On this live call-in, a Halloween caller tries to make the case that supernatural events are real, and Chris Mallard and Kelley Laughlin test his evidence. The conversation covers ghost photos and videos, hauntings that make money, coincidence and hallucination, and what 1 Peter 3:15 says about how Christians should defend their beliefs.
Is photo or video evidence of ghosts reliable?
Caller Marlin says spirits like ghosts and demons are already proven by photos and video, yet admits video is easy to fake, for example with fishing line. Chris raises the Borley Rectory floating brick photo from around 1932 and says it could show a brick dropped and caught mid fall. The hosts add that double exposure, video editing and AI make footage hard to trust without other proof. They note the Philippines Balete Drive ghost video was staged.
Transcript highlights
Selected passages from the live stream, lightly edited for readability. Click a section time to jump to that part of the video.
Halloween Chat and a Harassment Story
[Commercial break]
Patriot of the West wrote in with news of a conversation with a Jehovah’s Witness, and the host asked how his face was doing after past trouble. Chris said he hoped nobody had beaten him up the way they had the last group of people. He then asked whether the attack had been related to Patriot’s religious views and invited him to say what it was related to if he didn’t mind.
Patriot explained that his son had mentioned being an atheist in the high school cafeteria. “He’s 30 years old now, so this was years ago. He was in the high school cafeteria and mentioned to one of his friends that he was an atheist, and four boys jumped him later in the day and beat him up for being an atheist. He was suspended from school as well.”
Patriot then turned to Islam. “Oftentimes you hear about how dangerous it is to be an open atheist out in the Middle East. Well, it’s not as dangerous as that here. I feel like I’ve gotten over my programmed Islamophobia and realized where we really are in the world, but there are still dangers and still truths that are ugly about that religion. One of those dangers or ugly truths is that you cannot in Mecca go around as…”
Atheist Experiences, Religious Violence and Show Plans
I’m an open atheist and I expect to live a very long time. It’s kind of a thing. Probably some backwater places in Alabama too, and I would imagine it wouldn’t be real safe there as well. I tend to forget that we here in our own country have places that are kind of dangerous. I’m from the south, but I’m from the south central south, you know, West Texas and New Mexico, and it’s been more progressive, I guess, than the crap south. Sorry, Alabama. Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, all those ones where they had a real problem with slavery.
Surprisingly, this happened to my son in the suburbs of Chicago. It was 15 years ago, and I think we’ve come a long way since then as atheists. Maybe not as far as we would like, but looking back on the way the world was treating us just 20 years ago, we’ve come a long way.
In my experience, when I first became an out and open atheist, around 2007 or 2008, people would step back and cross themselves. That was in West Texas, though. One lady literally did it, but it was a common reaction for people to go, oh, wait. Here in Albuquerque it’s a little different. It’s 50-50 how they’re going to react. Often times it’s like, man, that’s cool.
I hear from people all the time that new agers aren’t going out and killing people like Christians and Muslims have in the past. But you’ve got to remember those religions took a couple hundred years before they started going around killing everybody too. That’s true, once they got some power. Paranormal, God and religion all fit together as make
Part 3
Caller Defends Supernatural Bible Events
[Commercial break]
Kimberly Murphy wrote in the chat that all gifts are evil, and at first I thought she meant gifts. Then I realized she meant GIFs. I’ve heard that the creator of the file format wants it pronounced with a soft G, but the G in there stands for graphics, so I’m going to keep saying GIF.
Marlin came on the line, and since it was Halloween, he wanted to discuss the supernatural. He said he wanted to make a case for proving the supernatural events in the Bible and for showing that those events are real. When asked why he thinks they’re real, he said he would start with spirits, like ghosts and demons, because he believes they have already been proven. He pointed to photographic and video evidence, but said it’s hard for him to accept that kind of proof on its own.
His problem is that video is easy to fake. He said he has seen clips of things moving across a room that could easily have been done with a piece of fishing line, like a chair sliding or a rocking chair starting to rock on its own. For him, a photo or video needs something else behind it before he will accept it. That’s a reasonable standard, and it’s the same standard I’d want applied to any claim.
I asked him whether he knew the famous photograph of the floating brick that Harry Price published from Borley Rectory. He said he hadn’t seen it yet, and he asked whether it was possible to send links or video links in the chat, since that would make it easier to share evidence during the call. I told him I wasn’t sure about the chat features and would look into it, but that he could search for the photo himself. If you search for “floating brick photo Borley Rectory,” you’ll find it. It was taken around 1932 and was very well known in paranormal circles.
The point I wanted to make is that the same photo could easily have been taken of a brick that was dropped and caught in midair as it fell. The claim was that it was floating, but the same visual effect could come from a falling brick. So the photo alone doesn’t settle anything. Marlin asked whether the brick could have had a string or thread on it, and that’s exactly the kind of alternative explanation that has to be ruled out before a photo can be called proof.
