The Inverted Path with Joshua Cutchin - Part 2: August 29, 2026

Where Did the Road Go?

Host Seriah welcomes Joshua Cutchin for a deep dive into his book, The Inverted Path, focusing on the theme of supernatural disorientation.

Key takeaways

• Joshua Cutchin argues that 'ghost-led' narratives are variations on the theme of being 'pixie-led'.
• The color blue is identified as a recurring and potentially more intense or dangerous element in anomalous light reports.
• Time slips are proposed as a parsimonious explanation for many paranormal events, including cryptids and ghosts appearing in the wrong era.
• A Brazilian farmer named Benedito Cristalvo da Silva experienced a trance-induced gap in time following an encounter with a dark figure and a beam of light.
• The concept of 'discontinuity' is discussed as a way to describe how reality seems to jump or skip segments during anomalous experiences.

Main topics

• Supernatural Disorientation
• Blue Light Phenomena
• Time Slips and Chronological Anomalies

Notable quotes

If you want to see what the phenomenon can do, say what it can't do and then wait for it to contradict you.

Conclusion

The episode offers a compelling framework for viewing disparate parano

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) warning where did the road go has been known to cause bizarre synchronicities poltergeist activity and can give you the feeling that the show is talking directly to you Speaker 3 (0:15) Because it probably is. This month's Where Did the Road Go? is sponsored by the following awesome individuals. Greg Ross, Allison Cook, Super Inframan, 36 Dingo, Yvonne Williams, and Michael Friske. Thank you so much for helping make this show possible. Speaker 1 (0:35) Transmission start. Welcome to Where Did the Road Go? Join us as we wander off the path and explore lost history. Consciousness, the paranormal, unexplained mysteries, alternative thought, and much more. We are present on the web at wheretotheroadgo.com. Now here is your host, Soraya. Speaker 3 (1:11) Welcome to this edition of Where Did the Road Go? And for two weeks in a row, Mr. Joshua Cutchin is here. Hello again. I refuse to introduce you any further than that. People should know who you are. Speaker 4 (1:25) Well, there's plenty of backlog to go through. Yeah. Speaker 3 (1:28) At some point, I'm going to count how many times you've been on. It's been a lot. You were on enough in the beginning that there's some people who thought it was your show. Speaker 4 (1:38) Yeah, I remember at one point I was getting emails saying, you know, hey, Josh, we really like Where Do the Road Go. Can we come on? I'm like, hey, let's go. Speaker 3 (1:48) It's fine by me. You should probably Speaker 4 (1:49) take it up with the guy who runs it. Speaker 3 (1:53) I mean, it made sense to me. Like, that was not an offensive thing to me. It's like, yeah, Josh is awesome, and he's on all the time. So, yeah, I could see why someone would think it was your show. And I Speaker 4 (2:02) would be on a lot more today, but it's just the madness of parenthood. Speaker 4 (2:09) Yeah, exactly. Trying to make a living doing this stuff. Speaker 3 (2:14) And the regular alien abductions you have to go through. And the missing time and all that. Yeah, Speaker 4 (2:21) something Speaker 3 (2:21) like that. Speaker 4 (2:23) Days Speaker 3 (2:23) just slip away. Speaker 4 (2:25) I have a lot less missing time now that I'm sober. I don't know what's up with that. Speaker 4 (2:31) Weird Speaker 3 (2:32) how that happens. Yeah. Funny thing, that. Oh, so I marked down where we got to last time. And I think what we're up to is, let's see here. Yeah, it's okay. So it's the ghost led chapter. Right. And just that, you know, you basically say in defense of blank dash led. Speaker 4 (2:56) Yeah, I mean, so this is sort of a response to, again, all the love in the world, all the respect in the world for Simon Young. But sometimes Simon gets a little bit hyper-focused on something, and he was like, you know, I don't really think... He said, I'm skeptical about being saucer-led. So I'm like, okay, let's go ahead and... Since this is the first chapter that's truly departing from being pixie-led, because light-led is related to being pixie-led, right? Let's go ahead and make a case for the different expressions of this that will apply to the whole of the paranormal. So that was sort of the reason for that section. Speaker 3 (3:30) And, yeah, you break a bunch of these down. But in essence, you're arguing that they're all the same thing. Speaker 4 (3:38) Well, variations on a theme might be Speaker 3 (3:40) a Speaker 4 (3:40) better way to put it. Okay. And really what you find is that you don't necessarily get... Well, on its face, it's kind of erroneous to even call pixie-led narratives pixie-led unless you see a dadgum pixie, right? Right, right. You know, you get lost and then you do something or some sort of corrective action is taken and then you hear laughter and it's like, oh, well, I'm in Cornwall. It might be the pixies. But, you know, if you... Put that in a different context in the haunted forest or something, then, well, you might as well be saying, you know, oh, it was it was ghosts or something along those lines. So