DR Q … The second concluding part of the epic ‘Last Orders on

Quentin Weir Ph.D. and Oddfellow encounter Elder Gods from the Cthulhu Mythos on a street of ill repute as slimy, suspicious, slithering things slide soundlessly through a sinful, saucy suburb.

We’ve known Ben for well over a year now, our paths crossed in the summer of 2018 and we finally met him at Sage Paracon 2018, in November of that year and got on like a paranormal house on fire. Ben is the sort of person you can chat too for ages and not have to keep looking at your watch. He is not a celebrity, nor is he a paranormal TV star, Ben is just Ben, and this is what makes him who he is. At the end of November 2019, he was awarded with the title of ‘special contribution to the paranormal’ from the Higgypop Paranormal Entertainment Awards. His battles with his Aspergers and his struggles with his depression are well documented (by himself), and because of this he is loved by lots of many of us on social media but also bullied by some on social media, for exactly the same reasons, the beauty of social media eh? He is probably not the sort of person a paranormal magazine should give page time too, it’s not the normal thing to do, but then again we are not normal, so we asked Ben some questions in the hope that for those that don’t know him it would give them a greater understanding of a person’s love the paranormal BUT for a person’s personal battles and demons. What’s to love and like about the paranormal? I love the paranormal because it’s such a fantastic subject that I have become interested in and fully focused on. I’ve met such lovely people in in the paranormal community as well. How long has the paranormal been an interest of yours? The paranormal has been interest of mine since the age of 18 when I sadly lost both my parents. Where’s the scariest place that you’ve been to, what happened? 30 East Drive in Pontefract I did a paranormal investigation there I was up the stairs alone because I needed to use the bathroom on a break during our investigation when I came out to head back downstairs I heard the taps turn on back in the bathroom I remember turning them off I then went to head downstairs to tell everyone then I felt a burning sensation on my body and there was 3 burn marks appeared across my stomach I freaked out definitely a night to remember. Have you ever seen a ghost? If so, when and where? Yes, I’ve seen phantom figures from the corners of my eye in my home on several occasions and I get the feeling I’m being watched. You’re quite open about your issues with your Aspergers, depression and such things, has being involved in the paranormal made it better to deal with at times? I am yes I like to think I can help inspire & influence other people in a similar situation and yes it has it has had a good impact on my life since I started I’ve made most of my friends through this subject.

You’re very close to the Help! My House is Haunted team? What is it about Barri, Jayne & Chris that gives you this connection? Yes, I am yes, they’re good friends of mine I’ve known Chris, Barri and Jayne for some time now they have all had a positive impact on my life just like the rest of my friends have which I appreciate so much and I’m thankful that they all entered my life they also inspired me in the paranormal field. What are your hopes for the paranormal world in 2020 and beyond?

I am hoping to grow my paranormal experience to another level where I invest and collect more haunted items for my collection, I also going to continue with making other people happy and help them in any way I can. Paranormal Bucket List, what are the top paranormal hotspots and locations that you’d love to visit?

I love to investigate the locations as followed - Harrisville Farmhouse - The Queen Mary in California - Edinburgh Vaults - Fox Hollow Farm - Zak Bagans Haunted Museum that’s a few of many places where I would like to investigate on paranormal investigations. You’re a Haunted Collector, what’s your favourite item, tell us more about them?

it’s really difficult choosing a favourite object from my collection I’ve got a couple of special objects one of them is a bottle of Peggy’s Holy Water that owner Jayne Harris gave me from Zak’s Haunted Museum in Las Vegas there were only two bottles of holy water that was blessed for Peggy the doll and Zak’s the owner of the other bottle I’m honoured to own a piece of paranormal history. My other item is a box that should never be opened that I have blessed and put a cross onto it every night I seem to get nightmares from the box where I’m being chased by the entity that’s attached to the red box. You were given an award SPECIAL CONTRIBUTION TO THE PARANORMAL in the recent Higgypop Paranormal Awards, how did you feel when you found out about this?

I was lost for words when I found out I was the winner for contribution to the paranormal 2019! I was out at the time during this event and when I got back home and checked into social media I was in complete shock to have found out I won award I couldn’t thank everyone enough for choosing me for this special award it really meant a lot to me. If there is one thing that you could change about the paranormal, what would it be and why?

I wouldn’t change it for anything I have found the right thing for me it’s such a fascinating subject and I’ve met so many lovely down to earth people in the paranormal community I am just going to carry on with making others smile and helping others and people with their paranormal problems.

