmly accept the presence of a human in one instance and may turn angry unfoul to a person in another it is on this generally vague chunk of theory that hinged our entire ghost hunting plan we were simply playing by the rules of ghost hunters that we'd seen on television and they could hardly all be wrong david have you heard of the history channel i know it's sarcasm but it's like oh boy oh boy history channel just because you made 11 season of ancient aliens is it called ancient aliens or building the whatever that stupid show with the crazy hair guy is uh doesn't just doesn't make it any more real our plan was twofold oh by now it's not gone live yet but we did an episode of uh i mean i've gone live by the time you see this probably but i've already recorded an episode on did did aliens build the pyramids it's the shortest videos like 17 minutes because the answer was like obviously not spoiler alert our plan was twofold phase one go to the quarantine station on a ghost tour and deliberately try to revoke a negative emotional reaction from the ghosts we'd do exactly the opposite of what we thought the particular ghost in question would want and improvise the sort of thing the ghost in question would definitely not want if a ghost didn't want us to enter a certain room or stand in a certain part of it would barge right in you're gonna be like going around with some guide and the guy's gonna be like these deads what the [ __ ] you're ruining the door for everybody like a legend if a ghost was angry about the manner in which he had died we'd laugh mock and tell him to get over it if a shadowy apparition appeared right in front of us we're trying to punch it in the face in short we'd brave like total jerks towards the spirit world and yes i know this sounds mean that was the point in order to augment this obnoxious behavior we'd get a little pissed up with dinner before legends all in the service of provoking the most extreme supernatural phenomena no casper the friendly ghost or oh my god a door just moved and i felt a little cold none of that pissy ass [ __ ] was gonna be allowed here we wanted full-on demonic possession hellfire gollums sadistic poltergeist splashes of the number 666 whisperings of get out upside down crucifixes chairs flying around and ceiling and blood pouring down the walls you know that kind of supernatural activity if we could handle it or if one of us died it would be in the name of science and the revolutionary breakthrough by definitively proving for the first time in history that yes ghosts and the afterlife exist such an earth-shattering revelation which would change humanity's outlook forever was surely worth one or two people dying for it especially if you find out there's an afterlife you'd be like oh okay totally worth it so you know that like you know most people don't i like the afterlife right no one's really sure i mean like people are like yeah god's real definitely believe in heaven gonna go to heaven and i said all right what happened so great why haven't you killed yourself yet i know it's really dark to say and i don't want to be encouraging anyone to kill themselves obviously not because that would be insane but it's not if you're so a hundred hundred percent there let's not go down this path of argument because it just sounds like i'm encouraging people to kill themselves which obviously i think is insane don't do that it's not real it's not real listen to that little bit of doubt in your mind hell it's not like we'd be losing much we'd probably wind up as ghosts if a ghost got angry and killed us while we were proving the existence of the afterlife would at least have the afterlife to go to exactly hence logically speaking win or lose we had nothing whatsoever to fear from the ghosts phase two after the initial ghost hunt we'd regroup list all the phenomena we encountered that night and make a list of plausibly sane hypotheses for what we'd experienced we'd then go back to the quarantine station again a few days or weeks later sobering during the daytime on a vanilla historical door and science the [ __ ] out of it which i believe is the technical term there were just a couple of direly needed ground rules first we could never wander off alone human instincts particularly in dark and unfamiliar surroundings are more likely to set off alarm bells and start shooting adrenaline into our own system when we're alone then when we're about when with other people we did not want to go the whole night imagining things were happening when really we were just startled by accidentally kicking an empty water bottle on the ground or seeing the shadow of a tree branch on a wall it is no good walking into a situation where your guide says you might experience a haunting with your mammalian instincts already on high alert this was also the more practical reason for the booze ah yes practical reasons for booze any excuse eh david not criticizing completely legit a numbing effect to the natural creepiness of all buildings and the cloak of nightfall and probably it's a nonsense of growing frustration that some of the sheer bull would likely to encounter on the tour two we were not to announce our intentions to anyone we are not to ruin the ghost tour for any other paying customers by either our statements or behavior when you like trying to punch ghosts in the face though it sounds like you're gonna be ruining the tour for someone else what are you doing trying to punch a ghost in the face are you drunk no we were not to harass the tour guide by peppering him with difficult questions or skeptical arguments the poor bugger was just earning a wage we were to keep it all to ourselves and as an extension of that we could not do anything so obnoxious or horrible to antagonize a ghost that would get us noticed and thrown off the tour or worse banned from returning to the quarantine station since obviously that would have the opposite effect that we intended and would ruin all of our efforts the only people we wanted to act like [ __ ] toward the ghosts and because we are pretty sure ghosts didn't exist at all our conscience was clear that in a nutshell was our plan phase one [Music] at this point in the show i want to issue a disclaimer before we continue [ __ ] on the existence of ghosts and delusional nonsense about the paranormal primarily because i feel bad about what we did the sydney quarantine station now renamed q station sounds like a q station makes it sound like something from a james bond movie like hugh where he's making all his gadgets and [ __ ] which sadly not so much in the new james bond movies i love the any james bond movies but the ones with piers brosnan when he was like lasering with his watch in his car was invisible i was like yeah it's ridiculous but it's also cool after it was renovated declared a heritage site and turned into a hotel is a lovely place it has a rich vibrant history dating back to the earliest moments of the australian nation for example many of the inmates of the quarantine station for a hundred years etched their names and the name of their ship into the sandstone cliffs near the entrance to the place each one of these etchings has its own fascinating story many of them are explored in an excellent book stories from the sandstone by hobbins frederick and clark they also don't give a damn about ghosts q station also sits in a lovely sunkist spot away from the bustle of the city and there's a lot of good bushwalking swimming fishing and boating to be had it also is right next to the small gap of sydney harbour where 23 million years ago the ocean waters finally eroded their way through the sandstone cliffs and burst into the valleys that now form the basin of the harbor queue station boasts stunning views of sydney a nice restaurant that even locals visit in a tea room where you can have high tea or a fancy gin cocktail david this sounds really awesome i feel like in a minute you're going to be like don't forget to visit my website it's my hotel no but uh this sounds really nice i've spent many i have to happy afternoon there even the ghost tours are a spot of good fun and they do a good job building up a spooky atmosphere which never crosses the line into being utterly cheesy this sounds great like i don't believe in any of this stuff as we already know but i'd definitely do that and i'll just hold my tongue and enjoy the tour and then i'd go have a few gin cocktails maybe i'll do them before the tour but i know unlike david i'll just be like i'll have a couple of jig cocktails and i'll be like yeah yeah we could do that ghost store we could we could or i could just continue sitting in this really comfortable chair and just looking out at the sea that sounds really good that sounds really good how about i just enjoy this moment of not working in a mild buzz from a cuppa gin that sounds brilliant there my guilty conscience is soothed now onto kicking the variable ectoplasm out of some ghosts we took an uber from manly up the steep hill along the old military road to the gates of the quarantine station the old sandstone archway at the camp greeted us from here our car could go no further we sorted over to a bench and waited for the next shuttle to take us down the hill to the station proper two other people were waiting there a man looked at us and did a double-taker woman openly gaped since our tour was to take place in the evening alex and i decided to make an event out of it we decided to have a fancy dinner down in the town first as such we were dressed to the nines i was wearing a black three-piece suit with a red tie you're a fancy ass restaurant david