really just sort of calling into question how how we label these things and being context dependent much in the same way as like, you know, the Vilmas Geist stuff from where the footprints end. Right. Yeah. And so a big part of that is something we talked about the last show, which is this sort of sort of unnatural compulsions, which, you know, I mentioned they feature. In UFO stories, but they certainly feature in ghost stories as well. You know, I don't know why I looked across the lawn, but then there was the little girl, or I don't know why I wandered over to the old well at the edge of the property, but that's when I found the Civil War bayonet that, you know, took into my house and now my house is haunted. Like, you hear this sort of thing over and over again in these narratives, right? Speaker 3 (4:51) Well, there was one here that says, in the late 1800s, and there's a couple reasons I picked this one. A Cornish miner returning home near St. Austell beheld a pale bluish light. He realized at once that he was pixie-led, but felt unable to destroy the spell and blindly followed it for some time. Exhaustion set in and the light transformed not into a pixie, but rather a man wheeling a barrow. The ghost approached, then dissolved into the earth. A few years before, a miner driving a wheelbarrow across the same crufts had walked right into a disused and unprotected shaft from which his body had never been recovered. Speaker 4 (5:30) Yeah, and that's a great example. That comes from a sort of antiquarian book on Cornish legends and such. But it's one of those few examples where it's very clear that we're not dealing with something that is pixie-related. It's very clearly indicated what we might call a residual haunting nowadays. The idea that the same action is replaying itself, in this case, to someone's demise, right? Speaker 3 (5:53) Well, but also, I mean, you have the connection of the pixies, UFOs, and the dead. I don't know if you've ever explored that. Maybe you can think about working on a book Speaker 4 (6:03) about that. You know, I was telling somebody the other day, if somebody came to me and was like, you have to rewrite Ecology of Souls, I'd probably be like, okay, well, the world can just be without it. Because looking back on that, I have no idea how I juggled all of those moving parts. But yeah, and this actually has an extra little bit of resonance I might as well sort of allude to as well. You know, in Cornwall, there were the traditions of the... Tommy knockers were the knockers who were, you know, sometimes conceptualized as dead miners, but equally often as little sort of fairy people who live underground and will either knock to warn you that there's going to be a collapse if you're a miner underground or knock to show you, you know, a vein of ore. But there's some comparisons between that and the Germanic kobold legends, right? Kobolds were also subterranean knocking. fairy spirits or sprites and the kobolds would take the form of a blue light that's where we get you know the term cobalt that's blue in color it's all related to that and cobalt and cobalt the mineral and it's all sort of a related set of etymological terms so here in this case you have you know a cornish miner uh sees another miner basically their ghost in the form of a bluish light and then falls into you know falls into a an old mine so Or, you know, rather, the older miner had fallen in. Anyway, you take my meaning. It's all sort of like, it mixes together, and it's like, well, if you look at it through that sort of ecology of souls lens, it might as well be a fairy story, right? Speaker 3 (7:32) Right, right. But here's the other thing, that blue light. This is something I've been noticing a lot over the years, is that blue seems to show up in a lot of these reports. And I didn't know the cobalt thing you just mentioned. Speaker 4 (7:46) Yeah, I don't want to spill too many beans because theoretically we're going to be finishing this book that we're working on. But Barbara and I have cataloged a lot of different light stories and the sort of colors that the lights take. And long story short, there's more or less a rule of thumb that we've seen that the blue ones are the ones that you don't really want to mess with. Speaker 3 (8:07) Really? Okay. Yeah, but you know how this Speaker 4 (8:10) is, Soraya. As I say in The Inverted Path, if you want to see what the phenomenon can do, say what it can't do and then wait for it to contradict you, Speaker 3 (8:17) right? Speaker 4 (8:17) Right. Or vice versa, you know. So I say that with all the caveats in the world that we have collected also plenty of pleasant and otherwise benign blue light experiences with no ill effects. But, you know, if you look back to something even like the... alleged, uh, just evaporization, disintegration, goopification of the three dogs at skin Walker ranch back in the hunt for the skin Walker book, that original book, those were very clearly blue lights as well. And right. Colm Kelleher has been talking about how, you know, you want to stay away from the blue ones. Speaker 3 (8:53) Hmm. Cause I, I started marking down how many times blue light comes up in this book. And it's a lot. Speaker 4 (9:00) Well, I hadn't noticed that