Welcome New Listeners! Revisit Episode 1: Ghosts & Specters
Richard Hatem's Paranormal Bookshelf
Richard Hatem welcomes new listeners to his podcast, 'Richard Hatem's Paranormal Bookshelf,' by re-broadcasting Episode 1: 'Ghosts & Specter
Key takeaways
- Childhood fear was both paralyzing and formative—used as a survival mechanism in an emotionally volatile home.
- A single book, 'Ghosts & Specters,' became a gateway to understanding the unknown and finding identity.
Main topics
- Childhood trauma and emotional survival
- The role of literature in self-discovery
Notable quotes
Those lights gave me direction and a destination. They gave me hope.
I felt like I was being stripped naked and that all my friends could suddenly see this thing inside of me that I'd been trying so hard to keep secret. That thing was fear.
Conclusion
This episode is a heartfelt origin story—where fear, memory, and liter
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:01) Astonishing Legends Network. Speaker 1 (0:13) Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. Now, for those of you who have been with me for years, you might be wondering why Ghosts and Spectres is showing up in your feed again. Well, it's because I recently had the incredibly good fortune to be a guest on one of my favorite podcasts of all time, Woo Woo with Rachel Dratch. In fact, my episode just dropped. So if you haven't heard it, run over to her show that she does with her amazing co-host Irene Bremes and give it a listen. Now, they had me on to talk about Mothman, the original case that took place in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, back in 1966 and 67. And we talked about the movie that I wrote based on that. And we talked about the upcoming annual Mothman Festival, where I'm going to be next week on September 19th and 20th. And that's just the beginning, because we talked about all kinds of woo-woo stuff. And it was really a dream come true to suddenly be a guest on a podcast you've been listening to. for years. It's amazing, and it's kind of scary. You might not believe it, but I get very starstruck, so I was actually really nervous as the recording day rolled up, but they were so nice to me. Rachel and Irene are exactly what you hoped they would be, kind and friendly and welcoming and fun and funny and down-to-earth and just truly into the subjects they talk about, like genuinely curious, so the conversation just flows. They set me at my ease and we ended up having a great time. And most important, I got to do Penji. I have been obsessed with Penji. Really terrified, actually. And every time I listen to the show, I think about what I would ask Penji. So literally all the way up to the minute that I was on the show and it was time to talk to Penji, I still wasn't sure exactly what question I would ask. But as soon as they brought it up, a question occurred to me. that turned out to be the perfect question. So if you haven't heard the episode, go listen to the episode to hear the question I asked and the answer I got, which thank God was the answer I wanted. But anyway, I realized that there might be a lot of people who listen to their podcast, but don't know about my podcast. But after hearing me on their show, decided to come over and check out Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf. So to all the new listeners who heard me there and followed me here, thank you. I cannot tell you how happy I am to have you here. Now, this is a rebroadcast, if you will, of the very first episode of RHPB from just like two years ago. And just so you know, even though this one is very pilot-y, You should know that the episodes don't go in chronological order, so you can really listen in any order. You can start anywhere. I just put this one out for you guys to start with. But the episodes jump around in terms of times in my life, and every episode features a different book. So it's designed for easy listening. You can use this podcast any way you want. So this is one of what I call the traditional episodes. Now, the ones in the feed that are marked special bonus episode, those are more interview style episodes where I talk to friends from the world of the paranormal or authors and experts in some area of the supernatural. So anyway, it's pretty easy to tell which episodes are which in the feed. So once again, if you're a new listener, welcome. I am so glad you're here. And if you're a loyal longtime listener who just loves hearing the stories over and over again, and I know who you are, you guys mean everything to me. All right, if you're all settled in and ready for some Ghosts and Spectres, here we go. Ghosts and Spectres by Bruce and Nancy Roberts. Speaker 1 (4:23) I grew up on a hillside in Monterey Park, California, just a few miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Sometimes at night, I'd stand on my bed and lean way over and look out my window. From there, I could see the lights of downtown flickering in the distance. To me, those lights were the real world. A world of happy, secure, content people who had jobs they loved and ate in fancy restaurants and didn't feel trapped in their lives and scared all the time. Those people were called grown-ups. And that's what I wanted to be. If I could see that world from my bedroom, that meant I could