alex very uncorrectalistically for her was in a red sequined evening dress i remember feeling a little embarrassed you were horribly overdressed everyone else we saw that evening was dressed in casual clothing yeah as you would expect on a ghost store i'd be like all right i'm just going to take this tie off and slowly slide it into my inside pocket i hope that no one no no else no no one notices the waistcoat the jacket the shiny shoes alex has more problems but there's no accounting for taste we didn't want to squeeze every drop of enjoyment out of this particular stone and after a few glasses of wine we ceased to care the shuttle took us to the bottom of the hill to wharf precinct where the beach and docks were passengers or infected ships were dropped off here for their long isolation we potted over to the restaurant which is housed in the old boiler room a brick building with giant imposings with a giant imposing smokestack in days of plague it fed steam into the sterilization chambers that killed off bacteria and viruses on people's luggage and the laundry room where people's clothes were similarly blasted clean i feel like you know i'm always like the past was the worst it's always good to be alive now because people just didn't understand like death and disease and stuff and i'm like this seems pretty advanced for like some 19th century like steaming [ __ ] it's like kind of impressive like that's kind of again why are we further ahead with this stuff i recently got a uv sterilizer because i got two young children and they have pacifiers dummies as we call them in the uk and uh they've got to go in this like steam thing it steams the [ __ ] out of them to make them like sterile and i was like there's got to be a better way to do this so there's uv ones which take like a minute you just put them in there there's no boiling water and stuff but it's amazing that we were steaming germs in the 19th century and was still steaming germs in the 21st what's going on science the boiler room was fully renovated into a two-story restaurant and we were led to a table on the second floor it was here that we experienced our first supernatural event i had tucked into an appetizer of scallops with a glass of prosecco followed by a hefty chunk of lamb washed down with liberal amounts of merlot alex says she had a portobello mushroom followed by a steak the room was filled with i don't know you're drinking prosecco alex is having a steak after doing some spear fishing david are you still wondering about those trousers ah the room was filled with middle-aged holidaymakers a bachelorette party and one looked like office pencil pushers at a corporate retreat at one point during our meal alex suddenly shivered and said don't [ __ ] yourself today though but i just felt like someone touched the back of my [ __ ] neck they turned around it was the waiter being a bit weird she'd be like what are you up to why do i always get the nuts as insignificant as this may seem many people accuse station and in haunted places generally report the feeling of being touched by human hands on their legs back and neck just as well we start light with our decoding the first thing to consider is front loading you already know you're in a place that contains ghosts the idea is already planted in your mind even if you don't believe in the damn things yeah okay i didn't know that was called front loading but this absolutely 100 makes sense because it's like i don't believe in ghosts i know there's no murderer in the attic but i'm still like if i'm alone and it's like 11 o'clock at night and it's fully dark and i'm just in the middle of nowhere i'm gonna be like oh boy oh boy i know ghosts aren't real and i know there's probably not murderers but what if they are and there are who if you were buying condoms in a drug store and you felt something brush the back of your neck your thoughts would probably not be an immediate jump to ghosts but if you're already primed and ready to think in those terms your mind is more ready to play tricks on you again even if you do not believe in ghosts second it was evening the sun had gone down the temperature was dropping alex was sitting there in an evening dress with legs back and shoulder exposed furthermore in australia the ac is always left on too long and too cold in public buildings it's because australia's hot because australia is usually so warm we seem incapable of properly heating them some places are like living in a shed drafts from the restaurant doorway the circulation of cold air around the room could easily stimulate the hair follicles on the back of alex's neck yeah david you know what else could ghosts these hair follicles by the way which cover most of our sensitive areas of the human body are evolutionarily designed to pick up sensations that could potentially be dangerous like a spider malarial mosquito or paralysis tig oh my god australia is the worst do you have malaria and paralysis ticks in australia and like the worst thing here there's that tick-borne encephalitis that disease that makes your brain a bit stupid if you get it badly that kind of stuff and i'm like man that's horrible so i got a vaccine against that and then there's the other one there's like two tick diseases and they're like there's no spiders there's nothing like that i'm just like okay and the ticks they have to be in your body for like 48 hours so it's like if you're going out in the forest just make sure afterwards there's no ticks ticks on you and you're fine whereas in australia it's like i feel like i've been murdered but i've been murdered by like seven spiders if i go there i once was visiting my aunt lives out in atlanta and i just wake up one morning with a massive like eye like just one side of my face just above my eyes super swollen and i'm like what the hell's going on and my aunt's like ah i was like a penny spider or a money spider or something mom was just like yeah it's normal don't worry about it and i'm like there's a my eye is massively swollen and she's like i'll go down and i'm like this is the worst i just imagine australia's like south america uh southern united states like on steroids i still want to go it's really far i'd still go i've never been weird so it's not such a massive stretch of the imagination to figure out that a wisp of cool air would stimulate the follicles on alex's neck leading her front loading brain to amusingly think what if it was actually a ghost did a creepy pervert die in the boiler room when we return to the boiler room restaurant a few weeks later during the day me wearing my usual t-shirt and shorts and alex in a tank top and leggings both of us with plenty of exposed skin we both noticed the exact same sensation from the ac so next time you feel a ghost touching your neck remember it was probably just a spoonful of the earth's atmosphere there exists i promise you that dial m for melo our ghost hunting then hit our first real obstacle we had sat down for dinner at 6pm our ghost door began at 9pm we had three hours to wait within the first 90 minutes we had worked our way through dinner and then slurped up whatever we had for dessert neither of us for the life of us can remember what we had so playing for time generally enjoying the conversation and slow descent into madness and with the object of being only slightly sourced for the actual tour we shared a bit of wine all told we went through about two and a half bottles between us holy we had to put on we hadn't put too much of a dent in the third bottle thank god before it was nearly 9 p.m in time to go that's roughly 1 000 milliliters and 9 to 10 standard drinks apiece to be clear both of us are quite thin and make for pretty cheap dates i don't know what our blood alcohol comes it must have been thank god we had both eaten a heavy meal yeah i mean i mean i'm a drinker i drink i'm also pretty thin but after a bottle of wine i'll be pretty sloshed the volume of our table got louder the use of expletives more frequent grandiose claims and bullish self-confidence approached megalomaniacal levels eyes bloodshot our teeth were gradually more stained red with wine tannins as the evening progressed oh my gosh you guys are getting smashed we swished with a bit of water to little avail as alex puts it when your teeth start to match the color of your lipstick you should probably stop yes we were thoroughly and utterly pissed sozzled squiffy blottoed couldn't find our ass with both hands riding the pink elephant that must be an australian one i've never heard that uh drunk as a hobo's fart we had not yet lapsed into total incoherence neither of us had pissed ourselves i don't think i i've i'm i don't think i need to be proud i've never pissed myself when drunk i've thrown up many times i've even thrown up in my bed but i've never wet myself in bed or outside of it whereas i know something that's definitely definitely friends of mine i've known who it's like if you're pretty drunk like we'd get about the same level of drunken they'd be like yeah definitely work myself and i'll be like not whistle boy i just threw up in my bed i don't know i'm not proud of this i don't know why i'm saying this like it's a good thing don't drink it's not good i i i just don't it's not worth it we were still able uh we were still capable of maintaining some sense of social instinct and good decorum as we headed out of the door and marched toward the ticket area to wait for our tour to begin despite everything the game was afoot the gas chamber our tour group consisted about 15 people the tour guide who professed an unshakable faith in the existence of