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In addition to being a fun way to learn new stuff about the weird world, paranormal conventions also give you the opportunity to meet like-minded individuals. In fact, that might be the best part. If you’re surrounded by people at your job or in your family who don’t share your particular obsession with the more wonderful aspects of the world, well then they can get tired of talking about the supernatural pretty fast. Or sometimes you get shut down if someone is a little too religious (I just had someone post on the wall of the Madison haunted history tour that by telling ghost stories we were really summoning the Devil… yikes!)

So, it’s always great to bring people on the show that we meet when we’re out in the wild. We met Timothy Yohe at the Haunted America Ghost Conference in Alton, IL. Hailing from St. Louis, Tim is a paranormal researcher whois as interested in the scientific aspect as he is the spiritual. He runs two blogs, Paranormal Insights (with a more spiritual bent) and Paranormal Entanglement (with a more scientific bent).

We were intrigued by Tim’s theories on how limestone of all rock, seems to be the likely candidate of the kind of stone that would be able to “record” as in the stone tape theory.

What’s the stone tape theory? According to Wikipedia it’s the speculation that ghosts and hauntings are analogous to tape recordings, and that electrical mental impressions released during emotional or traumatic events can somehow be “stored” in moist rocks and other items and “replayed” under certain conditions. 

In 1972, this theory was exposed to a huge population when the BBC put on a ghost story called The Stone Tape that was written by Nigel Kneale, the writer of the seminal sci-fi saga Quatermass (I wrote a little obituary for him on the Sunspot blog when he died in 2006.) Funny enough, the stone tape theory was first articulated by an archaeologist-turned-parapsychologist named Thomas Charles Lethbridge, who also believed that extraterrestrials had a had in shaping human evolution, a subject that Nigel Kneale mined to great effect in his classic Five Million Years To Earth.

Here’s the stone tape theory part of the episode of Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers that we mention in the podcast. There’s also a ghost story from Wisconsin, which I was delighted by seeing my home state in a UK TV show as a little lad.

One of Yohe’s ideas is that since limestone is made up of former organic matter, it might contain some residual living energy that spirits might be able to tap into. Because it’s calcified bodies of sea life,...