get there one day and be one of them. Those lights gave me direction and a destination. They gave me hope. Years later, I realized my window faced the wrong way and I wasn't looking at downtown Los Angeles at all. I was looking at a strip mall and beyond that, a cemetery. Speaker 1 (5:23) I turned eight years old on November 2nd, 1974. It was a Saturday, and since my Aunt Sally's birthday was on the 3rd, my mom threw a party for both of us. It was a nighttime party, and it was just after Halloween, so that was the theme. I loved Halloween. And after three years of asking for books about ghosts, and then being crushed when people bought me Scooby-Doo or Casper the Friendly Ghost paperbacks, I finally had the foresight to ask for something more specific. I want books about real ghosts. This request left every adult in my life with a look on their face that said, what the serious fuck is wrong with this kid? I was about a year away from knowing the word parapsychology, but if I had, I would have used it. I had never even seen a book about real ghosts, but I knew they had to exist in the grown-up world. And I really wanted to live in the grown-up world. It had to be better than the kid world, which was not going well at all. My obsession with ghosts began three years earlier, on Halloween, when my kindergarten teacher made us gather on the floor by the record player, where she played the LP of Walt Disney's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Speaker 1 (6:41) Sitting there, listening to the story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman, I started having feelings. I felt like I was being stripped naked and that all my friends could suddenly see this thing inside of me that I'd been trying so hard to keep secret. That thing was fear. Speaker 1 (7:02) Of course, they couldn't really see it. At five, even I knew that they couldn't. I was already an expert at keeping my fear concealed. But there was something darkly thrilling about that feeling of being totally hidden and completely revealed at the same time. Sometimes, when I was alone in my room, I'd close the drapes and sit on the floor, and I'd think about that feeling. I'd take it out and try it on. After a while, I'd feel my cheeks burning and my hands shaking and my stomach tingling, and it would be too much, and I'd push the feeling away. The process always left me embarrassed and scared. But it also calmed me down. And that brought me to another thing the legend of Sleepy Hollow made me feel. Relief. Because it told me that fear also existed outside of me. Other people felt it too. So, in this way, Ichabod Crane's terror at being overcome and annihilated by the Headless Horseman brought me comfort. He and I were the same. And even though in the story he died, the fact that he existed at all and felt my feelings meant that I wasn't alone. You might be thinking I was a scared little kid, and you'd be right. I was afraid all the time. When I was at home, I was afraid of going to school. And when I was at school, I was afraid of going back home. An 8-year-old, or a 7-year-old, or a 6-year-old, or a 5-year-old can't control the behavior and emotions of every person in their environment. But fuck it if I wasn't going to try. I didn't have a choice. It was about personal survival. My mom was depressed. and she could fly into fits of rage. From before I could speak, I had trained myself to feel when those storms were coming. Trying to control my mom's emotions was a 24-hour job, and every other part of my childhood life was arranged along that terrifying landscape. But no matter how hard I tried to make her happy, sooner or later, her anger would explode. And every time it did, I felt like I was dying. I felt like Ichabod Crane, running for his life from the Headless Horseman, blood flooded with adrenaline and terror. That's who I was at eight. And seven. And six. And five. In fact, it's who I'd been since the day I was born. Speaker 1 (9:34) The night of my shared birthday party, I finally hit the gift jackpot, and it was given to me by Aunt Sally herself. It was a book called Ghosts and Specters by Bruce and Nancy Roberts. It was published by Doubleday & Company in 1974. It was a slim hardback, only 93 pages long, and it was illustrated with Bruce Roberts' photography and filled with 10 supernatural stories, all of which... were 100 % true. I knew this because this was a grown-up book. There were no cartoon illustrations on the cover or anywhere else intended to reassure the reader that this book was all in fun. This book wasn't fun. It was a fucking nightmare. And it was real. The very first words of the introduction make that clear. Quote, Whether you believe in ghosts or not, these stories are true. those words had the unintended effect of reassuring me. No one in this book was going to tell me that there was nothing to be afraid of, or that there was no such thing as ghosts. This book was going to play it straight with me. And I could handle it. I'd been handling it. What I needed was someone in the outside world telling me I wasn't crazy, and that being afraid was an okay thing to be, and that real grown-ups in the real world felt that way too sometimes. Good. On the cover of the book was what looked like an actual photograph of a ghost pirate. It was blurry