ghosts whether this was genuine or paid was unknown he led us down to the docks to begin the tour i was already beginning to feel drowsy a bad sign alex pulled on her jacket yeah david you're having that regrets you know in this situation i would never have gone on that ghost store i'd be like yo alex can we just go home please let's call an uber i'm just i don't want to anymore or can we just go to let's have another bottle of wine we're ready let's just drink some more do we have to go on the ghost store they're not gonna have booze on the ghost store and i'm probably gonna start feeling a bit hungover halfway through it would never happen the tour guide asked the group by show of hands who among us believed in ghosts a few people put up their hands the guide then asked who among us definitely did not believe in ghosts annex and i kept our hands firmly down by our sides the guide had used a rather clever tactic at the start of the tour he'd take note of the easy marks among the crowd and also flag out the hardened skeptics who were likely to make his job difficult and give him a hard time alex and i had no intention of giving the guide a hard time or spoiling the fun for anybody we were on a secret mission for science for glory while still on the docks the guide mentioned the existence of two specters called the lovers a first-class passenger lady margaret who had an affair with a young italian immigrant witnesses had seen them walking along the beach dressed in late 19th century garb arm in arm what was more unusual is occasionally they were seen rising from the water itself it should be mentioned however that the lighting on the docks is fairly dim on the water and on the beach it's almost non-existent the water is generally black at night i doubt you could even see a real human being swimming in it yeah i i didn't why i'm bringing this up right now but water at night is scary like the sea is super black and i've been swimming at night a few times in the sea and it's always like ah this is supposed to be romantic but i'm just afraid can we go inside i've had two bottles of wine i'm gonna drown lighting was not particularly bright anywhere in the wharf district probably intentionally and remember that the entire quarantine station is a couple of kilometers from the bright lights of manly a shortage of artificial lighting surrounded by a stretch of dark snake-infected forest essentially a person could make out hazy shapes and see whatever they wanted to see if they wanted to see a couple of amorous ghosts they would see them from there we were led across the square towards a couple of run down looking sheds the guide mentioned another spectre a young girl aged around 14 or 15 who liked to run up to people and strangle them people would have difficulty breathing and would later find red finger marks around their necks again front loading if you have already been told about a young teenage strangler you're more likely to get strangled by her second if you're susceptible to ghost nonsense you're more likely to be anxious to panic and hyperventilate thus achieving a vague simulchrome simulacrum that word is always hard to say of choking finally i sincerely doubt anyone had clear hand marks on their necks i've seen those bruises in autopsy photos they are distinct and dark more likely you are willfully misconstruing harmless inflammation temporary discoloration clogged pores or a hickey your boyfriend gave you last night than the mark of another worldly land meanwhile in the back of the group alex muttered to me salva savagely if the little [ __ ] tried me she'd be in for a punt in the in the c word i don't like that swear word it's so savage like all their problems like fs and s's and d's but the sea always feels like so i i think it's like maybe different in britain i don't know how it is in australia are you just going around calling each other sea words all the time imprisoned i'm like that's heavy that's some heavy bro you save that you keep that in your pocket for when you really need it i tried to stop bursting out laughing a few people looked over we were rushed inside one of the compartments of the shed it was dark inside except for the dim illumination of the outside street lamps there were there the guide instructed us to guess what the room was for and to think about it for a few few seconds while she left us there the guide promptly shut the door and 15 people were engulfed in total darkness meanwhile alex and i had immediately gone to one of the corners and pressed our bags against the wall to avoid any cheap trickery a girl let out a blood-curdling scream her boyfriend had obviously impersonated a ghost with a roping hat again all of this was a tour tactic levus locked in a pitch rack room to get us on edge the guide opened the door he explained the shed was a gas chamber up to 50 people at a time were locked in here to kill off any parasites that were crawling in their hair or on their bodies the disappearing girl we proceeded to the luggage sterilization chamber adjacent to the boiler room within was a fairly dirty concrete floor some old rickety shelves nailed together about a century ago and some stairs leading down to a couple of enormous doors with giant wheels on them that functioned as spinning locks damn okay like an old-fashioned bang vault the doors themselves looked like something out of 90s 1930s science fiction there was a library that i used to go to before i had like my own office and [ __ ] like where i just go sometimes when i just needed not to work at home and uh it was in an old bank so they'd taken this like awesome i think it was because of the communists like the communists had taken this giant bank with all this crazy marble everywhere and statues and and all of this stuff and they're turned into like a library and it was really awesome and in the back the reason this is relevant is like where they kept all the index cards like in the past obviously now it's all electronic you could it was the bank vault so and they left all this giant door and stuff in there so it's this huge like bank vault room with this giant door and super thick walls that you could just wander around and i was like this is pretty cool but an irrelevant story so let's just carry on they were unbelievably thick in the dark they looked quite sinister the purpose of this room herb was quite innocent people's stuff would be piled in here blasted clean from every micro but then put on a small trolley track up the hill where the luggage would be stored the inmates particularly outside of first class would have limited access to most of their clothing and stuff for weeks all this oppressive trouble and here i was grumbling about wearing a mask on a plane yeah but i mean i i'm not some anti-mask person that obviously masks do help stop spread covert around and all of that but it does suck like i'm like i've got a big beard i've got a big face to be honest so most of the masks are quite tight on my face i re i was wearing like these masks that my wife kept buying and they were really like uncomfortable and then she discovered that they make large size masks and i'm like oh my god i've been living in just abominable conditions and then i just have a large mass sounds like oh my god my ears are no longer being brought towards my face my whole it was just a wonderful experience as we sat on the filthy concrete stairs in front of the doors both alex and i were too drunk to care about the dust on our nice clothes the guy told us about the disappearing girl a spectre who would join tour groups and walk around with them there were numerous reports where people would spot the ghost think they were a normal person and then several minutes later they'd noticed that they couldn't see the girl in the crowd she had dematerialized into thin air oh my god it sounds so real orchid simply buggered off to the toilet or they didn't see the total stranger again because they were standing behind other people in the dark yes alex and i didn't need to come back another day to figure this one out a tall group of 15 and at least half of them were total strangers to each other and you're saying that you think you see a stranger in the dark at one moment and then you don't recognize her amongst the group again say it ain't so what is perhaps more interesting is why you would take note of a total stranger in a large group of people in the first place to even notice their absence a few minutes later perhaps if you were an excitable believer in the afterlife front loaded with the story of the disappearing girl perhaps yes maybe that's it david maybe and by maybe i mean obviously or maybe it is ghosts or maybe just thought she was really hot and wanted to ogle her later again either way she probably wasn't a ghost the third possibility is the staff actually join tour groups as so-called ghosts periodically and then slip away to freak people out but i didn't detect anything that elaborate at the time i don't think they would do that because it kind of then it's like if they get caught doing that and it's like hey you you're not on this group you're a tour guide i've been here but then there's like busted and it's like oh okay so they're faking the ghosts whereas if they just use like psychological tricks and start them there's like plausible deniability it's like they're not the ones making up ghosts it's people's imaginations making up ghosts or maybe it's ghosts ah the acid showers and shadow man from there the guide led us up a few more yards to the building that housed the mass showers it was here that new arrivals had to strip down naked hop