To follow Ben on twitter - @wweisawesome123 To find out more about Ben, watch this: https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/av/uk-england-leicestershire-45285555/manwho-lost-parents-finds-solace-in-haunted-objects

Early on this year, Neil Packer and myself decided we wanted to do something different than a usual Investigation to celebrate Halloween. We had suggested several different experiments we could try and the most favourable one was to try and Astral Project into the large Arch Mirror located in the Séance Room at The Haunted Antiques Paranormal Research Centre. Having Astral Projected several times before, I was quite confident that we could do it safely and explore what was behind the mirror as so much activity has been recorded around this Mirror in recent times. Many people have captured interested photo’s, there is footage of SLS figures coming out of it and shadows and faces have been seen around it too, so it seemed an experiment that we should at least have a try at. On the night of Halloween, we met at the centre as arranged but unfortunately only Neil and myself turned up so it was only the two of us. We debated cancelling the event but I felt we should still try the experiment and see what happens. We went into the Séance room and set up. We decided Neil would operate the camera and watch over me as I went into deep meditation in order to leave my body and ‘fly’ into the mirror. Neil started the camera; I started my meditation music and we began. From here on in this becomes my account of what happened on my ‘journey’.

40 Listening to my meditation music and focussing on my breathing I relaxed deeper and deeper into the chair. I went to the point where I felt my body was completely supported by the energy of the Universe and that it was completely safe and protected for the next 30 minutes or so. When I was at a point when my spirit could leave my body, I lifted up and out of my physical body and gently moved towards the mirror. At this point I could see Neil and I paused in front of the mirror. I put my hand out to push through into the mirror but it was hard and unyielding. I was aware of a voice telling me that I could not enter the mirror this way and that I had to go up. I looked up and went skywards, through the roof of the centre and straight up. Up, Up and into the clouds.

I was aware of the clouds and how they were changing colour, the first clouds having a reddish tint, then they changed to a faint orange shade. Up, and up I went. The clouds had a yellow tinge and then green. I recognised these as being the colours of the chakras. Up I continued to go, but I felt I was no longer on the physical earth as we know it, passing through a beautiful shade of aqua green clouds then a phase of faint purple clouds. After this was a beautiful white light which was warm and brilliant. It is here I stopped and a voice said to me that I cannot enter into the ‘mirror’ realm directly and I needed extra protection. At that point, the light that I was became much brighter and stronger. I felt Angels around me and it was them who had given me the protection.

I began my descent back to the centre, passing through the clouds of colour only when I came out of the clouds everything was in black and white and grey tone. It was like viewing it all through and old black and white tv set. There was no colour. Back into the Research Centre I approached the mirror, Neil was still sitting there and I put my hand up and touched the surface of the mirror, and it went through. I entered and went down a long dark tunnel, I could see I was illuminating my path as I went with my own light.

I was drawn to a ‘Horned man’ with the goatee beard sitting higher than the others on the left-hand side of me. The being closest to me looked very much like the ‘Green Man’, a woodland being with greenery and thin brown twigs around his very old face. The next man was very large with long black hair and a beard to match. He had many wrinkles and his face was weathered and worn. He could well have been ‘Father Time’ for all I know but these beings were not welcoming. These beings felt ancient and as old as time itself. I glanced down the rest of them on and with my own light I could see they were standing in a ‘V’ formation, 5 either side with 2 Demon-like beings at the end - 13 in total, including the Horned Man. I was standing in the wider part of the V and it felt quite hostile. Were these the Guardians of this Gateway?

I started to feel a bit overwhelmed and needed to be cautious. The environment was intimidating and I was beginning to be afraid. My way was blocked and I felt they were not going to let me go through this Gateway. I was considering turning back and I felt I was out of my depth. Then, one of the beings spoke to me. He said “What are you doing here?” I replied, “I just wanted to see what was here, I just wanted to learn more about this place.”

There was a long silence as if they were considering what I had said. They then moved aside and the man who spoke pointed for me to go forward with his staff.

Two of the beings from the back escorted me through the group. I could not see them but I was aware of two black shadows either side of me. We travelled through another pitch-black silent void and when we came through that it was like the universe opened up. It was a vast expanse of space. Still quite dark, but it looked like there were lots of stars dotted around – some were just pin points of light. I then realised that these were not stars but doorways like our Mirror. It reminded me of Xavier’s Cerebro in the X-men, only these were not mutants that were in this vast space, but entities, creatures and spirits. It was like a spiritual Highway.

The two shadows escorted me to one of the doorways, they waited outside whilst I entered the room on my own. Again, I felt quite scared. I looked around the room, it was a medium sized room but dimly lit with two small fire torches on the wall at the front. As I looked around the room, it looked like it was covered in gold, no windows only solid walls, and they were covered in Egyptian hieroglyphs. It felt like it was in a base room in a Pyramid. A figure then came into the room, I recognised him as Anubis with his black dog like face. He looked at me and said sternly “What are you doing here?” I said “I just wanted to see what was here and I just want to learn”. He said with a strong, intimidating voice “You should not be here!” I said “I do not mean you any harm; I just want to learn!”