trend, but now maybe I should go back and look at it specifically in this book. In Speaker 3 (9:07) the very next account from this spot issued an electric blue glow. Speaker 4 (9:11) Oh, yeah, that one. Speaker 3 (9:14) You know, I mean, that's literally the next account. So I just started like making little notes like, okay, so there's another blue incident and another blue incident. And it's surprising. just how often you see the color blue. I mean, I had the experience where I woke up and everything was shaded blue around me. And I didn't know what was going on. I thought there was something wrong with my eyes. Jeff Ritzman, when he had his experience, he would wake up and see a blue light above him. When he was a kid, he would see like this shape that he would go into and then he'd wake up on a table with a black cloth over him like a sheet and there'd be a blue light above him. Speaker 3 (9:58) So when you start, and blue is a weird color. Speaker 4 (10:02) That it is. I think there's some stuff that Barbara and I are going to hopefully talk about in terms of looking at the spectra of light. I should have more command of that material than I do right now, but there's some significances there that we hypothesize. So yeah, blue is interesting because I suppose there's always a bit of... plausible deniability for white lights and orange lights and red lights and yellow lights. You know, it's always, Oh, is that fire? Is it, you know, is it natural illumination? But especially, you know, in some of these older stories, like nothing really glowed blue, you know, in parts of the Americas, you do, you do, you do get blue fireflies. They're, they're rare, but you do get them. So, and, and, but it's, you know, these are stories from a lot of, a lot of times from the UK and such. And so it's like, well, you know, what glows blue, very, very few things. That's for sure. I mean, yes, there are blue flames, but you don't usually see that blue part of a flame from afar, right? It's usually close-ups. Right. Yeah, Speaker 3 (11:02) so blue light, I mean, we've been planning on doing a show on the blue light stuff for a while, but the people involved have not finished collecting stuff about it. And we keep finding more, you know? Well, I mean, that's Speaker 4 (11:14) part of the thing that Barbara and I have been running into is that there's... There's really no end to the amount of material you can collect on anomalous lights. Yeah, Speaker 3 (11:23) yeah. Speaker 4 (11:24) It is literally overwhelming in every sense. So Speaker 3 (11:28) this tidbit interested me. Let me pull the whole article up here. Thompson Park. in Watertown, New York, is haunted by odd noises and ghosts, including mist-covered shapes, sometimes on horseback. Sightings began in the 1930s after WPA workers built a series of stone walls leading up a grassy hill. Sometime in the 70s, one 18-year-old vanished from the top of the hill in plain sight of several eyewitnesses. Twenty minutes later, he reappeared, totally disoriented, at the bottom of the hill. Speaker 4 (12:06) Yeah, this comes from one of the haunted places encyclopedias by, I believe it's Jeff Belanger. And again, it's a difficult one to categorize because it's like, well, you didn't really see a ghost, but you're in a place that has this haunted reputation and you have something that otherwise would sound very much like a third per... third-party observation of a pixel-led story in the case of a haunted location. But you're rather close to this, are you not, Saraya? Speaker 3 (12:36) I am, and I am going to go investigate this because when I put it in, let me pull this up real quick if I can find it. There's a vortex listed on Google Maps right there. Speaker 4 (12:53) It's just casually listing. Yeah. Speaker 3 (12:55) It's just sitting there and it's like whatever park, Vortex. And it says people have experienced ghosts, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm just like, well, there's somewhere I'm going to go. Speaker 4 (13:06) Yeah. I mean, it obviously has a reputation. Speaker 3 (13:10) Yeah. So, I mean, I don't generally see things listed as a Vortex very often on Google Maps. Speaker 4 (13:17) So as a sort of funny and halfway related aside. I went to a family reunion that we had in Greenville, South Carolina, a little while back. And so, you know, a lot of us in the family have young kids, including myself. And so as opposed to like doing anything interesting one of the days, it was like, well, let's go to a park. So I'm like, okay, we'll go to the park. And we ended up at this community park called Herd Clots Park. in greenville south carolina and as it turns out it had been one of these places that i'd read about because well the funny thing is suraya it was like a tuberculosis uh sanitarium uh that was there and they um they leveled the place i think the place was burned in a fire but instead of like taking out the infrastructure they just like sealed up the basement with cement and Speaker 3 (14:15) the foundations are still there Speaker 4 (14:17) and the stairs, you can see where the stairs will lead up Speaker 3 (14:19) and there's a Speaker 4 (14:20) plaque there. But it's literally a playground that's built above an old tuberculosis hospital. Speaker 3 (14:25) Wow. And Speaker 4 (14:26) if you look at the sort of people who live in that neighborhood, apparently it's just like super haunted, which I wouldn't doubt. But I had to question the wisdom of that. It's like the perfect setup for a horror film, right? Yeah. So it kind of makes you wonder what was going on at Thompson Park in Watertown, huh? Speaker 3 (14:41) Yeah. Well, I mean, there's forts and stuff up there. I forget which war. Because I know Aaron Gullias toured a lot of that stuff at one point. But I can't remember which war it was. Because he was in Seneca Falls, a half an hour away from me, and had no idea he was that close to me. Speaker 4 (15:00) Oh, wow. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about especially that part of the country. I mean, Speaker 3 (15:05) so Speaker 4 (15:05) obviously, like, you know, if side of... what Peter Lavenda has said in the past, which is like, you know, any post-colonial nation is a haunted house, right? Speaker 3 (15:12) Right. And Speaker 4 (15:12) America is a haunted house. But I think that, you know, when you look at sort of the history of European settlements in the Northeast and how many of those structures are still old compared to other parts of the country, like, I think that's part of the reason that you get so much, you know, haunting and ghost activity up there, which is kind of funny. I've noticed that it's like... So many, I mean, not exclusively, right? This is not a hard and fast rule, but it's like the Northeast has the ghost conferences and the Southwest has the UFO conferences and like the Midwest has the cryptid conferences. And in the South, we really don't get much of anything at all. And obviously that's not entirely the case, but like as a loose rule, it kind of holds true. And I think it's probably because, you know, there is so much haunted infrastructure still up in your part of the world where you're part of the nation. Speaker 3 (15:57) Right, right. Speaker 3 (15:59) So what it says about Tompkins Park Vortex. Five stars, but only one review. Locals whisper about a hidden time vortex that supposedly transports visitors to another area. Visitors highlight the park's scenic trails designed by famous architect Frederick Law Olmsted. And combining it with a... So, like, this is all in the before you go thing. And then the other one's people recommended combining a hunt for the vortex with a trip to the zoo. Just a Speaker 4 (16:35) casual. I like the juxtaposition, though. How far again from you? Speaker 3 (16:43) You know what? I can find out right now. I think I'm saying two and a half, 225. Speaker 4 (16:47) Oh, yeah, that's totally worth a trip out to the vortex. Speaker 3 (16:50) Yes. Oh, Speaker 4 (16:50) definitely. Speaker 3 (16:52) It is in the plan for this year. Yeah. And if nothing happens, nothing happens. But damn it, I'm going to go see. Because that's too close to pass up. Yeah. Speaker 3 (17:09) Let's see. Speaker 4 (17:09) If it was closer, I'd join you, Sarai. Speaker 3 (17:13) Well, you're supposed to come visit at some Speaker 4 (17:15) point. Speaker 3 (17:15) I Speaker 4 (17:15) know. I will. Someday. Someday. Speaker 3 (17:18) Someday. I mean, we've only known each other a decade. Speaker 4 (17:21) Well, it's not like we've never met. I mean, you know. That's Speaker 3 (17:24) true. Speaker 4 (17:24) We've met at least twice. Speaker 3 (17:27) Is it only twice? Was it just Fortfest and Tim's? Fortfest and with Tim, yeah. Huh. It Speaker 4 (17:33) feels like a lot more than that. Speaker 3 (17:36) So as we move on here, it says you're talking about, let's see which chapter is this still, ghost led. Okay. So you're talking about cursed ground. You said these disoriented places are geographically stable. By that I mean they aren't transitory. They remain in one place. But a whole subset of experiences sometimes lumped together as ghost stories involve locations as ephemeral as any pixie infested field. Speaker 3 (18:02) And so, go ahead. No, I don't remember. It's been a minute. Right. Speaker 4 (18:08) I found it. Here Speaker 3 (18:09) we are. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 4 (18:11) I mean, so this is sort of a, so I talked earlier in this chapter about haunted forests, which have a tradition of people getting lost. So Aokigahara Forest in Japan is a good example of that. Speaker 3 (18:25) That's the one everyone kills themselves in. Speaker 4 (18:28) Yes. Yeah. But there's also it also has a reputation for even if you're not going out there for that of disorienting you. And apparently there are there are like guideposts not only saying, you know, turn back, you know, you have other options, but also, you know, just helping people remain oriented in the forest. And it's kind of like, well, what are the odds of those two things happening together? But, yeah, this this particular passage talking about, yeah, geographically stable versus the more ephemeral version. Yeah. I mean, so this is. Part of why I always find it difficult to write anything is because you want to look at pixie-led stories. Speaker 3 (19:02) And once Speaker 4 (19:04) you start looking at those two categories that we mentioned last time, the wandering experiences and