onto one of these cold steel showers and scrub themselves thoroughly to get rid of any parasites or surface level infections that they might be carrying on their persons but after your shower you didn't exactly dry yourself up and off instead the water mixed with carbolic acid sat on your skin oh my god i'm assuming it's not particularly strong carbolic acid i'm not even sure what cabobolic acid is but that still doesn't sound awesome over the course of the next few days you would turn red itchy and the top two layers of your skin would gradually peel off it was like being sunburned all over including on your scalp and genitalia oh my god no there's a big difference between scalp and genitalia number of times i've been burned on my scalp well look i'm a very very bald man the answer is many and i pretty much always wear a hat now um burns on my genitalia never and never want to like i can't imagine having a sunburned penis that sounds horrible i will admit that the shah building looked like something out of a horror film chipped early 20th century tiles you'd see in a creepy derelict insane asylum walls made of rusted corrugated iron on each shower in rows and rows of them dozens stretching on and on into the darkness of the building lit only by the small windows at each end and the flashlights of the tour group yeah there is something spooky like inherently spooky about like derelict showers right it's just as i don't know it's just creepy i think maybe it's because you know we're vulnerable in the shower like there's lots of murder scenes in movies like famously psycho and all of this stuff that happened like when people are in showers because it's like you're naked you're slippery there's no weapons nearby it's like oh yeah you're screwed you're gonna try grabbing onto a knife and it just slips out of your hands while you're getting stabbed by a murderer yeah that's probably why isn't it that's why showers are creepy because it's where we're vulnerable like in prison the building was too long for a single flashlight to light it from end to end cavenous shadows yawned onward into oblivion between the rows of acid showers it was genuinely creepy and reminded me of something you'd see in a you'd see in a concentration camp perhaps it was the fact newly arrived travelers were tamely led here to have their skin burned off perhaps unsurprisingly it was in this location that the tour group really started to get jumpy while filming the shower someone's camera turned off suddenly while while the phone is still on full patchy i guess a ghost was a bit shy of being filmed in the nude a few people reported feeling a sudden coldness wash over them as if a spirit had just passed by yet another person reported having a metallic taste in their mouths which the guide speculated was consistent with the taste of blood yeah it's like if i've got a metallic taste in my mouth i'm like well i know what blood tastes like i've tasted blood many times not because i'm a weirdo but it's like oh i cut myself you know you just lick that blood up which is a weird thing to do isn't it i can't be the only one who does that or when you bite your mouth really badly and it bleeds you're like i know what blood tastes like i know what i know i'm extremely familiar with the taste of human blood that's the only time you could say that sentence um yeah and then you're like it's not that and it's just in your mind it's definitely in your minds and if you're constantly tasting weird things that you're not tasting go get a scan go see the doctor so that could be a brain tumor or something yes i think i saw that on our tv show when alex and i returned to the showers during the daytime a few weeks later during phase two we discreetly took a few swab samples of dust when the historical guide wasn't looking a simple chemical test revealed that within the dust there was plenty of iron and rust particles most likely chipped off from the decaying shower stalls that lined the entire building well guys you are like going above and beyond on your little research adventure um yeah i was just like oh the metallic taste it's since it's in the mind it's in the mind but like little iron particles in the air that sounds dangerous i'm not going there it's like ah in particles it sounds like you know it's going to cause that asbestos disease such dust could easily be agitated and swirled into the air by people walking around the showers and could easily have been inhaled or ingested by a person who would then report a metallic taste but it wasn't blood if anything it pointed to how the air in the building was mildly unhealthy because of the particles in it but one can inhale worse chemicals when wandering through an old building and it's unlikely it did the bloke on the tour any lasting harm yeah like asbestos that mesothelioma disease is crazy it's like there was an episode of house about it and a friend of mine's dad actually died of it and it's just you go to the doctor and you're like oh yeah i've got a bit of a cough and i yeah you'll be dead in a year it's like oh my god that is so intense because it's just that's it you know people don't survive it for like very long at all and it's like i just obviously got 100 fatal or whatever but it's like it's like a tumor around your lungs in the lining of your lungs from getting asbestos particles in there when you were a kid or like younger and i'm like that's intense and i'm like i haven't been around any asbestos i think i'm a bit young for it to be honest but really intense disease you don't want that also during phase two we took a portable thermometer to in earth yep sorry i'm like is that thermometer can you even read fact boy to investigate the flashes of cold that were frequently reported in the building it was 24 degrees celsius outside that day or 75.2 degrees fahrenheit and within the building the temperature varied between 21 and 18 degrees celsius or 69.8 to 64.4 degrees fahrenheit the construction of the building should be noted there was very little opportunity for sunlight to enter the building during the day the building itself was not built to retain heat like many buildings in australia wait why would buildings be built to maintain heat retain heat in australia that sounds like a terror isn't australia super hot be like i want a building that gets rid of heat i want terrible insulation although i guess you insulate like air conditioning inside as well right so i guess okay okay uh i'm i'm getting it i'm just a bit dumb okay i'm just not the smartest man around so when it was in use the shad did not become a sauna on really hot subtropical days the building was old not meant for living in even at the time of operation and thus had worse drafts than even the boiler room restaurant but it was the rows and rows of little metal cloisters each with a drain pipe through which a blast of cold air could rush upward that caused the most discrepancies in the building so it is indeed likely that it wasn't just the night or people's paranoia they were quite likely experiencing sudden slight drops in temperature as they walked around it just wasn't from ghosts as for the camera suddenly turning off without being able to look at that smartphone specifically to see what its screen saver and lock screen settings were or whether there was a malfunctioning battery or to see how incompetent the person using it was operating a smartphone we'll just have to chalk that up to user error on the part of the living or just the phone being a bit weird it's technology it crashes all the time actually phones are fairly reliable i find my phone doesn't crash very often in fact it just seems to crash way less often than it used to in the past but look technology's not perfect and uh yeah it was that because you know what there's lots of technology replay places uh technical support there's very little you know ghost support like oh yeah my phone stopped working as a ghosts uh the alternate explanation is a ghost could somehow operate a piece of 21st century technology better than that bloke could and if that's the best evidence we have for ghosts i think both alex and i can live with that yes me too it is one of those cases of confirmation bias if your electronic equipment messes up during a ghost hunt then it must be spooks responsible for it through the electromagnetic spectrum yet if your computer were to crash or your tv were to suddenly lose power in normal life it's unlikely you would blame it on ghosts electronic things mess up all the time thank you yes 100 degree and 100 of the time there is a mechanical explanation for it it's only when it happens in a dark room with scooby-doo vibes but it sends us into hysterics next time i'm just like working you know using adobe premiere or something and it crashes i'll be like nah not the ghosts again god damn it it was at this point the ghosts themselves began to appear this took a turn and that's when i started to believe in ghosts not really david didn't write that the tour guide told us about a girl who can sometimes be heard crying in one of the shower stalls unsurprisingly a few minutes later a woman on the tour said she could faintly hear the sound of a girl crying to this alex merely whispered into a nearby shower stall that the ghost should pull herself together and shouldn't hang around the showers all day but should get her fat weeping ass into her swimmers and get to suntanning on the beach savage alex as an afterthought she added that today people pay hundreds of dollars to come here and do that and to stop being such a mopey idiot the ghost did not respond shocking the tour