Skepticism Toward Ghost Videos and Paranormal Claims
I’ve seen some of those Gettysburg ghost soldier videos, and none of them were very convincing to me. There’s a video of a guy driving on a road, and you can clearly see on his front camera the ghost soldiers running in front of him. He could have got them from doing a double exposure too, so it’s really hard to say. It really is. A double exposure is filming the same thing twice on one piece of film. You get a ghostly image of what you filmed first, then you film some guys running across the road and do the same film again over the top. It’s overlaid over the first one. It’s just video editing.
There’s also a paranormal investigator I’ve seen on YouTube, Mind City Mindset TV, who was at a haunted house by a lake. One of the pieces of footage they caught, they literally ran up in fear, because on the lake a woman emerged with evil red eyes. Supposedly she just emerged and then went back down into the water with a huge splash. That could all be done with AI, right? And it’s easy to act scared. It’s really hard to use evidence that’s filmed today, because it’s so easy to alter that film.
It wasn’t AI back in 2016, but you could still do video editing then. That’s the problem. It’s too easy to manipulate videos today, so it’s really hard to call a video or a photograph evidence without something else to back it up. Just the video evidence alone isn’t enough for me. But if you saw that yourself, you would be running away. If I saw it, sure, but I’ve never seen anything like that.
I worked in a nightclub for four or five years that supposedly was haunted, and a lot of people who worked there claimed to have seen the ghost. I worked there longer than almost everybody else, and I never saw a ghost. I have to wonder if people were making up stories to sound cool. Did you hear any strange sounds? There weren’t any, not at all.
You have to remember that whoever posts these YouTube videos has an agenda. One of the main reasons people post YouTube videos is to make some money. If I can make a video of a ghost to get more people to watch it, then I can make more money. So I have to question the motive of the person putting up the video. I don’t know how much they were able to manipulate it. I would definitely need some other proof to back it up, especially from people I don’t even know. We don’t know who the person is that posted the video, or whether they can be trusted. There are too many questions.
What about a ghost woman in white captured by people driving on a road, something that got so much attention it went on the news? That was five or six years ago in the Philippines, wasn’t it? We have cases like that, like the Balete Drive ghost in the Philippines. I remember when it happened, and I was pretty sure they found out it was a hoax, if I’m not mistaken. Yes, it was a hoax. People set it up to make it appear like that. It’s like filming a horror movie. They filmed a little clip to make it look real, posted it, got a million views, and made a little bit of money off it. That’s exactly what I was just talking about, so it was staged. Yes, that was staged, and I’m pretty sure that particular incident was proven staged too. That’s why I knew about it when you mentioned it. The paranormal, spirits, ghosts, demons, this is my bread and butter. This is the stuff I live for. I always keep up on the news and check out incidents like this, so I try to stay up on it. But I have yet to see any unambiguous evidence, and that’s the problem. I haven’t seen any evidence that can’t be explained by something normal. The Philippine ghost was staged, and that’s completely normal.
Let’s say in a hypothetical situation you’re sleeping in your room at night and you suddenly hear a loud bang. That actually happens to me all the time. I have hypnagogic audio hallucinations, where as I’m falling asleep, or I’m half asleep, I will hear a loud noise that wakes me back up, and nothing happened. One time, about six months after my dog died, I heard my dog barking so loud that it woke me up, but I didn’t have a dog anymore. It was just an audio hallucination. It’s actually pretty common. It’s a feeling of affection, if we feel that our loved ones are there, like when a pet dog or cat dies.
I think a lot of people who see deceased family are experiencing what you’re talking about. It’s longing. I want those people back, I love them, and I miss them. So I’m already going to have a hypnagogic hallucination, and my subconscious is going to affect it. I’ll see my loved ones, the things I want to see, brought up from the subconscious to the conscious level. Does that make sense?
What if you were sleeping in your bed, suddenly woke up in the middle of the night, heard someone banging at your door, and when you
Ghosts, coincidence and violent Bible verses
Chris questioned the haunting claims around the Winchester house, asking whether Sarah Winchester ever said spirits were haunting her, since she built the house so they wouldn’t. He suggested that what we are looking at is a woman who felt really, really, really guilty and needed an outlet to get rid of that guilt, using the money made from the guns to build a giant house. He was unsure whether an earthquake knocked part of the house down, but he noted that today they run tours through it, claim it is haunted, and charge money for those tours. “What’s the motive for these claims? Is that motive to make money? Because that’s almost what all of these claims are.”
The discussion moved on to demons, not just ghosts and spirits. Chris said people make all kinds of supernatural claims, and that Sarah Winchester tried to communicate with spirits using mirrors and candles, with rituals and rites. He added that Thomas Edison also tried to talk to the dead. “Oh, there wasn’t any evidence of that. He was trying to build a machine so that he could talk to the dead, and he never did it.” He then asked his guest whether they had ever had a personal experience with a ghost.