He continued to stare straight at me and then thoughtfully he said “There is much to learn” and he followed that by saying “It is now time for you to leave!” I said “Thank you” and bowed my head as a sign of respect and left the room. The escorts joined me again as I came out of the room and guided me back across the open space and through the black void to where the group of beings were. They said nothing but parted to allow my passage through. They watched my every move. The escorts joined the group and I was left to make my way through the next black void where I could see the light from the tunnel to the Mirror. I came back through the mirror to the black and white realm and flew straight out of the building and up through the Chakra coloured clouds until I got to the white light. The extra protection and light were returned to the Angels and my own light restored to normal. I came back down to the normal coloured reality and back to the Research Centre and reentered my body. Slowly coming back round. It was a big relief to be back and I know Neil was pleased that he did not have to come in to the Mirror to find me. Whilst it was a good experiment and it lasted just over 30 minutes; it will be sometime before I go back.

This article may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you, on many levels I would wager, but stick with it and you will probably be as agog as I am to learn more. I’m going to take you back to World War II, and Russia.

On the 15th October 1941, the city of Moscow was in a state of total panic, they had been expecting the German Wehrmacht for some time and here they were. What the Russians (and the Invaders for that matter) were unaware of was that a week previous, on the 8 th October 1941, Stalin had given the order to have three women’s air units created. The person most historians believe to be responsible for this decision – or at least putting the thought in the Russian leader’s head – was Marina Raskova.

Most people are familiar with female aviators such as Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson, but most have not heard of Marina. She was born to a middleclass Russian family in 1912 to an Opera singing father and a teacher mother and aspired to be a musician herself. Various events put paid to that dream, including her daughter being born in 1930 and she began working as a draftswoman for the Aero Navigation laboratory. Originally, she trained as a navigator cum pilot and was actually very famous as the first ever female soviet Navigator in the Russian Air Force in 1933. Just a year later, another first for Russian women, she became the first ever female flying instructor at the Zhukovsky Air Academy. The next few years saw her setting records for distance flights, building on her famous public image even further.

When war broke out, many women applied to become pilots and join the military. Interestingly this was not actually prohibited but the applications would become enmeshed in red tape and hit permanent walls to try and dissuade the fairer sex to continue with their applications.

Enter Marina. Being a Russian “heroine”, she had the ear of the leader, Joseph Stalin, and strongly suggested to him to use the female pilots and navigators to form their own units. The three different divisions of Marina’s plan consisted of the 586 th Fighter Aviation Regiment, 587 th Bomber Aviation Regiment and the 588 th Night Bomber Regiment.

Back to the women, it was (and still is) highly unusual to have combat pilots who are not men, but what was also noteworthy was their M.O., their battle plan if you like. These amazing aviators were flying Polikarpov U-2 aircraft, no fancy Mosquito’s or Beaufights or Junkers JU87’s for these women, the U-2 was a wood and canvas single engine open top bi-plane, nicknamed the crop duster and primarily used as a training aircraft. To make the most of the equipment that they had, they would be able to fly in without radar detection due to their size and structure, idle their engine to near stall speed, glide in low

and drop their bombs – of which there would be two, one under each wing. Following a campaign strategy of both harassment and also precision bombing, this group had forty crews at its peak – with two people per aircraft, a pilot and navigator. The facts that cause me to make the “what!” face quite a lot whilst researching for this article was that the crews would fly between eight to twelve sorties per night, simply returning to their airfield to be restocked with bombs between trips. Frequently they came under attack from German Luftwaffe and would have to come up with ingenious ways to save their aircraft without weapons on board, no parachutes until 1944, no radios and making do with good oldfashioned pencil and paper to plot their courses. The one benefit of these crop dusters was that they were slow and that even their maximum speed was less than the stall speed of the fighters of the Luftwaffe which meant they were very hard to shoot down or engage with. Whether this lack of equipment was due to cost or the quote by Charlotte

*when we say not so’ orrible, some of it actually might be

Whitton “Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.” one could debate at length. The official reason for this, and their method of protecting themselves from attacking Messerschmitt to be to duck, was due to the limited weight capacity of the U2. What we do know though is if they were shot by anything that had some kind of flammable component, it would cause the flimsy wood and canvas to go up like a firework.