guide then told us about shadow man a seven foot tall spectre that only appeared as a black fat phantasm phantasm fantasm i don't know i don't care i'm not going to look up this word because let's be fair i don't look up that many words anyway and also it's a made-up phantom word i mean all words made up but this one particularly so and it was at times quite malevolent ghost hunters had previously talked to the ghost by a spirit box and had determined that shadow man was an ugly ghost disfigured by smallpox and that is why he never shows his true form shortly after hearing this story a girl screamed quite loudly and loudly and said that she'd seen shadow man lurking around one of the showers nominee could beat alex said well let's go find the bastard and she swiftly charged off in the direction that the spectre had been reported in a few people from the ghost store merrily followed us while the more timid and impressionable folks remained behind near the exit it'd be like yeah i'll go over there oh no the ghosty small box guy what's he going to do give me some more box he's a ghost and he's not real also shadow man was nowhere to be found it should be mentioned at this point that some ghost enthusiasts will say that if you don't believe in ghosts or otherwise spiritually closed off like alex and i almost certainly were that the ghosts will not appear to you i hope most of us can agree that this is some santa claus level right here conveniently the only sort of person who sees ghosts is either someone who believes in ghosts or is easily startled in dark foreboding places and on what information are people basing this claim wishful thinking and if that was the case if homeowners want to avoid the nuisance of living in haunted houses all they have to do is stop believing in ghosts and they'll stop appearing to them what circular nonsense it is indeed i saw an amazing picture it was a it was a real picture i don't think it was a joke of a house being sold somewhere in america like somewhere i don't know maybe like salem or something like that and there was the sign it said you know they hang out and it says like for sale and then underneath there was another sign attached to it that said not haunted it's like oh my god i'd like to buy a house in that town because i'd just buy the haunted ones i'd just be like yeah yeah this is haunted right i'm gonna need like at least 20 off because of the haunting thing and they'll be like yeah i guess we can do that because it's haunted and i'll be like amazing and then i'll move in and obviously there won't be any ghosts in there because they're not real alex and i took note of how the lines of showers could potentially refract and restrict light through the building indeed during the night you could easily see without the aid of a flashlight just from the dim lighting from the windows it wasn't pitch black and there was a moderate amount of visibility to walk around without tripping over stuff otherwise with all those hard corners and tiles that have a massive lawsuit on their hands this all changed when you turned on a flashlight suddenly you had clear visibility immediately in front of you and darkness lay beyond in the pictures of shadow man posted online the light of a flashlight ends and the yawning chasm of darkness begins just as you would expect to in any shadow it just so happens that these shadows can take on a vaguely anthropomorphic shape again if you've just been front loaded with a story about shadow man conveniently the same height as the showers roughly speaking it is hardly surprising you would imagine seeing something sinister yeah this is one of those things it's like you know why are we so good humans are amazing at spotting patterns like you look at the clouds it's like this looks like that this looks like this and it's like obviously it doesn't you know they're not really this item but it is crazy how easy it is for us to like spot things in random patterns and that is exactly what's going on here a merry jaunt the morgue from the acid showers we had quite a hike to our next ghostly location alex swore loudly at her uncomfortable shoes stopped furiously kicked them off and pulled on a pair of thongs from her purse oh yeah the australians and their thongs alex is not changing her underwear that's what british is this just a british thing but a thong is uh an under is underwear in a women's underwear in british english at least but the australians as flip-flops mate or plastic pool sandals for those not from australia the national footwear of our country is that isn't that is that actually like a thing or is that like fosters is the national beer australia or are you all actually walking around in flip-flops the flip-flops are stupid i'm sorry australians they're a bit stupid because they're like sandals except they don't have the thing on the back which so every step you take you're like constantly like uh gripping your toes to keep the shoes like and you know they make that slapping sound because you're using your toes to keep them on your feet it's like why not just have the back thing why not just have a pair of sandals or why not just wear shoes i remember i was reading a style blog once and something really stuck with me they were like the only place that is acceptable to wear sandals or flip-flops is when you're literally on the beach any other time wear something else and from that so i always have a pair of boat shoes that i typically wear like in hot climates and stuff like that you know without the socks on the inside they're comfortable are they called boat shoes i don't know what they're called like the shoes you'd wear on a boat they're great great and they're not sandals i should probably just be okay with wearing sandals because i don't care that much about style we trudged along a forested path the tour guide continued to regale us with interesting facts the first was that the grounds in which the quarantined station were built belong to the cadigal aboriginal people of australia who had used this as a site of health and wellness prior to european contact this made me reflect about where all the aboriginal ghosts were these people had first come to northern australia roughly 60 000 years ago and had been in new south wales for approximately 40 000 years or more as long as humans had been in europe in 1791 three years after europeans arrived in the manly north head area a smallpox epidemic wiped out an estimated 90 percent of the category people because they had no biological resistance to european diseases it seems to me that there should have been thousands of years worth of very angry aboriginal ghosts roaming around not just some european settlers who rocked up in the last two centuries yeah i mean of course but that's way too logical and thinking about it way too much and too sensibly aren't we because those aboriginal like the others they're like oh what happens well you died of a disease where you were going somewhere on a boat with other people with diseases you know there was the risks where the aboriginal people are like what the [ __ ] guys what the f why why greedy bastards the guide then gave us an account of the twins whom a colleague of his had seen on multiple occasions these two eerie apparitions were seven to ten feet tall but were composed of shimmering silvery light they nevertheless resembled very clear silhouettes of humans with the outlines of their rib cages somewhat unnervingly moving back and forth in and out of their bodies like pendulums as they stood and stared at you oh my god that is fairly creepy who came up with this i mean obviously they didn't really see a ghost so he's like yeah yeah the ghosts uh what do they look like well uh you know the first person who obviously made it up is like their rib cages came out of their body i'd be like dude you need to write you need to like write some stephen king's stuff because that is that is an imagination i'll be like well they were wearing a sheet they had red eyes that's all you know that's that's it not their rib cages came out and back into their body that is some nightmare [ __ ] my dude one theory when the twins were actually just one person the abnormally told dr reed who was once a doctor at the station or maybe this particular tour guide in question was just a little pissed up and seeing double when he ran into the good doctor a similar story came from yet another colleague of our guide this colleague was walking down a path near the mortuary called paranormal alley oh what's that again david is that is that front loading yes uh in part of the station where supernatural energy is at its highest when he saw two ghostly apparitions walking menacingly towards him also filled with foreboding he turned around to beat a retreat and he saw two more ghosts behind him also heading in his direction he was trapped this the man sat on the ground felt dizzy an overpowering sense of doom and he was violently sick it was only when he managed to rally and leave the area that he began to feel better again in both of these cases which were testimonies of people who worked at the station related to us second hand by yet another staff member who was literally paid to creep us out they are of dubious reliability to say the least oh i just found this is completely and utterly irrelevant i just changed my position and found a a sticker stuck to my leg which i've been walking around outside all day with that leg with that sticker stuck to my leg from one of my kids brilliant thanks for the tangent fact boy get back to it so it could all just be nonsense however with some later research i