the field crossing experiences, and you zoom in on the field crossing experiences, which are basically your entire environment changing around you, or at the very least, like the salient aspects of your environment changing around you, right? Like the path that you need disappears, the exit that you need disappears. Then you have to sort of say, well, are these time slips? Because that's what happens in these time slip sort of narratives, right? You've got someone who is oftentimes in a very familiar area. Not always, but oftentimes in a familiar area. And everything around them looks antiquated or they'll see an old building that supposedly had burned down or they'll run into someone who. is dressed in an outdated sort of way. So it's like, well, are we dealing with time slips? So it's like, okay, well now we've got to put some effort in discussing time slips and some of those landmark examples as well. So that's why that sort of gets slipped, slipped in here. Pardon the pun, but Speaker 3 (20:01) you know, time slips being, you Speaker 4 (20:02) know, time slips. I think that Speaker 3 (20:04) honestly, Speaker 4 (20:05) I think they, they deserve more attention in a lot of these spaces because they do so parsimoniously account for a lot of paranormal phenomena, right? I'm not saying that I, I think that's what's going on, but I'm saying I could be convinced if someone came to me tomorrow and was like, oh, it's all time slips. I'd be like, well, yeah, it makes perfect sense. You know, you've got, uh, cryptids time slipping forward into our current era, you know, plesiosaurs and gigantopithecus or whatever. Um, you've got people time slipping back as you, as, you know, as aliens or us time slipping forward into onto, you know, their craft or whatever. Um, And then to say nothing of ghosts, which would be time slips forward or backward, depending on your position on the timeline. So I think that it sort of deserves more attention than it. People talk about time slips as just sort of being a one-off expression of the paranormal, but it might be like most of what we see, honestly. Speaker 3 (20:57) You think so? I just said that I didn't. I just said that I didn't, but I could be convinced that it is. Speaker 4 (21:03) Okay. I mean. Speaker 4 (21:05) You don't see so, would be my sort of shot back to you, Sarai. I mean, you see what I'm getting at, right? Speaker 3 (21:11) Yeah. Well, okay. So let me ask you this, because this always has bugged me. And you have a bunch of accounts of people staying at, you know, or seeing places and they go back and they haven't been there in years, right? Like they've been torn down years ago and stuff. Right. But there's a few where people go in and they pay for a meal. And the place hasn't existed, you know, and this is like the 90s, and it hasn't existed since like the 60s. To the Speaker 4 (21:36) contrary, I think most of these time slip stories and phantom diner stories, which are kind of a subset of the time slip story, I think most of them involve the exchange of food, which is kind of a weird aspect, right? Speaker 3 (21:47) Right, but here's the thing. They're paying for it. So how many dollars do you have, how much cash do you have on you that is from that time period? That's a good point. Speaker 4 (22:00) You know, especially in the more extreme examples. That's a good point. You Speaker 3 (22:02) know, so if it's like, oh, that place was burned down in the 1960s and it's the 1990s, they're not going to notice the money looks a little weird. Right, and we're not going to have accounts of people Speaker 4 (22:16) having bills from today back in the 60s. You would expect to have seen that as well. Speaker 3 (22:25) Yeah, I feel like, assuming these stories are true, it seems more like a recreation rather than a time slip. Speaker 4 (22:35) I won't disagree with that. I won't disagree with that. I mean, I think that, I mean, this is something that I mentioned in fourth wall phantoms a little bit. It's part of my problem with screen memories is that they're very tidy and very reassuring. Did we talk about this last time? Speaker 3 (22:48) A little bit, a little bit. Yeah. Speaker 4 (22:50) But yeah, it's just this idea that like, Oh, well that 1950s diner that I went to with that's really sweet, you know, server who didn't make me pay for my meal and knew my name. But when I went back the next day, that diner wasn't. Hadn't been there in 50 years. That must have been a screen memory. Like that's, that's a comforting version of, of what that scenario could be. Right. Oh, it was an alien screen memory. Yeah. Everything is normal. I was just led to believe that it's not the really disturbing version. Is that like reality somehow warped in that time that you were right. You know, or that you slip back, but like. You know, if it's not a literal... Look, I have less and less patience nowadays, partially because of Hollywood, for multiversal sort of stories, right? But if we entertain the idea that there are sort of branching timelines behind us, then maybe you slip over into another timeline. And that's the reason that we don't have people getting 2026 dollar bills in 1952 or whatever. I don't know. But I think if you take it in its basic form, time slips