So why did I title this “not all witches fly broomsticks”, you may remember earlier that I described their technique of attack be to silently glide in and the only warning that the Germans would get of an approaching bombing was a swish of wind, causing them to be known as the “Night Witches”, likening the sound to broomsticks being ridden through the skies.

They were an incredibly successful group of aviators, also helping with the defeat of the Germans by conducting over 23,670 sorties, more than 28,600 flying hours and attacking places like the Crimea, Belarus, Poland and Germany – the Polish offensive was over 5,000 sorties alone!

Sadly, Marina did not see the end of the war, she died on the 4 th January 1943 when her aircraft fatally crashed during a forced landing, but in yet another slightly pioneering move, she received the first state funeral of the war.

As a flyer myself, I cannot imagine how these women achieved these kind of results – dropping around thirty thousand different types of explosives – in what was basically a rickety kit plane with none of the conventional resources attributed to other military teams whatsoever. I do hope you agree with me that these particular witches deserve to be recognised and remembered, perhaps thanked for their specific type of curse that they placed on the opposition. If you want to read more – and there is much more than I can put into a thousand word or so article- grab a copy of Defending the Motherland by Lyuba Vinogradova and fill your boots! Penny x

Atop Greenwood Memorial in Spokane, Washington, an empty mausoleum sits alone. Snug against its back is a rotting staircase leading down to the street. Unsuspecting as such a staircase may look; local legend suggests a more sinister function. Herein lays the story of the “1000 Steps”. As timeworn graveyards became obsolescent in the late 1800s, the need for a “modern” burial site grew in the city of Spokane. This need eventually lead to the foundation of Greenwood Memorial Terrace in 1888. The 3-terrace cemetery began with two levels called the Flats and the Bench. The lowest-level Flats contain the front entrance gate, an office and a mélange of different grave markers and headstones. The Bench holds a different landscape, featuring high-society obelisks, mausoleums and family plots. It’s on the Bench that the mausoleum of the Elks sits uninhabited. Stories have swirled for years regarding the purpose of the mausoleum and the staircase behind it. The explanations have ranged from satanic rituals and pagan meetings, to overgrown tunnels (which Greenwood has as well). The truth is hidden, however, within an agreement concocted by the fraternal organization called The Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elk. Their initial plan was to build a special mausoleum in which their brotherhood would be buried together, separate of their wives and children. Naturally their families objected and so the agreement ended, and the mausoleum and staircase were left to decay.

As for paranormal activity, a multitude of claims have been reported over the years, particularly regarding the crumbling staircase.

Glowing orbs and full-bodied apparitions can be seen while climbing the stairs at night and disembodied moans of men, women and children can be heard from all directions. Some have even said that the supernatural energy is so tangible and thick, that it resembles the feeling of “rain falling on your skin”. This inundation of paranormal phenomena has led to feeling as though it takes “1000 steps” to get to the top, giving it the name, it has today.

Photo: © Nick Thomas

Upon my many personal visits to the mausoleum, I can confirm that there is a particular energy to the area. Whether it is a spiritual meeting place for the dead, a transcendent imprint of the esoteric brotherhood or just a study in Will-o’-the-wisp theories; I can feel mystical forces at work around the 1000 steps. Paranormal activity is rather rampant at Greenwood Memorial Terrace as a whole. This could point back to the aforementioned “overgrown tunnel” whereas a (supposedly haunted) train tunnel ran through the Bench until sealed off in 1974. In addition, numerous bodies were exhumed from various cemeteries to move into Greenwood during its conception and the act of digging up graves has always been known to stir up preternatural occurrences. With so many factors contributing to the haunting of Greenwood Memorial Terrace, it’s likely the activity at 1000 Steps is more a spill over than an intended concentration. Greenwood could be so full of ghosts and ghouls that they venture out occasionally to take a stroll down the stairs. Then in the moments we catch a glimpse, do we become the ghosts in their stories instead? Well…those are theories and stories for another time.

Photo: © Anne Coogan-Gehr

Amanda Paulson is a paranormal investigator located in Spokane, Washington. She has been a paranormal enthusiast her entire life but her investigating experience started in 2008 when she joined a ghost hunting group in Montana. Since moving to Washington in 2010, Amanda has been solo investigating all over the United States. A selfproclaimed paranormal historian and highly sensitive person, Amanda has had experiences with the occult since she was a young child. Through a scientific approach, Amanda seeks to substantiate paranormal claims with solid evidence and give peace and understanding to those experiencing paranormal activity. As the creator of Pretty Fn Spooky, Amanda is a lifelong seeker of the unknown and lover of anything that might make you say, “that’s pretty fricken spooky!” Contact info: @prettyfnspooky on Twitter, IG, FB Email: Prettyfnspooky@gmail.com Website: Prettyfnspooky.com