found out that numerous staff members swear up and down that they are true believers in ghosts and evidently those same true believers are drawn to apply to work at the quarantine station in the first place yeah although honestly like they do uh ghost tours here in prague where you can you know there's lots of tours you can do around the city and they all have different themes and one of them is like you can go to a ghost store and i've never done it but it's like yo if i needed a job and someone was like simon you got to do the ghost store i'll be like okay i got no problem with this like it's fake but i can act you know we'll just be like and then during the night blah blah blah blah blah and people are like oh my god that's so scary i know right ghosts are so real michael they are real absolutely sorry i don't know who michael is just made him up i always like to give people names in my stories like at disneyland for kooks so if the stories out aren't outright lies if you are regularly seeing uh shimmering silvery twins with moving rib cages or just being bushwhacked by fast-moving specters while walking on a forest path these aren't just incidents where you get the creeps from a bit of darkness or a bit of cold that can easily be explained away this is either a sign of a more serious mental illness for which you might need medicational therapy or a hallucination brought on by a neurological condition in fact you may want to get yourself checked out by a doctor to make sure that you don't have brain cancer or chemical poisoning oh it's like this is the thing if i started seeing ghosts i would be like oh my god this is so cool i can see ghosts i'll be like i'm probably really sick it's either you know i'm going to need like drugs from a psychiatrist or i've got a brain disease i mean like non-site you know like a brain cancer or something like that it's either way it's not good or i'm being poisoned by something uh which probably means that my family's being poisoned as well because you know we're in the same environment all the time so that would be brilliant um that that would be my reality if i saw ghosts i'm being serious here profoundly realistic and bizarre visual hallucinations while you are awake might mean there's something very serious and life-threateningly wrong with your health get yourself checked be safe don't just say ooh ghosts tell your friends to go on with your day while a tumor that could significantly reduce your life expectancy might be growing inside your skull yes yes go see a doctor get a brain scan be like doctor i am seeing that i know is not there and they'll be like get him to the mri machine there was a great uh i've i've mentioned this on videos not on this channel but on other channels that i've done before and i still haven't found it and people have sent me so many things trying to identify this one thing that i just desperately want to find it was on reddit years ago and it was this incredibly creepy letter that a tenant had written to a lan her landlord or his landlord complaining about the upstairs neighbors being like they uh they keep banging on and it got and it goes through the lesser side they keep banging on the floors and uh i know they're watching me because they bang on this uh on the floor so i hear it on the ceiling of the rooms that i'm in and i'm pretty sure they've installed a camera somewhere but i can't find it blah blah blah blah and it just gets like spine chillingly creepy like the creepiest you've ever read and uh then the top comments on reddit was like uh or the the not the title because that would have spoiled it but like under the image it was like uh a letter written by someone with schizophrenia and you're like i'm getting chills thinking about this right now it was the craziest thing i've seen like not not being derogatory towards that person being crazy but it's like a crazy thing to read like it was mind-blowing just how that just feeling because at first you're like i'm reading that thing and i'm like oh my god those neighbors are who the hell does this why would you hate someone so much to do that to them and then you get down and you're like wait something's not right here and then you realize it's all just in their head and it's like god damn i still remember this if anyone knows that put it in the comments below because i guess if you if you're watching this video if not just uh hit me up on twitter at simon whistler because god damn i would love to find that if i find it i'll read it on a future episode because it is just uh i am off on the i'm off on a massive tangent let's get back mr slimy [Music] we arrived at the morgue while standing outside a man aged in his 20s or 30s started to have what i would describe as a panic attack he said he couldn't head inside the morgue there was just too much overwhelming negativity coming from the place i once had a panic attack it was really intense i was quite young i think i must have been in my late teens or early 20s and i just smoked too much weed and i was just hanging out just by myself and i'm like i just suddenly felt like not good like oh my god oh my god something's definitely wrong and then it just you got in this spiral of like something is wrong something is wrong something is wrong and i'm like just trying to get a grip of myself like i shot myself in the bathroom like like what is going on am i having a heart attack and then a few minutes later i feel totally fine and i've never had a panic attack again and uh let's just say i've not smoked that much weed again because it was not good time the tour guide obviously familiar with this sort of episode was comforting him and explaining and eventually convinced him that everything would be fine and to head inside during the man's panic attack alex and i happened to be standing nearby but we said nothing amelia observed what was interesting about it was that the man said he didn't really believe in ghosts but that the feeling had suddenly hit him either this meant that he wasn't telling the whole truth or the creepy stories of the exist of the evening had taken a mental toll on him which just goes to show how strong the power of suggestion can be on some people alex also wants me to mention that he could have been high or something which might have made it more quick to internalize the creepy atmosphere and have a profound reaction to it oh boy yes yeah i don't know this is like all things that alter your mental state yeah like i'm pretty sure i i no i i can't imagine myself having a panic attack unless there's a reason to be extremely panicked like that'll be like ah i've never been in a situation where it's been like oh my god this is a disaster i've always just been like okay let's logically deal with the problem i even when she's gone badly wrong like in a moment i'm usually like okay here's what we're gonna do because that's just how my mind works it's only when i've been chemically altered but it's been a problem sounds like this guy got super high and went on a ghost tour which seems like yeah yeah that that i can imagine that i can i wouldn't get super high before going on the ghost tour indeed the entire tour group had something of a party vibe so i can't rule out that some pills were popped or splits were smoked before by some people prior to the tour inside the morgue there was a table on top of which there was a mannequin from a 1980s shop window simulating the appearance of a corpse we barled into the room and stood around the table with our bags against the wall there was one gap where there was a large window and no pane of glass which would not step which people would not stand in front of so in order to make room i sit in front of it my own anxieties were about spiders or snakes coming through the window or maybe a flying fox a kind of giant bat rather than a ghost i'd be like david why are you scared of spiders you're an adult man they'll be like because david lives in australia west like my wife whatever she sees a spider she doesn't like spiders she's always like when you put it outside and i never do because i know if you put the spiders outside they die so i always just take it to another room and pretend to put it out the window hopefully my wife doesn't listen to this um and i'm like why are you scared of spiders i just don't like them if we lived in australia should be like because they could kill me that'd be like legitimate fear i also don't want to put this outside as it turns out in phase two in the light of day i discovered the giant window just opened into a second part of the morgue also inside so i needn't have worried on top of the mannequin the tour guide placed an emf meter a device the size of a tv remote used to detect abnormalities in electromagnetic fields if a disturbance was picked up the green light on the emf meter would turn red thus according to paranormal investigators a ghost was nearby unfortunately scientific testing has shown that emf meters can be set off by anything from a mobile phone to a computer mouse to power lines to car batteries to vibrating sexual aids who did that research it's like yeah we're going to get this ghost meter and put it next to a dildo okay what's up who it what what research are you doing the tour guide began to explain the cadavers were brought to the morgue for dissections autopsies and embalming once a disease killed them as such even today the ghostly stench of rotting flesh could be smelled by witnesses standing in the morgue i figure it was more likely a possum or a bandicoot to died in the bushes somewhere outside or a nearby trash can was stinking in the