The guest said they had experiences they thought were really weird, but could not say definitively that they were caused by a ghost or a spirit. “I’ve had some weird coincidences, but coincidences are coincidences.” Chris then asked whether they had talked about Littlewood’s law before. He explained that John Littlewood was an English mathematician who thought that if something has a one in a million chance of happening, and you have an experience every second that you are awake and alert, then over enough time that unlikely event will eventually happen to you. “If you were awake and alert for just eight hours a day, after 34 days and some change you would have experienced 1 million seconds. So you would have had a chance to have a one in a million thing happen to you every 34 days or so. Not that it’s going to, but you have a chance of it happening. So a lot of miracles can be explained just through those mathematics.”
Chris asked what the guest thought of video evidence, such as the footage that supposedly showed Jesus Christ in the sky descending to earth. He said he did not believe it, and that it had been shown on Inside Edition. He also mentioned discussing it before on another call-in show, and said the
Part 6
they kind of go together. Most of my plants have rocks in them. Most of my plant pots. I wanted to ask you, what’s your stance on mysticism? Uh like do you believe Jesus was an actual like historical figure or I I I that’s that’s a tough one because I I really don’t know it. I don’t have enough evidence either way. But if if uh I had to give an answer, I would say that I think Jesus was probably an amalgam of different people that there was maybe five or six people that did things that all got meshed into one person. I think that would probably be the best explanation for it. That was my position
for a long time. And it kind of places you in a bucket of mysticism because you don’t think the actual Jesus like the one person existed. You think it was among amalgamation. So I understand it and like it makes sense especially with the different verses in Bible talking how he like goes to different places at the same time like yeah it it makes sense but now I’m like diving deeper into the mysticism and I’m discovering more and more new stuff and I’m talking to my priest um who is like actually like really really knowledgeable guy um and he’s of course an atheist um and u uh I’m like we’re having really deep discussions about it
and like talking about how it could have been and what we actually have like what text we have to support any of the positions and I think I’m bringing him to mysticism slowly. So that’s kind of fun as well because like it’s just a lot of the stuff if you think about it just makes sense if you like if you come from the position that Jesus was not real person then just everything just like brick by brick builds itself to where it’s gone. But if Jesus was actually a person who lived there like maybe haven’t done any miracles maybe like fooled a bunch of people or whatever some of the stuff just doesn’t make sense.
for example, how Christians uh Christian tradition were it’s more about like Paul mysticism, but anyway, like um how Christian tradition was still arguing like 100 years later if they need to do circumcision or not, but like Paul allegedly like ended this debate like 50 years prior, it just doesn’t make sense. But if you think, oh, so Paul was just the character that Marcion made in early first um early second century u to end this debate as well as some others. Then it just makes sense like it just it just all fells into its own places so neatly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I’m starting to see I’m looking into uh Mohamad Muhammad mysticism as well. There’s
a growing school of Oh, interesting. of mysticism that Muhammad wasn’t a real person as well. And it and it’s some of it is also very convincing. You know, I never heard this one because like for me, Islam is like as dangerous and as harmful as it is right now. Um like the whole religion debate around Islam is just like so easy. Uh it’s like you basically need like two or three arguments to debunk the whole thing. So it just doesn’t make sense. And uh but uh yeah, I never heard of of Muhammad mysticism. What do you know about it? What can you tell? It’s well it’s like I said, it’s pretty new. It just got
started within say the last five or six years. But uh there’s a lot of claims about Muhammad that just cannot be justified. And we don’t like we don’t have any any evidence of his early life. just pretty much like Jesus, you know. Um, how how did how did Muhammad’s life end? By him ascending to heaven on the back of a horse. I mean, that’s a pretty crazy story in and of itself. So, there’s there’s a lot of there’s a lot of supernatural claims around Muhammad that seem very hard to justify. And I think that’s why we’re starting to see this school of Muhammad Muhammad mysticism. I I usually think of a I usually think of
Atheist Commentary on Buddhism, Politics and First Peter
Chris Mallard opens the segment by mentioning a Shakespeare parody with Wild Bill, then turns to a viewer question about whether Buddhists are committing atrocities. He says he doesn’t think that’s the case, noting that fighting between Buddhists and Hindus in India has gone on for centuries. He explains his understanding that Buddhists in most places get along fine, and that where violence occurs it is often a response to attacks by people from Abrahamic religions. He adds that Buddhism itself is not violent at its core, even though some Buddhist monks historically studied kung fu and some left the monastery to become bandits.