australian heat the guide warned us of the local morgue poltergeist a gentleman known only by the nickname of mr slimy who was nevertheless theorized to be a highly sexed mortician who used to hook up with nurses at night at his place of work i'm not sure how many nurses would be fond of making out in a morgue but whatever floats their boat i'm not one to kink shame the problem with mr slimy the guide explained was that his libido did not abandon him at death numerous witnesses over the years claimed that mr slimy had sexually assaulted them by groping their genitals playing with their nipples or kissing them on the mouth apparently mr slimy did not discriminate between men and women sounds like the tour guides gayla hansi is the ghost it's like someone touched my bottom it was the ghosts ah yes apparently mr slimy did not discriminate between men and women this was another interesting tactic to creep out the crowd in a whole new way and draw a particularly pronounced groan from some of the women there no boyfriend or husband had the audacity thankfully of impersonating mr slimy to scare their better half but i bet it's been done over the years oh my god yeah absolutely just like to my wife just to be absolutely clear be like oh yeah that would be amusing but i'm a child so maybe mr slimy was the reason that they left a mannequin in there wait what people filled up am i missing something was he assaulting sexually assaulting mannequins people falled out of the morgue i was one of the last people to exit just me alex and a couple of people standing around the table talking quietly to the tour guide as i strode forward from the wall and passed the table on my way out the emf meter which had previously been a placid green started flashing an alarming red the tour guide met my eyes and said he liked something about you it was probably probably a phone something like that in order to break the tension and pass over this awkward moment with a light-hearted joke i said rather loudly to the unseen specter how about a [ __ ] david you said you weren't going to ruin it for everyone the ghost did not respond and the guides to my disappointment and shame seemed like seemed slightly annoyed and upset i felt i pushed my luck too far it's kind of a dream but i like it just then alex decided to chime in and ask what it goes i am i'm going to get this video demonetized if we continue down this route david so uh definitely can't read that definitely can't say that one okay the postmaster and the matron [Music] yeah because uh youtube scans videos if you're just listening this is a podcast it also goes out on youtube youtube scans videos for words and if they find words they don't like they take away your money and they restrict it to an audience of over a certain age which is good i mean everyone listening to this is probably over the age you know is an adult or teenager i guess anyway so like 16 to 34 or 18 to 34 is my maid audience and then like around the edges of that typically um what are we talking about oh yeah if i say some of the words that david and alex talk about there let's just say i'm not going to get paid for this video and i like to get paid you know this is my work the tour continued uphill to the post office here was supposed to be an evil malevolent spirit named the postmaster it is speculated the actual identity of the poltergeist is superintendent james forsyth vincent who ran the choir as a name and a half isn't it forsythe vincent sounds like uh anyone you know double barreled surnames and i feel like is this a difference because i think i made this i've definitely made this joke before and people are like that's the opposite in america like if you've got a double-barreled surname in the uk you're usually a bit posh whereas people in the us were like ah you've got double world surnames you live in a trailer park in the u.s or something like that that's an interesting difference he ran the quarantine station good his wife died mysteriously of a morphine overdose less good and he married a woman 24 years his junior six months later well whether that's good or not that is uh a matter of opinion william hey to six months dude you could have waited till she was cold my man what the [ __ ] william haye a witness to the death also allegedly killed by the postmaster he is said to have committed suicide by shooting himself twice first in the stomach and then in the head uh people are going to be like ah addy shoot yourself twice well one cause you shoot yourself in the stomach like that's really painful i might as well shoot myself in the brain because this is i'm just gonna die like getting shot in the stomach isn't that like faint famously a painfully uh painfully way painful way to go you're gonna be okay i don't know an unusual method for suicide the postmaster had it buried within 24 hours of his death way way way is the postmaster murdering people he doesn't like like his wife and this dude and personally signed off on his autopsy william haye also became a vengeful ghost quarantined station meanwhile the ghost of the postmaster is said to be able to reduce people to spontaneous tears by sheer force of evil given how many reasons a person can have for bursting into tears especially when impressionable and front loaded by the ghost story it's difficult to investigate the phenomenon without more time and a suitable group of cry baby test subjects alex nevertheless spent several minutes trying to provoke the ghost calling the postmaster and i quote a small loser who was too stupid to know that getting a divorce was less scandalous than murdering your wife alex you savage the phantom did not appear and smite us down despite all of alex's come at me bro taunts and insults the only spontaneous crying that happened was from me laughing we then moved toward the hospital section the guy told us on the balcony that witnesses had detected an angry male energy there most likely from a male doctor who used to work there suck angry male energy sounds like incels nobody in the group detected anything we moved inside the hospital wing to where there were two main rooms filled with hospital beds in the first room we were told that was a benevolent spirit and we were asked if we felt a warmer of kindness in the room a few front-loaded people muttered agreement in the second room we were told it was inhabited by the matron the ghost of a head nurse and the most formidable entity in the quarantined station we were asked if anyone noticed the energy of the second room was drastically more evil led by the nose some people agreed the matron could overpower you with negative energy if you represented even the slightest disorder to a tightly run hospital ward at the back of the group alex immediately began wrestling and messing up the sheets and on the hospital beds nothing happened shocking the only thing of note to occur was a girl laid down on one of the hospital beds while the guide talked she later complained that she could have breathed properly which the guide speculated because people had died of tuberculosis and spanish influenza in those beds unless there were still traces of the disease on the bedsheets centuries later i suspect it was most likely hyperventilation and an active imagination i had also sat down on one of the beds and had noticed no such disturbance why are you sitting down on the beds i'd be like i'm on some ghost door in some abandoned hospital with like sheets that are 100 years old and we're like used for like plague victims i'd be like yeah har pass i mean i might be a little bit drunk moving into a little bit hungover but uh i'm just gonna i'm just gonna lean against this wall that sounds better the gravediggers cottage [Music] which brings us to the climax of the tour the last stop the so-called gravediggers cottage located between two grave sites despite the name a gravedigger never actually lived there instead the cottage was periodically inhabited by doctors who were said to have conducted sick and perverted experiments on women and children one woman is said to have committed suicide in the bathtub at the back of the cottage which is reputedly its most haunted room wait i mean like the doctor's doing experiments like yes has absolutely happened in history but did it really happen at a place where they were just quarantining people as they go into a country it doesn't seem like you know well at some point they're going to be released it's not like this is a death camp where they're just going to be murdered it's like well people there's a roster and a register and these people are just coming to australia it seems a little bit less likely than you know you're happening at a death camp the cottage itself is said to be inhabited by a powerful ghost named sam i feel like sam is like least ghostly name oh yes i'm the ghost all right he sounds friendly of unverified origin or identity the tour guides there all pay him a great deal of respect prior to entering the cottage the guides always knock and ask sam permission to enter it's a great way to ramp up the tension it's also a little bit cringe isn't it this is it this whole thing's a little bit cringe isn't it apparently sam was okay with two people inside today i do wonder if a believability and consistency guide sometimes printed that sam was angry and packed paying customers on their way before they could look around sounds like this is the last stop on the tourists like yeah yeah what's the time 10 o'clock seems sam's angry today and uh i want to catch the last bus tour bus home somehow i doubt it but certainly it paid not to make sam angry a few years ago a video went semi-viral in the australian media when a german medium pretended to be pushed by sam into an adjoining room the woman then claimed to have received a bruise from sam on her elbow the footage if you can find it shows a rather portly woman looking at the camera to make sure that it was pointed at her then comically flinging herself into another room out of sight of the camera if sam was truly responsible for this i'm confident to know that we share the same opinion of mediums i think it is a little messed up that some people think it's okay to take money by lying about talking to grieving people's deceased relatives yeah mediums are pieces of because you know it's fake you're doing cold reading like you're just looking up on like psychological hints that people are giving away and uh then you're manipulating them into thinking that you're talking to their dead relatives you know it's fake you know it's fake because you're faking it so you're kind of just a fraud aren't you kind of feels like you should be illegal doesn't it doesn't it because it's exploitative and it makes you a piece of uh numerous phenomenon have been noted at the gravediggers cottage voices moving furniture randomly opening cabinets or cabinets that refuse to open sounds of crying screams strange lights being emitted from the windows late at night when nobody's there the tour guide sent us inside gave us a little talk and then told us we were going to wait outside because the energy of the building was just too overwhelming later with research i found that all tour guides are instructed to do this a perfect tactic not only is it too much for our guide but we are left alone in the darkness to wander an extremely haunted location with a ghost that might harm us if ghosts were real this would be a legal minefield yes alex and i immediately set about our business alex seemed to be thoroughly absorbed by uttering obscenities a ghost so i didn't interrupt her meanwhile i quickly looked inside multiple cabinets to see what was inside at one point i found myself reflecting that it was actually quite a nice traditional australian cabin and i told alex i would love to have one like this at the edge of the woods alex snorted and said this place is a hole [Music] david are you smoking crack david this place is a dump you want to live here david get some taste looking at the old furniture rotary dull phone and rickety brass framed beds i admitted that it certainly would be creepy to sleep all night in this place alone at least not without a couple of lights and a nice show on the telly may i recommend streaming a nice relaxing podcast by simon whistler yes although don't stream my casual criminals podcast where you're staying alone in a cabin in the woods it'll scare the [ __ ] out of you and you will become convinced that you're gonna be on the podcast in the future i was gonna say if you're feeling that right now then uh but this isn't the casual criminalist podcast that is another podcast i do which you should absolutely subscribe to as well because i would say that wouldn't i if you don't my ghost is going to come and haunt you alex and i then head into the bathroom which was indeed a bit run down we walked up to the bathtub and stared inside its empty contents we did not see the specter of a woman who killed herself nevertheless alex said get out of there lady wait sorry get out of there late australian this is an australian accent it's a terrible one i'm not shall i try it i'm gonna try it get out of there lady you get all pruney come back with us we'll have a drink god i'm so terrible in accents i really need to work on that or just not do them let's just not do them that's an easier task there was no reply meanwhile a girlfriend and boyfriend had followed us into the bathroom the girl said it's i crepin here mate they i just added the mate to make it sound more australian oh they're tourists though it could be just from somewhere else and turned around the door to the door to leave again she then let out a massive blood-curdling scream directly in front of her she watched a cabinet open seemingly on its own her boyfriend gripped her in his arms they both seemed rooted to the spot i mean while then a flash knew what had happened when i looked through the same cabinet a few minutes earlier i struggled with the latch at the top that held both doors shut it was an old-fashioned latch and it was dark and i was admittedly still slightly drunk yes you had many bottles of wine so the thing had merely come free and scared the life out of this poor girl in the dark i quickly moved past the couple marched to the cabinet and slammed the doors shut as half the tour group looked on i then turned to the girl and said it's going to be all right nothing to worry about here the tour guide meanwhile came in inquired what had happened and spent a few minutes calming the girl down on the porch shortly thereafter we all piled into a shuttle and previously ignored i got a number of backstabs and compliments on my bravery as if i had swagged up and done something heroic instead of simply closing a cabinet i'd mucked up the first time all of which alex thought was hilarious you'd be like nah you're right i'll just be like yeah i'm a hero absolutely a hero buy me a beer but at least we had given other members of the tour group their money's worth without spoiling their fun i didn't mention the cause of this paranormal activity to anyone it just seemed like telling a child that the tooth fairy wasn't real ah david decoding the unknown is basically it could be called telling children the tooth fairy is not real couldn't it monkeys and shoes the tooth theory really strikes to the core of things when we are children the ghosts and goblins we fear in the dark seem all too real to an extreme degree i remember being deathly fearful for years as a young lad of an oddly shaped chest of drawers in my bedroom i had nightmares about this chest of drawers coming to life and dragging me into the basement where the furnace would eat me god damn david no wonder you're a writer your imagination is extremely active as it is a weird looking jester drawers that's a furnace he's a very boring child even at a young age we draw conclusions about natural phenomena but our young minds often draw the wrong conclusions humans are pattern seeking creatures we are evolved to find patterns in things and this in turn helps us to invent to adapt and to survive it is a power that makes us extremely successful as a species and has taken us from stone tools to skyscrapers in just a few thousand years but occasionally the wires get crossed we see patterns that aren't really there or we don't see the full picture the wheels and gears behind the illusion three thousand years ago thunder and lightning might be seen as the rage of an angry god less than 300 years ago the death of some livestock might seem like the worth of devil-worshipping witches and the bumps we hear in the night might be attributed to ghosts when all it is all it ever is is our powerful human imaginations running rampant and our instinct toward pattern seeking working overtime with limited information or misinformation we must recognize with some humility that we are just apes intellectually the same as we were a hundred thousand years ago just with more knowledge and more stuff i'll put it more glibly we're just monkeys and shoes as for alex and i we recovered from our hangovers the next day we decided not to write a paper we did however go back to enact phase two and came to some pretty solid empirical conclusions about our experience we may use that it was a unique idea for a tv show for two skeptics to wander around haunted houses drunk taking the piss out of ghosts and urban myths then returning the next day to investigate the paranormal activity we provoked so if anyone instills this idea you host royalties anyway my fellow apes sweet dreams and sleep tight thank you david this was very enjoyable i hope who are you out there listening you enjoyed this i don't know this show is just an excuse for me to read interesting stuff but people watch it which i love or they listen to it as a podcast if you are watching this make sure you have smashed that subscribe button so you find out about all our new shows although obviously that doesn't work because youtube is youtube look if you watch the end you're probably going to see more of this show because that is how youtube works uh if you're listening as a podcast thank you so much please consider leaving a review if you want to make it five stars that's brilliant if you want to make it one stuff simon made a show about ghosts and all he does is make fun of ghosts one stars ghosts are real go for it that's okay i don't mind it just hurts my feelings that so it doesn't that's it that's all i got thanks for listening or watching and i'll see you next time to decode the unknown i just made that ending up right now not bad right not bad [Music] you

Channel: Decoding the Unknown

Views: 234,431

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Id: Onyz2FMFFP0

Length: 87min 22sec (5242 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 08 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/prollie]

Anyone else hunting for that schizophrenic tenant letter? Anyone found it yet?

[u/TheMadChaotician]

I would love a channel just dedicated to Simon reading anecdotes from his writers. It's delightful.

[u/mental_lil_mama]

I was just wondering if he dropped this channel. I listen via podcasts and there hasn’t been any new loaded in a while. Thanks for showing that it’s there on YouTube!