Kelley Laughlin points out that a large wave of conservative Hinduism has been rising in India over the last decade, and that it resembles the Christian nationalism problem in the United States. Chris agrees that religion, whatever it is, becomes one more way to tribalize people. He says that when he left Christianity he searched for a replacement and spent years in Zen Buddhism, which helped shape a new age philosophy he later outgrew. He notes that many Buddhist ideals are peaceful, but that the tribal instinct runs through every religion.
The conversation then turns to politics. Chris comments on a South American leader who lost an election and fled to the United States, and he predicts that Donald Trump would flee to Russia if he lost power. Kelley suggests Saudi Arabia as another possibility. Chris argues that several authoritarian leaders around the world are falling at the same time, and he says Benjamin Netanyahu’s party has already cried election tampering after losing its election, just as Trump would.
Later, Chris asks for First Peter 3:15 to be brought up on screen. Kelley reads the verse aloud: “But in your hearts, sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give a defense to everyone who asks you the reason for the hope that is in you, but respond with gentleness and respect.” Chris says that is good advice for atheists as well, and he argues that the verse effectively calls Christians to come on the show and defend their faith. He notes that the Great Commission also pushes Christians to bring others into the fold, so he tells people who refuse to talk that they are going against their own god.
Chris then points out the other half of the verse, the call to respond with gentleness and respect, which he says does not describe the Christians they usually deal with on the show. He says viewers in the text chat have often noted that Christians are being hateful and mocking rather than turning the other cheek. He adds that Christians have plenty of guidance on proper conduct in the Bible, including in Second Timothy.
Part 8
uh 2:24 25 in Colossians there are like two of them in first John in uh yeah like it’s just a bunch of them where it says that like God going to choose the holy and beloved who clothe their themselves when com with compassion kindness humility like and all this stuff like there there’s just a bunch of verses in the Bible who basically say that Christians should be nice always and they usually not that nice. Well, we’ve got 2,000 years of murder, death, kill from Christians. So, yeah. Yeah, that’s a good point, isn’t it? Where are you, Anka? You’re over you’re on the other side of the world, aren’t you? Yeah, I’m in I’m in Moscow
just chilling, you know. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. One of these days I want to catch one of your real Russian shows and see listen to you in the Russian. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Cool. [snorts] You can go a joke for it. See, Russian people aren’t bad. Like they’re Russian people aren’t bad. Like they keep telling us. Oh, no. See, that’s the whole deal. Like people come on in like damn Israel. And I’m like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. It’s not all of Israel. Just like it’s not all of the United States. We’ve got to make sure like this party that’s taken over Israel is essentially the MAGA party. They’ve taken over Israel. They
have all the power. They’re do exactly what far right-wing people do when they get power. They kill people. That’s exactly what they do. And so in my opinion, it’s not all just Israel. It’s specifically the Zionists and that party over there. Dave Murphy isn’t in our chat, is he? Oh, really? Let’s see here. I challenge Dave Murphy. Wow, Dave Murphy. So nice to see you, Dave. I hope you’re doing great, Dade. Dade, I got to meet in person. Got to hug on and everything. Nice to see you. So nice to see you. Um JCH is a troll. Let’s see. Hezekiah says, “You can never block me, just so you know.” Okay, cool. That’s interesting. Um,
cool. And we will see you later. And you are I I always love seeing people online that I’ve actually met in person. True. True. It’s always fun to see It’s always fun to meet them in person, too, for the first time. I remember meeting you for the first time. It was awesome. I had no idea you were as [ __ ] tall as you were. I know. Yeah. [clears throat] I get that. That’s I met Go ahead. I would say I get all the time just the opposite that people don’t realize how small I am. When I met real small, you are you’re tiny. I met Brent here for coffee one day and he’s like,
“You’re pretty tall.” Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We met together. Uh, I met Dade at um the the Ark Encounter Protest. Oh, cool. Cool. Yeah. Yep. That’s where I met you. I must have met Dade then, too. Yep. Same time. Same time. Same bad time. That was where Joe the Kentucky atheist tried to get me killed. Tried to get me killed. Yeah. Sent me to the wrong house in the backwoods of Kentucky and said, “No, just go on in. Just go on in. You hear people in there? Just go on in.” I’m like, “Really? I’m not kidding. Joe the Kentucky atheist sent me to the wrong address in the middle of back Kentucky and I’m talking to
them. I’m like, “You sure this is the place?” And I could hear people in there. I bet they’re loaded up, too. Can you imagine if I open the door? What the [ __ ] Anyway, that was something else. Um, definitely not one of the places in the US you just want to walk into somebody’s house. No. No. Uh, apparently we’re false prophets for Satan. I did not know that. He doesn’t pay very well. No, he’s not paying me. Not paying [ __ ] Really? Um, cool. Kelly, I’ll let you. Wait, guys. You didn’t receive your check. Like, I get it on the mail like yesterday. Damn it. Damn it. It’s probably because of the sanctions,
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